How to Align Sales & Marketing Successfully

Do you struggle with sales for your business? How do you align your sales and marketing efforts? We've got Tim Kubiak (Bowties and Business) with us today. He's going to share tips to help you with these questions and much more.

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How to Align Sales & Marketing Successfully

Tim Fitzpatrick: There always seem s to be this constant battle between sales and marketing within companies, and I've never really understood it. I've always felt like the two need to be in alignment to be successful. And that is why I have a special guest with me today. And we're going to get into how to align sales and marketing successfully. I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm super excited to have with me today Tim Kubiak. Tim, welcome in, and thanks for taking the time to be here.

Tim Kubiak: It's a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be on.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yep, absolutely. And gosh, I think it was almost a month ago today that I was on your podcast both times in business. We had a great conversation. So I really appreciate you returning the favor and coming on and having a conversation with me.

Tim Kubiak: Yeah, no, that was so much fun. I'm looking forward to having another talk.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, well, I can always I love talking about marketing. Sales is closely related. So I've been looking forward to having this conversation. But before we get into how do align sales and marketing just tell us a little bit more about what you do and Tim Kubiak and how you're helping business owners?

Tim Kubiak: Sure. So you can find everything I do at timkubiak.com. And my business is really made up of three things. So the first thing is, is I work with business owners and transforming their companies and a lot of companies have reached a maturity and they're stuck at a level. And part of that is sitting down and with the business owner and their leaders and looking at their sales organization. The second part of it is a traditional sales coaching business, if you will.

Tim Kubiak: But we've taken a slightly different approach in the conversations we have. Or don't bring us your key players, bring us your players. We believe we can get players to accelerate faster than see players raise the level of the water that way. And we do it both in team coaching and individual coaching. And then the third part of my business is something called sales opportunity management. I've been part of developing an app. It's based on 15 years of experience. And what it does is it enables you to look at your top deals and understand where you really are in them in a different manner.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Gotcha. Awesome. I love it. Sales and marketing are so, so critical to companies. So this is really going to be a good, good topic. I'm really looking forward to digging into it. So let's talk first about underperformance. I think oftentimes management has expectations of their sales team and their sales teams underperform. Let's talk about this a little bit. Why does that happen?

Tim Kubiak: So as a guy who sat in the room in his corporate life. Right. Here's how executives often come up with the number. It's magic. They pull it out of the air. They've decided we want to grow 20 percent.

Tim Kubiak: So the first reason that there's a disconnect there is there's not necessarily validity. And I'll give you a real-world example, right? There was a client of mine that said I want to grow the business. Twenty-one percent this coming year. Now, that looks great, but the industry is projected to go down by five percent, that there's not enough share shift. They had a market-leading position, so it's not rooted in reality.

Tim Kubiak: Yes, you want to grow. Yes, you want to take share. But having that kind of a swing just never going to happen. They set the plan up to fail. And that happens so often as people back into the number and don't use the right analysis and the right data points to really understand what's going on. And I'm not saying you can't over-perform what the industry is doing, but you have to be realistic in it. The second part is there's a lack of a sales management process.

Tim Kubiak: It's great. You and I sit in a room, even if we align is marketing and sales right. And we pick a number. How are the actual sales director, sales managers, and the individual contributors going to get there? And what are their territory plans? What are their account plans and what opportunities do they have? And is that documented in a repeatable process? That's part of the disconnect in the final pieces.

Tim Kubiak: What is the process? So often sales people and even great ones say, I know what I'm doing. And I'm not saying it's an algorithm methodology because I certainly don't subscribe to that. But you have to know who you're calling on, where they're at, where they're at, in the cycle where your product fits, who your competition is. And that's the final place that there's really no validity. Everybody goes, oh, yeah, I can sell Joe Moore.

Tim Kubiak: That's great. You can sell Joe Moore. But what's Joe buying? Why is he buying it? Why do you think that?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, you know, I love this first thing you talked about because people I mean, I see it all the time. I've seen it in companies that I've done. I've owned companies that I've worked for. I haven't worked for a lot of companies. But I did work for a public company for a while after our distribution company got bought. And it's that OK, what's our sales number going to be this year? And. Oh, well, I think we can do this.

Tim Fitzpatrick: It happens all the time and it's, I mean, it's a perfectly valid reason for why people underperform because the sales expectations aren't realistic. So if we can dig into this just a little bit more, what kind of tips do you have to help people come up with a realistic number?

Tim Kubiak: So the first thing you have to do is look at what is the macro trend in your industry. And I know we're going to talk about shifts in the business a little bit later.

Tim Kubiak: But one of the things you need to do is understand now I come from a tech background and I love referencing this. Going into this year, PC sales and tablets and PC sales were forecast to decline by eight percent. OK, right. Nobody was going to buy there was no major technology to drive refreshes, it's just a cycle with the pandemic hitting, they actually are only going to decline two percent. And I'm literally sitting with owners that have cashed in on this going, well, next year we're going to grow this.

Tim Kubiak: No, no, you can't. You have to have realistic expectations now. Places you can get that if you're selling a product manufactured by somebody else or you're in the trades and you're looking at industry trends, you have to look at third-party analyst data. Right. And a lot of times you can get it for free from your vendors and suppliers. You can get it from lines that you're certified on and products that you represent. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And look, I've got a bow tie. I'm a nerd, right?

Tim Kubiak: If you go there, it's government data. It's all free. You should be using it to validate anything else. And then the other thing is people underutilized this one,. Whoever's managing your personal finances. Right, your financial planner, ask them for reports, ask them for access to their experts or the people that manage their money that are making those buying decisions. And see what they're saying is one of the things that happens is Wall Street's a great example.

Tim Kubiak: You talk to those guys, they might miss a little bit, but they don't miss by much, especially the guys that are following and girls that are following specific industry segments. So it's a great way to get a feel. The next thing to do is look at your own market share. And this is an area where people often fall prey.

Tim Kubiak: So if you're selling in the Denver metro or the St. Louis area or Orange County, California. Right. You're looking you say my addressable market is X or Y and you got to do the research. You got to understand that when you and I had a great conversation prior about understanding who your customers. Then you've got to look at how much of that market you have is eight percent share the most you're ever going to get. Do you have twenty-five percent share in your ideal demographic?

Tim Kubiak: If so, how do you share shift? What are the customers buying? What are the people you're working with today winning on? Right. And how can you take that into those? But you can't be overly aggressive. So if you're at we'll just pick a number, a twenty million dollar business. Right. And you've done your homework in the market in though Denver's forty million for the types of services you're selling and you're just selling in that geography or even if it's national or international peace.

Tim Kubiak: Right. You can't go in and say, well, I'm going to grow ten million next year with what I have. Maybe you have to grow your offers, maybe if you change your product and services mix, there's ways to get there, but you can't keep riding the same horse.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Gotcha. Yeah, I love that. Those are awesome tips. So we've got to dig into the data and analyze that data, to make knowledgeable predictions about what's realistic for us to achieve.

Tim Kubiak: You do. And then you can go talk to customers. And this is where executives and business owners fall off. Sales is talking to customers. Sales is a team sport. Right. If you're not using your whole team, especially in the sales cycle and the planning process, you don't have a view.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. So let's get into. Pipeline comes up all the time in sales. How can owners and sales managers have a better view of their most important deals, their must-win deals?

Tim Kubiak: So I use a term called Sales Opportunity Management, and not everyone uses it or is familiar with it. And when I start these conversations, people often say I have a CRM system, I use X, Y or Z. Look, CRM systems are great. They have a purpose. I know we'll talk more about them later on. Right, because they do feed into what you can do with marketing and how you react. But what you need to be able to do is look at more than the CRM system.

Tim Kubiak: And I love people that like I have eight stages in my deal. And this means this and this and that and that. Right in the truth is, is you don't do the work behind that. You're picking a number. You're trying to get your sales leader or sales manager from not killing you on the review call and not being the person one the target on them. Right.

Tim Kubiak: And that's what it is. And one way to do that is sales opportunity management is a process. We work with all of our clients on where we sit down and say, OK, where are you at? And deal in this and go through steps and procedures. And we call it Red Zone is the name of the thing that we teach the system that we teach, we develop that. And here's the thing. You'll see a good rep will say win. Right?

Tim Kubiak: So I'm a sales manager and I say, Tim, what are you going to do with this big deal? And I'll win it in a lot of people stop there. They're like, that's great. Tim knows his business always hits his. No, they don't go deeper. Right. And a great sales manager or a great business owner. So sometimes a team. That's great. You're going to win. Why are you going to win and have that conversation and take that time?

Tim Kubiak: Right. And then once we've had that conversation, we've got to step back and say, what's the customer thinking? Why is the customer looking at it? Who are we competing against?

Tim Kubiak: And I love the answer. Oh, I don't have any competition or my products so unique. Nobody will do it or I have the best throughput or whatever it is. That's B.S..Right. Everybody has competition in every deal, even if that competition is they don't make a buying decision. So you need to be aware of it. And then you have to look at the complexity and the drivers in the deal. How complex is it for the customer? What's it going to take for them to make the change or make the decision?

Tim Kubiak: Another question I love to ask you. They're like, we're going to win this. Are you costing the money? Are you saving the money? Well, we cost them money because at the spin on it. OK, but is there an ROI? Is it preventive maintenance? Is it providing services down the road? What is it that you're doing there? And you have to understand where you play in that. And that is one way to do it. The other thing is, is if I gave one piece of advice that every owner or sales leader should follow, it's spend time talking to your A players right now.

Tim Kubiak: I said it earlier. I literally have not taken business where people want to bring me their underperforming things, parts of the business. Now, I'm not saying those people are bad people or aren't ever going to be successful, but so often we always look to fix the part that is broken. Missing the most instead of focusing on the people that can give us the most and have the best results. And everybody loves the 80 20 rule. My personal phrases, you don't want to race a Ferrari or on a go-kart track.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes.

Tim Kubiak: And what I mean by that is it's a great car. It can go really fast, do amazing things, and it's super expensive. You put on a go-kart track, it can't get around it. The turns are too tight.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love that philosophy, Tim, because it's you know, people always talk about your strengths and your weaknesses. And, you know, it used to be common practice for people to say, oh, you need to work on bringing up your weaknesses now, find other people to address your weaknesses, keep playing off of your strengths. And and it really seems like that's exactly what you're doing when you come in with the company. Look, let's let's make your best salespeople, your strengths even better. And let's not waste our time on the underperformers, because my guess is it takes a lot more work to get the underperformers performing than it does to get them the over performers just continuing to crank.

Tim Kubiak: So sometimes the underperformers are underperforming because of structure, management and process. Right. And this is the joke is you hire sales guy. And I use this a lot of my presentations and it's a picture of somebody getting pushed off of a boat right into the ocean and the guys flying like this into the water, it looks like he can't swim. And I say this is what we do, this new salespeople all the time. Right. We hire them and then we say, hey, you know, Susan, here's the phone book.

Tim Kubiak: Here's the list of leads. Here's this. Here's that. Go sell. We give them 15 seconds of what we sell. Forty-five seconds on what our policies, procedures, and how great our company culture is. And no actual selling, training or information other than some product input, which certainly comes in. By focusing on those top performers first, you're creating best practices that are then repeatable, then you can start to look at your B plus players and your B players and even your C and D players and say, are my managers coaching the same system or are these people executing against something we know works?

Tim Kubiak: And then you can start to assess individual performance in a case. Once in my career, I've had two funny ones. I had one where I got hired and I decided to interview all of my 50 salespeople. Within the first two weeks, a job guy came in and handed me his resignation letter. His name was Brian and I'll never forget it. His dad was on the interview committee and sat on the board of the company that hired me. And I'm like, Brian, what's going on?

Tim Kubiak: He's like, look, I don't want to be in sales. I don't want to make calls. I don't want to talk to customers. I don't want to do this job. You're going to fire me. I'm going to save you the problem. I respect him hugely for that. And I don't know where he's at in life now. That was almost 20 years ago. The second one is I had somebody who was rated as a D performer when I took a sales leadership role in the man, literally expected me to fire him.

Tim Kubiak: The day I flew down to meet him and the rest of the team in that office, I sat down. I said, I don't understand why you're not selling, but let's talk about this. And then I realized that they were running in different silos. He had had no direct management. He had no process. He was acting as someone senior sales assistant actually in this case. So he wasn't doing the job he was hired for. He was doing a great job for this other person, but not making any money for himself or not apparently seeming to make the company anyway.

Tim Kubiak: So there's things like that that come out by focusing on the top, looking at the process, and then working down. The other thing is a lot of people say, how do you justify your fees when you do this? It's really simple. If you're building your company or you have C players and we put the processes in and the A and B players improve, the C players will either leave faster. Right. Or you'll be able to move them upstream faster and you'll never have all A players. That's a misnomer. Right. But you will be able to bring people up in and you will have C players that will become a players and be your next president.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, that's cool. I love that. What's the conversation today if we're not going to get into the pandemic, what kind of changes have you seen happen in the B2B sales process since the pandemic started?

Tim Kubiak: So one of the things is the entire customer buying process changed. Right, and everybody goes, great, that happens all the time, but here's the answers that worked for a lot of people for a long time. I've had these accounts for 20 years. I know everybody in it. I know what they're doing. They love me. I'm their guy. It's not true anymore. The person who could sign off on a fifty thousand dollar project or a hundred thousand dollar project anymore may not have that authority.

Tim Kubiak: There may be additional parts of revision and selling process there that you're not used to, so you need to line yourself not only with your traditional folks, but with the expanded you're seeing the CFO have a lot more input. And I use an example. There is a household name, billions and billions and billions of dollars kind of company that the CFO was approving things down to ten thousand dollars in a cash conservation effort as part of the change in the economy. They were getting out in front of it.

Tim Kubiak: They did it early. They were super conservative to begin with. But literally, things that were rubber that manager levels could improve on were going to divisional, if not corporate CFO for approval, depending on the things. The other part of that is you have to answer the questions why. Why now and why can't we wait? If you're not thinking through that and working through that with your customers and their buying criteria and understanding what their expectation levels are, you'll never get to that level.

Tim Kubiak: And then really the final piece of that is you have to highlight not what you do great. And so you run a great marketing company, you help companies with lead generation and you do an amazing job of it. But if the company doesn't know what to do with the leads or doesn't know how to target the right customers, and I know you do this in your business, right. You can go in and help them understand here's who you should be marketing to.

Tim Kubiak: Here's the messages that are resonating and then here's what you should do with it and track it. And I know you're big on metrics and doing those things and understanding what the customer really wants and everyone loves to say. Voice to the customer advisory panel have real conversations. The other thing you have to do in the process now is you have to get outside of your traditional swim lanes. If procurement is always sent you to no good ever comes out of a conversation with procurement, they always want something extra, something different.

Tim Kubiak: But even if you have a golden relationship with someone there, what's happened is because of cutbacks, because of consolidations, acquisitions, restructures. And we're really just in the beginning of it, the Fed tells us we're going to be back to full employment and two percent inflation in the next twenty-nine to thirty-six months, I think with the guidance a couple of weeks ago. Right. Even if you're doing that, what you're seeing is procurement people sourcing people have more authority than ever and they're also given more lines than ever to buy food because their peers have packaged out have taken on additional responsibilities. So you don't have the same amount of year there and you have to have a line of business conversations in a B2B cell on who's going to see the benefit and the impact.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So if I was to sum this up in a sentence, would I be accurate if I said there are some more intricacies or potential speed bumps in the sales process as a result of the pandemic?

Tim Kubiak: There are and there's new players. So we use a football analogy, right. I'm not a Patriots guy, but I love the analogy. For nearly twenty years, Brady was the quarterback. Right, Belichick was the coach, everybody else on the team had changed out, changed positions, moved on, moved in, and they kept winning. Sales is the same type of thing. You might have the one or two key players, but you still need a line and a running back and a wide receiver and a defense that can hold their own.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, got it. OK, cool. I love that. What about marketing and sales management? How do we align towards the same goals?

Tim Kubiak: Compensation. Right. Marketing metrics need to be on driving success for sales. Sales metrics need to be benefiting marketing. Right. So there's two parts of that often when you're in the room. And I unfortunately will stereotype marketing here a little bit. But I'm also stereotype sales. Right? Marketing gets in the room and says, I want to run the following things and we'll just say it's January 20, 20. We don't know about the pandemic yet. We have our budgets in place and we're going to do a 15 city roadshow and we're going to do a lead generation campaign to drive 50 thousand new people to the website.

Tim Kubiak: OK, that's great, right? What's it going to cost? What's it going to do? And what but where the disconnect is, is where is that benefiting sales? And so often we see, especially in mid-sized companies and larger marketing is paid on different metrics and sales. How many people? The joke is, how many people did you get to the web? And now it's how many people came to your virtual wine tasting?

Tim Kubiak: But that's the measure, not how many qualified opportunities came out of those attendees. So you have to align those goals. And I think if you do, you have a much stronger piece. The other thing is, is I think your marketing needs to be viewed as more than a creative service. They need to be integral to the business. And we're sales and marketing really could align is if you're doing a new customer acquisition program, right? If we tested messaging as sales and marketing together on a series of responses and follow-ups and scripting and collateral pieces, and we truly said this is the A, this is the B, we got these different results over one hundred or a thousand or whatever many leads.

Tim Kubiak: We want to test it over. And you can do it for people in the group. You can then spread that across a sales organization of any size. Right. Slice it by the territory plan, by that customer segmentation, and really leverage marketing's talents and ability to understand that because marketing typically does that great. Everybody goes on to build me a brochure or the on these pictures I have to change my email signature. That's not marketing does all those things, but marketing can really drive a business and drive growth if you align with them properly.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, well, I've always felt like I mean, the job of marketing is to get prospects to know, like, and trust the company so that handoff. When they're ready to take that next step, it goes to sales and it's not cold, it's warm. And if the communication this is where I think and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there's oftentimes a the communication in the message is not consistent enough between marketing and sales. And if there's a break in that communication, if they're not hearing the same message, once they go from marketing to sales, I think that can probably be pretty confusing for prospects. Do you see that happen?

Tim Kubiak: Yeah. So one of the things I think generally a place for improvement is marketing almost needs to treat sales like a customer. And I don't mean that and put them on a pedestal and worship them because that's not the case. Right. But they need to say this is why this is our messaging. This is what a customer is probably going to say.

Tim Kubiak: And this is how we take that to the next level because you craft a great thing, you draw interest and you will drive somebody in who maybe wants a commercial cleaning services or a client like that, and you turn it over to sales. And next thing you know, he's trying to sell an air conditioner maintenance program. Well, that's not what the original box. Right? They go in the wrong direction. So that whole alignment. I agree. And the other thing, a question back to you, if you don't mind, is what can sales provide to a marketing organization that's useful to them?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, they can talk about a common objections, right? Why there's so much data that you can glean from the sales process, I think that can help marketing, you know, so it's I think oftentimes marketing, we understand the problems that customers have. Right. And when and then we need to communicate what the solution is, the solution that we have, how it can solve that problem.

Tim Fitzpatrick: But I think oftentimes when you hand off to sales, there are other things that come up. And so if marketing has a better understanding of common sales objections, common roadblocks, you can actually address those things before the sales process. If you know about them, you can address them on the marketing level and make the sales process even easier for sales. So I think I totally agree with what we've talked about here. There needs to be an open dialogue between sales and marketing.

Tim Fitzpatrick: To me, they're on the same team. They're not separate departments. Frankly, I like it when I see sales and marketing in the same department because then they're all working together because that messaging, frankly, the messaging that starts at the marketing level needs to go down through sales and then it needs to go out and be with customer service as well. It needs to be throughout the entire company. If it's not, there's going to be a gap somewhere that's going to create some issues.

Tim Kubiak: So one of the things I think, and I'm curious to your perspective, is I've seen you marketing or bringing good leads. Sales will do it and inevitably some will go cold. And so the sales stereotype is, I'm going to call you like nobody follows up enough, right? Most people call once or twice and they pitch the lingo. These leads are crap, right? There's no you talk about being on the same team. There's no way that you and I then say, oh, wait a minute, you know, this prospect hasn't responded.

Tim Kubiak: They aren't resonating with sales. Put them in a nurture campaign that marketing can rewarm them, help them, bring them along the process. And it's so often miss that just that initial effort is great and then it gets wasted because sales doesn't know what to do with it. So they just ignore it. And there's no alignment there to keep things alive.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, yeah. So there's not a process to kind of close that loop and bring them back into the marketing spectrum. Right. Because just because they didn't close them doesn't mean that they're they may not be a good prospect at some point.

Tim Kubiak: Yeah, I was working with the client last week and they had literally generated thousands of leads for their customer base, right. And they handed them off to the, quote, sales specialists. And they have a call every two weeks to talk about what's going on, and they've not made a single cell off of it. I'm sorry they either have the wrong leads, which, by the way, I did. I looked at the stuff. We went through numbers. They don't or they don't have the right loop to your point to close that on, to keep people warm. There's no handoff in the process to hand it back.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like a, you know, one track rate, the relay where they're handing off the baton. It's like you got to have a good handoff if this process is going to work correctly.

Tim Kubiak: Yeah. And that's a great visual if you think about it, because the minute you drop the baton, you're out of the race.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, it's over. And you blew it. You blew it. So let's talk about you were talking about data before. You know, how marketing databases and CRMs, how should they be combined? You know, how do you make all these different things come together?

Tim Kubiak: So you can't have them operate in a stand-alone system, so the first thing is a database has to be a living, breathing part of your business, whether it's a sales database or marketing database. The problem is, is if you create two monsters, it's going to end up like a science fiction movie and they're going to end up fighting and killing each other.

Tim Kubiak: Right. So make it the same monster, if you will. And the other thing is, is I think there needs to be segmentation. Right. And this is a really hard conversation to have with salespeople and sales leaders. Like everything goes into CRM. That's great. You have one hundred and fifty thousand contacts. You have fifteen thousand active customers. Fantastic. Good for you. What's their job functions? Well, why does that matter?

Tim Kubiak: We have them in the database. We know about them. We can tag them in our opportunities. That's great. But they can't turn to the marketing organization and say, hey, I need to run a promotion for this job function or this business function area and pull that from the CRM and target it. And we talked about in the buying process, the number of players have changed. Sales should be adding that in. Right. And I know it's permissions-based and all this sort of thing, but marketing then, to your point on numbers, can look at the statistics and say, hey, by the way, we now have X plant managers or we have Y HR. specialists that have been added to the database in the past 60 days.

Tim Kubiak: We should do something to promote to them or whatever the category is. You'd be able to align that. Instead, they're all in one big bucket and it's there's these people and then there's the person sends me to. The other thing is, is and salespeople are notorious for this information is their form of control. And good salespeople don't want to share the information. And you've got to pull teeth to get them, especially to be breathing antiserum.

Tim Kubiak: And I'm not talking spoke with Susan and Joseph and did that Nuna. But what you have is you really need them to look at who do they really have in their iPhone? Who are they really emailing with how the conversation and draw those benefits for them? In the other piece we can do here is if you look at that, taking that top performer, top customer methodology, you could bring marketing in and say, I'm going to have you work with our top 10 percent of our salespeople to create, quote, a custom campaign for them.

Tim Kubiak: Right, and give them the collateral and then marketing can run, it can lead genic, can measure and manage it, but the top sellers have insight and purview and are helping guide that messaging into those customers.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I love that. So they should be they need to be combined. They can't be on two separate islands. And the data that you put in there is going to heavily impact how you can utilize that to benefit your business. So this concept of segmentation, I love because when you segment your database you can then craft messaging and campaigns that are very hyper specific to those segments, and when you do that, your conversions are going to be so much better.

Tim Kubiak: That's right. And the other thing is sales needs to make sure marketing gets credit for those conversions, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Tim Kubiak: And I'm not saying every salesperson does this, but a lot of them do it. I did this. I did this great deal. I'm so valuable. I'm so special. I'm so important. I might be a unicorn, but you also might have just been in the right place at the right time and look at success, too. Or you might have forgotten about the seven people along the way that got you in the door there, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Awesome. So let's cap everything off with. Challenges for a small, what small business, marketing challenges can the sales team help with? Right. We've talked a lot, talked a little bit about how marketing can help sales. But what's let's look at it in reverse.

Tim Kubiak: So how can sales help marketing, the first thing is include them, take them on a sales call. I mean, it sounds crazy to put them on a Zoom. It's even easier. They don't have to leave the office, though. Their home office include them. Let them hear what customers are really saying. Not from a oh, my God, you got it wrong. Nobody cares. But hey, let's go hear this. Customer's doing this. It's interesting, right?

Tim Kubiak: The other thing they can do is really, you know, if your customers are on LinkedIn, share on LinkedIn, if your customers are somewhere share on that, you know, from sales, you know, make sure that you're getting the messaging out consistently. Make sure you understand the branding guidelines. Right. Should you have your social media stuff? Look, I read most of my news off of Twitter. Now I get a couple of daily summaries, but I go look on Twitter for everything else. So where is marketing trying to message and are you helping them build that following because it's only going to serve you?

Tim Kubiak: The other part of this really is, is sales needs to understand and feed marketing, not data, but experiences. Right. Think about how many times you've probably run into a mid-sized business and say we need to do a case study, we need to do a white paper, we need to do this or that, and everybody in sales puts their hands in their pocket goes. And that's around right there. Not really offering it, we're not saying give me your commission check.

Tim Kubiak: What we're saying is help us understand why we won, why we're special, you know, so that, again, it's that information flow and that inclusive city, if you will, of marketing into the sales function.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. So it's really the data that you gain in marketing and in sales. It needs to be shared between the two because they can it's obvious, based on what we've talked about, that both sales and marketing can benefit heavily from that they can't write.

Tim Kubiak: And so often you go figure customer events. When we did live events right prior to the current situation, you go there, marketing man, the tables of the customers coming in. Right. They put the signage up. They made sure everything worked. And yeah, they maybe got a thank you from somebody from the stage at the end. But the truth is, sales should have been there doing that same lifting along the way, enabling and engaging those conversations.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, absolutely.

Tim Kubiak: That's got to be the entire process and not just around an event or a one-time thing, but truly part of how you run the business.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I love it. Tim, you have given us some awesome, awesome tips. I've learned something. I know people that that are listening and watching and will listen and watch will gain a ton of value from this. Where can people learn more about you?

Tim Kubiak: So everything I do, you can find it timkubiak.com. You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter at Tim Kubiak as well. I do a podcast that obviously you were a guest on, and it's Bowties and business. You can find it anywhere. You listen to podcasts and you know, the both my stick. So you usually see me in one and I welcome a conversation. Anybody has questions, isn't sure about something. I'm happy to give anybody an hour of my time to have that first conversation.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Awesome. I love it. The Bowties is an awesome memory hook. So Bowties and business podcast. Go listen to it. Or if you if you're running into sales, roadblocked and you need somebody to help you get through that, push through it. Reach out to Tim at timkubiak.com. I know that he can help you and get you to where you want to be. So, Tim, thank you for being here. And I'm going to thank everybody that has been listening, watching.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Thank you for being here. Remember, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. If you need to gain clarity on where to focus your marketing efforts right now to get the best return, pop on over to our website at rialtomarketing.com. That's R-I-A-L-T-O marketing.com. Hit the get a free consult button. I guarantee you will get a ton of value from the call and walk away knowing exactly where you need to focus your efforts next. So thank you for tuning in. Till next time. Take care.

Connect With Tim Kubiak

• [email protected]
• Linkedin

Links From The Episode

• Tim Kubiak
• Bowties and Business Podcast

About the Host Tim Fitzpatrick

Tim Fitzpatrick is the President of Rialto Marketing. At Rialto Marketing, we help small businesses & entrepreneurs eliminate the confusion of marketing by focusing on the fundamentals. As a marketing partner, we help clients put in place and manage a simple marketing plan so they can grow. Marketing your business shouldn't be a challenge. All you need is a plan.