Get Your Sales To Soar By Accelerating The Buying Process with Dave Hubbard
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Episode Summary
For every company to able to raise revenue, there is a need for the sales process and marketing methods to be aligned. Accelerating sales to 30% annually is an easing thing to do for Marketing Outfield CEO Dave Hubbard because he has an engineering background combined with a sales personality. This allows him to get into the gritty parts of sales and marketing. Instead of focusing on the sales process, what’s important is getting the customers into the buying process quickly. By aligning to what customers are trying to do, the sales process becomes dynamic, effective and gets on the same page with the marketing. Learn more on how to turn a suspect to a qualified lead, into a forecast, into and opportunity and then close deals.
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Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Dave Hubbard who is the CEO and Founder of Marketing Outfield. Dave is both someone who’s an engineer as well as a sales expert, which is very rare to find one person being able to do both. He wrote an article called CEO Leadership Required to Accelerate Revenue Growth. Regardless if the company is a startup or a big company, there are five symptoms that help the CEO identify that their product team, their marketing team and sales team are not in-sync with the target customer. When the revenue generation team is not working well enough to work across different functions, then the CEO must get involved. They don’t have to be sales rock stars or even marketing gurus to make a massive impact. Enjoy the episode.
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Get Your Sales To Soar By Accelerating The Buying Process with Dave Hubbard
Our guest is David Hubbard who’s the CEO of Marketing Outfield which is a revenue acceleration expert. He has helped small and medium business sized companies accelerate their revenues by 25% to 50% annually. The way that Dave does this is by collaborating with business to business companies in the design and execution of their successful product launches. Also, he knows how to get you lead gens and how to execute on those leads. What I really love about Dave is his expertise in getting sales up and running. Dave, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. Pleasure to be here.
Before we get into all your expertise, can you share with us how did you get all these expertise? Did you always know you’re going to be a CEO or a marketing sales guru when you were right out of school? What gave you the experience to get this expertise?
Actually, I became a professional engineer in computer design and systems. I was responsible for a number of computer systems for power utility. I decided I wanted to get in the general management, so I jumped into sales. I was very fortunate to jump into a $16 billion company. They gave me some training to actually sell. It enabled me to become one of their top sales reps in the corporation. A few years later, I decided to go into field marketing. They came along to train me with classical marketing: the product, price, place, promotion. That enabled me to create some and new significant businesses for the company. I went from there being at the field and I moved up to the chain from the field to country level to division, corporate. I did it in a very unique way. I went from sales to marketing all the way along. Sales and marketing field, sales and marketing division, sales marketing corporate and ultimately becoming chief marketing officer at some companies, chief sales officer at others and at a couple of cases, chief revenue officer responsible for all the sales, marketing and product management. I feel strongly that that uniquely qualifies me to help companies better align their sales, marketing and product management to the opportunity and actually accelerate sales.
I’ll say it’s very unique. Back in the day, I sold mainframe computers, Control Data, Amdahl which Fujitsu owned, competing with IBM. It’s a rare bird. It’s like a unicorn in the startup world that has an engineering background and a sales personality. Usually, they’re two very different skill sets and you’ve been able to combine them both. Is that an accurate description of what you do and who you are?
It is. If it wasn’t for the training and support I received early on, that transition wouldn’t happen. You’re right. An engineer that sells is a little bit unique but with all the training and skills, it becomes possible.
Also, sometimes engineers just don’t want to do it. It’s a left brain thing. They want to be in their left brain analyzing, solving problems with design or engineering, whatever it is. Sales people for the most part are not really interested in the tech stuff, “Just tell me enough that I can sell the product but I don’t really want to understand all the nitty-gritty stuff.” The fact that you can go into the nitty-gritty if need be, really gives you a stronger level of confidence and then you’re able to show other people how to get there. Let’s talk about one of the things that is really so important here which is the CEO Leadership Required to Accelerate Revenue Growth that you’ve written about. There are really five barriers to getting your sales up. What’s the first one?
The first barrier has to do with what’s called the sales process. A sales process is nothing more than the things that a salesperson must do to move a suspect into a qualified lead, from a qualified lead into a forecast opportunity, from an opportunity into an actual closed deal. The fortunate part is that a lot of companies don’t have a sales process. That is a big problem because a sales organization without a sales process is just a bunch of independent sellers. It’s not a sales force. They may have the sales process but then it’s rigid. In other words, a competitor does something with a compelling offer and it never gets in the sales process so the rest of the sales team doesn’t know about it. They all get surprised when it happens. The sales process has to be dynamic. If the sales process is not dynamic, it becomes outdated, ineffective and unused. Finally, the worst offender is the sales process should be about the salesperson trying to move the buyer through their purchasing process. It’s not about our sales process. It’s about the customer’s buying process. We want to move them through quickly and end up the winner. If we can do that correctly, and most companies do not, then having a right sales process can accelerate sales by 30% annually just that point alone.
[Tweet “How to go from suspect to customer?”]
The big takeaway here is, A) You need to have a sales process so the information gets shared across the entire team and not just scattered. B) Without this, then there’s no structure of moving someone on having a sense of what the next step is to move them as you called them suspects instead of prospects. I think that’s interesting all the way to them saying yes and really making sure that it’s on their timeframe and their criteria, not yours. Is that a pretty good summary?
Yes. It’s absolutely critical. Something like that wasn’t needed twenty years ago. Now that the buyers are self-educating online doing their own research, they’re making decisions without involving us. Therefore, we really have to make the extra effort to align to what they’re trying to do. If we do that, then we’ll become much more buyer-centric and miracles happen. We all of a sudden start talking about what the customer wants us to talk about. We, all of a sudden, start finding who is impacting that decision process and how we’re going to talk to him. We figure out how to get away from no decisions in half the sales because we’re gauged in the buyer’s process not, “An hour every day I did the sales presentation, I did the download, blah, blah, blah.”
It’s really finding out what’s important to them as opposed to just giving the standard presentation every time, right?
They don’t care about the product. They can find that online. What they want is a solution to their business problem.
Exactly. They will ignore us. They will avoid us. They will go through the whole process up to 70% all the way through their decision process without reaching out to us because we’re product pitching. They don’t care about the product. They can find that online. What they want is a solution to their business problem.
What’s the second barrier here as it relates to lead gens? I’m going to guess it has something to do with qualification and following up. Please tell us.
Lousy marketing leads. That’s always been the complaint between sales and marketing, “Lousy leads or they don’t follow up.” Now that you’ve got a self-educating buyer, the rules have changed. You’re going out looking for leads let’s say. 79% according to research of the leads that come from marketing will never buy. The 21% that will will do so eventually; maybe not this quarter, maybe not this week, eventually. The biggest problem is you can’t have a salesperson running around trying to qualify all these stuff instead of closing deals. When you look at the reasons for this, it’s not because marketing wants to do this. It’s because their strategy is outdated. Twenty years ago, in the old days, you didn’t have to worry about it. The customer would only find out what we told them. Now, they’re online. Marketing is still focused on just creating leads. They’re not focused on helping the sales organization convert and turn those suspects into customers. That’s what they have to do because the buyer is online all the time and they’re reading the competitor information, they’re making decisions so that both of them have to understand what’s going on. The key takeaway on that one is if you align the marketing and sales strategy so it’s throughout the entire buyer purchasing process, you’re going to deliver 38% more deals annually. It’s simple as that.
One of the things that I find really useful when we’re working with the marketing department or if you’re doing your own marketing is to really be clear on who you help and what problem you solve and in the marketing messaging and say, “Who this is for and here’s who this is not for,” so that that can really weed out some leads that aren’t qualified to buy or don’t need what you’re saying or don’t meet your minimum requirement. What are your thoughts on that?
That’s absolutely true. I’m going to talk about the impact of product to this whole process and the impact that marketing also has to be aligned to the entire buyer process to be educated to that. If they’re just doing leads, they have no visibility to what happens to the leads. It becomes magic. They have no possibility of knowing. I think that leads us straight into the third thing. It’s one of the reasons that marketing cannot demonstrate ROI. They cannot demonstrate the contribution to the business. The CEO is not interested in how many clicks and views and eyeballs they got. That didn’t wash it. Marketing can say what the cost to lead is but they can’t say what the cost of customer acquisition is. The reason for that is they can’t tell that a Twitter campaign drives more sales opportunities than an email campaign or a webinar or anything else. It comes back that they’re just doing branding lead generation. If they don’t engage with the whole buyer process, they can’t tell the impact of what they’re doing.
That’s so important what you just said there because if you’re pitching to an investor at any stage whether it’s the entry level or further down the road, one of the questions you’re going to get asked is, “What’s your projected cost to acquire a new customer?” If you’re further along and you’ve got revenue coming in, “What does it cost to acquire a customer and how can you reduce that?” Having that thought through in a way that makes a lot of sense because if they’re going to give you money to spend on marketing, they’re going to want to know how you do it. One of the mistakes people make when they pitch is saying, “If we only get 1% of all the people in China to buy this, we will be rich.”
They don’t go for that.
Do you have a story of how someone you’ve worked with has used your expertise to go from not really having an ROI to marketing to figuring out how to do it better?
I can give you the process. I can’t think of one right off the top of my head. Really it comes down to you have to take the marketing expense and tie it to not leads but how many sales opportunities did you increase? How many of those became sales forecast? How many of those became closed deals? How many of those became upsells? How many of those became cross-sells? How many customers do we retain? All of those points marketing can impact. They can impact with all the technology and approaches they have today. It’s all related to revenue. What’s exciting about that and where I have helped is sales and marketing are getting on the same page. You can get sales and marketing and say, “How do we move opportunities to forecast? Sales, what are you doing? Marketing, what are you doing? What can we do together?”
When the salespeople are talking to leads for marketing, do they ask them, “How did you hear about us? Where did you come from?” Sometimes the answers might be, “First, I saw a Twitter and then I opted in for something and then I got an email.” Then you start to realize, “It’s not just one thing that gets a good lead. It’s an accumulation of marketing efforts,” right?
It is. It’s technology that is available to marketers now that wasn’t twenty years ago. For what your example is called, it’s called attribution software. What it does is track a customer who could be anonymous when they go to the website. Track them and know exactly what they downloaded, what social campaigns they reacted to, what telephone campaigns. You can see the whole reaction. If you’re collaborating with sales, you share that. They’d say, “My customer has done A, B and C. I know they add up to a great qualified lead. I’m going to try to cold-call in there.” Let me give you some examples where this ROI comes in. The studies basically say if you go through this approach I’m talking about and execute it properly, you can deliver 27% faster profit growth. What caught my eye was this study. There was an interesting study of an industry. It showed that if you use the right mix of marketing programs, they increase revenue by 30% a year but get this, they decrease marketing expense by 50%. It comes back to marketing. If they don’t understand what’s working or why, they can’t fix it. Now, they have the technology to do that. They didn’t have before.
[Tweet “Getting the deal is never enough to keep a customer.”]
This whole concept of technology being used to retarget someone, they go to the website and they’re cookied and they’re tagged and they follow them when they go to other websites and they see an ad. That I know has shown great ROI for people who need some frequency. If you’re looking for a trip for example and you’re not ready to book yet but you keep seeing ads, so that when you are ready, you then book that hotel or what have you. Do you have any thoughts on the value marketing provides after someone is a customer? I think that other studies have shown that people tend to keep looking at ads of brands and products that they’re using to reinforce their buying decision so there’s no buyer’s remorse.
You’re absolutely in the right point. If you’re gauging online throughout the complete life cycle of the buyer, you know they’re going to go through that buyer remorse. You want to keep on feeding them messages whether it’s email, because you know who they are now, or online advertising to some degree. You want to actually be productive and try to upsell, cross-sell or get them into becoming an advocate for the company. In other words, it never stops. Just getting the deal is not enough. Sales can’t easily make that happen because sales is off to the next customer trying to bring him onboard. But marketing can because they have the technology. They just put it in there and keep the constant messaging going to those customers afterwards related to the product they bought. That’s powerful. It’s really important for startups particularly in the SaaS environment. Retention is critical. There’s so much more energy trying to get a new customer versus retaining what you have; so much better upselling a customer than trying to get a new one. Sales has not been equipped to do that very well because they’re always going after quota. Marketing can do a lot of fill in for that. All of the things that they used to get customers, all the technologies, all the campaigns are the same tools they can use to keep customers.
There’s so much more energy trying to get a new customer versus retaining what you have.
Barrier number four: Dealing with the product, go-to-market. Explain what that is please.
That one there is part of the biggest problem in companies and particularly in startups. If you have a product launch and sales don’t accelerate or every time you do new features and versions to release but you don’t see a balance in sales, it’s possibly and probably because they don’t have a good product market fit. They didn’t find out who the ideal customer profile is. That work is so critical when you develop a product to absolutely know who you’re targeting, who’s making the decision, what are their business issues and it goes on and on. If you do not do that work correctly, what happens is sales particularly in the startup, they’ll go out and they’ll find the early adopters. For them to accelerate sales, they’re going to find the sweet spot.
You can’t make all your predictions on the early adopters and think that there’s an unlimited number of them because there isn’t, right?
Right. If I was to talk to a CEO, I’d probably shake him and say, “You’ve got to get an experienced product manager involved earlier not later.” Doing this stuff, understanding product market fit, understanding the ICP, understanding product launch cross functionally, understanding go-to-market.
What’s ICP for those people who may not know?
That’s the Ideal Customer Profile. These things are not something you can think about in the weekend and go do. You’re betting the whole company as a startup that the product works. I’ll tell you from experience, it is much harder to find a market for an existing product than it is to design the product for the market correctly in the first place. I’ve seen companies go bust because they have this product but they don’t know where to sell anymore. The market they wanted to is not the right market.
Any example that comes to mind?
Not really except some of the startups I worked that was a problem. They had a product that worked well at the mid-sized side of companies, but it didn’t work well at the enterprise. The features were there. The problem is they didn’t have the robustness and reliability. At the enterprise level, for them that’s important. They don’t want to lose the job. For middle companies, they want to get the job done and they’re willing to take more risk. If you’re in the wrong market and you say, “I’m going to have a sales organization go after enterprise, and this is my product that was really made for the middle market,” you’re going to have a problem.
Keeping up with demand I think is also a big thing I see happening sometimes. If you don’t have the funding to make enough product or you don’t have the staffing to handle the results from a successful ad campaign, that can really be detrimental, right?
[Tweet “How to get you better leads?”]
It is. That comes back to really the four barriers we’ve talked about so far. If you look at moving the buyer through their process, that means you have a much more reliable forecast of what can happen. Marketing can tell you if they generate more leads from social how much revenue that could come out. They’ve tracked it by using attribution software and everything else. They know how many more opportunities could happen, with the right sales closes opportunities and actually have a reasonable forecast of what could happen. Right now, without that, you’re basically guessing.
That brings us to the fifth barrier, which is dealing with leveraging technology.
This one here, this is where the CEOs really got to jump up and get involved. Today, there is over 5,000 marketing technology vendors. That’s not counting the 600 or so advertising technology and the hundreds of sales technology. We have so much technology available to automate everything and anything. The investments on CRM, Customer Relationship Management, marketing automation, the C-level is not seeing the revenue they had hoped to see. There are two basic problems there. One is we’re still automating the outdated broken process that we used to use twenty years ago. That’s not a good thing because what you do is you just get lousy leads at scale because you’ve got outdated process. The second thing is these systems aren’t well-integrated. They suffer. When a salesperson goes to CRM, they see one thing. When the marketing person goes to their platform, they see something else. They’re not looking at the same thing. That makes it hard to align their efforts.
It’s like looking at the elephant, someone is looking at the tail and someone is looking at the trunk and saying, “We’re looking at completely different things.”
Aligning cross-functional processes is very difficult to do. It’s worth 13% faster growth. It’s a lot easier in a smaller company to fix all those stuff than a bigger company that’s got a lot of established bureaucracy per se. The CEO has to get on top of it. He cannot delegate technology, strategy. What he or she should be saying is, “I want a single revenue generation system. I want you to build me a single revenue system so that if we change strategies, I can see what the output is.” Sales looks at it and sees the same thing. Marketing looks at, sees the same thing as product management looks at and the same thing with the C-level.
If the staff doesn’t know how to do that, they can engage you to help them do that. Is that right?
Yeah. It really is straightforward. You really just have to make the commitment that says the CRM becomes a base unit. Everything revolves around it, every tool and you have one view. The marketing people look at the same window with the sales people. They may be looking at different things but they sustain information so that everybody is still on the same page. When it comes to trying to align sales and marketing and product management, it really comes down to give them the same page. Give them the same problem that everybody can work on. You’re looking to have collaboration. All of these people are smart. Sales understand sales they’ve been trained. Very few of them have ever been a marketing specialist especially in the data driven side. Marketers, very few have been in professional sales. They don’t understand. You get two of them in a room, you say, “Let’s communicate.” It’s like having two groups with different languages. They all agreed they want revenue. They all agreed they want customers. Now what?
If I get them focusing on a customer and moving the customer from where we found them to where we want to be, amazing things happen.
You really have to focus them on a common thing. What I found in my experience and in the last twenty years, if I get them focusing on a customer and moving the customer from where we found them to where we want to be, amazing things happen. They really do. You can get them to collaborate. It’s not marketing blaming sales or vice versa. They both have skill sets and they’re both trying to do the same job. I’ve seen it happen where sales and marketing just feel like one team. I see that as a future that has to be done. If we don’t get there, you can’t accelerate sales. You can’t accelerate revenue when you’ve got marketing going one direction, sales going in another. They’re doing their best but they’re not growing in the same direction.
What do you think is the most important thing a CEO can do to accelerate sales? Is it what you just described or is it something more with alignment?
It’s all about alignment. I don’t try to do alignment for enterprises. It’s just too difficult. Alignment is really taking departments, channels and trying to get them aligned. In an enterprise, there are hundreds of channels and departments to align. In a startup, you start out the right way. You get sales marketing and product management on the same page on the get-go. You give them your expectations of what you want to see. You allow them to take the tools and make it happen. The key thing for a CEO is make sure your revenue team is a team from the get-go. Don’t assume just because they get-together in a room, they’re on the same page. You have to make sure that every single person in the company, in the startup understands the buyer journey; what problems they have, how they make decisions, including customer service or customer success as it’s called these days, including financial. Everybody should understand how they’re interacting with a customer. Who else in the company may be interacting at the same point? It helps them understand better.
Dave, how can people work with you and your company Marketing Outfield to help them do all these things or even the services you offer include helping them as a chief financial or revenue officer? What’s the best way for people to decide whether they need you or not?
There are two primary ways. One way is if they’re not getting accelerated sales, I’ll come in and identify the two or three things that can make an impact over the next year that we should fix and collaborate with the existing organization, develop the right strategies and execute them. We take it from soup to nuts to make sure it works. That’s a typical consulting engagement. The one I prefer, the one I recommend and I’m moving more towards is what’s called a fractional chief revenue officer. In other words, you’re getting somebody with the experience that I have in sales, marketing, product management and you bring them in five or ten days a month, not for the full twenty days so you’re paying less, to guide the existing staff with the right strategies or right techniques to deliver acceleration. What it does is when I’d leave whether it’s a year or two years or six months, those people are better equipped and that leadership is better enabled to understand how the revenue engine is working.
You remind me of what a Sherpa does when people are climbing Mount Everest or any of the other big mountains. If you want to get up there faster, bring Dave in.
When I drive consultants in, when I was running companies and a CEO, etc. I wanted them to leave my staff smarter. I wanted them to leave me smarter. They’re bringing an outside perspective, something that when you’re trying to get your company going, you get blinders on unfortunately, and we all do. We’re just trying to execute the plan. Somebody coming in can add so much value. You really want them leaving the company better off, not like the traditional Big League management consultants who come in as a team and leave a PowerPoint behind and say, “Go ahead, do this and you’ll be fine.” It doesn’t execute in, the organization doesn’t get smarter. You’re not really doing the most value you can by getting involved.
I highly encourage people to follow you on Twitter. There are 30,000 people doing it already. You really are constantly giving great information and best practices for getting your sales to take off. It’s @MOutfield. Dave Hubbard on LinkedIn, you can follow him there. Go to the website, MarketingOutfield.com to see how to become more profitable and get those sales up. Dave, thank you so much for being on the show.
It was a pleasure. I hope those listening pick up just one idea that moves them forward in sales acceleration. I think we did a great job if they can just do that.
You did more than one. Thanks again, Dave.
Thank you, John.
Links Mentioned
- Marketing Outfield
- CEO Leadership Required to Accelerate Revenue Growth
- @MOutfield Twitter
- Dave Hubbard LinkedIn
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