The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 13, Part 1 - Aligning Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success with Teresa Allan
Fri, 31 Jan 2025
In this part 1 of 2 with Teresa Allan, we explore the necessity of integrating marketing, sales and customer success functions to enhance your customer’s experiences and drive growth. Teresa is the Managing Partner at Magnus Consulting and she highlights the shared objectives across these potential siloes and discusses the barriers caused by misaligned goals and misunderstood roles. Teresa shares the importance of collaborative strategies, leadership alignment, and a holistic approach to business metrics to build a unified growth engine.
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with your hosts, me, Matt Best and Jonny Adams. In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights from our combined 30 plus years experience and hearing from other industry leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business.
We'll cover all aspects of leadership, sales, account development and customer success, alongside other critical elements required to build an effective growth engine for your business. This podcast is aimed at leaders from exec all the way down to line managers. Hello, and welcome to the Growth Workshop podcast with your hosts, Matt Best and Johnny Adams. Hello.
We're delighted to be joined by Teresa Allen today, the founder of Magnus Consulting, who are a marketing effectiveness specialist consultancy. And Teresa, we've been working together now between Magnus and SBR Consulting on a number of different projects. So it's fantastic to have you joining us on the podcast today.
Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to come and talk to us about how we can align marketing sales and customer success together. And it's interesting, isn't it? We've got probably the first time that professionals in marketing sales and customer success have ever been in the same room together.
Good as book of records. Good as book of records. Should we get the boxing gloves and see what occurs or are we going to be all right?
No, it's your fault. No, it's your fault. No, it's my fault. Okay. All right. So as is customary on the Growth Workshop podcast, we like to kind of kick things off by just asking what's been interesting in your week. So tell us what's been interesting in your world this week.
This week, I'm embarking on a seven-week detox. I've signed up for a curated seven-week course that is not only about giving up all the fun things in life like alcohol and sugar and gluten and dairy and all of those things, but also transformational breathwork every day, ice baths every day, and a community to hold me to account. So, yeah, I'm enjoying it so far. Ask me in a few weeks.
Explain to the listeners and just to Matt and I, like, what's the thing that you felt changed so far? Is it the fact that you're sort of weaning off, not to say the partying and the drinking, that's unfair. But do you feel like, you know, like when you eat a lot of sugar, which we naturally do in our diet, do you feel like that's sort of starting to decline?
Oh, I mean, totally. You know, the usual headaches have kicked in, which is to be expected. I've been going to bed at nine o'clock just so I can avoid eating. Yeah.
Has sleep got better, though?
Sleep has got better because the transformational Beth has been transformational. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's like without going into those details, but it's a guided kind of 20 minute piece where you have to then keep holding your breath after every 40 deep breaths. And by the end, you have to hold it for two minutes and 30 seconds longer.
So when they first said this, I thought there's no way because you do this or you do the how many lengths can you swim into the swimming pool? We come up in that panic feeling and I was like, oh, no, I hate that feeling. I can usually do about 30 seconds. But through the whole process, by the end, you're so relaxed and your heartbeat is really slow.
It's slightly like you're floating around the room. It's amazing.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
That sounds so cool. I've probably been doing quite the opposite in this week, Johnny. I've just come back from a trip away with some pals. We had lots of croissants and dairy in the morning, followed by a few beers on the golf course. So that's what's been interesting in my world, which is probably the polar opposite to yours. Sorry to rub it in.
It's all right. I was there a week ago. Yeah.
So, yeah, and whilst we'd all love to continue just to do transformational breath breathing and what have you, I think it's probably helpful if we get into the meat of today's conversation. So, Teresa, we're fascinated to really dive into this alignment of
marketing sales and customer success and really start to think about and talk about like what are some of the strategies and thinking about the audience and what they might want to take out today's conversation if we can share some you know some approaches some strategies now to bring those those three areas of any kind of client facing business um together that's really the objective for today and i think you know weaving in data and how the various different tools and frameworks that we can use to support that as well so um
But maybe sort of starting with marketing first, given that Magnus is a marketing specialist consultancy, what do you see generally as the role of marketing and how it's evolving in a modern, in today's kind of business landscape? And I guess particularly as we think about then how it aligns into sales to drive growth?
I'm going to start because it came up yesterday in a conversation I was having with a client. So CIM, Chartered Institute of Marketing, their definition of marketing is to identify, anticipate and satisfy customer demands profitably. Now, if you think about all of those things, if I said, what's the role of sales, you'd probably say something quite similar.
If you said, what's the role of customer success, you'd also probably say something similar. So I think that firstly, there is a misunderstanding generally of what the role of marketing does, but I think also with sales and customer success.
Which is a drum that we've been banging for ages of it's, you know, at worst it's the colouring in department or they cut on events and make PowerPoints and everything else. We often see marketing being as a single person instead of an entire function. So I think the role of marketing is as it should be. I just don't think people truly understand what the role of marketing is.
We talk about strategic growth drivers as marketing, which ultimately comes down to customer centricity. So really starting with much like the CIM's definition. So understanding who they are and what that opportunity is and anticipating those needs. Does that sit with marketing? Really, it sits with all three of those groups, right?
Because anyone who's kind of having interactions with them is generating insight and understanding. But ultimately, really identifying those opportunities and then feeding that into the organization to be able to connect in the right way at the right time with the right thing and with the right message. So for me, marketing needs to do some marketing on itself.
That's an interesting topic. I like that.
From a customer's perspective, they shouldn't stop at functions to say, OK, I've done my job in marketing. I'm going to hand it over to sales now. And then suddenly something completely different happens. And then as soon as the deal's closed, it's like, you know, great, my job's done in sales and chuck it over to customer success. And I was trying to think of an analogy of this.
You know when you have to phone a utility and you have to identify what your problem is. And then they say, oh, we can't help you, but we'll put you on to someone else. And you have to start all over again and give them all your details. And they say, oh, no, we can't help you. And you have to go on to someone else. And then by the end of it, you're like, why am I saying this?
It's a really frustrating experience. And essentially... We want to bring all of those three together to stop that. It's all about customer experience and connecting the dots externally, which means under the skin internally, we have to connect all three together.
I'm thinking back to the relationship that we've got with Magnus and, you know, thinking about the time that we spend with you on mutual projects. And, you know, it's phenomenal for a sales customer success perspective to spend time with an expert like yourself and your colleagues. That's so fantastic.
You talked about one point where I thought was interesting, the fact that there's a misunderstanding of what marketing is. So my first question is going to be like, where do you think that origin comes from and who's responsible for that in a business environment? So is it the CMO or is it the CEO that's actually recruiting or trying to set that up?
And secondly, where does the origin of the misalignment come from as well?
So in terms of that, I suppose, where did it start, the misunderstanding? I think marketing is seen as the creative department, right? So which often can be not taken seriously. We're talking B2B, right? So often it's kind of like, well, they don't understand the business or they go and do the fun stuff at the end.
And I think that's, you know, if I'm being truly honest, when I first went into marketing over 25 years ago, I genuinely didn't really know what we were doing. And I was excited about all of that fun stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's that legacy, what marketing used to do. If you look at what marketing can do now with the access of data and insight, it's suddenly way more mature and it should have way more impact on a business in terms of being able to provide those insights on customers and make sure that it feeds into not only the commercial strategy, but also the business strategy.
So the first question I asked there around who owns that, who created that lack of understanding, it's interesting because you just prompted something else. It's like, because of the digitalization and the emergence of websites and digital opportunities, has that meant that marketing is naturally be seen as an even more important thing?
Well, it's also hard to prove an ROI and it's also an expense. So with all of these things, it's like a cost center. It's hard to prove impact. And, you know, they seem to be having fun. So are they taken seriously? All of those things are different now, apart from the having fun. We can still have fun in our jobs.
It's so fascinating that a lot of that same stuff I recognize from a customer success perspective, cost center, right? Definitely not the having fun. It's many customer success managers who really feel like they have an awful lot of fun. But it's this sort of intangibility about it.
Maybe it's because as we're talking about this, I wonder if a lot of that stems from, it does go right back to that kind of ability to measure. Whereas in sales, it's a little bit easier and can be a little bit more binary to say, you've won a client. This is how much that client's worth. That's attributed to you. Congratulations, off we go. You've paid your salary, the margin.
Right. So you've either closed it or you've lost it. Whereas marketing start right upstream. So connecting it up has in the past been difficult.
And the reliance on either side of sales. So you've got marketing relying on sales being able to effectively close and customer success relying on sales having sold the right thing.
And then doesn't the CS part go then wrap around back to marketing? Yeah. And which is a misunderstanding as well within business content. I still want to go back to the origin of misalignment because it's important if we're going to be talking about the power of one plus one equals three, which is essentially this.
Or one plus one plus one equals seven.
The important part around it is to understand the misalignment. But from your experience, and maybe an example, right, like where you've been in an organization or helped a business as part of a consultancy, where does that origin of misalignment come from? How does it occur? Yeah.
I genuinely think the origin of misalignment comes from the fact that we all are identifying as different roles and different functions. We made a joke earlier about all being in the same room. We've genuinely had meetings in the last three weeks where we've had sales and marketing and customer success teams all sitting in the same room saying, this is the first time we've all sat together.
How can you get aligned if you don't even know who they are or you're not even talking? So I think there is that, I'm in marketing, I'm in sales, I'm in customer success. Well, actually, we're all trying to do the same thing. So I think that labeling has always been an issue.
And I think the other piece that we all know is that if you're in different functions, you often have different targets and different KPIs. So you're not actually all working together to get towards ultimately kind of Sale and customer satisfaction and customer lifetime value. So without that alignment, there's never going to be people working together well.
And it reminds me, I worked in B2C for a number of years, for 10 years, a golf travel organization there. And I remember the time, especially in the B2C world, where you're reliant massively on marketing and they definitely weren't colouring. Because if marketing tap wasn't turned on, then sales can't do their job. And for a number of years, maybe five years, we never had marketing in the room.
It was just sales. You know, how's your target? What are you doing? And success was there, which was good. But then five years later, maybe we should bring marketing in. Maybe we should bring product in. And guess what? It was a little bit, there was a little bit friction to start off with, but the finger pointing started to come down less because we were like, oh, that's what you do.
You don't just sit in front of your computer putting colours on the website.
There's more of a respect for each other, right? Yes. And you're working together to be like, okay, understand the difficulties. Let's solve them together.
So actually to your point around misalignment of job role and the understanding of that, and actually a lot of businesses don't write out job descriptions properly. And so I think that's an interesting point, Nicky.
And I guess just sort of going, I don't want to go too kind of philosophical and I know there's not one size fits all, but I think that we talk about getting these teams in the room. How have you helped businesses in doing that? Apart from manhandling the teams to say, you've all got to come in, you've all got to be involved in this because otherwise it's not going to work.
But is there a structural thing there? If we think about organizational structures, worked in businesses where you've got, you know, success that are more closely joined to service delivery and support and therefore going to a COO, right? And then you've got a CMO and a CRO or probably a CRO, CCO, right? All the C's. But that's where the alignment stops.
If you're out there and you're listening to this or you're building a business and you're saying, right, I need to make a big decision about this structure of this organization. Is there a point in that hierarchy, in a traditional kind of business hierarchy, that you think we should be bringing it together? And should it be sooner than the CEO?
Absolutely. And that's why we're seeing, you know, obviously the... a new trend of a CGO, which is really the apex of marketing and sales together. But it's still up there at the top. And does it filter down? It's in behaviors in the culture. And one of the things when we go in, we're very conscious that we can't just tell people to change. Change doesn't happen in that way.
And they've got to be on the bus. But we've got to be really aware of What's going on behind the scenes? What are the challenges that people are facing day to day? What are the motivations to change?
There was a talk yesterday where it said actually people don't want to innovate because they're quite happy with the status quo because the risk of doing something that you can't quite tangibly see yet is greater than not doing it at all. Same goes for change, right? So really trying to understand what's the kind of risk versus reward motivation to doing things differently. Yeah.
Um, and then the capacity and capability to change is a really critical factor that we look at when we go into, you know, see how well are we performing as a marketing function or as a commercial function and then build out a plan that's really relevant to that organization. Because there's no point, you know, there's no. here's the right structure for everybody. Off you go, let's do it tomorrow.
That's not going to work. So often when we come in, we don't obviously just talk to the marketing team. As you well know, we spend a lot of time talking to the sales teams, to the product teams, to the management, to the CFO, you know, to get their understanding of, well, what do you think the role of marketing should be? Or what do you think it is right now? We kind of start there and map it out.
And then we say, well, look, if we shifted it to here, this is the impact it could have on the organization. But here are the dependencies that sit under that. Do we feel ready to do it? And then start to kind of build out that change roadmap. But absolutely, it starts with empowerment of kind of top down, of getting people together.
And even, you know, we've suggested in the past, go and shadow, you know, your counterpart in customer success or in sales and vice versa for a day, just to get some appreciation of, the pressure they're under and the targets that they're trying to hit and what they're doing on a day-to-day basis.
I've worked with a couple of really successful businesses that had a recruitment journey. So regardless of what role you join the business in, this is a SaaS organization, well, now SaaS organization, but every role that was going to be client-facing had to start on the support desk and you had to do three months of answering support tickets.
And there is no better way to get connected to the real on-the-ground challenges of your customer, but also how you can... understand what everybody else is going through.
So then when you leave that team and you go into the role that you were hired to do, whether that's a customer success manager, account manager, new business sales, whatever that might be, you've got this appreciation, not only for what the customer wants, but what the team that's going to be serving the customer that you win has to deal with. And it's really kind of transformed.
So I guess it's sort of where you don't have that, because obviously not all businesses can onboard in that way. But just having that exposure to what other people are going through in the team is critical.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, interesting. I was smiling when you said that. I was like, oh, that's such a gimmicky thing when, you know, a supermarket chain gets the CEO to walk the floor. I'm like, yeah, right, come on.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, they don't have a clue where they're going. They've missed my milk. They haven't given my apples. Just crashed into the wall.
Yeah, their uniform's clean.
But I was with the ex-CPO of Superdrug the other day, and she was referencing how her and now the CEO of a mutual client of ours... Used to work together 20 years ago and they worked behind the shop floor, right? But they worked together and that's how they met and now they're working again.
So it is, you know, about getting in front and understanding your customers and then understanding different parts of the business is important. I'm curious about one thing. When, you know, you're pioneering the alignment piece and I've seen how you work, Teresa, with your clients. Is there something that was sort of like a point in your time in your career where it went ding?
I really need this to happen because I've been trying my hardest in marketing in a siloed event, trying to push this change forward, but it's just never happened. When did you just think, right, if I'm going to carry on doing a job and you've been successful in selling an agency before you've done so many great things, when did you go, right, enough is enough.
I'm going to crack on and start thinking about alignment and go for that as a proposition. What was the turning point for you?
I think it really was years of work. So I started off in client side and then, and actually my boss there, she made us do at least six months in insights and analytics before we could go and do anything else, which I, to this day, I'm always forever grateful for because it's a critical skill for marketers. But most people don't have that ability.
But when I then moved to agencies where I stayed for a long time, what I was always struck with that whether it was B2C or B2B, you get a brief that comes in and you run with it. And but then you can get to the end and it's you're doing the wrong thing. The brief is wrong. Right. And there hasn't been that kind of in-depth understanding and analysis as a problem statement in the first place.
And as an agency, the truth is, you know, we're all pretty much yes men and be like, oh, yeah, great. We want to win it. So we'll say yes, we can do everything. And it's not going to have the business impact that was intended because ultimately you're doing the wrong thing and you haven't asked the right questions.
And often you give strategy away for free because you're desperate to get to kind of the end bit where the client, you know, sourced intangible output and that's where they saw the value. And after years and years of doing this, it just made me realize that there's a fundamental flaw and there's a gap.
in that process and the other thing that triggered it was you know at the same time we were starting to see a lot of brands creating in-house agencies so again they were kind of going straight to their well we've got all these creatives and they they can do all this great stuff but it's like well you're missing the thinking piece first that's connecting the dots between the output and really kind of connecting up to the business strategy.
I just found it frustrating because I feel like it was a waste of everyone's time and money if you're going to turn up and do something. And they were great things that you were doing. But were they the right things? Half the time, probably not.
I thank you for that. And I think it'd be really important, you know, to actually have a bit of chat amongst the three of us. You know, we are the three that's coming from different, you know, marketing, sales and customer success.
And as this topic is about alignment, you know, I think it's important from our own experiences, Matt, Teresa, to think about what's an experience that we've had in business where we've witnessed the power of the three verticals making seven. As we're all going to say it now, you know, marketing, sales and success. What have we all seen personally that's been a success and an outcome?
Have you got an example, Matt, where you're thinking that you've worked with a client or been in a business even where you've seen marketing, sales and customer success come together and it's sort of been quite a powerful outcome?
It's genuinely hard to kind of think examples where there's real success. where you can see this real bind together. It's probably easier in my experience with the smaller organizations, but I think that's as a result of being a smaller, more tight-knit team and proximity and everything else that goes along with that. And I think it comes back to this understanding the role.
So from a success perspective, your first focus typically is in customer success is, right, well, how do I serve this customer and make sure that A, I can retain them and B, that I can grow them? And the things that frustrate you in customer success typically are this feeling of they've been missold. So they've been missold. And in that situation, marketing and sales are to blame.
But actually what I found, you know, and you talk about pressure and how that forms diamonds, right? And that sounds a bit cheesy, I know. But when you get those pressure points, what then comes out the back of that is this realization. And I think this is where I've seen it work in those startup modes. We go, actually, we do need to be a bit more aligned.
We do need to come together a little bit more. Let's understand this. And I know, Teresa, that Magnus do a lot of this work across kind of customer journey mapping things. But it's something that I've been an advocate for for many years as well in really truly understanding right from the beginning or even before a customer knows who we are all the way through to this advocacy piece.
And I think so many organizations go, I'm going to do a customer journey map. So when do they buy? Okay, when do we hand over to CS? Customer journey done, right? Or how do we acquire them? Then there are sales qualified lead, customer journey done, or CS, it's all about, it doesn't matter. We just got to keep the wheels rolling and it becomes very support focused.
I think that holistic and where we've been able to, where in some cases I've orchestrated or where I've seen it being orchestrated, bringing those teams together to go, what is it that you do? What is it that you do? And in a recent workshop with a client who had that sort of, that's interesting. So there was a marketing person on the team and a sales person.
The marketing person was like, we could definitely help you do more there. Yeah. I didn't realize that that's the kind of insight you wanted to share with your customer. And it's those opportunities to have those clicks and those moments of, right, light bulb's gone. Let's do something different.
And it is just stopping the kind of the hamster wheel that everyone is on, you know, to hit those quarterly targets and to constantly be delivering to then go, actually, let's all get in the room maybe, which is hard to do. I mean, we all struggle to do it, right? It's really difficult.
But I think it's incredibly important to be able to do that and to be, going back to Rosamund's response, to articulate that. this is my role, this is your role, this is how we work together and here is our process. And this is where we all feed into ultimately the business strategy. And I think there's a disconnect there, right? It's like, well, we're all doing this.
We've all had examples in the past where we've worked with clients where They said, right, the brief is you need to help us acquire new customers. And we've gone, okay, fine. Let's just take a little step back and have a look at kind of the process and map it out and see what's going on.
And as we mapped the full end-to-end process, Matt, not just stopped at acquisition, what we realized was there was a huge hole in the bucket at the end. So we were filling it in, filling it in, filling it in. And then there was more people leaving than there were. So I was like, so we raised this and said, we appreciate that you were targeted on acquisition.
But if we don't sort out the retention issue, we're just throwing money away. Yeah. And in that circumstance, they actually wouldn't, they couldn't get the senior leadership team to change their objectives. So we carried on. But at the end, it was like, we're wasting everyone's time.
I think this is an important point that we're talking about, because if we're debating this topic and coming up with these answers, I know one of the next questions will be, well, what are the challenges? And I think we need to probably think about bottoming out the framework that supports that challenge, possibly. But
I recall a client that we've worked with since 2019, approximately around about 450 sales professionals, 60 leaders, eight different businesses that sit underneath a consortium that was carved out from a previous organization in 2019. And they are a B2C organization. What they've evolved in over the last five years is...
they really got themselves understanding the key metrics to staff, which they didn't have much data integrity, they didn't have the right CRM.
And once they understood that they needed to go from sessions to leads, from leads to bookings, and then retention of repeat customers effectively in their space, that core metric enabled the chief growth officer in this case to actually really get behind that. One of the pivots that they've done over the last year is actually quite interesting.
They had eight, what I would call VP growth officers that were possibly some of the original individuals on that sort of proceedings of 2019 up to sort of 2023. And what they then started to look at was analyzing the funnel, looking at the leakage between each of those gaps, as I say, from sessions that leads to sales and in sales to retention. Yeah.
And once they're able to identify the challenge in each space, they're able to look at the capability of each of the individual aspects. So success, marketing and sales, they were like, hmm, something's happening at the leadership piece. Marketing and sales isn't fluid enough. It's not optimized enough. So what they then did, which I thought was really good.
not just go in and find a person that could do the same thing, which was both marketing and sales in another business to change. They actually split the role, went out to another market basically. So completely away from their current organizational structure and found someone that had done it bigger, stronger and a new marketing as such a subject matter expert.
And then brought another salesperson in and they're running the funnel, I suppose, in a really optimized fashion. Now, I don't think they're there completely because it's really hard then to glue the people together. But it's actually quite a nice journey since 2019, having sort of no understanding of their funnel to then understanding it, then to building that change.
I don't think it is a destination. And there you go. We've done this. It's perfect because business is always evolving. You know, the continuous transformation world in which we find ourselves. And so does that constant evolution of sales, marketing, customer success working together? I don't think it's a project to then tick off the list.
It's a constant need for those leaders to check in and say, is this working? How do we iterate and how do we optimise?
Your example there, Johnny, just links right back to what Teresa said at the top, which is around having that holistic view across all of those things and having a leader who's driving that, but then also driving down the same objectives and the same goals, which stops your leaky bucket.
I recall when we had Chris Register from Planhat on the podcast quite recently talking about an example of him talking to a CRO saying, we just need to keep filling the hopper, we just need to keep filling the hopper. He's like, You've got a leaky bucket, right? That's why your ARR numbers are down. It's not because you're not getting enough in the front door.
It's because stuff's falling out the back.
I just want to balance the conversation out to make sure that we're also talking about brand. And we often go into organizations where that's the role of marketing, which is to drive leads. Now, that is one role of marketing, but we know the balance between having brand activity with balanced lead gen activity is really critically important to drive long-term growth and opportunity.
But there's loads of
research out there that says that if you don't do brand then you're not going to perform as well from a revenue growth perspective so because you're only filling in those people that know you and you've got to go out there's the 95 percent five percent rule of 95 percent people aren't market yet and so you're only dealing with those five percent if you're only dealing with lead gen in marketing you've got to go to that 95 so when they jump over into potential to
to buy they're aware of you there's a really nice fact that i always come back to that when people do that when they jump from that 95 into the five percent bucket they don't go to search they don't go to an event they don't ask somebody to go and do the research for them they think about who they might be able to recall to aren't to help them and typically one of three that can be recalled will end up being the supplier so that's why it's really important to do brand
That's a fantastic post for us to end today's conversation. So Teresa Allen, the founder of Magnus Consulting, to her more than this name, join us for part two as we continue this conversation. For more insights, make sure you subscribe. And if you enjoy the journey, don't forget to leave us a review. Your feedback fuels our growth. Until next time, keep up that forward thinking mindset. Goodbye.