Inside the Revenue Engine-Matthew Kanaskie on Breaking Down Team Silos

Overview:

In this episode, Kerry Guard talks with Matt Kanaskie about breaking down silos and building a unified revenue engine. Drawing from his journey in sales leadership and product management, Matt explains how his team creates harmony across functions—balancing priorities, navigating shifting customer needs, and using collaborative planning to stay agile. Whether you're a revenue leader, marketer, or product owner, you'll walk away with practical strategies to improve alignment and deliver faster value across the board.

Transcript:

Matt Kanaskie 0:00

This one I love, I perk up about it a little bit. The actual like quotation templates, the design and the format is a marketing function, what they look like and then what content is attached to it. The quoting and pricing is sales, right? But the SKUs and the catalog is product. So even that simple function of creating a quote as those three teams working together, and there can be a lot of deliberation on what a proposal should look like.

Kerry Guard 0:36

Hello, I'm Kerry Guard, and welcome to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. Matt and I are ready to rock and ride, and we're grateful you are here. It's gonna be great. That's put you on the spot. Matt, all the greatest answers put you on the spot. Well, yeah, I mean, that's what you're here for. Your expertise. We're ready for it before we get into it. A little bit about Matt. He's a accomplished sales leader, possessing a diverse background within the technology industry, expertise developed from the direct and indirect selling models combined with management and oversight of multiple technology practices, proven development of top performing sales teams, future sales leaders and revenue producing sales programs.

Matt Kanaskie 1:12

Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me happy to be here.

Kerry Guard 1:15

Excited to have you now. That was just a little blurb from your LinkedIn. I totally stole it. Thank you for doing my job for me. I appreciate you, but really, what I care about is your story of how you even got into sales. Because whether we found marketing or sales or it found us, it's never, it's never a linear path. What do you do now and how'd you get there?

Matt Kanaskie 1:31

Yeah, sure thing. Well, I started off in kind of the most traditional way of climbing the sales ladder as a telemarketer, that was the fancy title we were graced with when we started as telemarketers, and, you know, smiling and dialing, rolling through the Yellow Pages and making calls all day. And obviously that has matured to roles like business development representatives or sales development representatives now, but back then, we just had a phone, so, you know, did the outbound business development grew into an outside sales role, moved into more of a technical overlay role, into sales engineering, and then moved into sales leadership roles, overseeing teams, and then started working on the partner side of the business, working with independent partners, then also managing my own sales team. Kind of grew through the ranks, you know, up through sales management, Director, VP, and led large-scale sales teams. And then in my most recent venture here, joined the sales and marketing and product development functions under one house, and that is my current job duty with cyber advisors, is overseeing those three functions of the organization, and all that career leading up to that led me to that desire of merging those together, instead of them being different departments or different teams.

Kerry Guard 2:49

When you talk about your journey and coming up through the ranks, you don't you don't mention marketing a product at all. And so this is your first? I can't imagine. This is your first rodeo with these teams.

Matt Kanaskie 2:59

Well, no, it's not, it started, I guess I should clarify. Was a product manager and oversaw product development as one of my roles for a couple of years. And with that is where I really started getting further connection to the marketing function than sales, right? There's kind of a wall with sales and marketing and different goals. And, you know, sometimes they're great relationships, sometimes they're contentious. And in going into the product development side, you have to work with both right, and you have to create that harmony, and you develop an offering that has to be marketed and presented a certain way, but also sold and presented a certain way. And that increased my exposure to the importance of marketing in developing the message, developing the strategy, ensuring continuity and how it was designed and intended to be delivered is actually being what's represented when it is being delivered in sales calls or in content or on your website. So product management was actually the kind of glue that the product marketing side and sales was what connected the dots.

Kerry Guard 4:05

For me, that's interesting. So I've never really heard it put that way. I mean, product is essentially, you're gonna correct me if I'm wrong on this. I've had several product managers on my show, wonderful humans. It really did come down to content, right? Their primary role was to really take, take the thing and the audience and figure out how to message these things together to drive people through. So it sounds like content is really become, you know, Product Marketing being the function, but content being the thing.

Matt Kanaskie 4:44

That is the glue between all three functions, you could have designed the greatest product ever that solves the greatest challenge ever, but if no one knows about it and you can't share it with anyone, it's a ton of wasted effort. And so that was really the connection point for me. Was. We were identifying like and we put all this effort into making some, we think, solve so many problems, but how do we tell anyone about it, and how do we get them to listen to it and engage with it? So, yeah, content is certainly part of that, right? And then also, like the messaging with the sales team, making sure that they're actually presenting the value points that we worked on for months that we believe are the core value points. And then, you know, getting someone to listen. We spend a time, you know, a lot of time making this. How do we get people to listen?

Kerry Guard 5:29

It's an interesting time we're in in terms of the buyer, because we can't make, in my experience.

Matt Kanaskie 5:37

Yeah, do anything to be restated as, how do we get them exposure to it and let them draw their own conclusion of value, but how do we bring relevancy to what we had designed, and how do we bring awareness to it? And then that is really the role of marketing. And the combination with product is we spend a lot of time engineering something. How do we bring awareness to it and get other people engaged with it?

Kerry Guard 6:02

I just said this to somebody about, they were talking about the website, you know, like, we need somebody to build a website and to manage it. And I said, right, but just because you build it doesn't mean they'll come Well, it's true right from, you know, I know we all love the Field of Dreams quote, but at the end of the day, it's actually from a marketing perspective, a complete perspective, a complete lie and and really important to, you know, bring people to the well. So I love what you're saying, and I love to think of content as a goal. Actually, I was just talking to a friend of mine who's in sales, and I was like, how do you get your foot in the door? Like, what's the thing you do? And he's like, Oh, well, I develop a piece of content, usually a report, and then I I, you know, try to have a conversation around that report. And I was like, so you're using content? He's like, Yes, as a salesperson, I found that fascinating, that he's developing his own content to create these relationships. So it makes a ton of sense that you would have all three of these functions under the one umbrella that is working with the same content just to deliver that value. So in terms of your function now and working with these three teams, what's the biggest challenge y'all are facing? You know, before we get into the heart of our conversation, it's nice to just know we're all in the same boat. Things being hard?

Matt Kanaskie 7:22

Yeah. I mean, it's certainly hard, because those three functions are going to have sometimes contentious goals or timelines, and so aligning timelines with the demands or needs sales wanting it right away, but marketing, having a backlog or product having numerous projects that are ahead of the one that sales thinks we need most. So I'd say prioritizing the alignment is probably one of the more difficult tasks, and because it's not that we don't need to do all of them, we do need to do all of them, and that's where the harmony comes from. But you have to pick and choose kind of what's first or what's most important or going to have the highest impact to the organization, and then align the resources towards that effort inevitably disappointing some other project, or some other development of that project that was felt more pertinent, and those decisions are typically made based on market opportunity, right? Sometimes, how big of a project like? Is this a net new from scratch we've got to build everything, or are we just revising something so we can get it done quick? And then, you know, furthermore, are our customers actually asking for that? So really, what we have started implementing more recently is getting our customers involved in the development and prioritization of that list by introducing them to surveys and questioning them, and allowing them the opportunity to give us feedback on what they like and don't like, what they want to consume or not consume, or what they wish they had that we don't have, and allowing those things to influence our roadmap, and then allowing that to help us use some data back decisions to drive why we're doing this one before the other one. And it's not necessarily we don't need to do the other project. It's just that our customers are telling us, if we do this first, they would spend more money with us. So we're going to prioritize that.

Kerry Guard 9:16

You're like stealing from the develop. You know how developers work. I love that. Trevor van Warden, welcome to the show. So glad to see you sir. And yeah, love thanks to the stock. Yeah, yeah. Sales wants everything yesterday. Marketing has a backlog that's going to take years to get through. So it goes, so it goes.

Matt Kanaskie 9:35

But you know, you mentioned having it all in one or allows me to reshift those priorities, like really fast, or take action, like, there's, there's an offering we have that's kind of been dormant. We haven't had much activity on it for six months. And then, you know, as luck would have it, now, six clients are interested in it all at once in the same month, right? Totally random. Yes, and the content is very lagging on that because it wasn't prioritized as we didn't have a lot of proposals for it, and we didn't really have a big need to fill that. But then instantaneously it was like, Hey, why don't these flyers match our new proposal template? And they look totally different. And I said, we haven't even made a proposal for this for six months, so we pivoted real quick and essentially made that flyer and that content to match the proposal like on demand, because that immediately went to the top of the list, and it was a low lift task, like making a flyer and some content on a template wasn't a huge challenge, but it jumped ahead 20 other ones that were in queue, just because of the demand from sales, being able to kind of pull that lever and reprioritize that as a leader of both is, is what was unique, is because I could see, I could see the immediate sales demand. So we had to accommodate those proposals. And of course, a couple of them were RFPs. And so if there are fees, they require a lot more information. That information was now all of a sudden lacking, right?

Kerry Guard 11:05

But now it's templatized, so it's something you can easily, ideally repeat. So that's handy, yeah?

Matt Kanaskie 11:12

I mean, it was ripped off of a template of others, right? So because we were templatized, I was able to pivot really quickly. But that, I think, might have been a contentious scenario, had I not had sales and marketing just rolling under me and being able to make that decision and product as well, like prioritizing that product that we kind of thought was dormant, and then maybe it's due to the time of year that people are starting to think about that type of service, that all of a sudden it's hit our radar, And we have them in pipeline now.

Kerry Guard 11:42

Is it ultimately you being the decision maker that drops those barriers between the teams, or is it, is there something else that you're doing to create some synergy there, like the point of contention is real, and I I keep finding myself, even after five years of hosting a Podcast, coming back to the same conversation around team alignment. It's not even just sales and marketing anymore. It's like across-the-board team alignment. So how are you, you know, you mentioned some aspects of where the contention is coming from in terms of goals and priorities. And is it you being able to just be the decision maker that's helping with that, or what else? How else are you creating this alignment?

Matt Kanaskie 12:22

To some extent? Yeah, having the decision-making authority obviously helps. But realistically, we present ourselves as the revenue-generating team. And so everyone in my team understands their function is to generate revenue in some way and contribute to that greater goal of the company's growth. And so when we meet as a team, we have a full team retreat next week. And when we meet as a team, each one of those departments is represented with their leadership, but we're all in the same, you know, leadership retreat as a revenue generation retreat, not a sales retreat and a marketing retreat and a product retreat, if you will. We are together in that whole, that whole effort. So everyone's seeing everyone else's priorities or their task list, their to do's, their goals for 2025, so we get to see them, and then people naturally start drawing connections to their own goals and timelines and correlating how we can work together to go we all can accomplish that in q2 because we now can have a common goal, or at least see what all the other teams are working on, or maybe where some of those challenges might be in hitting sales needs it tomorrow for a meeting, right? But if sales is aware of the challenges that come with that, then different expectations could be set, or they can position, you know, alternative approach to a client or prospect that might allow some grace to the other team members, because they're on a team, right? It's not a us versus them.

Kerry Guard 13:55

The dream. Let's talk about some of the priorities. So we mentioned goals. You know, it sounds like revenue, you know, if everybody's on the revenue team, but how everybody gets to revenue is different, whether you're product marketing or or to your point sales, right? So, how are they You're coming together next week, which sounds magical. Are you going somewhere fun? Where are you going?

Matt Kanaskie 14:14

We're in town. We do have some members flying to town to join us here, and then we have a little off site venue that we have booked, and then we've got a team dinner. We're going to, like, a Brazilian steakhouse, with tons of meat, and so it'll be an interesting dinner.

Kerry Guard 14:33

Oh, it's so important, though. I love that I we get together once a year, and I keep moving it up. I like, don't want 12 months to go by. So I got a nine-month up, because I just don't want to wait that long. I love that. So when you get together next week and you're talking about 2025, priorities, how are you, you know you one, I'd love to know where your revenue number is coming from. Usually, revenue comes from a CFO or a CEO. And you guys got to. Then figure out how to get to it. Is there a bit of a bridge there? Like, how are you working with leadership to define the overarching company goal, and then how are you bringing that into your team?

Matt Kanaskie 15:08

Yeah, so certainly, working with CFO on current year, current year's budget and performance against budget, as well as some forecasting for next year's budget and the goals that go with that combine in our business, some pro forma of acquisitions that have to be melded into that to reform what the budget would look like next year. So there's certainly collaboration there to get the high level goals of what we need to do on revenue and margin and profitability, as well as by department or by product line, some of the things we need to be aware of, and that's really where the strategy starts weaving in, is the the top line, the macro numbers are pretty easy to to do some math against. It's in our business particularly, there's a lot of mouths to feed. There's a lot of different individual departments that all have goals, and your sales strategy has to feed all of them just enough so that they hit their individual goals while not focusing too much on one practice or one service or one product at the you know, demise of another. So there's a balance there, and a strategy on making sure that our sales motions are pointed, but also comprehensive and wide. And so we have to kind of keep zooming in and zooming out and measuring how we do that. Like, for example, we have a big part of our portfolio is recurring service, right? And so we tend to focus more in the beginning of the year on those type of services, because we can get, you know, the twelfths, we can get more months billing throughout the year, if we can capitalize earlier in the year and then kind of pivot towards the end of the year to more one time services that correlates with with our customers budget and trying to get things done by the end of the year. It also allows us to close the gap on the on that top line macro budget to do the one time things. So you're going to see, you know, marketing and sales incentives and product launches and things correlate with those type of strategies to try to smooth out against that budget where it needs it the most. And so bringing that to the team, along with a bunch of ideas on how we get there is we start collaborating on that, and then we start delegating and assigning out to the other leaders on who's going to take these 10 bullet points. And our goal of that meeting is to have known leaving that what people have in their roadmap for q1, 234, next year, at least, with an asterisk on it, with a high level plan on how we're going to accomplish that, and then we subdivided in sales, marketing and product.

Kerry Guard 17:46

I love that you're not trying to just come to the table with all of the answers. I feel like, as leaders, so often we feel like we have to know how to do the thing, to make it happen. So the fact that you feel like you don't have to know and you can bring it to your team to collectively solve it also creates that buy in too, which is so key, right? If you're just showing up and telling people what to do then and they don't necessarily agree with it, then you're losing folks, right? And then you're not all in the boat, sort of rowing together. So I, I love, I love that you're in that collaboration space, and you're clear. One of the challenges with collaboration, right, is, what are those? You don't always have clear outcomes of what you're trying to accomplish. So I love that there's that clear. This is what needs to come out of this, and then how we're gonna get after it next year. How are you? You mentioned the asterisk piece of it. I'm assuming, correct me, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like to create space for change.

Matt Kanaskie 18:47

Oh yeah, yeah, all of these plans are subject to change. We're in a fast-paced, changing industry, right? It's Rest assured, some of the products or solutions we choose now are going to merge, acquire or become part of some other organization mid year, next year that I don't have on my roadmap, and we're going to have to pivot and change strategy, maybe completely forklift a solution, maybe replace them all together in our portfolio. And that is not at all in the plan right now. So we know that's going to happen, so we have to leave some space. It's almost like you leave an empty bullet point that's just blank, and it's like to be filled in in q3 and because we just know what's going to happen. And then you know, the other side of our business is we are on an aggressive growth trajectory, both organic and inorganic, so acquisitions are not known right now. I know that we will try to accomplish acquisitions next year. I don't know what they'll be, the make size, geography, product set, or anything like that. So we have to be aware of that and then make room in our strategy on integrations so that that ties into how we develop. Products too. We were intentionally developing products with room for ingestion of other products, so we keep them a little more open and less rigid, knowing that we're gonna have to continue to mold and accommodate as other offerings come in.

Kerry Guard 20:14

I don't know how you prioritize all this move all these moving pieces. So is it you know you you have your goals for the year and sort of that drum beat, but then how do you prioritize which you mentioned, customers? So are you basically looking to them to sort of dictate where the priorities come from? And it one of the questions I had when you mentioned that aspect of it was, is it current customers, or is it prospects? Like, where are you getting that data from? And then how are you using that to help you prioritize? You know, not just in the moment, like you mentioned, you know, where you could sort of shift on the fly, but in the long term too, of what they might need in the future.

Matt Kanaskie 20:55

Three contributing factors. I mean, our clients are one of them. Obviously, my team is another big contributing factor. And when I say my team, I do want to extend and give credit to my service organization. They're a big driver and collaborator with, uh, with the sales team on things they're seeing that are either broken or don't work or aren't performing the way they need to, or common issues they're seeing in customer environments. That we have a methodology for them to bring that forward to us to react to it. So we've created an intake process for the service side of our organization to bring things to sales and product to action them and put them into our queue. So that's another feed source for us, because they're out working with the customers every day. They're active in these environments. They can tell us what's really going on, you know, at the street level. And then the third, which actually is the most disruptive, is actually our vendor partners. They can make a pivot on direction, on their product portfolio, or their partner programs, or end of sale, end of life, something, you know, all of those things, and that's going to completely change the trajectory of a plan we may have had. We just recently. I'll keep giving real world scenarios so that we're tangible. Here. We just recently had a scenario where we did a bake off, you know, and we assessed 13 different solutions to try to narrow it down to five, and we chose our final five, and we were going through our product launch process, and before we even got to the launch date, one of the five we chose got acquired and sold to another organization, and one of the The other eight that was not chosen also got acquired and added to that a list. So we didn't even make it through the product launch and evaluation before two of the vendors completely changed profile by the end of the process.

Kerry Guard 22:53

Oh no, yeah, you guys have to pivot a lot on the fly. That is, you know, that's why I find you're you're planning for 2025, step fasting, because it sounds like the way you're doing it, which is so smart and how I think we all should be thinking more about marketing. And, you know, marketing is the long game, but you do have to give yourself space to iterate in the way that you're talking. And I find, you know, we put these together, these big plans and big, beautiful presentations, and I've actually sort of moved away from that. I'm like, it's a checklist. These are the things in terms of priorities that need to get done in ideally, the order in which they we think at this very moment they need to get done, and that will change. But it's a lot easier to move a checklist up and down than it is to then have to redo all these presentations all the time to, you know, kind of show what we want to get.

Matt Kanaskie 23:42

Yeah, and to that point, like we we worked a lot, we're starting to focus more on, like, just templates, right that we brought up earlier, right is maybe not so focused on the completeness of this laser focused presentation and infographic and flyer and the whole campaign, and a little more loose to like. Here's the structure of content we want, but then I can change words and I can change graphics and I can change image, kind of on the fly, because I want that brand image and that continuity throughout what we're doing, but we know that there's going to be change, so we have put a little more focus on templates, and then also that allows a little more creative freedom to the users, to like you had mentioned, that salesperson kind of making their own content. We choose to nurture and enable that. Where that's that's another touchy marketing topic where we want to control that. And know you can only use these templates and only use these ones that I've made. Don't make your own slides and don't say your own things where if, if we create enough guardrails around that to know, can't go that far off course. They got, we got all the core stuff in here, but we, we even in our templates, we leave maybe three or four blank slides with guiders on them to actually. Be filled in. And so they're not going completely rogue by making up slides, right, right, but we are leaving the blank space to go put your own spin here.

Kerry Guard 25:09

I think that's so like, that's the beauty of sales. I feel like you know the reason why you need both. Trevor just said, Marketing wants to control sales. Content heaven.

Matt Kanaskie 25:17

Sales can get wild, though. Okay, so let's be fair, right? I've run a sales team too, but that's why the guardrails are important. You need to inspect what they are delivering and saying and using, or, you know, my favorite is, like, what's on their desktop, right? Because that's, that's the most fun one, which one's safe to their that's the most you know, tweaked version of your template.

Kerry Guard 25:40

Let's update that for you. Save this one instead. I know I think that's so cool, because when you talk about sales and marketing and sort of their superpowers of how they function, right? Marketing being more of the brand, like the brand awareness, the wide net, so to speak, yes, it can get targeted, and it can be thoughtful and reduce waste, but, but we're generally saying one thing to many people, right? Where sales can be so thoughtful and targeted and can be more one-to-one, right? So how many can I do you mind sharing? Like, how many accounts does each of your sales team, each person on your sales team, generally try and is it like a handful?

Matt Kanaskie 26:26

They average clients, about 150 clients, right? 100 to 150 clients per sales representative with with the prospective targets of about 500 so, so they'll make, they'll maintain 100 150 that they have. And then they're kind of going through their target list of, say, 500 more. And you'll see movement of, say, 20-ish a year in and out.

Kerry Guard 26:52

Yeah. So that personalization piece of giving them the blank space to play with to cater to their individual audience, of, you know, update company, name, here, and persons, aspect here and title and those elements of per you know, personalization actually go such a long way. And as I really believe is, is the superpower of sales. So hats off to your team and giving them the space, the thoughtful.

Matt Kanaskie 27:17

Another tangible way that we do that. That's really been powerful, that I this one I love, I perk up about it a little bit. Is the sales operations component. So the actual like quotation templates, the design and the format is a marketing function, what they look like, and then what content is, you know, attached to it, the quoting and pricing is sales, right? But the SKUs and the catalog is product. So even that simple function of creating a quote is those three teams working together, and there can be a lot of deliberation on what a proposal should look like to a client. It's a remarkable phenomenon. I don't I don't think a lot of people understand how much deliberation there is on like, what that sheet of paper to or PDF, no sheet of paper. But you know what I mean, that deliverable to a client looks like with like line items and descriptions and quantities and show price or not. You show per unit or not. You show part numbers or not all that stuff. And typically, organizations had chose a way. This is the way we present them. And then there's a subset of sellers that are frustrated with that, and they're going to try to modify them or make their own. So in that same concept, we have created guide rails, and we have created three templates that allow them to pivot and choose which they prefer, and that can even be opportunity based. So you may go, No, this customer really prefers to see it this way, with super detail. So I'm going to use the detail template, but it's still on the marketing approved template. It still looks the same. It's still using all the right product numbers and everything like that, so we can transact and all the workflows work, but that's, I think that's a perfect harmony of those three teams, and just making a proposal.

Kerry Guard 29:08

I love what you're saying, Matt, in terms of even being able to personalize their proposals, because, you know, unless you're a SaaS company where it's off the shelf, that's such a Pain. I'm sure, you know, from a sales perspective, that is definitely where, like, the over promise challenges sort of ebb and flow and come in, where then, you know, everybody's sort of mad at sales because they promise something that can't actually happen. They're like, I was on the call and I had to make a judgment, and I just did the thing. So again, these guard rails are, are so key, and I love the way you're doing it through template templates. And it sounds like you're gonna, you're gonna tell me here, but it sounds like, you know, maybe in your other experiences, you can speak to this. The only way that this is possible right now is because all three teams are working so well together to know what the sales. Needs to put up those guardrails from both a marketing product standpoint, and then be able to iterate on that so they get them, they get sales in a good spot to be able to show up on those calls and make those judgments in the moment.

Matt Kanaskie 30:10

Yeah, certainly there's a benefit of just speed and autonomy right? Ultimately, like I always say, we have to move at the speed of sales right. And that is pretty immediate. And that quote that they want delivered, I can assure you, is today, probably in an hour or two, right. And the real skill of my team is knowing that scenario before it happens. And so if we can pre think of all these things that I can dream up that sales would want to do, and then feed that to marketing a product, and say, Get ahead of them. And so when sales comes and asks, they go, I knew you would ask. There's already a template for that. It's an awesome, awesome thing.

Kerry Guard 30:54

My job is to make sales jobs easier. So you tell me, let's sit down and help me understand. So I think there's real power to what you're saying around you, sort of being, you know, the leader of the full team, because you already know, having sat in that sales seat many a time, as well as as well as the other ones, you've had a taste of product and marketing. But really, sales is where you grew up. And so you can anticipate what they're going to ask for and what their needs are. And I think that are just incredible power, power to that in terms of sales. And you know, one of the things we talked about, I'm going to go, I'm going to go a little off script here, because I really loved one of the things we talked about when we met initially, and I want to talk about it when it comes to sales, and the buyer certainly having changed, and it getting tough out there, I mean, it's it's like marketing and sales, I feel like are going to have to pivot in a really big way. And I don't know if we quite know what that means yet, but between AI being able to give everybody the answers they're looking for without going to websites and buyers not really wanting to engage with marketing and sales if they don't absolutely have to, and then cold calling just, you know, millennials not wanting to pick up the phone, because that has just been such a rough channel and sort of abused over the years, where are you seeing opportunity? You know, how are your, how's your sales team? And maybe marketing and product are really supporting this, but like, how's your sales team getting their foot in the door? It seems so much harder these days to just get a conversation going.

Matt Kanaskie 32:36

Really, it definitely is. This is a tough one. And if I were to just, you know, jokingly comment, I say, Well, we're doing it all. I mean, we're trying everything. And I think one of the beautiful things of having sales and marketing under one umbrella is, as a sales leader, I'm willing to take some more risk and try and experiment more with marketing than maybe would get a normal approval.

Kerry Guard 33:04

Do you have any examples of what that means? What do you mean by like?

Matt Kanaskie 33:07

Like, you know, so spending money on AdWords, or, you know, wrapping cars or putting up a billboard, or, you know, things that kind of have those intangible ROIs that that you can't necessarily connect directly to like, oh, they saw our car drive by, and that's why they called us. And we got a quote that's hard. And a lot of times, as a sales leader, you're looking for that linear path of like, how did because in a cold call, it's I called them, they answered. I set a meeting. We did a proposal. It's very linear how we got there. So you have very tangible ROI that if I just call a million times, I can get this many proposals out right. Where do we really throw money at billboards around town? What's that going to get us right and then, but, but layering and strategy? Well, if we do, we have to be able to track, we have to be able to track, we have to be able to measure, we have to be able to quantify and then show that that's driving towards sales pipeline, and then give some credit to marketing, right? I've also seen that challenge too. Is like, well, sure, but I'm really the one that got the proposal right. Marketing didn't do that, and I'm always going to give a little more credit to marketing, because, you know, it's also my team, so I need them to shine as well. I go, Well, we probably wouldn't even have had that conversation if we didn't influence, or we didn't take that chance. We didn't, you know, invest here. So those are some examples of like, maybe where we'd experiment, but we're continuing to try all kinds of different things, whether it be in person, events, virtual events, attending conferences, speaking sessions, paid private meeting services, outsourcing business development in sourcing business development using. Enablement tools, using AI tools. I mean, we are literally doing all of them to try to get to just the return of I used to call people, they would answer, and we would talk, and they would say yes or no. So it just has the volume had to increase a lot to get that same response rate, and we have certainly been trying content and developing ourselves as a thought leader and becoming visible in keywords and creating a bunch of you know SEO to drive towards us and hoping that inbound would come. It is still heavily trumped by outbound, right? And we can't sit around waiting for someone to contact us, and there's a whole other dynamic challenge to inbound coming that I'd like to unfork as well, that we're seeing firsthand. And maybe it's proxy of our industry. Maybe not, but it is. It is spam and scam city now on inbound, and so how do you even trust an inbound lead anymore?

Kerry Guard 36:05

I had a switch, and it's still not quite perfect, but I had to write code for one of my clients websites that where we would only take a business email address,

Matt Kanaskie 36:15

right? Yeah, we've made that. We've made that pivot as well. There are no emails or anything like that.

Kerry Guard 36:21

So it's better, but it's still not. People can still get around that it is, it is a needle in the hay. It does feel like a needle in the haystack these days. And I love what you're saying. Of outbound channels are shutting down. Oh, Trevor, say more around that. Yeah. I mean, I think this, this notion of surrounding your audience in a really thoughtful way, the awareness piece, the branding piece, the intangible piece of marketing, is definitely coming back in full force. We're all feeling sort of this wave that's incoming, of like, how do we get back to basics and build brand? Because we haven't, and we've been dependent on lead gen for so long that now we gotta play catch up, and we're behind. And building brand takes four ever and now it's really noisy, thanks to AI. So how on earth are we even going to remotely do that? So I love what you're talking about from a testing standpoint, I am curious, though, in regards to all of these things you're testing, which is a plethora of aspects, how are you managing your resources? Because again, we're all feeling the crunch, especially at the end of the year, and you know, budgets are generally staying flat year over year, if not coming down. So how are you thinking about this for 2025 of keeping up this volume of surround sound with limited resources?

Matt Kanaskie 37:52

So one of the things we absolutely have to do is consolidation, so we have absolutely fallen into the trap of tool sprawl and disconnected you know, APIs, or workflows from tool to tool to tool. Combine that with acquisitions, we have even worse disconnected tool sprawl. So one of the things we must tackle as one of our priorities next year is consolidation and centralization of as many of those functions that I mentioned in one place where we can get good data and actually efficient functional workflows as well, because that will break the marketer or the salesperson. If there's too many steps, or there's imports and exports, or it takes too long, or whatever it may be, it's already a hard thing to do prospecting, or, you know, build your content, or your video, or like that. If you add the difficulty of just doing the task, then it tends to get dropped, right? So, like, the last thing a salesperson wants to do is outbound. And I think if everyone doesn't know that, it's true, and the last thing a prospect wants is to receive a cold call, right? So we have this contentious thing that neither party wants to do, but kind of has to do to get there. So if you can make that frictionless, easy, maybe even fun, then we'll get some adoption there.

Kerry Guard 39:28

Say more on the fun piece. How are you making that engagement fun? How are you bringing people in from that aspect?

Matt Kanaskie 39:34

That sounds awesome. I had a trophy here in my office. That's what I was looking for. But we do make silly little trophies that we give as awards, you know, most calls, or most contacts, or most, you know, meeting set things like that. We also have awards for the worst, which is also fun to least calls, right? So we make, we make little trophies we haven't sent. Is for the team. We make it a team event. We have tried doing like Team blitz days, so that at least we're all in it together and we're all doing the same thing. So then it also turns into like a lunch and a happy hour and the teams together and they all went through it together. Yeah, we have a hybrid in mostly remote workforce, right? So trying to create those avenues for team camaraderie, especially on a task that nobody really likes doing. And if you're at home and you're remote working, you're probably going to even be less productive on that because it's easier to tap out. So we'll, we'll bring the team together and do it as a group, and that kind of creates a social support structure and some competition and a little bit of fun around it.

Kerry Guard 40:44

That is, yeah, especially for the things you don't want to do. That sounds like a great way, till I get my kids to fold their laundry. You know, nothing works better than a soft competition. Who can pair the most socks? Let's go.

Matt Kanaskie 40:58

Yes, there's probably a cookie at the end of that or something.

Kerry Guard 41:03

No, just bright, just bragging rights, and then they got to go put it away. It's great. No, I absolutely love that. I think really, what the big takeaway from this conversation, that I'm feeling that, and I'm so grateful for it, is your ability to really see all sides from each team and be able to give them the empathy they all need within their within their superpowers, to be the most successful and at the at the end of the day, working together towards whatever those priorities and common goals are as a as a team, and you really are using like the full toolbox, it is magical. I have no idea how you're keeping it all in flight. I'm guessing. I know you're not doing it alone, for sure, but it is to have this many balls in the air. Essentially, between all the marketing efforts you're doing, all of the testing you're making happen, all the team camaraderie you're building is just, is just wonderful to see. And I'm so grateful for you sharing your experience with us so we can take even just an end of it, back to our own, to our own teams, the sales and marketing alignment conversation is continuous, and it's nice to find those glimmers of possibility.

Matt Kanaskie 42:22

It's awesome. I'll give you one more scenario here that ties them together: the sales, marketing and product. Because these, these tools are amazing, right? And AI is awesome. And the way that you can gather data is exponential, and it's rapid. So lean in and start using that but, but they're hard, like, they're not, they don't just, like work out of the box as they're all proposed, that they do, and so they're, they're a little hard to administer and get to to function. But like, an example, on those blitz days, the revenue operations and marketing team generated, you know, templated emails and some call scripts, and we collaborated with a couple manufacturers that we were representing those solutions, and we kind of built the pitch deck, right? So we feed that to sales, but again, left the room for customization, because nobody wants to read a script, but it gave them the guidelines of like hit these things, but at the same time having call recording and transcription on those calls and allowing that rebound data back, and then feeding that to the product team, they were able to identify maybe two or three of the top rebuttals or challenges on why someone didn't want to consume at that time or talk about that solution. So that collaboration, again, helps going, okay, maybe we thought the value point were these three things, but then we went out and tested and called, you know, 5000 people, and we found that they brought up another value point that we weren't even thinking about, and that came up 20% of the time on these calls as a no rebuttal, maybe. Let's pivot the marketing message, and let's pivot the value prop of the service to answer that. Okay, let's go call another 5000 and see if those results increase. And so it's like this constant experiment that does require 5000 touches, right? But it's like this, this constant experiment and revision. I think the biggest learning lesson for us is, let's not assume we know what our customers want and what the value is.

Kerry Guard 44:30

Yes, and what a beautiful way. I've never heard of a blitz day, but what I love about it is, you know, I'm not, I'm kind of, I agree that cold calling is a dying art. As a receiver, I don't pick up my phone. I'm not a fan of them. I don't like being interrupted. But the power of the way that you're talking about it right now is in that learning and that data and being able to pivot on the fly that way. I imagine when you came out of those split stays. Because your messaging was so much tighter as you went into normal conversations that didn't have so much pressure on them, and they are probably landing significantly better just because you had, you gave that. You know, it's why diamonds are made, right? They're they're made under that kind of pressure. And so what a beautiful way to learn very quickly, with everybody involved and creating that feedback loop through AI that is, that's magical, and yay that you have enough. I think one of the struggles a lot of folks are having is why outbound is, is really, really hard, is because they don't have the numbers to be able to make that many calls and burn.

Matt Kanaskie 45:39

Yeah, well, I mean, when transparently, like, you have to use an auto dialer, and so that's a great, efficient tool for outbound sales, and it dials and you only talk when it connects. So that allows them to make 500 calls, right? But they're not actually making the calls, the systems are making the calls. And so you also kind of shield yourself from all those declines or all those empty calls that you make, because they're not really impacting you, you're only connecting with the calls that are answered.

Kerry Guard 46:16

Right? Look at all this, lots and lots of learning. Here I am going to transcribe this. We're going to wrap it up in an overview. Don't you worry, it'll be on the website so you can skim it later, and we'll have the notes ready for you to figure out how you're going to start implementing this and bringing your sales and marketing and product teams in alignment, how you're going to be able to pivot with templates and giving your sales team the right kind of guardrails they need for that personalization, but without going rogue and and how you can create these these moments for your team in camaraderie and while also meeting goals of the company. Wow, wow. Yes, that will all be in the show notes. Matt, if people want to learn more about you and Cyber Advisor, where can they find you? They find you?

Matt Kanaskie 47:03

They can absolutely find me on LinkedIn. That's like my most active spot. Surprise, surprise, Matt, you can ask you Cyber Advisor, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Kerry Guard 47:13

Wonderful, before we leave. You are more than a seller, more than a marketer. Tell me, you know, we've got two and a half months left here of 2024, what are you most looking forward to personally as we wrap up the year?

Matt Kanaskie 47:27

Well, I love the holiday season. So I love I love fall. I love that the weather is getting cool and crisp, the leaves are changing. We get the 123, combo of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas time. So that is my favorite time of the year, and I go all out. So I got the, you know, so many light bulbs on my house that I'll probably blow a breaker. But I, I love, I love dolling up the house every year with all the Christmas lights and that, you know, collection keeps growing every year. So I'm really looking forward to that.

Kerry Guard 48:03

We need pictures. And do you go all out for Halloween as well?

Matt Kanaskie 48:07

Or just, oh, yeah, I still dress up. Yeah, I dress up and come to work too. So, yes, yep. So I will. I'll be wearing that at work and joining video calls for a day on that.

Kerry Guard 48:23

Oh, that is fantastic. Again, we're gonna need some pictures. Matt, you're gonna need to share that love. That is amazing. I love it. I love the fall too. This is the best time of year, for sure. I miss Halloween. We don't have Halloween here. We do, but we don't. It's not, it's not Halloween the way that I know, I know, so I'll be living vicariously. Thank you so much, Matt. I'm so grateful for this conversation. Thank you to our listeners. Trevor Lee, Ann, I see you. I appreciate you. If you like this episode, please like, subscribe and share. This episode was brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps complex clients like cybersecurity get found via SEO and digital ads. So it's by me. Kerry Guard, co-founder of MKG Marketing, and if you'd like to be a guest, hit me up. DM me. Let's have you on the show. Thank you again, Matt. Really appreciate you.