Back in the saddle again
A long time ago, in a cubicle far far away, I worked in B2B sales. Not always in a cube, though. That was kind of the point. Back in the 2000s, salespeople were among the few who could leave their cells during the day without reprisal. But it’s backbreaking, often soul-crushing work and if you can’t find your way to a position where you’re only quasi-responsible for generating revenue, it’s a career path that often leads to a mattress store and a name tag.
Thankfully, fortune smiled on me and I now get to do for a living what I’d always wanted to do, and that’s write. Not poems or screenplays or novels that get turned into limited series on Netflix, but rather technical marketing content. My business partner Joel and I run Lion’s Way, a B2B marketing content agency where we obviously have to sell our services. And as a Jack of all trades, I’m more of a “sales coach” to Joel than an actual sales person.
Or at least I was.
We’d thrived for years on a referral-based sales strategy that yielded incremental revenue gains every year for close to a decade, but once the layoffs started, interest rates began rising, and SVB collapsed, things changed. Since many hands make light work, we decided it would make sense for Lion’s Way to double its outreach efforts. Back in the saddle again, so to speak.
Cinematic “coming out of retirement” stories usually feature humorous bits where the protagonist gets a rude awakening about ring rust or is given a stark reminder of how things have changed. I recently attended an event where I got the opportunity to do some networking. In the past, I’d done the dancing monkey thing for hours on trade show floors, but those are skills one must nurture lest they diminish.
In my brain, I presumed I’d glide up to a potential prospect and dazzle them with my eloquent elevator pitch. In reality, I’m guessing I was more like the Tarman from Return of the Living Dead, lurching towards unsuspecting attendees and wheezing, “Brains!” At one point, I found myself shaking hands and blabbering what sounded a lot like, “Gorp! Blark! Schmegle!”
As I got my tongue untied and ramped up prospecting efforts, I was immediately struck by how far some sales enablement tools had progressed. I can compile target lists with hundreds of viable contacts in a fraction of the time it took to develop a much smaller list in 2011. Before I knew it, I was flinging cold contact attempts like a baboon greeting a horde of grade schoolers on a zoo field trip.
Then it hit me. Nobody knows who the hell I am.
Oh, FFS, now we’re going to have to do marketing crap too? But we help other people market their goods and services, not actually do it for ourselves. A world gone mad. Now we’re focused on increasing profile awareness on LinkedIn, promoting our podcast, and preparing to start, gulp, advertising. Lion’s Way has a marketing arm!
We recently released an episode of our Smelly Pirate Content Creation Show where the pungent mariners discussed the ins and outs of how marketing and sales teams coexisted. At the time we had the chat, we framed the conversation around marketing and sales teams being separate entities. At Lion’s Way, Karl and Joel are the sales team and we’re the marketing team. Dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria!
Even though it’s just been a few weeks, I’m realizing the benefits of wearing both hats at once and how our experiences moving forward could be helpful in finding insights for our clients’ marketing and sales teams. Marketing and sales strategy and methods are automatically integrated because Joel and I each have only one brain. Unless you count ChatGPT which is currently about as useful to us as this rabbit.
It’s obvious that Lion’s Way is a small company and larger organizations can’t expect the “one brain” integration between sales and marketing. There exists no shortage of tools supposedly aimed at uniting the efforts of the two teams. In my experience, these tools all offer tradeoffs that can seem acceptable one moment and be untenable the next. Leadership teams presumably spend quality time strategizing on how marketing can best support sales and how the sales team can provide ground level feedback back to them. It’s a challenge, one that evolves constantly.
So stay tuned! As the Lion’s Way sales and marketing team blunders into the future, we’ll document our successes and failures here and on the high seas. Check out Lion’s Way Presents: The Smelly Pirate Content Creation Show.
