A Human-Centric Approach to Sales and Marketing

Building a relationship with somebody is so important. So you can when you get to that point of misalignment and when that horror story happens, you can actually call and say, 6AI. We need to talk. We have to take this offline. We have to talk human to human. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Six Cent investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Adam. This is a question that I’m not sure I want to hear the answer to. But would you consider me your friend? Yes. I think There was a little bit of hesitation there. Well, because I think sometimes in a conversation and I think I even did this yesterday. I think I even will caveat with, like, let me just have this conversation with you in that frame of mind. It’s important sometimes, especially with somebody like, I work for you. But, yes, I would say yes. I just if I’m gonna say something crazy, I might be like, there’s a friend. You suck. But, like, I’m gonna say it I’m kidding. But you know what I mean? Like, I think sometimes it’s important, but, yes, I would. The reason I ask is because so much of our day to day struggles, angst, things we’re trying to accomplish, challenges, misalignments can be solved just by the fact that we kinda like working with each other. You and me personally, but I think across our entire team, across the organization, the people make all the difference in terms of whether you’ll actually solve a problem or let it fester. Yeah. Totally. And I think we’re talking about sales and marketing alignment today, and we’re talking about it from a much more human angle. And there’s some really, really great points that come up in our conversation today. But, you know, it’s important because that’s a relationship. And we’re even saying sales and marketing. And there’s something in the conversation that I won’t reveal. It’s just it’s such a simplistic thing. You’ll be like, of of course. Why wouldn’t I think of it that way? So our guest today is Leah Davidson. She’s the CMO over at EAB. And we talked about sales and marketing alignment from a human perspective, from a people perspective. It was a great quick conversation, but had so much, like, sort of light bulb moments of, like, doesn’t have to be contentious if you do these things. And at the end of the day, remember that you’re not sales versus marketing or sales and marketing. You’re Bob and Joe or Sarah, you know, whatever it is. And, like, the human element changes everything. This is one of those episodes that everyone should really listen through to. There’s just so much goodness to take away no matter what role you’re in. I personally have, like, four three or four things I’m gonna implement immediately. And so I hope everyone enjoys. Let’s jump in. Let’s do it. Leah, thanks so much for joining us today. So we’re gonna get are we gonna get emotional, or are we gonna get I don’t know if we’re gonna get emotional, but we’re gonna get real because We’ll definitely get real. We’ll get real. Because we talk about we’re gonna talk about sales and marketing alignment. Now everyone who’s listening is going like, but wait. Wait. It’s a terrible term. It’s a terrible term. Sales and marketing alignment. Terrible. Boring. It needs a rebrand. It does, which we might be we work on that later. But we wanna talk about people because there are many times we talk about process and data and reporting and dash boards, and that’s all super important. But at the end of the day, it’s people alignment. So let’s talk about people and how that actually aligns together. Yeah. I mean, we spend our day with people. Right? So that’s that’s where it all starts. Yeah. So let’s start off with just sort of the like, before we were recording this, I’m talking about, like, your relationship with your sales leader. And I think one of the things that struck a chord with me is, like, walking a mile. Marketers are listening. There’s some sales people listening to, of course. But, like, walking a mile in someone’s shoes. So could you talk about let’s just jump into that. Like, how does that gonna drive the alignment a lot better from the beginning? Yeah. I think on a personal level, I think one of the things that’s allowed me to create great relationships with different sales leaders over time is that I have dabbled in sales myself. And I wasn’t particularly successful in this dabbling, but I’ve been out there and I’ve been on the road and I’ve been responsible for trying to sell things. And I’ve worked in sales operation. So I I often say, like, I’ve worked in the adjacencies around sales, and that has made me a much better marketer. There’s almost nothing that can replace the experience of really being either in the market or along for the ride in the market. So whether that’s, you know, jumping on a sales call and listening as a marketer or dabbling and spending a little bit of your career doing some commercial work, it helps with empathy. So if you think about how to build trust between teams, like, where does trust come from? And trust comes from shared experiences. It comes from knowing people as people. It comes from, like, empathy. And I think empathy is a really big deal. And so, obviously, if you’ve had the experience yourself, you’ve got that source of empathy. But sometimes you don’t have that experience yourself, and so you have to find ways to build empathy otherwise. And I think that that is something that a lot of marketers and a lot of salespeople miss when they’re thinking about this concept of sales and marketing alignment. One of the things that really bothers me with that you hear often is when people refer to something like, oh, well, product marketing said x. Finance said y. And it’s like, finance isn’t a person. You know what I mean? Like, that’s not a human. You talk to someone. You talk to Lindsay. You talk to Grace. You talk to Bob. Like, who did you talk to? Stop referring to situations as functions and, like, start thinking about these people as humans who have jobs, who have goals. And I think that makes it a lot better of a starting place. So true, though. Empathy and then just taking the person into account as opposed to this monolith of a function maybe. You’re a tenured CMO, Leah. I’m sure there are some horror stories out there that you’ve experienced. Is there any real sort of story you wanna share just to ground everyone in? We we’ve all got a story or two around sales and marketing misalignment, but I’d love to hear yours. Yeah. I mean, there’s plenty of stories. And one of the things I shared with Adam is just, like, if you can build that really strong relationship with your sales leader, your CRO as a marketing leader, that’s great because it gives you an opportunity to, like, feel comfortable and feel safe if you have to calm up and be like, what the f are you doing? You know? Like, we are not aligned. Like, this is very misaligned. But if you have that friendship and you have that relationship and you can pick up the we have a term at our company called pick up the bleeping phone. Just because, like, you know, people get over there, like, email exchanges going back and forth and people are getting angry and passive aggressive and all this. And it’s like, hey. Just pick up the phone. There’s a human on the other side of the phone. Pick him up and sort this thing out over the phone. But I think that’s why building a relationship with somebody is so important so you can when you get to that point of misalignment and when that horror story happens, you can actually call and say, hey. We need to talk. We have to take this offline. We have to talk as human to human. So my company has tons of different products, different types of products serving different markets, and it’s a pretty complicated go to market. But one of our core businesses, which is a market leader in in what it does, was having a huge issue at the top of the funnel. So we were having a really hard time hitting our visit goal. Now visit for us is a commercial sales visit. And so rather than talking about MQLs, we talk about visits. It’s forty five minutes. You have to pitch a product. It’s a qualified lead. It’s pretty down funnel. It’s the transition from the marketing funnel to the sales funnel. So if I say visit, that’s what I mean. But we were having a really hard time hitting our visit goal. And the weirdest part is, like, as soon as something got to pipeline, conversion was crushing. So the sales team was doing a really good job. The product market fit was there. The product was performing really well. And we were in this six month or so blip of just not hitting our top of the funnel targets. We had analyzed this thing to death. Right? We had done all the diagnosis. We had executive intensity, bunch of add on meetings, like, all kinds of things that you would typically do in this situation, and we weren’t really making a ton of progress. And then Jack, who’s the the BDR leader at my company, and I, who are are very close, we kinda took a step back and we’re like, you know what? I actually think this is a personality problem. And we don’t report up. So Jack reports up to sales. I don’t. But we sort of operate like one team. And if you go back to that question of language from earlier about sales and marketing alignment, we talk a lot about one funnel mentality. So it doesn’t really matter that the reporting structure is separate for us. Like, we’re very, very close. And we were just like, these people do not get along and they don’t like each other, like, on our two teams. And that was very person specific. And so we sat back and we’re like, what are we gonna do about this? Turns out we did a retreat. Okay? And in this retreat, instead of talking product, instead of talking market, instead of talking about those things, what do we do? We did a personality test. Going round robin on, hey. What do you do outside of work? We did all of these, like, cushy things. And from a business perspective, you’re like, was that a good use of a full day? And the reality was it was great. Performance actually started to turn around. It didn’t u-turn. It wasn’t a one eighty overnight, of course. But performance started to shift. And you know what else? Meetings were so much more pleasant. We really had a people problem in that instance, and we had to solve it with, like, a people solve, if that makes sense. So that one comes to mind. You know, I think we generally do a good job here at 6sense on, like, trying to align on, like, one set of, like, numbers and one set of, like, shared wins. But it’s tough. Right? Because there can be situations where you feel like, okay. We create a bunch of pipeline or there’s a bunch of opportunity, but it doesn’t feel like it’s coming through. Like, how do you when you think about this from the lens of people Yep. Right, and certain being and, like, and even when you said earlier about, like, oh, finance said that, I’m like, I do that all the time. I talk about the the monolithic function, and I’m like, that now this is gonna be something I’m gonna get. I’m totally gonna be checking myself now. But, like, we wanna align on data, of course. We talk about that. Talk about metrics. But, like, incentives and, like, what’s the shared win? Right? Obviously, at the end of the day, like, more business is a shared win. But can you talk a little bit about, like, some of the the ways you’ve navigated that from the more people specific human perspective? Yeah. Like, it’s an evergreen problem. Right? And it’s it’s a great question. I got some advice when I was, moving into this role, I I don’t know, five or six years ago, and I wish I remember who gave it to me. And maybe it maybe it’s a common refrain. I don’t really know, but it it has stuck with me, which is marketing can’t be green if sales is red. And it was advice generally, and it was advice about how to talk to boards. And it just it’s so simple, and it’s so visual that I was like, okay. Got it. And it’s not like I didn’t think that already, but that phrase has stayed with me. So a couple of things. I think it’s important to have the KPIs that you measure to find a way to align them. I do think that’s important. It’s a little bit less about the human, but just if I can take a small tangent on that for a moment. So I talked about the visit earlier, which is our commercial sales visit conversation, qualified sales conversation. And for a long time, we had marketing gold on And for a long time, we had marketing gold on MQLs. Now our MQLs are a little further down funnel than typical. But, anyway, so marketing had these MQL goals, and sales really began their their funnel thinking about the visit. And I finally was like, this is nonsense. Like, this isn’t working. And I finally was like, this is nonsense. Like, this isn’t working. Even though the MQL and the visit are closely related and there’s a, you know, a data relationship there. But, anyway, I was like, why don’t we just shift marketing to visits? Okay? We’ll just call we’ll just make up a new metric. We call them MIVs. So we’ve got the marketing influence visit. Simple concept, took some work to get the data structures right and to get the analysis right. But I think there was great signal value in that for my team. So, again, it’s not like it totally changed performance, but it was like, hey. We came out with, like, a roadshow, and we’re like, why are we talking about the marketing influence visit? Because we don’t wanna have any more meetings where we’re celebrating the MQL, celebrating the leads, and sales is like, that’s cool. I’m at fifty percent of my target. Like, what are y’all talking about? So we shifted, and and it has helped transition the mindset, especially of some of the more junior marketers, to think in terms of the visit and thinks in term in the way that the sales team is thinking. So one of the things that I struggled with when I I still struggle with this. When I think about marketing can’t be green if sales is red, you know, I have a team of eighty five marketers with different functional roles and all that. Well, how do you celebrate those people? Like, we can’t be so tied to the sales culture that we can’t celebrate what happens inside of marketing. So, like, how are we gonna solve for this puzzle? Actually, I guess the entirety of the time that I’ve been CMO, I have a tradition if I send out a monthly ish win email, and it’s to the marketing department. Now I copy a few people, few leadership people on it, but it is a marketing only place to celebrate marketing wins of all kinds. So we can celebrate digital metrics. We can celebrate innovations. We can celebrate finally implementing a certain piece of infrastructure in in our CRM. Like, we can celebrate all those little things that other people aren’t gonna care about, and we call out names, and it’s a great tradition. And I think it makes people in the marketing department feel seen. They also know I copy leadership on it. They know that I talk about their wins in other settings. So it’s been a really helpful device, a really helpful tactic, I think, to balance, you know, that there’s so much great work going on inside of marketing, and yet in shared environments, let’s focus on the sales culture. You know? It’s so smart. You know, so much of this misalignment does come from compensation structures and incentives and goals. And so having that external viewpoint of the shared funnel, the shared goal, but still celebrating what marketing does best, you’ve struck a really beautiful balance. One thing you said, Leah, really struck me when you were referring to your BDR leader. You said, we don’t report into the same function, but, like, we’re one team. How do you cultivate that? How do you create that culture? Because just from this conversation, I think you are a people person. You are a bridge builder. You know, it is kind of innate in what you do and and maybe part of your superpower, but how can others really take from what you’ve done and implement it? I think I’m gonna start start kind of where I started this whole conversation, which is, like, I think you have to know each other as people. I really like spending time with Jack. Right? Like, I enjoy being with him. I enjoy solving problems with him. I enjoy his personality. And his predecessor, who was also awesome, completely different people, it was the same thing. I really liked being with them, and I liked that that idea that, hey. No matter what issue we’re facing, we’re gonna get through it together. And there’s a element of radical candor that to the relationship where, like, 6AI. This isn’t working that I’ve had with both of these BDR leaders. And I’ve been really lucky. You know? I didn’t I got to influence the the decision and the hiring decision of Jack, but the predecessor, you know, was was in place that had nothing to do with me. So and I do think I’ve been really lucky with the people, but I I think you have to have radical candor. And the other thing is is I think that we have a value kind of at our company called run to criticism, which I think comes into play, which is instead of being like, hey. What we did was great. Hey. We’re hitting our targets. Hey. It’s like but what else can we do? But how can we get better? Like, just yesterday, we had an ask me anything type session for the marketing department, just like optional. And we bring in other leaders from around the company. And yesterday, we had two two pairs of sales leader and BDR leader for different product sets come and do an ask me anything type session. And one of the sales leader who’s wonderful, she was like, literally, thank you so much. We wouldn’t we we wouldn’t exist without eMarketing team. She was like, glowing praise and thank yous and all of this. And the moderator, who’s my chief of staff, who’s wonderful, turned around and said, that’s great, Lex, but what would you rather we not do? What do we do that annoys you? How can we get better? And I think it’s, like, genuinely baked into our culture. And so back to the BDR leader and I, he’s like, as soon as there’s a problem, he’s like, that’s on me. What else could I have done? And same. You know, those are, again, maybe individual characteristics, but I think having the right value structure in place helps helps us out. But, again, like, spend time as people. Like, you know, our CRO and I, went to a Nat’s game last week together, shot the shit, had a couple drinks, talked about the issues that we don’t have time to talk about in the deluge of Zoom meetings. You gotta do those things, I think. This is very human of you. Very human. To have a couple drinks at an at scale. Yep. One team. I’m sure if you go through culture webs or websites and their company missions and values, one team is probably on, like, eighty seven percent of companies’ websites. Hashtag one team. Yeah. Hashtag one team. Our version of it is called connectedness, which, like, shouldn’t be a word, but connectedness. It’s conceptually, I love the idea of one team. Right? But Yeah. We’re not. There’s two different teams. But how Yeah. I didn’t just sit it down, but we’re not. We’re not. Obviously, it’s It’s a good slogan. Important. It’s a good slogan, but what does that look like in practice? How do you actually not make it happen? I mean, we talked about, like, shared goals and incentives and all those different things. But at the end of the day, is there one team? Is it possible? Can you really get to a point where it does feel that cohesive? Or is there one ish team or your three fourths of a team there? I mean, anything you and from your experience and kind of, like, talking to your teams and people and say, like, here’s how we think about it. But, like, let’s also be real about it. Yeah. I mean, it’s not gonna be perfect. Right? To your point, you aren’t one team. And heck, even if you are one team, it’s not like there’s not struggle and dissent inside of teams. I think team composition is only one part of it. I think it starts at the top. You know, what I would say is is, like, there’s a lot of signal value in how our CRO and I interact. The display of rapport, the display of friendship. Even in board meetings, I think we’ve presented things where, like, he’s talking about marketing and I’m talking about pipeline and sales. Like, there’s a top down sort of sentiment where people can sense that it’s real. They can sense that there’s a line alignment at the top, and that’s fine and well. It doesn’t necessarily trickle down. And and, actually, I found that, like, a lot of the struggles are sort of at the lower levels of the organization where maybe those goals are butting up against each other a little bit more directly, and people don’t have the experience and tenure behind them and haven’t developed that sort of empathy and and friendship and rapport. So I think it starts at the top. And then, also, I have a strategy framework that I use each year to, like, set the vision for the year, and it has some pillars in it. And one of my pillars is one funnel mentality. So that’s the, like, replacement language that I use for sales and marketing alignment. It actually used to say sales and marketing alignment, and I was like, ew. That’s gross. But one funnel mentality and I talk about it. If I align initiatives, I ladder up initiatives to one funnel mentality. And we have our quarterly meetings. Like, we talk about how are we doing in each of the pillars and what kind of progress have we made on some of these initiatives. Well, yeah. I mean, it’s almost like, I don’t say modeling behavior, but, like, if you go to a Wizards game next time and the camera catches the two of you courtside, right, and then someone just sends a screen grab to your team, I mean, like, there you go. Right? We’re They’re like, look. They’re having drinks. What are these two doing? Well, then it’s like, wait. Who paid for those tickets? Wait. Well, anyway, in those public forums, if there’s even if you’re in a pipeline call or something and there’s people on both sides and they’re seeing it, that in and of itself is gonna make a huge difference. Yep. We have a question that we ask everyone on the podcast. What is the most ridiculous thing you’ve been asked to do in your career? Good or bad? Oh, man. That is a great question. That is awesome. Things from I worked with NASA on a marketing campaign too. I think the statute of limitations are up on that one. So really kind of the the pendulum just swung both ways. Actually, I’ll come full circle. I don’t think this is not this is not completely ridiculous, but it’s a nice full circle moment. I’m a boomerang to my company. And so I started my career at the the advisory company, which is the predecessor company to where I work today, which is EAB, as did a lot of people in the the DC area as a marketing associate, which was basically just a BDR, but it was before BDRs were called BDRs. So I spent two years at the company, and then I left and did some other things. I followed a boy somewhere, etcetera. So then several years later, I was at, Blackboard in the EdTech industry, and I got a call from the executives at the advisory board. And they said, 6AI. We’re launching a new product, and we really need someone that knows something about EdTech. We’d love to have you come in and be the first salesperson. And I was like, I’m good. I’ve been through a lot. A lot of in the last couple of years, there had been, like, an acquisition and private equity and job shifts and all kinds of things that happened. I was like, thank you thank you for calling, but I’m okay. No. Thanks. They called again. I said, no. Thanks. And they called a third time. So I go in, and I’m like, fine. I’ll come chat with you guys. So I talked to everybody and their mother, and then they offered me the job to be the launch salesperson on this product that didn’t exist. I have no sales in my background at all. And I told them in the interview, I think you’re making a mistake. I’m not gonna be very good at this sales job. Like, that’s not that’s not me. I’m not gonna you’ll be great. Three months later, I’ve been on the road for three months, and they were like, you know what? You’re not very good at this sales thing. And I was like, but what what did I tell you? I told you I wasn’t gonna be good at this. And they were like, we’re gonna need to find a new role for you. Anyway, so found a new role. I thought that was all pretty ridiculous. It’s actually quite funny. I tell people that story all the time for various reasons because it’s a good life lesson. And by the way, I ended up on the road launching the product as, like, the expert person on the road, the sales engineer type person, the market intelligence person, which helped launch the product. And it was really wonderful to be on in the road and in the sales process, but not responsible for the bag, which was the part I wasn’t so good at at the time. But, anyway I love that story, though. You’re so honest and authentic, and you’re such a delight, Leah. Oh, thank you. This has been a fantastic conversation. It’s been so fun. Absolutely. I love these topics. Very human. Topics of humans. Personally, I’m taking, like, three things away that I’m gonna implement. So thank you. I love that. Well, thanks for having me. And when she doesn’t implement them, I will quote this episode every time. Well, it was so it was so fun to be on. Happy to be here. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.