Sales and marketing departments usually operate as two separate entities. Although that’s not healthy for a business, it’s generally the reality in many companies. Santosh Sharan, president and COO of Apollo.io, joins our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank, in this second of three conversations, to talk about the evolution of data as a business asset and how shared data — and unified leadership — can eliminate this unfortunate dichotomy of purpose, and fuse sales and marketing into one weapon with a single goal: market domination. “Sales is simple,” Santosh says, “You’re looking for an edge over your competitors.” It used to come primarily from developing relationships, which Chris defines as gaining your prospect’s trust. Now, though, getting the desired information or data to an interested prospect provides an increasingly important edge — if you can do it faster than your competitors can. And, thus, data joins trust as a necessary tool of sales. Learn more about this and other data- and sales-related insights in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Data & Trust: Your Assets in Market Domination.”

About Our Guest

Santosh Sharan, president and COO at Apollo.io, a leading data intelligence and sales engagement platform. Previously, Santosh was COO at LeadGenius, COO at Aberdeen, and VP at ZoomInfo.

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The complete transcript to this episode is here:

Announcer (00:06):

Sales and marketing departments usually operate as two separate entities. Although that's not healthy for a business, it's generally the reality in many companies. Santosh Sharan, President, and COO of apollo.io joins our Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall and Corey Frank in this second of three conversations to talk about the evolution of data as a business asset and how shared data and unified leadership can eliminate this unfortunate dichotomy of purpose and fuse sales and marketing into one weapon with a single goal, market domination. Sales is simple Santosh says. You're looking for an edge over your competitors. It used to come primarily from developing relationships, which Chris as gaining your prospect's trust. Now though, getting the desired information or data to an interested prospect provides an increasingly important edge, if you can do it faster than your competitors can. And thus, data joins trust as a necessary tool of sales. Learn more about this and other data and sales-related insights in today's Market Dominance Guys episode, 'Data & Trust: Your Assets in Market Domination.'

Corey Frank (01:45):

Chris talks about a connected cell and he's done many a podcast and panel discussion about weasels. And pigs and weasels in data, pigs and weasels and dials, probably in life too. I suppose we could extend this to the zest for life. When you see this Santosh, is it possible that sometimes the intentions, the well intentions that I have as a sales manager or VP or a CRO to get the best data for my team. But, I look at the evolutionary scale. Maybe my marketing eyes are bigger than my sales stomach, if you will. Right? And it ties in into Chris, your weasel and pigs analogy. What do you do when they're just operating at two different evolutionary mentalities? Who wins? Where's the lowest common denominator that you can apply that? Does that make sense for both you guys?

Chris Beall (02:39):

Yeah. I'm really mystified, but I do get the pigs and weasels thing. I don't know Santosh, if you even know our pigs and weasels analogy. But, it goes like this. At ConnectAndSell, we divide our users or people that we meet into two categories, pigs and weasels. We love pigs because pigs are hungry for the next conversation, no matter what the last one tasted like. And we don't like weasels, because they're trying to weasel out of the one thing you need to do in sales to gain proprietary advantage, which is hold an intelligent conversation with somebody. When we work with a company that will have sort of a rebellion among t