110 | What Sales leadership really want from marketing

Jon Busby: Welcome to another episode of the tech marketing podcast. Fellow listeners. I'm really

excited to be joined

by my usual cohost, Harry. Hello. Welcome back, Harry. And of course, no, a stranger to the tech marketing podcast, our very own executive client director, Minaz. So Minaz, thank you for joining us today.

We have, we are joined by one of our longstanding and most favorite clients. Not that we're supposed to have favorites, but Chelsea Gaspard, director of a MS, enterprise Marketing at Veritas. Hopefully I've got that pronunciation correct

Minaz Tejani: there, Chelsea. You got

Jon Busby: it. We are really excited, like we've got some, a rollercoaster of marketing and sales alignment that we're gonna go through today.

So should we just jump, should we jump straight into it? Chelsea, you've been at Veritas now for a few years. Tell us a little bit about your story. Like how did you land at at Enterprise

Marketing?

Chelsea Gaspard: Yeah. Actually I feel like I've touched a lot of marketing. I've been field marketing, global marketing, a BM I've done branding.

I think I've started in writing, if I remember this, a long time ago. So I've been a couple of places, but I think in the end, my true passion is, helping sales. And so that's why this is a great topic for me, aligning into sales. I love supporting them. I like walking along on the journey with them.

And I guess that's how I've settled on field marketing.

Minaz Tejani: And if I'm not mistaken as well, Chelsea, you've you've done your stint on an agency bill as well, right?

Chelsea Gaspard: Oh yeah. Yeah. I did a agency bill. I even did my own consulting business for a while. And I think I decided that you guys are a special breed.

Harry Radcliffe: Agency

bill is the. It's the Alabama

of marketing.

Minaz Tejani: That's what we call it, but

Jon Busby: just jump straight into sales leadership, Because I think the more I talk to people about sales and marketing alignment that, and get the different, get different perspectives, the more I just find that it's, there's no one answer what is some tips, firstly, for how you align with sales in marketing? And what impact has that driven across different company pipelines that you've been working with?

Chelsea Gaspard: Yeah, This could be different for a lot of people, right? But at any given company I've worked at, I think we were responsible, marketing was responsible for driving anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of that pipeline for sales, right?

And pre COVID, I think. That was a little easier now. It's gosh, so many conversations about how much harder a marketer's job got after COVID, right? But the one thing that has stayed consistent and all of that I think has been That alignment with sales and making that a priority, right? And really trying to understand the needs of the business what are those business drivers, right?

And then how does that translate to sales plans and execution? And as a marketer, if you can, especially a field marketer and ABM or right, if you can jump in the middle of that and develop those strategic plans that kind of link those to those business drivers and then the sales plans that's where you're going to get results because you're going to be aligned to what your VPs want, what your DMS and your reps want, and then they will be more likely to follow up on them.

Your leads and pipeline because it's going to help them to truly hit their goals. But also important to have those relationships at all levels of sales right from the RVP down to the rep having those relationships and maintaining those relationships so that you understand what's important to your SVP all the way down to your BDR is important.

Yeah.

Minaz Tejani: It sounds a lot like those sorts of efforts are really closing the gap in between effort versus outcome in terms of ROI. Am I spending my marketing dollars in the right places? Because ultimately you can then control or in better influence, you say the road to revenue in that respect.

It's if this is a fair assumption, it's almost, where the B2C world, in some shape or form, lives a good life because You run an advertising campaign, that people buy more Snickers or Mars bars. And, the correlation in the ROI can be quite quick to determine longer term to specify, in the detail, but still that measurable and provable area.

It sounds a bit like actually putting some of these strategies in place, is only going to help B2B marketers in proving their campaigns. Are valuable and obviously getting more investment off the back of that. Is that something that you faced or come up against in a positive

Chelsea Gaspard: way?

Absolutely. And I think, the more strategic we're allowed to be as marketers, the longer growth or a longer engagement we can look at across the board with our customers, I think there's this every single company on the net, to be fair, there's always the argument around, what was marketing sales support or is marketing here to really drive growth And sadly, the answer is both.

You, you've got to be able to do a little bit of sales support to, to win those relationships and have that trust from your sales teams. So that you can, they can trust you to be more strategic and help them for the long haul, right? The more strategic we are, we can think about the greater vision.

To meet those business drivers. Whereas if we're just throwing out a dinner every night or every week, it's not going to help us in the

Minaz Tejani: long run. Although it'd be fun. That's good. Let's not shout away. Yeah.

Chelsea Gaspard: Yeah. Fair enough. And that has its place, right? I was just having that conversation with with my boss this morning that.

Yesterday, one of my RMPs called me and a 911, right? There's this really hot potato deal on the table with a great customer and they're going to be in town and he wants to get a dinner together and he needs help like turning this over in 24 hours. That's not my ideal everyday scenario of what I'm contributing as a marketer, right?

But that same RVP next week, he is hosting a meeting for me to come into a meeting with his team and be able to do a deep dive into marketing metrics. So that I can help them how to take more advantage of what it is that we're producing for their teams and so that they can get higher pipeline, higher revenues down the line.

If you were to use a way of describing that relationship, like how would you summarize it,

Minaz Tejani: Chelsea?

Chelsea Gaspard: It's complex. It can even be competitive. I don't think it has to be, but maybe there's a healthy mix of all of that to keep us all a little bit honest, right?

Minaz Tejani: So we're like sisters.

Chelsea Gaspard: Yeah. And not siblings, sisters. Exactly, sisters. You got it. You nailed it.

Jon Busby: There's that quote. And I think what you mentioned there, I'm looking at our show notes here that we have beforehand, you, you call it a give to get relationship like you, and that's a great example of where you did that.

Okay, I helped you organize this dinner, but you're going to help me get into the rest of your organization. I think that summarizes the kind of partnership that you need with sales. No. How can. How do you snowball that? How do you build momentum to foster a stronger collaboration with sales and achieve mutual success?

Like what's the stage to push that boulder down the hill? Oh,

Chelsea Gaspard: yeah. I think you have to build someone's trust. There are some people, in the world more trusting than me. They, you. They give you trust before maybe you've earned it. I, with me, you got to earn it. So is what it is.

And I think I always look at it that way when I'm walking into a new organization and I'm meeting a sales team, I have the uphill battle in my mind of earning their trust. And if that means having to do a few more of those sales support dinners to get them on board, but then also figuring out what are my quick wins that I'm going to show them how I can start helping them.

You've got to find some nice mix of of helping them understand how you're going to ultimately help them in their pipeline in the future. It's not for the faint of heart, especially I think as a field marketer.

Minaz Tejani: I think also just linking to that, what we were discussing earlier is almost this idea of from your perspective, like how much is too much to help them.

And I think, all relationships should be built on, positive and healthy boundaries. And I think, how'd you go about setting those boundaries or do you let them just naturally occur as part of the course of business or what do you, are you a bit more clear is there a.

Is there a sort of a blueprint or a bit more of a mandate that you go into it with, or do you, do you just let it happen a bit more organically? You can tell I've been married for 15 years, because, boundaries go out the window, and I'm like, yeah, I don't even know what's going on at the moment.

Chelsea Gaspard: I don't know that there's a blueprint for any of it for the marriage or for the sister relationship with sales, right? I do think that some of it does have to happen organically. But back to what I was saying a little while ago, I do think it's about trust and respect. And, this is something that, in all honesty, I have struggled with my entire life.

Probably since I was five years old. I am a people pleaser. I like to say yes. I know this about myself, right? But I don't think that sales wants a yes person. I think they want someone that's going to push back and ask questions and they want someone that's going to understand the why and the how so that they have a true partner.

Just like a marriage, right? But not as they have a true partner that's walking this path with them. And I think if you can't, if you don't have that mutual respect, if you can't push back and ask those, have those hard conversation and ask those honest questions then you're just a yes man. And I don't know that I think that's the right way for marketing to go.

Minaz Tejani: We'll have a very short runway. I may, I forced John to sit through a talk we did last week, right? About the difference between getting either colleagues or clients, a love versus respect. I think you can get anyone to love you pretty quickly. Like you say, just doing whatever you, whatever they require, they say job, you say how high, but actually what Minna doesn't realize

Jon Busby: actually left that talk halfway

Minaz Tejani: through.

But oh, did you? Because you love me, but you don't respect me. I stay, I stayed

Jon Busby: to the end, cheer to the end. But the

Minaz Tejani: the, it's a much harder state. But actually, like you

Jon Busby: talk on a really interesting point, Chelsea. 'cause we were. We were running a roundtable a few weeks back, actually, and one comment that came up around sales and marketing alignment was around, it was around educating sales about what marketing really means.

In this case, the example they use was sales teams just think that marketing is sponsoring us. A football team. They're like, yeah, that's marketing. Like they just need to sponsor a football team. And then that's, you've used this case of going, running customer dinners, like what how have you helped to expand that partnership?

Does it need educating them? What works well, what have sales learnt, what have sales learnt that you can bring to the relationship? And what have you taught them through that process?

Chelsea Gaspard: I think sponsoring the football games like you just talked about are the dinners.

Those are fun. And they, you have to do this, right? Especially since COVID. If you want people to get out of their house and come meet with you face to face, I think that the experiential event has And once again, we are doing some of those things that probably back in 2016 and 17, I think I was having conversations with my boss at the time.

And we were saying, we don't want to do that as marketers. We don't want to just sponsor football games, right? We're back there and we're doing those things because that's, what's getting people out of the house. But it's not about just having those football games or those dinners, right? It's about the bigger package that we're putting together for sales.

What is the content that's going to be shared at those events? Is there a briefing to be had where we're going to be talking through? Is it, an upsell for our customers or a solution set for our customers? Let's look at the accounts that are going to be there. What's the right message for them?

So I really think that's about the bigger package and it's I think those experiential events are also one small tactic in a blip of a whole host of tactics that we're trying to use to engage customers, whether that's digital or events or direct mail or emails, right? Whatever that might be, I think that's just one of many channels that in which we're trying to get through to our customers.

Harry Radcliffe: As a B2B podcast maker, I have had many conversations involving the alignment of sales and marketing. And I noticed that a lot of the conversations involve us educating them and generally us feeling a little bit unappreciated as well. We never really talk about what we can learn from sales. Is there anything that we should be focusing on?

the other way in terms of learnings. And secondary, why is this a conversation that never ends? Why, what is it about? Why can we never come to a definitive kind of, this is how we align with sales? What are the roadblocks there?

Chelsea Gaspard: Yeah that's a good question. And I agree with you. I think there's a ton to learn from sales.

In fact, what I was saying, I think earlier about. As a marketer, if you want to be able to be a little bit more strategic and go beyond that sales support, you've got to be able to understand those business drivers and marry that up with how sales is translating that. And you've got to have those relationships with sales to understand.

How are they catching those business priorities? And how are they pushing those down within their sales organization? And that's not a one time conversation. You don't have that conversation at the beginning of your fiscal year. And you're like okay, I'm done. It's an ongoing convert. Conversation every week, something is changing in our world.

And so you've got to be on point and ready. To understand why they're pivoting, why they're staying the same, why are they doing what they're doing and how can we pivot or continue help supporting. But 100 percent Harry that I, this is probably a Veritas. I have a very good relationship with my RVPs.

I talk to them all the time. Probably sometimes I drive them crazy, but if I am driving them crazy, if I'm really honest, I would never know. That I am because they want to help me. They want to educate me. They want to make sure that I understand what's on deck and what's most important for their teams.

So I can go help my team go build a plan that works for them and their team and supporting what's relevant to them right now. I think they see it as part of their mission to make sure that sales is on board and on the train with them. Riding on this riding this journey right alongside them. So I'm with you, Harry.

I think that it's definitely got to be a two way street. I don't know that this will ever be. I don't know this. This will ever be a solvable problem just based on culture and based on how sales and marketing work together at different. different organizations. Some organizations are very sales led.

Some organizations are very engineering or product led. Some organizations are marketing led, right? So it's just, it depends on what kind of company that you're at that I think, what kind of mix you start working with. I think

Minaz Tejani: the and the process started, I feel a couple of years ago with the birth of the.

CRO, right? The chief revenue officer, which I think from what I observed initially was always having one person that kind of brings them together because it's all about revenue at the end of the day. So marketing are accountable for revenue. Sales are accountable for revenue. But what I've seen across those companies, actually that CRO role hasn't really, hasn't been that.

Intrinsic sort of role that's brought both parties together under one strategy is tends to be probably more lead on sales and they've ended up being a bit more of a sales leader, in that way. So I think the market went into it with some intentions, but I do think there's a lot of a long way to go.

Until organizations really do the bold move, which I believe one or two have, and that's actually get rid of sales and marketing and have one function. And then one team. And, I think they, whatever they call themselves, but yeah, previous job, John, didn't you have a brand that's done one of our other previous podcast

Jon Busby: guests, actually, Jeff, I actually met up with him fairly recently, but.

Jeff at smart technologies created what's called the UGE. I think unified generation engine. I am going to get that wrong and I'm going to get my wrist slapped, but yeah, there's the, they've written Harvard papers on it and everything. It's really interesting because you think about it, like, why do we still talk about sales and marketing as two separate departments?

I think I remember talking about that at university 20 years ago. And yeah, you were talking on a podcast today.

Minaz Tejani: I could. There does need to be some adjustment to it to change that. Still in the same situation.

Chelsea Gaspard: That's interesting. And I think, to your point, Manoj, I think when they brought in the CRO, they tried to somewhat solve for what you were talking about, John, by making marketing report into the CRO.

And, I don't know that I think it's good or bad. I think all these models have good and bad involved in them, right? To your point, Minaj, I think the CRO is all about how are we getting the revenue, and I don't know that It's great to understand where that leader is coming from. You absolutely have to have that.

But when I'm talking about true sales alignment, I really am referring to who are your SVPs over your DOs and your RVPs over your region, your DMs, your sales reps, right? All the way down. I, the CRO is of the utmost importance as the chief marketing officer and how they work together. That's how you're going to receive a lot of that direction.

But as far as true alignment. I think it's really more about like those NGO, in region sales folks that we have to be talking to on a regular basis. Unless you have a relationship where you can just go, plop down in the chair in your CRO's office and be like, Hey, what's up? What's going on?

What's happening today? I don't, I can't do that.

Minaz Tejani: Maybe some people can. Yeah. So now you've described it in that way and that's obviously the experience you've had. And I don't want to lead the witness here, but would you say that a good sales alignment strategy. Is it is it almost like a bottom up approach rather than necessarily a top down?

Or is it? Or should it be both? Or should it be neither? I don't know, I'm just throwing

Chelsea Gaspard: options out here. Yeah, no, and probably the answer is all of the above, depending on the company that you're working with. But everything I've seen, I do think it's top down. I think that change and relationships and how you value all the teams that you work with is driven top down.

I can even say for myself and marketing, I'm going to try to replicate and recreate relationships that I see successful marketing leaders having in my organization, right? And I think the same could be said of sales, HR, finance, you're going to try to replicate what you see your leaders doing.

I think that's very true for reps. And I think, I feel for reps because they're so busy. I just see sales reps being pulled in so many directions that unless they're being given the direction from their leaders, look, you've got to look to marketing to be able to catch some of these very relevant leads in this pipeline, and you've got to follow up and then the leaders are holding them accountable.

These poor reps, like, when would they have time to catch some of this stuff? Because they're trying to catch, education on new product and this new training and Oh, marketing rolled out a new white paper. And there are just so many things that they're trying to do. So I do actually believe that it is a top down approach, but maybe that could be different for

Minaz Tejani: other people.

Jon Busby: Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that from the top down, really. The, we know CMO 10 years is something that In constant debate how long CMOs tend to last. Yeah. Short. We know the nature of their role is always changing. I had someone mention to me the other day like, if you took 10 different CFO descriptions and Ted and.

10 different CMO descriptions, the CFO would all be the same, but the CMO, they would just all be different because we all have different ways of approaching those challenges and different backgrounds. In what way do you think alignment with sales is becoming important for that CMO then?

Especially if they come from, let's say a brand background over something else. Like how is that how is that changing? I

Chelsea Gaspard: think the roles are evolving in different ways. True. True. I don't know that I think the relationship with sales is different. So what I was saying earlier, I think that's the first thing I said actually was pre COVID marketing was hard.

Post COVID, it's harder.

Jon Busby: Why do we keep saying it's harder post COVID? What's

Minaz Tejani: changed? Yeah,

Chelsea Gaspard: That's part of it, right? People have just gotten comfortable with staying home. But I think we're trying to utilize as marketers. We're trying to utilize all of these other channel webinars as an example.

Trying to utilize webinars more, and we're trying to utilize digital marketing more, and we're all trying to do that. And we're all trying to go after tech. We're all trying to go after the same persona. So these catcher, these personas that we're going after poor people, they're, just being hit a hundred different ways with a webinar and come to this event.

And, here, have another email about what's coming up from our company. And the idea of the relevant will provide relevant content and they will come, I couldn't agree more. just getting harder and harder to do, right? It used to just be easier to develop that content. Now it's just, it's getting harder to do because a lot of people have a relevant message to be fair, right?

We wouldn't all be in business if we didn't. But I think from a CMO perspective, while the role itself might be evolving, I don't think that alignment with sales. Is evolving it that's just has always been true and in my mind will always be true. I mean I was 22 when I started working in marketing.

I'm not going to say how long ago that was but That it was a while ago. It wasn't yesterday. I'll say that and that was true when I was 22. It's still true Decades later, right? So I just I don't think that those pieces of Of being a CMO or changing, that's always gonna be a key to being a good CMO,

Harry Radcliffe: From a content creator standpoint.

If relevancy isn't the metric of content that we're putting out to be important anymore, what do you think needs to be on top of relevancy

Minaz Tejani: for people to come to your content? I

Chelsea Gaspard: think we've gotta just be able to stand out and get their attention and having relevant content is. But I also think it's important to be funny, be provocative just be different than what the others are doing.

And it's just

Jon Busby: getting harder and harder. I think Harry, to your point, relevance, probably the most important metric to still use because it's what Google, if you look at the recent changes last year and not to dive too much into this, like I think SEO is going to become more important for B2B, but you look at the changes Google are making and it's.

They're promoting helpful content. It's about providing, you need to be providing value back to your customer and it's just tipping more and more that way. Chelsea, this is something that's been going through my head for the last couple of years.

One question I love to ask is it time for marketing?

To now be the one on top. Is it time for marketeers to take the lead over sales? And if not, why not? Oh man,

Chelsea Gaspard: you're going to hate me, but I think the answer to that question is really, it depends on the nature of your business,

right? I think that works for some companies. I'm thinking of a company that I worked for back when I was younger and before I joined tech and, it was absolutely true that marketing needed to be leading the way on that we needed to be providing this path, like parting the sea for sales to come in behind us and pick up all the leads, right?

But just. Was the nature of how that business worked. Our audience responded really well to our marketing initiatives. They were like hungry for more and for the education. So it was a great way for us to be able to say, Hey, sales come along in this journey with us. Let us help you and pave the way.

And in, in a company like Veritas is a good example. We've been around the block a little while, right? We've been in this market. We are the leader in our market. We own a vast majority of the share here and our sales reps aren't like sitting there waiting for us to kick a lead to them. As hard as that is for me to say as a marketer, they're not like sitting there saying Hey, Chelsea, I, until you send me a lead, I don't have anything to work on.

That's not it. What we're here for is to help them grow. And I just think that has to be done as a partnership that can't be done as one leading the other or a silo. We've just got to grow together. Yeah,

Minaz Tejani: And ultimately, back to me back to that existential question of, which one's more important at the end of the day, I think comes back to the the fact of, marketing is what you buy into sales is who you buy from.

And I think. You will always need that unless you are in a transactional business, which, is all done digitally, e commerce as an example, but for the majority of B2B tech organizations, there always will come a point where you want to stop buying into what you're selling me and actually talk to somebody and somebody to close that deal and that human interaction because they were all people like, even though the stats might say they don't want to talk to somebody, I think it still depends on what, what market you're in.

So I think that relationship will always need to be there. But yeah, I think also one of the parts is that we bouncing back to the question previously about the idea of the role of CMOs and still that slightly oceanic gap in between there and sales. I do think it comes down to lead quality. I do think there's amongst the world of digital fatigue amongst the world of post COVID where everyone's going after digital.

What we're doing is we're actually, almost diluting and slightly hammering the lead quality that is going over to sales. So we're eroding the confidence that they have for what they get passed over. It's almost the big brands that are being successful are the ones that are super mindful of that and harnessing it and not compromising on volume versus quality.

One brand that particularly, we were working with who, they wouldn't pass a lead to sales. And kind of an MQL until that person had been actively hit 19 times and that nine, 19 downloads, if you like. As an organization for them then to get themselves involved, because anything less than that, all it's going to do is do more harm than good.

I think it's the, it's the engine that we're all part of, and I think we need to. Understand it, but also be very sensitive to what is being sent to sales as well. Because as you say, they're not just sat there waiting for these leads to come through. You're almost disrupting their normal day of hitting their quota to saying, I need you to follow up on these leads.

So they have to be good. They have to be considered. They have to be well, cleaned and gleaned really. So

Chelsea Gaspard: Absolutely. And then I think that goes back to the building of the trust, right? The more cred leads we send their way they don't have faith in their marketing team that we know what they want or that we're giving them what they need.

And then they start to ignore you. And I wouldn't blame them. So 100%. And I was, I haven't heard that 19 stat. I think that is really interesting. And I'm definitely going to be talking about that with my teams today. But I couldn't agree more that and we're actually starting to close the gap on that at Veritas and be better about.

Not lumping spreadsheets over not saying, Oh, but this is so important. This is so important, but mine, mine is important. My campaign is important. No, actually what's important are the leads that are continuously engaging with us and really showing interest. That's where, they should be. They should be spending some time.

So I

Minaz Tejani: don't disagree. That

Jon Busby: raises an interesting question, right? Which is, if you just talked about touch points and the quality of leads, as metrics are quite. Topical really, and I think we all have different ways of measuring things. Like which kind of metrics would you recommend a CMO focuses on to create better alignment with sales?

Like what are the core thing, gauges we should be looking at? And we know how salespeople love a big gauge that kind of goes up and down and looks like a speedo on a car. So what should we put on

Minaz Tejani: that

Chelsea Gaspard: dashboard? I think there's like those. Those metrics that kind of stay strong that stand the test of time, right?

Sales is always going to know what is driving the business from a marketing perspective? What should be driving the business from a marketing perspective? And, what are customers saying about us? And what is our pipeline? And what are, where are the gaps? And why are there gaps? And what are customers saying?

And what are we doing to put messaging out there to to talk to those customers? So they're always going to want to. They're always going to want to have those conversations, but I think you have to think about as a marketing organization, what are your big rocks? What are the sales big rocks?

And those change, right? Which means that your scorecard as a CMO is going to evolve over time. You might have that column that stays strong all the time. But you're going to have to constantly speak to, maybe there was a new solution set AI. AI is all over, right? So maybe there's new AI messaging what's the voice of customer looking like in the market around Veritas and AI?

And so I think that while there are the metrics that stay strong, we want to know about the pipeline. And we want to know about the relevant customers. I'm sorry, not customers contacts that are that we're putting into the database. We also want to keep up with what's important to sales and those big rocks.

So we can report on that too.

In your experience, and of course this doesn't represent all salespeople. What sort of tools do you think that they really do want from marketing as an organization, because, all marketers have their ideas that all salespeople need is they need a presentation, they need this, they need ready made assets, they need ready made emails, they need social posts. In your experience, is there anything that seems to come up time and time again that your sales teams that you work with are like, this is what I need for marketing? And I don't mean, sorry, from in terms of higher quality leads or new contacts.

Minaz Tejani: tactical ground level stuff that they will use for customers. Any thoughts or insights on that?

Chelsea Gaspard: I do have some thoughts. It's the first thing I'm going to say is that it depends on your organization, but you knew I was going to say that. But you were right. But I think if you're if you're in an install based motion, your reps are going to want something different than if you're a startup.

And you're trying to acquire new customers, right? And, I think when you're in that startup mode, you're trying to acquire those new customers. Having all of those sexy and amazing tools out there to help you gain quality new leads, you want that. Any place where you can get a new lead to go follow up on, you're gonna, you're gonna take it.

And so whether you're turning to a Sixth Sense or a Path Factory or an Outreach you want all of those things you want to build those sequences and you want to play in all those spaces to get those leads. I think when you're in an install based motion, you've been around a long time, you're really looking for Hey, what are our differentiators?

I need that messaging and I need that in a deck that I can use as a starting point to be able to customize this for my accounts, right? At the end of the day, building a sequence and outreach for a Veritas technologies, I'm not going to say that's. Not a great thing. If unlimited budgets were a thing, then heck yeah, why not?

But when you're trying to pick and choose your hills, I don't know, that might, that will help maybe the BDRs. It's not going to necessarily help your sales team, who already knows their customers. They know who they're going after. They just have to understand the messaging and they have to be well armed with what do I use for follow up?

What is the message there? What are the personas i'm going after educate me on what those personas are and what they're interested in And then give me the messaging to go after them and then give me the quality leads to get there. So unfortunately, I think it just depends.

Minaz Tejani: Yeah I'd second that in my experience as well a lot of times Particularly if you go to more strategic sales and the higher up you go, definitely they don't want You know, they don't need another ebook or a video.

What they need is tell me the thing that's going to grab the most attention. When I've got that in an elevator pitch, I need to know what's our big differentiators, where have we done it before and failing all of that as well, they all love a direct mail. I've got, I'm just going to put that out there.

All sales teams, doesn't matter who they are, if they're a BDR right up to strategic sales, and every time we do. A really cool, creative DM, as soon as they see it, that's it, the orders come flying in, it's gotta be more than a postcard, it can't just be a postcard, it's gotta be something. It's

Chelsea Gaspard: funny that you say that, because you and I have done some killer direct mailers in our past, right?

We have, yeah. And I feel like when I walk into a new role, and I'm talking about one of these direct mailers, they look at me a little bit like you want to do snail mail? You want to send a postcard? And I'm like no, hang on. And I have to go right over to my closet over here and pull out one of these amazing mailers.

And I'm sitting here on, Zoom trying to open a box and flip up headphones and show them a postcard. I'm like, what all is included in this box? And all of a sudden they're like, Oh, I didn't even know that this was possible. This is really cool. So yeah, they all, when they understand what a good direct mailer is, they're all

Minaz Tejani: in.

I think it also comes down to obviously direct mail is cool. But I do think it comes down to impact what they're really looking for. Is attention, right? We're in an attention economy. They know that's going to get attention. Equally, you could do it through many other ways as well, like good messaging good proven case studies.

So I think it comes down to the same principles, right? Marketing is there to make, to grab the attention. Sales are there to sustain it. And I think it's, if you can work together.

Chelsea Gaspard: And I think the direct mailers are a good example of, that is in my mind a differentiator. You send out a high value direct mailer, not the postcard, and then you're standing out.

Now, you want to keep their attention. That's where you have to have the relevant message and the good content and give them something that they want to hear. So to what Harry said earlier, right? That's all very relevant and all still very true. But you've got to give them the vehicle to just get their attention to make them read it right off the bat.

And I do think direct mailers do that.

Minaz Tejani: Going from

Jon Busby: old marketing, from the oldest type of marketing, which is direct mailers to the newest type. We made it nearly all the way through the podcast without you mentioning AI. But now you've mentioned it, we're going to have to talk about it.

Minaz Tejani: Every time someone says AI, you have to

Jon Busby: drink normally. Yeah. Every time you have to drink. Yeah. Yeah. I'm that's, it's dry January, so give me a few more hours and then that's it. I'm obliterated but Veritas is known of course for data management and generative AI has a big. Draw on data, right?

That's what it needs in order to be successful. Like, how are you seeing, how are you using generative AI? Are you using it yet? Are you excited about it? What does 2024 hold when it

Minaz Tejani: comes to the future of marketing? So

Chelsea Gaspard: As a leader in data management and application resiliency, Veritas is absolutely focused on using AI and automation, I think mostly just to reduce complexity for our customers, right?

And just recently there was to be fair, I guess this kind of happens all the time, but I have a specific account in mind, a specific customer who recently underwent a cyber attack. And they came to our team after it was all said and done. And they said, we just weren't prepared. The attackers were coming after us saying, pay this ransom.

And we just were like frozen and we didn't know what to do next. And I think for this reason, Veritas is putting a lot of time and energy and focus into AI powered resilience. And how can we make that recovery process easier for our customers? So I imagine that experience is only going to get better in the future.

How,

Jon Busby: Building every technology vendor is now looking at building artificial intelligence into their products. How can we bring it into our marketing? Like, how do we bring something like that to life? And how do we try and use it to I'm worried about this. Why are you worried about this, Harry?

Harry Radcliffe: I just think that I think that it's going to find really effective ways of marketing to us that I think are going to be very revealing of the human condition. I think that all marketing might just come back to maybe like jingles. And then maybe someone just like

Jon Busby: shaking boobies. And this is why I don't go on, this is why I don't go on TikTok, because it just starts to see who you are.

And you're like, am I the kind of person that finds this entertaining? Yeah, exactly.

Harry Radcliffe: I'll out you right now as TikTok quickly figured out you're a man that loves watching trains

Jon Busby: crash. Yeah, you're right. Yes, I did. And you talk, you know about me and cement. Yeah. No.

Harry Radcliffe: What happened? So I went on to Facebook and they'll tell you everything you're interested in.

And I was relieved. Because I saw that one of my top interests was cement. And I was like, these guys don't know me at all. I'm a ghost. I'm a ghost in the machine. They can't get me. And then I go onto my Instagram and there's a reel of this guy smoothing out cement. And I was like, Oh yeah, baby.

And then I was like, damn, I do

Minaz Tejani: like cement. There's a building based ASMR, right? Yeah, it's just

Harry Radcliffe: smoothing it out. And I was like, look at that. That

Minaz Tejani: is some smooth cement. I'm

Harry Radcliffe: thinking about changing careers, just bricklaying. And it's just that is how I want to live my life. Wishing that

Chelsea Gaspard: screed dry. It would be

Minaz Tejani: very gratifying.

A hundred percent. That's all I seek. That's all I seek. It's a good thing to save time or waste time, right? But no, I think I'm with you. But bringing it back to AI, particularly for sales teams as well. What we are starting to see is some of the new AI tools that can actually automate things like insights and grabbing and scraping of real time data to then serve to sales teams.

So if you're on the way into a meeting with a big client. Having at the touch of a button, which previously would probably have to be done slightly manually, start to be built, start to be assessed, analyzed, and then served, now there's dashboards that are out there that sales teams can get everything they need to know.

On the way into a meeting and I think that's cool. I think that's definitely something that's not gonna replace something that was there before. It's just making it way quicker and easier that, we don't have to troll Google to do it and stuff.

Chelsea Gaspard: I think the AI powered insights for marketing and sales are gonna be revolutionizing from a resource perspective.

And I'm thinking about, an ABM program that I worked on with you guys a few years ago, and you guys would put together these amazing, I'm calling it a booklet, but these presentations for us that had all of these account insights that would take your teams. Weeks to put together to go out and dig and find all this information.

And then, and once you guys handed them over to us for marketing and sales, they were like gold, right? We had reps that were actually using those two on board new reps that were coming onto their team. They were. They were amazing. And to your point, now all that time and energy doesn't, not only doesn't have to be spent going and sourcing all of that information.

Also, once we print it, we know it goes out of date pretty much a week later. Now you can get all of the latest and greatest pretty quick. And so I, from an insight perspective, that's amazing. I do. I'm with you, Harry. I think that it'll be interesting to see what AI does to marketing and are we going to come back to the jingles are direct mailers going to be even more common.

They're not very common right now. They're like making this little comeback here and there. But are they going to be more common in the future? Are we going to go back to older ways of doing things as a way to stand

Minaz Tejani: out? Yeah, and we got to be careful

Harry Radcliffe: like how we align those metrics as well because let's say an AI is Driven to send emails with the highest click rates with the highest open rates or something like that Which is something that maybe our copywriters would be incentivized to do.

I got an email in my inbox that said Oh, HR wants to speak to you about sexual harassment. Best believe I clicked on that very worried, but it was just spam. And AI is going to quickly realize, ah, if we say this guy needs to go to prison, they'll click it, so I, it might not be the best experience for the end user.

Jon Busby: I got one telling me I was promoted. That's

Minaz Tejani: the thing, it knows what's believable. Yeah. It's that's completely unreachable for Jonathan. This

Chelsea Gaspard: is

Minaz Tejani: problematic. We got one, yeah. But you know what, but what you've described, I was like, again? What you've described about the kind of, a future state of marketing where, and I know it feels like we're moving into a different podcast but, a future state of marketing where.

AI democratizes everything to the point at which it just becomes a whitewash and you need to stand out. I don't think that's a bad thing. If you look at the young Gen Z's today, highest levels of purchasing of vinyl since vinyl pretty much began, or in the last 20, 30 years. Lowest records and listening to it though.

But at the end of the day, the driving force behind it is because Gen Z's, they want to do something different. They're sick of the whitewash. I don't think it's a bad thing if AI just shines a light on all of that and then all the cooler, older tactics just make a comeback. As long as we're grabbing attention and having some fun along the way, I think.

I think bots can go do whatever

Jon Busby: they want.

Harry Radcliffe: It'll probably be mainly bots marketing to bots

Minaz Tejani: anyway. I think, yeah. I was thinking that too. We'll have

Jon Busby: AI writing our copy and then we'll have AI clicking on it on emails. You

Harry Radcliffe: can go to the new Google phones and say hey, book me a And one and the other.

Then the other side, the hair salon is probably going to have a chat bot there and then

Minaz Tejani: they'll work out between them They'll have their own little sub community where they're buying and selling stuff Cyber security

Harry Radcliffe: as well. That's just going to be loads of AI, trying to hack AI, trying to stop AI.

from being hacked. It's just going to be attackers and defenders.

Minaz Tejani: Yeah. It's going to be like some sort of film script. Now

Chelsea Gaspard: we have our next movie. Here we go. I know, we have our next movie. AI to XAI.

Minaz Tejani: And there's a sales guy at the back just going, Hey, do you want to buy some security?

Chelsea Gaspard: Hey, everybody,

Minaz Tejani: I'm here.

And Chelsea behind him going, Hey, I got you this lead. Yeah, this AI attack lead. We've, we've

Jon Busby: covered so much on today's podcast. We, starting off with just some of those fantastic tips on sales and marketing alignment and what that means really when you're dealing with sales on a day to day basis, we've debated some of the metrics that go alongside it, of course, ended with AI like Chelsea from your side, if you were, we're in, we're still in January, we're recording this on the 31st of January right now, 2024.

So we can still talk about new year's resolutions and all that magic. As you plan out the next 11 months of this year, like what's your, what's going to be your main initiatives? What's going to be your main tips to other marketers that they should nail over the next few months?

Minaz Tejani: That's a good question.

Chelsea Gaspard: I should probably start with saying, make sure you're aligned with sales. That's just life's lesson today. Number two, I would say just my head and it popped out. I think this year is going to be really hard. I think we say this every year, but like doing more with less.

If you're on LinkedIn and you're watching the news, you're seeing what's happening in the world around us, specifically in tech. Budgets are being cut. People are being let go. It's a very unfortunate time. And if you're left standing you got to be able to do more with less. And I'm already seeing some of that, talking with friends and colleagues is.

Oh, you have lost budget. Oh, but your metrics aren't going down. How are we going to get there? How are we going to do that? I think that probably goes back to what we talked about earlier with If you can make sure to hold strong to you handing those quality leads to sales, don't focus on the volume.

Your volume may go down, but focus on those quality leads and what you're gonna hand over to sales and I think at the end of the day,

Minaz Tejani: you're gonna be okay. And I also have one, one tip as well, I would say taking me back to when, Harriet, I was probably your age actually, don't worry, the whole screen's not gonna go seep here as I tell you this old school story.

I was fortunate enough in my first job to do tech sales over the phone, selling Cisco, selling Nortel, selling solutions. And I, and it was part of a marketing agency and the ability to be able to see the messages that were going out from marketing and having to physically sell to customers and going back to the marketing team saying your messages are completely wrong.

That's not what the market wants to talk about. What they really care about here is. I don't know, compromising data and et cetera. And those themes was absolutely gold and it absolutely shaped the marketeer marketing career I then had. And what I would say to anybody who's in marketing, try and spend as much time sat with a salesperson or alongside them, hear the conversations they're having, talk to them.

Even before you get the alignment comes from that empathy. And honestly, once you start to hear it, the types of conversations that are approaches at the end of the day. You're so reliant on them and you will learn more than you can believe. And then it will just make you a better marketer, a hundred percent.

I completely agree. I think any

Jon Busby: marketer that hasn't spent, I recently actually spent time with the sales channel sales person listening to them pitch. And this was unified comm solutions. Very, fairly homogeneous products and just listening to how they broke down the features and made them compelling to the end user.

I was like, Oh, I can turn that into a marketing campaign. You just, those little things that they just do instinctively. If you could replicate that further up the funnel, think of the time and the quality, the increase in quality to come back to your point, Chelsea, that we can all do.

Quality

Minaz Tejani: of campaigns. We get to, we, marketers get to head up in our own insular world of language and we convince ourselves that this is what the customer wants to hear. Sales, sales is going to be the key to, to, to that insight, really.

Chelsea Gaspard: A hundred percent. And I think actually some of the best marketing campaigns I've seen were the result of sales.

Something that they send to a customer in meeting and someone from marketing just happened to hear or sales was doing a, Hey, this is what happened during this big win. And we heard it and said oh gosh, we need to scale that. I think that's where the best campaigns come from for sure.

Minaz Tejani: Chelsea, it's been

Jon Busby: absolutely brilliant to have you on today's podcast.

Of course, it's been great to have Minaz back as a regular guest. But thank you very much for joining us on another episode of the Tech Marketing Podcast. And we'll see you again in two

Minaz Tejani: weeks. Nothing but love. Thanks guys. See you guys.