It’s crucial to establish a proper handoff between marketing and sales…
In this episode, Joel Stevenson shares how.
Joel is the CEO of Yesware, a leader of sales productivity software, and the former GM and founder of Wayfair’s B2B division, which he grew to several hundred million in revenue.
He’ll reveal his top insights about sales and marketing, including:
- How the channels that leads use define marketing strategies
- Top software for sales and marketing
- How to identify when parts of your sales funnel are broken
- Why data builds trust between sales & marketing
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Voiceover: This is Performance Delivered, Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success with Steffen Horst and Dave Antil.Steffen Horst: Welcome to the Performance Delivered Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success podcast, where we talk with marketing and agency executives and learn how they build successful businesses and their personal brand. I'm your host, Steffen Horst. The topic for today's episode is the handoff between marketing and sales. Here to speak with me is Joel Stevenson, the CEO of Yesware, a leader in sales productivity software. Before taking the helm at Yesware. Joel was the GM and founder of Wayfair's B2B division, which he grew to several 100 million in revenue. He began his Wayfair career by leading the company's home improvement products division, followed by his role as Managing Director of Wayfair UK, where he drove the growth of the company's international presence. Joel then served as Vice President of FP&A while Wayfair was transitioning to a public company. Before joining Wayfair Joel held a variety of sales and marketing roles at Arriba, Innovus, and Verizon and was a consultant at ZS Associates. Joel, welcome to the show.Joel Stevenson: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.Steffen: Now, Joel, before we before we talk about the importance of a proper handoff between marketing and sales as it relates to leads. Tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself. How did you get started in your career? And how did you end up as CEO at Yesware?Joel: Yeah, well, my first job out of college actually was in sales out of undergrad and I was studying, I was planning to study finance. And then somebody came to speak, that was pretty dynamic and sort of convinced me that like, well, you know, sales is a skill you need no matter what you do in your career. And so I decided, well, I might as well change to a business degree and ended up a sort of general business degree and end up starting in selling. And then that led me to one of my customers who was a tech company, and we were sort of part of the whole .com thing we got by bought by Arriba. And you know, it was it was all great until it sort of until it wasn't. And then I did a couple other jobs and then decided I'd go back and get my MBA, because I wanted at that point I've been strictly customer-facing, and I wanted to do something more quantitative. And that's when I actually then properly got my finance concentration in my MBA. And then worked in consulting for a bit. Eventually found my way to Wayfair really had a great run. And most of that time spent really in B2C, not B2B marketing. But from my background, I knew there was always an opportunity there. And so we sort of started this experiment to try to sell directly to interior designers and builders and that sort of thing to see if we could generate better customer lifetime value through a different service approach. And if we could acquire those customers directly. And that worked, and I went away from it for a while, do some other jobs. And I came back to them and when we scaled it like crazy. And eventually Wayfair just got a little bit too big for me. But you know, but I wanted to do something earlier stage. But one of the things that was so interesting about the way we scaled that business was we just spent a lot of time and attention on technology as applied to the sales productivity problem. And so we had an investor in common Battery Ventures. This guy Neeraj Agrawal was on the board of both companies. And so he had introduced me to them, and then you know, after a little while, decided to join and then became CEO shortly thereafter.Steffen: Interesting. Now talking about the handoff between marketing and sales, why is it important to establish a proper handoff when it comes to leads moving on from, you know, being generated from a marketing activities and moving into the sales side?Joel: Well, you could do it, why suppose without a sale, establishing a proper handoff, but a lot of bad things tend to happen when you do it that way. And in some ways, I feel like we haven't really advanced that much further past, you know, the old Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, like, oh, you gotta give me the good leads, you know, and then I'll, then I'll produce good revenue. Like we've been having this argument between marketing and sales for, you know, 100 years or something like that. And so what I think what tends to happen when you don't sort of establish a proper handoff is it's difficult to understand sort of what's true. And so then you get into this place where, you know, the sales team says, well, we would do better if we only had better leads. And the marketing says, well, like, we're giving you all the good leads, and you can't close them. And so you end up with this with this bit of misalignment. And what I often see is sort of like the main points of misalignment, or one is, I think this is probably the most common one is where there isn't really a good understanding of the ideal customer profile or there isn't good agreement. And so, the marketing team maybe has one idea of what they think is the ideal customer profile. And so they go, then they go and diligently acquire those types of companies. And the sales team has a different idea. Or maybe it changed you know, in from the sales experience and didn't get well communicated back into the marketing side. And so they're wanting a different type of customer to come in. And so right off the bat, we're probably going to have a bad result or not an ideal result, because what's coming into the funnel is not what salespeople think they're gonna have the best chance of closing. And so getting on the same page about that, I think, is the sort of the number one. And that changes over time, too. Just because you had an ICP that was great a year ago, it may or may not be the case anymore. So that's probably the number one that I see. And then the next one has to do with buyer journey. So well like, where does the handoff occur? How ready are these leads are when they get introduced to the sales team? You know, whether it's a, you know, what, what constitutes an MQL? And is an MQL really sales-ready? Or should that should that translate at a very high percentage of sales accepted? Like what do we believe about, about sort of quantity versus quality in that sense. And then the last one, I think just comes down to, you know, understanding what good execution looks like. And if we don't have I think, a good solid understanding of like, what the handoff is, then it becomes very difficult to, I think, to sort of have a real discussion about whether it's the top of the funnel, or the middle of the funnel, or the bottom of the funnel, where the problems exist.Steffen: Now, so the handoff, obviously, is about sitting each party down. The leader of the sales department, the leader of the marketing department, and talking about what they're going after, right. At the end of the day they need to come in the middle and need to say, okay, this is how, how a lead needs to look like. It needs to be that person with that title within that organization with that department, in that state of mind, kind of right. And they agree on that. And that's kind of from where they work. But as you mentioned, as people, as time passes, things change. So how is it? How important is it to provide feedback from the sales side to the marketing side, about what works and what doesn't work?Joel: Critical in my opinion, and I suppose most people would accept that, it's important to give the feedback, but it may be that it's the nature of the feedback, that can vary quite a bit where on one extreme, you might like the most, the least helpful part of feedback would be, hey, marketing team, you suck, you know, I think would be the least helpful way to, to deliver that feedback. And then on the other side of that feedback, it's sort of specific, specific, actionable, and also comes with really good examples. And so that's where I think, you know, some technology tools start to come into play where, you know, if you use a tool, like, you know, say, like a wingman, or a gong or something like that, where you can, you know, if you say, well, hey, this customer came through and was the wrong profile. Well, now you can send the link to the recording, or you could use your own word, record the Zoom call, or whatever, it ends up being. The phone call, whatever it is. But, you know, that ability to sort of say, this didn't come through the funnel in the right way. Here's why. And then giving the tangible backup for somebody to sort of hear and listen to that themselves, I find is a very powerful way to start to elicit change versus saying like, well, you know, they weren't like you're sending leads that weren't ready, or you're sending leads that it's the wrong industry, or it's this or that. Like, I think I find that, especially in bigger B2B sales, the selling process can be so complicated, and there can be so many different variables. If you can actually deliver, well just listen to minute 10 of this. And you'll understand why I'm saying what I'm saying, I think can be, that can be a very powerful way to deliver the feedback.Steffen: How important is it to be even more specific. I mean, obviously, when you run demand gen activities, right, you will use several channels to drive leads. And as you mentioned, those leads might be in different stages. You know, someone might look at a white paper or read an ebook, and because they fill in that information, they are a lead. But they might not be sales-ready, right. They need to be still nurtured. And then there is someone that really fills in, I want to see a demo, you know, and scheduled a demo. How important is it to get information about channels that drive these individual leads, and what content they use, etc., to then define further your marketing activities?Joel: Yeah, I'm a big fan of instrumentation, and we've invested in it pretty heavily here in our own funnel to the point where we in some of our digital campaigns we'll look at you know, individual keywords and how that translates all the way through the self serve funnel so that we understand lifetime value. So we understand where to, and the same thing is true in a sales funnel like to the degree that you've got good instrumentation you can really start to get into the details of some of these things. And you can imagine that, you know, somebody that, for example, maybe watches a video on YouTube that they consume for 30 minutes versus somebody that watches a, you know, a 30-second TikTok. They both watched the video, and maybe they both have the same intent, but they know, they know much, they don't know the same set of things, when they show up in the sales funnel. And so, you know, to the degree that you can invest in instrumentation and start to figure some of this stuff out, and you pay attention to it, you're definitely going to end up with a better end result, if you're sort of willing to commit to the test and iterate approach. And you know, and it's very difficult to build up a new channel, these channels get very, very crowded very quickly, you got to be able to move pretty quickly. And, you know, there's enough sophistication out there where people are going to bid, at least to what the, you know, to sort of what their marginal return is. And, you know, and maybe even you could argue in the in maybe the last 36 months, on the B2B side, it's well beyond that, because you had sort of excessive amounts of venture capital funding. At least in tech, sort of allowing people to make silly decisions, as it relates to CAC. But if you're not constantly watching that stuff, and really monitoring and optimizing all of these, not only from what you're bidding on, but then what the what the buyer journey is like for each of those things, then your, your competitors, some of your competitors probably are. And it makes it very difficult to grow the top of the funnel, when you don't have an approach that says, you win, it's a one size fits all approach, if you will. Very difficult, I think. And it's hard to without the instrumentation to know where that lead really came from, it's very difficult to make changes to your process, and then go find, you know, the next set of keywords or audiences, etc, that you're going to go bid on.Steffen: Now, when you go into more detail that sounds really labor intensive to identify, you know, which channels content etc. And if you are an industry where you get a lot of leads for your products, right, that might need, that means you need additional hands? Or is there is there some software that you use to to kind of feed that information back aggregated?Joel: There are many different ways to approach that tech stack. But there's a product called segment that we use here that we like, which basically plugs into all the various analytic platforms. And then also, you know, we also plug it into our actual product, so that we can marry up things like usages. And, you know, and where the channel originated from. I think there nowadays are many approaches to this. But I think if you can try to, to me identifying a strategy whereby you can build something of a data lake, and then start to do analytics against the data lake, regardless of the tool that you use, I think that's a good starting point, because the channels are always changing. Well I mean, the big ones haven't changed much recently, but you know, they do change. And the places where you may want to send the data may change over time. So I think trying to establish, you know, a central repository, whatever it is, is great. And then you know, there are some of these other more advanced types of tools that allow you to do things with that data, like create an audience and push over here, or create an audience and put them in drip campaign. And then when you do this, you can get very, very sophisticated with it, but it all starts with, I think that this sort of this, this shared data lake.Steffen: Yeah, yeah. Now, we talked about the importance of establishing a process for the handoff, or, you know, who marketing and sales are going after. What does it still break?Joel: Yeah, you know, communication is definitely part of it, as we mentioned before. But, you know, if we were to push a little bit more in the, like, it worked before, and now it's not working anymore. That part of it, I think, comes down to the pace of change, if, at least in tech, and I think is true, you know, probably for most industries is that it things are generally getting more competitive, not less competitive. And it's easier than ever to start companies and so you just end up with more competition quicker. And so something could have changed in your, in the external environment where, you know, maybe there's a piece of legislation or there's some macro effect that now is, what was true six months ago is now no longer true, and that's affected your prospects. It could be that a new competitor is now showing up, and they've got a set of talking points that paints you in a bad light. And so when the salesperson gets the lead, they're already on the defensive. It could be that something about your product is changed and it now either opens up a different part of the market or makes a certain part of the market more attractive. And so you know, there's any number of external factors and then you know, thinking about some of the some of the other internal factors that we mentioned earlier about, like disagreement around ICP, and, and buyer journey, all these things like, you know, I suppose the way to think about it is you should expect that it will break. And somebody once said to me a good truism about being a CEO is you can't prevent the company from breaking, but it's your job to fix it when it does break. And I think that's true for, you know, for marketers, and for rev ops and sales leaders. It's like you're, at some point, your funnel is definitely going to break. It's only a matter of when and it's kind of becomes more a question about how do we get back on track?Steffen: In marketing, right, when we run campaigns, we run a lot of tests, right. Because we assume something is right, but then it might not work as well. For sales, I almost have the feeling, it kind of is the same thing that we have an idea. We think this is our target audience, right. And this is what we're going after. And over time, we have to identify well, yes, there are some targets there that work. But we also want to fine-tune it. And I assume that's probably also reason why things air quotes break, right? Because you went out with this is our target audience. You identified yes, there are some but it's not really so effective that we hoped for. And therefore you have to test, A/B test and have to fine-tune audiences, in order to get better results basically. Be more efficient with your sales activities. Once you identify something breaks, how do you fix things?Joel: Well, I think the first, yeah, the first part is maybe the diagnostic of what's broken. And, you know, on the marketing side, it may be a question of something has changed in the quality of the leads, maybe the cost of acquiring a lead has changed. Maybe there's something about the way that the sales team is getting the leads and re-presenting the leads. Like so you know, you would sort of, you know, quick diagnostic would just be looking at the whole funnel all the way from, you know, traffic, you know, MQL, sales, qualified lead sales accepted lead, you know, whatever the sort of the sales process is, and trying to say, like, well, is there a point now, where our yield is very different, and or the volume is very different. And that might be sort of an initial sense of where you've identified something. And I think it's important that, you know, people try not, like it this, especially at this stage, it's not so much about, you know, sales versus marketing, it should very much be like, hey, this is a team sport type of thing. And like, let's get to the right answer. Which I feel like is one of the reasons that revenue operations has started to in bigger companies have started to supplant separate sales operations and marketing operations groups. Because the funnels have become much more, you know, people travel in different you know, in both directions now in funnels. And there's, you know, retargeting and customer marketing and all this stuff. And so I think the companies that have started to adopt, you know, the, this revenue operations mindset, I think is one of the reasons why is because you want to try to analyze your funnel as holistically as you can. And, you know, on the sales side, sometimes what you'll see is, there might be an approach that's now different, where like, maybe the sales team for whatever reason isn't putting the same amount of effort that they put in before. It could be that the messaging that's used is now not working as well. Or something even as crazy as you know, we've seen this happen before where you get one rep that's a moronic spammer, and the deliverability goes way down, of not only potentially marketing emails and also sales emails. So then like your messages, you know, like you're, you're starting to deliver leads into the funnel, but then they're actually not getting spoken to you in the way that you think. You know, the way that the team does demos, or does discovery. Like there's so many different things that could go wrong from top to bottom. And depending on where the problem is, then you've got to, you know, then try to think about what's the set of things that we can test or just straight up fix if it's something obvious and easy.Steffen: Yeah, so obviously, on the marketing and sales side, there's a lot of data that's being collected. First question on that one. How are you able to identify, or what is required to identify whether parts of the sales funnels are broken? Is there a specific setup that you would say, you know what, you have to have these KPIs on hand to see whether, you know, leads are able to move through the funnel smoothly, or whether you have a high amount of unqualified leads or spam leads, for example.Joel: Right. Well, I think the first thing to establish is has the sales team put in an inappropriate amount of timely effort towards progressing these leads. And that might be something where, you know, you can you know, tools like Yesware it could give you data about like, for example, like how many emails have you sent out and how fast did you send them and what sort of reply rates did you get? So you can at least get some idea of like, okay, well contact was made with this person in a timely way. And then something happened or didn't happen, but at least we know that the lead wasn't getting lost or wasn't getting, you know. Or some people will also structure this a little bit more where as soon as the lead comes into the funnel, then a salesperson puts them into a particular sales email campaign. So, you know, okay, it definitely went into this email campaign, we can see it went through the steps. And here's what happened. So I think it's like effort, and timely effort is number one. Number two, I think then comes down to efficacy. And there's a few different ways to look at efficacy. One way to look at efficacy is to look at how leads progress from say a, what you might call a cold funnel versus the warm funnel. So somebody shows up to the website, and they say, oh, I'm interested in this product, I'm contacting sales, and you have the salesperson call me or set up a meeting or something. You know the best forms of leads. Watch how that progresses through, like, you know, how long does it take, what are the deal sizes, what sort of, you know, yield, do we get from, you know, from demo, through to proposal, et cetera. And then compare that to the, to the cold funnel, and generally, there's gonna be a pretty significant drop off there. And like ballpark from some of the funnels I've seen over time, I think like, you could probably expect at least a 50% drop in yield from the cold funnel versus the warm funnel. And then inside of the cold, but if it serves to be dramatically worse than that, like, if you're yielding 5% or 10%, then you may have a real problem, unless your CAC is extremely low, or you have just some completely ridiculous ACV, where you can afford a wildly inefficient funnel. But you know, for most of us, that's not true. And so then you can start to look at alright, well inside of the cold funnel, are there any channels that work? Maybe there's some channel that's actually working well. Or maybe none of them are working well. If none of them are working well, then, you know, there's a few different places to look. One is back to the what we were talking about before around ICP. Like, do you really have the right people coming through the funnel, but also, you know, I've also seen it happen where the sales team actually can't handle a lead that's less qualified. And so they happen to be very good at warm inbound leads. And they're good at demoing, they're good at handling competitive pressure, they're good at pushing somebody through the funnel, but they're actually not good at basically demand. Sort of demand development, if you will. And so in, in some companies, you'll see this specialized where you have, you know, sales development reps, or business development reps that are trying to work with people at that very early stage of the funnel before they're ready to be handed off to a salesperson. But not everybody is set up that way. And so you just you just end up with a sort of a skill or quality gap that you could maybe address. So there's, there's no one size fits all answer. But I tend to find that the first place to look is like how big of a drop-off do we have between the cold leads we're bringing in versus the quote-unquote, warm leads.Steffen: Now when things don't work. So when when when marketing creates a lot of leads, or leads that sales can't convert, then there's always an argument between the two departments, right. You send us, sales says you send us crap leads that we can't convert. Marketing says well, we send you get leads, you just don't put in the effort to do it. How important is data there to build trust between sales and marketing? That those kinds of communication, those kind of discussions, don't, you know, come up?Joel: Right. There's a few aspects there. I think the one aspect is like, well, what is the type of customer that's coming through? And, you know, and while none of these methods aren't necessarily foolproof, there's any number of external data sources that you can now tap into to sort of quantify what's coming through the funnel. You can quantify how many employees they have. You can quantify the industry. And so if you've, if you've done that, for the whole funnel, then you can, you know, there are other now other analytics that are available to you. Well, hey, sales team, you said that, you know, bigger companies are better, but look at the data doesn't like we're not closing bigger companies better. You know, things of that nature. And, and so I've seen, you know, I think many companies, especially on the tech side, I think you see this a little bit more where territories get broken apart by not necessarily by geography, but by sort of size or industry or something like that. And so you almost have to have the data to be able to sort the leads. In that case, if there's been bigger investments into making sort of a streamlined funnel that gets all this data pended to that it can then be later used. Other people haven't made that investment maybe because you haven't had to because it's like well, you got the you know, the all the leads in Illinois go to this person. But there's a supplemental reason to have all that data, which is for this type of analysis. And that's one aspect is like what's really coming through the funnel. And then the other part that it can be helpful in the hey, sales you didn't your job is, you know that sales is tracking all of their activity. And that can then be mapped back to the opportunity to the lead. And so when there's a question about, you know, hey, we're giving you these leads, but you're not converting them, you say well look like it's not because we're not trying. Look, we, you know, here's the number. Here's our SLA per contact. Here are all the people that did that. You know, here's where we're running into issues. And, you know, and maybe that, that that approach, or that SLA is incorrect. But at least now you're talking about, you're not talking about whether appropriate effort was applied, you're really talking about like, are, you know, are we sort of working in the using the proper methods and procedures to try to progress these leads? And if you don't have that stuff, then it does very quickly get into, you know, sort of anecdote and name-calling. And, like, well, the problem has always been marketing, you know, like, you know that that type of, which is not helpful to actually solving the problem.Steffen: Yeah. And I think at that point, at those points, it's important to kind of revisit if kind of the information that is being shared to those leads was correct. Have we marked them correctly as where they are in the journey, right? Did they get the right information when they were looking for? Or do we need to adjust the content that we share with them to prepare them more for what the sales team is trying to do in the early stage, or whatever stage they are in?Joel: That's, that's right. And there's another thing that I think is, is maybe worth mentioning here, which is, it's one thing when sales and marketing are both inside of the company, and they're arguing. It's a different thing, when the marketing is external to the company, and the sales is internal. It's a much easier thing to say, oh, it was that third party, that's bad. Let's get a new third party. It's much more difficult to fire your internal marketing. I mean, it happens, but that's a much more difficult thing. And so I think as somebody that's a digital agency, it's like, you're gonna have to you have to work much harder at this, I think, to make sure that the data is there. And there's a good discussion, there's a good dialogue, because it's much I've seen this happen a million times where, you know, and I've probably done it myself, where it's like, oh, like, you know, the agency sucks. Like, get rid of the agency. Like that's gonna solve all our problems. Very rarely does. I mean, it does sometimes, I suppose. But that's, I think that's a particular challenge for digital marketers that are operating with, you know, as a third party with multiple customers.Steffen: Yeah. How does that work when we have a product lead growth? The handoff part?Joel: Yeah, it's interesting. We, you know, we've experimented with this a lot on the Yesware side. And we're mostly product lead, it's somewhat, maybe counterintuitive, since we're a sales tool. But a lot of, quite a bit of our revenue comes through sell service and product lead growth. And what ends up happening is, the handoff points change, can change quite a bit. Where instead of the marketer's primary job being demand generation and delivering leads to the sales force, the marketer's job becomes actually delivering a trial or delivering product usage. Initially, either into a free tier or a pilot, or some other method of trial. And then you have some choices now about when the sales team is going to engage. And so a lot of, now a lot of what you're trying to think about is like, well, when is the right signal thrown so that we can get involved? Like, is it when the person first starts a trial? Or should they invite a person? Or should they be a paid customer and have a little bit of success? When do we introduce somebody to make sure that they're successful versus somebody versus more of a sales or commercial conversation? And then what is the nurture part of that journey look like? Whereas before, we might say, oh, somebody downloaded a piece of content, and now we're going to put them into a drip campaign. Well, on the product side, now, you've got to let, you now know a lot more about them because they've given you information because they're paid or free customer. And you can start to do things that are now nurturing them towards using the product more. So you think about, you know, maybe now you have, if you're doing a land and expand strategy, you might say, oh, well, everybody that looks like this user should now go in an audience that we're going to now target on, you know, whatever platform just to drive awareness. Or you might get some initial users, and you want them to use a particular feature, you could start advertising that feature to them. And you now have information about product usage. And so you can start to devise different nurture campaigns to, based on what the, based on what the customer is doing to try to generate a different result. And so I in my opinion, the marketing there becomes maybe a little bit more technical, and not so much more analytical, but there's a little bit more, I suppose software-type work to do. Where like in an ideal sort of growth team scenario you have growth marketers working with software engineers working with, you know, sales and customer success people that understand all this stuff. And so that is starting to blur the lines a little bit. And you know, and then people we mentioned this earlier, but in a product lead funnel, you should sort of expect that people will go out of the funnel, no, come back in the funnel, and it can create a bit of a measurement nightmare, but it's quite an interesting way for the right product and the right audience to be able to grow.Steffen: Great. Joel, unfortunately we've come to the end of today's podcast episode. Thank you so much for joining me on the Performance Delivered podcast and sharing your thoughts on the handoff between marketing and sales. If people want to find out more about you, and Yesware how can they get in touch?Joel: Yeah, best way is yesware.com. And we've got, we've been writing sales content for many, many years. So we've got tons of free sales content that's there. You can start a free trial of Yesware there if you want to do that. And yeah, if you want to be in touch with me, you know, good old email, jstevenson@yesware.com. And I'm starting to make a little comeback on Elon Musk's Twitter. You can find me at iconoJoel.Steffen: Perfect. Will leave all those information in the show notes. Thanks everyone for listening. If you liked the Performance Delivered podcast, please subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast application. If you want to find out more about Symphonic Digital you can visit us at symphonicdigital.com or follow us on Twitter at Symphonic HQ. Thanks again and see you next time.Voiceover: Performance Delivered is sponsored by Symphonic Digital. Discover audience focused and data driven digital marketing solutions for small and medium businesses at symphonicdigital.com
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