Breaking Silos: Gary Schwartz on Aligning Sales and Marketing for Revenue Growth

Overview:

Gary Schwartz unpacks the ongoing struggle of sales and marketing alignment, revealing why outdated lead metrics fail and how focusing on opportunities can drive real growth. He discusses the importance of aligning sales and marketing teams around shared goals, the role of BDRs in creating qualified opportunities, and how shifting from MQLs to outcome-driven metrics can transform go-to-market strategies.

Transcript:

Kerry Guard 0:00

Hello. I'm Kerry Guard and Welcome to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. Welcome back to the show. I'm so excited for our guests and our conversation today. Before we get there, a little housekeeping. This is live on LinkedIn and YouTube. It's the beauty of being live is that I get to hang out with not only a wonderful guest here, but also all of you. So we are on the edge of our seats for all of your questions, which I know you have, because Wow, is this a topic that just keeps nobody's cracked the code on it. Nobody's cracked the code on it. Maybe Gary has so bring your questions, bring your ideas. Let's have a side chat here on how you all are trying to figure out marketing and sales alignment. It's going to be great. I'm Gary has a pathway, folks, he's got a pathway. It's just a matter of whether we can stand it up and get after it's going to be good before we get there. A little bit about Gary Schwartz: Gary specializes in building tightly aligned GTM teams to Turb, turbocharge, sales, velocity, more opportunities, larger ACVs, and a higher conversion rates, all while fast-tracking the closing process. Man, the dream, Gary the dream, here's why you'll here is why you'll want to work with Gary. He's revenue-focused. He's demanding. He's he builds demand generation. He's all about brand and product marketing and his leadership style. He's got a ton of notes in here. I'm reading from his LinkedIn. If you want to know what each of these means, from revenue to demand to brand and product marketing to leadership, please go check it out. It is beefy, it is glorious, and it's all well and good, but how you got there? Gary is the real is the real secret to the sauce, because your journey is different than anybody else's, and your experience is what makes you special in terms of what you do. So tell us. Tell us your story. Gary, what do you do now? And how did you get there?

Gary Schwartz 1:56

Well, first, Kerry, I just want to say thank you so much for inviting me to join you on your show today. I'm really excited to be here, and if I can provide any value at all to your audience, I'm grateful for the opportunity to do that. So my journey it's I'm sure everybody's got unique stories to tell. I've recently launched a business called What Great Looks Like. And my mission is to build that kind of alignment between sales and marketing teams that allows them to hit and exceed their targets. And if I have to do it one by one, that's what we're going to do. So what great looks like. And the reason for the name is I've in 2025, years of being both a seller and a marketer and in leadership positions and B to B SaaS companies, I can tell you, I've seen what bad looks like. I've seen what great looks like, and I'm here to bring great into people's businesses. But you asked me, Where did I get started? So that's a good question. I studied physics in college, and I got into health physics at the time, and I started my career. I was a good little physicist, and somebody said to me, you should be in marketing. And I immediately said, Don't be such an idiot, because that's how scientists think right? Marketing is the Dark Side of the Force in that world. And they said, no, no, seriously, you should think about it. They said you would be really good in front of customers. So I thought I was young. I thought, Okay, I'm not setting the world on fire as a physicist. Let's, let's give this a go, right? There's, there's time to pivot, which was a good early lesson, which is pivoting can be a good thing at times, and what I found was that I had a really good way of explaining complex technology to people who didn't understand it in a way that made them want it. And I kind of call that product marketing and positioning today, but that's really been a cornerstone of my career, and those early lessons served me very well in the journey that's taken me to where I am now. And probably the most important focus on that path was that focus on customers. I loved talking to people, learning what their problems were and figuring out how we could solve their problems. That's in a nutshell. You know, that's my that's my jam. That's what I love to do. And that's taken me. My path took me to the United Kingdom. Whereas, you know, cut teeth on being a sales leader and Product Marketing, Marketing leadership. I'm back in New Jersey, not jersey at the moment, and so yeah, I've had the geographical journey as well as the career journey. But really, my jam is, you know, looking for those dysfunctional teams and helping them get past that. And create organizations that that play together like a well tuned orchestra, sales enablement.

Kerry Guard 5:06

Ah, the I love the orchestra analogy. I've heard that a couple times, and it's just you need the conductor. You 100% need a conductor in front of both teams, bringing them together. So we are going to unpack that before we get there. I know I keep saying, before we get there, you're all on the edge of your seats. You just can't wait. One more thing. One more thing, Gary, in terms of what you're doing now, of the alignment piece and working with different companies to do that, what challenge Are you currently facing? What's feeling hard and a little bit in the way of making your job a little easier and more streamlined?

Gary Schwartz 5:40

Well, a couple things. One is, you know, I'm now running my own business, so I'm a sales guy again, and so learning to behave like that, understanding how to close business, I'm still getting through that. And the interesting one that I was talking to someone earlier today is I'm also now having to market myself. I'm not marketing or doing demand gen on behalf of an employer. I'm doing that on behalf of myself. And it feels weird, it feels different, and I know it shouldn't, and so I'm working my way through that challenge, building lists, trying to make sure I don't upset too many people, as I, you know, bombard them with emails and then wondering, why don't I worry about that when I'm doing that on behalf of an employer? Why am I only worried about that and so, so we're working through that is, yeah, ongoing challenge.

Kerry Guard 6:36

I could speak to that all day. I certainly feel that the imposter syndrome is real Gary and marketing yourself is super hard, but it's I find it in some way a little bit relieving because you know what you're talking about, right? Like when you're marketing yourself and your expertise, and you can sit in that power. It's really kind of freeing, versus being on behalf of a brand and trying to get their messaging right and trying to really know, especially if they're really technical, you know, making sure you really dial in like who they are and why they're different. And it's so much, and that regard, it's harder. It's definitely overcoming posture syndrome. On our side of marketing ourselves is definitely tough. But on the flip side, they cut. They both have their pros and cons.

Gary Schwartz 7:22

It's and I gotta just get through it right. I think really, that's what that is. And in terms of working with, you know, the companies that have been consulting with and and advising, I think the biggest challenge is that there's a lot of old school thinking that that hasn't really caught up to the way people buy today. There there been a lot of changes in buyer behavior, partly driven by the pandemic, partly driven by the fact that there's more and more millennials that are making buying decisions, and they want to be communicated with in very different ways, and I and we'll talk about this, you know, a bit more right throughout the discussion. But I heard from an investor in a series a startup, as I was walking through, you know, here's my assessment of where you're at, and here's where we need to go. He directly asked, how many MQLs Are you going to deliver to sales? And I thought, Well, you were not thinking about the right metrics here. The MQL is quickly becoming a deprecated metric, and people don't want to hear that yet. So, but my position is, I don't want you to have to go through another 12 months of not getting to where you want to go in the investment that you've made. Let's figure out a better way to do this that's going to maybe not align with how you've done things for the past 15 years, but how you're going to need to do things and what's really going to drive growth for your business. And I think getting helping people pass that and overcome those older ways of thinking is, is it's a challenge, and I think it's one a lot of us are working together to overcome.

Kerry Guard 9:11

It's definitely tricky, because without capturing leads on a regular basis, it feels a little like, from a marketing standpoint, we're working a little bit in a black box. It's a lot harder to show our value out of the gate. It takes a lot longer till you, till that revenue starts heading and the contacts booked, contacts start coming, we'll unpack all this in a minute. But I'm feeling that pain as well as with with my own clients, of how I'm trying to move them away from leads and MQLs and thinking more about brand and how the messaging needs to land with folks in a way that you know nurtures them through the experience to want to then work with them. And it's um, it's it's longer and stiff, it's different. You. Everybody's a little scared to make decisions right now.Gary Schwartz

Gary Schwartz 10:02

Yeah, and buyers behave differently. Buyers don't want to become when's the last time you filled in a form? Kerry to get to some content, I don't do that because I know I'm going to get a call from a BDR who's been told if they filled in a form, they're in MQL, and you got to call them within five minutes. I spoke to someone recently who downloaded a 40 page white paper and received a call five minutes afterward asking how they enjoyed the white paper. So you know, and you know, I do say MQLs are a deprecated metric. There they are important in understanding engagement and trying to understand when is the right time to reach out to people. I think there are other there's another technology now that's available that delivers signals, that gives indications of when people are in buying motions. But the idea that somebody gave up their name to get some content and they are ripe for contact is is really old school, and that's, that's the kind of thing that needs to change, and we need to think about, and we can get into this a little bit our ICP and understanding, you know, because I think you're right on the brand, the messaging side, as long as you got authenticity, you're going To largely be in a good place. But it's about understanding when people are ready to move forward in a buying activity or buying decision, and a lot of the content, a lot of stuff, is earlier stages, and people could be researching, they could be the but you want them to be aware of you as a vendor, but that's a different question that starts looking at SEO, and how do you build awareness, and so on. So it's, I want to say it's not trivial, but to unpack it, I think the key, and I know we're going to get into this, is really how you align goals and objectives of your sales and marketing team so that the behaviors drive in the direction you want to get to, and that they're not destructive behaviors that just upset people who aren't ready to be contacted. But we'll get into that in a little bit more

Kerry Guard 12:15

detail. Trevor van Warden always popping in. Lovely to see you, sir. He says that immediate call MQL strategies have become pretty rare. So that's good news because, yeah, yes, they should. I hope that's

Gary Schwartz 12:29

true, but I don't always see that. I see especially really early stage companies where they just want people to talk to anybody who fills in a form. Is an immediate MQL. You know, maybe it's not everybody, but it's definitely something to consider.

Kerry Guard 12:49

Okay, let's get into it, folks. So in terms of today and what Gary's talking about in terms of marketing and sales alignment, we're gonna talk through first the why this is still an issue, and then get into the how we're going to solve the issue, and then how you get after the plan to solve the issue. So that's the format we're going to follow. We're going to try and stay on track. But you know me, I love a good tangent. So you know, we might take a little, a little turn here or there, but we'll come right back on track. Don't you worry. So Gary, let's, let's kick it off. Let's talk first about, why are we still having this conversation like I've been doing podcasting for almost five years now, and I remember my very first season back in 2019 I had somebody on my show where we talked about this exact topic. We are still having this conversation. So help me understand why?

Gary Schwartz 13:40

Well, I'll start by saying I still recall an interview I had with a CEO in London when I was living in the UK. And this is, this is close to 20 years ago now. We spent an hour together, and the very last thing he said to me as I was leaving is, he says marketing is just leads. And I thought, Okay, well thank you for that. I don't need to talk to you again, but that's I think that is the basic problem, is the idea, and this still exists today in too many businesses, where a structure is set up, where marketing is expected to create leads, right? It used to be called lead generation. They change the name through demand generation, but they still think lead generation and marketing throws the leads over the wall to sales, and sales is then meant to follow up with those leads. And that's wrong behavior on so many, so many ways, because you heard me say throwing the leads over the wall, right? That's the definition of a silo, right? It's, it relegates marketing. Forget all the brand and the messaging and all that good stuff. Your jobs just give us leads and we'll be happy. And then you worry about sales organizations who aren't necessarily following up on the leads. It creates those arguments, well, you're not following up on the leads that we give you. What you know? Going on. It just creates a mechanism for people to point fingers at one another. So when the foundation is our job is to create leads, you follow up on and then you go ahead and close the business. It creates a separation between marketing and sales, and we haven't even gotten into the customer success side. I think we'll keep that out of I don't want to go down that tangent today, but the foundation is that line of thinking that relegates marketing to being a service provider whose job is to deliver leads, and to me, it starts resolving that starts with aligning on metrics that are outcome driven, and then align to the goals of the business. I'm a huge fan of OKRs, and, to me, leads our KPIs, and I know we're getting into like, acronym soup here.

Kerry Guard 15:58

Okay, that's okay. Let's break both of those down, though, before we get too far down the rabbit hole. So we got OKRs and we got KPIs. Let's, let's define those and then give examples of each.

Gary Schwartz 16:08

Great, so OKRs stands for objectives and key results, and those should be relatively few for a business I worked in a series a startup four years ago, two OKRs for the whole business, and those OKRs, one was revenue, and the other was utilization of our product by individuals that were being impacted by the product and in a positive way, everybody in the company was driven to we measured those constantly, like on a weekly basis. How are we doing towards our revenue? How are we doing towards utilization of the product? And then each department had its own OKRs that rolled up into the corporate OKRs. So I ran marketing there. I had one OKR that OKR was opportunities created. My job was to create opportunities. And what was good about that is all my budget, all my spend, all my activities, were judged against. How is it going to help you hit your OKRs so you never we never ran into busy work, right? We never had marketing's doing all these things. I don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it, because we had everything we're doing was rolling up to, how is it going to help us deliver opportunities? Then how are those opportunities going to help us deliver revenue? It was very, very simple. And then we aligned with sales on that as our OKR, sales OKR was to close the opportunities and generate revenue. So OKRs. If you've got 200 OKRs in your company, you don't have any. And I've had people tell me, Oh, we got hundreds of OKRs, but they are the very few things that matter most. They're outcome driven. They deliver outcomes to the business. KPI, right.

Kerry Guard 17:57

Hold on, sorry before we move on. Sorry about opportunities for a second, because I feel like this could get muddled as well in terms of what is is, I don't know that I agree with this Gary, I was going to state what maybe people are thinking and aren't able to say out loud right now. But aren't opportunities just MQLs?

Gary Schwartz 18:15

No, they're not, and this is part of how you solve the problem. Opportunities are opportunities that are qualified and accepted in the CRM. And I've worked in variety of different companies that have different qualification criteria to allow a sales rep to create an opportunity in the CRM, and to a large extent, they use band. I'm going to stop the alphabet soup, right? BANT is budget authorization. Need and timing. In my mind, need and timing are the most important right. Need is about, do you have a problem that we can provide a solution to? And timing is, do you know when you need to solve that problem by because if I don't know the timing, then I don't really have, I'm not top of mind for you. So those are very important, but getting agreement on what makes for a qualified opportunity is key. And then we'll talk in a bit about where the BDRs fit into this, with this, with the with the sales reps, to be aligned on what is a qualified opportunity. But to me, that's the trick, and that is an OKR, because if I know my conversion rates, that say I'm going to convert one out of four upper qualified opportunities into a deal that helps me understand how now, how many opportunities do I need to create? Now your question was, isn't an MQL the same as an opportunity? It's not. I would consider an MQL as a key performance indicator. Really, I would say it's a key leading indicator. How many MQLs Am I generating? How do they convert to becoming so if it's a marketing an MQ, all an MQL is, and this is because Mark. Automation software enabled us to track this all in MQL is is a measurement of how often are people engaging with us as a business or our content. And you apply a scoring system to that, and magically, when they hit X number of points, let's say it's 100 points. You know, Kerry, you've seen us at an event, you've downloaded a white paper, you filled in some form, presto, you're an MQL. Problem is you don't know you're an MQL I don't know if you're actually ready to buy but the marketing automation system let me create a mechanism to say these people are MQLs. Then we work to turn you from a marketing qualified lead, because you've engaged with our marketing stuff to now call you a sales qualified lead, because, in my experience, maybe 20 or 25% of MQLs will become SQL sales qualified leads. Then I'll get you into a meeting, and hopefully 75 or 80% of the sales qualified leads become qualified opportunities. But you see, what I'm doing is I'm walking down a conversion funnel, and I would say all those steps on the conversion funnel, where you call them KPIs, performance indicators, or leading indicators of performance Klis, to muddle it further, those are paths to an outcome, and an opportunity is an outcome, because that's the first time we should have alignment between sales and marketing that that person or that organization is in a buying motion, and therefore they're when we're they're qualified to spend time with them, right in order to sell to them. So that's how I demarcate those.

Kerry Guard 21:45

Okay, so what's the trigger? And maybe you said it, but I just want to make sure we sort of zone in on it. There's this moment you talked about it before as throwing it over the wall, but there's this moment that happens between the MQL and the SQL is that, in a perfect world scenario where people do fill in forums, is that when a meeting is that's when the meeting's booked, right? The meeting is booked when it gets handed nicely over to sales. Is that the moment,

Gary Schwartz 22:15

Well, the way that I think about it, and this gets into that where, you know, where the SDRs live conversation in many organizations. SDRs are part of the sales organization. They're called sales development representatives, but I've seen them called BDRs, Business Development representatives, Ace ADRs, I've seen them called account development representatives, but they are the person who is tasked with taking, contacting, reaching out to that MQL and determining, are you really qualified to have a meeting with sales. This is where that whole conversation of delivering MQL to sales comes from, because in companies that are organized that way, what marketing is doing is they're delivering MQLs to the SDR who sits in the sales organization. Now, I would ask, how many MQLs Do you want? Right? I could, I could set the scoring system in different ways. I could give you 1000s and waste a lot of your time talking to unqualified people. I could give you fewer and have you spend your time better and talk to really qualified people, and we should be able to get in the right place, in the right agreement on that. But this is where that throwing the leads to sales comes in. The way that I've seen it work really, really well. Is where these first let's call them BDRs, Business Development representatives, these people who are reaching out to your prospects when they sit in marketing, and their job is to contact people to do a little bit of qualification, right? Do we have the need and the timing and set up what I would call that first meeting, whether you call it an initial qualifying meeting, whatever meeting where it's the first time the sales rep is going to meet with that person that, in my mind, becomes that handover and that conversion point, that BDR creates the meeting, and then the salesperson is responsible For saying, Yeah, that's qualified. I'm going to turn that into a qualified opportunity. Or no, that's not qualified now, in the places where I've seen that work the best, that's how we have that structure. But here's the other catch, a lot depends on how you compensate your BDRs. If anybody who's listening today has talked to has hired appointment setters, meeting setters, right? And I've never seen those go well, because the meeting setters are paid. Oh, well, you know you're paying me. My agreement is, I'm gonna get you 30 meetings a month. I'm gonna deliver you 30 meetings a month. Now, those meetings. May or may not go anywhere, because there's no skin in the game for them after those meetings are set. And too many times I've seen BDRs compensated or incentivized on how many meetings are they setting for the salespeople. And where I've seen this work best is I don't pay the BDRs and how many meetings they're going to set. I pay them on how many opportunities are then accepted by my sales team. So in effect, the BDRs are dependent on a really good relationship with their account exec, so they know what the account Exec is looking for and moving that more quickly to be in a qualified opportunity. So it starts to so that way of structuring organizationally, and I'll get into why it's all you know, other reasons why it's a good idea to have the BDRs in marketing, but where their compensation is not based on setting meetings. That's like based on creating MQLs. How many do you want? Their compensation is based on the sales rep accepting that as a qualified opportunity. Well, now what happens? Now, they create, they work together. They the good BDRs who want to make money, spend a lot of time with their AES and say, Okay, where's your focus area? What company should I be talking to? What people should I be talking to? Those companies? How should I talk to them. They're learning. You're creating a really solid mentor mentee relationship. Because let's face it, most BDRs want to be AES when they grow up, and so it's a great place for them to start learning. What do I need to be thinking about? How am I going to be basically delivering to you what really matters, which is qualified opportunities that we're then going to convert into sales. Now you're starting to build a real handshake between sales and marketing, because we're not throwing leads anymore at you. What we're doing is we're delivering qualified opportunities. Remember, I said my OKR as a marketing leader in that company, was opportunities, the way that I know I delivered opportunities was that my BDRs were setting the meetings, working with the account execs, and my BDRs were paid and measured on how many opportunities were they creating. I was measured as the head of marketing on how many opportunities was my team creating that were accepted by the AES. And I can tell you, I've never had a better working relationship with sales than I had at that organization, because I had a sales leader who was my partner in crime on this we were totally aligned. We and the CEO were aligned on those as the OKRs that were driving our business. Because remember, the OKRs were not just about meeting that target. They were about Gary. How are you aligning your team's activities so that they're going to deliver those opportunities you're tasked with creating? So my content team, my blog team, my events teams, my demand gen team were all measured on how many opportunities were their activities created. The BDRs were just the focal point of making that happen. What did we have? We had a team that was aligned on business outcomes, not lead generation.

Kerry Guard 28:17

This is interesting because it goes into what Trevor van Warden saying in terms of so comment he made is, I'm convinced this imbalance is because sales has way more capacity than most marketing orgs. It doesn't resolve until the marketing org is in front of the sales org, and sales is sprinting to keep up. Now, knowing Trevor and have having had this conversation with him on a couple occasions. What he's saying at the end there is that marketing is creating so many opportunities that sales is struggling to keep up with all of them. Like that's that's the dream for sales organization. So I think what you're saying, Gary, in relation to that, what helps here is by having the BDRs on the marketing side and giving more resources to marketing in a way that can warm up those leads and can see if they're ready to buy, could create that balance that you're both talking about.

Gary Schwartz 29:12

When, yeah, I think that's the case. And when, when you're aligned on opportunities as your metric or pipeline creation as your metric that allows you to structure your teams to deliver on that metric. So I would argue, you know, and I'm probably agreeing with Trevor, but my suggestion was the the BDR team needs to keep up with the capacity of the sales team. And what you end up with is, you, you no longer have an Oh, sales is generating more opportunities than marketing is or sales pipeline, or marketing generated pipeline, because, in a perfect world, marketing is delivering the messaging and the cadences and the material that sales, when they're doing their own prospecting, is using. So even if sales is. One who is the last touch. It's content and material derived from marketing because everybody should be using the same messaging that delivers that. So I think, you know, marketing should be thinking that it's contributing 100% of the pipeline. And BDRs are one channel partners, and we haven't even talked about that ecosystem, but that's one channel, and sales is one channel, right? Nobody should think that's beneath them to be doing their own prospecting. But when everybody's aligned on the ICP, when everybody's aligned on who are the companies we're going after, and how are we doing that, then the capacity becomes less of an issue, because what we're focused on is, here's our pipeline target, here's our opportunity target to get to that pipeline. How do we divvy up the responsibilities to get there? Now it may be that a company has a strategic sales team they're going after, you know, like the big fish, or the companies that are the ones we really, really, really have to be in front of. Maybe we task the sales team with doing prospecting, but working with their BDRs, because there should be a mapping, a pairing of BDRs to account executives, because that's how they learn from one another. And then maybe it goes more heavily on the BDRs to focus on inbound that's coming in those MQLs I think of as inbound activities, but there's and there's certainly different ways to structure that, but they all need to be thinking about what's the outcomes we're trying to create in the outcomes that We're trying to create this pipeline for the business, qualified pipeline that we're going to be able to convert at a predictable rate.

Kerry Guard 31:49

This is good, because this happens, happens all the time. Gary, I'm on the I'm on a vendor marketing, vendor side for marketing, right? So I'm an agency, and I support marketers, and so nothing hurts our heart more than when our marketing managers show up and say, I got our targets for the next quarter, and they look like they just got hit with a baseball bat, because the targets came from the top, and it's what you're Talking about, right? So the targets are coming in, and the revenue goal is there, and then you work the numbers backwards, and all of a sudden your KPIs feel out of reach. This constantly, right? All companies do this. Inevitably, the CEO shows up, or the CFO shows up and says, We to grow X percent year over year. Let's go marketing. And they haven't. All they're doing is looking at their math, right? They're not looking at all the KPIs that go into making that math possible. And so then it falls on marketing and sales to all of a sudden try and close that gap, and it feels like a mountain. How do you help? You know, we're speaking to marketers, mostly marketers and some sales folks right now, when that happens to them, and you're looking at this from a sales op, from a from an OKR opportunity standpoint, how do you overcome that challenge with this framework?

Gary Schwartz 33:20

The first thing is, I feel for them. I've been there too, and I would, I would just question, what's the request from the top? Because I wouldn't expect the CEO to say, you've got to generate this number of MQLs, or you've got to generate this number of leads. I would expect the CEO kind of to your points. Okay, we need to generate X percent growth. And there's, I guess, one of the ways that I would guide people to work through this is to ask to frame the question in a different way, because they're probably working on certain assumptions that are long-held assumptions. And when they do their math, it comes out with, well, I need to generate 4 million leads a quarter, and that's impossible, right? And that's where they look like they're hit by the baseball bat. But I think of corporate growth, and I didn't invent this term, Kerry and but I think in terms of an equation, see, this is my physicist training, comes back in a good way every now and again, and I think of sales velocity. So I didn't invent the term sales velocity, but it's a simple expression, and it's defined by the number of opportunities times the average, the ACV, the average contract value for those opportunities, times the conversion rate, and then divided by the time to close. So if we're given a lead target, I think what we're assuming is that the ACV the time to close. And the conversion rates are static, therefore, sorry guys, you just need to create more opportunity, more leads, in order to get to the more opportunity count. And I would start looking for ways marketing and sales can work together to create more value, right? If I can double the ACV, then I've just halved that ridiculous lead request. Right? The best way to increase your sales velocity is to close deals faster. Right? When that number goes in the denominator and it gets smaller, the number in the numerator gets higher, a lot more quickly. And then if we can increase our conversion rate again, then we're relying on less at the top, and it's all got to be predictable. It's not like, you know, just roll the dice and here we go. But those are the kind of the questions I would ask is, how can we get better at other other performance, at other tactics and other strategies to allow us to hit our growth targets without just amping up the lead generation. Because I'll tell you one thing, the other reason that person feels like they've been hit by a baseball bat is their budget hasn't grown to accommodate that request either. 100%

Kerry Guard 36:16

Absolutely 100% normally, sometimes it even gets cut. Right? Hey, hey, marketing team, we have to grow by 20% year over year, but your budget is actually gonna come down a smidge. Sorry, you're losing a head count, right? Ah, so I love what you're saying. I actually had a really great conversation with one of my clients when they brought me on, they were giving me lead goals, and I was like, why? And they were like, well, we know that we need to hit this many leads to close, you know this many to get this many meetings to close. And I was like, right, but I need to see where, what deals are closing more often, and if they're that, and where are the higher deals coming from, and you're spending ACV was huge in this like your ACV for some of these channels is super high. You are chasing people all over the place. Can we not do that and focus on putting that money towards the higher propensity of those more quality leads who are going to close faster, at a higher rate than these other folks that you're just chasing around because you feel like revenue is revenue, not all revenue was created equal, as the ACB proves. So 100% agree with taking a minute to figure out where, where can you juice the lemon a little bit more? And to your point, it fits in these little pockets that you don't need a ton of juice. You just need that little extra percentage in that conversion rate over here and that little, you know, month close, that just one month faster over here. And it all, it all adds up, for sure. So hats off to you on on that, because I think a lot of times we feel like we have to go argue and push back, and that's not, I think, taking a minute to say, do we, or is there, where's that value, or is that opportunity for us to bring that so I'm so glad you didn't say, Well, you go back to your CEO and tell them, It's not a chance. That's like, I don't know too many people who have that authority to be able to do that. So thank you for that playbook. I think that's wonderful. In terms of we have the we have the sale, we have the BDRs on the marketing side, with the sales team. They're doing this lovely handshake. They're working together. We're focused on OKRs. Is there anything else to this sales and marketing alignment that we need to make sure is in place to ensure that this is going to go off without a hitch. What am I missing?

Gary Schwartz 38:45

There's loads of places, and it's, you know, I've one of the things I value in my career is I've been the sales leader in the siloed organization. So I get to point fingers at both sales and marketing in a good way, but I had an experience. And this also I was living in the UK. At this time, I was opening up the UK business for a San Francisco-based organization, and marketing was working from what I called the ivory tower. They had no idea what was actually going on in the field and what objections, what the salespeople were hearing, what worked, what didn't work. And it was a huge, huge learning for me that there was a big opportunity missed there where, if you as a marketing person want to validate your messaging, I mean, look, everybody's got great ideas. Everybody you know. You're there because you're smart, you're there because you know your space. You're there in many cases because you've done it before, and you've got all these great ideas, but the best way to validate those great ideas is to talk to the folks who talk with your market on a daily basis. And so I'd experience. Last year, when I was at Veracode and we were launching an amazing new product. It was an AI driven product that didn't just scan for flaws, but actually resolved them, corrected security flaws in code. And as we were getting our positioning going, our I had some questions of our product marketing team, is this really going to fly? And we went and talked to our sales architects, the people who and the sales architects, the SES, you're the ones who I love the most, because you're the ones who hear the truth you know the most about what the problems are and how to solve the problems and and what I find is clients tell you the truth. They don't always tell the the reps all the truth, because the reps are trying to take your money, but you're just there to solve your problem. So those people are the gold dust in any go to market organization. My question to them was, this is what we built. We built an ROI calculator. Is it going to fly? And they said, no way that those people aren't going to know, that our audience is not going to know those metrics. Here's what you need to do with that ROI calculator. And I was like, Okay, well, thank God we talked about this. We rebuilt the calculator before we launched the web page, right before we got into, you know, a mess. And two, you know, a couple of things happen. One is, you rebuild the trust when you're doing that, when you're validating and you're in there in the trenches with your sales organization as a marketer, all of a sudden they trust you. They know you're not going to feed them stuff that they can't use. And then the other thing is, they're immediately bought into the result, because they contributed to the result. So what are they going to do when their colleagues, have you seen this stuff that marketing gave us? They're going to be, you know? Yeah, I saw that stuff, and I helped them build that, and you should use it, right? And it creates this really, bigger cohesion amongst the organization. So the sales team, we should be in each other's pockets all the time working to learn what resonates, what doesn't resonate, what are you hearing? Right? The best thing I could learn as a marketer is, what objections are you hearing the most often, and how can we work together to understand how to manage those so to me, that's another, another pinch point where you can create that collaboration, that cohesion and that trust at the end of the day between the sales and the marketing organizations. I much prefer to talk about it is okay. We are one go-to market team. It's not sales and marketing or enemies of each other. We're all working together to deliver that one. OKR, that means the most, which is our revenue,

Kerry Guard 42:49

revenue. I love that when I have joined the same company that I was just talking about, the one thing I said to the salesperson was, it's my job to make your job easier. That is my mission in coming on, is to see how I can make your job easier. So with that in mind, and having and him knowing that and that I was in his corner, every decision I made, I came back to that, right? You're chasing these people around, and it's a really high ACV. We're not we're going to cut this channel. You're not going to need to worry about these folks anymore. And he had a little bit of panic. He's a little bit of panic. He's like, Well, are we leaving revenue on the table? And it's like, no, it's okay. We're not going to leave revenue down the table. We're going to shift our efforts towards the things that are working most and figure out how to make them even work even better. And then he was talking about,

Gary Schwartz 43:39

no, sorry, that's just so important is focus, right? And so many companies like that, they try to be everything to everybody, even large organizations even startups. So what you're describing is, how can we focus on the stuff that's going to get us the most bang for our buck? I love that

Kerry Guard 43:54

absolutely. Yeah. And then the second piece is the nurturing piece, right? So, still needing them to do a little bit of calling and following up and making sure that, like, if somebody fills in a contact us form, they're doing their due diligence of doing that, but then supporting them behind the scenes, from a marketing and nurturing perspective of making sure that we're also surrounding them and helping that conversation along and to help them close that deal faster as well? So when I said that, you know, he feels really slow right now, I'm like, I know, but like your higher, your ACV is higher, and the deals you're closing are higher. So I appreciate that. That feels weird, but hang in there, like more is coming. And so it's been an interesting shift for the salesperson. But he trusts me. And he said it, he's like, if I didn't trust you, I You wouldn't be here right now. And I said, I know, but I got you, Chris, it's going to be okay. So I think, yes, talking to your salespeople so critical, and really hearing what's hard for them and what's in their way. And to your point, hey, check out your check your messaging, because they know. So they know what is going to land and not land, because here I am talking the customer all day last if you could give people one last piece of advice here, Gary, in terms of marketing and sales alignment, we know we've talked through what the core challenges are of why people are out of alignment, in terms of being in silos, because they're working on different metrics in terms of marketing, throwing leads over to sales. And having a lot of conversation there. We talked about the beautiful channel of the BDR, and how that could really lend itself to working with sales and to getting to those SQL and everybody working towards, again, that OKR of opportunities. And we talked a little bit about how we can work, you know, to with leadership in, you know, building this out. Is there anything last piece of advice for folks as they think about, man, I want this, but I don't know where to begin, and this seems really scary, and I'm just low man on the totem pole here as marketing manager. How could I help sort of move the needle here and make, you know, working towards this op, you know, this structure? What? What advice do you have for folks out there?

Gary Schwartz 46:09

Well, I'll tell you one of the best pieces of advice I ever got. Actually, I'll give you two pieces of advice that I got from this mentor when I first moved into marketing, when I left the physics world. One thing he said to me is never lie. Tell the truth in the most positive way possible. I've kept that with my with me all those years. And then the other one, which I think really resonates, is a relentless focus on the customer. And he said to me, ask yourself, if you're not sure what to do, ask yourself, What's best for your customers? And he said, nine times out of 10 that will give you the right answer for the business. And I would say, you know, I know the challenges right. I've lived, you know, I've lived both the toxic and the damning organizations, but I know the challenge is and it's just stay grounded and what you're doing is what's best for the customer that's going to show itself in your messaging, and how your sales team works with your customers, how your customer success team works, how you're creating demand. All the things that we're trying to do, focus on what's best for the customer, and nine times out of 10 you'll be going in the right direction.

Kerry Guard 47:30

I love that. It really does when you can build that trust and that bridge with the customer, that's really what it comes down to. And marketing and sales go about it a little differently, because they have to, but ultimately, ultimately, we're there to create opportunities, and the best way to do that is by making customers happy. It's what we're here for. We're here for Gary. Before we close out two last two last things for Gary. One is, if people want to learn more about setting up this kind of go to market strategy across marketing and sales, where can they find

Gary Schwartz 48:00

you? Well, they can find me. Excuse me. Sorry. They can find me at what great looks like.com, it's got hyphens because the other domain was taken. So what dash? Great dash looks dash like.com They can find me there, and I will respond to the Contact Us forms. I don't have anything for you to download, so don't worry about me contacting you because you downloaded my white paper. Not a thing. You'll find me on LinkedIn. I'm been LinkedIn long enough that my name is my tag, so after the i n, it's slash Gary Schwartz, and more than happy to to chat with people, learn about your challenges and see how we could work together to to get you to where you need to be.

Kerry Guard 48:47

I love that, Gary. Before we close out one last thing, because you were more than a marketing leader and a go-to-market strategist. What are you most worried we're almost in October. We are four days away here, folks from q4 I know crazy, crazy, and it's going to be short. It's always a short q4 because the holidays, you know, come in out of nowhere and and while we're grateful to have the time off, it's a crutch. It's a crutch. So Gary for you from a personal side, what are you most looking forward to in the final months here of 2024

Gary Schwartz 49:23

Well, on the personal side, I'm looking forward to walking unaided again. I had surgery on my hip last week. I got a brand new hip, but that's going really well. And for q4 again, for me personally, I'm looking to build new relationships. And as I said, my mission is to remove that toxicity one company at a time. And so looking to meet folks and do that, my guidance to people, say, one of my good friends and former colleagues has a sign in her home office that's visible on all the video calls. That says, Just breathe. So I would say to everybody, remember, just breathe. We'll get where we need to get to.

Kerry Guard 50:09

Beautiful Gary. Thank you so much, and thank you to our listeners and to the folks in the comments. I appreciate you and carpenter Trevor Van Gordon so good to have you guys hanging out with us. We look forward to following up with some of these comments asynchronously. Don't you worry; we're here for it. We'll be doing that. Thank you to our other listeners. We're gonna republish this across all the channels, and I'm so excited to get this content out there, as it's so helpful. So, thank you again. Gary, this episode was brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps complex brands get found via SEO and digital ads, is hosted by me, Kerry Guard, CEO and co-founder of MKG Marketing, Music Mix and mastering, done by Snappy. And if you'd like to be a guest, I'd absolutely love to have you ping me. Let's hang out. Thank you so much.

Gary Schwartz 50:57

Thanks so much, Kerry.