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The Factory Floor is hosted by the three co-founders of Conversion Factory, the marketing agency at the forefront of SaaS growth, marketing, and tech trends. Episodes are released on Twitter one day early, @coreyhainesco.
Every other week Corey, Zach, and Nick break down what’s working right now in SaaS marketing, share real-world lessons from the field, and give you the strategies you need to outpace the competition.
You can also find us on YouTube, X, and everywhere you listen to podcasts!
Don't fall behind. Subscribe. Like. Drop a comment. Or not. The ball is in your court.
Nick Loudon (00:00)
okay, let's do it. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the factory floor. I'm joined today by my two homies is what I'll call him. We have Corey Haynes and Zach Stevens. How are you guys doing today? We good?
Zach Stevens (00:18)
Yo, I'm good, homie. What's the word?
Nick Loudon (00:22)
Okay, I'm gonna Yeah, okay. I'm gonna kick both of them off the call. I'll just do it by myself ⁓ We today are talking about something that we hear a lot ⁓ Particularly on our discovery calls when we're meeting with the prospective client ⁓ and that is ⁓ The we're focusing on sales objection. I'll call it ⁓ So kind of the topic for today is why?
Corey Haines (00:22)
Muy bien, ese.
You
Nick Loudon (00:49)
we're focusing on sales isn't really a good reason to stop marketing. That's kind of like our claim that we're staking. So ⁓ in order to kind of color this question a little bit better, ⁓ maybe we should try to figure out what people mean when they say that. So what do you guys think people really mean when they're saying we're focusing on sales? Is it a Trojan horse? Is it legit? What is it?
Zach Stevens (01:16)
I think that they are limiting themselves on all the things that are getting to what they really want, which is growth in business. Cause when you're focusing on sales, what are you trying to do? You're trying to grow the business. The downside is it's kind of like saying I am only going to use my right hand.
to cook this dinner as opposed to saying I will use both hands and I will take advantage of every single option and tool that's in my arsenal. I mean, that's the sense that I get when I hear this is...
What is the why are those mutually exclusive? I feel like they play on each other so much that by siloing them and completely shutting one out that that's a use a nonsensical approach to growth Corey, what do you think?
Nick Loudon (02:13)
you
Corey Haines (02:21)
Yeah. Um, I think from my perspective, it's a little bit different just having talked to a ton of founders in the past and being on the side of marketing and sales and being a marketer, working with salespeople and, um, having heard this a lot for a long time, I had that same like, huh, what do you mean? That's weird. But now whenever I hear people say that they're just focusing on sales, they're not so worried about marketing right now. To me, it's just like a
The underlying issue is it's an indicator of a lack of understanding of marketing and how marketing and sales play together. And it's sort of just a, not a red flag, but we'll just say, ⁓ it's a dead giveaway that they don't really have a lot of maturity or sophistication in their strategy for getting customers. ⁓ because really, like you said, the two are not mutually exclusive.
And the more that we talk about it and the more people hear this, they'll probably, it'll be, it'll become and feel more more obvious. but yeah, to me, it's just sort of a fundamental misunderstanding of what marketing is and how marketing and sales play together.
Nick Loudon (03:37)
Yeah, I was gonna say I feel like the like sales and marketing are they're like you they can't it's impossible to disjoint them and be like, okay, turn this one off. Turn this one like they're almost impossible to fully separate. And there's some sort of interconnectivity, like always a little bit. ⁓ I guess why do we like why are they bucketed together? And then like
pushed on each other, like, well, if we're doing one, maybe we don't do the other. Like, why is that always like those two together and not like, instead of, you know, some other department, we're gonna like stop focusing on that to let sales and marketing work together. Does that make sense?
Corey Haines (04:17)
Yeah, yeah.
Zach Stevens (04:19)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (04:19)
I think a lot of these companies that come from this perspective, they have pretty high contract values. and they have a, a, their belief, let's just say their belief is that their customers aren't hanging out on LinkedIn. They're not searching for things on Google. They're not subscribing to newsletters. They're not, ⁓ they're not really perusing through social media. You can't reach them.
online. ⁓ you know, especially when we get to like, okay, they're selling to VPs at fortune 1000 companies. Their belief is that marketing does not serve a purpose to reach those types of people because you can't reach those types of people with marketing channels. You have to email them. You have to build a relationship in person. You have to show up to a conference. You have to do an ABM kind of, you know,
triangulation of giving gifts and smoozing them at dinners and, ⁓ you know, talking them up to their boss or whatever it is. So that's usually, I feel like the, the persona of like the type of person, type of company that doesn't think that marketing sales complete and that they can play together or that there's no need for marketing, that they only need sales in that instance.
in my experience, know, just to like, I don't know, burst their bubble a little bit and spoiler alert, like none of those things are true usually. But their belief is that they can't do any marketing to reach their target customers. So therefore, why should they do any marketing?
Nick Loudon (06:03)
Yeah, it's like, it reminds me of like, ⁓ like when some I famous people find out that super famous people know about them. Like you'll have like some small time artist and some like actor actresses like I love your stuff. And people are like, my gosh, like, you know, George Clooney loves my, you know, music or whatever. And it's like, they have phones. They look at Instagram, they look at like, they operate just like we do most of the time and these
big VPs of enterprise level companies that you're selling to have phones and they probably watch somebody on YouTube and I'm sure they get a bunch of newsletter style emails to their inbox. Do they read them all? Who knows? I don't know. Like it doesn't seem that surprising to me that those people operate a lot like most of us.
Zach Stevens (06:54)
And it seems like the, things that you actually do during a sales effort, the line between is that sales and is that marketing is very, very blurry. You know, like if you go to a conference, is that sales or is that marketing? Cause that sounds a lot like a market to me that you are going to, which would be marketing. ⁓ and then while you're there, your sales team, I'm going to assume has maybe some case studies and some collateral maybe.
a interaction representation, is it sales or is that marketing? my, my assumption or the way that I think about this, I think that sales is actually a function of marketing. It's just pure. It's the purest form of outbound marketing that you could ever do. And it's, ⁓ highly personable and conversation-based. It's still marketing. You are, you're no different than someone going to the bazaar in, you know,
Nick Loudon (07:48)
you
Zach Stevens (07:52)
medieval times and advocating for a product that's marketing. There is no distinction between those two and the things that you need to do to have successful sales efforts are very similar, if not part of your marketing efforts.
Nick Loudon (08:11)
Right. ⁓ I was going to ask, because like, okay, I'm trying to think like if we're meeting with say we're meeting with someone who's a prospective client and they're like, yeah, we do a little bit of paid advertising. We do a little bit of SEO. We do a little bit of this. We also have a sales team. The sales team says this stuff, but we're not focusing on marketing now. Shut all that down. We're focusing on sales. What would that like alloc
like resource allocation even look like if they were going to do that? what let's say they have X amount of dollars they're spending here in marketing and X amount they're spending in sales and they're shifting all of that marketing budget into sales. What would they be buying to do that? Or is it just hiring? Like, is that all it is?
Corey Haines (08:58)
More people, yeah. It's
seats and butts, it's people, more people to send, more email addresses to send emails from. And ⁓ more names and faces to circulate around conferences and dinners and cocktail hours and networking events. ⁓ That's always the interesting part about sales in general is it's really not super scalable, it's very inefficient.
And actually the larger sales team historically like the less efficient it gets. kind of the law of diminishing returns in general. But like there's a lot of times really, really steep drop-offs. And I mean, I remember being at a startup where I worked, my marketing team worked pretty closely with the sales team and the sales team was about five times as large as the marketing team. So there was like three marketers and like 15, 12 to 15 salespeople.
And half of the sales team would be gone every four to six months because they would churn out because they wouldn't land a single deal. Um, but you're constantly looking for people who can produce something. And it kind of all goes back to, I think the, the SAS 1.0 era where it was this predictable revenue era. This is, that's a book written by this guy who kind of
made the whole model of like before, before performance advertising was an option and before SEO was something that was like well known, like really what were your options for getting customers on the internet? You had to email them. You had to just like blast their inboxes. ⁓ he'd be scraping lists and leads from anything and anywhere. And so there was
basically it came down to a bunch of math and arithmetic of, okay, for every salesperson you hire, you pay them this much with this much commission. They need to be generating this much business per year. Otherwise you cut them and you put them in with someone else who can produce those numbers. And it's pretty ruthless. So you, if you want, you know, $1 million, a new ARR per quarter, that means you need to have 10 sales reps producing, you know, at least a hundred K ARR and a new business per quarter.
kind of backs into that math pretty easily, but a lot of people have stuck to that idea and that model of, well, that's all you need in order to grow a SaaS business.
Nick Loudon (11:30)
Hmm. That's crazy. I feel like the there's like an efficient efficiency feedback loop that like happens between marketing and sales that like, you know, we talked about like, ⁓ paid advertising, we're pretty like, ⁓ bearish on using paid advertising until your foundation is set. And you have a lot of things in place before you start dumping money into advertising.
⁓ The same kind of feels similar to me with just like general marketing versus general sales where it's like, I'm not going to go, don't go hire a bazillion people over here. Like until the quality of what's coming in through your marketing channels is making sense and making their job easy. We're trying to make sales more efficient by making our marketing better. And then vice versa, like.
I don't know, I feel like with the right salespeople and you just have a select few that are good, it's gonna feel more ⁓ like the marketing is cohesive with that. Like it's more of a exclusive experience, I guess, if that makes sense. I don't know, maybe that's a weird way of describing it. But I did wanna ask about like the idea of pausing marketing and how sometimes we...
we might read that as like, we just don't know what we're doing. ⁓ And do you think that's usually the case when someone says, yeah, we're gonna just focus on sales, like none of that marketing stuff ever worked. And so we're just pausing on all that and we're just gonna focus on sales. ⁓ How often do you think that's actually just someone saying that they don't really know what they're doing?
Corey Haines (13:16)
pretty much a hundred percent of the time, like there's so many basic things you can do that are just obvious, low hanging fruit that if you didn't do it, you would look back at yourself and look in and realize that you've been shooting yourself from the foot for very unnecessarily for a long period of time. ⁓ even really basic things related to SEO to website, CRO, basic email marketing.
Nick Loudon (13:18)
Ha ha.
Corey Haines (13:44)
I mean all the stuff in our like phase one phase two process is like, honestly, the foundation it's like the fundamentals of marketing. If you, if you can't even do that or know how that works or understand the value of that, then you're not going to get the value of anything in our phase three, which is about expansion where it's like SEO, advertising, ⁓ social media, more sophisticated brand marketing.
performance marketing types of plays. And so if someone's like, yeah, we have a website, but doesn't really do anything. You're like, well, okay, we need to catch you up, mister. I mean, we had a call like this just the other day, candidly, where someone was like, yeah, we have a website, but like, doesn't really, there's no real like purpose to it. We just, we have all of our deals come through trade shows and conferences. It's like, well, yeah, imagine if you did have a functioning website that could actually
Nick Loudon (14:24)
There's probably a reason, yeah.
Corey Haines (14:43)
get you some deals like imagine how that could change everything for you. But people just have no understanding or faith in the value of that.
Zach Stevens (14:54)
it's just too hard to do. think that people have a hard time making a codified effort into putting, because everything that happens on a, like in a marketing funnel and your marketing efforts should reflect exactly what happens during a ⁓ good sales cycle.
You it starts with a problem. What is the problem? And then you diagnose, you empathize, and hopefully state the problem in a way that the person providing it to you in an articulation better than they could. And...
The same thing happens in marketing. You know, that's why we're so such big advocates of, look, you need to list out this problem so that somebody has assurance that you understand it just as well, if not better than they do. And then you provide solutions. You provide steps on, you know, this is how it works. This is how easy it is to get into our product and start using it.
So it's almost like, I mean, the phrase, your website is the salesperson that never sleeps. ⁓ I think rings true where it is the salesperson that never sleeps and it always has that, it should have the same phrase ology and, ⁓
structure that a good salesperson does where it can answer the same questions. The only difference is, that it might not cover as much nuance, but if you're really good at your marketing, you can cover all that nuance and make it easy for people to find. So that when they get on that sales call, it's really just an opportunity for them to be assured that what they had read at 1130 PM, when they were looking for a solution to their problem, that you were saying the exact same things and it's reinforced
the value and process that your product stands behind.
Corey Haines (16:58)
I think a lot of people who are more sales oriented too don't really realize the collaboration, the value of collaboration between marketing and sales teams and specifically like a marketer with a salesperson. I think a really good, like a really exceptional salesperson is great at understanding, kind of dissecting, okay.
These are the types of problems that I hear from these types of people. And these are the things that I say, they really resonate with them and they can start to pattern match to build a really good sales pitch and they can turn that sales pitch into a sales deck. And then there's a philosophy to it and a structure and something that is repeatable for other sales person, other sales people to, to use and to follow. But most salespeople are not that good, especially I think
in tech because they've been spoiled to be honest. And they just think, well, if I'm a good conversation list and kind of charming and I can follow someone else's playbook or just make it up as I go, then we'll figure it out. And that is just not the case. I think a lot of the value of where, ⁓ the marketing team can come in is to help bring a lot of that structure, bring a lot of the market research of problems, solutions, nomenclature.
the types of phrases and things that seem to resonate in the market. And even something as simple as like, Hey sales dude, I know that you're not a designer. Why are you making a sales deck? Like get that in the hands of a copywriter and a designer, like stop dicking around in Google slides and like let a professional do this. I've seen some really, really atrocious sales decks from very successful companies.
And I'm like, how is this even allowed? It's actually kind of a problem because I've seen it talked about in other circles where it's like, you have to do kind of like quality assurance and quality control of what salespeople are showing on their demos because a lot of it gets really bastardized where they're just, they're kind of just going rogue and they're saying their own stuff. They're showing stuff. You know, there's no like consistency in the layouts or even the colors or branding.
And so imagine that and then for any other sales medium, know, cold emails, ⁓ marketing material and one-pagers, ⁓ presentations and demos. ⁓ and everyone's talking, using different phrases, using different slides, emphasizing different things. It gets very, very messy. Like you need to have that close collaboration. I remember even, this was when I was still an intern.
Nick Loudon (19:25)
you
Corey Haines (19:53)
at my first startup job at Cordial. And one of my last projects before I got hired on full time was to do some market research and to figure out like what are some of the common firmographics and problems that our target customers were experiencing just so that the salespeople kind of know. So I just went through and like asked around, started doing some pattern matching, looked through some call recordings and like did a really
basic job of like, okay, here's kind of the outline and here's the bullet points. And then I presented it to the sales team and they were blown away. Some of them were like, I never thought of, of that angle or like, my gosh, that's so true that like every company that's using this tech stack experiences this problem. like, Holy mackerel is low.
Nick Loudon (20:49)
That's hilarious. I when I was ⁓ first out of college, I worked for a large university. It's Grand Canyon University. It's probably fine to say ⁓ and GCU had, I think in my opinion, a great marketing engine, tons of brand recognition, specifically in my area and, you know, in the communities that I was working towards as a salesperson. So I'm a sales guy or admissions rep.
It's sales. And there's tons of like marketing dollars and engines and they give us like presentation decks for when we'd meet with parents or when we would go present at a school. And I remember in training, I was shadowing someone they're presenting at this school and they have this like sales deck that they got for marketing that they added a bunch of stuff to. They put some different like numbers in there. They basically like made it their own and it looked like garbage.
And it looks so bad. It had a bunch of like figures and metrics that were not true. And I just was like, I had just come from the school. I knew all these like things because I worked in the marketing department as a student. And I was just like, dude, none of that stuff's true. Like that's just not true. And he's like, no, yeah, it was true. And it was true, like five years ago when you changed the sales deck for some reason. And it's crazy that you can have this huge marketing machine.
Zach Stevens (21:47)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (22:15)
and then still have all these people that are just like, I know what they need and just totally do their own thing. ⁓ It's, I don't know, you could see the value and if they all just worked more cohesively.
Zach Stevens (22:28)
Yeah, well, mean, that's a, that's a common trope as well, which is the sales team promising something that doesn't yet exist. And, you know, even that I would say that's marketing. It's just marketing head of the product. And in a bad way where you're not even doing it to build anticipation, but instead doing it to close a commission. That's a little bit more of a.
Corey Haines (22:44)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (22:54)
a nuanced topic that I don't think we should go into, but I think that there is a parallel or it's a good segue into some of the other stuff that we want to speak about, which is like, I think just the efficacy of sales. It's a hundred percent augmented by
Nick Loudon (23:02)
you
Zach Stevens (23:18)
marketing and by having everybody on the same page and saying the same things, it's, you're beating the same drum in rhythm and that makes it a lot louder and expands your reach and makes it more powerful.
It's, the, the phrasing of this topic of why we're stopping on it, it still baffles me when I hear people say it. It's like, I, I have a hard time understanding why people completely bifurcate these and, ⁓ stop one. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that initial idea of why.
Nick Loudon (23:59)
Yeah.
I was
Corey Haines (24:02)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (24:04)
gonna ask, let's say someone genuinely is like, no, we can't, we have to pare some things down. What are the things that it's like, okay, can pare, you can stop spending your advertising dollars or you can kind of slow down in these areas, but what's the, can you give me the bit, here's what you have to have over here in marketing, you have to have this stuff. And then fine, you can focus on sales. Can you give me like,
maybe like some of the things that are non-negotiables or things you would tell people who want to pare down on marketing.
Corey Haines (24:37)
Sure. Well, I mean, honestly, it's funny cause I didn't plan this and we definitely come from a biased viewpoint, but honestly, if you just had like one marketing function or one marketing title, like one marketer on your team, if you just had one, the only marketer you would need to help with your sales team is a product marketer because that is, those are the types of things that a product marketer can do. And
Well, the things that a product marketer can do is what you need in order to help your sales teams. Things like positioning, messaging, ⁓ consistency across the website with the sales material. ⁓ a lot of the lead nurturing and just a fundamental understanding of why are people buying this product and how can we use those learnings to improve the efficiency of our funnel and all the different entry points and ways that we
convert leads into customers. And one of the things I wanted to mention too, which, goes off of that is that I also think that there's a ton of learnings stuck inside sales that can be relayed over to marketing. They would drastically help improve the efficiency of marketing as well. Um, again, this is something that I did at Cordial was then we started digging into and really asking the salespeople, like, Hey, why did, why did this?
deal close. What were the objections that you heard? ⁓ What are the common kind of steps you have to get through? Who are the people or the titles of the people that you're talking to? Where did you meet them? How much do they know about you? Like there's so much knowledge and good insight that's really sometimes it's even better and richer than doing like customer research because you know, they're
Zach Stevens (26:30)
It's the real real. Yeah.
Corey Haines (26:32)
Yeah, they're they're
Nick Loudon (26:32)
Mm-hmm.
Corey Haines (26:33)
skeptical of you.
Like they're giving you like the real honest truth because they're not sold yet. And so they're they're telling you like exactly what's on their mind. They're not really biased in favor of you quite yet. And so if you can unlock all those insights, I mean, there's so many things on the website and funnels in lead nurturing and positioning. ⁓ There's a lot of like competitive intelligence that was just stuck in salespeople's heads. There was a lot of
Phrasing and you know the the good sales people have a way of kind of describing things and they kind of just find it along the way Where man like those are those are h1s and h2s. Those are Those are those should be on like ad creative. Those should be like plastered on the on the conference signage ⁓ That it's it's there for the taking you just have to go and mine it
Zach Stevens (27:18)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (27:23)
Yeah,
I love that idea. Like the best your top sales guy opens every call with these couple phrases. And one of those is basically your headline probably. Like that idea is so good that I love that because I mean, I did a bunch of sales and
Corey Haines (27:37)
Probably.
Nick Loudon (27:42)
my time before we all worked together. And I remember listening to like some of the, you know, whoever the top rep was, some of the calls and how they would open them and just the like, you kind of just get this like really connected strong sense whenever they did it. And they said it was such confidence and that's a really interesting, awesome point. We've been talking for a while. Anything you think is left unsaid or I don't know.
Any like last little tidbits of advice you give to people that have maybe said this and are now rethinking whether they should focus on sales.
Zach Stevens (28:16)
I think that...
We say it a lot that, everyone is looking for a silver bullet, like the one thing that will take them from point A to point B. And the more and more I get into working with other entrepreneurs, there's just a lot to do. And this is what you sign up for. yes, there is ranking and ordering of your objectives and the
things that you have to do, you can't completely ever discard them in business and let them go by the wayside. We're marketers and we do sales. We do outreach. We get on sales calls and, ⁓ you know, we, it's, you wouldn't say this about finances like, yeah, you know, we're, we're, we're going to start doing sales. We're going to, ⁓ you know, stop accounting. You know, this, this is not going to be a thing anymore.
or customer service, but for some reason marketing gets stalled. And maybe it's speaking to the, how truly intertwined they are that when you are still doing sales, you're still doing marketing and you're probably not doing all the things that you should be doing alongside it that would help those sales efforts be even better.
Corey Haines (29:42)
And I think my final remark would be that I've seen and heard this many, many times where it's a curse of success. If a company or a founder does have a lot of success with kind of that pure sales approach, I've kind of done quote unquote, no marketing, even though it's impossible to actually do zero marketing. but even if they do have success and they end up getting past, you know, a major revenue milestone, they're doing half a million dollars in sales a year or $5 million in sales a year.
And then they're like, okay, I think it's time for us to start looking at this marketing thing. It's not that it's too late, but it's always like, man, now you have to play some serious catch up. Like, Hey, your domain authority is like really, really low. And like your website sucks. Like we got to redo this thing. That's going to take a while. ⁓ do you have zero, ⁓ newsletter subscribers? What are we supposed to do with that? I, I,
pretty much always see it that people who end up being successful with building a sales engine, then realize and get scared about how reliant they are on that sales engine that they want to start to diversify in marketing. And it's not as simple as just turning it on or hiring people the same way that it is with sales. So you have to start it earlier than you think, even just making small investments. ⁓ it might not seem like you're doing much, but
Everyone who I know who's been successful with sales ends up wishing that they did marketing earlier, specifically things core around to product marketing and inbound marketing like SEO and, ⁓ you know, building a newsletter subscription list and kind of this more like brand recognition within the market. They're always trying to play catch up on those ends of things like, man, I wish we did this.
two years ago, three years ago, I we started doing little things from the beginning, just, you know, someone, sometimes they don't even set up a company, ⁓ social media profile or like a profile on a startup directory or they don't do anything. And then they're like, what could we have been getting this whole time through inbound leads if we had just done the basics.
Zach Stevens (32:00)
kind of reminds me of...
If you, you should not choose between hunting and farming. You should be doing both because at some point you, like those will have seasons where they aren't great. The ground will go barren for a season. And that's when you're relying on all of your hunting efforts.
Corey Haines (32:12)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (32:26)
And at some point, the herd's just gonna completely evade you. You're gonna miss your shots. And that's when you're thankful that you have that sack of potatoes in your cold cellar.
Corey Haines (32:37)
Yeah, yeah, very true.
Nick Loudon (32:38)
Yeah, love
it. ⁓ Okay, team. Great episode. It's really great topic. I love digging into that, especially because we hear that from people sometimes. ⁓ But yeah, thank you everybody for listening and we will see you on the next round of the factory floor. Goodbye.