What role should marketing play the sales cycle? “Every role,” says David “Rev” Ciancio, Head of Revenue Marketing at Branded Strategic Marketing. Rev and host Chris Smith take a new approach this week and look at sales leadership from a marketing perspective, exploring how does marketing and sales work together to acquire and retain customers.
Rev realized sales wasn’t his calling early in his career. He wasn’t a bad salesman, but much preferred coaching other members of his team and looking at the big picture. He used his experience in sales to jump into marketing strategy, and has been working to integrate the marketing and sales departments in every company he’s worked for since.
Rev offers actionable steps to build a strong relationship between marketing and sales teams, with a focus on every step in the process from lead generation to customer retention. From co-writing sales sequences to encouraging sales teams to guide marketing content, Rev has solutions that you can implement tomorrow to get great results.
Watch or listen to this episode about how does marketing and sales work together
Transcript
Fri, 12/18 4:00PM • 43:38
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sales, marketing, sequences, people, sales team, organization, selling, salesforce, marketer, leader, data, crm, salesperson, tactic, retention, funnel, important, sales cycle, rev, customer
Speakers of discussion about how does marketing and sales work together
Rev Ciancio, Christopher Smith
Intro
Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog Podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith, talking with sales leaders about how does marketing and sales work together, that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack. Listen to find out how the best of the best achieve success with their team and CRM technology. And remember, unless you are the lead dog, the view never changes.
Christopher Smith 07:07
Welcome to Sales Lead Dog. Today we are taking a bit of a different approach to what we’ve been doing so far. Today, we are going to be talking about sales leadership from the perspective of a marketing leader, which I think is very important as a sales leader that we understand that. Today we have a terrific guest on the show to talk about that, Rev Ciancio. Rev, welcome to Sales Lead Dog!
Rev Ciancio 07:35
Chris, thanks for having me I’m super excited for everybody else out there that’s listening, psyched you’re here, man, it’s gonna be great, great, hopefully we provide a lot of great insights today.
Christopher Smith 07:43
Awesome. Rev, tell us a bit about yourself and your company.
Rev Ciancio 07:48
So I originally wanted to be a radio DJ. And I made that dream happen in college and I was like, “I hate this.” That’s not we’re gonna start the story. The last time I carried a bag was 2013, I was selling it, believe it or not, you can sell advertising on people’s digital bank statements. So you log into like your bank statement and there were ads on your purchases, right. So somebody saw that like you went to Subway, and you got an ad for Five Guys, you know what I mean. So that, that was the last time I carried a bag was I sold that, was that that company for six quarters of the, of the six quarters that I was there, two of those quarters I was the number one salesperson in my division like crushing, like my boss calling me and being like, “Can you show everybody else?” The other four quarters, like lowest 10%. And I realized in that moment two things. I was not really good at being like a sales person, right. I was good at sales but like the quota carrying, hit your goals, type of update Salesforce daily, like I just didn’t, it just didn’t jive with me. But I was on the phone constantly with my colleagues who would go, “Hey man, how’d you do this, and how do you organize that, and how did you make this cold call?” When I came to the realization that like, “Oh, I’m actually a marketer in a sales person’s body.” Right. “And I am better at empowering sales people to do better than being the salesperson,” and that that perspective changed my entire life. And since then I’ve been, you know, a “marketer” and marketers I think can be looked at like in two ways, right. There’s like the, the branding, graphic design, you know makes things look good and cool and awesome version of marketing, and like I get that and have vision but like, at best I can like Photoshop a taco into your hand, like, that’s about as far as my creative skills really good in that aspect and that. You know the other side of marketing is like, how do I affect both the strategy and sales of the company on a grander scale than one person? And I realized that, that is my skill set. So when I get up in the morning and I do what I do and everything since that the job was selling a 5% off your next five guys purchase was all about how, how do I enable salespeople and how do I, how do I generate leads? How do I, you know, speed up the, accelerate the sales funnel, stuff like that? So that’s kind of who I am. I’m the head of revenue marketing for a company called Branded Strategic Hospitality. We, we work with early growth hospitality tech companies to help them find investments and do some investments on our own and then also accelerate their growth. Me in particular, I help them to basically speed up their sales funnel, whether it’s generating leads, creating content that accelerates people through a funnel, you know, stuff like that. And then I also work with hospitality groups, so you know restaurant, multi-unit restaurants with their acquisition and retention efforts, so how do they get into keep more customers.
Christopher Smith 10:54
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I’m gonna read a section from Rev’s LinkedIn profile. “Generate more leads, wuicken the sales cycle, create memorable customer journeys, earn customer loyalty, build fervent brand ambassadors, elevate your brand in the marketplace, grow business and sales.” That summarizes, to a large extent what every sales leader, leader should be worried about and focused on in their business. Let’s start talking about that, breaking that down.
Rev Ciancio 11:27
Sure, so I’m a, I’m a believer in, you know, understanding the customer journey and aligning all of your efforts towards that. And you have to think about what happens in the customer journey from the moment they kind of like are aware of the problem, not aware of you. Right. But aware of the problem. And how do you get them from the you know why you, why now, why us side of sales to also the success and the retention metrics. Right? And I think it’s sort of, you know, it’s certainly a sales leader’s duty to think about what happens after the sale, even if you have a customer success department, but from a marketer’s perspective, I’m thinking about every piece of revenue that there is, right? I’m thinking about how do we get more and how do we keep more. And so a lot of those really cool buzzwords that you just read off my LinkedIn profile that I have to thank somebody else for writing, wink wink, but essentially it’s aligning yourself with the customer journey. What are the things that my perfect prospect needs to care about this, to be interested in this, to buy this, and then want to keep buying it and then ultimately, and this is where sales develop is get them to tell other people they should want it too. You know what I mean? And I think a lot of sales people because of how they align to the journey is like they’re just about acquisition, right, they’re just filling the bait shop. They have a tendency to not think about what happens after the sale and a lot of times a lot of organizations I’ve been a part of where things get screwed up on the retention side is, they were sold something that they can’t have or that the company doesn’t actually fulfill.
Christopher Smith 12:58
Right. Right. And that for our perspective, or my speaking from our firm, Empellor CRM and what we do, that transition from the sales process to now being a customer and hopefully a lifelong customer is so critical. So from a marketing perspective, what advice do you have for sales leaders to to manage that, beyond just the, the blinders the sales team might have on?
Rev Ciancio 13:29
Sure, I’m gonna go with a really really deep, deep, deep tactic, and then we’ll go up higher to a strategy level. So, I’ll tell you, so I used to work at this organization, and they brought me into oversee partner marketing. The idea was they primarily sold to enterprise, but they had a partner division so like resellers and people who are white labeled. And most of their go to market and their strategy was built around the enterprise side of business, and they were having trouble relating that to the partnership side. Well, in talking to those partners and coming in and be like, how can I help you, I realized something really, really critical. And, you know, I think we all know what buyer’s remorse is right, like I just bought this, like oh I’m scared, why did I do this? Well we had a huge problem of buyer’s remorse, right, is because they would sell it. And then after they said like, “Okay, cool thanks for the sale, here’s your like Customer Success person, I’ll see you later” and like, you know, the partner’s kind of left like, “What do I do, I don’t get it.” And one little, this is a, this is a tactic that like every sales team should do, get customer support involved, before the sale. Right? I don’t care if you’re selling widgets. if you’re selling automobiles, or if you’re selling the biggest software package out there, have customer support involved in the sales side of the process. Make that handoff before the signature hits the dotted line, because you’re essentially just gonna erase buyer’s remorse. Right, so that that’s it that’s it, that’s like a deep tactic that you can go in tomorrow and be like “Oh, that makes sensem, we just go do it.” You know, I mean,
Christopher Smith 14:58
Yep, yep.
Rev Ciancio 14:58
So, you know and then from from it to, you know, take it up 30,000 feet, is really honestly like map the customer journey. We ,my last organization, single platform, we had all kinds of problems with our pipeline, post, pre, and post. So you know, we’re gonna take two weeks, and we’re gonna meet like every single day. You know the head of customer success, the head of sales, me, and the GM, we’re gonna meet once a week and we’re going to reserve a whiteboard. We literally we’re like, “You cannot touch this whiteboard,” and we sketched out the entire customer journey, every piece of it from from the why you, why us, why now through retention. And literally like that exercise alone, just having all the people that were assigned to different parts of the funnel to stand in a room and actually look at how the whole thing, it oiled the whole machine, right, it oiled the whole machine because things that were happening in on the retention side, like we would lose a customer, we realized where in the sales process we could affect that. Right? And being at, sitting on the marketing side of things, I started to think about, “Oh how do we use like our current customers to sell you know possible new customers?” And so like when you have that 360 view on all sides of your team on what happens to your customer from the moment, like again, not when they would think about you, but when they realize they have the problem, all the way to the point where they can’t wait to tell somebody that they should also buy it. When you have that view, a lot of these things will just start to fix themselves.
Christopher Smith 16:23
Right. What advice do you have for sales leaders in terms of, you know like, “Hey, I’m struggling connecting with my marketing team or we’re just not, we’re not in sync.” What advice do you have for them to begin to rectify those issues?
Rev Ciancio 16:41
So I like to I like to speak in tactics, like I want to give people actionable items. Okay, so you’re a sales leader and you’re looking to get more support or buy in from your marketing team. Do this. Okay, get your team together, if it’s just you, right, and write down the top ten sales objections you get, okay, in order from frequency the least frequent. These are the ten things we get told no on. Okay. Then also write down the top ten things of why a customer says yes, what is the last thing that happens before they go, “I will buy.” When you have those two lists, call a meeting with your marketing team and go, “Here’s what I need help with, and here’s what works,” right. When the marketing team has that type of information or the marketing person, it makes their job so much easier, because then they can think about sales accelerate, like funnel acceleration, and they can think about what are the tools that you need to get rid of you know objections. That’s a deep tactic that I would tell somebody to do. It’s a great way to start a relationship.
Christopher Smith 17:40
Oh I love that. I love that, that’s great. That’s a great way to create alignment to to get those quick wins go in and create some momentum.
Rev Ciancio 17:46
Yeah. And another thing, and this still boggles my mind, why marketing doesn’t sit in on sales meetings blows my mind. Right? And what blows my mind more is why sales leaders don’t sit in on marketing meetings, right, because for sure every once in a while, like you’ll see marketing people in sales meetings but you never see sales people in m marketing meeting. The two should act as one, they really should. They have different things they do when they go back to their desk, but you should have the team, like, operate as a unit, right. And then the other key, right, is you want to make sure that marketing also has time with product, right? Because marketing is seeing what’s happening with sales, right, and there’s hopefully seeing what’s happening to customer service and they can bring that help, bring that information back to product to develop again what those two teams need. And then obviously, how do you go to market.
Christopher Smith 18:34
Right. What about customer success? What about their level of involvement with marketing meetings? Can they contribute to that process?
Rev Ciancio 18:43
Absolutely. 100%. Anybody that any department that touches revenue should should have, you know, a dotted line or even a direct line to marketing. Marketing at the end of the day, it is about acceleration of the process and retention of the customer. That’s what it is. Salespeople and customer success, people are there about, they’re there to implement the tactics and marketing is there to help make sure they move.
Christopher Smith 19:09
Yeah, I love that, I love it. That’s good, that is terrific advice. The, when you come into an organization as a sales leader, when it comes to marketing, what’s some of the first things they should be doing to build those relationships with the marketing team?
Rev Ciancio 19:34
Well if you’re asking what, how did they get buying with me, pizza usually does a pretty good job. Right. So, so if you’re talking about me coming to your organization, buy me a pizza, that might work. Also it might work for anybody. Take somebody out to lunch. Like, get to know people, and, and you know again I’ll go back to that tactic, like if you can give your marketing team what they need to be better at their job, they’ll be better, right. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in a marketing team, and the sales team is like, “We need more leads.” Cool. How do you expect me to get that. Like what is it you want to do, like how do I get that, like, marketing people don’t necessarily know the pain of selling, and they don’t know what it’s like to live the day to day life of that salesperson or even the customer success person. So, help them learn it real, real fast. You know what I do, I love this. Every, every marketing person should do this let’s talk about the opposite way. Every single marketing person that joins an organization should go spend a week with the sales development team. Right? Sit in the bullpen, listen in on what SDR and BDR calls are like, and when you, when you understand that pain, you’ll be a better marketer, because you will walk away feeling so bad for those people, and you’ll realize how important they are to the organization that you’d be like, I’m gonna help them. I’m here to help that person.
Christopher Smith 19:41
That works for me.
Rev Ciancio 19:53
Yep, and how tough their jobs are, you know to, to hear the objections and the no’s and just whatever you know and, and the cadence that they have to keep and that’s, that’s really important. I’m a big believer in that kind of cross training and just opening up the organization. Are there other ways, or other advice you have for ways to make the marketing team better for the sales team? I mean honestly, really it comes down to communication, like what is the communication between the groups. And, again, I like tactics and strategy at the same time, but really marketing should spend time with whoever is developing leads, because though, literally those people have the hardest job. And if you can make their job even 1% easier, it like, it makes a difference. I mean when I was at, at Yext, right, I used to meet with the SDRs every single Wednesday like basically the halfway through the week, and we’d like okay phones down, half hour, let’s go sit with Rev. And I’d be like, what did you hear this week? What did you get told no on? Why do people hang up with you? What, and like when I heard when I started to hear the patterns there, but it was able to come back and be like, okay, here’s a tool. Here’s a script. Here’s how I got here, I brought the sales leader in to come talk to you, and I think that I actually think that the sales development function should not just report to sales. I think the sales development functions to report to both marketing and sales, right, because they’re the people that need the most amount of tools.
Christopher Smith 22:27
Oh yeah, that’s, that’s pretty interesting that you know to, uh, cuz you said it is again, it’s all about communication and having those lines of communication. If you’re not getting that information, you’ve got a hand, at least one hand tied behind your back.
Rev Ciancio 22:42
Yeah, we have a single platform, I’ll never forget this, I came in, and the way that their sales works, I have to explain this to sort of tell the story, but essentially, they would have an SDR call, cold call and set a meeting and the meeting would happen the next day, and a closer would take the meeting. Okay, that was always the way it worked. Well we had like, I think it was like a 12% hold rate on meetings, so SDR would call, book the meeting, and only 12% would hold for the next day. That’s like a really low rate, you know unless you’re doing thousands and thousands. I was like, how do we get these meetings to hold? Let’s just automate it. Like, I’m not even just, I don’t mean a calendar reminder, like let’s send somebody an email that makes them feel why like they can’t miss that meeting, right, and in in that email, we also had linked a piece of marketing that was like, explained why it was important. And it at least like stoked the curiosity enough to get people interested. We tripled that hold rate, and went from 12% to 36%, right, just by putting that in there. Do you know who loved me? Every single SDR.
Christopher Smith 23:47
Oh yeah.
Rev Ciancio 23:47
And I don’t want to act like that was a genius move, that’s like pretty basic, right? Like that’s a pretty easy move, but they didn’t have a marketing person there to work on that stuff before me, they like, they didn’t have that. Those are the kinds of tools that marketers should be thinking about in terms of like, you know, helping the sales team to do their job better.
Christopher Smith 24:05
Right. And those are the things that are gonna move the needle in a significant way. I mean you’re talking about some big time movement there.
Rev Ciancio 24:13
I’ll never forget, just for one day the automation tool we were using broke, like suddenly just went, we couldn’t figure it out. And literally, it was like, it was as if the room was on fire, like, like sirens were going off and people were screaming and like, Rev, drop everything! And like make, you realize like how important a tool or a tactic is like when something goes wrong and like it doesn’t work anymore like, you know?
Christopher Smith 24:35
Yeah, that tells you how important it is, how much they rely on it. Let’s talk a bit about quickening the sales cycle, because that is something that, you know, as a sales leader that’s something everybody cares about. What role should marketing play in helping the sales team shorten that sales cycle?
Rev Ciancio 24:54
Every role, every role except the sale. You know, if I would tell you this, too, if you’re an organization, and you’re not using sequences in your sales, you are missing the boat. Right, sales sequences, for those that don’t know, it’s like a multi-step process to get somebody to take an action, whether that’s an upsell or cross sell. Take the first meeting or buy a product, right? And so usually way those work out is over the course of, I don’t know, 25 days or so or 30 days or so, there’s a number of touches involved. You’re going to email them, you’re going to call them, you’re going to hit them on LinkedIn, you’re gonna email them again, you’re gonna call, them, blah blah blah. First of all, if you’re not using a sequence, just google the word or words, “a goji sequence,” and whatever you see the first link, you click on it, and you do exactly what that blog says. Okay, Sam Nelson, he’s a genius. If you’re not using an emoji sequence, go do it immediately. Okay now to answer your question a little differently, I think that the marketing and sales team should co-write all of the sequences, right, because marketing is going to talk about it and did you know more of like a platitude, where sales is going to talk about it more of like an execution, so you kind of need both sides of that voice. And along with those sequences, sometimes you need collateral to help somebody make a decision. Maybe they need a blog post, or they need to attend a webinar, or there’s just like some sort of piece of thinking that changes their mindset that an SDR is not going to get across in a five minute cold call. Right? And so you need marketing to supply those materials to the sales team to make you know making a sequence really really move fast. So get, have sequences, and collaborate, collaborate on what that material is, and then, here’s the other thing, is the sales department needs to be incredibly detailed about the performance of their sequences, so they can go back to marketing, go this is what worked, this is what didn’t work. Right? And so I like to tell this way, let’s think of a 17-step sequence. If most meetings book at step 13, right, then you need to look at what can you do to step 12, and if they book at 12, what can you do step 11, right, and you need the feedback of why somebody did or didn’t take the action at each step, so that you can find out. When you get that kind of collaboration between marketing and sales, you’re gonna be very happy person.
Christopher Smith 27:08
Yeah, and to really make that work, you’re not going to be doing that out of a spreadsheet or off of a notepad, you really need technology to support that successfully. And so a big part of our podcast is really talking about CRM and how it can enable things like that. You know, what, I ask this to all the sales leaders, I’m going to ask you from a marketing perspective, when it comes to CRM, do you love it or do you hate it?
Rev Ciancio 27:34
I have a love-hate relationship with CRM, because I’m really bad at massaging them. Like if you hand me a login to Salesforce, I’m kind of like, I don’t know what I’m doing. But I, I look at it this way, right, my life’s motto is, “Be awesome at two things and outsource everything else.” I am really good when I’m paired with somebody who’s like Salesforce Jesus, right. If I can go to Salesforce Jesus and go, “Listen, here’s I want to get the data moving,” blah blah and Salesforce genius gets in there like sews the whole thing together, like, that’s a pretty powerful team. So the true answer is I love CRM, because really, really good data allows you can make really really good actions. Right. And if you’re just like working on spreadsheets or worse, notepads, like ick. You’re gonna get nowhere. So CRM is what keeps you organized, and you know I work with an organization that we argue about this all the time. The leader of the organization like doesn’t believe in CRM, and the rest of the team is constantly frustrated with the process, right, because they don’t have access to good data, and it makes it hard to do automation. And if you want to go faster, you need technology and you need automation.
Christopher Smith 28:42
Absolutely, absolutely. And you cannot improve any process I don’t care what it is, if you’re not measuring and, and analyzing that data you’re capturing. You know, it if you don’t have that foundation, forget it. And so as you were talking about, like, “Hey, we know we’re nailing it at step 13.” If you’re not capturing that data, you know what, you have no idea what to do next.
Rev Ciancio 29:09
Yeah, hunches are only so powerful, right? The data tells the story for sure. I’ve seen, I’ve seen mistakes made many times, somebody’s saying, “Oh, this thing works, we should keep doing it,” and you realize like oh that’s actually that’s just coincidental, like that’s not the thing. You know what I mean?
Christopher Smith 29:25
Yep, yep.
Rev Ciancio 29:27
Like my favorite question to ask an organization is when I start is like, “What’s our average sales cycle?” like okay, cool, “What moves the needle?” “Oh this that thing, this thing, the thing.” I was like, wait a minute you don’t know? Like you, you should have data information. When prospect A does action B, C happens, like you need to know those things.
Christopher Smith 29:48
That’s right. I have this, you know as an entrepreneur, we have this type of a conversation all the time where, like if you’re working with your CFO, or your controller, and you go to them and you ask them, “Hey, what’s our expenses this month,” or “What’s our revenue this month,” whatever, you, they better give you an answer and it better be right. Why should it be any different? For the sales team, the marketing team, anyone else involved in revenue, you better know your numbers and better be able to give good answers. And to do that, a big part of that is having a good technology foundation.
Rev Ciancio 30:27
You know, you don’t know, you don’t know what to spend on leads if you didn’t know your cost of acquisition.
Christopher Smith 30:32
That’s right.
Rev Ciancio 30:32
And if you don’t have good data, you don’t know your cost of acquisition is.
Christopher Smith 30:35
Yeah. What do you think, if you had that that crystal ball in front of you, what do you think the future of marketing is going to be or what’s really going to drive like maybe the next five years or so, from a technology perspective?
Rev Ciancio 30:54
You mean like in terms of like how people are going to sell for the next five years?
Christopher Smith 30:57
Yeah, exactly what, what’s really going to drive or what should people be looking at?
Rev Ciancio 31:01
Funnels. The only answer I have is funnels, right. How do I get somebody to either give me their email address or purchase something so that I can move them along to the next step of the journey. Right? And, you know, for years we’ve been doing inbound marketing and, you know, landing pages and those are great but I really think like moving into the funnel side of things is, is the future of sales, you know, maybe not if you’re selling hamburgers, but for sure if you’re selling software, you know, or books, or information, or coaching, or whatever it is, funnels. Get somebody to a page where there’s only one action. So one thing they can do, and then hammer them til they buy it. Are you, what do you think aboutm what’s your feeling on funnels?
Christopher Smith 31:43
You know what I, it’s, I agree, I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying. One of the things that I’m seeing a lot, and I’m wondering what impact it’s going to have, is the use of AI to help refine your analysis of what’s going on, where you’re having AI begin to serve up here’s where we’re thinking you know what the technology is telling you where you need to make adjustments. What’s your feelings around using AI to do some of the things you’ve been talking about?
Rev Ciancio 32:22
AI to me feels like a fancy concept that nobody gets, like nobody, nobody that actually needs it you knows how to use it, right. And there’s a bunch of really smart guys that like write movies that I can’t understand that make it happen. I sort of joke there, but basically like I think when we get to a point where like we have data analysis that’s clean and easy, AI is really really important again because clean data means, you know, clean action and clean move. And so, you know I haven’t seen anybody yet come out with some sort of AI that’s just like push button easy, but I would love to see, you know like a CRM or some sort of data tool that basically like I don’t even know what I’m doing, I just like put things in and out the other side comes data that’s like incredibly clean. But here’s the problem with clean data, right, here’s the problem. Clean data is addicting. Right. And the minute you have a question, so my hypothesis is X. Let’s go look at the data, you will get a bunch of answers and you know what invariably happens? More questions.
Christopher Smith 33:24
Oh yeah.
Rev Ciancio 33:25
More questions, and I’ve run into this in sales, every sales organization I’ve ever ever ever ever been a part of. Marketing and sales did this thing, we had Y result, they’re like cool what else, like, I don’t know I just gave you a 50% improvement in your whole race like what else do you need me, how do we get to 60 like?
Christopher Smith 33:41
Oh yeah.
Rev Ciancio 33:42
More better, cleaner data.
Christopher Smith 33:44
It is a vicious cycle it’s, anyone who’s ever spent time doing like from an IT perspective doing report development, you put out the scrape report, they’re like, “Hey, that’s great. Now we need this we need it to do this or we need it to do that.” And because now we have more questions that need to be answered, it becomes a very vicious cycle.
Rev Ciancio 34:04
Yeah, that my word of warning there is don’t get caught up in the unicorn. Lots of people are like, “What’s that, oh I had this well, what happens if this weird thing happens and this other weird thing happens and this other weird thing happens where drop off.” My answer is like, I don’t know, let it go. I’m not spending time trying to figure out like the 1% of things that like rarely ever happen. I’m trying to add 1% of the things that happened well.
Christopher Smith 34:28
Right. What’s gonna move the needle. You know what’s really going to drive growth. Do you have any closing advice? We’re coming up on our, our time here on Sales Lead Dog. Do you have any advice for a new sales leader someone who’s, you know, new VP of Sales or new CRO around, you know, if you know how they should be approaching their job and taking advantage of what marketing can do for their organization?
Rev Ciancio 34:57
Sure, so I mean my life, I said already my life’s motto is be awesome at two things and outsource everything else like know what your strength is. Walk into the game be like, I’m really good at this. I’m really good at this. And I get these things, but I really really need help, and the things that you need help on, ask, and find the person in the organization who’s going to really supercharge that thing that you know is important but you’re not good at. And typically, a lot of those synergies happen between sales and marketing, right, like I know we need sequences, but I don’t know how to do it. Well marketing might, you know what I mean. So find the thing you know, hone in on what you’re really, really good and what’s really important and find partnerships to do the other things.
Christopher Smith 35:39
Yeah, yeah, I love that.
Rev Ciancio 35:40
And, and use sequences.
Christopher Smith 35:42
Yeah, I, I think it’s a great idea, I, it’s one of those things that, like you were saying that you have to create some kind of structure to start with and see what works and what doesn’t and sequence is a great way to to do that. And, and then adapt and react and evolve.
Rev Ciancio 36:05
I, Chris, you will laugh I use sequences internally.
Christopher Smith 36:09
Do you really?
Rev Ciancio 36:10
Yeah, well all the time. Here’s, here’s two, I’m gonna give you some secret sequence moves. Okay. If you send an email to somebody and it’s perfect. Whether it’s a cold lead gen or somebody else in the organization or your mom, where you’re asking for something, if you don’t get it in a timely manner, here’s the boss move: reply all just seeing if you got this, send. Like don’t draft a new email don’t go just literally just go back into that same email, and you do it two days after so if you send on a Monday you do Wednesday, but if you don’t hear back by two more days so like Friday, go back into that same email hit Reply All, and all you write is “Any thoughts here?” You’ll get an answer.
Christopher Smith 36:56
Yep, yep. I never thought about that but, you’re right, that’s spot on.
Rev Ciancio 37:00
I do to my partners and they’ll get angry because they know they just got sequenced.
Christopher Smith 37:04
Yeah they know.
Rev Ciancio 37:06
But it works! It absolutely works, and don’t on that, don’t discredit the value of a Hail Mary email.
Christopher Smith 37:12
Oh yeah. Yeah, that’s awesome. Rev, thank you so much for coming on Sales Lead Dog. It’s been great listening to you, I think you offered us some, some great tips and tools and actions for any sales leader.
Rev Ciancio 37:24
Awesome. You’re very welcome. I’m excited to share, listen. If I can help sales people and marketing people like be better then I feel good about that. So, thank you.
Christopher Smith 37:33
If people want to get in touch with you and connect with you and learn more about your company, what’s the best way for them to to connect?
Rev Ciancio 37:41
Sure. Anywhere you find me, and easiest way is I have the same screen name on every social network and that’s @revciancio, I’m most active on LinkedIn and Instagram. And if you’re like, I don’t know how to spell Ciancio, even though you just said that, there’s two other options you have to find me. You can Google expert burger taster, and I will be the top seven results on Google, that’s an easy way, or I run the world’s largest french fry feed Instagram account, it’s @funwithfries. So if you follow them with fries in my bio is a link to recipes. So there you go, all the recipes.
Christopher Smith 38:18
I have to tell my father in law about that, he is like French fry maniac.
Rev Ciancio 38:22
Good guy. Well, tell him to follow @funwithfries.
Christopher Smith 38:25
Awesome, thank you for coming on Sales Lead Dog.
Rev Ciancio 38:26
Thank you for having me, pleasure.
Outro
As we end this discussion on Sales Lead Dog, be sure to subscribe to catch all our episodes on social media. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Watch the videos on YouTube, and you can also find our episodes on our website at Empellorcrm.com/salesleaddog. Sales Lead Dog is supported by Empellor CRM, delivering objectively better CRM for business guaranteed.
Quotes about how does marketing and sales work together
- “I’m a believer in understanding the customer journey and aligning all of your efforts towards that” (11:06-11:18)
- “Any department that touches revenue… should have a dotted or even a direct line to marketing” (18:27-18:35)
Links:
Branded Strategic Hospitality LinkedIn
David “Rev” Ciancio Instagram
Branded Strategic Hospitality Website
Empellor CRM LinkedIn
Empellor CRM Website
Podcast production and show notes provided by FIRESIDE Marketing