Why Sales and Marketing Need to Work Together | Scott D. Clary

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Do you know what it takes for a company to win? Today’s guest, Scott D. Clary, knows that companies win by having demand generation coupled with a strong and smart outbound playbook. Yet, most tend to focus on the outbound without getting the demand gen or the marketing piece.

Scott is a Career Sales and Marketing Executive who is rewriting the book on sales, marketing, and brands. He has worked with execs and entrepreneurs to 10x their business. He has sold and marketed to the most Fortune 500s and Fortune 1000s and featured in over 100 news sites. He speaks globally at industry conferences and has articles written in Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Hacker Noon, and The Startup. Currently, he is running a SAAS sales and marketing organization and is the host of the Success Story Podcast. 

Scott understands how to create huge amounts of content to turn any organization into a media company, how to build a community around the content put out by a person or a brand, and how to build the marketing engine of tomorrow. 

He is joining us today to share strategies for building the marketing engine of tomorrow and aligning that with a sales strategy. 

Scott started working for Bell Canada right after finishing high school, and he was making more money from sales than almost everyone else he knew! He enjoyed the money and was good at his job because he was always very technical, and selling came naturally. He worked for Bell for eight or nine years, always in sales and moving through larger markets after completing university. He made a lot of money and even made the President’s Club for a couple of years. After his tenure at Bell, he went into a smaller telco company where he later went into the first leadership role in his career and sold to large enterprise companies. That role involved complex implementations and longer sales cycles.

He left when the company was bought by private equity and went on to do his own thing to consult with other companies and teach them what he had learned in enterprise sales and sales leadership. He did not do well on his own, so he partnered with two people. They did fairly well, almost hitting $1,000,000 at the end of year 1. He had some great experiences and learned some great entrepreneurial lessons. They had set everything up to be project-based, so he did not enjoy the place he was in, and they soon closed that business up.

Scott went back to work at the company that eventually led him to where he is now. They had an exclusivity agreement, so they brought Scott on board to bring their software products for broadcast to market through a company called Grass Valley. 

After about a month-and-a-half, they were officially acquired. They have been growing aggressively for the past 2 years. 

Scott is now a Director at Grass Valley, where he is running most of the SaaS development, SaaS sales, and Saas marketing, as well as helping to modernize, revolutionize, and change the business. Scott describes what he does at Green Valley to be like leading an innovation unit within a much larger company. 

Grass Valley does about $600,000,000 in revenue per year.

Scott’s side-hustles are a podcast and writing a newsletter.

Any company needs to have sales and marketing alignment and congruence. Although that might seem obvious at a service level, if you take a deeper dive, you will realize how many companies have disjointed sales and marketing business units. 

A process for implementing a strategy and execution process for sales alignment:

Step 1: 

Find your first 50 customers. You then need to find a product-market fit and build out a customer profile or a buyer persona. After that, you need to give that to a marketer to develop demand against the customer profile or a buyer persona to start bringing in leads. 

Step 2:

A sales leader needs to build an outbound sequence that matches the ICP and BP that your marketing has bought into, and is marketing to. The outbound sales messaging must target the same ICP buyer persona. Solving the business pain points with which CMOs tend to struggle should drive the majority of your marketing collateral, which should be the content on your blogs and social media, and be covered in your webinars. 

The sales must use a personalized outbound, target the same profiles, and solve the same pain points as the marketing is advertising for. That will bring alignment.

Both the sales and marketing departments must be congruent and aligned with the personas to create the best possible customer experience. Having similar discussions in both business units will encourage CMOs to book a demo.

After getting the initial alignment, you must have your Marketing and Sales Executives constantly feeding information to each other to keep on updating that persona. There should also be scheduled one-on-ones between the VP of Marketing and the VP of Sales to discuss the lessons they have learned. That congruence needs to be maintained as the organization grows.

Scott feels that to be an effective marketer you have to take advantage of every single channel on which your company can show up. 

To do that, you need an effective, reliable, and educational content strategy that can answer any question your buyer may have. The easiest way to do that is to have a long-form, educational piece of content that you break up into blog posts, YouTube videos, or podcasts. Then, break it up even further into 2-4-minute pieces that go on Facebook and LinkedIn. Break that down even further into a 60-second piece that can go onto Twitter or TikTok, or a 30-second piece, that can go onto YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn Stories, or Snapchat Spotlights. 

To summarize:

  • Show up all the time.
  • Win the war of attention on social media.
  • Find a content strategy that is replicable and scalable.

To repurpose a piece of content across the platforms:

  • Figure out your target market.
  • Get to know the questions that your target market has.
  • Create a pillar piece of content and use it on a platform like a podcast to interview as many different experts as possible.
  • Use questions that you know will drive traffic and that other COMs also want to know the answers to.

You can take it a step further by turning a video into a blog post by:

  • Creating show notes for the podcast.
  • You can write a blog post.
  • You can use otter.ai to summarize your ideas before writing your blog post.

Title your blog post in line with the high-search volume queries that someone has to get Google to direct people to your article.

You can take the answers to your questions from the podcast to Quora to drive more traffic.

You can break down the podcast content into a 2-minute clip and optimize it for grabbing attention on social media. You can do the same thing, sub-60-seconds or sub-30-seconds, for Instagram Reels, TikTok, LinkedIn Stories, Snapchat Spotlight, or YouTube Shorts.

Remember that at least 90% of your content must be educational.

The best platform for creating revenue from Scott’s strategy for B2B is LinkedIn. For non-B2B, the only channel that Scott sees effectively flow into other social media channels is YouTube.

Links and resources:

Scott’s Website

On all social media: @ScottDClary

The Success Story Podcast

answerthepublic.com

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Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets