The Marketing vs Sales Blame Game Is Costing You Millions |EP22| Mark Walker

Mark Ackers: If you're enjoying the I used to be crap at sales podcast. Show us some love, please. Like, share, subscribe to the podcast. Help us grow and spread the word what's coming up in today's episode.

Do Mark Walker: not pay sales people permission. It drives all the wrong behaviours, and everyone's jaw dropped. They've gone from five to over 100 billion like. Unbelievable story.

None of their sales teamwork Mark Ackers: commission. That's obviously a big part of why people work in sales and the highs being the highs, the lows been the lows, the commission that comes in. He's been a three time CRO a go to market coach, a mentor at TechStars, and, scale wise, a long term pavilion leader and now the founder and CEO at revved up. But before all of that, he cut his teeth in marketing, leading brand and growth at Eventbrite, and then moving to a test in a similar role.

Today's guest is Mark Walker. Did you used to be crap at sales? Mark Walker: Yes, I did. I saw them the dream of there being in front of 100 key decision makers, and the event just didn't pan out that way.

There was maybe like 20 people in the booth. So this sponsor was not very happy at all. Brand is probably the biggest driver of sales and closing deals, but it's impossible to attribute directly, and that's why so many people are missing Mark Ackers: their revenue. I've heard many a marketer say this, well, I want some commission, then I would Mark Walker: actually rot trying to finesse the attribution model of how much did Martin contribute to this number?

How much did sales contribute to this number? If you want them to have the same level of ownership that a sales team does, then why wouldn't you also give them performance driven metrics? Mark Ackers: How imperative would you say great Account Based Marketing is in today's sales landscape, Mark Walker: bland campaigns that don't directly speak to specific accounts still much more difficult to actually get the level of depth that's required for ABM. That's what helps cut through.

What Mark Ackers: kind of percent do you think can really get an Account Based Marketing? Right? Very few right now. Where's the quick fixes?

Mark Walker: The fixes with Mark Ackers: Hello and welcome to another episode of The I used to be crap at sales podcast. I'm your host. Mark Akers, the co founder and Head of Sales here at my sales coach and today's guest brings a new background and work experience that's so far been uncovered in the podcast. Sure, he's got the sales and leadership and coaching experience.

He's also coached hundreds of founders and sales leaders along the way. Today's theme is what sales can learn from marketing and what founders learn on the front lines. Mark, welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Mark, thank you so much. I'm great. Really excited to be here. I've listened to several of these episodes.

It's a brilliant podcast. So delighted to be part of it, and yeah, life's pretty good right now. Fantastic. Yeah, you just telling me off camera.

It sounds like a really exciting time at revved up. And I certainly want to hear all about that and share that with the audience. But before we can get into any of that, we have to start with our Yes. No.

Question Mark Walker, did you used to be crap at sales? Yes, yes, I did. When you say yes, yes, I did. Is there a point in your career that really springs to mind very clearly, and it was my first job out of university.

What I was selling was conferences, my B to B conferences, specifically in the pharmaceuticals industry, there were two different types of sales that you had to do there. One was delegate sales, so people buying the tickets. Now I didn't actually do that myself. I had to try and manage a sales team, having never done sales, which is maybe a different story.

But you also had to try and sell your own sponsorship. So that was slightly bigger ticket sales. You intended to try and do 510, 20k, deals with sometimes pretty, pretty large organisations. And because it's my first job out of university, I'm cutting my teeth.

I got a lot of the crappier products, the the events that didn't have great sponsorship reputation. So yeah, I was just hitting the phones trying to sell sponsorships to these no named events that I was producing and putting on. And it was a struggle. It was.

It was a pretty steep learning curve. I did make some sales, but I probably lost way more than I could have made. Have you got a particular story from that time that you can look back on that's quite funny now, but perhaps a mistake or a howler, if you will, that you made. The most painful memory from that time was a sale I did make, and we didn't deliver value to them, right?

So it's a slightly different tangent than not having made the sale, but it was quite cringy. I sold, I sold to this business and sold them the dream of there'd be in front of Mark Walker: key decision makers. And the event just didn't pan out that way for various reasons, largely outside of our control. And there was maybe like 20 people in the room, so this sponsor was not very happy at all.

So that was quite painful. And just dealing with that taught me a lot around mitigating angry people in general. But also, just like having confidence in what you sell is so important, and that knocked my confidence, and that. Really impacted future sales, right?

Because I didn't know whether we could deliver the value that I had to give to future sponsors. And it took moving, I would say it took moving to the next company that had better products, that I had more control over, to really build my confidence back up. So, you know, one of my earlier sales lessons was you have to believe in what you're selling, otherwise it just comes through, right? Whoever you're selling to can feel whether you believe in Mark Ackers: it or not.

I think a lot of people will resonate with that. I think people sometimes confuse you gotta love what you sell versus having confidence in it. When I look back at my career, I feel like I've always had confidence in what I sold, but I can certainly relate to doing demos where you're not quite sure if you press this button that the next page is going to load. I remember, actually, I had all the tabs open and I would jump from tab to tab rather than go for it.

And I got called out on that, I can see what you're doing, Mark you're going from tab to tab rather than clicking through the platform. And that lack of confidence because the product's not quite there can be quite impactful. Fortunately, it was a long time ago in my in my career, that's a nice segue. And call this out early doors, bring it up.

You and I, we actually crossed paths. I think it was 2017 maybe the start of 2018 you were, I think you were in the CRO role at a test at this point. So you'd gone from marketing to CRO, and it was in my early days as an AE at refract. I'd probably got about five years sales experience, but really probably had the same year five times.

And I remember I was dealing with your colleague, Hillary at the time, who's actually now a coach at my sales coach small world, and she said, there's just one last thing, Mark, you need to meet our CRO Mark Walker and present to him. I did, and we got the deal over the line. And I loved working with you during our time. But, yeah, I'm curious, what do you remember of that demo discovery I did Mark Walker: with you?

Funny enough, I don't remember that many sales calls, but I do remember this one, so you'll be happy to hear that. Well, I don't know. It depends what you about to say, No, it's for good reasons. So before you joined the call, this is critical.

I knew who you were ish because of the video that you did on LinkedIn that went viral, where you were teaching your cousin, I think, or like, it was a nine year old. I can't remember whether it's your cousin or like a friend's kid. I don't know whether Hillary shared it with me or I came across it organically, but either way, that was a wonderful bit of content that built an enormous amount of trust and credibility with you as an individual. When we first spoke, I'd already built a perception in my mind about you being an expert in this space that really helped significantly.

And then I do remember, I think there was probably two or three things that I think you did really well during during that call, right? The first is, you actually didn't leave any assumptions on the table, right? You sent, checked and queried and we went over everything, instead of kind of glossing things over. You try to unpick things and just just hear firsthand.

Are these the problems that I was experiencing as the CRO attest, which I thought was quite refreshing. You didn't try and rush anything through. The second piece was there was a key integration missing, or in the pipeline, or something. I can't, can't quite remember exactly, but I do remember that was an objection, and you handled it like really well, right?

Because it was a it was a big thing for us. It was a great experience of how to do discovery. Mark Ackers: Well, I remember having and like you say, I don't remember every discovery call, but I do remember meeting you for that first time and feeling like it went well. For those wondering, the clip you're referring to, that was actually Kevin, my co founder and the CEO of my sales coach.

It was his son. We did a bit of a social experiment where I coached him to make cold calls, and then he did some cold calling that day, just sort of warm, friendly faces, but they were still not really knowing when the call was going to come or what the purpose of it was. And, yeah, I think that video, certainly in my realm, went viral. I think it was like, you know, half a million impressions, pretty much out the gate, and lots of comments, etc.

But I think the key thing that I want to take from this is social selling that brand. And you use the word critical, you're saying that was critical to your sales experience. Was my called it brand. It probably wasn't a brand back then, but what might felt like one was that social presence that I'd managed to get online on LinkedIn made you feel like you trusted me in that credibility straight away.

This will date the podcast slightly, but you'd have seen the cool screening that Apple have released that's coming out in September. I did a webinar, and I'm curious to get your take on this. One of the things I said in this webinar was, I think this is opportunity. First of all, if I just picked up the phone and dialled, let's say I dialled you now, my phone number would just pop up.

If you haven't got me saved, you'd look at that and you just think, Ah, I don't know who this is, not sure. I've actually got the chance to promote it to you. You know that call screen could say it's Mark acres. I think you saw the video of me coaching Joe, the 10 year old, to make cold calls.

Yeah, you're more likely to answer it. And I made the argument now that when I recruit sales people, the first thing I do is I look at their LinkedIn before, before a CV, and I look to see, do they sell socially? Do they write LinkedIn posts? Are they engaging?

Have they got 500 plus connections? As it is a in the past, I've sort of made the excuse. Oh, well, they don't do that, but look how credible their background, their CV, their results, are still gonna go with this person. I feel like now it's non negotiable when hiring a salesperson in this space, they've gotta have a social brand.

But I know maybe that's just me. What do you think? Mark Walker: I think it's getting towards that non negotiable? I don't know if I'm quite all the way there, but it's definitely tipping towards that so very similar to your point around the phone screening technology, right?

One of the things that a lot of people don't realise with cold email, right? There's, there's a lot of talk around cold emails, dead and so on, and it is absolutely harder and harder to cut through with cold email. One of the things that's so, so important to the efficacy of it is, if you get an email from someone you recognise, you are going to open it, right? So again, if you have built some kind of brand presence and credibility in your space, and you then send emails to people, they are so much more likely to open it.

It's going to trump the best subject line. It's definitely going to trump any personalization you can put in it. It's who that email is from, right? My mum does not have to personalise an email for me to open it, right?

It's from someone I know. Maybe that's a bad example, right? I'd probably put that one in the in the spam folder, but, yeah, that brand presence and credibility is super, super important now, and there's two parts to it, right? One is, does the company have a strong brand, right?

It's there's a reason it's easier to sell the sales force or a gong than it would be from one of their challenger brands, because there's a lot of credit credibility with the brand. But as you said, particularly if you're selling at an SMB, if you yourself have built a bit of a brand reputation, and you email someone that's engaged with your posts, you don't even need to say, Hey, I saw you liked my post. I actually often think that doesn't come across that well, but just the fact that you are sending emails to someone that already knows who you are is going to make it much more likely that they open it and engage with it.

And maybe one final point, you shouldn't always care just about the vanity metrics when it comes to social posting. And the reason I say this is I post regularly, and I don't have huge numbers of impressions or likes, right? I just post regularly, and I believe that it drives good results. Why do I say this two things.

One, I go to a lot of events. I typically will go to an event every single week, and I cannot remember the last time I went to an event and someone didn't say, Hey, Mark, I recognise you that I didn't know I see you posting all the time on LinkedIn, and I had no idea that they followed me. No idea they're not showing up in my metrics, but it's qualitatively. It's having valuable impact on my brand and reputation within the industry that I care about.

So yeah, it's it's not always showing up in the metrics, but it's absolutely, categorically working. And then on top of that, I will get direct DMS and organic outreach coming back. And I know it's hard to connect. But I know it's coming from LinkedIn, because they'll say, Oh, I saw this post.

So yeah, lots of good reasons there that people should be investing in building their brand on Mark Ackers: LinkedIn. I totally agree. Yeah, I think I'm at the point. Now, if you're not doing it, I'd say it's non negotiable.

And to your point, even if someone's not actively engaging, there sort of that Lurker, if you will. But here's what I do know. Before you meet someone, they're likely to look at your LinkedIn profile. Even though they just scan your content, they'll say, okay, because there is this almost illusion that if you're writing and putting yourself out there, you must know what you're talking about.

And I see that happen all the time. Let's talk about your early sales experience, because you have, we're talking just off camera that you've had such a varied career, like events, conferences, marketing, revenue. Where do you believe you actually learn how to sell? Mark Walker: I don't know.

There is, there is a singular moment where, you know the light appeared and it's like, I now can sell. It's definitely been an evolution of over time, and I think I've learned bits and pieces from each role, each colleague that I've worked with, I've picked up bits and pieces along the way. I guess the most sales centric role that I had when I really started to consider myself better at sales was when I got to a test and I started to move from pure marketing to looking after the whole revenue function, and I just immerse myself in everything and anything I could find around sales.

I listened to every podcast, read every blog post, bought books. It's when I joined pavilion and I would pick anyone's brains that you could imagine. Imagine I'd have hour long calls with people. I'd join these dinners and so on.

So I just completely immersed myself. But most importantly, I then practised it, because I got to then practice the theory speaking to prospects all the time and seeing what worked and what didn't. I would say that's where I genuinely good at sales, but I definitely had various experiences in sales along the way. And one other moment, I think it was before I was at Eventbrite, and someone wants remarks to me.

They're like, man, you're good at sales, or you should. You should be in sales. It was some kind of remark by that. And I remember thinking, No, I'm not a salesperson.

And the reason they said that is because I built trust and credibility very quickly with prospects by being a product expert. I really knew in and out what I was trying to say, again, I wasn't technically a salesperson, but what maybe a bit of context. In this role, I owned the event. So I owned the P and L and the overall revenue for this event, and that included everything from, you know, creating the agenda to to the sponsorship revenue number, the delegate sales revenue number, the marketing of the event, and so on and so forth.

So part of my role was interfacing with sponsors, even though I wasn't specifically sponsorship sales. That's where the sponsors were just warm to me and I built that credibility. And the sales team were like, Hey, be good at sales, right? You were helping make the sale.

That was a really nice moment earlier, before I considered myself truly in sales and revenue. Mark Ackers: And it's interesting, because being an expert in the product means you can recommend the right things. But one of the things that I found in my career is it's all well and good, be an expert in the product, but you have to be an expert in your ICP their world. Why they go to work, what problems they really have?

How do they moan about those problems at the dinner table? And I remember there was a moment in my career when I realised I've just onboarded people to become product experts. I listened to their demos, and everything sounded like it was being run by a very technical person and just wasn't connecting with the ICP. I'm wondering, did your background and time in marketing help you with that shift into into sales, or was there anything you had to unlearn.

It's a good Mark Walker: question. Firstly, I'd agree with the observation, right? Like one of my bug bears that I think I've posted about on LinkedIn a few times, is people get onboarding wrong. They should spend way more time on onboarding people in the market and the customer's problems than they should in the product, right?

And usually it's like an hour of here's an ICP definition. That's all you get. Now, all we're going to do is talk about the product in terms of, like, what I learned from marketing and that has benefited sales and maybe some pieces that haven't. So again, marketing, ideally you should be good at storytelling, right?

So being able to simplify and tell the good narrative is something that a lot of people don't do well. In sales, they focus on the features and even like features benefits, but they don't craft a story or a narrative. Again, in marketing, if you are going to create good campaigns and good overarching narratives. If you're doing marketing Well, it has to be based on deep research and understanding of your market.

And so one of the things when I was leading marketing and sales is I would always ask the marketing team to specifically listen to sales calls at least once a week, twice a week, right to actually understand the language being used by the prospects. Otherwise, how can you do good marketing? I do think a mistake that I see from marketing is is they think theoretically or abstractly about the market, and they don't actually understand exactly how a prospect speaks, and they also don't understand the challenges that sales are facing, either, right?

So there's two parts to this that you get from listening to discovery calls and so on. So. So one is what actual language is the prospect using? Like, are they calling it x, and we're trying to call it y, and then the second piece is hearing those, hearing the objections that sales is facing, should really help Martin think about, well, here's what we need to we need to create these sales enablement materials.

Or, Oh, man, we we keep hearing this and we don't have a case study for it, or we don't have this battle card prepared, or we don't have a story to tell around this particular lack of functionality and why we've invested more over here so you get the best ideas from listening to real calls that can be put back into mock Mark Ackers: looking to unlock your team's full potential. At my sales coach, we pair individuals and teams with expert coaches for personalised one to one and group coaching.

Concessions. Our platform makes booking seamless. It tracks progress and delivers real results. Studies show expert coaching increases win rates by 30% and revenue by 7% whether you're an individual or a team leader, we provide coaching that sticks and delivers visit mysalescoach.

com use the link in the bio and start achieving your goals today, and it feels like what you're saying there, it's just so obvious and in today's world, when call recording and conversation intelligence products exist and you can share transcripts and review calls and clips really easily, every body in the company should be doing that, let alone marketing, but it feels like what you're talking about really, you were ahead of your time thinking like that, because we're going back earlier on in your career, when you were in a marketing role, and it's interesting that it sort of brought back memories for me.

So I started out in marketing as well. When I did my student placement, I did it at Sunderland Football Club, and I remember the marketing manager made a comment that, why are we sat in a different office to the sales team? And at the time, I thought, Oh, I'm glad I'm glad we are. They're bloody noisy.

They're on their phones all the time. I get my work done. But he made this big push that we should all be sat in the same room. We should all be talking to each other.

We should be hearing how they sell. They should be feeding back to us from a marketing point of view. And he never quite got his own way, and it felt like sales consistently misunderstood marketing and marketing consistently misunderstood sales. Where do you commonly see the two departments misfiring with each other?

It sounds like language is an example, but have you got some other tidbits there for us? Yeah, language is a huge one. I think the number one root cause of a lot of misalignment is a misalignment in in goals and metrics. That's pretty much the the root cause in many scenarios.

So the classic setup in SAS was to create this, yeah, factory, factory style funnel, where marketing were tasked with MQLs. And those MQLs get handed over to SDRs to qualify into SQL, and then obviously, from SQL to ops going through to the AES. The challenge with that was there's two challenges. One, marketing just stopped caring at MQL, right?

Because that is how they're bonus, and that's how they're metric. Metrices, gold. Let's use an easier word, Mark Walker: and and so how often have you seen sales teams just tearing their hair out that marketing celebrating having hit their MQL, MQL goal for the quarter, and there's no pipeline that they can close, right? Because they're not actually connected.

And so that that's one major issue. And then the other piece is the definition of that MQL and whether it actually lines up to what sales can can close, I would say that's like a number one root cause and and I think the idea that marketing just generate junk leads and MQLs for the sake of it, then leads to a lack of trust and credibility from the sales team, right? And that that pervades many, many organisations. Because if you grew up in that environment, you know, and you were selling and marketing that type of environment, you know, seven, eight years ago, you've probably lost faith in marketing as you've gone on to other organisations as well.

I've certainly had that frustration in my in my career, you know, marketers creating content, I'm just like, What is this? It doesn't reflect the conversations that I'm having. It uses different language, the stereotype of creating junk leads. I would say that is the meme that when I see that pop up on like Instagram, where marketing sending a lead to sales, and so that makes me laugh the most because I've just lived in that world, and it does feel like it's changing.

I've got a number of friends that work in Marketing, and a couple of them have recently been acquired. They've said to me all, it's all changing. Our marketing metrics now are revenue based, and they're uncomfortable with that, and it's so different. What about you?

When in your marketing days in Have you had the revenue KPIs before, or have you more focused on the MQLs? So again, earlier in the career, when I was head of growth at Eventbrite, it was much more heavily MQL based. Maybe didn't drive all the right behaviours, although I would like to think that we tracked how many of those MQLs did ultimately turn into opportunities and turn into revenue. We had a really great run over the three years I was, I was driving that my default thinking was MQL, right?

Because that is how I was measured in my role. And if I did anything else, I wouldn't necessarily get, get the credit for it. And so the real shift in thinking was when I, I got to a test and I was, I was like, Well, look, we're an early stage company, right? There's nowhere to hide.

If I generate pipeline or MQLs and it doesn't close, the whole business is in a bad state, right? So I have to drive all of my mentality to closing business, right? If I don't do that, then what's the point in doing the. Marketing side of things, so that really shifted my focus and and all the metrics that we looked at were built up from, are we driving, driving the revenue number?

Ultimately, I think there's a big challenge. It's okay in a smaller organisation, because you can all be one team, it's kind of easier to track things. And you can shout across the room, right? Oh yeah, I see so and so's close, and it's maybe not showing up in the revenue attribution model, but we know that we met them at that event, whatever, right like, it's just a little bit easier to try and connect the dots in a wider organisation.

It is inherently political, because you your marketing budget and your head count and so on is probably going to get set by these attribution metrics that have to be trackable, and so I've heard this right in organisations where sales are screaming for particular case studies or battle cards or like certain things that marketing is the best equipped to provide, but they will not provide them because they won't show up in any attribution model, so they will not get any credit for it, and therefore their budgets and their numbers and so on, they will be the ones getting raked over the calls.

There's just a fundamental issue with attribution and modelling in a lot of modern day revenue teams. Mark Ackers: So let's imagine I dropped you in stereotypical company that's got that problem. Maybe someone's listening to that and they they recognise this problem. What are some of the things that you would do, or even suggest, maybe as a coach, to try and fix that?

Mark Walker: This is not a popular opinion. Some people might say it's naive, but I disagree otherwise. I wouldn't hold it as an opinion. So what I would try and do is convince the rest of the leadership team, or if I just had the magic one to do it, where I would actually drop the trying to finesse the attribution model of how much did marketing contribute to this number?

How much did sales contribute to this number? Because that is inherently what drives politics and infighting and the sharp elbows. And I would just look at the number. Did we hit the number this quarter?

Or did we not hit the number this quarter, and we are all winning, or we are all losing together as a team? Now that is deeply antithetical to how most most organisations are run, and I get deeply uncomfortable, because if you don't hit the number, how do you start to dissect it, right? How do you start to understand and if you did hit the number, how do you then try and optimise your spend going forward? Right?

Because there might be a bunch of dead weight that's been carried, but it does solve an enormous number of sins by saying, don't worry too much about whether this exact event, this exact webinar, whether 15% of budget spent on PPC was the exact right, right number, because that that often ends up with weird over optimization as well. So slightly chunky example that I usually give is football team, 11 players who's going to get the attribution most of the time, it's the striker, right?

It's your forward, because they're the ones most likely score the goals. So you go, Huh, well, the defenders didn't do much here for this game. So you start to get rid of your defenders and then your midfielders and your keeper and so on, and you end up with a team of 11 strikers. They're not going to perform very well, right?

But that's how we set up revenue teams, right? We say, well, who's got the last touch? Maybe there's a bit of first touch attribution. All your money goes to there, and then you're missing the messiness of today's modern buyer.

And again, like going back to our point around building brand and perception on social, if it doesn't show up in the numbers, you won't do it, but it's such a miss, and that's why so little money gets spent on brand when it comes to marketing. And brand is probably the biggest driver of sales and closing deals, but it's impossible to attribute directly, and that's why so many people are missing their revenue number, because they haven't built the trust and credibility that gets those deals over the line because they won't invest in brand, because you can't prove the ROI, and so marketing doesn't do it, and everyone suffers.

There you go. There's my soap box piece. So Mark Ackers: there's a lot to break down there. I think the key thing that I'm taking from what you're saying is you need to measure together as a team, sales and marketing.

We've got different goals that serve different motivations, and like you say, like politics, and I've seen those play out in organisations. The first challenge that I've seen play out when you start to have those conversations, and I've heard many a marketer say this, well, I want some commission. Then what do you think Mark Walker: about that? Again, difference between commission and bonus?

I've mostly worked in organisations that have had a bonus driven marketing team, where you want marketing to share the sharp end of revenue, then they should also share in the upside as well. So everyone complains that marketing are the colouring in department, or they're doing the jump jump leads and so on. If you want them to have the same level of ownership that a. Sales team does and essentially carry quota, then why wouldn't you also give them performance driven metrics?

Now, it might not be straight up commission like a sales team, and this is, again, it's a difficult debate. I don't know whether there is a singular correct answer to this marketing in a mid market to enterprise type motion where a sales rep is needed to close the deal, marketing can't close the deal for them, right? So they can't actually drive the revenue number themselves, but they can massively help contribute towards it, and they can also do all the wrong behaviours to mean you don't get the revenue number.

So I think they should take a share of the spoils, maybe not commissioned, but absolutely be bonus driven. And is Mark Ackers: that what you put in place in previous organisations? You beat them, yeah, and it's what Mark Walker: we're doing at Rev death as well. The marketing team will have a revenue number and they will have a bonus attached to Mark Ackers: it.

Do you think, let's just say we meet up again in 10 years time? Is that gonna be more common? Or do you think that's just not gonna happen widespread across other organisations. My Mark Walker: take is it should be more common.

Will it be every time you have a crystal ball, you look silly, right? But, yeah, I actually think it will be. I mean, it's super interesting. The whole commission like, how do you drive behaviours through incentives?

I sat next to a dinner. This was a while back, like a year ago with the CRO of a pretty large organisation, and they'd driven incredible success. I think they've gone from five to over 100 million like, unbelievable story. And everyone's jaw dropped when they said none of their sales team were commissioned right.

They just did base. They're like, it drives the right behaviours and everyone's just like, No, it's impossible. Like, how do you attract the right talent? How do you retain them?

How do you just like, This is how you do it. Absolutely, 100% believe in it. Do not pay sales people Commission. It drives all the wrong behaviours.

There's different models for different businesses that will work. There's no one size fits all. But maybe the world will go towards no commission for sales and marketing, or maybe it will go all the other way, and everyone will get commission and bonuses across the board. I'm just looking at BEC Mark Ackers: when you say sales people should not get commission, I'm sitting there going, that's the headline we're leading with Marvel, because that's such a Beatty topic, right?

That makes me feel emotional, like, that's obviously a big part of why people work in sales, and the highs being the highs, the low has been the lows, the commission that comes in. When you heard that we don't pay salespeople commission. Did you lean in and go, go on, I'm listening. Or did you think ridiculous?

Mark Walker: I thought both. I was like, this is the most nuts thing I've ever come across. And funnily enough, it was at a very similar time that I was speaking to a really great sales, sales rep slash set. They were a player coach, and they were in an organisation that wouldn't do commission, and they hated it, right?

They hated it. They really felt like it was stopping them bringing in talent, and ultimately they left because of it. So I had these two twin views of here's where it's definitely not working. And Sarah absolutely swear in blind that it does, and it was a key part of the success.

So I was very curious, and I absolutely leaned in, and I left the dinner going, do you know what? This really makes sense. This could be the new model. Would I do?

It absolutely not. Is the is the answer? I'm not brave enough. It all made logical sense at a level.

But yeah, I'm building a team here at revved up, and I'm absolutely going to build it on a commission base. I just can't, I cannot shift my mindset so radically from sales being connected to some some kind of commission step too far for me. But it really made sense when they were explaining it and they they swap line. Mark Ackers: Let's try and get them on as a as a guest.

Here's something else I've been really critical of Mark in on LinkedIn. It doesn't happen often, but maybe one in 40 or 50 conversations I have sales development teams in particular report into marketing. Just gonna put out there. Don't like it?

It's not for me. What do you think? Mark Walker: Oh, this is a good one. Then I think it's going to become more common, and I'm actually in favour of it.

Mark Ackers: Oh, God, right. Okay, let's have this conversation then. So should I start with why I don't like it? Please, please.

Yeah. So first of all, actually, it largely leans into kind of what you've said is wrong, how they're measured differently. It's a little bit like the problem I've had in the past with outbound telesales agencies. I've dabbled with them in the past, but I've always felt like their agenda was different to mine.

They wanted to be able to say, there you go, there's 10 leads. We've done our job. But I'm like, Yeah, but these are 10 crap leads that they're no good, but they're measured on the volume. I need the quality, and maybe largely the reason you're in favour of it is because you want to instal the right behaviours.

Maybe that's what we're going to get to. But I've always felt like, if you're at SDR in sales development, normally, you're Junior, right? You're young in your career, that's the starting point. Of course, there's exceptions of where people are just really all about sales development.

They don't want to leave their own. Little bit older in their career, but largely when you start in their role, you're relatively new to the world of sales, like maybe a couple of years in at most, when I think of all the skills that you need to have as a modern day prospector right now, when I started out, really, you had to be good at cold calling and mail merge. That was it. Now you've got to be great at cold calling, and that's about to get a lot harder come September.

You've got to be great at emailing, like, if your bounce rate is more than sorry, if your sort of response rate where people say this is spam is like, more than 5% you get blacklisted. So you've got to be great at cold calling, great at emailing, which is, you know, creative writing. You've got to be great at social selling, really, that's what we're saying. Now you've got to be great at video, greater voicemail and voice note.

You've got to be a creative thinker, you've got to be a researcher. You've got to be able to use, I think the average rep has something like 21 things they've got to log into. You've got to be able to use all these different tech stacks. And I think when you think that, then that's, by the way, the just skill set.

You've got to have the right mindset. You're going to have cold calling, anxiety and reluctance. You're going to have imposter syndrome. You're going to have need for need for approval.

You're gonna have supportive buy cycle. You're gonna need to be able to negotiate objection, handle you're gonna be there to need to deal with rejection and pick yourself up. And every week, you start zero. Every month, you start a zero.

Every day, you can still save your day as an SDR by booking a meeting at the very last minute. I know I'm just skimming the surface. By the way, of all the things the modern day prospect has got to be able to do. The thought of having a marketing manager that hasn't, and this is to keep it that hasn't lived that role, to me, is nuts.

And actually, I feel like it's unfair for leadership to expect a marketing manager who has, critically, hasn't done that role to be able to coach and develop an SDR across all those things to the right level, to keep them in a job. Because let's be really clear, if you're crap at sales as an SDR, you're not supported. You're sacked. So I feel like you're letting them down by not giving them a manager that is great at these things, because they've lived and done it to coach and support them.

I'm sat here feeling like I've given you a grenade there, and there's no way you can come back from that, but you're in support of it Mark Walker: over to you, yeah, no. So it's a very compelling argument that you've you've given, and a lot of it resonates. But I think there's, there is an alternative way. So a lot of the skills that you've just described right, the ability to write creatively, tell a good story, do research, manage a bunch of tools at scale.

How do they all connect together? Making sure that you can social sell so many of the tools and skill sets that you've just described are core marketing, almost everything, bar cold calling and the ability to face a human telling. You know, every day is a little bit more in the camp of my mind of marketing, right? So a lot of what you described is why I think it's moving more into marketing.

So instead of having 20 SDRs whose sole role is to just smash the phone every day. You've now getting 234, SDRs who are acting almost like demand generation managers to figure out what's the campaign angle, what's the tooling we're going to build? How do we resonate with all of these prospects, and how do we manage this suite of tools to get the responses that we need at scale? That skill set tends to be lending itself a little bit more to the creativity and campaign driven thinking of marketing, the behavioural attribution piece that you mentioned.

I actually do think we're we ultimately land on the same page there, right, which is you have to have the right goals in place. So again, marketing, managing, SDRs, need to make sure that those meetings booked ultimately drive revenue. So it's about quality, not just quantity. And that's just how you set up good.

Good goal link, right? You always try and have the counter measures. You don't get too extreme with one over the other. Pure quality, you don't get enough volume.

Pure volume, you don't get enough quality. So that's easy to easy to overcome with the right kind of goals and metrics. And quite frankly, I've seen SDR teams reporting to sales that had entirely the wrong metrics themselves, right? It was just meetings books, and they didn't convert.

So yeah, that that problem happens in both cases. I think the point around marketing not necessarily having lived the roles, they don't understand how to coach reps, particularly with rejection, right? That's really hard, picking up the phone and being told f off several times a day, right? That that's not an experience most marketers will have, so that's really difficult, but it doesn't preclude you setting them up with a coaching relationship, with an AE or with someone in sales leadership to upskill them on that side of their role, where they sit.

Doesn't it doesn't squarely mean they have to sit in sales, and I do think. 70, 80% of that skill set is more lending itself to marketing. And then the 20, 25% whatever it is that marketers might not have, I think you can cope. You can set them up with a great coaching relationship.

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Good job. Mark. I mean that legitimately. So the bit that I straight away, we go back to the very first thing you said, I'm in total agreement.

I just, I've just seen it play out over the last couple of years. SDR teams shrinking, that that that is just happening, right? And And technology is enabling those to do more. So like bloated SDR teams, I totally accept are done.

I really like the phrase, it's gone from an army to a SWAT team. I kind of really buy into that. It's nice. I feel like the bit that I sort of emphasise twice that's critical and I still sit with is I think they need to have done the role.

And the reason I say that, and this might just be a me thing, but I'm keen to get your take. I feel like I have to believe my manager has done it for me to do it. I almost like I can't follow someone that's not walked the path they're asking me to walk. And that might just be me.

Obviously there's a pun there with your last name, but there we are. And the reason I said that so just, just, uh, I won't say who, but a month ago, spoke to a sales leader, new to new enrol. There was CRO and they said one of the big problems is their sales manager has come over from a marketing role. They're now the manager of the sales team.

They've been a manager for the sales team for three years, and they've never sold a thing. And I sort of called that. I was like, sorry, I actually did this on purpose. I said they've not sold anything for three months, just because I wanted them to say again, no, three years.

I wanted them to say that out loud again. And I was I didn't act surprised. I was surprised, and I thought there's no way I could work for someone that's never sold. I struggle with that, and I think that's my point being in what is a high pressured role, an ever demanding role, a monotonous role, to have a manager that hasn't done it.

Now I can totally say you can be in sales and move to marketing like you can marketing to sales, but I think you convinced me on the skill set roles in into very much a marketing role, demand gen I totally buy into that. I still think when the going gets tough, I want to know my manager has walked that path before and really lived it. Because I think the second you have a difficult conversation with manager and you're like, you don't get it, you've not done it, I feel like that becomes a really difficult relationship.

What do you think Mark Walker: it's a really great challenge? I've got mixed views on it, right, which is, and maybe this is, this is too much, because I'm in a I'm in a seat now as a founder and a CEO, where I will absolutely be managing functions that I've never done before. I have never led HR, I've never led finance, but I'm still going to be expected to manage them, and I just need to learn and understand the bits that I haven't done right? And I so I think as you, as you climb any career ladder, and you become more and more towards an executive level, you will just find yourself managing functions that you haven't done themselves, right?

It you can't have possibly done every role by the time you hit some sort of exec level, whether that's marketing or or sales. You know, if you when I've led marketing, I've had to make decisions around performance marketing without ever actually having done it before, right? So, and I would like to think I've done a pretty good job in these roles, and because I'm deeply curious and I learn, and I'm also quite authentic, and I will tell someone I haven't done this before. My job as a leader isn't always to have the exact answer is to ask the right questions and provide coaching and guidance and so on, right so I think with the right leader in marketing, so long as they are not trying to portray themselves as, like, I know best, this is how i i would do it, because you can't, right?

But if you can say, Oh, interesting that you're having this challenge, and what have you tried to do to overcome it? Have you spoken to so and so in the sales team, like, I think they had a similar challenge, but you can, as a leader, manage people in functions you haven't led before. So my overall view, and that is just true, right? It's categorically true.

It happens all the time in lots of businesses. I do take your point, though, that there is a certain mentality, particularly in sales. If you haven't done the job, you just don't get how to face sometimes. So building that rapport and credibility.

So in this specific scenario, can be a little bit can be a little bit tougher. So overarchingly, I believe you can lead a function that you haven't done itself, so long as you are a good leader. But I do take your point it's a little bit more tricky in this specific scenario. And again, Mark Ackers: great counter argument, right?

These are strong blows we're sending each other and we're dealing with what the reason I say that is, I buy into that. You know, as the co founder at my sales coach, I wear hats that I've never worn before. You know, like everyone jokes I'm the HR manager. Like, don't have any clue about HR, right?

But I think, I think we're saying the same thing when I say that. I picture bigger companies, I think, in the smaller startup life, yeah, you have to wear different hats. And actually, that is the blessing and the curse of a startup is you, you get to wear these different hats. But God, those hats can be heavy and uncomfortable at times, but talking of So, yeah, you're founder led selling.

Now, how have you found being the seller and the founder. How have you found that? I love it Mark Walker: ice. Most fun I've had in in in quite a long time.

It's a different type of sale, right? There is a, almost a cheat code, right? Which is, if you are the founder, you just, you don't just get the sale, right? I wish, but you do get a certain level of credibility built out that this product you're about to show someone and the conversation you're about to have with them is built Yeah, it's it's not a playbook handed to you by someone else.

It's genuinely your vision, your belief in how the world should be, what the challenges are. And I mean, again, even more so in this scenario, I'm selling a product that I wanted to have as a chief revenue officer, right? I've lived selling to CMOs and CROs, having been a sales and marketing leader. So there's a huge amount of fun, right?

Because you're basically having a peer to peer conversation with people. So that is a little bit of a cheat code. And what's the challenges? Hang on, what's the question again, just, how am I finding it?

How are you finding found the lead selling, going back to the point, an enormous amount of fun, I think maybe one of the challenges is making sure you do not get carried away with from missing things that you're set your that your tech team can't deliver, right? And I've been, I'm not a developer, but I've been on calls with other founders where they've promised something and then it just sends the whole business up in arms because it completely changes the roadmap, or it's very, very difficult to deliver.

And you know, you kind of have that power, so it's about not exercising it and being like accepting the restraints, which is actually quite difficult to sometimes have that self discipline and say, I'm selling this product that I have today, not this vision that will be here two years from now, or even six months from now. And actually in the very early days when the product was MVP and very nascent, that was, I wasn't great at that, right? Because you kind of needed to sell a bit more than you had there and then.

But as the products evolved, and it's now a genuine, fully fledged product. It's much easier to sell what is in front of me today than try and sell what's coming six months from now. And it's also the other thing is, we are BEC backed. So when you're fundraising, that's, that is a sales process, but it's a very different sales process, and when you're trying to fundraise sell and product sell, it's really important you don't let those two things converge, because, again, you're going to be selling a massive vision to someone that wants functionality when they buy it.

Equally, you don't want to sell a VC on the functionality you have today, because they're they're not invest in. So Mark Ackers: there's a lot there that I can relate to. I think just taking it back to the start, founder and selling is a lot of fun, but it's hard as well. Yeah, cheat code is definitely an interesting phrase, because I get exactly what you mean.

There are deals that I know I can do that it wouldn't be fair to expect anyone in my team to be able to do and that purely comes down to the title that you have. In my case, co founder and head of sales. And there'll be deals that you can do that you won't be able to replicate with other people that come into the team. And again, it wouldn't be fair for you to expect them to do that.

But I think that's the chasm that is so difficult to cross when you break from founder led selling and having sales people in place. And then the bit you talk about that, really, I call that staying in your swim lane. You know? I remember the early days of refract.

I remember the early days of my sales coach. You've got your swim lane, but you've got someone saying, Oh, if it could just do that, we can make it do that. No problem. But then when we were.

Guilty this at refract would build features for one person, and that would really shift your roadmap, push back the feature didn't quite work, or they didn't really use it, and then no one else really adopted it, and you'd constantly move out your swim lane. I mean, it sounds like that, something you're very conscious of, revved up is maybe in the early days it was harder, but you're really focused on your swim lane. So I can, I can totally relate to that. But founder led selling is just difficult, isn't it like, in the sense of, whilst a lot of fun, to not break out of your swim lane and and to say no to people, particularly when you're VC backed.

But then here's the other thing that that is true. If you sign up a crappy customer, in the sense of poor fit, and you've tried to fit square peg in a round hole, you're the one that tells the board they've signed up. You're the one that tells them they've churned and it's on you. And I suppose there is that that hat and that responsibility that you have to wear.

And it's a real it's a real tightrope, isn't Mark Walker: it? It definitely is, yeah. And the other inherent challenge with founder led sales is, you're a small business, right? So you don't have all of the brand and tailwinds that come from being a large organisation.

At that point. You don't have a huge marketing budget. You know, the brand often is you right, going out on to LinkedIn and so on. So there's, there's plenty of challenges, but yeah, to your point, if you, if you fudge things a little bit and you try and sell to someone that you know isn't quite a good fit, but you want the win for the quarter, you you know you're on the hook for that the following quarter.

If they churn going back to the very first point, I would never knowingly sell to someone that I didn't think could get value from the product, because there is just no point, right? You are just going to invite churn, but in the really early days, you are finding product market fit, and you don't know whether it is going to work or not. And those, those have been a couple of painful experiences, right, where we've had clients that it's just for whatever reason, it's just not quite worked, but that's just the process of learning and growing, and you get better and you refine every quarter, and churn starts to get lower, and your revenue gets higher.

And that's how you're building a business. Mark Ackers: And part of that is your responsibility as the founder, to take risks, to try new things, right? Like I remember in the first year at my sales coach, we said we should be experimenting every week experiment, try new things and and that's almost like your duty to try and build the best version of the business. And you know, you would have sat there like I did with a whiteboard, thinking, Okay, this is what the business is going to be.

This how we're going to do it. And then you get out there and you're like, Okay, we need to make some changes, and we need to make them quickly. And then, I don't know about you, we've we've made a change. Oh no, let's go back.

Oh no, let's make this change. Let's go back. And I'm sure that's the journey you're going on. Let's hear about revved up, because I'm conscious of time, so revved up is a business I'm somewhat familiar with, but I don't want to make any assumptions.

Let's go back to how you described me when I first sold to you. Let's not make those assumptions. Why don't you, first of all tell me who's the ideal person that, if you could get an inbound demo request from someone, what's their perfect job title and company? Mark Walker: Yeah, for sure.

So if I take the medic framework to an extent I'd have to right, and the economic buyer would be either the CMO or a CRO who actually looks after marketing, right? But it's fundamentally the most senior marketer in the business. Would we would want to be sponsoring the product, and then, in an ideal scenario, we would have at least two champions. One of them, our primary champion, would be head of demand, Gen smaller business, maybe head of marketing, but they're effectively on the hook for delivering qualified pipeline to the sales team.

And then, crucially, we would ideally have a second champion who runs sales, right because the product that we are selling is Account Based Marketing, and ABM, while he's got marketing. The title is inherently a team sport, and if you do not have sales bought into it, the whole thing will fall flat. So it comes back to this sales, marketing alignment conversation. Mark Ackers: So let's start there in your own words.

I know maybe for many listeners, an obvious question, but I want, I want your words. What is Account Based Marketing? There Mark Walker: probably is a dictionary definition of it. I'm going to give you two two answers so that this simple theoretical answer to what is ABM is it is marketing that targets a specific set of accounts that are predefined, and you customise all of your content and all of your campaigns to resonate specifically with each one of those accounts and the key stakeholders within those accounts.

So that's like the as close to my textbook destination as you can get. And then the question is, well, what does that mean? Right? What's the kind of workflow around a good you.

Good ABM like a good ABM motion would be good account selection, and we can double click into anything that you want, but let me give you the high level. But you firstly, you've got to select the right accounts. Then you need to do deep research and understanding into those accounts. What's their context?

What are their drivers? What are their goals, what are their challenges, and who is the most likely buying committee and influences within the account? What are their motivations? What are their drivers, and so on.

Then you need to have a great angle that's built off of the research, like, how are we going to attack this account? Like, what's uniquely valuable about our business to them to their business. And then you need to customise all of your content to that account. So you've got to really show you've done the work to understand their context and how that connects back to your value proposition.

And then you need to execute the campaign, and that's usually across multiple channels. You've got to show up where the stakeholders are and where that account is multiple times, and often that does start from brand building, because if you if the account doesn't know you, sometimes you just have to build that familiarity and awareness with your business before you can actually start to break into the account and have conversations. Which is why ABM tends to be a longer cycle to actually start to see results, and that's why you reserve it for these larger organisations who are going to be very meaningful to your revenue line.

Mark Ackers: And how imperative would you say great Account Based Marketing is in today's sales landscape. Mark Walker: I mean, I'm building a whole business around it. So you would imagine my answer is, it is very imperative, like bland marketing and bland campaigns that don't directly speak to specific accounts and the individuals within them are just noise. They're just noise.

And it's so easy to scale noisy campaigns through automation and AI, it's still much more difficult to actually get to the level of depth that's required for ABM. That that's what helps cut through. Now there's also typically motions or campaign touch points within ABM that cannot be scaled through AI or digital. For example, I would almost always have some kind of breakfast or dinner or in person.

Touch point for an ABM campaign, right? Because you are saying I am willing to invest the time and money to get you in a room with peers, and I'm going to spend the time and expense of calibrating this event just for you, right? It's on a topic that we know is going to resonate with you and your business, and you're going to meet your peers. That type of cut through is very different than, yeah, Can I record you a 32nd loom video?

Right? So it's just a different level of weight that goes along with these ABM campaigns, and if, but if you don't have them, it's, it's very difficult to cut through to these accounts. And would you say again, you know, you're building a business in this you live in this world. When you speak to organisations, what kind of percent do you think can really get an Account Based Marketing?

Right? Very few. Right now. Where's the quick fixes, the fixes with organisations that are not doing ABM correctly right?

What are the what are the quick fixes here again, they might have not been identifying the right accounts to go after in the first place, so having better intelligence, better decision making frameworks around who are the right accounts to go after is potentially a really quick fix to the level and depth of research that you need on that account can be really time consuming and take whole teams. If businesses aren't leveraging AI and available tools, then they're probably really missing something, and therefore they're making their ABM campaigns far more expensive than they need to be.

And the third one, and maybe I should have started with this, because really, this is where I I see most of them derail. Is the sales and marketing alignment, right? ABM is a marketing driven initiative. They want it to drive leads, or MQLs and the sales team are not bought in, and it's not all coordinated together, or they are broadly aligned, but it's a fight over who's going to claim the attribution for the success of the campaign.

Sales is trying to call up the accounts outside of the agreed cycle, because they want to be able to claim that they got got it over of the line, right? Or marketing is deliberately, yeah, trying to consume sales with a particular activity and claim the credit, right? So honestly, the organisations that I'm speaking to or working with, where the quickest fix would be, it's around getting those teams aligned, Mark Ackers: and this sets us up nicely. I'd love for you to now just share with us how does revved up?

Help with all of this. If I'm sales leader, CRO, responsible for marketing demand, Gen, and I'm buying into what you're saying. Wanna hear more about revved Mark Walker: up? So revved up helps with three of the core components that I've just spoken about.

So revved up will do unbelievable amounts of research on the account and the stakeholders within the account. So you end up with this incredible dossier of information and insight into the account and the stakeholders, the likes that it would have taken multiple people many, many days and man hours to pull together. So that gives you the base of a really strong ABM campaign. Now, the second thing that revved up does is it takes that content and that research, it matches it to your unique value proposition, and then it pulls together really compelling content that will allow you to cut through to this account with a unique point of view and a unique value proposition tailored to the needs of the account, right?

So again, often, many days can be spent in workshops trying to figure out, how do we translate this research into content revved up? Does that? Does that for you, out the box? And then the third piece is, we make it really easy to connect all that content to all different channels, so you can run that multi, multi touch campaign, not just email, not just LinkedIn, but actually helping you create thought leadership that can go out to your sales team so they feel a part of it.

They're they're empowered and enabled to drive the ABM campaign and build their brand, PPC, bespoke landing pages, right? The whole shebang is, managed out of revved up. So you really get this kind of out of the box ABM pod with the platform, Mark Ackers: amazing. Thanks.

So thanks for bringing that to life. I'd love to send people your way. Obviously, it sounds like every week you're at an event, they'll probably see you, social butterfly that you are. Obviously, I'm guessing LinkedIn is the most obvious place to find you, right?

So, Mark Walker on LinkedIn, revved up. For those not watching, listening, how do we spell revved up? Where's the website? How do we find you?

Mark Walker: Yeah, for sure. So revved up is R, E, double, V, E, D, u, p, revved up all one word.ai, revved up.ai.

Is the website and then, yeah, LinkedIn, for sure, my LinkedIn handle is pretty easy. It's J, F, D, I, Mark, just fucking do it. Mark, it's been, been a mantra of mine for many, many years. So easy to find me, or, yeah, just search Mark Walker at revved up.

Well, Mark Ackers: that's that's a great LinkedIn handle, and that brings us to the end of the podcast. We just fucking did it to take up your your mantra. And loved having you on Mark. I knew this would be a great episode.

As I say, we've not really explored that sales and marketing side before, and as a ex marketer myself, I was really keen to have that conversation with you. I think there's some great debates, you know, a few things where you definitely challenge my thoughts. Hopefully I've done that with you as well, but hopefully, and I trust the listeners, got a load out of this episode as well. So thanks for coming on.

Thanks for sharing your story, and best of luck. We've revved up, and I'm sure I'll see an event at some point in the future. Thanks Mark Walker: so much, Mark. It's been a lot of fun.

Appreciate having me you.