Can marketing really be the strategic powerhouse of a go-to-market engine? We're challenging the old-school notion that marketing merely plays second fiddle to sales. Tune in to our latest GTM Pro Podcast episode, where we dissect the evolution of go-to-market strategies for B2B software and services companies in the lower middle market. We confront the assumption that marketing should be in service to sales and instead, illustrate how it's a critical driver of revenue growth. We underscore the value of aligning sales and marketing under a unified strategy with a crystal-clear understanding of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Andrei Zinkevich's Post
How to Market Internally - April Dunford
gtmPRO.co
Can marketing really be the strategic powerhouse of a go-to-market engine? We're challenging the old-school notion that marketing merely plays second fiddle to sales. Tune in to our latest GTM Pro Podcast episode, where we dissect the evolution of go-to-market strategies for B2B software and services companies in the lower middle market. We confront the assumption that marketing should be in service to sales and instead, illustrate how it's a critical driver of revenue growth. We underscore the value of aligning sales and marketing under a unified strategy with a crystal-clear understanding of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Andrei Zinkevich's Post
How to Market Internally - April Dunford
gtmPRO.co
Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies, especially those with less than $50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support. Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now.
Tiana:Now, good day to everyone listening to us. This is a GTM Pro podcast, delivered to you weekly, ready to spark that go-to-market light bulb for the lower middle market. So this week is a little different. We don't have our star Gary, with us. We miss you very much, gary, but we still prepared a topic for you and Andy and I will be giving a brief introduction to it. So, first things first, let's define the lower middle market. These types of companies tend to be in the $5 to $50 million revenue range per year, but we often see our sweet spot being in the $10 to $30 million in revenue. These are the companies that we work with and, well, I hope you enjoy it. And he's going to give you a little more background, and I'll jump again if needed.
Andy:A lot of these companies we work with are bootstrap. They're founder led. By being founder led, that tends to be the lead salesperson for a lot of these companies, and so what we're talking about today is relevant to that, because we're really talking about marketing's role within the content of that situation and how that often starts out and how that often evolves, where, again, sales is typically started and led by a founder who knows the product they oftentimes had a hand in building the product and then they start selling it on behalf of the company and that's they. They're bootstrapped. They are maybe a little bit of uh, early stage sort of seed money, uh, maybe some, maybe some private equity, or maybe they they had a venture round, but an initial one and and then they had didn't have any subsequent ones. So they're, they're in that position to be kind of the head sales leader and and what we often see is that's the beginning Then they try to replicate themselves because they need to scale, so they need to hire additional salespeople and, by definition, the company kind of becomes sales led and then marketing becomes an afterthought right and marketing oftentimes, you know, maybe they're hiring somebody, you know, marketing being in service to sales or marketing being an internal agency where they kind of do a bunch of tasks for the company. They almost they almost like have their own ticketing. And this has actually happened in my experiences that you know, marketing has their own ticketing system. They're they're like doing things for the company and in a situation that's you know, a smaller company, it's sales led, they're doing things for sales, they're creating all the materials there, they're obviously generating leads for sales.
Andy:And so this, this LinkedIn post that we're referring to, by one of the co-founders of Full Funnel, his name's Andre Linkovich. He's really talking about that and it's it's all. It's all fine that and it's it's all, it's all fine. But what really? What really struck us is that it kind of really referred to marketing doing these things for sales. Like sales is, you know, it's kind of the hero in the, in the story, and then marketing is kind of supporting them in that. So the tone of it is marketing do these things like so sales can succeed.
Andy:And that kind of smacked us in the face a little bit, where, you know, we kind of thought about it and thought about a euphemism we use, which is this notion of team pudding, this notion of team pudding which we sometimes refer to sales teams as and it harkens back to my experience working with a day camp, working as a counselor in a day camp where after lunch sometimes we'd have pudding for dessert and the kids would sit there with their spoons, sitting at their picnic tables, and start beating on the table saying we want our pudding, we want our pudding, and so sometimes you know when again it's tongue in cheek we think about this and we, when we hear the sales team kind of demanding things, especially from marketing, especially from the company, when in fact marketing, right, should be a very strategic role. That's what this is all about. Right, marketing should be strategic. Sales and marketing obviously work together. The CEO is responsible for leading all this. It should be very focused. Marketing should be focused, sales should be focused. They should be focused on the same things, which starts with the right segment, the right targeted audience, what we call ICP.
Andy:Right, and we really like an article that Emily Kramer published about selling marketing internally to a company. The exact post name is how to market marketing internally, and that can be tough if you've already kind of established yourself as an internal agency and run around and do things in a reactionary way within a company Like to say I'm suddenly going to be of remind yourself of these things and the process around establishing the right frame of reference for go to market and marketing specifically as it pertains to, you know, an entire go-to-market engine and being decisive in that. So we kind of jump right in and start talking here about this post on LinkedIn that we referred to what sales wants from marketing. That's literally the first sentence of this LinkedIn post, and so we talk about the, the different aspects of that, but really from the, from the context of like we, we don't necessarily agree that it's really up to sales to dictate what marketing provides. It's. It's absolutely a two-way street and it's a team sport and we're really all trying to achieve the same.
Tiana:Yeah like there should be shared metrics, there should be shared goals, there should be things that, like, every part of the company is working towards, for and not exactly marketing, working for sales and product working for sales and customer success, working with whatever lands on their table once they've achieved all these deals, just for the sake of achieving them and for getting a number. And we also think that, well, metrics should change and they, they should be more driven to what their, what the icp is, and just focus it on that. Because if you just give marketing the idea of getting more leads, then they will just try to get more leads. And and if you just give marketing the idea of getting more leads, then they will just try to get more leads. And and if you just increment sales quota, they're just going to try to hit those deals whatever they are, and they're just not thinking holistically in like a go-to-market perspective. And they this is our icp and this is what we want and this is how we get there and they all work together towards it.
Andy:Anyway, the point there is, if you act like an agency, you're going to be treated like an agency, meaning like you're this laundry list of tasks, right? So people ask you for you know, obviously sales is always asking for content and battle cards and stuff to do with their sales process when it really was at one point and it's tough to to come back from that more strategic and like put a foot down and like put a stake in the ground and start to be more strategic at a, at a place that you've already kind of established that you're willing to take on these tasks and be very, you know, task driven and have like a, a queue of things that you're producing for the rest of the company that they've asked for, that you didn't even really vet whether that was the right thing to do on behalf of your ICP. And to me that's what it all boils down to is you, as the marketer, have to come in and establish some of those core things, whether they exist or not. You can't sit there and flounder and just be like I'm going to take on these tasks that sales is asking for. They need this asset, they need this one pager, they need this deck and all that stuff without having that, because then it's a game of whack-a-mole where it's like, well, I've got this deal over here that I need this thing for.
Andy:Well, is that, do we serve that kind of customer? Well, and so if you haven't established ICP, jobs to be done, a job map and really understanding again all this stuff and this ties to what we've talked about extensively on the investigative journalism side Like if you haven't done that work, then you are, you're, you're destined to fail on all of these fronts because you have, you don't have, you're going to be, you're going to be, it's going to be constant, like flailing, like you're going to be, it's whack-a-mole, you're going to be going after all these different kinds of deals. You won't know who to target. So if we go down the list and this is kind of where I'm struggling with the organization because I'd like it to be framed differently, but maybe here's an option as we talk about these symptoms through the lens of Maybe here's an option as we talk about these symptoms through the lens of Hello me.
Tiana:Again, just for context, we're talking about Andrei.
Andy:Sinkovich's post on LinkedIn and we're going to put it on, on the description of this episode. It's kind of going down the list of like what he was saying. You know, marketing should be providing sales, right, and it's like, well, to some extent this is true, but to some extent it's well, it should be all based on a strategic plan. And then if you need additional assets we got to ask some questions around that, because if you've done your homework properly, like we just talked about, and you have the building blocks, then there shouldn't be all these one-off requests, because then you should be able to repurpose a lot more and it should be honestly, sales should be able to fend for themselves a lot more if you have that foundational stuff. That's kind of the premise, right.
Andy:So the branding he mentions, branding that there's not an awareness what's the solution to that? Well, that's not going to change overnight, we know that right. But you can to our point and we've talked about this before being the Coca-Cola of your industry, which is if you have your ICP nailed. If you have your ICP nailed, you can make more headway into share of voice and to be in a more known quantity from a brand because you stand for something for a particular segment because you serve them well, they know about you, you talk to them, you have content that speaks to their problems specifically, whether or not you're, they're a customer of yours, right?
Andy:So and I go down the list of, just like, job mapping, right, like they. He talks about that a bit. Yeah, it may be not not exactly in that vernacular, but it it goes back to that, which is like, if you you have, if you have that you should only have to do that, like a limited number of times, whether it's once or a couple of times, depending on whether you have a couple of segments that you map those jobs to from an ICP perspective, account insights, right, and that's where he had the whole map of engagement and scoring and essentially grading and scoring.
Gary:And it's like.
Andy:Well, first of all, that's a kind of more company-wide initiative that involves rev ops, that involves having accurate data, but it also involves being pretty specific about your ICP and kind of only working within that. So it all. It all comes back to that business case he calls it. It's really the buyer package that we've talked about, where you set someone up as the internal champion to sell. You know you've sold to them, but you need to allow them to sell internally. No-transcript. We all should be completely on the same page with how we're positioning.
Andy:And that is on marketing. But like sales should not go off the rails on that.
Tiana:I feel like it all relates a lot to the type of strategy you have, because this seems like motions that would be done by a company that is moving around a sales led strategy.
Andy:Yes, for sure.
Tiana:Because, like they absolutely just. And I started to think that that is the problem. Because, like, I feel like of course we all want to sell, but at the same time, like, at what cost? Uh, you know. So I don't know like everything, if everything in the company is just done to be able to close a deal, right, not taking into account, yeah, exactly because that's what I was saying like if you're, if you're doing whack-a-mole, that that's that right.
Andy:Like you're, you're not, if you're, if you're, if you're not speaking to the job to be done for an icp, the job map, an ICP, and you're not telling that story, which should be pretty specific. And we just got done talking about this, which is, you know, it's not going to be many of the features, and in fact the leader of CS just said that, like we now know some of the features we've been really pushing hard in onboarding. People aren't hardly using like 10 and there's stuff that they like say in every onboarding it's like so why are we even talking about that in onboarding? So even the most successful customers are rarely using this. So it's like like yes, exactly Right. Like that's a perfect case in point where it's like continually reevaluate that, which is, you know what your ICP probably is, using two features consistently that you have just to just to throw out a number. It's not a lot, it's going to be a fairly limited and you want to know how that, how that happens, how do they, how do they ingrain that in their, in their daily work processes? That's what you want to understand. So when sales says you know, I want to go after this, this thing here. It's like what we talked about going up market perfect example and that's the equivalent of going off the rails on ICP, because then you're going to marketing saying, hey, I need a deck that works in this situation. It's like that's not who we serve, but marketing rarely does that. Marketing is like, okay, let me go build that for you and stuff, and so they get what they subsidize. So that's kind of. That's kind of all the the thought process I have around that. Again.
Andy:Well, part of this also always will go back to it's actually not between sales and marketing. To some extent, this is absolutely on the CEO to say, like we're putting a stake in the ground here, this is what we're going after, or letting the data dictate it, which is, you know, those two things go together for me, which is like I'm not going to like pander to my sales organization. This happens a lot. When a company sales led sales is really like pulling a lot of the strings, where a CEO has to say, no, like each function absolutely has its own purpose and no, marketing is not there purely to serve you, sales, and your whims. And oh, by the way, you actually need to bring some of those inputs which we've talked about right. There's inputs to all of these things, to these outputs which may be a clear business case having a buyer package, having a cohesive deck to share with, hopefully your ICP, so you don't have to have many, many versions of that, but hopefully your ICP, so you don't have to have many, many versions of that. But sales is an input to that. They're talking to customers all the time.
Andy:It's a travesty when sales ask marketing for something and they don't actually come with any of that data that they hopefully are physically collecting but at least have an anecdotal form in their brains from all these conversations they're having. Like that to me is a sin and but can very well be a condition that we see in this sort of situation, which is, you know, sales led. Sales gets what they want from marketing. That's just an internal agency and they just are able to just ask them for whatever.
Andy:But I think that's the the situation we're talking about, which is it's sales led, especially if we're talking about team pudding being the sales team, I think if it's sales led and there really hasn't been a strategic like there, we haven't done and this is what I've said to this right, like we don't know who our ICP is. So sales has potential deals all over the place. They might be very small companies, very large, totally different industries, totally different use cases, totally different job maps, and they have a bunch of them and they're like well, this deck I have doesn't really serve this other deal. So I'm going to ask for this, something that supports this other deal. And that's a really bad situation to be in, especially as a marketer, because, like, you're just you're just reacting to what sales is asking for, as opposed to hey, is this deal even relevant? Is this our type of customer?
Tiana:Yeah, I feel like people lose perspective on the purpose of the company itself because they want to just for the sake of selling totally they want to just close deals, close deals, close deals, and they're not thinking like this is really sustainable, like in time we'll be able to sustain this will. Will we be able to keep going like this and keep growing?
Andy:can we scale? Can we scale? And that goes to can we do this from even just the sales motion perspective, let alone then think about cs, just by the way often ends up the dumping ground for that, exactly what you just described, which is, oh my god, this, this customer, is absolutely not a good fit for our product. It happens, sales did everything, they, they pulled out all the stuff, they figured out how to make a deal happen. They're happy, right, but cs gets that customer, they start onboarding them. They're like holy crap, this is like way off. Like we, like this customer is not, they don't know, like they're not going to be able to get good use out of this product and who should be the one defining the icp in this case well, that is marking so in into what we talked about before, which is, um, the investigative journalism role, whether you actually have somebody called something like that.
Andy:Product marketing is often that when it's a constant fight to really try and hone in on who your ideal customer is.
Andy:So that's, it is a, I would say, product marketing function.
Andy:If you're a CMO, that does fall under you and it's a strategic initiative and one we think often falls short, right, like when we're working with companies, that's, you know, we know our ideal customer, and then you find out, well, you're really talking about a TAM, you're really talking about firmographics.
Andy:You haven't done the job map within the jobs to be done, umbrella to figure out how your most productive customers I always say happy customers, but that gets frowned at a little bit but your most productive customers, your longest tenured customers, the ones you could talk to and they say I love this product, how they're really using it, what are the contexts around that, how the entire organization uses it, and that often, when I say job map, that's really a process, that's a strategic initiative that marketing owns has to be endorsed by the CEO, right? So that's a, it's a company-wide thing. You can't just say, well, marketing it's on you. And then the CEO says well, why aren't you giving sales everything they need here? Sales has this laundry list of things they're asking you for. Those are those. You can't do both right.
Tiana:Yeah.
Andy:You can't say well, we're very strategic with ICP, but why aren't you chasing down every piece of content that that sales is asking for, when, in fact, those things are in conflict?
Tiana:I feel like one of the things that could drive this behavior is exactly what bill masaita said in our late our last podcast, and he talked about just sharing goals in between the departments and metrics that would drive their behavior strictly to to just all of them knowing what they're serving and and what they're going for.
Tiana:Uh, because in some way, as he said, if, if you, if you want to know, like, if attribution again right if marketing just wants to know, like just wants to create more leads, then random leads will start coming up, and if sales just wants to close deals, then random sales will just start to be closing and then that's a problem to customer success and that's also a problem to product, because they will have it to start creating a bunch of different features that don't fall into the category or your to what we serve and what the purpose of the whole company is and the product is and it just it just started becoming something like. It's like if you have a soup and you just start putting random ingredients to it actually you just nailed on some.
Andy:You just hit on something exactly accurate from an analogy perspective, which is product right and so feature requests or product requests that the market asks for, and you have. Oftentimes what happens is you have a big customer who says I want this thing right, so product's like well, I got to build that because this big customer we have wants this thing right, and so they put that in the roadmap to build into the product. When that's not strategic, that is not your ICP, that is not your ICP. Exact same thing with marketing on behalf of sales. Sales says I need this thing for this type of customer, but they don't often say that's not strategic, that's not our ICP, they just build it, they cater to that. So they're very analogous concepts and in fact they probably share some commonality as far as the product is concerned or the way the product's used. Those things are one and the same in some cases.
Tiana:Yeah, it all goes back to the beginning. Like know who you serve and serve them, talk to them. Like marketing should direct their campaigns to them and sales should try to close them. Like they should be the priority, no matter what the number is, and products should make the features that they serve like better for them. Like, but at the same time, I feel like it has to be something that comes, as you said, from the CEO, because if you don't have that same mentality across the company and you just want to like, increase your number, no matter based on what, eventually it becomes non scalable, and that's the problem that most of them encounter with 100%.
Andy:It's. It's about ICP, it's about focus on that, and it's about marketing setting that tone with the support of the CEO. To your point, like, if the CEO wants marketing to act as an internal agency, that's probably what's going to happen and that's probably why, you know, people churn out of a marketing role at a particular company because they're like, well, I'm being, I'm being asked for so many things. It's overwhelming. We've seen this before. Right, and it's not strategic, and I know there's more to this than that. I want this to be more strategic, but you've gotten spun up and wrapped in this vicious cycle where you're just chasing down tasks that are being requested from you. I go back to say, like, if you're well functioning, you're aligned as far as the strategy. You're aligned as far as ICP. You're aligned as far as the positioning, which is really the byproduct of a proper job map and jobs to be done exercise. If you're aligned in all of that, honestly, sales can fend for themselves a lot more where you have assets that are much more reusable because they speak to.
Andy:I always think about it like you probably have three flavors of of use cases where and when. When we talk about use cases and case studies. Oftentimes they're pretty, they're pretty general and it's usually talking about an outcome that somebody had and the details are pretty sparse, right, when you have your ICP nailed, those business cases can be a lot more specific. They can speak to an exact situation around a company what they do, how many employees they have, what industry they're in, what their customers look like, what they're hiring in this case a hiring process as an example but whatever your product serves for that company, how the process works around that. And I think there might be like three flavors of that. Right, like there might be subtleties with respect to the company type or industry. And you know, I keep, I keep going back to, to the hiring example in terms of the SaaS product, but because that's that's one, that's that's easily referenced in my brain right now.
Andy:But there may be like several flavors of how you speak to those in terms of business cases. And then sales can like grab one off the shelf and leverage it. Because, lo and behold, if you're really tight on your ICP, ideally and it's logical to say if that's where you're spending your time in terms of demand generation, you're speaking to those customers, you're targeting those customers as accurately as you can, you're at least in a target rich environment to those customers, then you're pulling out those leads. That's when the hand raisers occur coming from that pool. So, logically speaking, one of those three business cases which is going to be the hook that gets them to say you know what? I do want to buy this product because you just took a stand and said a scenario to me that really resonates. That is exactly my problem. I can now see it may not be identical but I can absolutely see through that that there are those common threads that absolutely pertain to me. And I get it now, as opposed to speaking in generalities or trying to do whack-a-mole with all these possible scenarios because you're all over the place, you're not focused on that core ideal customer, to do whack-a-mole with all these possible scenarios because you're all over the place, you're not focused on that core ideal customer that you do already serve well. So it's in getting better at that cycle of knowing and understanding who they are, how they use your product and then how you can speak to that and find more that have those common problems that they need solved. It's a circular process, a good circular process, a good cycle to continue to refine and iterate on. But if you do that well, you see how that becomes much more virtuous as far as a cycle, as opposed to a vicious cycle which is, you know, scrambling to address the needs of every single potential buyer with with content. That is one off, just like the product case where it's like, look, that big customer wanted this one feature because you know that's what they want, so we're going to build it because we care about that customer. Similar story, right. So if you're tight, it's more virtuous, it's much more reusable, much more extensible.
Andy:You can use that in different venues. You can use that both for attracting that customer in the first place from a call it a demo perspective, because you're really tight on that. You already did your research pre-demo to say that's exactly who I'm targeting and, yes, it could be a couple of different flavors, but it's going to be one of those three. Let's say it's not going to be something random, so I'm able to track them that way. And then they say you know what? I get this. Then, when you do your buyer package, which is allowing that champion, that you just really won. You won over for them to go internally at their company and sell it. And if it's tight it's all going to be and smoother for them. And then when it gets to onboarding we've done this before.
Andy:This is not a one off, so that's all. That's obviously the rationale for ICP. But it all speaks to marketing. You can call it versus sales. Right, like who's doing what, like sales can come much stronger. Also, everything they're requesting at that point let's say, battle card right, there's a competitor that keeps coming up. Well, that'll be really reusable and sales because they're not all over the place will have a much stronger perspective on how that battle card should be built from. You know what? We're hearing this a lot. But when we do make sales against that competitor, it's because we do this really well. So that's what you focus on and they can come much stronger with, honestly, a written outline and perspective on that. Marketing does not need to conjure that in a vacuum, and that's that's how.
Tiana:That's how this should work, right, marketing should not conjure any of this in a vacuum and even from a practical point of view, like if, for example, just uh, like getting to product again if, if the features that are the most successful within our icp are determined, like even just put sales to actually like, work through the product, like actually go through the product and understand what they like about it, like put themselves put sales in the perspective of the buyer, yes, and make them actually understand what is to be like, to be liked and what is to be praised about the product and the features that are the most important ones, that are your selling point, and then start for looking at people that actually understand that and it's just easier even for product, because they can make those features better, they can focus on those features and they can understand them and go deeper within those features, instead of just adding more and more and more to just get more clientele.
Andy:Right. So you just hit on an incredibly key point in all of this, which is it's actually not sales led, marketing led, product led. It's buyer. Every, all of those, the business model, right, um that that you know you choose as a company up front, like we're going to be, sales led versus product led, it's really the buyer.
Tiana:Yeah.
Andy:And honestly we've talked about this, we've talked about this quite a bit recently like the upfront needs you must have in place in order to even be able to entertain being product led. Right To a large extent, the buyer will dictate a lot of that what they need, what they need, you know, their ability to be a, you know, single player user of a product, like in order to be product-led. That's one of the criteria right, like, the buyer is going to tell you that, how you know, can, can I can, as a buyer, if I put myself in the buyer's shoes, can I, can I be a product led customer of this product? So if you put yourself in the context of the buyer and that's an ideal scenario for any company is continually look through that lens then you are in a much better position to be strategic about how you organize all of this.
Tiana:Yeah, yeah, and even like, as you said before, for customer success, like once, once all of this is done, like product focuses on the main features that actually are the best for the customer that we're serving. So sales has an idea of how to talk to them because they have used the product and understood why it's good for these people exactly, or these companies specifically. Marketing knows how to target them and get to them because they know them and then, when they land to customer success, they it just makes sense they know exactly what to help them with because the companies are we couldn't exactly say the same, but it say it serves the same purpose to those companies. So it, it just like it all that's. That's like the unified commercial engine thing. It just it just works when and as you said, it's not you can.
Tiana:You could be sales led as long as you're buyer led. You could be product led as long as you're buyer led, like the approach could be the sales that motion. Or they go to market like the the sorry, sorry, the sales that motion and the the product like motion, like that's the approach, like how do you get for your customer to understand your value? But the, the strategy has to be buyer led and like anything that diverts from that path is just hard for them to get and it just makes your company do random acts and in every part of the like, any department just starts doing random things to get to their goals without knowing the purpose of it. Like that's what I really loved about, uh, the podcast with bill he, he, really, he really emphasized on all the company, like sharing these things for them to understand what they're going for, and that absolutely worked for Slack, so like even starting to think where it started and how it ended.
Tiana:Not every company has a luxury of being something that everybody needs and I feel like that's something that they want to be and that's why they're trying to serve like all the different types of ICPs and customers, because, of course, they want to make the numbers bigger, they want to hit their goals. Everybody wants to be directed towards growth and unscalable if that's possible. But that only works for the diamonds in the rough kinds of companies like Zoom in its moment, where everybody needed it. So it just made it easy for for them to serve like different types of customers for these lower middle market companies that serve a specific purpose in a specific part of the market. It's just they have to be buyer-led, not well, I, ideally everyone.
Andy:It's good, but your, your point being that you have to be in the lower middle market, especially bootstrapped or not venture funded, let's just say, where you have to be efficient and, in a sense, being very, very focused on your ICP and being very focused on the buyer is a means to be efficient. I think it all and we can put a, we can wrap a bow tie around this, probably by kind of talking about leadership and the CEO. In the context of go-to-market strategy, which is, you know, really you can see businesses where sales and marketing act in silos. And, to your point, you brought this up right that everybody has their own agenda. Sales just wants to sell and they're gonna figure out every which way they can. That's how they're incented and that's what they do right. And then marketing is depending on the situation. Are they an internal agency? Are they just taking requests? Um, are they, you know, working in their own silo, really, for lack of a better word and leaving sales to figure out the marketing side that they need?
Andy:Right, because that can happen. So if sales gives up too much to marketing, saying you need to do everything here, what ends up happening is marketing starts to do sales job like. It's like marketing starts to eat sales. That's, that's um. Another thing we talk about, right, like without bound, for example, like if, if sales isn't in control of some of that strategy, strategy becomes a marketing strategy. Conversely, if there's a lack of GTM strategy, there's a lack of really understanding ICP, there's a lack of collateral, especially where the rubber hits the road. Sales in a lot of cases and we've seen this starts doing that themselves. They start coming up with their own pitches, their own decks, right, so they start doing marketing. And it's because they're not getting that support, they're not getting that form of leadership from the marketing team and then you know, ultimately from the CEO, because that is up to the CEO to make sure the right people are doing those things, you got the right talent and there's the right underlying strategy for all of that.
Tiana:Okay. Thank you very much for joining us. I know this was a completely different episode from the rest of them, but we still hope you liked it as much as we did. If you want to find us, it's at gtmproco. We're gonna leave the link of it in the description of this episode. And if you'd like subscribe to our newsletter, we send one each week talking about the same topics on the podcast, just with very actionable results from it. Thank you very much for joining us again and see you next week. Bye.
Gary:Thank you for tuning in to GTM Pro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as a revenue leader, offering the insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit gtmproco and continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey, subscribe, engage and elevate your go-to-market skills. Until next time, go be a pro.