Introducing... Connor the Content Octopus

Benjamin Ard (00:02.292) All right, okay, I think we are good, perfect. Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by David. David, welcome to the show. David Malmborg (00:12.829) Yeah, thank you for having me. Excited to be with you. Benjamin Ard (00:15.266) Yeah, David, this is going to be fun. This is to Utah people nerdy not about content and marketing. It's going to be a good time. David though, before we dive into the subject, let's get to know you. Tell us about yourself, work history, all that good stuff. David Malmborg (00:29.191) Yeah, for sure. So currently I am VP of marketing and sales for Boostability, which is, I guess you could call it a hyper scalable SEO solution for small businesses. And I've been with the company for just a few months now. So relatively new to the company, but I've got a lot of background history with them just throughout my career. So prior to this, was running a mental health startup with Amelia Wilcox, if you know her at the company called Novati, we created a more easier mental health solution than a benefits package for employees so that they can have easier access to mental health benefits. I ran that for about four years. Prior to that, I was running an agency called Number Six and then worked with Struck as a design agency. And then I was in the B2B tech space with companies like Fusion IO, Faircom, which is a database company. Uh, and then early days, uh, SEO.com it's like way back in the early days. Uh, outside of that, I ran, uh, an organization called the Utah DMC, which was, uh, a kind of a network meetup nonprofit, uh, where we just got a bunch of marketing nerds together, talk shop. And that turned out to be quite a huge community until, uh, COVID did its job and killing it. And then, um, and then also, uh, coach for the high school mountain bike team for fun. So there you go. Benjamin Ard (01:58.019) Very cool. That's amazing. So David, we're going to talk about something where you have this unique opportunity to talk about it. You are currently over both sales and marketing at boost ability and every marketer and every salesperson at some point in time in their B2B career has felt the friction between the two departments. David Malmborg (01:59.679) I'll just flick over here. David Malmborg (02:10.685) Yeah. David Malmborg (02:20.031) Yeah, it's, it's kind of like the tell as old as time as they say, right marketing and sales, butting heads, not agreeing. We threw over 100 leads, all those leads were crap. So give us more leads, give us better leads, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And yeah, I kind of now find myself in this position to run both teams, which I think is really interesting to do. I This kind of has worked in through my career over time, because Fusion IO was that traditional horror story. It was terrible. And I remember going to that company and marketing spent 80 % of their budget. This might be an exaggeration, but a majority of their marketing budget was spent on events and doing these really big events. And they would just like toss a bunch of leads or whatever. And the goal was to scan as many people as possible. It didn't really matter if they were like, qualified or a good fit or whatever, like we just go to events, scan thousands and thousands of leads, send it over to sales and say, do your job. And the sales team would obviously come back and say, this is crap. And I was like, man, this has got to be a better way to do this. And the division between marketing and sales was just really toxic in a lot of ways. And I, found myself as this like lonely contributor, doing digital marketing for them, just trying to bridge that gap a little bit better. Like, Hey, can I Can I get these assets? Can I do some remarketing to them? Can we like get a little bit better on some of our email marketing initiatives? Like how well is this doing? I tried to create an early Domo dashboard with them. And I think I ended up just making more enemies than friends over there. And preparation for this merger acquisition by Sandisk and Western Digital, me and 40 others from the marketing team got let go. And I was like really upset. about this, but I said, I am never going back to a company that has like a terrible sales marketing vibe. And, and over the years as I've worked in all these different companies, my number one goal was to like bridge that gap and make sure that what we're doing in marketing works for sales and what works for sales, you know, can be supported by marketing. And I think at this last company I was at with Navati in the mental health space and this mental health tech. David Malmborg (04:43.603) I did not run the sales team. had, we had a VP of cells and, and the CRO who kind of managed that sales team, but I really made sure I was like closely aligned in working with them. And, I, put the marketing team in a position to be kind of more of like a service level team. I guess maybe part of that is because I was working in agency for a long time. but I wanted to make sure that we were actually, servicing the sales team. And if the sales team needed something. we made ourselves available to fix and do that and create whatever they needed, all with the idea that, that conversation needed to be as easy as possible. and then because I've got such a long history in SEO and marketing and working with the marketing community here locally in Utah, this opportunity to join boost ability and running both the sales team and marketing team as like, well, If there is one thing I could sell, is definitely marketing services. And so I felt pretty good trying to branch out and do both marketing and sales in a single position. And like there's a lot to do. I'm only three months, four months into this job, but it's good. I'm having a lot of fun for sure. Benjamin Ard (05:50.775) I love that. Benjamin Ard (05:59.502) That's amazing. So again, you have this unique position. You're currently over the two departments. You've seen it gone horribly wrong. You've been in position where you have bridged the gap before. Let's compare and contrast. Like what does it take to align and to build collaboration between a sales and marketing team from the experience that you've seen firsthand? David Malmborg (06:25.105) Yeah. So, first and foremost, internal communication is like key, right? And, I make sure that I have the opportunity to sit in on the sales team as well as I sit in on, the marketing teams, obviously, and the meetings that we're doing there. and I started to bring my HubSpot, CRM engineer and kind of lead ops guy into the sales market, the sales team meetings. And I said, okay. sales team is struggling here. Like what can we do to make that easier for them? And then when I go into the marketing meetings, I let them know like, hey, know, sales teams is having issues here or what we can do for them there. And then vice versa, when I'm in the sales meetings with them, I'm like, here's what marketing is coming out with. And just making sure both teams are really aligned in communication is first and foremost, some of the biggest things. I think in my short time here, we found a lot of operational gaps of what the sales team thought was happening from marketing, where they thought leads were coming from, vice versa. And what marketing thought the sales team was like supposed to pick up on, but the sales team didn't know existed. They didn't know certain assets existed. They didn't know content existed in this place. They didn't know how to necessarily address certain situations. And then of course, when a sales falls through, and then this is probably the biggest thing we're working on now is like, timing's not right. It's a good fit. Maybe timing's not right or vice versa or whatever the case may be. Like we've spent a lot of time on lead qualification and just making sure that the sales team wasn't spending a lot of time on burnt leads. they weren't spending time on spam leads. so we've reduced that, now that we have got more of a higher quality lead set going to the sales team that are working when a lead is closed loss for whatever reason, like Can we get it back to marketing and nurture that lead in a good way and kind of complete that loop? And that's what we're currently working on. Yeah, for sure. Benjamin Ard (08:23.566) I love that. So you mentioned communication being big, like one of the pillars. With that, you talked about in-person meetings. Is that your primary go-to? Do you have a regular cadence kind of meetings you like to do, or do you like Slack channels? Like, how do you like to promote communication internally? David Malmborg (08:40.861) Yeah. So we, I'm a big fan of Slack. but one thing I have learned is every company that I've kind of gone through, it has a little bit different culture in terms of how they meet and get together and talk through some of the stuff. I love Slack personally, but it is not the biggest tool here at this company. And so kind of learning to adapt. we do have our weekly meetings that we scheduled. We do have some one-on-ones as well. I do think one-on-ones, especially with direct reports is incredibly important. And so I make sure that I have one-on-ones with my, my sales manager who is leading the sales team. And then of course my marketing team, and making sure that everybody that directly reports to me is, getting that communication. And then I encourage them, of course, to have their one-on-ones downstream. but, it's, it's a matter of like figuring out where that culture fits. team meetings is kind of the bigger deal here. And that's what we're operating with here. Benjamin Ard (09:43.182) Very cool. So one thing that I've noticed from my career is often misalignment in the two teams comes from a misalignment of goals and metrics and how things are reporting. You use that example of, we tossed over X amount of leads. That was our goal. You're supposed to close X amount of them and you didn't do that or things like that. How have you in the past seen it done wrong and how are you rectifying that currently to have alignment with goals and metrics for the teams? David Malmborg (10:10.909) Yeah. So like my first two, three weeks here, at, this position, and I I've made it a point, in every company that I've worked with is to actually get solid definitions of a customer journey, through and through. And this is kind of more like traditional HubSpot concepts in terms of, you know, your leads, your MQLs, your SQLs deals, so on and so forth. But when I came in here, there was actually quite a divergence, from the traditional definitions, but also just definitions from team to team, which surprised me as far as like, what is an MQL and what is an SQL? When does one trigger the other? And we spent a lot of time in making sure that everybody actually started talking in the same language. Like definitions are the same across the entire company. So now when I even report up to the executive team and to our investors for that matter, it's really important that they understand That definition that I'm now feeding them is the same definition that marketing operates by. It's the same definition that sales team operates by. And that's really key. The one thing though to get kind of metrics on board across the board after you get those definitions in place is understand like what goals are and working towards that. So once the definitions were in place, the sales team had their KPIs and we made sure that they were okay with their KPIs. their revenue goals, their meeting set goals, et cetera. And then everybody on their team knew exactly what their goals were. And then you work backwards, right? I always like to start with the end in mind as far as like the closed one deal. Like what does that actually look like? What are the goals associated to that? Like how many meetings does it set? I created what I call a revenue requirements goal. So we start with the end goal in mind is like, okay, if our goal is to sell, you know, 100,000 in new sales this month. Well, what does that actually take to do? And so now we build out what we call our revenue requirements to understand, well, in order to do that, I have to have so many meetings and in order to have so many meetings, or I have to have so many deals and in order to have so many deals, I have to have so many meetings. In order to have so many meetings, just go backwards. And then I have it all the way down to, this lead source has to generate this many leads. And I actually now, David Malmborg (12:34.409) can go in reverse of that now that I've got it all built out is like, are we above schedule? Are we ahead of schedule? Are we behind schedule with this lead source, this lead source, this lead source? And then see how that actually tailors down. And our ratios, if there's an adjustment in ratios, like, hey, we're closing at a higher rate from lead source A to B, I now know what that effect will have downstream and vice versa. And so this revenue requirements document is super key. And each person on the team is starting to take ownership over which part of that requirement, whether it's from marketing to the SDRs to the sales team. So that's how we've done it here and is working really well. But that revenue requirements document at the end of every month we go through, we evaluate. I have a model that is constantly updated based off of, so I have a model based off of the last month, what we were doing in the last month, but then the model can be extrapolated out to what we've done in the last year. Benjamin Ard (13:11.822) That's really cool. David Malmborg (13:33.547) and then I actually have the initial model that I created of what I guessed everything would be when I was getting it, going through the hiring process. And I'm way off of what that model was, but I keep everything kind of like in line and then, that gets updated as, as we learn more, add new lead partners and et cetera. So. Yeah. Benjamin Ard (13:50.562) Very cool, that's awesome. So one thing that you mentioned before we started recording is another way to align the teams is to really put yourself in the shoes of your customer and make sure that they have a unified experience as well. How do you practically do that? What does that look like? David Malmborg (14:03.4) Yeah. David Malmborg (14:08.401) Yeah, so this is, I think ultimately what the goal is. All of the objectives that we come out between marketing sales and even through our onboarding customer success teams, which that's kind of like next on my list. I haven't gotten into that position yet, but in previous companies, it's really important is, is my goal is to make sure that the experience that the customer has is as seamless as possible and as unified as possible. Like it should be very obvious when you're talking to, boost ability, whether it's from marketing to sales to customer success, like the language, the way we operate, the touch points that that person has is exactly the same. And when you start looking at it from the customer's perspective and making sure that the touch points are consistent and kind of unified from the beginning conversation that they have with us, the introduction of the brand essentially, to actually becoming a customer going forward. or a lost lead that maybe wants to continue to keep tabs on us as a company or whatever the case may be, that experience should be the same. And so when you look at it, that starts to really break down exactly where that process is and what that content experience should be going forward. And that's how I like to start breaking down what we're working on and what we're fixing. And this is looking just more at all of these different touch points. And not so much in terms of lead generation, et cetera. There's a process to that. But once somebody's engaged with that brand, that has to be a consistent experience. And again, I look at it, this is one where I might look at it more linear in terms of what the initial touch point was for marketing. That initial touch point for marketing is always the first place that a customer will have experience with that brand. So if it's at a conference, if it's at a website, if it's social media, If it's some other random content piece that we've got floating around the internet or just some network lunching that somebody's going to, we want to try to keep that touch point to be really great. But is that going to be the same experience that they have when they start talking to sales, when they actually start talking to the people that they're going to be engaging with? David Malmborg (16:26.801) And then where it seems to always get a little bit wonky is like, does the customer success team speak the same language as a sales team? Because you never want that sales experience to be super great. And then all of sudden the customer success experience to be like, this is definitely different, right? That's, that's where expectations get set. then a disappointment comes in. And if you can control that and you can look at what those touch points are, that is, that's kind of what you want to. work through. That's the goal. And so in order to do that, we have definitely set up a lot. And I give credit to April on our VP of Ops here. She is awesome, but she has done a really good job with our CS team in getting every interaction that the CS team has now recorded properly analyzed in real time by AI. This is some of the benefits that AI brings. So we are in real time sentiment on every single call. across thousands and thousands of calls that we are doing across our customer success team, right? And then we're going to start bringing that into ourselves approach and making sure that that is happening where I can't listen to every sales call, but now we can start analyzing and making sure things are going through. But training is what's really important for the sales team to understand the language and how they should be selling it. We do biweekly again. team crossover meetings between customer success and sales, where we dive into anywhere that, so like any sales that went awry in the onboarding experience, we talked through and understand where that is. And that kind of started before I got here, but we're continuing it on. And you can see these issues diminish to now that call used to be an hour or so long. It's like 15 minutes. The last one I think we had was like 15 minutes long. Because there's no issues. They're starting to get more aligned. They're talking the same language and understanding the same thing. And then again, working backwards into what the handoff between marketing and sales and then back to marketing on a closed loss deal, feels very similar in that regard. And so you just have to take each one of these points and where it gets the most critical is during these handoffs. And those handoffs from marketing to sales and sales to CS and back to marketing where necessary, that you spend a lot of time. David Malmborg (18:49.609) getting those perfected. It honestly is mind boggling how much time it actually takes. Or maybe I'm slow. I could be slow at this. I don't know. But it takes way more time than you feel like it should, for sure. Benjamin Ard (18:56.219) yeah, absolutely. No. Benjamin Ard (19:04.152) Yeah, I love that. That's amazing. So I love the alignment that you have internally and that you've also focused on the customer and their consistent journey. I love the approaches. David, though, these episodes are short and on purpose. We actually have run out of time. Yeah, thank you so much for the insights. This is absolutely amazing. I'm sure our audience will love it. If anyone listening would like to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you? David Malmborg (19:19.527) Shoot, already, we're already there. David Malmborg (19:31.359) Yes, so I reluctantly am still on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place to find me. I've really killed most of my other social media platforms. I'm getting old, I guess, and anti-social. But LinkedIn is still there. So definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. And of course, if you're interested in Boostability, can go to boostability.com and see what we're doing there in providing SEO for small businesses. Benjamin Ard (19:56.974) I love it. And everyone listening to this episode, just scroll down to the show notes. Look right there. We'll link to David's profile and the boost ability all inside the show notes. Again, David, thank you, thank you, thank you. Really do appreciate the insights. David Malmborg (20:07.945) Yeah, my pleasure. Yeah, thank you again, Ben.