Sales and Marketing Alignment with Dean Mannix

James Lawrence: I'm very excited for today's pod. With me, I have Dean Mannix, who is going to downplay all of this stuff. But Dean is the number one international bestselling author of Protect and Provide, with 20 years of global consulting on sales strategy, training and coaching across North America, ANZ, Europe, South Africa. Clients like Deutsche Bank, Oracle, Goldman Sachs. Look at him, smiling. He's blushing. He's also the CEO and co-founder of Sales ITV, which is one of Australia's leading sales organisations, where you've coached and trained senior execs, corporations like Suncorp, Westpac, Macquarie Bank, Fairfax, NewsCorp, Meridian, Energy, Medibank. It goes on, on and on. Welcome to the pod.

Dean Mannix: Great to be here.

James Lawrence: Dean, it's 2022 and from what you're seeing on the other side of the fence, are sales and marketing working better together now than they have historically?

Dean Mannix: I think that the challenges may have changed, but the lack of real collaboration and real understanding of the value each brings to the equation is still pretty poor, considering that organisations need to rally around sales because revenue and profit is what enables a business to survive, and buy the tech stack that everybody wants and to buy the people they want. And so it surprises me that the alignment isn't stronger. 

James Lawrence: What would you say? Like, why does it actually matter? I think it's a really obvious question to ask. But why does it matter if I'm a marketer sitting in-house in an organisation and don't really have a great relationship with sales or vice versa? Why does it matter for the two teams to have a better working relationship?

Dean Mannix: It always mattered, right? It always mattered. The bottom line is a great salesperson without a lead to talk to is like a 747 sitting on the tarmac not earning you any money, and costing you lots of money. At the same time, a fantastic marketing campaign with zero conversion is worthless. And in fact, it's worse than worthless. It costs you money. The simple reality is that every aspect of the pipeline is important and therefore collaboration is important. Now, what we've got happening now, obviously, is this real blurring of the lines in terms of, well, who's responsible for which part of the pipe? And can organisations operate without salespeople and just real smart marketers who nurture incredibly effectively and convert online? Maybe lower level sales people. Or what I'm really saying is we're still in a place where most organisations that want perfect marketing, nurturing, doing everything through the pipeline, through marketing alone is still a pipe dream. I'm not saying there’s not great marketers-

James Lawrence: Yeah, totally. I think that's right. And some industries have been more impacted than others. But fundamentally, most businesses do need to have both working together. And I guess my perspective on that is that the Internet, the ability for the collective and customer to go out there and research and read reviews and read branch-generated content and case studies and whatever else, it almost magnifies the importance of the two teams working together. Back in the day, the classic old story of walking into a car sales showroom 20 years ago and the sales rep had all the power. These days, the customer sits there doing their own research. They do probably come into an organisation better armed than they once did. So they're more swayed by marketing. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there's no role for sales to kind of close out the revenue touchpoint.

Dean Mannix: Car dealerships are classic. The fact that people still have to go into the dealership to buy a vehicle because they want to touch it. They want to fill up. They want to test-drive it. It is an indication of the fact that we still have department stores. Online sales going through the roof, Amazon taking over the world. But the simple reality is there are still a very significant number of people that want to touch and feel and can be turned off or turned on as a result of great sales and great sales experience.

James Lawrence: 100%. I think that from our side of the fence, Google did some awesome research, kind of two or three years back now, looking at the average path to purchase in auto and was kind of 900 digital touch points before they'd actually go into the dealership. But you're not seeing cars bought online, right? I guess the Tesla kind of is an example but imagine that 99% of vehicles being bought in Australia are being sold by a sales rep, right? 

Dean Mannix: It's one of those things, right? It's always easy to pull out that case study that somebody throws up so they can sell you something out of their text that promises the world. But the reality is most of these huge wins are exceptions and outliers. They are nowhere near the norm. And so you've got to be very, very careful about what you make big strategic decisions and big strategic statements around. Because the super-reality is so much of what marketers and salespeople are getting fed is simply not true. It's just not true. When you look behind the numbers that these companies are claiming and reporting and the marketing that's going on at the moment, none of those numbers stack up without a peer review. 

James Lawrence: Interesting, interesting, Dean. We'll have that one off the pod, not now anyway. I think it'd be interesting to…like, you're a really seasoned expert in sales environments, right? You've worked with B2B, B2C, lots of businesses in Australia, lots of businesses abroad. What are the typical reasons or factors you say you see or have seen as to why sales teams and marketing teams just don't seem to see eye to eye?

Dean Mannix: It does my head in. But even when I talk to really senior executives and very, very smart people from both sides of the table, there's a real lack of understanding of how each party can generate real value in each piece of the pie. And what I mean by that is, I think so many sales people completely lack any understanding of the concept of priming, the concept of getting someone ready to buy the amount, the value that can be generated by really working on someone before they speak to the salesperson.

Dean Mannix: Some of them totally discount that and they think that they are the center of the universe and the wholesale starts with them. And that's just pure ignorance. And missing out on a huge opportunity to participate with the marketing team, playing in that awareness and interest piece of the puzzle and really sharing valuable knowledge around what's going to happen as they come through the pipe. The other side of that is, I think, marketing really underestimates just because I generated an MQL, how challenging it is to convert an MQL into an SQL. And then actually into action, decisions and paying over the money. And, you know, it's really interesting. I think the industry with the MQL SQL language has done a lot of damage. A lot of damage. Because it's sort of parted responsibilities and created more of a chasm between sales and marketing when what it should have been doing was saying, actually, we need to work together the whole way through the pipe because we can both have major wins here. 

James Lawrence: I think we should. I'd like to dig deeper into that later on the MQL SQL kind of divide. I did do a little bit of research coming into the pod today and I didn't want to come totally unarmed against you because I know you generally have most of your bases covered. I was reading- 

Dean Mannix: I'm just an angry old man. As soon as I got over 50, each and every year I’ve gotten angrier. It’s quite scary. 

James Lawrence: I’m getting there, don’t worry. There was a good study, which said that when marketing teams were surveyed about how they felt about sales, and when sales teams were surveyed on how they feel about marketing, the terms used to describe the other was 87% negative, which is an interesting kind of overview. And then there was a Harvard Business Review piece that looked at what the benefits were in organisations that could actually move closer towards sales and marketing alignment. And just so clearly benefits, whether you're working in a sales environment or working in a marketing team. Essentially the time it takes to close a deal radically reduced, increased profit on the deals themselves. A flywheel effect like we would all expect, which is the quicker sales are closing, the more profit on them, the more money goes back into the marketing team to fund activity for the next, you know, planning cycle. Actually bigger average sales and lower CPAs. So the benefits are there, right? But I think-

Dean Mannix: Yeah, yeah.

James Lawrence: It’s not like it’s not an issue. 

Dean Mannix: This is the fascinating thing. We know this, but we don't apply this or we don't discuss this enough. I think inside organisations that so much of the clients’ decisions/ customers’ decision about how much they're willing to pay therefore how much margin you're going to generate, and when they want the product, therefore what the deal velocity is going to be and whether they want to tell their friends about their experience and therefore whether the advocacy is going to happen. So much of that is generated very early in the pipeline. And there are some very brilliant marketing people playing an amazing game before anybody turns up to that store or walks through the front door. And what sales often don't appreciate, is that so much of what's making it easier for them to sell some more product, sell more of it and sell more margin, is actually determined and driven by what the customer experiences before they've even spoken.

James Lawrence: That's really interesting because coming back to your point before about whether the whole concept around MQL SQL has actually done more harm than good in terms of bringing the two teams together. It's a very interesting benefit, right? I think we all think about the role of marketing just to bring leads and make them reasonably well qualified. We think less about the work of marketers and kind of our side of the divide in terms of actually portraying a message and storytelling and all the stuff that we do, to not only bring leads in, but to have them primed to spend real cash, right?

Dean Mannix: Yes. Primed to spend, primed to want to spend, primed to expect to spend. They’re 3 different things, right? And the MQL SWL thing, the reason I think it's been so damaging is that terminology was more about covering your ass than it was about actually generating real value inside the pipeline for both marketing and sales. And I think it's worthwhile to point out here that I’m a sales guy. I’m an absolute sales guy. But if I was building a new business, my head of marketing would be the head of marketing and sales. And sales would report into marketing. Because whilst I believe in our marketing concept, the simple reality is, if you don't get the front end right and the front end isn't supporting the back end of the product line as in conversion, you're never going to be as successful as you could be or should be. 

James Lawrence: Is that a big-time exposé you've just revealed on the pod? Sales leader, sales coach, sales guru, Dean Mannix says that all sales reps should be managed by the head of marketing.

Dean Mannix: I'm working a lot harder on my marketing skills now than I am on my sales skills. 

James Lawrence: And I mean, that's clear. There’s organisations which are structured, marketing, heading, you know, reporting up the food line - sales similarly. So then you do have structures where you have a seat which, you know, has marketing and sales underneath reporting up, right? Are you saying therefore that the head of marketing and sales should have a marketing background or pedigree? Or are you suggesting that just you have responsibility for both functions, but your background could be anything? 

Dean Mannix: Ideally, they're probably an engineer these days. Straight up. The reality is that whoever heads up that team should understand the process, should be smart enough to understand psychology, and has to put together a tech stack if they're doing something on scale that's truly got to support everybody throughout the process. But the reality is that these days you really have to come at it from a marketer’s perspective and say, ‘right, how can we fill the top of the pipeline in a way that's going to support?’ So if you look at it, basically I pulled this one up just in case. And how do I fill the pipeline at the top to make sure that the way we do that accelerates our velocity? And what can I do from a nurturing perspective to support that, both in terms of sales, people's conversations and other stuff that's going on. And that could be retargeting, what sales conversations are going on, that could be a better proposal process to make things go fast back to a more effective chat room so that people get responses within five minutes. But then how do I make sure that what we're doing is supporting a conversion of more sales at more volume, at more margin? And there are so many things we can do from a traditional marketing perspective to support that. And then not only that, once the customer actually comes on board, that can be great. Such an amazing experience that it becomes very easy to sell more, to retain more effectively, and to make them into advocates. Just fill the pipeline with really high-quality leads.

James Lawrence: And that's kind of where you want to get to as an organisation. The best clients, most successful clients we have are the ones that have that flywheel of alignment and marketing bringing people in, sales having a great product to offer and delivering on the promises that are made, and happy customers referring to other customers. And you know, the kind of ecosystem takes off, right? 

Dean Mannix: But if you think about the disconnect here, right? If sales isn’t working with marketing, we might fill the pipeline with the wrong type of people with the wrong type of message. If sales and marketing aren’t working together, we're missing out on all the nurturing, retargeting, social proofed strategies that we could be executing online. If a poor job is done in the first part of the pipeline by marketing not really understanding what's going on, then sales are one: going to blame marketing, but two: going to do a really poor job of those three: conversion strategies. And then four: if marketing is not doing a fantastic job once the client's on board and they don't understand the value or don't appreciate the value of working with them to let them deliver the value, then we've got massive problems because we're going to have to keep bringing more and more new customers because we're not creating retention. So a disconnect at any level of the four stages of the pipeline creates a massive problem. Massive problem. 

James Lawrence: It leads into the next kind of theme or bucket I wanted to cover, which is practical tips to building or rebuilding or keeping strong alignment between sales and marketing. I think you kind of just touched on it there. For me, I think one is great personas. Like we'll often find that we will speak to marketers who don't really understand from the coalface what are the pain points, what are the benefits, what's keeping the customer up at night and or potentially marketers who don't understand the benefit of value that the product that they themselves are marketing brings to the customers. 

Dean Mannix: It’s interesting, right? The sign is a classic disconnect between sales and marketing. So many marketers have taken personas to such a crazy deep level that salespeople can't cope with all the detail. It all gets too confusing and they switch off. And then the marketer is getting upset about the fact that the salespeople aren't buying into it and they're not really inputting. Even taking a step back and saying: alright, just some agreement around personas between sales and marketing around which is the most dominant persona at the beginning of the purchasing process and throughout and then towards the end. And if a salesperson can say, ‘Oh, wow, I get it. So the reason we've got five personas is so that you’re marketing heavily on booking meetings with that person because they’re normally interested and are going to get me through the front door, then you're retargeting the other stakeholders that I see before I meet with them or talk to them. Plus, our proposal document speaks to each of those other stakeholders. And then basically from a pricing perspective, you've created some fantastic cost benefit case studies that enable me to sit in front of the CFO and the CEO and have a really powerful story. Now, I can understand why you've broken down these personas and want to have different tools around each one, but that's not really the conversation’. 

James Lawrence: What's the normal conversation? 

Dean Mannix: The normal conversation is: WTF are personas. And you're trying to boil the ocean, you know, you confuse the hell out of everything. You've outsmarted yourself. I know that the first time that we used personas in my organisation, we outsmarted ourselves. 

James Lawrence: There's a phrase that we picked up three or four years back, which is - done is better than perfect. And it hasn't just infused the way we develop personas if and when we do it for a client. But it's very much how we try to run a lot of things through the agency, and personas were a thing that were becoming increasingly overbaked. And to the point where they either A: they weren't finished or B: were just never referred to. But definitely a big believer of, if we are having, it depends on the client and depends on their set up. But ideally, we do try to get input from sales functions into personas because it's very difficult if the two functions are in isolation, you're just not properly hearing it from the coalface, right? As to what are the issues and the objections that should be part of that persona framework. 

Dean Mannix: I think that with large organisations and even medium, small-sized organisations that have good CRM data, it’s amazing how many of them don't look back when you say, well of the last 50 sales, what was the entry point? Like it's there in the CRM or you can pull it out from the diary. But who was the first person we spoke to and what was their role? How many meetings or communications did it take to get through to the other personas? Like where in the sales process did those other studies get involved? I think a lot of organisations outsmart themselves by trying to figure this out in massive workshops with salespeople who have retention of a goldfish. You know, I'm one of them so I’m putting my hand up here.

James Lawrence: So everything we say about you guys is true. 

Dean Mannix: I mean, one thing about salespeople, is that we are very proud of this. You know, you ask me where a deal got done and I'll just tell you what I want it to be, not what it was. 

James Lawrence: But you guys are doing all the hard work over there, aren't you, in sales? It’s where the money comes from. 

Dean Mannix: We are generally better at selling ourselves than we are selling up. And so the challenge when you're trying to get qualitative data from a salesperson, they’ll tell you what they want to hear and what you want to hear. They won't tell you what's really going on. And that's why in many ways, I'm not a big fan of all these "speak to the CEO" programs, because most of the data I see suggests that the first person people spoke to was not the CEO. 

James Lawrence: Yeah. 

Dean Mannix: In fact, most sales go through without anybody actually speaking to the CEO. Everything gets signed off somewhere below.  

James Lawrence: I think that's right. You’re doing a good job of segwaying into the next point that I wanted to talk about. This is good, Dean. The next one is metrics. Like SQLS and MQLs we’ve touched on. What you just referenced there is: don't necessarily rely upon what a sales rep tells you they think he or she might have seen sales from, look at data. Or are you saying out there, organisations that are kind of doing a better job of aligning sales and marketing looking at certain metrics more closely and actually discarding other metrics that probably aren't as relevant to sales and marketing alignment? 

Dean Mannix: I am amazed at how immature, effective use of CRM really is when you get underneath the hood across every size of organisation. I think about drinking the Salesforce Kool-Aid and this is nothing against Salesforce. I'm a huge fan of their product and their solution and what they do and what they're all about. But I remember really drinking the Salesforce Kool-Aid back in 2009. And where we are now is where I thought we'd be in about 2012. It's just mind-blowing how poorly organisations are implementing CRM and driving adoption. That is still a massive problem and that kind of does my head in because it should be pretty obvious if you've been in sales after the last ten years that CRM can generate massive value. If they’re failing to collect the data because they're making way too much of it. They’re failing to use the data so people are devaluing the data. And even when the data is there, they're ignoring the data and just going off on the journey that suits them. 

James Lawrence: That to me is a really interesting point, which is that we see the same problem coming from a different perspective, right? CRM is a legacy not kept up to date. I'm doing the job, too cumbersome, whatever else. Organisations that actually do have one and they're using it in an okay fashion. Often attribution is just not considered, so MQLs will come through. They're looking at last, last click, where did it come from? They all came from LinkedIn or they all came from Facebook or Google. Those leads aren't any good. But to the point you've just touched, on most high-value sales, it's not one touch Google form and you buy a $100,000 piece of software. It's multiple touches offline, multiple stakeholders in an organisation. And so if we don't have a more nuanced approach to how we're using our EMS attribution-type stuff, then the whole thing is fruitless, right? 

Dean Mannix: But it is interesting. I guess that almost gets the essence of it. If I was sitting down, developing a marketing plan with sales, I'd say, let's work backward. Let's actually imagine that we've got a client who's a massive advocate. And they told three other people that they should buy from us. And we've got meetings from those three people. What happened just before that? What happened just before that? And what supported conversion is working? And then what? How do we move through the pipeline and what are the stakeholders actually motivated on the way through? And then how do we actually get into the pipeline to get in front of them? And then how do we generate awareness before that? And I’d be working backward and saying, okay, great. So therefore the metrics that support that journey are the metrics that we should use for success, including conversion. But that's not what happens. What happens is someone says, ‘oh, well, my MQL line stops at around about when you fill the pipeline it accelerates its velocity. So I'm going to give you a pack of metrics around, basically what I got to there and then everything from there on is your fault’. And then if someone comes around six months later and says: but we didn't convert any of those, then we'll swap channels over. Which is insane. 

James Lawrence: I think that's right. And the tone you just used then in acting out the actual reality of lots of organisations. It touches on this kind of blame game type thing, which we know is eternal. I’m keen to unpack - because I've got my own view on this and happy to share - but the relationship between the two. At the end of the day, we're often with people and we've got kids or we don't have kids and we're trying to develop our career and retain our place in an organisation. Like the importance of the human relationship between sales teams and marketing teams. Advice or feedback.

Dean Mannix: Let's break that down. What does the science say? The science says there are four things that drive a higher level of liking interdependent support between two human beings or two teams. What am I saying? Number one, similarity. Similarity in goals, similarity in values, similarity in beliefs, similarity in experience, similarity in passions. So just by going - you’re marketing, you’re sales, you create a difference. So if there's a lack of similarity, don't be surprised if there's not fantastic collaboration.

Dean Mannix: Number two: exchange and the quality and the quantity of exchange. So the more interaction two parties have and the better the quality of the interaction and the richer, the deeper the conversations are. The higher level of liking. Now, if I was to map the average conversation between marketing and sales, it's not high quality or high quantity exchange. So you have a problem there.

Dean Mannix: Three: praise. And like you said, it's normally the opposite. It's actually bad-mouthing each other and devaluing each other rather than praise. So we're now three for three that we haven't ticked. And in fourth: admiration. 

James Lawrence: I'll tick that one. 

Dean Mannix: The more we admire the other person or the other team or what they do, the more we want to work with them. The science says I need those four things in place to generate a higher level of support agreement, engagement, work together activity, collaboration. Call it whatever you want. Most organisations are not supporting the ticking of one of those boxes, let alone four of them. 

James Lawrence: I love that. I do feel that because we are talking fundamentally about a typical relationship in organisations - the relationship between the sales department and a marketing department. Departments aren’t real, humans are real, right? So it is a relationship between two people. And if we look at it, we - similarity - you’re sales, I’m marketing - exchange, hopefully as little as possible because I'd rather just blame game. The third one, praise- 

Dean Mannix: Even the way you send me the leads. If the way you send me the leads or the way that I take the leads on, the exchange is terrible. There’s no feedback, there’s no-

James Lawrence: Praise. I’m sales, I made all the revenue. That was all me.

Dean Mannix: Correct, it was me. 

James Lawrence: Thank you so much for the awesome work, the awesome campaign that went out into the market and brought these really good quality leads in. We've now brought them over the line, let's put more money back into marketing. Doesn't happen, we both laughed at the same time when you said that. I think that's right. And the one around exchange to me is maybe the most important of that. I just feel that from my observation, it's just such a cliche, I’ve been in marketing for the last decade, but you just find that there's actually no real collaboration, no connection, no standing meetings, no casual meetings between the two.  

Dean Mannix: No. Well, you think about this, right? And really ponder this. My experience in the last five or ten years has been that people's behaviour inside organisations of more than 20 people are far more of a reflection of the relationships than the results they've been given to achieve.

James Lawrence: Interesting. 

Dean Mannix: Despite the fact that someone's been given a certain set of results, if the relationships are terrible, their behaviour is going to reflect the relationships more than the results they were meant to achieve. So if you don't get the relationships right internally, you can KPI all you want, you can provide targets, you can provide incentives, you can do all those things. But if the relationships are crap, especially in Australian culture, then you're always going to have so much friction that your efficiency is going to be terrible. 

James Lawrence: Great point there, Dean. I've been making notes here as you've been talking. In terms of those five practical ways that marketing teams and sales teams can work better together, almost for their own personal interest. I think one is: agree on personas. It doesn't have to be war and peace, just good-quality, practical personas. I think the education piece - crucial, like how do you educate each other on the challenges that each of you are experiencing? I think trying to put yourself in the other’s shoes makes a lot of sense. The third being metrics, as you know, do MQLs equal SQLs? Do marketing metrics make sales? If they don't, if there's a natural division, how do you bring them together and agree on metrics that actually have you both moving in the same direction? The fourth one, I've actually never thought of it and I completely love it. The whole concept of the idea of getting on makes a lot of sense, but the actual concept of liking and what makes you like someone: similarity, exchange, praise and admiration. Going back to some basic psychology, Dean, is phenomenal.

James Lawrence: And then the fifth one is just - exchange, regularly meeting. And I think if you take those first four boxes and you are meeting and you have regular catch ups where you're coming into it with the best of intentions, it feels like five pretty practical, tangible ways that a marketing team and a sales team can actually get better results that will not only serve the company's interests, but also their own personal interests. That is awesome. So, Dean, that's most of the themes, the topics I wanted to cover. I think just any observations from you as to: you're a young marketer, say, listening to the pod or an in-house marketer. One that you could do to help build alignment with your sales manager or your sales team in your organisation?

Dean Mannix: It's really simple. If you are a young marketer, you need to get more excited about conversion and what happens at the end of the funnel than the sales people are. If you are a young salesperson, you have to get more excited about filling the pipeline than the marketing team is. There's no more room for people who want to play a specialist’s game, especially because the simple reality is that if you tell me: but Dean, I'm the best closure in the world and a fantastic negotiator, I'm going to be great. I’m going to say, great. But if that's all you do, then your overall value to me is very limited and constrained by the number of ready to close deals I can send through to you. And if you're a great marketer but no one's closing, then you're not going to have the budget, the tech stack and everything else you need to be successful. So if you're young and starting out, if you're my age and starting out, you've got to reprogram yourself to get excited about the other end of the pipeline. 

James Lawrence: I love it. Dean Mannix, thanks for your time. 

Dean Mannix: Always great to speak. 

James Lawrence: Thanks for listening to The Smarter Marketer podcast. Stay up to date about new episodes on LinkedIn and Instagram by searching for Smarter Marketer podcast. You can purchase your own copy of Smarter Marketer via the Amazon website. And if you want a second opinion about your business's approach to digital marketing, send me an email at jamesl@rocketagency.com or visit the rocketagency.com.au website. Thanks for your time.