S1E6: Andrew Dumont: How To Finally Align Sales and Marketing
More often than not, the relationship between marketing and sales is siloed at best or it’s adversarial, at worse. There’s no better time to lean into digital and for these organizations to unite. In this episode, Andrew Dumont draws on ways for sales and marketing organizations to be aligned on their shared revenue goals.
Andrew Dumont is a serial technologist with a passion for building, growing, and investing in early-stage companies. He’s currently the founder of Curious Capital and has worked as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Betaworks in New York City, a startup studio that has invested in companies like Tumblr and AirBnB, and has created companies like Bitly, Giphy, and Chartbeat.
Show notes:
Marketing should be goaled on revenue and top level business metrics as opposed to vanity marketing metrics.
Weekly pipeline conversations between marketing and sales leaders is critical to maintaining that relationship. A standing agenda could include pipeline updates from the sales organization, performance from the marketing organization, activities attributed in terms of leads generated, or attributed revenue.
One of the big tensions in conversations between sales and marketing is ensuring that marketing is filling in the gaps when it comes to collateral and that the sales teams feel they have the materials and support for them to be successful. Marketing should set goals for that and then benchmark against whether they were able to help sales reach those goals.
At a minimum, a website should be making the life of the seller easier. A visual website experience is a key component of the brand and how reputable you look as an organization.
Marketing should be responsible for building predictable, repeatable processes for generating qualified leads for the sales organization.
As a marketing organization, revenue is the key determining metric of whether you’re successful or not. If you’re not creating leads that turn into revenue, then you’re just spinning your wheels.
A lot of strife comes from marketing vanity metrics, and marketing organizations being focused on leads and getting people into the funnel, however if those leads aren’t qualified, that’s where the disconnect happens between sales and marketing.
Attribution is a huge challenge for sales and marketing. When the shared focus is on revenue and growing the business, you don’t have to worry as much about whether sales generated the lead or marketing generated the lead.
A good sales and marketing alignment meeting may mean walking through the campaigns and activities for the week, looking at the timing, and pipeline, and uncovering disconnects. That’s when these meetings are valuable.
Marketing should go through the sales process. They should be a sales person for several days, try to sell the product and have conversations with customers to understand where they are failing in terms of their messaging, and the way the product is being served.
Modern marketers today are very tactical. They know a lot about SEO, content marketing, they know about all these channels that exist on how to generate leads and generate new customers, but they actually step over the core of it which is: what is the value proposition? What is the benefit to the customer? What are the objections to why this product wouldn’t work well for them?
Everything is easily trackable and can be digitally measured from channels. As a marketing leader, you need to lean into that and make that process as predictable and efficient as possible for the sales team.
In a virtual selling environment, inefficient sales processes are being uncovered.
When most people think about customer acquisition, the first thing that comes to mind is paid acquisition. But, the most unhealthy thing that you can do for a business is over index on paid acquisition. A healthy business, in terms of digital acquisition channels, is not more than 50% at the very most paid acquisition.
The world we’re in today, the opportunity for being more digital and having an inbound focus, as opposed to spending on these single use events and single use trade shows, is much more accessible now than it’s ever been, and that’s where you need to focus your marketing efforts.
Links mentioned in this episode:
About Andrew
Andrew Dumont is a serial technologist with a passion for building, growing, and investing in early-stage companies.
He’s currently the founder of Curious Capital. Previously, Andrew worked as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Betaworks in New York City, a startup studio that has invested in companies like Tumblr and AirBnB, and has created companies like Bitly, Giphy, and Chartbeat. This led him to his most recent role as the Chief Marketing Officer at Bitly.
Since the age of 18, Andrew has been building and growing startup companies like Moz, Seesmic (acquired by Hootsuite), Stride (acquired by Copper), and Tatango. He’s worked across all areas of the customer acquisition funnel, from awareness through retention, with a heavy emphasis on SaaS and consumer internet. Andrew also advises at groups like Techstars and Startup Weekend, and is an occasional columnist for Inc. Magazine.
Forbes named Andrew one of 30 innovators under the age of 30 in marketing, the United Nations appointed him an entrepreneurial delegate, and he’s spoken around the globe on all topics digital.
A proud Seattle native, Andrew currently splits time between Seattle and New York City with his beloved espresso machine and obligatory Nirvana albums.