February 25, 2025 • 44 mins
Discover how to align your revenue team for success in an ever-evolving market with insights from A. Lee Judge's book, "CASH: The 4 Keys to Better Sales, Smarter Marketing, and a Supercharged Revenue Team." Join Bruce Scheer as he discusses the transformative approach to connecting sales and marketing.
- The shift in buyer control and its impact on sales and marketing dynamics.
- Exploring Lee's CASH framework: Communication, Alignment, Systems, and Honesty.
- The significance of fostering a revenue team mindset, bridging the divide between departments.
- The role of content quality and quantity throughout the buyer's journey.
- The crucial elements of becoming a trusted adviser to facilitate buyer decisions.
00:00 Sales & Marketing Alignment Insights
03:51 ""CASH: Key to Team Efficiency""
09:19 Marketing Insights from Sales Meetings
12:19 Cross-Functional Team Visits Enhance Value
15:45 ""Revenue Team Sweet Spot""
17:19 Revenue Team Kickoff Enthusiasm
20:09 Aligning Sales and Marketing for Better Leads
25:47 Rethinking the Customer Funnel
28:13 Modern Buyer's Journey Insights
31:30 Balancing Content: Quality vs. Quantity
33:15 Quality vs. Quantity in Content
38:03 Authority vs. Influence in Decision-Making
39:46 Bridging Sales and Marketing Gaps
43:54 Aligning Sales and Marketing Teams
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Welcome to the ValuePro Show, where value pros get value
ready.
Hi. My name is Bruce Scheer, the host of the ValuePro Show. In this
episode, we are talking with A. Lee Judge, a seasoned
expert in sales and marketing alignment and the author of Align Your
Revenue Team for Success with Cash. The
(00:23):
world of sales and marketing has changed dramatically.
The buyer is now the captain, steering their own journey, making
decisions long before they ever engage with a salesperson.
So how do sales and marketing teams work together in this new
reality? Leah spent decades in the trenches bridging
the gap between these two functions, and he's here to share
(00:45):
his insights on how companies can break down silos and
create a high performing revenue engine. We'll
be diving into his cash framework, communication, alignment,
systems, and honesty, and exploring how organizations
can shift their approach to match the way modern buyers make decisions.
If sales and marketing alignment isn't a priority for you yet,
(01:09):
it should be, and Lee's insights will show you why. Let's
get into it. Well, Lee, thanks so much for joining the show. I'm
I'm really excited about this conversation with you today.
Lee, I've been just kind of immersing myself in your
book, and, it it's really rich. There's a lot
there. And, thankfully, because it is really well
(01:31):
written, some of the things in in the review that I wrote for
you, verified review, I might add. Now that I'll ask everybody watching the
show, get the book. You're gonna love it, and leave Lee a verified review so
the world can celebrate this thing. But, the thing I was
loving the most about it probably is, a, it was steeped in your
deep, been there, done that experience. And,
(01:54):
you know, I see a lot of books where the the you don't have that
experience base behind it. But, you know, the stories you tell in there,
yeah, you've been there, done that. You've seen it all, for better or for
worse. So I know you got some battle scars. The other thing
that I liked is you kinda brought in some big gun experts.
I know you yourself are rocking it in terms of this whole
(02:16):
world of sales and marketing alignment, but you did bring in
some big guns with their points of view just to kinda anchor on some of
the concepts that you were teaching within the book and illustrating. And
and I thought that was really powerful too. So just really well played. And
for everybody here, you know, you'll find Lee's book out on
Amazon, other other popular places, but I'd encourage you to go out and get
(02:39):
a copy of it if sales and marketing alignment is a concern for
you. And if it's not, I'm concerned for you because it's a big
issue, and I I see it day in and day out. Not
not a good thing. So, Lee, if you wouldn't
mind, just tell us a little bit about, you know, the book and
why you wrote it, principally. And, let me know when
(03:01):
you wanna jump into a a story that talks about pork chops.
Okay. Well, thanks, Bruce. Thanks for having me. Well, so the book
came about after about twenty years or so being
between sales and marketing. Now I've been marketing a few years before that,
but it came to a point where because of some of my technical background,
(03:21):
I was given the the ownership of the the CRM. And
so my task was to help sales put things in
Salesforce and, you know, give more data to the business for
forecasting. And so here I was a marketing person tasked with
working smack dab between sales and marketing, and that
became my career for the next ten I mean, twenty years.
(03:44):
And I saw some unique things, and I got a chance to sit in
on both sides, meetings for sales, meetings for marketing. I
realized how separate these teams were, and I found out there's
about four things that cause these teams to either
not work together or to be inefficient at driving the
company forward towards revenue. And so the four things
(04:07):
and I've been taking notes the whole time, you know, since since beginning of this
career. I'm taking notes thinking one day, boy, one day I'm gonna write a book
about these experiences. And so the four things that stuck
out the most were communication, alignment,
systems they used, and honesty. And it just so happens those
made a wonderful acronym of CASH that both marketers
(04:28):
and salespeople especially understand and love the word cash because a
business has to have cash to operate. And in this
sense, with this acronym, these four things, communication alignment systems
and honesty, we need those four things to operate as well. Oh, I love
it. I love it. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At the end of the day,
you need a great economic underpinning. You know? You need some cash. Yeah.
(04:51):
That that makes the whole thing spin right. And when you don't, it don't
spin right. And I I love how you use cash as your your acronym
for explaining this. Fantastic. But,
Houston, we do have a problem. You know? The, the the ship
is going down, and and, you know, we we gotta deal with this
leak. So, tell us, you know, what you found,
(05:13):
and I I think it wasn't necessarily overly pretty. Tell us a
story. Well, so this particular company I
just began working at, in marketing, and they
were going through a transition. The CEO had come back out of see my
retirement to run the company and build it back up. The sales team had
been diminished quite a bit. The marketing team was gone. I was the
(05:35):
the new number one employee for marketing as this company
was transitioning. And I'm going through the marketing
closet trying to find out, okay. I'm the there was a marketing team here
before. What artifacts did they leave to give me a hint of what they've been
doing? So I go to the marketing closet, and I find a big box
of plastic pork chops. I'm thinking, what in the world
(05:58):
what was the campaign? This is a software company for customer experience.
So I I just, you know, I kept thinking all these crazy, like, what kind
of slogan or logo or trade show gimmick was this
for them to need a box of plastic pork chops. So
long story short, I never did find out what the plastic pork chops
were for. But I did find out that
(06:20):
that was a representation of how marketing was viewed.
They were a cost center that spent money on cheap
giveaways for trade shows. And the whatever was spent on
this campaign was some plastic pork chops that were left in the closet. They're
not selling software, helping sales to sell anything. They were a
cost center, and I realized that's where my starting point was. How do I bring
(06:42):
this marketing team out of the call center into the profit center
column? Oh my god. Yeah. And, you know, sadly, there's still
organizations operating that way, you know, that, you know, marketing is a call center
and, you know, they're the event support team
and You know, just make it pretty team. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And I I just came back from CES, early
(07:05):
earlier last month, and, man, I'd see them spending millions and millions on
that type of stuff. So it does matter, but you what what you are saying
is, you know, hey. It's so, so, so much more than
just event support and and and and swag. So,
let let's get into it a little bit. Yo. And it sounds like your
journey was elevating marketing with sales.
(07:27):
So maybe, Lee, we could turn the corner and talk about what good looks
like a little bit. Do you wanna start with, you know, I
guess, anchoring the problem, sales and marketing, very often, they're
two separate functions doing two separate things. But I think,
you also at the time I don't even know if there was a term for
it, Lee, but would you have said you were in the revenue operations
(07:49):
role at that point? Or Well, you know, that wasn't
a term that I used back then, even heard back then. Mhmm.
But I was being placed in that position because at that time,
the CEO was a salesperson who was hired because of his sales
acumen, and I often reported directly to him. And so
he was really adamant about marketing makes making
(08:11):
sense to sales and making sure that whatever he spent on marketing
contributed to revenue. So, yeah, before the phrase was popular or
used often, I was definitely in that in that position of revenue
ops, because I was running the marketing operation marketing
automation platform. I was running the sales operations platform
and all the interconnectivity between those. So, yes, it was absolute
(08:33):
absolutely revenue ops. Very cool. You're showing this feature here,
and, that came from many instances where I'm
the marketer standing outside looking through the glass window, the sales
meetings thinking, you know, I have all their data.
Like, I'm the one who's, you know, moving around what happens in marketing,
what happens in sales. I know what their customers are doing and, you know, the
(08:56):
reports that that are on the screen, I created them. So why am I not
in the meeting? Now, I'm the marketer, but because my title was marketing. And
regardless of what I've been doing in sales and with sales, my title was
marketing, so I wasn't called to the meeting. And so what I
found out was well, first of all, I pushed myself into the meetings. I said,
hey. Let me, there's a meeting tomorrow. Let me let me sit in on that
(09:17):
meeting. And there wasn't a pushback of saying, no. You can't come. It was just
more or less, why is marketing here? So as a
marketer sitting in a meeting, I got some really interesting
insights, like, what really drives the sales team right
now? Like, what product is their bread and butter? What products
do they prefer to sell? What what objections are they getting from customers?
(09:39):
That's a gold mine for marketing because while marketing's
working on this, this trade show or this new brochure or
website, we're writing content based on
marketing research, perhaps, what we think is going on. But what
if we hear three salespeople say, look, I've gotten the
same objection that my other colleagues here have gotten is because the
(10:01):
buttons on our interface for our product are out of order. Mhmm. You
know, that's a problem that marketing needs to address,
And it could be anything from a lot on the website to a
whole campaign to say, hey. Our product is the most ergonomically
correct in its field. All of a sudden, marketing has gotten
out ahead and helped sales sell while the customer's
(10:24):
doing their own research. But those things will happen if marketing isn't in
the meeting. So it I don't I'll I'll stop talking, but it goes both ways,
you know, in terms of who's in the meeting. Yeah. Ab absolutely.
Gosh. You've made me think of of a few different things. And you know that
my firm, we, you know, very often start with our clients and
thinking about a value narrative. And I believe I told you,
(10:46):
Lee, a story about, Tableau and how we were building a
value narrative just before their IPO. And they wanted to
start getting bigger deals, go after a new customer segment, you know, enterprise,
accounts, if you would, not do the typical product led growth of land and
expand, but actually head upstairs and say, hey.
It makes strategic sense for you guys as a whole to
(11:09):
be more data driven at the time. But how do we
build a narrative? You know, we included, you know, the
CMO and her office. We included sales.
We included product and the product leaders,
all coming together, having a dialogue about
what is our story, what what's our our sales narrative, our value narrative.
(11:33):
How do we go out and create value for our customers? Did we stop there?
No. We went we went out. You know, I got, the Tableau
executives involved because we, you know, created a value
narrative that we wanted to use to target people like
themselves, those executives. And I I talked to their CFO,
talked to their product leader, their chairman, etcetera,
(11:54):
testing this value narrative. And then we went
out to their customers as well to test that
value narrative. So just, you know, I love how you're talking about sales
and marketing being tied at the hip, but sometimes you can even go further. And
I I love Mark Schaefer's story in your your book, Lee, about
how he, or go ahead and tell us what what you remember about your interview
(12:17):
with him. That'd be great. Yeah. I was thinking about that as you mentioned what
you did Yeah. Similar to what Mark said because in his
previous, career in sales, he was saying that, you know, he had worked
in marketing and in sales, so they trusted him as as someone who's been in
both areas similar to my story. But there was an
instance where or a time when he the sales team, the marketing
(12:40):
team, and the technologist would make a regular trip out to their
customers and have conversations with them. Yeah. And that
added so much value not only in the particular customer that we're talking
to, but also understanding the market and responding to the market
better because they had all three people in the same room. And and that's
important. Even when you add in the technologist, maybe that's version two of the book
(13:02):
is to add in, you know, the the product team. But Yeah. You have all
those people in there that understand what's important to the customer and
how they can work together to satisfy that customer. Because they all have
different they'll hear different things. If you send a salesperson or marketing
person into a customer Mhmm. They will both hear different things.
Yeah. And they need to go back to the office or get back together and
(13:23):
say, okay. This is what you heard. This is what I heard. How do we
pull this together to benefit not only that customer, but future customers
as well? Absolutely. Yeah. It it's so critical. Yeah.
The thing that Mark also highlighted, I remember from your story with him, Lee, is,
they had a rigorous process. And, you
know, we do that type of work as well where, you know, it's called voice
(13:46):
of the customer research, But where you go in and and
Mark talked about that account specific. You know, they did that for their
huge elephant accounts, if you would, and, you know, figuring out how they could improve
their game there. But then, also, you you glean learnings that
flow back into product enhancement, marketing strategy,
sales strategy based on that that concerted
(14:08):
approach that they were taking. You know? You you know, it's a huge investment
as market called out, but, oh, man oh, man can it pay
off, you know, when when that's done right. Very, very
powerful. Absolutely. This is a a good
one to to think about. Just we need to start bringing
together because they have to be together, you know, versus disjointed
(14:30):
activities. And, I thought if you wanted to
highlight for the audience, I really love this from the book, your
perspective about a revenue team sweet spot and just
thinking starting with people, which I always love to hear. Tell us
what you were thinking here. Well, because, you know,
as I worked on trying to be that unicorn between sales and marketing
(14:53):
and understanding both teams, I realized we're all on a spectrum
of, you know, you have your most amazing marketers who are the most
creative and maybe the most analytical, but they don't understand
sales. They don't understand the the bottom line. What are we trying to achieve here?
We're not trying to achieve the best marketing. We're trying to achieve revenue for the
company. So on the left side of the continuum, you
(15:14):
have the marketer who doesn't quite understand sales. On the
far right side of the continuum, you have the salesperson who thinks it's
all about them, and they can just go in, close a deal, and they don't
understand marketing. They don't understand that marketing helped them get there. They don't
understand the skills or the analytics involved in marketing.
So that's the far, you know, the far right of a of a continuum.
(15:36):
And so what you have is either a marketer on one side with nothing to
sell, or you have somebody who's selling who has no market to sell
to. Mhmm. So I think, ideally, if you're a
marketer, your ideal place to be between halfway
and then the extreme marketing side, meaning that you you you're well
steeped in marketing, but you also understand, sales. And on the
(15:58):
other end of that, the best place for the salesperson to be is halfway between
the middle and then the super salesperson. Now in
between this marketer, this good marketer, and this good
salesperson, I'd say the unicorn. And there's two things
between these two. Well, there's this area that I call the revenue
team sweet spot, which is anybody who falls between an amazing marketer and
(16:20):
amazing salesperson. The everybody in that area, that's your
revenue team. Those are those are people who understand sales and marketing
together enough to make sure the company's working to build revenue.
Not to be amazing marketers or amazing salespeople,
which, you know, don't understand the whole picture, but a revenue team.
In the middle, there are few people who are unicorns, who really get both.
(16:44):
Even I don't claim that. I'm probably just marketing side of
Unicorn. I don't claim to be a career salesperson
despite the the numb number of hours I've spent in that in those seats
and with working with sales. So that diagram's in the
book, and, you know, I encourage anyone to to compare that to their
organization and the people who they have in sales and
(17:06):
marketing. And, you know, try to set a goal of having
everyone on your sales or marketing teams to be in that revenue
sweet spot so that you can actually drive revenue versus, you know,
working just in silos. I love it. I love it. When
we do, oh, sales kickoff work or, you know, I
I try to frame it more towards revenue team kickoff,
(17:28):
And, we'll we'll build, playbooks, you know, go to market playbooks.
You know, say it's a new segment, new market, new
opportunity, new partnership, joint partnership. You know, when we bring
people together, I just love bringing
distinct revenue sales driven type of focus, but having everybody
(17:49):
there to appreciate and and, you know, cross
fertilize, is so important. Lee,
another story I wanted to mention with you. I personally worked in a wood
products mill going through college, and I I paid for my
college education really proud about that. But, yeah, I I was a a
working man, especially on Christmas holidays and summers. I was in a
(18:12):
mill. And, you know, one of my first,
first couple weeks in the mill, the plant manager
stopped by my station, and I'm just stacking wood, you
know, coming off a big saw. And he told the guy, you know,
the operator, hey. Shut the saw. And he goes, hey. Take a break. I wanna
spend some time with Bruce. And I'm, like, just going, wow. That's kinda fun. What's
(18:35):
up? You know? And his name was Dave. So Dave walked me through the
plant to another station, and he's going, hey, Bruce. Do
you see those guys over there? And do you see that
big stack of wood that's on the ground? He
goes, that came from you. And I and I
Lee, I just have this big, oh, shit moment.
(18:57):
There's this big stack of wood laying on the ground, just
a bunch of sticks, you know, big big pile, and and it was a waste
pile effectively. And he goes, yeah. What's going on, Bruce, is
you're passing wood through to them that they
can't use in assembling into the doors that they're making.
You know, because it's got too many jagged edges. And I'm like, just
(19:20):
going, jeez, Dave. I I didn't know. And he goes, yeah. I knew you
didn't. That's why I wanted to show you what's going on here.
So so you would know, and you can know what's happening
downstream with with the things that you're doing.
And, so, anyways, of course, I I paid attention
moving forward and didn't pass stuff along. You know, it kinda caught it upstream.
(19:43):
But, you know, I I bring that story even though it's a wood products mill.
Just that shared, you know, perspective and
appreciation for what what each activity is doing,
I think, is really critical. And and I think that's what you bring into this
sweet spot, that that shared respect and understanding
of how you can help one another to to, you know, what what
(20:06):
really matters drive revenue, revenue growth. Yeah. And
there's there's a couple places in the book where I refer to a communication loop
and how it's it's traditional
for sales to say, well, the leads aren't good coming in, so that's
why my day isn't going great because the leads are crap. Well,
the book encourages companies to help sales take responsibility for that
(20:30):
situation because if sales takes a stance
to help marketing understand the target customer,
understand what the customer needs to know and understand, then it means
those leads are either gonna be the better targeted or
better educated and more warm when they come to sales. But in
order to educate that prospect, in order to warm them up,
(20:53):
you have to have input from sales to do so. So if
marketing is going out there by themselves and just doing
their own analytics and their own market research, it could be
interesting to them from a market standpoint. But what about for that company? What
about for your particular product? That has to come
from the boots on the ground, from your sales team. So if your leads are
(21:15):
coming in, they're not targeted well or not they're not warm enough,
let's take it from sales to say, hey, marketing. Let's have a meeting together and
see why this lead isn't good and why this lead is
good. How can we help you target better on the ones we
want to receive? So it's a shared responsibility, so that we don't
end up with that that wood pile of of leads that you can't
(21:37):
use. Let's figure out how do we work together to sharp
to sharpen the blade, and everybody who gets training on how to
get it smoothed out so we can use everything that we put into the
top of the funnel. Holy here. I I
I hear you with sadness, but also opportunity. One of
my clients, I won't mention him by name, but $2,000,000,000 company,
(22:00):
Global. And, they do an annual state of
the union type of survey. And, the guy reached out to
me. I was talking to him, I and I was saying, hey. Would you be
interested in knowing what sales is focusing on for the next
year? There's eight key use cases that they'll
be speaking about and talk, you know, highlighting customer pains around
(22:22):
and talking about your solutions that you've been investing tons of r
and d in to bring to those customers to solve for those problems, those
use cases. Would you be interested? And he goes, damn. I'd love
that. And I'm like, I I was hoping you'd say that
because that might help you design some of the questions you
ask in your survey and get some better real
(22:44):
authoritative data around the importance of those
use cases and how they can really move the dial for for
other prospective customers. And he's like, oh, yeah, Bruce. Send it
over, man. I'm in. You know? But, gosh, you just need to make
those bridges. I'll tell you. Yeah.
That reminds me of another another story in the book where, I
(23:07):
realized as a marker, we were working on this campaign,
pushing really hard. We had, you know, email
campaigns and website updates and everything for this new particular
product, and we couldn't figure out there was something missing.
Like, sales wasn't motivated. They weren't selling it. They weren't even
bugging us about the quality of leads because they just didn't seem to be
(23:28):
engaged in this big new campaign. Now given there's some
underlying management issues that we won't address that are here,
but the bigger story is that when the marketing got a chance to
sit in on the sales meeting, we realized when they got access to the
numbers, the revenue numbers, they found out that the bread
and butter from the sales team came from one of the legacy
(23:50):
products. They knew they had faster
sales, bigger sales. The revenue was
strong for the legacy product, so nothing that marketing brought
to them that was new was gonna excite them.
So that wouldn't have that gap would have
continued had those meetings not been merged. So the
(24:13):
the resolution was, marketing marketing can work harder
on promoting the older legacy products. And if the company is
moving on to something new, then sales would be able to now get
some data on, hey. Your this product is selling
great, but it's gonna be outdated in a few months or a year. Let's help
you look forward and sell this new thing. Here's what the market is
(24:35):
saying about the new product. But that communication has to happen. Otherwise, it
would have continued on this track of, you know, the parallel but not
connected track of them working, in two different
directions, so to speak. So that's why the communication
loop is so important. That's why the the the meetings together is so
important. I mean, that's really the the the the beef of why this book
(24:57):
even exists is trying to solve for those kind of problems. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That
that up and down and side to side, you know, just good communication
striving that alignment. Absolutely critical.
Lee, one I wanted to move us forward on another concept that I just
loved that that you have in the book, and and it's the the
funnel. You know, the marketing funnel, sales funnel, you know,
(25:19):
what you you know, I I love how you coined the revenue
funnel. That that's what you should be thinking about, as you
approach this. And, also, just the fact that I I think a lot of
people like to put it into a linear model,
but, you know, and I know, and a lot of people that have, you know,
kind of been in the battle know that it it's not ultimately
(25:42):
linear. Things are going on all over the place. Could you
explain this? Yeah. You know, we often wanna say nowadays that
the funnel doesn't exist. Well, the funnel really is just our way of trying
to visualize and understand if there is a
customer journey and how does it go and how the teams work together
to get them from unknown to known to a customer. How do you do that?
(26:04):
So the visualization of that was a funnel. Start off with many, and you
narrow them down to the few winners. Well, the funnel
at first was understood to be linear, but now we understand that
customers, they not only do they they they hover above the
funnel before we even know about them, that's even more so with, you know,
the the searchability and social media and Internet. Since
(26:26):
that happened, which has been years now, we just realized it recently,
the customers do all that research before they even come near our funnel. Then
once they come in the funnel, they, you know, come out the
side. There you go. They come out the side to go find a buyer's group.
They come back in the top. It is not linear. And as I said in
the book, they are the captains now. They're in control.
(26:48):
We do not control this buyer journey. We can call it a
funnel for descriptive means and understanding, but there's
no longer a marketing brings it in and hands it off to
sales, and then it goes away to the sales land and and and closes.
That's no longer existing. Marketing has to be a part
of the effort all the way through. Sales can't let
(27:10):
go, when they disappear. They need to, you know, stay with
them as they come back into the funnel. It's just this
mess of a traffic in and out of the sides of the funnel before they
come back in. And they are truly the captains. Now we we wanted to
think when we had this funnel that we made this
customer journey, that sales made a customer journey or marketing
(27:32):
made a customer journey. That no longer exists. That's
where the I am the captain now analogy comes from. The
customer, it's it is their journey to guide, and it
is our job to try to help them along the way wherever they
may happen to be that particular day. Absolutely.
Yeah. And it's interesting. You know, the world of the buyers
(27:54):
changed, and Lee and I were kinda laughing, for people seeing this
episode on YouTube. I'm showing a little meme of Tom Hanks
and then the person that you know, the pirate that took over the ship that
where Tom Hanks is the captain. And the pirate's going, look at
me. Look at me. I am the captain now. And,
you know, which is true. You know, right now, it's a buyer's journey.
(28:17):
And, you know, and and their stats to back that up. You know, one of
the more recent ones is 70% of the buyer's journey
transpires without the buyer even dealing with sales
until they start to engage with sales. But then as Lee talks
about in this this kinda interesting random looking
funnel. I mean, it is a funnel, but there's some, you know, random acts happening
(28:40):
in there where the buyer's kinda in and out. And, gosh, all of a sudden,
the buyer talked to somebody else, another potential buyer within the same organization.
Now they're getting into the funnel and having conversations. So that, you know,
things just happen, especially around b two b and high consideration
decisions. And that's where it's really important
for sales and marketing to be in concert, you know,
(29:03):
similar messaging, similar, you know, approaches
that that will resonate with those buyers as as they move through their their
decision making journey. Probably to build share
Go ahead. Before we go, I wanna share an interesting thing story that happened since
the book was written in the past few months that Sure. Really would have made
that diagram even more complicated. We had
(29:25):
three calls from the same company within two
days, and they all asked for different meetings with
us. These were all prospects. And we had
done business with this company in the past. And so we thought, okay.
It's time for a new project. They probably called from different parts of the same
team. They set up three meetings. So my our our email back to them was,
(29:47):
hey. You know, you set up three different meetings. Would you like to combine
this into one? Because even before we had multiple
people involved in the sales process. So the funny thing
was nobody knew each other. These were three
calls for within the same company who all had
projects they wanted to do with us, and none of the people knew
(30:10):
each other. And so that
just adds a whole another level of complexity to the buyer journey.
They had heard they had worked with us before, heard about us.
So, you know, they were in our funnel, but not only was they were they
going out and getting buyer groups to bring more people in,
these buyer groups were splintering into other buyer groups
(30:33):
that then came into the funnel. Yes. Yeah. Definitely. It
gets to the point. Too, just to help, you know, connect the dots would be
a keyword here. You know, a lot of my work with Hewlett
Packard's been that way too. Hey. Did you know this group's doing this? You guys
could you know, let's let's get that together. You know, you know, just cross
fertilizing and helping and yeah. As as the great
(30:55):
marketing and sales teams can can help make that happen, especially with
an account based approach. Perfect. Well, Lee,
moving on then, just thinking about, you know, kind of this concertedness
in helping people, or helping marketing and
sales perform better as part of this high performing revenue engine.
I liked your concept that, you know, you're talking about
(31:18):
the funnel, but some of the activity that's happening there and and more
importantly, just this notion of quality versus
quantity. Do you wanna talk about that a bit from a content perspective?
Yeah. So you you may know I have a an agency, a content marketing
agency. And, you know, when we launched in 2017,
at that time, we're all about, look, you need a lot more content because you
(31:41):
don't have enough at the top of the funnel to capture the attention
versus your competitors. And to an extent, that is still true,
but what has happened is the question of, well, do we produce
quality content or quantity content? And the
answer is you need to do both, but it's a matter of when,
how much you spend on each kind of content, and what is the purpose of
(32:04):
that content. We had a client recently come to us and said,
hey. We wanna compete with content against this competitor.
We went to that competitor. That competitor was putting out they have they had a
podcast, first of all. That podcast was kicking out the audio
version, the video version for YouTube. It was kicking out, like, four or
five social shorts per week that was also getting,
(32:27):
views on YouTube. It was searchable. And in LinkedIn,
They were kicking a lot of content. Meanwhile, this potential
prospect was proud of their one video they did per month.
Now here's the thing. This is how b two b tends to think right now.
We're trying to work on changing that. This video they did once per
month was what they perceived as quality.
(32:49):
This is their perception internal looking out. In other words, they brought in a
film crew. They were in their studio. They
set up a fake studio in their office. They they carefully scripted
it. It costs a lot of money to get that three or four minute
video that was not very genuine because it was from
the CMO to, I think, the CTO who who was not gonna say anything
(33:11):
negative about the product. So it just didn't feel authentic enough.
And because of the cost, they did one a month.
Turn it upside down and look at the competitor who's cranking out
stuff, you know, video shorts. They're probably doing like we're doing right now,
sitting down, having a conversation, one hour conversation,
hundreds of pieces of content possibly, right down to the blogs written
(33:34):
from the conversation. So the QPQ
quality versus quantity balance comes from at the
awareness stage, you need to have quantity. In order to compete with
your competitor, you had to have more marketing touches.
Now does that mean that it's low quality content? Not necessarily,
but it means that your focus should be on quantity. So
(33:58):
what what we're struggling with is how do we define quality?
Well, quality should be defined in a couple different ways. One, the quality
of the what you're communicating. Like, if you're communicating quality, if
it's information that is valuable, it doesn't matter if you have the
most expensive camera, the best microphone. Did you
communicate something that is of quality? Think about how many,
(34:20):
you know, times it hurts on the radio who was out a
reporter, for example, a reporter out in the storm. Right? If a
reporter is telling the storm is coming, you're not worried about how the
wind affects his microphone or if the camera is shaky. You're interested in
the quality of what they're gonna tell you. Is the storm coming?
So that's one thing about quality. That's the production side.
(34:42):
Another part is the the value of what they're saying. So it's production and then
value. So to sum up this funnel, top of the funnel
awareness stage, quantity over perfection.
Quality is good, but quantity over perfection. Now when your customer becomes
more interested, then once you're in the interest phase, you start
to add in more quality, production quality, and the
(35:04):
value gets more targeted towards them. You can start building
this emotional connection because now you know a bit more about who they are, what
they're interested in. And then once you get down to the iteration stage, you
know, you're you're imparting more value about how valuable your
solution or product is. You're talking about your product features more.
Your production quality goes up because it then it becomes more about
(35:26):
you. Before, it's about the customer. Like, how does this help you? That's your
awareness part. But now if they're considering buying from you, then you can
talk about yourself, talk about your product and your services and how great they are.
Your production quality goes up. And then, your highest
quality content is in the action stage. You want to convince
them to buy from you, to take action. And what makes this even better
(35:48):
is that you can afford to spend more on higher production
quality here because you have the narrow part of the funnel with
people who are more likely to buy from you. So think about your
your acquisition cost. You don't wanna spend Hollywood budget
when you don't even when you're spraying and praying at the top of the awareness
part because you don't know who they are yet. Don't know if they're interested. Don't
(36:10):
know if they're gonna consider you or not. So spending all that high end
money for that is not worth it. But if they're taking
about to take action with you and they're the bottom of the so called
funnel and they're talking about, your company, now your
white papers, your high quality video, your long explainer
videos, that's when your highest quality both in what you're saying and the
(36:32):
production quality comes in. Oh, interesting. Okay.
Yeah. Interesting framework on this. Well, let's move
into another concept that you wanted to
love this thing. Lee, when I saw it in the book,
I it it just made me think of the the quote that I cite often.
(36:54):
88% of b two b buyers will only buy from a trusted adviser, and that
comes from Salesforce.com. So fairly recent
statistic as well post pandemic. So, gosh.
You know, you know, to get, you know, bigger
deals, high consideration deals over the goal line from a sale
perspective, the seller needs to be perceived as a
(37:15):
trusted adviser for that buyer to buy in 88% of the cases.
So, Lee, we what do you have to say about that, and what else could
you teach us about how how to how to treat this paradigm of
trusted advisor? Yeah. So the goal is to get
this prospective customer to take an action. So what does
that customer need to take an action? Well, let's talk about the
(37:37):
individual pieces and why those alone may not get you there.
So let's say someone has experience. Let's make a scenario like,
someone who builds engines for cars. They may have the
experience repairing engines, but if they're
not if you don't know them, they can influence you. And if they've only built
one, they don't have the authority to tell you what engine to put in your
(38:00):
assembly line of vehicles. So they only have experience. Now if they have the
authority again, if you don't know who they are, they're not gonna influence you,
and they may have the authority, but they could be at an
executive level, but don't have the hands on experience to convince you to
make a move. I mean, the CEO of a company a software can can
have the authority to say, hey. Our software is the best,
(38:22):
but the CTO or the engineer, the programmer has
the experience and when that really if that really works. And then you have the
influencer. The influencer, you know, if Kim Kardashian tells me
that this is the best engine for my car, I'm not gonna believe it. Like,
I know who she is. She has extreme influence on lots of things, but
I don't know if she has experience or the authority in that space.
(38:45):
So what you're looking for is what you need to have
to get the customer to take action is influenced
by someone with real experience relatable
to your goal with the authority
to lead me in that direction. So when those three things
converge, then you have your trusted adviser, and then the
(39:07):
customer takes action. Absolutely. No. I just
think this is so eloquent in in having people think about all
three parts of this is is if you would with an
infinity diagram in your mind, but you need all three just to
make this come together. So really well stated.
Well, Lee, we've covered a lot. I'm
(39:30):
just thinking maybe we talk, you know, about any
concluding remarks because I know everybody's gonna find so much more in your
book and and and just the richness of it. But any other big
idea or thought you'd like to leave folks with?
Well well, Bruce, you know, I really enjoyed writing the book because it was from
so many experiences. And part of my goal in the book
(39:53):
was to also walk the line between, you know,
helping salespeople, helping marketing people. I'm talking directly
to the leadership, the CROs, the CEOs in this book as
well. And also wanted to have something in there for the for the student, the
person who is either literally a student in sales and marketing,
but also those who are in their careers and won't be better at it.
(40:15):
I encountered many marketers and salespeople and even leaders
who said, you know what? I don't quite understand what the other department's doing.
Why are they doing that? I don't understand what their what motivates them.
How do we connect to them? And so, you know, now from the
book and even before the book, I do I do a lot of speaking on
helping these teams understand each other and how do you
(40:38):
get the mindset of a revenue team as opposed to a marketing
team. I talked to marketers who are like, hey, Mark. Hey, Lee. How do we
keep our jobs? How do we justify our place as marketers
in this company? And the first thing I tell them is you need to get
into the profit center line, learn how to talk sales,
learn how to understand what's important to sales, getting those meetings and find
(41:01):
out what's important. And then the same time, part of that is,
you know, also sales teams trying to figure out,
don't point the finger at to why you don't have the leads you want or
why things aren't going smoothly or how can you deal with the a changing
market. Marketing may have those answers, but Mhmm. Unless you end
up being with them, you may not know. So it's to build a
(41:23):
revenue team. And to do that, marketers need to step up,
sales need to step up, and their management needs to understand how
to stop thinking about these two teams as being separate. Oh,
absolutely. Yeah. And and the beauty of your book is it helps bridge
that divide and bring people together with that shared understanding perspective,
kind of the the bigger north star, you know, revenue growth and how do we
(41:45):
all play a role in making that happen. So it's a well done in laying
all that out. So I just wanna, you know, highlight for everybody, you
know, go grab Lee's book. It's out on Amazon. Yeah,
and my proof that I purchased it, Lee, is right there in front of us.
But, yeah, go go grab it. It's awesome and and and
marinate within it. There there's a lot to learn and grow with within
(42:07):
Lee's book. And then, I would encourage you to
lead or, connect with Lee on, LinkedIn.
I'm showing his profile for people that can see the YouTube channel, but you know,
definitely find him on LinkedIn. And,
Lee produces content on LinkedIn all the
time. And, you know, he's one of the thought leaders that you should be following.
(42:29):
And, Lee, I'm sure you'll welcome people to connect with you
and you know, or become part of your 23,000
followers and and make that number even bigger, but, you know,
I would encourage that. And any any other ideas, Lee, for how to connect
and interact with you moving forward? Yeah. So, actually, the
book is being built with the community as well. So you can buy the
(42:51):
book also from my website, aleadjudge.com. If
you do that, then you'll have instant access access to our community, which
you'll be able to hear the full conversations. So in the book, they
are excerpts from conversation with 10 other experts in
sales and marketing. And we recorded the audio for that, and
so parts of that translated into the book. But then if you're a part of
(43:13):
the community, you get to hear the whole conversation. We talked with Joe Pulizzi, Mark
Schafer, Seth Godin, Laura Erdem, several people in there.
Matt Crisp who has sold many companies and done well. So
in the community, you get a lot more multimedia. I mean, I'm a media person,
so I couldn't stop at just written word. So, yeah, if
you buy from the website from a leadjudge.com, you get a chance to get,
(43:36):
all the other content as well. And if you get it from Amazon, I guess
there's a process to let us know you got it from there. We can also
add you to the community from there as well. Very cool.
Well, Lee, on that note, thanks so much for being on the
show. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Bruce. Always is. Thanks for
having me. Wow. What a conversation with Ailey Judge. We
(43:57):
covered so much from the shift in buyer control to the importance of
a truly aligned revenue team. One of the biggest takeaways
for me is the idea that marketing and sales can no longer afford to
operate in silos. If we wanna meet buyers where they are, we
have to work together seamlessly, providing value at each and
every touch point. Lee's cash framework is a powerful way
(44:19):
to think about how to break down barriers and create a revenue engine that
truly works. If you're in sales or marketing or leading a team
in either function, you owe it to yourself to rethink how your teams
collaborate. If you enjoyed this episode,
please like and subscribe to the ValuePro Show. And if you're feeling
kind, leave a review so others can find and enjoy it too.
(44:42):
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you on the next one.
Welcome to the ValuePro Show, where value pros get value
ready.
Hi. My name is Bruce Scheer, the host of the ValuePro Show. In this
episode, we are talking with A. Lee Judge, a seasoned
expert in sales and marketing alignment and the author of Align Your
Revenue Team for Success with Cash. The
(00:23):
world of sales and marketing has changed dramatically.
The buyer is now the captain, steering their own journey, making
decisions long before they ever engage with a salesperson.
So how do sales and marketing teams work together in this new
reality? Leah spent decades in the trenches bridging
the gap between these two functions, and he's here to share
(00:45):
his insights on how companies can break down silos and
create a high performing revenue engine. We'll
be diving into his cash framework, communication, alignment,
systems, and honesty, and exploring how organizations
can shift their approach to match the way modern buyers make decisions.
If sales and marketing alignment isn't a priority for you yet,
(01:09):
it should be, and Lee's insights will show you why. Let's
get into it. Well, Lee, thanks so much for joining the show. I'm
I'm really excited about this conversation with you today.
Lee, I've been just kind of immersing myself in your
book, and, it it's really rich. There's a lot
there. And, thankfully, because it is really well
(01:31):
written, some of the things in in the review that I wrote for
you, verified review, I might add. Now that I'll ask everybody watching the
show, get the book. You're gonna love it, and leave Lee a verified review so
the world can celebrate this thing. But, the thing I was
loving the most about it probably is, a, it was steeped in your
deep, been there, done that experience. And,
(01:54):
you know, I see a lot of books where the the you don't have that
experience base behind it. But, you know, the stories you tell in there,
yeah, you've been there, done that. You've seen it all, for better or for
worse. So I know you got some battle scars. The other thing
that I liked is you kinda brought in some big gun experts.
I know you yourself are rocking it in terms of this whole
(02:16):
world of sales and marketing alignment, but you did bring in
some big guns with their points of view just to kinda anchor on some of
the concepts that you were teaching within the book and illustrating. And
and I thought that was really powerful too. So just really well played. And
for everybody here, you know, you'll find Lee's book out on
Amazon, other other popular places, but I'd encourage you to go out and get
(02:39):
a copy of it if sales and marketing alignment is a concern for
you. And if it's not, I'm concerned for you because it's a big
issue, and I I see it day in and day out. Not
not a good thing. So, Lee, if you wouldn't
mind, just tell us a little bit about, you know, the book and
why you wrote it, principally. And, let me know when
(03:01):
you wanna jump into a a story that talks about pork chops.
Okay. Well, thanks, Bruce. Thanks for having me. Well, so the book
came about after about twenty years or so being
between sales and marketing. Now I've been marketing a few years before that,
but it came to a point where because of some of my technical background,
(03:21):
I was given the the ownership of the the CRM. And
so my task was to help sales put things in
Salesforce and, you know, give more data to the business for
forecasting. And so here I was a marketing person tasked with
working smack dab between sales and marketing, and that
became my career for the next ten I mean, twenty years.
(03:44):
And I saw some unique things, and I got a chance to sit in
on both sides, meetings for sales, meetings for marketing. I
realized how separate these teams were, and I found out there's
about four things that cause these teams to either
not work together or to be inefficient at driving the
company forward towards revenue. And so the four things
(04:07):
and I've been taking notes the whole time, you know, since since beginning of this
career. I'm taking notes thinking one day, boy, one day I'm gonna write a book
about these experiences. And so the four things that stuck
out the most were communication, alignment,
systems they used, and honesty. And it just so happens those
made a wonderful acronym of CASH that both marketers
(04:28):
and salespeople especially understand and love the word cash because a
business has to have cash to operate. And in this
sense, with this acronym, these four things, communication alignment systems
and honesty, we need those four things to operate as well. Oh, I love
it. I love it. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At the end of the day,
you need a great economic underpinning. You know? You need some cash. Yeah.
(04:51):
That that makes the whole thing spin right. And when you don't, it don't
spin right. And I I love how you use cash as your your acronym
for explaining this. Fantastic. But,
Houston, we do have a problem. You know? The, the the ship
is going down, and and, you know, we we gotta deal with this
leak. So, tell us, you know, what you found,
(05:13):
and I I think it wasn't necessarily overly pretty. Tell us a
story. Well, so this particular company I
just began working at, in marketing, and they
were going through a transition. The CEO had come back out of see my
retirement to run the company and build it back up. The sales team had
been diminished quite a bit. The marketing team was gone. I was the
(05:35):
the new number one employee for marketing as this company
was transitioning. And I'm going through the marketing
closet trying to find out, okay. I'm the there was a marketing team here
before. What artifacts did they leave to give me a hint of what they've been
doing? So I go to the marketing closet, and I find a big box
of plastic pork chops. I'm thinking, what in the world
(05:58):
what was the campaign? This is a software company for customer experience.
So I I just, you know, I kept thinking all these crazy, like, what kind
of slogan or logo or trade show gimmick was this
for them to need a box of plastic pork chops. So
long story short, I never did find out what the plastic pork chops
were for. But I did find out that
(06:20):
that was a representation of how marketing was viewed.
They were a cost center that spent money on cheap
giveaways for trade shows. And the whatever was spent on
this campaign was some plastic pork chops that were left in the closet. They're
not selling software, helping sales to sell anything. They were a
cost center, and I realized that's where my starting point was. How do I bring
(06:42):
this marketing team out of the call center into the profit center
column? Oh my god. Yeah. And, you know, sadly, there's still
organizations operating that way, you know, that, you know, marketing is a call center
and, you know, they're the event support team
and You know, just make it pretty team. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And I I just came back from CES, early
(07:05):
earlier last month, and, man, I'd see them spending millions and millions on
that type of stuff. So it does matter, but you what what you are saying
is, you know, hey. It's so, so, so much more than
just event support and and and and swag. So,
let let's get into it a little bit. Yo. And it sounds like your
journey was elevating marketing with sales.
(07:27):
So maybe, Lee, we could turn the corner and talk about what good looks
like a little bit. Do you wanna start with, you know, I
guess, anchoring the problem, sales and marketing, very often, they're
two separate functions doing two separate things. But I think,
you also at the time I don't even know if there was a term for
it, Lee, but would you have said you were in the revenue operations
(07:49):
role at that point? Or Well, you know, that wasn't
a term that I used back then, even heard back then. Mhmm.
But I was being placed in that position because at that time,
the CEO was a salesperson who was hired because of his sales
acumen, and I often reported directly to him. And so
he was really adamant about marketing makes making
(08:11):
sense to sales and making sure that whatever he spent on marketing
contributed to revenue. So, yeah, before the phrase was popular or
used often, I was definitely in that in that position of revenue
ops, because I was running the marketing operation marketing
automation platform. I was running the sales operations platform
and all the interconnectivity between those. So, yes, it was absolute
(08:33):
absolutely revenue ops. Very cool. You're showing this feature here,
and, that came from many instances where I'm
the marketer standing outside looking through the glass window, the sales
meetings thinking, you know, I have all their data.
Like, I'm the one who's, you know, moving around what happens in marketing,
what happens in sales. I know what their customers are doing and, you know, the
(08:56):
reports that that are on the screen, I created them. So why am I not
in the meeting? Now, I'm the marketer, but because my title was marketing. And
regardless of what I've been doing in sales and with sales, my title was
marketing, so I wasn't called to the meeting. And so what I
found out was well, first of all, I pushed myself into the meetings. I said,
hey. Let me, there's a meeting tomorrow. Let me let me sit in on that
(09:17):
meeting. And there wasn't a pushback of saying, no. You can't come. It was just
more or less, why is marketing here? So as a
marketer sitting in a meeting, I got some really interesting
insights, like, what really drives the sales team right
now? Like, what product is their bread and butter? What products
do they prefer to sell? What what objections are they getting from customers?
(09:39):
That's a gold mine for marketing because while marketing's
working on this, this trade show or this new brochure or
website, we're writing content based on
marketing research, perhaps, what we think is going on. But what
if we hear three salespeople say, look, I've gotten the
same objection that my other colleagues here have gotten is because the
(10:01):
buttons on our interface for our product are out of order. Mhmm. You
know, that's a problem that marketing needs to address,
And it could be anything from a lot on the website to a
whole campaign to say, hey. Our product is the most ergonomically
correct in its field. All of a sudden, marketing has gotten
out ahead and helped sales sell while the customer's
(10:24):
doing their own research. But those things will happen if marketing isn't in
the meeting. So it I don't I'll I'll stop talking, but it goes both ways,
you know, in terms of who's in the meeting. Yeah. Ab absolutely.
Gosh. You've made me think of of a few different things. And you know that
my firm, we, you know, very often start with our clients and
thinking about a value narrative. And I believe I told you,
(10:46):
Lee, a story about, Tableau and how we were building a
value narrative just before their IPO. And they wanted to
start getting bigger deals, go after a new customer segment, you know, enterprise,
accounts, if you would, not do the typical product led growth of land and
expand, but actually head upstairs and say, hey.
It makes strategic sense for you guys as a whole to
(11:09):
be more data driven at the time. But how do we
build a narrative? You know, we included, you know, the
CMO and her office. We included sales.
We included product and the product leaders,
all coming together, having a dialogue about
what is our story, what what's our our sales narrative, our value narrative.
(11:33):
How do we go out and create value for our customers? Did we stop there?
No. We went we went out. You know, I got, the Tableau
executives involved because we, you know, created a value
narrative that we wanted to use to target people like
themselves, those executives. And I I talked to their CFO,
talked to their product leader, their chairman, etcetera,
(11:54):
testing this value narrative. And then we went
out to their customers as well to test that
value narrative. So just, you know, I love how you're talking about sales
and marketing being tied at the hip, but sometimes you can even go further. And
I I love Mark Schaefer's story in your your book, Lee, about
how he, or go ahead and tell us what what you remember about your interview
(12:17):
with him. That'd be great. Yeah. I was thinking about that as you mentioned what
you did Yeah. Similar to what Mark said because in his
previous, career in sales, he was saying that, you know, he had worked
in marketing and in sales, so they trusted him as as someone who's been in
both areas similar to my story. But there was an
instance where or a time when he the sales team, the marketing
(12:40):
team, and the technologist would make a regular trip out to their
customers and have conversations with them. Yeah. And that
added so much value not only in the particular customer that we're talking
to, but also understanding the market and responding to the market
better because they had all three people in the same room. And and that's
important. Even when you add in the technologist, maybe that's version two of the book
(13:02):
is to add in, you know, the the product team. But Yeah. You have all
those people in there that understand what's important to the customer and
how they can work together to satisfy that customer. Because they all have
different they'll hear different things. If you send a salesperson or marketing
person into a customer Mhmm. They will both hear different things.
Yeah. And they need to go back to the office or get back together and
(13:23):
say, okay. This is what you heard. This is what I heard. How do we
pull this together to benefit not only that customer, but future customers
as well? Absolutely. Yeah. It it's so critical. Yeah.
The thing that Mark also highlighted, I remember from your story with him, Lee, is,
they had a rigorous process. And, you
know, we do that type of work as well where, you know, it's called voice
(13:46):
of the customer research, But where you go in and and
Mark talked about that account specific. You know, they did that for their
huge elephant accounts, if you would, and, you know, figuring out how they could improve
their game there. But then, also, you you glean learnings that
flow back into product enhancement, marketing strategy,
sales strategy based on that that concerted
(14:08):
approach that they were taking. You know? You you know, it's a huge investment
as market called out, but, oh, man oh, man can it pay
off, you know, when when that's done right. Very, very
powerful. Absolutely. This is a a good
one to to think about. Just we need to start bringing
together because they have to be together, you know, versus disjointed
(14:30):
activities. And, I thought if you wanted to
highlight for the audience, I really love this from the book, your
perspective about a revenue team sweet spot and just
thinking starting with people, which I always love to hear. Tell us
what you were thinking here. Well, because, you know,
as I worked on trying to be that unicorn between sales and marketing
(14:53):
and understanding both teams, I realized we're all on a spectrum
of, you know, you have your most amazing marketers who are the most
creative and maybe the most analytical, but they don't understand
sales. They don't understand the the bottom line. What are we trying to achieve here?
We're not trying to achieve the best marketing. We're trying to achieve revenue for the
company. So on the left side of the continuum, you
(15:14):
have the marketer who doesn't quite understand sales. On the
far right side of the continuum, you have the salesperson who thinks it's
all about them, and they can just go in, close a deal, and they don't
understand marketing. They don't understand that marketing helped them get there. They don't
understand the skills or the analytics involved in marketing.
So that's the far, you know, the far right of a of a continuum.
(15:36):
And so what you have is either a marketer on one side with nothing to
sell, or you have somebody who's selling who has no market to sell
to. Mhmm. So I think, ideally, if you're a
marketer, your ideal place to be between halfway
and then the extreme marketing side, meaning that you you you're well
steeped in marketing, but you also understand, sales. And on the
(15:58):
other end of that, the best place for the salesperson to be is halfway between
the middle and then the super salesperson. Now in
between this marketer, this good marketer, and this good
salesperson, I'd say the unicorn. And there's two things
between these two. Well, there's this area that I call the revenue
team sweet spot, which is anybody who falls between an amazing marketer and
(16:20):
amazing salesperson. The everybody in that area, that's your
revenue team. Those are those are people who understand sales and marketing
together enough to make sure the company's working to build revenue.
Not to be amazing marketers or amazing salespeople,
which, you know, don't understand the whole picture, but a revenue team.
In the middle, there are few people who are unicorns, who really get both.
(16:44):
Even I don't claim that. I'm probably just marketing side of
Unicorn. I don't claim to be a career salesperson
despite the the numb number of hours I've spent in that in those seats
and with working with sales. So that diagram's in the
book, and, you know, I encourage anyone to to compare that to their
organization and the people who they have in sales and
(17:06):
marketing. And, you know, try to set a goal of having
everyone on your sales or marketing teams to be in that revenue
sweet spot so that you can actually drive revenue versus, you know,
working just in silos. I love it. I love it. When
we do, oh, sales kickoff work or, you know, I
I try to frame it more towards revenue team kickoff,
(17:28):
And, we'll we'll build, playbooks, you know, go to market playbooks.
You know, say it's a new segment, new market, new
opportunity, new partnership, joint partnership. You know, when we bring
people together, I just love bringing
distinct revenue sales driven type of focus, but having everybody
(17:49):
there to appreciate and and, you know, cross
fertilize, is so important. Lee,
another story I wanted to mention with you. I personally worked in a wood
products mill going through college, and I I paid for my
college education really proud about that. But, yeah, I I was a a
working man, especially on Christmas holidays and summers. I was in a
(18:12):
mill. And, you know, one of my first,
first couple weeks in the mill, the plant manager
stopped by my station, and I'm just stacking wood, you
know, coming off a big saw. And he told the guy, you know,
the operator, hey. Shut the saw. And he goes, hey. Take a break. I wanna
spend some time with Bruce. And I'm, like, just going, wow. That's kinda fun. What's
(18:35):
up? You know? And his name was Dave. So Dave walked me through the
plant to another station, and he's going, hey, Bruce. Do
you see those guys over there? And do you see that
big stack of wood that's on the ground? He
goes, that came from you. And I and I
Lee, I just have this big, oh, shit moment.
(18:57):
There's this big stack of wood laying on the ground, just
a bunch of sticks, you know, big big pile, and and it was a waste
pile effectively. And he goes, yeah. What's going on, Bruce, is
you're passing wood through to them that they
can't use in assembling into the doors that they're making.
You know, because it's got too many jagged edges. And I'm like, just
(19:20):
going, jeez, Dave. I I didn't know. And he goes, yeah. I knew you
didn't. That's why I wanted to show you what's going on here.
So so you would know, and you can know what's happening
downstream with with the things that you're doing.
And, so, anyways, of course, I I paid attention
moving forward and didn't pass stuff along. You know, it kinda caught it upstream.
(19:43):
But, you know, I I bring that story even though it's a wood products mill.
Just that shared, you know, perspective and
appreciation for what what each activity is doing,
I think, is really critical. And and I think that's what you bring into this
sweet spot, that that shared respect and understanding
of how you can help one another to to, you know, what what
(20:06):
really matters drive revenue, revenue growth. Yeah. And
there's there's a couple places in the book where I refer to a communication loop
and how it's it's traditional
for sales to say, well, the leads aren't good coming in, so that's
why my day isn't going great because the leads are crap. Well,
the book encourages companies to help sales take responsibility for that
(20:30):
situation because if sales takes a stance
to help marketing understand the target customer,
understand what the customer needs to know and understand, then it means
those leads are either gonna be the better targeted or
better educated and more warm when they come to sales. But in
order to educate that prospect, in order to warm them up,
(20:53):
you have to have input from sales to do so. So if
marketing is going out there by themselves and just doing
their own analytics and their own market research, it could be
interesting to them from a market standpoint. But what about for that company? What
about for your particular product? That has to come
from the boots on the ground, from your sales team. So if your leads are
(21:15):
coming in, they're not targeted well or not they're not warm enough,
let's take it from sales to say, hey, marketing. Let's have a meeting together and
see why this lead isn't good and why this lead is
good. How can we help you target better on the ones we
want to receive? So it's a shared responsibility, so that we don't
end up with that that wood pile of of leads that you can't
(21:37):
use. Let's figure out how do we work together to sharp
to sharpen the blade, and everybody who gets training on how to
get it smoothed out so we can use everything that we put into the
top of the funnel. Holy here. I I
I hear you with sadness, but also opportunity. One of
my clients, I won't mention him by name, but $2,000,000,000 company,
(22:00):
Global. And, they do an annual state of
the union type of survey. And, the guy reached out to
me. I was talking to him, I and I was saying, hey. Would you be
interested in knowing what sales is focusing on for the next
year? There's eight key use cases that they'll
be speaking about and talk, you know, highlighting customer pains around
(22:22):
and talking about your solutions that you've been investing tons of r
and d in to bring to those customers to solve for those problems, those
use cases. Would you be interested? And he goes, damn. I'd love
that. And I'm like, I I was hoping you'd say that
because that might help you design some of the questions you
ask in your survey and get some better real
(22:44):
authoritative data around the importance of those
use cases and how they can really move the dial for for
other prospective customers. And he's like, oh, yeah, Bruce. Send it
over, man. I'm in. You know? But, gosh, you just need to make
those bridges. I'll tell you. Yeah.
That reminds me of another another story in the book where, I
(23:07):
realized as a marker, we were working on this campaign,
pushing really hard. We had, you know, email
campaigns and website updates and everything for this new particular
product, and we couldn't figure out there was something missing.
Like, sales wasn't motivated. They weren't selling it. They weren't even
bugging us about the quality of leads because they just didn't seem to be
(23:28):
engaged in this big new campaign. Now given there's some
underlying management issues that we won't address that are here,
but the bigger story is that when the marketing got a chance to
sit in on the sales meeting, we realized when they got access to the
numbers, the revenue numbers, they found out that the bread
and butter from the sales team came from one of the legacy
(23:50):
products. They knew they had faster
sales, bigger sales. The revenue was
strong for the legacy product, so nothing that marketing brought
to them that was new was gonna excite them.
So that wouldn't have that gap would have
continued had those meetings not been merged. So the
(24:13):
the resolution was, marketing marketing can work harder
on promoting the older legacy products. And if the company is
moving on to something new, then sales would be able to now get
some data on, hey. Your this product is selling
great, but it's gonna be outdated in a few months or a year. Let's help
you look forward and sell this new thing. Here's what the market is
(24:35):
saying about the new product. But that communication has to happen. Otherwise, it
would have continued on this track of, you know, the parallel but not
connected track of them working, in two different
directions, so to speak. So that's why the communication
loop is so important. That's why the the the meetings together is so
important. I mean, that's really the the the the beef of why this book
(24:57):
even exists is trying to solve for those kind of problems. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That
that up and down and side to side, you know, just good communication
striving that alignment. Absolutely critical.
Lee, one I wanted to move us forward on another concept that I just
loved that that you have in the book, and and it's the the
funnel. You know, the marketing funnel, sales funnel, you know,
(25:19):
what you you know, I I love how you coined the revenue
funnel. That that's what you should be thinking about, as you
approach this. And, also, just the fact that I I think a lot of
people like to put it into a linear model,
but, you know, and I know, and a lot of people that have, you know,
kind of been in the battle know that it it's not ultimately
(25:42):
linear. Things are going on all over the place. Could you
explain this? Yeah. You know, we often wanna say nowadays that
the funnel doesn't exist. Well, the funnel really is just our way of trying
to visualize and understand if there is a
customer journey and how does it go and how the teams work together
to get them from unknown to known to a customer. How do you do that?
(26:04):
So the visualization of that was a funnel. Start off with many, and you
narrow them down to the few winners. Well, the funnel
at first was understood to be linear, but now we understand that
customers, they not only do they they they hover above the
funnel before we even know about them, that's even more so with, you know,
the the searchability and social media and Internet. Since
(26:26):
that happened, which has been years now, we just realized it recently,
the customers do all that research before they even come near our funnel. Then
once they come in the funnel, they, you know, come out the
side. There you go. They come out the side to go find a buyer's group.
They come back in the top. It is not linear. And as I said in
the book, they are the captains now. They're in control.
(26:48):
We do not control this buyer journey. We can call it a
funnel for descriptive means and understanding, but there's
no longer a marketing brings it in and hands it off to
sales, and then it goes away to the sales land and and and closes.
That's no longer existing. Marketing has to be a part
of the effort all the way through. Sales can't let
(27:10):
go, when they disappear. They need to, you know, stay with
them as they come back into the funnel. It's just this
mess of a traffic in and out of the sides of the funnel before they
come back in. And they are truly the captains. Now we we wanted to
think when we had this funnel that we made this
customer journey, that sales made a customer journey or marketing
(27:32):
made a customer journey. That no longer exists. That's
where the I am the captain now analogy comes from. The
customer, it's it is their journey to guide, and it
is our job to try to help them along the way wherever they
may happen to be that particular day. Absolutely.
Yeah. And it's interesting. You know, the world of the buyers
(27:54):
changed, and Lee and I were kinda laughing, for people seeing this
episode on YouTube. I'm showing a little meme of Tom Hanks
and then the person that you know, the pirate that took over the ship that
where Tom Hanks is the captain. And the pirate's going, look at
me. Look at me. I am the captain now. And,
you know, which is true. You know, right now, it's a buyer's journey.
(28:17):
And, you know, and and their stats to back that up. You know, one of
the more recent ones is 70% of the buyer's journey
transpires without the buyer even dealing with sales
until they start to engage with sales. But then as Lee talks
about in this this kinda interesting random looking
funnel. I mean, it is a funnel, but there's some, you know, random acts happening
(28:40):
in there where the buyer's kinda in and out. And, gosh, all of a sudden,
the buyer talked to somebody else, another potential buyer within the same organization.
Now they're getting into the funnel and having conversations. So that, you know,
things just happen, especially around b two b and high consideration
decisions. And that's where it's really important
for sales and marketing to be in concert, you know,
(29:03):
similar messaging, similar, you know, approaches
that that will resonate with those buyers as as they move through their their
decision making journey. Probably to build share
Go ahead. Before we go, I wanna share an interesting thing story that happened since
the book was written in the past few months that Sure. Really would have made
that diagram even more complicated. We had
(29:25):
three calls from the same company within two
days, and they all asked for different meetings with
us. These were all prospects. And we had
done business with this company in the past. And so we thought, okay.
It's time for a new project. They probably called from different parts of the same
team. They set up three meetings. So my our our email back to them was,
(29:47):
hey. You know, you set up three different meetings. Would you like to combine
this into one? Because even before we had multiple
people involved in the sales process. So the funny thing
was nobody knew each other. These were three
calls for within the same company who all had
projects they wanted to do with us, and none of the people knew
(30:10):
each other. And so that
just adds a whole another level of complexity to the buyer journey.
They had heard they had worked with us before, heard about us.
So, you know, they were in our funnel, but not only was they were they
going out and getting buyer groups to bring more people in,
these buyer groups were splintering into other buyer groups
(30:33):
that then came into the funnel. Yes. Yeah. Definitely. It
gets to the point. Too, just to help, you know, connect the dots would be
a keyword here. You know, a lot of my work with Hewlett
Packard's been that way too. Hey. Did you know this group's doing this? You guys
could you know, let's let's get that together. You know, you know, just cross
fertilizing and helping and yeah. As as the great
(30:55):
marketing and sales teams can can help make that happen, especially with
an account based approach. Perfect. Well, Lee,
moving on then, just thinking about, you know, kind of this concertedness
in helping people, or helping marketing and
sales perform better as part of this high performing revenue engine.
I liked your concept that, you know, you're talking about
(31:18):
the funnel, but some of the activity that's happening there and and more
importantly, just this notion of quality versus
quantity. Do you wanna talk about that a bit from a content perspective?
Yeah. So you you may know I have a an agency, a content marketing
agency. And, you know, when we launched in 2017,
at that time, we're all about, look, you need a lot more content because you
(31:41):
don't have enough at the top of the funnel to capture the attention
versus your competitors. And to an extent, that is still true,
but what has happened is the question of, well, do we produce
quality content or quantity content? And the
answer is you need to do both, but it's a matter of when,
how much you spend on each kind of content, and what is the purpose of
(32:04):
that content. We had a client recently come to us and said,
hey. We wanna compete with content against this competitor.
We went to that competitor. That competitor was putting out they have they had a
podcast, first of all. That podcast was kicking out the audio
version, the video version for YouTube. It was kicking out, like, four or
five social shorts per week that was also getting,
(32:27):
views on YouTube. It was searchable. And in LinkedIn,
They were kicking a lot of content. Meanwhile, this potential
prospect was proud of their one video they did per month.
Now here's the thing. This is how b two b tends to think right now.
We're trying to work on changing that. This video they did once per
month was what they perceived as quality.
(32:49):
This is their perception internal looking out. In other words, they brought in a
film crew. They were in their studio. They
set up a fake studio in their office. They they carefully scripted
it. It costs a lot of money to get that three or four minute
video that was not very genuine because it was from
the CMO to, I think, the CTO who who was not gonna say anything
(33:11):
negative about the product. So it just didn't feel authentic enough.
And because of the cost, they did one a month.
Turn it upside down and look at the competitor who's cranking out
stuff, you know, video shorts. They're probably doing like we're doing right now,
sitting down, having a conversation, one hour conversation,
hundreds of pieces of content possibly, right down to the blogs written
(33:34):
from the conversation. So the QPQ
quality versus quantity balance comes from at the
awareness stage, you need to have quantity. In order to compete with
your competitor, you had to have more marketing touches.
Now does that mean that it's low quality content? Not necessarily,
but it means that your focus should be on quantity. So
(33:58):
what what we're struggling with is how do we define quality?
Well, quality should be defined in a couple different ways. One, the quality
of the what you're communicating. Like, if you're communicating quality, if
it's information that is valuable, it doesn't matter if you have the
most expensive camera, the best microphone. Did you
communicate something that is of quality? Think about how many,
(34:20):
you know, times it hurts on the radio who was out a
reporter, for example, a reporter out in the storm. Right? If a
reporter is telling the storm is coming, you're not worried about how the
wind affects his microphone or if the camera is shaky. You're interested in
the quality of what they're gonna tell you. Is the storm coming?
So that's one thing about quality. That's the production side.
(34:42):
Another part is the the value of what they're saying. So it's production and then
value. So to sum up this funnel, top of the funnel
awareness stage, quantity over perfection.
Quality is good, but quantity over perfection. Now when your customer becomes
more interested, then once you're in the interest phase, you start
to add in more quality, production quality, and the
(35:04):
value gets more targeted towards them. You can start building
this emotional connection because now you know a bit more about who they are, what
they're interested in. And then once you get down to the iteration stage, you
know, you're you're imparting more value about how valuable your
solution or product is. You're talking about your product features more.
Your production quality goes up because it then it becomes more about
(35:26):
you. Before, it's about the customer. Like, how does this help you? That's your
awareness part. But now if they're considering buying from you, then you can
talk about yourself, talk about your product and your services and how great they are.
Your production quality goes up. And then, your highest
quality content is in the action stage. You want to convince
them to buy from you, to take action. And what makes this even better
(35:48):
is that you can afford to spend more on higher production
quality here because you have the narrow part of the funnel with
people who are more likely to buy from you. So think about your
your acquisition cost. You don't wanna spend Hollywood budget
when you don't even when you're spraying and praying at the top of the awareness
part because you don't know who they are yet. Don't know if they're interested. Don't
(36:10):
know if they're gonna consider you or not. So spending all that high end
money for that is not worth it. But if they're taking
about to take action with you and they're the bottom of the so called
funnel and they're talking about, your company, now your
white papers, your high quality video, your long explainer
videos, that's when your highest quality both in what you're saying and the
(36:32):
production quality comes in. Oh, interesting. Okay.
Yeah. Interesting framework on this. Well, let's move
into another concept that you wanted to
love this thing. Lee, when I saw it in the book,
I it it just made me think of the the quote that I cite often.
(36:54):
88% of b two b buyers will only buy from a trusted adviser, and that
comes from Salesforce.com. So fairly recent
statistic as well post pandemic. So, gosh.
You know, you know, to get, you know, bigger
deals, high consideration deals over the goal line from a sale
perspective, the seller needs to be perceived as a
(37:15):
trusted adviser for that buyer to buy in 88% of the cases.
So, Lee, we what do you have to say about that, and what else could
you teach us about how how to how to treat this paradigm of
trusted advisor? Yeah. So the goal is to get
this prospective customer to take an action. So what does
that customer need to take an action? Well, let's talk about the
(37:37):
individual pieces and why those alone may not get you there.
So let's say someone has experience. Let's make a scenario like,
someone who builds engines for cars. They may have the
experience repairing engines, but if they're
not if you don't know them, they can influence you. And if they've only built
one, they don't have the authority to tell you what engine to put in your
(38:00):
assembly line of vehicles. So they only have experience. Now if they have the
authority again, if you don't know who they are, they're not gonna influence you,
and they may have the authority, but they could be at an
executive level, but don't have the hands on experience to convince you to
make a move. I mean, the CEO of a company a software can can
have the authority to say, hey. Our software is the best,
(38:22):
but the CTO or the engineer, the programmer has
the experience and when that really if that really works. And then you have the
influencer. The influencer, you know, if Kim Kardashian tells me
that this is the best engine for my car, I'm not gonna believe it. Like,
I know who she is. She has extreme influence on lots of things, but
I don't know if she has experience or the authority in that space.
(38:45):
So what you're looking for is what you need to have
to get the customer to take action is influenced
by someone with real experience relatable
to your goal with the authority
to lead me in that direction. So when those three things
converge, then you have your trusted adviser, and then the
(39:07):
customer takes action. Absolutely. No. I just
think this is so eloquent in in having people think about all
three parts of this is is if you would with an
infinity diagram in your mind, but you need all three just to
make this come together. So really well stated.
Well, Lee, we've covered a lot. I'm
(39:30):
just thinking maybe we talk, you know, about any
concluding remarks because I know everybody's gonna find so much more in your
book and and and just the richness of it. But any other big
idea or thought you'd like to leave folks with?
Well well, Bruce, you know, I really enjoyed writing the book because it was from
so many experiences. And part of my goal in the book
(39:53):
was to also walk the line between, you know,
helping salespeople, helping marketing people. I'm talking directly
to the leadership, the CROs, the CEOs in this book as
well. And also wanted to have something in there for the for the student, the
person who is either literally a student in sales and marketing,
but also those who are in their careers and won't be better at it.
(40:15):
I encountered many marketers and salespeople and even leaders
who said, you know what? I don't quite understand what the other department's doing.
Why are they doing that? I don't understand what their what motivates them.
How do we connect to them? And so, you know, now from the
book and even before the book, I do I do a lot of speaking on
helping these teams understand each other and how do you
(40:38):
get the mindset of a revenue team as opposed to a marketing
team. I talked to marketers who are like, hey, Mark. Hey, Lee. How do we
keep our jobs? How do we justify our place as marketers
in this company? And the first thing I tell them is you need to get
into the profit center line, learn how to talk sales,
learn how to understand what's important to sales, getting those meetings and find
(41:01):
out what's important. And then the same time, part of that is,
you know, also sales teams trying to figure out,
don't point the finger at to why you don't have the leads you want or
why things aren't going smoothly or how can you deal with the a changing
market. Marketing may have those answers, but Mhmm. Unless you end
up being with them, you may not know. So it's to build a
(41:23):
revenue team. And to do that, marketers need to step up,
sales need to step up, and their management needs to understand how
to stop thinking about these two teams as being separate. Oh,
absolutely. Yeah. And and the beauty of your book is it helps bridge
that divide and bring people together with that shared understanding perspective,
kind of the the bigger north star, you know, revenue growth and how do we
(41:45):
all play a role in making that happen. So it's a well done in laying
all that out. So I just wanna, you know, highlight for everybody, you
know, go grab Lee's book. It's out on Amazon. Yeah,
and my proof that I purchased it, Lee, is right there in front of us.
But, yeah, go go grab it. It's awesome and and and
marinate within it. There there's a lot to learn and grow with within
(42:07):
Lee's book. And then, I would encourage you to
lead or, connect with Lee on, LinkedIn.
I'm showing his profile for people that can see the YouTube channel, but you know,
definitely find him on LinkedIn. And,
Lee produces content on LinkedIn all the
time. And, you know, he's one of the thought leaders that you should be following.
(42:29):
And, Lee, I'm sure you'll welcome people to connect with you
and you know, or become part of your 23,000
followers and and make that number even bigger, but, you know,
I would encourage that. And any any other ideas, Lee, for how to connect
and interact with you moving forward? Yeah. So, actually, the
book is being built with the community as well. So you can buy the
(42:51):
book also from my website, aleadjudge.com. If
you do that, then you'll have instant access access to our community, which
you'll be able to hear the full conversations. So in the book, they
are excerpts from conversation with 10 other experts in
sales and marketing. And we recorded the audio for that, and
so parts of that translated into the book. But then if you're a part of
(43:13):
the community, you get to hear the whole conversation. We talked with Joe Pulizzi, Mark
Schafer, Seth Godin, Laura Erdem, several people in there.
Matt Crisp who has sold many companies and done well. So
in the community, you get a lot more multimedia. I mean, I'm a media person,
so I couldn't stop at just written word. So, yeah, if
you buy from the website from a leadjudge.com, you get a chance to get,
(43:36):
all the other content as well. And if you get it from Amazon, I guess
there's a process to let us know you got it from there. We can also
add you to the community from there as well. Very cool.
Well, Lee, on that note, thanks so much for being on the
show. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Bruce. Always is. Thanks for
having me. Wow. What a conversation with Ailey Judge. We
(43:57):
covered so much from the shift in buyer control to the importance of
a truly aligned revenue team. One of the biggest takeaways
for me is the idea that marketing and sales can no longer afford to
operate in silos. If we wanna meet buyers where they are, we
have to work together seamlessly, providing value at each and
every touch point. Lee's cash framework is a powerful way
(44:19):
to think about how to break down barriers and create a revenue engine that
truly works. If you're in sales or marketing or leading a team
in either function, you owe it to yourself to rethink how your teams
collaborate. If you enjoyed this episode,
please like and subscribe to the ValuePro Show. And if you're feeling
kind, leave a review so others can find and enjoy it too.
(44:42):
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you on the next one.
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