Aligning Teams for Revenue Growth: A Strategic Sales-Marketing Case

Brandy Starr [00:00:35]:
Welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host Brandy Starr and we have another amazing episode for you today. In traditional therapy, we learn just as much from others breakthroughs as we do from our own. And so today we will unpack a transformation that every revenue leader wants, but few achieve. Sales and marketing misalignment isn't just frustrating, it is expensive. When teams operate in silos, leads slip through the cracks, deals stall, and messaging feels like a game of telephone. Jamie Walsh has faced this exact challenge and reactive. A reactive, fractured go to market approach that kept the business style stuck in inefficiency mode.

Brandy Starr [00:01:26]:
Instead of accepting the status quo, he built a proactive revenue aligned machine. One where sales and marketing co own success, messaging is consistent and execution is seamless. How did he break the cycle of friction and actually make alignment work? Let's find out. And so to help us unpack this, I am joined by Jamie Walsh. Jamie has been in go to market for over 10 years in B2B SaaS with several scale ups going to 100 million and those on the journey to 1 billion. He has driven a hundred million plus in revenue over the past five years. Jamie, welcome to Revenue Rehab. Your session begins now.

Jamie Walsh [00:02:17]:
Thank you, Brandy.

Brandy Starr [00:02:21]:
I am excited to talk to you. Sales and marketing alignment feels like one of those challenges that has existed since the beginning of time. But before we dive into that, our industry loves its fancy jargon. But let's be real, some of the buzzwords are just fluffy and they can hold us back more than they can help. So Jamie, tell me, what is one overused buzzword you'd love to erase from existence?

Jamie Walsh [00:02:55]:
Geez, I think optimize. I mean, who wants to degrade anything? So when you see optimize, I feel like it's a given. It's just, well overused. The only other one that comes to mind is streamlined. It's. It's neck and neck between the two of those.

Brandy Starr [00:03:14]:
Yeah, I was gonna say usually we streamline as a part of the effort to optimize. So I can say, at least for this conversation, we can put both those words in the box and, and throw away the key. And so now that we have cleared out the fluff, let's get into the real stuff, which is Your big win. And so let's start at the beginning. What was the challenge that you were facing and how did you know that you had a problem?

Jamie Walsh [00:03:48]:
Yeah, well, it's, you know, it's, I think it seems to be a common thing from companies that have been in enterprise SaaS for quite some time. You know, they've been given edicts and marketing does this thing, product does this thing, sales does, you know, their thing. They're supposed to be working together, but. And a lot of times when, you know, the things hit the fan, right, they go in, in different directions and then poor customer success, you know, they inherit the mess after the fact and they've got to make a customer happy, you know, maybe turn them into advocates at some point. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's not a, it's not a new problem and it's just one of those things where the more you get people to work on the same page and understand the same goals and realize that we share the journey from a customer from start to finish, you become a little bit more of a cohesive team, really. I mean, it becomes a lot more of us versus those guys over there. Those guys over there.

Brandy Starr [00:04:56]:
Yeah. And I, I do think it is one of those things. I can remember many, many moons ago in couples therapy, the therapist had said, you have to think of it as us versus the problem and not me versus you. And I really think that that is very necessary for sales and marketing. Whatever the challenges are not having that finger pointing, but really thinking about us as a revenue team against the business challenge. And so in the scenario where you were able to overcome this, what was your initial understanding of the business challenge and did that change as you worked through it?

Jamie Walsh [00:05:39]:
Yeah. So, you know, before coming aboard the company, I, you know, talked with the VP of marketing who would eventually hire me and to just discuss the state of things. And you know, this was a company that had just recently divested from a very large company, parent company. Prior to that, they were acquired by a private equity company who was actually in the growth mode for them, investing a lot of money into the, into the company. And I know that investments like that come with even bigger expectations. So whatever got you there ain't going to get you to the, to the next rung or to where they want you to be. And you know, the company had been growing modestly up to that point, you know, doing things to think about like 25, 30%. But you know, the product marketing function that I was taking over just needed to scale processes were going to have to evolve.

Jamie Walsh [00:06:39]:
There was a lot of gen AI that was just coming on board. This was, you know, right after ChatGPT was launched. So we would have to find some things to make it work for us. We were going to have to address a number of different inefficiencies that were, you know, plaguing the company or holding them back. And, you know, we eventually just agreed on four key priorities that we were going to be focusing on. And that was great because it gave me an opportunity to really build a plan and hit the ground running and know where I was going to be or where I should be within the first quarter, within the first 90 days. And so I came into it, you know, understanding that the size of the problem and the size of the expectations, you know, there were some other things that I would eventually learn as I, as I moved on.

Brandy Starr [00:07:35]:
Okay, and so once you identified the issue, what was your strategy or approach to fix it?

Jamie Walsh [00:07:45]:
Well, I mean, I came from a unique background. I had grown up with a company prior to this for 10 years, and I had moved through customer success. I was given a principal consultant role to handle a couple of our biggest accounts. And so that came with a lot of experience understanding the pressure of doing certain things to make customers happy and working on the back end with product to get things done. But I also became a product manager, which gave me a lot of insight on that aspect of the go to market for horsemen, as I call it. And I was successful with that as well. And they moved me into sales manage or sorry, sales engineering leadership, which, you know, gave me an even better appreciation for what salespeople have to go through and how you actually close, close big deals. And then moving into the product marketing role, you know, I was able to really craft narratives that helped win business and really, you know, amplify that in a number of different ways.

Jamie Walsh [00:08:55]:
So, you know, basically the way I was going to tackle it was just having empathy and talking with a number of different groups and, you know, really understanding their motivations, you know, having been in their shoes, I think bought a lot of credibility and bought a lot of trust that I was going to be the one to help bring everything together. And it was going to be on me to make sure that we got things done and we were meeting their needs as, you know, deals were going through, as customers were, you know, going into escalations or product was having a challenge delivering their to their needs.

Brandy Starr [00:09:39]:
And it's interesting because it sounds so simple when you say it that way, in that you led with empathy and you had conversations with people to, you know, help them see that we were all going to move through this collectively. And it's so funny because I often feel like the, the sales and marketing battle and the misalignment happens so frequently. And it does often happen because these conversations are not taking place. And it has that mentality, you know, has that feeling of us versus them. And so I'd love to dig in a bit more in. I know you said that the business had aggressive growth goals, but were there other challenges that you were seeing that led you to feel that it was the alignment between the different go to market functions that was really creating the problem? Like why this versus believing the problem was something different?

Jamie Walsh [00:10:45]:
Yeah. So it immediately becomes evident when you see the interaction between product marketing and sales. When you're being reactive to individual deals and hyper reactive and creating a bunch of new collateral, doing a bunch of new things without really stopping to ask why are we doing this? It becomes just disruptive to the bigger picture. I talked to people right off the bat and I said, look, I really understand this. You know, the challenge that you have. This is this salesperson's deal. Their whole, you know, commission for the year can depend on that. But unfortunately you have to take a step back and say, I'm, I'm not necessarily building a program that's reactive to one deal.

Jamie Walsh [00:11:39]:
I'm proactively building a program that is going to serve us as 10 to 100 deals over the next quarter or two. So we really need to like stop running around to do certain things at last minute or you know, pulling all nighters to do stuff that is distracting us from getting ahead of ourselves and getting ahead of where we need to be as a program. It just was burning people out, quite frankly. And I said, you know, we're going to take a step back. There's going to be some things that we continue to react to, but over time we are going to be much less reactive, if reactive at all, and more proactive in saying these are the big things that we're going to be focusing on. There's only four or five of them, it's not 30. And we are going to then all agree that these are priority and anything that comes along that's going to disrupt us from that. We all have to agree that something off this list has to go.

Brandy Starr [00:12:39]:
So yeah, I think every marketer at some point in their career has gotten that fire drill of sales needing that oh so critical one cheater that everybody runs around to, to create that, you know, gets seen by one prospect and then goes to die. But I, I mean, I definitely agree that it is important to stop focusing on kind of the needs of one and really have that alignment and focus on the needs of the whole, like, what are the priority things? And a lot of people can find it hard, you know, to say, okay, these are our priorities. If you want to put something else on the table, what is it that we are taking off? And you know, if everyone has that same mentality of we've got to get to the greater good for the organization, you can get there. Did, did you have easy buy in from all the players or were there any, you know, challenges to getting people on the same page?

Jamie Walsh [00:13:47]:
Yeah, well, there was a couple of different things that were going on. So there were, as there always are, large pivots to certain things that go on. As, you know, you're building a plan, it doesn't happen overnight. If you're building sort of a six month or an annual marketing plan, you know, the budget has to come first to figure out, like how much are we going to be spending, what are our goals and targets? And it takes sometimes a month or two to really flesh that out. And as things change during that period, you have to kind of go back to the drawing board. But I think the bigger thing is that culturally there were some new folks coming in that had ideas and were brought in specifically to challenge some of the status quo. And then there were a lot of people that had been there for seven plus years that had been doing certain things a certain way. And while, like I said, they did have some modest success, that's why the PE company was attracted to them.

Jamie Walsh [00:14:54]:
But nonetheless, the expectations were going to go up dramatically and that kind of stuff could not sustain them for that growth. We weren't saying that we were going to disassociate from everything, but there were going to be things that we looked at and just said, look, this is, unless you can prove to me that this is 10xing in returns, we just have some other things we're going to try in addition to that and if they do, you know, pan out to be a better return, that we are going to forfeit some of those other things we're going to be doing. You know, I did have, I did have a lot of good leadership support throughout that process. I was, you know, making, finding quick wins, working with some of the top salespeople. That's, you know, you kind of have to start there because once you get alignment there and you can align with what they're doing that's actually producing results, then it all sort of trickles down from there. You know, everybody kind of buys in there, but you have to have a partnership. And it can't be necessarily that servit leadership sort of thing. It's like we are partners together.

Jamie Walsh [00:16:13]:
There are some things that I have done in the past that are going to work, that may not work here, but we're going to try them. There are some things that you've been doing that are working so far, but they are maybe not going to get us to that next level that we need to go. And so those are sort of two big things. Probably just getting over that hurdle. There was some risk appetites of, you know, change that you have to overcome. And I think that it's nothing new. Everybody's kind of had a little hesitancy to change. I don't know anybody that's like, yeah, let's just change everything tomorrow.

Jamie Walsh [00:16:53]:
But, you know, had to, you know, have a big bet, but also have some rationale behind why that big bet could in fact play very well there.

Brandy Starr [00:17:03]:
I mean, it's interesting you brought up, like, looking at getting that buy in from some of your top sales reps as a key first step, you know, reflecting on my own journey that, you know, the time that I had to overcome a similar challenge of not getting sales to want to change, to want to move forward, that was exactly what we did in that organization. We had a new approach, and we started with the top three salespeople. We got them to agree to pilot what we were looking to do, and it was really effective. And what ended up happening is, know, when they were doing their meetings and reflecting on deals and how they're moving and things like that, and other people heard that, oh, they were doing this new thing, it was almost like everybody else got offended that, you know, well, I'm not winning because I don't have this new thing. And so it went from marketing fighting an uphill battle to get sales to try something different to. To almost, you know, sales at marketing's door with pitchforks. Like, why didn't I get this? You're holding me back. And then it was like, oh, okay, you could have it too.

Brandy Starr [00:18:23]:
And so that is, you know, we didn't do it intentionally for that reason, but that, you know, ended up being the outcome.

Jamie Walsh [00:18:33]:
I would argue that you have to kind of be intentional to do that. Right. Is that when you force things upon everybody, you get such resistance and not malicious sabotage, but sometimes people drag their feet because they know that if it doesn't work out right away, that you can sort of turn the tides. So when you find those allies, right. And you can get them on board and I didn't have to look hard. There were some people out there that were just looking for our help and I was like, okay, let's do this and we'll, you know, give you some really good deal support on this particular deal or we will do some things to test this out or listen in. You know, I did a lot of ride alongs and instead of jumping in and meet, you know, sales meetings, I would text the sales engineer or the rep themselves and say, hey, I just heard this. Try saying this or this is something that might work.

Jamie Walsh [00:19:27]:
And sometimes they would do it and sometimes they wouldn't and you know, was just not necessarily jumping in and doing it for them, but giving them that support was, was very helpful. And it becomes contagious. Right. Like when that starts to work for one or two, like, like you said, they're fighting over each other to get that attention. You're like, okay, there was a reason why I didn't want to do this because I knew that if it worked for this person then it would work for other people. And, and versus showing everybody that they have to do it this way and majority of people, you know, poo, pooing it, whatever.

Brandy Starr [00:20:06]:
Yeah. And just in general when you're trying to, you know, test things, I mean, I think starting with a solid sample size of, you know, what is the, what gives us the best opportunity for this approach working and then even just being able to take that iterate, you know, for that's where we can streamline and optimize pulling in our buzzwords before you then roll it out to other people. That also tends to work better because it's easier to kind of work through some of the kinks of any approach with a smaller group. Have you seen the same?

Jamie Walsh [00:20:44]:
Yeah, Yeah. I mean you have to, you definitely have to pick the right people. Right. Because if you, you know, you, you pick a poor performer and it doesn't work out well. Well, was it the program or the process or was it the performer? Right? And so there's, when you, when you choose correctly, you're like, okay, this is either going to make a good performer bad or it's going to make a good performer even better. And I'll be okay with either of those outcomes. But the other one leaves you with so much doubt that you just, you know, it's kind of a waste of time.

Brandy Starr [00:21:21]:
Yeah. And so what was the overall business outcome. You, you created alignment, you got focus on the priorities. What was the measurable impact that this solution had on the business?

Jamie Walsh [00:21:35]:
Yeah, well, ultimately, you know, we, we achieved, you know, the, the target for the year. I came in around half of the year and I made a decision that we, I wasn't going to really enforce or make dramatic changes on day one, but there were some things that were being added to the fold, such as competitive enablement program. I had already built one from scratch. This one was actually built on top of technology that we, that we had purchased. And so that was a very quick win. There was a lot of people looking for battle cards for and competitive intel on a number of our competitors. We were in a landscape that had about, I would say, probably 50 to 60 competitors that we would, we would see at any given time and said, okay, that's good, but we're going to focus on the top five and really go deep on those five. And got that up and running within a quarter.

Jamie Walsh [00:22:34]:
And within that first quarter after it was launched, we, you know, we saw a dramatic change in that. I think there was one of the deals that we were working on was the largest deal in company history. Oh, wow. And we, we had a couple of different ways that we were going to approach competitive enablement. And one of them was what I called strategic deal support. This was obviously met the criteria for that. It was pretty large. It was in an industry that was in our ideal customer profile.

Jamie Walsh [00:23:16]:
I had a champion there. She was one of those top performing salespeople. But it was a really tough, you know, really tough deal. We found out late in the game that we were up against two really strong competitors. But we were able to leverage some of our external partners to help give us some insight from the outside in on what we did well and what we did wrong and just brought people together to roll up our sleeves and put together a really great presentation that made them forget about the other two competitors that we were up against.

Brandy Starr [00:23:55]:
That's awesome. That is definitely a big win. Um, and so one of the best parts of learning from others is understanding what really made the difference. So before we wrap up, let's make sure our listeners walk away with insights they can use right away. And so if you were talking to someone with the same challenge that you were before solving this, what's the first thing you'd tell them?

Jamie Walsh [00:24:23]:
Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing is having clarity on the objectives, right. You come in, identify what are the biggest four problems, three or four problems that you have to Tackle in a very short period of time, like 90 days, because I think that's attainable. And it's also something that people will notice really quickly about you having that identified and building a plan so that you can really hit the ground running and be successful in that, in that time period, I think is really critical. But the other thing is, is that efficiency really starts with that alignment. You know, meeting everybody, you know, giving them the high level overview of like what you're going to do and how you're going to operate is kind of key. They don't need to necessarily get down into the minutia. What they need to know is at the end of this, you know, part of the launch, we are going to be giving you this, this and this. And during the strategy development part, we are going to be involving you.

Jamie Walsh [00:25:27]:
And I like to use consent over consensus because it's difficult to get a lot of people, especially in a large organization, to all agree. And you kind of need to move fast and say, hey, we're going to leave ourselves room to iterate and I'm going to be monitoring the things as they progress in the execution and we're going to be able to refine things as we go. It doesn't have to be perfect right now, but we're not going to wait for that perfection. We make progress and not perfection.

Brandy Starr [00:25:59]:
I love that. Consent versus consensus. And so, you know, Jamie, I really appreciate you joining me and you know, every good session ends with a plan for progress. So I love that. And so where can our audience find you if they want to continue the conversation?

Jamie Walsh [00:26:19]:
Yeah, I focus a lot of my time on LinkedIn. In fact, just yesterday I'm going to get rid of X, Instagram and Facebook off my phone just to keep the distractions off my mind.

Brandy Starr [00:26:38]:
Yeah, I was gonna say I definitely have been reducing my overall social media usage as well. Well, and really still find a lot of value in LinkedIn. So much great information. So wherever you are listening or watching this podcast, make sure you check the show notes. We will link to Jamie's LinkedIn. Well, Jamie, thank you again for joining me.

Jamie Walsh [00:27:03]:
Absolutely. Brandy, it was a pleasure.

Brandy Starr [00:27:05]:
Awesome. And thanks everyone for joining us. I hope you have enjoyed my conversation with Jamie. I can't believe we're at the end. Until next time. Bye. Bye.