126: Bridging The Sales & Marketing Divide with Dialpad

Thank you to our sponsors, LeadIQ, Costello, SalesLoft, WorkRamp, and Dialpad for helping us produce this podcast. Head over to jbarrels.com slash blog for the highlights of this episode and explore resources you can use right away. Let's make it happen. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrels with Make It Happen Monday. Hopefully you all had a fantastic weekend. I am very excited for this conversation because we got a two-for-one deal here, and it's coming from both sides of the house that I love. But constantly are at odds with each other, and we're going to try to figure out some issues. So I'd like to introduce Dan O'Connell, who's this Chief Strategy Officer, and Keith Messick, who is the CMO over at Dialpad.

So, gentlemen, introduce yourselves. I guess maybe, Dan, you want to say hi first? Yeah. So, Dan, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having us. Keith and I are actually sitting right next to each other. Right there. We're going to do some things that will annoy him. But quick background. So, you know, I'm the Chief Strategy Officer, and then I help run sales here at Dialpad. And Dialpad acquired the business that I was running called Talk IQ about 18 months to get. We're going to come in here and talk about sales and pick on marketing a little bit. I love it. Yeah. And so, Keith, what's up, man? Hey, man. I'm Keith Messick, CMO at Dialpad. Happy to be here with two esteemed sales thought leaders.

And mostly impressed that both of you were able to set up your own technology without an SE. Right? Isn't that amazing? Congrats, guys. Big win. Big win. I love it. Cool. So, let's talk. This is something that, you know, so I graduated with my marketing degree, and I kind of stumbled into sales, just like everybody else does. That's my path. Yeah. Then made it back to marketing. All right. So, we went back to kind of the roots, right? Yeah. And I think, you know, I've been, so I've now been in the business world for like 20 plus years, right? And I've been hearing about the sales and marketing divide since I came out of college, and it's still there. And it seems like you guys over at Dialpad are doing some stuff that is different, which is why I want to have this conversation.

Because it seems like you get along a lot better than most from a sales and marketing standpoint. And so, could you, and Keith, I'm going to start with you as far as that experience you had with marketing, sales, marketing. With that perspective, what are you seeing as the biggest, what's the biggest gap? I guess, what is the biggest divide that you see between the two? And then we'll kind of talk about some of the things to do to address it. Yeah. I think that, I mean, listen, I think the best B2B CMOs have some sales experience. Now, I'm obviously pretty biased with that. I like to hire a lot of marketers who have at least given it a shot in sales. Could be BDR, could be inside rep, didn't love it, didn't love the repetition of it, whatever it might be.

But they know that it's a hard job. So, I think part of it is that marketers just don't really fully understand that it's a hard job, right? And you start at zero every period, whether that's monthly, quarterly, yearly. You know, you're both expecting support from the organization. And then the organization is also expecting you to feed yourself at times. So, I think it's just a hard job. And I think marketing doesn't really have a lot of empathy for how hard the job is. And how do you build that? Because, you know, Dan, I'll get to you in a second as far as on the flip side of that. But Keith, I want to dig into that a little bit. Like, you had the experience. I couldn't agree more. I actually think every role in the company should do some type of sales just for a period of time to see what it's like to get their teeth kicked in.

But how do you do that with, I mean, let's face it. The vast majority of people that get into marketing are marketing, right? So, is there a way that something that you've done over at Dialpad to help marketing develop that empathy? Do you get them on the phones? Like, what are some of the things you do? Yeah, so we definitely just had an all-hands with my team and sort of reemphasize that, like, if you're trying to figure out what to do at any given moment and you don't have a task, then hop on a sales call or a customer call. Like, it's the best use of your time. You'll never be like, well, I've heard enough sales calls, right? Right. And also with positioning, it helps, like, where are we winning?

Where are we losing? And I mean that if you're a designer, if you're an ABM, if you're obviously in your demand product marketing. So, it doesn't really matter. It's sort of position agnostic. So, I think that's one thing. Two is I think it's just a matter of, like, everyone on my team is either creating demand or fulfilling demand. That's the way I sort of structure it. So, even if you're sort of an emo designer and they all are, let's be honest, wave them as they walk by, you're still, like, your work is not, it's not meant for your portfolio. That's a nice place for it to end up. It's meant for someone to see it and have some sort of emotional reaction to it or communicate some form of logic visually, whatever it is, so that we can create demand or fulfill demand.

So, I think part of it is just preaching that over and over and over again so that no one ever feels like, hey, like, I'm in marketing. I don't have to care about that. And the reality is, is if you're not selling anything, then you're not in marketing because you don't have a job. I love it. And Dan, from your side, like, what do you see? Because I love the empathy side, right? Because I think if each one of us kind of lived each other in each other's shoes for a little while, like, we'd have a lot better understanding of how we can work together more effectively. What are you seeing from a sales standpoint? Because I see sales reps, there's, I don't want to say an arrogance, but there's almost like this, ugh, marketing, because we're so used to this, like, just the shit, right?

And we're all being asked to follow up on these trade show leads where somebody dumped their card into a bucket just for their squishy ball, but has zero interest in the product. And now I'm being forced to call every one of those bag of shit clients and knowing that it's just going to waste a time. So, I have this disdain for marketing. So, how do you build empathy on the sales side of the house for marketing to understand that they're part of this equation and they're helping us? Yeah, so I think in a couple ways, in the screen, I just realized the way we have this set up, it might actually grab, just show Keith. Ah, there you go. There you go, both of you. I think, like, one, it starts at the top at the end of the day.

And I'll get to a more specific answer, but it's always interesting to me when you get into an organization, how many times people kind of, I'll just slide over here. All right, yeah, sure. I think at times people become quick adversaries. And that piece to me is always very interesting. There's always this dynamic between sales and marketing leadership that plays out pretty much all the way down the line. And I think for us, like, Keith and I happen to get along really well. I think we appreciate people's perspectives. You know, running a startup in a past life, like, you have to think about marketing, I've ran sales. And so, I think we have a lot of overlapping experiences. And that then bleeds down to the teams.

And they see, oh, well, Keith and Dan have a great partnership, so then we should be thinking about how to have a tighter partnership. So, I do think it stems a little bit from the top of how does that leadership actually get along and interact. And I have worked at places where marketing and sales are adversaries at times. And for like, hey, you're part of the same team. I think the other thing when you get into like the marketing is the number one job for sales, outside of obviously generating revenue, is how do we tell the same story? And that ultimately comes down to the marketers or experts at that. And they should be the ones saying, hey, here's the best way to tell a story. And in order to tell that story really effectively or well, then that means you've got to know the customer.

And so, I think we really embrace everybody from our product and our engineering team to our CEO. Everyone's got to be immersed in deals. And if you're not talking with customers, to no surprise, you're not going to market things well. You're not going to build the right things. You're not going to know how to sell things. So, I think we do our best to try to make that a focus and a coherent piece of strategy across all of Dialpad. I love it. And so, how do you balance the controlling the message, right? Because I think that's one of the things I see a lot from marketing is they want to control the message, right? They want to make sure that because they've done research and all this other stuff.

And so, a lot of times they're turning sales reps into robots because they're saying, no, here's the template. Here's what you say. Push that button. So, that's too far on that side. But then there's the other side of the autonomy of a sales rep to kind of do and say whatever they want to do. How do you guys figure out that balance of messaging? Because I talk a lot about the difference between marketing messaging and sales messaging. And it's a real thing. Marketing is a lot more buzzword bingo type of stuff and ROI things where sales is much more specific to the persona or whatever it is. But what do you guys do to balance that so that you're not turning the reps into robots, but you're still controlling it to a certain degree?

Yeah, I think it's less about controlling the message and sort of integrating. Instead, I focus on integrating the messaging. So, like every rep is, if you just tell someone what to say and expect them to say it exactly like that, it always feels forced. They're never comfortable with it. So, some reps sell, they're very, you know, they're probably maybe even too far on the concierge side. But they're, you know, they just build relationships and they integrate the messaging into their sort of normal communication. And you have others who are just sort of like all activity, all activity, all activity. And in their world, they're just trying to find like, what's the 15 second thing that I can get?

Do you know what I mean? Like, and then it's just a matter of supporting them. Like, marketing needs to be an expert on value, on customers, right? And then how you, like, it's not about knowing what to say. It's really sort of knowing when to say something. Like, I think that's really where people get screwy is if you just turn everything into a script, it feels like a script. Nobody wants a script. And then you end up in these calls, you know, where someone six, seven minutes to end is like, hey, like, hey, sorry, I must have missed it. But what do you guys do again? Like, because like, it just has felt so unnatural that they're not exactly sure. Like, I think I know what you do, but you sort of just read the script.

And let me just reconfirm, let's check in that that's what you do. So I think a lot about integrating messaging more than controlling it. And then real quick, I want to go back to empathy for the heads of marketing. The one thing I will say about sales is not everyone in the org thinks they can be in sales. But fuck, does everyone in the organization think they can run marketing? It's just really clear. Like, everyone's got an opinion on every word, every picture, every everything. Oh, God. It's a charming part of the job. So I just want to make sure for any marketers listening there, I see you. I never do that. Yeah, that's right. Well, that's why I like my, so my buddy used to do websites.

And when he would do a website, he would, he does it black and white, grayscale and Loris Ipsum, blah, blah, blah. So just to show the framework, because as soon as you put colors on there, as soon as you put any verbiage on there, literally, everybody's a marketer. Oh, I don't like that color. Oh, no, no, no, no. It could be a shade better. It's like, shut up. Just can we agree to this framework here, right? Dan, Dan, how do you, so going off what Keith said there, as far as the, you know, integrating messaging versus controlling it, how do you like coach your reps or the reps on the team to be natural, but still follow somewhat of a structure that can be, you know, that can be taught and scaled?

Yeah, so the structure and scale comes from onboarding, and I would say like product certification, we do practice with pitches, we make sure that those pitches, yes, there is a script, like what I say, it's not even a script, it's what are the values and guidelines and the key points that you want to hear. How you deliver that message is then something that the individual managers have to coach. I think like the biggest thing that gets lacked when you get into scripting ultimately comes down to it doesn't sound authentic. And I would actually argue that those two, those two key elements are probably what, what separate good from great is to think that actually sounds natural and sounds like, hey, I'm not using the, I'm not using enterprise AI and I drive down one-on-one and sell billboards and I'm like, what, I don't know what that is.

So it's a balance of, look, you got to talk in normal terms and making sure that we actually can understand that there's a consistent message around that and some consistent language that we use for it. Yeah, because I think that's like, that's the challenge, right, is, is, is when a rep starts, they don't know what they don't know, right? So it's almost like, you know, my, at least my approach to this, like when, when Morgan came on board with me to do sales training, right? Like I gave him my deck and I was like, look, I need you to, I need you to, like, I'm going to write the notes and I'm going to have you watch me and I want you to deliver it like I deliver it, right? Because I want to make sure that you can go through the deck and figure out the timing of those things, right?

And so I quote unquote certified him on the deck, but then I told him right after he was certified, I said, look, if I come back and I audit one of your courses and jump in maybe three months later, and you're still telling the exact same stories that I have, you know, those, all these things, then I'm going to be pissed. So you, you have to make it your own, right? But how do you get, how do you get the reps to do that? Because I feel, I feel like so many reps just go through the motions because that's what they're told to do, right? They push the button on the cadence. They, they make the cold call with the script, you know, they, they, I mean, demos are literally one of my least favorite things ever, right?

Because every fucking demo is exactly the same. They say, hey, is this still a good time? Okay, we'll get about a 30 minute demo here that I'd like to go through. If you have any questions as we go through it, just let me know. Okay. And then they press play and they go through every fucking slide, like they were badged for, and then they get the end and they are, you know, does that make sense? So like, how do you coach being normal, I guess? Sorry, that was, that was amazing renditions. Actually taking that in for a moment. Yeah, I think, look, like there's two ways. One is I actually think I would, well, what I would say is that actually falls to the manager. And I think a lot of reps actually fail, not because of, look, like you got to have good onboarding, you got to have good messaging.

Sure. Then there's the, the approach that I've seen done in plenty of startups, which is, hey, we're just going to push the rep off the ledge into the deep end and hope that they figure this out. And I can tell you that's not, they're not going to, some of them, like, some of them will figure it out, the vast majority are not. And then it comes down to like, hey, well, what do you do? What is your sales manager doing? And I think that's why you've seen a lot of investment in different types of companies that are helping solve that. But it really comes down to like, look, does your manager actually coach, spend time coaching people and giving them that feedback, which is like, hey, you're awkward.

Or you sound too scripted, or I need you to loosen up and use your own verbiage and language. And when it gets down to it, you know, when you talk to managers, a lot of their time is not being spent on calls. And then if you go talk to the AEs, a common complaint that will be, that they may say around a manager is, they don't know the product. And then that will actually get pushed up across an organization to like, does your CMO know the product? Can they do a pitch? Can your VP of engineering give a pitch? And that's where I think the breakdown all starts to happen. Why I say like a lot of this starts from the top of, look, you got to have that product knowledge and that message from the top down and demonstrate that expertise.

And you need to then, and I'm given a little bit of a long-winded answer, the day-to-day of the managers has to be coaching and has to be providing value and giving that pointed feedback because it's much like, it's like a hitting coach. Most people, if you give them a bat, even if they've never played baseball, will pick it up and know how to at least swing. They're going to be hitches. They're going to step in the bucket. Like they're going to do all sorts of different things. And that nuance becomes really important. And again, what kind of separates people that are effective and people that aren't effective. Yeah. Yeah. I think that it's, you know, I go over, you know, my whole connection between sales and marketing is context over content.

Right. So I always say, you know, this is Gary V, right? He says, everybody talks content is king. Content is king. Fine. If content is king, context is God. To me, that's marketing and sales, right? Marketing is content and sales is context. If we as sales reps can't put any context around the content that we're putting out there, we're no different than marketing. And I have no idea why we're getting paid to do what we do. You know what I mean? So it's like a lot of that comes into that sort of hustle too. I mean, a lot like, you know, the reps who practice their craft, right? You know what I mean? When they're not on a call and they're not prospecting, they're listening to someone else do it.

Like, you can't, you know what I mean? Like, you can instrument, you can, you know, you can, here's the process, here's this, here's that. But at some point, there's just someone sitting next to someone else. And one of those people cares more. And so then it comes down to hiring, firing, and coaching. Yeah. It's crazy. Like, if you think of any sport, right? Like, most sports are 90% practice, 10% application, right? Sales is pretty much 100% application and we're practicing on the job. Yep. The fact that people don't take time to do role play, don't take time to do, like, listen in on calls and dissect them and reverse engineer bad deals and those type of things, close loss, you know, that type of stuff, like, blows me away, right?

I mean, I get it because we're being forced, oh, you know, every month. Well, it comes to priorities, right? And I think, again, like, setting a culture of getting people to understand, like, what's the best use of your time? Yeah. Like, at that meeting, right, or getting pulled into actually sitting down and calling from it. Yeah. Let me ask, I'm going to shift gears a little bit because I'm curious on both of your perspective on MQL versus SQL. Like, defining it and so that we're not yelling at it because that's the other thing. Going back to my example of, you know, trade show, shitty leads, go follow up with them. These are all great leads and no, they're not. So how do you guys deal with that, like, defining what it means so that you can actually track, really track what works, what doesn't, where the channels are that are driving the best?

Like, could you kind of give me some insight there? Because I've lost that insight a long time ago. Thank you. We actually just do, we do what we call TQLs, total qualified leads. Okay. And then the next step is sales accepted. Yeah. Right. So, and the bar for TQL is actually pretty high. It's, so, so trade shows do not make the TQL list. We, they get put, they get nurtured unless there was like a very specific communicate, like with a rep there. And the rep claimed it and the rep has moved it to, um, an SAL and the, they would never see those until they bubble up into the TQL thing. So we just did like the, the war for attribution is sort of like the least interesting fight in all of business.

And it's sort of one where like, I, the only time I've ever seen people really give a shit about attribution is when things aren't going well. So it's a pretty good, like when everybody's above quota, no one's like, where'd that lead come from? Nobody gives a shit. So you should, so I always think like, Hey, like you're, there's something wrong and at lead attribution probably isn't it. So let's fix the action. Because when you're on the way up, no one gives a shit. Yeah. Um, so one is this, we just did away with marketing qualified versus seller qualified. We, everyone's leads go into one bucket. That bucket has a pretty high bar. Um, and then, then we convert the waterfall starts at sales accepted and then to opportunity.

So one, it just simplifies reporting and then we do, we handle exceptions. Like one of the things we do here is we report by lead source. We report by all those things. And if there's some exception, then we always handle it. Like, you know, like, yeah, marketing, it was a marketing lead 12 months ago, but I just talked to them. I mean, that this falls like directly in my don't give a shit bucket. Like, sure, dude, you can have it. Like, I don't, we don't really fight for those things. Yeah. And, and, and, you know, Dan, how do you prevent sales reps? And I don't think sandbagging is the right word, but, but like getting a legit, so whatever your definition of total qualified lead is, right?

Say that flips over to me and I use the SDR BAE example here, right? SDR calls in, they, they, you know, they get a good cut. Like let's use Bant. Like I hate Bant, right? But, but, you know, what happens is some, a lot of companies still use that. And so to me, I only care about need. So say you flip it over to an AE and you got a lazy AE, right? Who's like, you know what? They get on and the person says, oh yeah, I'm interested, but I actually don't have any budget for that right now, but I'd still be raising a talk. And the AE then flips it back over and says, that was bullshit. You know what I mean? And if they just were worth anything, they could have uncovered and driven that urgency. So how do you prevent that from once it gets the TQL to then, to then a sales accepted lead to then being like, yeah, yeah, no, this wasn't me or I'm sandbagging.

Cause it's not an opportunity. Like I'm going to put it as a zero out. Yeah. So two, so two things that I think personally should get tracked is, is tracking on both sides. And I've seen this like running SDR organizations in the past is like, one is you got to track like, Hey, did I actually go through it? Say a lead comes in from a trade show, whatever it might be. Okay. It goes to an SDR team and be like, Hey, you got to go qualify. And it's got to go hit these things before you go send an appointment for, for somebody of sales and then would call it like checking quality for sales, which is something I'm also interested in, in running sales orgs, which is like, okay, great. This SDR, they sent over 10, they set 10 appointments.

We can then go look at those 10 appointments on the sales side to say like, would that sales person agree that those were 10 qualified appointments? And if that person comes back and says, no, only one of them is, then there's some breakdown in the process, right? Either the qualification's wrong or there's a breakdown in the way the sales rep is actually doing it. And I'm not sure everyone does that. And then that again, kind of solves the problem of what you're bringing up, which is you got to look at not just the number of appointments that are being set on, and I'm just picking on SDR, BDRs for this example, but then you have to go check quality. And then you've got to look at those two data points to figure out like, where's the discrepancy and if there is a breakdown, what's the breakdown of it?

Yeah. Cause I mean, that's where I see the biggest frustration, right? And it's, it's marketing SDR to AE. It's like, you know, the SDR role just, you know, that, that's rough, right? Well, we also have like, the funny thing is, I would say the, this process is, I hate the phrase sales and marketing alignment because it usually only gets uttered my direction in some sort of like bullshit way that doesn't mean anything. I'm like, so what do you mean by that? And usually the person saying that says, I don't know, I read a blog over the weekend and this isn't the right thing to say. So, but this process is where you have to be aligned. And, you know, we'll see, you know, I think every marketer has the same problem sometimes like, you know, someone comes to a web form, they fill it out.

They want to talk to a rep or, you know, it's like, I requested them, whatever it is, you know, you have to, someone has to contact that person. Like, it's just bad for the brand. Otherwise, like either take the form off or, but you know what I'm saying? Like, I don't know how to score their intent beyond just sort of like, Hey, they, they've contact sales. Like, like, I think you're going to have to contact them back. I'm not sure. Um, but I think we've, we, we actually don't have this that much. It bubbles up every now and then. I mean, one of the things is I think because I used to be in sales, like I, like when I first got here, um, you know, we count, I looked at the, the, the previous board deck, which is sort of the first thing you do.

And we counted a lot of volume from like free try to free signups for one of our other products. And these are so far from being actual leads. So I probably cut between like my first month there, I cut probably 90% of the leads out of the reporting. The one is just like being realistic. Like there's no, I don't think there's, there's, I, I don't get a trophy or a sticker or a bonus for leads. I only get it for revenue, so it was not an incentive to, to sort of, you know, vanity metrics, right. At the end of the day. So, so, and that kind of leads to another thing as far as like, cause you, what you're talking about there is, is the shift really to quality over quantity, right? Like we really want to be focusing on the right thing.

So where, where are you guys on ABM? Like, you know, the account-based marketing and all that stuff, like where, and how does that truly align on the sales side of the house for you guys? ABM is probably one of the things that we do best on demand. Um, so we just identify everyone's top accounts. We throw them into the pile. Um, we use, you know, obviously technology for that and we create content specifically for that. And we've just done a lot of targeted events. I mean, the reality is, is if, if your LTV can support it, then like people, like people, dinners, games, you know, networking events, they work right. If you do them with high quality, like, I think the first pass at ABM was like, we're going to be really sophisticated.

And you know what I mean? Like, we're just going to, they're going to target this and we'll show, we'll retarget here, some content and all this. And then there's also just a piece that's like, Hey, I've got two tickets to the Warriors game. Do you want to go? It's amazing how many people want to go to the Warriors game. Right. Sometimes I just think like we sort of over index and sort of like, let's be really sophisticated versus, um, Hey, sometimes people like to be spiffed, like, so we balance that. Plus we do a lot of direct mail, which has been, um, if there's one place where we get called in the attribution war, it's, it's direct mail because we set up, we set it up. We also do a lot of automated outbound.

Plus we ride everything. And Dan's team hits a button and wants credit for it. And I'm like, I don't know, like the button and keep the credit. So we fight about that sometime. Dan, what's your, what's your sales team's role in ABM and how do they look at it? Yeah. So I think, um, what Keith highlighted, um, very specific outreach and events, I had great success on kind of, I would say like pulling back on trade shows and doing a lot more investment however you want to frame them. Um, also adding like plus ones to those events too, is just something I was going to add on. Um, you know, there's a lot of times like you'll get invited to something and you're like, ah, like last minute, you always know somebody's going to bail on something like, Hey, here's a cool event.

Um, you can bring a plus one to it. And I think that's interesting for, you know, that partner, spouse, whatever it might be, um, to go and kind of learn a little bit about what their significant other is doing. It's kind of interesting. Um, we've seen great results on that. I think the team likes it, gives them focus. Right. And as I said, it's another utility and tool. Again, we get into like kind of the buzzwords of like ABM. And I'm like, I don't know. All of sales, like everything kind of just goes around in circles. I'm like, I don't know. Is it rocket science? Hey, pick your top accounts and we'll be strategic on what way to invite them to. Like, I mean, in five more years, somebody else is going to come up with another word for it.

I don't know if it's ever been like a trend or not. It's good marketing. Seems logical and reasonable thing to go into. That's why it's like, it's like acronyms, right? Like cracks me up. It's like, you just come up with a new acronym so you can market it. So you can take credit for it and write a book about it. And then all of a sudden, you know what I mean? It's like one marketing. It was like Peppers and Rogers. I'm old enough to remember that. And then all they did was just take that and turn it into software. And I was like, wait, this is the same thing that's been around forever. But you got to sell software. But the team, if you ask them, hey, do you want to go work a trade booth floor?

Right. Do you want to go show up at the Chase Center and hang out with your top accounts? And build a relationship with another CIO or CRO or VPSA, whoever they're selling to, right? They opt 99.9% of the time for that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's also, you almost look at it as a little bit of a spiff to the rep too, right? It's like, if I'm inside all the time and I'm making calls and I get to go to that event and meet my clients, if I drive a certain amount of them there, then that's kind of benefit to everybody, right? Yeah. And some, I mean, there are startups in the world that pitch the, hey, go work, the trade show floor is the spiff in, you know, X, Y, and Z city. Right. And I'm like, I don't necessarily know if that's always been a spiff.

That's right. Yeah. Our team will now hear, we do have our team work, the tribute. So I know they will all come and they'll be like, listen to you on the podcast. And when you said that, you're not tricking me anymore. You know, I say that. The other thing about proprietary events is you get both prospects and customers in one place. And that's a dream scenario. They sell themselves, right? Yeah, absolutely. Like it's, you know, like it's usually, um, an engaged customer, right? And, you know, they're, and so they're there and it's just a nice way to get people talking on your behalf, which is the best marketing ever. So we've definitely, we've, we've worked proprietary events hard in the past year.

And, and from a, from a voice standpoint, cause you're right. I think the customer's voice, right. Is what is what you want. Like me telling you how great I am, who gives a shit. Like, but my client saying, Hey, so, so how do you get that voice? Like how much engagement do you guys do with your customers on both sides? Right. Because I think, you know, interviewing, like I, I had, when Morgan came on board, what he did was I gave him my top 10 clients and I didn't give him my ICP. I said, these are the top 10 clients that we work with. I want you to go research them and interview them and figure out what the commonalities are so that you understand what our ICP is. And the same thing with personas.

I said, look, these are our three personas, VPs of sales, VPs of enablement, VPs of, uh, of, uh, or CROs. And I said, I'm not going to tell you what they care about. I want you to go do research and I want you to go to interview some. So with that context, he was able to go out and have much better conversations when he was out there. How much do you integrate or, or how do you integrate the voice of the customer into, to what you're doing? Let me take that one. Yeah. I was, yeah, go for it. You're on a roll. Am I? I feel like I'm talking too much. I defer to you and then I'll correct you. Yeah. So, um, so we do a couple of different things like customer advisory boards. We do once a quarter.

Okay. Like how do we bring marketing sales? And then obviously a product and engineering all to the mix of, um, you know, some of our, our, our largest customers, also some new customers, they represent different buyers. We sell three different products to three different buyers. So it's also a nice mix of like, you have VP of sales, VP of customer success, you got a CIO or COO on them too. Um, so those are pieces that break down those walls and really allow people to go and hear the pain, um, right. Or the frustration. And also the good things directly. Other things we do is I think it's, it's always interesting when you work on, um, you know, with engineering and product teams, um, is when somebody, you know, somebody turns out or somebody's really frustrated, um, is sharing that email directly with the engineer.

That's building that feature. And if you want to motivate an engineer or somebody to do something, literally go and show them, Hey, here's a hundred thousand dollars yield that I just lost because X, Y, and Z didn't work. Um, that's probably the only way that you will motivate them. They literally see it and feel it and realize that it costs revenue for them to go and fix. So sometimes it does, you know, it does fall to sales to go and do some of the dirty work of like, I literally have to go and drag this person onto a call or into an email thread, but they need to hear it. And it takes a little bit of extra effort. Yeah. I don't think it's super effective for teams to sit behind ticketing systems and say, Hey, here's the most common feature request and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Like nobody feels the pain from that. It's all nice to have. So those are some ways that we actually try to gather the voice of the customer. Some of it's a little bit of, of heavy handed legwork, but I think it's valuable and needed and necessary and it gets passed, um, it gets, doesn't get done by, by other places. And now a lot of it is like some structured events. As I said, it's kind of customer advisory boards and things of that nature. Keith, your color commentary that everyone is waiting for, please. Yeah, I actually, that was pretty good. Um, I, I was going to say, I think, um, all or, well, a lot of organizations fall into the same trap is that they just want to talk to their happiest customers, but you don't learn a ton from them.

I mean, like, like, like we've got a couple, we've got some customers who love us so much. And I'm like, I love you too, Michael. You're amazing. Like we'll take any reference call. We'll show up at the event. Like, who do you want me to talk to? Like, like you couldn't have a bigger advocate, but you also need to talk to the person who's like, Hey, this sucked. Yeah. Like, right. And I think you have to just sort of like culturally believe that, that you have to prepare yourself because those are the, those conversations are not fun. Nope. Um, but they're where you're going to learn the most. Like in, in oftentimes it's also where you learn more. Like there was a breakdown in the sales process, breakdown in the marketing messaging.

Like we, we were like, it works in any part of the world. Maybe that was true. Maybe it wasn't. Do you know what I mean? So like things like that, where you're like, okay, well shit, like this, maybe it is a product problem. Maybe we oversold it. Maybe we, whatever it may be. But, um, if you're just trying to talk to the people who love you, I don't think you get very good information. Actually, I forgot to mention that. The other thing was like, I gave them my 10 best customers, but I also gave them the customers that not, not weren't what were overly unhappy. But I said like, we should be doing more business with them. Like they, we did, I did one session. I got great feedback and all that other stuff, but they now, they, they didn't follow up with something else.

So go ask them why. Go ask them why they didn't do a second session with me, a third session with me or invest in our online portal. Cause I want to know that. Cause there's some real stuff there, right? Like it's, they have internal resources and they took it on themselves or whatever it was. Cause now that insight will help you sell better. Right. You made a good point earlier, which is, um, you know, doing postmortems and five lies and a lot of stuff that gets done on, on, from a product and engineering angle angle and less so on kind of deal reviews, which is, and you see it in details. It's like, Hey, this deal pushed or 11th hour, you know, something boxed and, and, and it didn't happen.

Um, and actually taking a moment to, you know, to go and actually review that and figure out where, where, where was the breakdown? Was it in a process? Could we have done something differently? I think it's, it's, it's something that gets good. Oh, cool. Uh, we're coming up on the half hour here. Any, any other specific, like any like tactical things that you guys are doing that you, that, that probably most aren't to help with that sales and marketing alignment. Um, that, uh, but any, any other kind of tips that people could at least consider or think about doing in their organizations? Yeah, I think, um, you know, Keith and I talk a lot about BDR, SDR orgs. Um, I think we debate a lot about how much specialization is actually necessary in order to, um, speed to lead.

Do you actually need to involve SDRs or BDRs in touching opportunities that come in all of the time? Okay. I have my own thoughts on that stuff, but we have generally pretty solid alignment of how we think about, look, like BDR, SDR. I put it in the marketing camp. Um, that's the role, that's the task. Um, and then in terms of just, you know, specialization is necessary, but, um, at times I don't think it's always needed. Actually real quick before Keith, uh, I forget who, who, uh, who does the SDR, BDR, uh, org line up to? Is it marketing or sales? We just made a flip over to marketing. Yeah. I see. I see. I see this happening all over the place. I know it. I also just took on sales enablement as well.

Okay. Yeah. And I, the reason I did that, um, I, I felt like there were too many weird, hard lines between go-to-market, product marketing, and sales enablement. And I view them all like, as the same thing. I mean, like when I, I, I used to work at product marketing years ago at SuccessFactors and I spent 99% of my time with the enterprise sales team. Like, like you would have never known I was in marketing and here, I think we have, we, we had too many like divisions, but of just, and it's all the same work. It's just like one person's turning into a program, one person's turning it in. So we just, I just took on sales enablement because I'm trying to smash all those groups together and get them all like your job is sales enablement period.

Um, you know, this person's job is just to turn that into a program and like e-learning or whatever it may be. And to work with the managers for like consistent follow-up. But, um, yeah. So SDRs, BDRs into marketing helps us control messaging there. It also like just gets everyone bought into the early stages of the funnel, I think. Um, but back to your question around alignment, I think like the two things I see one, you just have to agree, like you have to find a, a top of funnel, like definition that you agree on and you can't leave the room until you agree on it. And then neither fucking party can pretend they don't agree with it. Like, which is the most important thing. Like you have to like say to everyone, we agree on this.

Um, is what happens is like, as soon as the numbers go down, everyone starts blaming everyone. So you can't do that. The other thing, and I think marketing departments are really bad at this is like, it's hard to align on 7,000 things in your personal life and your professional life, like anything. So like, and marketing is like a little bit of like we, you know, activity it's like, well, I checked, I did 50 data sheets. And so my job's complete. And so, um, so I'm working really hard right now. And we've fallen into this trap as well, where it's like, Hey, like there's 400 pieces of sales collateral, 400 pieces of sales collateral can't be important. Right. But someone's just cranking shit out and they're cranking out and it's vertical marketing.

It's all this. And so we're just simplifying, like greatly simplifying. It's like, here's the five things that matter. And now your job is to keep those five things completely up to date and ensure that the reps understand those five things and all of the changes. And we're just going to do that for a couple of quarters. And, and number six doesn't exist. So someone says, I really need that. I call it the PDF to president's club. But like, if I just had that PDF, I would have made president's club. And that's never, ever happened. It's never come true ever once in the history of sales. That needs to be your new t-shirt. It is. Your t-shirt should say, fuck your PDF. Exactly. Exactly. Nobody cares.

Exactly. So we're simplifying pretty greatly. And then I think you can align on five things. I don't think you can align on 50. No, I agree. Like we did that last year. Like I, we were tracking everything last year, every social metric, every engagement piece you could. And I had this spreadsheet where honestly, for the first like couple of months, I was like, Oh, it was such an eyesore. And then after three months, I was like, I honestly don't give a shit about any of this because none of it matters to me at this point. Yes, there were some things in there, but it was so, it was such lost in the noise that I stopped paying attention to it. And, but the problem was I, I, my team, because I told them to track all this shit, they kept tracking all of it.

And I checked out literally three months in, I should have told them to cut the shit, you know, at that point. But I didn't. And they, they wasted a whole bunch of time last year, tracking a whole bunch of metrics that ultimately didn't matter at all. So it's, I, I agree with you. Just like cut down one of the five key things that matter here and then move the dial. And then let's take a look at it next quarter and see if they, if they've changed. Perfect. Awesome guys. Well, it's been a fantastic conversation. I appreciate it. Uh, any last minute comments that you want to make for everybody? I mean, well, well, let me tell me a little bit about how people can get to like what you want people to know as far as dial pad, as far as how to get connected with you guys, what do you guys are focused on these days, like hiring or any of that stuff?

Yeah, I think I can take it. You want to take it? I'll say, well, first of all, dialpad.com. That's easy. Yeah. Um, two, for all the salespeople, like we, we just launched a product probably two quarters ago. That's really like a phone just built for sales teams. Yeah. Um, we thought we talk a lot here. You may see this as well as like sales has become the crutch in sales that no one wants to talk about is email. And everyone just wants to blast an email sequence out for people to raise their hand and be like, Oh, cool. That email really just. And so, um, we see this even in our hiring of like just generationally, a lot of people aren't super comfortable on the phone. Yeah. Um, so we actually, the, when we acquired Dan's company, one of the things we loved was sort of the end call coaching.

So like literally like I'm on the phone, I'm a new rep. Someone asked a question. Part of inside sales is just finding the shit. You know what I mean? Like here's a battle card and here's a thing. And I don't know that. And so, you know, using NLP and AI, we actually surface those answers right there on the screen. That's awesome. So we can, you know, the goal is to try and take a new rep and get them like comfortable as fast as possible. So, um, you should check that out. It's called Dialpad Sell. We'll cut you. By deal, we'll sell it to you at list, but then we'll sell you something else. Love it. I love it. Yeah. No, I've actually checked it out and we got, we're seeing the same thing by the way, as far like, that's why we came up with our keep dialing workshop because we're actually seeing phone now being a competitive advantage, right?

And, and it's the one thing that computers can't do, right? I don't need, I don't, I honestly don't need a sales rep to send out emails. I really don't. Yep. Right. So, uh, Dan, any, any, uh, last thoughts of what you want, uh, from a sales standpoint that you hire, like those types of things people find out? Yeah. So as Keith said, um, just go check us out at dialpad.com. You can connect with us on LinkedIn and find us there. I'm happy to continue the conversation otherwise. Awesome. Well, thank you guys both for coming on. I, I, I, I wish that more, uh, uh, sales and marketing organizations got along as well as you do. Cause I, cause to your point, like I just see them fighting all the time and it just works so much better when we work together here and we all have that common goal, right?

Yeah. We're huddled around a little screen here. Right. Look at this. Yeah. See, it's everyone big, happy family. So awesome. Well, again, hopefully everybody got as much value out of this as I did. Um, if you have any information, just go to dialpad.com. Check out Dan and Keith on LinkedIn. And, uh, yeah, like I say all the time, if, uh, if you had a bad day or anything like that, do one thing today and make somebody smile. Cause if you make somebody smile, no matter how bad today went, you know, you had a good day, right? It made a difference in somebody's life. So. Thank you. Right. It's good to talk to you. Great talking to you too, guys. Thank you very much. Have a great day. Yeah. Cheers.