Smarter, Not Harder: How Marketers Can Drive Sales Efficiency

Alex Brown: [00:00:04] It's 11 a.m. in the Bay Area, 2 p.m. in New York City and 9 p.m. in Yemen, where they probably invented coffee. It's like a whole confusing thing. There's Wikipedia has the answers for you, but wherever you are, turn your slack notifications off. Grab a mug of your favorite caffeinated beverage and get ready for insights and strategies that you can immediately pour into your marketing and sales campaigns. Because it's a coffee break. I'm Alex Jonathan Brown, senior copywriter here at Iron Horse. And I'm joined today by two very special guests, both making their coffee break debut, Nancy Maluso, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Edgio. And Iron Horse is Senior Director for Growth Marketing, Maria Gianottii. Hi, everybody.

Nancy Maluso: [00:00:52] Hello. Hi.

Alex Brown: [00:00:54] Uh, and Nancy, I want to ask before we started, but since we're here, official pronunciation is Edgio. Don't read the dot out loud. 

Nancy Maluso: [00:01:02]  Correct. Well, the, the, the logo is edgier without a dot. It just so happens that our email address is edg.io.

Alex Brown: [00:01:10] It's. I love that. I love whenever there's that like when it lines up like that where it works. Either way it's great. But it does mean I have to ask the questions. So as much as I would like to do a half hour long webinar about how to pronounce your your company's name, we're here to talk about something different today. For a long time, I think people have been really on board with the idea that if you've got a sales department and you've got a marketing department, they should be pulling in the same direction, they should have the same goals. We're all we're all on the same team. We're all working for the same thing, right? A lot of times when we talk about that, we call that alignment. So sales and marketing should be aligned. Um. And the reason we're having this conversation today is we've been talking about alignment for long enough now. Like, sure, great. We want the same thing. What we're really here to talk about today are the ideas of. Effectiveness and efficiency and just how do we actually translate the the big whiteboard, the vision boards like the concepts into actually doing the work better. So I think maybe the best place to start for for all of us is how do we kind of think about those things differently? Like is there a real difference between just being aligned and then being effective and efficient with the way that your sales and marketing departments work together?

Nancy Maluso: [00:02:41] Hmm. Well, I don't think personally that you can be effective. You can’t be effective or efficient if you are not aligned. However, I would say that you can be aligned and still not efficient and effective.

Alex Brown: [00:02:56] So is that so? The way that I've kind of been thinking of it, especially as we've been planning this is it's really the difference between like intention and planning, like the alignment happens in the planning, but execution is really where you find that efficiency and effectiveness. Like.

Nancy Maluso: [00:03:17] Yeah, hold on a second. But alignment happens in the execution.

Alex Brown: [00:03:22] Okay.

Nancy Maluso: [00:03:24] Um, if it doesn't, if it only happens in the planning and it doesn't carry through to the execution, then you know you have a challenge. And I think that's probably where the breakdown actually happens, that you don't end up efficient and effective because you haven't brought your alignment through to execution.

Maria Gianotti: [00:03:46] I agree with Nancy here. So if you think about this. Right, like efficiency is essentially the outcome that you get when you have an aligned sales and marketing team that is working together to achieve the same result. When you're aligned, you're not working against each other's initiatives, essentially, but that is self, that is self efficiency. So let's take a marketing campaign, for example. As a marketer, think about all the time wasting resources when you're working on the wrong campaign because you didn't include your sales team in the creation process. And as a salesperson, having the marketing team launch a campaign towards an audience that you either are not prioritizing or that doesn't generate any pipeline during that quarter. Let's say you end up having to do all the work by yourself to meet your objectives, and that in itself is very inefficient. So I, I believe if sales and marketing are able to align on common goals and objectives for campaign or specific company initiatives such as account based marketing from the get go, it's just a way easier to become more efficient, in my opinion.

Nancy Maluso: [00:04:45] Yeah, and I think I agree with that completely everything Maria said. But I also think that what happens is the field is living in the moment all the time. Our sales people are reacting to what's happening in the market all the time, and most of marketing stuff has to be created and deployed. And we're not yet using artificial intelligence and, you know, ChatGPT and stuff like that to dynamically create our messages and our content, right? So in the moment. So sales is constantly adjusting and tweaking the message to the individual that they're talking to, but also to the market dynamics and what's happening. And if we aren't able to get real time insight into what's happening in the market and then tweak our own messages, we can get out of alignment.

Alex Brown: [00:05:39] Yeah, I think there's I think it's kind of a joke at this point. But the idea of like the worst case scenario version of this, right, is that sales is out there having conversations and then it gets to the execution team and they're just like, What did you actually sell this person? Like? That's the worst case scenario. But it does work that other way of like. If sales is giving one message that is built on their response to the marketplace and that never gets back to marketing. All of your campaigns aren't going to align with the conversations they're having, but you're also not taking advantage of that knowledge that they're getting while they're out there and you're not using that to build moving forward.

Nancy Maluso: [00:06:24] Yeah. And I think that's, you know, sales is busy doing their thing and I find it very difficult to get feedback from them about what's really working or not working. They're involved in our planning. They're involved in approving our messaging and all that kind of stuff. And we then go out to them and say, Here's all the stuff that we created based on what we worked together on, but we don't get real good feedback. And so we have to be listening to their conversations to really understand what's hitting or not hitting.

Alex Brown: [00:06:58] What is that? What does that process look like? As much as you want to talk about it, but knowing that knowing that sales is sometimes a black box and it's like I got my leads these are the sales, great, I'm going to go do more of that. Um, how do you extract that information?

Nancy Maluso: [00:07:18] There's a bunch of different ways. So one, obviously listening to recordings, I mean, thankfully so much is virtual now that that we're able to record a lot of those customer conversations and, and be able to listen in on them at our leisure. We can even get the insight on what's discussed and at what time, you know, in the in the recording so that we can get that kind of intelligence. And I want to know how this particular thing resonated. We can go find that stuff. So that's pretty powerful, first of all. Second of all is we can listen to what what our own metrics tell us, because if we're consistent in our messaging, our message is going to be out there in our search engine marketing. It's going to be in our ads, it's going to be in our keywords, it's going to be in our, you know, all the stuff that we're doing right in our campaigns. And if we're looking at what's working in our own data and then we're talking to sales about, hey, this looks like this is working, this is what we're seeing, double down on this message. Tell us if it's working. Then you get more. You know, you're getting closer to real time. Then that's the way we think about it.

Maria Gianotti: [00:08:24] To add to that, what we've seen work really well for clients at Iron Horse is technology that combines your first party and third party data to provide actionable account intelligence. So technologies such as Demandbase, 6sense do this exceptionally well. Yeah, these types of technologies, if you're not familiar with them, the leverage to pull first party data from marketing automation platform, corporate email, website chat, right? So you have all that data together and third party data that looks into firmographic internal graphic data plus intent, which is really the key to integrate these into actionable insights that can be used for personalized sales, follow up and customized marketing campaigns. And it's really cool when you are able to turn anonymous activity into opportunities. And when I think of efficiency, the fact that these platforms help with account prioritization, enabling sales and marketing teams that tells them which accounts have the highest conversion potential, we're talking about huge efficiencies. And all in all, what I love about these technologies is that they enable better collaboration in alignment between sales and marketing because they just create more transparency into account activity. And it's something that both teams can truly get excited about because like Nancy said, you don't always get that feedback and it's really hard to pull that feedback from sales that really help with that.

Nancy Maluso: [00:09:38] Yeah, they really do. You know, the other thing is that it's not a baton, right? We know that we're not handing off leads, right? We're we're both marketing and sales are both in market with our buyers through the entire journey, their entire life cycle from, you know, prospecting through purchase, through post purchase, adoption and application. So it's it's important that and Maria is exactly right if we can show them what's going on on the digital side of that customer's interactions with us across their life cycle, then we're informing sales and then they're trusting what we're doing to further that conversation, right? So, you know, I think you when you do use tools like that and you're very transparent about what's happening and what's working and what's not working, then a trust develops that says, you know, hey, marketing, jump in here and do your thing.

Maria Gianotti: [00:10:38] And also from a more operational standpoint, there are tools like revenue.io. I don't know, Nancy, if you guys use it, but they can help you automate a lot of processes that historically have been extremely inefficient, such as correcting inaccurate data. Now you can automate data capturing, removing the need for manual data entry, which is huge, huge time saver for sales team. You can also have instead of having your sales team having to do a lot of manual tasks, you can now focus on sales automation through generative AI to automate post call, recap, email, styling, voicemail emails mean. So there's a lot of things we can do from a marketing perspective to support sales, but having the visibility and insights to to be able to do that is super important. So these tools really help us be more efficient and effective.

Nancy Maluso: [00:11:23] Absolutely, 100%. I mean, the stack is pretty I mean, the marketing and sales stack is pretty complicated these days and making sure that you can effectively pull the data from all the different technologies and look at it holistically is pretty important. We're working on that right now is how do we pull together all the information that's available from all these different technologies and sources across our entire sales and marketing stack and even our product stack. So our product gives us a lot of information. Its customers are engaging with it. So being able to pull, you know, interaction data and engagement data out of out of that system and our services system and our customer value reports and all that kind of stuff, that all has to come together to inform us on what is the next conversation we need to have with that customer.

Alex Brown: [00:12:17] Yeah so one of the things you mentioned, Nancy, was the idea that it's not a baton, which I think is it's one of those things that we're all starting to process. But also it gets really easy to like, take for granted, especially when you look at things like organizational structure, like those places where silos still exist. I think silos are also one of those things that like if you tell anybody or if you ask anybody, are you siloed, pretty much everybody's going to want to say no. There's like that little ego part that takes over and like, no, not me. We're perfect. That's not always the case. There are a lot of silos still out there. Look for them. Um, but with it not being a baton and with marketing and sales efforts happening all of the time, and like we kind of said throughout this conversation, sales is in the field, whether that's virtual or in person doing their own thing. Um, and now especially with this added layer of tech stacks being as large and complicated as they are and trying to manage all of those moving parts at the same time, um. I mean. Maybe there's not a better way to phrase this question, but like, how? Like, there's just so much happening, like, organizationally. And I think maybe that's the most interesting layer to talk about this on is just like organizationally, how do you even start to attempt to process all of these different inputs into like this cohesive, efficient operating process? You know, no big deal. Just if you can come up with an answer off the top of your head, that'd be amazing.

Maria Gianotti: [00:13:56] I can maybe start this. And Nancy, feel free to chime in. But I think honestly, that's a great question. I think this is the hardest part. Right. So what I'm probably about to say is something we all know and I'm probably going to sound like a broken record, but open streams of communication is key, right? Even when you thought you were already communicating enough with your sales team, try over communicating. That's like the only way we'll create the right processes that ultimately lead to efficiency and a few specific ways that I can think of to enhance that communication is first of all, reporting is key. Like meet consistently with your go to market teams, have weekly meetings with people on the ground, have monthly meetings with executives. Where you start meetings by showing results like even small wins go a long way in these scenarios. The second way I can think of is get specific feedback from your go to market team. Easier said than done. Possibly. But how are they leveraging the technologies that you have been you know, that you have implemented? What has been their experiences? Have their tools been effective, ineffective? Many times this has happened to me, actually my past experiences. But many times you learn that the users of these tools just don't know how to operate them, which of course leads to a lot of inefficiency.

Maria Gianotti: [00:15:05] So that's that's something to keep an eye on. And the third one is have consistent training. Like even when you think you've completed all the recommended training by the tech vendor for that tool, adoption always make it a habit of doing more. So offer monthly trainings, biweekly office hours just to ensure that the tech is fully adopted by your team and think that this one is very critical. Actually, the last one I'm going to say it's identify a champion, identify a person within your organization that believes in your vision and like what you're trying to accomplish. Make that person a super user showcase wins. And as soon as you'll see the other team members, I mean, as soon as the other team members will see that, they will start to follow because at the end of the day, they want to be efficient and successful too. So I think that is really key because like Nancy said earlier, feedback is so hard to get sometimes from sales. But if you have a champion that you can really align with, I think that's key to get that consistent feedback loop or keep that open communication going.

Nancy Maluso: [00:16:01] So we do we do a number of things in the creation of messaging and content and training and programmatics where we bring in different members of the sales organization to help us. But then we also, just as Maria said, we then, you know, we talk about what we're going to be doing next. We share what we're currently doing and we rehash what's happened and the results of what we've done and the corrective actions we're going to take and apply to the next go round. So you're communicating at every step of the way, not just in front when you're building and designing, but during and then after. And you have to just constantly, you know, assess and work through that stuff. And then and then stuff happens, you know, a competitor drops out of the market or releases something amazing, and you've got to, like, you know, respond quickly.

Alex Brown: [00:16:58] This is one thing that came up in our our pre chat to pull the curtain back a little bit. Um and it was a point you made Nancy but. For sales, especially like marketing one. Like as a marketing person, I will always love a new toy. Like, let me see a new toy. I'll go play with it. For sales. And this is your point. It does have to work or else none of this is going to work. Like if you're rolling out a new thing, like sales doesn't care. Like sales probably hates that it's new and shiny. Unless there's like a very clear line to, like, their comp plan, basically.

Nancy Maluso: [00:17:32] Well, yeah. The good news is, though, I will just say this. The good news is that a lot of the tools that we're talking about and a lot of the capabilities that we're talking about are actually ones that actually add value to the sales person for a change, right? They give them insight and tell them what's going on in their account, visibility that they weren't getting. And so unlike when we first rolled out CRM ages and ages ago and we said, you got to, you know, please put in your data notes. We're not asking that. Right. We're not It's not about that. This is now giving value to the sales person. That's what makes it so incredibly powerful. I was going to also say to add on to Maria is one of the things that I think that teams can do is make sure they have an integrated revenue ops team. That if the same team is pulling the data and looking at the pipeline all the way through the customer lifecycle and reporting on it consistently, so we have the same measurements and the same the same way of calculating. So how we calculate leads or, you know, we don't even use that word anymore, but how we calculate all that stuff matters and we have to be consistent about that. We don't want sales calculating one way, Oh, I got this many leads from marketing. A marketing says I sent you this many. Like, we've got to have the same way of reporting all that stuff. So having an integrated rev ops team helps a lot. And if they're managing the entire stack and you build the stack so it's integrated or you at least have a tool like a segment or something like that that pulls the data together so you can get a holistic picture that helps to.

 

Maria Gianotti: [00:19:14] And talking a little bit more about the data component, which I think is so critical. Just having one rev ops team that looks at the whole funnel. Like if you think about how we work. This is where the silos kind of happen, right? So your sales and marketing will define success with different metrics. Your marketing team will be working towards meeting top of the funnel, right? Like I said, marketing metrics around marketing, qualified leads and sales leads that your sales team is not able to differentiate and does not even understand necessarily. And then your sales team will be measured on the bottom of the funnel success metrics, such as the number of sales qualified leads, pipeline generation, which are metrics that historically marketers have not been held accountable for. So the typical if you think of the typical marketing source versus Salesforce versus even partner source revenue only helps create more misalignment and distrust between go to market teams. So I think the idea of having one of rev ops team that all those metrics and where you can define a North Star metric for your team such as pipeline and revenue or both teams, that really is something that both sales and marketing can rally around and you'll be able to ensure the messaging around strategies, campaigns and even tactics will be better aligned. So I think that's just so critical.

Nancy Maluso: [00:20:22] Yeah, we. We measure three. We have three specific goals in marketing on my team. So driving awareness, improved awareness, driving revenue and driving sales productivity, those are our three measures.

Maria Gianotti: [00:20:39] I love that.

Maria Gianotti: [00:20:40] How do you measure product sales? Productivity?

Nancy Maluso: [00:20:43] It's hard. It's hard.

Nancy Maluso: [00:20:45] We're not very good at it yet.

Nancy Maluso: [00:20:47] Oh, that's a good one.

Maria Gianotti: [00:20:48] But how do you do that?

Nancy Maluso: [00:20:49] But I'll tell you, the.

Nancy Maluso: [00:20:50] The only way that I know to do.

Nancy Maluso: [00:20:53] Is before we do an enablement. And we're about to do a big training, you know, a big, deep dive on training next month before we run the training, we'll take a snapshot of each individual's funnel and their conversion rate. And then we do the training. And we take a snapshot a month later and two months later. And did we help move the needle?

Maria Gianotti: [00:21:17] I love that. Okay.

Nancy Maluso: [00:21:19] So you can't claim all the growth or all the negative, right. Other stuff happens. But what you're looking for is if you if you're measuring your assessing on an individual basis, did the people who took the training and got certified compared to those who don't because there's always some people who can't, you're out of the office there, You know, whatever. You know, Can you compare the people who did versus the people who didn't? And if, for example, we're doing a launch, you can you can look at the ramp to revenue by individual who who did the launch training, who's using the launch materials, are they then converting at a different rate or building the ramp? You know, their pipeline faster or better or bigger than other people. So there's a bunch of different ways, but it's really not easy to do.

Maria Gianotti: [00:22:09] But yeah.

Speaker4: [00:22:09] Now we're a small company. We only have, you know, I don't 60 people in our sales force. It's a little bit easier than if you've got 20,000.

Maria Gianotti: [00:22:18] Yeah.

Maria Gianotti: [00:22:20] I know revenue. It sounds like I work there, by the way, but don't. But I know they also focus on the whole sales efficiency where you can look into like sales activities and the outcomes of those and you can have a clear visibility into their like which rep are more efficient, which are more effective leads to that. And, and I think that's super critical for, for marketers to guess, to hold each other accountable a bit, right? From a marketing team, you are doing all the campaigns, you're doing all the activities, but you need to ensure that sales is following up. Otherwise all your your efforts are wasted.

Nancy Maluso: [00:22:52] Well, and what's good about what you just said, Maria, is when you when you say to your marketing team, are you impacting revenue or conversion, then they are going to follow up because they have to understand are they doing that? And so they're going to they're going to make sure that that next interlock happens.

Nancy Maluso: [00:23:11] Yeah.

Alex Brown: [00:23:13] I think another thing as as the copywriter slash marketing person most on this call, I think, um, it does feel so much better from the marketing side of things to know that like. Your work is being judged on the full end result rather than any of those vanity KPIs, because I can write a great subject line that I know will get opens and I also know won't do anything downstream in that because that is just a very different process. Um, and I think one of the things that we've sort of been dancing around is whether or not you're siloed and whether or not you think you have an integrated sales and marketing. Operation like you actually do. Like you don't just get to magically have marketing's work, not affect sales. Like it's all the same pipeline. And so. Recognizing that and acting like it. Is so much more realistic than the old thing of like marketing. Got a stack of leads and we send them out the door to sales and we never think about them again. Good luck, sales. I hit my goals.

Maria Gianotti: [00:24:27] Yeah, that's like the old funnel. I feel like that's the old way of doing marketing, which is not working nowadays. And that's yeah, we need to move away from that. And, but the fact of the matter is some customers will first engage with you digitally and they may engage always digitally. You know, if they're, if they're purchasing online and all that kind of stuff. So they're, you know, it's, you know, it's it's it is a fact of the matter that the marketing effort does bring in business, particularly now, you know, in a digital world. And so about that.

Nancy Maluso: [00:25:06] Think about it that way.

Maria Gianotti: [00:25:07] Let's talk about that a little bit, because that's critical. Like, as most of us B2B, B2B marketers have experienced, like today's B2B buyer's journey is much more complex than it ever has been. Right? Of digital digital touchpoints. According to Gartner and Forrester, there's an average of 11 individuals involved in a B2B purchase, and about it takes about 20 plus touches before a prospect becomes a qualified lead for sales. And on top of that, another challenge is that prospects are less likely to pick up their phones and answer the emails. Also, going back to the 11 individuals that are involved in a B2B purchase, we know that B2B buying decisions are made by a group, but for like an account, if you think about a company's marketing strategy and just think of all the people in the buying committee you have to engage with for them to even consider you as an option and ultimately select you as the right fit for their needs. That takes a lot. So I think when we talk about efficiency, like that becomes really critical because we're also challenged by the current economic conditions. To like Nancy's point, I think you almost alluded to that because because that's really changed how we work. One, we have linear sales and marketing teams. There's still rifts going on. Two, we're required to do more with less resources, not only from a people perspective, but also from a budget perspective. Again, like I said, our buyers have shorter attention spans, like they don't answer anything in nowadays. It's really hard. And just lastly, to bring this together, like having to deal with longer B2B buying journeys when you only have a limited amount of time and resources to get things done, create better efficiencies, become a must have to drive positive business outcomes in a challenging market. So I think, yes, having marketing do the work to ensure that your buyers are moving through the buyer's journey is too critical because of all those digital touchpoints that it requires.

Nancy Maluso: [00:26:55] Absolutely.

Nancy Maluso: [00:26:56] The other thing we can't we're talking a lot about sales and marketing alignment, but the third leg of the stool is really product and we have to be also aligned with product. So, you know, there's some of the obvious ways, you know, are we messaging the product consistently and, you know, is product teams trying to go in and directly train the sales team or are they coming through the marketing team? You know, like there's all that kind of noise stuff that happens, but there's also an opportunity within our products to market. And to sell. And if we're not taking advantage of that, then we're missing out. And so, you know, for example. Um, being able to provide news to our customers about what's happening with their, you know, with the the portfolio through the product. You know, click here to learn more about this or, or, or even in our documentation as they go to engage with something. And there's features that they haven't purchased to letting them know Oh yeah that's not part of your but you can learn more about them here, right? Those are all important customer touchpoints that happen. So the ability to expand our relationship with customers happens, you know, through all of those materials. And if marketing isn't working with product on how to leverage and take advantage of those, we're missing an opportunity.

Alex Brown: [00:28:21] And I think that's like you got you mentioned it right at the end there, but it's super important. That doesn't mean have whoever's doing your docs right a CTA about the next thing that you're you're about to launch, right? Like it is bringing marketing into that conversation and have them do that copy and then have it live there. Yeah. Um, and.

Nancy Maluso: [00:28:41] I mean, we're creating the copy.

Nancy Maluso: [00:28:42] Anyway.

Alex Brown: [00:28:43] Yeah, exactly. Anyway.

Alex Brown: [00:28:45] It's, it's that level of stuff. That's right.

Maria Gianotti: [00:28:48] Nancy How do you do you meet like, how do you work with, how does your marketing team work with product? Is that sometimes a little difficult unless you're like one want to go to market where you all you know the same team and so product usually a separate team and you like how is that collaboration between Yeah.

Nancy Maluso: [00:29:03] So our product management at our company, our product management team sits within the product organization and the product marketing team sits within the marketing organization. And the difference is that, you know, the, the product management team is. Basically building and launching, you know, bringing to market and managing the products themselves and marketing responsible for communicating that through and directly right through sales, through partners and directly. So we translate feature functionality, if you will, into buyer benefits and all that kind of stuff. But increasingly, our product teams, at least in our world, are are defining use cases and user value statements and differentiation. They're getting all that. So they're doing that really early on as part of the requirements process to even define whether we want to build something. So, you know, staying in lockstep with them is important. So just like we do with sales, we meet with product, we look at the roadmap, what's coming, when is it coming, when are we going to launch? Is it a Tier one launch, a tier two launch? Based on that, how much effort do we want to make in the market? You know, how much splash, how much enablement? And we have to plan it all. So we meet before we meet, during and we meet after we do a postmortem. So, you know, it's just it's, you know, I feel like I'm in meetings all day.

Maria Gianotti: [00:30:34] Yeah, that's the thing. I think it's very how I work also with product teams because I'll also be working in in-house before coming to an agency, the agency world. But I know it was the marketing and product living separate teams, but I know a few. It's all relationship based at the end of the day. So if you can create close relationships with between your product marketing managers and their product managers, I think we had we had like match like we had to write to product managers that connected with one specific product marketer and that's and they just created those relationships where the communication flow was just easier to to go back and forth. I think that is one way I've seen it work because it is a little difficult and it requires a lot of meetings and such. But I think it's just the relationship building is critical there. I guess that's the same with sales in a way, right?

Nancy Maluso: [00:31:23] Yeah. And then, you know, sales uses the product management team all the time with customers. And so, you know, they're they're getting direct interaction with the customers as well and that's informing things. So we need to hear from them. Is the positioning changing? Shifting is the messaging needs to change or shift is, you know, so it's just and it's so easy for any of these things to get out of alignment. I mean, it's the number one thing that as a leader of the organization you have to do is just constantly work on getting it together. It's so funny because my counterpart on the on the product management side and I are always talking about, you know, the teams.

Nancy Maluso: [00:32:03] Are so constantly we're constantly doing this with each other and that's healthy. It's healthy, you know? Oh, you think that that's a differentiator? Well, guess what? That's not getting any traction in any of our our marketing messages or anything. You know, that's a and what we might find is it only gets traction on the third call or the fourth call or one sales is engaged. Once the opportunity you know, the opportunity is baked, then that's a message. So we're learning, you know, what's working at Tip of Spear, What's working later on. Et cetera.

Nancy Maluso: [00:32:36] So, yeah.

Maria Gianotti: [00:32:37] It's so critical.

Alex Brown: [00:32:39] And also, if you if you don't have the healthy exchange version of those that errr energy, it gets very toxic very quickly. And like there are definitely organizations where marketing from the jump is just like this product, is not it? And so I'll do my best with this email, but if anybody would ask me, I have five things that would improve it. It's making sure that those conversations take place. So like that energy gets to go somewhere and isn't just being Toxic.

Nancy Maluso: [00:33:13] Yeah. In yeah.

Nancy Maluso: [00:33:15] And I mean, let's face it, everybody thinks they know how to market and things.

Nancy Maluso: [00:33:22] So yeah.

Nancy Maluso: [00:33:24] And so one of the things about having transparent measures, having transparent data is if we go to the data. And we use the data, it lowers the whole whole or it lowers. It just brings it down, right? So having the insight and using the information that's available to us to inform our our conversations and our decisions. Really gets to it helps you align much faster and allows you to execute much faster because, you know, you're you're looking at the data together.

Maria Gianotti: [00:33:59] Yeah.

Alex Brown: [00:34:01] What a great note to end on that got very warm and fuzzy at the end. I liked it. We are coming up on time. I do want to give everybody the chance just to say if there's one thing about organizations that really get this efficiency working that like you like to see the most. One example from our previous conversations and Nancy, I hope I'm not stealing yours because it was it was your thing. But if if this alignment and efficiency works, it doesn't matter who an email comes from to your client because whether that's sales or marketing, like when it's all clicking, the right message hits it the right time. And like the name in the from form doesn't matter from where I'm at as a copywriter, that's like the superpower of this whole thing is like the messaging works. But I just wanted for either of you, is there something else that we haven't talked about yet that really feels good when you see it happen?

Nancy Maluso: [00:34:56] Well, I will say. What you just described is possible today because we can give the insight to the sales person that the message was sent and that it was opened or not opened or whatever. Right. And we can use technology to actually send it from the sales person on their behalf so that the customer is getting still getting that personal information so we can automate things for the seller, have things happen for the seller, but completely keep them informed. And that's why it's possible to do that together. That's why at the end of the day, it doesn't matter now if you're not being transparent that way or you can't because your tools don't let you. It makes it harder. Then sales is like, What are you doing? What are you talking about? What's going on? And it's hard for them. They got to know what's being said, you know, and to whom. Because they have to then have the next conversation. It's not efficient if they repeat everything we've already said. Digitally. Doesn't help them.

Maria Gianotti: [00:36:00] To end with. Like, you know, the thing I want also to share that's really important. I recently read Busting Silos by Hilary Carpio and Travis Henry at Snowflake, and they emphasize how critical it is to get sales and marketing aligned when one team go to market strategy to efficiently scale market programs, which ended up being a total game changer for their company. And that's super inspiring to me. It tells me that the idea of creating better alignment between sales and marketing by taking advantage of all the amazing technology to also Nancy's point, that's like easily accessible to us nowadays enables us to reduce inefficiencies that ultimately allow us to work smarter, not harder. So I think that's I love the concept of one team go to market strategy where we work together. We don't look at top of the funnel versus bottom of the funnel metrics. You know, in silos it's all together and that's how we are, you know, successful and that's efficiency to me.

Nancy Maluso: [00:36:54] Yeah, we're getting, you know, we're doing our 2024 planning and the three organizations sales, marketing and product are getting together. We love that. And we're aligning on, Okay, what tweaks to our go to market do we want to make? Why? What are we going to prioritize? How are we going to and it comes down to how are we going to allocate the money across the three organizations, including well, if we think that's going to be the tip of the spear for us this year in terms of this product is going to move more than others than are we investing our R&D dollars properly? Are we investing our marketing dollars properly? Are we investing our sales coverage properly?

Maria Gianotti: [00:37:33] That's a great meeting. Love that you are doing that.

Nancy Maluso: [00:37:37] It's not easy.

Maria Gianotti: [00:37:39] No, I'm sure it's not. Just trying to do that. It's amazing.

Alex Brown: [00:37:43] So I was just going to say, I'm glad that meeting is happening. I'm also glad it's not in my job description to be in that meeting. It sounds like it might get a little tense. Um. Everybody, thank you so much for joining us today. This was fantastic. This was one of the most fun ones of these we've done, at least for me. Um, let's just go around the room real quick. If people want to follow up with you, if they have any other questions or if they just want to learn more about what you do. What's the best place for everybody to track you down?

Nancy Maluso: [00:38:15] Linkedin is always good. Nancy Maluso and Maluso at LinkedIn. I'm the only one out there, I believe. So you should be able to find me that way. And of course, our company to learn what we're doing is Edg.io is our website and you know, we'd love to engage.

Alex Brown: [00:38:32] It's such a good url I’m so mad.

Alex Brown: [00:38:36] Yeah, go ahead, Maria.

Maria Gianotti: [00:38:38] No, for me, too. Same same as Nancy, LinkedIn. Love to connect. If you have any questions, any, any you want to pick my brain or, you know, just have a coffee conversation or coffee. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

Alex Brown: [00:38:51] And if you want to learn more about what Maria and I do for our jobs, check us out. It's ironhorse.io. Um, and still on some social networks, it's like social is complicated right now. Everybody who knows what we're doing. Uh, but ironhorse.io is the website. Check us out there. Um, we do this once a month, so please come back next month and we'll do it again. Um, again. Nancy, Maria, thank you both so much for joining us. And until next time, break's over, let's get back to work. Bye, everybody.

Nancy Maluso: [00:39:22] Thank you. Bye bye.