Episode 64: Interview with Meghan Anderson - Enhancing the Sales-Marketing Relationship

Audio:

Show Notes

In today's world, you can't post three blogs a week and have qualified leads pour in because it wouldn't work; you would end up cannibalizing your own search traffic. It makes more sense to put everything into one single piece of content and have all your supplemental posts take different angles and link back to that one piece. Otherwise, you're making a lot of content with no good return because while volume is great, it isn't everything, and the way we consume content has changed. A majority of traffic today goes through one of two places, Google or Facebook. Every time they make a change, the ripple effects are massive. You have to understand the keepers of all information. That way when a shift does happen, you can shift with them.

So, if you're an emerging company, competing in the market is a challenge. One of the ways in which you can compete is by trying to be an early adopter of newer channels and playing around with them if your audience is there. For more fundamental advice, you need work that is infrastructure in nature. You need short-term, high-impact content along with the "how to" pieces to bring a strong point-of-view to break through all the noise. 

With the content you do have, how do you unlock the full potential of your sales team? Meghan goes into great detail here about how important it is for marketing and even the product team to talk with sales through their thoughts and processes. If a piece of content or advertising campaign is going to fail, the sales team will know before it launches because they know whether something is going to resonate. Try to do as much planning as possible with the sales team to find out how to best put together the messaging so that not only the sales team can utilize the content in their outreach, but also so that the customers/prospects resonate with it. The marketing and sales relationship is super important for this reason, otherwise marketing is sitting around making art that looks pretty. 

When it comes to getting this relationship rolling, it's important that marketers take into consideration the sales rep's day. Reps are in calls all day, and it can be hard for them to step back and get perspective. Give them a familiar starting place; that will help them figure out what challenges they're facing and where you can most help them. The biggest thing is that you want to minimize the amount of barriers between you and the rep. 

The other big thing with the sales-marketing relationship is that you have to have balance. Sales is very micro-oriented while marketing is very macro-oriented. As a marketer, you're thinking long term while the sales rep is thinking about the next call on their calendar. To get it right, you have to connect those two dots so that you're solving for the problem today while also showing that there is a plan for the future. To do so, marketers have to help bring context to the story that the sales reps are telling. A great example of this is a blog that Meghan wrote for HubSpot, 5 Ways Go-to-Market Strategies Will Change in the Post-Pandemic Economy. In this blog, she lays out the story for the salesperson and explains how everything fits. The same context is needed for buyers because there's so much information out there that contradicts itself, it's challenging to pinpoint what's true and what isn't. 

Towards the end of the conversation the topic changes drastically. Doug asks how Meghan is dealing with the crazy environment and what advice she's giving her team to keep them going. She responds that work and home life are blending and it's a traumatic time for a lot of people. There's no line or barrier anymore. To get through it for yourself, you have to know that your life is layered and you have to keep it all balanced. If you feel like you're not having an impact, what are you doing out side of your job to balance that feeling out? We have to do our best to see every conversation as it's own meaningful mission. We have to find that one thing that gives us purpose because without feeling significant, it'll be touch to get through this rough time. And above all else, we need to get better at cutting each other a little bit of breathing room and give everyone empathy because at the end of the day, we can't do this alone.

If you would like to get in touch or follow Meghan, you can connect with her on LinkedIn, follower her on Twitter @meghkeany, and/or listen to her podcast The Growth Show. 

If you are interested in the book Doug mentions in this episode, you can purchase it here: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage.