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Back on T-R-A-C-K (formerly Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders) is where founders learn how to build a true marketing growth engine — one that runs smoothly, scales sustainably, and supports the business you actually want to lead.
After hundreds of conversations with marketing leaders on Tea Time, one truth kept surfacing: too many founders are stuck chasing what’s shiny and new instead of strengthening the systems that create consistent, compounding growth.
Back on T-R-A-C-K is your reset. Join me and a lineup of fractional marketing leaders and founders who’ve paved the way — or are finding it in real time — as we share honest stories, practical strategies, and proven frameworks to help you get clarity, build momentum, and stay the course. Because growth doesn’t come from doing more — it comes from getting back on track.
This one I love, I perk up about it a little bit, the actual quotation templates. The design and the format is a marketing function, what they look like and then the content is attached to it. The quoting and pricing is sales, right? But the skews and the catalog is product. So even that simple function of creating a quote is those three teams working together.
And there can be a lot of deliberation on what a proposal should look like. Hello, I'm Keri Gard and welcome to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. Matt and I are ready to rock and ride and we're grateful you are here.
It's going to be great. That's put on the spot, Matt. All the greatest answers. Put you on the spot. Well, yeah, that's what you're here for, your expertise. Yes. Before we get into it, a little bit about Matt, he's a accomplished sales leader possessing a diverse background within the technology industry.
His expertise developed from the direct and indirect selling models combined with management and oversight of multiple technology practices, proven development of top performing sales teams, future sales leaders and revenue producing sales programs. Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, happy to be here.
Excited to have you. Now that was just a little blurb from your LinkedIn. I totally stole it. Thank you for doing my job for me. I appreciate you. But really what I care about is your story of how you even got into sales because whether we found marketing or sales or it found us, it's never a linear path. What do you do now and how did you get there?
Yeah, sure thing. Well, I started off in kind of the most traditional way of climbing the sales ladder as a telemarketer. That was the fancy title we were graced with when we started as telemarketers and smiling and dialing, rolling through the yellow pages and making calls all day. And obviously that has matured to roles like business development representatives or sales development representatives now.
But back then we just had a phone. So, you know, I did the outbound business development, grew into an outside sales role, moved into a more of a technical overlay role into sales engineering, and then moved into sales leadership roles, overseeing teams, and then started working on the partner side of the business, working with independent partners, then also managing my own sales team, kind of grew through the ranks, you know, up through sales management, director, VP, and and led large scale sales teams. And then in my most recent venture here, joined the sales and marketing and product development functions under one house. And that is my current job duty with cyber advisors is overseeing those three functions of the organization. And all that career leading up to that led me to that desire of merging those together instead of them being different departments or different teams. When you talk about your journey and coming up through the ranks, you don't you don't mention marketing a product at all.
And so is this your first I can't imagine this is your first rodeo with these teams? Well, no, it's not it started, I guess I should clarify, was a product manager and oversaw product development as one of my roles for a couple years. And with that is where I really started getting further connection to the marketing function than sales, right there.
There is kind of a wall with sales and marketing and different goals. And, you know, sometimes they're great relationships, sometimes they're contentious. And in going into the product development side, you have to work with both, right? And you have to create that harmony and you develop an offering that has to be marketed and presented a certain way, but as well as sold and presented a certain way. And that increased my exposure to the importance of marketing and developing the message, developing the strategy, ensuring continuity and how it was designed and intended to be delivered is actually being what's represented when it is being delivered in sales calls or in content or on your website. So product management was actually the kind of glue that the product marketing side and sales was what connected the dots for me. That's interesting.
So I've never really heard it put that way. I mean, product is essentially, you're going to correct me if I'm wrong on this, I've had several product managers on my show, wonderful humans, it really did come down to content, right? Their primary role was to really take the thing and the audience and figure out how to message these things together to try people through.
So it sounds like content is really become, you know, product marketing being the function, but content being the thing that is the glue between all three functions. You could have designed the greatest product ever that solves the greatest challenge ever, but if no one knows about it and you can't share it with anyone, it's a ton of wasted effort. And so that was really the connection point for me was identifying like, and we put all this effort into making something we think solve so many problems, but how do we tell anyone about it? And how do we get them to listen to it and engage with it?
So yeah, content is certainly part of that, right? And then also like the messaging with the sales team, making sure that they're actually presenting the value points that we worked on for months that we believe are the core value points. And then, you know, getting someone to listen, we spend a time, you know, a lot of time making this, how do we get people to listen?
It's an interesting time we're in in terms of the buyer, because we can't make, in my experience, you can't make them do anything. Well, maybe it should be restated as how do we get them exposure to it and let them draw their own conclusion of value? But, you know, how do we bring relevancy to what we had designed and how do we bring awareness to it? And then that is really the role of marketing and the combination with product is we spend a lot of time engineering something.
How do we bring awareness to it and get other people engaged with it? I just said this to somebody about they were talking about website, you know, like we need somebody to build a website and to manage it. And I said, right, but just because you build it, doesn't mean they'll come. Well, it's true, right?
From, you know, I know we all love the field of dreams quote, but at the end of the day, it's actually from a marketing perspective, a complete lie. And really important to, you know, bring people to the well. So I love what you're saying.
And I love to think of content as a glow. Actually, I just was talking to a friend of mine who's in sales. And I was like, how do you get your foot in the door? Like, what's the thing you do? And he's like, Oh, well, I develop a piece of content, usually a report. And then I, I, you know, try to have a conversation around that report. And I was like, so you're using content?
He's like, yes. As a salesperson, I found that fascinating that he's developing his own content to create these relationships. So it makes a ton of sense that you would have all three of these functions under the one umbrella that is working with the same content is to deliver that value. So in terms of your function now, and working with these three teams, what's the biggest challenge you all are facing, you know, before we get into the heart of our conversation, it's nice to just know we're all in the same boat of things being hard. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly hard. Because those three functions are going to have sometimes contentious goals or timelines. And so aligning timelines with the demands or needs of sales, wanting it right away, but marketing, having a backlog or product, having numerous projects that are ahead of the one that sales thinks we need most. So I would say prioritizing the alignment is probably one of the more difficult tasks. And because it's not that we don't need to do all of them, we do need to do all of them.
And that's where the harmony comes from. But you have to pick and choose kind of what's first or what's most important, you're going to have the highest impact to the organization, and then align the resources towards that effort, inevitably, disappointing some other project or some other development of that project that was felt more pertinent. And those decisions are typically made based on market opportunity, right? Sometimes, how big of a project? Like, is this a net new from scratch? We've got to build everything?
Or are we just revising something so we can get it done quick? And then, you know, furthermore, are our customers actually asking for that? So really what we have started implementing more recently is getting our customers involved in the development and prioritization of that list. By introducing them to surveys and questioning them and allowing them the opportunity to give us feedback on what they like and don't like, what they want to consume or not consume, or what they wish they had that we don't have, and allowing those things to influence our roadmap, and then allowing that to help us use some data-backed decisions to drive why we're doing this one before the other one. And it's not necessarily we don't need to do the other project, it's just that our customers are telling us if we do this first, there has been more money with us. So we're going to prioritize that.
You're like stealing from the developer's work. I love that. Trevor Van Ward, welcome to the show.
So glad to see you, sir. And yeah, love. Thanks for the start. Yeah. Yeah, sales wants everything yesterday.
And marketing has a backlog that's going to take years to get through. So it goes. So it goes.
But you mentioned having it all in one, or allows me to reshift those priorities really fast, or take action. There's an offering we have that's kind of been dormant. We haven't had much activity on it for six months. And then, as luck would have it, now six clients are interested in it all at once in the same month. Right.
Totally random. And the content is very lagging on that because it wasn't prioritized, because we didn't have a lot of proposals for it. And we didn't really have a big need to fill that. But then instantaneously, it was like, Hey, why don't these flyers match our new proposal template?
And they look totally different. And so we haven't made a proposal for this for six months. So we pivoted real quick and essentially made that flyer and that content to match the proposal, like on demand, because that immediately went to the top of the list. And it was a low lift task, like making a flyer and some content on a template wasn't a huge challenge, but it jumped ahead 20 other ones that were in queue, just because of the demand from sales.
Being able to kind of pull that lever and reprioritize that as a leader of both is what was unique. Is because I could see I could see the immediate sales demand. So we had to accommodate those proposals.
And of course, a couple of them were RFPs. And so if there are fees, they require a lot more information. That information was now all of a sudden lacking. Right.
But now it's templatized. So it's something you can easily ideally repeat. So that's handy. Yeah.
And I mean, it was ripped off of a template of others, right? So because we were templatized, I was able to pivot really quickly. But that, I think, might have been a contentious scenario. Had I not had sales and marketing, just rolling under me and being able to make that decision and product as well, like prioritizing that product that we kind of thought was dormant.
And then maybe it's due to the time of year that people are starting to think about that type of service, that all of a sudden it's hit our radar and we have them in pipeline now. Is it ultimately you being the decision maker that drops those barriers between the teams? Or is it, is there something else that you're doing to create some synergy there? Like the point of contention is real. And I keep finding myself, even after five years of posting a podcast, coming back to the same conversation around team alignment.
It's not even just sales and marketing anymore. It's like across the board, team alignment. So how are you, you know, you mentioned some aspects of where the contention is coming from in terms of goals and priorities. And is it you being able to just be the decision maker that's helping with that?
Or what else are you, how else are you creating this alignment? To some extent, yeah, having the decision making authority obviously helps. But realistically, we present ourselves as the revenue generation team. And so everyone in my team understands their function is to generate revenue in some way and contribute to that greater goal of the company's growth. And so when we meet as a team, we have a full team retreat next week. And when we meet as a team, each one of those departments are represented with their leadership, but we're all in the same, you know, leadership retreat as a revenue generation retreat, not a sales retreat and a marketing retreat and a product retreat, if you will.
We are together in that whole effort. So everyone seeing everyone else's priorities or their task list, their to-dos, their goals for 2025. So we get to see them and then people naturally start drawing connections to their own goals and timelines and correlating how we can work together to go. We all can accomplish that in Q2 because we now can have a common goal or at least see what all the other teams are working on or maybe work some of those challenges might be in hitting sales needs tomorrow for a meeting, right? But if sales is aware of the challenges that come with that, then different expectations could be set or they can position, you know, alternative approach to a client or prospect that might allow some grace to the other team members because they're on a team, right?
Just for not to usverse them. The dream. Let's talk about some of the priorities.
So we mentioned goals, you know, it sounds like, you know, everybody's on the revenue team, but how everybody gets to revenues different, whether your product, marketing or to your point sales, right? So how are they, you're coming together next week, which sounds magical. Are you going somewhere fun? Where are you going? We're in town. We do have some members flying to town to join us here. And then we have a little offsite venue that we have booked and then we've got a team dinner. We're going to like a Brazilian steakhouse with the tons of meat. It'll be an interesting dinner.
Oh, it's so important, though. I love that. We get together once a year and I keep moving it up. I like don't want 12 months to go by. So I got a nine months up because I just don't want to wait that long.
I love that. So when you get together next week and you're talking about 2025 priorities, how are you, you know, you one, I'd love to know where your revenue numbers coming from. Usually revenue comes from a CFO or a CEO and you guys got to then figure out how to get to it.
Is there a bit of a bridge there? Like how are you working with leadership to define the overarching company goal? And then how are you bringing that into your team?
Yeah. So certainly working with CFO on current year, current year's budget and performance against budget, as well as some forecasting for next year's budget and the goals that go with that, combining our business, some pro forma of acquisitions that have to be melded into that to reform what the budget would look like next year. So there's certainly collaboration there to get the high level goals of what we need to do on revenue and margin and profitability, as well as by department or by product line, some of the things we need to be aware of.
And that's really where the strategy starts weaving in is the top line, the macro numbers are pretty easy to do some math against. In our business particularly, there's a lot of mouths to feed. There's a lot of different individual departments that all have goals and your sales strategy has to feed all of them just enough so that they hit their individual goals while not focusing too much on one practice or one service or one product at the demise of another. So there's a balance there and a strategy on making sure that our sales motions are pointed but also comprehensive and wide.
And so we have to kind of keep zooming in and zooming out and measuring how we do that. Like for example, we have a big part of our portfolio is recurring service. And so we tend to focus more in the beginning of the year on those type of services because we can get the 12th, we can get more months filling throughout the year if we can capitalize earlier in the year and then kind of pivot towards the end of the year to more one-time services that correlates with our customer's budget and trying to get things done by the end of the year. It also allows us to close the gap on that top line macro budget to do the one-time things. So you're going to see marketing and sales incentives and product launches and things correlate with those type of strategies to try to smooth out against that budget where it needs it the most. And so bringing that to the team along with a bunch of ideas on how we get there is we start collaborating on that and then we start delegating and assigning out to the other leaders on who's going to take these 10 bullet points. And our goal of that meeting is to have known, leaving that what people have in their roadmap for Q1234 next year, at least with the nastrics on it with a high level plan on how we're going to accomplish that.
And then we subdivide it in sales, marketing, and product. I love that you're not trying to just come to the table with all of the answers. I feel like as leaders so often we feel like we have to know how to do the thing to make and make it happen. So the fact that you feel like you don't have to know and you can bring it to your team to collectively solve, it also creates that buy-in too, which is so key, right? If you're just showing up and telling people what to do, then, and they don't necessarily agree with it, then you're losing folks, right?
And then you're not all on the boat sort of growing together. So I love, I love that you're in that collaboration space and you're clear one of the challenges with collaboration, right? Is one of those, you don't always have clear outcomes of what you're trying to accomplish. So I love that there's that clear, this is what needs to come out of this and then how we're going to get after it next year. How are you, you mentioned the asterisk piece of it? I'm assuming, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like to create space for change.
Oh yeah, yeah. All of these plans are subject to change. We're in a fast-paced changing industry, right? It's rest assured, some of the products or solutions we choose now are going to merge, acquire, or become part of some other organization mid-year next year that I don't have on my roadmap.
And we're going to have to pivot and change strategy, maybe completely forklift a solution, maybe replace them all together in our portfolio and that is not at all in the plan right now. So we know that that's going to happen. So we have to leave some space. So it's like you leave an empty bullet point that's just blank and it's like to be filled in in Q3.
And because we just know what's going to happen. And then, you know, the other side of our business is we are on an aggressive growth trajectory, both organic and inorganic. So acquisitions are not known right now. I know that we will try to accomplish acquisitions next year.
I don't know what they'll be, then make size, geography, products, etc., anything like that. So we have to be aware of that and then make room in our strategy on integrations. So that ties into how we develop products too. We're intentionally developing products with room for ingestion of other products.
So we keep them a little more open and less rigid, knowing that we're going to have to continue to mold and accommodate as other offerings come in. I don't know how you prioritize all these moving pieces. So is it, you know, you have your goals for the year and sort of that drumbeat, but then how do you prioritize which you mentioned customers. So are you basically looking to them to sort of dictate where the priorities come from? And one of the questions I had when you mentioned that aspect of it was, is it current customers or is it prospects?
Like where are you getting that data from and then how are you using that to help you prioritize, you know, not just in the moment like you mentioned, you know, where you can sort of shift on the fly, but in the long term too of what they might need in the future. Three contributing factors. I mean, our clients are one of them. Obviously, my team is another big contributing factor. And when I say my team, I do want to extend and give credit to my service organization. They're a big driver and collaborator with the sales team on things they're seeing that are either broken or don't work or aren't performing the way they need to or common issues they're seeing in customer environments. We have a methodology for them to bring that forward to us to react to it.
So we've created an intake process for the service side of our organization to bring things to sales and product to action them and put them into our queue. So that's another feed source for us because they're out working with the customers every day. They're active in these environments.
They can tell us what's really going on, you know, at the street level. And then the third, which actually is the most disruptive is actually our vendor partners. They can make a pivot on direction on their product portfolio or their partner programs or end of sale, end of life, something, you know, all of those things.
And that's going to completely change the trajectory of a plan we may have had. We just recently, I'll keep giving real world scenarios so that we're tangible here. We just recently had a scenario where we did a bake off, you know, and we assessed 13 different solutions to try to narrow it down to five. And we chose our final five and we were going through our product launch process. And before we even got to the launch date, one of the five we chose got acquired and sold to another organization. And one of the other eight that was not chosen also got acquired and added to that list. So we didn't even make it through the product launch and evaluation before two of the vendors completely changed profile by the end of the process.
Oh no. Yeah, you guys have to pivot a lot on the fly. That is, you know, that's why I find you're planning for 25 so fast and because it sounds like the way you're doing it, which is so smart. And how I think we all should be thinking more about marketing and, you know, marketing is the long game, but you do have to give yourself space to iterate in the way that you're talking. And I find, you know, we put these gathers, these big plans and big, beautiful presentations.
And I've actually sort of moved away from that. I'm like, it's a checklist. These are the things in terms of priorities that need to get done in ideally the order in which they, we think at this very moment they need to get done and that will change. But it's a lot easier to move a checklist up and down than it is to then have to redo all these presentations all the time to, you know, kind of show what we want to get at.
Yeah. And to that point, like we, we worked a lot for starting to focus more on like just templates, right, that we brought up earlier, right, is maybe not so focused on the completeness of this laser focused presentation and infographic and flyer and the whole campaign and a little more loose to like, here's the structure of content we want, but then I can change words and I can change graphics and I can change image kind of on the fly because I want that brand image and that continuity, you know, throughout what we're doing, but we know that there's going to be a change. So we have put a little more focus on templates and then also that allows a little more creative freedom to the users too. Like you had mentioned that salesperson kind of making their own content. We choose to nurture and enable that where that's another touchy marketing topic where we want to control that and know you can only use these templates and only use these ones that I've made. Don't make your own slides and don't say your own things.
Where if we create enough guardrails around that to know, you can't go that far off course. We've got all the core stuff in here, but we even in our templates, we leave maybe three or four blank slides with guide on them to actually be filled in. And so they're not going completely rogue by making up slides, right?
But we are leaving the blank space to go put your own spin here. I think that's so like that's the beauty of sales. I feel like, you know, the reason why you need both Trevor just said marketing wants to control sales content. Heavens.
Sales can get wild though. Okay. So let's be fair. Right. I've run a sales team too.
But that's why the guard was important. You need to inspect what they are delivering and saying and using or you know, my favorite is like, what's on their desktop? Right. Because that's the most fun one.
Which one's safe to their desktop? That's the most, you know, tweaked version of your template. Let's update that for you.
Save this one instead. I know I think that's so cool because when you talk about sales and marketing and sort of their superpowers of how they function, right? Marketing being more of the brand like the brand awareness, the wide net, so to speak.
Yes, it can get targeted. It can be thoughtful and reduce waste. But we're generally saying one thing to many people, right? Where sales can be so thoughtful and targeted and can be more one to one.
Right. So how many can I do you mind sharing? Like how many accounts does each of your sales team, each person on your sales team generally try in?
Is it like a handful? They average clients about 150 clients, right? 100 to 150 clients per sales representative with the prospective targets of about 500. So they'll maintain 100, 150 that they have. And then they're kind of going through their target list of say 500 more.
And you'll see movement of say 20 ish a year in and out. Yeah. So that personalization piece of giving them the blank space to play with, to cater to their individual audience of update company name here and person's aspect here and title and those elements of personalization actually go such a long way. And I really believe is the superpower of sales. So hats off to your team and giving them the space. The thought.
Another another tangible way that we do that that's really been powerful that I this one I love. You can I perk up about a little bit is the sales operations component. So the actual like quotation templates, the design and the format is a marketing function, what they look like and then what content is, you know, attached to it. The quoting and pricing is sales, right?
But the skews in the catalog is product. So even that simple function of creating a quote is those three teams working together. And there can be a lot of deliberation on what a proposal should look like to a client.
It's a remarkable phenomenon. I don't I don't think a lot of people understand how much deliberation there is on like what that sheet of paper to or PDF, no sheet of paper, but you know, that deliverable to a client looks like with like line items and descriptions and quantities and show price or not you show per unit or not you show part numbers or not all that stuff. And typically, you know, organizations that chose away, this is the way we present them. And then there's a subset of sellers that are frustrated with that, and they're going to try to modify them or make their own. So in that same concept, we have created guide rails and we have created three templates that allow them to pivot and choose which they prefer.
And that can even be opportunity based. So you may go, no, this customer really prefers to see it this way with super detail. So I'm going to use the detail template, but it's still on the marketing approved template. It still looks the same.
It's still using all the right product numbers and everything like that. So we can transact and all the workflows work. But that's, I think that's a perfect harmony of those three teams and just making a proposal. I love what you're saying, Matt, in terms of even being able to personalize their proposals, because, you know, unless you're a SaaS company where it's off the shelf, that's such a pain. I'm sure, you know, from a sales perspective, that is definitely where like the overpromise challenge is sort of ebb and flow and come in where then, you know, everybody sort of mad at sales because they promise something that can't actually happen. They're like, I was on the call and I had to make a judgment and I just did the thing. So again, these guardrails are so key. And I love the way you're doing it through templates.
And it sounds like you're going to tell me here, but it sounds like, you know, maybe in your other experiences, you can speak to this. The only way that this is possible right now is because all three teams are working so well together to know what sales needs, to put up those guardrails from both the marketing product standpoint and then be able to iterate on that so they get sales in a good spot to be able to show up on those calls and make those judgments in the moment. Yeah, certainly, there's a benefit of just speed and autonomy, right? It's ultimately like I always say, we have to move at the speed of sales, right? And that is pretty immediate.
And that quote that they want delivered, I can assure you is today, probably in an hour or two, right? And the real skill of my team is knowing that scenario before it happens. And so if we can pre-think of all these things that I can dream up that sales would want to do and then feed that to marketing and product, and say, get ahead of them. And so when sales comes in, I knew you would ask, there's already a template for that.
It's an awesome, awesome thing. My job is to make sales jobs easier. So you tell me, let's sit down and help me understand. So I think there's real power to what you're saying around you sort of being, you know, the leader of the full team, because you already know having sat in that sales seat many a time, as well as the other ones. You've had a taste of product and marketing, but really sales is where you grew up. And so you can anticipate what they're going to ask for and what their needs are.
And I think there's just incredible power, power to that. In terms of sales, and, you know, one of the things we talked about, I'm going to go, I'm going to go a little off script here, because I really loved one of the things we talked about when we met initially. And I want to talk about it when it comes to sales and the buyer's journey having changed and it getting tough out there. I mean, it's like marketing and sales, I feel like are going to have to pivot in a really big way.
And I don't know if we quite know what that means yet. But between AI, being able to give everybody the answers they're looking for without going to websites, and buyers not really wanting to engage with marketing and sales if they don't absolutely have to. And then cold calling, just, you know, millennials not wanting to pick up the phone, because that has just been such a rough channel and sort of abused over the years. Where are you seeing opportunity? You know, how are your, how's your sales team, and maybe marketing and product are really supporting this, but like, how's your sales team getting their foot in the door? It seems so much harder these days to just get a conversation going. Really is.
It definitely is. This is a tough one. And if I were to just, you know, jokingly comment, I say, well, we're doing it all. I mean, we're trying everything. And I think one of the beautiful things of having sales and marketing under one umbrella is, as a sales leader, I'm willing to take some more risk and try and experiment more with marketing than maybe would get a normal approval. Do you have any examples of what that means?
What do you think? And then, you know, if you're planning money on AdWords or, you know, wrapping cars or putting up a billboard or, you know, things that kind of have those intangible ROIs that you can't necessarily connect directly to like, oh, they saw our car drive by and that's why they called us. And we got a quote. That's hard. And a lot of times as a sales leader, you're looking for that linear path of like, how did, because in a cold call, it's, I called them, they answered, I said, I'm meeting, we did a proposal.
It's very linear how we got there. So you have a very tangible ROI that if I just call a million times, I can get this many proposals out, right? Where do we really throw money at billboards around town? What's that going to get us? Right. And then, but, but layering and strategy, if we do, we have to be able to track, we have to be able to measure, we have to be able to quantify and then show that that's driving towards sales pipeline, and then give some credit to marketing, right?
I've also seen that challenge too is like, well, sure, but I'm really the one that got the proposal, right? Marketing didn't do that. And I'm always going to give a little more credit to marketing because, you know, it's also my team.
So I need them to shine as well. They go, well, we probably wouldn't even have had that conversation if we didn't influence or we didn't take that chance. We didn't, you know, invest here. So those are some examples of like maybe where we experiment, but we're continuing to try all kinds of different things, whether it be in person events, virtual events, attending conferences, speaking sessions, paid private meeting services, outsourcing business development, in sourcing business development, using sales enablement tools, using AI tools. I mean, we are literally doing all of them to try to get to just the return of, I used to call people they would answer and we would talk and they would say yes or no. So it just has, the volume had to increase a lot to get that same response rate. And we have certainly been trying content and developing ourselves as a thought leader and becoming visible and keywords and creating a bunch of, you know, SEO to drive towards us and hoping that inbound would come.
It is still heavily trumped by outbound, right? And we can't sit around waiting for someone to contact us. And there's a whole nother dynamic challenge to inbound coming that I'd like to uncork as well that we're seeing firsthand. And maybe it's proxy of our industry, maybe not, but it is spam and scam city now on inbound. And so, how do you even trust an inbound lead anymore? I had a switch and it's still not quite perfect, but I had to write code for one of my client's websites that where we would only take a business email address, right?
Yeah, we've made that pivot as well. There are no emails or anything like that. So it's better, but it's still not, people can still get around that. It is, it is a needle in a hay, it does feel like a needle in the haystack these days. And I love what you're saying of outbound channels are shutting down. Oh, Trevor, say more around that. Yeah, I mean, I think this, this notion of surrounding your audience in a really thoughtful way, the awareness piece, the branding piece, the intangible piece of marketing is definitely coming back in full force. We're all feeling sort of this wave that's incoming of like, how do we get back to basics and build brand because we haven't, and we've been dependent on lead gen for so long that now we got to play catch up and we're behind and building brand takes for ever.
And now it's really noisy thanks to AI. So how on earth are we even going to remotely do that? So I love what you're talking about from a testing standpoint.
I am curious though, in regards to all of these things you're testing, which is a plethora of aspects, how are you managing your resources? Because again, we're all feeling the crunch, especially at the end of the year. And you know, budgets are generally staying flat year over year if not coming down.
So how are you thinking about this for 2025 of keeping up this volume of surround sound with limited resources? So one of the things we absolutely have to do is consolidation. So we have absolutely fallen into the trap of tool sprawl and disconnected, you know, APIs or workflows from tool to tool to tool, combine that with acquisitions. We have even worse disconnected tools for all.
So one of the things we must tackle as one of our priorities next year is consolidation and centralization of as many of those functions that I mentioned in one place where we can get good data and actually efficient functional workflows as well. Because that will break the marketer or the salesperson if there's too many steps or there's imports and exports or it takes too long or whatever it may be. It's already a hard thing to do prospecting or, you know, build your content or your video or like that.
If you add the difficulty of just doing the task, then it tends to get dropped. Right. So like the last thing a salesperson wants to do is outbound. And I think if everyone doesn't know that, it's true.
And the last thing a prospect wants is to receive a cold call, right? So we have this contentious thing that neither party wants to do, but kind of has to do to get there. So if you can make that frictionless, easy, maybe even fun, then we'll get some adoption there. Say more on the fun piece. How are you making that engagement fun?
How are you bringing people in from that aspect? That sounds awesome. I had a trophy here in my office.
That's what I was looking for. But we do make silly little trophies that we give as awards, you know, most calls or most contacts or most, you know, meeting set, things like that. We also have awards for the worst, which is also fun too, at least calls, right? So we make little trophies.
We have incentives for the team. We make it a team event. We have tried doing like team blitz days so that at least we're all in it together and we're all doing the same thing.
So then it also turns into like a launch and a happy hour and the teams together and they all went through it together. We have a hybrid and mostly remote workforce, right? So trying to create those avenues for team camaraderie, especially on a task that nobody really likes doing and if you're at home and you're remote working, you're probably going to even be less productive on that because it's easier to tap out. So we'll bring the team together and do it as a group and that kind of creates a social support structure and some competition and a little bit of fun around it.
That is, yeah, especially for the things you don't want to do. That sounds like a great way. That's how I get my kids to fold their laundry. Nothing works better than a sock competition. Who can pair the most socks?
Let's go. There's probably a cookie at the end of that or something. No, just bragging rights and then they got to go put it away. It's great. No, I absolutely love that. I think really what the big takeaway from this conversation that I'm feeling that and I'm so grateful for it is your ability to really see all sides from each team and be able to give them the empathy they all need within their superpowers to be the most successful and at the end of the day, working together towards whatever those priorities and common goals are as a team and you really are using the full toolbox. It is magical. I have no idea how you're keeping it all in flight. I'm guessing, I know you're not doing it alone for sure, but it is to have this many balls in the air essentially between all the marketing efforts you're doing, all of the testing you're making happen, all the team camaraderie you're building is just wonderful to see and I'm so grateful for you sharing your experience with us so we can take even just an ant of it back to our own teams. The sales and marketing alignment conversation is continuous and it's nice to find those glimmers of possibility.
It's awesome. I'll give you one more scenario here that ties them together, the sales, marketing and product because these tools are amazing and AI is awesome and the way that you can gather data is exponential and it's rapid. Lean in and start using that, but they're hard. They don't just work out of the box as they're all proposed that they do and so they're a little hard to administer and get to function, but an example on those blitz days, the revenue operations and marketing team generated templated emails and some call scripts and we collaborated with a couple manufacturers that we were representing those solutions and we kind of built the pitch deck. We feed that to sales, but again left the room for customization because nobody wants to read a script, but it gave them the guidelines of like hit these things, but at the same time having call recording and transcription on those calls and allowing that rebound data back and then feeding that to the product team, they were able to identify maybe two or three of the top rebuttals or challenges on why someone didn't want to consume at that time or talk about that solution. So that collaboration again helps going okay maybe we thought the value point were these three things, but then we went out and tested and called you know 5,000 people and we found that they brought up another value point that we weren't even thinking about and that came up 20% of the time on these calls as a no rebuttal. Maybe let's pivot the marketing message and let's pivot the value prop of the service to answer that. Okay let's go call another 5,000 and see if those results increase and so it's like this constant experiment that does require 5,000 touches, right, but it's like this constant experiment and revision.
I think the biggest learning lesson for us is let's not assume we know what our customers want and what the value is. Yes and what a beautiful way I've never heard of a BlitzDai, but what I love about it is you know I'm not, I agree that cold calling is a dying art. As a receiver I don't pick up my phone, I'm not a fan of them, I don't like being interrupted, but the power of the way that you're talking about it right now is in that learning and that data and being able to pivot on the fly that way. I imagine when you came out of those BlitzDais your messaging was so much tighter as you went into normal conversations that didn't have so much pressure on them and they are probably landing significantly better just because you had, you gave that, you know, it's why diamonds are made right, they're made under that kind of pressure and so what a beautiful way to learn very quickly with everybody involved and creating that feedback loop through AI that is, that's magical and yay that you have enough. I think one of the struggles a lot of folks are having is why outbound is really really hard is because they don't have the numbers to be able to make them any calls and burn.
Yeah well and I mean transparently like you have to use an autodialer and so the that's a great efficient tool for outbound sales and it dials and you only talk when it connects so that allows them to make 500 calls right but they're not actually making the calls the system's making the calls and so you also kind of shield yourself from all those declines or all those empty calls that you make because they're not really impacting you're only connecting with the the calls that are answered. Right look at all this with lots lots of learning here. I am going to transcript this we're gonna wrap it up in an overview don't you worry it'll be on the website so you can skim it later and we'll have the notes ready for you to figure out how you're gonna start implementing this and bringing your sales and marketing and product teams in alignment how you're gonna be able to pivot with templates and giving your sales team the right kind of guardrails they need for that personalization but without going rogue and and how you can create these these moments for your team to income rotary and while also meeting goals of the company wow wow yes that will all be in the show notes. Matt if people want to learn more about you and Cyber Advisor where can they find you?
They can absolutely find me on LinkedIn that's like my most active spot surprise surprise Matt Kanaske Cyber Advisors you can find me on LinkedIn. Wonderful before we leave you are more than a seller more than a marketer tell me you know we got two and a half months left here of 2024 what are you both looking forward to personally as we wrap up the year? Well I love the holiday season so I love I love fall I love that the weather's getting cool and crisp the leaves are changing we get the one two three combo of Halloween Thanksgiving Christmas time so that is my favorite time of the year and I go all out so I got the you know so many light bulbs on my house that I'll probably blow a breaker but I love I love dolling up the house every year with all the Christmas lights and and that you know collection keeps growing every year so I'm really looking forward to that. I'm going to take some pretty pictures and do you go all out for Halloween as well or just or just oh yeah I still dress up yeah I dress up and come to work too so um this year I'm going to be the Mad Hatter Mad Hatter from Pass. Yes yep so I will uh I'll be wearing that at work and joining video calls for a day on that. Oh that is fantastic again we're going to need some pictures Matt you're going to need to share that love that is amazing I love it I love the fall too this is the best time of year sure I miss Halloween we don't have Halloween here we do but we don't it's not it's not Halloween the way that I know I know so I'll be living vicariously thank you so much Matt I'm so grateful for this conversation thank you to our listeners Trevor Leanne I see you I appreciate you if you like this episode please like subscribe and share this episode was brought to you by MKG Marketing the digital market agency that helps complex clients like Cybersecurity get found via SEO and Digital Ads so this is by me Keri Gartzi I'm a co-founder of MKG Marketing and if you'd like to be a guest hit me up DM me let's have you on the shelf thank you again Matt I really appreciate it thank you