Reinforce Benefits and Revenue Generation at Every Step

Alex Shootman joins Walter Rogers and Kevin Price on The Price of Business to cover the importance of looking at sales and marketing as a single revenue engine

[Kevin Price]:  Welcome back to the “Price of Business.”  I am your host Kevin Price.  Talking to you about you and your business.  I’ve been getting some great comments at the fan page over there at Facebook.com about the price of business show.  Next segment, I’m going to be sharing some of comments, some of the thoughts, some of the ideas from that fan page.  So, if you’re a Price of Business fan make sure you check that out coming up in the next segment.  But in this segment we’re going to have a very important discussion with our regular weekly contributor, Mr. Walter Rogers on a very important subject to every single business out there which is customer relation management.  Walter you’re going to introduce us to a guest as well.  Welcome to the program.

[Walter Rogers]:  Yeah, thanks for having me back Kevin.  Really appreciate it. 

[KP]:  You bet. 

[WR]:  I’ve got Alex Shootman with me. Alex and I have actually know each other almost twenty years now, which just made me realize today, how young I actually am.

[KP]:  There you go.

[WR]:  Alex is the executive vice president for a very successful software company called Eloqua and he’s going to have some terrific insights for us today. 

[KP]:  That’s an interesting name too.  Eloqua.  Eloqua.  What does it mean?

[Alex Shootman]:  Eloqua is just the name we picked for our company which is a company that’s a category deciding marketing automation platform that proves return on investment, proves the value of marketing and drives revenue by improving marketing effectiveness Kevin.

[KP]:  Is it kind of a spin or a play on “Eloquent?”

[AS]:  Yes it was.  I think, as many early stage companies, we probably had a party late one night and couldn’t pronounce the name that we really wanted, so we ran with Eloqua.

[KP]:  Actually, it is the result of several cases of beer.  [laughs]  I know what we could call it!  Yeah, huge list and it was the only word you could actually say and not get in legal trouble.  No, no, no.  Anyway, glad to have you on.  You guys really have a huge footprint in your industry.  Articulate what you do in a manner that would be helpful for a general business understanding. 

[AS]:  Sure Kevin.  Thanks a lot.  What we do is we provide powerful lead generation and nurturing and conversion tools to do one thing and that’s to align marketing and sales and that’s where Walter and I get to know each other.  Well you know, marketing is…If you look at it basically, marketing is from Venus and sales is from Mars. 

[KP]:  Yes, we’ve talked about that several times on the show. 

[AS]:  And a lot of times they just don’t speak the same language.  Marketing will use words like campaign and leads and response rates and projections and sales will use words like opportunities and sales stages and account plans and close plans and forecast and commitment.  Really what’s necessary in these organizations is these two groups need to be one team.  And the Lingua Franka if you will the front end of a corporation has to be the revenue pipeline.  The culture has to be making the number.  So what we do is we come along side the sales organization, an investment that they’re making in customer relationship management, and we bring a lot of fuel to the CRM investment and enable a CEO to glue together his or her marketing and sales engines.

[KP]:  Got it.  Got it.  Got it.  Very important topic and I tell you right now we’ve had this discussion before.  I mean it’s kind of funny.  There’s a certain arrogance in the perception of the sales people when it comes to marketing because the marketing people are “aloof,” they’re actually above the fray.  They get to convey information, in the eyes of the sales people, that they don’t really know anything about.  And there’s a little bit on the marketing side towards the sales people that yeah, all they can bring is anecdotal information of what they know customer to customer, but they really don’t understand the larger mackerel that the marketing people understand.  The reality is that they desperately need one another. 

[AS]:  And I tell you, a lot of it lands on the desk of the CEO.  I spend a lot of time with CEOs and frankly hiring sales and marketing executives can be frustrating to them.  You know, I’m a sales executive.  We’re good at selling.  So they’ll like us immediately and want to hire us and then they say I want more revenue.  We say we want more people.  When they talk to the marketing professional it might be hey, let me show you the cool new color on the website.  Frankly, I lay a lot of this at the feet of the CEO.  In a typical b2b business, they’re spending 43% of revenue on sales and marketing together.  They really don’t have the instrumentation down says, “What am I getting for the money that I’m spending?”  Those folks need to ask the right question.  They need to ask what’s the return of my sales force?  What’s the return on my marketing investments?  When they start asking the right questions they’ll get the right kind of executives in the organization that are willing to step up and make commitments to the business.

[KP]:  Yeah, Walter Rogers brought you to our attention.  Walter Rogers with Baker Communications and a weekly contributor on the program, plus you provide phenomenal information every week, virtually every week in our column at Price of Business and Houstonbusinessdaily.com.  Walter, what was it that resonated about our guest today that made you want to bring him in?

[WR]:  Well, a lot of things actually.  We spend the last 11 weeks talking about 11 failure points around CRM implementation.  The CRM, the customer relationship management system, that any one company uses, really is the glue that binds sales and marketing together.  At least it should be the glue that binds sales and marketing together.  Often times it isn’t.  The very first topic that we covered was around executive alignment and the importance of getting executive sponsorship before launching into any CRM initiative.  The reason Alex is a fantastic guest for us to recap those 11 shows today is that Alex has run multibillion dollar sales organizations.  He’s fought the battles.  He’s earned the scarred tissue, as I call it, and can give direct perspective around this disconnect between sales and marketing and how if you focus on the only thing that does matter which is revenue generation and you figure out a way to have your CRM be that binding glue between those organizations, you can actually get substantially better results than if you continue to operate separately.  He’s got a perspective both from an implementer of these problems because he’s had to deal with the challenges of these sales and marketing organizations and now of course he runs a sales team in a company that actually helps solve the problem.  So he can bring a perspective from two sides.  He’s the cherry on the cake for these 12 programs that we’ve been running. 

[KP]:  Very, very interesting.  Very important information.  Real quickly Alex, tell us a little bit about how people can reach you and your company, a little more about it. 

[AS]:  We are at www.eloqua.com.  We power some of the leading brands.  If you look in the technology space today we probably have 50% market share and you look at companies that have been highly successful, they’ve implemented CRM on our platform and it’s not so much that they just implemented those platforms.  Kevin, there’s really a philosophy.  It’s a philosophy that Walter said which is the heartbeat of this company is the revenue engine.  That revenue engine starts with a customer raising their hand and ends with us closing business and getting a check.  What we know is that relevance equals conversion equals revenue.  All along that path we have to be incredibly relevant to clients which improves the conversion rate which drives revenue.  It’s truly what Walter said.  It’s one revenue engine.  Glue the marketing and sales together.  Measure everything that you do.  Squeeze out the stuff that doesn’t work.  Replicate the stuff that does work.  Build it all on an infrastructure that really cares about the pipeline. 

[KP]:  Very, very important information.  Very good stuff.  I encourage people to get more information about that.  Also, how do people get more information of Baker Communications Walter?Bakercommunications.com which is an incredible platform when it comes to huge amounts of content and information.  What’s your phone number as well? 

[WR]:  713-627-7700.  So, 713-627-7700. 

[KP]:  Yeah, give that number one more time.

[WR]:  713-627-7700 Kevin.

KP Very good.  Also, you can check him out at Bakercommunications.com.  I challenge you to go over there to Houstonbusinessdaily.com and you will be impressed by the huge amounts of content that Walter has written.  I got the sense and I think that you’ve alluded to this before in conversations before that you’re writing a book. 

[WR]:  Yeah, we are building up towards a book.  Absolutely.  These first 12 sessions are all around CRM adoption and the importance of really focusing on revenue as a lever for change inside of any organization.  To bring sales and marketing together as one unit because you need to fix that interlock before you fix anything else.  There will be a book coming out on that and of course the next 12 sessions we’re going to be covering are all around sales management which, Alex we’d love to have you back as a guest on that because I know that that’s a concept that very near and dear to your heart as well. 

[KP]:  Awesome.  Walter Rogers, Baker Communications  and Alex Shootman and he is with Eloqua.  Thank you very much gentlemen.  Great job. 

[WR]:  Thanks, goodbye.

[KP]:  You bet.  Alright, I do want to mention, coming up in the next segment.  First of all, I want to mention great information, great content that you can only get at Houstonbusinessdaily.com and while you’re there you really need to sign up for the newsletter because there’s…It tells you great information about excellent people, excellent news, excellent information that keeps you informed and examples include a great article just done by Walter Rogers:  “Cover All Bases and Turn Your CRM Into a Revenue Engine.” …I am Kevin Price.  This is CNN650.