Sham Sao, GM and Board Director of think-cell, and founded Growth 11, has grown organizations from $3M to $20M, from $15M to $75M, and from $300M to $450M! In his roles, making sure that the sales and marketing teams are aligned in order to reach their goals has been key.

So what are some of his tips in helping these team stay aligned?

Carole Mahoney:
Let's assume that at this point we've overcome some of these hurdles that we've talked about. How do we stay that? What works best in what you've seen?

Sham Sao:
Yeah. So I'll touch back to the thing we were talking about before. Someplace I've seen it work best is literally having bi-weekly meetings with sales and marketing. They don't have to be long, and I'm not a believer in wasting time in meetings, so they could be stand-ups, right? They could be two half an hour stand-ups.

Carole Mahoney:
Mm-hmm.

Sham Sao:
They could be meetings where you might end it in 10 minutes if you get everything done that you need to get done. And the value of having marketing run one and sales run one is so in one of them you can use that meeting to say, "Here's what marketing is planning for the next week, the next month, et cetera. Here's the reason why we're doing these things. Here's the programs." Ideally, you send them out before the meeting, right?

So you shoot that stuff out and say, "Here's what we're planning. Take a quick look." Make the meeting as efficient as possible. You come to it. Marketing talks a little bit more about it.

Sales can then push on and pressure test it, right? "Well, did you think about this? Do we want to do that?" And they can agree or disagree on certain things, right? They can make some refinements.

Carole Mahoney:
Yeah.

Sham Sao:
They can also present what they're seeing from leads coming in.

Another one that's I think really important is the follow-up cadence of leads, right? So if there's an expectation that leads are going to be called within 10 minutes, certain kinds of leads, and they're going to be followed up seven times, well then marketing should have that dashboard, right? And they can share it. And when we meet, you can say, "Hey guys, we had this 10 minute target and it's at two hours now." Right? Do we think that could be causing an issue? And then sales might say, "Well, there's too many things coming in. We can't call them in 10 minutes." Then we might say, "Okay, should we hone it down to just people that press this particular interest button that say they're really interested now?" Maybe those ones need to be called in 10 minutes, right? So it's that kind of interchange that needs to happen.

Carole Mahoney:
Yep, yeah.

Sham Sao:
And then with sales leading, it's also good because they can give feedback on what they're feeling from the leads. And this is one where I've asked the sales team to just collect some data, but also some anecdotes, right? And you got to have both. You can't just come and be like, "Yeah, we heard three or four people say this." Right? But it's got to be like, here's the data of what we're seeing, and then here's some more sort of color context around that.

Carole Mahoney:
Yeah. And I also love the idea too, having been in the marketing side, working with sales teams. One of the things that I would do a lot in those situations was get campaign ideas from them. So what are some of the things that are happening in your industry with your customers? And actually brainstorm what might be some marketing campaigns that work. And then sales feels like this isn't just being something that they're handing to us, they're actually collaborating with you on it. So there's a lot of great techniques like that.

Sham Sao:
Yeah.

Subscribe to learn more
Next week, join us to listen to Sham Sao discuss what the best way to iterate the process so that we’re staying focused on buyer-focused intel is. To make sure you're not missing any tips, make sure to subscribe to our blog or YouTube channel! To learn more from Sham, make sure to follow him on LinkedIn as well!