How Can Content Bridge Marketing and Sales?

Ben  
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Bryce. Bryce, welcome to the show.

Bryce Kaspar  
Thanks, Ben. Appreciate you having me.

Ben  
I love it. I'm super excited for the subject today. I'm also really excited because this is a little bit different of an episode. Bryce is not your traditional marketer like we have on this podcast all the time. So Bryce, very much today, if you could explain your background, let us get to know you, let us get to know what you do, and then that'll lead us into the subject for the day.

Bryce Kaspar's Background

Bryce Kaspar  
Sure, yeah, I'll try to be brief. So I am not a marketing expert, so I'm the black sheep on the podcast at scenes, but I do have a long career as an entrepreneur. I've worked, you know, started or led numerous businesses. So I've always been around sales and marketing. Sales, I would say, is more of my wheelhouse. So started out my career graduating from the University of Texas and working in sales at Dell, like a lot of people.

did, then migrated into the startup world as an employee and then when I was at the young age of 25 started my first company and took a lot of punches, learned a lot of things and if you want to fast forward that all the way up to the beginning of 2022, I joined Growth Era which I'm the CEO of right now.

Bryce Kaspar  
and I had been actually a leadership coach for them for about a year and a half prior to joining the founder had worked for me in a previous company as an SDR. So here we are at Growth Era, exciting time, no pun intended.

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Sales

Ben  
I love it. I love it. That's awesome. So for today, I'm really excited about the conversation. I think it's fascinating for marketers to really listen to all of the different sides of the equation, especially when it comes to go -to -market content, aligning with the business. So I'm excited about the conversation. So today we're really going to talk about how do we bridge the gap between marketing and sales? How does content really fill that gap? How can it become a bridge?

How can we work closer together and things of that nature? So Bryce, at the very get go, you've seen from the entrepreneurship and the leadership side, you've seen kind of both ends of everything going on. How can content kind of help that handoff between marketing and sales? How does it really align those two different groups?

Unifying Marketing and Sales Messaging

Bryce Kaspar  
Yeah, and I think the lane that I probably cross through a lot with Growth Era in content, and by the way, just to back up, Growth Era is a sales enablement company. One of our primary service products is outbound sales development. So our mission is really the same as marketing, which is to turn someone who's curious into someone who's now an opportunity in the sales funnel.

And so when we think about content in our world, we're thinking how do we take people from raising curiosity to that first small commitment of being willing to go on that initial sales meeting.

And some of the lessons that we've learned and challenges really is how do we unify the marketing side's messaging with that narrow goal of getting that first meeting. So it's not in the branding area really.

There's certainly education, but in our world, what we've learned is we have to keep our world small because the intention span of the prospect is also small. They're moving on to the next thing very, very quickly. They're swiping through very quickly. So I think some of the best practices as we work with marketing teams and sales teams with our clients is how do we distill this messaging down to something that within a few seconds,

Ben  
Yep.

Bryce Kaspar  
you know, peaks curiosity to either solve a pain that would resonate quickly or to capitalize on a gain that is on that prospect's mind or should be that they can relate to.

Rebuilding Momentum Between Marketing and Sales

Ben  
I love that. I love that. So as you're finding this messaging and you're working through it, obviously we all dream that every time someone interacts with marketing and sales, they continue to progress down the pipeline. Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen. Sometimes people go stale. Sometimes things don't happen as you would hope they would. Like you said, they're busy. We've got jobs to do. People get caught up and they lose momentum.

How can marketing and sales align to kind of rebuild or reestablish that momentum in that process?

Creating Explicit Definitions of Success

Bryce Kaspar  
Well, this is going to sound a little bit operational and not creative, but it is. So the way I think about the storyline from marketing and into that, from that curiosity point, all the way to the point where an agreement is forged with, and that prospect becomes a customer.

is it definitely needs to have explicit definitions of success. Otherwise, it's easy to veer off. There was some interest, but we don't know why it went away. So one of the things we do is we create a definition of success at each stage of the process. And that helps us to understand if something stalls, why did it stall? So if we're talking about sales stages or even if you incorporate some stages maybe in the target account area, some sales stages,

success criteria, if we know what success looks like, then we can study why we're not moving. And once we've done that, we can say what action should we try to see if we can stimulate them to the next step. So I think of it almost like a manufacturing process, which is terribly uncreative and not fun, but...

you have these raw materials of interested prospects coming in and there's things that have to happen for them to progress to the next step in the process. And those things are repeatable, they're criteria that we want to meet. So if we can line up sales and marketing to share those, have clarity on that criteria.

be able to report on whether it's happening or not, then you get a real collaboration going. You don't have that silo effect where marketing's succeeding in their own KPIs on this side. Sales may be succeeding in their KPIs on one side, but there's this whole land of missed opportunity that could have moved into the sales funnel and had line aside to revenue.

Defining and Aligning Success Criteria

Ben  
I love that. And I love how you framed that. I love the analogy. I think it is creative, it is fun, and it is operational all at the same time, which I think is a good thing. But I love how you're focusing on it step by step. And I love how you define what success is, because if you don't know what success looks like, how you know if people are being successful or not, and you have that fall off. So as you're trying to bridge those gaps, you've created...

the definition of success that aligns marketing and sales because it's the same definitions. A lot of people get caught up on that. And once you find those, how, I guess, actually to take a step back, how do you find those levers for success? And then how do you fill the gaps when they don't hit success? Like what's the right way? I know every business operates differently, but how do you actually find the definition and alignment around those definitions?

Mapping Out the Milestones

Bryce Kaspar  
So that's a great question. And we take a pretty simple approach to it that usually helps us gain the right answers. And we create for each stage, there's three simple questions. What is the objective of this milestone? What?

Do we need the prospect? What actions does the prospect need to take for us to move to the next step? What actions do we need to take? And sometimes it's on us, sometimes it's on them, sometimes it's both. And the criteria to move to the next step is that next milestone of maybe it's taking that initial sales meeting or maybe it's things go dark after a honeymoon discovery meeting, but then they go dark.

and we can't get to a proposal. So we actually map that out. We memorialize that in writing where everyone can see what it is. And then it's easy to say, what would be the best way to do this? Maybe there's something that is a quick case study that focuses on the opportunity cost of inaction or something like that. And this can be applied to any type of business. It's really, it's just a...

a structure.

Consistent Alignment Through Regular Meetings

Ben  
I love it. I love it. So you figured out this system. You create moments of success. You're aligned around the definitions. So now you know if there's fall off and then you align marketing and sales, building content, sharing content, the whole machine factory analogy of what needs to be put in one place. What else can marketing and sales do to consistently be aligned and

really come together? What other opportunities do you know if you've taken those steps what else can you do to make sure that you're on the same page?

Bryce Kaspar  
Well, again, another one that's simple, but I believe very strongly in a regular cadence of a meeting, not letting communication drift apart and not just a meeting, but an organized meeting where you essentially come in and say, here's our weekly scoreboard. These are the things that move the dial. Let's talk first about what has happened, how we're trending.

And then let's move to a discussion section. And this is kind of classic traction, if you're familiar with that framework of identify, discuss, and solve. And we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We have to keep that cadence going. And I think the more you do it, the more the communication is effective. And the more you start to kind of drift from, you know,

We've seen a lot, like there's talent on both sides, but they're kind of quarreling cousins, you know? And then you start to unify into more of a marriage where we're all looking at the same things with the same goals, and there's real problem solving happening, and we're making fine tuning adjustments usually instead of pivoting or ripping tears. So that's, it's not a complex solution, but it's more of a discipline to stick with it.

Identifying and Addressing Gaps in the Process

Ben  
Well, and you've done a lot of background, right? Like you've gotten to the point where you align on definitions, you align on objectives. You've done a lot of the glade work. So these kinds of meetings can become productive and things like that. So when you're, when you're in that meeting and you're identifying opportunities for improvement, how do marketing and sales really work together to accomplish that? What are some of the recommendations there, especially as it pertains to.

you know, all of the marketing leaders listening in, how can they then say, okay, there's a gap, you know, people are hitting this success point, but they're not getting here. How can they collaborate with the sales team and what does the sales team wanna see from the marketing team to start to accomplish and really improve some of these difficult points?

Handling Objections and Improving Content

Bryce Kaspar  
Well, I think one of the most important things that is just solid gold for marketing is to hear the actual objections or the points where sales loses traction or loses interest. So if you keep an objection handling document, a living document there, then we can also understand.

Why did they stop? Well, maybe we're putting a case study in here that's too long and we're not seeing that folks are opening this. Or maybe they've read the one pager and they say, I still don't know what you guys do. Or they have an objection that says, you're just like so -and -so and no, we're not. So I think studying the way the content is responded to that's coming from marketing, sales to understand,

what's getting the greatest lift on the marketing side so they can utilize it more in the sales process and maybe fine tune the sales assets for what's working best to create the curiosity in the first place is one thing. And the other is to take that full circle and come back and say, when we get to here, this is getting too complex for them or we're losing them. And I see it as really the same storyline. And so we need to find out what's working best and align that.

I also think that just from the marketing side, and I know this is the case in many organizations, but not all is really having a clear line of sight real time to how things are moving down the sales funnel. I know you have your sales leadership, but staying connected with that so that we can look at everything from the beginning to the end. And again, it's what's lighting up red, what's lighting up green from the baseline of what we say success is, whether it's a connection rate,

Bryce Kaspar  
whether it's a intent, whatever it is, let's understand what that is. And then we really have a control panel to look at instead of being in the land of maybes where we're just, I think, I wonder, because that's really hard to, it's hard to make concrete improvements that way.

Ben  
Yeah, if you're changing behavior based off an assumption that you can't track, it's hard to know if you fixed that said problem, because you can never track it in the first place. And there's a lot of value there. So one final question. Again, these podcasts go so quick and it's fast and rapid fire. But if I'm on the marketing team,

Bryce Kaspar  
Right, yep.

Ben  
And I know I need to involve sales more in the content creation side of things to avoid potentially some of these issues that could come up. What's the best way to really engage sales and have them contribute to the content and really help them be a part of the creative process?

Engaging Sales in Content Creation

Bryce Kaspar  
Yeah, that's a great question. And there's a few ways we do it. And one is, and you can't do this at scale is listen to some initial sales meetings, listen to some down funnel sales meetings. I mean, with the AI tools now you can pick off points, you know, pretty efficiently where someone's lost or there was not much interaction on the prospect side. And I think the other thing is to keep a top list in sales of these are the things, these are the points where the prospect says,

I like that, that's different, that resonates with me. And these are the points where they say, I lost you. And they're asking questions that tell you that you've lost them. And that's just a matter of if you do that as a practice.

Ben  
Hmm.

Bryce Kaspar  
you begin to see themes develop and if something is shifting a different direction, again, it's not a big computation. It's just what did we hear this week? So that that communication coming back of things that are working best, things that aren't working at all and and being able to have that flowing back over because then on the marketing side you can say, why don't we adjust this a little bit? Why don't we word that a little differently? Maybe I even heard the salesperson say something in a way that would work really well in the way we're

prospecting out to people who don't know us yet.

Ben  
I love that, I love that. And I think it's just another opportunity, constantly communicate like you said with your sales team. Also constantly communicate with your customers. You know, obviously as you engage with them, there's wording, there's terminology, there's pain points. And as you see those themes, you can build around those themes. And I think that provides a lot of value. Yeah, exactly. 100%. I love that.

Bryce Kaspar  
These are the people where we know it resonated. You know, the customers we won, yep.

Ben  
Yeah, why not go to the source? You know, like there's a lot of good people willing to answer. I love it. I love it. Well, Bryce, again, thank you so much for all your information, insights and everything you shared today. Have loved the conversation, Bryce, but if anyone connects wants to connect with you and reach out and continue the conversation, how can they find you? Where can they go?

Connecting with Bryce Kaspar

Bryce Kaspar  
So they can find us at growthera .com on the web, also growthera on LinkedIn. And we're happy to, you know, we love connecting with marketing folks. A lot of our referral partners are fractional CMOs and.

or existing clients who are on the marketing side. So happy to talk to anyone and greatly appreciate it. Ben, thanks for the opportunity to bring a sales -minded person in here.

Ben  
I love it. I love it. Thanks for stirring the pot a little bit and giving us a unique perspective. So thank you. Appreciate it. Have a good one.

Bryce Kaspar  
Thank you. You too.

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