Latest / I Used To Be Crap At Sales / The Marketing vs Sales Blame Game Is Costing You Millions |EP22| Mark Walker

Transcript

The Marketing vs Sales Blame Game Is Costing You Millions |EP22| Mark Walker · I Used To Be Crap At Sales

• 0:00
  Mark Ackers: If you're enjoying the I used to be crap at sales
• 0:02
  podcast. Show us some love, please. Like, share, subscribe
• 0:05
  to the podcast. Help us grow and spread the word what's coming up
• 0:09
  in today's episode. Do
• 0:10
  Mark Walker: not pay sales people permission. It drives all
• 0:12
  the wrong behaviours, and everyone's jaw dropped. They've
• 0:16
  gone from five to over 100 billion like. Unbelievable
• 0:19
  story. None of their sales teamwork
• 0:21
  Mark Ackers: commission. That's obviously a big part of why
• 0:23
  people work in sales and the highs being the highs, the lows
• 0:26
  been the lows, the commission that comes in. He's been a three
• 0:29
  time CRO a go to market coach, a mentor at TechStars, and, scale
• 0:33
  wise, a long term pavilion leader and now the founder and
• 0:37
  CEO at revved up. But before all of that, he cut his teeth in
• 0:40
  marketing, leading brand and growth at Eventbrite, and then
• 0:44
  moving to a test in a similar role. Today's guest is Mark
• 0:47
  Walker. Did you used to be crap at sales?
• 0:50
  Mark Walker: Yes, I did. I saw them the dream of there being in
• 0:53
  front of 100 key decision makers, and the event just
• 0:56
  didn't pan out that way. There was maybe like 20 people in the
• 0:59
  booth. So this sponsor was not very happy at all. Brand is
• 1:02
  probably the biggest driver of sales and closing deals, but
• 1:07
  it's impossible to attribute directly, and that's why so many
• 1:10
  people are missing
• 1:11
  Mark Ackers: their revenue. I've heard many a marketer say this,
• 1:13
  well, I want some commission, then I would
• 1:15
  Mark Walker: actually rot trying to finesse the attribution model
• 1:18
  of how much did Martin contribute to this number? How
• 1:21
  much did sales contribute to this number? If you want them to
• 1:24
  have the same level of ownership that a sales team does, then why
• 1:27
  wouldn't you also give them performance driven metrics?
• 1:30
  Mark Ackers: How imperative would you say great Account
• 1:33
  Based Marketing is in today's sales landscape,
• 1:35
  Mark Walker: bland campaigns that don't directly speak to
• 1:39
  specific accounts still much more difficult to actually get
• 1:43
  the level of depth that's required for ABM. That's what
• 1:46
  helps cut through. What
• 1:47
  Mark Ackers: kind of percent do you think can really get an
• 1:49
  Account Based Marketing? Right? Very few right now. Where's the
• 1:52
  quick fixes?
• 1:53
  Mark Walker: The fixes with
• 2:00
  Mark Ackers: Hello and welcome to another episode of The I used
• 2:03
  to be crap at sales podcast. I'm your host. Mark Akers, the co
• 2:06
  founder and Head of Sales here at my sales coach and today's
• 2:09
  guest brings a new background and work experience that's so
• 2:13
  far been uncovered in the podcast. Sure, he's got the
• 2:16
  sales and leadership and coaching experience. He's also
• 2:19
  coached hundreds of founders and sales leaders along the way.
• 2:23
  Today's theme is what sales can learn from marketing and what
• 2:26
  founders learn on the front lines. Mark, welcome to the
• 2:30
  podcast. How are you? Mark, thank you so much. I'm great.
• 2:34
  Really excited to be here. I've listened to several of these
• 2:37
  episodes. It's a brilliant podcast. So delighted to be part
• 2:40
  of it, and yeah, life's pretty good right now. Fantastic. Yeah,
• 2:43
  you just telling me off camera. It sounds like a really exciting
• 2:46
  time at revved up. And I certainly want to hear all about
• 2:48
  that and share that with the audience. But before we can get
• 2:51
  into any of that, we have to start with our Yes. No. Question
• 2:56
  Mark Walker, did you used to be crap at sales? Yes, yes, I did.
• 3:00
  When you say yes, yes, I did. Is there a point in your career
• 3:04
  that really springs to mind very clearly, and it was my first job
• 3:09
  out of university. What I was selling was conferences, my B to
• 3:13
  B conferences, specifically in the pharmaceuticals industry,
• 3:17
  there were two different types of sales that you had to do
• 3:19
  there. One was delegate sales, so people buying the tickets.
• 3:23
  Now I didn't actually do that myself. I had to try and manage
• 3:26
  a sales team, having never done sales, which is maybe a
• 3:29
  different story. But you also had to try and sell your own
• 3:32
  sponsorship. So that was slightly bigger ticket sales.
• 3:35
  You intended to try and do 510, 20k, deals with sometimes
• 3:39
  pretty, pretty large organisations. And because it's
• 3:43
  my first job out of university, I'm cutting my teeth. I got a
• 3:47
  lot of the crappier products, the the events that didn't have
• 3:51
  great sponsorship reputation. So yeah, I was just hitting the
• 3:54
  phones trying to sell sponsorships to these no named
• 3:56
  events that I was producing and putting on. And it was a
• 4:00
  struggle. It was. It was a pretty steep learning curve. I
• 4:02
  did make some sales, but I probably lost way more than I
• 4:06
  could have made. Have you got a particular story from that time
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  that you can look back on that's quite funny now, but perhaps a
• 4:13
  mistake or a howler, if you will, that you made. The most
• 4:16
  painful memory from that time was a sale I did make, and we
• 4:20
  didn't deliver value to them, right? So it's a slightly
• 4:23
  different tangent than not having made the sale, but it was
• 4:26
  quite cringy. I sold, I sold to this business and sold them the
• 4:30
  dream of there'd be in front of 100
• 4:33
  Mark Walker: key decision makers. And the event just
• 4:35
  didn't pan out that way for various reasons, largely outside
• 4:38
  of our control. And there was maybe like 20 people in the
• 4:41
  room, so this sponsor was not very happy at all. So that was
• 4:45
  quite painful. And just dealing with that taught me a lot around
• 4:48
  mitigating angry people in general. But also, just like
• 4:53
  having confidence in what you sell is so important, and that
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  knocked my confidence, and that.
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  Really impacted future sales, right? Because I didn't know
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  whether we could deliver the value that I had to give to
• 5:07
  future sponsors. And it took moving, I would say it took
• 5:10
  moving to the next company that had better products, that I had
• 5:14
  more control over, to really build my confidence back up. So,
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  you know, one of my earlier sales lessons was you have to
• 5:21
  believe in what you're selling, otherwise it just comes through,
• 5:24
  right? Whoever you're selling to can feel whether you believe in
• 5:27
  Mark Ackers: it or not. I think a lot of people will resonate
• 5:29
  with that. I think people sometimes confuse you gotta love
• 5:32
  what you sell versus having confidence in it. When I look
• 5:34
  back at my career, I feel like I've always had confidence in
• 5:37
  what I sold, but I can certainly relate to doing demos where
• 5:41
  you're not quite sure if you press this button that the next
• 5:44
  page is going to load. I remember, actually, I had all
• 5:46
  the tabs open and I would jump from tab to tab rather than go
• 5:49
  for it. And I got called out on that, I can see what you're
• 5:51
  doing, Mark you're going from tab to tab rather than clicking
• 5:53
  through the platform. And that lack of confidence because the
• 5:55
  product's not quite there can be quite impactful. Fortunately, it
• 5:58
  was a long time ago in my in my career, that's a nice segue. And
• 6:02
  call this out early doors, bring it up. You and I, we actually
• 6:06
  crossed paths. I think it was 2017 maybe the start of 2018 you
• 6:09
  were, I think you were in the CRO role at a test at this
• 6:13
  point. So you'd gone from marketing to CRO, and it was in
• 6:16
  my early days as an AE at refract. I'd probably got about
• 6:20
  five years sales experience, but really probably had the same
• 6:23
  year five times. And I remember I was dealing with your
• 6:26
  colleague, Hillary at the time, who's actually now a coach at my
• 6:29
  sales coach small world, and she said, there's just one last
• 6:33
  thing, Mark, you need to meet our CRO Mark Walker and present
• 6:37
  to him. I did, and we got the deal over the line. And I loved
• 6:41
  working with you during our time. But, yeah, I'm curious,
• 6:43
  what do you remember of that demo discovery I did
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  Mark Walker: with you? Funny enough, I don't remember that
• 6:48
  many sales calls, but I do remember this one, so you'll be
• 6:52
  happy to hear that. Well, I don't know. It depends what you
• 6:54
  about to say, No, it's for good reasons. So before you joined
• 6:58
  the call, this is critical. I knew who you were ish because of
• 7:05
  the video that you did on LinkedIn that went viral, where
• 7:08
  you were teaching your cousin, I think, or like, it was a nine
• 7:11
  year old. I can't remember whether it's your cousin or like
• 7:14
  a friend's kid. I don't know whether Hillary shared it with
• 7:17
  me or I came across it organically, but either way,
• 7:20
  that was a wonderful bit of content that built an enormous
• 7:24
  amount of trust and credibility with you as an individual. When
• 7:28
  we first spoke, I'd already built a perception in my mind
• 7:32
  about you being an expert in this space that really helped
• 7:36
  significantly. And then I do remember, I think there was
• 7:40
  probably two or three things that I think you did really well
• 7:42
  during during that call, right? The first is, you actually
• 7:46
  didn't leave any assumptions on the table, right? You sent,
• 7:50
  checked and queried and we went over everything, instead of kind
• 7:53
  of glossing things over. You try to unpick things and just just
• 7:57
  hear firsthand. Are these the problems that I was experiencing
• 8:02
  as the CRO attest, which I thought was quite refreshing.
• 8:05
  You didn't try and rush anything through. The second piece was
• 8:09
  there was a key integration missing, or in the pipeline, or
• 8:13
  something. I can't, can't quite remember exactly, but I do
• 8:15
  remember that was an objection, and you handled it like really
• 8:19
  well, right? Because it was a it was a big thing for us. It was a
• 8:22
  great experience of how to do discovery.
• 8:26
  Mark Ackers: Well, I remember having and like you say, I don't
• 8:28
  remember every discovery call, but I do remember meeting you
• 8:31
  for that first time and feeling like it went well. For those
• 8:35
  wondering, the clip you're referring to, that was actually
• 8:37
  Kevin, my co founder and the CEO of my sales coach. It was his
• 8:41
  son. We did a bit of a social experiment where I coached him
• 8:44
  to make cold calls, and then he did some cold calling that day,
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  just sort of warm, friendly faces, but they were still not
• 8:51
  really knowing when the call was going to come or what the
• 8:53
  purpose of it was. And, yeah, I think that video, certainly in
• 8:57
  my realm, went viral. I think it was like, you know, half a
• 9:01
  million impressions, pretty much out the gate, and lots of
• 9:05
  comments, etc. But I think the key thing that I want to take
• 9:08
  from this is social selling that brand. And you use the word
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  critical, you're saying that was critical to your sales
• 9:15
  experience. Was my called it brand. It probably wasn't a
• 9:18
  brand back then, but what might felt like one was that social
• 9:21
  presence that I'd managed to get online on LinkedIn made you feel
• 9:25
  like you trusted me in that credibility straight away. This
• 9:28
  will date the podcast slightly, but you'd have seen the cool
• 9:32
  screening that Apple have released that's coming out in
• 9:35
  September. I did a webinar, and I'm curious to get your take on
• 9:38
  this. One of the things I said in this webinar was, I think
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  this is opportunity. First of all, if I just picked up the
• 9:44
  phone and dialled, let's say I dialled you now, my phone number
• 9:46
  would just pop up. If you haven't got me saved, you'd look
• 9:49
  at that and you just think, Ah, I don't know who this is, not
• 9:51
  sure. I've actually got the chance to promote it to you. You
• 9:53
  know that call screen could say it's Mark acres. I think you saw
• 9:56
  the video of me coaching Joe, the 10 year old, to make cold
• 9:59
  calls. Yeah, you're more likely to answer it. And I made the
• 10:02
  argument now that when I recruit sales people, the first thing I
• 10:06
  do is I look at their LinkedIn before, before a CV, and I look
• 10:09
  to see, do they sell socially? Do they write LinkedIn posts?
• 10:12
  Are they engaging? Have they got 500 plus connections? As it is a
• 10:16
  in the past, I've sort of made the excuse. Oh, well, they don't
• 10:20
  do that, but look how credible their background, their CV,
• 10:23
  their results, are still gonna go with this person. I feel like
• 10:27
  now it's non negotiable when hiring a salesperson in this
• 10:30
  space, they've gotta have a social brand. But I know maybe
• 10:32
  that's just me. What do you think?
• 10:34
  Mark Walker: I think it's getting towards that non
• 10:36
  negotiable? I don't know if I'm quite all the way there, but
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  it's definitely tipping towards that so very similar to your
• 10:42
  point around the phone screening technology, right? One of the
• 10:46
  things that a lot of people don't realise with cold email,
• 10:50
  right? There's, there's a lot of talk around cold emails, dead
• 10:52
  and so on, and it is absolutely harder and harder to cut through
• 10:56
  with cold email. One of the things that's so, so important
• 11:00
  to the efficacy of it is, if you get an email from someone you
• 11:04
  recognise, you are going to open it, right? So again, if you have
• 11:08
  built some kind of brand presence and credibility in your
• 11:12
  space, and you then send emails to people, they are so much more
• 11:15
  likely to open it. It's going to trump the best subject line.
• 11:19
  It's definitely going to trump any personalization you can put
• 11:22
  in it. It's who that email is from, right? My mum does not
• 11:25
  have to personalise an email for me to open it, right? It's from
• 11:28
  someone I know. Maybe that's a bad example, right? I'd probably
• 11:32
  put that one in the in the spam folder, but, yeah, that brand
• 11:34
  presence and credibility is super, super important now, and
• 11:37
  there's two parts to it, right? One is, does the company have a
• 11:40
  strong brand, right? It's there's a reason it's easier to
• 11:43
  sell the sales force or a gong than it would be from one of
• 11:47
  their challenger brands, because there's a lot of credit
• 11:50
  credibility with the brand. But as you said, particularly if
• 11:53
  you're selling at an SMB, if you yourself have built a bit of a
• 11:57
  brand reputation, and you email someone that's engaged with your
• 12:00
  posts, you don't even need to say, Hey, I saw you liked my
• 12:03
  post. I actually often think that doesn't come across that
• 12:06
  well, but just the fact that you are sending emails to someone
• 12:10
  that already knows who you are is going to make it much more
• 12:12
  likely that they open it and engage with it. And maybe one
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  final point, you shouldn't always care just about the
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  vanity metrics when it comes to social posting. And the reason I
• 12:24
  say this is I post regularly, and I don't have huge numbers of
• 12:28
  impressions or likes, right? I just post regularly, and I
• 12:33
  believe that it drives good results. Why do I say this two
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  things. One, I go to a lot of events. I typically will go to
• 12:43
  an event every single week, and I cannot remember the last time
• 12:46
  I went to an event and someone didn't say, Hey, Mark, I
• 12:49
  recognise you that I didn't know I see you posting all the time
• 12:53
  on LinkedIn, and I had no idea that they followed me. No idea
• 12:57
  they're not showing up in my metrics, but it's qualitatively.
• 13:00
  It's having valuable impact on my brand and reputation within
• 13:04
  the industry that I care about. So yeah, it's it's not always
• 13:07
  showing up in the metrics, but it's absolutely, categorically
• 13:10
  working. And then on top of that, I will get direct DMS and
• 13:15
  organic outreach coming back. And I know it's hard to connect.
• 13:20
  But I know it's coming from LinkedIn, because they'll say,
• 13:23
  Oh, I saw this post. So yeah, lots of good reasons there that
• 13:27
  people should be investing in building their brand on
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  Mark Ackers: LinkedIn. I totally agree. Yeah, I think I'm at the
• 13:31
  point. Now, if you're not doing it, I'd say it's non negotiable.
• 13:35
  And to your point, even if someone's not actively engaging,
• 13:38
  there sort of that Lurker, if you will. But here's what I do
• 13:41
  know. Before you meet someone, they're likely to look at your
• 13:45
  LinkedIn profile. Even though they just scan your content,
• 13:48
  they'll say, okay, because there is this almost illusion that if
• 13:52
  you're writing and putting yourself out there, you must
• 13:54
  know what you're talking about. And I see that happen all the
• 13:56
  time. Let's talk about your early sales experience, because
• 13:59
  you have, we're talking just off camera that you've had such a
• 14:01
  varied career, like events, conferences, marketing, revenue.
• 14:05
  Where do you believe you actually learn how to sell?
• 14:08
  Mark Walker: I don't know. There is, there is a singular moment
• 14:12
  where, you know the light appeared and it's like, I now
• 14:15
  can sell. It's definitely been an evolution of over time, and I
• 14:19
  think I've learned bits and pieces from each role, each
• 14:23
  colleague that I've worked with, I've picked up bits and pieces
• 14:26
  along the way. I guess the most sales centric role that I had
• 14:32
  when I really started to consider myself better at sales
• 14:35
  was when I got to a test and I started to move from pure
• 14:40
  marketing to looking after the whole revenue function, and I
• 14:44
  just immerse myself in everything and anything I could
• 14:49
  find around sales. I listened to every podcast, read every blog
• 14:54
  post, bought books. It's when I joined pavilion and I would pick
• 14:58
  anyone's brains that you could imagine. Imagine I'd have hour
• 15:02
  long calls with people. I'd join these dinners and so on. So I
• 15:06
  just completely immersed myself. But most importantly, I then
• 15:10
  practised it, because I got to then practice the theory
• 15:15
  speaking to prospects all the time and seeing what worked and
• 15:19
  what didn't. I would say that's where I genuinely good at sales,
• 15:22
  but I definitely had various experiences in sales along the
• 15:26
  way. And one other moment, I think it was before I was at
• 15:31
  Eventbrite, and someone wants remarks to me. They're like,
• 15:35
  man, you're good at sales, or you should. You should be in
• 15:38
  sales. It was some kind of remark by that. And I remember
• 15:41
  thinking, No, I'm not a salesperson. And the reason they
• 15:43
  said that is because I built trust and credibility very
• 15:49
  quickly with prospects by being a product expert. I really knew
• 15:54
  in and out what I was trying to say, again, I wasn't technically
• 15:57
  a salesperson, but what maybe a bit of context. In this role, I
• 16:01
  owned the event. So I owned the P and L and the overall revenue
• 16:05
  for this event, and that included everything from, you
• 16:10
  know, creating the agenda to to the sponsorship revenue number,
• 16:14
  the delegate sales revenue number, the marketing of the
• 16:16
  event, and so on and so forth. So part of my role was
• 16:19
  interfacing with sponsors, even though I wasn't specifically
• 16:23
  sponsorship sales. That's where the sponsors were just warm to
• 16:27
  me and I built that credibility. And the sales team were like,
• 16:30
  Hey, be good at sales, right? You were helping make the sale.
• 16:33
  That was a really nice moment earlier, before I considered
• 16:36
  myself truly in sales and revenue.
• 16:38
  Mark Ackers: And it's interesting, because being an
• 16:40
  expert in the product means you can recommend the right things.
• 16:43
  But one of the things that I found in my career is it's all
• 16:46
  well and good, be an expert in the product, but you have to be
• 16:48
  an expert in your ICP their world. Why they go to work, what
• 16:52
  problems they really have? How do they moan about those
• 16:55
  problems at the dinner table? And I remember there was a
• 16:57
  moment in my career when I realised I've just onboarded
• 17:00
  people to become product experts. I listened to their
• 17:03
  demos, and everything sounded like it was being run by a very
• 17:07
  technical person and just wasn't connecting with the ICP. I'm
• 17:11
  wondering, did your background and time in marketing help you
• 17:16
  with that shift into into sales, or was there anything you had to
• 17:20
  unlearn. It's a good
• 17:21
  Mark Walker: question. Firstly, I'd agree with the observation,
• 17:24
  right? Like one of my bug bears that I think I've posted about
• 17:27
  on LinkedIn a few times, is people get onboarding wrong.
• 17:31
  They should spend way more time on onboarding people in the
• 17:37
  market and the customer's problems than they should in the
• 17:40
  product, right? And usually it's like an hour of here's an ICP
• 17:45
  definition. That's all you get. Now, all we're going to do is
• 17:47
  talk about the product in terms of, like, what I learned from
• 17:50
  marketing and that has benefited sales and maybe some pieces that
• 17:54
  haven't. So again, marketing, ideally you should be good at
• 17:58
  storytelling, right? So being able to simplify and tell the
• 18:03
  good narrative is something that a lot of people don't do well.
• 18:08
  In sales, they focus on the features and even like features
• 18:12
  benefits, but they don't craft a story or a narrative. Again, in
• 18:16
  marketing, if you are going to create good campaigns and good
• 18:20
  overarching narratives. If you're doing marketing Well, it
• 18:23
  has to be based on deep research and understanding of your
• 18:26
  market. And so one of the things when I was leading marketing and
• 18:30
  sales is I would always ask the marketing team to specifically
• 18:36
  listen to sales calls at least once a week, twice a week, right
• 18:40
  to actually understand the language being used by the
• 18:45
  prospects. Otherwise, how can you do good marketing? I do
• 18:48
  think a mistake that I see from marketing is is they think
• 18:51
  theoretically or abstractly about the market, and they don't
• 18:57
  actually understand exactly how a prospect speaks, and they also
• 19:03
  don't understand the challenges that sales are facing, either,
• 19:08
  right? So there's two parts to this that you get from listening
• 19:11
  to discovery calls and so on. So. So one is what actual
• 19:15
  language is the prospect using? Like, are they calling it x, and
• 19:18
  we're trying to call it y, and then the second piece is hearing
• 19:22
  those, hearing the objections that sales is facing, should
• 19:27
  really help Martin think about, well, here's what we need to we
• 19:30
  need to create these sales enablement materials. Or, Oh,
• 19:33
  man, we we keep hearing this and we don't have a case study for
• 19:36
  it, or we don't have this battle card prepared, or we don't have
• 19:40
  a story to tell around this particular lack of functionality
• 19:43
  and why we've invested more over here so you get the best ideas
• 19:48
  from listening to real calls that can be put back into mock
• 19:51
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  sticks and delivers visit mysalescoach.com use the link in
• 20:17
  the bio and start achieving your goals today, and it feels like
• 20:20
  what you're saying there, it's just so obvious and in today's
• 20:24
  world, when call recording and conversation intelligence
• 20:27
  products exist and you can share transcripts and review calls and
• 20:32
  clips really easily, every body in the company should be doing
• 20:35
  that, let alone marketing, but it feels like what you're
• 20:37
  talking about really, you were ahead of your time thinking like
• 20:41
  that, because we're going back earlier on in your career, when
• 20:44
  you were in a marketing role, and it's interesting that it
• 20:46
  sort of brought back memories for me. So I started out in
• 20:48
  marketing as well. When I did my student placement, I did it at
• 20:53
  Sunderland Football Club, and I remember the marketing manager
• 20:55
  made a comment that, why are we sat in a different office to the
• 20:59
  sales team? And at the time, I thought, Oh, I'm glad I'm glad
• 21:02
  we are. They're bloody noisy. They're on their phones all the
• 21:04
  time. I get my work done. But he made this big push that we
• 21:08
  should all be sat in the same room. We should all be talking
• 21:10
  to each other. We should be hearing how they sell. They
• 21:12
  should be feeding back to us from a marketing point of view.
• 21:15
  And he never quite got his own way, and it felt like sales
• 21:20
  consistently misunderstood marketing and marketing
• 21:23
  consistently misunderstood sales. Where do you commonly see
• 21:27
  the two departments misfiring with each other? It sounds like
• 21:29
  language is an example, but have you got some other tidbits there
• 21:33
  for us? Yeah, language is a huge one. I think the number one root
• 21:38
  cause of a lot of misalignment is a misalignment in in goals
• 21:44
  and metrics. That's pretty much the the root cause in many
• 21:48
  scenarios. So the classic setup in SAS was to create this, yeah,
• 21:53
  factory, factory style funnel, where marketing were tasked with
• 22:00
  MQLs. And those MQLs get handed over to SDRs to qualify into
• 22:06
  SQL, and then obviously, from SQL to ops going through to the
• 22:09
  AES. The challenge with that was there's two challenges. One,
• 22:13
  marketing just stopped caring at MQL, right? Because that is how
• 22:18
  they're bonus, and that's how they're metric. Metrices, gold.
• 22:22
  Let's use an easier word,
• 22:24
  Mark Walker: and and so how often have you seen sales teams
• 22:28
  just tearing their hair out that marketing celebrating having hit
• 22:33
  their MQL, MQL goal for the quarter, and there's no pipeline
• 22:36
  that they can close, right? Because they're not actually
• 22:39
  connected.
• 22:41
  And so that that's one major issue. And then the other piece
• 22:44
  is the definition of that MQL and whether it actually lines up
• 22:49
  to what sales can can close, I would say that's like a number
• 22:52
  one root cause and and I think the idea that marketing just
• 22:56
  generate junk leads and MQLs for the sake of it, then leads to a
• 23:01
  lack of trust and credibility from the sales team, right? And
• 23:04
  that that pervades many, many organisations. Because if you
• 23:08
  grew up in that environment, you know, and you were selling and
• 23:11
  marketing that type of environment, you know, seven,
• 23:13
  eight years ago, you've probably lost faith in marketing as
• 23:16
  you've gone on to other organisations as well. I've
• 23:19
  certainly had that frustration in my in my career, you know,
• 23:23
  marketers creating content, I'm just like, What is this? It
• 23:27
  doesn't reflect the conversations that I'm having.
• 23:29
  It uses different language, the stereotype of creating junk
• 23:32
  leads. I would say that is the meme that when I see that pop up
• 23:36
  on like Instagram, where marketing sending a lead to
• 23:39
  sales, and so that makes me laugh the most because I've just
• 23:42
  lived in that world, and it does feel like it's changing. I've
• 23:45
  got a number of friends that work in Marketing, and a couple
• 23:49
  of them have recently been acquired. They've said to me
• 23:51
  all, it's all changing. Our marketing metrics now are
• 23:55
  revenue based, and they're uncomfortable with that, and
• 23:57
  it's so different. What about you? When in your marketing days
• 24:01
  in Have you had the revenue KPIs before, or have you more focused
• 24:04
  on the MQLs? So again, earlier in the career, when I was head
• 24:09
  of growth at Eventbrite, it was much more heavily MQL based.
• 24:12
  Maybe didn't drive all the right behaviours, although I would
• 24:15
  like to think that we tracked how many of those MQLs did
• 24:18
  ultimately turn into opportunities and turn into
• 24:20
  revenue. We had a really great run over the three years I was,
• 24:23
  I was driving that my default thinking was MQL, right? Because
• 24:28
  that is how I was measured in my role. And if I did anything
• 24:31
  else, I wouldn't necessarily get, get the credit for it. And
• 24:35
  so the real shift in thinking was when I, I got to a test and
• 24:40
  I was, I was like, Well, look, we're an early stage company,
• 24:43
  right? There's nowhere to hide. If I generate pipeline or MQLs
• 24:48
  and it doesn't close, the whole business is in a bad state,
• 24:51
  right? So I have to drive all of my mentality to closing
• 24:57
  business, right? If I don't do that, then what's the point in
• 24:59
  doing the.
• 25:00
  Marketing side of things, so that really shifted my focus and
• 25:03
  and all the metrics that we looked at were built up from,
• 25:06
  are we driving, driving the revenue number? Ultimately, I
• 25:09
  think there's a big challenge. It's okay in a smaller
• 25:12
  organisation, because you can all be one team, it's kind of
• 25:15
  easier to track things. And you can shout across the room,
• 25:18
  right? Oh yeah, I see so and so's close, and it's maybe not
• 25:22
  showing up in the revenue attribution model, but we know
• 25:24
  that we met them at that event, whatever, right like, it's just
• 25:27
  a little bit easier to try and connect the dots in a wider
• 25:30
  organisation. It is inherently political, because you your
• 25:35
  marketing budget and your head count and so on is probably
• 25:39
  going to get set by these attribution metrics that have to
• 25:44
  be trackable, and so I've heard this right in organisations
• 25:48
  where sales are screaming for particular case studies or
• 25:52
  battle cards or like certain things that marketing is the
• 25:56
  best equipped to provide, but they will not provide them
• 26:00
  because they won't show up in any attribution model, so they
• 26:02
  will not get any credit for it, and therefore their budgets and
• 26:06
  their numbers and so on, they will be the ones getting raked
• 26:09
  over the calls. There's just a fundamental issue with
• 26:11
  attribution and modelling in a lot of modern day revenue teams.
• 26:15
  Mark Ackers: So let's imagine I dropped you in stereotypical
• 26:20
  company that's got that problem. Maybe someone's listening to
• 26:23
  that and they they recognise this problem. What are some of
• 26:26
  the things that you would do, or even suggest, maybe as a coach,
• 26:29
  to try and fix that?
• 26:30
  Mark Walker: This is not a popular opinion. Some people
• 26:32
  might say it's naive, but I disagree otherwise. I wouldn't
• 26:36
  hold it as an opinion. So what I would try and do is convince the
• 26:40
  rest of the leadership team, or if I just had the magic one to
• 26:43
  do it, where I would actually drop the trying to finesse the
• 26:48
  attribution model of how much did marketing contribute to this
• 26:51
  number? How much did sales contribute to this number?
• 26:53
  Because that is inherently what drives politics and infighting
• 26:57
  and the sharp elbows. And I would just look at the number.
• 27:02
  Did we hit the number this quarter? Or did we not hit the
• 27:07
  number this quarter, and we are all winning, or we are all
• 27:11
  losing together as a team? Now that is deeply antithetical to
• 27:15
  how most most organisations are run, and I get deeply
• 27:19
  uncomfortable, because if you don't hit the number, how do you
• 27:23
  start to dissect it, right? How do you start to understand and
• 27:26
  if you did hit the number, how do you then try and optimise
• 27:29
  your spend going forward? Right? Because there might be a bunch
• 27:33
  of dead weight that's been carried, but it does solve an
• 27:37
  enormous number of sins by saying, don't worry too much
• 27:41
  about whether this exact event, this exact webinar, whether 15%
• 27:46
  of budget spent on PPC was the exact right, right number,
• 27:50
  because that that often ends up with weird over optimization as
• 27:53
  well. So slightly chunky example that I usually give is football
• 27:58
  team, 11 players who's going to get the attribution most of the
• 28:03
  time, it's the striker, right? It's your forward, because
• 28:06
  they're the ones most likely score the goals. So you go, Huh,
• 28:09
  well, the defenders didn't do much here for this game. So you
• 28:12
  start to get rid of your defenders and then your
• 28:14
  midfielders and your keeper and so on, and you end up with a
• 28:16
  team of 11 strikers. They're not going to perform very well,
• 28:19
  right? But that's how we set up revenue teams, right? We say,
• 28:22
  well, who's got the last touch? Maybe there's a bit of first
• 28:26
  touch attribution. All your money goes to there, and then
• 28:28
  you're missing the messiness of today's modern buyer. And again,
• 28:32
  like going back to our point around building brand and
• 28:35
  perception on social, if it doesn't show up in the numbers,
• 28:38
  you won't do it, but it's such a miss, and that's why so little
• 28:43
  money gets spent on brand when it comes to marketing. And brand
• 28:47
  is probably the biggest driver of sales and closing deals, but
• 28:51
  it's impossible to attribute directly, and that's why so many
• 28:54
  people are missing their revenue number, because they haven't
• 28:57
  built the trust and credibility that gets those deals over the
• 29:00
  line because they won't invest in brand, because you can't
• 29:02
  prove the ROI, and so marketing doesn't do it, and everyone
• 29:05
  suffers. There you go. There's my soap box piece. So
• 29:07
  Mark Ackers: there's a lot to break down there. I think the
• 29:09
  key thing that I'm taking from what you're saying is you need
• 29:13
  to measure together as a team, sales and marketing. We've got
• 29:17
  different goals that serve different motivations, and like
• 29:21
  you say, like politics, and I've seen those play out in
• 29:23
  organisations. The first challenge that I've seen play
• 29:26
  out when you start to have those conversations, and I've heard
• 29:29
  many a marketer say this, well, I want some commission. Then
• 29:32
  what do you think
• 29:33
  Mark Walker: about that? Again, difference between commission
• 29:36
  and bonus? I've mostly worked in organisations that have had a
• 29:41
  bonus driven marketing team, where you want marketing to
• 29:45
  share the sharp end of revenue, then they should also share in
• 29:48
  the upside as well. So everyone complains that marketing are the
• 29:51
  colouring in department, or they're doing the jump jump
• 29:54
  leads and so on. If you want them to have the same level of
• 29:58
  ownership that a. Sales team does and essentially carry
• 30:02
  quota, then why wouldn't you also give them performance
• 30:05
  driven metrics? Now, it might not be straight up commission
• 30:08
  like a sales team, and this is, again, it's a difficult debate.
• 30:11
  I don't know whether there is a singular correct answer to this
• 30:14
  marketing in a mid market to enterprise type motion where a
• 30:21
  sales rep is needed to close the deal, marketing can't close the
• 30:24
  deal for them, right? So they can't actually drive the revenue
• 30:28
  number themselves, but they can massively help contribute
• 30:32
  towards it, and they can also do all the wrong behaviours to mean
• 30:35
  you don't get the revenue number. So I think they should
• 30:38
  take a share of the spoils, maybe not commissioned, but
• 30:41
  absolutely be bonus driven. And is
• 30:43
  Mark Ackers: that what you put in place in previous
• 30:45
  organisations? You beat them, yeah, and it's what
• 30:47
  Mark Walker: we're doing at Rev death as well. The marketing
• 30:49
  team will have a revenue number and they will have a bonus
• 30:52
  attached to
• 30:53
  Mark Ackers: it. Do you think, let's just say we meet up again
• 30:56
  in 10 years time? Is that gonna be more common? Or do you think
• 30:59
  that's just not gonna happen widespread across other
• 31:01
  organisations. My
• 31:03
  Mark Walker: take is it should be more common. Will it be every
• 31:06
  time you have a crystal ball, you look silly, right? But,
• 31:09
  yeah, I actually think it will be. I mean, it's super
• 31:12
  interesting. The whole commission like, how do you
• 31:15
  drive behaviours through incentives? I sat next to a
• 31:18
  dinner. This was a while back, like a year ago with the CRO of
• 31:22
  a pretty large organisation, and they'd driven incredible
• 31:26
  success. I think they've gone from five to over 100 million
• 31:30
  like, unbelievable story. And everyone's jaw dropped when they
• 31:35
  said none of their sales team were commissioned right. They
• 31:38
  just did base. They're like, it drives the right behaviours and
• 31:41
  everyone's just like, No, it's impossible. Like, how do you
• 31:43
  attract the right talent? How do you retain them? How do you just
• 31:46
  like, This is how you do it. Absolutely, 100% believe in it.
• 31:51
  Do not pay sales people Commission. It drives all the
• 31:54
  wrong behaviours. There's different models for different
• 31:56
  businesses that will work. There's no one size fits all.
• 31:59
  But maybe the world will go towards no commission for sales
• 32:01
  and marketing, or maybe it will go all the other way, and
• 32:04
  everyone will get commission and bonuses across the board. I'm
• 32:07
  just looking at BEC
• 32:09
  Mark Ackers: when you say sales people should not get
• 32:11
  commission, I'm sitting there going, that's the headline we're
• 32:14
  leading with Marvel, because that's such a Beatty topic,
• 32:18
  right? That makes me feel emotional, like, that's
• 32:21
  obviously a big part of why people work in sales, and the
• 32:24
  highs being the highs, the low has been the lows, the
• 32:26
  commission that comes in. When you heard that we don't pay
• 32:30
  salespeople commission. Did you lean in and go, go on, I'm
• 32:33
  listening. Or did you think ridiculous?
• 32:34
  Mark Walker: I thought both. I was like, this is the most nuts
• 32:37
  thing I've ever come across. And funnily enough, it was at a very
• 32:40
  similar time that I was speaking to a really great sales, sales
• 32:45
  rep slash set. They were a player coach, and they were in
• 32:48
  an organisation that wouldn't do commission, and they hated it,
• 32:52
  right? They hated it. They really felt like it was stopping
• 32:54
  them bringing in talent, and ultimately they left because of
• 32:57
  it. So I had these two twin views of here's where it's
• 33:00
  definitely not working. And Sarah absolutely swear in blind
• 33:05
  that it does, and it was a key part of the success. So I was
• 33:09
  very curious, and I absolutely leaned in, and I left the dinner
• 33:13
  going, do you know what? This really makes sense. This could
• 33:15
  be the new model. Would I do? It absolutely not. Is the is the
• 33:19
  answer? I'm not brave enough. It all made logical sense at a
• 33:23
  level. But yeah, I'm building a team here at revved up, and I'm
• 33:27
  absolutely going to build it on a commission base. I just can't,
• 33:30
  I cannot shift my mindset so radically from sales being
• 33:34
  connected to some some kind of commission step too far for me.
• 33:38
  But it really made sense when they were explaining it and they
• 33:41
  they swap line.
• 33:42
  Mark Ackers: Let's try and get them on as a as a guest. Here's
• 33:44
  something else I've been really critical of Mark in on LinkedIn.
• 33:47
  It doesn't happen often, but maybe one in 40 or 50
• 33:52
  conversations I have sales development teams in particular
• 33:56
  report into marketing. Just gonna put out there. Don't like
• 33:59
  it? It's not for me. What do you think?
• 34:01
  Mark Walker: Oh, this is a good one. Then I think it's going to
• 34:04
  become more common, and I'm actually in favour of it.
• 34:06
  Mark Ackers: Oh, God, right. Okay, let's have this
• 34:08
  conversation then. So should I start with why I don't like it?
• 34:11
  Please, please. Yeah. So first of all, actually, it largely
• 34:14
  leans into kind of what you've said is wrong, how they're
• 34:17
  measured differently. It's a little bit like the problem I've
• 34:19
  had in the past with outbound telesales agencies. I've dabbled
• 34:23
  with them in the past, but I've always felt like their agenda
• 34:27
  was different to mine. They wanted to be able to say, there
• 34:29
  you go, there's 10 leads. We've done our job. But I'm like,
• 34:32
  Yeah, but these are 10 crap leads that they're no good, but
• 34:36
  they're measured on the volume. I need the quality, and maybe
• 34:40
  largely the reason you're in favour of it is because you want
• 34:43
  to instal the right behaviours. Maybe that's what we're going to
• 34:45
  get to. But I've always felt like, if you're at SDR in sales
• 34:49
  development, normally, you're Junior, right? You're young in
• 34:52
  your career, that's the starting point. Of course, there's
• 34:54
  exceptions of where people are just really all about sales
• 34:57
  development. They don't want to leave their own. Little bit
• 35:00
  older in their career, but largely when you start in their
• 35:03
  role, you're relatively new to the world of sales, like maybe a
• 35:05
  couple of years in at most, when I think of all the skills that
• 35:08
  you need to have as a modern day prospector right now, when I
• 35:11
  started out, really, you had to be good at cold calling and mail
• 35:15
  merge. That was it. Now you've got to be great at cold calling,
• 35:18
  and that's about to get a lot harder come September. You've
• 35:21
  got to be great at emailing, like, if your bounce rate is
• 35:24
  more than sorry, if your sort of response rate where people say
• 35:27
  this is spam is like, more than 5% you get blacklisted. So
• 35:31
  you've got to be great at cold calling, great at emailing,
• 35:34
  which is, you know, creative writing. You've got to be great
• 35:37
  at social selling, really, that's what we're saying. Now
• 35:39
  you've got to be great at video, greater voicemail and voice
• 35:42
  note. You've got to be a creative thinker, you've got to
• 35:45
  be a researcher. You've got to be able to use, I think the
• 35:48
  average rep has something like 21 things they've got to log
• 35:50
  into. You've got to be able to use all these different tech
• 35:53
  stacks. And I think when you think that, then that's, by the
• 35:55
  way, the just skill set. You've got to have the right mindset.
• 35:57
  You're going to have cold calling, anxiety and reluctance.
• 36:00
  You're going to have imposter syndrome. You're going to have
• 36:02
  need for need for approval. You're gonna have supportive buy
• 36:04
  cycle. You're gonna need to be able to negotiate objection,
• 36:07
  handle you're gonna be there to need to deal with rejection and
• 36:10
  pick yourself up. And every week, you start zero. Every
• 36:14
  month, you start a zero. Every day, you can still save your day
• 36:17
  as an SDR by booking a meeting at the very last minute. I know
• 36:20
  I'm just skimming the surface. By the way, of all the things
• 36:23
  the modern day prospect has got to be able to do. The thought of
• 36:26
  having a marketing manager that hasn't, and this is to keep it
• 36:30
  that hasn't lived that role, to me, is nuts. And actually, I
• 36:34
  feel like it's unfair for leadership to expect a marketing
• 36:37
  manager who has, critically, hasn't done that role to be able
• 36:41
  to coach and develop an SDR across all those things to the
• 36:45
  right level, to keep them in a job. Because let's be really
• 36:48
  clear, if you're crap at sales as an SDR, you're not supported.
• 36:51
  You're sacked. So I feel like you're letting them down by not
• 36:55
  giving them a manager that is great at these things, because
• 36:58
  they've lived and done it to coach and support them. I'm sat
• 37:00
  here feeling like I've given you a grenade there, and there's no
• 37:02
  way you can come back from that, but you're in support of it
• 37:06
  Mark Walker: over to you, yeah, no. So it's a very compelling
• 37:10
  argument that you've you've given, and a lot of it
• 37:13
  resonates. But I think there's, there is an alternative way. So
• 37:17
  a lot of the skills that you've just described right, the
• 37:20
  ability to write creatively, tell a good story, do research,
• 37:26
  manage a bunch of tools at scale. How do they all connect
• 37:30
  together? Making sure that you can social sell so many of the
• 37:36
  tools and skill sets that you've just described are core
• 37:39
  marketing, almost everything, bar cold calling and the ability
• 37:44
  to face a human telling. You know, every day is a little bit
• 37:48
  more in the camp of my mind of marketing, right? So a lot of
• 37:53
  what you described is why I think it's moving more into
• 37:57
  marketing. So instead of having 20 SDRs whose sole role is to
• 38:02
  just smash the phone every day. You've now getting 234, SDRs who
• 38:08
  are acting almost like demand generation managers to figure
• 38:12
  out what's the campaign angle, what's the tooling we're going
• 38:16
  to build? How do we resonate with all of these prospects, and
• 38:20
  how do we manage this suite of tools to get the responses that
• 38:24
  we need at scale? That skill set tends to be lending itself a
• 38:29
  little bit more to the creativity and campaign driven
• 38:33
  thinking of marketing, the behavioural attribution piece
• 38:37
  that you mentioned. I actually do think we're we ultimately
• 38:41
  land on the same page there, right, which is you have to have
• 38:44
  the right goals in place. So again, marketing, managing,
• 38:49
  SDRs, need to make sure that those meetings booked ultimately
• 38:55
  drive revenue. So it's about quality, not just quantity. And
• 38:58
  that's just how you set up good. Good goal link, right? You
• 39:01
  always try and have the counter measures. You don't get too
• 39:04
  extreme with one over the other. Pure quality, you don't get
• 39:07
  enough volume. Pure volume, you don't get enough quality. So
• 39:09
  that's easy to easy to overcome with the right kind of goals and
• 39:13
  metrics. And quite frankly, I've seen SDR teams reporting to
• 39:16
  sales that had entirely the wrong metrics themselves, right?
• 39:19
  It was just meetings books, and they didn't convert. So yeah,
• 39:21
  that that problem happens in both cases. I think the point
• 39:25
  around marketing not necessarily having lived the roles, they
• 39:29
  don't understand how to coach reps, particularly with
• 39:33
  rejection, right? That's really hard, picking up the phone and
• 39:36
  being told f off several times a day, right? That that's not an
• 39:40
  experience most marketers will have, so that's really
• 39:42
  difficult, but it doesn't preclude you setting them up
• 39:47
  with a coaching relationship, with an AE or with someone in
• 39:50
  sales leadership to upskill them on that side of their role,
• 39:54
  where they sit. Doesn't it doesn't squarely mean they have
• 39:57
  to sit in sales, and I do think. 70, 80% of that skill set is
• 40:01
  more lending itself to marketing. And then the 20, 25%
• 40:05
  whatever it is that marketers might not have, I think you can
• 40:08
  cope. You can set them up with a great coaching relationship.
• 40:11
  Mark Ackers: Hey, sales leaders, do you want a cost effective way
• 40:14
  to develop your team skills and help them smash their quotas? My
• 40:17
  sales coach offers team memberships for just 20 pounds
• 40:21
  per month per individual plus VAT, this will give your reps
• 40:24
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• 40:28
  hours and exclusive events, all led by world class sales coaches
• 40:32
  with over 25 group sessions to choose from monthly. There's
• 40:36
  something for every role we have. Sessions for SDRs all the
• 40:39
  way up to CROs. Empower your team to perform to their best.
• 40:43
  Visit my sales coach.com to get started. The link is in the
• 40:46
  description. Good job. Mark. I mean that legitimately. So the
• 40:49
  bit that I straight away, we go back to the very first thing you
• 40:52
  said, I'm in total agreement. I just, I've just seen it play out
• 40:56
  over the last couple of years. SDR teams shrinking, that that
• 40:59
  that is just happening, right? And And technology is enabling
• 41:03
  those to do more. So like bloated SDR teams, I totally
• 41:06
  accept are done. I really like the phrase, it's gone from an
• 41:09
  army to a SWAT team. I kind of really buy into that. It's nice.
• 41:13
  I feel like the bit that I sort of emphasise twice that's
• 41:17
  critical and I still sit with is I think they need to have done
• 41:20
  the role. And the reason I say that, and this might just be a
• 41:23
  me thing, but I'm keen to get your take. I feel like I have to
• 41:27
  believe my manager has done it for me to do it. I almost like I
• 41:32
  can't follow someone that's not walked the path they're asking
• 41:35
  me to walk. And that might just be me. Obviously there's a pun
• 41:38
  there with your last name, but there we are. And the reason I
• 41:40
  said that so just, just, uh, I won't say who, but a month ago,
• 41:45
  spoke to a sales leader, new to new enrol. There was CRO and
• 41:48
  they said one of the big problems is their sales manager
• 41:51
  has come over from a marketing role. They're now the manager of
• 41:55
  the sales team. They've been a manager for the sales team for
• 41:57
  three years, and they've never sold a thing. And I sort of
• 42:00
  called that. I was like, sorry, I actually did this on purpose.
• 42:04
  I said they've not sold anything for three months, just because I
• 42:07
  wanted them to say again, no, three years. I wanted them to
• 42:10
  say that out loud again. And I was I didn't act surprised. I
• 42:13
  was surprised, and I thought there's no way I could work for
• 42:16
  someone that's never sold. I struggle with that, and I think
• 42:20
  that's my point being in what is a high pressured role, an ever
• 42:25
  demanding role, a monotonous role, to have a manager that
• 42:28
  hasn't done it. Now I can totally say you can be in sales
• 42:30
  and move to marketing like you can marketing to sales, but I
• 42:33
  think you convinced me on the skill set roles in into very
• 42:38
  much a marketing role, demand gen I totally buy into that. I
• 42:41
  still think when the going gets tough, I want to know my manager
• 42:44
  has walked that path before and really lived it. Because I think
• 42:48
  the second you have a difficult conversation with manager and
• 42:50
  you're like, you don't get it, you've not done it, I feel like
• 42:54
  that becomes a really difficult relationship. What do you think
• 42:58
  Mark Walker: it's a really great challenge? I've got mixed views
• 43:00
  on it, right, which is, and maybe this is, this is too much,
• 43:05
  because I'm in a I'm in a seat now as a founder and a CEO,
• 43:08
  where I will absolutely be managing functions that I've
• 43:13
  never done before. I have never led HR, I've never led finance,
• 43:18
  but I'm still going to be expected to manage them, and I
• 43:21
  just need to learn and understand the bits that I
• 43:23
  haven't done right? And I so I think as you, as you climb any
• 43:28
  career ladder, and you become more and more towards an
• 43:31
  executive level, you will just find yourself managing functions
• 43:35
  that you haven't done themselves, right? It you can't
• 43:38
  have possibly done every role by the time you hit some sort of
• 43:40
  exec level, whether that's marketing or or sales. You know,
• 43:44
  if you when I've led marketing, I've had to make decisions
• 43:47
  around performance marketing without ever actually having
• 43:51
  done it before, right? So, and I would like to think I've done a
• 43:53
  pretty good job in these roles, and because I'm deeply curious
• 43:57
  and I learn, and I'm also quite authentic, and I will tell
• 44:02
  someone I haven't done this before. My job as a leader isn't
• 44:07
  always to have the exact answer is to ask the right questions
• 44:11
  and provide coaching and guidance and so on, right so I
• 44:15
  think with the right leader in marketing, so long as they are
• 44:19
  not trying to portray themselves as, like, I know best, this is
• 44:22
  how i i would do it, because you can't, right? But if you can
• 44:26
  say, Oh, interesting that you're having this challenge, and what
• 44:29
  have you tried to do to overcome it? Have you spoken to so and so
• 44:32
  in the sales team, like, I think they had a similar challenge,
• 44:35
  but you can, as a leader, manage people in functions you haven't
• 44:40
  led before. So my overall view, and that is just true, right?
• 44:44
  It's categorically true. It happens all the time in lots of
• 44:48
  businesses. I do take your point, though, that there is a
• 44:51
  certain mentality, particularly in sales. If you haven't done
• 44:54
  the job, you just don't get how to face sometimes. So building
• 44:58
  that rapport and credibility. So in this specific scenario, can
• 45:02
  be a little bit can be a little bit tougher. So overarchingly, I
• 45:06
  believe you can lead a function that you haven't done itself, so
• 45:10
  long as you are a good leader. But I do take your point it's a
• 45:13
  little bit more tricky in this specific scenario. And again,
• 45:16
  Mark Ackers: great counter argument, right? These are
• 45:19
  strong blows we're sending each other and we're dealing with
• 45:22
  what the reason I say that is, I buy into that. You know, as the
• 45:25
  co founder at my sales coach, I wear hats that I've never worn
• 45:28
  before. You know, like everyone jokes I'm the HR manager. Like,
• 45:32
  don't have any clue about HR, right? But I think, I think
• 45:36
  we're saying the same thing when I say that. I picture bigger
• 45:39
  companies, I think, in the smaller startup life, yeah, you
• 45:43
  have to wear different hats. And actually, that is the blessing
• 45:46
  and the curse of a startup is you, you get to wear these
• 45:49
  different hats. But God, those hats can be heavy and
• 45:51
  uncomfortable at times, but talking of So, yeah, you're
• 45:56
  founder led selling. Now, how have you found being the seller
• 46:01
  and the founder. How have you found that? I love it
• 46:05
  Mark Walker: ice. Most fun I've had in in in quite a long time.
• 46:08
  It's a different type of sale, right? There is a, almost a
• 46:12
  cheat code, right? Which is, if you are the founder, you just,
• 46:15
  you don't just get the sale, right? I wish, but you do get a
• 46:19
  certain level of credibility built out that this product
• 46:23
  you're about to show someone and the conversation you're about to
• 46:26
  have with them is built Yeah, it's it's not a playbook handed
• 46:30
  to you by someone else. It's genuinely your vision, your
• 46:33
  belief in how the world should be, what the challenges are. And
• 46:38
  I mean, again, even more so in this scenario, I'm selling a
• 46:42
  product that I wanted to have as a chief revenue officer, right?
• 46:45
  I've lived selling to CMOs and CROs, having been a sales and
• 46:50
  marketing leader. So there's a huge amount of fun, right?
• 46:54
  Because you're basically having a peer to peer conversation with
• 46:58
  people. So that is a little bit of a cheat code. And what's the
• 47:02
  challenges? Hang on, what's the question again, just, how am I
• 47:06
  finding it? How are you finding found the lead selling, going
• 47:09
  back to the point, an enormous amount of fun, I think maybe one
• 47:13
  of the challenges is making sure you do not get carried away with
• 47:20
  from missing things that you're set your that your tech team
• 47:24
  can't deliver, right? And I've been, I'm not a developer, but
• 47:29
  I've been on calls with other founders where they've promised
• 47:32
  something and then it just sends the whole business up in arms
• 47:36
  because it completely changes the roadmap, or it's very, very
• 47:41
  difficult to deliver. And you know, you kind of have that
• 47:44
  power, so it's about not exercising it and being like
• 47:47
  accepting the restraints, which is actually quite difficult to
• 47:51
  sometimes have that self discipline and say, I'm selling
• 47:54
  this product that I have today, not this vision that will be
• 48:00
  here two years from now, or even six months from now. And
• 48:04
  actually in the very early days when the product was MVP and
• 48:08
  very nascent, that was, I wasn't great at that, right? Because
• 48:13
  you kind of needed to sell a bit more than you had there and
• 48:16
  then. But as the products evolved, and it's now a genuine,
• 48:20
  fully fledged product. It's much easier to sell what is in front
• 48:24
  of me today than try and sell what's coming six months from
• 48:27
  now. And it's also the other thing is, we are BEC backed. So
• 48:34
  when you're fundraising, that's, that is a sales process, but
• 48:39
  it's a very different sales process, and when you're trying
• 48:42
  to fundraise sell and product sell, it's really important you
• 48:47
  don't let those two things converge, because, again, you're
• 48:49
  going to be selling a massive vision to someone that wants
• 48:53
  functionality when they buy it. Equally, you don't want to sell
• 48:57
  a VC on the functionality you have today, because they're
• 48:59
  they're not invest in. So
• 49:01
  Mark Ackers: there's a lot there that I can relate to. I think
• 49:04
  just taking it back to the start, founder and selling is a
• 49:07
  lot of fun, but it's hard as well. Yeah, cheat code is
• 49:11
  definitely an interesting phrase, because I get exactly
• 49:14
  what you mean. There are deals that I know I can do that it
• 49:18
  wouldn't be fair to expect anyone in my team to be able to
• 49:21
  do and that purely comes down to the title that you have. In my
• 49:25
  case, co founder and head of sales. And there'll be deals
• 49:28
  that you can do that you won't be able to replicate with other
• 49:31
  people that come into the team. And again, it wouldn't be fair
• 49:33
  for you to expect them to do that. But I think that's the
• 49:36
  chasm that is so difficult to cross when you break from
• 49:39
  founder led selling and having sales people in place. And then
• 49:43
  the bit you talk about that, really, I call that staying in
• 49:46
  your swim lane. You know? I remember the early days of
• 49:48
  refract. I remember the early days of my sales coach. You've
• 49:52
  got your swim lane, but you've got someone saying, Oh, if it
• 49:54
  could just do that, we can make it do that. No problem. But then
• 49:59
  when we were. Guilty this at refract would build features for
• 50:03
  one person, and that would really shift your roadmap, push
• 50:07
  back the feature didn't quite work, or they didn't really use
• 50:10
  it, and then no one else really adopted it, and you'd constantly
• 50:13
  move out your swim lane. I mean, it sounds like that, something
• 50:16
  you're very conscious of, revved up is maybe in the early days it
• 50:19
  was harder, but you're really focused on your swim lane. So I
• 50:23
  can, I can totally relate to that. But founder led selling is
• 50:27
  just difficult, isn't it like, in the sense of, whilst a lot of
• 50:30
  fun, to not break out of your swim lane and and to say no to
• 50:35
  people, particularly when you're VC backed. But then here's the
• 50:39
  other thing that that is true. If you sign up a crappy
• 50:42
  customer, in the sense of poor fit, and you've tried to fit
• 50:45
  square peg in a round hole, you're the one that tells the
• 50:48
  board they've signed up. You're the one that tells them they've
• 50:50
  churned and it's on you. And I suppose there is that that hat
• 50:54
  and that responsibility that you have to wear. And it's a real
• 50:58
  it's a real tightrope, isn't
• 50:59
  Mark Walker: it? It definitely is, yeah. And the other inherent
• 51:03
  challenge with founder led sales is, you're a small business,
• 51:07
  right? So you don't have all of the brand and tailwinds that
• 51:10
  come from being a large organisation. At that point. You
• 51:12
  don't have a huge marketing budget. You know, the brand
• 51:14
  often is you right, going out on to LinkedIn and so on. So
• 51:18
  there's, there's plenty of challenges, but yeah, to your
• 51:22
  point, if you, if you fudge things a little bit and you try
• 51:25
  and sell to someone that you know isn't quite a good fit, but
• 51:27
  you want the win for the quarter, you you know you're on
• 51:30
  the hook for that the following quarter. If they churn going
• 51:33
  back to the very first point, I would never knowingly sell to
• 51:37
  someone that I didn't think could get value from the
• 51:39
  product, because there is just no point, right? You are just
• 51:43
  going to invite churn, but in the really early days, you are
• 51:47
  finding product market fit, and you don't know whether it is
• 51:51
  going to work or not. And those, those have been a couple of
• 51:54
  painful experiences, right, where we've had clients that
• 51:56
  it's just for whatever reason, it's just not quite worked, but
• 51:59
  that's just the process of learning and growing, and you
• 52:04
  get better and you refine every quarter, and churn starts to get
• 52:08
  lower, and your revenue gets higher. And that's how you're
• 52:10
  building a business.
• 52:11
  Mark Ackers: And part of that is your responsibility as the
• 52:13
  founder, to take risks, to try new things, right? Like I
• 52:16
  remember in the first year at my sales coach, we said we should
• 52:19
  be experimenting every week experiment, try new things and
• 52:23
  and that's almost like your duty to try and build the best
• 52:26
  version of the business. And you know, you would have sat there
• 52:29
  like I did with a whiteboard, thinking, Okay, this is what the
• 52:31
  business is going to be. This how we're going to do it. And
• 52:34
  then you get out there and you're like, Okay, we need to
• 52:35
  make some changes, and we need to make them quickly. And then,
• 52:38
  I don't know about you, we've we've made a change. Oh no,
• 52:41
  let's go back. Oh no, let's make this change. Let's go back. And
• 52:43
  I'm sure that's the journey you're going on. Let's hear
• 52:46
  about revved up, because I'm conscious of time, so revved up
• 52:49
  is a business I'm somewhat familiar with, but I don't want
• 52:52
  to make any assumptions. Let's go back to how you described me
• 52:55
  when I first sold to you. Let's not make those assumptions. Why
• 52:58
  don't you, first of all tell me who's the ideal person that, if
• 53:02
  you could get an inbound demo request from someone, what's
• 53:06
  their perfect job title and company?
• 53:08
  Mark Walker: Yeah, for sure. So if I take the medic framework to
• 53:12
  an extent I'd have to right, and the economic buyer would be
• 53:15
  either the CMO or a CRO who actually looks after marketing,
• 53:21
  right? But it's fundamentally the most senior marketer in the
• 53:24
  business. Would we would want to be sponsoring the product, and
• 53:28
  then, in an ideal scenario, we would have at least two
• 53:32
  champions. One of them, our primary champion, would be head
• 53:37
  of demand, Gen smaller business, maybe head of marketing, but
• 53:41
  they're effectively on the hook for delivering qualified
• 53:45
  pipeline to the sales team. And then, crucially, we would
• 53:48
  ideally have a second champion who runs sales, right because
• 53:54
  the product that we are selling is Account Based Marketing, and
• 53:58
  ABM, while he's got marketing. The title is inherently a team
• 54:03
  sport, and if you do not have sales bought into it, the whole
• 54:06
  thing will fall flat. So it comes back to this sales,
• 54:09
  marketing alignment conversation.
• 54:11
  Mark Ackers: So let's start there in your own words. I know
• 54:14
  maybe for many listeners, an obvious question, but I want, I
• 54:16
  want your words. What is Account Based Marketing? There
• 54:19
  Mark Walker: probably is a dictionary definition of it. I'm
• 54:22
  going to give you two two answers so that this simple
• 54:26
  theoretical answer to what is ABM is it is marketing that
• 54:32
  targets a specific set of accounts that are predefined,
• 54:37
  and you customise all of your content and all of your
• 54:40
  campaigns to resonate specifically with each one of
• 54:46
  those accounts and the key stakeholders within those
• 54:49
  accounts. So that's like the as close to my textbook destination
• 54:53
  as you can get. And then the question is, well, what does
• 54:56
  that mean? Right? What's the kind of workflow around a good
• 54:59
  you. Good ABM like a good ABM motion would be good account
• 55:04
  selection, and we can double click into anything that you
• 55:07
  want, but let me give you the high level. But you firstly,
• 55:09
  you've got to select the right accounts. Then you need to do
• 55:13
  deep research and understanding into those accounts. What's
• 55:17
  their context? What are their drivers? What are their goals,
• 55:19
  what are their challenges, and who is the most likely buying
• 55:23
  committee and influences within the account? What are their
• 55:26
  motivations? What are their drivers, and so on. Then you
• 55:29
  need to have a great angle that's built off of the
• 55:33
  research, like, how are we going to attack this account? Like,
• 55:35
  what's uniquely valuable about our business to them to their
• 55:39
  business. And then you need to customise all of your content to
• 55:43
  that account. So you've got to really show you've done the work
• 55:46
  to understand their context and how that connects back to your
• 55:50
  value proposition. And then you need to execute the campaign,
• 55:53
  and that's usually across multiple channels. You've got to
• 55:57
  show up where the stakeholders are and where that account is
• 56:00
  multiple times, and often that does start from brand building,
• 56:04
  because if you if the account doesn't know you, sometimes you
• 56:08
  just have to build that familiarity and awareness with
• 56:11
  your business before you can actually start to break into the
• 56:15
  account and have conversations. Which is why ABM tends to be a
• 56:19
  longer cycle to actually start to see results, and that's why
• 56:23
  you reserve it for these larger organisations who are going to
• 56:26
  be very meaningful to your revenue line.
• 56:28
  Mark Ackers: And how imperative would you say great Account
• 56:32
  Based Marketing is in today's sales landscape.
• 56:35
  Mark Walker: I mean, I'm building a whole business around
• 56:36
  it. So you would imagine my answer is, it is very
• 56:39
  imperative, like bland marketing and bland campaigns that don't
• 56:45
  directly speak to specific accounts and the individuals
• 56:49
  within them are just noise. They're just noise. And it's so
• 56:53
  easy to scale noisy campaigns through automation and AI, it's
• 57:01
  still much more difficult to actually get to the level of
• 57:05
  depth that's required for ABM. That that's what helps cut
• 57:10
  through. Now there's also typically motions or campaign
• 57:17
  touch points within ABM that cannot be scaled through AI or
• 57:22
  digital. For example, I would almost always have some kind of
• 57:28
  breakfast or dinner or in person. Touch point for an ABM
• 57:32
  campaign, right? Because you are saying I am willing to invest
• 57:36
  the time and money to get you in a room with peers, and I'm going
• 57:40
  to spend the time and expense of calibrating this event just for
• 57:44
  you, right? It's on a topic that we know is going to resonate
• 57:46
  with you and your business, and you're going to meet your peers.
• 57:48
  That type of cut through is very different than, yeah, Can I
• 57:53
  record you a 32nd loom video? Right? So it's just a different
• 57:57
  level of weight that goes along with these ABM campaigns, and
• 58:01
  if, but if you don't have them, it's, it's very difficult to cut
• 58:06
  through to these accounts. And would you say again, you know,
• 58:08
  you're building a business in this you live in this world.
• 58:11
  When you speak to organisations, what kind of percent do you
• 58:15
  think can really get an Account Based Marketing? Right? Very
• 58:17
  few. Right now. Where's the quick fixes, the fixes with
• 58:21
  organisations that are not doing ABM correctly right? What are
• 58:23
  the what are the quick fixes here again, they might have not
• 58:27
  been identifying the right accounts to go after in the
• 58:29
  first place, so having better intelligence, better decision
• 58:32
  making frameworks around who are the right accounts to go after
• 58:35
  is potentially a really quick fix to the level and depth of
• 58:39
  research that you need on that account can be really time
• 58:45
  consuming and take whole teams. If businesses aren't leveraging
• 58:50
  AI and available tools, then they're probably really missing
• 58:53
  something, and therefore they're making their ABM campaigns far
• 58:57
  more expensive than they need to be. And the third one, and maybe
• 59:00
  I should have started with this, because really, this is where I
• 59:03
  I see most of them derail. Is the sales and marketing
• 59:06
  alignment, right? ABM is a marketing driven initiative.
• 59:11
  They want it to drive leads, or MQLs and the sales team are not
• 59:16
  bought in, and it's not all coordinated together, or they
• 59:20
  are broadly aligned, but it's a fight over who's going to claim
• 59:24
  the attribution for the success of the campaign. Sales is trying
• 59:27
  to call up the accounts outside of the agreed cycle, because
• 59:32
  they want to be able to claim that they got got it over of the
• 59:35
  line, right? Or marketing is deliberately, yeah, trying to
• 59:40
  consume sales with a particular activity and claim the credit,
• 59:43
  right? So honestly, the organisations that I'm speaking
• 59:47
  to or working with, where the quickest fix would be, it's
• 59:52
  around getting those teams aligned,
• 59:53
  Mark Ackers: and this sets us up nicely. I'd love for you to now
• 59:57
  just share with us how does revved up? Help with all of
• 1:00:01
  this. If I'm sales leader, CRO, responsible for marketing
• 1:00:05
  demand, Gen, and I'm buying into what you're saying. Wanna hear
• 1:00:09
  more about revved
• 1:00:09
  Mark Walker: up? So revved up helps with three of the core
• 1:00:12
  components that I've just spoken about. So revved up will do
• 1:00:17
  unbelievable amounts of research on the account and the
• 1:00:22
  stakeholders within the account. So you end up with this
• 1:00:25
  incredible dossier of information and insight into the
• 1:00:29
  account and the stakeholders, the likes that it would have
• 1:00:32
  taken multiple people many, many days and man hours to pull
• 1:00:36
  together. So that gives you the base of a really strong ABM
• 1:00:40
  campaign. Now, the second thing that revved up does is it takes
• 1:00:43
  that content and that research, it matches it to your unique
• 1:00:47
  value proposition, and then it pulls together really compelling
• 1:00:52
  content that will allow you to cut through to this account with
• 1:00:55
  a unique point of view and a unique value proposition
• 1:00:58
  tailored to the needs of the account, right? So again, often,
• 1:01:03
  many days can be spent in workshops trying to figure out,
• 1:01:06
  how do we translate this research into content revved up?
• 1:01:09
  Does that? Does that for you, out the box? And then the third
• 1:01:12
  piece is, we make it really easy to connect all that content to
• 1:01:18
  all different channels, so you can run that multi, multi touch
• 1:01:22
  campaign, not just email, not just LinkedIn, but actually
• 1:01:25
  helping you create thought leadership that can go out to
• 1:01:27
  your sales team so they feel a part of it. They're they're
• 1:01:30
  empowered and enabled to drive the ABM campaign and build their
• 1:01:34
  brand, PPC, bespoke landing pages, right? The whole shebang
• 1:01:40
  is, managed out of revved up. So you really get this kind of out
• 1:01:44
  of the box ABM pod with the platform,
• 1:01:49
  Mark Ackers: amazing. Thanks. So thanks for bringing that to
• 1:01:51
  life. I'd love to send people your way. Obviously, it sounds
• 1:01:54
  like every week you're at an event, they'll probably see you,
• 1:01:58
  social butterfly that you are. Obviously, I'm guessing LinkedIn
• 1:02:01
  is the most obvious place to find you, right? So, Mark Walker
• 1:02:04
  on LinkedIn, revved up. For those not watching, listening,
• 1:02:07
  how do we spell revved up? Where's the website? How do we
• 1:02:10
  find you?
• 1:02:10
  Mark Walker: Yeah, for sure. So revved up is R, E, double, V, E,
• 1:02:15
  D, u, p, revved up all one word.ai, revved up.ai. Is the
• 1:02:22
  website and then, yeah, LinkedIn, for sure, my LinkedIn
• 1:02:26
  handle is pretty easy. It's J, F, D, I, Mark, just fucking do
• 1:02:31
  it. Mark, it's been, been a mantra of mine for many, many
• 1:02:35
  years. So easy to find me, or, yeah, just search Mark Walker at
• 1:02:40
  revved up. Well,
• 1:02:41
  Mark Ackers: that's that's a great LinkedIn handle, and that
• 1:02:43
  brings us to the end of the podcast. We just fucking did it
• 1:02:47
  to take up your your mantra. And loved having you on Mark. I knew
• 1:02:51
  this would be a great episode. As I say, we've not really
• 1:02:53
  explored that sales and marketing side before, and as a
• 1:02:57
  ex marketer myself, I was really keen to have that conversation
• 1:03:00
  with you. I think there's some great debates, you know, a few
• 1:03:02
  things where you definitely challenge my thoughts. Hopefully
• 1:03:05
  I've done that with you as well, but hopefully, and I trust the
• 1:03:08
  listeners, got a load out of this episode as well. So thanks
• 1:03:11
  for coming on. Thanks for sharing your story, and best of
• 1:03:15
  luck. We've revved up, and I'm sure I'll see an event at some
• 1:03:18
  point in the future. Thanks
• 1:03:19
  Mark Walker: so much, Mark. It's been a lot of fun. Appreciate
• 1:03:21
  having me you.