Stop the Blame Game: How Sales and Marketing Can Win Together with Nick Jones & Max Childs

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So I think. What would you say the pipeline was at the beginning? It's like as close to zero as you can get. Six months down the line, we were over 3 million and it was sustainable. We beat our, uh, number for the year, 250% sort of increase. And it was a record year. We go back all the way through the history. It was a record, a record year as well.

Speaker A: Welcome to the spotlight of marketing brought to us by Armstrong Lloyd, headhunters in the B2B marketing space. I'm your host, Karen Lloyd, and today I'm joined by two guests. Nick Jones, the founder of Glendower Advisory, former managing director of EMEA and APAC for Lucid Works, and also Max Childs, the fractional marketing director currently for technology Marketing Europe. But previously he worked alongside Nick as the dream team together for the EMEA marketing lead for Lucid Works. So I'm really excited to talk to Max and Nick because their story is real. This isn't a theory, this isn't a framework framework. This is an actual journey that happened with a commercial outcome that really does speak for itself. So today we're going to learn how they overcame a sales and marketing misalignment, how they got their leadership team on board, and what happened to the pipeline when they did. So if you're a marketing leader who's ever felt like they're pushing water up a hill, or a sales leader who's really frustrated that things just aren't working the way they want to, or you're a senior leader who just suspects things aren't all pulling in the same direction. This one is for you. Welcome both.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you, Karen.

Speaker A: Great stuff. So, Nick, you know, you came to the business not from the marketing side. You're really from the sales and delivery side. What was your honest view of marketing in your early career and any shifts that you had with that?

Speaker B: Yes, I think my first experience with marketing was when I took on the managing director role at a small consultancy called Cirrus 10. So we did, uh, e commerce search consultancy. I was the first man on the ground in emea. So I had to set everything up from scratch. And to be fair, it was my first proper sales marketing kind of, kind of job. And what I realized quickly is that being the first presence in a territory, people don't know your name and don't know what you can do. Even if you've got a fantastic, you know, the parent company's got a fantastic list of logos, they kind of mean nothing in that territory. So I found myself quickly doing a dual sales and marketing role to kind of get. Get the business up and running. The only time in my life that I've been called a marketing genius, uh, is when I sent out letters to potential prospects with a lottery ticket in it. And weirdly, somebody won. So we didn't get that deal, but we did get another deal off the back of all the publicity. So, you know, that felt to me like a win, but also an interesting attribution kind of question.

Speaker A: Yeah, very funny. Very good. Yes, exactly. So even though you were in sales, they called you a marketing genius because

Speaker C: you, uh, gave them something.

Speaker B: It's never happened again.

Speaker A: Well, maybe by the end of this call, but one of the things I was interested in, as you just mentioned, you said it came apparent that the people in the region didn't know the logos from somewhere else. What was that aha moment in that when you realized they just weren't resonating with the logos? Or was it just something you had as a gut feeling?

Speaker B: It was in one sales meeting and they said, yeah, this is all right. But what about somebody here

Speaker A: who said that, though?

Speaker B: That was one of the prospects in that I was working with. Now the interesting thing is that, you know, Fast forward to LucidWorks. I had a conversation with the then CEO, uh, what about marketing in Europe? And he said, to paraphrase that, um, well, we've got all these great logos. I have an idea.

Speaker A: You thought I'd been here before. In the previous.

Speaker B: Before I recognize this story.

Speaker A: So what did you say?

Speaker B: What did I say? I. You know what, I was a little bit shocked at that point. A little bit shell shocked. And I went, I went back and, uh, had a chat with Max and we came up with a strategy after that.

Speaker A: So, so this is when you both met and you realized that. So the CEO was saying, it's okay, we don't really need to do any marketing in emea because you've got all these brands regardless of where they are. But look, they're great logos. The customers are going to resonate. You know, I've been here before. The customer, like before has said, look, I want customers that are like me in my region, and if I don't have that, then I'm not going to kind of buy into your brand. And so you knew this was the problem. And at this point, what was the pipeline looking for for the business and Emea at this point when you were having these conversations, about as small as

Speaker B: you can get before you hit zero.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. Okay. So brilliant. So you knew you had to change and you know, you saw the pipeline. So that's when you went to Max. And you'd only just started working with Max at the time, hadn't you, as a fractional lead?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is my m. First spot with Max. And I'd have to say that the sales team from the SDR onward were also a little bit like they'd had enough. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay.

Speaker B: So it was like, yeah, there's the imperative to get the number, but there's also the imperative just to change the way we work together.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So like the sales seem a bit despondent. You didn't have any pipeline. You were being told to just do what you've already done and get on with the logos. And that's it. And that's when you were like, actually we have got a fractional marketing lead. Let me speak to this person. Hope they can help us. And that's enter stage left Max. Yes, yes.

Speaker C: Not the first time I've encountered the companies coming into Europe with a whole bank of logos. And they're wondering m. Why that they don't seem to resonate. I, uh, think right away through marketing career working with US Companies, it's been the same. And you can, yeah, especially if you do quite a lot of events that have uh, over the years, you can see it in the faces of uh, of prospects. They look at logos and they're just meaningless because maybe a, uh, mum and pop sort of shop somewhere in Kansas means absolutely nothing to uh, the likes of a big German retailer or a UK bank. So uh, the need to have logos and customs that resonate with your local audience is absolutely paramount. And with Lucy works, I think the, the challenge was, was that the contract form where uh, on the MAS contract we had a uh, clause in there about marketing and uh, we were asking for different kinds of marketing support. So use logo, uh, to do some kind of a case study or maybe have someone talk on stage. The original formal language was very legalistic, ultra precise, uh, ultra detailed and left no room for flexibility. And yeah, it concerned me looking at it, let alone what it would do to a, uh, prospect. So we'd really had a conversation about changing this back in the very early days when started working lucyworks. But uh, it's a very kind of siloed organization at that point. And when Nick came in and became uh, the VP International, then the organization was restructured slightly. So we had the opportunity to change it. And just by relaxing the language in the contract to be A little bit more flexible. Then we went from, I think in the first three, four years working with LucidWorks, which had zero net new customer case studies in Europe, uh, we went from zero to three over uh, the space of 18 months. And it was simply down to uh, being a little bit more flexible.

Speaker B: The language, the flexibility of the language definitely did help, but it's also the recognizing that there's a value to the organization of having customer references as well and to feed that into the sales team. So what I think we had before was really, really tight language around marketing and um, no internal value associated with that language. So the first phrase that we get negotiated out would be that, that marketing language phrase. So we put a value, internal value on that and made that uh, a strong negotiating point which really helped with our conversations with procurement.

Speaker A: This really does show the full cycle as well, doesn't it? Because basically you've got Nick who's in Max, who's looking at, from a marketing perspective and going, look, we need new logos. What's the barrier? Well actually the wording in the contract at the point, I mean at a point when you're signing a customer, you know, how do I know I'm going to want to do a case study with them? Because you're not putting yourself in the shoes of the custom at that point. And so I suppose your sales team, all they want to do is get it over the line. They're not worrying about the marketing. So it was a seesaw of conflict from the customer and the sales team and you spotted that. And it's, I reckon that's something that a lot of companies probably have and they don't even realize is an objection that's coming through. But they ultimately you do want the logos because that is again it. So it's the cycle of cells, but it's that broader piece that was basically disconnected there. So you, you resolved this and then what was the outcome or what was the next step after this when. Because this is one aspect. What's the next step after this? That helped you layer up what you were doing.

Speaker B: The next thing was recognizing that the business landscape in EMEA is different, uh, to the landscape in the United States. So lucidworks is a company that does on site E commerce search and some behind the firewall knowledge discovery search as well. But we focus on uh, E Commerce, which was the big focus for lucidworks at the time. There are a lot of really big brands in the United States that uh, support the kind of investment that you need for a really Sort of strong search solution and particularly in B2B commerce. Right. You know, there's a company that sells beads called Finemount and Gen Beads and they make close to $100 million a year. You don't get that kind of business in Europe because we're kind of fragmented a bit geographically. There are some, there are a few that kind of span the entirety of Europe and some really big names, but there's not very many of them. So we realized we're kind of fishing in the wrong pool. But where Europe is strong is in the manufacturing and the B2B side of things. So our pivot was to go from B2C commerce search to B2B and Max, you probably want to talk about how we realized that was a really good bet.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean that was, it was challenging. So when I first started working with. So we had uh, this retail commerce focus which was, yeah, fairly straightforward. Been working in, in retail technology for a long time. So, uh, we already had a bit of a database. Uh, we knew we were going after. We're doing the right kind of things. But the, the warning signs came when we get the right leads in. So the right uh, audience we're talking to, but they're just not converting. And I think that was the understanding that we then got was actually perhaps we're not playing in the right space here, uh, because we just don't have the. It's not the right fit of customer for Lucidworks.

Speaker A: How did you know that they were the wrong leads? So what was the trigger that you realized the wrong leads? At what point did it happen? Because I know obviously I've seen the bigger picture of Nick going, yeah, we figured it out. But if you were just working through that process, what was the point where you were like, yeah, these are the wrong leads.

Speaker C: I think the challenge was, was for the audience we're going after, they were the right leads, but they were the wrong leads to Loose Works because ultimately they just weren't closing. They weren't ending up as closed one. So if with a marketing hat on, you're thinking, right, what are we doing? Are we doing the right things? Are we hitting the right numbers? Are we getting the right kind of flow through the lead funnel? And those boxes were sort of by and large being tipped. But when things just aren't closing, it's at that point you've got to start thinking there's something not quite right here. Are we just playing in the wrong? Uh, we've got the oval shaped ball and we're kicking it Around a pitch with goals down the end. So we're on the wrong field. And it was at that time there's also this realization from Nick and the team sales. So we had this pivot across to BSBY, uh, manufacturing, very much enterprise focused, 1 billion pound sort of uh, $1 billion plus accounts. And that was a massive challenge from a marketing perspective in that we had almost zero awareness uh, in the field, uh, we had zero opt in contacts which is quite a challenge. Most of the target accounts that fell into this were in Germany which we also hadn't really been covering and we needed a good B2B story. So consequently there was an awful lot of work to do. And I think actually this is what kind of really pulled the team together because the approach was new across the whole commercial organization from sales through to marketing through to str. Actually we need to work really, really closely together, understand the icp, who are we targeting, what are their needs, what are their pain points, how do we talk to these, what have we got in content, what's missing in content? How do we get the right things in front of the right people at every stage of the customer journey? And what's that customer journey look like? Oh by the way, we need a German language website that's going to talk through these things. And then how do you convert all the digital interactions and engagement that you get uh, into conversations that then the sales team can do something with. So it required a really holistic sort of joined up thought process and you can't really do that in isolation in marketing. You've got to talk to your colleagues. And actually this is where I think the team, uh, it's a very small, quite tightly knit team in Europe really came together because I needed the insights from the client success team. What's working? Um, why do people use us, what they love about us? We need to hear the insights from Nick and the sales team when they're going out talking to B2B prospects. Again, what are their pain points? One of the things that seem to really resonate because it just helps us refine the messaging we get emarting lots of data to understand what's being downloaded, where people engaging. The bit we're missing is the why. And you also don't know what you don't know. And that's where insights from your other colleagues who are working day in, day out with customers and prospects are super helpful.

Speaker B: I think the thing that really made this tick was just the general working together of sales, marketing and customer success and professional service as well. So our sale, a traditional sales meeting is like salespeople just going through their pipeline and everything in kind of in isolation because we're kind of small enough. Team representatives from customer success, professional services and uh, marketing, we're all in it together. So we were able to kind of see the bigger picture and challenge each other on, um, why is this working? Why is this not working? What can we do to help? And it became collaborative really quickly. The other thing kind of behind this is while there was a great, I think, marketing engine in the US because we were going after a different market, we kind of had to, to do this ourselves, right. We didn't get that sort of support. So our little mantra was, well, you know, if it doesn't exist, we'll create it, right? And just giving, you know, empowering that team to do that, to move forward and to experiment with types of content, with types of approaches. You know, even the events and the venues that we went to, it was very much an open, experimental refinement kind of mode rather than that kind of everybody pointing at somebody else for, for the answer, at least from my point of view, that was, that was what it felt like. But. But Max, is that kind of what you got?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, absolutely. And when you start from the perspective of we're all new into this market, so we've got a, I need you, uh, to help me understand who we're targeting and why, then it becomes much more shared conversation and the building the go to market strategy. We don't know what the right answer is when we set out, but what we do, we can do some analysis, we can look at, uh, the target accounts that we're going to hopefully get in, in front of and then you can just discuss with the team and say, we've got eight options, we've got budgets to do three of them. What are we going to focus on? Where do we think the biggest wins are? Uh, and it's from a marketing perspective. You give your advice and say, well, here's some objectives. This is what we need to be looking to do because this will help people through the funnel. But you also need the input from your colleagues as well to actually, I think here we've got the best opportunity because of X. And uh, then you, you arrive at a consensus together.

Speaker A: And I think the main thing for me to signpost here is that what you're describing, people might say, well, that's normal, isn't it? And it isn't normal because it isn't normal in every company because there's a couple of like if there was like if we were to map out the process, you are, there's a couple of little gates where things could have gone wrong. So the first thing that could have gone wrong, which was basically when the sales team weren't converting the leads, some companies and um, I've spoken to people with this attitude. They've turned around and said well it's because marketing are ah, giving us the wrong type of leads. And without being. In this instance it kind of was the case. But you weren't defensive about it. You did go back and there was a huge project about it. But the other response that marketing could have in that situation, rather than doing what you did, which was go and invest, investigate it, which was no. The problem is the sales team don't have to close people, they need training. So we need to go and put them on a better training course on how to close their customers on how to do that. I don't know if you've experienced that in other organizations and if that was something that's helped you learn from that from this moment that you came to.

Speaker C: Yes, yes and yes, uh, I agree totally. And yeah, I think it was fairly unique in some ways in the collaboration openness. I've been lucky enough to work in a number of organizations where it has been similar as well. Uh, and that we have had the ability to have good discussions. But I think uh, it was unique just how collaborative the team was in Europe with uh, US Wirtz.

Speaker A: Can you think or reflect this of other moments like where they could have gone wrong or maybe there was something and that you had to shut it down? Was there people that basically were upset, upset about things perhaps and like how that was handled and how again like I said it could sliding doors moment. It could have been, it could have just gone completely differently. But you know, you caught it from your experience and how you sort of like stopped it.

Speaker C: I'm not sure I could pinpoint any specific moment. I think the, probably the, the thing that is most important with all this is if you just look at numbers then it's easy to get into blame game with living leads with while they're closing. The really, really important thing is always the why. And actually the why I'd say is the most important thing throughout marketing is understanding if something is happening, why is it succeeding? If it's not succeeding, why isn't it succeeding? And that then needs uh, a discussion. And if you can get that why question out there and people trying to get to the bottom of it then you usually have a reasonable discussion and look at some hypotheses as to why things aren't happening. That was probably one of the critical aspects that the team at Lucidworks were uh, introspective in terms of they were good at analyzing what was going on in the marketplace. And that was fairly unusual. And it was that analysis of why is this not happening for us that I think led to the actually yeah, we're just in the wrong market. There's other people who can provide what retail and E commerce in the UK needs better in an easier way than we can do.

Speaker B: If I hit probably the first, I would say first day, but certainly the first week I took on the role, I brought everybody together, at least the leaders in sales, marketing and success and services. I think our partner manager was in there as well as. And uh, I listened to a good old moment fest. But what came out of it was just, just you know, a couple of rules. You know, one, we just don't blame each other and uh, two, we don't wait for somebody to give us something. And I think that having that expectation of how we want to behave together I think started the, started that kind of more collaborative approach uh, as well. And I think, you know, there was an imperative here, you know, we wanted to, everybody wanted to do well.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: And there's an imperative to do better. I think we were really lucky in having some very strong, collaborative, analytically minded, curious salespeople, uh, in the team as well, which you know, allowed us to, you know, there was as much concerned about closing the deal as how they closed the deal, which is, which is like, you know, a wonderful thing to have to deal with and uh, can't speak highly enough of them as well.

Speaker A: So lessons learned from that.

Speaker B: I think having the autonomy and the structural change that Lisa Works did, which resulted in me having this GM role, it allowed us to be a little bit more separate from the mothership and to attack the market as it was on the ground. But what we had to do uh, as a team was make sure that we had that sort of mothership connection and to make sure that those processes and the things that we were learning were being fed back. And one of the interesting things with this, with this journey is we flipped in EMEA to B2B manufacturing. Fast forward 18 months, the US has started to flip towards B2B manufacturing, uh, as well. So it was A2, it didn't feel like it at the time, but it was actually a two way process. So I think that structural autonomy within the region, ability to bring things together, ability to adjust processes but not go rogue, you know within that structure I think is also helped.

Speaker A: Yeah, the localization of a European, you know, EMEA division rather than it just all being from America which some companies have currently flipped back to to save money. So they've tried to do it all from America which you know, they can definitely learn from your lessons. So tell us about the results because you, we know, we've talked about the process, we've talked about the challenges but come on you guys. I know, I know you had a ah, phenomenal. You know once you put this in place you started to see the rewards, fruits of your labor from a commercial revenue point of view.

Speaker C: And pipeline.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think what would you say the pipeline was at the beginning? It was like as close to zero as you can get. Six months down the line, uh, we were over 3 million and it was sustainable. Uh, we beat our uh, number for the year, 250% sort of increase. And it was a record if you go back all the way through the history, it was a record year as well. And customer success actually we started to see, see an uptick in the retention numbers as well through some other sort of joined up programs that we uh, had running uh, which Max called leapfrog, which is cool. And I think there's some really strong marketing metrics as well that were coming through that as well. Max.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's right. The alternate marketing metrics all feed into that final end game which is sales pipeline and uh, close one. And I think uh, at the end of the first year or so we've got some like 10x the number uh, of qualified strategic account leads then compared to previous year. And that was, that was super important in terms of right accounts, right people and right conversations that we're having. And that then filled into a tripling of the pipeline.

Speaker B: Maxi M taught me. Einmail ist kleinmal.

Speaker C: Einmail ist kaimal. Wunks is none is the German, which is a short way of saying don't just do a one big hit in the market, you need to have a constant presence there. And I think it's one of the things that companies frequently underestimate. If they're going to market in Europe they'll do one uh, big trade show and then expect that it's going to fill their pipeline for the year. Uh, it doesn't. You actually need to build a presence. You need to build trust and credibility within the audience and that requires commitment. So I've worked with in Germany for German companies for a long time and you understand how the Germans think. So uh, that was really important that if we're going to go off the B2B market in Germany, we've got to be consistent about it and we've got to be consequential about the way we approach this so people can see we're not just here as a one off, we're here to stay and going to be repeating and coming back and being present. And I think the, that was borne out over some of the events that we did. First event or first time we did it, might have a couple of conversations by the time we're there. Second or third times we're having repeat conversations with uh, the same brands who are getting more and more interested because it takes a long sales cycle and people need to know that they're gonna be around to support and uh, look after.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think just you've touched on something there that is kind of important about the way we evolved as well. So, you know, every event we did, we'd have a look and have a dispassionate view on, you know, what worked, what didn't. And it's again, it's not a blame thing, it's a, how can we do things better? You know, it's like Wiley Coyote, you know, when he, he drops the, he drops the rock over the, over the thing, but he's got his, his foot sort of tied to it and he goes down with it. But then the next thing he straps a rocket to his back. We weren't doing that. We were just going, okay, we're going to drop a rock. Let's make sure there's not a big piece of rope that's going to kind of catch us on the way down. So we shifted our events and I think we went to smaller events where as a, you know, we're building up a presence, we could have more intimate kind of interactions. And we always did something that was value add in that event. So a speaking slot or a round table or something like that, like that to get ourselves known rather than just having a fancy booth and hoping people would come to us. And I think that really, you know, that's, that's where Max's expertise came in. And that really, really did help us sort of uh, move, move the bar forward. So flipping back a little bit to the, to the outcomes. I think we've not got to forget the, the people outcomes from this. So, you know, I said at the beginning there were some, some people who are pretty frustrated. You know, bit at the end of their tether, uh, everybody stayed with us through the journey and the poor sdr, who was obviously not doing great, uh, with a tiny pipeline, he became the best performing SDR in the entire company. And that was great for his career and he did so well as an sdr. Uh, we moved him into customer success where he was also fantastic as well and using some of those skills to build that, uh, more commercially focused CS organization that we wanted to be. That's probably another podcast, Karen.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, exactly. Well, we're gonna wrap things up. But what I want, what I want to say is what I think is really interesting that the points you just made as well is that you made a big change at the beginning, but it didn't just, you know, you didn't just stop there. You know, you continuously improved and, and it wasn't just, you know, like the one trick pony we did one big year and that was it. As Max, you know, you've got your expression, you know, once is once. What was it? Once is nothing, once it's not.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Once is none. Yeah, once is none. So, you know, uh, English we'd say one trick pony, but you know, it's the same thing. A one hit wonder, you know, a great translation for the German market. And instead you constantly looked involved and iterated and you worked together for several years and you know, produced great revenue that also other, ah, parts of the business replicated on the back of what you've done. So I think it's, you know, a true case study of success, of sales and marketing working together. So thank you for sharing it. Is there anything else you wanted to add that I haven't asked you at this point?

Speaker B: No, just, I just, just one, one thing that I think we're kind of, uh, proud of. So when we started this journey, the region was called Rest of World, which is a very American phrase. Right. Um, we started to be known even at board level as Best of World, which is really cool. And I think somebody decided we, we can't have that. So we got cooked, we got our name, changed it international, but I'll live with that.

Speaker A: No, that's really nice. Well, well, it's great that they, that they saw that. Also the underdog team, you know, the small Amia team, as you said in America, they were basically, it was easy for them to sell because there was a big market and there was lots of companies and it's very siloed in America, isn't it, just to have a small pie of a market. In America is, is very different to Europe as we we describe. So it was great that they recognized that the underdogs in Europe did well. So fantastic. Thank you. It's a really uplifting inspir actually and I think it's going to resonate with people who, you know, they may be struggling or they may see some of the things that you could have gone wrong with and perhaps hopefully they can catch this and, and share this with somebody else in their business. So please do share this if you think this is going to help you in your business with other people in your team. Great stuff. Anything else you want to finish on, Max?

Speaker C: It was a, yeah, uh, a great journey. Really interesting set of folks to work with and I think, yeah, it's just really a really good testament to what you can do with collaboration.

Speaker A: Brilliant stuff. And in the beginning I mentioned that, Max, your workings are fractional. So you're still working with businesses now on a fractional basis?

Speaker C: Uh, yes, that's right, yeah. Supporting uh, companies where they need marketing field marketing work, fractional, cmo, whatever the need is both UK and uh, also across Europe.

Speaker A: And Nick, you're also in advisory. You have an advisory business now is that you're consulting?

Speaker B: Yeah, so yeah, uh, my advisory business, uh, focuses on SaaS, companies that need help, uh, mostly with post sales and where the revenue gaps are around the interfaces between uh, the different functions. I think this story is a great example of what can happen if you get all that right.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, exactly. So, yeah, feel free to reach out. We'll have links for both Max and Nick. If you have these problems in your business and you need some help, we'll include that in our show notes. So thank you very much Max and Nick. It's been uh, a lovely, really interesting conversation. Really enjoyed it. I'm very lucky to be a podcast host and speak to brilliant commercial leaders like Max and Nick. And as a passionate marketing myself, also a business owner and headhunter, I also run a search firm for sales and marketing. So if you're looking to grow your team and you'd like a conversation about what the current market looks like, please drop me an email at, uh, Karen Armstrong lloyd.co.uk. but in the meantime, keep shining that spotlight on marketing and commercial growth.

Speaker C: Sam.