Kelley Hippler (00:02)
show now upwards of 80 % of a buyer journey is already done before a buyer even talks to a salesperson. And so that really does raise the importance
of that alignment between sales and marketing and what's being said out in the market.
Ben Ard (00:43)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Kelley Kelley, welcome to the show.
Kelley Hippler (00:48)
Thank you, Ben. I'm pleased to be here. Thank you so much for having me on.
Ben Ard (00:51)
Kelley, I'm excited. This is a topic that I absolutely love. I don't think we could ever preach this message enough. I'm excited to dive into it. But before we get into the subject, Kelley, tell us about yourself. You have an amazing background and career. Let the audience get to know you for a couple of seconds.
Kelley Hippler (01:08)
Great. Well, thanks, Ben. So for the last three years, I've been Chief Revenue Officer at a company called Briefly Legal and Briefly provides back office support to a number of law firms in the US and Canada. under that, I'm responsible for sales marketing and customer success. And prior to that, spent 23 years of my career at Forrester Research in sales customer success roles, but spent the last five years of my career there as a global chief sales officer for Forrester. So really excited to be here today. ⁓
marketing alignment is definitely a passion and so excited for this conversation.
Ben Ard (01:41)
I love it. So starting off, you mentioned sales and marketing alignment. You've seen it all. mean, you've had such high leadership roles that you were working with both marketing and sales leaders. What? mean, there's this dynamic that just sometimes is bad. Why does it get that way? And what have you seen kind of fix that? What's, what's been your experience in the space?
Kelley Hippler (02:00)
Yeah, no, absolutely. And have definitely lived through the sort of finger pointing the Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, you know, marketing saying sales isn't following up on the leads, sales saying that's not a lead, I'm not wasting my time on that. And so I think that that has sort of been somewhat of the history of sales and marketing. And I'm glad to say I've seen it evolve quite a bit in recent years. And so I've been fortunate to be in instances where we have worked really hard to align sales and marketing. And what I mean by that is
is having a shared plan for what it is that we are trying to accomplish across sales, customer success, marketing, and also ideally the product organization, and making sure that those plans all ladder up into the ultimate revenue goal that a company.
has. And I think when the goals themselves are shared, it takes a lot of the noise out of the system. And then people can focus more on how do we collaborate together to get to the ultimate outcome that we're looking for. And I think another big shift that is influencing this is just the change in buyer behavior. And as we were talking
show now upwards of 80 % of a buyer journey is already done before a buyer even talks to a salesperson. And so that really does raise the importance
of that alignment between sales and marketing and what's being said out in the market.
And when you couple that with the revenue bow tie, which sort of says, hey, everybody should have a role to play, not just across the buyer journey, but the customer lifecycle as well, that basically necessitates that partnership ⁓ all the way through from cradle to grave. And marketing's got an important role to play at every stage in that process.
Ben Ard (03:39)
I love that. Okay. So you had this really cool story you told me before we were recording or you weren't Forester. You had a big goal to hit. And this is amazing. Like what happened was phenomenal. And I want every marketer to pay attention. If you don't mind sharing the story, I think it could do us all a lot of good.
Kelley Hippler (03:56)
Yeah, no, I'm happy to. And so when Shirley Macbeth joined as our CMO, she and I talked a lot about how can we partner together to help get to the overall company goals. And so what we started doing was every other week, her leadership team would join my global sales leadership meetings so that they could see and hear what was going on. We could help drive alignment. as a CSO, and my team always loved this meeting, always started with a round the horn forecast. How are we doing for the quarter? And we had a quarter
where things were looking a little tight with a couple of weeks to go. And unbeknownst to me, but after that meeting, Shirley and her team debriefed and they basically went through our pipeline in Salesforce and looked for every growth opportunity that was at ⁓ stage three. So it was nearing the proposed phase, $100,000 or higher. And they literally started picking up the phone and calling sales reps and asking, hey, is there anything we can do to help you with this deal? And so then I started getting calls from sales reps
saying like, I've been at Forrester for over 20 years and no one from marketing has ever picked up the phone and offered me help. And so I think it was just a beautiful moment of really all being in the boat together, all being aligned and everybody doing whatever they could to get the company to its goal and to its target. And to me, that was just, you know, the high point of the collaboration that we had built there.
Ben Ard (05:17)
And what I love about the story, like that experience was so cool that they actually called up and cared, but there was a lot of work that had to go into that. Number one, you mentioned the magic word of Salesforce. You actually had marketers who had Salesforce access, knew what to look for. We're looking at the right reports, actually knew what the sales number looked like, that it was behind, like there was actual alignment in the trenches where they could.
Be enabled to say, here are all the potential deals who's on those deals. Let me reach out and see how I can help. There are a lot of organizations. I feel like where the goals aren't aligned that most marketers don't have access to even the CRM. They don't know what the target is besides maybe a lead goal or something like that. So when it comes to that alignment of goals, what, what do you think marketers should be setting in terms of goals for their team? How does that align everyone? How do you figure that out?
Kelley Hippler (06:08)
Yeah, I mean, I think alignment is one of those words, Ben, that is so easy to say, but really hard to do. And I think it has to start with an executive leadership team getting in a room and agreeing on how we're going to work together. think marketers, you know, sometimes are reluctant, same as customer success I've seen, to like take part of the revenue number. But I think that's almost a necessary step to really show that alignment there. And ⁓ not to say that all the pipeline has to come from marketing, but at least have a
target for how much they're looking to contribute so that you can then as a sales leader break the plan down and sort of know, okay, this is coming from these different groups here. But I think if you have a marketing team.
that only wants to be golden. I've seen this before on, you know, number of leads that they're generating and not what actually happens to them afterwards. ⁓ I think that's when things really start to break down and taking that extra step of saying not only we're going to generate the leads, but we're concerned about the quality of those leads and we're willing to take on that revenue piece. I think that's really when the relationship starts to pivot, because at the end of the day, that just brings everybody closer together and I think gets you out of that
good lead, bad lead, lead quality conversation. If you're really focused on quality of the pipeline and then also obviously on the client side, which I think also gets understated how important ⁓ messaging to an engagement with your clients is. I've no, I think it's just human nature. Everyone loves the big win and focusing on new business. I think by pivoting just a little more time, attention and resource to your existing clients, making sure that they're getting value out of what they currently have, making sure they're aware of all the capabilities
that your organization can bring to them to help solve problems. I think that there's an important role that marketing can play there as well that sometimes gets overshadowed by everybody focusing on top of the funnel still.
Ben Ard (08:01)
And I love that. I love this praise of full customer lifecycle marketing, how marketing can be every part of the loop. I think there is a genuine understanding for teams that do this of where revenue really comes from. It's the word of mouth. It's the existing customers that expand their book of business. It's the excitement they have. It's the interaction they have with the company that makes for a quality experience.
marketing, just being focused on spending a lot of dollars for top of funnel awareness to people that have no idea who you are, generating somewhat questionable quality leads is not the right thing for anyone. And I love how you've unlocked this ability to say, Hey, you have a revenue target. So I'm giving you permission to find the right kind of material to do the right kind of marketing that's going to drive results. And I think it's nerve wracking for marketers sometimes to have that revenue target because you're accountable to something very big.
But on top of it though, the people that really embrace it, I think they feel like there's freedom where they can say, okay, let's do the right marketing. Let's go after the right leads. Let's do the right things. I think that's so cool. So you talked about weekly meetings or bi-weekly meetings, kind of an idea. How are you ingraining the marketing team like throughout the whole customer journey? Cause that's not just the sales touch points. That's customer success. That's support. That's life cycle marketing.
How do you really incorporate the marketing team across all of the organizations?
Kelley Hippler (09:19)
Yeah. And so in my current role, we have regular meetings that involve sales, CS and marketing just to help with that. We've also done both buyer journey and customer journey mapping to sort of talk about and prioritize ⁓ where can marketing play a role in helping those teams to scale, especially as we look at things like the lifetime value of clients, cost of client acquisition, where does it make sense for marketing to actually take some of the lift on the client side so that
The humans that we have from a customer success, client success function are actually focused on the larger clients, the ones that are driving more value and so actually being able to take more work off the plate. And one thing that you also mentioned that I think is so important right now is that concept of advocacy. Again, going back to the conversation and the point earlier about your potential buyers being 80 % of the way through the process, they're talking to people in their networks. And so if your clients aren't advocating for
your brand, that's also going to have an impact. And so I think, you know, on the customer success side and also the marketing side, not just thinking about engagement and retention, like those are becoming table stakes. But how do you get to a place where your clients are actually willing to be advocates for your brand, whether it's, you know, publicly or whether it's just, you know, when a peer calls up and asks, hey, I see you're using this, how's it going? ⁓ They really do need to be advocates if you're going to continue to grow your business moving forward.
Ben Ard (10:47)
I love that. Okay. Now there are probably some marketers and I want to say this the right way. There are probably some marketers that are listening to this that aren't sure if the alignment between marketing and sales is healthy at the moment. Do you have any like warning signs that you've seen that there might be misalignment and some extra focus on kind of reuniting the teams might be needed and might need to be an emphasis point.
Kelley Hippler (11:12)
Yeah, I mean, think a couple of ones that I've seen over the course of the years, obviously, there's the classic Glen Gary, Glen Ross, lead quality, sales following up, not following up on leads. I think another thing that I've seen happen, ⁓ and this is where sales ask for like 80 flavors of the same piece of content and marketing goes off and builds them. And then the content is not ultimately being used. And it's a huge waste of time, effort, and energy. think that's another place where
you
can see that people aren't really aligned. Because if they're asking for things but then not using it, I think there's some disconnect there. And I've seen that happen a lot. And I've had to, at times, go back to my team and be like, guys, this is just another shade of vanilla here. You don't need a brand new piece of collateral for this one selling situation. And I think sometimes sellers can be, you
a little less creative with leveraging what they have and wanting a bespoke piece for a certain situation. And the lift just isn't justified. So I've also seen that happen as well. And that's where we talked a little bit about the plan on the page. Part of what's great about that, not only does it state the goals, but also states the priorities around what is each function going to do. And I found it hugely helpful, even as a CSO, to be able to say, because we are dealing with a global team, lots of great ideas.
always things cropping up, but I think what happens is resources become so diffused that you don't actually have an impact because you've spread yourself too thin, whether it's sales or marketing. And so what's great about having those plans is somebody can come up with a great idea and you say, okay, we've got four priorities for this year.
Is that idea going to generate more revenue than, you know, any of these four? Is the one I should take off? And it's usually like, no, well, and so it's a really great way to kind of filter all of those ideas. And not that you want to stymie the creativity, but there's just has to be some acknowledgement of everybody has limited resources and you have to prioritize things. And it becomes a great forcing function for being able to do that, because I would look at all of the things that marketing created at sales requests that would then
go unused when we would check in the content repository. And I would feel sick that people had spent so much time doing something that then sort of died on the vine. So it definitely works both ways. And I think that's where having content calendar, content plan that everyone's aligned on, laddering up to a revenue goal just helps everybody to be more successful and leverage their resources. Because it's no fun for a marketer to create a piece and then see nobody use it. That's going to be uber frustrating. And so
I do think a lot of it does go back to that. Planning can tap down a lot of the wasted energy that can happen on both sides.
Ben Ard (13:55)
Yeah, and that makes perfect sense. love that. One last question, because we're running out of time. When you're working on the plan and working on the goals, do you get sign off from the other departments, so sales saying, hey, this is the overall company number that we need to hit, marketing, what are your goals? What are your priorities? How are you going to get there as well? Do you have that cross alignment so people are signing off on the plan so that when a priority or a request comes in to say,
Hey, I this, isn't this someone has the ability to say, Hey, we all agreed. These are kind of the main things I'm trying to accomplish. That's going to kind of push off some priorities. What do you think about that? Do you kind of really align in the goal setting stages for those things and get sign off cross departmentally?
Kelley Hippler (14:35)
yes, absolutely. And again, I think it also goes back to, you know, making sure that there's agreement around what is marketing looking to contribute towards the revenue goal, because I will build a bottoms up plan for the organization. And so you're looking at a host of different variables that aren't just isolated to the sales organization, right? It can involve marketing. also involves product, right? Are we launching any new products? Is there going to be a price increase? How much do we think that that's going to be?
And so all of those inputs ladder up to whatever your growth plan is. And there have also been times where, going through the planning process and looking at what sales needed. If some of my peers didn't have enough resource, I've shifted budget to help make sure that those priorities could be met over the course of the year, whether it was marketing being underfunded or, you know, one year we had, ⁓ you know, grown the business so much, but our deal desk folks who approved the deals had stayed the same side.
And so, you know, end of quarter, end of the month, you know, you'd have deals potentially getting stuck or, you know, poor team in Asia Pacific folks staying up till one or two in the morning because there was nobody real time to help with deals. And so we agreed to add somebody and shifted some budget to be able to do that. So I think it is really important that you be ⁓ aligned across the board. Everyone's aware of and that those interdependencies do get called out in your planning process so that you can feel confident going
into the year that you've structured a plan that can be met. And because you as a sales leader, you've also got to get up in front of the sales organization. know, most organizations are looking to grow and folks want to sort of know, well, how did you come up with that number? How can I be confident that I'm going to be successful? And it doesn't just come down to, hey, these are the new tools we've gotten for you. But also, here's what marketing is doing. Here's what products doing. And here's how we're going to align for this upcoming year.
Ben Ard (16:27)
Yeah, it's not all just on your shoulders. Believe me, we're doing everything we can to help you get there. I love it.
Kelley Hippler (16:30)
Yep. Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Ben Ard (16:34)
Well, Kelley, I love this discussion. I love your approach to the alignment across the rest of the business and how marketing sales success, everyone can align contents role in that whole process. It is probably an episode I'm going to refer back to a lot as soon as I ever hear. mean, I get that on occasion. Like, Hey, how did you align with sales and stuff? I'm probably just going to be like, okay, here's your episode. Go listen to this. Cause it's gold. Kelley, anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you online after listening to this, how and where can they find you?
Kelley Hippler (16:47)
⁓
Yeah, I'd say best place to do it ⁓ is LinkedIn. So folks are more than happy to reach out. And I will say, this was a big shift for us. And so happy to chat with anybody about how to do it within their organization. Because it is a game changer when sales and marketing are on the same page. when there's a win, it is a company win. It's not a sales win. so having that alignment just makes it so much more rewarding for everybody. So happy to talk through that.
for folks who are stuck in the, you know, Gary, Glenn Ross phase still.
Ben Ard (17:34)
and that's very generous. For anyone looking to connect with Kelley that's listening, we will link to her profile in the show notes below, so look there. Kelley, thank you for the time and insights today. I really do appreciate it.
Kelley Hippler (17:45)
thank you, Ben. Really appreciate it. And hopefully we'll chat again soon.
