Aligning Teams for Long-Term B2B Sales Excellence with Adam Miller

00:00 - Adam (Guest)
We run an ideal customer profile workshop. Most sales and marketing teams struggle to agree on who their ideal customer profile is. So marketing drive the leads and then sales go. Well, they're not the people we're selling to. So again, I think it comes back to that interlock between sales and marketing.

00:19 - Mike (Host)
My name's Mike Lander and you're listening to Higgle the B2B Sales Club podcast, where we bring you actionable insights about sales, RFPs, negotiations and difficult procurement discussions from sales leaders, brand leaders and procurement leaders. Please subscribe to get updates when new episodes are released. Adam, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle the B2B Sales Club podcast. Great to have you.

00:46 - Adam (Guest)
Thanks, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here and really looking forward to it.

00:49 - Mike (Host)
Likewise. So before we kick off, obviously for the audience who are you, what do you do and something unusual about yourself.

00:56 - Adam (Guest)
So my name's Adam Miller. I'm the CEO of Elevate. What do we do? It's always a good question. So imagine you're a company with a complex sales cycle, large deals in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, you target C-suite decision makers and basically you want to grow your business. So for the last 30 years, we've been working with companies that are actually looking to grow their business, either in new acquisition or in growing their existing accounts, and we help them in various different ways to actually achieve their goals in terms of talking to the C-suite, understanding who they are and their pains, and then getting them in there to start growing their business with them.

01:37
I am a helicopter nerd, so I've been flying helicopters for the last 20 plus years and I am passionate about helicopters. Where did that come from? Do you know where that comes from? Yeah, my dad owned a helicopter company when I was really small and it was something that I always absolutely adored, from when I was probably the age of seven or eight, and then finally got to fly when I was in my early 30s, late 20s, early 30s.

02:02 - Mike (Host)
Very good, excellent, okay, so let's crack on with the questions. So, just before we start, we've got three questions, so something that we didn't prepare, but a really simple question for the audience that's listening Are you in the game of cold outbound lead gen, or are you in the game of nurturing existing contacts broadly, or are you both, both.

02:24 - Adam (Guest)
So the way that we look at it is that you either and again, growing a company can be complex or simple, but the majority of companies make it complex due to lack of focus. So one of the key things is do you want to grow your new acquisition accounts or do you want to grow your existing accounts? So there's those two things. Both require those areas that you just mentioned. So it's a tool in the tool bag to achieve the objective. Good, excellent.

02:52 - Mike (Host)
So let's start with the first question, then which is what's the problem, as you see it today, with the term ABM, so account-based marketing?

03:00 - Adam (Guest)
Well, how long have you got?

03:03 - Mike (Host)
Excellent, but it's all the rage, adam. Everyone's talking about it. It's all the rage.

03:08 - Adam (Guest)
It is. It is all the rage. So you know, I think the first thing is ABM account-based marketing. Is the fact that you've got the term marketing in there Right, because it's actually an interlock between numerous teams to achieve the objective. That's the first challenge.

03:26
The second challenge is that there's a big difference between existing customers and new customers, which the term ABM covers dramatically, and the approaches that you attack new customers with is very different than the way that you kind of approach existing customers. Even when you get down to that, then there's also a challenge in terms of existing customers where it depends on the maturity level of that relationship that you have with them. You could have had them for years, but you're actually not seen as a strategic partner. Or you could have had them for six months and you're seen as a strategic partner with them. So there's a kind of a complexity of terminology which it doesn't bode well for the marketing team when they're talking to the other departments in the organization, talking to the other departments in the organization. So there's a lot of problems with that term because people don't actually understand what people are talking about. That's kind of one of the big things about it.

04:30 - Mike (Host)
But where did it come from? So where did this whole I mean I talk to clients about you know, do I call it ABM for new accounts? I probably do. But what I really mean is I mean for your new business acquisition, ie net new logos. I say to my clients, well, you acquisition ie net new logos. I say to my clients, well, you need a targeting strategy. You can't spray and pray, so you have to have some way of saying, well, who are your top 20 ideal prospects in your ICP? Go after them. But after that, my knowledge I always say to them my knowledge of focusing on those 20 is now very limited about how do you do that with net new clients. So where did ABM come from? And, digging a bit deeper, why is that now a problem?

05:06 - Adam (Guest)
So I've been in this industry over 30 years, lots of gray hair and the term ABM has been around for all the time that I've been in sales, marketing, revenue generation. I think the terms change but the core never changes. So growing your existing accounts, growing targeted, highly targeted accounts that you want to do business with has always been there. Abms the term has been around for all of those years. I think it's been trendy in the last couple of years in terms of when you've got the technology. Companies have really pushed it with the companies like Demandbase, sixth Sense, because their business is built around ABM.

05:47
I think the complexity comes when nobody really knows what you're talking about, when you talk about ABM, because you need to go to the next level. So when you're targeting new accounts, you might pick 20, but you need to do a lot of research to make sure that they're your ideal customer profile, because a lot of companies don't. So they spend a lot of money on these very kind of elaborate campaigns or targeted approaches and they don't actually know whether that company is a good fit for them from a strategic objective and then they look at it and say, well, that didn't work, that failed, or they try and customize everything so much and focusing on 28 counts is a very small pool unless you've got some really good insight into what those companies are doing or whether they're a good fit for you.

06:29 - Mike (Host)
Right. So if that's the case, what do salespeople really want in order to help grow existing and new accounts? Because you deal with salespeople every day and your team does.

06:39 - Adam (Guest)
Yeah Well, I think again, it depends on whether you're going to keep on hitting this, because after 30 years we kind of finally worked it out that most companies don't pull apart their new business acquisition and their existing business. The sales teams often work on the existing accounts and new accounts, but the strategies are very different. So I think if you're talking about existing accounts but the strategies are very different, so I think if you're talking about existing accounts, salespeople are incredibly protective of their relationships with those. The way that marketing and the business supports them is a very different kind of strategy, especially now where customers are demanding a lot more intimacy with their relationships with the organizations they partner with. Then you're talking about what salespeople want with new acquisition. So if you look at new acquisition, a lot of salespeople literally they want really highly qualified, ready to sign deals.

07:33
So this is one of the big problems in the industry at the moment is that we've come up, especially in the technology industry, we've come up on a wave of growth. So salespeople are used to kind of going in there and the customer's ready to buy. That whole nurturing process and that courting process needs to start 6, 12, 18 months in advance before people are ready to buy. It's like bank qualification. So everybody wants you know salespeople want bank qualified leads. The trouble is when you're selling hundreds of thousands of multi-million dollar deals, bant doesn't exist. Because if you're talking to a C-level executive, of course they have budget, they have authority and they have need, but they're scoping out the need. So when our customers say we want Bant qualified leads and we've never had a relationship with these people before we look at them and go, you're courting someone who's going to spend millions of dollars and you want them to have all of that in place before you talk to them.

08:30 - Mike (Host)
Isn't that the job of the salesperson? I thought that was what selling was about was actually engaging with prospects on a journey over several months or years.

08:38 - Adam (Guest)
Well, I think we need a whole different podcast interview on that topic. You know it depends on how honest you want me to be. Yeah, it is. Again, I think there's a lot of technology changes in the demands that are put on salespeople when it comes to it. So you know they're busy, they're working with existing customers. There's a lot more demands put on them in terms of those types of things. So they do want people who are ready to talk. But I think we've just written recently an article about the art of developing relationships in the early stage of the sales cycle, because it's a really important step. But again, time is always an issue in terms of those things.

09:13 - Mike (Host)
So it's the critical step, isn't it? I mean bluntly, and having been in that, having been there for many, many years, as we both have, finding new clients, net new logos is incredibly hard, and when you're selling deals that have a big impact on that person's business, it can take months and years. And there is an approach. It's so me. I start as the kind of the trusted advisor model. I just start by asking questions that are relevant, providing value where I can, delivering insights that might help them move forward, irrespective of if they ever buy from me at all. I almost ignore any prospect of selling to that person at all for the first six or 12 months.

09:54 - Adam (Guest)
Often because, they don't know me and that's a really good approach and I think that's the longer term approach that actually drives kind of real intimacy with the customers and that trust. Because, like you've said through our previous conversations, mike, you know when an RFP comes up there's five people involved. Two of them are kind of you know, really going to get it and the rest of the three are there shopping just to see if there's any dramatic differences.

10:15 - Mike (Host)
You're down at the 5% conversion rate level.

10:17 - Adam (Guest)
if you're in the bottom three, yeah, yeah, so I think you know in the bottom three, yeah, so I think the salespeople want there in terms of new acquisition, they want something that they can get their hands around, that they can really have a good conversation about, to actually start that relationship. I think the difference is the salespeople that actually know how to build relationships at the early stage and value that is dependent on the individual that actually is going to that meeting. And also one of the key things which most companies struggle with is their ideal customer profile. They struggle hugely with they might identify the company, the type of company, but then really going down to it.

10:55
There's a good thing about you're looking for a prince in a castle that lives in a castle that's in their 60s, but you have to go further. You've got Prince Charles as it used to be, now King Charles and Prince of Clark now Ozzy Osbourne. They're exactly the same but they have very different needs and most companies struggle. We run an ideal customer profile workshop. Most sales and marketing teams struggle to agree on who their ideal customer profile is. So marketing drive the leads and then sales go. Well, they're not the people we're selling to. So again, I think it comes back to that interlock between sales and marketing.

11:30 - Mike (Host)
Well, that's a fascinating topic. Just thinking on the fly, I was a product manager for a while in a bank and of course, when you come to start targeting prospects you have to rely upon well, I've built this customer segment, rather than ICP as we used to call it. So I've got a segment which is effectively an ICP. And then how do I target them? Oh, I know, I'll buy a database or we'll use the bank's database that's already pre-qualified, permissioned, and all you've got then is you've got.

11:55
Well, what sector are they in? I can get that. How big are they? Yep, I can get that. How many people do they have? Yep, I can probably get most of that. Not all of it, maybe. But after that it starts to dry up quite quickly about what you can actually really get in terms of real data. So I get it that actually marketing are trying to perform a job based around. Well, once I've defined this ICP, we've got to be able to go and find them and engage with them. But sales are saying that might be completely irrelevant, because what a salesperson is looking for is a certain type of maybe emotional state, that the buyer's in a certain growth stage, that the buyer's in which you'll never be able to tell from data that's in the public domain.

12:35
Is that right or not?

12:36 - Adam (Guest)
I would agree with that.

12:37
I think some of it you can find in terms of trigger points.

12:46
So there's trigger points in an organization when you have a change of personnel, when their stock price goes up and down, whether they publicly state that their strategy is X or Y, or you know, they have certain types of technology where you know that they're going to have to replace that within a certain period of time. So I think there's other indicators that you can use, but again, it requires a deep level of thinking. So one of the big things that we see is that some of the challenges are is, firstly, that the organization as a whole is not agreed on where its growth is coming from in terms of new acquisition or existing accounts. It then struggles to really clearly define who their ideal customer profile is for the products or services that they're selling, because, again, there's different ideal customer profiles for each of the products or services that they're actually sending into market, especially in the kind of the way that technology is changing at the moment. Everybody's selling AI, everybody's selling business transformation or those types of things.

13:49
But it comes down into the character of is a company conservative or very futuristic in terms of the way they're thinking, all of these different types of things which then have an impact with regards to looking at things like win-loss analysis why did they win, why did they lose and you're not allowed to use price or product fit or those types of things. So that's where companies struggle hugely in terms of driving growth.

14:08 - Mike (Host)
I had one last year where a client was looking at. It was in the food and beverage market. If you looked at the, they were a private company, obviously large companies there are lots and lots of private companies rather than publicly listed companies. But the problem we had was if you looked at that food and beverage company that were VC-backed, they were a challenger to the big, heavy, hefty incumbents who were risk-averse. You wouldn't get that kind of data out of buying a list or buying a data set or even looking at what's going on in the stock market. You had to know who that brand was and go. Yeah, I can get from probably some of the data sources. They've got Series A funding recently and that's clearly a trigger. But the type of organization and what they were looking for and the kind of fit, all that was much more nuanced, much more nuanced.

14:55 - Adam (Guest)
Yeah, and I think one of the biggest things is that the sales team has a massive amount of knowledge that's generally not transferred to marketing with regards to the individual experience on those organizations, and then it's not captured and then leveraged in terms of that. So when we're looking at driving existing account growth, we drive the interlock between sales, marketing and operations or delivery, because when you get those three departments in the same room talking about that same customer, you suddenly kind of come up with a lot of information that they all operate in silos generally, which is, once you break down those silos, suddenly you've got a huge competitive advantage.

15:35 - Mike (Host)
Definitely so, given the time, especially if you look at the last kind of 20 or 30 years of working on growth programs for clients. What are the kind of the three biggest lessons you've learned about new customer growth so putting to one side existing accounts in terms of new customer growth, new customer acquisition? What are the kind of the three big things you think about?

15:55 - Adam (Guest)
I think one of the big things is expectations, expectations between the business, sales and marketing. They all work on different timescales and they expect different things, which are generally in a lot of things they're completely misaligned and everybody's unhappy, generally with the result. So I think the first thing is you have to get everybody on the same page within the organization. We had a customer that recently is like we're not necessarily, we want to close deals within the next six months because we have a lag in our pipeline. Our first question was what's your average sales cycle? That's nine to 18 months. How's that going to work? Then we had another conversation with sales and they're very much looking at okay, we want to close deals, we want to go in there, we want bank-qualified leads. Marketing are saying we're happy because we're building the brand. These are new customers and if you close something in the next 12 months then that will be great. Or if you're looking at pipeline attribution, wonderful. So you've got a three-month versus 12 months versus 18 months all across these. So I think expectation setting is incredibly important.

16:57
I think the other thing is messaging you. Look at cars these days, suvs all look the same. They got the different badge on the front and, I think, a lot of people messaging. We do a lot of work with one organization, which is incredibly good, about why you exist in the marketplace. Why are you better? All of these different things and if you get your messaging correct, that makes everything easier. But most companies they gloss over it and it's like messaging is okay, we've used the brand agency and everything's good, but you don't really understand the differentiators of why your brand is better and why it exists in the marketplace. Huge, because those are the foundational things that everything comes off of, and then everything after that is incredibly important. But if you don't get those foundations right, then you've got an uphill battle definitely.

17:42 - Mike (Host)
Something else that occurred to me was around when you talked about kind of timescales and alignment of objectives In terms of being in this kind of sales environment and looking for net new clients. I've talked to a lot of salespeople in the last three years probably hundreds and one of the common problems is this constant need for quarterly earnings drive. It's been there for donkey's years. When I was back in well early 2000 to KPMG, that was always the mantra was every company that we worked with you need to hit your quarterly targets. That's not changed. But I think the problem now potentially is I was talking to a guy, brent Adamson, the other day who wrote the challenge of sale with Matt Dixon and if you look at what's happening in terms of the way that the buying decisions are made, there are now more stakeholders. There's a lot more nervousness and awareness that if a buyer makes the wrong decision and they spend half a million dollars and it goes wrong, they'll probably get fired.

18:33
In this market More syndication required. So the decision-making process is getting longer and Brent was saying the research they've recently done was around this kind of like decision-making uncertainty about how confident is the buyer in making the decision. When you add all that together at the kind of upper, mid-market and the enterprise level. You have to invest in your sales teams to build longer-term relationships that will lead to high-quality deals and hopefully long-lasting customers. But that's completely contrary to. You've got to hit your quarterly target. The two just don't add up because the lead-in time could be 18 months before that starts to pay off. And I think you mentioned before that when you see clients who are desperate for new leads and desperate to close because they're behind on pipeline, you're already on the back foot before you even start and they're going to blame someone in that environment, and it's normally the people responsible for lead gen or for closing deals it just seems like it's.

19:29
I don't know if there's an answer to this, but it does seem like those two are opposing forces.

19:35 - Adam (Guest)
Well, I think a lot of companies use demand generation organizations as, like the emergency room oh my God, we have a lack of pipeline. We need to increase the number of meetings for the salespeople, because that's a lead measure.

19:50 - Mike (Host)
A lead indicator? Yeah, exactly.

19:51 - Adam (Guest)
But it doesn't necessarily mean to say that you're going to change that into business. So I think a lot of it comes through is it's like planning for the future. You need a big pipeline, you need to develop those relationships, but the sales teams don't have a relationship. So I think when you're in some of those circumstances we've worked with a number of companies where we look at it as in you're swimming and you're floating, you're going really fast, you're growing or you're sinking.

20:15
So a number of companies come to us when they're sinking and they have a massive need and then it's because the long-term planning has not been done three years before or two years before and now you have a really big problem. So I think that's always really hard to fix. So you need to build a big pipeline, but then you've got the sales team always under pressure because management are always looking for the reporting. Or we see a lot of inefficiencies in organizations where so many people are spending so much time traveling in meetings, doing things that doesn't actually increase the North Star of driving more business or increasing relationships with customers. So nobody can be an ER for an organization. They're always going to fail because it comes back to that planning and strategy that you did two, three years ago. That's not actually in place.

21:02 - Mike (Host)
And the irony is having been a sales director, if you put all the planning in place and you make the investment and you build the relationships and you start to exceed your sales quota, corporate suddenly increases your sales target, which is never going to work because it's taken you 18 months to take the investment, to build the relationships to deliver the sales value that you need. Now they up the target by 25%. You're always going to fail Because it's an 18-month lag. Time. Again it's the same problem.

21:28 - Adam (Guest)
We see a lot where again it comes back to that earlier in the discussion is misalignment. There's a lot of hope, so one of the things that we do when we go into an organization is what are your figures based on? What are your targets based on? What are your targets based on? A lot of the time, not for all customers. A lot of the time, it's well, that's what we've been given by senior management. Well, how did they get to that? How did they get to that? And it's like, well, we don't know.

21:52 - Mike (Host)
They did it on a spreadsheet. It was really scientific. Did they talk to sales?

21:56 - Adam (Guest)
Not at all, no, so a lot of the things we do around key account growth is when we say, oh, we need to double the size of this account this year, and you say, well, why? What gives you the indicators that that's actually possible? Well, that's what we've just been told to do. We just need to double the size of the account. But that customer might actually not be able to kind of achieve those goals because they don't have the need.

22:17 - Mike (Host)
Complete disconnect.

22:18 - Adam (Guest)
Yeah, there is a massive disconnect across sales, marketing, senior management and the delivery teams, especially in existing customers, but also in new acquisition as well. So I think that would be one of the biggest things. I say expectations and alignment that you have to get right.

22:32 - Mike (Host)
So, adam, final question from me If you were brought in as a CRO into a $100 million ARR tech company and you were told we've got to drive an extra 15% of growth in the next couple of years or 20%, it's the usual 20%. So we need to show 20% year-on-year growth. We've got 18 months to be able to demonstrate all that. Where would you first look? What are the first two or three things that you'd do?

22:58 - Adam (Guest)
So the first thing I'd do is I'd look at your entire customer base at the moment to see if there's any growth within those customer bases there. Is there different things that we can increase the monthly or annual reoccurring revenue? Then I would look at your ideal customer profile. I'd look at your. How does that existing customer base make up in terms of ideal? What are the similarities between them? I'd look at the messaging in terms of do we have clear differentiation in the marketplace? I think one of the challenges with the new CRO role, which is a new terminology, historically, 30 years ago it was sales and marketing director right, that's right. Then it was business development director.

23:32 - Mike (Host)
Yeah, we've had that one as well.

23:34 - Adam (Guest)
It's kind of all changes right, same stuff different day. So one of the key things then is is that growth going to come from? Can it come from existing accounts or does it have to come with new acquisition? And then I would look at all of the sales cycles around in terms of the timing. How long does it take to get a new customer? So even if you, generally, if we talk to an existing customer, if you look at, by the time you've gone through procurement, you've gone through those things, even if you're a warm, friendly, yes, we want to do it now it's always minimum of three to six months. If you're looking longer, it's like and people say so I'd look at timescales in terms of sales cycle and then I would develop in terms of how many customers were made.

24:15
So again, a lot of marketing strategy sometimes is kind of misaligned with what is actually trying to be achieved. So they go for big campaigns where you're only trying to get another 20 or 30 customers, depending on the average size of the customer and the deal cycle, but they're sending it out to thousands of people, so it's not targeted enough. So we would then look at the strategy, how sales and marketing work together. I would look at that and do we have the right sales team for the right strategy? Where are things working well and where are things broken?

24:47
I was talking to a newly appointed CRO the other day and they were being asked ridiculous things by their management team. They'd been in the organization four days and they said we want a strategy for the next year. For the first two, three months you don't even know where the bathrooms are in terms of that. So I would say a new CRO would need to be looking at three months before they really understand the business well enough. But again it comes back to that quarter yearlings because they're generally in a firefighting mode and we hear a lot new CRO, we've just fired our head of marketing, we've just fired our head of sales and you need to come in and fix it because we're not going to hit our targets. You've got three months. It's like again it comes back to expectations.

25:28
So that's how.

25:29 - Mike (Host)
I think it might also explain why the average tenure of those CRO sales directors is quite short.

25:34 - Adam (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. And again, I think when people are recruiting for CROs, they're actually CROs. They need to really understand does that CRO come from a big enterprise background with high value deals that there's a small number of it or do they come from a large, high volume background? Do they have more experience in marketing or sales? And then they have to build a team around that? Because a lot of the time you might have an enterprise person, a CRO, that's enterprise focused, really sales, big deal focused. They don't really know that much about marketing per se and they might not have a strong marketing team. So now they're struggling from the get go. So I say to a lot of people I know is when you're recruiting, when you're applying for these roles, here's some of the questions you need to ask to make sure it's a good fit for you Because, again, it's a relatively new title for a lot of these people that would generally be sales heads of sales, not heads of revenue.

26:29 - Mike (Host)
Exactly, and I think the counter is also true is that if you've had success selling into the mid market, the upper mid market, the kind of you know, the hundred million maybe to 500 million turnover customers, and then you try and go into the enterprise market, the entire world changes. The way that you sell into that market is completely different to the way you'd sell into the mid market. And if you've not done it, you won't know it, you'll have no idea until you try it.

26:51 - Adam (Guest)
Yeah, so one of the things we get told a lot is our sales team is not equipped to sell into when we're moving visionary in terms of you know, we want to go into the enterprise space, or so that's a big topic of discussion generally is we need to re-gear our sales team because they're not used to selling at that level. Again, it comes back to alignment strategy in terms of you're trying to move your business into a whole different league, of playing a different level, which might not be the best strategy.

27:19 - Mike (Host)
Exactly, and I'm having the same conversation with someone tomorrow evening. Exactly the same conversation. And on that note, adam, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you ever so much for joining me.

27:28 - Adam (Guest)
Thank you, mike. Always a pleasure to have these discussions and, kind of you know, bandy these things around and bat them from here to there Exactly Great, I really appreciate it.

27:36 - Mike (Host)
Where can people find?

27:37 - Adam (Guest)
out more about you. So if you go to our website, thinkelevatecom, you'll see that, and then you'll see our contact details or reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. Very good, excellent, adam, it's been a pleasure. Thank you Lovely. Thanks, mike, take care.

27:48 - Mike (Host)
Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to Higgle the B2B Sales Club podcast series with your host, mike Lander. Please subscribe so that you'll catch all the next episodes.