How to B2B Better With Jason Bradwell

[00:00:00] Jess Bahr: My approach to marketing is that marketing exists to make sales easier.
[00:00:03] Jess Bahr: Like, that is the sole purpose of existing.
[00:00:06] Jess Bahr: Everything is designed to make sales easier, to get the product out there.
[00:00:15] Jess Bahr: Welcome to another episode of Marketers Talking Marketing.
[00:00:19] Jess Bahr: Today we are talking about what I think is another rising inflammatory statement coming from CERN marketing figureheads that lead gen is dead.
[00:00:27] Jess Bahr: And we're going to talk about why it's not dead.
[00:00:30] Jess Bahr: Okay, guys, it's not dead.
[00:00:31] Jess Bahr: We're not having the funeral yet.
[00:00:33] Jess Bahr: But before we jump in, I'm joined today with Jason.
[00:00:35] Jess Bahr: Do you want to introduce yourself to the audience at home?
[00:00:38] Jason Bradwell: Yeah.
[00:00:38] Jason Bradwell: Jess, thanks so much for having me.
[00:00:40] Jason Bradwell: My name is Jason Bradwell.
[00:00:41] Jason Bradwell: I'm the founder of B to B Better, a strategic marketing advisory firm.
[00:00:46] Jason Bradwell: And I also host a podcast of the same name, which I've been doing for the last almost three years now, 80 plus episodes.
[00:00:53] Jason Bradwell: And yeah, I just absolutely love being on podcasts, talking about podcasts, and I'm really looking forward to diving into this topic today.
[00:01:01] Is Lead Generation Dead? A Conversation with Jess Bahr and Jason Bradwell

[00:01:01] Jess Bahr: So lead gen being dead, everything's always dead at some point, it seems like.
[00:01:06] Jess Bahr: This is one that I've started to hear some people talk about on LinkedIn.
[00:01:10] Jess Bahr: Not as prominent as MQLs being dead, but starting to rise, kick us off.
[00:01:17] Jess Bahr: What are your thoughts on lead gen being dead?
[00:01:19] Jason Bradwell: So I've spent a fair bit of time on social media over the last three years and it feels like over that time, this concept of lead gen being dead or lead gen being kind of like vilified and positioned as the kind of antithesis of good marketing, good B, two B.
[00:01:35] Jason Bradwell: Marketing has just gotten louder and louder and louder.
[00:01:38] Jason Bradwell: And at the beginning I thought, isn't me.
[00:01:39] Jason Bradwell: Like, am I being stupid?
[00:01:41] Jason Bradwell: Because I can kind of understand this idea of incentivizing marketing teams to chase after volume of leads and then hand them off to sales and say, great job done, we don't need to worry about it anymore.
[00:01:56] Jason Bradwell: That I understand.
[00:01:58] Jason Bradwell: But what I always end up coming back to is surely the idea of particularly if you're working in an enterprise setting and you're operating across long sales cycles, small windows of sales opportunity, surely the idea of building a marketing strategy to capture contact details, email addresses, which are then stored in a database and nurtured appropriately over whatever time frame is appropriate, so that you are top of mind when that customer switches from being out of market to in market.
[00:02:35] Jason Bradwell: And you stand a better chance of them coming to you directly because you've been communicating with them one to one over that period of time.
[00:02:41] Jason Bradwell: Surely that is not a bad thing.
[00:02:43] Jason Bradwell: But I mean, that is what seemingly a lot of marketers define as legion these figureheads that you mentioned in your intro.
[00:02:51] Jason Bradwell: So that's always kind of left me a little bit perplexed and it was only really in the kind of last year or so when speaking to other marketers about this on podcasts or on social media, the lead gen gang is still very much alive.
[00:03:05] Jason Bradwell: There are enough of us out there that can apply that context to the idea that lead gen is perhaps dead.
[00:03:15] Jason Bradwell: That lead gen is just a natural consequence of an effective marketing strategy built on the idea of building one to one relationships with prospective customers.
[00:03:25] Jason Bradwell: It's what you do with those leads.
[00:03:26] Jason Bradwell: I think that's the problem, and I think that's where a lot of companies fall short.
[00:03:31] Jess Bahr: Yeah, definitely a horrible moment in the life of any marketer is if you go into a sales meeting and sales are reporting, they're not hitting their number and you're reporting, you crushed it because you're measuring that point that you're reporting might be too far away from the number.
[00:03:49] Jess Bahr: I think organizations that just focus on lead goals just focus on reporting on that lead volume.
[00:03:54] Jess Bahr: Yeah, that's probably not good, but it's still part of your overall story.
[00:04:00] Jess Bahr: You need to gate something, you need to capture their information somewhere so you can start having that conversation.
[00:04:06] Jess Bahr: And again, often if lead gen, when done well and done right, you're inviting someone to opt in to communicate with you.
[00:04:16] Jess Bahr: You're inviting someone to have a conversation, to continue going on the conversation, not buying a list and just pushing it on people who haven't opted in yet.
[00:04:24] Jess Bahr: I think that's a big differentiation between how some people because some people do lead gen by just let me go buy list, or do content syndication, which is essentially buying a list with more steps in between.
[00:04:36] Jess Bahr: You still have a room for this where you can bring someone in in a nice invited way and provide value and then start nurturing them on that side.
[00:04:45] Jess Bahr: I think that's where it comes from, though.
[00:04:46] Jess Bahr: Someone somewhere was in a meeting and they're like, we had 50,000 leads and then nothing converted.
[00:04:52] Jess Bahr: And they're like, well, lead gen is wrong, then we shouldn't do lead gen anymore.
[00:04:56] Jess Bahr: That's not the right reaction.
[00:04:59] Jason Bradwell: Exactly.
[00:04:59] Jason Bradwell: And I think you touch on a couple of important points there.
[00:05:01] Jason Bradwell: I think volume in of itself is not a bad milestone, right, to measure marketing success, should it be the North Star metric?
[00:05:10] Jason Bradwell: Like the number of contacts in our database?
[00:05:13] Jason Bradwell: No, it should always be pipeline revenue, profitability, like a commercially focused metric.
[00:05:18] Jason Bradwell: But is it a good milestone?
[00:05:20] Jason Bradwell: Is our database getting bigger?
[00:05:22] Jason Bradwell: And more importantly, is our database of our ICP contacts getting bigger?
[00:05:28] Jason Bradwell: Are we seeing that grow over each quarter, every year, what have you?
[00:05:34] Jason Bradwell: That is a good position to be in if you can say that.
[00:05:37] Jason Bradwell: Over the last quarter, we've added an extra 10,000 contacts that fit our ICP into the database, and we're now not necessarily at the complete mercy of an algorithm to dictate whether or not we can reach them with our message, right.
[00:05:52] Jason Bradwell: Unless we're willing to spend a huge amount of money on paid so the volume piece yes.
[00:05:59] Jason Bradwell: If that is the be all and end all goal of a marketing team, that's where problems arise in of itself.
[00:06:04] Jason Bradwell: If it's part of a bigger picture, it's not a bad thing.
[00:06:08] Jess Bahr: Yeah, I do think an edge case with that though, if you are just starting out a marketing department, a new company, you might also just need leads, you might also need people to talk to ideally in your ICP or who you think your ICP is.
[00:06:23] Jess Bahr: So there might be like a stage in your company growth where your goal is just to start getting people into your database to baseline it, to just get some activity and traction.
[00:06:35] Jess Bahr: And that's not bad, recognizing you're moving towards a larger, more mature program down the road.
[00:06:42] Jason Bradwell: Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
[00:06:44] Jason Bradwell: I think the important thing is just determining what does a good lead look like?
[00:06:49] Jason Bradwell: And it doesn't matter what stage of the business you're in, whether it's day one or day 10,000, having that conversation across function, sales, marketing, leadership of if we could get any lead in our database that would satisfy our ICP what does that look like?
[00:07:10] Jason Bradwell: That's an important conversation to have.
[00:07:12] Jason Bradwell: And at the beginning that may change.
[00:07:14] Jason Bradwell: In fact, it probably should change as you get your product into market and you analyze more signals from your prospective buyers and companies.
[00:07:24] Jason Bradwell: But just having an idea of what does a good lead look like and having that criteria set up in your CRM, it's a really important first step.
[00:07:31] Improving Lead Quality and Sales-Marketing Alignment

[00:07:31] Jess Bahr: Do you have favorite stages that you like to use when setting that up?
[00:07:35] Jess Bahr: Are you leveraging like Mal to MQL?
[00:07:39] Jess Bahr: Are you just using one or two stages?
[00:07:41] Jess Bahr: What does that usually look like for what you recommend?
[00:07:45] Jason Bradwell: Working for predominantly enterprise b, two b companies that don't have a well developed or particularly sophisticated marketing function.
[00:07:56] Jason Bradwell: My preference is always to keep things simple and if a lot of the clients that I work with leverage HubSpot as their CRM, in my view it is better just to use the default lifecycle stages in that CRM from day one rather than going on an exercise of trying to build out a custom lifecycle stages.
[00:08:18] Jason Bradwell: Spend three, four months talking about it as a team and ultimately you've wasted three or four months because you wanted.
[00:08:24] Jess Bahr: To talk about it, ultimately rebuild the same thing that HubSpot has by default.
[00:08:28] Jason Bradwell: Exactly, yeah, I think the important thing is about figuring out what are the triggers that move a subscriber to a lead, to a marketing qualified lead, to a sales qualified lead, to an opportunity and so on.
[00:08:40] Jason Bradwell: I would rather spend time talking about that than talking about what are the individual stages, because in most companies that default selection that you get out of HubSpot is probably going to suffice in the short term.
[00:08:53] Jess Bahr: Yeah, I agree completely.
[00:08:55] Jess Bahr: I'm a huge HubSpot fan, so a little biased on that side too.
[00:09:00] Jess Bahr: But it makes a lot easier.
[00:09:02] Jess Bahr: And then really aligning on that criteria so that if you have a sales team that is going in and they're spending a lot of their time on your subscriber lead level, they're also going to feel like marketing is not driving qualified things, because those people may not yet be ready for a sales conversation.
[00:09:17] Jess Bahr: Versus aligning on what is our MQL criteria, what exactly does it look like and how is someone getting to you?
[00:09:23] Jess Bahr: And then stay in the MQL bucket?
[00:09:25] Jess Bahr: You don't need to dip down into leads and subscribers where they might not be warm enough for you.
[00:09:30] Jess Bahr: And so they're not going to respond as well.
[00:09:32] Jess Bahr: They're not going to perform as well.
[00:09:33] Jess Bahr: They also don't want to talk to you yet.
[00:09:35] Jess Bahr: Let them get nurtured so that they're ready when they come to you.
[00:09:39] Jason Bradwell: Exactly.
[00:09:40] Jason Bradwell: And I think what that is, is just about raising the bar on what does trigger a MQL to becoming an SQL.
[00:09:49] Jason Bradwell: I think a lot of the companies I've seen when I start working with them, if a lead or a contact in the database fits certain demographic or thermographic criteria they work in, the kind of size of company that we like to go after, they're in the right region, they're the right organization type.
[00:10:10] Jason Bradwell: That in of itself triggers them into becoming a sales qualified lead.
[00:10:14] Jason Bradwell: Right.
[00:10:14] Jason Bradwell: And that means that they're handed over to sales and sales chases them.
[00:10:17] Jason Bradwell: They're not taking into account any information around intent.
[00:10:21] Jason Bradwell: Is that contact engaging with our marketing materials?
[00:10:25] Jason Bradwell: But specifically, are they engaging with our bottom of the funnel marketing materials?
[00:10:29] Jason Bradwell: Are they visiting our pricing page?
[00:10:30] Jason Bradwell: Are they downloading technical specs?
[00:10:33] Jason Bradwell: Are they here in the book?
[00:10:34] Jason Bradwell: A meeting form on the website?
[00:10:37] Jason Bradwell: All of these things are just not considered as part of the total picture.
[00:10:42] Jason Bradwell: And that is where you see things start breaking down where a bunch of dud leads, dud leads in the sense that they're just not ready to buy right now, are being handed over to sales and they're not being able to be converted.
[00:10:55] Jason Bradwell: So, yeah, I think it's a quick win for any company listening to this saying, well, we've got a high volume of leads that aren't converting.
[00:11:02] Jason Bradwell: Just raise the bar on what a sales qualified lead should look like within your organization and work backwards from that.
[00:11:10] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:11:10] Jess Bahr: Tactically, there are so many tools now that you can leverage to bring in that intent data where you don't I'm a huge fan of Bombora, but you don't always have to get a massive subscription that might cost you 20 $30,000 a year to leverage intent data.
[00:11:25] Jess Bahr: You can get it from tools like Apollo where it's $100 a month maybe.
[00:11:29] Jess Bahr: I think it's actually less it's like $75 a month for their version.
[00:11:33] Jess Bahr: That gives you all of their intent signals on it.
[00:11:36] Jess Bahr: The tools are there, the availability is there for Intent Data and Behavioral intent.
[00:11:40] Jess Bahr: Also, website activity, all that to really play into those numbers where yeah, five years ago is a lot harder to pull that in.
[00:11:47] Jason Bradwell: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:11:49] Jason Bradwell: And I mean all of this raises an interesting conversation because I think raises an interesting point.
[00:11:55] Jason Bradwell: Because if the problem is that we're just not able if we raise the bar of what constitutes a high quality lead, something that should be handed over to sales, the natural then argument is, well, we're going to decrease.
[00:12:11] Jason Bradwell: Then the total volume of marketing qualified leads that are handed over to sales.
[00:12:16] Jason Bradwell: Which means that we're going to have a bunch of salespeople out there twiddling their thumbs, not sure what to do because they've got no one to chase up.
[00:12:22] Jason Bradwell: Which then raises like a fundamental organizational chart question have we got too many salespeople within our business?
[00:12:31] Jason Bradwell: Yeah, which is a hard conversation to have as a marketing consultant going into businesses, talking to leadership teams when we're trying to dig into this.
[00:12:42] Jason Bradwell: If the natural conclusion is, well, we're not going to have enough volume, the total conversion rate of what we send over is going to be higher and ultimately the pipeline and revenue is going to grow as such, which is great, that's what we all want.
[00:12:55] Jason Bradwell: But then we're going to have a bunch of salespeople just sitting around not sure what to do because the volume isn't there.
[00:13:00] Jason Bradwell: Well then what do we do with those salespeople?
[00:13:02] Jason Bradwell: Are we happy to keep them in the business?
[00:13:04] Jason Bradwell: Do we want to reassign them to other parts of the business?
[00:13:06] Jason Bradwell: Do we want to hire more marketers and invest in more channels in order to try and increase the total volume of leads we're bringing into the database, which then has a knock on effect to the number of leads that qualified leads that we end up generating.
[00:13:19] Jason Bradwell: I don't know, it's an easy thing for me to sit here and say, oh well, just raise the bar, but it can have serious business ramifications in terms of how you set up your organization.
[00:13:31] Jess Bahr: I think oftentimes the desire for more leads is driven from sales and sales saying we need more at bats, we need more coming down the pipe, we need more conversations, we need more happening.
[00:13:41] Jess Bahr: And so sales leadership will go to marketing leadership and say, hey, you're not giving us enough, give us more.
[00:13:46] Jess Bahr: And then it kind of trickles down and so marketing ends up hearing we need more leads.
[00:13:50] Jess Bahr: And so they go and just try to find more leads and more volume to come in.
[00:13:53] Jess Bahr: But really what the sellers need is more qualified at bats.
[00:13:57] Jess Bahr: So the solution isn't always giving them, don't give them exactly what they ask, give them what they need.
[00:14:03] Jess Bahr: So if they need more at bats, go to your database, go look at people they're already talking to.
[00:14:08] Jess Bahr: Can you get more qualified to come into conversation?
[00:14:11] Jess Bahr: Can you run something that will get timeliness there?
[00:14:14] Jess Bahr: You don't always have to go source like net new leads to flood the sales team with them if you can get more qualified in.
[00:14:20] Jess Bahr: But I think it comes down to that almost miscommunication and what they actually want with it.
[00:14:27] Jess Bahr: But I've often internally seen it driven from sellers wanting more versus marketing just overperforming on their own with it.
[00:14:36] Jason Bradwell: Yeah.
[00:14:36] Jason Bradwell: No, I agree.
[00:14:37] Jason Bradwell: And I think your point on kind of digging in the gold mine that you've already built with your established database and trying to reignite lapsed or closed opportunities from days gone by is a fantastic way of as you.
[00:14:54] Jason Bradwell: Say figuring out ways to help your sales team leverage those contacts and try and reopen conversations is a great way of marketing demonstrating its value.
[00:15:05] Jason Bradwell: I think ultimately it starts at the top, right.
[00:15:09] Jason Bradwell: I think sometimes marketing and sales are left to figure out this battle between themselves.
[00:15:16] Jason Bradwell: There's definitely ways for both teams to get more closely aligned on how they can be effective in capturing leads, nurturing them through the funnel and then ultimately closing them.
[00:15:28] Jason Bradwell: But the only way you get off this hamster wheel of volume, we need more leads.
[00:15:33] Jason Bradwell: Marketing go out and get them.
[00:15:35] Jason Bradwell: We need more higher quality leads.
[00:15:37] Jason Bradwell: Do a better job in filtering them is for leadership to come into the picture and say, look, we are as an organization taking the stance of capturing leads is a good thing.
[00:15:53] Jason Bradwell: We're raising the bar on what constitutes a marketing qualified lead.
[00:15:59] Jason Bradwell: We are spending more time thinking about the quality of that sales outreach workflow.
[00:16:08] Jason Bradwell: That it's not just a spammy cold email with zero personalization, that sales teams are incentivized and given the room to actually make that experience as good as all the marketing stuff that hopefully you're seeing up at the top.
[00:16:23] Jason Bradwell: And if in order to do that, we need to reassign individuals or restructure our organization, our chart across both marketing and sales to accommodate that approach, so be it.
[00:16:39] Jason Bradwell: Right?
[00:16:39] Jason Bradwell: It is something that just needs to get done.
[00:16:41] Jason Bradwell: When you've got 100 salespeople and three marketing people and you're on this volume hamster wheel, it is always going to be a recipe for disaster.
[00:16:50] Jason Bradwell: Marketing is never going to be able to never going to be able to achieve, let alone overachieve.
[00:16:57] Jason Bradwell: So it is a business, strategic business decision that needs to be taken.
[00:17:02] Jason Bradwell: It's not an easy one.
[00:17:03] Driving Organizational Change for Better Marketing and Sales Alignment

[00:17:03] Jason Bradwell: Particularly we were talking a little bit before this call.
[00:17:07] Jason Bradwell: My experience is predominantly working with organizations that are already well established.
[00:17:12] Jason Bradwell: They've been around for 10, 20, 30 years.
[00:17:14] Jason Bradwell: There is a status quo.
[00:17:15] Jason Bradwell: It's a really hard, really hard conversation to have and even harder to implement it within a company like that.
[00:17:22] Jason Bradwell: But ultimately it's going to be what keeps you alive as an organization.
[00:17:29] Jason Bradwell: There definitely needs to be a change, but how you roll out that change is important.
[00:17:33] Jess Bahr: Do you find that the change is often restructuring.
[00:17:37] Jess Bahr: So you have like an SDR team that is more closely aligned with marketing reporting to it.
[00:17:42] Jess Bahr: What is that often?
[00:17:44] Jess Bahr: Is it just getting leaders that are aligned?
[00:17:46] Jess Bahr: What does that usually look like?
[00:17:48] Jason Bradwell: I think getting aligned leadership is obviously incredibly important.
[00:17:52] Jason Bradwell: Especially aligned marketing and sales leadership that can present a if you are trying to enact change within your organization, bottom up.
[00:18:01] Jason Bradwell: Having an aligned marketing and sales leadership that can go to the board and present a new way of working is a really powerful thing because marketing try and doing it on their own.
[00:18:11] Jason Bradwell: In my experience is very hard if sales are trying to pull in a different direction because sales is usually deferred to as the deciding vote.
[00:18:20] Jason Bradwell: To your point about SDRs, whilst I have not worked within an organization myself where SDRs have sat under the marketing function, I've spoken to a lot of marketers that have got that set up and from what I can tell it seems to work very effectively.
[00:18:37] Jason Bradwell: Just having that kind of qualifying layer that is a little bit closer to marketing, that is a little bit more influenced by the marketing experience and ensuring that kind of initial qualification, one to one qualification with contacts is appropriate and meaningful.
[00:18:56] Jason Bradwell: I think that's the right way of going about it.
[00:19:00] Jess Bahr: I think marketing orgs that have BDRs or SDRs under them tend to be better aligned also with sales, with the number when you're essentially also responsible for it in such a meaningful way where if your marketing is just responsible for sending leads over to the sales team it really creates a divide between them.
[00:19:22] Jess Bahr: But if your marketing is touching so much of the sales process itself, I think it really helps drive alignment between the two organizations too.
[00:19:30] Jess Bahr: Or it makes your sales leader hate you because they want the BDRs you have them.
[00:19:37] Discussing the Concept of a Chief Revenue Officer Overseeing Sales and Marketing

[00:19:37] Jason Bradwell: What's your take on having a marketing and like a Chief Revenue officer and one individual responsible for both functions?
[00:19:47] Jess Bahr: I love it.
[00:19:48] Jess Bahr: Massive asterisks caveat here.
[00:19:51] Jess Bahr: I love it.
[00:19:51] Jess Bahr: But I think that when we look at our current generation of sales and marketing leadership that have 30 40 years of work experience, I think they often came up in a world where marketing sales were greatly divided.
[00:20:09] Jess Bahr: And so if you're going to be a one unified leader who is running sales and marketing together, you need to really have, I think a track record of having worked closely with your partner, partnering with them, being on the same page and existing in a world where you understand the other function.
[00:20:27] Jess Bahr: There are so many horrific leaders who are really good at sales, who don't understand marketing but think they do and because they think they know how it works.
[00:20:36] Jess Bahr: I said this before, no one thinks they're a marketer.
[00:20:40] Jess Bahr: Like a technical co founder who's never done marketing.
[00:20:43] Jess Bahr: A lot of people think marketing is easy.
[00:20:46] Jess Bahr: I think a lot of salespeople think marketing is easy because they only see one facet of it.
[00:20:50] Jess Bahr: And so if you are a leader who's going to take both functions, I think you need a track record of having really worked well with those other functions in the past and really understanding it from a personal standpoint.
[00:21:03] Jess Bahr: On the marketing side, I am never feeling at risk of losing my job at the end of the quarter, if I don't hit my goals, I'm at risk of losing budget.
[00:21:11] Jess Bahr: It might be harder to get buy in, but on the sales side, if you don't hit your quota, that's a different risk experience than marketing hitting it.
[00:21:18] Jess Bahr: And a lot of marketers haven't been in that seat.
[00:21:19] Jess Bahr: They don't understand little nuances like that.
[00:21:23] Jess Bahr: So I think it can be really effective when it's the right people at the helm.
[00:21:28] Jess Bahr: Andrea Kyle, who was the CMO at Electric, just took a CRO role.
[00:21:32] Jess Bahr: She's going to crush it.
[00:21:33] Jess Bahr: I'm confident she will absolutely crush it because she's always been from my interactions with her, she's always been a very revenue focused marketer.
[00:21:40] Jess Bahr: So that like 100% confidence.
[00:21:42] Jess Bahr: There are marketers I know that should not be in that combined role because they hate sales, they just don't get it.
[00:21:48] Jess Bahr: So I think it's really good when done well, but it's really risky if you get the wrong person in there.
[00:21:54] Jason Bradwell: Yeah.
[00:21:54] Jess Bahr: What are your thoughts on it?
[00:21:57] Jason Bradwell: I'm pretty much with you.
[00:21:59] Jason Bradwell: I just feel that well, I think there's two things.
[00:22:03] Jason Bradwell: I think one, it depends on where your organization is at, like, what stage is your organization at?
[00:22:09] Jason Bradwell: If you're working in a really early days like Seed Startup Series A, maybe just out of necessity, having an individual who can wear a lot of different hats, it makes sense.
[00:22:22] Jason Bradwell: And as you're building out processes and just starting to get traction, having that one individual who can just have a 360 view of the entire marketing sales experience and make quick decisions on how to set it up and improve it can be a good thing.
[00:22:41] Jason Bradwell: I think as you grow the organization and you start adding, I mean, marketing, as you know, is just like such a complex function.
[00:22:48] Jason Bradwell: There's just so many different facets to it.
[00:22:50] Jason Bradwell: Right?
[00:22:51] Jason Bradwell: There's product, there's growth, there's brand, there's content, there's comms, et cetera.
[00:22:57] Jason Bradwell: And then all these subcategories underneath all of these.
[00:23:00] Jason Bradwell: Yeah.
[00:23:00] Jess Bahr: I'm picturing a sales leader on a call with a PR agency trying to figure out an upcoming press release for a new product feature.
[00:23:11] Jason Bradwell: It would be tough, right?
[00:23:13] Jason Bradwell: For nine out of ten people, it would be tough.
[00:23:16] Jason Bradwell: I just think as you start to scale that organization, you start introducing these specific disciplines, like marketing disciplines within the company.
[00:23:26] Jason Bradwell: I think the pool of individuals that can really confidently take on that chief revenue role and be responsible for marketing and sales just gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
[00:23:38] Jess Bahr: Agree.
[00:23:39] Jason Bradwell: Right.
[00:23:40] Jason Bradwell: And I think you get to a point where you're trying to chase a unicorn.
[00:23:44] Jason Bradwell: Not that they don't necessarily exist.
[00:23:46] Jason Bradwell: If you talk to my four year old they very much are out there they're just very hard to find at the end.
[00:23:52] Jess Bahr: I agree with that completely.
[00:23:54] Jess Bahr: Yeah, I agree that completely, yes.
[00:23:58] Jess Bahr: And especially depending on what side of marketing you're coming up from I think I am biased towards revenue at all times.
[00:24:05] Jess Bahr: I came up on the demand gen growth side predominantly when I was in other functions at Martech companies I was still in a role where I was helping clients drive revenue with marketing.
[00:24:14] Jess Bahr: So my approach to marketing is that marketing exists to make sales easier.
[00:24:18] Jess Bahr: That is the sole purpose of existing.
[00:24:21] Jess Bahr: Everything is designed to make sales easier to get the product out there right.
[00:24:25] Jess Bahr: So there's definitely marketers I know who are phenomenal at brand and corporate comms who I think would really struggle in a role where they had to also own the sales function.
[00:24:37] Jess Bahr: There's not a lot of candidates for it but if you can find them it could be impactful.
[00:24:41] Jason Bradwell: Oh, definitely, I mean it could help your company completely.
[00:24:43] Jason Bradwell: Just like rocket fuel basically but yeah, I just think the pool of potential candidates is relatively small and because of their talents are quite expensive.
[00:24:58] Jason Bradwell: I think as the company scales, having two leaders is the right way to go forward.
[00:25:02] Jess Bahr: I think what we're also taking from this is if you're a seller who understands marketing or a marketer understands sales, get in that function and charge ton.
[00:25:13] Jason Bradwell: And probably you could go and work in house but you probably make an absolute killing doing it on your own, right?
[00:25:19] Jason Bradwell: Like a fractional CRO or something like that.
[00:25:22] Jess Bahr: Yeah, it is a to the freelance consultant right now with it very interesting.
[00:25:28] Jess Bahr: Yeah I think traditionally if sales and marketing aren't combined under one CRO type leader, typically you'd have marketing eventually reports into COO and then you're asking for alignment at a different level with it too.
[00:25:44] Jess Bahr: The more layers there are of I think reporting into different functions the more complicated it can get and the more risk there is a miscommunication.
[00:25:53] Jason Bradwell: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:25:55] Jason Bradwell: I heard an interesting thing.
[00:25:56] Jason Bradwell: I was reading an article the other day.
[00:25:59] Jason Bradwell: I forget the name of the company, but they basically did away with their marketing and their sales team and they essentially restructured to go against the different stages like Unaware, Problem Aware, Solution Aware, Product Aware, I think.
[00:26:18] Jason Bradwell: And then most aware, I think, with the five.
[00:26:21] Jason Bradwell: And then so they would throw in a combination of their former marketing and sales professionals against each of those stages.
[00:26:30] Jason Bradwell: And it was just a test, so it was a bit too early.
[00:26:32] Jason Bradwell: I don't think the article gave any specific results but I just thought it was an interesting way of instead of looking at it as like marketing and sales it's instead like repositioning it across through a lens of the customer and their stages of awareness and then building out an.org chart that maps up against that.
[00:26:49] Jason Bradwell: It'd be interesting to see how that pans out.
[00:26:51] Jess Bahr: That is interesting.
[00:26:52] Jess Bahr: I ran a growth team in that structure just on the marketing side at one point where we had someone who just owned awareness, someone who owned once they came into our system, how do we get them to start qualifying and splitting it?
[00:27:05] Jess Bahr: And it was pretty impactful, but I would imagine that that in smaller, let's say, like mid sized small organizations would be really powerful.
[00:27:14] Jess Bahr: I can't imagine a large enterprise being able to really enact it at scale.
[00:27:19] Jess Bahr: Who knows, maybe it's the new matrix.org structure.
[00:27:22] Jason Bradwell: Maybe.
[00:27:22] Jason Bradwell: I mean, then you start getting into a personnel problem where if you're trying to hire a VP who historically have labeled themselves as a VP of Sales, and now they're kind of coming in as, like a VP of solution awareness or whatever?
[00:27:40] Jason Bradwell: Are they going to want that on their LinkedIn profile as they're thinking about their next kind of role 36 months down the line?
[00:27:47] Jason Bradwell: To your point about enterprise, like as you're trying to hire a lot of people to help facilitate that, that's a perception thing as well.
[00:27:54] Jess Bahr: I feel like this type of organization would have a flat structure where everyone would have the same title too.
[00:28:02] Jess Bahr: Yeah, Director of Growth.
[00:28:05] Jason Bradwell: Exactly.
[00:28:05] Jess Bahr: Director of Growth for this stage, for everything on the inside.
[00:28:09] Jason Bradwell on Jess Bahr's Show Discussing His Podcast and Platform

[00:28:09] Jess Bahr: Well, Jason, thank you so much for joining the show today.
[00:28:12] Jess Bahr: If people are looking to hear more from your podcast, learn more about you, where do they go?
[00:28:18] Jason Bradwell: So if you search B two B better, you'll come across my podcast and my website WW dot b two Bbetter.com.
[00:28:27] Jason Bradwell: You can follow me on Twitter at jason rbradwell.
[00:28:31] Jason Bradwell: But I'm spending more time on LinkedIn these days, ever since Elon took over.
[00:28:35] Jason Bradwell: So just search.
[00:28:35] Jason Bradwell: Jason bradwell.
[00:28:36] Jason Bradwell: I've got the bright yellow background.
[00:28:38] Jason Bradwell: You can't miss me.
[00:28:39] Jess Bahr: Perfect.
[00:28:39] Jess Bahr: And we'll put all of the links in the show notes below and we'll see you guys on the next episode.