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Welcome to GTM News Desk, the podcast where Mark Kilens and Rachel Elsts Downey bring you real talk backed by real action. Twice a month, we cut through the noise to deliver the essential resources, news, and expert takes you need to create impactful, People-first GTM motions. From trending topics to clickbait headlines, we sift through the clutter to highlight what truly matters in the world of B2B Go-to-Market.
With nearly 25 years of combined experience working with top B2B brands like Drift and HubSpot, we’re sharing our insights and advice to help you navigate the best (and worst) GTM strategies. Whether you’re a startup founder or a CMO, tune in to GTM News Desk for analysis, candid discussions, and actionable tips that prioritize people and drive real results.
Mark Killens (00:00):
I think a lot of automation is good, but if there's not some type of human involved in some part or some different parts of the automated sequence, the automated process, I think that's a big mistake.
Rachel Elsts Downey (00:11):
If you're focused on tools, you are a tool. Wow, maybe. So
Ellen Rataj (00:18):
Everything you are doing every day, whether it's prospecting, outreach, or deal management or working active deals, should be focused around getting one step closer to helping your prospects or customers to say yes or no to whatever it is you're trying to sell them.
Rachel Elsts Downey (00:43):
All right. Welcome to another episode of Go to Market News Desk. I am your host alongside Mark Killins, and this is a fun episode because Mark Killins is as many of not only the great founder and creator of Tack, but he also is the VP of marketing at EasyLlama. And joining us today is Ellen Ratage. She is the VP of sales. And the cool thing about this is that we get to hear them in real time, really talk about what it means to have true go-to-market collaboration, how to work together in terms of deal management, and basically be on the same team and help each other win more deals. Yeah.
Mark Killens (01:21):
Yeah. I mean, I hate the word alignment. I mean, I like United Alignment's fine. Collaboration is good, but you're one team to your point,
Rachel Elsts Downey (01:30):
One team. I'm feeling like there's a little spiciness happening. Mark, you're showing up a little more casual, a little like, are you a little defeated this week? What's going on?
Mark Killens (01:40):
No, no, no. I feel actually not defeated. We are recording this episode on Halloween number one,
Rachel Elsts Downey (01:46):
Hall Eve.
Mark Killens (01:47):
There you go. Look at you, Rachel. There you go. The angel.
Rachel Elsts Downey (01:53):
I'm an angel because you're
(01:55):
About to be spicy and I already know it.
Mark Killens (01:57):
Classic. Yeah. No, I mean I am spicy. I just think there's so much just bullshit between marketing and sales that there's no need for the bullshit. Stop blaming or putting fingers or saying, oh, well the data says this. The data says that. Whatever. No, no, no, no. That crap doesn't matter. Just become friends. No, I'm not joking. Rachel. Become friends,
Rachel Elsts Downey (02:23):
Like actual friends.
Mark Killens (02:25):
Yeah. Stop all the work, talk and nonsense. Start with getting to know each other and legitimately become friends. Yeah. You might not become friends outside of work, but think about this. You spend with your fellow coworkers, Rachel, 40, 50, 60 hours a week, you better be friends with people. So get to know them genuinely. That's another one of my favorite words. Genuinely understand who they are as people, just as people who are, they
Rachel Elsts Downey (02:55):
Like, period.
Mark Killens (02:55):
Yeah. How can I support you? How can I help you? How can I have empathy for you? How can I make sure that we understand each other's point of view? We might not agree, but that doesn't matter. Become a trusted partner to one another, become friends. And if you do that, I think number one, the finger pointing, blaming won't happen as much, but number two, you'll start to create friend rules. I mean, we have family values, Rachel, at our house, and it's like, Hey, be respectful. Be kind, be helpful. Those are the three of the family values. Those can cultivate themselves, manifest themselves if you truly are intentional about becoming a partner with this other person.
Rachel Elsts Downey (03:36):
I like that word a lot, mark. I think the friends thing might be a stretch for some people listening, but a partner I think is super fair because partner to me assumes mutual respect and then I hate the word I know, but how about united towards the same outcome?
Mark Killens (03:54):
Yeah. United and yes, you're aligned. So it's both. It's always both, right? You're united and aligned. Fine.
Rachel Elsts Downey (04:00):
Should I be calling you out when you say the word aligned?
Mark Killens (04:03):
No, no, no. Because it is both 99.9% of things. It's both. So I know you have a spicy take in the next segment. We both kind of do around AI automation. There's a lot to unpack in the sales and marketing profession today. It is going through a maybe revolution. Yeah. I mean, buyer behavior continues to change at a pretty unprecedented pace. I look at the stats on the EZ Lama revenue dashboard, and we're seeing so many more people engage with AI search tools and engines
(04:39):
That is driving a different type of buying behavior. Our paid media strategy is needing to evolve because we need to change how we serve up and the types of ads we serve up from a creative standpoint. And it's getting so much more video-based as an example. It just everything. If you are not constantly trying and testing and changing the ways in which you engage with your customers and potential buyers, and it's not just with ai, but you're going to be in a tough position in a quarter or two quarters or a year from now because things are just moving so fast.
Rachel Elsts Downey (05:15):
And the thing I think about it too is buyers are getting younger, which means of course we're getting older, but buyers are getting younger and people consume like this. You know what I mean? And so it's like to your point of marketing and sales has to work better together or they have to collaborate better together because the buyer demographic is changing. How we consume media is changing. How we search and find people that we want to work with and buy from is changing. And so if the two of you are operating in stagnant or old playbooks, then you're going to continually run into tension as opposed to your point of coming together and saying, what's this new world look like? Let's come alongside each other, share what we're learning, what we're seeing, so that together we can win. My big issue is like, why would you be fighting or looking to blame other people when if the company fails, you both fail, you're out. You know what I mean? So I'm excited for everyone to listen to your conversation with Ellen. I think it's a really beautiful example of how VP of marketing and VP of sales can be partners, and I think that our audience is going to learn a lot.
Mark Killens (06:15):
Yeah, she gives a lot of good insights and yeah, stop focusing on all of these tools. This goes back to ai, which is, I know we're going to talk about it right now, but the tool obsession right now is disgusting, and you should be focusing on people and storytelling and strategy.
Rachel Elsts Downey (06:31):
If you're focused on tools, you are a tool. Wow, maybe
Mark Killens (06:37):
Mind blown. That's so dumb. Oh, alright, Rachel. So yeah, let's go to the next. I guess it's your segments. Technically
Rachel Elsts Downey (06:47):
I think we're fired up for some. Nobody in B2B wants this. Okay, mark, my nobody in B2B wants this today is nobody in B2B wants more automation. What's your take?
Mark Killens (07:03):
So how do you define automation in your mind? What's automation? I'm putting you on the spot, Rachel. What is your definition of automation? Just improv right now. Keep top, go
Rachel Elsts Downey (07:11):
Like being a robot, having a workflow that's just going without stopping without any human checkpoint or honestly, what I think of is that skit from I love Lucy, where she's in the factory, you know what I'm talking about, and you're doing the chocolate and then all of a sudden it's getting too fast. That's what I think of for automation in our world right now.
Mark Killens (07:32):
The point on automation that is people are focused on buying tech then thinking about the process, then thinking about the data. We've talked about AI in a lot of episodes. We've had a lot of people on the show that are using ai. Interestingly, I want us to have a few guests coming up that are talking about not ai, but about data. Because what we're learning at EZ Lama is if your data is not accurate, structured in the right way, you have a data warehouse, you have someone managing the data on a continuous basis, you're checking to make sure that things aren't breaking the process. And then the tech you use, it doesn't matter the automation you use, right? The process could be automated or non-automated or semi-automated. That's what I mean by process. It doesn't matter. So one thing that I like about, for example, ZoomInfo, is they give you a way to make sure your data is really clean so that they can then use their AI intelligence solution to help you take the data, find the right signals, build the right automation. That's not pure automation. So that's where I say yes and no. I think a lot of automation is good, but if there's not some type of human involved in some part or some different parts of the automated sequence, the automated process, I think that's a big mistake. It's like when we talked about AI SDRs in that other episode with Ryan,
(08:50):
Before we had to Ryan on ai SDRs, you're trying to automate the entire process, Rachel fail.
Rachel Elsts Downey (08:56):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it sounds like what you're saying is ZoomInfo actually was put in a good position to lean into what they've now launched because they were a data company first and now they're not. So they didn't lead with product. They actually led with data and then went from there. And so it seems like that actually makes a lot of sense as to why their intelligence platform would be so impactful for people looking to use automation in the right way.
Mark Killens (09:25):
You have to nail on the head exactly right. A lot of these companies that are building stuff are relying on other data sources, don't even have a data source. They need to cobble together your stuff to get the data. And then again, we've talked about data. It's not just third party, but it's using your own data. Everything from product data to support data to website data to purchase data, all of these data points you have, but you got to make sure that you bring 'em together, bring all those sigma if you will, together augment them with some other things like your classic city enrichment, if you will, or your classic, oh, they're looking about us or researching us, I should say on a review site and bring it together so that you're not going to serve up like 10 or 20 signals on their own to one of your account executives. You're going to package them in a nice way so that they know here's what this person is trying to do this week or these last couple weeks or right now, and here's how you could possibly, you're automating maybe half or three quarters of the process, but the outreach and that human touch that's so important today in my opinion, still exists.
Rachel Elsts Downey (10:34):
Love it. Well, let's talk to Ellen and learn a little bit more about how she's thinking about automation and see what we learn. Sound good?
Mark Killens (10:41):
Let's do it. What's up everyone? Welcome to the flagship conversation for today's episode. I am stoked. I am here with my good friend and someone who recently joined me at EasyLlama, Alan. Alan, how you doing?
Ellen Rataj (11:07):
I'm great. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to chat today.
Mark Killens (11:10):
Give everyone a quick TLDR on who you are and how did you get into sales. And then we can get into the topic which is, as you folks heard from the first few segments, marketing, sales, alignment, unification, all the good stuff, but give some folks the interesting background take.
Ellen Rataj (11:29):
Yeah, sure. Happy to. I've been in sales for 18 years, which is almost the same length as my professional career. When I graduated from college, I went to Clemson University down in South Carolina. I went into corporate banking and after that exciting 12 month stint, I decided that wasn't exactly the right fit for me. So I was looking for something different to do, and one of my friends from college had gotten involved with at t's business leadership development program. And at the time, this was a program that was run from an at t campus in Atlanta, Georgia. And so I moved for six months down to Atlanta. I joined this program and I learned how to sell and I learned how to sell at and t mobility services. And so it was a way, a really smart way for at t to attract recent college grads, new talent and give them skills to be successful in B2B sales, but then also quickly figure out how to level them up to be able to then turn around and sell for them for at t.
(12:46):
And so that was the beginning of my sales career. I sort of stumbled into that. I was fortunate enough to work for a couple of companies where I moved through the ranks of selling to small businesses, mid-market companies, enterprise organizations, all the way up to multinationals. I spent some time living in Amsterdam over in Europe, and so I feel pretty confident at selling to organizations of all sizes. And then when I moved back from Europe is when I connected with HubSpot, and I joined HubSpot in 2013, which is the transition of me moving into SaaS sales. So I've been in SaaS sales for about 12 years at a variety of companies, and I would never go anywhere else. I love sales. I think it's a really challenging and rewarding career, and so happy to talk about it, part of it or dynamic that you want to jump into from then.
Mark Killens (13:36):
Yeah, let's do it. Because I think the best marketers think like salespeople. They might not be great salespeople, but they understand sales and they think deeply like a salesperson. And I think the best salespeople like sales leaders understand marketing and think like marketing. Maybe they're not great at executing it and all the details, but the yin yang both have to understand the other discipline enough to be pretty deadly, if you will. So before we get deeper into that, you have been focusing the sales team at EZ Lama on two things recently. I love these two things. Can you just unpack those two things for people right now when it comes to sales, the two core jobs of what a salesperson should and needs to do? I think starting there gives the listeners some context to how you approach just selling overall.
Ellen Rataj (14:28):
Absolutely. I think selling is easiest when it is simple. And I think unfortunately, especially in today's world, with all these shiny objects that are floating around, it can be easy to overcomplicate the SHIT out of this profession.
Mark Killens (14:48):
You can swear by the way,
Ellen Rataj (14:49):
It's
Mark Killens (14:49):
Fine. You can swear.
Ellen Rataj (14:51):
Okay, okay. It's easy to overcomplicate the shit out of sales and running a sales process. And it became very clear once I joined Easy Lama that our sales team needed to focus and sales boils down to two things and two things only. You are creating pipeline, creating deals, and then you are working to close deals or pipeline management. So it's about deal creation and pipeline management. And these are the two motions that you want your AEs to flex between 100% of their time should be spent in one of these two buckets because they're either adding deals to their pipeline through prospecting and aligning and collaborating with marketing and doing a bunch of things to build their pipeline to find new sales opportunities. And then they are working their active pipeline of deals to get those folks to say yes or no. Hopefully yes, but sometimes no.
Mark Killens (15:54):
I love the simplicity of that, but what has changed with the first thing, the prospecting in your minds, you've seen it for 18 years now. Let's just go for the last maybe 10 or five years. What do you think has changed when it comes to an account executive's approach, and what other factors, maybe from a go-to-market standpoint, specifically for that company that you're selling for make that piece different than it was say five, 10 years ago?
Ellen Rataj (16:24):
Yeah, so this is a great question. So a lot has changed in terms of outreach and prospecting, this first bucket around deal creation in the past five years. And a lot of that has to do with the access to technology and information on both the buyer and the seller side. So it's really easy for prospects to ignore calls to mark emails as spam or not open them, reply to them, click to them. It's also equally as easy now for sales reps to send out mass communications and messages. And so we have this sort of perfect storm that is building in the wrong direction because we've got all these communication mechanisms that are either designed to help somebody push out more, more or help somebody to block out more, more, more. And so from my perspective, the best way to effectively do outreach as a B2B salesperson today is to be really thoughtful and purposeful with why you are reaching out and figuring out the best way to communicate for that specific person to reach them in a way to meet them where they're at, because deals are still happening, companies are still purchasing things.
(17:43):
If it's not you, it's going to be your competitor that gets into the tech stack or offering as a vendor of the companies within your ICP. So it's not can I, it's how, and that's really why I believe that the best sales teams are the ones that are really aligned with marketing because it is a joint effort between these two organizations to create a qualified pipeline. It's not one responsibility or the other, but it's how we work together to create opportunities for our company to continue to grow and scale and hit our revenue targets, et cetera.
Mark Killens (18:23):
What you take on this concept, the message to your point, the way that you deliver that message as an account executive salesperson is important and how thoughtful you are. Everything you just said, spot on. What about the importance of the messenger? How much does that matter? An account executive can send it versus your CEO could send it versus someone that person knows could send it versus an AI agent could send it. What's your opinion on the messenger in this whole equation of getting someone to say, yeah, I'll take a meeting with you?
Ellen Rataj (18:55):
Yeah, so for me, I think part of this is going to depend on who you are reaching out to your ICP, what those profiles are, who those personas are, but what is going to be constant across any sort of outreach that's designed to create or peak interest or create a compelling reason for somebody to say, sure, yeah, let's actually chat about that is going to be how quickly you can gain their trust. They need to have confidence that you are not going to waste their time. And so that could be conveyed through the sender of the email, the CEO versus an SDR versus an ae. But that can also be conveyed through what you say and how you say it. For example, think about yourself when you receive an email that is really long, just scroll below the fold. Do you read it all? If you don't, maybe that is not the type of emails you want your sales team sending to prospects. I try to send emails that are one to two sentences or to encapsulate the intent of the email in the subject lie, because the goal of an email is not to sell. The goal of an email is to get somebody's attention so that you can have a chance to sell them in the future. And I think that is something that we overcomplicate and if we can simplify and focus on the goal of the outreach, which is to get somebody's attention can make this task feel less daunting.
Mark Killens (20:30):
What about enablements? So this is something that you and I have talked about at EZ Lama now for a little bit. You've brought in several new account executives. We have new positioning and messaging, we have new products, we're redoing the sales process. So we're starting to do a lot with enablement. Your claim to fame at HubSpot, and feel free to unpack this and tell people all your secrets, is building a world-class enablement program like world-class. So when it comes to everything you're saying and the dynamics that have changed, how should a sales leader approach enablement and how should, give me some tips here. How should we approach it together between not just the sales leader approaching it, but sales and marketing approaching it?
Ellen Rataj (21:09):
When I think about enablement, there are many varying definitions and degrees of enablement that you could provide. I think it's less about can we put together the perfect enablement motion team, et cetera. And it's more about when we are doing enablement, where are we going to get the most bang for our buck? And I think a lot of teams have room to improve on where they're focusing When it comes to enablement, if you think about the goal, it is to give information to people to help them succeed in their role. And a big part of enablement is change management, and unfortunately, sales teams are not always, and sales leaders are not always known as change management experts. A lot of sales leaders today came up through the ranks of being a top rep and then they flipped and became a manager and maybe another, a director, et cetera.
(22:06):
I very much value the experience and exposure I got when I took a sidestep into enablement at hotspot because I really do believe that I'm a stronger sales leader today because I have that perspective on how to effectively we folks through change what good looks like around helping individuals upskill and how to think holistically about taking different things and pulling them together to get to the desired end result. So for enablement, for example, if you're going to enable your sales team around a new product or a new selling motion or a new competitor or overcoming an objection, right? There are likely going to be a few different pieces to that puzzle, which are important. You need the actual thing that you want them to learn and do, but it's more important how you serve up those puzzle pieces in a way so that they can put them together more easily.
Mark Killens (23:07):
What's an example? How would you do it? What's your take on that, I guess? Yeah,
Ellen Rataj (23:10):
I think it is well worth it to take a few minutes and pull up a blank document, a draft email, a piece of paper and a pen, and to think about, okay, what is the thing that we need to help the sales team do differently? And really defining what is the outcome that you are striving for? A simpler way to say this is you are at A, and you need to get to B, what does a look like and what does B look like? So you have to describe the current state today, and you got to describe your ideal future state. Once you have those two goalposts, then it's like, okay, how is somebody going to get from A to B? And you can list out those different things. Maybe it's call coaching role plays, a certification, a certain number of reps or activities or practice sessions, et cetera.
(24:08):
Once you have those items that you believe are the things that need to happen to get somebody from A to B, then you string them together and you say, okay, what order should these go in? And then you tie it up with a bow, which is the most important part. And this is the part of change management that is often overlooked, which is slowing down enough to bring everybody along with you. The key to effective change management is taking the time to level set in the beginning with a group of people who want to lead through change to explain why owing about to embark on this journey of change together. What's in it for me? What's in it for you? What's in it for the business? Why is this the use of our time? Once everybody is on board with why we're going to do something, then you shift and you talk about how that's going to happen. Most sales leaders, a lot of people jump to how they overlook or do not raise enough importance on the why, or they feel like everybody is already on the same page as them. And often that is not always the case. So slowing down and really making sure everybody knows why you're doing something can drive the alignment that you need to get the behavior change actually taking place.
Mark Killens (25:26):
Fantastic advice. Thanks for joining us on this episode of GTM News Desk presented by Tac Insider. To dive into the exclusive content with our guest today, head to the link in the show notes to subscribe to Tack Insider. Until next time, I'm Mark ENSs.
Rachel Elsts Downey (25:44):
And I'm Rachel Ls Downey. Let's keep it people first. Everybody.