Why Marketing and Sales Must Collaborate to Deliver Customer-Centric Solutions

[0:00] I would say that if you listen to this episode of the Full Funnel Freedom podcast, I will reveal to you the date and time when season two of Shogun will be released. But other than that, the other reason why I think you would find this conversation interesting is because you will hear it from a marketer's perspective. You will hear the story from a marketer's perspective, and what that story is is really why I think that we are marketing and sales functioning in a very similar ecosystem. There has to be some kind of symbiosis between us. And I've seen it firsthand and from my own personal experience that there are so many ways in which both sides can actually work together and produce even better results because of this collaboration, right? And if you want to hear some examples of how I did that, right, and what challenges we faced and how we overcame those challenges, then I think that this might be an episode that is worth listening or watching.

[1:11] Music.

[1:16] Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. If you are listening to this, you are likely leading a team responsible for generating revenue. Purpose of Full Funnel Freedom is to support people like yourself and keep your.

[1:29] Music. Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Amish Knox. today. I'm really excited to have Christian Klepp joining me as my guest today. Christian is the co-founder and director of client engagement at Einblick Consulting. Einblick means insight in German. He has more than 13 years of B2B branding, marketing, and communications experience across different markets and has worked closely with companies such as Henkel, Philips Lighting, Caterpillar, DSM, ArcelorMittal, UPM, Samson Display, Logitech, and National Instruments to help them develop the right brand strategy and marketing campaigns. Christian has been invited to speak and give presentations at B2B industry events in Germany, Austria, and China. Before moving to Toronto, Christian has spent much of his time abroad and has lived as well as worked in places like Singapore, the Philippines, Austria, Germany, and China. He has a Bachelor of Science in Business Management degree from the Management Development Institute of Singapore. Christian, welcome to Full Funnel Freedom. Hamish, it's a pleasure to be here. That was a heck of an intro. Thanks for the opportunity.

[1:29] Funnels consistently, reliably full.

[2:41] You're very, very welcome. And I really enjoyed our chat when we first got connected about sales and marketing and how these two can not only coexist, but thrive together. And before we get into that, though, I've given the audience the 30,000 foot view of who you are and what you do. And clearly you've had a very incredible career. Take us down a level. Tell Tell us the story of how you got from where you started to where you are today. Yeah, yeah. So once again, thanks for the opportunity. So I'm originally from a small country in Central Europe called Austria. And yes, for those of you that know the sound of music, well, yeah, it takes place in that country.

[3:21] As you said in the beginning, I've had the privilege of living in many countries. So I've spent a great part of my life abroad, which is probably the reason why I don't sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger when I speak English. But I've been in the B2B marketing space since 2011, and I kind of inadvertently got pushed into that role. I was an agency that was mainly focused on B2C and we were just, we were just losing a lot of these pitches to big consumer brands, to bigger agencies. And it just so happened that I was at a networking event and I met a guy, I met a guy who knows a thing. And we started having a conversation. and I identified an opportunity there because it was a niche that was massively underserved. And little did I know that that little conversation led to a nine-year business relationship with a company that you guys might know. It's called Caterpillar, right?

[4:29] Small company. Small company, right? So I had the privilege of working with companies like Caterpillar and some of the others that you mentioned out in the Asia Pacific. And in 2018, we, I was based in China at the time in Shanghai and I had relocated from Shanghai to Toronto where my wife was from, and that's where I'm currently based, so Toronto is home and I think it was something that just really happened. I would say organically just before the pandemic, I realized, you know what? I've been doing B2B marketing for the best part of my career for other people. Um, it was time to do start doing it for myself.

[5:07] And that's how the idea for this company and I'm Blick was born. And the reason why we called it that was because it's the German word for insight, as you mentioned. And that's what we hope to deliver to clients. So we are a B2B consulting firm is what we are that works with companies in the B2B tech, SaaS and professional services space. And what we really try to do is help these companies that are in very competitive niches find that unique advantage that will help them to rise above the competition and ultimately generate more leads from their niche. And we do that through a combination of market research, brand strategy, copywriting, and content development.

[5:49] Brilliant. Thank you for sharing that, your journey with us today. And so on this episode, the hills are alive with the sound of marketing. And so let's dive into the topic of today, which is marketing and sales and how do we make these two groups who are typically adversarial. And even if we do have a leader overseeing both groups, usually there's a bit of a cats and dogs, Mars and Venus, however you want to characterize the relationship between sales and marketing. It's usually not good. So from your experience, Christian, when you look at the typical makeup of a revenue organization, which includes marketing, it includes sales, it includes after sale.

[6:37] Why do we have such breakdowns? Like this boggles my mind that theoretically we are all trying to get to the same mountain top, yet we all want to push each other down the hill as we're trying to walk up. So why is this the case from your experience? Fantastic question.

[6:55] In my experience, I think it boils down to a couple of things. I mean, one, especially in B2B, it's the nature of the beast. It's the way that these big organizations are structured and programmed, right? And I say programmed because it's one of these, I think, states of affair, right? For lack of a better description of everybody is kind of relegated to a specific function and business unit. And this is your task. This is what you're mandated to do. And that's just the way it is, right? That's the way we've been doing it for the past 25 years and so on and so forth. So a lot of it is organizational, structural, but also cultural, right? Because they kind of all go hand in hand, right? There's very little room, despite what the corporate slogans say, there's actually very little room for innovation and teamwork, right? Everybody, it's almost like a survival of the fittest. It's like everybody's always engaged. I mean, a little bit of healthy competition is great, but this is intense competition at the expense of someone else, right? And I think that all of these factors together are, in my experience, the reason why you have this unfortunate age-old conflict between marketing and sales. And as we talked about in the previous conversation, Hamish, it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be that way. So why?

[8:19] I've, I've in my, in my experience, I've actually, you know, um, been in situations where I've learned that we can achieve so much more if we work together and if we collaborate, right. But you have to get crazy, right? Like, wow, just mind blowing.

[8:36] Um, that being said, it does require a mind, a mindset shift. I mean, it certainly was that way with me. And I think I can probably best illustrate this through my own example, my own professional experience, right? And I may have talked about this previously. Please share. So back then I was a product manager in a French company called Sodexo, right? And for those folks that don't know what Sodexo is, they're pretty big in Europe. I'm not so sure in North America, probably to a lesser scale. But they are basically a company that does catering solutions, so for very B2B, right? So catering solutions for factories, for schools, for facilities. And there's another business unit that does what they call employee benefits and incentive solutions, and that comes in the form of vouchers and prepaid cards, right? So I was part of that division, right? So to cut the long story short, because it's an extremely long story, but the challenge was, in fact, when I came in as part of the new marketing team.

[9:45] Sales were down, the teams were underperforming, or they were unable to hit their quotas. And we were tasked with the challenge of turning that ship around, which is no small feat, considering that a lot of the senior salespeople had been there for many years. Right so they ran they ran a pretty tight ship whether the ship was sailing in the right direction well that was something that we had to investigate further right and um you know i remember my first couple of months on the job i remember having meetings with the not just the sales directors but the supervisors and uh like their subordinates and they they came up with all these reasons why they felt that the product was inferior and for that reason they couldn't um they They weren't able to sell it. And they even handed the marketing team, the new marketing team, they had printed out copies of this list. They called it the 11 barriers. Right? And once we, it gets better. It gets better. So we actually analyzed these 11 barriers and we had a discussion with the CEO about it. And the CEO said, this looks more like 11 excuses. Right? And they were. They were basically like, they were 11 impediments.

[11:03] So what did we do to try to find out how we could solve the problem? Well, we did what I would even dare to say that some marketers are a little hesitant to do it this way, but we went out into the field with the salespeople, right? Because it's one thing for the sales teams to tell us, well, this is the reason why we're not performing and because the product is inferior and this is what the clients are saying. And we said, okay, well, we want to actually hear it from the horse's mouth, right? So we went out into the field with the salespeople. We attended the meetings with the sales team who were having conversations with the prospects and having conversations with the clients. And we were listening to what objections they had, what questions they had, how the sales teams addressed these objections. Oh, and there was one question that the prospect asked that the salesperson, it seems like, intentionally skipped. Right um and they would they would try to avoid the question and and just go around it and like okay i'm going to take a note of that so i was kind of like the invisible journalist there the invisible observer right because we were allowed to ask questions but we were also kind of told not to intervene we were just like okay just just observe just observe see what's going on right.

[12:21] And we would come back from those and and i and i did about 30 30 of those field visits right And so did other members of my team. And we came back and had findings. And with these findings, we found patterns in terms of, okay, so there were standard questions that all of the salespeople were either hesitant or unable to answer. There were certain objections that the prospects had, which the salespeople didn't have. I wouldn't call them argumentations, but they didn't have compelling answers for.

[12:56] Right got it so we put all that together and it's not to make the sales people look bad and that was something that we communicated with them from the get-go this is not to say you guys are wrong and we are right if you're saying that the product is not good we need to understand why and how we can improve it because it's probably a question also of refining the offer right which is what something something we ended up doing right and the way that we did it differently as compared to like probably our predecessors is when we came up with marketing campaigns or sales initiatives big surprise we got the sales people involved right yes because you know at some point it's like when we always told them we you know we can do our internal high five where we're doing this and patting each other on the back in the in in the uh in the meeting room and saying yeah that's a great idea and then we take it out to market and it flops and we don't want to go down that route we want to get your feedback and we want you guys to test out this idea with your prospects and see if see if they bite.

[13:58] And if they don't buy it, we want to know why. And then you come back, you give us the feedback, and we refine the offer further. And Hamish, I'm talking about something that we did over the span of one to two years, right? This didn't happen in one week, right? Got it. We did that. We refined the offer. We came up with campaigns. And another thing that we did, which we also observed, right? Because if we're talking about salespeople, and I know it's different depending on which company and industry you're talking about. Well, are we talking about new business, existing business, so the account servicing teams, inbound, outbound? So there's a couple of different sales units, right? Sales divisions, right? Totally. What we did to help them was we also helped, I'm going to say, update their toolkit. Because what we also realized was they were using outdated material. They didn't have what we call the barriers to entry sheet, which helped them to prepare and anticipate the most common argumentations, the most common barriers that they're going to encounter. For instance, if a prospect says you're too expensive, how do you counter that? How do you convince them that this is not about necessarily just the cost? It's about having the right investment, right? So updating that. And another thing that we noticed was some of these guys, not all of them, but some of these sales guys were going into these meetings with prospects completely unprepared.

[15:28] Shocking. They didn't know anything about the company, the industry, what these guys were up against, what challenges they had. So there was no pre-meeting, no pre-meeting preparation. So pre-meeting, during meeting, post-meeting. So during the meeting, some of them weren't taking notes. I'm like, well, a big surprise that you forgot what they said. Right. Like, yeah. Yeah. Post meeting. Well, so what's the followup? Do you wait, do you wait two days? Do you wait one week? I mean, you know, at what stage of the process are you guys at with this prospect? Are you, is it warm? Is it cold? Is it lukewarm? Like, what is it? Right. So, um, and another one, which, you know, for you, for you and I, this is table sticks, but they didn't have a way of segmenting the prospects. Really? Because not all prospects are created equal. Fair. Right? And okay, so which industries are you guys going after? Well, any industry that has the budget. I'm like, oh, yeah, and therein lies the problem.

[16:28] And therein lies the problem, right? They had certain industries that they've been traditionally going after. Okay, but what about everybody else? Everybody else was in that, like, whoever has the budget. I'm like, well, yeah, well, see, that's why you're having challenges with your prospecting, because we have to identify which industry segments benefit the most from the solution. And also because it's B2B, who is a member of the buying committee? Because, yes, you might be having a meeting with one person, but is this one person the decision maker? Is he or she the influencer, the gatekeeper? And you have to understand what role this person plays in the buying group ecosystem. I mean, I could go on and on about this, but those are some of the ways that we help them.

[17:18] So they metaphorically nailed their 11 complaints on the door of the Church of Marketing in this company. And then, you know, you went about this, you know, period of two years and sales leaders who are listening, you know, heed what Christian said. This is not an overnight thing. This took visits. This took insight. So I'm curious. You gave them all these great tools, right? You gave them the data. You said we've observed. This is not conjecture. How, what happened after that, right? So you rolled out this amazing support system for the sales team, built on real data, and then what happened after that? Yeah. So, okay. Well, for starters, I was a junior product marketer at the time, so it wasn't me leading the initiative. I was part of the support function. But to answer your question, as we anticipated, it was met with resistance in the beginning. I would say it's not even you don't know what you don't know, but if you are going up against people that have been doing it the same way year in, year out for many, many years, and all of a sudden a new business unit comes along and in so many words and reports tells you that it's time for a change.

[18:34] Change, well, that, that, that tends to, people tend to react to that and, and, you know, not necessarily in a positive way because they feel like, um, their, their jobs are being threatened or you're making them look bad. And that wasn't, that wasn't the intention at all. The intention at all was to help them to see the bigger picture. And the bigger picture was that if we don't turn this around, we're, you're going to continue on the slope of not hitting your quotas.

[19:02] And nobody wants that. Nobody wants that because, you know, we, we, we'd have the global team visiting us on an annual basis. And if we, if we keep showing them these charts where it's, where everything's in red, well, guess what? They're not going to be very happy. Right. And when they're not happy, guess where the investment gets diverted to? Not to us. So it was a very collaborative process. And I hate to use this word because of the, what it, uh, what it insinuates, but a lot of education was involved. Education in the sense that, okay, this is what you guys are saying. These are the barriers, right? These are the challenges that you're facing. We've conducted the research. We've gone out into the field and we've collected the data. And this is what the data is telling us.

[19:46] Your prospects are saying that this is the reason why they don't have intention to buy. Well, we've heard the interviews. We've heard the sales. We've seen, we've been in the sales meetings. We've heard the sales calls. And this is what we took away from that. And what we basically, I would say, seven times out of 10 took away was it wasn't a complete no. And for us, that was a sign. That means that there's an opportunity to get it to a yes. But we have to find out what it requires to get closer to that yes. What is it exactly that these prospects are facing and how can our product or solution, slash solution, how can that help them in their goals? Because at the end of the day, you also have to answer the what's in it for me question, right?

[20:37] Slowly but surely, and it was a lot of, I wouldn't say trial and error, but it was a lot of testing. There was a lot of A-B testing going on, right? Like, okay, we come up with an offer, we run it past the salespeople internally, and they bring it out into the field to test it. They come back with the feedback, and we continuously iterate it, right? So let's just say that the first campaign that we rolled out was in the home run. There were a lot of learnings that came back from that. But the one thing that was constant is that we kept the sales team informed and we continued to keep them involved. Because if we get them involved in the campaigns, they will feel like they have a role to play. They will feel because they've contributed ideas to the campaign and what we should do. they feel like they have a role in that ecosystem.

[21:28] And at the end of the day, they're the ones that win. If they hit their quotas, if they close the deal, that's them. That's their achievement. Right. Totally.

[21:41] And so every time, every time we had weekly meetings, it wouldn't be, okay, it's just a sales meeting or it's just a marketing meeting. It was a combined sales and marketing meeting. If we were talking about sales initiatives, the marketing department was involved. If we were talking about marketing initiatives, we always had the sales supervisors and the director, if they were available, sit in and we would always get their opinion on, on everything that we wanted to roll out. Because at the end of the day, it's the sales that benefit from our, whatever work we produced. Absolutely. So now looking at your work with your clients now through Einblick, what, what, what are some of the lessons that you took from that experience earlier in your career that you're sharing with them to make their marketing not only more effective, but also aligning it with sales so they don't necessarily run into the resistance that you ran into early on? Yeah, that's a great question. That's a great question. We tend to work with a lot of, it's a couple of groups. So we tend to work with founders. They're either founders of like SaaS startups or B2B tech and what have you. We also work with marketing agencies, right, it as an extension of their team. And what we try to do just, you know, uh, based on the lessons that I've learned in the past is, um, although there's, there's a few, um, number one is.

[23:05] Start with a strategy. Ooh, that word again. Right? And I think maybe there's so many ways that I could illustrate this, but I think the best analogy for me that comes to mind is, think about the way that you build a house. Right? And I think that's probably something that a lot of Canadians can relate with. You have your property, you have your contractor, you have your building material, but what are you going to do if you don't have an architect's blueprint? What's the house going to look like when it's done? the contractor will know how to build a house. But again, if you don't have that blueprint, what will the house look like, right? Or do you start with a foundation first? Or do you start like picking out the tiles for your roof, right? Or the wood for the porch, right? So there's all of these, I could go on and on with the analogy, right? But long story short is, I bring up this example to illustrate that some of the clients we work with, they are so, and I love using this term, they are so seduced by technology and chasing the newest hack, and finding the quickest, like finding the best shortcut and what have you. And to which I always say like, look, you know, if somebody says like, oh, Christian, you know what? We absolutely have to have a TikTok campaign because, you know, a friend of mine showed me these videos on TikTok and it's great. And I'm like, okay.

[24:31] Was your target audience again? Oh, it's this demographic and they're about this age and all that. Okay, so they're in their 50s and something. Do you think that a demographic who's at that age range, do you think that they spend a lot of time on TikTok? Probably not.

[24:52] Or we should do a video, or my favorite one is we should do a video that goes viral. I'm like, well, first of all, you don't get to decide that a video goes viral. Yeah. Right? Very true. That's up to your audience. That's up to whoever views the video. Right? If they like it, they'll share it. But even if they share it, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going viral. Right? And at the end of the day, what is it that you want to achieve? Right? I mean, I'm bringing up all these examples, but it has to start with you have to have a game plan. Right? And have this all mapped out because if you don't have a strategy, if you don't have a plan, you're going to not only waste a lot of money, but you're going to waste a lot of effort and another precious asset, time. You're going to waste time on things that you don't necessarily need to do or they might not yield the best results. So that's something from my experience that I took away that I impart to our current clients. So it's this whole having a game plan. then don't be fooled into grabbing hold of all these shiny objects and buying the latest software because you may not necessarily need it. And here comes a shocker, the third one. Talk to your target audience. Conduct interviews with them.

[26:08] Keep your target audience, your target customer in mind at all times. For example, if you create a website, do not, do not create the website from an inside out perspective. And what I, what that basically means is like, you know, everybody internally looks at it and says, yeah, that's fantastic. And it's in the website ends up being all about yourself and how great your company is, how awesome your products are. And it doesn't take your customer into consideration at all. Right.

[26:36] Absolutely. The fourth one is be very intentional and plan out how you're going to keep your funnel full. How are you going to think about your sales tactics, your sales process, the procedures, right? And I remember I'm having this conversation with you previously about people that tell me like, okay, so Christian, I heard you have a podcast and what's the ROI on that? And, uh, you know, how much business do you generate from that? And I, and I always tell them, like, I did not create this podcast to have a revolving door of leads that wasn't well, that certainly wasn't my primary motivator. Right. It was something that happened organically or not. Right. Because not everybody that I interview is going to be a potential customer and that's okay because that's not the, that wasn't the objective of the exercise. Right. So we went from that conversation to, well, what do you do to, to generate leads? And I said, well, I, I lead. Well, first of all, I lead by building trust and build by having relationships. Because in the B2B world, if people don't trust you, man, they're not going to work with you. So you lead by building trust, by building credibility, by being an authority in your space.

[27:58] And also by building up a network where you lead by helping and not selling. You have to earn the right to sell. You have to earn the right to pitch, right? And so when people come to me and say, well, you know, I'm probably not going to go down that road with podcasting because that'll take too long. I'm just going to do lead gen where people are going to guarantee me X number of appointments per week, to which I say, good luck with that, right? I'm not sure what it is you sell, but I can imagine that you probably can't close that deal on a 40 second phone call.

[28:37] A hundred percent or an email for that matter. So yeah. So just to answer your question, those are a few of the things that I try to impart to, uh, to the customers and, you know, people that I work with now.

[28:49] Well, thank you very much for sharing that with the sales leaders listening around the world. So Christian, you and I could clearly, uh, chat about, uh, marketing and sales, all this stuff all day long. Uh, I have a few questions for you before we wrap up our episode today. Uh, first question being, if you could go back and coach younger Christian, go back as far as you like and go, Hey, younger Christian. You have this amazing career, work all around the world, work with these great brands. You will also have a lot of scar tissue and bumps and bruises. What would you coach younger Christian to say or do different to get to the same place? Little less scar tissue, fewer bumps and bruises. Absolutely. Absolutely. Great question. I would probably say, even if you are busy or if you find yourself in a period where you're just extremely busy with work and servicing clients, meeting project deadlines and what have you, never stop prospecting. And I learned that the hard way. I learned that the hard way. I was, I was drawn into like, okay, I'm super busy with these one or two clients and I'm just going to keep my head down and keep, keep plowing through and power, you know, powering through and, and, and, and, and, and what have you.

[29:58] And then I realized, you know, as life happens, sometimes the relationship ends for whatever reason, right. Or the project wraps up and then all of a sudden you find yourself like, oh, wait, hang on. I don't have any other work. Right. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, that's a scary thing when you don't know when, where the next project is coming from or where the next client is coming from. And so you spent all that time being busy with this one client or two clients, and then you totally neglected, okay, these other possibilities. Right.

[30:35] I don't know how much gardening you do Hamish, but you know, we tend to do it here in Toronto when, when we can, because Lord knows our summers are super short. And it's the same thing, right? Sure. You end up, you end up planting some seeds and my daughter keeps asking me, well, why hasn't it grown yet? I'm like, well, it's only been five days, right? Fast forward three months later, we've got like, we've got less sunflowers in the backyard that are taller than I am. Right. And I bring up that example to say that the same is true in sales.

[31:07] You make connections, you meet some new people on LinkedIn, and you start having conversations with them. I never expect them to come back in a week and say, hey, Christian, I love what you do, man. Where's your contract? Where do I sign? It takes months. Sometimes it takes years, right? Because it's that old, it's not even an adage. It's just a fact of life in the B2B world for about 90% of the time, people are not looking to buy, right? They're trying to see what's out there. They've probably identified some demand triggers or something that triggered some kind of problem or some situation or some moment that arose within their professional lives that triggered them to look for a solution. But even when they're looking for that solution, that doesn't mean they're taking their credit card out and they're ready to buy. Not yet. 100%. Right? But that's what I would tell my younger self in so many words.

[32:11] I absolutely love that. I think you were actually the first guest ever to talk about, I would advise my younger self to keep prospecting and sales leaders. You all know that's the lifeblood and you've had plenty of sellers on your team who, like Christian said, were service, service, service, or work, working on projects. And all of a sudden their, their funnel starts to look more like a pencil. So heed that advice. And, uh, I love that you shared that Christian. Uh, I am curious, uh, what have you read, watched, or listened to, whether it's recently or in the past, uh, that you would encourage the audience to check out to further their own development? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, so I've been thinking, I've been thinking long and hard about this one, but, um, there's a couple of things that do come come to mind, um, I've been reading a book called happy money by a guy called Ken Honda. So he's rumored to be like the Japanese word version of Warren Buffett. So it's, it's basically the Japanese art of making peace with your money.

[33:07] And it's, it's going back to that, um, that old saying, um, you know, or this misconception, I would say that people think that money buys you happiness. And this book really proves that that's completely the opposite, right? It's, um, I can't remember which rapper it was. It might've, it might've been P Diddy. Um, more, more money, more problems. Right. So, and it's all true. Yeah. It's all true. So that's what I'm reading, um, at the moment, um, which I highly recommend. Um, there's another one because I am a branding guy. ISO, building a story brand by Donald Miller, right? And it's a great, um, it's a great way to look at branding also from a, not just a business, but also communications perspective. The most compelling, what are the most compelling things that you can communicate about your brand to your potential target audience? And I, and I love one of the, the lines that he had in the book where he says, please don't make people burn calories to figure out what it is you do. Right? Right.

[34:08] Great phrase. Right. Yeah. So that's another one. And I think the third book is one that I mentioned to you in our pre-interview call, which is a book by a gentleman by the name of Ron Tite and it's called Think, Do, Say. Yes. And it's like, mean what you say, say what you mean. Right. And cut out all the jargon. Amen. And be clear. Amen. Love it. Love it. I love those recommendations. Thank you for those. Christian, last question I have for you. You've already given us great ideas and insights on marketing and sales and how to make them align. What do you have as a final thought, a closing bit of wisdom, or even something to plug? The floor is yours. Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks again for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation.

[34:53] I think my parting advice would be to all of those sales leaders out there who are dealing with marketers, we have so much in common. We have so many more commonalities than we do differences. And I have seen it myself personally and professionally that marketing and sales can actually collaborate together wonderfully and we can be assets to each other. So find those commonalities, find those ways to collaborate And please do not function in silos, right? That is a thing of the past. It should stay in the past. It should stay in that old dusted book on the shelf, right? Absolutely. I love it. Great way to wrap us up today, Christian. Thank you for being a guest on Full Funnel Freedom. Thank you.

[35:42] Sales leaders, I really appreciated Christian's story as a young marketer being told to go out in the field with sales and get some data. And this really illustrated a number of things. You know, first of all, is it doesn't matter what we say, it matters what they hear. And as he shared, even though this was positioned, this exercise was positioned as being supportive of sales, it was resisted initially. And even though sales was missing their target, so they theoretically needed help, they just didn't necessarily want to be told what to do. It's It's also a great illustration of sending people out in the field, whether it's us or whether it's someone who is on the delivery side, to simply be an observer. And there's lots of different ways to frame that conversation with a buyer so that that individual doesn't unintentionally get sucked into the conversation and potentially damages rapport or pulls a, creates friction in an opportunity because they said something that that they didn't necessarily need to share.

[36:49] Can be really, really powerful. And there's lots of great ways of gathering that data and making it feel okay for the seller that they're not being adjudicated, that they were genuinely setting this up as a support tool. And from clients who have sent, whether it's the leader or whether it's other client-facing team members out as observers, there hasn't been any blowback. And in fact, the buyers oftentimes feel elevated because, oh, well, this other person is coming in to listen and observe and make sure that I feel whole. Other thing that I really took away from Christian is this idea of trust. And there's a previous podcast episode called Rapport Beats Relationships Every Time for Selling. And the root of the word rapport is the word trust. And unfortunately, to this day, we don't really trust sellers. So how do our sellers go out and build that trust and make that action happen with the buyer? Because as we've all seen, selling on relationships usually takes a really long time and it usually ends up in heartache and tears. I'm very curious to hear what your big takeaways are in the comments in our social media. Leave them there. And until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Full Funnel Freedom podcast.

[38:08] You can continue to support us by leaving us a review and a rating, sharing this episode with a couple of sales leaders in your network who you care about. I'd love to connect with you. I'm easy to find Hamish Knox on LinkedIn. Also, if you'd like a free 15 minute call with me, go to www.hamish.sandler.com forward slash how to Sandler until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

[38:35] Music.