SEO Podcast The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing

Aligning B2B Sales and Marketing: Strategies for Supercharging Business Growth with Will Barron

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Unlock the secrets of aligning B2B sales and marketing with insights from Will Barron, founder of Salesman.com and host of the top B2B sales podcast. Will explores the challenges between sales and marketing, including miscommunication over marketing vs. sales-qualified leads, and offers actionable strategies for collaboration. Learn how to optimize content marketing and messaging to reach the right prospects at the right time.

We discuss the differences between B2B and B2C marketing, the impact of digital transformation on industries like oil and gas, and the importance of cultural shifts for success. This conversation highlights the need for continuous teamwork between marketing and sales to nurture leads effectively through the sales funnel.

Will also provides practical advice for improving sales performance, especially for those transitioning from big brands to smaller enterprises. Discover how to refine messaging, leverage automation, and prioritize sales training over traditional marketing. This episode equips small business owners and executives with the tools to streamline sales processes and drive long-term success.

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Guest Contact Information: 

Salesman Podcast Youtube account - https://www.youtube.com/@SalesmanPodcast

LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/willbarron/

Website: https://salesman.com/

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

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Speaker 1:

Howdy, welcome to the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. I am your host for today on the Unknown secrets. As we continue to expand out into the growth setting of businesses and how they grow, I thought a great guest to come on is Will Barron. That is the founder of salesmancom. It's the leading B2B sales podcast. Uh. He's helped over 2,300 sales and small business owners uh generate over $1.3 million in revenue. Um. His podcast is huge 700,000 downloads a month, um, according to HubSpot. Um he's got a huge YouTube channel, got a great newsletter and, uh, as you know, uh listeners from my other podcast on sales and marketing, expanding into growth and bringing people on. I thought Will would be a great person to help start to guide that direction. Will, it's great to have you on.

Speaker 2:

I'm glad to be on that. I'm disappointed in your haircut change from the intro animation that I just saw until the short hair that you've got right now. When did that happen?

Speaker 1:

So we were a sponsor for a PTSD veterans event this past weekend and I just didn't feel like it was appropriate, so I cut it all off. Yeah, Before our event last weekend, it was a really nice gala to help camp hope. Um, uh, just, uh, you know, uh really want to support the veteran community and uh, I, I do have a a past. Uh, that, uh, when I wear the long hair, people don't know. So, um, um, but uh, but yeah, so I just decided to cut it off and everybody's saying I'm looking younger. So thank you for noticing, but do you need to update the podcast cover for everyone listening?

Speaker 1:

As we were kind of talking about the pre-interview, I have a new podcast cover coming out everyone, and so, if you're looking for the image that you all know and love, it is going to be changing, since Chris is building his other podcasts and his other brand and we're taking this in another direction. We're going to be coming out with the new intro as well as a new podcast cover. So thanks for calling it out. Well, I appreciate it. Good, Well, I am, I'm just excited. We talked about a lot of different things that we could talk about, I think, just starting off the conversation with. How do you view as a B2B leader in the industry? Marketer interviewed some of the top people in the space. How do you view B2B sales and then B2B marketing or account-based selling or whatever different kind of nomenclature they want to put associated with it? Let's kind of tee that up on what we're talking about here.

Speaker 2:

It is an absolute mess. You mentioned just before we could record the scope of B2C and the sales and marketing a lot, to use the cliche, the alignment between those two uh parts of the organization in most in successful b2c organizations, in b2b, in b2g, in medical devices, what I was in previously before I started selfcom it's an absolute state. It's all over the place. It's absolutely shocking to me the how siloed both of these elements are. It's a waste of money on both sides.

Speaker 2:

Both people are generating, both groups of people are generating essentially the same leads, but from different angles. The stereotype of marketing from sales is that they're creating beautiful PowerPoints that no one presents and doing brand marketing which nobody cares about, and obviously the inverse of that is marketing have a stereotype of sales that we're all just running around, go and have a nice dinners with potential clients and not actually move the needle whatsoever either. So the whole thing is typically a mess. There's very few B2B brands that have solid sales, that have sales marketing under one roof brands that have solid sales, that have sales marketing under one roof.

Speaker 1:

So so, just to kind of catch everybody up based on our conversation is um, many organizations use, um, hubspot there's a lot of other tools or there's, you know, uh, salesforce. Um, they might use different kinds of tools, but sales is over here, siloed marketing is over here, and then financial and the C-suite's over here and they're looking at what's going on and the language of how everyone's communicating is looking at different things and have different value sets. That I think is important to define is how would you define a marketing qualified lead versus a sales qualified lead and how are they compatible, or how do you think that both departments are looking at that?

Speaker 2:

So this is one of the key problems, right, marketing one to many, b2b sales, typically one to one, and the, when they get transferred over, don't convey that nuance. So a marketing lead is some random dude downloaded a white paper that was published seven years ago which has nothing to do with the current product that they have and that is now a sales is passed over from marketing to sales. For sales to qualify, sales don't bother with it, because they know that there is literally zero value in calling that person, communicating with them, unless they're getting the hit on the back of the head from the motivation stick, from leadership, that they've got to do these things. They've got to tick a box to then justify marketing's ad spend. Typically, sales don't bother with the lead. It just goes into a black hole in the CRM and it's a waste of everyone's time and energy.

Speaker 2:

What sales needs is what marketing should provide, which is a lead that is the right person, that's been shown the right message at the right time. When those three things align, sales will absolutely gobble up those leads because they're going to make a commission on the back of working with them and helping the prospect make a buying decision further down the line. But marketing and I do a lot of marketing over salescom right, most of our leads are inbound at this point because of the content marketing that we're doing. So I can talk about both sides of the equation here. But, yeah, most marketing leads they've not received the right message or they've not responded to the right message. They've not gone to the right person and typically the timing is just way off. And all of this and and Will.

Speaker 1:

I think that this is going to lead into to where our discussion is going to really really open up in. In content marketing is the right message, the right prospect, the right time, as you're saying. And really, if you're putting out as a marketer, um, the wrong bait, you're going to get the wrong fish to bite the hook Right. And so, yes, there could be random people, there could be a competitive intelligence going on people downloading stuff, uh with with random emails. But I have seen and I drank my own Kool-Aid in this that if you put out the right message to the right people, it will attract the right kind of audience. And so if you do that, work up front, the merge between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead it should just be a qualified lead that everyone's looking at. And I think, just to finalize kind of what we were talking about previously to catch everybody up, is that direct-to-consumer businesses okay, and we work with a number of direct-to-consumer businesses and e-commerce companies. It is dialed in up to the CEO, marketing and sales and financials and the lifetime value to cover customer like the, the CAC, all the way to the top, and everybody's laser focused. I did a previous interview that we were looking at a men's consumer brand, a billion dollar brand, and it is dialed in to the point Now, on the B2B side of things outside of, maybe, oil and gas because I, you know, I have my other podcast of sales and marketing on gas they're catching up.

Speaker 1:

Okay, now, I think oil and gas might be a little bit of a lagger in that, but the same things apply. And also a lot of these B2B companies are trying to reach the oil and gas market. That's who I work with. A lot is people that are trying to reach the oil and gas market not necessarily the producers Right, um and uh, the oil and gas market, not necessarily the producers Right, and it's a lot of well, I think, company cultures one of the biggest things that I run up against of what I'm dealing with, of how to view marketing Cause, yeah, like what you said, they view it, or hey, you just do the booth right for the conferences that we go to.

Speaker 1:

Now I think COVID has really accelerated the digital transformation and moving into that, and really there's a lot of sales organizations that have huge sales budgets while the branded high-level marketing budget is there, and then you can go into account-based selling and you can go into becoming omni-channel around who your targets are and pushing them through like a sales funnel essentially. I know that might be cliche sales funnel, but there really are steps when you're selling somebody of what they need to hear to get to the next level, and sales typically have been the one that holds their hand and takes them on that journey and evaluates that, and so you know, I don't know. I want you to respond to that and then we can start talking about content marketing. You've done some really interesting things with that and I think that there's a lot of overlap.

Speaker 2:

So I think we do have to separate B2C and B2B most of the time, in that B2C can run a campaign and see whether it's a fast-moving consumer good or if they're doing direct-to-consumer even better, they can see that this ad spend led to this revenue being generated, which led to X profitability. That can be done in a very quick feedback loop. If you're selling some enterprise tool that takes three years to get people into the idea of change because they're stuck in the current status quo, maybe you're selling some enterprise tool that takes three years to get people into the idea of change because they're stuck in the current status quo. Maybe you're waiting for some market force to be the timing element of all this to get them over the line. Then it takes six months to implement and maybe there's three months of going through the procurement process, the feedback loop, from advertising campaign to purchase. Well, the people who run the advertising campaign are probably left and gone to a different job by the time all this trickles down. So there is a slight difference in the way that things are measured and it's more difficult to accurately proclaim that this led to this, led to this, which we can do B2C a lot more easier or a lot easier.

Speaker 2:

But yeah, the nuances the issues that we're talking about are still there of what marketers are doing a lot easier. But yeah, the nuances the issues that we're talking about are still there of what marketers are doing is typically the exact opposite of what salespeople want from them. And what it should be is that a marketing lead comes in, a salesperson literally qualifies it to make it a sales qualified lead via a conversation of it's the right person, they've got the budget, there's a need for the product or service, they've got the authority to make the decision, all the band cliche, sales qualification, terminology and steps, and then the process can move forward. And then marketing should continue to support sales via conference appearances, whatever it is, so that conversation can keep going over the three, six months, 12 months that it takes to close these bigger B2B deals. So I think if I'm going to rip on marketing, it's also fair to kind of paint that broader picture that it's often not quite as simple as a B2C purchase.

Speaker 1:

Attribution is the first thing kind of you talked about is incredibly hard to point on. Okay, did this happen or did this happen to get them to take that next step? And certainly on an e-commerce standpoint, you're selling a product, you can see the whole sales funnel and when you're going offline, online, you're going to conferences in person. It could be a timing issue, depending on the size of the deal. Typically, sales have a weighted average of what's the value of this deal over what period of time. What's the shape of the deal? How are we going to land it? Like there there's a lot of things that have to be um considered.

Speaker 1:

On the B2B side, I think that the, the, the, the sale, this, the marketing effort. I almost look at like it's air cover, like, if you want to use a military um analogy, military analogy, and then you got the boots on the ground right and you got the people that can really vet that out. But, to your point, the long cycle of some of these deals and the implementation and the shape of the deal is very can't all be done online, right, but you can get someone to raise their hand and say, hey, I'm interested and you can get the right kind of companies. You can get the right kind of people to solve a need for and then you can continue to support what the sales are doing, because a lot of it is. Am I making the right decision? I'm going to put my name on this to buy this big thing, and man, the sales guy's telling me a lot of good stuff. I got to feel good about this purchase before, during and after it, and so marketing's there throughout the funnel and I think that what we're doing a lot more of is really how do we build that story and how do we take people along that journey through the different marketing channels, the marketing mix online, to help make a good salesperson great, a great salesperson like a super salesperson, right.

Speaker 1:

And if you design your marketing components whether it be email automation or what have you to support that salesperson, to help them do their job better, because they have in their head. I just need to say these things. I need to get through this call. Here's going to be the common objections, here's going to be things that are going to happen and then we're going to be able to convert this guy. And if I could do that with every client, it's like a time issue. I feel like like a lot of automation, um is, you're just, you're trying. You're trying to create a similar personalized experience for everyone, but salespeople just have limited time on the deals they're chasing and also understanding if someone's in that time to buy, because a lot of these big sales cycles get delayed. It's like no, it's just a not right now sort of thing in some cases. I mean, what are you seeing?

Speaker 2:

I think a lot of this is made simpler when we and this is not a kind of a hippie way of looking at things I'm here to help people make a bunch of money right, that's fundamentally what I'm here for. But when we take the sales funnel, which is a selfish way of cramming a bunch of people that may or may not want to be down this pathway to hopefully someone pops out the other end of it and gives us some cash, if we think about it more, of the buyer's journey of unawareness, awareness, ready to break through the status quo, and then we get to the other side of that of comparing vendors, making an actual decision. When you frame up the sales and marketing function as how do we help potential customers move along that pathway, all this then gets a lot easier, because there's no point in most instances of salespeople doing outbound prospecting to people who are unaware of the problems that they have. That can be done a lot quicker, smoother, easier with marketing, with one-to-many outreach as opposed to one-to-one outreach.

Speaker 2:

But what marketing kind of sucks at is as you're describing. Big organization knows that they need to change. No one wants to put their name on it. No one wants to strip budget from something that might be kind of working right now to something that really absolutely could work in the medium term. And that's when a one-to-one communication of a salesperson and you can you can change salesperson to some kind of kind of bullshit title if you like, but essentially it's a salesperson helping them make that decision right one way or another, to commit to it or to say this isn't a good fit so you can move on. That's when, then, sales can add to the function itself. So absolutely when we flip it on its head of the buyer's journey and guiding people along it, where sales and marketing fit in, I feel like they fit in slot into that process a lot easier.

Speaker 1:

So let me ask you Will, what are you seeing? And you work with a ton of b2b companies as well um, what is needed like minimum viable product of a good sales and marketing funnel? If you will, as far as like you're designing the customer journey. You know it's going to be a little bit different for every client, but ultimately, what are kind of the services that they need if they're trying to bolt on marketing to their current sales organization?

Speaker 2:

The starting point for all of this, which very few B2B organizations have nailed, is understanding a value proposition that elicits a meeting. So what's the one thing? When you communicate it with someone, that person goes don't really want to meet with Will. I'm pretty busy, I've got stuff to do, but I'm not doing the due diligence of my role unless I pick up the phone and have a quick chat with him. So for me over at salesmancom, I get a 25% meeting booking rate with a single email to VPs of sales that it goes along the lines of hey, we help sales leaders teams find a close deal in the next 30 days or your money back. I know it sounds too good to be true. Would it make sense to jump on a quick call and I'll explain how it works? That is it. That's took. Obviously it's simple and relatively straightforward, but it took years to refine down and to make that way and obviously there's elements of risk to it from a business owner perspective of the guarantee in 30 days and all that good stuff. So it's not for everyone, but that in itself is the starting point for sales and marketing, because now we're all on the same message. So every piece of content I produce it goes back to we will help you find or close more deals, or in this timeframe, or we can offer this guarantee because we're so good at it.

Speaker 2:

Here's a list of a page of a hundred video testimonials of current and previous customers. That's from a marketing standpoint, from the sales standpoint. As soon as I jump on a call, all I'm trying to find from the buyer is when I'm doing discovery with them do they need to find or close or both more deals? Can we help them? So that's the first bit of this sales and marketing alignment and building the ultimate both meeting booking and then deal closing machine. It's what's the one thing that when you share it, people go I don't really want to meet with this dude who's just emailed me, or I really don't care to spend time with someone from this brand and I just watched one of their videos, but I kind of have to do it. That's the missing link in most sales and marketing teams and all it is is we help this person solve this problem in this interesting, unique way. Hopefully it's somewhat interesting or unique, but it doesn't have to be, and that's it. Once you've got that nailed, the rest of the process can be built on top of it.

Speaker 1:

So my mom was one of the first salespeople at Microsoft before it was Microsoft and she always told me nothing happens until something gets sold, and I think what you said there is you got to define who you're going to be talking to. What is that target persona and then what is the pain points that you're going to hit on? That they have to talk to you, they have to pick the phone. I like that. They have to do their due diligence right. And I agree with you A lot of times when I'm looking at a sales and marketing process, they don't have the right collateral to push that message forward and also show how they're different, because there's a lot of noise actually right now that's in the space and AI is making it even worse, and it's just. You know, messages are kind of starting to sound pretty similar, right Cause everybody's using the same Lawrence language models and it's like okay, what? What makes you different? You know what is the pain point that you're speaking to and how can you really help them. And if they're the ideal client you could be, you could line this stuff up pretty well and then everything that you're doing backs into that and pushes them down that process.

Speaker 1:

I feel like there's a I don't know like having appointment centers, social selling, some of these things that I would say are pretty much a marketing function, but it's bleeding over into sales. Pretty much a marketing function, but it's bleeding over into sales. Um, uh, sales organizations when I talk to them sometimes they have a very uh, robust, uh, sales budget. We're going to these conferences, you know, we're meeting with these people. We got to do this many lunches. Um, again, it goes back to culture of I'm not going to deal with any of that stuff. What has been your experience when you come across that objection and maybe your current sales process?

Speaker 2:

So my whole shtick is making selling simple. Sales get this wrong all the time because they're like, okay, we are down this quarter, we're going to attend a conference, but unless your buyers are at the conference, which isn't always the case, it's a waste of time and energy and money. That's a classic one for sales leaders that they do every quarter we're down, we're going to this conference, we're down, we're going to tell everyone to up the cold email. That isn't working anyway, because we're just going to do more of it to try and spam and break through, whereas what we should be doing is thinking the only reason anyone will reply to cold outreach is on two fronts One, the message, and two, which is kind of tied to the message, is the person behind it. So if Warren Buffett sends me an email and it's just half gobbledygook because he's drunk as he's writing it and there's a phone number on it, I'm going to phone the number and I'm going to hopefully have a chat with him and learn, glean something, anything from him, even if he's still in that drunken state. When I chat with him, there'll be something that I can pull from it because he's got such a high level of trust in the marketplace and obviously trust is a perception, where you have a perception of trust so that can be influenced and pulled one way or another quite easily. But marketing don't always have that trust because it's coming from a brand, especially in large B2B, it's a corporation. That can be difficult and takes a long time to build that trust. So a lot of B2B organizations have zero trust. So then you've got to look at the person and the message, which comes back to the kind of same rhetoric that I came started with of the right rent, right message, right person, right time, and no one has that message. Very few brands have that message dialed and so it all comes back to that.

Speaker 2:

What's the one thing that we can say where people go? Ah, can make sense, jump on a call. And to simplify the process even further, we can split up the entirety of the buyer's journey into two halves pre-call, post-call, pre-call it's not marketing doing webinars explaining every feature and benefit of the product. Nobody cares, nobody cares. Marketing should be focused on what's the one thing where people go? That's cool. I'd like to learn more about that. What's the one specific thing where people go that sounds interesting. When a salesperson then reach out, reaches out more directly the prospect goes yeah, okay, I'll do a call after the fact. We can diagnose the person's problem and align the specific needs that they have with the many, very likely many features and benefits that the kind of product can offer. But to simplify the process, write message and then split the sales process in two.

Speaker 1:

No, I love that. I think that that's really, really important of you know before you talk to them and qualify them. I guess that's where the marketing qualified lead becomes the sales qualified lead in your mind. One of the challenges that, as you were talking, that I thought of that I've actually heard from a lot of B2B salespeople is a lot of B2B salespeople start off, get great training at a big brand and they have that logo behind them, right, and then they get. They get enticed by a huge comp plan or or whatever to to move to a company that's not as well known, okay, and then they have a lot of challenges getting that meeting and getting in the door. And again, branding is so important. I don't think people understand how important branding is.

Speaker 1:

I've talked to a lot of salespeople. I actually talked to a business owner. There's this equity deal. I ended up passing on it. He said brand doesn't matter at all and I was like you're, you know, it was a restaurant. And I was just like, ah, you know, I'm not sure we're on the same page with some of this and and and they were probably an idiot I'm, I'm not. I'm not going to talk about but, but, but I'll just tell you, um, there was just a different alignment, right? And I think any salesperson, if I say, hey, you worked at a big company, you and I I worked at a AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, so I was in kind of a similar space, uh, uh, as you, that brand opened doors for me. It opened doors because of everything that they had done in the past to let me get in to do what I needed to do on the sales side, even before the marketing the brand carried it.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of salespeople that don't have that ability and also some of the conversation I have with some of these organizations saying, hey, the CEO, because of the clout and maybe who they are and what they've done, working with the CEO to build that messaging, to start becoming a lightning rod for interest, or get that messaging out there or getting them qualified, is really, really helpful. And I'm not saying it's 100% critical, but it's certainly helpful to get that message out there because it's who says it, like you said, and what they say, of course, but who's saying it? And if you don't know anybody, one of the things I used to do and this was post smartphone and everything else I had a business card that had my name on it and it was like in my company on it and the logo. And then I created my own personal blog and this was like who I was as an individual and I and I had the approach of teach me right, like I want to be your mentor. But this is who I am as a person and trying to connect with them on that level Because, like you said too, if they don't like you, know you, trust you, those sort of things they're not going to do business with you and you and you've got to get, you've got to get past that.

Speaker 1:

The logo could carry you, but you've got to get it across the way. So, with the challenge of moving from a big brand to to a smaller brand, maybe you switch industries and you're you're a salesperson, um, and you don't have that logo behind you and maybe you don't have some of the collateral that that logo behind you and maybe you don't have some of the collateral that you might need from the messaging standpoint or the downloadable, or the CEO doing X, y, z. That's a challenge. I hear a lot. If someone approached you with that, how do you combat that? And have you heard that as well?

Speaker 2:

So if you're a salesperson, I would encourage you to find what I call the best wealth vehicle. The goal is to make a bunch of money and get out of sales. You don't want to be in sales next 30 years because you'll end up red-faced, angry, driving a cheap BMW and you will hate your life.

Speaker 1:

It's a grind yeah.

Speaker 2:

My opinion of sales right Absolutely the best career to make a ton of money very quickly, to invest so you can retire early or you can go do wherever you are, else you want to do with your life. So that's how I frame up the a career in sales for everyone that I work with fair enough that being said, you want to choose your wealth vehicle.

Speaker 2:

I'll answer your question in a second, but just for any sales people, you want to choose your vehicle very carefully, you know if you're driving a Formula One car and you're capable of getting it started without stalling and I'm driving a Mini and you are a terrible driver and I'm an excellent I'm an ex-F1 driver you're still going to be way faster around the circuit than what I am. So, being in a role where your prospects actually want to communicate with you, they actually want the product, you're a third of the way there already, and that's my background in medical device sales. I would literally hold up my either Kohl's, stortz or Olympus badge in the window of a operating room and I'd just walk straight in, which is crazy.

Speaker 1:

They didn't know who I am.

Speaker 2:

I don't even think I had my face on the name badge. They just saw the logo Go in. I on the name badge. They just saw the logo go in. I put scrubs on. I'd walk into the operating room, go and have a chat with the surgeon.

Speaker 2:

So that's the power of brand, right, because obviously anyone could just print off a badge and lie about it. So that's the power of brand. So any salespeople listening really think hard about what I call the wealth vehicle that you're in. Now, to answer your actual question, if you've got no support from a brand perspective from the organization that you work for, fine, you then become the brand. So then the sales process might slow down slightly because you've got to build up a level of trust as you communicate with people. You perhaps can't send the email that I outlined earlier on that I send when it comes from the fancy salesmancom logo and a lot of VPs of sales that I communicate with, they've either kind of half recognize our brand logo or they listened to a podcast of mine five years ago, or one of the teams shared a blog.

Speaker 1:

The domain carries it.

Speaker 2:

So all that then encapsulates value over the longer term, and they know that I'm not some kind of sales training charlatan, but if you don't have any of that, you've got to build it yourself. So, whether that be building your LinkedIn profile and a persona on there and a tiny as in one piece of content, a week bit of content marketing, whether that be, you start a podcast. That again maybe. You do one industry interview a month. This is not a full-time gig. This is a podcast where you interview your customers or people that your customers want to spend time with, and you get five downloads, but you have it in your email signature or you use it as the timing element of right message, right person, right time. You can then create the timing to reach out to your prospects of hey, I just spoke to this person in your industry. They had this to share. Would it make sense to have a quick call? And I'll I'll give you the kind of five minute conversation of what we had.

Speaker 1:

So so well, funny, funny that you say this, cause I actually the first book I ever wrote was called build your brand mania how to build your brand to authoritative Cause you're saying basically, uh, same, same messaging. Um, I want to switch gears now. Okay, Say you're a small business owner. Say you're a large corporation and your salespeople? Maybe you don't have the big household brand and you're trying to get the meeting set up. You're trying to get in the door. You're trying to help your salespeople. They need more support. What would you say then and I know we're running close to time, I know we're just now getting into the good juicy stuff, so we'll have to definitely have you back on. I know we have a hard stop, but, yeah, what would you say to? Now you're a small business owner and that maybe is your wealth vehicle, right? Or you're an executive at a large company and you're trying to get your sales team to perform better and you have a great product.

Speaker 2:

But I think again, you don't have the message out there yet, right? So two things. One, large organizations spend a gazillion dollars a year on I know you can lean into the pay-per-click or the brand marketing or content marketing. Most of it is absolute trash and a waste of money. Yet they will have zero budget for sales training, which is incomprehensible, right? You're paying these salespeople 100,000 base a year. They've got the opportunity to make $500 million a year and you won't spend three, four grand a year on training them. So that's the first thing, because it doesn't matter how good your message is if it's being delivered in a really incompetent way and that's not, then, the salesperson's fault at a certain point. The second thing is big brands have tons of data that they should be using to build that value proposition, which they just don't. Most salespeople get hired, they get thrown into the field. They get tons of product marketing but no communication marketing. They get lots of product training sorry, but no communication training and no sales training. So they're the two things to invest in.

Speaker 2:

And you can use pay-per-click, you can use content marketing to understand what that buy proposition is. You just do your next campaign with an ABC test of different buy propositions on the landing page. What is the thing that people care about? Then tell the sales team that and allow them to build email cadences, cold call cadences, whatever it is, linkedin content around that one thing. But then you've got the whole of your team, especially if you've got a large team. So I work with Oracle, I've worked with HubSpot, worked with lots of large organizations. When you get the whole team all pushing in the same direction and you're dealing with the same top 500 companies, whether it's Fortune 500 or wherever you're trying to get in front of, it becomes more than the sum of its parts. People chat, content is shared, webinars are kind of replayed internally, and that one specific message can really break through them. And that gives them, the salespeople, all the leverage they need and all that trust to then book those meetings on the back of it.

Speaker 1:

So Will. I know you're running to a sales coaching meeting here in a second. I just want to end on what you said, and this could be a great place for us to start the qualitative piece that marketing provides today. Yes, you can do surveys, and I think surveys are great, but you can put out A B test, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. You can do surveys, and I think surveys are great, but you can put out AB test, ABCDEFG, all the way to Z test, all kinds of different messages, openings with, like cold email, marketing, all these sorts of things.

Speaker 1:

To get your message dialed in at that place in the sales funnel to move them forward is absolutely critical and getting that testing right that's how sales, I think, can start to look at marketing in the beginning is let's get the message dialed in of working and then amp it up and then pull it through the whole organization. I think that's a great, great way to end on, to put a cork in this. So, Will, how do people get in touch with you? I know you've talked about your podcast. You do coaching. Just give us your spiel if people want to hear more about you or get involved with what you're doing.

Speaker 2:

Everything I do is available for free over at salesmancom All the content, the books, these big old, thick, heavy books that we have all available for free on the website salesmancom, and then, if you want to help implementation, you'll find a way to contact me over there.

Speaker 1:

So I only charge for implementation, but all the content is completely free. Fantastic, will, it was so great to have you on. I really enjoyed our discussion. I hope everybody else got it. I know I have some housekeeping to do over the last couple of podcasts. Everybody, if you need to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the internet, reach out to EWR Digital. We can help you leverage search engine marketing, digital marketing. Thank you so much for listening and bye-bye for now.

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Matt Bertram

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