Sales + Marketing: How to Speak Your Partners Love Language

Overview: Learn how data can bring your marketing and sales teams together to drive business success with Mark Maughan VP of business Operations.

Transcript

Alright, let’s jump into this PowerPoint. Well, welcome. I’m excited to have you here with me. If you thought you were joining a business presentation, I’m sorry to have to be the one to inform you that you’ve actually been tricked into a couples therapy sessions. So I hope you enjoy the next 15 minutes. Now, but in all seriousness, I’m excited to talk to you about building a foundation of success with your counterparts in sales if you’re in marketing, or in marketing, if you’re in sales, and hopefully help us all get to a place where we’re leveraging our marketing and sales dollars in the most effective way possible.   

So before I jump in, give you a little bit of background on me, and on the company I work for. Domo is a platform that businesses big and small use on a daily basis to run their business. The Domo solution allows you to bring in data from thousands of different systems, aggregate that data, and then transform that data and ultimately, leverage that data, in metrics and in applications. We were founded 10 years ago, actually, 10 years ago, this month, we IP owed and in 2018, and our are traded on the NASDAQ. Feel free to pick up a share too, if, if you’re so inclined. I’ve been with Domo for about half of its life. I oversee the operations and analytics teams here. It’s my team that’s using the Domo platform to analyze and run Domo as a business.   

So knowing that I run analytics is critical information for you to understand my lame humor, and my next joke here to see what I did there, you pay for the presentation, but you stay for the jokes, right? But seriously, I’ve been in more sales and marketing, syncs, and more sales and marketing meetings than I probably like to that I probably like to count in my career. I know that the relationship between sales and marketing can be a complicated one, like complicated to the level of jealous girlfriend meme. But I think we started to crack that code here at Domo. I’m excited to tell you about some of our learnings and, and talk you through those today.   

So let’s start with the basics. You all familiar with the five love languages. The concept, for those of you that still live with your parents in their basement, is that we each Express and feel love in different ways. We tend to prefer certain ways of communicating love. One person might feel loved when they hear the words I love you or another person might feel loved when they’re getting a hug. The real question is, how do sales and marketing feel loved? Sofirst marketing, in my opinion, marketing is all about words of affirmation. Marketing wants to be told that they are amazing.  

When they produce a lead, they want the world to know about that. They want credit for that. They want to be recognized for that. Sales, on the other hand, is all about the money, right? Or anything that they could convert into money. In this case, we’re talking leads. Okay, great.   

So we know marketing’s love language. We know sales love language. How do we bring those two things together to drive business success? In my experience, the answer is data. Now, there is an age old story. Right? That is the marketing side says, Hey, we’re giving you great leads, why aren’t you working them? They say, we’re giving you all this collateral and you’re not using it. Or, look, the leads are great, it’s you that’s not owning accountability for your conversion rates.  

On the other side sales, the saying, these leads are crap. They’re saying you’re starving me, my family and my dog. Or they might say, Hey, I know that you built this website. But if you could just change it to be like this, I think we’d have a lot more success. So you can start to sense where that tension comes from. Right? We know that that’s the age old fight. How do we get past it?   

Like I said, in my experience, it’s with data, and we’ve taken data Domo. We’ve done these three things that I think have driven success overall. So number one, set expectations for lead production. Oh, make sure that everyone knows what is expected. And we’ll dive into each of these a little bit deeper in a second. Second, is create a unified view of the sales and marketing funnel that everybody can look at, and can align to. Then last thing is inspect those metrics, look at those metrics regularly. Let’s jump into each one of those things.   

The first is setting expectations, we do this through an exercise that we call the plan of record, we do it on an annual basis, and then refine it quarterly, you could do it however you want. But the real exercise is one, set revenue targets, pretty basic. But say you want to make 100 million dollars in revenue, great, set that as your target. Then the second step is take all of your contributors for all those that are going to contribute all the groups that are going to contribute direct revenue, and distribute out that hundred million dollars by each of those groups.  

So that each knows their percentage and their overall revenue target. Then, what we do is we take and use a reverse waterfall waterfall exercise to identify volumes of leads volume, which then and conversion rates, which then ultimately turn into dollars. That’s the way that we kind of complete this accountability cycle. I like to think of this as like the business DTR talk. So if you still live in your parents basement, you might not know what that means. But for the rest of you, right?   

All right, second, create a unified view of performance. Teally, this is about creating metrics that measure those targets that you set in your plan of record exercise. It’s really about driving accountability. We do that internally with meetings. We call those meetings or run the business meetings. And we have a specific data dashboard that we use to run those meetings on. I thought it might be good for me to, to give you a view of that dashboard, and maybe give you some ideas of some metrics that you you could use to run to run a similar meeting.  

So this page is, as your first meant mentioned that this is all fake data. Before you buy that share to keep this keep this in mind as I go ahead and stop my video so that you can see the full screen here. This first card is overall our overall pipeline. Right. This page is really, it’s about pipeline, it’s about conversion rates for those opportunities that we have in pipe. We usually look at this overall. But we also have the ability to filter down by region. We do this one, we have these meetings with these with the individual groups. If we’re going to meet with the West saless group, then we filter this page down, and are looking only at the West metrics.   

So the first card gives us a view of open sales opportunities, both in dollars as well as deal counts. So all in one view. We can see how our pipeline is trending over week by week. Now, maybe there’s a Captain Obvious statement. But if the line goes up here, and the pipe and the bars go down, then that means that we have a deal size issue. We can see that right away. I if the bars go down, then we know that we’ve got a pipeline issue or if the line goes down, we know pipeline issue, then the next chart is probably one of my favorites. And it’s because it helps me quickly see how we’re burning down our open pipe this quarter in comparison to previous quarters.  

So I can see that this quarter, we look pretty good in comparison to where we were this time last year, or this time last quarter. If that starts to dip below the previous quarters, I know there’s a problem there and we need to do something about it. We have that broken down into tables. We can consume that easily when we don’t have this filter down. Also by the source here as well.  

Then the next section of this page is focused on opportunity source. What this allows us to do is see as you remember, we have those four contributing groups that are contributing revenue to Domo we’re able to see their contribution to pipeline at any given time, week over week and can see where where whether they’re performing the way that we think that they should. I also can see that by how that looks for the last 12 months and trended by month as well.   

The last section I wanted to show you here is the driver section. So now that we’ve got overall revenue targets, and we’re seeing how those are performing, and we’re looking at each of those groups and seeing how they’re performing, we now have the ability to look a little bit deeper at what they’re actually doing and how they’re getting, how they’re getting those opportunities. So we have that by ADM a And marketing here. Cool. Jumping back to the presentation. Really, like I said, the key here is to create metrics that align everybody to the same story. That’s what we do in that page that I just shared with you.   

The last thing that I wanted to talk about was just this continual inspection of the metrics. I had a colleague that used to say, all the time, people respect what you inspect. He also said, when he gets on a plane, he only ever turns left. So you decide if you want to take this advice, based on that other saying, but really, in my mind, it is it is a helpful exercise to inspect what what you’re doing, if you do that, too, will know that that’s important to the organization. They’ll pay attention to it. And they’ll take it seriously. So at the end of the day, it’s really just about holding people accountable.   

So I wanted to take the time here and just show another page that we use to drive this accountability, and to align our executive team on how we’re doing from sales and marketing perspective. Jump over here to this other page. This page is our exact pipeline review page. This first section is focused on prediction. So we built some several predictive models that are predicting how we’ll do for the quarter. We got these pretty dialed in are now at a place where we’re predicting within about 5% at the beginning of the quarter, where we’ll be at the end of the quarter, which is pretty cool. And we’re just doing that all with default demo functionality. So really cool offering within our product.   

And then the next card is a our overall ACB pacing card, this is probably the most viewed metric at Domo and there’s a couple of reasons for that. Not only does it tell us where we’re at right now, but it also gives us at any point in the quarter comparative metrics in comparison to where we were at this time, last quarter. And at this time last year, and so gives us a real good idea. If our red line here is dropping below the other lines, we’ve got, we’ve got work to do, we’ve got to make it up. But if we’ve got a healthy margin in between this line and the other lines, we know we’re doing, we’re doing a good job.   

The next section of this page is really about diving into the details and doing deeper inspection at a deal level. It calls out deals does seem to be at risk. And it brings up deals that are that are requiring executive attention. So this first card just is a week over week change allows us to see deals have pushed, if they’re a new deals and pipe. Then this next card in this inspection section gets to it gets to deals at risk. For example, if a rep is saying that this deal is going to close for $640,000. But it’s been aged for 209 days over our average cell cycle. We know that there’s a chance that maybe that’s a deal at risk, and we can have conversations around it.  

Same thing here. This is just a deals that are early in early stages. But the rep is saying that they’ll close, something doesn’t add up there, it should be in a later stage. And so we can have conversations around those. We also have a section here that talks about deals that maybe we could try to accelerate and pull into current quarter. Allows us to then have a conversation about next quarter, which is where the rest of this rest of this page is focused. These metrics are the same as as what you’ve seen above, but they’re there, they’re driving towards current quarter plus, plus the next quarter, so we can get a view of the future quarter as well.  

All right, jumping back into the presentation. So like I said, third thing, continual inspection, right? People respect what you inspect. So summary. First, set expectations for lead production and get aligned across the the organization for who’s going to produce why, and do that through some sort of plan of record exercise. Second, build a view that sales and marketing can go to and everyone knows how they’re performing. There’s no question around what the truth is suggest that you leverage tactics like I showed things like daily pacing, trending, and being able to drill by group, things like that. We found it very, very helpful.  

Then lastly, continually inspect how your pipe and your metrics review top deals, review high risk skills, set alerts within Domo we have functionality that allows us to set alerts on any metric and we use a ton. It’s great because we can do what we call manage by exception. Where we’ll set an alert and not have to worry about that metric. Until the alert pings us and we get a text message saying that there’s something wrong. And then we have the ability to jump in and do further analysis and make changes within the organization.   

All right, so I’m not sure if we’re going to have q&a here. But if we don’t feel free to hit me up on one of these channels, email mark.maughan@domo.com or LinkedIn Twitter. Lastly, if you want to try Domo, you can do so for free. Just go to domo.com/start/free or you can go to our homepage and click on the try free button. I hope that this has been helpful and hope that everybody stay safe out there. Thanks so much.