Rowan Tonkin: Transparency and Trust: The Key to Sales and Marketing Success

All right, before we get started here, you all know I talk a lot about AI and the pros and cons of AI and what we need to do to stay relevant in today's world. And it's all about leveraging this. Look, we have two options here. We either jump in and start figuring this stuff out or we get replaced. And I want to jump in and start figuring out, which is why I'm so excited to talk about HubSpot's new AI power tools. They have a content assistant and a chat spot that they've actually integrated into their CRM. And it talks about being a conversational virtual assistant baked into the CRM experience. And it's run on OpenAI's ChatCPT model. So it really gives you that conversational coaching that you need at every stage and wherever you are.

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And today's guest is Rowan Tonkin. I've known Rowan for a while now. We've worked at three or four different companies together. He's brought me in to train his teams. And he is now the CMO over at Planful and has a great perspective on sales and marketing, which is why I wanted to have him on the podcast. One of the things he said when I was talking to him a couple of weeks ago was, his frustration with a lack of transparency on the marketing side of the house. And that was speaking my language, right? Because sales reps, we get measured to the nth degree about everything. Every call we make, every meeting we have, our forecast, and we get in trouble for a lot of it. And marketing is kind of this black box of like, hey, what's going on over there?

And I think that's what creates a lot of the divide between sales and marketing. So we dove into that topic. But we also talked about a lot of different things like the financial metrics and how we can use that from a top level to align sales and marketing. Talked about that transparency and how you can't have trust without transparency, which is a huge issue, which I think is plaguing most sales and marketing organizations. And then I asked some very specific questions about in bad times, like what gets cut first, marketing budget or sales budget and why. And also attribution, right? And how I think all sales reps need to be mini marketers here and drive that outbound activity that ultimately drives inbound.

But how do you actually connect the dots there with all that outbound activity? Who gets credit? And then last but not least, we tied up on personal branding and how the advent of the chief evangelist officer and how to leverage internal resources from a marketing standpoint without overly controlling it, but doing it the right way. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Roland, what's going on? Welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How you been? I've been great, John. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah, it's been a long time coming, man. I appreciate this. We've been... When did we actually connect? Was it at Anaplan?

Was that the first place? Yeah, it was. It was back then in Anaplan. So, and then we worked together at the last company, OmniSci, and did some stuff here at Planful. So, yeah. It's been a couple of bounces around, yeah. Exactly. And I think the reason, you know, the reason I continue to enjoy working with you is we both come from slightly different sides of the same equation, I think. But we have different... We have the same opinions on our respective areas of interest, right? On the marketing side of the house and I'm on the sales side of the house. But before we're going to get into that, kind of that sales marketing divide and also the transparency of the different roles and such like that and see if we can find some type of ways to work together better.

But before we do that, Roland, why don't you give the audience a little bit of background of where you're coming from and what you're up to these days? Yeah, sure. So, my name is Roland Tonkin. I look after marketing here at Planful. I'm the CMO. I've been here for about four years. I led the company through a big rebrand and go-to-market strategy shift. And funnily enough, I'm the marketing guy that looks after revenue operations, which isn't the most common situation for many CMOs to be in. So, it's the fox guarding the hen house sometimes. But better that than the CRO guarding the hen house. So, yeah, I'm Australian. I moved out to the U.S. in 2016 after spending 10 years in London. And yeah, I've had a couple of rides here in the U.S.

And prior to that, I spent actually a bunch of time being a solution consultant, implementation consultant, and sales rep for marketing technology. So, I have seen the other side of the coin. You've been on the dark side or the light side, whichever one you want to look at. Love that, man. Hey, and I think that actually gives you an interesting perspective, right? Because that's why I think for me, I always have had a healthy respect for marketing because that's what my degree was in. You know what I mean? I got my degree in marketing, and so I understand the fundamentals of it. But I went all in on sales when I was coming out of school. And so, you know, and it's always driven me nuts that, you know, when I got, well, shit, I'm 20, I'm 47 now.

So, I've been in sales for 27 years, give or take. And I heard about the sales and marketing divide when I got into this industry, and I have not seen very many improvements since. And everybody always talks about tech and all these different things that's going to solve the problem. But it's still marketing over here, sales is over here, marketing comes up with messaging, throws over the fence, sales doesn't use it, doesn't give any feedback, says it sucks, and there's this never-ending loop of hatred between the two. So, let's start, I guess, with that. Like, what have you seen be effective? So, let's start with some alignment issues, okay? Because I want to get into transparency, because I do think there is something that you had mentioned when we first started talking about, you know, accountability on both sides of the equation.

But let's start with some positives here about, like, where have you seen it work? And, like, in today's world, with all the tech, with all the different AI and that type of thing, like, what are some of the things that you see for companies that have that alignment, right? What are some of the major things that you say, these things have to be in place for this to work, or it's just going to shatter? Yeah, I think where I've seen it work is when you really have a CEO that understands both sides and can ensure alignment through a CSO and a CMO or a CRO and a CMO, right? The more that we can create the alignment in terms of the actual go-to-market strategy, the easier everything becomes. And most of the time, the friction comes from having two leaders who have differing opinions on go-to-market strategy.

You know, one wants to be marketing-led, the other one wants to be sales-led, someone else might be product-led. And it creates conflict at the executive level. And ultimately, you're just sitting there, like, bitching about which way to go. Whereas when you have a CEO that understands both sides and can either just be very definitive that, you know, hey, marketing is a subordinate to sales, sometimes that might work. Other times, it might be, do you know what? This is marketing-led, brand-led, we're going to do this. And you just guys receive leads. And that's how it's going to work. You guys listen to marketing on go-to-market strategy? That'll work too. It's when there's a lack of clarity, I think, at the executive level as to what the defined go-to-market strategy is, who's responsible for what, is where most of the problem comes in, and I've seen that in, you know, kind of founder-led, you know, technology-led companies.

But that's also where I've seen it be most successful, because the, you know, the tech founder got out of the way and brought in someone to run both sides of the house. And that was, you know, a CRO that, in my case, had a marketing background. And ultimately, everything ran through that, but they were a great salesperson too. So it worked on a balance. Yeah, I think that the expectations is, and it also comes down to, like, the measurement too, and what each group is actually being measured for. Like, this whole, like, MQL, SQL bullshit. Like, I really wish we would just focus on, like, qualified meetings, right? Wherever they come from, I could care less. But, you know, people are like, well, we sent over, you know, a bunch of, you know, MQLs for you.

Why didn't you follow up on those? It's like, to a sales rep, an NQL, I mean, we've all been burned before by those bullshit trade-show leads. You know what I mean? Where, you know, we went to a trade, you know, marketing went to a trade show and scanned every fucking badge that walked by the booth, whether they talked to them or not, or took the, you know, bowl of, you know, fishbowl of cards and threw them in when people were just looking for the squishy ball. And then sent us over a list, this Excel list of all these names that we had to follow up on with Gmail accounts and everything like that. And then had to be, and then we're yelled at if we didn't, but 99.9% of those are bullshit leads.

And it takes us away from actually doing our job to drive real leads. So that's why, you know, I think that the definition of what a lead is, the definition of what a good outcome is, is where it starts. Right. And is that, is that, is that something you see in these organizations that, that like we should have like, Hey, before we even get started here, we need to understand and brainstorm what the go-to markets were all on the same page. Yeah. I think I'd actually step that back even further and say that is a symptom across all departments. Right. And what, one of the things that we certainly hear at Planful talk a lot about is, you know, we need to have multiple sets of metrics. Right. And if you think about your metrics in a hierarchy, so the core metric we all care about is our financial metrics.

Right. That's what we report to the street. That's how we make profit. I know SAS companies don't do a lot of that, but it's new. And, um, you know, it's a good idea. Um, and, and so we've got our financial metrics and then we have commercial metrics to me, commercial metrics are things like sales pipeline, right? That's, that's a metric that all go-to-market teams should be organized. And, uh, and then underneath that are our operational metrics. Now, the reason that we often fight is we haven't aligned on what's an operational metric that might be shared versus what's a commercial metric that we should all care about. And, uh, most of the time our commercial metrics are, are lagging indicators.

So we end up fighting on all the leading indicators like MQLs. The MQL is just the leading indicator of will there be future pipeline, right? Now it's important for me to know, I'm not sure it's that helpful for, for a CRO or CSO or actually a VP of sales or an SDR to know how many MQLs we generated, except for the fact that if it's going up or down, it should help them understand what's going to happen to their pipeline, which is a commercial metric. And so, you know, I would encourage folks to think about their metrics in that way, um, to, to kind of answer your question of what I've seen work, what we do here and why I measure my team on, on stage three plus pipeline, right now, who cares what stage label that is?

The reason I measure it that way is because a customer has said, I have a problem and I'm going to do something about it. Now that's the metric for me that says that's a good opportunity for anyone in sales because the customer is actually going to do something about it. Uh, until that point, it's irrelevant to me. I've just got interest in maybe some awareness, but, uh, no one's doing anything. So that's, uh, that's our metric. Obviously you got to step back and go, all right, I need all the leading indicators, but the commercial metric that I need to agree with the sales is S3 plus. Hey, I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JV sales membership.

It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, filling the funnel and driving to close. It also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific skills and different tech like chat GBT and how to leverage it in the sales process. And it gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. You get all of this for $420 a year as an individual or $5,000 for teams. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to www.jbarrows.com and click on the individual or team membership and use code podcast, you'll get 20% off. Let's make this happen together. So with that, you know, I have this talk tracker theory that I'm working on and I believe it is, I think a lot of sales reps.

So I think that the role between sales and marketing is starting to blend quite a bit right now because of, and I actually think marketing is creeping further and further and further into the sales world, especially with a lot of this AI stuff, you know, a true account based marketing. And I'm curious what your take is on this with, because I've been talking to a lot of CROs about the SDR role specifically, right? And how I think it's in a lot of trouble because in the, in the good times, right? Look, the predictable revenue model of segmentation of roles, right? So you got the inbounds and you get the outbound rep making cold calls, then you get the AE doing closing and then you have CS. That is fantastic for us as organizations to help scale, or at least it was, right?

Because we can bring in cheap labor, basically beat them up, let them grow into our sales. And we create this nice little funnel for ourselves. But first of all, it's not customer centric in any way, shape or form, nor has it ever been. No client likes to be handed off five times before they actually talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about, right? And the model breaks now because most SDRs don't even stay in their roles or their company for that matter for more than nine to 12 months, right? So if it still was the bench for the AEs, I could see the argument here. But now we've, I feel like we've over-engineered this process on the SDR side of the house specifically, which has gotten us into this mess.

We've over-engineered with technology and process, and we've skipped a lot of the fundamentals because we've been growing so fast as an industry of tech and SaaS specifically, right? A 60% button seat is better than a zero button seat. Who cares? Go blast out template emails. I don't give a shit. And now we're in this world where people actually, ROI matters, thoughtfulness matters. And so now you're seeing this SDR go through a transition here. So with the advent of AI and all the ability to do actual real personalization at scale, not just change somebody's title, name, and industry, right? Where do you see the SDR role evolving to? And do you believe that we're headed back to full cycle sales supported by true ABM on the marketing side of the house?

I think it depends on where you sit in the maturity of your, let's take B2B SaaS, for example, on your kind of must-have list of technology, right? There's a lot of technology out there that is fundamental to the way the business needs to work. Brand recognition is already established. So you and I go and start a company, we know we're going to need a CRM, right? So we don't need SDRs at a CRM company, really. Although there's a lot out there. But we really don't need that. But where you might be actually creating a category, but a new way of doing something, we need to educate and evangelize the market on that. And effectively, the way that I do think about SDRs in some of those capacities is, I'm just paying for reach to a target set of customers.

And, you know, maybe I'm not asking for a meeting, but I just want to create brand awareness. And my techniques might be more telemarketing-based. I've run campaigns like that before. But when you get to a more mature kind of space inside that, you really might be just paying for, hey, I want to inform this person, or I want to get to historical users that have changed jobs. And SDRs are really good at doing that, right? Like actually picking up the phone. So I'd say it really depends on the audience. I think like we're very saturated in sales and marketing where the echo chamber that we live in of sales tech and martech, right? We all know each other's vendors. We know what's going on everywhere.

SDRs are out there beating the drum, and I respect them for that. But a lot of the times, it's like you might be more efficient not doing that and scaling back. But in a different role or selling to a different audience, you might actually still see a lot of success. And I do think you just need to look at the target audience you're going after. I do believe that a lot of – you said this probably five years ago, right? Marketing is content and sales is context. And now the AI is helping provide a lot of that context and automating a lot of that. And so, you know, we can leverage those tools, and that makes us more efficient and comes back to that little narrative I said before. Profit might actually be there for tech companies one day.

Do your SDRs report to you as a CMO? No. We actually have the reporting into sales, and we actually do have the graduation process from SDR to inside AE and then up to field A. And it's worked really well for us. But, you know, if I was discarding a company tomorrow, it would be audience-based. And we started the office of the CFO, and office of CFO tech hasn't had the golden age that sales and Martech had. So they still pick up the phone, funnily enough. Well, then that's what cracks me up is, like, I always have to remind myself that, you know, SaaS and tech is a world in and of itself, right? I mean, as soon as you come out of SaaS and tech, it's like sales 1985 all over again, you know, that type of thing.

So, but I do believe that the AI right now is going to flatten it out pretty quick, right? So all these other industries that were laggards and didn't use a lot of this tech are going to get disrupted because we're moving into a world, I mean, I've been talking to a lot of venture capitalists, and they don't know where to put their money anymore. So, because it used to be like, hey, you put 50 mil into a business, and you have to build a whole engineering team, go to market, and all that other stuff. Now, you don't need those engineers. You don't even need to go to market. Like, you can automate a lot of this stuff. So instead of giving 50 mil to one company, they're giving a million to 50 companies and saying, hey, what's going to happen?

And I think we're moving into a world where you're going to start to see, I mean, I saw this on Instagram the other day, somebody predicting the first billion dollar five-person company. You know what I mean? Well, that was Instagram. I mean, that's already happened. Oh, yeah. But more like a startup, you know what I mean? Not more like a B2B, like not like a viral B2C thing, but like legit B2B company. I mean, that's what I'm doing, quite frankly. I mean, you see a lot of the stuff that I'm playing with, I'm actively trying to replace myself because of these AI tools and the coaching and all that other stuff. And I can do it so much better with some of this tech than I could with people. Well, you say you're replacing yourself, right?

The number of times I've heard a sales leader and an executive committee say, if I could just clone this guy, we would hit, or this person, we would hit 126% of quota every year. That world may be coming. Faster than we think, right? Like, you could train a rep on another rep's large language model, right? Answers all the questions. We've got enough tools with demo capabilities now. And if you can kind of get an AI like LLM to do that type of thing, I actually think we'll be in a world where we are far more bio-led, right? I think the shift has happened to become more bio-led and it's only going to get more and more bio-centric where, you know, we as companies can start to evolve what we're doing in, you know, like, oh, I have to speak to an SDR to qualify myself for the opportunity to get a demo.

I mean, that will go away pretty quickly. It's already happening with, you know, a lot of those cool demo tools that are out there. But as soon as they get some AI in them, wow, like, you can clone your best solution consultant and guess what? I would be asking it tons of questions and it would probably give me the answers I need. That's, and that's like, for me, you know, you look at the AI bot I put together with free tools. That was just, we put, you know, a couple of my podcasts through it, right? Now, fast forward, you throw a few bucks at that. You take every podcast I've ever done. You take every video I've ever, I mean, the amount of content I obviously have on the internet right now is massive, right?

So now, and by the way, so that's my data set, right? So that's my language. Oh, and by the way, hey, could you go find every other sales guru on the planet? Sandler, Miller, Hyman, Taz, spin all of it. Make sure that all those methodologies go through this AI version of John. Now, you have this fucking super AI John that is available 24 hours a day, can speak in any language, and can give you coaching at a moment's notice on way more. Or you have a guy with 27 years of experience, in my opinion, on stuff that you have to wait a week and a half to get on his calendar because he's busy. Yeah. I mean, which one would you rather engage with, right? I mean, I'm going super AI John. Yeah. Well, when super AI John is training AI Rowan, then we might be in trouble, right?

Let's go live on a beach, my friend. The boss are going to train each other. Yeah. Right? Well, that's, I kind of cautioned that, you know, people talk about the, you know, replacement of sales reps. I'm not really worried too much. I'm worried for quite a few sales reps who are just going through the motions getting getting replaced. But I'm not worried about the profession of sales until the robots start buying. When the robots start buying, that's when I think we're all in some deep shit here because it's going to be like, oh, because you could easily foresee. I mean, I guarantee this has the ability right now to say, hey, scan my sales tech stack. Tell me who's adopting what and what the adoption numbers are.

Tell me what the overlaps are as far as what tools. Tell me which ones I can get rid of. And now map this to my 12 to 24 month growth plan and tell me which new tools I need to have as part of this tech stack. And when you identify those, go put an RFP together and send it out to the top three vendors based on Gardner's Magic Quadrant and receive those. That ability is already there with like auto GPT and stuff like that. So when that happens, I'm like, oh, OK. Yeah, I think there's too much risk involved in many companies to want to say, you know, what you just talked about there was insight, recommendation, decision. I don't think we'll see a world where we get to decision for a little while, primarily because of all the risk involved.

Imagine, you know, walking into your CFO and saying, hey, we just bought a tool with a tool. But I do think we'll shorten sales cycles a lot. And vendors need to be, you know, folks like myself need to be really thinking about what's out there on our brand right now. What would a machine detect about our brand? How would it interpret what we're saying and what we're doing in terms of the evaluation that it would run on us and our space? And because that's where we're going to get to, right? People are going to just be going to, I mean, Bing on ChatGPT, right? You know, people will be going to Bing and asking the question and, and soon enough, we won't be getting answers from Google anymore. We'll be getting answers from the open AI.

Yeah. I think that's, that shift is already. I mean, it's, some of these things are just, now my fear also is to your point of like the, the fact that I do agree that we're not going to get to decision is because, I mean, my fear is that people are putting stuff into ChatGPT and then taking it as the answer as gospel, right? They're like, oh, cool. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That thing's pulling off of the internet. Okay. And we all know that at least 50% of the internet is total full of shit. So why don't you source check that? Because I've done that a couple of times. I've been like, source, please, source, please, source, please. And it'll put out these sources and I'll click on it. It'll be like a 404 error.

It'll be like, I'll be like, ugh. It makes up its own sources because it knows it needs, like it's generative, right? It's not actually fact-checking itself. And that's an interesting part of like from a marketing perspective is, yeah, sure, folks will go out there and they'll use it to generate content, but editing will become a huge part of what we need to do. But there's huge efficiencies there from a marketing perspective, from a sales perspective, but I don't think it'll replace relationships. And that's why I think both the profession of sales will continue and the profession of marketing will continue because that human element still needs to occur. Yeah. And I think that we're a long way off of like robots truly understanding like empathy and those type of things for humans and actually being able to, because even still, like I even look at some of these coaching tools and I think the coaching tools are really good from an AI standpoint for like junior reps, right?

You know, like the ones who don't get coaching because their manager doesn't have time to coach him or whatever. Yeah. I think it's fantastic for that, but like, I've tried some of these coaching tools and it's listened to some of my calls and it's giving me some recommendations. I'm like, dude, like cut the shit. Like, like, okay. Yeah. All right. I forgot to ask this quite, you know, okay. I didn't ask a second layer versus the, which shut up. You know what I mean? So it's one of those where I think it is, I think it has massive capabilities at certain levels, but then as you move up and it gets to be more strategic, more thoughtful, more person oriented, that's where I think the people, you know, the, the challenge I see is that, you know, a vast majority of reps right now are going through the motions.

They're acting like robots. And like I was saying earlier, we've actually taught that we, we, we've put them in that. Yeah. We've taught them to be robots. Right. I mean, it's like the trophy generation, right? Everybody gets mad at the trophy generation for always wanting a trophy. Well, guess what? Who gave them the trophies? The parents did it. Like, it's not their fault. Like when you and I were kids and we lost, right? If we didn't come in first, second or third, it was okay. Uh, work harder. Right. And we felt bad, but our parents were like, well, work harder, try harder. You know what I mean? Like where now the kid still feels exactly the same way you and I did when we lost, but now the parent jumps in and says, here's, here's a trophy.

So it's not their fault that they've grown up like this. It's the same thing with these SDRs. We've skipped the fundamentals. We've stuffed technology down their throat. We, in some cases, we don't even let them have the autonomy to write their own messaging. You know what I mean? Like we, we force feed them these messages and these sequences in these cadences. And now we're wondering why they're not effective in their job when things are slightly harder than they were before when anybody has money with free and people are just signing whatever. Well, we've operationally metriced out of it, metric them out of the business in some cases, right? It's like, well, we drive to the operational metric, which is calls to conversations.

And, you know, you can generate a conversation a hundred different ways. And, you know, but a lot of leaders are like, no, it's call activity or it's email activity or it's number of sequences you're running or it's number of people in sequences. Uh, we're forgetting about the end goal, which is close one revenue. And, um, until we start thinking about the system as a whole and stop managing people just to that front end, then, you know, we're going to end up with machines that can be replaced by machines. Yep. Absolutely. Let's pivot a little. Cause you had said something. I want to, I want to talk about your frustrations and I'll talk about mine too. Um, with, uh, we're going to come at this from both frustrations of our own respective professions and so we can kind of go middle ground here, but you had said something that was interesting to me that, you know, marketing has, you know, and as it relates to transparency, right?

Sales is one of the most measured professions on the planet. Like every activity, you just said it, right? Like every call is analyzed. Like it's recorded for crying out loud. Anybody in the organization can listen to it. Anybody can look in Salesforce or whatever CRM you're using and see exactly how many activities, calls, metrics, everything. So now we're tracked on everything. Now, are we held accountable to all of it? That's a different story, right? In the, in the sense that I still think that sales should be one of the most objectively viewed perceptions on the planet, but yet still there's the weird subjectivity. Oh, so-and-so didn't hit their target, but they're a nice guy and they, you know, he works hard.

So let's drag this out for the next three months. He's got good activity metrics. Yeah, exactly. He's got good activity metrics, but, but he's missed his quota three months in a row, but that's okay. Like I, I, that mentality is kind of hard. I get it. We're dealing with people and everything. So, but, but we are measured on everything and we are analyzed on everything and, and it's, and to a certain degree, it's over overwhelming, right? Um, marketing on the other hand, I haven't been a part of internal marketing teams or anything like that. I know there's metrics that you measure yourselves on, but talk to me about a little bit about your frustration as it relates to accountability, um, on either end, but mostly on marketing for Yeah, I would say, I think, you know, objectively, if you sit back and you look at whatever organization you're in today, your ability to understand where sales is at in terms of their numbers, their goals, their objectives, uh, we have, it's not perfect, but we have much better transparency on that.

And, you know, there's plenty of reps that will still hide a deal or try and park it into four quarters in advance so that the RVP doesn't notice that they're parking a massive deal, uh, out in future and hold them accountable to actually delivering on it. Um, that all still happens. Don't get me wrong. I'm still very much in the fact that there's still a lot of bad behavior, but as a whole, I pretty much know based on your level, the accounts that you're selling to where you're at the quota, how much you're making, how likely you are to get fired, uh, you know, what activities you're doing. I can find all of that out pretty much in the Sierra. And if you then objectively looked at yourself and said, as a marketer, how are my team doing?

Right. Everyone would say, I think we want more leads. Right. Right. It's, it's, it's very nuanced. It's like, how do we measure analyst relations? How do we measure PR? How do we measure product marketing? What are the key measures? And the nuance with marketing is that every function, like it's very rare to walk into a marketing team and say, oh, there's 10 of the same people doing the same job. Right. That's, you don't have a pod of AEs, for example. Right. But as a whole, the marketing system isn't transparent, right? You don't know how much marketing budget often the team even has. You don't know what it's expected to produce in terms of, you know, I say S3 pipeline, how much are you expecting me to produce?

Where are we on the path to that? Are we off track? You know, ahead of pace. Should we be spending more on marketing instead of SDRs? Most companies just don't have that level of understanding. And as marketers, sometimes we get to say, well, that's part of the sausage factory. Like you just need sausages and we're going to avoid, you know, showing you how you make a sausage because it's ugly and, you know, it's not nice. And we get to hide behind that a little bit. And that frustrates me. And I think that that creates the mistrust. We talked at the top of this call about why the great divide. Well, you can't create trust without transparency, right? Why do we, why do we trust some of the top reps?

It's because we know that they're going to do the right behaviors because we've seen it happen time and time again. We've got the transparency. All right. Quick break to tell you about one of my favorite podcasts on the HubSpot podcast network, which is the surf and sales podcast hosted by my good friends, Richard Harris and Scott Lees. First of all, these two are personal friends of mine, and they are two of the most authentic, smart, intelligent, knowledgeable people that I've ever come across as it relates to sales. And their podcast is fantastic. There's no fluff in this podcast. If you like my podcast, you're going to love theirs because they get right down to it. Real world stuff. And it's not just about sales.

It's about mental health. It's about being an entrepreneur, growing your business, all sorts of different things that round out the business professional and the person. So I highly recommend checking out their podcast and listening to some of their new episodes. They got one with Anthony Natoli, who talks about getting off the sidelines and engaging and building your own personal brands and the right mindset for starting to build your brand. So if you're all talking about personal brands and thinking about that journey, you're going to want to check out that episode. And there's a whole bunch of others that I recommend as well. So check them out. Let me know what you think. Let's make it happen.

I've always, you know, kind of scratched my head. It's like, I'm getting in trouble. You know, when I was a rep, like I'm getting in trouble, but, but why, you know, where's the accountability on that? And then I think that that creates that divide because now I'm bitter of the fact that I'm getting a pip and I'm getting all this shit when what's going on on that side. I don't even know who's supposed to be responsible for, for giving me those leads or what those leads should even look like. Cause if I talk to you, it's going to be somebody else. It's going to be somebody else. Well, uh, or, uh, sausage making can't really tell you. Yeah. So that's why I think sales reps have a hard time wrapping their head around, which is also why I really wish that, I mean, you carried a bag, right?

And, and I think it's almost, I really do wish that as organizations grew, they would actually like meld sales and marketing together and, and actually have them sit right next to each other. Right. So a sales rep, marketing rep, sales rep, marketing rep. So we could both hear what each other has to go through and we could do short-term feedback loops on stuff that worked that didn't work because otherwise it's that proverbial wall that gets thrown up and messaging or leads get thrown over that wall. And then, you know, who knows what's going to happen to them. And then we throw them back and say, that sucked. And there's no connective tissue between how we communicate with each other. Well, now it's a, now it's a proverbial screen, uh, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, because none of us are really, not many of us back in the office as, as teams or functions.

And, and that's probably historically been mostly true for field sales, right? Like, you know, they weren't necessarily in offices before anyway. Uh, and that probably created some of the divide historically is like these, these folks are out in the field and they're precious time. You marketing can't talk to marketing, want access to the customers and say, Hey, like, how can I talk to customers? That's my customer. I talk to them. Um, so there's, there's plenty of that. Like we could sit here and, and throw shade on both sides. I'm sure. Um, but ultimately, like we all have to have that common goal of, Hey, the transparency needs to be there to create the trust. How do we, as, as kind of sales and marketing leaders do that for the junior SDR so that they know what, why is the go to market strategy this way?

And how can they understand, all right, the dollars into marketing actually helps me with my dollars in for, you know, I know I'm picking up a salary and I'm supposed to make X number of calls and I get incentivized for, you know, getting that right. Where, where, where is marketing in that funnel? And, and like, I'm going to pick on some specifics here, uh, as it relates to that to try to figure out the, because it'd love your perspective. I've, I've always said that that's why I look at SDRs and a lot of what they do is very similar to what you said, which is, you know, there it's almost brand awareness, right? They're calling there. It's, I look at a cold call very similar to what I look at, like an ad on, you know, whatever that, that person, because it's kind of the same thing.

Like it's, it's quote unquote interrupting. It's, it's a, it's a brand awareness thing. But, um, I remember when like Morgan worked here, right? Morgan would do a ton of outbound calling into target accounts and everything. And then what would happen was I would get the inbound lead right now, all of a sudden I used to get all the inbound leads and I would take a look and I would look at it and be like, oh, this is cool. And where this come from, great. But then I'd look in CRM and I'd notice that Morgan had done a ton of outbound to that client and it wasn't that person, but it was that company. And so you can't tell me that all that effort that he put into calling and emailing that company didn't tie, you know, have somebody internally point to somebody else and say, you go, Mike, go on a look.

And then they reached out to us the way they wanted to. So how do you solve for that kind of, you know, again, micro point on that, but from an accountability or, or from a credit standpoint, right? Cause that's the other part of sales and marketing is like, who gets credit for what? And if I didn't get credit for it, you know, I hate you. So, so how do you address that scenario where, you know, that, that, that activity, that that SDR was doing set the stage for that inbounds and they're not going to get credit for it in most cases. Yeah. And so it happens all the time. I can tell you, I was at an event recently. I was having a conversation with a, uh, a CMO. We talked and I said, let me reach out to you and we'll set up a meeting.

And, uh, little did I know that, uh, that CMO then, uh, spoke to their VP of operations and they inbounded on the website, probably two to three hours later. SDR picks it up, hasn't booked it in Salesforce. And then I forward to the rep and I say, Hey, we're going to work this deal together. Uh, and, um, book it in Salesforce. So now we're fighting over the AE and the SDR getting credit, right? Happens all the time. Yeah. What I say to my team is let's celebrate the fact that the combo of sales and marketing worked, right? Like, and so how do you give credit in that case? Well, I think a lot of what we need to figure out is back to this financial metrics. Why are we doing it that way? Well, because finance need to understand how many SDRs should I have?

How much pipeline do the SDR function create? How much, uh, how much demand and money should I throw into marketing? How much pipeline do they create? Let me stack the two things together, right? We've ultimately ended up in this place because finance doesn't understand the go to market motion and they want to look at this through a mathematical formula, right? And, uh, and so, you know, as go to market leaders, we've got to get together and just say to finance, no, it's a balanced approach. We're going to both sign up for, you know, $200 million of pipeline this year. And we're going to call it, you know, not sales and not marketing. And it's just going to be all bound or whatever you want to call it.

Not inbound, not outbound, combo bound, whatever language you want to use and celebrate that together, right? Like I love celebrating cold outbound wins when someone gets that. I think, you know, if, but I can tell you the more brand activity I do, the easier cold outbound becomes because it's not necessarily cold, right? Uh, um, and we can see all of that, right? There's enough ABM platforms telling us that that, that account knows about our space. And, and, you know, that outbound person is getting intent data for a hundred different streams and they're calling warm, warm accounts, not, uh, not true cold. Um, so we all know that that's happening. So we've got to just set that reality and say, do you know what?

We're going to maybe still pay the same as if it was sales versus marketing sourced, but celebration culturally, we're going to say, this is all bound. We've signed up to a joint number. I'm going to cover you with, if, you know, the SDRs can't get, uh, at a certain group marketing is going to try and spend more and, and just work as a go-to-market function. That's what a lot of folks try and do when they go and hire a CRO and put marketing under, under a CRO. The challenge I often find is that that's not successful because you've got a, typically a sales person that doesn't have a marketing degree or the ins and outs of marketing. It works really well when they hire a great marketer and they trust, right?

And, and they let them go and run the motion, but often it's, no, this is, this is just a glorified title sometimes. And that's where it comes unstuck back to the top of the call. Yeah. Let's talk about budgeting right now. Cause I, I really would love your perspective on this cause I've, I've heard it a lot and I'm curious what you see and because of this lack of transparency or accountability for certain things on both ends, right? On sales, it's like, well, you know, you still haven't hit your target, but you're still here type of thing. And marketing, like where can we attribute these things to a lot of, you know, when, when times are hard, when budgets need to be cut, where do you see, do you see cuts coming from marketing or sale?

Like if you were to force, like if you were to force rank where you would quote unquote cut, and I know there's a ton of variables as part of this question, but in general, do people tend to cut on marketing spend first because like they can't really attribute it's a brand thing or do they cut sales first because they look at it and they say, you know what, these underperformers, we got to get rid of them anyways. You know, from a budgetary standpoint, is there a theme there or is it so individualized that it's hard to kind of generalize that? Yeah. Let's put our finance hats on for a second, right? Let's pretend we've all got, you know, accounting degrees. Marketing is non-recurring discretionary spend, right?

You know, I don't have to do that event, right? It's, it's available capital that we have assigned out, but have not spent or have not limited to it. Whereas a human, a salesperson is recurring and definitely not discretionary, right? Like making that decision is a harder decision. So from a finance perspective, finance do look at the marketing buckets as being, well, that's discretionary. We don't have to spend it, right? We can, we can not spend that money. And so I certainly understand why finance look at marketing first because outside of other discretionary spend, like T and E is the first thing to go. Why? Yeah. Because you don't have to do it, right? You don't have to do it. You can constrain that cost, right?

And, and so T and E goes down and then they're like, okay, where else can we go? All right. Well, the marketing budget, they don't want to do it. They know that it's got ROI. Like these are smart investment-like folks. They understand that you put capital into something, you're going to get a return. That's the goal. Um, but in those types of situations, depending on where the company is at, right, how much do they need to kind of wrap their arms around it? Marketing is the first to go because it's discretionary and, you know, you can still have that, that salesperson doing some of those marketing efforts. They can be doing the manual outreach. They can be doing those things and, and still trying to get results from capital that's already effectively deployed, right?

Um, now most good finance teams will look on both sides of that ledger. They'll, they'll look at the underperforming reps and, and they'll start to go, right? And marketing budgets will be, will be cut at the same time. It's not, I don't think it's a one and, you know, it's a binary decision. I don't think, I think, uh, finance look at it through, Hey, where can we find the most efficiency without hurting the short-term and long-term? And it's a really hard decision. You've got to put yourself in the finance team shoes. They don't want to make that call either. They work with these people. They want the business to succeed, but they're getting informed of, Hey, this is how we make the business successful long-term and they go through that process.

Yeah. Cause from the sales perspective, I always, it, it, it's such a hard decision because you kind of cut off your nose, just by your face when you cut sales, right? You're like, okay, we need to conserve capital and those are there for, but I remember, you know, my CFO, my first company, you know, he would, it, it was, it was just me as a sales guy. And so I would, you know, kill myself and whatever. And we'd have a great quarter and a rough quarter and a great quarter and a rough quarter, but all the activity I always used to try to explain to him that, that sales is like a, a, like a, a train, right? It takes a while to get going. And then it actually takes a while to slow down, but he would come to me every once in a while and be like, Hey John, we're over capacity.

The engineers, we don't, I don't have any more capacity. So I need you to stop selling. And I'd be like, Calvin, like, what do you mean stop selling? Like literally, even if I stopped today, all the activity that I did, over these past couple of months, there's going to be stuff that just trickles in and continues to sell. And the problem with that is I'll stop selling. It'll trickle down for the next month or two. We'll still have to get some stuff in, but then you're going to come to me in two months and say, John, my engineers, you know, the engineers need business. You need to get, and it's going to take me three to four months to get the sucker back on track, man. So, so that balance is marketing kind of the same way as marking a little bit more, turn it on, or is it more like a train?

Yeah, I would say most, uh, most marketers would say it's more like a train. I mean, if you think about like building brand, right. Uh, you know, the, the analogy we use a lot, um, I've used before is, you know, you're pushing the snowball up the hill, right? It's getting heavier and heavier. It's harder and harder, but eventually you find that tipping point and the brand starts to get attracted, right? And people start coming to you and the market starts coming to you and it's just rolling down the hill, gathering more and more momentum. Um, that happens the same in marketing and it's not a tap. You, you can't just turn it on and off. You can turn the dials a lot, right? You can, you can say, all right, I'm going to pause maybe, uh, my demand capture programs, right?

Uh, and that's going to stop the floodgates, but I'll keep my demand awareness programs going. Well, you'll stop awareness and just focus on capture for a while, right? You can turn certain dials, but it is more like a train. And I think that's, you know, the whole go-to-market team are on that train. Um, so it's, it's a hard thing, you know, I'd, I'd rather be in that. Can you slow down sales than the, Hey, we need to, um, we need to make changes and actually shut the train down. Um, but yeah, it's, it's far much more like a train similar to sales. And that's why I think, you know, you see the cuts on both sides when people are making them. It's not, it's not that they, um, marketing is easier, an easier lever to find and it's more available.

Last question before we have to wrap things up. I am really interested in your perspective on the chief evangelist officer approach here. Their personal brand is everything right for individuals and businesses. And it's evident that people do not trust corporate brands. They trust personal brands. I mean, you look at almost any company you look at the, like, let's just use LinkedIn as a perfect example. You look at the company's LinkedIn page versus the most popular person at that company's LinkedIn page and it's night and day, right? The engagement, everything. And so I've said this for a while that I think that there's going to be a, uh, this, and I'm surprised it hasn't happened more now that the chief evangelist officer is going to come to fruition where it's going to be some of the companies are after going to get very comfortable with people with it, like their reps, whoever representing their brand, but in a pseudo uncontrolled fashion, like you can't dictate, okay, you have to, right.

Cause then brand doesn't authenticity matters here. So I'm curious to what you see now as far as personal brands within an organization coming from marketing. Cause you have, I mean, how many people work at Planful? Oh, about 450. So you have the potential of 450 individual marketers effectively in your company that can be posting and sharing and building your brand, which would amplify the efforts a thousand times over if we just, if we let them all go. Right. Yeah. So, so, and there's a blessing and a curse to that. So I guess what's your philosophy or what are you seeing with the personal brand versus the corporate brand and allowing sales reps or marketers or whatever to have those personal brands that represent with the risk associated with the, one of them doing something stupid.

So where are you on that? Cause I think it's a thing that a lot of companies are struggling with right now. They're trying to use there, but they use like autobots where they connect to their sales reps, Twitter profiles, and they just promote a bunch of company shit. And that actually reduces the value of those brands. So where are, what are you seeing and where are you on that? Yeah. We, we, we have folks internally that, uh, are building their own brands, uh, and have their own brands per se. Um, the first thing I'd say is I, of course you want all, every employee to be, uh, an evangelist of your product platform. A number one, that says that you've got a very engaged culture. Yes, you do.

Right. And you've got a very high employee NBS score and that people love what you do. Right. So, so that would be great for the company and then great from a marketing perspective, you're getting more reach, right. For free. It's all organic. Totally. Um, but you don't get that because a lot of folks are like, what's in it for me, right? How, if, if you're selling to say a tech ops lead, how is the, uh, the RVP of sales going to really help their own personal brand that aligns with the company brand around that type of, uh, story. Right. And so where we often see really good evangelism is where those two things align. And gong is a great example, right? Yeah. Who do gong sell to? Salespeople.

Who are all their great evangelists? Salespeople. Right. And what do they use? Sales data. Like it's a complete brand alignment. Yeah. Right. And they've executed it fantastically well by just enabling those, those team members to say, Hey, go for it. Here are the guardrails. Here's what we, how we can help you. And then let it happen organically and then scaled it when it works. Right. Um, whereas, you know, for example, in, in my business, you know, the team in the accounting team, very, very, um, GNA doesn't exactly get the most budget in a tech company. Right. So they're very time constrained. They're going through a lot of change as, as they always should be in a tech company. And so how do I get my, my CFO, my VP of FP&A, my chief, chief accounting officer to be evangelist of the product?

It's so time consumed. How do I do that? Right. It's about how do I find the efficiencies in their time? How do I make them, uh, look like the story that they want to be. And they all want to tell their stories, but they, they don't have marketing skills. So we've got to go and invest in that. So that's what you have to do as a marketer is invest in their brand and help them and help them understand why it matters for them. What, what benefits will they get? What's the selfish benefit? And then how does it benefit the company? And then if they want to do it, guide them along the way, but you can't force it. Uh, cause you're just going to get a bunch of people just reposting. Like you talked about, right?

They're going to use the bot thing, share the one evangelist posts, and, uh, it's going to depress everything. So, you know, I think it ultimately comes from a culture that wants to talk about their company. And it's interesting you bring up Gong. Um, I actually use them as a good example, but in a little bit of a different way, because if you remember like Gong and Chorus, right? Tomato, tomato, right? When it came, I don't know anything about the tech stack, but you know, they're, they're similar, right? In exec vision, whatever. Um, but all of a sudden back in the day, Gong all of a sudden exploded. And it was because Chris Orlub, very specifically, Chris Orlub was using Gong's data to evangelize Gong's data, but it wasn't about Gong.

It was about the data and it was important. So all, I mean, I, even I was like, Oh my, every post that he did, I was like, Holy shit. Like that is incredible. Right? So just because of what he was doing, Gong was perceived as by far the industry leader at a time. Then Chris Orlub took an internal job in sales and he stopped and Gong disappeared. And then Devin Reed picked it up and started doing something similar. And all of a sudden it was like, God, Gong's back. Holy shit. Gong's back. And again, the perception wasn't about the quality of the tool. It was the, it was Gong's better just because their, their brand is better. Right. And then Devin. Because they built, because they built the credibility through the data.

Right. So somewhere, someone in Gong, whether it was UD or Amit said, Hey, what do we have that no one else has? We have so much sales data. How's that going to help us win? Well, that's what people want in their own internal organization. So let's tell them what works at scale. And they had to invest in, I'm sure engineers, data science time, like they've invested in like another company that I know does this really well is, is recorded future. Right. They sell, um, security software. Well, they have a team of journalists out there pitching stories around breaches and things that they found because they've invested in that idea of, Hey, we're out there. We're at the forefront of understanding what are, what's going on in the world of security.

They've effectively built a journalism team that goes and talks about what's going on. And therefore they've built a media company. Um, and, and that's what Gong did was they, they really had a great investment in the product data that they then turned into content and context, right? Chris gave it the context, marketing probably empowered the content originally. And then when, and then when we lost Chris and he, you know, got busy selling, they went, well, someone else can do it. May as well be Devin. Yep. Right. And, and then maybe built the machine around it. And, and, you know, that's what I think AI has the opportunity to help a lot more companies do that. But it was the vision and strategy of saying, what do we have that no one else has in our space, but we're going to procure that data.

Of course, could have had that same idea. They just did it. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating how this all evolves too. And, and that's why from a marketing standpoint, I, to a certain degree, I miss a little bit of the marketing side. Cause I like the analytics of like, you know, trends and those types of things. I don't get to follow those as much, but man, things are things it's, it's to a certain degree. I like to say like things, the more they change, the more they stay the same. Um, but I do think we're in a, in a whole new world right now with AI. I think AI has, has fundamentally changed how we're all going to look at data, how we're all going to leverage data. And then what the human component is going to be compared to everybody else.

So let me, the interesting thing is the data is going to go away. We're, we're entering the world of privacy, right? So as marketers, we're going to lose a lot of the data that we love. Yeah. And we're going to go back to Mad Men style brand advertising with a little bit of data. It's going to be an interesting, interesting dynamic with all this hyper-personalization, but a lack of like, what are people opting into here? Yeah. The regulators are going to probably change all the data rules even further soon. Oh yeah. They're going to have to, right? Cause yeah. I don't know. I, I think the data, I think the privacy and stuff is at least here in America, I don't think nobody, I don't think anybody gives a shit about privacy and they say they do.

Uh, but they don't, they, they, they value convenience far over privacy. And I, and the proof of this is like when Snowden, I remember when Snowden came out and we all found out that the government was spying on us. Right. And I had all sorts of friends who were just up in arms and be like, Oh, I told you, I told you. I'd be like, yeah, you care. Right. And they're like, yeah, this is ridiculous. I'd be like, okay. Can I ask you one question? They're like, what? I'm like, have you changed your passwords yet? Well, no. Then shut the fuck up about you being worried about like the fucking shut up. You would rather have Amazon drop off. You would rather give all your data to Amazon and have them know everything about you so that you can order your stupid, whatever thing that shows up tomorrow and you can have the convenience to do it.

So I do think that I actually think that we're moving. It's just like Instagram, right? The reason, and I don't, I'll finish on this. Where, you know, spam, the reason we hate spam, right? Is because it's irrelevant. Like most of the spam that's in my inbox, we don't give a shit about, but why do I like Instagram? Well, I like Instagram because I've trained that algorithm. I thumbs up them sound ads. I like things I've stayed on things. So now every fucking ad that hits me on Instagram, I'm like, shit, man, I want that. Like, yes. Right. Like, you know, now whether it shows up in six months from China in a weird box or not, I don't know. But the point is I like it. I foresee a future that in a year, quite frankly, all of our inboxes are going to be filled with personalized, relevant messages.

And do I give a shit on whether that comes from a sales rep or a robot? Nope. Nope. Yep. Now I care that I talk to a sales rep and that's again, where, where the human element comes into this, but digitally, if I get an email that's super spot on with something that just happened because of what I posted and some comment that I made on a podcast and it's really relevant to something that I want to be able to check out, man, I'm going to be thrilled with that. And I don't give a shit if a sales rep actually took the time to do that. So that's the part Except when you want one, you just got to have access direct to one, right? It's like, well, I want to talk to someone about it now. And that's when you don't want to get rerouted to, uh, to someone who can't help you.

Well, well, and a little caveat, I want to talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about. What I don't want is that frontline piece of shit. That's going to ask me a bunch of spant questions and force me through a piece of shit demo when I already know what I want. You know what I mean? So that's a different side, which is, which is why the, the AI enabled demo, I think will be the way because it's been trained by the expert and it's got all of the same questions that you and me have on that same product. Yep. So yeah, it's going to be fun times. We will see where it goes, man. We'll see how much longer we have. I think the, the options these days are you either dive in with both feet and try to like, just ride this wave as long as you can, or you unplug completely and go live in a beach and try to just pretend like none of it's happening.

Well, yeah, well, maybe we've got to do the first one before we can get to the second one. Yeah. I'm desperately trying to figure out how to get to that second one, by the way. Awesome, bro. I loved this conversation. Hopefully people enjoyed it too. Uh, let's tie it up there. What, uh, where, where can people find out more information about you, about Planful, about what you guys are doing over there? Uh, talk to the audience a little bit. Yeah, sure. Uh, on Planful, go to planful.com. Uh, we have solutions for every part of your business, uh, for those marketers out there that want to become a little more transparent. Uh, we can help you do that, uh, in a way that is, is guarded a little bit from finance and a little bit from sales, but, uh, helps you share what you want to share.

Uh, and you can find me on LinkedIn, uh, Rowan Tonkin, and I'm seeing more here at Planful. Thanks, Sean. Love it. Thanks, Rowan. I appreciate it. And everybody go check it out, uh, and go check out Rowan. He's doing some really, really cool shit there. So thank you, Rowan, for coming on, man. I appreciate it. No worries. Thanks, man. And everybody else, hopefully you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did here and you got something out of it, get you to think a little bit different these days and take some action here to keep relevant in this weird world that we're all in right now. And like I say at the end of all my podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day is going, or how bad you think it went, you out there make somebody smile today and you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now.

So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests. We're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now. And I can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going. It would mean the world to me. If you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also check out my new website at www.johnm.com where you'll find even more ways to engage. There's a ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team. Look, I'm out there selling every day, just like you are.

And I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends and technology. So if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales, let's connect and let's make this happen together.