Navigating the Intersection of Sales and Marketing for Maximum Efficiency

Thanks very much for the invitation, Ranmay. I’m very pleased to be here.

Absolutely. So our agency is known as Kexino, K E X I N O. We are a marketing, branding, and media production agency. In the past, we’ve been in business for just over 15 years, and in those 15 years we’ve worked with around 400 startups and small businesses to help them increase their awareness, reputation, trust, and most importantly, sales.

Because sales are the name of the game, right? As marketers, our job is growth. And so if it doesn’t move the needle, it’s not marketing, it’s fluff. Customer-wise, we work with B2B businesses up to around 25 million in revenue. Startups we work with are usually externally funded, either by private shareholders, startup accelerators, private equity, or, VCs.

80% of our clients are based in the US while our team is based in nine countries. Then we have nine in the US. The rest are in various European countries, South Africa, Japan, and Australia. We help businesses in all industries with things such as positioning, branding, strategy design, website development, print design, SEO, copywriting, PR, social media, advertising all the usual sort of stuff.

And that’s, primarily. What, do we do we’ve operated under a distributed working model from, day one. While it’s somewhat commonplace today, back in 2008, we were one of the very first agencies that ran totally a hundred per cent remotely, as I like to say, we’ve been working from home since before it was fashionable.

I think there are five main mistakes. I don’t know if I’ll go through all of them, but I, think there are five of the biggest mistakes that I see.

Number one is a confusing strategy with tactics. Number two is talking about yourself. Number three is employing multiple marketing providers. Number four is not having a marketing plan at all, and number five is what I call self-diagnosis. Self-diagnosing your problems. So if we go to the first one, which is a confusing strategy with tactics.

That’s probably the biggest mistake we see with business owners or even people with marketing in their job titles. I won’t call them marketers. I’ll call them people who call themselves marketers. They ignore strategy altogether. What people who work in marketing should be doing.

And what should be done before anything is done externally is the basic work that underpins all successful marketing, and that is diagnosis, strategy, and tactics. And it has to be in that order. Diagnosis is first. So you start with a qualitative and quantitative diagnosis of the situation because you need to take the time to work out what’s going wrong.

And every business, every industry, every category is unique and different. Then you move on to defining clear and strategic objectives. Not too many of them, but just a few with a benchmark. So that and a goal so that you know when you’ve hit the target, then it’s a combination of long-term mass audience brand-building work.

Note that this shouldn’t be targeted or restricted beyond whatever industry or category the business is in. And the reason for that is that 95% of the customers who see your messaging are out of the market, they’re not ready to buy at the time that they see your messaging. So that’s why you combined the brand awareness, longer-term stuff with shorter-term sales activation, targeted performance-based work, designed to deliver big hit results in a shorter term.

Fundamental to all of this, there needs to be a tight, clearly defined, differentiated position at the heart of everything the business does, not just marketing anything that faces the customer. So that who, whatever’s been created can’t be mistaken for being from somebody else. Then there has to be a heavily and consistently codified execution so that everything is grounded and distinctive in the minds of the audience.

And underpinning all of this is amazing levels of creativity, which need to be at the heart of all of this, which unfortunately seems to be sadly lacking from 99% of the marketing we see today. We see creative creativity being deployed. Inconsistently and not in empathy across multiple channels without any integration into a campaign.

So that’s primarily what I’m talking about from the strategic and the tactical standpoint. If you want me, I can go to number two, which is talking about yourself, which I think is self-explanatory. It’s, when businesses say, oh, we’ve been in business for 20 years. Our product is the best.

We have 200 employees in 10 countries, etc. And this kind of marketing mistake usually happens when the people within the business forget who the communication is aimed that. If you’re doing a shareholder meeting, okay, fine. But instead of thinking of their customer, they’re thinking of themselves.

You know what, I’ve found, as I said, I’ve been doing this for 15 years as KEXINO, but I’ve been in marketing for pretty much all my working life, and one of the hardest things I think for businesses or business owners especially, or CEOs to accept, is that you are not your target audience.

You forego that, to have an opinion on what your target audience thinks. That instant you became a seller. But moreover, customers don’t care about that kind of shit. Customers don’t care about buying your service if they do if it didn’t allow them to do something that they couldn’t otherwise do as easily. What they want to know is whether what you are selling makes their lives better in whatever way they define better. It’s not about what you do, it’s about what you do for them. So linked to this, we are great, we are wonderful. Is this endless talking about product features without framing those features in a way that customers can better identify?

There’s an old sale selling, which says features tell, benefits sell. And it’s exactly that instead of talking about the product, talk about how using the product solves a particular problem that the customer is facing. You probably know the Theodore Livi quote.

Theodore Livi, was a professor at Harvard Business School in the fifties, and he said customers don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. So sell the hole, not the drill, sell the fire, not the extinguisher. Sell the grass, not the lawnmower.

It’s the same thing. So that’s the thing when I say talking about yourself. The next one was multiple providers. Another common mistake. So you’ve got a logo designer designing your logo. You’ve got somebody else putting together your website, you’ve got somebody else doing your social media.

Is it any wonder that nothing matches with anything else, right? You are patting yourself on the bat because you think you’ve saved a fortune and you’ve cost yourself a bundle. The reality is a customer just sees an uncoordinated mess. Nothing looks like it belongs to anything else.

The ads don’t feel like they’re coming from the same position as the website copy, the email newsletter, or the blog articles, and that’s because your marketing team is a bunch of different people producing different stuff in isolation and don’t talk to each other. And you are the single point of management direction and coordination.

But since you don’t have any formal training or education in marketing, you don’t know what to focus on or what to ignore you don’t know what you don’t know. So invariably it looks like there’s something that a catch has vomited. It’s just junk, right? Unless you have a skilled and experienced marketing person on your payroll, dividing marketing tasks across multiple providers invariably leads to a fragmented brand communications framework and value proposition, which creates confusion and obfuscation in your market and the minds of your audiences, and it just makes everything that much more difficult.

So if you’re gonna go down that road, you need to have an experienced conductor of the orchestra, you know you need. If you don’t have that person in your organization and most small businesses don’t, then you need to find an agency that has expertise right across the board so that a single entity can deliver the focused and targeted presentation of the business to the intended audience groups.

Want me to continue?

Next one I think was no marketing plan. Too many business owners and marketers, to be honest, dive straight into the tactical stuff without having any real plan. So basically they’re doing this and they’re waving a wet finger in the air to find out the direction of the wind and their trust they’re winging it or they’re just making it up as they go along.

And I think it’s vitally important to have a defined list of the underlying business goals that the marketing plan should address, and they have to be business goals because we are doing this. To move the needle for business. And once you know what the target is, then you can design a clearly defined plan outlining the ways and means you would tend to deliver on those business goals.

And if you don’t have a marketing plan, you don’t know when you are winning, right? And you don’t know why you are winning. Without defining target audience segments, customer value proposition, market climate, customer expectations, competitive analyses, or whatever you risk losing opportunities.

Unless you know exactly why your marketing isn’t working, you can’t do anything to change it. I’m just guessing. Maybe you’re saying the wrong thing to the wrong people or communicating from a place that they don’t want you to be or expect you to be. Maybe your pricing is off. Maybe your distribution model sucks, right?

Maybe they want to buy it in red and you only sell it in blue, right? But without keeping track of what you are doing and how you’re doing it, how often you’re doing it, where you are doing it what kind of results you’re getting, then you know you’re flying blind. If you don’t have a marketing plan because you don’t know how to design a marketing plan, that’s a different problem, right?

And that’s something that your marketing services provider should be able to help you, right? And if they can’t, maybe you should think about using a different marketing services provider. And then the last one in terms of mistakes is probably a personal favorite of mine, to be honest. And that is self-diagnosis?

Now let me give you an example. Supposing I go to the doctor because I have pain in my chest. And I’ve been on the internet. Something you should never do when you’ve got a medical complaint. I go onto the internet and I find something that describes the symptoms that I have.

And I’ve deduced that I’ve got angina, I’ve got something wrong with my heart. So then I go to the doctor and I say, hello, doctor, can you prescribe me some heart medication? Because I have pain in my chest and I have angina. What does the doctor say to you? What the bloody hell do you know about medicine?

I’m the doctor. You are the patient. You tell me what’s wrong and I tell you what the cause is. That’s how it works. And so what does the doctor do? He asks you a load of he or she asks you a load of questions. Maybe run some tests. Takes some blood, takes some urine, does whatever.

And then it finds out that. The problem is you’ve got gas because you had a hot, spicy curry last night and it’s repeating on you today, and you all that you need is an antacid and you don’t need heart medication at all. So it is not my job to tell you what to do. It is my job to tell you my problem and your job to tell me what to do.

You don’t ask your if you go to the garage, you don’t ask your mechanic to change the transmission in your car when all it needs is new oil. It’s the same with marketing. It’s not up to you. I’m not up to you to define the mix of marketing tactics that you think will deliver on the revenue plan.

That’s what your marketing services provider should be doing. And if they’re not doing that for you, you should be changing your marketing services provider. What happens is people come to us and I’m sure they come to you with take away list. I want number two and I want number 64, and I want number 95 with no bean sprouts and this is what I want to deliver for the best price, and then you do it and it doesn’t work, and you get the blame. So hang on. Firstly, how do you know that this recipe is the right recipe for your business at this particular time of its life? You don’t you, are you in marketing? Do you have a marketing education?

Do you have any marketing experience? No. You are self-diagnosing for those people. Get the hell out of here. I’m not interested in working with you because as soon as things go wrong, which they will, I’ll get the blame and it’s nothing to do with me. Part of my job is to make recommendations to the client that I think are in the best interests of the business.

I don’t give a shit about egos and vanity metrics and all of that stuff because that’s not the stuff that moves the needle. That’s not the thing that adds value to the business. And I will fight and I will argue with for people to spend money here versus here. Because based on what I know and what the experience that I’ve had, and if you value my opinion as a professional, you have the choice to take that advice on board or ignore it.

But if you ignore it and it all goes wrong, that’s your problem. I’m not gonna be there with a mop today to clear up the mess. So it’s a very long answer to a very short question as to the mistakes. That startups and small business makes. But like I said, I’ve been doing this for a long time, man, mate.

So, I couldn’t cut it down to just one because there are five and there are probably more than five, but those are the five that sort of really stick in my throat more than others.

In terms of innovation or terms of trends or, what, how do you mean?

The first thing I’d say about trends, technologies, and developments.

Who gives a shit? Who gives a shit about trends, technologies, and developments. Because if it’s coming from an intern inside the company, I don’t give a shit unless it’s the customer asking for it. My advice is don’t waste your time. Because there’s always something. As marketers, we’re always looking for the next shiny new thing to focus our attention on.

And as marketers, what we do is we take that technology and we screw it up for everybody. We did it with email, we did it with text, we’ve done it with chatbots, we’ve done it with everything. The problem with trends is that they’re fleeting and for every trend that gathers traction, there are a thousand that don’t.

Do you remember when we were all gonna buy 3D TVs? Whatever happened to that? Or, how about when 3D printing was gonna change everything or virtual reality or chatbots? Do you remember I beacons? Are these Bluetooth beacons you’re gonna have in retail, or web three?

Who the hell’s talking about web three now? Nobody. Who’s even talking about crypto now? Nobody. What about the metaverse? That was only five minutes ago. The fact is none of this shit matters to your customers, so it shouldn’t matter to you. Maybe tomorrow, but tomorrow doesn’t pay the bills.

Today, he pays the bills. So let’s focus on what influences the customer today because that’s all that matters. Now, if the customer is interested in a particular trend, channel, media, or whatever, then absolutely jump all over it. But 99 times out of a hundred, this is the industry talking, or somebody at your company talking who saw, who went to some conference or read a blog or something else and says, oh no, we need to be all in at this.

It’s don’t waste your time. There’s always gonna be stuff that’s gonna distract you from what you should be doing always. So it’s not a popular opinion Ranmay I tell you that now? But it’s the customer who is driving the car, right? We’re just passengers. The customer is driving the car.

So if the customer decides that this stuff is important, then we do it. But if the customer decides it’s not important to them yet, then we don’t, there are plenty of other things we can get involved with that will move the needle. So let’s focus on that. Makes sense. Makes more sense to me.

Standing out? Mark, I mean at the heart of it, marketing as a business function is a game of attention.

An attention economy is not a new concept by any means. But even if we say that marketing is a game of attention, it seems to be that similarity or sameness seems to be the default. Most marketers lack. They don’t lack data. They don’t lack insights. They lack creativity and guts bravery. So firstly, I’d say that compelling and resonant messaging starts with the business strategy. Before the marketing strategy, because you can’t bolt one onto the other. You have to be that kind of business for the marketing message to reflect that kind of business. In terms of the articulation of the value, standing out is about positioning, and positioning is about differentiation, and the problem with most businesses is they’re not differentiated enough, especially in B2B.

Everybody looks the same. They all say the same thing. They all have the same features. Half the time you could take 10 websites from 10 different providers, especially in B2B. And if you covered up the logo, you wouldn’t know who they were. They’d all say the same thing.

The most dangerous place to be is blending into the background. Yet that’s precisely where the vast majority of businesses are. Why? Because they’re too afraid to stand out. But the only way you’re gonna be noticed is by thinking, looking, saying, doing things that the competition needs to do and are not going to do.

Our job as marketers is to get the product into the very limited considerations set of category buyers looking and saying the same as everything else is not gonna work. When you think of a category bias, you think of anything that you wanna buy a TV, a DVD player, whatever.

If you do, ask your network, your family, your friends, and your colleagues. I want a new tv, I want a new espresso maker. I want a new CRM for my business, whatever it may be. Okay? What should I get? Normally 99 times out of a hundred, you’ll get the same three or five suggestions.

Now and again, you might get a new one that you’ve never heard of which maybe you’ll consider or, maybe you’ll just throw it in just to say, okay, I’ve considered something that’s outside what everybody else is saying. But even in B2B, nobody looks at every single option in the category.

Nobody looks at the 497 CRM systems that are available in the market and do a huge big matrix and the plus, nobody does all of that stuff. They say, okay, what do you use? Oh, I use this one. It’s not bad. It’s a bit slow, it’s a bit expensive, but it does what it says it’s, going to do and it’s very reliable.

Let’s have a look at that one. That’s what you do, so your job as a marketer is to be in that select consideration space in the minds of the buyer when they are ready to buy. Now, like I said before, 95% of the time your messaging is going to people who are in your buying customer profile, but they’re not ready to buy at the exact moment in time when they see your messaging.

So your job is to be at the back of their mind. When they are in that 5% ready to buy, that is your job. So if that is your job, and you’ve got probably much bigger, much better-funded competitors who are in their mind already. Looking and sounding the same as everybody else is not gonna work.

If you are up against much bigger brands, standing out is the only way you can grow and it’s the only chance you have to be in that consideration. So small brands need to be better than established big brands just to be able to compete in the same space.

If you have a big brand, could go onto Twitter and put we love ice cream and get a hundred thousand shares. Now, you or me, we could spend hours and hours crafting a super insightful post on LinkedIn and we get 19 likes. It’s not fair. So if that’s, if that’s the reality, We need to win on other things on top of the product or service that we’re offering.

Now, for me, that should start with mental availability salience. In other words, are category buyers thinking of us at all when they’re thinking about buying and what do we need to do to get into that category space? There’s also a question of timing, right? Because you need to be there at the right time.

And I, so what do we do? How do we do that? And people think this is so difficult, but the answer like, lots of these things in marketing is very easy. You speak to customers. 60% of C-suite level marketers have not spoken to a customer in the past six months. That is scandalous.

You should be talking to customers every single week, if not more frequently. We mentioned this before we started the podcast. You get your information from speaking to customers, and existing customers. Also, if you can speak to past customers, because customers who are no longer can give you some really, interesting intel if you can have that sort of relationship.

But it’s you are, customers are driving the car. So you ask customers where, are you going? What do I need to do to help you get to where you’re going? It’s very simple, but so many people with marketing and their job title, won’t speak to customers. Oh, we’ll do a survey. Oh, we’ll do a type form.

Oh no, You pick up the phone and you speak to people like human beings have done since the dawn of time. All right. That’s how you do it, and you listen to what they say, and you may have pre-prepared questions, but you need to be prepared to go off into various tangents depending on what the answer is to the customer.

This is to your questions. That’s how you get data, real data, and that’s how you can develop insights and make strategic decisions on where you focus your marketing. It’s, not rocket science. It’s easy. I didn’t say it’s simple. It’s not simple but the process is really easy.

It is a good question. I think especially today, it’s not so much about sales and marketing working better together. I think it’s more about every single independent silo of the business coming together around revenue-based metrics and not some nonsensical MQL or SQL number that doesn’t translate to a revenue jump.

If you’ve been in sales, anybody’s been who’s listening to this, has been in sales, they know the problem. They get a bunch of leads from marketing. And they call up these leads or contact these leads. And these leads are not leads. They’re people who downloaded an ebook.

They’re, people who asked a question. They’re people who filled in a form at a trade show booth, but they’re not leads. They’re, warm bodies, but they’re not leads. So what happens? The sales go marketing, they’re a bunch of idiots. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

They gimme all this crap. And I’m supposed to filter all of this stuff through, even though I’m, I’ve got pressure to build my sales numbers every 30 days and they’re giving me, and these things are supposed to be leads. It’s crap. And what happens on the other side of the fence? Marketing says these sales guys, they’re so lazy.

We give them all these leads, they do nothing with them. They say they’re rubbish, but they just want the whole thing to be wrapped up in a little bow and put onto their lap, and all they have to do is get a signature and then claim their commission. This is the juxtaposition of sales and marketing in so many organizations over the years.

The thing is sales aren’t sales anymore. The role of sales is migrating from persuading or cajoling or sometimes intimidating customers to one which is a bit more advisory and consultative a position of recommending the most appropriate solution for the customer, even if that most appropriate solution is not something you sell.

It should be. Its selling is not so much about sales anymore. It’s about helping customers to buy wherever that may be. So it’s less about, my widget being better than the one from the woman down the street. It’s now helping the customer understand the wider causes and implications of the problem that they’re aiming to solve so that they can make a more informed purchasing decision.

So you’re not being seen as just like another supplier. You’re seen at the same level. You are seen as a peer. You are representing the business. The customer considers credit creditable and with reputation. Sometimes all a prospect wants is a sounding board, so all they want is someone who understands their problem and can help them rate make the right decision.

They don’t want a branded microsite or a geo-located Snapchat filter or a VR experience. Sometimes at the end of the day, buyers are human beings, right? So sometimes all we want is buyers is we want reassurance that we are making the right decision and we’re not buying some shit and part of the role of the salesperson. Now for the marketing side, as marketing as a business function continues its shift towards making sense of data and providing more useful buying decision criteria. Perhaps the next iteration of the salesperson’s role is as much with customer engagement, customer retention, and loyalty building.

Maybe sales performance in the future will be less about targets and quotas and more about customer relationship quality measurement indicators like How happy a customer feels after their purchase. How likely are they to buy again? How willing they are to recommend to their friends, colleagues, peers, whatever one, marketing technology can have the effect of making messaging more timely and more individual. It can at the same time make communication more impersonal. We’ve all had those emails where it’s got Dear first name instead. They haven’t done the proper programming, and it just says, dear first name instead of substituting the name in the database.

So perhaps the new role of sales is to reinject that tactile human element into the transaction, even as the acquisition process itself is becoming more impersonal and more automated.

As you probably guess, Ranmay, perhaps my position may not be conventional.

So I’m sure there’ll come a time when AI and advanced programming transforms every area of what we are doing as marketers.

But I think we need to draw a line between the long-term implications of what might eventually happen someday, maybe. And all of the bullshit that’s written about AI, what it can do right now, and what it can do maybe at some time. The thing is about all of these large language models.

Bard, ChatGPT, whatever. They work by mimicking the human language without actually understanding it. ChatGPT for instance, stitches words together to form plausible answers based on patterns of text. It’s scanned off the internet. The key word here is plausible ChatGPT is optimized for plausibility, not for accuracy, not for fact-checking, not for truth, which is why it can’t do maths. That’s why it’s so shit at maths. Why it’s so shit at numbers. Because all ChatGPT cares about is producing a bunch of text that seems to make sense, even if it’s total bullshit. Now there’s a guy called Gary Marcus who’s a. Very clever guy, AI expert, guru, written books on this sort of stuff.

He wrote an article about this not too long ago, which explained this tendency a lot better than, I can do it. ChatGPT doesn’t understand anything that we say. It doesn’t understand our questions and it doesn’t even understand its answers. GPT not just G P T, but all of them. They have patterns of human written text devoid of meaning.

This is for instance why ChatGPT fails to compute even very basic maths because it has zero capacity for reason. At the end of the day, AI still can’t do things like creativity, humor, pathos, empathy, anger, disdain, frustration, or any of the other thousand emotional-based components, which are essential for effective marketing output. AI is words, pictures, or even sounds, but it’s devoid of meaning, soul, or nuance. So if you think marketing is throwing an Unsplash image into a Canva template and pushing it out on social media, then yes, AI is gonna kill your job. But you know what? That job needed to be killed because what you are doing was not marketing.

What I’m saying is that all the AI has done so far has raised the bar. It’s risen the bar for content. So all those idiots on fiverr.com who are asking for 20 bucks to write an article for your blog and put it on their PBN, all of those guys are outta business. And you know what? That’s a good thing.

Because we’ve got plenty of idiots in our industry we don’t need anymore. Where, AI will have the biggest impact, I think, and where we’re seeing it already is in search. Because for as long as anyone can remember globally, Google has dominated search. You look at any reports, any data, you’ve got Google at 90% share of search and everybody else grouped occupies like 10.

Google’s dominance in the category is gigantic. It’s part of our vernacular. We, don’t say, I’ll search for it. We say I’ll Google it. No one in their ever mind says, oh, hang on a minute, let me big it. Nobody says that. So when you’ve got that kind of level of mental availability, the chances of anyone else touching you, you would think are virtually impossible.

But if you change the rules of the game, suddenly you have a chance, which is exactly what Microsoft has done with Bing by putting ChatGPT inside of it. All of a sudden, Bing became cool. So cool that there was a list to join. Now Google has barred it, of course. So it’s not like they’re going down without a fight.

But the constituent components that govern a search engine result, I think are gonna be less and less about the words themselves and more about what those words mean. And AI is gonna be making that decision, not you.

Now Google and the rest have been doing that direction for years of search intent. It’s always been there, but with ChatGPT and Bard and the rest of them, the pace of evolution is just gonna accelerate exponentially. So as for a search engine, what we currently see, In terms of an interface and an interaction with Google, Bing, and whomever else you use as your partic duck dot go, if you want to use your particular search engine, what that whole paradigm of interaction will have to change.

But the problem with using something like ChatGPT a search is you don’t know if it’s true. There are no citations, there’s no backing up of any evidence. It’s just while it’s pulled together from various places. Now, as an ideation tool. As a starting point. It’s a gazillion times better than a clean sheet of paper and wondering what the hell am I going to start with.

Coming up with ideas of what you’re going to do. It’ll always come back with things like, oh crap, yeah, I forgot about that one. And it helps you as you’re doing that for that first ideation state, fantastic. If you’re using that as your final result, you are screwed. In the short term or long term there, there are already AI detection algorithms in Google.

They’re not perfect, but you bet, don’t bet against Google. First of all, SEO, doesn’t bet against Google, right? Google has more, doctorates than any other company on the planet. Those guys are seriously clever. Don’t you know keywords? Remember when we did keyword stuffing?

And meta key, the keywords tag that people used to use. Remember all of that stuff? If you put the text in white on a white background, you would. All of that crap. Do you think Google took more than two microseconds to work out that we were doing all that crap?

Just imagine what they’re thinking of now, you cannot comprehend how far ahead of these guys are from what we’re doing. So AI is a tool just SEO tools are a tool. Just, like any of the things that we use that marketers use, Photoshop is a tool, and InDesign is a tool. They’re all tools, but they’re not the destination. They’re the journey. They help us do our jobs. That’s it. But if you use that to do the result, it’s going to be, it’s gonna be ineffective. It’s, gonna be words, but it’s not gonna evoke any people who have to be emotively involved to react.

If it doesn’t involve an emotional reaction, you have failed. Whatever that emotional reaction is we are as Jill Bo Taylor said, we think that we are thinking beings that feel, while actually, we are feeling beings that think, anything that we buy emotionally and then post-rationalize logically.

Anything we buy. And we buy from feeling, we are moved by feeling, by emotion. And that’s the future of marketing. The future of marketing is getting away from all of this mechanized automation to drive marketing, not getting rid of the tools, but focusing on creating an emotion in the mind of the person that we’re trying to target.

That was my, mic drop moment.

I was happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me and I hope your audience found some of what I said insightful.

You too. Take care.