Special Guest - Pete Steege

0:04 Thank you for joining us on the Willing It Selling Podcast. I'm Professor Scott Plumb of the Minnesota Sales Institute, and with me is Bill Hellkamp of Reach Development Systems. Sales and marketing should work together closely to craft messages that engage customers and encourage them to consider a product or service. Unfortunately, this is not always true. Quite often marketing is more interested in winning awards, and sales doesn't pay attention to the messages that marketing is sending out.

0:31 And the result is confused prospects. And confused prospects wait or say no. What's to be done? Break out your marketing materials. Scott and I welcome B2B growth strategist and author, Pete Staggy, to discuss how marketing support sales and other valuable viewpoints on episode 663 of the Winning It Selling Podcast. Well, I'm really looking forward to that conversation with Pete and kind of the collaboration between sales and marketing and how they work together and support each other.

1:04 And I love the introduction. Or how they don't work together and support each other. Well, sometimes they're independent and they're called divisions because they're divided from everybody else in the company. But for those of you that are following along at home, we are doing the book The One Thing by Gary Keller. We are not covering any of the chapters today since we want to give all of our time with Pete. But next week, when we get together, we'll be doing chapters 16 and 17.

1:28 So you've got an extra week to prepare for those two chapters. That's going to be fun. All right, well, let me introduce our guest. What happens when a brilliant tech founder suddenly becomes a CEO and realizes they're in over their head? Today's guest, Pete Staggy, knows that story well. He's a B2B gross strategist and the founder of B2B Clarity, where he helps accidental CEOs, technical experts, turned leaders, gain clarity, build trust, and scale smart.

1:58 With decades of experience in the tech world, Pete's upcoming book offers a roadmap for founders learning to lead. Get ready for practical insights on growth, leadership, and doing business with purpose. Pete, welcome to the Winning It's Sewing podcast. Bill, thanks so much. And Scott, Professor Plum, I've been such an honor to be on your podcast today. You guys, 661 episodes, that's incredible. Yeah, well, it starts as an honor and then it gets worse.

2:26 So obligation. So you start. You start. Oh, well. I'll tell you what, this is going to be exciting because this whole merger, this communication between sales and marketing is just so crucial. And so much money and time is wasted. We see it from the sales side, right? We see that salespeople, they just ignore what's going on. They walk into a client, the client, a prospect. And the prospect says, well, I was really interested in this that I saw.

2:58 And they go, we don't do anything like that. OK, great. So we just blew all the money we spent on that. So we know CEO should be concerned about business development. Since that's really the engine that drives the whole business. And we see an important connection between sales and marketing and how they work together. So let's start talking about that. What are some of the issues that you CP'd and what can be done about?

3:22 Let's give you the whole floor. Well, I absolutely can recognize what you just talked about, having lived it in the marketing seat so many times and also working with CEOs on their business and that all tension between sales and marketing that's always there. What I see as some of the core things going on that I'd like to unwrap a little bit is, one, sales wants the company to win, just like everybody else. Marketing mostly wants the company to win like everybody else.

4:03 So everybody wants the same thing at the end of the day. I think that what's getting in the way with these problems is lack of alignment, lack of clarity, really. And people aren't all pointing the same way. Or they have the same motive, but they don't have a common shared vision of what we're here to do. Why is it that we're here? And it's that difference in perspective and difference in metrics, if you will, between the organizations that create a breakdown.

4:38 So for me, it's a lot about when I work with CEOs related to sales issues or marketing and sales issues, which frankly, so many different companies define that line between sales and marketing in different ways. So it's not like there's a universal accepted definition for V2B sales and marketing on where that it depends on your business model. It depends on what you're selling. It depends on the market. It depends on the technology that your customers use as far as what sales does to make it happen and what marketing does to make it happen.

5:15 So I often like to think of marketing and sales as business development or revenue generation or things like that as a whole. But anyway, I'll stop there for now. It's this idea of clarity around a common goal. If you start with that, it makes all the tactics easier to agree on in a line. And I think we're seeing a lot more of that business development, umbrella being used by companies. So they're talking about BizDev, and they're not talking about sales and marketing as separate strategies.

5:48 And I think that's good. Now, a lot of companies have put that leadership, a VP of sales and marketing together. Have you seen that helping or do we still have this conflict at one level down where the marketing manager and the sales manager now, both report to the same person, but we're still not communicating? I agree with you, Bill. I'm seeing a lot of Chief Revenue Officer roles coming in, which is that commonplace.

6:13 And I've worked with clients on building what I call a revenue office. So regardless of the leader, it's a function that covers both of those needs. That loan doesn't solve it. If you have a boss over just lowering the level of joint management, if you haven't first, starting with the CEO, it has to begin with the CEO or it has to be involved. Having a clear agreement with everyone on the team, so that sales and marketing, but it's everyone.

6:47 It's the product team as well on what I call the true story of the business. Why are we here? Why have we created this venture? Why do we come in every day or get online every day? Who do we do this for? Exactly who do we do it for. I'm a big fan of, you cannot be too focused. We can talk about that if you want. But having that clear agreed vision of who we're doing it for and what is the value that they get from working with us?

7:22 So that what is the value of our product or service? Or the relationship, the whole thing, right? The engagement. I like to say sales and marketing, their purpose is to create relationships between customers and businesses. The revenue comes out of that valuable relationship, right? The relationship is the meaning that motivates them to take the call or to do the research or to commit to buy or to stay, right? All of that comes because they have a reason to do it that's good for them.

8:02 Finding that relationship often gets lost. And that's back to your very first example. I think salespeople are right up front on that relationship motive, right? That's part of their job. And if that's great, but if their view of how to have a successful relationship doesn't align with that true story, then it's gonna be at odds with how marketing is defining the successful relationship. So from a sales standpoint, and I can't not take my sales hat off, I'm gonna see marketing as pre-relationship.

8:40 Your job is to grease the skids for me so that when I make that call or I make that contact, they know who we are and they have some idea of what we do. Do you think marketing has a role beyond that pre-relationship? And I see sales taking it over from there and making that a close relationship? Yeah, can marketing do something to help continue to drive that relationship or not? Yeah, see, I believe, what you said is absolutely true

9:08 from the customer acquisition side. But I do believe that marketing has a very valuable role through the entire customer lifecycle. And in some ways, if you have account management, sales could, and again, back to the definition, you could say, well, sales is actually upfront because they're acquiring the clients and it gets handed off to account management, whereas marketing, in my definition of marketing, that focus on creating that relationship, it starts well before they know who we are, it thought leadership, building that true story and communicating it to the market, providing the tools, that's the messages, the artifacts, the whatever it might be that gives sales

9:59 what they need to communicate that value that creates a relationship. So that's what I think you're talking about. That is so important in that customer acquisition phase. But in my opinion, marketing has a continuing role with existing customer relationships. And well, in B2B, I'll say especially because let's say we land a contract and it's B2B, it's a strategic contract, it's $100,000. Everybody did all that work, most likely

10:34 because they plan to buy again. Maybe next week and maybe in three years when they re-up the contract, but the best case for everybody is that we chose a good partner and we have a relationship that's gonna continue, right? So for that reason, as soon as that contract is won, marketing's job is now reset to be, well, how do we win again? How do we sign that client again? And it's different, right? Of course it's different.

11:04 It's no longer about what they read externally or what they find in a search on Google. It's more likely how marketing helps sales or account management or the product team create a path to continued value for that reorder. And so marketing has a really important role in that as well. He's got, I'm gonna let you, I know I'm absorbing this conversation. But you talk about car ads. Yeah. So bring that up though, kind of what your value or what you say.

11:40 I'm sorry I've been quiet, I've been listening to Pete, I forgot I'm part of the co-host here. So really, it's listening to everything Pete's going to, the car ads I call those, after the sales sale is that we have to continue to reinforce somebody's decision to buy from us through advertising, through marketing, through whatever impressions that have credibility and influence on somebody. And instead exactly do that, what you just talked about Pete is that that second sale.

12:05 And I think too often sometimes sales departments end up turning their sales representatives the ones that are going out, the hunters bringing in the new business. And then all of a sudden they're turning them to account managers where now they have to manage the account. And then their skills start to dull and we've talked about that in previous episodes. But I love the idea of marketing maintaining that presence and defining the reputation that the company has with the customer or the client after the sale.

12:31 So I really love how marketing really reinforces that. And in fact the definition of the difference between marketing and sales, I was looking at marketing as everything that happened before a prospect identifies themselves, raises their hand for a sales person. Now a sales person starts talking with them, via an email or filling out a form or a chat or cold call or inbound call. And now we've got a sales person that's trying to carry the ball across the finish line.

12:54 And that's where I think some companies really fall down as those sales people don't take that marketing interest and convert it into a commitment. How can sales be more supportive of the marketing efforts and what can sales people do to be able to manage that process of committing to the sale after marketing has started the conversation? So I think a key part of that is back to alignment topic that sales and marketing have first got on the same team for this process.

13:26 If when you have a culture, and I think all three of us know this happens a lot, where sales, the sales culture or the sales team has their definition of how to find clients, how to nurture clients, how to close deals. And they have an over the wall relationship with marketing. So well, we'll see what marketing gives us next month. Oh, well, here's what I got from marketing. Here's the leads I got. Here's the story I'm supposed to tell.

14:03 Here's the slides I'm gonna use. Whatever they think of it, when it's this arms length transaction, it fails because back to that relationship,

14:17 if you don't agree upfront on what the end goal, what the end promise is, not just a brand thing, right? The end promise includes the product and the relationship that sales is gonna build, because that trust, right? We all know trust creates commitment. Without trust, it's not gonna happen. Without relationship, you're not gonna have trust. So to kind of answer your question, what sales can do, I mean, this is where, of course, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the CEO.

14:48 The CEO has the biggest opportunity to make this happen by starting and getting this team aligned, because it's his team. And it's a culture thing, it's an organizational design thing. He can help that a lot. But let's say what can sales do by themselves? Let's say that the CEO's not doing that. Sales has the opportunity to create awareness about this gap, rather than just complaining about the tactical pieces that are not right, sales can bring to higher management the issue of overall purpose in aligning, these things we were talking about.

15:38 Because I think sales misses the opportunity when they complain about operational tactical shortcomings that are actually root-caused by this more important alignment. So it's asking the CEO, do we know, what does success look like? Can we agree on that? Another thing sales can do is own their power as the closest to the customer.

16:13 Businesses that are successful are customer-focused. That's a cliche. But it's really, really true in B2B that so many businesses are inside out. You just go to any, go to a lot of B2B, especially tech websites, and you'll see so much information about the product and the capabilities and the features and what we can do or our capabilities, we're so good and all may be true. But that's you talking about you. And customers that are really successful are talking about how I can solve your problem.

16:54 The how we do it is the next thing, right? And so sales has the opportunity to be the evangelist, the leader for the company related to the voice of the prospect. And if your company culture is customer-focused,

17:15 that's so important, right? That's your power as a sales team. So rather than complaining about what marketing is doing, what can sales leadership do to make sure the message that's going out is the same one that their people are talking about when they get into that prospect's office? First thing is rather than just take it, you need to have a conversation about the message and its alignment with that truth about the company.

17:46 Okay. So for example, hey marketing, great. This is really good product information. I don't see anything about our overall XYZ, our story, our value, things we've said to the clients about our promise. Or hey, I've been using this content you shared with me and it's not resonating.

18:12 And here's a story that happened to me yesterday on a call. Here's a quote from a client, get back to that voice of prospect. Right, right. You can't fight with, you know, they can, because they're so often internal or internally focused businesses or functions, there's these groupthink meetings that happen where they've all convinced themselves that this is how the customer thinks. Right. Well, they can't, that is totally overcome by the actual words of the client or words, multiple words of the client.

18:47 So what sales can do is then it's take that message they're hearing from the client back to marketing and saying here's what's resonating, here's what's not resonating, here's where we're talking differently about this product or the customer is asking different things than you're marketing to. Yeah. Get that voice of the customer back to marketing so they have a better grasp of what's working and what's not. Another thing that sales can do is I find that there's often a disconnect when it comes to metrics.

19:17 What's a good lead, right? Is it, you know, how is the SQL or the MQL or the, you know, all the different acronyms? Those acronyms are internal names that are being used because they fit on a funnel chart or in a spreadsheet or in a CRM system. And they are important, but what happens is conversations about customer success get oriented around these internal measures

19:53 rather than what's really happening for success. So it's kind of a parallel to this idea of sharing the words of the customer in the interactions with marketing rather than just pulling up the CRM chart. Sales leadership can start, I wouldn't create a separate funnel, I'm not saying that, but in your conversation with what's working and what's not don't limit yourself to the SQLs and the MQLs and the metric charts. Talk about their behavior and why the lead was bad.

20:33 Maybe don't even use the word bad. What you know about the lead. Off target perhaps. Off target or just here's what the lead is. Here's what they said. Here's, you know, here's the response we got. The good leads talk about those too.

20:51 Wow, this was, you know, this is that positive reinforcement like parents know, celebrate marketing. You know, that's powerful. That doesn't happen very often. But it's really- We've got to be getting some good leads out there, right? So I think that's great. Let's give them a vision of both what's working and what's not working. And by doing that on a continuous basis, they're going to hone their message to get you that proper prospect more often.

21:19 Yep. Just listening to how you described the two working together, Pete, I came up with this short sort of question in my mind and it has three parts to it. And it is, what do we do for who and why? Yes. So what do we do, it's the unique selling proposition that we stand out from, for who the ideal customer profile and why the emotional reasons why they engage with us. Yes. And they're just living that question can create a lot of synergy and a lot of friction and a lot of clarity.

21:49 And if we do some genealogy, looking back at our best customers, our best sales, what are three attributes that describe the best perfect ideal customer profile? And once we start targeting that in the future, it's amazing how much synergy you can have between sales and marketing. And I think that that sometimes kind of falls down is there's a market segment and the salespeople address market segments differently, but marketing doesn't have a different message for that particular segment.

22:16 So now it's not a big segment, so then sales is on their own going, yeah, it's a small part of our business. You guys figured out on your own. Wait a minute, that's greatest potential because maybe it's a leading product that like you said earlier, creates the second sale in the future, but we need to be able to invest in getting them to be a customer before we can make future sales to them. Any experiences that you can elaborate on that particular scenario?

22:37 Scott, those three questions are perfect, right? The great thing about them, they are literally what I call the true story that I have with customers fine. And all three of those questions, every function in the business can help answer those questions.

22:57 And if you do that together, you're guaranteed to be aligned. Exactly. That's the power of it, is that all the question, all the friction, I almost say 100% of friction

23:14 comes from people not having clarity and alignment around the answers to those three questions. And the answers aren't easy and they're not gonna be complete. Those questions are an ever answered, constantly answered evolving set of answers, but that's really the growth path of your business. That defines the priorities of the business, the gaps between those, that's another thing I'd love to say.

23:46 A really powerful tool for an organization, for a CEO, but also for sales, for anybody, is a gap analysis between related to those answers between what success looks like in a customer journey and where you're at today. So an exercise I like to go through with clients is, we'll come up with that true story today. What's our answer to those three questions? And then we say, okay, now let's do a thought experiment for that target who we've defined.

24:18 And let's maybe talk some more about what is that, who is that, what do they like, what do they care, you know, that's that persona stuff, persona stuff. Now let's map their journey, their experience journey, that will bring us success given what we said we do, who we're doing it for and what the result is. So start with somebody who doesn't even know who we are, but they're in that target. And then go through, I have seven steps in my, in my customer journey, but go through and say, okay, well, what happens in our view, what do we think, what do we want to happen that takes them from not hearing about us to knowing who we are, from knowing who we are

24:59 to being curious about the solution, right? On the way through to longtime user advocate of us. So you do that once and you brainstorm on what does that look like? Cause we have a vision for it. That's what's, that's the detail behind those, answer those three questions is, we believe it's valuable. So this is what will happen, they have this problem, research it, they'll, et cetera. Then you go back through those seven steps and say, what is it like today?

25:30 What's the ugly reality? And you can go down to a level of sales. What's getting in the way? What's our role in that journey? Where do we step in at step two, is it step three? How do we know when it's our turn? You know, it's a, it's a model that pretty simply allows everyone to understand their role in the overall success of those answering those three questions or delivering those three questions. Where it's broken, where it's not broken.

26:04 Cause that's another thing. Successful sales organizations and sales and marketing organizations don't treat every task with the same priority. And that's a big problem in business today is overwhelmed because tactics are so easy to spin up that people do them because they're free and you end up getting overwhelmed with activity. And we all know there's certain things that really need attention that should be taking our time.

26:35 And this process helps you to get to those priorities as well. But you get to them in a way that's aligned with everybody else, because that common view is the whole operation. So you talked a little bit, Pete, about, you know, driving this down. And so most of our listeners are salespeople. We've been talking about sales leadership. Let's focus it down a little bit more on the salesperson. When they're not happy with marketing, they tend to just bitch about it and not really do anything about it.

27:04 What can they do actively? You talked about taking that voice of the customer back to marketing or up to their leadership so they can take it back to marketing. Is there anything else that the sales, the regular run of the mill, the street salesperson can do to continue to hone this message? I think one thing I'll just reiterate is at the salesperson level, they are the tip of the spear of the voice of the prospect. So it's not just the sales organization, it's all the more clear some value they have in that every individual salesperson has this precious access to real-time conversations with the prospects.

27:49 That's gold, right? So leaning into that, knowing what you have, that's valuable rather than complaining about your lack of leads or your struggle to close deals because of marketing exists in that,

28:06 that's not gonna pull a lot of weight because that's you complain, they would view that as you complaining about your job. Do your job, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got you the prospect, go out and sell them. Yeah, and quit whining. Yeah, well, that's harsh, but it's really good at that. It's just people are good at that, you know, yeah. Versus, hey, let me tell you about a conversation I had yesterday with my ex-YZ.

28:29 So make it valuable, don't just make it complaining. Make it valuable, make it about them. Again, back to you, now you're not talking about poor you. Yeah. You're talking about what the customer said and how you don't have the tools you need to give that. Remember we all agreed, guys, these are the three questions. I don't have what I need to do what we said. Or the clue. Here's why it's what they said, right? Yeah, or that message is getting muddled.

28:56 That message is muddled. Or into the client. And that solves a lot. Yeah, or into the client. Or into the client. All right, Scott, you got one final question where we're running out of time, unfortunately, it goes very fast. So Scott, you have one question. Great stuff. Great stuff, Pete. My question, then I asked this of every guest that comes on the show, is what book or author leader has been most influential in your career or your life?

29:20 I love to read. So I'm going to share, well, first of all, Jim Collins, Seth Godin, Simon Scenic, I'll mention them because they're kind of to me their classics. I go back to their work a lot. But I wanted to share a new one, Chris Lockhead. I don't know if you guys have heard of him. He's written several books, one's called Niche Down. He's a visionary about category design, which is this idea that every company can become a leader in their space, a category leader, by designing the category.

29:57 Break down the leader. And to me, that's just so powerful. I love to say from him, it's better to be different than better. And it's this idea of if you're different, if you're uniquely differentiated, you can't be as easily compared to anybody else. So their alternatives start to go to zero if you clearly find a unique value and talk about that. So that's been really meaningful. Say that name again. Lockhead, it's spelled kind of unusually L-O-C-H-E-A-D.

30:31 OK. So that's two H's in the middle. Interesting. Great. Excellent. And one of my favorite authors is Pete Steghe. And he's got a new book coming out. So Pete, I want to give you a minute or two to tell us about your new book that's coming out very soon, I think. Thanks, Bill. It's called Radical Clarity. We've talked a lot about what that means. But the subtitle is how accidental CEOs uncover meaning, inspire their team, and accelerate their growth.

31:05 So it's this idea of, I think, a superpower for businesses and CEOs that are these technical leaders that are now in the CEO seat in B2B to rather than do more and add on to the craziness, slow down, get clear. And some of the ways we talked about the true story and use that clarity to unite, align the team, accelerate growth. It just solves a lot of problems. So the book's about how to use clarity as a business accelerator, really.

31:40 And that'll be coming out in May. In May? OK. All right. And I assume we go to any major site, Amazon or whatever. Absolutely. It'll be on the Amazon. Yep. OK. In goal, there'll be an audio version as well. And if you want to get hold of Pete or learn more about what he's doing, B2B-clarity.com, B2B-clarity.com. You'll find out more about him on that. So thank you. A great interview. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah, thanks Pete.

32:08 Great stuff. It is great talking with you guys today. I really enjoyed it. And if you want to make any comments, we're going to just wrap up the show here. And so Scott, you've got a golden nugget we finished. Golden Nugget is the objective of marketing is to make selling superfluous. What's that one? Scott shouldn't choose superfluous. Superfluous, yeah, which is to make easier. Actually, I think it means to make it not necessary.

32:34 Really? My dad always used to say that your work here is superfluous, which means making its job easier. No, I think Pete, I'll let you be the voice on this. Awkward. I don't think I'm going to tell that. I think superfluous means not necessary. Not necessary. Well, I guess I picked the. That was by Peter Drucker. I don't think he was really thinking. Well, Peter Drucker is a marketing guy. He didn't know what he was thinking when he said that.

32:58 He did know what he was thinking when he said that. Whoops, I'll do better next time. All right, maybe look up the words you don't know. OK. That's not all right. Well, in addition to quotes that make selling superfluous, we're going to go to winningasselling.com. All the information to show notes are there. That's episode 663. Great. And next week, we're going to be talking about defining yourself. And again, the book, The One Thing by Gary Keller, we're going to be doing chapter 16 and 17.

33:31 So please subscribe and show us podcasts with your colleagues on your social media network. Go out and get better one skill at a time. Joyful selling.