Siloed, competitive, potentially feuding. This was the traditional marketing/sales relationship. But lines are blurring, both on paper, and in practice. And when yocu look at it, it makes sense. Bringing people from a point of pre-contemplation to contemplation, to consideration and then decision–it's what both marketing and sales do. So, is this evolution creating space for sellers to grow into?

This week Luigi speaks to Robert Tadros, founder of Impressive Digital (a 2021 LinkedIn Top Australian Startup) about the increasing amalgamation of marketing and sales functions within companies. They define how cross-skilling and collaboration can help both camps perform better, and the next-steps.

Check out Impressive Digital at their website or on their podcast Growth Masters.

Connect with Robert on LinkedIn or Instagram.

Find Luigi on LinkedIn.

Is it time you started upskilling in marketing? Dip your toe in the water with our Social Selling course.

RingDNA is a recognized Gartner cool vendor that makes rev ops possible. Find them at ringDNA.com

Are you in marketing or sales? It's a fair question. It's a simple question. If you're selling, you would classify yourself as a sales professional. If you're in the marketing department, you classify yourself as marketing. You probably thinking, what the hell are you talking about luigi? What, what sort of question is that? But want you to think about something, right, the world of sales, the world of marketing, has changed and it is going to continue to change. The whole ecosystem, that whole funnel environment flywheel, whichever way you want to describe it, is changing. In order to grow your pipeline, in order to grow your revenue line, in order to grow sales, you have to become a better marketer and you have to become a better seller. To some extent, both roles are becoming one. Okay. Now you might be going, hang on, mate. I do not agree with you at all, but hear me out for a second.

You're a sales professional. Your role is to create opportunities. And bring people from their point of even pre-contemplation to that point of contemplation, to their point of consideration and then decision and ultimately help them achieve an outcome that they're looking to achieve that customer success piece that's fundamentally what our role is when we're trying to get customers to a point of decision, we want to help them achieve something better. That's why sales is a noble profession. But the way in which we bring those people into our funnel, like we're doing a lot of marketing activities now to bring those people into our funnel, gone to the days where you had it, you had a phone book and you did door knocking and you tried to, you know, create yourself opportunities.

We're now becoming, and we're writing emails. We've really thinking about the buyer persona, the goals and objectives, the challenges that they're experiencing and we're crafting unique messages. To engage with them across multiple different platforms. We're performing a marketing function, right? Self-generating pipeline. And marketing are doing the same.

Marketing are creating content to create awareness and yes, marketing there's so many other elements of marketing too. Right? You're talking about brand, you taught this so many things product here on the, the focus of this conversation today is around the marketing and the sales piece is around the roles, how they're becoming one.

And this week's guest runs an impressive agency. They one of Australia's leading digital marketing agencies. They're called Impressive. And we're interviewing the founder. And what I love about this conversation, we're going to talk about his story, how he built his company, how he's built his company to where it is today, where he's working with some of Australia's largest brands, and now he's entered the US market, but how his adopted a sales first mentality when it comes to growth.

And the opportunity that we have in front of us right now as sales professionals or marketers, it doesn't matter where you sit, is the more we can understand the left and right side of the funnel from that marketing stage to the sale stage, the more we can understand about those two stages, the better we're going to be in enabling customers to get through that, that marketing funnel.

And what's even more powerful. Is our ability to then go into that customer success base, knowing how our programs, how our products, how our tech, whatever it is we're selling, how that enables them to fix a problem.

Revenue operations is much more than words in a job title. It's a movement that is transforming sales, marketing, and customer success teams into high-performing revenue. RingDNA is a recognized Gartner cool vendor that makes rev ops possible by driving improved operational efficiency and revenue capture from sales, marketing, and customer success. Trusted by the top companies across the globe RingDNA offers a complete sales engagement conversational intelligence and revenue intelligence platform for Salesforce customers. Learn how we can transform your results at ringdna.com. That's ring dna dot com.

So in listening to this episode today, I want you to think about, you know, what is your role and how deep are you going on the left or the right side of the funnel. Are you completely going right on the sales and marketing side. I'm not worrying about success. I'm not worrying about the use cases and understanding how it impacts organizations to achieve a better outcome.

Because if the answer is, you know what, I only do sort of one part of it. I'm not worried about the other parts. You got a massive opportunity for growth and that opportunity for growth represents incredible pipeline opportunities.

I've always had a bit of a love for you know, technology and computers in general. So I thought I'll start dabbling around in this online world. So I started hacking together, this WordPress website, you know, I was, I was at uni still, I'm putting together this WordPress website and I've built a brand off the back of it.

I'm selling online supplements, right? Selling weight-loss supplements. So I was importing products from, from overseas, bringing them into Australia, white labeling them, and then selling them out to the to, to the open market. So I started getting into I kind of just fell into marketing, right, because I was like, well, how am I going to market this brand?

And this is like early, early days of Google where you could literally just like throw some keywords at a page and it would just rank it. So start optimizing the site and it would start to like rank for keywords and try to drive traffic, you know, with the payment gateway. The only one that we had at the top was PayPal, right? So you know, this business started to just grow and grow and grow and grow and just like, you know, subsequently I started to learn a lot more about. You know, consumer behavior and, you know, market segments and, you know, persona profiling and understanding, you know, what makes people tick through certain, you know, emotional copy and, you know, I kind of just fell into marketing.

Right. I was like, this is awesome. I'll start it. Like, I really just grew to love it. Right. So I did that for a few years and then I decided that you know, I needed to go out there in the real world and get some, some real experience. So I went out and got a sales gig. Right. And they'll get to why in a second, go to the sales gig, you know, old school telecommunications company, basically just in a massive call center with like old school dialers you know, a hundred calls would drop an hour and it was just you know, pick up the phone make call and, you know, you were pretty much on a timer. And that interestingly enough, taught me a lot right. At the time. It didn't, I didn't think that it did, but now reflecting back, it actually taught me so much, right. From professionalism to, you know even just holding a conversation with someone and staying in a particular path rather than going off on tangents, especially when you're on the phone, that could be quite, quite hard, right?

So I learned a lot from that. And then I was, it was at a very big corporate you know, it was 4,000 employees or so, and then I just found myself into different areas of, of the business. Right. And I jumped from sales to marketing, from sales to marketing. And at the time, you know, sales and marketing, where it was always looked at as almost like a separate function.

And it was like, sales are over here. And then the marketing team are over here. And I think over the last sort of decade what's happened in the experience of, I guess th at I've been, been exposed to is they've now really become one function. Well, they really need to start. They do really very very much support each other.

So you can say I fell into it. And I've always been I've always had it in me. You know, I think sales is one of those things you can absolutely learn. But for a lot of people that it is very natural, right.. Yeah. And it's, it's, you don't have to put as much effort into learning how to, you know, how to become a sales professional.

And I think we've spoken about this before, you know, you on our podcast that there was always these, like, yeah, this is negative connotations that come along with the title. Right. Or what do you do? I'm in sales. You're one of those guys, you know, like so I think true sales professionals that really understand the craft are very much marketers at heart.

Yeah, right. So yeah, man, I fell into it. And since then, you know, I've built a number of businesses, the most recent one, and the one that I'm currently building up is is Impressive, which is a a digital marketing agency or a performance agency. And again, you know, one of the, the major successes that we've had, and the reason why we were on such a trajectory is that most agencies typically don't have a growth function within the business. Right.

They're very good at what they do, but they don't necessarily put a lot of emphasis on, you know, generating good quality leads, you know, having a, an outreach approach to, to particular segments or a market that they can serve as or align with the capability. So that was something that really gave us a very strategic edge and it was my background was building sales teams and, you know, because that's just what I, what I had done over these.

So sales and marketing your company that together, you know, and next thing you know, you've got a very impressive agency. That's how I got here. Yeah.

There's an element of marketing that you're doing everyday life, but now we're responsible more than ever before to build personal brand. It wasn't something as a seller, we, or as a sales professional, when we first started building personal brand, you like, what do you mean? Like I've got my network, I've got my phone, you know, go door knocking.

Now we're asked to build personal brand, create content. You know, there's a whole range of things and functions that sellers are doing really top of the funnel to engage with their target audience. When did you realize that, you know, you were, and, and I'd love to know sort of. Why did you start it Impressive because you're obviously a seller, you're doing a few businesses.

What led you down the path of creating? Because it's a big agency now, right? You serve some of the biggest companies in Australia. You're selling into enterprise and, you know, B2B clients. When did you come up with the idea to say, Hey, I'm going to tackle a market that had some dominant players already.

And that is the digital world. Right? Prior to digital coming in it wasn't as competitive, right. You didn't have, you know, your LinkedIns, your Facebooks, your Instagram, and all these different platforms, which you can go and engage with prospects. Right. It was a very different approach. And it, and it was a very even playing field, if you like, for everybody else.

And then it was just a matter of, you know, who was better than the other one, right? We're now you've got such an open platform. Which is a, you know, I believe it's a global platform for anybody really, you know, like you could be selling to different countries from Australia and yes, absolutely. You could have done that in the past from, you know, using whatever technology was available, but you know, now it's just, it's a lot easier.

And it's very different okay. To, to, to historically how we've been able to have been able to sell. So you take that and then you go into, you know,going after pretty much one of the most competitive industries in the market right now, right. Is, is, is agencies. There's a number of reasons why I did it.

Number one you know, at the time when I, before, before I sort of started Impressive, I was working at an agency, a global agency, very well known brand. And I noticed that, you know, th th the, the methodology or the way that they went on about the it didn't have any entrepreneurial approach to it, but didn't have any entrepreneurial flair, right?

We with, we will force to think like marketers and that's it. We weren't, we weren't, we weren't able to think like business owners, you know, we were very blinkered in our approach. Everything was about what we could do. And that was very much just marketing. But you know, when you think about marketing, marketing is a cog in a very big engine, right, which is a business. And unless you understand how that engine functions and how that cog influences everything else within that, within that engine, you're isolated and you're siloed and if you're running one your own and running your own race and trying to operate that cog just separately, you will not contribute to anything else that's working within that engine and subsequently you won't be able to produce the performance. So that was the biggest thing that I, that I identified was a lot of agencies are very much think. They just think like marketers and just like just agencies. This is what we do. We're great at what we do, but that is it. The minute you start to challenge them a little bit or take them outside of that, you know, outside of that thinking they just, they get frazzled.

So, you know, we w w we built something that was very much around how to think like businesses you know, marketing is just a tool for us to solve a problem and a challenge that the businesses having. But on this, we understand how marketing, how the business actually operates and how we can influence that businesses' P and L we're just selling marketing, right. We're just a marketing agency.

So that was really the biggest eye-opener. And that came from me building my own business. To going well, you know, okay. But how do I get someone else to think the same as me? To get me the results that are required rather than me just going into a marketing agency who just want to pull together some colors and some branding and off you go, right.

Right. And you can apply this to any function at the business. Right. Then you've got the guys that are a bit more strategic. Right. But they understand what problem is like you go to the doctor, right. You go to the doctor and you sit down and the doctor goes, let's, let's diagnose what's going on here.

What's going on there. It's elimination process, right? I believe you have this. I'm going to send you to a specialist. If they can confirm what the problem is, then we'll, then we'll treat it. It's the same thing. Right? You can apply this thinking to anything that you do in life or anything that you do in business.

And I believe, you know, more specific to, to, to this conversation that we're having now. Yeah. As a sales professional, it's our job to identify what or diagnose the challenge or the problem that we're trying to solve. And then we have a plethora of tools over here and, you know, technology that can help us fix that problem or treat that, treat that challenge.

Right. This is very much how all of us think in the agency and how I very much think, you know, I've been thinking my entire life. It's like, if I can't figure out what the problem is, I'm just going to be misdiagnosing and just product pushing. Yeah. And that doesn't last very long. Right? You and I both know that right, it's a churnwheel. Right. You just, you just pushing product, whether it works or not, it doesn't matter. You know, there's, there's the next one, you know, what if you actually take the time to sit there and figure out what the problem is, address that problem and go, okay, what tool do I have to be able to solve it that problem you're going to get a much better outcome. And one of those just mentioned is like crafting that message or that content to then take that to market. So if the challenge is business a strong generate X amount of leads, but they're not able to get the volume. Well, that's the challenge that we need to solve.

So let's go out to market and figure out how big is the category? Have you used the target segments? What is it that makes the persona that we're trying to reach out to actually tick right? What is it that, what problem are they having in their role? That if we can solve that's our way into be able to solve the bigger problem. And from there, you start to craft a message, right? Figure out what makes them, you know, what's going to resonate with them.

You know, here's like value, value, value, value. You know, here's my time. Here's our resources. We don't even want you to pay for that. Cause that's us putting our money where our mouth is. That we are serious about this, and that was our way in, right? Until this day we still do that. You know, to business relationships, you've got to have skin in the game. Otherwise I'm just sending you a bill every month, still doing the job, send me a bill. You're paying me. And it's very transactional.

And, you know, I ha I had a session last week with one of my clients from Singapore and we had sellers from all over Asia and we brought one of their buyer personas on the chief procurement officer. It was a really interesting conversation because he spoke about, you know, that w we were trying to bring the buyer persona to life, and you're going to love this.

Cause he said, I don't, I don't, I don't purchase stuff. He goes, I buy an outcome. Right? You guys, if you call me about products to purchase, I'll send you to the purchasing department, to put your details in a spreadsheet and we'll call you if we need anything. Right. It was a really interesting dialogue that he had and he actually he went even deeper and spoke about the fact that he's got a, you know, he's there to mitigate risk and, and that, you know, if a seller, he doesn't get sellers that call him to actually talk about what's important to him and his outcome. But if they call you know, he'll take a meeting based on. And it's just interesting that a lot of sellers are kind of forgetting that they've got to create that value. And, and he went, he went on to talk about the fact that he was about to procure SAP Ariba for a procurement platform.

And he went to four vendors to provide you know a proposal to implement. And he nailed it back down to two. And out of the two, one was double the price of the other one. But he selected the more the more expensive one, because they had taken the time to learn about what was important to them. He mentioned to them that they a very reactive business and often with projects of this nature, they go off scope.

And so they needed somebody to support them when they go off scope. The other provider, I didn't focus on that, purely focused on price, and they didn't create any value in that initial conversation. So we went with the other provider, right. So there's a really interesting for me, it was kind of like validating everything that we're talking about today, why we need to create value, why we need to have skin in the game and build that relationship and go deeper.

But what is that? Unpack that, what does value actually mean? Right. And it's exactly what you've just spoken about. Like take the time to actually understand. Well, that person's role, you know, like I asked sometimes even ask that some of the marketing directors and CMOs that we speak to. For me to be successful, you need to earn your bonus.

So how do I get you to earn your bonus? What do I need to do so you earn your bonus because when you add your bonus, you win. Meaning that we win to. So, you know, and we sit there and we have a bit of a joke, a bit of a laugh about it, but it's like, you know, for you to earn your bonus, that means you've hit your KPIs.

So what are your KPIs? Because your KPIs now become my KPIs. Okay. It's like, if I can influence that, then I can build my value around how I can make you successful. Right versus just, Hey, you should buy this. You know. We've got these great products over here and services that we sell. We might be able to, you know, make change or, you know, make, you know, get to get the needle to move.

But the reality is I'm just pushing a service onto them versus understanding what they need to achieve and then aligning my services to their KPIs and getting them to where they need to go.

I need to understand what motivates you, what enables you, like what's your outcome? And whether you're sitting on the sales side or the marketing side, if we don't know what that outcome is, neither side can help them achieve that outcome. So therefore we're not creating a customer and I often say, you know, like Jeffrey Gitomer, one of my favorite authors used to say, you know, creating a customer is when they come back and buy again. Right. Otherwise you're just getting a sale.

So, so mate, tell me, when did you realize that you, you know, you had to, you had to have that marketing element to be a great seller and vice versa.

So you know, there wasn't a particular point in time where I kind of, you know, I can hand on heart say to you this is when I realized it. I think, as I said, it sort of came natural. And, and the reason for that is I, I was exposed to both departments very early on. Right. And I could see how the two impact each other, you know, it's like the chicken or the egg. Right.

It's like, you know, sales can't do their job if the brand doesn't market correctly and generate that awareness and that top of funnel opportunity. Right. And marketing, you can do all the marketing in the world, but if you haven't got a strong sales sales team, you're just marketing for the sake of marketing.

Yeah. So I think they're equally important and hence now we're seeing those two departments get very, very close to each other and understand, you know, how does sales influence marketing and how does marketing influence sales? And it's very important, right? Feedback is critical if your sales team or the growth team is not feeding customer information and feedback back to the marketing department, the marketing department is just marketing something that they're not, I mean, they get stuck in their old ways of doing things, right. They're not keeping up in adapting with what's happening in the marketplace. So you got to speak to the frontline who are speaking to your customers on a daily basis and gaining feedback from them.

And as long as the feedback is being passed to you back to back down the chain, you will know how to market and adapt accordingly. Yeah. And then you're feeding that back to the sales, to the sales division. So as I said, you know, w when I do a little bit of consulting in the space, and it's always, it's always around those two teams really need to be in sync with each other, right, they both learn from one another versus separating them and having them ultimately competing against each other, which has historically happened, right? The marketing team don't like sales, and sales don't like marketing.

You know, I do want to say, look, there's plenty of of content on the Impressive website and the way of resources.

So I did hang around lot. I hung around a lot of big marketers, right. Hung around a lot of like really you know, high end of town sales professionals that were, you know, that were closing million dollar deals, right, at the time. And I just surrounded myself with people that a) were better than me and 2) people that I can just absorb information from.

That's how I learned, you know, you say something to me once or show me something once that's it it's pretty much ingrained in the way that I'll do things. So that's how I learned. So it did look, it just depends on, you know, on the listeners on how they consume their content or how they learn. Some are very visual. Some are audial some listen to podcasts. For me, I just, I connect with people that I, that I could learn from and basically like extract information out of. So yeah, that's, that's just my advice.

And mate, if you had to go back and do it all over again, what's one thing you would do a hundred percent again, like what's one, you know, piece of learning that you've taken that, you know, that works each and every time that helps you build a successful business.

Right. So the one thing I've taken from every single venture that I've jumped into, every single business that I've gone into is just what ha what is the growth roadmap? What does that look like? Right. Irrespective of what it is that you're selling, right. Or the business has to offer as far as its capabilities. If you're not clear on that growth mindset on that growth roadmap, you're going to you get a plateau very quickly, right?

And you're going to spend a lot of time just sitting there innovating on the same product or service and refining that product or service, you know, til you believe it's, it's, it's a hundred percent, but guess what someone else out there has got an MVP that they've already launched with and they're miles ahead of you because they've got a growth mindset.

So, you know, the one thing for me that I'll take from every single business that I started, or, you know, get involved with is, is understanding that growth, right? How are we gonna, you know, what does success look like for us? And how are we going to get there?

And, and, and secondly, you know, have a, have a clear path of growth and make it happen. So I love that advice.

What's your marketing plan? What's your growth plan. We haven't gone there yet. So you've just spent a million, $2 million, in investors money on sitting there refining this product, but you don't even know how you're gonna take it to market. Yeah, well, there's a problem, right? So I'd rather you get something that's an MVP.

That's good enough to take out to market, and put your focus on how you're going to actually take it to market. And what does that growth team look like? Or how are you going to get the growth? Because the products you can iterate, you can, you can make changes to as you, as you go, rather than investing years and years and years and refining this product.

But no one actually bloody knows about it. You don't getting any feedback from the clients to tell you these are the changes that you need to make their product or service. So you're doing it based on assumptions.

So. Yeah, but, but Robert, I want to say that I know that we're, we've come to a point of you know, to the end of the podcast. So I'll make sure I put, we're gonna put show notes of the Impressive website, some of your own, your own podcast as well. But apart from your, your podcast and the Impressive site, where can people find and connect with you?

But if you just, you know, if you Google my name, you'll find my podcast. You'll find my website. You'll be able to find Impressive as well. But yeah, generally speaking, it's LinkedIn is where I'm most active.