IndustrialSage
Sales Benchmark Index: Mike Drapeau, on Uniting Sales and Marketing Departments
Mike Drapeau of SBI (Sales Benchmark Index) joins us to share practical ways companies can address the disconnect between sales & marketing. Danny: Hey, so let's go ahead and jump in today's episode. I've got Mike Drapeau here from SBI. Mike, thank you so much for coming and joining. Mike's a great friend. But for those who don't know you or SBI, tell us about you. Mike: Thank you, Danny. So, again, my name is Mike Drapeau. I'm a partner at SBI. SBI is a management consultancy focused on sales and marketing, on revenue growth. And our mission in life is to work with our clients to help them improve their top line, and to do so via initiatives and projects, and the sales, marketing, customer success, and customer experience functions. So thanks, Danny. Danny: Awesome, so it looks like you have a little bit of experience at this. Mike: A little bit yeah. Danny: So, to say the least. But what we were talking about, what are the big challenges that we hear all the time for not just manufacturers but across the board, but still, it applies, is this misalignment between sales and marketing. And it's a big challenge. What are some of the key missteps that you see on how people are kind of missing the mark? What does that look like so we can kind of lay that foundation? Mike: Well, gosh, we could have a show that lasts 10 hours on that topic. Danny: I'm sure. Mike: We really could. And for those out there in the marketing function or leading marketing functions, I'm going to kind of speak to you all because there's a unique opportunity for you to really drive the engagement you have with your parallel Chief Sales Officer. So many marketing officers, especially those at around my age, have come into that from the B2C function. They've been classically trained, price, product, position, place, and that is completely antithetical even, there's no way for a salesperson to understand that. And so there's a language barrier that causes a complete inability to talk. Also, many marketing leaders don't understand the coin operated, day-by-day, quarterly ability to hit numbers. And so they don't have a number. So the second fault line is when we work with, especially industrial companies, we give, we ask the marketing person, what's their number? First question, they don't have a number. So putting that number together so that both share it, that's what we call revenue marketing. So revenue marketers walk into every meeting with the Chief Sales Officer understanding, "Hey, I own a number, and the number can be defined various different ways." Let's say, for instance, the number of net new leads generated in a buying persona that are not part of the existing sales go-to market. So that's a way for a marketing person to say, "Hey, I'm going to owe you 10 of those each month," each quarter, whatever, and that then becomes something that we can rally around. Same thing with campaigns. Sales leaders don't understand campaigns. It's sort of voodoo. Marketing puts the campaign out and suddenly leads fall from the sky. We don't know...we know that's not real. So when we work with CMOs we make sure that they give a role. Every marketing campaign, every single one, should have a role for the salespeople, sales manager, and sales rep. And literally giving them the scripts, giving them the custom emails, giving them the text message content that they need to send so they can play their role in the campaign, and then it occurs to them, "Oh,