Marketing 911
Marketing 911, is the podcast where we tackle the toughest marketing challenges at the executive level.
Whether you're navigating complex strategies, trying to reach your target audience, or facing shifting market dynamics, we're here to provide you with actionable solutions.
From digital transformation to customer retention, if it's a marketing crisis, we're here to help you solve it—before it turns into a full-blown emergency.
Marketing 911
Nothing Matters Until a Sale is Made: Bridging the Gap Between Sales and Marketing
What happens when a finance professional finds himself thrust into sales leadership? John Mellon, former President of Blanco Technology, takes us on a fascinating journey through his unexpected career trajectory and the lessons learned along the way.
"You've got to figure out why customers give us their money," was the advice that transformed Mellon's career path from potential CFO to sales and marketing executive. This pivotal shift revealed a timeless truth he shares with our listeners: trust, not tactics, drives successful customer relationships. Through failures and successes, Mellon discovered that building trust through empathy and insight trumps even the most meticulously planned sales campaigns.
The conversation takes a candid turn as Mellon reveals the pitfalls of broken attribution models that plague many marketing organizations. "The attribution model of the organization that I took over was desperately broken and giving off all kinds of incorrect signals," he admits, highlighting the dangers of making investment decisions based on flawed data. This revelation serves as a warning for leaders to verify their measurement systems before making strategic decisions.
Perhaps most valuable is Mellon's perspective on the natural tension between sales and marketing teams. Rather than viewing this friction as problematic, he embraces it: "I love the tension that gets created between sales and marketing." This productive conflict, when properly managed, drives innovation and better outcomes for customers. And as we transition from "the age of search to the age of answers," understanding how to optimize for AI-driven platforms becomes critical for forward-thinking organizations.
Ready to transform your thinking about sales and marketing alignment? Listen now to gain insights from someone who's closed billions in business while navigating the evolving go-to-market landscape. Subscribe to Marketing 911 for more conversations with industry leaders who share practical wisdom from the frontlines of business.
hello everybody. This is brian backstrand, co-host of marketing 911. Richard, how are you?
Speaker 2:today I'm doing good. I'm richard bliss, the other co-host, and we are on opposite sides of the coast. I'm here in sunny well it's raining california, and you're in that wonderful, beautiful tropical place called boston, right. Actually, today, I think you're somewhere else, aren't you, brian? Where are you today?
Speaker 2:Well, boston, manhattan, yeah, I'm in Manhattan today, yeah, to somebody on the West Coast. That's just all one place. We've got a guest today that you have invited along, somebody that you and I both know. I'm really excited to kind of listen in on this conversation. Who do we have today?
Speaker 1:listen in on this conversation. Who do we have today? Yeah, we're lucky to have John Mellon from the city of Dallas, and John is a seasoned sales and marketing executive at both startups and large firms. He's a leader in the go-to-market and, most recently, president of Blanco Technology. So, john, thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 3:Hey guys, Thrilled to be here. It kind of feels like getting the band back together with you two and for your listening audience I would say delighted to be here on many fronts. But most notably, these are two individuals that I have worked with for a good amount of time. We've probably, among us, closed four, five, six billion dollars with the business together in the trailing 10 years, so it's really a pleasure to be here with you.
Speaker 1:Excellent. So anybody reading the news, anybody talking to folks in tech, Anybody reading the news, anybody talking to folks in tech go-to-market is changing in marketing, it's changing in sales and you've been on the forefront of that, John, for a long time at many different companies. How do you view go-to-market and what it takes today versus what you were doing at the last few companies?
Speaker 3:Is it any different?
Speaker 1:or have things really changed.
Speaker 3:Well, let me start by saying that I began my career in finance. I was recruited in undergrad to be a finance guy at a big tech company and I believed for a good period of my career that I was going to be CFO of a technology firm. About 10 years in, I was mentored into a sales role and the conversation kind of went like this John, you've been my planning manager for the last 12 months, why are you in this job? I'm like I just spent 12 months mortgaging body parts for you, sir. I thought I was doing a good job and he said you are. But listen, if you want a job like mine and I sense that you might you got to go figure out why customers give us their money.
Speaker 3:And so I was mentored from a planning manager role to sales rep in Cleveland, ohio, and it was a really, really watershed time of my career to get exposed to the things that John Patterson, the founder of my original employer, ncr, said nothing else matters in an organization until a sale is made. And so if you think that through, you think about the importance not only of customer engagement and interaction and lifetime value of customers, but it fuels everything else in the firm and I've just been really, really fortunate to have had the opportunity to represent, as you both have, the go-to-market part of a bunch of businesses. Now your question was have things changed? I would say that, foundationally, it's still true that nothing else matters until the sale is made, but the way in which we engage with, serve customers, figure out leverage in the business model and so forth, that has changed radically over time, and these are among the new challenges of not only being a life learner, but being a life learner while leading, you know, obviously sets up some really, really new challenges for all of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think I was going to interject here.
Speaker 2:So hang on, brian. I was going to interject. John, how in the world did you think that you lacked any personality to go into finance? That's what I want to know. Those people have no personality, well when I was in college.
Speaker 3:you know this is going to be so self-serving here. When I was in college, all of the hard classes were finance and accounting, and the people who couldn't hack those majors ended up being marketing majors.
Speaker 1:And I thought, hey, I'm going to hang with the smartest and the highest paid salaries.
Speaker 3:And it was just. It just goes to show how young people can be so diluted in their career and misguided.
Speaker 2:I did history because that was the easiest one that I could find, yeah, and now you all are like, oh, I wish I'd done history and and and. What you just told us is that when you did with the smart kids, they kicked you out and said go get sales. Pretty much.
Speaker 1:I had a brother who was in finance and another brother who was in sales and they used to say marketing, sales is where rubber meets the road and marketing is where it meets the sky.
Speaker 2:So I like that, so so, john from a go to market standpoint.
Speaker 1:One thing that's really changed the last five, ten years is your idea of nothing matters but the sale, and I think marketing has gone from what matters is engaging people to generating leads, to generating pipeline, to all that matters is generating revenue and marketing needs to own that whole. As someone who has run both sales and marketing, what kind of the challenges or opportunities that you saw in terms of those two organizations going at the customer base together?
Speaker 3:So what? I'll answer from just a human condition point of view and then we'll talk about what's a little bit more modern in terms of the things that we have to master. When I moved from finance into sales, I had this bloated view of the value of my finance background as being instrumental to separating customers from their money. I planned well, I structured my sales campaigns in a very, very specific way and I had all the answers all the time and believed that as long as I do those things, the sales will just kind of fall off the shelves, when in fact trust is the most important part of sales and we all know this today. But for a young person that moved from finance to sales, it was not evident, not, it was reinforced over and over, more often through failure than success. But over a period of time I realized that, you know, building trust through empathy and insight was going to be fundamental to bringing the value of my credibility to bear on a customer's decision-making. And we can talk a lot about first impressions and how those things go, because there's been a lot of research done on that. So I'll tell you that that move from really understanding why sales happen from a finance and consulting background is not that much different than the way in which I took charge of a complete go-to-market team sales and marketing and business development and channel and whatever else.
Speaker 3:I went into it with a sales mindset. I was coming from years and years of not only selling but leading sales organizations and then leading theaters of operation and getting better and better at measuring productivity and mastering the engagement process and so forth. And when I moved into marketing I frankly had a very weak veil on not only the power of a great marketing organization notwithstanding having had the experience of working with people like you, brian, where you know I learned so much from a sales point of view about the marketing function but at the end of the day I just I counted on others to deliver that for us, if you will. And then you're thrust into a go to market general management role where you own it all and I took a sales view and that was a mistake and I'll tell you why. I mean there are certain things that I should have known and there are some things that I couldn't have known and really the should have known stuff should drive a seasoned leader to a trust.
Speaker 3:But verify mindset OK. Now the couldn't have known stuff is really about constant learning and life leadership, that kind of stuff. But on the should have known things, I'll give you a couple of examples. I assumed that the attribution model was accurate and so it was giving me signals around our marketing investment that could guide me in reinvestment and do more of these things, less of those things, over a period of time. The attribution model of the organization that I took over, that when I first owned marketing, was desperately broken and it was given off all kinds of incorrect signals. But I assumed oh wait, a minute, this is an attribution model built by marketing professionals to serve the marketing function.
Speaker 2:John, just real quick, let our audience know. When you say attribution model, what is that? What are you talking about there?
Speaker 3:It's a model that captures feedback about marketing investment. So did this event drive that kind of outcome and that amount of demand? Or was it this ad campaign or this channel a partner? As a marketing leader, you have to decide how you're going to spread your marketing investment across many potential demand generation, brand enhancement kind of elements, and an attribution model is meant to capture the investment and capture the return so that you can attribute to the individual investments what's working and what might not be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think what Go ahead, Brian?
Speaker 2:Sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 1:I was going to say, and what I've always said to my team is the attribution is telling you what is happening, but you have to determine why it is. And a simple example is oh, this ad campaign drove $3 million in pipeline, let's reinvest. Well, if you look closely at the data and this is a simple example it was two different accounts that drove that $3 million out of thousands that came in as leads. So you have to understand why Did you find that, john, in terms of you really have to dig in to figure out how to fix the attribution model?
Speaker 3:The answer is absolutely, and the marketing function was was broken enough not only to only for the model itself to be inaccurate, but our team just was dealing with incorrect signals, and so they were answering the wrong question why? So? The downstream impact on an organization is pretty huge. So that's just one example. There's a long list of things that you should know. Even if you're coming at it from a sales point of view, you should know and you need to go and verify. And it could be how you tag web content. It could be a lack of discipline along the continuum between MQL and SQL. All of that stuff. You need to go through a situational assessment in the first 90 days to make sure you understand what you have.
Speaker 1:I got a question. Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:I'm going to ask a question between the two of you and this is a little bit delicate question, having been primarily on the marketing side over the years running marketing organizations. When you talk about this attribution, it would appear to me and I have glibly said this that a sales rep gives attribution for success to their efforts and if they fail to make quota or their number, they give attribution or the problem to an external. The market changed, the customer changed, marketing didn't do their job. And marketing's attribution is like well, we drove that sale and here's how we can prove it.
Speaker 2:And there seems to be a huge gulf between this concept of attribution. And I've always said the salesperson says, hey, if it was successful, I did it, if it failed, it was somebody else's problem, and I don't mean that they're pushing that off, but they're seeing the world through a very different filter. And marketing, being frustrated, is like look, we did all this work, we drove that sales and we're not getting credit. And there seems to be this big gap on this concept of attribution. Either one of you want to kind of address that? Am I? I mean, I am Go ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I'll go first, john, and then I'll turn it over to you. A hundred percent agree in one of the ways. There's two major ways Building a relationship with the sales leader from a marketing standpoint of trust, and wearing this together. We're not going to point fingers, I'm just trying to help you close business. And two shared goals right, it used to be all right. Marketing you own, engagement leads, pipeline sales you own, create the pipeline and move it to close. And I view it as we all own revenue. So we sales and marketing need shared. We're both going to have goals that impact our pay in some regards that relate to generating demand, generating pipeline and closing revenue. And when you have that agreement around those shared goals and you have trust, you can eliminate a lot of the finger pointing. John.
Speaker 3:Yeah, brian just described why he was so good at his job, because that is absolutely the partnership that he established with sales leaders in his past.
Speaker 3:I would say equally firmly that this condition absolutely exists, and I really don't care. I love the tension that gets created between sales and marketing and the different points of view. You can actually both be right and not get the right result, and so that's where the partnership comes in between sales and marketing. Now, in my role as president at Blanco, I own both, and so it was really a lot easier for me to manage this tension, but to also be a part of fueling it when it was necessary to drive change. You know, if you're a seller that is in command of direct customer feedback, that's pretty powerful stuff. So if the direct customer feedback says we're doing this for this reason and the attribution model says no, it's because marketing spent money this way, it's like, okay, well, you know, I'd rather go to the person writing the check you know for our business, as opposed to you know, some marketing model that may be accurate in aggregate but not necessarily accurate at a point in time with a specific customer.
Speaker 2:I like that one. Yeah, I like that one. So where are we going?
Speaker 3:We were talking about the should have known attribution models, web tagging, all that kind of stuff that you've got to go through a process of verifying, especially if you're, like me, bringing a sales point of view to the entire go-to-market challenge. But I think that there are some really, really interesting couldn't have known when you first take over a go-to-market team. And let me give you some recent examples of stuff that I couldn't have known when I started but needed to find out in order to be successful in these investments. So one is it sounds so simple, but you can have channel marketing dollars being driven with loyal, productive channel partners and wildly in conflict with the marketing investments that the channel partner themselves are making. I found us in direct conflict in our value proposition with another one of their partners that was doing sort of the same thing, but not maybe exactly the same thing, and it was just squelching out all kinds of differentiated value and I didn't know that they were partners with these other organizations and literally had to go in and say, all right, listen, here's how we're marketing ourselves in partnership with you. You know we hear this noise from another one of your partnerships. Let's just make sure that we're not stomping all over one another in the process of trying to build a business together, and it may be something as simple as no, that's not for this market. We're focused on enterprise. They're focused on SMB. No, it's not for this market, because they're really a federal solution for us and not a commercial solution for us.
Speaker 3:You can get to the answers, but this is really about very, very quickly.
Speaker 3:Even if you couldn't know it, you've got to go figure it out.
Speaker 3:And another this one hit me right in the face in the last six to nine months, and that is we were struggling with our search dollars and the Google ad work that we were doing and trying to figure out what the hell is going wrong.
Speaker 3:We're making these investments in optimizing search, but we're just not getting any of the value. And I would tell you that in one case, the web tagging was inaccurate, so we were invisible to the search engines, which was a real problem. Up until the point in time where you realize that we are moving from the age of search to the age of answers. And if you get caught today focused solely on optimizing search engines and not focusing on optimizing large language models that are powered by AI, you're missing the boat, and I will say, every CMO, every head of go-to marketing is in the process right now of waking up to find out that the couple million dollars you've spent trying to optimize content instead of answers is really going to be a wasteful continued investment. And I've got a long list of things that we've done wrong in this regard, but I think we're starting to get it right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Brian, all kinds Go ahead.
Speaker 2:We're out of time, but I think that's a topic that we need John to come back and we can have an in-depth discussion about marketing, sales and the AI model and how that works together, wouldn't you agree?
Speaker 1:I think that would be absolutely right. Yeah, that's a complete session. Yeah, that's a complete session, and from a. You know, we've already done an AI podcast with a CMO, but it would be terrific, john, to do one with you as someone again. That's run sales and marketing, because I think there's a lot of good stuff we could dive into. I like that idea.
Speaker 2:I like that. Well, hey, we're John, you're going to come back, you're going to join us again, and we appreciate that. It's always great to see your smiling and energetic face. For those who don't know, we're actually recording this on Zoom so we can see each other, and we decided not to do it because I got a port-a-potty.
Speaker 1:That could be good and bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I got a port-a-potty right outside my house here over my shoulder. Yeah, I saw that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, this platform is fantastic you guys.
Speaker 2:I'm humbled to be a part of it, especially given the caliber of the talent that you've brought on before me. Whatever I can do to help to continue to drive this dialogue and awareness among like-minded people in this industry. I'm the co-host, Richard Bliss, joined by Brian Baxter and our other co-host, and our guest has been John Mellon, who has shared with us some really insightful ideas of marketing, sales and how those come together, and we're going to have him back, so hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about AI. Thanks for everybody for listening. Take care. Take care.
