Intro 0:04

Welcome to the Best Kept Secret videocast and podcast from Centricity. If you're a B2B service professional, use our five step process to go from the grind of chasing every sale. to keeping your pipeline full with prospects knocking on your door to buy from you. We give you the freedom of time and a life outside of your business. Each episode features an executive from a B2B services company sharing their provocative perspective on an opportunity that many of their clients are missing out on. It's how we teach our clients to get executive decision makers to buy without being salesy or spammy. Here's our host, the co-founder and CEO of centricity, Jay Kingley.

Jay Kingley 0:43

I'm Jay Kingley, co-founder and CEO of Centricity. Welcome to another episode of our Best Kept Secret Podcast, where I'm happy to welcome Kyle Hamer Founder and CEO of a marketing group is a fractional CMO consultancy focused on serving small businesses, where his expertise is in eliminating the rivalry between sales and marketing teams. And Kyle is based in The Woodlands, Texas area, which for those of you if you're like me, visited Texas don't live there. That's in the Houston area, a really nice part of Houston and I might add. Kyle, welcome to the show.

Kyle Hamer 1:22

Hey, Jay, thanks for having me.

Jay Kingley 1:25

It's a real pleasure. You know, Carl, in my career, I have had, you might say the privilege of being sentenced to time in jail in the marketing jail working in marketing issues. And then I was paroled in a promptly re arrested and put on the sale side of the house. And so often, the marketing team, and the sales team, really, you might say, fought as the old expression goes by, like cats and dogs. I know you similar to me, Yvonne been on both sides of that house. But unlike me, you decided to actually do something about it. What is it that businesses, small businesses, lower mid market businesses are missing? When it comes to how sales and marketing need to play in the same sandbox?

Kyle Hamer 2:15

Oh, man, I think you know, I think the thing that that that's interesting for small businesses is so many small businesses are hyper dependent upon revenue, and getting to the sale, right, they focus all of their efforts in everything they do on bringing in revenue, closing the deal, bringing in the next, the next person or contract or selling the next product. If they forget that there's a part of the market that needs to be developed, it needs to be brought to attention that what you're what you have to bear. And so what, what ends up happening is there's giant chasm between founders and people who are good at closing deals and in getting revenue in the door. And then thinking about, well, where's my next opportunity going to come from? There's this thought of I need marketing, but I'm not sure what marketing does. And for somebody who's very action oriented, and results oriented, and I can see it right scores on the door. What most small businesses get wrong is they don't understand how the two played together well, and what that can mean for their organization.

Jay Kingley 3:19

I know this is a real frustration, if for no other reason. You've got all the people dynamics, which in and of itself, you know, makes a business owner want to pull his hair out? And then of course, you've got Why aren't my results as great as I think they should be? So given that you've identified this challenge, what is it that small business owners need to do? how they how should they be thinking about addressing this issue of bringing these two critical functions together?

Kyle Hamer 3:48

Well, I think, I think part of it starts with framing. And in when I say framing, there's a perspective that a lot of small business owners have that the marketing team can only bring brand, or awareness or, or future events and impact. And don't really understand that, perhaps, if you instrumented or set your marketing team up with different benchmarks or focus that they might actually have a bigger influence in the pipeline and revenue closing near term. And so when I what I tend to see is I tend to see a lot of organizations where the sales leader or this the sales team, the marketing leader, the CEO and founder, they're listening to be right versus listening to be successful. And they've created an environment where sales is driven by revenue and marketing is driven by contact form conversions. And we have the age old debate of you know, here's where's my leads, and sales will turn around and say give it the lead you gave me were terrible. I've never calling them and there's this bickering match that happens and CEOs and CEOs and the rest of the business just put their head in their hands and go I wish these two would get along. Mom, dad can't You can't you make them play nicely together in the sandbox? Because we're getting dirty and this is gross.

Jay Kingley 5:08

Right, I think I think there's another big issue that I want to get your, your take on, which is, it's only natural when you're in an organization, be it whether you're in sales, marketing or in need, you got the grandstand or the box seats, I should say, as the CEO, COO, CFO watching this huge fight, is we forget about our customers and our prospects in our target market. And there's a lot of lip service on customer experience, right. And when we are the customer, we don't care how the company that we want to do business with is organized, we don't care what their issues are, we want to make it all about us. Because we're the customer, we want to have this unified integrated experience, you know, your thoughts on when they're not on the same page, the impact that has on the customer experience?

Kyle Hamer 6:06

Well, you've been in a room with two people that are feuding and you can just sense the energy regardless if they're in sales or marketing, right, whether it was mom and dad or grandpa and somebody or, or that family reunion where the uncle and the second cousins, third wife twice removed, they couldn't get along, and you just felt the negative energy. If you're in a business and you have the box seats, and you're not looking at the world, from your customer, a prospects eyes, you're not seeing that you may feel the negative energy but not as much as your customer not as much as your prospect. The customer and prospect when they engage with you, there's something that they want to learn, there's something that they need, there's a place that they need to go. And any sort of energy that you put in, in place or, or friction that you put in place will prevent them from having the best experience, right, there's the each moment whether it's a handoff between a marketing contact form that's been converted to a BDR, that's picking up the phone to call. Or if it's a content piece that's being shipped out via Facebook and through different distribution channels. Each moment is an opportunity for the organization to sell itself as a place that has the culture, the product and service or the experience that I the customer, I the prospect want to consume. When there's tension, you're not focused on the customer, you're focused on how wrong the other guy is across the aisle, and in the customer and prospects get lost in the shuffle.

Jay Kingley 7:39

Right? It's the total opposite of that customer experience that you need to deliver if you want to have a thriving business. So how you make, I think, a pretty compelling case for the importance of switching this over. But let's make it a little bit more tangible. For a business that tackles this problem. Gets these guys if you will, smashes their heads together and says, Okay, get on the same page, work together as a team. What are the benefits that a business can expect from that?

Kyle Hamer 8:14

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Man. Well, there's the intangible benefit of everybody enjoying coming to work, right? And there's that additional productivity and kind of overflow of innovation, new ideas happen when I'm not worried about my job. I'm not worried about bickering with a colleague. I'm just coming in, in a natural space and hitting my rhythm and my creativity. There's this intangible pole of creativity that's fostered in teaming that happens, right? It's in a sports team, you'll see, you'll see players make ad lib plays, they'll do things that you wouldn't have expected because they have this trust and inherent comfort with their counterparts. Right. But the market feels that right? The market responds to that in ways that are quantifiable, you know, for their for a lot of organizations, they can expect to see 30 to 40% more of their pipeline close when coming in business because now it's easier to do business, we don't have friction, right? We can see our velocity improved, because now we're thinking about the customer and what is their pain point? And how can we quickly help them solve this and get through to where they're fixing it versus friction with one another. It makes me think about an organization that I was working with, and must have been two or three years ago, where the marketing team had a goal or the CEO would set the goal out of Okay, we want to sell x of this particular new product to our customer base. I think the number was 150 and at the end of the first year, they had sold 32. And the CEO was frustrated because it's like look, this isn't hard. Our customers need this particular product, our sales team is already talking to our customers what is going on? Well, marketing, wasn't listening to what the mandate was from the CEO marketing wasn't joined at the hip with what sales was doing. And marketing was focused on global brand. with just some simple changes in how marketing was doing their motion and how they were focused, led to pipeline going for I think there were 100 100 125 opportunities within the first six months net new, the organization closed an additional 70 of these sales into their customer group, because marketing said, Oh, wait, look, I've got a sales prevention motion in over here. If somebody wants to get more information, I'm making them fill out a form that has 18 fields. And sales on the other side was looking at it saying, well, this person came in, they filled out 18 fields, but none of this information is relevant to what's going on for this particular product. And so as we began to get those two to collaborate, and work together, the impact in not only the short term wins for the customer, but also for the organization's uplift, were undeniable when it came to board reports and CEOs perspective.

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Jay Kingley 11:17

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I just want to highlight them in the tangible benefits clearly are impressive. But you said something at the outset that I just want to put a little spotlight on, which is how much you enjoy coming to work. From time to time, we're in tight labor markets, and the current time, but there is always a tight labor market for highly skilled, talented people. And the last thing if you're the business owner, you want to do is create an environment which causes your talent to want to walk out the door. So that is massive dollars on your bottom line. So both in the I can quantify it. In the more intangible side, it adds up, I think, to a pretty attractive return from making this change, which call begs the question. So you're the business owner, I'm persuaded that I now need to do this, what are the steps that I need to take to make it happen?

Kyle Hamer 12:16

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You know, you would think that this is really difficult, you need to get a get out one of those big long couches and bring in a therapist and have them go around and everybody lay down and start talking about their feelings. But it's way more simple than that. If I'm a business owner, here's, here's really the steps to getting where you need to go. First and foremost, you have to define your sales process. Without definition of your sales process. Marketing doesn't know where they're shooting. The second thing you need to understand is and define is what is my marketing motion? What are the techniques that we're going to run as an example of how these two will play together? Jay, if you're an enterprise organization, providing services to large companies, and your sales team is focused, or your marketing team is focused on demand gen, Pay Per Click inbound strategies, those are all cool and great. But your CEO, your CEO, your director of it, somebody who's going to procure consulting services or support services, they're not going to go fill out a form to talk to a sales rep, that's just not what they do. They're not into the inbound motion. They, they, they need to be targeted. They need to be there need to be courted. And so marketing needs to run a technique called account based marketing, where you identify who the players are, what their pains are. And you work in tandem with your sales team of how do we actually work this account to help them understand the value and the pains that we can solve. So you really have to at the core have to understand your sales process and your marketing mode motion. From there, you got to understand where they intersect. Right. So which of this motion is a sales part? One to One, which of this motion is a marketing one to many? And and

Jay Kingley 14:01

Kyle let me jump in here.

Kyle Hamer 14:03

Yeah.

Jay Kingley 14:04

You mentioned ABM, account based marketing. I'm a big fan of that way of thinking even for smaller enterprises, it really causes you to organize around your target prospects, and act as a team, not multiple teams, one team get in the same sandbox. Let's all get focused on the same objective. So I'm really glad you brought that up and encouraged people to look into how to implement an account based marketing strategy.

Kyle Hamer 14:34

And I think, no, and look, I think this is one of the things where there's so much information out there and there's so many different ways to skin, the cat that, oh, let me try a little bit of everything. But the end of the day, right? The reason you go into the process of defining your sales process, and your marketing motion, and where they intersect is so that you can provide that epic experience for that customer, right. It starts to shift your focus from you and what you're doing. And how you're right into? How can we actually better serve our customers or prospects as they come through this piece? Which takes me to the fourth component that you need to understand, which is, what does the handoff look like between sales and marketing? Right? Where does that prospect move from being in an automated nurture email sequence into a custom hand delivered handwritten note that comes from the sales rep thanking them for coming to an event, you need to understand when and where those pieces happen, and what's important to your customer. Now, you create an insight so that you can you can make it repeatable, you've got to understand what those key actions and insights are, and tag them, right, whether that's in your CRM or someplace else, you've got to create that framework. And it ultimately, without communication, there's no clarity without clarity. There is no collusion. And when I say collusion, I mean moving towards the sale, right? Our our job here is to get people to come in the door and close you and you're the sales team, the marketing team and leadership needs to be meeting on a weekly basis, we need to be talking about what's working, what's not working, what we saw the nuance, so that as we expand out, that velocity picks up.

Jay Kingley 16:14

Just the thought cooperation maybe rather

Kyle Hamer 16:16

Fair, I'd like to I like that better. I was going for alliteration Jay and I got stuck in I was like, oh, collusion, note that and then more. I'm like, well, that probably has a negative but I love cooperation.

Jay Kingley 16:25

I think we know the difference. When you use collusion you're wearing orange when you do cooperation, it's green like Munson.

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Kyle Hamer 16:34

Let's, let's definitely not end up in orange jumpsuits, because that's what we kicked this off at. Right.

Get the ankle brace. It's silly. All right.

Jay Kingley 16:45

All right, we're gonna be right back in a moment to learn a bit about

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Jay Kingley 17:51

Welcome back. Let's find out a bit more about Kyle and Kyle's business. Kyle when you're working with your small business clients, what are the pain points beyond what you've talked about already? Which is this alignment of sales and marketing? But what are the pain points do you deal with in Why do your clients find it so hard to get there without your help?

Kyle Hamer 18:16

Oh, so the pain points, the pain points that we are that we typically work with our clients on really revolve around this, this whole revenue operations component in understanding what part of this is communications, what part of this is paid advertising, digital advertising, and what part of this is truly just a fundamental strategic miss with my marketing plan on my sales performance? And so from our, from our experience, and the way we work with our clients, we come in and we look at, okay, at a high level, what's the marketing plan? What are we trying to achieve? And who are we trying to achieve it with? And is that aligned with sales, right? Like that's the core of what we've been talking about here today. But for the there, right? A lot of organizations will override date and it's like, Alright, let's put together a press release strategy. Let's go write a blog. Let's go post a bunch of things on social media. But that may not be the right communication strategy for how you approach your market. And it may lead to you thinking, Okay, well, now we need to go spend a bunch of money on paid media, we need to go by E newsletters and banners and billboards and thinking that it's going to drive programming through my demand gen. Because of the organizations we work with, when you start with the right strategy, and you move into the right communication channels, then you understand how to use an effectively market advertise for getting the biggest bang for your buck.

Jay Kingley 19:41

Now Kyle one of the things that I always like to say to people is that when you talk about what you do, you sound the same as everybody else who does what you do and by definition that makes you average in who is looking to buy average one of the things as I've gotten to know you is you are not average my man. So perhaps you could share with our audience, what are the things the skills, the talent, ability, knowledge expertise that you have, that makes you great at what you do?

Kyle Hamer 20:14

Well, what makes me great as I'm a weird cocktail of these three things, sales, marketing, and data. But none of those things are focused on me, or you, those three things are focused on your customer. What makes me exceptional is I have the ability to suspend my personal reality or the situation I am in and look at how your customer or prospect is experiencing how you're going to market. I understand what that means as it relates to sales conversations from cold calls, picking up what, what are the types of things we need to do to get that gauge and that that initial conversation rolling, hey, marketing, if you did X, Y, and Z, this would set up our SDRs to make it easier to get a conversation, not a close, just get that conversation, once we get the conversation rolling, then we can deploy other tactics to bring them in. But having sat in that cold call chair, that gives me insight that a lot of marketing consultancies or marketing agencies don't have. Conversely, if you flip it on its head and you go the other way, there was a period of time in my life, when I owned a digital marketing agency, I did the SEO, the SEM that the blogging that the social media, all of the building the websites, and really understood the mechanics of digital marketing and what's working and what's not working. And when you when you look at those, the diversity of that, and the expertise that it requires to actually run an agency, a small agency, right, where it's, it's, it's a bit more than, hey, I hired a bunch of really great specialists and just pointed where to do it was we dug in and understood how to do these things. When you mix those two together, it makes you ask certain questions of the data. It makes you look for intent, and understanding of how your prospect is behaving, which creates exceptional results. Because it's not about what we do. It's about how we create that experience for them coming in.

Jay Kingley 22:09

Fabulous, certainly an uncommon grouping of three key characteristics or spectrum. And my last question for you, I encourage everyone to go on LinkedIn and connect with Collin when you do so you will see how your resume. But what it doesn't ever tell you is why you've done what you've done. So what are those couple things maybe in the personal side, or on the professional side? That you would say, Ah, this explains why I'm sitting here today, running the Kyle Hamer Marketing Agency.

Kyle Hamer 22:42

While it's we're never we're never bigger than one or two moments, but we are the sum total of events that led us up to this point, right. And I think for for me, there's probably a few defining moments. as a sales guy turned marketer, somebody who did not finish college, and was doing door to door sales, right knocking on doors in rural Iowa I was I was traveling a lot. And it wasn't getting to spend time with my young family. And in that forced me to ask questions of well, why am I doing this? Isn't there a better way? Right? I was always thinking for marketing to can you make it easier for me? Like why does this have to be so difficult to shouldn't be difficult, it just should be easy. And in 2007, I found myself in an inside sales position, where marketing was giving me general brand and high level Product Overview stuff, but I was calling into a market they hadn't sold into before. And I had to be the translator. And I had to cold call. And so I purchased the book and had a mentor who purchased a series of tapes for me, the series was called How to Monopolize Your Market. And that was the first step in going from being just a sales guy to understanding or not understanding, being on a journey for quest of understanding how marketing works, how customers buy, how things are sold. And for me, the moment that that put me where I'm at today was is I built a seven touch campaign off of the backside of that book in audio series. That led to about $2 million in closed one business in the first year, in our first full year in this in this particular role. And that's where I went, oh man, if you do sales, right, and you do marketing, right, and they're the same hand in glove, like you know what you're doing and you're coordinating it, it's electric. Now, how do we do this at scale. And so those that that that moment in 2007, which was you know, a correlation of what was going on my life and wanting to spend more time at home and then being in an area where I had to go help a company sell something that they'd never sold before, led me to, as some would call the dark side today.

Jay Kingley 24:58

Kyle you've given us tremendous insight today, I'm sure we've got a lot of listeners, that would be quite a year to continue the conversation with you how best they get in touch with you.

Kyle Hamer 25:12

Well, as you said, Jay, go out to my LinkedIn profile, shoot me, shoot me a message on LinkedIn, it's LinkedIn forward slash kylehammer, all one word k y l e h a m e r or you can shoot me an email at k h a m e r at hammer marketing group dot com those are the two easiest way to get ahold of me. And I'll respond to usually around my computer. And if it takes longer than 48 hours for me to get a response to you, then something happened or I'm on vacation.

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Jay Kingley 25:44

Excellent. We'll put all that in the show notes make it easy for people now call before we say goodbye. I'm going to spring this on you. I know this isn't necessarily fair to but I don't really care. Because my first love is my audience, right? I like a guest like you to be kind and be generous. give a gift to the people that are listening. So I want to put you on the spot. What can you offer our audience in return for them listening and learning from you?

Kyle Hamer 26:17

You know, based on the fact that we've been chatting about sales and marketing today, I think probably the most value that I can give away is a sales and marketing audit and a two hour consultation. I have a worksheet. That is a questionnaire for your sales team, a questionnaire for your marketing team. And then we sit down and we walk through it that helps you get that baseline of those steps of what you need to do. And I would be happy to extend that to your audience and pay it forward.

Jay Kingley 26:48

Oh, that's awesome. All right, guys, I want you to shoot Kyle, either through LinkedIn or through his email address. Take him up on that generous gifts. Tell him that you heard it right here on the Best Kept Secret podcast. And with that, Kyle, I thank you for sharing your wisdom, your expertise. And as is so often the case, mostly, if you took off that very nice shirt you're wearing and turned around, we probably see all the scars on your back that represent your learning. Don't get scars on your back. Reach out to Kyle take advantage of his with that guys. Let's keep crushing it in the marketplace every minute of every day until later. Thanks.

Kyle Hamer 27:29

Thanks for having me, Jay