In this episode, we're exploring how a company successfully aligned its sales and marketing teams to maximize the efforts of its sellers.
The great Andrew Sims, CRO at SentriLock, and Trey Morris, VP/Senior Consultant here at CSS, are joining Matt Sunshine in breaking down that journey.
Both bring such great points to the table, like:
- Why you don't have to make Mount Everest-sized changes in order to achieve sales and marketing alignment.
- How marketing should help prepare your sales team for battle.
- Why do all great companies have a singular mission from which all marketing, branding, and content can be drawn?
Recognizing the Misalignment
Andrew began by sharing his unique perspective upon joining SentriLock as the head of sales.
Having previously experienced the sales cycle both as a customer and within another organization, he quickly identified significant gaps in how sales and marketing operated at the company.
“When I started at SentriLock, I had a lot of perspectives on the good and the bad regarding how we approached conversations with customers and brought up negotiating and working through the retention and the new business cycle. I also had, I think, a unique perspective on how people buy products within organized real estate and technology products for real estate.
“And I think I wanted to be...a lot more persistent in how we found those valid business reasons for people and also found people other than just the main gatekeeper to express those valid business reasons too. Because, in our industry, gatekeepers don't use our products. It's the people that the gatekeeper represents that actually use our product, right?”
“We had none of that content, we had none of that script, we had none of that infrastructure [that showed] how to have those types of conversations.”
“And I think what Trey, your team brought to us, as a company, was perspective. Perspective in that this is not a massive Mount Everest that you can have to climb. You can make very small incremental changes, philosophically and tactically, and get yourself back on track.”
Overcoming Initial Challenges
The journey towards sales and marketing alignment wasn’t without its challenges. Sims and Morris highlighted several initial roadblocks, including organizational hierarchy issues and a misalignment of objectives between sales and marketing teams.
One major hurdle was the perception of marketing solely as a communications department rather than a strategic partner in driving demand generation and sales enablement.
Andrew says, “I very much tried to push this idea that there's corporate communications and then there's demand generation, right?
“I wanted the marketing team to be solely focused on demand gen and sales enablement.”
Leaving Spreadsheets Behind
A pivotal step in their success was the adoption of a unified platform, HubSpot, to centralize data and streamline operations. This move enabled better tracking of customer interactions, enhanced lead nurturing, and improved sales funnel management.
“Looking back on this,” Andrews says. “We never really had a CRM. We never really had a kind of dashboard or a place to look at all this stuff.
“I mean, the people who came before me were just dialing it in the spreadsheets, right? And I said, ‘I want to get out of spreadsheets, I want to put everything in one place, I want a single source of truth.’
“That was a journey because we don't have, you know, a sophisticated BI, as I wish we did, but we have finally committed to HubSpot. I'm in love with HubSpot. You guys have done an amazing job helping us push that over the line. Maybe I was the one holding out, but now I'm in love with it. I'm absolutely in love with it, and now I can't wait to spread the gospel.
All Great Companies are Missional
Matt wraps up the conversation by asking, “What are the necessary things that need to be in place to ensure this sort of success continues into the future?
“I like to say that all great companies can be described as missional,” Trey says. “They have one objective, one mission, one destination, and everyone is working together for that one singular outcome. Everything they do can be drawn back from the ultimate destination. Every ad campaign, sales call, new client, new branding piece, new handout, and everything they do must be focused on that one thing.
“And there has to be continual correction because a 1% misalignment can end up being thousands of miles away from the actual destination you wanted.”
