Improving Sales Performance
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Improving Sales Performance
The Power of Aligning Sales & Marketing with Andrew Sims and Trey Morris
In this episode, we're exploring how a company successfully aligned their sales and marketing teams to maximize their efforts of their sellers.
The great Andrew Sims, CRO at SentriLock, and Trey Morris, VP/Senior Consultant here at CSS, are joining me to break 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 all great companies have a singular mission from which all marketing, branding and content can be drawn from.
LINKS:
Andrew Sims
SentriLock
Trey Morris
Matt Sunshine
The Center for Sales Strategy
Welcome to Improving Sales Performance, a podcast highlighting tips and insights aimed at helping sales organizations realize, and maybe even exceed, their goals. Here we chat with thought leaders, experts and gurus who have years of sales experience from a wide range of industries. I'm your host, matt Sunshine, ceo at the Center for Sales Strategy, a sales performance consulting company. In this episode, we're exploring how a company successfully aligned their sales and marketing teams to maximize their efforts of their sellers.
Matt Sunshine:The great Andrew Sims, CRO at SentriLock, and Trey Morris, VP/ Senior Consultant here at CSS, are joining me to break 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 and, finally, why all great companies have a singular mission from which all marketing, branding and content can be drawn from. With that, let's get the conversation going. So, andrew, in your experience, what were some of the initial signs that you saw that sales and marketing were not aligned in your company? Did and did this? Did this lead to any specific challenges that you were having to deal with?
Andrew Sims:CLock I had a really, I think, unique perspective when I came in to SentriLock as the head of sales, because I had been a customer of journey and the sales cycle myself. But then I had also gone and worked at a organization that had had SentriLock for a while, so I knew it from both the having navigated the onboarding and new customer process, as well as the retention and renewing the contract process and renewing the contract process. And so when I came in I had a lot of perspective, I think, of the good and the bad, about how we approached conversations with customers, how we brought up negotiating and kind of working through the retention as well as the new business cycle, and I also had, I think, a unique perspective about how people buy products within organized real estate and technology products for real estate. So I think in the first three months we made a lot of changes within the sales team, both from a personnel perspective as well as kind of putting a process in place that was more than go get lead, go talk to lead, nurture lead, and if they say yes, great, if they don't wait three, four years until they're ready again. And I think what I wanted to do was be a lot more I don't want to say forceful, but at least a lot more persistent in how we kind of 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 the gatekeeper doesn't use our product. It's the people that the gatekeeper represents that actually use our product right. And so you know, if I'm selling them on how a lockbox works or how our system works, they might say, oh, great, cool, sounds good, whereas if I'm talking to a realtor or a broker or somebody who uses it every day, they're going to have a different perspective.
Andrew Sims:So we had none of that, we had none of that content, we had none of that script, we had none of that infrastructure of kind of like how to have those types of conversations. And so you know, obviously I knew of you guys and your agency and the Center for Sales Strategy and had followed some of the blogs and other things that you guys had created, and I was like you know, what these guys are talking about is infrastructure. What they're talking about is process and procedure. Trey's known me a long time.
Andrew Sims:I am not a process and procedure kind of guy, but I respect it, and I respect the fact that you need to have organization in order to grow an organization. So I think, when I realized that I had none of these things before me, I needed to find somebody or some people that could come in and say, okay, we don't have to rip out all the plumbing here, we just maybe need to like redo the tile in the bathroom. And I think what Trey and what your team brought to us as a company was perspective Perspective that this is not a massive Mount Everest that you can have to climb, that you can make very small incremental changes, philosophically as well as tactically, and get yourself back on track.
Matt Sunshine:Yeah, Trey, anything to add? Yeah?
Trey Morris:Yeah, so so when we, when we started, when we engage and start working together, you know, I went, went to Birmingham and met with Andrew and the team and I and I met the marketing people and it quickly became very apparent that they were not on the same page with Andrew and his sales team. And I went to Andrew and I said we need to get this aligned. And he absolutely agreed. And it was a struggle for about a year of getting everything in line to make sure that sales and marketing really understood each other. The sales team knew who the audience was, who knew who the prospect was, knew what their needs were. Marketing didn't, and that was a big problem in the communication strategy that they were putting out on behalf of the sales team.
Matt Sunshine:Yeah, yeah. So doing enough of these types of podcasts. I hear sales doesn't understand, marketing doesn't understand. Right, and both have their perspective and from their perspective they're 100 percent correct. So let's, let's dive a little bit deeper. What were some of the biggest roadblocks that you faced in fostering and nurturing that communication and that collaboration, that collaborative effort between sales and marketing? What were some of the roadblocks?
Andrew Sims:Well, I think the biggest one was simply organizational hierarchy. At the time I was not managing the marketing team directly. They were housed underneath a different department completely and you know, there was sometimes outside input, like they would solicit input from me and the sales team, but it was more of kind of like let's get some suggestions from sales. And I think also I tell people all the time I am in sales but I am a marketer, like I classify myself as a full stack marketing person who just happens to be decent at sales presentations. But I always feel like I wear the marketing hat first and foremost. Right. And that's why I love this new era of revenue operations and chief revenue and VP of revenue world, because it's kind of like those of us who are good at sales don't have to call ourselves salespeople. Some days we can still pretend that we're marketing people but we get to kind of own the whole customer journey there, which is exciting, right. But I think probably the biggest obstacle was number one they didn't have that understanding of kind of who I was and who I could be within the organization. So I mean, trey and I basically had to build what revenue operations and Andrew, as the chief revenue officer was going to be at SentriLock, right, we had had, historically, sales and marketing had been together and then sales and marketing were separate, and then they were together and then they were separate. There had never really been this kind of understanding institutionally within the company of where and frankly, marketing was treated as the communications department, make a newsletter, send an email blast.
Andrew Sims:And when I came in, I very much tried to push this idea that you know, there's communications, there's corporate communications and then there's demand generation right, and that I wanted the marketing team to be solely focused on demand gen and sales enablement right. And so we had to, kind of so I had to first gain control of the marketing team, which I did. You know, we had some movement on the management team and it opened up that team to not have a leader, which I then quickly grabbed it and pulled it into my org and said you know, this makes sense. And my CEO at the time was like, yes, it makes sense, let's, let's do it. And and so we, we really locked that in. But that was probably the biggest hurdle was trying to have these conversations about marketing when I was not directly leading that effort, and Trey remembers those days where we felt like we were having to convince people to do things.
Andrew Sims:I think the second thing was that at the time our marketing team structure they and again I was not in charge we tried to build out an internal agency. We tried to put a person in every single possible function that we would just assembly, line and conveyor belt marketing and it was not good from a human capital standpoint but it was also just not productive from an output standpoint. We just weren't getting things done and our Monday board was just growing and growing and growing and the backlog was growing and so finally I was just like you know what, I've got a really great agency partner here in Birmingham, a friend of mine. I was like I'm going to outsource like 75% of this and we did it. We pulled the trigger on it in the kind of second quarter of this year and we have not looked back Like they've been a great Dot Edison, they've been a great partner for us and just getting creative work done right.
Andrew Sims:So that was not you know, that was not apparent at that time that we didn't need a seven person marketing team inside of SentriLock. It just was not productive. So I think, again to answer your question, there were a lot of internal roadblocks. I think there was just a lot of structure and hierarchy, as well as competing thoughts of what marketing represented within the company, and I think we're past all that now. I think we have absolute alignment here and I think we all realize and we've all accepted the fact which I'm sure every marketing person who listens to this podcast will be like tell me your magic. Yoda Sales has finally realized that marketing is going to tell them what to say, who to say it to and when to say it, and that the job of the salesperson is to deliver those messages, run the sequence, keep the cadence alive and close the deal, but that marketing is going to prepare you for battle and it's your job to go capture the flag.
Matt Sunshine:So I've been taking some notes because I know that people that are listening to this are probably going to want to kind of break this down and go OK. So what are the strategies that I can implement? Like, what are the? What are the specific things that if, as I'm listening to the story, that I could take away and do away and do so, let me restate them and then Trey, if you want to comment on them, maybe that's a good way to add some life to what I'm saying or add some color to what I'm saying.
Matt Sunshine:So, andrew, a few of the things that you did is you really defined what the job is? It's no longer the marketing role, is no longer a corporate communications job. It's more of a demand generation job. The second thing that you did is you took stock of what are we really good at doing and what are we not as good at doing, and you outsourced and brought in expertise where you needed to, versus believing that, boy, we can do everything on our own. And then the third thing, the last thing, is you implemented a playbook that everyone understands what their job is in implementing this playbook Fair.
Trey Morris:Trey yeah, no, that's exactly what he did, you know, first of all, he had to take over marketing because the person running marketing wasn't really doing the marketing. I mean, we would have so many conversations where I felt like I was talking Andrew off a ledge because of the frustration that he had with, you know A the number of people they had, the amount of money they were investing in those people. And then the thing that was a kicker was he'd call and he'd be like, okay, should it take a month to put together a 15 second social media video? And I'm like, no, it should take a day or two.
Trey Morris:He's like that's not right. And then he would tell me how much it costs and I'm like, oh no, that's not, that's not right. And he was so frustrated and so. But he finally was able to get in control. He was able to move those resources around, he was able to figure out what the messaging was, get them on that, outsource it to a very good agency in Birmingham that was going to be more efficient, more effective and much faster, which would give the tools and resources that the sales team needed to actually start to go after and have the activity to their prospects like they needed to. And it's it's working so well.
Andrew Sims:Yeah, and Trey, I'll just say Matt Trey. I think I felt like Trey was like the man on the Island he was. He was Tom Hanks on castaway, liking all of our Facebook posts. I would look at stuff and he'd be like, well, there's Trey, he liked it, trey liked it. And I finally went back and you know I was like, look, I love Trey, but like I need more people to like our content than we pay Trey to like our content. Hey I did a good job, man, I liked every single one of them.
Andrew Sims:He earned that top fan badge on Facebook very well, but but no, you're, you're exactly right it. It was tough. There were some dark days where I was just like I don't know if I can break through this, you know, and meanwhile, matt, what's crazy about it is that we're closing so much business, Like we're, we're, we're continuing to be sex successful on the sales front, um, but we just can't, we can't get it right in the backend, which I think is what drove me crazy, because it's like I want to feel like the machine is working and we're not just like winging it here, especially knowing that we were looking at and are still looking at launching into adjacent marketplaces. Right, you know, I think, one thing that it's worth noting for anybody listening, because I think our business is very unique. I tell people all the time, you know, when I recruit salespeople, I'm like welcome to the easiest sales job you'll ever have. You know, we're in a very niche industry with a very niche product and there's a singular competitor, and so the only job is that if they're not with you, they're with them.
Andrew Sims:So go, you know, go do sales Right and and so I think that's what was going to be daunting and have lots of competitors where I can't rely on my institutional knowledge or my baked in contacts from 10 years as a customer and in the industry and I have to cold prospect and I have to run the scripts and I have to do all these things. I don't have that written down anywhere. There is no playbook, there is nothing for somebody to go out and pitch SentriLock to anybody outside of realtor world, right. So I think that's ultimately where, you know, I had the executive push, Andrew, go find new ponds to fish in.
Andrew Sims:But then I had the reality of the fact that it's like well, I can't build the blueprints, I can't design the blueprints for this because I don't have any control over it. So again, I think once we got that control in the world changed and I think once we made the organizational changes, everything, the sun got a little bit brighter. And I think, sitting here now, two weeks into the tenure of my new sales manager, because I was going to say another thing that you know people that are looking for advice one thing is that if you, if you ever find yourself holding holding the gun, holding the bayonet, holding the flag, also handling the ammo box, you need to fire yourself from one of those jobs and there were many times where I feel like Trey was trying to very passively tell me like you cannot be the sales leader and the individual contributor at the same time, like that is that?
Trey Morris:is not passive about my instructions on that.
Andrew Sims:But but you know he was right and it took me some maturation, it took me some kind of come to Jesus moments, as we say here in Alabama, before I finally realized look, my skill lies in organizing the RevOps engine, not carrying out the tactical side of it.
Andrew Sims:A lot of times, people in marketing and sales, they are multifaceted, they are multi-talented, you know they can sell, they can market, they can do all these things and they think that they can and should. Right, but you have to build the team. You have to build the team. You know you have to build SEAL Team 6 around yourself, right, and I think that's what I finally have now is that I have a good sales leader. I can focus on the, the tactical, like the, the strategy side for once. Like I can actually think about those things because I know that she is focused on. Once I give the orders, you know she's going to tell the soldiers where to go, and, and so I think that's that again was another roadblock was that I was trying to be 17 different positions while mastering none of them.
Matt Sunshine:Yeah, I would. I'll share that. I think that this is a reoccurring theme that we see again and again, certainly on this podcast, where the solution to any challenge is oh, we just need to hire somebody. And so we hire people and then, over time, that job that they were hired to do is no longer necessary. But they're really good people and you like them, and so you retrofit them into doing something else and then, before you know it, everybody's doing everything and nobody's really excelling at anything, and I think that you're articulating the real world of that in your examples. So I do have a follow-up question so you're having success, so you're having success. Let's go a little deeper on that. How do you measure success, or keep track of, or know, how do you measure the impact of this improved sales and marketing alignment that you've built? Do you have any specific metrics that you look at?
Andrew Sims:Yes, hours of sleep, no, I'm not losing them anymore. No, I think the biggest thing it's a great question and I wish I had an equally as great answer. We're kind of at that point, we're kind of at that exact moment where I'm kind of asking myself all right, how can I show quantitatively that I've done something around here, right, like I mean, the obvious KPI is, you know, money. Right, we've increased annual revenue, we've added annual revenue, we've increased our market share. Right, you know, we've shortened the gap between us and them. Those are all easy, quantifiable kind of metrics to have. One thing that we are and Trey knows about this journey too, and I guess, if I'm counting roadblocks, this is perfect therapy in time for my therapy tomorrow.
Andrew Sims:But to look back on this, we never really had a CRM, we never really had a kind of dashboard and kind of a place to look at all this stuff. Like, I mean, the people who came before me were just kind of 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, and that in itself was a journey, because we don't have, you know, as maybe a sophisticated BI, as I wish that we did, but we have. Finally. I have finally committed to HubSpot. I'm in love with HubSpot. You guys, elise and Trey, have done an amazing job, helping us just kind of push that over the line, and 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.
Andrew Sims:But you know, I think that was another major part of something that we didn't have was a way to track velocity, a way to track how many emails it takes, how quickly we get from introduction conversation to let's start talking about that.
Andrew Sims:This marriage is going to happen, right, and so I think, as we get more of that data inside of HubSpot and we kind of capture more of that kind of intent data, as I call it right, I think we're going to learn a lot more about whether or not marketing is having an impact, because right now, I couldn't tell you that marketing has ever contributed to a sale, and I want to be able to quantify that. I want to be able because, like, if you look at my customer acquisition costs, it's crazy right. That I want to be able because, like, if you look at my customer acquisition costs, it's crazy, right, because I'm looking at a whole marketing budget versus, you know, perhaps, individual accounts and that yeah. So I want to be able to get some of those metrics there. I think the eternal struggle between chief revenue and chief finance is whether you really needed to sponsor that event in order to get that client, and so I want to be able to have that number.
Trey Morris:Trey anything to add to that? No, I mean he definitely is working on it. It's been a struggle because operationally they just didn't do it, and so he is doing the right steps, he's bringing in the right people, he's starting to measure the right activities that will then give us the output, and so he I mean it's definitely helped a lot and it's just going to get better, especially the more he gets ingrained with HubSpot and really is able to measure every little activity that is going to end up giving them meetings, proposals and sales.
Matt Sunshine:Yeah, excellent, all right. My last question, and while we were talking, I was trying to think of that quote from Mad Men about how you know if advertising works. I'll find it later, maybe I'll put it in, oh yeah. It just does Make your quote your quote 50 of my advertising which which 50 yeah, no, it's not that one, but that's also a good one. But it's like you do something and you see results happen, and so you know it works.
Andrew Sims:It was something just yeah, you never knew you were at. You never knew you were at, you, never knew you were marketed to.
Matt Sunshine:Right, you never knew, it just happened, right. All right, let me final question, and maybe you can both chime in on this one. So we've talked a lot about what you've done past. We've talked to get to where you are today. We've talked about the results that you're seeing as a result of the work that you've done. Let's look forward. Let's look forward. How do you? What sort of systems, process, tactics whatever that right word is what sort of things have you put into place so that you can remain aligned, sales and marketing can remain aligned going into the future? Make sure that that communication continues so that you don't see drift happen? Give us some wisdom on that.
Andrew Sims:I'll start right where I ended on the last answer. I think unified under HubSpot or you know the platform. That technology is massive, where I feel like everything's going into one place. We're able to write the sequences, we're able to assign the cadence structure we want to leads and influencers and then just have the sales team go and do that. That's what is exciting to me, right? Because now I can focus on the strategy and the writing and the crafting of the message and know that there is the implementer in my sales manager to go and put that into action on the battlefield, Right, like that's. That is going to be huge.
Andrew Sims:The second thing is that we finally have this kind of structure in place. The biggest thing we have to do next is perfect the next stage of the customer journey right the handoffs, the implementation, the post-launch you know continuing. I mean it's interesting. I just was on another conversation about the fact that we have a 67 NPS right, which is huge. That's great. We have a 96% satisfaction rate from our current customers about their account manager, right. But I also know that there are conversations that happen where frustration and issues are still present. So I'm trying to get a handle on which narrative is true, right, and again, my account team the account management team is not recording those conversations within the environment where we could then see trends, right? Hey, if 15 people are asking about the same thing, we need to make content about it. You know, if that's an issue that's out in the marketplace, we need to make that part of our sales conversation.
Andrew Sims:Again, these are things that billion dollar companies do that have this kind of sentiment and intimate knowledge of who their customer and users are and the data within that. And our goal as a company is to go from a $40 million-a-year company to a $100 million-a-year company in the next five years, right, well, all of these things that we're talking about today are going to have to be flawless and perfect, I think, in order to really take that to the next step. And that's not to mention the other parts of it product and ops and all those other things. But as much to my dismay, I don't get to control the world. To my dismay, I don't get to control the world. So you know, I think showing that my house is in order will go a long way culturally to kind of present to people you know, hey, there is a promised land of stability out there.
Andrew Sims:Yes, you're going to have to make some tough decisions and tough calls but at the same time, you know, getting to a place of peace where I feel like we finally are. You know it will go a long way, but I think, to answer your question, it's the processes that we're going to put into place, it's the platforms that we're going to put into place, because, you know, I tell every sales rep, 80% of selling this lockbox is that it opens. The other 20% is that they like you, you're solving a problem for them and you're bringing them a solution that they didn't have before. So if I can perfect the messaging on that 20% for them, as long as the box opens, I'm going to keep making money and the box does open, by the way.
Matt Sunshine:Trey anything to add on? What are the necessary things that need to be in place to ensure that this sort of success continues into the future and that drift doesn't happen and modifications are made along the way that need to be made?
Trey Morris:Yeah, I like to say that all great companies can be described as missional. They have one objective, they have one mission, they have one destination and everyone is working together for that one singular outcome, and everything they do can be drawn back from the ultimate destination, so that every ad campaign, every sales call, every new client, every new branding piece, every new handout, everything that they do must be focused on that one thing, and there has to be continual correction if they ever get off track, because a 1% misalignment can end up being thousands of miles away from the actual destination that you wanted, and so everyone on the team has to understand that, they have to believe that and they have to be a part of that.
Matt Sunshine:Yeah, Excellent. Andrew and Trey, thank you so much for your time today. I mean, this 30 minutes went by like in a flash right. I just looked up at the clock and I saw it was 30 minutes. I was like, wow, that was super fast and that's because your willingness to be so open and forthright with your experiences just makes it so powerful. So thank you so much for joining us. Anyone that would like to reach out to either Andrew or Trey, we'll invite you to do so by putting their LinkedIn and contact information in the show notes so you'll be able to find them there. And again, thank you.
Matt Sunshine:Everyone that has listened or watched this Really appreciate it, Love sharing great insights on how businesses are having success on these episodes and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Improving Sales Performance. And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Improving Sales Performance. This has been Improving Sales Performance. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, join us every week by clicking the subscribe button For more on the topics covered in the show. Visit our website, thecenterforsalesstrategycom. There you can find helpful resources and content aimed at improving your sales strategycom. There, you can find helpful resources and content aimed at improving your sales performance.
