This episode features a deep dive into the pivotal role of sales and marketing alignment. Matt Heinz, president and founder of Heinz Marketing, shares actionable approaches to bridging the gap between sales and marketing teams.
He brings a wealth of experience and insights to episode, showcasing how strategic alignment can be a marketing game-changer.
Alignment, Step by Step
Viewers and listeners are treated to a hands-on exercise to kick off their alignment efforts. The exercise involves mapping out the key stakeholders in the buying process and aligning their journey with your marketing and sales efforts, focusing on awareness, challenging the status quo, and commitment to change.
This practical approach helps demystify the process and sets the stage for a more integrated strategy.
Navigating Challenges and Complexity
Matt doesn't shy away from addressing the common challenges faced in aligning sales and marketing. He emphasizes the importance of embracing the inherent complexity of today's B2B marketing landscape and offers insights into overcoming those hurdles through a cohesive approach to data management and cross-team collaboration.
Defining Success in Alignment
The conversation goes beyond just hitting sales targets, delving into the importance of establishing a system that ensures consistent and predictable success. Matt encourages businesses to look at the bigger picture, focusing on building processes that support long-term growth and scalability.
* * *
The episode underscores the critical importance of sales and marketing alignment in achieving sustainable growth and success in B2B marketing and sales.
Check out the video for more details, and the full podcast (link below the video) for the entire insightful conversation.
Don't miss future episodes: Subscribe to the Marketing Smarts Live Show on YouTube. And to catch up on all previous episodes, check out the full playlist on YouTube.
Episode Details, Guest Information, and Referenced Links
Episode No. 72
- Live date: March 1, 2024
- Episode link: youtube.com/watch?v=n_4-r8TdoHs
- Original podcast episode: Sales and Marketing Alignment Insights, Strategies, and Success Indicators: Matt Heinz on Marketing Smarts [Podcast]
Guest's social media profiles:
- Twitter: @HeinzMarketing
- LinkedIn: Mat Heinz
MarketingProfs resources referenced in the show:
- How to Drive Sales and Marketing Alignment in an Enablement Role
- Three Steps to Better Marketing and Sales Alignment
"In B2B News" article referenced in the show:
"From the #mpb2b Community" links referenced in the show:
Transcript: Sales and Marketing Alignment Insights, Strategies, and Success Indicators, With Matt Heinz
Hello to all my Marketing Smarts Live viewers today. I'm super excited to bring you another episode of the Marketing Smarts Live show.
This week's topic is all about Sales and Marketing Alignment Insights, Strategies, and Success Indicators.
So, if you're ready to get your learn on, buckle up and let's get ready to rock and roll.
Hey, I'm your boy George B. Thomas, speaker, trainer, catalyst, and host of this here show, the Marketing Smarts Live show, as well as the Marketing Smarts podcast found on your favorite podcast app.
Our guest clips today are brought to you by none other than Matt Heinz.
Matt Heinz, president and founder of Heinz Marketing, a Seattle marketing agency focused on sales acceleration. He has 15+ years of marketing, business development, and sales experience from a variety of organizations and industries.
Matt's career focuses on consistently delivering measurable results with greater sales, revenue growth, product success, and customer loyalty.
He has helped organizations such as Amazon, Seagate, Morgan Stanley, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and many others create predictable, repeatable sales and marketing engines that fuel growth.
Matt is a repeat winner of Top 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management and Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers.
Now, remember the clips of Matt Heinz today are pulled from the full marketing smarts podcast episode, and if you want to listen to the full interview with Matt Heinz and myself, make sure to tune into the Marketing Smarts podcast, link to the full show will be in the description below after the live show ends.
Now, in this episode, again, I'm talking with Matt Heinz about Sales and Marketing Alignment Insights, Strategies, and Success Indicators.
In this clip, I asked Matt what can we do to get started and to understand the sales and marketing alignment and gain more insights.
Listen close; these words are powerful!
Matt: Here's what I want you all to do. Either take a blank spreadsheet or just take a piece of paper, and down the left-hand side, I want you to write the titles of the people that are involved in the buying process. We know that there are buying committees involved, different people with different roles, different titles, write down those titles as you know them today. I'm not going to ask you to go do personas. You can do that later, whatever, fine. Write down those titles, at least three to five.
Across the top, I want you to write a couple of sales stages. The first stage that I want you to do is awareness. The second stage that I want you to do is challenge the status quo. The third stage that I want you to do is commit to change.
What I want you to do in each of the cells that you now have underneath those for each of those individuals is think about the sentence or the couple of bullets that is the message. What are you going to put in front of someone that is going to get their attention and earn their attention with something that sparks their brain a little bit? How are you going to challenge the status quo of what they're doing today? Why would they commit to change based on those insights?
Here's the catch. You are not allowed to talk about your product or service in any of that content. We do this exercise with sales teams all the time, and that's the hardest part. They can't wait to use their product or service as an example of challenging the status quo, as a reason to commit to change. None of that is necessary to get those messages across to the prospect. In fact, the longer you wait in that process to bring up what you sell, the more the customer is committed to that outcome for themselves.
If you can customize that to each of those individuals in the buying process to have a distinct message for each, you have them more engaged and you're more likely to build consensus among them around that commitment to change down the line. That's what gets them committed to the full sales process.
Are you building that worksheet yet?
Have you scheduled the meeting?
Do you need better alignment and insight in your organization around sales and marketing?
Put the answer to that in the chat pane or let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #mpb2b and, of course, tag me using @georgebthomas.
We'll get back to Matt Heinz and his thoughts on Sales and Marketing Alignment Insights, Strategies, and Success Indicators, But first, I have to ask...
Are you part of the MarketingProfs community? If not, become part of the MarketingProfs community by heading over to mprofs.com/mptoday - That's mprofs.com/mptoday.
Now, it's time for one of my favorite sections...
In The B2B News - Where we talk about breaking B2B news or really important tips we find on the Google news tab related to you and your B2B business. This week, the title is...
Marketing And Sales Can't Align Without This By: John Arnold
Are your marketing and sales functions aligned?
It may depend on who you ask. Business and technology decision-makers who work in sales are almost twice as likely as those in marketing to say that marketing operates independently or is minimally aligned with other internal functions.
Whether the disconnect is more perception or reality, the results of misalignment are dismal.
Despite all the advancements in frontline marketing and sales technologies and processes, only 10% of B2B sales and marketing leaders say that their sales representatives have plenty of high-quality leads.
It's Time To Change Your Approach To Sales And Marketing Alignment!
To read this article, check out the link below when the live show is over.
So let's get back to Matt Heinz and his Marketing Smarts podcast episode.
In this clip, I wanted to ask Matt about the hurdles we may face along this journey of sales and marketing alignment, insights, and the strategies we are using.
Again, Matt dropped some knowledge bombs along the way.
Matt: You're basically talking a pre-postmortem. We've done these programs for so many companies, and everyone has great intentions. Then you start to execute, and then you reach that trough of disillusionment where everyone is like, "Why isn't this working the way we want it to."
We come up with almost the same reasons every time. Without getting into the full detail, one of them is just a lack of embracing the complexity of modern B2B sales and marketing. This is going to be more complex. This is going to be more difficult. Engaging in an integrated dance between Sales and Marketing is going to take more forethought, more process, and more systems than you may be used to doing. I guarantee you that it will be worth it. I guarantee you it's going to create better outcomes for you. If you invest less money in media and more money in systems, in your data and your processes, you'll be in far better shape. That lack of being willing to embrace complexity is one of them.
Upfront you can just say, "We know this is going to be hard, we know this is going to be a challenge, we know this isn't going to be perfect, but we're going to go through it."
The other one is having a more integrated approach for data management. You can't just have some data in your marketing automation platform and some in your CRM, and it doesn't talk to each other. If you're going to take a more nuanced approach and a more account-based approach to your marketing and sales moving forward, your systems need to talk to each other, and your ability to manage and update and enrich that data is going to be critical to doing this moving forward. This levels up. The level of sophistication and the expertise you have to have internally around technology systems and data increases.
It doesn't mean you're deprioritizing creative, it doesn't mean you're deprioritizing story. It makes those things more important. But to make them stand out and be effective, you have to have some of those fundamentals and those systematic tools put in place.
Have you faced aby of those hurdles?
Did hearing this give you an action plan moving forward?
We will get back to Matt Heinz in a few minutes but first it's time for some...
Dope B2B Learnings From The Vault of MarketingProfs Articles
That's right, It's time to dig into the treasure trove of valuable information and pull out two pieces of gold to help you be a better B2B marketer.
Article one this week is: How to Drive Sales and Marketing Alignment in an Enablement Role by Tamara Schenk
Misalignment, Paired With Moving Targets, Happens in Business Every Day!
Measuring things we can measure rather than things we should measure is a challenge every sales enablement leader is aware of.
Actions taken in Marketing are not always consistent with actions taken in Sales. Sometimes those respective sets of actions are even counterproductive:
They block each other and don't create any value other than keeping everyone busy.
Article two this week is: Three Steps to Better Marketing and Sales Alignment by Justin Gray
Sales and Marketing alignment is both critical to achieve and difficult to measure.
If asked about the state of your Sales and Marketing alignment, you'd likely say it's better than ever. But our perceptions rarely tell the full story.
In fact, alignment within most organizations is actually failing, according to a recent LeadMD and Drift study.
This article will walk you through more findings and outline how you can apply them in your own company to make a real impact on alignment—and organizational success.
Want to keep learning more? If so, check the links in the description below after the live show to get access to both amazing MarketingProfs articles.
OK, back to Matt Heinz... Let's dive back into this conversation of Sales and Marketing Alignment Insights, Strategies, and Success Indicators
In this clip, I wanted to ask Matt what the heck does sales and marketing alignment look like in a modern world? In other words, how do we know we have reached Sales and Marketing Alignment Insights, Strategies, and Success Indicators nirvana?
Matt: For sure becoming one [team]. That doesn't mean that you have one team that everyone reports in to. It means you have one integrated team that everyone is engaged doing their jobs to be done to be successful.
I would define success in two ways. One is hitting your number. If marketing hits their MQL goal, but sales misses their number, you missed your number. If sales hit their net new number, but the company misses its revenue target, you missed your number. In this tighter market right now, a lot more companies are focused on customer-led growth, because net new revenue and net new customers are harder to come by. Being able to make those transitions, don't have territory wars around just focusing on net new. Maybe your function, maybe your resources should be focused on retention, renewal, cross-sell and up-sell right now to hit the revenue number.
So, first objective is hit your revenue goal. Second is build a system to be able to predictably do it moving forward. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people hit their number and they predicted their quarter, but have no idea whether they can repeat it. "We had a great quarter. I don't know what happened. We had a great tradeshow. I don't know what happened." What's your sense of confidence that you can do it again this quarter? What are the systems in place that can help you increase reliability, predictability of hitting that number, and doing it as your numbers continue to scale?
Your ability to create predictable outcomes in a complex sales environment is one of the other objectives of doing this that will continue to help you hit your number, over and over, over time.
Are you hitting your numbers?
Are you hitting predictable outcomes?
Are you positioned to scale based on the alignment and success you have achieved?
We're going to get some words of wisdom from Matt Heinz here in a few minutes but right now, it's time to turn the spotlight on you, the MarketingProfs community. Yep, time for...
From The #MPB2B Community
We searched far and wide in the #MPB2B universe to find amazing information and conversation to bring to the masses.
So, first, make sure you are using the hashtag, and second, make sure you have fun and add value to the community.
OK, let's kick it back to Matt Heinz and some words of wisdom around this topic of Sales and Marketing Alignment Insights, Strategies, and Success Indicators.
Here is what Matt Heinz wanted to leave us with...
Matt: Now that you've brought that question, to me, it goes back to our why. I used to think our purpose was predictable growth through revenue responsible marketing. Well, that's not our purpose, that's our niche, that's what we do. Why do we do that? We do that because our stated purpose as a business is to positively impact careers and lives by enabling work that matters.
We can positively impact careers and lives by helping marketers be more revenue responsible, by helping marketers create more impact in the business. That creates more upward mobility for them in their careers, it helps them create more flexibility in terms of how they do that. It's not just a forever checklist of getting tactics done, but doing the right things to drive revenue impact.
I feel strongly that if we can do the right work and we can focus on work that matters, that impacts our careers and our lives and the stuff that really matters to all of us. That's what I get fired up about.
I love Matt's words of wisdom!
Why!
Why do you do what you do?
Do you know your why?
I sure hope so.
Have you enjoyed today's journey? Let us know, use that hashtag #mpb2b on whatever platform you are joining us on.
