Unify Sales and Marketing | Stories With Traction Podcast

 

SHOW NOTES:

PODCAST SUMMARY: In this episode, Erik Wolf and Matt Zaun talk about the disconnect between C-suite, sales, and marketing and what can be done to change that.

ERIK WOLF BIO: Erik is the founder and CEO of estound, which is an award-winning fractional marketing department for mid-size companies.

For more info, check out Erik here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikwolf/
https://estound.com/
https://getunifiedmarketing.com/

MATT ZAUN BIO: Matt is an award-winning speaker and storyteller who empowers organizations to attract more clients through the art of strategic storytelling. Matt’s past engagements have catalyzed radical sales increases for over 300 organizations that range from financial institutions to the health and wellness industry.

Matt shares his expertise in persuasion with executives, sales professionals, and entrepreneurs, who he coaches on the art of influence and how to leverage this for profits and impact.

For more info, check out Matt Zaun HERE.

 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors.

Matt Zaun (mattzaun.com)

Today, we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics in all the world, which is marketing. Now, the reason why I'm so passionate about marketing is because marketing saved my business a few years ago.

I was so focused on aggressive sales that I failed to recognize the importance of marketing. That's why I'm really excited for this conversation.

Today, I'm joined by Eric Wolf. Eric is the founder and CEO of the Sound, which is an award-winning fractional marketing department for mid-sized companies.

 

Erik Wolf (estound)

Welcome to the show, Eric. Hey, thanks for having me.

 

Matt Zaun (mattzaun.com)

I really appreciate it. And I appreciate your time. I know you're extremely busy, so I'm thankful for the time you're willing to give us today to dive into marketing, kind of where you've been regarding marketing and where you see marketing going.

So as far as the beginning, so to speak, take us through your founding of the company, a sound what led you up to that point.

Was there a moment where you recognize the importance of marketing or was it something that kind of came about almost accidentally in the beginning?

 

Erik Wolf (estound)

In the beginning. I honestly it was founding the company was actually sort of an accident. I never actually intended to run a marketing business or an agency or anything like that.

At the time that I started the company in it was 2006 and at the time I was running a marketing communications department for a baby toy manufacturer and that company was a growing company.

They had grown from about 70 million to about 130 million I think during my time there and I've been there for five years.

And I felt that I'd done everything that I would. was going to do with that company. I felt that I was at the top of the hill.

And I said, well, what do I want to do next if I'm going to leave this company? And I said, you know, what would be really great is if I could be like a VP of marketing or something like that, but at a smaller company, wouldn't it be really great to be VP of marketing at a $20 million company or a $15 million company?

And I thought that that would have been my dream job at the time. And so I started applying for stuff.

And lo and behold, it turns out that there aren't a lot of $20 million companies that hire VPs of marketing.

Call me naive. I didn't know at the time. It was what am I going to do? I kept going on these job interviews.

And I kept sort of hearing that ultimately the decision was that we're not going to bring marketing in house right now.

And so I was, I'd been talking to one company in, and I was in Atlanta at the time, and I was talking to an IT managed service provider.

I felt like I had good chemistry with the owner. I felt that that it was like right there and it wasn't happening.

And so I called him up. I hadn't heard from him about four or five weeks. And I called him up and I said, Hey, I'm getting the impression that you're not going to be looking to hire me as, as your in house marketing person.

What if I was your agency? And he said, actually, I would really like that. And so, and so we signed that that was my first client.

And. And then kind of overnight, I was the owner of an agency. It was a fictional agency at the time.

But I used to, so I spent a month taking long lunch breaks. Our office at the toy company was right next to the shopping mall.

And so I would take my Macbook across to the mall and I'd sit in the chair like right outside the Apple store and steal their Wi-Fi.

And I spent a month basically learning how to be an agency owner before I left my job. And I went to work and I've been basically doing versions of this ever since.

 

Matt Zaun (mattzaun.com)

Wow, that's awesome. Alright, so let's talk about 2006 though, because that's an interesting time to start a marketing agency.

So right before the Great Recession. So take us through that. Did you feel like it was a good decision to start at that time?

 

Erik Wolf (estound)

Or was it more challenging than you thought it was going to be? You know, it was interesting. Because I, yes, that was a very interesting time to start a company.

I was still ramping up and so, and so it took me a little while to realize that we were in a recession.

And I was like, oh, this is just really hard. No, it's actually harder than it should be. We actually did real well, actually up until sort of the back part of it.

It was the 2007 to 2009, 2010, we were doing pretty good. It was actually that back half, that 2010 to 2012, when technically we were already starting to come out of it.

That was the harder time for me. At the beginning, there was a whole lot of the thing that kept us going and why it might have been a good time to start a company.

start despite the economic conditions is because a lot of people, even in relatively big businesses, I was working with, you know, so I was working with an IT company, I was working with a, I was actually working with several commercial builders, the kinds of like big construction companies that were building schools and power plants and things like that.

And nobody really understood where they fit into this whole new digital thing. I was working with companies that despite being fairly large and mature, didn't really have web presences.

They weren't doing, they weren't participating in things like email marketing, they weren't participating in any of the new technology that was really starting to filter

down to that level at the time. And so it was a really interesting time because I ended up being a lot of people's sort of digital Sherpa, like showing them how to start embracing these things.

And then, but yeah, then we slowed down big time in around 2010. And that took a little while to all the amazing work you're doing now, right?

So it was worth the challenges 100% We love the work that we're doing now and we love and and of course you work in a business for for 17 years and and a lot of stuff changes and a lot of stuff has changed in our industry.

A lot of things have changed in the way that that we approach things. Certainly, there's been a lot of evolution in that and a lot of things that we've learned.

But we're living fundamentally. thing in a very, very different world, then I started this business in. And so it's been really interesting and really gratifying in some ways to be a part of that.

So it's kind of amazing when you look back and if you picture yourself waking up in, you know, in 2006 and looking around and then going back then waking up in 2023, you wouldn't recognize a lot of the things about how businesses are run nowadays.

You wouldn't recognize virtual selling. You wouldn't recognize the fact that that were, that so many of us are in hybrid and remote workplaces.

The smartphone didn't really exist. We had the Blackberries and that was about the apex of smartphone technology at the time.

So there's a lot of stuff that has changed in the time that we've been doing this and I like to think that.

We've grown along with the rest of the world.

 

Matt Zaun (mattzaun.com)

Yeah, so I appreciate you mentioned the differences. One of the things that's interesting to me though, based on what I've experienced, which sounds similar to your experience, was something that I don't feel has changed, is that a lot of midsize companies are still not doing in-house, right?

So they like to have consultants or a contract out or rely on agencies. So can you talk to us about the companies that do this well and maybe some of the companies that are really frustrated by the agencies they've worked with?

 

Erik Wolf (estound)

What are some of the differences between that? So the frustration is palpable. There was a study by the Harvard Business Review that basically says that 4 out of 5 CEOs don't have to be able to do that.

don't trust their marketing people. And on the same, on the other hand, we've got the reverse of that, where 75% of marketing leaders don't believe that they're empowered to make the kinds of differences at companies that they're capable of.

And so we've got a situation where fundamentally and in huge numbers, CEOs aren't talking about company the way that they're expressing that widespread frustration with marketing.

4 out of 5 CEOs aren't saying that they're unhappy with their CFOs. They're not saying that they're unhappy with their IT companies.

They're unhappy with marketing. So it's a real problem when you have such a cultural breakdown between between... and the people who want the work and the people who are doing the work.

And so that's a major problem. It is absolutely widespread. A lot of companies are looking at marketing and saying, well, I spent all this money on marketing.

What is it that I'm getting? And a lot of the marketers aren't being as forthcoming as they should in terms of saying, we need this from you.

We need that from you. We need to. And so we've got a breakdown. And so figuring out how to solve that breakdown is really one of the best things that I feel that my team and I can help contribute to.

And that's really been the focus of a lot of my efforts over the last two, three years, because the companies that are doing it well.

are doing things like they're setting and communicating objectives. They are making sure that everybody is on the same page.

In many companies, the C-level folks don't know what the marketers are doing, and the marketers don't really know what the C-level folks actually expect of them.

They're just saying, oh, well, we needed a website, we need more SEO, we need new AdWords campaign, and they're just on the treadmill doing stuff, and nobody's happy.

So the companies that are doing it well are communicating really well with their marketing people. The goals are documented.

Everybody knows what job they're here to do. They've got a... methodology for measuring things and for deciding how they're going to be successful.

What does success look like? Believe it or not, a lot of companies are moving those goalposts all the time because they haven't chosen measurables that will be thought, oh, well, we thought if we got more leads, that would be the thing that mattered.

And now we have a bunch more leads, but we're not getting more sales. So what's going on marketing? Are these not the leads?

And well, we just thought that you wanted leads. That's what we did. And so there's a real disconnect. So we really want to solve those disconnects and to be super truthful about it.

In a lot of cases, whether marketing is going to be successful or not has actually been determined before the marketing people were even hired.

And And that's a hard thing for a lot of CEOs to wrap their heads around. But the truth is, is that a lot of times.

We haven't given a lot of attention to how we budget for things. How are we deciding how much money?

What's our marketing budget? Well, you know, we really want to blow the doors off this year. So what we're going to do is we're going to take last year's budget and we're going to add 10% to it.

And our marketing people are going to be thrilled. And okay, well, that's cool. We're spending more money. Marketing has got more work to do.

But is that work aligned with the outcome that we're trying to achieve? Is there adequate, even with that 10%?

Is there adequate funding to actually do the thing that we said we wanted to do? If we said that we want to grow this company, top line revenue by 12%.

or whatever that goal is, have we budgeted enough to afford that growth? Because if we've said we want 10% or 12%, but we only budget enough that we can grow by 6%, guess what happens?

Everybody's unhappy. The marketing folks get fired. And we start all over again. And so a lot of those misalignments are really tough to manage.

I'll tell you one story and then I'll let you. And I'll stop soliloquizing. But this is a really common thing that we've seen versions of this a million times, where a business owner would call us up.

In this case that I'm referencing, it was a California company, tech company, B2B. And they were talking about how they're nine months deep into a contract with a search engine optimization agency.

And man, if this company is in screw and everything up, we're not getting anything. We're wasting our money. Can you help us figure out what's wrong?

And I said, yeah, well, let's take a look at it. We'll open up the, give us your Google Analytics.

Let's open it up. We'll look under the hood, see what's going on. And we'll tell you what we think.

And so lo and behold, they do that. We look in the Analytics. We look at their webmaster tools. I've got my team is messing with stuff.

And they're like, well, you know what? These guys aren't doing like a crazy fantastic job. I mean, they're only nine months in.

But man, I mean, I feel like this is a solid BB plus effort. And it could be getting better.

But everything looks really healthy here. It really does. Everything looks good. They've grown in terms of their impressions on search.

They're getting more search traffic. They're getting better rankings on some of these terms, which look really important. So we're not really sure what he's angry about.

So I'll call him back and I said, well, hey, here's the deal. We looked at it and everything's looking pretty good.

What pain are you experiencing? He's like, well, we're not getting any leads. I was like, oh, this is, I think it was right before the, this was kind of around pandemic time.

I was like, this is 2020. We don't use search engine optimization, not in these kinds of businesses to generate leads.

If you're spending here and you're looking for leads, that's like, you know, that's, that's, that's, It's like, you know, you're thirsty and you buy a bag of potato chips.

We don't, you've got to, you've got to actually connect the things that you're doing with the things that you want to achieve.

Your SEO is being a really great awareness builder for your company. But you don't have the things in place to then go and convert people that might be interested into leads.

And that's the thing that you've got to really focus on. If you want to, it's not the SEO, that's the problem.

It's the plan that's the problem. And maybe you shouldn't have spent on SEO at all. But a lot of people are doing that.

They think that they should be doing something. And so they hire somebody to do that thing. They're not asking the question, hey, I want to grow my revenue or my, I want, you know, more marketing qualified leads this year.

Or I want to grow my revenue this year. Or I want to, I want to, achieve this goal, what should I be doing in order to do that?

If I said, hey, this is the destination, show me the path, what are we doing? That's a great way to work.

A really bad way to work is for the business owner to say, well, I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this.

And so I'm going to go in higher marketing people specifically to do the tactics that I think need. And then nobody's ever happy.

 

Matt Zaun (mattzaun.com)

That's a really good point. It's a really good point. I appreciate you mentioning all that. The thing that really stood out to me is that trust factor.

Just the fact that four out of five C is don't even trust their people with this is unbelievable. So to speak about trust, I've also seen sales and marketing not trusting each other's department, which is not the best situation, right?

Because if we can get the marriage of sales and marketing together, that's when I think a lot of these goals are going to be crossed.

Based on what I've seen so if you were to instruct a medium-sized company that might be having that detachment within sales and marketing What would be some of the things that you would recommend that they would do to get those two units to work together?

 

Erik Wolf (estound)

It's it's a huge problem and and back in the day We could have sales and marketing live separately and we could You know and and we created I mean, let's be honest this this competition and this budding of heads between sales and marketing Is so stupid and so cliche at this point.

It's an environment that that Business owners and business structures have created but the fact is that sales and marketing are not different and and with virtual selling with With with Generation Z the zoomers entering the workplace becoming

consumers, you know, now, you know, some of them the older ones in positions where they may be making decisions at companies now.

That line between sales and marketing is way blurrier than it ever has been. And more than ever, it is very clear that sales and marketing are the same process.

It is a continuum. And the thing that matters is that the difference between the part of the process that's marketing driven and the part of the process that's sales driven is that marketing is really, really good at fostering one to many conversations.

You know, marketing marketing is the person on great speech. The sales, the salespeople are really good at those one-to-one relationships.

Marketing is scale. sales is not because one to one is a very difficult model to scale. And so, but now, we're back in the day, there used to be a very kind of clean sort of handoff between, okay, marketing's job is over now, it's sales job.

With all of the changes that we've experienced in the workplace, in how we're selling, in how the marketplace receives sales and salespeople.

You know, it's gotten murky, it's like we've got, you know, it's not just like fresh water versus salt water.

It's like those are, they're those like estuaries, the spots where the water mixes, and it's, you know, and it's not really fresh water and it's not really salt water.

And we've got those big overlapping spots in the sales and marketing process now. And we have to get out of the habit of treating these things like they're separate.

We've got to put sales and marketing together. They should share objectives. They should share a budget. They should share measurables.

People always ask, like, we spent $10,000 to go to a conference last month. We'll see ROI on that. The fact is that we can't anymore go through the process of saying, like, okay, let's calculate ROI for every little thing that we produce.

What we have is a process that's designed to approach the marketplace and create revenue. And so we need to value the whole journey.

If we go in value the little bits and pieces of it. It's like making soup and having your kids ask you what the ROY of the celery was.

You know, that's not what we're doing. We're making something bigger than that. And so we've got to acknowledge that all of these things that we're doing are ingredients in the soup.

And if something doesn't taste good, we should take it out. But it's going to be really difficult now to measure those things on an individual basis.

It's well, it's easier than ever to measure things. But in terms of that impact, how am I going to value every single contribution that marketing makes that makes the job at the end easier for sales?

And how do I then value the closing of the lead and say, you know, on this one? on sales' effort was worth this and marketing's effort was worth.

It's really hard to do. But if you put everybody together and you acknowledge the fact that everybody is part of the same process, that we have to have a collaborative environment between sales and marketing, that's the future.

The folks that are, I mean, we used to have all of these, you know, the conference room argument where sales, you know, stands up, starts waving their hands around, we're not getting any leads and marketing isn't doing their job, they're not supporting us and the marketing person stands up and with the spreadsheet, and it's like, well, look at all these leads.

These are leads. What's, you guys aren't closing them? And they're like, well, they're not good leads. And so when people have been having versions of that argument for decades, and if you're still allowing that argument,

to happen in your company. That's as sure a sign as ever that things need to change and that you need to realign the goals and priorities of the people on those teams and you need to put them together because there's no solution to that problem.

 

Matt Zaun (mattzaun.com)

Well, 100%. And the analogy that you mentioned, marketing being that person, I'm envisioning the person standing on a box using a bull horn, right?

Maybe it's a very powerful speech. They're giving all kinds of stories that really connect to people and then that sales analogy, that one-on-one conversation.

Imagine if the sales individual with a one-on-one didn't hear what was being said on the bull horn, right? Didn't know what street they were standing on, didn't know who they were trying to connect with.

Like it sounds silly that that would happen, but that happens all the time in businesses, all the time. They don't know what they're marketing people or

doing. The marketing people don't know what the sales people are doing as far as those conversations. And it's amazing that so many companies are living in an old world, that old world that everything could be done separate.

But now today more than ever, it needs to be done together. So I very much appreciate you mentioning that.

It would be something if, if a company is having this issue, which I know there are people listening to this, that they have those issues in their companies, what would be something that you would say, do this right away when it comes to that sales and marketing piece?

What would that be? Would that be having a meeting where they're together? What would be one of the first things that they should do right out of the gate out?

They listen this podcast episode and they implement blank.

 

Erik Wolf (estound)

What would that blank be? So the thing that I would do is get people together, but with a purpose and

and recalibrate on what is the thing that we are actually trying to accomplish. And then beyond that, what are the things that we need to do to accomplish that?

Which of those things are things that that that sales controls and has authority over? Which are things which are things that are under marketing's influence?

And let's actually sit down and put a plan together. And like I said, let's get everybody working on actually the same objectives.

My goals are your goals. The budget should be shared, the process should be shared, the understanding the... So what we say that marketing is here to do.

You know, people are like, well, what does marketing do? And it's like marketing is supposed to do two things.

And really, it's not that marketing is supposed to do these two things, but this process that we're in together is supposed to...

to do two things. It's supposed to increase the lifetime value of customers and it's supposed to reduce the cost of acquiring new ones so that we can scale.

And a functional sales and marketing process is going to do those two things. And so let's put our goals together.

Let's, I really do like we've seen the advent of sort of the chief revenue officer in the last few years.

And that also just in terms of organizing them together and showing people, hey, not only do we have the same goals, the same measure goals, the same budget, we've got the same reporting structure, and our teams are doing the exact same thing.

And we've got a process of how to do this and we're happy to share with folks. It's part of the system that we implement with companies called the unified marketing system.

And that's what we do is we come in and we help lay this out and help facilitate those conversations so that people cannot be in that problem.

 

Matt Zaun (mattzaun.com)

Great. Well, thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. And Eric, thank you so much for your time today.

I very much appreciate this conversation. I got a lot out of it. There were three specific takeaways that I got out of our time together.

I was blown away when you said four out of five CEOs don't trust their marketing people. That is staggering to me.

Okay. So that's the first takeaway. The second was, well, what happens when companies are doing this well? And you mentioned they're communicating their objectives.

They have a unified vision. And you mentioned C suite being on board with marketing. That is so key. And then the third and final piece is that analogy that you mentioned regarding sales and marketing marketing out there with that bullhorn sales more one on one.

Other companies that are messing up, they don't even know what those two entities are saying. So it's unifying it, not keeping it separate, unifying it, getting it together, sharing objectives, understanding purpose plan and process.

Now, if anyone wants to learn more about that plan and process and they want to contact you, where's the best place that they can go to get your information?

 

Erik Wolf (estound)

Um, hook up with me on LinkedIn. And say, Hey, I want the copy of your book. I want to talk.

I want to do that. We'll hook you up with that or check out our websites, um, astound.com, uh, and get unified marketing.com.

 

Matt Zaun (mattzaun.com)

Perfect. All right. I to make it super convenient. I'll include all that in the show notes. People can just click and go and get right to your information.

 

Erik Wolf (estound)

But again, thank you so much, Eric. I very much appreciate your time today. Hey, thank you. This was a lot of fun.

I really liked doing this. Thanks so much for inviting me.