#1: 4 Steps To Align Marketing, Sales, and Service for Higher Growth With Jennifer Montague

Jennifer: We call it the N M F P, not my fucking problem. So marketing, get the lead in. I hit my target sales, close it, and sales go, these are crap. And we say, not my fucking problem. I hit my target. Then sales are like, we gotta close these leads. So they say, sorry, CS not my fucking problem. We close these leads and CS go: what the hell, you know, these are bad fit. They hate us, they're mad, they're not getting, and it's like, what is the point of that? What is the point of that? And there's so many companies who operate in this way and I was so tired of it.

Soren: Welcome to the Messy Growth Show, where we talk to founders and marketeers of software and manufacturing companies about their path to growth and challenge the conventional beliefs of what works and what does not to help you untangle the path to your growth. Your host on this podcast is Christian Jorgensen, and I am Soren Hansen. So let's get started with today's guest on the Messy Growth Show.

Christian: In this episode of the Messy Growth Show, we're talking with Jennifer Montague. She's the Vice President of Growth At Onomondo. We will talk about how they have solved some of the classic challenges that are with sales and marketing teams by creating a growth team and the results they have achieved by doing that. Let's get started. Jen, love to have you on the podcast, Messy Growth Show, and you and I already know each other, but, the listeners don't. So, you're the VP of Growth at Onomondo which is one of these, famous iot Internet of things companies, which people still don't know what is. But, maybe, you know, can explain.

Jennifer: Part of my job now, right?

Christian: All about? Yeah.

Jennifer: So, yeah, so Onomondo is an Internet of Things solutions, company. We talk a lot about connectivity. But we are essentially, in industrial iot it has three main parts There's the hardware. Where there's devices that collect the data, there's a cloud that kind of extrapolates data and then there's something connecting it. We're the connection. So we're the ones who kind of transport the data. But we do it in a different way. We built our own core, which is very unique to a company our size. We're competing with Ericsson and Vodafone and, kind of the big players. And we're stealing all the big players customers cuz we're awesome.

Christian: Amazing. And what about you? You know, where are you coming from and, how did you end up, at where you are today?

Jennifer: Wow how long of how long is this podcast?? So, I'm originally from New York. And I ended up living in Europe studying abroad and things like that. So I've actually lived in New York longer than I lived in America. So I started my career where I started my life in Europe, in the United Kingdom where I stayed for 12 years, moved on to Switzerland and that's kind of where I really started getting real jobs, I'll say in air quotes. So I went to Switzerland and I was working at fifa. And, that was a wonderful experience. And as part of the job, I was in charge of customer support. And one of the things I was realizing is the more I invested my time effort and things like Twitter and social media, the less Very basic questions I was getting from my clients. So my responsibility was to make sure that the transfers of players would happen on time. If you fan of football, you know, that transfers had to happen during a transfer window. Was responsible for Asia in the Middle East to make sure that they did things on time and yeah, and I found the more I use media and newsletters and comms, the easier my job. So I kind of said to my boss I really wanna do marketing. He said, that's cool, but this is FIFA and we're a corporation and that's not your job, so could you please just do your job? Yeah, so I kind of got the marketing bug and had the opportunity to relocate to Copenhagen and that's actually where I decided to reinvent myself and really dove head first into marketing and got my first marketing job with you Christian. So what's actually kind of cool I was thinking about today is like I. My career has almost come full circle where the guy who taught me marketing is now interviewing me on his podcasts. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Shows you did a good job.

Christian: Yeah.

Jennifer: Yeah, so now I'm at the Vice President of Growth for an IOT company. Before that, I was the director of marketing at Dixa. Worked together. I was the head of growth at TwentyThree before that, and then I was the global campaigns manager at Planday before that. So kind of working my way up rather quickly. I would say.

Christian: That's a nice little journey.

Jennifer: It's been fun.

Christian: What's kind of getting you up in the morning, besides, you know, wondering about marketing and thinking that's the most amazing thing that has ever been developed.

Jennifer: Well aside, and you mean aside from a screaming one year old.

Christian: That's.

Jennifer: That technically gets me up every morning.

Christian: A natural alarm clock right there.

Jennifer: That is my natural alarm clock is my one year old. But, no, I think, the thing that gets me up in the morning is I have been given an opportunity that a lot of people don't get is in that I am. Building a dream team. I'm literally in charge of choosing my own team, how I want that team structured, how I want that team to go. I am getting to build a marketing function in the way that I think marketing should be done in a way that, as far as I've seen in my career, I've not really been able to do. For different reasons. And so that really gets me up in the morning of like, what are we gonna do today? Like, how are we gonna structure this? What's the next big project we have coming up? And how can I take this incredibly talented team that I've built and point that canon in the right direction and motivate them and get them. Kind of chipping away at the big projects that we have.

Christian: Just for a bit of context, how big is the company? How big is your team by now?

Jennifer: Well,when I joined the company was about 40 people. My team was myself and two others. That was in May. On August 1st, I welcomed four new team members to my team, and as a whole, we went up to 58 people. So we've grown really fast in three months and in October I'll welcome another four people. So we'll be going to 11 and the company as a whole is gonna be between 72, about 90 people. So, yeah, we're growing very fast.

Christian: So, today's topic, that we talked about was, you know, this where like gross meets lead generation or gross versus lead generation.

Jennifer: -.

Christian: Versus traditional marketing We're going to talk about,you know, challenge some of the conventional thinking on, how we go about growth to remove this inefficient grinding that we have between marketing, sales, and customer support. And, sharing a better way of actually reaching those growth targets.

Jennifer: -.

Christian: Actually we do a unified marketing sales team as well. And then I know you will be sharing some of like how you measure success, your success indicators, and you've created kind of framework, for how you do this. So I'm curious about, you know, what's the difference for you between gross and lead generation, for example.

Jennifer: Yep. So, I don't think, I know we talked a little bit about growth versus lead gen, and I don't think it's necessarily, versus I think one inevitably leads to the other, but I think. For a long time we've been focusing on the wrong stuff. So, for me, lead generation obviously is, the creation of leads. Different companies call leads, different things, but for the most part, in my experience, a lead is someone gives you an email address. So whether they're signing up for a demo or a webinar or a white paper or your newsletter, it's someone expressing an interest in wanting to know more, but maybe at different points of the buyer journey. But growth is holistic. Growth is not just acquisition. Growth is not just leads, but growth done right can also create more leads, right? But it can also increase the business in other areas outside of acquisition. Outside of leads, it's kind of, growth is a growth mindset is looking for opportunities to grow, whether that's increasing retention, expansion upon existing customers or. You know, acquiring new customers. So having a growth mindset is finding opportunities as opposed to lead generation is kind of getting those new customers in.

Christian: Where does growth sit in Onomondo where you are today? Is it the marketing department that's been replaced or is it like sitting on top of it? Or where. Where are you putting it in the machine?

Jennifer: That's a really great question because it kind. For me, the growth model that I have built, it encompasses the buyer journey and the customer journey. So it's kind of end to end from the first time you hear about us, to the time we get you on stage to tell people how amazing we are. Because you're a really happy customer. So in theory, we kind of overlap the entire commercial process. But also growth can influence the product. So I guess if you wanted to see like a, you know, kind of a diagram, it kind of oversees everything. We have our kind of tentacles and everything, but within the organizational structure, we sit within the commercial team. And in the commercial team we have Rev Ops who kind of are the first. If you look at it from kind of a timeline, you have the Rev Ops team who are kind of sourcing leads and qualifying leads. Then you have us where we would kind of be the inbound team, and then you have sales and then you have, customer success. So that's kind of how we set up and I report to the cco, chief Commercial Officer at the moment.

Soren: Jennifer, you are, you are managing both the marketing team? What about the sales team? Is that, under your control as well?

Jennifer: No. So we have a vice president of sales and I'm the vice president of growth. And we basically renamed marketing growth because we wanted a title that kind of showed the mindset we're applying. For me, marketing has always largelyMeant acquisition, and that's kind of where marketing sits. And a lot of the business structures is acquiring new customers, inbound leads, inbound leads, inbound leads. But for me, growth is yes, acquisition, but also activation. How do we get customers onboarded more successfully, set them up for success so that love us faster. How do we then increase retention and reduce churn? And then last but not least, how do we expand? So we're not just looking at new customers, we're looking throughout the whole customer. And buyer journey, where can we optimize and where can we grow?

Soren: I'm gonna mention an acronym here like abm, account based Marketing, where the focus is really on we do what works best in terms of getting the right customers in the right amount. The end result is that we get the right fit customers that consume the, width and the depth of our services for which they are perfect.

Jennifer: Correct. And we do have ABM sits within growth. We have a, an ABM person as well. But yeah, so it's not just how many leads can we get and hit that target and that's, I think we'll talk a little bit about that with that kind of planet marketing, planet, sales, planet cs, we are looking for good fits who will become advocates and then we empower them to become advocates through other kind of growth initiatives such as, community building and community. Initiatives. So literally full cycle.

Soren: Coincides very well with, I don't know how your experience is Christian, but most who contact us, at least me, is looking for new customers and they are not really considering or aware of the possibilities they have within the current customer range. Which of those are great. Of those are not?

Jennifer: That's a huge problem. And I think that's something that we've seen, you know, Christian and I have worked together for a number of years and I think we've seen that a lot. Where, am I allowed to swear?

Christian: Yes. Yes.

Jennifer: Okay, good. Cause I'm a, I'm a, I'm a swearer. No, but we call it the N M F P, not my fucking problem. So marketing, get the lead in. I hit my target sales, close it, and sales go, these are crap. And we say, not my fucking problem. I hit my target. Then sales are like, we gotta close these leads. So they say, sorry, CS not my fucking problem. We close these leads and CS go: what the hell, you know, these are bad fit. They hate us, they're mad, they're not getting, and it's like, what is the point of that? What is the point of that? And there's so many companies who operate in this way and I was so tired of it. And you know, I come from, as I said in FIFA, I was largely working with customer success. And so, you know, my heart kind of sits in CS and those, that's your lifeblood of your business. And they are always gonna be under-resourced because they're a call center. They're not making money for the business. I'm putting that in air quotes. You can't say on a podcast, but you know, they, people don't look at that as a retention tool. They don't look at as a money maker, so they don't get the head count. They're overworked. They're already doing so much there. The face of your company help them. And so we, I wanted to work in a place where we could work together. You know, there's no point in closing a customer who is gonna churn in two months because they weren't told the right information. They were a bad fit. It benefits no one.

Soren: Costly. It's costly. And, It hurts your cash flow, all the money you've invested in lead generation sales people, expensive sales people, and then it turns out that they just.

Jennifer: Then it's word of mouth and then it gets expensive on another side where they're gonna go on social media. And we saw this and I won't say the company, but a company Christian and I worked in someone churned and they went on Facebook and they. Blasted us on social media. And one of the things I did actually in that role was I did a comparison because I was trying to tell people, we need to fix this. This is a problem because people are going on social media and I was told no one read social media. No one looks at social media bullshit. That is part of a due diligence. People look at your profiles and what I did was I saw a direct correlation to the number of complaints going up to leads going. And it was there in numbers. I made a line graph to show them like, this is what's happening because Yeah. And so it is expensive, not just in wasting the money that you spent, but it's gonna make it harder to close deals later on down the line if they, if they're vocal about it.

Soren: What we cannot see is that, whatever is posted on open social media is then carried into.

Jennifer: -.

Soren: Whether it's discussion groups or closed Facebook groups, closed in LinkedIn groups, and it just expands like popcorn.

Jennifer: Absolutely.

Christian: Don't you think it like comes back to, you know, marketing people typically are fairly competitive sales people. 100% psycho competitive and you know, we set some targets like, marketing needs to generate 200 marketing qualified leads it this month, sales need to close 50 customers and it's just like, you know, go run for it.

Jennifer: -.

Christian: I'm, at least the companies I worked in where it's been like that and it's like, yay. Like you said, we nailed it.

Jennifer: -.

Christian: The leads, they were complaining, bad quality, so how do you go around that if you're actually working with inbound, with abm, with sales customer support, it sounds like you're doing a lot of different that can be maybe hard to measure.

Jennifer: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that brings up a really good point though, is this need to measure everything. And that's something that we don't do at Onomondo, and it's not because we don't wanna know how much we're spending, but we see it. You get what you measure, and if you measure leads, you're gonna get leads. We measure revenue, we want Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). So whether that means I dump a bunch of money in Google ads, or I look at expansion opportunities, you know, I have the free range to figure out where I'm going to get the most ARR and I work with sales to figure out how we're gonna get the most ARR. And maybe this is a good point to talk about kind of the four pillars of growth that I have in my team, because you're absolutely right. It's very hard to measure. Common sense would tell you this is what we should be doing. So let's kind of calm down on the attribution side of things. So, we have four pillars. First is acquisition that we focus on. Obviously we do run Google ads, we have landing pages, we have a website, we do inbound. We do all of the stuff that everyone else does.

Christian: Word like.

Soren: Don't worry, that's my bread, that, you know me, that's my bread and butter. I'm doing that, don't worry. But then we also have retention, excuse me, activation. So we're using our resources to make the onboarding process easier. Because right now it's a CS person who's like on the phone with someone, talking them through, here's how you activate your product. That is not scalable. So we're using marketing resources, landing pages, videos, animations, infographics. Anything that we would usually use in an acquisition channel, we can actually use that internally. To help get people on the product faster and get them to that wow moment faster. That's so one of the things we have is we have what we call optimal features. These are the features that we know are our usps. This separates us from everyone, and my job is to, how do we get people doing this as early as possible to get that wow moment? Then we have retention. Let. Me just comment on that because I think what you said there is quite important is that what experience is that people wanna mention all their features. Because they feel that then the value of their service and their product.

Jennifer: -.

Soren: On the receiving side of the prospect and the lead that doesn't have the awareness of the product that the internal people have, it sometimes becomes an.

Jennifer: -.

Soren: If you have a plora of features. So I thought it was interesting that you mentioned that you, point out for your ideal audience, which features i e a subset. You decide which ones that you actually.

Jennifer: Yes. And this depends on the customer. This actually brings me to the point you mentioned about sales being super competitive. And that's something that we also try to do different. We see our sales people as kind of consultant. So they wanna know what your challenges are in iot is kind of an emerging, it is an emerging tech, so there's a lot of unknowns, right? So we could get someone like Maersk, who's one of our biggest customers, and they know exactly what they're doing and they know exactly what they want and they're 90,000 devices around the world versus maybe a smaller company that just got started. To figure out what's possible. And they're so used to the old way of doing things, and so when you know the BDR will reach out to this lead, they will understand their needs and where they kind of are in the iot journey. Then the Account Executive (AE) will take that over and they are more of a consulting role. They wanna figure out what's the best solution and from that they identify what are the key features that would benefit you the most. Some people like that we're a "pay as you pay as you go", so you only pay for the data you use. That works great for someone like Maersk, which is 90,000, containers around the world, but maybe they're all not active at the same time. But then there's other people who maybe need things active all the time, so there's a different function they like. So, It kind of comes back to not only are we looking at growth different, but we're looking at sales different because they are acting as consultants to make sure you know, and there's lots of times where sales will say, this is actually not gonna be the cheapest for you, we're not the cheapest option for you right now because there's no point in lying to the customer. So that's kind of explains, huh?

Soren: Love, I love that approach because I have been hit by solution selling, which is just one of the many sales.

Jennifer: -.

Soren: Really, you can assume a lot of pains on the leads side, but if it's not confirmed by the lead, it's not a pain and it's not a pain.

Jennifer: -.

Soren: You need to drill out what the pain is and how big it is, because if it's not big enough, there's no reason to.

Jennifer: Exactly.

Soren: I love that approach.

Jennifer: I think you bring up also, A really good point of you know, if you go to a restaurant and the menu is 12 pages long, you're gonna sit there forever trying to figure out what to read. Right? But if you have, here are the four dishes of the day, you're gonna go, that sounds really good. And it's the same with features, you know, and if you sit there and you're scrolling through going this, yeah. People are gonna zone out. So we identify their needs and then we identify how we can meet those needs and we try to push those, during the onboarding.

Christian: Basically the wow moment is individual for each.

Jennifer: Yes.

Christian: Because that's when they really like, wow, this is something that changed my business.

Jennifer: -.

Christian: Be radically different from the next customer you have. That's super interesting.

Jennifer: Yeah, so that's the sort of second pillar of the onboarding. And then the next one is retention. So how can we help keep customers? And this is the area, I mean, we've only kind of started since May, so we're still building this out, but we're looking at, health checks of customers, how often they're checking in, you know, logging into the platform and things like that. And then last but not least, is identifying expansion opportunities. So we have currently two different offerings. We have a smaller kind of version. That's kind of the mini small price. And then we have enterprise. And so a lot of people use our smaller version to kind of test out and dip their toes into, you know, what the hell are we offering and what, how is it different? And then, you know, looking at those people, looking at their data usage, looking at what they're doing and going, Hey, you might benefit actually phone the full platform. And how can marketing help Customer Support (CS) do. Videos documentation like we do. One of the cool things that we started doing actually for, expansion is we started doing a quarterly wrap up. So it's very similar to the Spotify thing that you get where it's like, this is the songs that you listen to the most and blah. We're doing something similar of like, this is the data you use, this is the countries you were most active. And kind of twisting it and kind of, you would've been able to do X, Y, and z if only you had these other features and again, in a helpful way, not in a pushy kind of way.

Christian: Okay. I hope it's gonna be different than my Spotify wrap up, because that's like kid song from my, from my child.

Jennifer: Mine's, sleep aids. So. Yeah.

Soren: Just outta curiosity. Jennifer, I know that in your, in your industry you have, you mentioned Maersk, you have some big customers.

Jennifer: Yes.

Soren: Potentially they may be better served with some personal account executive status interaction. How do you do better, or how do you solve this better than the regular videos. Automated emails? So are you differentiating in different customer tiers on this?

Jennifer: We're not at the moment, but it's definitely on the cards because the level of service that someone like Maersk, Carlsberg, some of our larger customers, the level of service that they would require is more than say a smaller company. But because they have the enterprise, you know, it's built, it's a package built for them. But we also need to scale. And so that is definitely something that we're thinking of. How can we offer just as great a support in a scalable way? The standard SaaS B2B question, how do we offer tailored service to everyone,? So we're also approaching that hill very quickly.

Soren: The interesting part is, which is the beauty of it, that you stay focused here in the early stages to keep things simple and make sure that it works before you start expanding into other models for other tier of the.

Jennifer: Exactly.

Soren: Keep it.

Jennifer: Yep. 100%. And one of the new things we're actually gonna be launching, hopefully early 2023, is a no touch. So we're calling it product led growth but it is completely no touch. Sales, onboarding, expansion, retention. How can we do that? And that would obviously come at a different price and we wanna make IOT accessible. We want Brenda in HR who's been told You gotta find some cost savings on resources. We want her to be able. To do IOT. So how can we do that? We have to make it simple and we have to make it very clear and straightforward. Because right now, dude, the acronyms that I'm trying to get my head around in this industry is crazy. And that's why I think it has been very difficult not to crack and even Christian in your opening, like, what the hell do you do? I haven't been able to get that down to a, you know, a tagline yet because it is. A complicated space. How can we make that simple? We wanna make that, accessible to as many people as possible so they can do digital transformation for themselves.

Christian: Okay. Good points. If you could choose,what all the marketing teams out there should do more of.

Jennifer: That's a tough one. I think. Maybe not necessarily directed marketing teams, but marketing leaders slash CEOs or kind of C level who oversee marketing is stop with this attribution. If we can't measure it doesn't happen approach, because that's what's killing marketing. You cannot measure everything. I do not know if my onboarding plan is going to make that customer last. But I know it's goddamn important that it's done, so I've worked in, I think every job I've had so far, I've said, Hey, we could probably really help existing customers. And I've been told, no, you do not deal with existing customers. That's Customer Support (CS). You just deal with new customers and new leads. And that's such a waste, I think of opportunity. So I think that kind of measure what matters. Of course, we need to see where the money's going. And actually when I do my budget. I do employer branding in a separate bucket. I do branding in a separate bucket, and then I do the high intent lead gen in a separate bucket, and that's what I look at when it comes to cac. I look at how much did I spend on this intent channel, because branding is super important. All of these other things are very important, but if you start piling all of that onto the CAC you're gonna look and go, this customer was super expensive. We need to take our foot off the gas a little bit when it comes to attributing every damn thing.

Christian: It's a even worse in these like cookie less times where like ad blocked like crazy.

Jennifer: Exactly. And I think christian you and I, we've worked in places where we were told, turn off LinkedIn. LinkedIn's not working. No, LinkedIn isn't driving leads. And it's like, of course LinkedIn is huge for a B2B company. Why would you not be on LinkedIn? It's just maybe don't use it for lead gen, use it for brand awareness, thought leadership, but this idea of, you know, turn off LinkedIn and turn up Google ads. That's what happens when you have a black and white approach to attribution. So I think that if I could change one thing, it would be that because that was a strangle hold for a lot of really talented teams.

Christian: Yeah. You need to look at it holistically and see how the different channels play together. Like, yeah, maybe they saw us on LinkedIn, maybe they just watched the webinar or whatever that social post from random employee but it all mattered into like getting the attention towards your company.

Jennifer: One of the examples I like, oh, sorry. I was just gonna say one.

Soren: Marketing team is not doing any, significant amount of work in customer expansion, then that might be a cost to stop up and just take a view of what it is that you're actually doing. Because part of what marketing does in lead gen is what we need to be doing for customer expansion. I mean, leaving customer service on their own to educate customers, to expand customers and sales to follow up, is bit of a challenge.

Jennifer: CS aren't salespeople, you know, that's not their, that's not their toolbox. So to expect CS to be the ones to try to sell is a little kind of counterintuitive, right? It's not what they're there to do.

Christian: It can also be a bit destroying for the relationship. If they actually have good communication about what's working about the product and so on, and then suddenly out of the blue it's like, oh, by the way, you wanna, buy this super great upgrade, which you, I know you don't really need.

Jennifer: I have a target. I have to hit.

Christian: Exactly. It becomes completely disconnected.

Jennifer: Then you lose that trust. Right? And that's also part of the brand. You know, one of the big projects that I'm working on also at Onomondo is the brand. A branded community manager is a post that I just hired in August, and that's, you know, your brand is so much more than your logo and your colors. And so many companies spend so much time on their bloody website or figuring out their tagline or figuring out their logo. But actually what your brand is, do people trust you? What do people think about when they see you? And so we're spending that effort to build our community holding hackathons, holding thought leadership, holding webinars, not just, focusing our efforts on getting new customers, but. Actually Thought leadership. Why should you listen to us? Why are we the ones you should be going to? That's how you build a brand. You build it organically from the ground up. And that's, another big part of growth and spotting opportunities for growth and jumping on them.

Christian: If we, ask the same for sales, Like, what should they do? Differently?.

Jennifer: Well, I think a lot of the work we do with sales, of course we do a lot of inbound and you know, BDR sit within sales, they will action an inbound lead, so an MQL that comes in for us. So very similar to what we've had in other companies. A lead comes through, but there is lead score and depending on the action they took, depending on their size, their vertical, those things, is it an MQL? If it's an MQL, then it will go to a BDR for outreach. And that's kind of where the sales process comes in. So we talk a lot to the BDRs. Were these good leads? What are the top five things you wanna need to know before you get them on the phone? That's my job, right? My job is to make sure the leads know this before you get them on the phone. One of the things that we've built actually the way on Onomondo does it, and I've never worked in a company like this before, where they built the outbound model first. So before they invested in marketing, our go to market is like the, an onion graph. So you have sales and outbound as the first kind of core, and then growth is on top of that. So our outbound engine runs like a Swiss watch. We know in verticals that we have an 80% closing rate from first touch to final in this vertical with this size. So this is who we go after. Our sales team is doing very well at that and they're doing great without marketing, which is a very good position to be in. So we're kind of the cherry on top. So we give them, obviously, we try to warm up the leads. So anyone at Rev Ops identify in our market research team identify as a good lead or a good, outreach prospect goes into a warmup campaign immediately so they get kind of ads. So it's not a cold call. Maybe it's a warm ish call. We also invest heavily in, sales enablement assets. So we do battle cards. My product marketing specialist is on battle cards all the time. We have a system whereby they're on the phone. Oh, sorry. I'm with competitor. A. Well, did you know that we are better than competitor A because of X, Y, Z? So we do a lot of that kind of stuff. And then we work very closely with sales of, again, I said to all the sales guys, what are the five things you want every prospect to know before you talk to them? And now that's my job is making sure that they know that to make those calls go better. And then of course reactivation campaigns and things like that. I think sales, it's also different because they're not complaining about leads because they haven't really had a lot of them anyway. They're not like, these leads are shit. They're like, we got leads, there's a lot of people coming through the website, Jen. You know, and so it's also kind of a different mentality of like, you know, and we were on Slack, like sending emojis to each other because we had like 10 MQLs come through and book meetings and then they become SQLs. That's 10 we do that in an afternoon in some of the other companies. But, you know, we're building up to that. So I think it's a mentality of sales. You know, our next approach is abm. That's where we're really gonna have to join forces very heavily on, identifying key target accounts and using marketing resources to kind of move the needle.

Soren: What does sales actually do? Are they part of, engagement, through social media? Do they reach out to some of the prospects and decision makers on social media? How do they work?

Jennifer: It's a little bit of both. It depends on what data we get from them. So yeah, they'll do outreach on LinkedIn. They'll do email outreach, they'll do phone call.if it's an incoming inbound, for example, they'll say their preferred way of being contacted. So they'll do that. It depends on kind of the data that they have. How they do their outreach. It's entitle it to the BDR to decide how they.

Soren: The example you gave, was. Being happy with the leads that come in, sales know exactly how to close a lead, so that tells me that they know that this type of customers, what their pains are. They just gotta figure out which ones are the biggest ones and which ones resonates with the leads they're talking to.

Jennifer: Correct.

Soren: They can help you create the content.

Jennifer: -.

Soren: Here comes marketing and sales collaboration Now sales, because they have the conversation, they know that within this niche of ideal customer profiles that this is the content we need because we know exactly what they're.

Jennifer: Yep.

Soren: That's a beautiful collaborationship. That when what you create for that purpose can be reused elsewhere and can be reused for.

Jennifer: -.

Soren: I think that scenario just highlights ever so clearly why marketing and sales and customer service needs to com combine.

Jennifer: Absolutely. And it is a constant feedback loop. You know, customer success will say. Is something that just happened or this is a problem that customers are having. I'll give you a great example. Yesterday Google announced that they're getting rid of their Google, IOT core. That's a big problem if you built your entire IOT infrastructure on Google. Which a lot of people have, they have a year to move all of their stuff onto a different core. That came through sales. They're like, Jen, this just happened. We wrote up a post about it. You know? And our CEO and CTO are posting about it, and it's this constant collaboration of how can we all work together because we're all on the same team.

Soren: Then marketing needs to create a guide for how you migrate.

Jennifer: Exactly.

Soren: Google platform to your.

Jennifer: Exactly.

Soren: You can help with that and here's how you.

Jennifer: Exactly.

Soren: Beautiful example.

Jennifer: It's been wonderful. It's a relief because we're not pitted against each other. We're not fighting for credit. That's the other thing. I think Christian, you asked what would I change? That's, I think that's a huge one, is only gets headcount if they generate X amount of money. We only get credit if we identified as the first touch. A lot of people only do first touch. It doesn't work like that. You know, if you are a, you know, a $20,000 ARR per, you know, customer, you're not gonna see a Facebook ad and sign up.

Christian: True.

Jennifer: Just doesn't work that way. You're gonna maybe see a Facebook ad, then maybe Google, then maybe visit our landing page, maybe then get a call. You're gonna have so many touch points. So to go, well, the first touch was from sales. So sales get a hundred percent of that is so stupid and it disincentivizes marketing from doing marketing content. Why the hell should I do it? I should just do Google ads. That's where I'm gonna spend a hundred percent of my budget because that's where I'm getting that first click. Bullshit.

Christian: Yeah.

Jennifer: Know, why do a blog? Why do webinar?

Christian: Like, you know.

Jennifer: Just do purely outbound.

Christian: Which is like not scalable at.

Jennifer: Guess what? Sales, sorry, because I'm not getting any headcount. I can't get you PDFs. I can't get you customer case stories because I have no resources to do them. So you're just gonna have to call someone who's never heard of us. Doesn't like our website. We have no assets, we have no social proof, and they just have to trust us. So. Yeah. That kind of fighting for credit with sales. Again, it's so counterproductive and like, I mean, you've seen it yourself, Christian, like we've had shouting matches with sales. That's ours. No, that's ours. No, it's ours. And it's so stupid. We're all doing the same thing. Yeah.

Soren: You have solved this with, now you are collaborating, but you are also. Using OKR as a way to actually unify yourselves around the common goal.

Jennifer: Correct.

Soren: How does that work?

Jennifer: Yeah. So we have ARR as our main goal and the, it is overall company ARR. So I think the only kind of sticking point that we do have to navigate is we can also achieve that ARR in expansion. So whereas sales tend to focus on acquisition, I remember talking with sales about my strategy and seeing their eyes get big. I was like, no. We are gonna do acquisition. But it is five times cheaper to expand an existing customer than it is to get a new one. So if we achieve our ARR goals by expanding customers, that's. That's what we need to do. And so that's why we're moving our AEs into an expansion function as well as an acquisition function. So not only are they gonna close deals, but they're the ones that see us are gonna call upon to say, Hey, I think these guys would be able to be, expanded upon. So that's kind of how we all work together. I imagine as we grow, that's gonna change and we have to be aware of that. And that's something that I do like to flag. Because again, in our plan day days when there was 40 of us, it was a lot easier than when there was 200 of us.

Christian: Indeed.

Jennifer: Yeah. So.

Soren: Sounds just.

Jennifer: Yeah. And so there we're getting there. But, the shared ARR goal definitely helpful and that incent and that lack of marketing. You spent $400 on something, what did you get out of it? Getting rid of that so that we can focus on what we know will move the needle, even if we can't put our finger on it and say, this came from this podcast, this came from this event. We know it's gonna help. And so we can focus on that without worrying every how we spend, every single penny.

Christian: Will be pouring in. With leads from this podcast? I guarantee.

Jennifer: I can't wait. That's why I'm here. This is onomondo.com.

Christian: Yes, Can you say that again? Louder?

Jennifer: It's actually something we talked about in our podcast about kind of social selling. Maybe my core market isn't gonna be listening to a marketing podcast, but it's definitely gonna elevate my company's brand as someone who hires talented people, and maybe they should be taken seriously. If someone hears me on here and then Google's Onomondo and becomes a customer, there's no way they're gonna know I was here. So does that mean I don't do this? No! So it's another reason to kind of ease up on that attribution.

Soren: I think also, maybe less so in SaaS, but in manufacturing and professional services, they do not put themselves out there. There is no personal connection. It's a website with the sterile website and people don't give themselves away. It's hard to get a, create.

Jennifer: -.

Soren: I absolutely concur with you in that, putting yourself out there and make yourself available for chat, for outreach for whatever just a big game changer.

Christian: It.

Soren: Because we're not all extroverts that just pick up the phone and call. There is a certain amount of in betweens and introverts and that's going to require some kind of personal connection before I reach out.

Jennifer: -.

Christian: True. True.

Jennifer: Trust building trust.

Soren: Yeah.

Jennifer: Is priceless. Yeah. And very easy to lose. Sorry, Christian.

Christian: Of that is this, growth model? Is that for like everybody, you know, every type of company or every stage or, like you have big deals, right? Each customer pays a lot of money, Like you think this would work in like small startup, small deals, what are your thoughts on that?

Jennifer: I think you have to have money and getting the funding has really helped us be in a position where we don't count every penny, you know? So I think you need to be able to spend money knowing you're not necessarily going to get that penny back anytime soon. Our sales cycle can be between six months to 18 months. So we have to have that kind of even three months for smaller customers of course. The bigger deals take longer and so you have to be in a position that you can spend the money and wait 18 months to get it back. The other thing I'm doing different is I'm hiring specialists. So I have a designer, I have a product marketing person. I have an SEO person. I have specialists who own an area. I don't have four or five generalists who are like, oh, I'll do social today and I'll do some Google ads. I have the resources to get people who own an area. I think there's like a mini version of this that everyone can be doing. Know, everyone needs to do branding and you don't need to have a ton of money to do branding. You can go on podcasts, you can do a LinkedIn post every single day or two times a day. As long as you say it's something valuable. I'm getting so sick and tired of all the noise, but you know, you can build a following.

Christian: Has.

Jennifer: Oh, the oh poles about what kind of shoes do you like? Like get the hell outta here. But anyway, you can have a smart brand awareness strategy that doesn't actually take a ton of money and you can build yourself up that way. So I think it is actually something that everyone can do. It's just at different levels. You know, if you have no money, then you build up your LinkedIn following or your Instagram following, or, and the way you do that is provide value. If you don't have money, you have to provide value, and by providing value, then you'll probably get money and you know, be able to build on that.

Christian: Onomondo was like built on outbound. You know, that has probably been a huge factor in leading you to where you are today because the sales people have really understood how is the market, how are people choosing a vendor, what are the pains out there?

Jennifer: -.

Christian: They could like feed that back to you. So, you could create content that was actually, you know, valuable.

Jennifer: -.

Christian: Would guide them towards down the journey of becoming a customer. So, completely agree with, you know, sharing nonsense stuff on LinkedIn where there's no value for anybody because you're not really hitting a pain.

Jennifer: Yeah. For your.

Christian: Ideal customer profile. It's just a waste of time. But if you actually manage to understand your ideal customer, By speaking to them, at least in the beginning seeing like, how is this Louise person actually, how is she deciding? That's amazing. Info for marketing to do their job.

Jennifer: Absolutely. Growth. Yes.

Soren: I think Chris, and you also alluded to when you and, Jen worked that, Planday is that, which now I have a, consulting background as well where I've been co-driving with client sales people and it's just such an eye-opener when you have marketing together with sales in that both you understand each other's situation, but you also get a completely, you take out the guessing element because you can ask specific questions and that direct client approach of pulling out this valuable information and what content you need to, create is what I would say outbound in the early stages can deliver, which inbound could not buy its own.

Jennifer: -.

Soren: I mean, inbound, as you said, is the success is larger, built on what you learn with specific customers because that drives what you create and what you generate and what resonates. So, hugely important point.

Christian: Jennifer, it's been amazing having you on the podcast to share your experience on growth and how that can be used in companies and, you know, watching your success over the years. For myself personally love to see that and, you know, where can people find you? You have a podcast, you social handles. Bring it.

Jennifer: Bring it. This is the plugging part of the podcast. So, yes, we have a, I have a marketing podcast with, Casper Rouchmann is, also a Copenhagen based digital marketer. We spoke on a panel together and we were like, are you feeling this man? Are you feeling it? It was very well received. A thousand people attended and yeah. And so we started a podcast and it's been doing really well. We got about a thousand listeners in our first, seven months or so like that, so it's called Marketing Corner. With Jen and Casper, it was the most creative. We're not the creative type. So, it's just called me Marketing Corner, with Casper and Jen and, you can find me on LinkedIn, Jennifer. And feel free to add me. I love adding people. Just don't add me and then sell to me immediately after, because I really hate that and I talk about that on the podcast. So, yeah, I do hate that.

Soren: You might get mentioned.

Jennifer: Yeah. I said that on my podcast and my sales team we're like, that's what we do. I'm like that's a problem. Then. Yeah, marketing Corner with Casper and Jen or, LinkedIn, Jennifer.

Christian: Perfect. Thank you so much for joining and we'll see you out there.

Jennifer: Yeah. Thanks for having me guys. It's a pleasure.

Soren: Thank you.

Jennifer: You.

Soren: Thank you for joining us on today's episode of The Messy Growth Show Check out the upcoming guests on messy growth show.com. And you can subscribe on Spotify, apple Podcast, Google Podcast, and YouTube, And if you do have any comments, feedbacks, or suggestions of topics that are particular importance to you as owner, marketer in the software or manufacturing industry, please do reach out to us on Messy growth show.com. We'll see you on the next episode of The Messy Growth.