January 30, 2025 • 29 mins
In this part 1 of 2 with Teresa Allan, we explore the necessity of integrating marketing, sales and customer success functions to enhance your customer’s experiences and drive growth. Teresa is the Managing Partner at Magnus Consulting and she highlights the shared objectives across these potential siloes and discusses the barriers caused by misaligned goals and misunderstood roles. Teresa shares the importance of collaborative strategies, leadership alignment, and a holistic approach to business metrics to build a unified growth engine.
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Episode Transcript
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Matt Best (00:00):
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with
(00:02):
your hosts, Matt Best and JonnyAdams.
Jonny Adams (00:05):
Hello.
Matt Best (00:05):
We're delighted to be joined by Teresa Allan today,
the founder of MagnusConsulting, who are a marketing
effectiveness specialistconsultancy, and Teresa we've
been working together now withbetween Magnus and SBR
Consulting on a number ofdifferent projects. So it's
fantastic to have you joining uson the podcast today. Thank you
that taking the time out of yourbusy schedule to to come and
(00:25):
talk to us about how we canalign marketing, sales and
customer success together. Andit's interesting, isn't it,
we've got probably the firsttime that professionals in
marketing, sales and customersuccess have ever been in the
same room together.
Teresa Allan (00:37):
Guinness Book of Records.
Jonny Adams (00:39):
Should we get the boxing gloves and see what
occurs, or are we going to beall right?
Matt Best (00:42):
No, it's your fault. No, it's your fault. No, it's my
fault. Okay. All right, so as iscustomary on the Growth Workshop
Podcast, we like to kind of kickthings off by just asking,
what's been interesting in yourweek. So tell us what's been
interesting in your world thisweek.
Teresa Allan (00:55):
This week, I'm embarking on a seven week detox.
I've signed up for a curatedseven week course that is not
only about giving up all the funthings in life, like alcohol and
sugar and gluten and dairy andall of those things, but also
transformational breath workevery day, ice baths every day,
(01:16):
and a community to hold me toaccount. So yeah, I'm enjoying
it so far. Ask me in a fewweeks.
Jonny Adams (01:22):
Explain to the listeners and just to Matt and I
like, what's the thing that youfelt changed so far? Is it the
fact that you're sort of weaningoff, not gonna say the partying
and the drinking, that's unfair.But do you feel like, you know,
like when you eat a lot ofsugar, which we naturally do in
our diet, do you feel that thatsort of slight decline?
Teresa Allan (01:36):
Oh, I mean, totally. You know, the usual
headaches have kicked in, whichis to be expected. I've been
going to bed at nine o'clockjust so I can avoid eating.
Jonny Adams (01:46):
Has sleep got better though?
Teresa Allan (01:47):
Sleep has got better because the
transformational breath has beentransformational. I mean, yeah.
I mean, it's like without goinginto laser detail, but we it's a
guided kind of 20 minute piecewhere you have to then keep
holding your breath after every4, 40 deep breath, and by the
end, you have to hold it for twominutes and 30 seconds. So when
they first said this, I thought,There's no way, because you do
(02:10):
this, or you do that, how manylengths Can you swim into the
swimming pool? You come up inthat panic feeling? And I was
like, Oh no, I hate thatfeeling. I can usually do about
30 seconds, but through thewhole process. By the end,
you're so relaxed and yourheartbeat is really slow and
it's slightly like you'refloating around the room. It's
amazing.
Jonny Adams (02:28):
That's incredible.
Matt Best (02:29):
We should just do that. Yeah, that sounds so cool.
I've probably been doing quitethe opposite. And this week,
Jonny, I just come back from atrip away with some pals. We had
lots of croissants and dairy inthe morning, followed by a few
beers on the golf course. Sothat's what's been interesting
in my world, which is probablythe poor opposite to your sorry
to rub it in.
Teresa Allan (02:49):
It's all right, I was there a week ago.
Matt Best (02:52):
So yeah. And whilst we'd all love to continue just
to do transformational breathbreathing and and what have you
I think it's it's probablyhelpful if we get into the meat
of today's conversation. SoTeresa, we're fascinated to
really dive into this alignmentof marketing, sales and customer
success, and really start tothink about and talk about,
(03:12):
like, what are some of thestrategies and thinking about
the audience and what they mightwant to take out today's
conversation, if we can sharesome, you know, some approaches,
some strategies to how to bringthose, those three areas of any
kind of client facing business,together. That's really the
objective for today. And I thinkyou know, weaving in data and
how the various different toolsand frameworks that we can use
(03:33):
to support that as well. So, butmaybe sort of starting with
marketing first, given thatMagnus is a marketing specialist
consultancy, what do you seegenerally as the role of
marketing and how it's evolvingin a modern in today's kind of
business landscape, and I guess,particularly as we think about
then how it aligns into sales todrive growth?
Teresa Allan (03:56):
I'm going to start because it came up yesterday in
a conversation I was having withthe client. So CIM, charter
Institute of marketing. Theirdefinition of marketing is to
identify, anticipate and satisfycustomer demands profitably.
Now, if you think about all ofthose things, if I said, What's
the role of sales, you'dprobably say something quite
(04:17):
similar. If you said, what's therole of customer success, you'll
also probably say somethingsimilar. So I think that,
firstly, there is amisunderstanding generally of
what the role of marketing does.But I think also with sales and
customer success, which is adrum that we've been banging for
ages, of it's, you know, atworst, it's the coloring in
(04:38):
department, or they put onevents and make PowerPoints and
everything else. We often seemarketing being as a single
person instead of an entirefunction. So I think the role of
marketing is as it should be. Ijust don't think people truly
understand what the role ofmarketing is. We talk about
strategic growth drivers as.Marketing, which ultimately
(05:01):
comes down to customercentricity, so really, starting
with much like the CIMSdefinition, so understanding who
they are and what thatopportunity is, and anticipating
those needs. Does that sit withmarketing, really? It sits with
all three of those groups,right? Because anyone who's kind
of having interactions with themis generating insight and
(05:23):
understanding, but ultimatelyreally identifying those
opportunities and then feedingthat into the organization to be
able to connect in the right wayat the right time, with the
right thing and with the rightmessage. So for me, marketing
needs to do some marketing onitself. That's an interesting
topic. I like that from acustomer's perspective, they
shouldn't stop at functions tosay, Okay, I've done my job in
(05:46):
marketing. I'm going to hand itover to sales now. And then
suddenly something completelydifferent happens. And then as
soon as the deals close, it'slike, you know, great, my job's
done in sales, and chuck it overto customer success. And I was
trying to think of an analogy ofthis. If you know, when you go
on, have to phone yourutilities, and you have to
identify what your problem is,and then they say, oh, we can't
help you, but we'll put you onto someone else. And you have to
(06:07):
start all over again and givethem all your details. And they
say, oh, no, we can't help you,and you have to go on someone
else. And then by the end of it,you're like, why am I saying
that? It's really frustratingexperience. And essentially, we
want to bring all of those threetogether to stop that. It's all
about customer experience andconnecting the dots externally,
which means under the skininternally, we have to connect
(06:28):
all three together.
Jonny Adams (06:29):
I'm thinking back to the relationship that we've
got with Magnus. And, you know,thinking about the time that we
spend with you on mutualprojects. And you know, it's
phenomenal from a sales,customer success perspective to
spend time with an expert likeyourself and your colleagues
that say, fantastic. You talkedabout one point, what I thought
was interesting, the fact thatthere's a misunderstanding of
what marketing is. So my firstquestion is going to be like,
(06:51):
where do you think that origincomes from, and who's
responsible for that in abusiness? So is it the CMO, or
is it the CEO that's actuallyrecruiting or trying to set that
up? And secondly, where does theorigin of the misalignment come
from as well?
Teresa Allan (07:05):
So in terms of that, I suppose, where did it
start? The misunderstanding? Ithink marketing is seen as a
creative department, right? Sowhich often can be not taken
seriously. We're talking b to b,right? So often it's kind of
like, well, they don'tunderstand the business or they,
you know, they go and do the funstuff at the end. And I think
that's, you know, if I'm beingtruly honest, when I first went
(07:27):
into marketing over 25 yearsago, I genuinely didn't really
know what we were doing, and Iwas excited about all of that
fun stuff. Yeah. So it's thatlegacy, what marketing used to
do, if you look at whatmarketing can do now is with the
access of data and insight, it'ssuddenly way more mature, and it
(07:49):
should have way more impact on abusiness in terms of being able
to provide those insights oncustomers and make sure that it
feeds into not only thecommercial strategy, but also
the business strategy.
Jonny Adams (08:01):
So the first question I asked there around
where, who owns that? Whocreated that? Lack of
understanding? It's interesting.So you just prompted something
else. It's like, because of thedigitalization and the emergence
of websites and digitalopportunities, has that meant
that marketing is naturally beseen as even more important.
Teresa Allan (08:19):
Well it's also hard to prove an ROI, and it's
also an expense. So with all ofthese things, it's like a cost
center. It's hard to proveimpact. And, you know, they seem
to be having fun. So are theytaken seriously? All of those
things are different. Now, apartfrom the having fun, we can
still have fun in our jobs.
Matt Best (08:36):
It's so fascinating that a lot of that same, that
same stuff, I recognize from acustomer success perspective,
cost center, right? Definitelynot the having fun. I don't
speak to many customer successmanagers who really feel like
they have an awful lot, but it'sthis sort of intangibility about
it. Maybe it's because, as we'retalking about this, I wonder if
a lot of that stems from it doesgo right back to that kind of
(08:59):
ability to measure whereas insales, it's a little bit easier
and can be a little bit morebinary. To say you've won a
client, this is how much thatclient's worth that's attributed
to you. Congratulations. Off wego. You've paid your salary...
Teresa Allan (09:11):
Well you're at the end point, right, so you can
either, you've either closed itor you've lost it, whereas
marketing start right upstream,so connecting it up has in the
past been difficult.
Matt Best (09:21):
And the reliance on either side of sales, so you've
got marketing relying on salesbeing able to effectively close
and customer success, rely onsales having sold the right
thing.
Jonny Adams (09:30):
And then doesn't the CS part go then wrap around
back to marketing, yeah, whichis a misunderstanding as well
within business content. I stillwant to go back to the origin of
misalignment, because it'simportant, if we're going to be
talking about the power of oneplus one equals three, which is
essentially this...
Teresa Allan (09:45):
...or one plus one plus one equals seven.
Jonny Adams (09:50):
The important part around it is to understand the
mislamat, but from yourexperience, and maybe an
example, right? Like where,where you've been in an
organization or helped abusiness as part of a
consultancy. Where does thatorigin and misalignment come
from? Like, how does it, howdoes it occur?
Teresa Allan (10:05):
I genuinely think the origin of misalignment comes
from the fact that we all areidentifying as different roles
and different functions. Like,you know, we made a joke earlier
about all being in the sameroom. We've genuinely had
meetings in the last three weekswhere we've had sales and
marketing and customer successteams all sitting in the same
(10:25):
room saying, this is the firsttime we've all sat together. How
can you get aligned if you don'teven know who they are or you're
not even talking so I thinkthere is that I'm in marketing,
I'm in sales, I'm in customersuccess. Well, actually, we're
all trying to do the same thing.So I think that labeling is
always been an issue. And Ithink the other piece that we
(10:45):
all know is that if you're indifferent functions, you often
have different targets anddifferent KPIs, so you're not
actually all working together toget towards, ultimately, kind of
sale and customer satisfactionand customer lifetime value. So
without that alignment, there'snever going to be people working
together well.
Jonny Adams (11:05):
And it reminds me, I worked in B to C for a number
of years, for 10 years at golftravel organization there, and I
remember the time, especially ina B to C world, where you're
reliant massively on marketing,and they definitely weren't
coloring, because if marketingtap wasn't turned on, then sales
can't do their job. And for anumber of years, maybe five
years, we never had marketing inthe room. It was just sales. You
(11:26):
know, how's your target? Whatare you doing? And success was
there, which was, which was,which was good. But then five
years later, well, maybe weshould bring marketing in, and
maybe we should bring productin. And guess what? It was a
little bit. There was a littlebit friction. Start off with
there's but the finger pointingstarted to come down less,
because we were like, oh, that'swhat you do. You don't just sit
in front of your computerputting colors on the website.
Teresa Allan (11:48):
Respect for each other, right?
Jonny Adams (11:49):
Yes.
Teresa Allan (11:50):
You're working together. To be like, okay,
understand the difficulties.Let's solve them together.
Jonny Adams (11:54):
So actually, to your point around misalignment
of job role and theunderstanding of that, and
actually, a lot of businessesdon't write out job descriptions
properly. And so I think that'san interesting point.
Matt Best (12:03):
Thank you. And I guess just sort of going, I
don't want to go too kind ofphilosophical, and I know
there's not one size fits all,but I think we talk about
getting these teams in the room.How have you helped businesses
in doing that, apart from manhandling the teams? To say,
you've all got to come in,you've all got to be involved in
this, because otherwise it's notgoing to work. But is there a
(12:23):
structural thing? Now, if wethink about organizational
structures worked in businesseswhere you've got, you know,
success that are more closelyjoined to service delivery and
support, and therefore go into aCOO, right? And then you've got
a CMO and a CRO, or a C probablya CRO, CCO, right? All the C's,
but that's where the alignmentstops. If you're out there and
(12:44):
you're listening to this, oryou're building a business and
you're saying, right, I need tomake a big decision about this
structure of this organization.Is there a point in that
hierarchy, in a traditional kindof business hierarchy, that you
think we should be bringing ittogether? And should it be
sooner than the CEO?
Teresa Allan (12:58):
Absolutely. And that's why we're seeing, you
know, obviously, the a new trendof a CGO, which is really the
apex of of, you know, marketingand sales together, but it's
still up there at the top. Anddoes it filter down? It's in
behaviors, in the culture. Andone of the things when we go in,
you know, we're very consciousthat we can't just tell people
(13:20):
to change. Change doesn't happenin that way, and it's they've
got to be on the bus, but we'vegot to be really aware of what's
going on behind the scenes. Whatthe challenges that people are
facing day to day, what are themotivations to change? Was it a
talk yesterday where it said,Actually, people don't want to
innovate because they're quitehappy with the status quo,
because the risk of doingsomething that you can't quite
(13:41):
tangibly see yet is greater thannot doing it at all. Same goes
for change, right? So reallytrying to understand what's the
kind of risk versus rewardmotivation to doing things
differently, and then thecapacity and capability to
change is a really criticalfactor that we look at when we
go into, you know, see how wellare we performing as a marketing
(14:05):
function or as a commercialfunction, and then build out a
plan that's really relevant tothat organization. Curious,
there's no point. There's nohere's the right structure for
everybody. Off you go. Let's doit tomorrow. That's not going to
work so often when we come in.We we don't, obviously, just
talk to the marketing team, asyou well know, we spend a lot of
(14:25):
time talking to the sales teams,to the product teams, to the
management to the to the CFO,you know, to get their
understanding of, well, what doyou think the role of marketing
should be, or what do you thinkit is right now, we would kind
of start there and map it out,and then we say, Well, look, if
we shifted it to here. This isthe impact it could have on the
organization. But here are thedependencies that sit under
(14:46):
that. Do we feel ready to do itand then start to kind of build
out that change roadmap? Butabsolutely, it starts with
empowerment of kind of top down,of getting people together and
and even, you know, we'vesuggested in the past, go and
shadow. So you know yourcounterpart in customer success
or in sales and vice versa for aday, just to get some
appreciation of the pressurethey're under, and you know the
(15:08):
targets that they're trying tohit and what they're doing on a
day to day basis.
Matt Best (15:12):
I've worked in with a couple of really successful
businesses that had arecruitment journey. So
regardless of what role youjoined the business here, and
this is a SaaS organization.Well now SaaS organization, but
every role that was going to beclient facing had to start in on
the support desk, and you had todo three months of answering
(15:33):
support tickets, and that getthere is no better way to get
connected to the real on theground challenges of your
customer, but also how you canunderstand what everybody else
is going through. So then whenyou become a, you know, when you
then you leave that team and yougo into the role that you were
hired to do, whether that's acustomer success manager,
account manager, new business,sales, whatever that might be,
(15:54):
you've got this appreciation notonly for what the customer
wants, but what the team that'sgoing to be serving the customer
that you win, has to deal with,and it's really kind of
transformed. So I guess it'ssort of where you don't have
that because obviously not allbusinesses can can onboard in
that way, but just having thatexposure to what other people
are going through in the team iscritical.
Teresa Allan (16:14):
Yeah, absolutely. .
Jonny Adams (16:15):
You know, it's interesting, I was smiling when
you said that was like, that'ssuch a gimmicky thing when, you
know, supermarket chain gets theCEO to walk the floor about,
yeah, right. Come on.
Teresa Allan (16:22):
You can always tell when the Ocado person turns
up. You're like, Oh, they're oneof the trainees for management.
Jonny Adams (16:29):
Oh, yeah. They don't have a clue where they're
going. They've missed my milk.They haven't given my apples.
Teresa Allan (16:33):
They've just crashed into the wall.
Matt Best (16:34):
Yeah, their uniforms clean.
Jonny Adams (16:38):
But I was with the ex CPO of super drug the other
day, and she was referencing howher and now the CEO of a mutual
client of ours used to worktogether 20 years ago, and they
worked behind the shop floor,right? But they worked together,
and that's how they met, and nowthey're working again. So it is
you know about getting in frontand understanding your customers
and then understanding differentparts of the business is
(16:59):
important. I'm curious about onething, when you know you're
pioneering the alignment piece,and I've seen how you work
Theresa with your clients, isthere something that was sort of
like a point in your time, inyour career, where it went I
really need this to happen,because I've been trying my
(17:19):
hardest in marketing, in asiloed event, trying to push
this change forward, which hasnever happened. Like, when did
you just think, right, if I'mgoing to carry on doing a job
and you've been successful inselling an agency before, you've
done so many great things, whendid you go, right, enough is
enough. I'm going to crack onand start thinking about
alignment and go for that as aproposition. What was the
turning point for you?
Teresa Allan (17:39):
I think it really was years of work. So I started
off in client side, and then,and actually my boss there, she
made us do a at least six monthsin insights and analytics before
we could go into anything else,which I to this day, always
forever grateful for, becauseit's a it's a critical skill for
marketeers, but most peopledon't have that ability. But
(18:01):
when I then moved to agencies,where I stayed for a long time,
what I was always struck withthat whether it was B to C or B
to B, you get a brief that comesin, and you run with it and but
then you can get to the end andit's you're doing the wrong
thing, the brief is wrong,right? And there hasn't been
that kind of in depthunderstanding and analysis as a
(18:24):
problem statement in the firstplace and as an agency. The
truth is, you know, we're allpretty much yes men and be like,
Oh yeah, great. We want to winit, so we'll say, Yes, we can do
everything, and it's not goingto have the business impact that
was intended, because ultimatelyyou're doing the wrong thing and
you haven't asked the rightquestions, and often you give
strategy away for free becauseyou're desperate to get to kind
(18:46):
of the the end bit, where theclient, you know, saw some
tangible output, and that'swhere they saw the value. And
after years and years of doingthis, it just made me realize
that there's a fundamental flaw,and there's a gap in that
process. And the other thingthat triggered it was, you know,
at the same time, we werestarting to see a lot of brands
creating in house agencies. Soagain, they were kind of going
(19:09):
straight to their Well, we'vegot all these creatives, and
they they can do all this greatstuff, but it's like, well,
you're missing the thinkingpiece first, that's connecting
the dots between the output andreally kind of connecting up to
the business strategy. Justfound it frustrating, because I
feel like it was a waste ofeveryone's time and money if
you're going to turn up and dosomething, and they were great
things that you were doing, butwere there the right things half
(19:29):
the time? Probably not.
Jonny Adams (19:31):
I thank you for that. And I think it'd be really
important, you know, actually,have a bit of chat amongst the
three of us. You know, we arethe three. That's, you know,
coming from different, you know,marketing, sales and customer
success. And as this topic isabout alignment. You know, I
think it's important from ourown experiences, Matt, Teresa,
to think about, well, what's anexperience that we've had in
business where we've witnessedthe power of the three
(19:51):
verticals, making seven thethree areas, as we all going to
say it now, you know, marketing,sales, a success. What have we
all seen personally that's beena. Success and an outcome. If
you've got an example, Matt,where you're thinking that
you've worked with a client orbeen in a business, even where
you've seen marketing, sales andcustomer success come together,
and it's sort of been quite apowerful outcome.
Matt Best (20:12):
It's genuinely hard to kind of think examples where
there's real where you can seethis real bind together. It's
probably easier in my experiencewith the smaller organizations
and but I think that's as a Ithink that's as a result of
being a smaller, more tight knitteam, and, you know, proximity
and everything else that goesalong along with that. And I
think it comes back to thisunderstanding the role. So from
(20:35):
a success perspective, it'simportant your first focus,
typically, is in customersuccess is, right? Well, how do
I serve this customer and makesure that AI can retain them and
B that I can grow them? And thethings that frustrate you in
customer success typically arethis feeling of they've been
miss, sold, so they've beenmisled, and in that situation,
marketing and sales are toblame. But actually, what I
(20:56):
found, yeah, and you talk aboutpressure and how that forms
diamonds, right? And that soundsa bit cheesy, I know, but when
you get those pressure points,what then comes out the back of
that is this realization. And Ithink this is where I've seen it
work. In those startup modes, wego actually, we do need to be
bit more aligned. We do need tocome together a little bit more
let's understand this. And Iknow Teresa that that Magnus do
a lot of this work across kindof customer journey mapping, but
(21:19):
it's something that I've been anadvocate for for many years as
well, in really, trulyunderstanding right from the
beginning or pre, even beforethe customer knows who we are,
all the way through to thisadvocacy piece. And I think so
many organizations go I'm goingto do a customer journey map. So
when do they buy? Okay? When dowe hand over to CS? Customer
Journey done, right? Or, how dowe acquire them? Then there are
(21:40):
sales qualified, lead customerjourney done, or CS, it's all
about, it doesn't matter. Wejust got to keep the wheels
rolling. And it becomes verysupport focused, I think that
holistic, and where we've beenable to where, in some cases,
I've orchestrated, or where I'veseen it been orchestrated,
bringing those teams together togo, what is it that you do, and
what is it that you do? And sortof a recent workshop with a
(22:00):
client who had that sort ofthat's interesting. So there was
a marketing person on the teamand a sales person. The
marketing person was like, Wecould definitely help you do
more there. I didn't realizethat that's the kind of insight
you wanted to share with yourcustomer. And it's those
opportunities to have thoseclicks and those moments of
right light bulbs gone, let's dosomething different.
Teresa Allan (22:19):
And it is just stopping the kind of the hamster
wheel that everyone is on, youknow, to hit those quarterly
targets and to constantly bedelivering to then go, actually,
let's all get in the room,maybe, which is hard to do. I
mean, we all struggle to do itright. It's, it's really
difficult. But I think it'sincredibly important to be able
(22:40):
to do that, and to be going backto roles and responsibilities,
to articulate, this is my role,this is your role. This is how
we work together, and here isour process, and this is where
we all feed into, ultimately,the business strategy. And I
think there's a disconnectthere, right? It's like, well,
we're all doing this. We've allhad examples in the past where
we've worked with clients wherethey've said, right? You know,
(23:02):
the brief is, you need to helpus acquire new customers. And
we've gone, okay, fine. Let'sjust take a little step back and
have a look at kind of theprocess, and map that out and
see what's going on. And as wemapped the the full end to end
process map not just stopped atacquisition, what we realized
was there was a huge hole in thebucket at the end. So we were
filling it in, filling it in,filling it in, and then there
(23:23):
was more people leaving thanthere were. So I was like, So we
raised this and said, weappreciate that you are targeted
on acquisition, but if we don'tsort out the retention issue,
we're just throwing money away.And in that circumstance, they
actually wouldn't, they couldn'tget the senior leadership team
to change their objectives. Sowe carried on, but at the end it
(23:46):
was like we're wastingeveryone's time.
Jonny Adams (23:48):
But I think this is important point that we're
talking about is because ifwe're we're debating this topic
and coming up with theseanswers, I know one of the next
questions will be, well, whatare the challenges? And then I
think we need to probably thinkabout bottoming out the the
framework that supports thatchallenge, possibly. But I
recall a client that we'veworked with since 2019
approximately around about 450sales professionals, 60 leaders,
(24:12):
eight different businesses thatsit underneath a consortium that
was carved out from a previousorganization in 2019 and they
are a B to see organization.What they've evolved in over the
last five years is they reallygot themselves understanding the
key metrics to start off withwhich they didn't have much data
integrity, they didn't have theright CRM. And once they
(24:33):
understood that they needed togo from sessions to leads, from
leads to bookings and thenretention of, you know, repeat
customers effectively in theirspace, that core metric enabled
the chief growth officer, inthis case, to actually really
get behind that. One of thepivots that they've done over
the last year is actually quiteinteresting. They had eight,
what I would call VP growthofficers that were possibly some
(24:57):
of the original individuals onthat sort of. Proceeding, sort
of 2019 up to sort of 2023 andwhat they then started to look
at was the analyzing the funnel,looking at the leakage between
each of those gaps, I say, fromsessions to leads, leads to
sales, and in sales toretention. And once they're able
to identify the challenge ineach space, they're able to look
(25:17):
at the capability of each of theindividual aspects. So success,
marketing, sales, they werelike, Hmm, something's happening
at the leadership piece.Marketing and Sales isn't fluid
enough. It's not optimizedenough. So what they then did,
which I thought was really good,not just go in and find a person
that could do the same thing,which was both marketing and
(25:38):
sales in another business tochange. They actually split the
role, went out to anothermarket, basically so completely
away from their currentorganizational structure, and
found someone that had done it,bigger, stronger and new
marketing as such a subjectmatter expert, and then brought
another sales person in, andthey're running the funnel, I
suppose, in a really optimizedfashion. Now, I don't think
(26:00):
they're there completely,because it's really hard then to
glue the people together, butit's actually quite a nice
journey since 2019 having sortof no understanding of their
funnel to then understanding it,then to building that change.
Teresa Allan (26:11):
And I don't think it is a destination. There you
go. Oh, we've done this. It'sperfect, because business is
always evolving. You know, thecontinuous transformation world
in which we find ourselves, andso does that constant evolution
of sales, marketing, customersuccess working together, I
don't think it's a project tothen tick off the list. It's a
(26:32):
constant need for those leadersto check in and say, Is this
working? How do we iterate andhow do we optimize?
Matt Best (26:39):
Your example there, Jonny just links right back to
what Teresa said at the top,which is around bringing that,
having that holistic view acrossall of those things, and having
a leader who's driving that, butthen also driving down the same
objectives and the same goals,which stops your leaky buckets.
I recall when we had Chrisregister from plan hat on the
podcast quite recently, talkingabout an example of him talking
(27:01):
to a CRO saying, we just need tokeep filling it. You just need
to keep filling the hopper. Justgonna keep filling the hopper.
And say you got a leaky bucket,right? That's why your ARR
numbers are down. It's notbecause you're not getting
enough in the front door. It'sbecause stuff's falling out the
back.
Teresa Allan (27:14):
I just want to balance the conversation out to
make sure that we're alsotalking about brand and we often
go into organizations where thatis the old that's the role of
marketing, which is to driveleads. Now that is a one role of
marketing, but we know thebalance between having brand
activity with balanced lead genactivity is really critically
(27:36):
important to drive long termgrowth and opportunity. But you
know, there's loads of researchout there that says that if you
don't do brand, then you're notgoing to perform as well from a
revenue growth perspective. Sobecause you're only filling in
those people that know you, andyou've got to go out there's a
95% 5% rule of 95% people onmarket yet, and so you're only
(27:58):
dealing with those 5% if you'reonly dealing with lead gen in
marketing. You've got to go tothat 95 so when they jump over
into potential to to buy,they're aware of you. There's a
really nice fact that I alwayscome back to you that when
people do that, when they jumpfrom that 95 into the 5% bucket,
they don't go to search, theydon't go to an event. They don't
(28:20):
ask somebody to go and do theresearch for them. They think
about who they might be able torecall to art to help them, and
typically, one of three that canbe recalled will end up being
the supplier. So that's why it'sreally important to do brand.
Matt Best (28:35):
That's a fantastic place for us to end today's
conversation. So Teresa Allen,the founder of Magnus
Consulting. To everyonelistening, join us for part two
as we continue thisconversation.
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with
(00:02):
your hosts, Matt Best and JonnyAdams.
Jonny Adams (00:05):
Hello.
Matt Best (00:05):
We're delighted to be joined by Teresa Allan today,
the founder of MagnusConsulting, who are a marketing
effectiveness specialistconsultancy, and Teresa we've
been working together now withbetween Magnus and SBR
Consulting on a number ofdifferent projects. So it's
fantastic to have you joining uson the podcast today. Thank you
that taking the time out of yourbusy schedule to to come and
(00:25):
talk to us about how we canalign marketing, sales and
customer success together. Andit's interesting, isn't it,
we've got probably the firsttime that professionals in
marketing, sales and customersuccess have ever been in the
same room together.
Teresa Allan (00:37):
Guinness Book of Records.
Jonny Adams (00:39):
Should we get the boxing gloves and see what
occurs, or are we going to beall right?
Matt Best (00:42):
No, it's your fault. No, it's your fault. No, it's my
fault. Okay. All right, so as iscustomary on the Growth Workshop
Podcast, we like to kind of kickthings off by just asking,
what's been interesting in yourweek. So tell us what's been
interesting in your world thisweek.
Teresa Allan (00:55):
This week, I'm embarking on a seven week detox.
I've signed up for a curatedseven week course that is not
only about giving up all the funthings in life, like alcohol and
sugar and gluten and dairy andall of those things, but also
transformational breath workevery day, ice baths every day,
(01:16):
and a community to hold me toaccount. So yeah, I'm enjoying
it so far. Ask me in a fewweeks.
Jonny Adams (01:22):
Explain to the listeners and just to Matt and I
like, what's the thing that youfelt changed so far? Is it the
fact that you're sort of weaningoff, not gonna say the partying
and the drinking, that's unfair.But do you feel like, you know,
like when you eat a lot ofsugar, which we naturally do in
our diet, do you feel that thatsort of slight decline?
Teresa Allan (01:36):
Oh, I mean, totally. You know, the usual
headaches have kicked in, whichis to be expected. I've been
going to bed at nine o'clockjust so I can avoid eating.
Jonny Adams (01:46):
Has sleep got better though?
Teresa Allan (01:47):
Sleep has got better because the
transformational breath has beentransformational. I mean, yeah.
I mean, it's like without goinginto laser detail, but we it's a
guided kind of 20 minute piecewhere you have to then keep
holding your breath after every4, 40 deep breath, and by the
end, you have to hold it for twominutes and 30 seconds. So when
they first said this, I thought,There's no way, because you do
(02:10):
this, or you do that, how manylengths Can you swim into the
swimming pool? You come up inthat panic feeling? And I was
like, Oh no, I hate thatfeeling. I can usually do about
30 seconds, but through thewhole process. By the end,
you're so relaxed and yourheartbeat is really slow and
it's slightly like you'refloating around the room. It's
amazing.
Jonny Adams (02:28):
That's incredible.
Matt Best (02:29):
We should just do that. Yeah, that sounds so cool.
I've probably been doing quitethe opposite. And this week,
Jonny, I just come back from atrip away with some pals. We had
lots of croissants and dairy inthe morning, followed by a few
beers on the golf course. Sothat's what's been interesting
in my world, which is probablythe poor opposite to your sorry
to rub it in.
Teresa Allan (02:49):
It's all right, I was there a week ago.
Matt Best (02:52):
So yeah. And whilst we'd all love to continue just
to do transformational breathbreathing and and what have you
I think it's it's probablyhelpful if we get into the meat
of today's conversation. SoTeresa, we're fascinated to
really dive into this alignmentof marketing, sales and customer
success, and really start tothink about and talk about,
(03:12):
like, what are some of thestrategies and thinking about
the audience and what they mightwant to take out today's
conversation, if we can sharesome, you know, some approaches,
some strategies to how to bringthose, those three areas of any
kind of client facing business,together. That's really the
objective for today. And I thinkyou know, weaving in data and
how the various different toolsand frameworks that we can use
(03:33):
to support that as well. So, butmaybe sort of starting with
marketing first, given thatMagnus is a marketing specialist
consultancy, what do you seegenerally as the role of
marketing and how it's evolvingin a modern in today's kind of
business landscape, and I guess,particularly as we think about
then how it aligns into sales todrive growth?
Teresa Allan (03:56):
I'm going to start because it came up yesterday in
a conversation I was having withthe client. So CIM, charter
Institute of marketing. Theirdefinition of marketing is to
identify, anticipate and satisfycustomer demands profitably.
Now, if you think about all ofthose things, if I said, What's
the role of sales, you'dprobably say something quite
(04:17):
similar. If you said, what's therole of customer success, you'll
also probably say somethingsimilar. So I think that,
firstly, there is amisunderstanding generally of
what the role of marketing does.But I think also with sales and
customer success, which is adrum that we've been banging for
ages, of it's, you know, atworst, it's the coloring in
(04:38):
department, or they put onevents and make PowerPoints and
everything else. We often seemarketing being as a single
person instead of an entirefunction. So I think the role of
marketing is as it should be. Ijust don't think people truly
understand what the role ofmarketing is. We talk about
strategic growth drivers as.Marketing, which ultimately
(05:01):
comes down to customercentricity, so really, starting
with much like the CIMSdefinition, so understanding who
they are and what thatopportunity is, and anticipating
those needs. Does that sit withmarketing, really? It sits with
all three of those groups,right? Because anyone who's kind
of having interactions with themis generating insight and
(05:23):
understanding, but ultimatelyreally identifying those
opportunities and then feedingthat into the organization to be
able to connect in the right wayat the right time, with the
right thing and with the rightmessage. So for me, marketing
needs to do some marketing onitself. That's an interesting
topic. I like that from acustomer's perspective, they
shouldn't stop at functions tosay, Okay, I've done my job in
(05:46):
marketing. I'm going to hand itover to sales now. And then
suddenly something completelydifferent happens. And then as
soon as the deals close, it'slike, you know, great, my job's
done in sales, and chuck it overto customer success. And I was
trying to think of an analogy ofthis. If you know, when you go
on, have to phone yourutilities, and you have to
identify what your problem is,and then they say, oh, we can't
help you, but we'll put you onto someone else. And you have to
(06:07):
start all over again and givethem all your details. And they
say, oh, no, we can't help you,and you have to go on someone
else. And then by the end of it,you're like, why am I saying
that? It's really frustratingexperience. And essentially, we
want to bring all of those threetogether to stop that. It's all
about customer experience andconnecting the dots externally,
which means under the skininternally, we have to connect
(06:28):
all three together.
Jonny Adams (06:29):
I'm thinking back to the relationship that we've
got with Magnus. And, you know,thinking about the time that we
spend with you on mutualprojects. And you know, it's
phenomenal from a sales,customer success perspective to
spend time with an expert likeyourself and your colleagues
that say, fantastic. You talkedabout one point, what I thought
was interesting, the fact thatthere's a misunderstanding of
what marketing is. So my firstquestion is going to be like,
(06:51):
where do you think that origincomes from, and who's
responsible for that in abusiness? So is it the CMO, or
is it the CEO that's actuallyrecruiting or trying to set that
up? And secondly, where does theorigin of the misalignment come
from as well?
Teresa Allan (07:05):
So in terms of that, I suppose, where did it
start? The misunderstanding? Ithink marketing is seen as a
creative department, right? Sowhich often can be not taken
seriously. We're talking b to b,right? So often it's kind of
like, well, they don'tunderstand the business or they,
you know, they go and do the funstuff at the end. And I think
that's, you know, if I'm beingtruly honest, when I first went
(07:27):
into marketing over 25 yearsago, I genuinely didn't really
know what we were doing, and Iwas excited about all of that
fun stuff. Yeah. So it's thatlegacy, what marketing used to
do, if you look at whatmarketing can do now is with the
access of data and insight, it'ssuddenly way more mature, and it
(07:49):
should have way more impact on abusiness in terms of being able
to provide those insights oncustomers and make sure that it
feeds into not only thecommercial strategy, but also
the business strategy.
Jonny Adams (08:01):
So the first question I asked there around
where, who owns that? Whocreated that? Lack of
understanding? It's interesting.So you just prompted something
else. It's like, because of thedigitalization and the emergence
of websites and digitalopportunities, has that meant
that marketing is naturally beseen as even more important.
Teresa Allan (08:19):
Well it's also hard to prove an ROI, and it's
also an expense. So with all ofthese things, it's like a cost
center. It's hard to proveimpact. And, you know, they seem
to be having fun. So are theytaken seriously? All of those
things are different. Now, apartfrom the having fun, we can
still have fun in our jobs.
Matt Best (08:36):
It's so fascinating that a lot of that same, that
same stuff, I recognize from acustomer success perspective,
cost center, right? Definitelynot the having fun. I don't
speak to many customer successmanagers who really feel like
they have an awful lot, but it'sthis sort of intangibility about
it. Maybe it's because, as we'retalking about this, I wonder if
a lot of that stems from it doesgo right back to that kind of
(08:59):
ability to measure whereas insales, it's a little bit easier
and can be a little bit morebinary. To say you've won a
client, this is how much thatclient's worth that's attributed
to you. Congratulations. Off wego. You've paid your salary...
Teresa Allan (09:11):
Well you're at the end point, right, so you can
either, you've either closed itor you've lost it, whereas
marketing start right upstream,so connecting it up has in the
past been difficult.
Matt Best (09:21):
And the reliance on either side of sales, so you've
got marketing relying on salesbeing able to effectively close
and customer success, rely onsales having sold the right
thing.
Jonny Adams (09:30):
And then doesn't the CS part go then wrap around
back to marketing, yeah, whichis a misunderstanding as well
within business content. I stillwant to go back to the origin of
misalignment, because it'simportant, if we're going to be
talking about the power of oneplus one equals three, which is
essentially this...
Teresa Allan (09:45):
...or one plus one plus one equals seven.
Jonny Adams (09:50):
The important part around it is to understand the
mislamat, but from yourexperience, and maybe an
example, right? Like where,where you've been in an
organization or helped abusiness as part of a
consultancy. Where does thatorigin and misalignment come
from? Like, how does it, howdoes it occur?
Teresa Allan (10:05):
I genuinely think the origin of misalignment comes
from the fact that we all areidentifying as different roles
and different functions. Like,you know, we made a joke earlier
about all being in the sameroom. We've genuinely had
meetings in the last three weekswhere we've had sales and
marketing and customer successteams all sitting in the same
(10:25):
room saying, this is the firsttime we've all sat together. How
can you get aligned if you don'teven know who they are or you're
not even talking so I thinkthere is that I'm in marketing,
I'm in sales, I'm in customersuccess. Well, actually, we're
all trying to do the same thing.So I think that labeling is
always been an issue. And Ithink the other piece that we
(10:45):
all know is that if you're indifferent functions, you often
have different targets anddifferent KPIs, so you're not
actually all working together toget towards, ultimately, kind of
sale and customer satisfactionand customer lifetime value. So
without that alignment, there'snever going to be people working
together well.
Jonny Adams (11:05):
And it reminds me, I worked in B to C for a number
of years, for 10 years at golftravel organization there, and I
remember the time, especially ina B to C world, where you're
reliant massively on marketing,and they definitely weren't
coloring, because if marketingtap wasn't turned on, then sales
can't do their job. And for anumber of years, maybe five
years, we never had marketing inthe room. It was just sales. You
(11:26):
know, how's your target? Whatare you doing? And success was
there, which was, which was,which was good. But then five
years later, well, maybe weshould bring marketing in, and
maybe we should bring productin. And guess what? It was a
little bit. There was a littlebit friction. Start off with
there's but the finger pointingstarted to come down less,
because we were like, oh, that'swhat you do. You don't just sit
in front of your computerputting colors on the website.
Teresa Allan (11:48):
Respect for each other, right?
Jonny Adams (11:49):
Yes.
Teresa Allan (11:50):
You're working together. To be like, okay,
understand the difficulties.Let's solve them together.
Jonny Adams (11:54):
So actually, to your point around misalignment
of job role and theunderstanding of that, and
actually, a lot of businessesdon't write out job descriptions
properly. And so I think that'san interesting point.
Matt Best (12:03):
Thank you. And I guess just sort of going, I
don't want to go too kind ofphilosophical, and I know
there's not one size fits all,but I think we talk about
getting these teams in the room.How have you helped businesses
in doing that, apart from manhandling the teams? To say,
you've all got to come in,you've all got to be involved in
this, because otherwise it's notgoing to work. But is there a
(12:23):
structural thing? Now, if wethink about organizational
structures worked in businesseswhere you've got, you know,
success that are more closelyjoined to service delivery and
support, and therefore go into aCOO, right? And then you've got
a CMO and a CRO, or a C probablya CRO, CCO, right? All the C's,
but that's where the alignmentstops. If you're out there and
(12:44):
you're listening to this, oryou're building a business and
you're saying, right, I need tomake a big decision about this
structure of this organization.Is there a point in that
hierarchy, in a traditional kindof business hierarchy, that you
think we should be bringing ittogether? And should it be
sooner than the CEO?
Teresa Allan (12:58):
Absolutely. And that's why we're seeing, you
know, obviously, the a new trendof a CGO, which is really the
apex of of, you know, marketingand sales together, but it's
still up there at the top. Anddoes it filter down? It's in
behaviors, in the culture. Andone of the things when we go in,
you know, we're very consciousthat we can't just tell people
(13:20):
to change. Change doesn't happenin that way, and it's they've
got to be on the bus, but we'vegot to be really aware of what's
going on behind the scenes. Whatthe challenges that people are
facing day to day, what are themotivations to change? Was it a
talk yesterday where it said,Actually, people don't want to
innovate because they're quitehappy with the status quo,
because the risk of doingsomething that you can't quite
(13:41):
tangibly see yet is greater thannot doing it at all. Same goes
for change, right? So reallytrying to understand what's the
kind of risk versus rewardmotivation to doing things
differently, and then thecapacity and capability to
change is a really criticalfactor that we look at when we
go into, you know, see how wellare we performing as a marketing
(14:05):
function or as a commercialfunction, and then build out a
plan that's really relevant tothat organization. Curious,
there's no point. There's nohere's the right structure for
everybody. Off you go. Let's doit tomorrow. That's not going to
work so often when we come in.We we don't, obviously, just
talk to the marketing team, asyou well know, we spend a lot of
(14:25):
time talking to the sales teams,to the product teams, to the
management to the to the CFO,you know, to get their
understanding of, well, what doyou think the role of marketing
should be, or what do you thinkit is right now, we would kind
of start there and map it out,and then we say, Well, look, if
we shifted it to here. This isthe impact it could have on the
organization. But here are thedependencies that sit under
(14:46):
that. Do we feel ready to do itand then start to kind of build
out that change roadmap? Butabsolutely, it starts with
empowerment of kind of top down,of getting people together and
and even, you know, we'vesuggested in the past, go and
shadow. So you know yourcounterpart in customer success
or in sales and vice versa for aday, just to get some
appreciation of the pressurethey're under, and you know the
(15:08):
targets that they're trying tohit and what they're doing on a
day to day basis.
Matt Best (15:12):
I've worked in with a couple of really successful
businesses that had arecruitment journey. So
regardless of what role youjoined the business here, and
this is a SaaS organization.Well now SaaS organization, but
every role that was going to beclient facing had to start in on
the support desk, and you had todo three months of answering
(15:33):
support tickets, and that getthere is no better way to get
connected to the real on theground challenges of your
customer, but also how you canunderstand what everybody else
is going through. So then whenyou become a, you know, when you
then you leave that team and yougo into the role that you were
hired to do, whether that's acustomer success manager,
account manager, new business,sales, whatever that might be,
(15:54):
you've got this appreciation notonly for what the customer
wants, but what the team that'sgoing to be serving the customer
that you win, has to deal with,and it's really kind of
transformed. So I guess it'ssort of where you don't have
that because obviously not allbusinesses can can onboard in
that way, but just having thatexposure to what other people
are going through in the team iscritical.
Teresa Allan (16:14):
Yeah, absolutely. .
Jonny Adams (16:15):
You know, it's interesting, I was smiling when
you said that was like, that'ssuch a gimmicky thing when, you
know, supermarket chain gets theCEO to walk the floor about,
yeah, right. Come on.
Teresa Allan (16:22):
You can always tell when the Ocado person turns
up. You're like, Oh, they're oneof the trainees for management.
Jonny Adams (16:29):
Oh, yeah. They don't have a clue where they're
going. They've missed my milk.They haven't given my apples.
Teresa Allan (16:33):
They've just crashed into the wall.
Matt Best (16:34):
Yeah, their uniforms clean.
Jonny Adams (16:38):
But I was with the ex CPO of super drug the other
day, and she was referencing howher and now the CEO of a mutual
client of ours used to worktogether 20 years ago, and they
worked behind the shop floor,right? But they worked together,
and that's how they met, and nowthey're working again. So it is
you know about getting in frontand understanding your customers
and then understanding differentparts of the business is
(16:59):
important. I'm curious about onething, when you know you're
pioneering the alignment piece,and I've seen how you work
Theresa with your clients, isthere something that was sort of
like a point in your time, inyour career, where it went I
really need this to happen,because I've been trying my
(17:19):
hardest in marketing, in asiloed event, trying to push
this change forward, which hasnever happened. Like, when did
you just think, right, if I'mgoing to carry on doing a job
and you've been successful inselling an agency before, you've
done so many great things, whendid you go, right, enough is
enough. I'm going to crack onand start thinking about
alignment and go for that as aproposition. What was the
turning point for you?
Teresa Allan (17:39):
I think it really was years of work. So I started
off in client side, and then,and actually my boss there, she
made us do a at least six monthsin insights and analytics before
we could go into anything else,which I to this day, always
forever grateful for, becauseit's a it's a critical skill for
marketeers, but most peopledon't have that ability. But
(18:01):
when I then moved to agencies,where I stayed for a long time,
what I was always struck withthat whether it was B to C or B
to B, you get a brief that comesin, and you run with it and but
then you can get to the end andit's you're doing the wrong
thing, the brief is wrong,right? And there hasn't been
that kind of in depthunderstanding and analysis as a
(18:24):
problem statement in the firstplace and as an agency. The
truth is, you know, we're allpretty much yes men and be like,
Oh yeah, great. We want to winit, so we'll say, Yes, we can do
everything, and it's not goingto have the business impact that
was intended, because ultimatelyyou're doing the wrong thing and
you haven't asked the rightquestions, and often you give
strategy away for free becauseyou're desperate to get to kind
(18:46):
of the the end bit, where theclient, you know, saw some
tangible output, and that'swhere they saw the value. And
after years and years of doingthis, it just made me realize
that there's a fundamental flaw,and there's a gap in that
process. And the other thingthat triggered it was, you know,
at the same time, we werestarting to see a lot of brands
creating in house agencies. Soagain, they were kind of going
(19:09):
straight to their Well, we'vegot all these creatives, and
they they can do all this greatstuff, but it's like, well,
you're missing the thinkingpiece first, that's connecting
the dots between the output andreally kind of connecting up to
the business strategy. Justfound it frustrating, because I
feel like it was a waste ofeveryone's time and money if
you're going to turn up and dosomething, and they were great
things that you were doing, butwere there the right things half
(19:29):
the time? Probably not.
Jonny Adams (19:31):
I thank you for that. And I think it'd be really
important, you know, actually,have a bit of chat amongst the
three of us. You know, we arethe three. That's, you know,
coming from different, you know,marketing, sales and customer
success. And as this topic isabout alignment. You know, I
think it's important from ourown experiences, Matt, Teresa,
to think about, well, what's anexperience that we've had in
business where we've witnessedthe power of the three
(19:51):
verticals, making seven thethree areas, as we all going to
say it now, you know, marketing,sales, a success. What have we
all seen personally that's beena. Success and an outcome. If
you've got an example, Matt,where you're thinking that
you've worked with a client orbeen in a business, even where
you've seen marketing, sales andcustomer success come together,
and it's sort of been quite apowerful outcome.
Matt Best (20:12):
It's genuinely hard to kind of think examples where
there's real where you can seethis real bind together. It's
probably easier in my experiencewith the smaller organizations
and but I think that's as a Ithink that's as a result of
being a smaller, more tight knitteam, and, you know, proximity
and everything else that goesalong along with that. And I
think it comes back to thisunderstanding the role. So from
(20:35):
a success perspective, it'simportant your first focus,
typically, is in customersuccess is, right? Well, how do
I serve this customer and makesure that AI can retain them and
B that I can grow them? And thethings that frustrate you in
customer success typically arethis feeling of they've been
miss, sold, so they've beenmisled, and in that situation,
marketing and sales are toblame. But actually, what I
(20:56):
found, yeah, and you talk aboutpressure and how that forms
diamonds, right? And that soundsa bit cheesy, I know, but when
you get those pressure points,what then comes out the back of
that is this realization. And Ithink this is where I've seen it
work. In those startup modes, wego actually, we do need to be
bit more aligned. We do need tocome together a little bit more
let's understand this. And Iknow Teresa that that Magnus do
a lot of this work across kindof customer journey mapping, but
(21:19):
it's something that I've been anadvocate for for many years as
well, in really, trulyunderstanding right from the
beginning or pre, even beforethe customer knows who we are,
all the way through to thisadvocacy piece. And I think so
many organizations go I'm goingto do a customer journey map. So
when do they buy? Okay? When dowe hand over to CS? Customer
Journey done, right? Or, how dowe acquire them? Then there are
(21:40):
sales qualified, lead customerjourney done, or CS, it's all
about, it doesn't matter. Wejust got to keep the wheels
rolling. And it becomes verysupport focused, I think that
holistic, and where we've beenable to where, in some cases,
I've orchestrated, or where I'veseen it been orchestrated,
bringing those teams together togo, what is it that you do, and
what is it that you do? And sortof a recent workshop with a
(22:00):
client who had that sort ofthat's interesting. So there was
a marketing person on the teamand a sales person. The
marketing person was like, Wecould definitely help you do
more there. I didn't realizethat that's the kind of insight
you wanted to share with yourcustomer. And it's those
opportunities to have thoseclicks and those moments of
right light bulbs gone, let's dosomething different.
Teresa Allan (22:19):
And it is just stopping the kind of the hamster
wheel that everyone is on, youknow, to hit those quarterly
targets and to constantly bedelivering to then go, actually,
let's all get in the room,maybe, which is hard to do. I
mean, we all struggle to do itright. It's, it's really
difficult. But I think it'sincredibly important to be able
(22:40):
to do that, and to be going backto roles and responsibilities,
to articulate, this is my role,this is your role. This is how
we work together, and here isour process, and this is where
we all feed into, ultimately,the business strategy. And I
think there's a disconnectthere, right? It's like, well,
we're all doing this. We've allhad examples in the past where
we've worked with clients wherethey've said, right? You know,
(23:02):
the brief is, you need to helpus acquire new customers. And
we've gone, okay, fine. Let'sjust take a little step back and
have a look at kind of theprocess, and map that out and
see what's going on. And as wemapped the the full end to end
process map not just stopped atacquisition, what we realized
was there was a huge hole in thebucket at the end. So we were
filling it in, filling it in,filling it in, and then there
(23:23):
was more people leaving thanthere were. So I was like, So we
raised this and said, weappreciate that you are targeted
on acquisition, but if we don'tsort out the retention issue,
we're just throwing money away.And in that circumstance, they
actually wouldn't, they couldn'tget the senior leadership team
to change their objectives. Sowe carried on, but at the end it
(23:46):
was like we're wastingeveryone's time.
Jonny Adams (23:48):
But I think this is important point that we're
talking about is because ifwe're we're debating this topic
and coming up with theseanswers, I know one of the next
questions will be, well, whatare the challenges? And then I
think we need to probably thinkabout bottoming out the the
framework that supports thatchallenge, possibly. But I
recall a client that we'veworked with since 2019
approximately around about 450sales professionals, 60 leaders,
(24:12):
eight different businesses thatsit underneath a consortium that
was carved out from a previousorganization in 2019 and they
are a B to see organization.What they've evolved in over the
last five years is they reallygot themselves understanding the
key metrics to start off withwhich they didn't have much data
integrity, they didn't have theright CRM. And once they
(24:33):
understood that they needed togo from sessions to leads, from
leads to bookings and thenretention of, you know, repeat
customers effectively in theirspace, that core metric enabled
the chief growth officer, inthis case, to actually really
get behind that. One of thepivots that they've done over
the last year is actually quiteinteresting. They had eight,
what I would call VP growthofficers that were possibly some
(24:57):
of the original individuals onthat sort of. Proceeding, sort
of 2019 up to sort of 2023 andwhat they then started to look
at was the analyzing the funnel,looking at the leakage between
each of those gaps, I say, fromsessions to leads, leads to
sales, and in sales toretention. And once they're able
to identify the challenge ineach space, they're able to look
(25:17):
at the capability of each of theindividual aspects. So success,
marketing, sales, they werelike, Hmm, something's happening
at the leadership piece.Marketing and Sales isn't fluid
enough. It's not optimizedenough. So what they then did,
which I thought was really good,not just go in and find a person
that could do the same thing,which was both marketing and
(25:38):
sales in another business tochange. They actually split the
role, went out to anothermarket, basically so completely
away from their currentorganizational structure, and
found someone that had done it,bigger, stronger and new
marketing as such a subjectmatter expert, and then brought
another sales person in, andthey're running the funnel, I
suppose, in a really optimizedfashion. Now, I don't think
(26:00):
they're there completely,because it's really hard then to
glue the people together, butit's actually quite a nice
journey since 2019 having sortof no understanding of their
funnel to then understanding it,then to building that change.
Teresa Allan (26:11):
And I don't think it is a destination. There you
go. Oh, we've done this. It'sperfect, because business is
always evolving. You know, thecontinuous transformation world
in which we find ourselves, andso does that constant evolution
of sales, marketing, customersuccess working together, I
don't think it's a project tothen tick off the list. It's a
(26:32):
constant need for those leadersto check in and say, Is this
working? How do we iterate andhow do we optimize?
Matt Best (26:39):
Your example there, Jonny just links right back to
what Teresa said at the top,which is around bringing that,
having that holistic view acrossall of those things, and having
a leader who's driving that, butthen also driving down the same
objectives and the same goals,which stops your leaky buckets.
I recall when we had Chrisregister from plan hat on the
podcast quite recently, talkingabout an example of him talking
(27:01):
to a CRO saying, we just need tokeep filling it. You just need
to keep filling the hopper. Justgonna keep filling the hopper.
And say you got a leaky bucket,right? That's why your ARR
numbers are down. It's notbecause you're not getting
enough in the front door. It'sbecause stuff's falling out the
back.
Teresa Allan (27:14):
I just want to balance the conversation out to
make sure that we're alsotalking about brand and we often
go into organizations where thatis the old that's the role of
marketing, which is to driveleads. Now that is a one role of
marketing, but we know thebalance between having brand
activity with balanced lead genactivity is really critically
(27:36):
important to drive long termgrowth and opportunity. But you
know, there's loads of researchout there that says that if you
don't do brand, then you're notgoing to perform as well from a
revenue growth perspective. Sobecause you're only filling in
those people that know you, andyou've got to go out there's a
95% 5% rule of 95% people onmarket yet, and so you're only
(27:58):
dealing with those 5% if you'reonly dealing with lead gen in
marketing. You've got to go tothat 95 so when they jump over
into potential to to buy,they're aware of you. There's a
really nice fact that I alwayscome back to you that when
people do that, when they jumpfrom that 95 into the 5% bucket,
they don't go to search, theydon't go to an event. They don't
(28:20):
ask somebody to go and do theresearch for them. They think
about who they might be able torecall to art to help them, and
typically, one of three that canbe recalled will end up being
the supplier. So that's why it'sreally important to do brand.
Matt Best (28:35):
That's a fantastic place for us to end today's
conversation. So Teresa Allen,the founder of Magnus
Consulting. To everyonelistening, join us for part two
as we continue thisconversation.
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