Marketing and sales alignment: insights from experts at Palo Alto Networks, Cabro SpA and Digital Science

Speaker A: Hi, welcome to the B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast. Today we are discussing a very important topic, the alignment between marketing and sales in B2B. Is it healthy relationships or more like a dysfunctional family? Let's find out. And uh, there are some fantastic experts here with me. And so just let's start with the introduction. Please introduce yourself and share a little bit about your background. Who would like to start? Maybe let's start with Doug then, then Julia.

Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. Thank you, Olga. Appreciate the opportunity to be on this. Doug, uh, Kimball is, uh, currently senior director of product marketing at Digital Science where we focus on, uh, research and much more. With that, uh, I've been everything from a product marketing executive to a chief marketing officer. Worked with sales and marketing for 18, 20 plus years. Excited to dig into this. So thank you for being, for having this opportunity.

Speaker A: Thank you, thank you. Impressive experience.

Speaker C: I'll go next. Uh, I'm um, Hiten. I lead AI security marketing for Apollo Alto Networks. I've been a product marketer now for almost a decade or actually more. And before that I was in research and development. I am really excited to be in marketing also because of sales. I always wanted to uh, be close to sales roles and I think this was a great opportunity of influencing sales not and not being in sales. So this was a perfect mix for me and I enjoy product marketing overall.

Speaker A: Thank you. That's amazing. Yeah. Sales collaboration. Collaboration with sales is very important to all of us.

Speaker D: Yeah, please.

Speaker A: Julie.

Speaker D: Hello, my name is Yulia Katarska. I'm a marketing manager at Cabro. It's a chemical company in Italy. And I have been working for nine years in the automotive sector in international companies, Goodyear and Michelin. And for three years I worked in the telecommunications sector in top three telecommunications company Tele2 and uh, as a marketing manager and brand manager. I'm happy to be here.

Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you so much. Very impressive experience as well in different industries. That's amazing. So let's start with your personal experience of collaboration between marketing and sales. Could you please share your experience from your experience where collaboration between marketing and sales didn't work? Let's start with some problems and negative things. And why did this happen?

Speaker C: I can start. I think, uh, one of the biggest challenges I have faced as Drew in my product marketing role is um, how marketing sees the world and how sales sees the world. They are much more closer to individual and specific customers that have their specific needs. But marketing, uh, especially product marketing tends to be very research driven and we look at very macro pictures. So sometimes it's, it's kind of like a boxing match in terms of whose message wins. You know, is it the individual sales message that wins or is it, uh, the overall marketing message that wins? That's been an interesting journey, uh, to be on aligning with sales leaders and just working through some of that challenges. And I think the biggest way it shows up in my experience is when you're launching campaigns and products. Uh, that's when sales gets really excited and they pay attention to you three times a year or more. If, uh, you're doing more product launches, then that's where you get to see, uh, the reality of the sales world and the marketing world sort of code a little bit.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. Thank you for the example. If you'd like to continue, I'll jump in.

Speaker B: Uh, I'll use an example that was an unfortunate one. I wanted to start a win loss program at the company I was at and have done a few in loss programs my time and made the, I'll just say the error of not really doing a good job of involving sales in the process. It was more of a. I was earlier in my career it was all about marketing and product marketing or make some, you know, some good impacts and rolled the program out to, I'll just say limited success because we didn't, you know, I didn't spend the time saying sales, will you buy into this? Sales, will you support this? Can you help me get clients? Can you help me get people to talk to, uh, make it clear that a win loss wasn't going to be punitive. We're not looking to evaluate somebody negatively. So spent a lot of, I guess time and cycles running around trying to gather these interviews and persuade sales to do this. No, no, you can't talk to my client. We're still in discussions there. Um, and so again, I can't blame sales and I can't blame anybody but myself really for not creating a more of a. I've now learned the executive focus to get alignments and sponsorship and all those pieces. So we create a reason to collaborate. And that's what I learned from that process is that just because I want to collaborate doesn't mean you want to. And I agree with Hitan is that I've gotten very close to working with sales. We have to collaborate, but we have to give them a reason to collaborate. What's the value of collaboration? So that was a very good lesson to learn for me.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's amazing. And we all talk about the positive situations as well. So thank You, Doug and, and Julia, would you like to continue?

Speaker D: Yes. Uh, that's a great share that Doug has bring up because I have also an example with no collaboration between marketing and sales and the project unfortunately was not successful. In a certain moment I realized that in my company customers torn was a significant issue for the company in general. And I wanted to understand. My customers were leaving and I, uh, made a research on the base of this research. I decided to make a presentation to executives and to sales team to improve our approach. I prepared detailed presentation. I prepared the chart for salespersons. And uh, this chart listed companies uh, which we lose last year and uh, highlight uh, the current year. I asked the salesperson to take a feedback from our clients to understand better bottleneck we have in our company. But unfortunately the salespeople reacted negatively. The feeling was that I'm questioning their expertise and competence. The Tuan study was closed, it was put apart. And uh, of course it was my mistake because I did not involve in the very initial phase, initial step sales personnel into this project because I needed to let them understand why we are doing it, what is the scope of this, uh, exercise and uh, that I'm not trying to control them. Instead of that, I'm trying to understand better the situation. And um, it was really a big lesson for me, very important lesson. Because in my experience I see that m. In many cases sales department consider marketing as a control or a support. But in reality we are working to achieve the same goal with different tools. It's not about control, it's not about support. It's about different instruments that we are using as marketers to reach the same objective. In my opinion, this is the key issue. Losing the space, team spirit, the collaborative approach in the team.

Speaker A: Julia. Uh, it's a great case. I think it's an interesting case. And uh, thank you for being brave to share the mistakes and failures. Yeah, it's a lot of respect for that. And uh, I would like to jump to the opposite side. So could you share a case where marketing and sales were well aligned and effective working together and what made it work?

Speaker C: I can give you an example. So during my time at aws, I was tasked to create our global migrations campaign. Uh, and how should AWS talk about cloud migrations? One of the first things I did is I started attending briefing presentations and sales presentations that sellers were giving to customers. And that gave me a couple of great insights. One, it showed me how understanding the why to do something is so much important for our customers and not just what I need to do and how should I do it? They wanted to take a step back and say, you want me to move to AWS cloud? Why? And the second thing is there are always some psychological or on the ground factors that have nothing to do with technology, that have nothing to do with business priorities, but something to do with a personal priority, like a new CIO has come in and they want to get a quick win and they want to show agility and new processes being brought in and they would take a traditional on prem company to cloud. And uh, understanding some of those nuances was so critical in how we do marketing. So we pivoted our campaign to some of those factors and uh, when we showed it to sales, they were extremely happy. They said, finally, somebody's talking the same language that our customers want to hear and then that we don't go and tell them. So you're in a way telling our story. You're making my m job easier by explaining the customer why they need to do it in the first place. So I can actually go in and talk about the how and the what. That to me was a big learning overall from that project in terms of how should we message and how should we talk to customers from a marketing perspective. So from that point on, I think that my first customer is always sales teams. I treat them as my first customer and I go to them first, review things with them before something new is launched ideally. And that gets me a lot of good feedback.

Speaker A: Great, thank you. So I believe that Doug wanted to continue.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'll jump. I love what you were saying because, uh, that sales alignment and what, you know, the whole why piece. I was talking to Olga before this. I've got a messaging framework that said that is a. So what? Why who cares? Just launched a book about that today, by the way, so it might be worth looking at. But that, that why is such the best way to engage the sales team. And so the success I was thinking of, uh, digital science. I was brought over to work with one of our sales teams based on this messaging framework to help them improve their pitch decks. And it was just such a rewarding and exciting thing to have a sales team say, hey marketing, why don't you come over and meet with us? We spent four and a half hours I spent four and a half hours with the sales team going through pitch decks, going through the framework, discussing the somewhat why who cares framework to the point I actually leaned over one point to the SVP and said, are these people real? I mean, how often does marketing get sales to pay attention to them and engage with them for four and a half hours. It was an amazing experience. But I think the alignment was. I didn't come in and say here's how to do it. This is the right way to do it. I said what are you, what are you struggling with? What are we trying to get across to our clients and to our prospects? Where is the breakdown in the messaging and the understanding and the engagement? And that's where they like the so what why who cares Framework because it tied it to answering the questions to the why is this a pain? And the who cares? Which was the Persona which was very, very important to them. And to watch them go scurry off and take that and do a workshop and come back and bring results. I want to say one of the best alignments I've experienced. And it was just, it was just cool.

Speaker D: That's great.

Speaker A: Yeah. Hitan, would you like to add something?

Speaker C: No, I think uh, that, that, that, that all sounds very well and I believe that if we can, we as marketer can figure out a way to speak the language the sales speaks and understands. It makes in the long term.

Speaker A: Yeah. Much easier.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you so much. Doug and Julia, would you like to continue?

Speaker D: Yes. I like the approach and I want to share once again one example from my experience how we do it. We found ourselves in that point when we're speaking the same language. So in one of the companies when I've worked, uh, for quite a long period, this communication was very well structured and it was organized on a company level. So it was not, let's say people's initiatives because it's nice, always nice to create personal relationship with everybody. So we're doing it and working and uh, everything like this every day. It's a part of our job. But when the company supports it, when the company organize the process which help us to do it. So it's really have uh, have a very big effect at the end. So we have an important result. So for example, in one of the company members of marketing team, every year we have several business trips with our sales representatives to our clients. In the beginning was quite um, embarrassing experience for me because I um, grew up as a marketer who make decisions based on a lot of numbers and a lot of statistics and data which I collect from the market, from our customers, etc. But this exercise to go with a sales team member to a real customer, to speak to this customer and not to expect to have, let's say some data which I can use after in my marketing companies and my marketing campaigns, etc. But to understand in which conditions they are working so what challenges they have and what uh, success means to them, just in real time communication. It was really precious experience for me and I always, uh, say thank you to this company, to this opportunity to be a part of this team.

Speaker A: Yeah, sounds great. I think it's very important for marketing professionals to attend sales calls, sales meetings, uh, and to understand real customers and see and feel how they speak, how they behave and what they share. Yeah, it's, it's really important. And I would like to talk about some maybe formats of collaboration between marketing and sales. Sales that you use maybe M in your current company or in the past. That worked great. So some best practices of how you build this collaboration, what kind of format?

Speaker C: So a couple of things that I've done in my previous role that worked really well. We're trying to do that here as well at, uh, Palo Alto. One is we created a podcast sort of series and we would invite sales teams to submit questions to a forum. And every couple of weeks or once every month, we will bring in a product expert, an SME or somebody to answer those questions live while sales teams tune in and listen. We would also use that time for the product teams to share new updates, upcoming things on Roadmap. One of the things that we really did which was very, very effective was keep it very tight. We made ourselves a promise that this podcast episode, each episode is not going to be more than 20 minutes. Sales teams understood it that when they were submitted questions, they were very clear about, here is exactly what I want to know. And they were looking for one minute, two minute answers. So that blew up like from our first call of 36 people to. By the time I left the role running an 800 attendee podcast, it was a huge success. Like pretty much our entire global cloud sales teams would tune in and listen to it for two reasons. One, it was 20 minutes, it was very short. Two, it answered questions live from the field. And we would pick up, hey, this is an interesting question. Doug, you're the products lead for this migrations product or this cloud product. Um, how would you tackle this customer situation? And it worked wonders. Uh, second thing that worked really well is we created a newsletter. Like everybody creates a newsletter. But we made it an intentional choice to make our newsletter very fun. Um, and we would infuse it with memes and funny graphics and interesting, engaging images. The whole idea was people to open it up and remember, we went from like 20, 30% open rate to 78% open rate after uh, a few iterations, which was really, really exciting. And um, kudos to my design team at the time. I um, think they did a fantastic job. So sales is looking for engaging content. As long as you can make something engaging, you will get their eyeballs on it. And I think that's what we wanted.

Speaker D: Wow.

Speaker A: Thank you. These examples are amazing, interactive and fun. Yeah, thank you so much. And uh, I'm wondering.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's very impressive numbers. That's well done.

Speaker C: Um, yeah, thanks.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. Are you planning to create something opposite? For example a podcast where sales team members come and answer questions from markets.

Speaker C: That's a great idea, Olga. I think we should try that format. That's a good idea.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I think it would be interesting to do it.

Speaker C: And I can tell you it will not be a 20 minutes podcast for sure. It'll be probably a three hours podcast with sales team selling us. Here is all the things I want you to do. But yeah, I think we should definitely try it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Great. Thank you. Thank you for sharing.

Speaker D: I would like to share the successful example from my experience. So when I uh, relaunched the website for our company, so I got that need to work on the positioning more because we need to uh, create our unique sales proposition in a more direct, in a more clear way. The first idea was to work with our customers to make a question and to ask them. But in the end we decided to work with the sales team. This is where the very important moment also for me because I realized that our sales team are experts. They know such in a deep way the market, our customer needs and eye opening moment for me. Then they see the result, our unique sales proposition which we put on our website. They were also excited because they uh, see how it could be easier and involving the message that they bring normally to the clients. So I'm very satisfied with this collaboration and happy with the result from both sides from sales and from marketing. And I think the key for this success was because they were involved from the very beginning in this project. So we explain why we do it, how we are going to do it. And uh, the result that we got was also their result.

Speaker A: M. The secret is to start together, ah, clear the expectations and align from the first steps and then um, do it together. Involve sales team to the joint work. Yeah, that's an amazing example. Thank you. Thank you. Julia and Doug, would you like to continue?

Speaker B: Sure. I don't know if any of mine will be groundbreaking or anything original, but as I said we did a bunch of, I did help to facilitate and run a couple of global field kickoffs. The reason I bring them up as a collaboration is that it wasn't marketing presenting. Marketing presented 10% of the time and we had sales and pre sales presenting. But it truly was a collaboration between us to say what is it we want our prospects to hear, what does we want our sales teams to get better at in that alignment and collaboration. So we tried to focus on topics and conversations where we could inform the rest of the organization about what we've been doing, what we've been succeeding, where we've been challenged, where we had problems to make it better because this was an internal one. But then use those to then springboard into creating, uh, basically quarterly sales boot camps for lack of better term, where we continue that education, that collaboration between uh, sales and marketing and pre sales and customer success to really get to a more of a collaborative environment. Um, some went very well. Some of there were some hiccups and some changes. But what we really took away from that was when you've got sales and marketing standing next to each other on a camera presenting to the company, you're seen as collaborating, which is a large step towards actually being that way.

Speaker A: Mhm. So yeah, it's important to build a platform so they could work together, talk to each other actually. Yeah, uh, share some expectations and their side. Yeah. So great example. Thank you. Doug and I would like to ask you about the specific details about the collaboration between marketing and sales. For example, uh, what input does marketing get from sales and um, how does it maybe um, change something, shape the marketing campaigns or some initiatives? So do you get something from sales like information or something else?

Speaker B: I'll jump in on that one real quick just because I've just had a sales call where we have those same challenges. Um, so as I mentioned, the one team that worked really, really well with us, there's a lot of teams I work with that don't always work as well. And they will, I won't say shut out marketing or shut out product marketing, but they aren't do seem to be encouraging that. Um, and what I've just really found is going back to them again, kind of playing off what Nintendo was saying is that you've got to give them a reason of why we want to engage with them to get those kinds of inputs to understand, you know, we'd love to listen to your sales calls, we'll look at your pitch decks, we'll look at your messaging. Where are you being challenged um, and make sure they understand that we're not trying to tell them how to do it. Right. Of course all of us feel like marketing wants to tell sales, here's how to do it. We all been there, I think most of us. Um, but it's really more about how do we help you to open doors, not how do we help you to become better what you are. And it's really, I try to tie it as much back to opportunities, pipeline, conversions, sales numbers and not. Marketing's got a new messaging that's not as appealing as how do I create you to beat competitor X or to advance a deal or something.

Speaker A: Yeah, it can be part of uh, an account based marketing campaign as well. So when you help with some specific accounts, for example, how to better approach them. Yeah, great example. Uh, Hiten.

Speaker C: Yeah, I, I would add to that. I think one of the things I've learned is that sales teams are the closest to customer truth and competitor truth. So I often use uh, my sales counterparts to get feedback on our marketing campaigns. Messaging, how we are talking about the why of why you need to do this to the customer in the right way. And I always get great inputs and great feedback. They are the ones who know the customer not just from a, uh, technical standpoint and their requirements, but also like I mentioned earlier, what are some of the other on the ground factors? What's happening with this company? Are they struggling in the business? Are they thriving in the business? Are they a market leader? Are they trying to catch up? And that motivates a lot of other business decisions. So understanding those factors can also help you as a marketer create the right content, right messaging, um, and also competitive truth. Like where are competitors doing better? Because we are tracking competitors only based on what they are advertising. But sales knows the truth in terms of the product and what the competitors are actually able to deliver because they're in those conversations live. So I think those two areas have been very insightful to partner with sales on. Do I think that product marketing or marketing in general has done a great job on it? No, because I think one area we fail a lot is capturing the feedback and translating it and making actually show it up in our marketing messaging. We are good at having the conversations and capturing the feedback. But sometimes when it comes to actually having that message reflect in what we do becomes a hard choice because there are so many other executive priorities and business priorities that we as marketers are also exposed to that we need to think about and we need to drive. Sometimes competitor truth may take over customer Truth and sometimes customer truth may take over what our competitors are doing. So there's a lot of trade off that we as marketers have to do. And I think that's one thing that I really wish my seller counterparts would be more appreciative of. But that's my experience.

Speaker A: Great, thank you so much. Yeah. And I think we in marketing uh, usually love teaching and training sales. Yeah. But it's also great way to learn from them yet to implement some new things. So Julia, would you like to.

Speaker D: Yes and yes. That's actually the thing which I would wish to add to topic to this point because as marketers we are many cases are teaching sales team, teaching our colleagues and teaching our customers. And that's not correct because the think which I learned to continue this learning uh, process from my sales team is the language, the language which our customers are using because it's relative to any kind of products. But uh, for the moment I'm selling a very complicated chemical product so which needs this very specific and very deep knowledge about uh, the process, the product, et cetera. And in each segment they use different language which I can get only from my colleagues from sales team. I'm trying to be involved in this communication to understand better customers and to understand better the approach which I need to use in my marketing communications. Taking inputs from Dell's team.

Speaker A: Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. And thank you for mentioning the common language. I think it's also important that uh, so marketing and sales find this common language and one of the approaches how to do it is metrics. Maybe having some common metrics uh between marketing and sales and um, what do you think which metrics help marketing and sales work as one team?

Speaker C: I would say there's only one metric that's revenue. Pretty much as long as we can show impact on pipeline and revenue work gold. Anything else in my opinion is nice to sales and I appreciate that.

Speaker A: Mhm. Yeah.

Speaker B: It's most important I hate metrics. I'm a marketer. True and true and well I'm the soft fuzzy, let's talk about things. But uh, you know, after spending some time as a cmo, I really got, I had to get better at metrics. I can't agree with you more. It is about revenue, it's about pipeline movement, pipeline conversion. We can talk about cost of acquisition or click through rates or dwell time on the website. You can put all those metrics out there. But ultimately it doesn't come down to you know, the overused term. How does it move the needle then really who cares? I think that's where understanding how to communicate those same metrics back to executives to say here's the impact that marketing or product marketing is having on their business is so important. But yeah, uh, it really does come down to did we make more money today than we did yesterday?

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. Revenue oriented approach. Yeah. And Yulia, would you like to add something?

Speaker D: Totally agree. I'm totally agree. Nothing to add this. Revenue, of course, uh, lifetime value. So for how long we can stay with our clients depends on the sector in the industry, but in general it works. And number, number of clients.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think especially in B2B it's all very connected. Uh, sales and marketing are connected and revenues in the first place. For example, in B2C brand recognition can be also very important. But in B2B it's all sales and revenue related. And the final question for today, uh, if you joined a new company, let's imagine, uh, and had to build marketing and sales alignment from scratch, where would you start?

Speaker B: I'm biased of course, but I would hire a product marketer first. If I'm building a company from scratch, you know, and I'm working with a couple of startups on this, that if you really think about it, we're bringing a product to market. That's what we do as a product marketers are great at. I would start there and have that product marketer be part of the interview and the hiring process and the selection process for anybody who comes in, who becomes a seal, a salesperson or a field person so that they become m as much embedded in that, in that discussion and that engagement as possible. Because otherwise we, we, we start off with that divide. And while I always maintain that sales and marketing should have a healthy disagreement friendship, the best way to describe we're not always going to agree and that's fine. We have different, we have different needs, but we have to have that initial. I understand what you're trying to solve and you understand what I'm trying to solve for and how we can help each other. It's, it's not two one way streets. It is a, it is a circle. So that's why I would say the product marketer. But make sure that person doesn't have to have a seat at the table, but they're part of the engagement with anybody who comes in from sales as a part of that.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker A: Love it. This healthy disagreement approach.

Speaker C: Yeah, I'll, I'll agree to that. And I think that what I will add to that conversation is speed to execution, sales Moves really, really fast. And I have been in situations where marketing took months to release or catch up something and sales was furious because our, our competitors got to that first. I think if one thing I could change in terms of starting from scratch or wherever I am, if I'm setting a new process, I would focus on speed of execution over quality or even quantity for that matter. Uh, quality. Of course there has to be a minimum bar. But how can you get minimum viable content, MVC or like minimum viable assets out into the hands of the sales and market faster? Whether you use AI to generate content or you use AI to speed up communications, how do you pull the lever and use the tools that you have at your disposal to speed up what you're doing essentially?

Speaker D: Mhm.

Speaker A: Yeah, Startup approach. And I've never heard about this term minimum viable content. Yeah, sorry, minimum.

Speaker C: It's just an internal down the wheels. Yeah. Like I'm in a space and AI security and AI space moves so fast that sometimes we have to publish things within like in less than 24 hours of something happening in the world. M. So you know, we don't have time to get it perfect. Uh, we've had this term internally. Like how do you get something minimum viable just out there quickly?

Speaker A: Mhm. Yeah. Minimum viable product is everything. It's a common term. Yeah. And people know it. But for the content I love the approach because I think, yeah, it also works and um, it should work faster. Yeah. Thank you, thank you for mentioning.

Speaker C: I coined the term. Just, you know, so.

Speaker A: Great. So Julia, would you like to uh, also to say something about building from scratch?

Speaker D: Yes, of course. Yes. If I enter the new company. So the first thing I'm trying to organize is to participate in a meeting with a client, with any client, with a sales team. Of course. This is the way first of all to see the client, to participate in the real conversation and also to show the added value of marketing. Because I'm sure that in any kind of meeting marketing can bring value.

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much and thank you our amazing experts, our amazing speakers today for sharing practical insights and real step by step actually instructions what to do and uh, some best practices that we could just implement in any company. Yeah. So that's, that's amazing. Thank you so much for that.

Speaker D: Thank you.

Speaker C: Nice to meet everybody for organizing this. It's been fun. Nice to meet you.

Speaker A: Yeah.