Sales and Marketing Unite [Podcast]

We’re very excited to share the new Oktopost podcast, B2B Marketing Now! In our first episode, Brett McNay, the Director of Enterprise Client Engagement at Bluewolf, an IBM Company, joins Jessica Stephens, Inbound Marketing Director at Oktopost to discuss sales and marketing. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, as this is the first topic of a twice-monthly program. Next time we will be reviewing the power of video in B2B marketing.

A Few Takeaways from Episode 1

“SDRs can be a key connection between sales and marketing.”

Many successful organizations have a blurred line between the two groups, having a few SDRs that actually roll up to marketing. Having that crossover is powerful. It creates greater revenue accountability for marketing and greater brand accountability for sales, overall helping the bottom line. Additionally, the feedback loop created by sales delivering insights gleaned from prospects to the marketing team facilitates stronger content. They encounter potential customers when they are still in the early discovery phase, which provides a lot of context. If the sales team is consistently getting the same objection or hearing a gap in the external awareness of the product, sharing that with marketing (and even product) to build better messaging.

“Delivery is the alpha and omega of business development.”

Sales professionals are no longer just following up on leads. It’s all about the customer experience now. Consumers are more well informed than ever before, which means sales needs to be as well. Often, a prospect will understand feature sets pretty well by the time they have a discovery call. Or, worse yet, they think they know everything about the products they are evaluating. This being the case, especially the latter, sales teams should be prepared to deliver a full education in some cases. Salespeople becoming thought leaders can be critical in a crowded market (most are), it can no longer just be a feature or pricing competition. Marketing needs to help prepare the sales team for these interactions, arming them with more than the traditional sales enablement pieces.

Quote here shared by Brett, from the book “How Clients Buy”

“ABM is fluffy”

ABM is an effective marketing strategy, not a tool. It is a heavy buzzword right now, and there are dozens of tools on the market to enable teams to more easily execute an account-based marketing plan. The tools are not ABM. Programming requires a huge commitment from both sales and marketing. It completely changes success metrics, which is a hard change to make for most teams. Traditional sales strategy is not an easy thing to change. A less drastic alternative discussed is the “double funnel” concept from TOPO.

“Walking videos on LinkedIn”

Sales professionals love videos on LinkedIn. It goes hand in hand with the idea of sales sharpening their thought leadership skills. The individual’s brand developed through videos or podcasts can have a positive impact on deals won, and not just for social selling. Marketing should embrace this, making sure videos contain captions and upcycling them into the company’s content plan. A great thing to build into an employee advocacy program.