Mandy Hornaday: Well, hey, Jim and Michael, it's great to have you on the Growth Activated podcast today. Thanks so much for joining me.
Michael Phelan: Thank you for having us on.
Jim Irving: Delighted to be here.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. So hey, I'd love to start off. Jim, I'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about your background. What has led you in your career to where you're at today?
Jim Irving: Okay, I'll try and keep this short. I have had a 30 year career in sales and marketing, starting with door to door sales of all things, almost entirely in the technology industry. But over that period, I went through various levels and ended up running a division for a very large corporation at the time called Silicon Graphics over 25 countries, and then as UK managing director running the largest subsidiary in the world for an enterprise software company called Information Builders. When that finished, I then decided to do my own thing. My career has gone between, it's quite unusual, between sales and sales leadership, marketing, marketing leadership, and then business leadership. So I've done all of those. So having ridden those waves, I wanted to pass on my expertise. So I spent the last 19 years working with start-ups, scaling companies and corporates, helping them to grow faster, or to make more of the resources and the capabilities that they have. And that's anything from sales, training and coaching, to marketing advice, to marketing strategy, to branding, to any of the elements that go into the marketing mix. So that's what I've been doing and I've done it over a broad range of companies around the world.
Mandy Hornaday: Amazing. You know, I think there's something really special about, as a marketing leader, as someone who also has led sales in my career, I just think it creates so much empathy. I am a tried and true marketing leader for probably 15 years, but there was a few years there where I led sales and it blew open my perspective in terms of having empathy for them and really thinking about the broader growth and revenue picture and frankly, the bigger business.
Jim Irving: Yes. And it's that revenue generation engine, which is the combination of the two, that is what I've learned, and that's part of the reason why this service has been created. Yeah, absolutely.
Mandy Hornaday: Amazing. Michael, what about you?
Michael Phelan: Yeah, thanks. I started my career kind of at big consumer products companies like Reebok and then got involved on the B2B side of things, companies like Staples. And then I got involved in both sales and marketing roles in kind of SaaS companies, you know, a five million dollar company looking to go to 50, looking to grow to 100. And then about 13 years ago, I formed GoToMarket Pros based in Boston. And I focus on helping companies grow revenue, enter the US market. And I work across a lot of best practices in both sales and marketing. Specifically in the last two years, I've been very focused on how do you drive an exchange of value and information between B2B sellers and prospects.
Mandy Hornaday: Amazing, amazing. Well, I'm not sure if you both know this, but I specialize in marketing transformation and working with organizations that have marketing teams where they've got probably five to 10 marketing team members, but they're really a support function to sales. They're more reactive, they're activity-based, and they're really looking forward to transforming into a strategic proactive growth engine. And so when I saw Michael share out a little bit about the sales and marketing maturity matrix, I just knew I had to talk to you guys because this is really interesting and exciting for me. So Jim, let's start there. What is it and what encouraged you? How did you get into creating it?
Jim Irving: Yes, okay, so let's start with the basics. I'm ancient and I've ridden all of these different waves. But what constant has been the disconnect between sales and marketing in many businesses, the differing approaches and the inability of companies to quickly and easily establish where they are, how they're doing, not in terms of individual skills, but in terms of the capabilities of the sales department or the marketing department. This has taken two of us a full year of full-time work to develop, helped by 20 advisors who are all in one way or another world-class specialists and domain experts. So marketing people who are into fractional working, people who've led large organizations on both sides, and also an interesting mix of one of the world's most prominent speakers on negotiation, someone who's a real domain expert on pricing. And believe it or not, someone who looks at this from the other side, who's a really big name in procurement. So we've brought together this group of people and we've said, what does good look like?
Jim Irving: The idea behind the service is to very quickly get to a point where you know where you are. You know, the old saying, the start of any journey is knowing where you are. You can't go out to your competition and say, how are you set up in sales and marketing? What are you doing? What tools do you use? Of course you can't. So we tried to overcome that, and we used two things. We used these 20 domain experts and my business partner, Norman, who is a mathematician and data scientist. You can guess where that one's going. We have worked to create a questionnaire, fairly simple, which up to five people in the organization complete. And we would suggest someone on the board, maybe a CRO, CEO, CFO, someone who looks down on these areas, the head of sales, head of marketing, and a good strong person in sales, good strong person in marketing. So it's from one person to five, take this questionnaire, and what it then does is the backend then says, okay, compared to worldwide best practice, and we've done a ton of research with public domain output from the big consultancies, from the professional standards bodies, from the professional bodies for sales and marketing and from everywhere we could get it. McKinsey, Forbes, anywhere we could get it, for a year.
Jim Irving: And what we've got is, and it is a matrix, it's two axes. One is sales, one is marketing. And the first thing that the organizations that do this will receive is a score. So the backend system calculates. If you think of any area, let's talk about marketing strategy. A score of one is, we've never thought about it, or we asked someone to write it, but we've never looked at it since. And we've all been there. Level five, we are the people in our market sector that everyone else is scared of, and we have everything going, including everything that would have been best practice a couple of years ago plus AI on top. And two, three and four are just building up that level. So you're going from, we know nothing about this or haven't done anything, to we are the absolute masters. So you end up with a score. Marketing is from A to E, sales from one to five. So your company will end up having a company score that is, let's say, a C3. That would be middle. Now, that's interesting, but not incredibly useful. There are nine pillars that the questionnaire covers for sales and for marketing. So things like strategy, tactics, how much of the marketing mix are you involved in? Are you using branding? Go to market, pricing, all of that stuff. And the same on the sales side. The report then that comes out as the result of this process gives your score, you're a C3, and says, in every one of these areas, this is how you've scored and this is how you've done against best practice. So if you were a B in strategy, part of the half page would say something like, yeah, you've written a strategy, you've started it off, but it's really not well developed. And then it says, well, if you're a C today, we would presume if you want to grow, you want to become a D. And if you want to become a D, here's what D looks like, and here are some ideas for moving from C to D. So you end up with a summary score and a real understanding of what that means in sales and in marketing and how to move to the next step. So that's the fundamental of it.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Okay, wow, I have so many questions. You talked about what made up the different scores, but let me even start a level higher than that. How did you land on five different phases?
Jim Irving: It's interesting that maturity matrix has been used in science for a while and they tend to say that in almost any endeavour there are between three and six gradations or steps or levels. As we started to work it, we just came to five as being a good number. Nothing more scientific than that, and the reason that happened was, as we started to think about, let's say, branding, what would no branding look like? What would the best branding look like? And what would be the steps in between? Time after time, it came to around five levels. So that's what we settled on.
Mandy Hornaday: Interesting. And I'm curious, if we take branding as an example versus marketing strategy or all these different pillars, how often do you see that the maturity level even within those areas varies greatly? Maybe someone is an E on branding, but a C on strategy, although that seems a little bit backwards, but I would love to hear.
Jim Irving: Yes, yes. Well, one of the things that people love when we give them the report, and you may have seen it, Mandy, is a spider graph. And it shows you what perfection is like on the outside and then inside. My goodness. We've had ones where the inside level, where you currently are today, is almost at the centre of one area. And it's touching the top line of perfection, if you will, in another area. So yes, we see the real world where this company is really hot on go to market, but it's never actually thought about the overriding strategy, and that comes out instantly and visually.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, that totally doesn't surprise me because marketing has become such a wide and complex function over the last few decades, it seems like. Even as a CMO, it's hard to be great at everything. It's impossible to be great at everything.
Jim Irving: Yeah, and you know one of the questions is, if you think of the seven or eight P's, are you doing all of them? Are you active in each area? Do you do digital marketing and events and PR and direct mail and, you know, we're finding people are saying, well, yeah, we're good at that, but we're nowhere on this. So absolutely. This is about the real world. Where are we today? And for organisations that want to stay in their happy place and don't want to find out any of that, this is not the tool for you. If you want to say, where are we today and what are the steps to become better, then this is absolutely the tool.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Now, I'm curious in terms of the weighting, does advancement in certain marketing areas contribute to a higher score than others, or is it pretty much an equal balance across?
Jim Irving: No, it's absolutely not an equal balance. Norman, my business partner, the data scientist, who by the way teaches that at postgraduate level for the next generation, so he knows what he's doing. He was also a vice president level person at Information Builders. So that's how we met each other 20 years ago. He looked at this and then started to analyze and to go to all of the big bodies that provide national and worldwide data. So we have weightings by the competitiveness of geographies, the competitive levels within individual industries, and the weighting and ranking of the individuals who are giving the information. For example, all three of us on this call know the CEO is always told how great everything is. So whatever input they give is different from those who are right at the coal face, the really good person in sales, the really good person in marketing. So all of that is taken into consideration and weighted behind the scenes. All the individuals do is answer the same set of questions. And we've done something a bit revolutionary there. We have created our own questionnaire software, and that uses, thank goodness, a slider. You know when you're doing a questionnaire and you've got that question and you go, well, I'm more than a 2 but I'm not a 3? Fine. Be a 2.75. Be a 2.25. Whatever you want to be in between, you take the slider. So that makes giving the graded answers much better. And the testimony to that is that every customer that we worked with has said we've absolutely nailed where they are and what their challenges are. Although a couple said we're much worse in two of those than we thought we were. So the whole process, to answer your original question, is for the first time, we believe, for sales and marketing, to create a simple way to understand where you are and a simple way to understand how to move to the next level of performance.
Mandy Hornaday: Amazing. And it's funny that you said that we always tell the CEOs that everything is great, but so many stats are out there. With CMO being the highest turnover in the C-suite, and with CEO mistrust of CMOs being so high, it's interesting. You could say it could swing either way, I guess, their results.
Jim Irving: Yes, yes. And one of the things that's happened is that everybody has walked us into the boardroom and said, okay, here's where we are, here's our challenges, now we know. We had a feeling maybe that this was a challenge, or it's come out of the blue. But look at this, this is independent. And some people have said to us, why don't we try and figure this out ourselves? How on earth could you do that? We have got 500 years of domain expertise and leadership behind this. You won't get that in your own company. And if you go to a consultancy, Michael, I don't know if you'd like to speak to the US, but what sort of value would you think of a consultancy project to try and get to this level of detail?
Michael Phelan: Yeah, no, it's a good question. Consultants come in obviously and they do the interview, 10, 15 people in the company. They come up with a deck and things like that. But it's not scientific, it's not data-driven, it's not that robust a lot of the time. So I think consultants, this would be very complementary to what they do, whether you're a fractional salesperson or a McKinsey. I think it'd be very helpful. And to go back to something you just said, Mandy, about CMOs, yes, they have churn. Yes, CEOs and boards don't always understand the world of marketing. This may be a tool to help them understand that better, and understand what are the dimensions of success, and help the marketing team themselves understand that. On the revenue side, what I'm hearing is the revenue leaders in a lot of these companies are now under more pressure from the boards, from the CEOs, because the revenue is less predictable in this economy right now. So many CROs said that they had a revenue machine, we had a wheel and literally they went in and turned it every day, they knew exactly what was going to happen, and that may have been more predictable four or five years ago, but as we went into 2024, 2025, key metrics change, like discovery meetings are down 30%. MQL, SQL conversion and meetings is down 50%. So both on the sales and marketing side, we're seeing changes, we're seeing a lack of predictability. And there's no better time than now to really get a better independent sense of that. I would say also, there's egos involved in terms of how well I'm doing, how well marketing's doing, how sales are doing.
Jim Irving: Never, never make it.
Mandy Hornaday: We don't have egos. No.
Michael Phelan: And this takes it away a little bit. And it's good for both teams to say, you know what, we thought we were really good at this and we're not good at this. And we thought we were really bad at this and we're actually pretty good at it. But it's very good for them to say, where are areas that they could accelerate performance? And it's good for sales and marketing together to be able to look at areas to accelerate performance, because it's really a handshake to deliver pipeline. Marketing plays a big role, sales plays a big role, but the teams that are most successful are playing together as an integrated, united team, and they have seamless handoffs from leads to meetings to proposals to close. And this will help to bring teams together, which is one thing I think is really important.
Jim Irving: Yes, Mandy, just to add to that. One of the funny things: before we went live three or four months ago, we spent the two years, we didn't find anything that enabled a quick stock check, if you want, of sales and marketing. Dozens that would do sales, dozens that would do marketing. And one of our very wise advisors, as we were creating the questionnaire and sending it out and getting it back, said to us, where's the big question? And I said, what big question? And it's now in on both sides, on the marketing questions and the sales questions: how well do you both work together? And that one goes from, we know each other exists, but we don't talk very often, to, we're a joined up team. We don't care about the job titles. We all have the same aim. We're all working to the same strategy, building the same programs. And so, yeah, that question went in very quickly as soon as we thought, of course, that's the big question.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Sales and marketing alignment is such an important topic and it can really make or break revenue teams for sure. And that's a nice transition into the sales side, because I know that there's a sales portion of this. And I think that's what makes your approach and report unique, is that you typically stand up both. So how does the sales side vary from the marketing side? Are they similar inputs?
Jim Irving: Okay, so the headings, the pillars, some of them are similar. Do you have a sales strategy? Is that joined up? On both of them, by the way, marketing and sales, what's your tech stack? What's your use of AI? It could be zero, it could be we're playing around with it, it could be, yeah, we're right there. In sales, some of the other areas that come in are use of partners and indirect sales channels. How are you working those? How are you dealing with them? And so what we've got is the sort of nine headings on marketing and an equivalent with some the same on sales, some different. And those really came together from all of the research which we did. The software was being built in the back end and there must have been nine months of concentrated full time research just looking, and then taking the hundreds of aspects that there are, pricing, skill set, training, negotiation, plus all the ones we've already mentioned, and putting those into groups which became the pillars. So sales has the same depth, and sales also has delivered surprises. We have had people who thought, in one example, that marketing, dare I say it, was doing really well and sales was underperforming. Turns out in their case that sales were not great but okay, but pretty rounded. Marketing was stand out in a couple of areas and almost non-existent in other areas. And the great thing with that is the second they saw it around the table they went, right, we know what we've got to do now. We know where we've got to step in. We know what actions we've got to take. So this is designed to be fast and to be real world.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Well, and I'm curious, when the marketing and sales organizations are at vastly different maturity levels, what is your recommendation back to the companies? Does one have to catch up with the other before it makes sense to move the other one forward, or how do those work in parallel?
Jim Irving: Yes, so the first thing to say is that Norman and I, as the founders and the creators of this, our only role is to deliver the information. And we say, look, this is where you are, this is the reality. Most of the companies that we're dealing with, when they get the results, go... and that's where Michael, the other advisors, specialists in those areas come into play. So we're not saying that we then take it on and move it forward. We give you your stake in the ground. Here's your challenges, here's where you're weak, here's where you're strong. Now how would you want to take it forward? Some companies have said, we've got that and we'll do it internally. Others, I think logically and creatively, have said, right, where can we get help to overcome these quickly?
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. So Michael, I'll throw the question over to you then. When you see those types of results, or you enter into an organization where the go-to-market teams are at very different maturity levels, what would your recommendation to the organization be? Do you think one has to catch up with the other?
Michael Phelan: Yeah, I think there's a couple of ways of looking at it. So if you look at it across both sales and marketing, if there's some elements that are so critical to success that are really weak in both areas, certainly those are high priorities, because if you're really low on a critical sales axis, critical marketing axis, you can prioritize those. In order to be successful, we have to do this well, sales and marketing. And the individual teams themselves certainly have a responsibility of tackling their weaknesses and improving. And I wouldn't say... sometimes they're very good at something and they can be much better. Sometimes they're very good at something and it could be a competitive advantage to them. So they may well really push the envelope on why they're good, why they're succeeding, and bring up some other things as well. So it's not totally a matter of ignore your strength, focus on your weaknesses. The other thing is, if you can show them some examples of some peer companies that are doing better than them in these areas. Because now that they accept the fact that they're not the best, the next question will be, well, who is the best? Or, can you give me an example? I think companies are very, very motivated by their peer companies and their competitors. But being able to show them an example, let me show you a company that's a five on that, what are they doing differently? And so you identify what I call a performance bridge. You say, here's where you are today, here's what best in class is, here's what you're doing today, here's what best in class does. And then you encourage them to go down that road.
Michael Phelan: And I also encourage them to take, you know, I sometimes call it baby steps. I don't remember the Bill Murray movie where he had the glass jam jar with the goldfish, but he was taking baby steps because the world was so difficult, he could only take baby steps. So I encourage people to take a first step in the right direction. I think too many consultants come in and they try and go for the moonshot and they tell companies you can go from the worst in class to the best in class in two weeks. And I think you frustrate the client by doing that. So what I do is I show them direction. If you're going from Boston to Detroit, we're not gonna go there in an hour, right? But we're gonna make the first step in the journey. And we make a bite-sized step. We say, we're gonna do this, we're gonna have this impact. We tick that off. The organization feels like, we're on the journey, we've made the first step, great. And you actually need to watch that the organization doesn't try and do too much too fast, because they can get frustrated. Let's take the next step. That's gonna be a bigger step with more commitment, more support. Now we've got a foundation. And you start them on that road, not over promise, but actionable, tangible, doable, and have them get some early wins. Because on any big initiative like this, getting some early wins builds the confidence in the team and shows the organization that we know where we're going and we're ticking off stuff. And you may find some organizational resistance where people don't necessarily want to admit that they're not as good as they think, or as bad as they are. And it may be that the sales and marketing team needs some help from the executives in terms of investment, in technology, in IT and other areas. So use the information to also support the sales and marketing team, give them the resources, give them the corporate support, and then report every quarter, every three months. Let's come back and do this again. Let's show we've made progress. Because if people feel they're heading in the right direction, they feel confident and they'll make bigger moves. But make it easy for them to get started and make the first step and hit some early stage milestones.
Jim Irving: Yeah, yeah. If I could add to that, Mandy, one of the things that we've seen when we were building this all out, we got to the tech stack. And some people would say, all right, we've got a CRM, we're sorted. Or, we've got something from AI that does this, we're good. And Norman came up with the most fantastic example from his recent career. He was working with a business that had really good tech stacks in sales and in marketing. But they were always getting caught out, and being a mathematician and a data scientist he thought about it and he said, have you got any examples? And they said yes. The CRM didn't have any connection to the financial back office system. So they were selling very large value solutions, and in one situation they had a whole sales campaign to a company that hadn't made their last four payments on the finance system. So that sort of thinking outside the box stuff really matters. But when someone gets the report, we do suggest, and Michael's exactly right, let's find a low-hanging fruit, let's see what we can do, and then let's start to work together and to build together.
Mandy Hornaday: Yep. I'm a huge fan of balancing quick wins with long-term transformation, because these areas take time. It takes a lot of time and investment, depending on the company size, certainly.
Jim Irving: Yes, yeah. If you've got an absolute powerhouse of a marketing team, as Michael was alluding to, and their scores are all up near the top, theirs is about continual improvement. And what can their activity do to help the sales organization who are maybe only halfway there? Or vice versa. Every single company is different, and that's the magic of this. It's opening up the thing we could never see before.
Mandy Hornaday: Well, the big question for me is, and I'd be curious, I know it's probably an anecdotal share, not necessarily data-driven, although that would be interesting too, but where across those five stages from a marketing perspective, I want to know what percentage of marketing teams fall in each of those phases. Are the majority at the early stage maturity, or the majority at the late stage and we're behind? How do you typically see current state marketing teams? Do 50% of marketing teams fall within levels two and three, or B and C?
Jim Irving: So you're asking me, against absolute best practice in any given pillar, where is the typical customer so far? Yeah, and you actually just said the words, it's levels two and three overall. And that's become almost their expectation when someone requests for the report to be run for them. We're seeing that a lot. And if you think about it, it's human nature. Whoever was their first marketing hire or head of marketing had a set of skills, so they honed on that set of skills, and then the marketing department built around them. And we've had people who are only into digital marketing, never done an event. We've got people who are very traditional, only done product marketing and events. And so you get these combinations. And it's just nice to realize and to sit back and say, yeah, but what does that mean for us? And what does that mean against that best practice goal?
Michael Phelan: The other thing, Mandy, I would say is everybody is talking about throwing AI at everything and AI is going to solve everything. So far, AI ROI hasn't really been proven out at the level of hype in the market. It will. But the beauty of this tool is, if you have an area that you say we're good at, but it's very strategic and we really want to get better, then you can focus, how could AI help this particular aspect of a marketing operation? Or if you have an area you're very weak at, maybe AI can fill up some resource deficits and do it more effectively. So I think focusing AI on what is important and what needs to be built or what is underachieving is a better strategy for the team than just kind of, let's throw AI at everything and we don't know really where it goes and where it fits. I think this helps to focus that a lot more, which will help teams too.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. I could totally see how there's the question over here that's like, are you adopting AI, are you leveraging AI, that's maybe a new pillar that you would add to the phases. But then there's the broader question of AI should be helping you with all of those pillars in a way. And it's almost changing, I imagine, even what your highest level of mastery might look like. That feels like a moving spectrum even today.
Jim Irving: Yes, and so what we're doing is we're working on a six monthly window to reassess, to readjust, on what's happening in the market. One little extra that we were asked by a couple of our advisors to give, which we've done because we did all of this research: the last few pages of the report are, what are the mega trends that are coming down and hitting worldwide on sales and marketing? So we've said several times, AI is one of them. Becoming easier to do business with is another one. So we've highlighted those, I think there are six or seven, and we'll be updating that every six months. And to your point, Mandy, we are seeing organizations saying, is this a one off, or can we do this every six months or every year? And we think that's a great way to go, because you want to know where you are after all your effort and then to move forward again.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Great point. Although I have to say it might feel discouraging if you put in a bunch of effort, but then the finish line keeps moving, which is how today's world feels like, so you're chasing it.
Jim Irving: It's moving, yeah. Well, yes, but again, still better to know where you are. There's an old saying in Ireland... I'm from Scotland originally, but I've worked for US multinationals all my life, and I now live in Ireland, and there's a great Irish saying, you know, how did you get to X? Well, if I was going to go there, I wouldn't start from here. In other words, we're often not in the place that we hoped we would be, but we have to start and we have to try and move it forward.
Mandy Hornaday: Yes. My golden retriever puppy is at training camp right now and each week we get a report card. Last week she was a C. I'm like, oh gosh, we're not getting her back for a while. I hope she's a B this week. So assessments are top of mind for me right now, apparently.
Jim Irving: Poor thing! Yes.
Mandy Hornaday: Wonderful, wonderful. Michael, I'd be curious to hear from you. What are some of your tactical tips or action items when you see teams that get these assessments back? Where do you recommend that they start once they're self-aware? Where are you seeing some of the most natural pathways to success coming out of assessments like this?
Michael Phelan: Yeah, I mean, if you look at the world of marketing right now, we've done a great job of bringing technology to marketing. And in many ways, a lot of the people that have risen up to the ranks recently in marketing have been technologists of one kind or another. And I often say that they're very good at making the trains run on time, at operating campaigns, at metrics. But if they step back and look at it broader, with AI and content marketing exploding and AI getting better all the time, the companies that succeed are going to be the ones that are more creative in terms of how they visualize what they're offering and how it helps the prospect do a better job. So the creative side, or getting prospects to interact, exchange information and have a conversation, is really gonna be the win-win. So I ask questions like, are your prospects engaging and interacting with you on a regular basis? How many meetings are you having with your prospects? How many questions are you getting from your prospects? What are your prospects asking you? If your marketing is largely marketing download leads, which die and don't go anywhere, you're gonna be in real trouble. And if your prospects are attending your webinars but they're not asking questions and you're not answering questions on the webinar... So I drive to prospect interaction and engagement, and that happens both on the sales side and marketing side. And I look at all of the capabilities that would really drive and deliver that. But I do believe that marketers need to be more creative and they need to add more value to buyers. They need to really understand, how do you make the buyer a better buyer, and how do you get the buyer to ask questions, meet with you and engage? Because if you're doing that, you're going to win. So I look at anything that will drive that. And I think that's going to be the most important thing in 2025.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. It feels... I've been trying to get more active on LinkedIn and build my own personal brand. And so often it just feels like we're speaking into a void as marketing leaders these days. So I agree, I think engagement is everything right now.
Michael Phelan: Have you tried the LinkedIn questionnaires? Have you done any of those? That's a really good way of doing it. Right now I just did one on, what are you doing about discovery meetings being down 30%? Do you think that this person should solve it, this person, and so forth? So I ask it different ways. But if you've got a good network and they care about the subject you're asking, you pose a pertinent question.
Mandy Hornaday: I haven't, no. I'm gonna write that down though.
Michael Phelan: You know, and the people that then react and engage, you can see their profiles and then you can reach out to them and connect with them. And not only that, but you're helping the audience understand the topic. So some questionnaires get good response, some don't. So you're figuring out what's relevant, what's interesting. But that's a nice tool to get your network to engage and interact with you and allow you to have follow-up conversations depending on who votes and what they say. So again, it's driving interaction. Rather than just posting a blog, it drives interaction. So I'm very, very big on anything that will do that.
Mandy Hornaday: I love that. I love that. I'm going to check that out. Okay. And then any final words on the sales and marketing alignment challenge that we talked about? Jim, I think you might call it the great divide. I think I saw that reference somewhere.
Jim Irving: Yes, yes. And I have lived that great divide, because luckily my career has stepped between the two. So I've been in meetings with marketing professionals who were rather less than excited about what sales were doing, and I've been on the other side where sales are saying, what on earth are marketing doing? I think the critical thing is, I mentioned this earlier, you can get any number of tools that will help you figure out to some degree where you are in sales. You can get any number of tools that will help you figure out where you are in marketing. I think the critical thing is, where are they together? If one is doing well, one is doing badly, if they both got a really strong strategy but they're completely different strategies, there's a starting point for a conversation. So it's that idea of thinking of yourself as a single revenue generation team. But what are the steps to get to that level? And the most common sort of answer from those two sides to how well do you work with each other is, we have meetings, but not a lot happens.
Michael Phelan: And I would add to that, Jim, I think one of the challenges we have on both the sales and marketing side is we have too many metrics on sales, too many metrics on marketing, and none of them are the same metric. My argument is one metric for both teams. And I believe that the metric for both teams should be that you have gotten the prospect to engage and interact, share information, and have a conversation with you. If both teams are driving that, it will be successful. So I think one metric, and it's prospect interaction and engagement, and on the customer marketing side also it's customer interaction and engagement of any type. Because that marketing will have done the job if they created that, and if sales sees a conversation and there's an interaction and engagement, they can take it forward. So I throw all the metrics out on both sides and say one metric for both teams. That's it, and we'll all drive the same thing. So marketing download leads will not get reported. The person who attends the webinar and doesn't engage will not get reported. It's only if they're engaging and interacting. I think that would change the game enormously for both teams. So that's a key thing I would add, is single metric.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. And it's interesting too, Michael, because historically I would have considered an engagement to be, they're engaging with a gated piece of thought leadership, they're engaging with attending an event. So you're not necessarily even calling that an engagement. You're saying it has to go a step further, an engagement off of that activity.
Michael Phelan: Right, right. Because most people... I call the content marketing download kind of fool's gold for marketers in many ways. Because what happens is, and I've been on both sides, I've created that content, I've been delighted when people download it, I've sent it over to sales and go, look, we got all these, but the reality is people download assets and they can't remember they downloaded it. In most cases, they don't read it. Even if they read it or look at the title, they don't know who published it, and they may have saved it or not, and that's it. So there's not much of a brand engagement there, and the brand engagement is really more the subject matter of the content and not the brand. So that's why when sales follows up... I had a guy call me up the other day and he says, I see you downloaded one of our content assets. And I said, when did I download it? He said, a year ago. I said, well, why are you calling me right now? He goes, well, it's my first day on the job, it's the last day in the quarter, and the sales manager said, call all the old leads. And I'm like, that's great. And then I said, well, what was it about? He goes, I have no idea, I didn't read it. So there's a way of following up with a customer who actually has downloaded an asset that would go like this: have you had a chance to read it? No. Well, I've talked to three of our customers just like you, and this is the value they got from it, and these are the questions that they had. Would you have similar questions? So there are ways of converting those, but generally it's a dead lead. Generally it's a, can't remember downloading it, didn't read it, stop bothering me. And we need a strategy of reaching out that will drive engagement and interaction. But it's the strategy of reaching out that drives engagement and interaction that gets the tick, not necessarily just because they downloaded the asset. And that's the change. It's right in the middle of the pipeline from my perspective. It's right before a discovery meeting. A discovery meeting could be interaction and engagement, but it could be a chatbot, it could be an email, it could be anything. Any question they're asking is an opportunity. So get them to engage is really what it's all about. The same thing at an event. When you go to an event and you're handing out swag, why don't you say, can you answer these three questions about your purchasing pattern, and I'll give you the swag? So now we've gotten specific input of what they're thinking about. And that is really driving engagement. It's driving their thought process. And then we can follow up with them and say, hey, guess what, other purchasing people were getting more value than you're getting. So the other thing is show them they're underperforming versus their best-in-class companies. Show them they're leaving money on the table and they will engage with you. Nobody wants to think they're overpaying for product. Nobody wants to think they're paying more than they're getting. And nobody wants to think they're underperforming their best-in-class peers. So these companies have to change their view to be more about the prospect and helping the prospect do a better job. And that's part of engagement: the right connection strategy, the right engagement strategy, and the right value proposition, if that makes sense.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Jim, I think we have our new mastery definition over here, marketing and sales just focus on engagement. I love it.
Jim Irving: That's it. Well, he was involved, yeah. And it's interesting, but the audience for this is two completely separate groups of people. Those who are maybe a CRO or a leader in sales who thinks, or in marketing who thinks, we're not quite getting it together. So that's one level. The other level is those who are looking for consistent results, the CEO that every quarter has to go into a board meeting and explain what's happened. So the people who are looking for a growth in company value and an understanding of what they can do to change things quicker, this is a shortcut starting point to help them on that journey.
Michael Phelan: Makes sense.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Well, it's been so great having you guys today. I'd love to take a moment. Jim, if people are interested in taking the assessment or being a part of it, how can they find it? How can they reach you?
Jim Irving: Yes, it's really simple. We realised after we named it, it's the Sales and Marketing Maturity Matrix. So we have got a URL which is SM3, three in superscript. So sm3maturitymatrix.com, and the website shows examples, gives information. Although we're fairly new, it already has multiple testimonials up from very different companies. So that's all there and it's a self-service. You say you would like to do it, and just to be absolutely clear, it's obviously a commercial operation. It's $2,600. Up to five people in the organisation within that cost can answer it, and then the result comes out in about three days. So really simple, go to the website, look. My contact information is there if anyone wants to speak to me, I'm delighted to do that.
Mandy Hornaday: Amazing. Thanks, Jim. And Michael, what about you? If people want to work with you, where can they find you?
Michael Phelan: Thanks, Mandy. My company is GoToMarket Pros. It's just gotomarketpros.com. And the other thing I would say, Mandy, is it used to be where you'd go to the SiriusDecisions of one of these consulting companies and spend 50 or 100 grand getting a marketing maturity assessment. So this is really small dollars for a lot of these companies, and the value they can get, it's a fraction of the price. So happy to talk to any companies about that, or about how to drive interaction with your prospects through this and other programs as well. And thank you so much for having us on, I really appreciate it.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, thanks for joining me. Agreed, it's been a really fun conversation. Well, thanks both. We'll talk soon.
Jim Irving: It's been fantastic. Yes, thank you, Mandy.
Michael Phelan: Thank you.
