Marketers of Technology
00:09:34 · Ralf Paschen
[00:09:34] S0: I give up Asia Pacific. I'm not doing Asia Pacific. I cannot help with that. That's not my that's not my gameplay. It's a total different play. What I typically do is help companies to scale from the German market or from the German speaking market into The US market because I know the playbook of The US market, but also the other way around. Because US market to the German market, everybody believes they can utilize The US playbook, it doesn't work. And I can explain the reason for it because most people missed it out. Maybe they get something out of this studio today of podcast, which is everybody kind of know it, but nobody follows it because they all try to go to London first. And London is like, let's say UK is like US kind of a little bit. Now they're trying it go into the German market which is a big market. All the brands is a big market. Okay. And now they try the same. We sell features. We are doing the cowboy shooting. We're doing everything. Let's bomb. We're doing the full presentation. We're doing a harbor tour of our products. We're doing everything. This is happening. This is happening as of today. And I can tell you, this is not working because there's not one person in Germany who makes a decision. Not one person. There's always a seat of people making the decision. It's called in the Gramium or in a in a, you know, in a kind of roundtables. They all make the decision. I guarantee you, in this room there's no vendor, absolutely no vendor allowed. So if you want to get a fast decision, let's say a 2 k, 20 k deal, yeah, of works. If you go higher in enterprise sales, talking about 100, one hundred and fifty, two hundred k deal, definitely happened. Okay. So that's the point you're running into. That's the point you're running into. And then you have another person which is called procurement. You have another person which is called legal, which can overrule anybody before, including the CEO, by the way. Okay. So to understand that market here, you need to understand how to play that book. It's a trusted advisor approach here in sales. You need to know somebody who knows somebody to help you to get on the game. In The US, you can call call someone. Here call calling, you get fired up on this call call. Okay? So you have to be prepared to do call call.
00:11:46 · Ralf Paschen, Andres Figuera
It works, but you have to be much more prepared in The US, which is good paying up. Remember there's this movie with Will Smith, he played a role with being a guy who being like a Wall Street guy, have a lot of calls, doing all the calls with his son, right? You need to look it up what the name was. [00:12:03] S1: I think that was the pursuit of happiness, right? [00:12:06] S0: Perfect. That was it. Pursuit of happiness, happiness where his son played. Remember the scene when he did not drink water to do more calls? Try that in Germany, try that in Germany. It doesn't work. [00:12:17] S1: Okay, so there's this whole cultural difference, I was not aware of this, so I'm also learning this on this episode to anybody who's listening to us, that's amazing man. And Ralf, in terms of companies that you've worked with, problems that you've seen and that you've helped out with, do you have any anecdotes or any other lessons that you can tell us about? [00:12:36] S0: Yes, absolutely. I'm old enough to have anecdotes. I got this quickly last two years. I'm not a guy of the anecdotes, funny. So yeah, I'll you one anecdote, which I faced almost in every customer. Marketing and sales are always clashing. In any company I start with, they're always clashing. [00:12:54] S1: It's true, it's like cats and dogs.
00:12:54 · Andres Figuera, Ralf Paschen
[00:12:54] S1: It's true, it's like cats and dogs. [00:12:56] S0: You know that, it's kind of normal, right? Because, hey, you cost me money, I make the revenue, I don't need leads. Leads aren't good enough, blame game, sales blame game, marketing blame game happening. They're not taking care of all my MQLs, their MQLs aren't good enough. You all know this, right? Do you know what the reason for that is? [00:13:13] S1: I believe I could, but I'm not even sure now, so I'll wait until you tell me.
00:13:18 · Ralf Paschen
[00:13:18] S0: And I tell you everybody in the room now, when they listen to this podcast will know it quickly, because marketing does not have the same KPIs than sales does. So... And that is the main problem. If you're being paid on... Your bonus is paid on impressions, CPC, CAC, ROAS, whatever. You're not in sales. Sales get paid on revenue. So why is the revenue team like marketing not paid on revenue? So every marketing team I joined, I switched the bonus to next level after the, you know, the bonus payment date, all the revenue. Do you know what the difference is now? Everybody's interested in the deal. Everybody's interested in what's the deal moving forward. Everybody's interested in the MQL being a high quality. Everybody's interested in CSQL high enough or where we are staying in the M1 deal, why isn't moving forward sales. And now it's a clashing, how can you support you after the POC to get this going? What kind of customer marketing can we do to help you to get this ongoing? So that's their interest. And interest stops when you're doing this impressions, CAC, ROAS, whatever thing at MQL stage. The interest stops there. So therefore they never talk the language of sales. So they cannot force anyone. I delivered you a 100 MQL, they give you a 100 meetings a day, whatever you kind of LinkedIn thingies. That's not a thing I can tell you about. It's all over the last six months about, I booked with AI a 100 meetings. My first comment under every post I saw, you can look it up on my LinkedIn profile is, and how much revenue did you generate with these meetings? There's absolutely never an answer below that because there was no meeting with revenue. It's because that's what I'm interested in. Right? I'm interested in revenue. So you book 100 meetings, you can book thousand meetings. I don't care how much revenue did you deliver with few thousand meetings. If it's zero, you had thousand meetings with my salespeople being all sitting in there, including SDRs, whoever did these meetings, if people sitting there, which cost me money, you didn't do anything for the revenue. So you have to explain it to the board. You have to explain it to me as a CMO. Why did we do that? Because it's revenue driven.
00:15:21 · Andres Figuera
[00:15:21] S1: No. And I see then how you level the playing field between both of the departments by making them all worry just about the revenue because it is true that it turns into this passing of the ball that once the marketing team sends it over to sales, they're like, my job's done. It's their turn now. And if it's not appropriate, then if they don't show the interest that they had when it started, even the customer feels abandoned a little bit and then they are passed on to a new person and it is something that can be felt in the process. So I think that is so cool, that you're able to really join both of those worlds and have them understand each other because it really is crazy how sales and marketing marketing do not get along.
00:16:00 · Ralf Paschen
[00:16:00] S0: And that's a normal behavior. It's an anecdote. Everywhere I can touch these sales in red, I'm not changing anything in sales, I'm changing the marketing behaviors. But this means when I change the marketing behaviors, then I get sales on responsibility because now the MQL deliver have high quality. Now you better take care of it. You cannot lay on me anymore because now I have... So the the first connection, by the way, as CMO, the first connection you should do as a CMO is not your CRO or VP of sales. Everybody believes that CMO, CRO or VP of sales, whatever, they should be all get along. Are you sure this is the best combination? Everybody believes that. No, the best combination is the CMO of the CFO. If nobody believes that, who do you get the money for a great campaign idea to move the needle for revenue? Who do you get the money from? From the CRO? So if you can explain what you make a difference and you always can report back because now you talk revenue, right? Now you can talk with a CFO about upcoming revenue, which you potentially see when you invest in marketing at this level. Now you're talking about a totally different language of CFO. Now it's all revenue driven. That's the difference between a VP of marketing, head of marketing now, and some startups call it CMO, which is nothing else than the marketing person. This is a strategic part of a CMO. Get the CFO and the COO along to be a revenue driver for the company and not just a cost center. That's the difference in being a CMO.