How to Align Sales and Marketing for Best Results, with Peter Buscemi [Episode 385]

Joining me on this episode is Peter Buscemi, Founder of Four Quadrant, LLC. He serves as an advisor and educator to Fortune 1000 companies and startups, and provides go-to-market resources. Among the topics that Peter and I discuss are the connections between sales and marketing roles, and a one-page Sales & Marketing Quick Reference Card that should sit by every telephone in your organization.

Key Takeaways

• Where is the dividing line between Sales and Marketing? Where do the SDRs fit? Peter quotes David Packard, “Marketing is much too important to leave to marketers.”
• Peter says Marketing either builds or maintains a brand, or helps build better products, or helps sell.
• Demand creation and field marketing functions are best handled by marketing. A salesperson is too expensive to use for development. Carve out tasks for the experts in that area.
• “Integrated Sales and Marketing” does not want Marketing Qualified Leads. It wants Sales Qualified Leads. The salesperson wants opportunities with high propensity to close.
• How do you align Sales and Marketing?
• Why companies need to plan with a longer planning horizon. It takes months between planning for opportunities, engaging them, and closing them.
• Peter offers a Sales & Marketing Quick Reference Card, to put Sales and Marketing on one page, for a SDR or a BDR to have in front of them on phone calls. It has a positioning statement, opportunity use cases, discovery questions, FAQs.
• Building a brand and maintaining it are necessary, but those are not sales messages. Sales needs to align with corporate messaging, but focus on client needs. Marketing needs to know sales messaging, to create leads.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul: Hello and welcome to accelerate. Joining me on the show today is Peter Buscemi. He’s the founder of Four Quadrant LLC, and he serves as an advisor and educator to Fortune 1000 companies and startups provides a lot of great go-to market resources. We’re going to talk about some of those today. Peter, welcome to accelerate.

Peter Buscemi: Thank you very much for having me, Andy.

Andy Paul: Oh, my pleasure. So take a minute, introduce yourself beyond that bare-bones sketch I gave people they tell us how you got started in business even

Peter Buscemi: Sure. A lifelong marketer. I went to school on the East Coast at Bentley and while I was, I was able to work with DEC Digital Equipment Corporation, the oldies will remember that. Fell into a marketing role, Ken Olson.

Andy Paul: I always, always remember Ken Olson because I mean, I knew DEC I’ve worked in the computer business mainframe business before joining Apple relatively early days in Apple and always remember I had this newspaper clipping from Ken Olson, in which it said basically derided PCs, they’ll never last, you know, this is if they’re going to go away, this is a fad, who needs those things?

Peter Buscemi: That’s right about when I left Yeah, they, it was great because I was able to work while I went to school, and then they offered me a job after the fact when I graduated. Next thing you know, 30 or 35 years later, here I am, and it was great because it was a DEC was a very well established company and had the opportunity to work with some really great people at that particular point in time, but you know, those first 15 years of my career, I spent a DEC, HP, Apple, Oracle and Business Objects. So, you know, really, with classically trained managers, you know, that had been in the company, you know, for 10, 20, 30 years, sometimes especially at HP, I was able to get that classical training background and from people that have been in business for quite some time, which, you know, always isn’t the case today. But after 15 years of that you can imagine, or some people, you know, there’s a fork in the road and you either choose to do that corporate life or, or not. It was about 1999 I started to do startups. So I ran startups, ran marketing for three startups. And one of the board members there had a boutique VC out in New York, Kevin Kimberlin, Spencer Trask and I went in work and advised portfolio companies for Kevin, for a few years. And after that, it just sort of was a natural path for me to advise companies on my own. And so that’s what I have done for a long time. And typically those roles are interim gigs. So I’ll be the interim CMO of VP of marketing of VP of field marketing, or whatever it might be after a company is let somebody go or a lot of times now is what happens is in the companies I work with pretty much are 10 million in revenue to 100 hundred 150 million revenue deal, they’ll separate the corporate marketing function and the field marketing or market development, a sales development function, report it to the sales guy, you know, so the head of sales basically says, hey, look, I want control of my resources to create the pipeline and sales enablement tools that I want. And then I’ll come in and create that function for them, get it up and running, and then you know, we’ll backfill  somebody and then I’ll move on to the next roll.

Andy Paul: well it raises an interesting question is because this is one we’re seeing more debate about certainly in the valley and I know and other companies is yeah where’s that dividing line between sales and marketing? Where do they SDRs this inside sales development role, where does it really fit on? What what’s your take on that?  You come from a marketing standpoint.  To me, I’ll tell you my take, I think they can belong in marketing just as well sales. I mean, it is fundamentally a marketing process as far as I can tell.

Peter Buscemi: Yeah, I go back to basically there’s a triangle in marketing what do you don’t make, sell, or fix anything. I was irritated and motivated by you know, Packard’s comment, you know, way back when, ] in the 80s he basically said, marketing is much too important to leave to marketers. So that there’s actually some truth to it, but there’s some motivation. So I said, basically, okay, what does marketing do? Well, I think it really can do three things. You either build or maintain the brand. You help build better products, or you help sell. And you can do all three of those. But it depends really the mentality of the company you’re working for. I’ve always found it more fun to work with salespeople and to help sell and you know,  at the end of the day, I think that portion of marketing, which is typically demand creation, field marketing, and you brought up an interesting point, in terms of, you know, sales development reps, BDRs, business development reps, whether they actually sit and that function, you know, it’s basically, you know, if marketing didn’t exist, you’d have salespeople, and there’d be fewer salespeople that would actually make the number but, you know, spending 35 years in this world, the best salespeople are just phenomenal. They’re incredible, and they figure out how to, you know, identify their target market and you know, identify those particular companies, those particular prospects, they figure out how to craft messaging, they figured out how to do their lead gen, they figured out how to do that conversion, and yada, yada, yada. And that’s good the only issue is, is there way too expensive, especially direct sales organization, because, you know, back of the napkin kind of numbers are a fully loaded direct sales person’s about 350 K, you know, at a minimum, it’s 120 yeah, you know, the numbers, you know, 250 based and bonus, you know, 50 to T& E 50 benefits 200 business days, you’re talking about 1800 dollars a day. And so then the question comes up, as you know, do you want a sales rep who’s got to get a certain number of deals, you know, per month, per year or per quarter per year, focused on these particular activities? And, you know, the good answer should be no, I mean, if you’ve got one sales rep, and this is it, you know, that’s one thing but if you’re trying to build a scalable model, no, you want to, you know, segment and you want to carve out those tasks to, you know, an expert so that there’s one person that can spend the vast majority of their time on each one of those particular tasks, and they can optimize it and a lot of times automate it. So, you know, back to your original question. Yeah, I think that is one process. And, you know, we call it the sales process, I always, you know, tag a little piece on the front of it, and I call it you know, the marketing and sales funnel, because there are some tasks that are top of the funnel, but if they’re not focused on what a best practice, best in class, direct salesperson would do, they don’t belong there. You know, so, so marketers that think that, you know, if I create a lead or a marketing qualified lead, you know, and I turn around and I go back and I do that again, that’s not what I would call integrated sales or marketing in I would push away from that and I see salespeople push away from that because it’s not integrated on the final goal of creating me an opportunity that has a high propensity to close. Those are two really, really different concepts.

Andy Paul: Well, this is sort of topic detour, certainly in, in large parts of Silicon Valley is this whole idea of sales-marketing alignment, right? Given this development over the last 10 years of this new inside sales model being driven largely by the emerging SAS business model is yeah, where, how do we make these two work together even better than they have in the past or at all compared to the way they have in the past. And you see it again in lots of books and lots of articles being written. And I think it seems like it should be fairly easy to achieve but and you look like you sound like you’ve had the experience of having that alignment, but I’m sure you’ve seen it both ways.

Peter Buscemi: I’ve got some scars. We, we originally created, and I say we, at Oracle in the 90s, I go back to this, because I believe it was really the right conceptual fit. I mean, the concepts have been somewhat bastardized over the years. And there are a couple of really key people you know, Kate Mitchell, Laurie Myrick, just two phenomenal people that were in Oracle. And I was fortunate to be part of this where we actually created an America’s marketing model, which was field marketing. But the difference was is you have all the executional pieces, which everyone has today, you know, whether you’re doing emails or marketing automation, or events or whatever webinar, all that stuff, your website, great. Those are exceptional pieces. But they were two cool pieces. One was a plug back in the development organization understand what are they building? And you know, why are they building that and what’s the right message and what’s the business outcome and what’s the unique differentiation and what’s the value of arriving to the audience that is responsible for the buying process. So a lot of people don’t do that, or they do that through product marketing or whatever, but it’s never really tied to, you know, demand Gen demand creation or any other pieces is to have a planning function that’s connected back into the sales organization. So it’s not, you know, at a rep level, hey, you know, make sure we got an event and you know, this hotel on this date, make sure there are enough doughnuts and coffee. It’s okay, you know, what’s your number? And how we’re going to make it, you know, is that, you know, expansion revenue is that you know, what’s the annual contract value going to be? What are we thinking about churn? You know, do you have hunters? Do you have farmers? Is your geographic makeup really spread out like in the southeast? Or is it like Manhattan where you know, someone’s going to have a couple of blocks, you know, do you have strategic accounts is an opportunistic base. And then from there, really build on a plan to say, okay, you know, it’s going to make sense top-down, or you’re going to exceed your number. But bottom-up, you know, from a rep point of view, you’re going to have, you know, a plan that makes sense. So it cascades from the top down. And those are the pieces that people miss, they miss the part of, you know, I really have to be integrated with a salesperson because if that sales person’s not calling you on, you know, the weekend or at night and you’re not on his speed dial, you’re really an event planner, and event planners are fine.

Andy Paul: You’re not marketing, your event planning at that point is what you’re saying.

Peter Buscemi: Yeah, you need events. Don’t get me wrong, and events are good, but an event is not really where a salesperson is going to go, Okay, I got a partner that’s going to help me make my number and I’m going to look for them to create 25% or 35% or 50% of my opportunities, and I know that this person’s got to do it. Those are really different things.

Andy Paul: Right, which I think is such a key concept you brought up because this is something I wrote an article about a year or so ago that, you know, occasion some comments I got is that people this whole idea I called it a lead deficit, but, yeah, how does how does sales reps can’t go into a year without understanding what they’re going to get from marketing on what they’re going to generate themselves.

Peter Buscemi: I would argue that you know, it, it’s hard, especially with a sales team, but, when you actually sit down, it’s really a year and a half in advance, you know, because if you’ve got, you know, a sales cycle that’s, you know, from qualified sales opportunity to close if that’s, you know, six months or whatever the time to get, you know, an mql to a qso is going to be whatever three months and then the time to actually plan that campaign. So, you know, that’s what I tell people today I said, you know, if we start today, you know, we’re going to really impact you know, the middle of next year. I mean, there’s some, quick hits that you can do that are going to force-fit, you know, some opposition unities you know, find out some bluebirds that are going to close in the next 90 days? Sure. Is that going to be really expensive and time-consuming? Sure. Do you know? And is that a sustainable long term solution, no.

Andy Paul: When I think that’s one of the things that I’ve found fascinating about a lot of the content you have available on your website, and I urge people to check it out. And Peter will tell us later how to do that as is you’ve mapped out a lot of these processes, these planning processes, so you sort of templatized it, and really start classic, classic marketing process to some degrees you’ve talked about, but still so relevant. For anybody who wants to go to market or implement a new initiative or something is too often you see, especially startups, yeah, you know, there’s a brave new world we, you know, we’re just going to go figure it out as we go. And, boy, you can spend a lot of money that you have by being unmethodical as opposed to being methodical and you provide a great sort of avenue to be methodical.

Peter Buscemi: Yeah, you know, it’s a blessing and a curse. I mean, you know, I fell in those spaces and I just, I just loved it. I just want to continue doing this and but I think there were a couple of things. One is, when I went to Spencer Trask, this was in 2005. You know, it’s, it’s pretty common now. I mean, if you look across all the VCs and whatever, they’ve got incubators, or they call them accelerators. Now, remember which, which is classic, I mean, that is great. But in 2005, that’s what I was doing with Spencer Trask. I was looking at it, I’ve looked at 15 companies, and the issue was, oh, you know, you don’t have any background and bio or pharma or, you know, manufacturing of this or that I said, you know, what, I said, I’d argue that any company any size, you basically have, there’s really 10 basic marketing problems you have, you know, and they never really changed. They change in scale and complexity, but they’re all the same. And then I started to really focus on what these issues were, you know, basic messaging and positioning, customer acquisition, and return tension and, you know, sales and they’re all the same problems. And so what I started to do was to formalize it. And, you know, it’s more of an analytical driver. And that’s what I started to do with Spencer Trask. And then, so I had these, you know, pre-defined go to market processes. And then I started to teach at the Executive MBA level at the University of San Francisco. And, you know, this is you know, 40 to 50-year-old people, you know, there’s 20 or 30 of them that show up and, you know, you’re trying to teach marketing, you know, 13 weeks in an accelerated pace, so I really had to hone what I would do and what I did was I created I broke these, you know, tasks down into about 10 processes, and then I tried to say, okay, if I was going to go in and work with a client on this, what would I start what were my shell be and then I walked the MBA students through this, and then these are the things that I actually use in my consulting engagements today. And so I’ve got some things that, you know, there, there’s a minimal cost to them but there, you know, beautifully designed, you know, professional PowerPoint templates that will show you.

Andy Paul: Well they are, I would say if you’re a marketing or sales consultant, and you want to use it with your own clients, I pay 199 bucks into it and download them. Because, you know, you look very smart to your clients all of a sudden.

Peter Buscemi: yeah, and then the goal is not to make money on that, we just want to be able to just make more of them for people, but we try to do is we try to provide a lot of free things to four people and then, you know, we’ll put, three or four blog posts up each in a month. And those are usually questions that I hear that I just I want to formulate the answer to in my head, or I’ve just heard it, you know, two or three times in the course of a month and I’m like, oh my God, if this is a problem for me, it’s got to be a problem for other people, so I want to, I want to share that that information out there. And then I think I just started now it’s like, you know, there’s a lot of research out there, numbers and so forth from Gartner, IDC and Forrester and then there’s always, you know, some wonderful charts that I see. So I tried to, you know, start to pull those together for people so that, you know, when you’re under the gun under pressure, you don’t have to go, you know, spend half a day on Google and try to figure out who’s how to optimize their page to show up on the first page and results in what have you.

Andy Paul: So I really like your sales marking a quick reference card, I think it’s a really useful tool. So tell people what that is.

Peter Buscemi: Yes, the quick reference cards you know, one-page document to help with sales and marketing on one page, the idea was to provide

Andy Paul: a shocking idea, by the way.

Peter Buscemi: It’s funny if you go around the organization and you ask everybody what the company does, and you get a lot of different responses. And so that’s, you know, the catalyst really for This document, it really wanted to be the form that was supposed to be one page so that, you know, a sales development rep, business development rep can have it in front of them as they’re making phone calls, you know, or receiving inbound calls. And the idea is that there’s a positioning statement, that’s, that’s a sentence or two that somebody can say, Okay, this is what our company actually does. And

Andy Paul: it’s relevant to what customers are calling on.

Peter Buscemi: Exactly. And it’s not supposed to be, you know, a jargon riddled kind of a thing. It’s basically just supposed to be, you know, you know, what do we do kind of thing. And the next piece that is supposed to help the SDR is to identify, you know, the specific use cases. So, we’re going to try to identify what those opportunity areas are that our solution would be a good fit for. And again, it’s a high-level kind of a thing, but it’s trying to help the SDR bring up something that’s relevant so it will be engaging For the for the prospect to have a conversation,

Andy Paul: when I think as I looked at the document if I can interrupt for a second is that especially given sort of emerging account-based, you know, strategy account-based everything. Yeah model that people are embracing us, you really can also have one of these by it could be by vertical market you’re attacking a range of specific target accounts. So as you’re getting defining specific opportunity areas thoroughly for that type of business that you’re selling to this particular type of prospect.

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Peter Buscemi: Exactly, you know, that is ideal. You know, you can make one for the company, but industry-specific is really good. And then you can split another couple of different ways. One, you can split by audience, whether it’s technical or non-technical, and then you could split again, whether it’s strategic or operational. So a lot of clients I work with, we’re able to get the first level down, down to the industry level and so that that’s good, but if you can take it down further because all it’s going to do is, you know, it’s making for a meaningful, relevant conversation and then everyone gets those calls. You know, hi, how are you doing today? Andy, you know, click, you’ve got to get past that. And there’s, there’s the only way you can get past that is, you know, being meaningful and relevant. So, you know, having that quick synopsis of what the company does is great, but then also identifying those opportunity areas. But, you know, those use cases about are you doing this, you know, frustrated with that, you know, is this you know, yetta yetta yetta is very important, as well as identifying that the titles of the people that you should be having conversation with those in the buying process, whether it’s VP level and above director, manager, which will contribute, so it’s, it’s a great reminder because, you know, the SDR BDR they’re doing a bunch of things, right. They’re making outbound calls, they get inbound calls, they’re updating Salesforce, they’re doing this they’re researching accounts, they’re on LinkedIn, whatever. So, typically, you know, these people re a little bit younger, and you know, haven’t been around as long. So it’s, it’s great to give them tools. You know, and discovery questions are great tools too. And these are questions that, you know, the salesperson would ask, in the beginning, cycle of a sales cycle. So you know, and it should be maybe three, four or five, six questions tops that should be provided. So the SDR can use those in a conversation again, not trying to read a script, but referencing some material that might be topical for them.

Andy Paul: Well, I think it also is really important this in this section is those discovery questions is to have a couple called killer questions, which are sort of the aha questions, shows, it’s great learning experiences for the reps to start getting experience answering those types of questions and then understanding and developing an aptitude for asking a good second question that’s not necessarily on that formula follows up. That’s a good first question, but all sorts of good first questions on that. Too many companies leave the rep serve on their own to come up with these good questions, and they’re really the corporate assets so put it out there so people can learn from it

Peter Buscemi: It really is. And there’s, a couple things that I like to do ahead of this as one as, when you’re doing your sizing kind of document, you’ve discovered your total addressable market, your serve marketing, and your target market, you come up with this target account profile of, what is the ideal prospect look like, and you create as much criteria as you possibly can. And then the second piece is, you know, a qualification matrix. So, if you looked at a salesperson said, okay, great, give me the profile and the response of some questions that, you know, would, you know, give me a 90% probability that you’d be able to close them? Would they be in this industry? Would they have that kind of revenue? Would they have this kind of problem? And those qualification metric questions, hopefully, there’s only five or 10 of them, but those are the type of question you want to sort of pull back into your discovery questions but also, you know, if there’s a potential gotcha, you know, you want to use that is your you know, frequently asked questions or objection handling, you know, so if there’s something you need to defuse don’t hide it under the rug, bring it up and come up with a good response. And, you know, the wonderful thing is, or not maybe not so wonderful, wonderful for me because I’m a consultant is that this will change right? I mean, you’ve got competitors coming in and out and people will adapt to messaging and functionality whatever over three-six months so this is going to have to be a bi-directional document where you know, the sales development person on the phone that’s pitching this stuff is going to have to come back weekly monthly back to the lead gen back to their direct salesperson or inside salesperson, they’re supporting, saying, hey, look at you know, dogs not eating it,  this isn’t working on finding tremendous success with this or, you know, we found another use case or whatever it might be. So it’s you know, it’s an to put to sort of put people on the same page, but you know, what it does, or when it’s most effective is it becomes this conduit for information to be fed back into the process because you might want to, you know, change your lead gen program relative this, or you might actually identify a new niche market or a sub-segment of a market, you know, that is receptive to this that wasn’t, you know, on the target list?

Andy Paul: Well, yeah, I think that, to me, one of the real values of this and we sort of skirted around this before is, it’s a learning document, you know, for almost everybody in the company. I think that we’re putting down one page, what we do anybody can read this and be able to talk knowledgeably about what we do and ask the right questions of a potential prospect. And that has so much value. And then you have a common thing that everybody can reference. A common reference everyone can refer to is that because right now, gosh, you know, you get marketing message put out and sales changes and turns into sales, messaging, and so on, and I just I think, you laugh because you’ve seen that happen, right? So it’s a common document you put on the stories you put in your value statements, your common value statements value that you deliver. I said sales stories, ask the great questions, objection handling. And objections, I like the fact you include that because I think I don’t really call them objections at that stage. I think they’re, as you said, frequently asked questions, but, they prevent continuity. And so if they’re not answered appropriately, then thing’s not going to move forward. So having those down is, is again, really important for your SDRs, BDRs. You know, they may not use them verbatim. You don’t want them to use them verbatim but they may understand the context.

Peter Buscemi: No, it’s a great thing, and I think he made it a wonderful point, a lot of times, you know, the first call is into an 800 number or an operator or, you know, the receptionist or whatever it might be, and that person needs to get that information as well. And then you could you know, extended to onboarding customer support. So that’s where we sometimes forget, because, you know, in a SAS world, it’s all about, onboarding, that customer and making sure that they’re successful and thinking them through. So, we’ve used this type of template, all across the organization, whether it’s, you know, for this SDRs or, marketing campaigns or for, customer support or whatever. But, I think you made a real key in terms of, you know, messaging people get confused. And we talked about this really, in the first couple of minutes here in terms of, you know, what is marketing do there’s, you know, build a brand, maintain it, make a product or sell and not building a brand and maintaining it is really, you know, the classic messaging and positioning. Classic messaging and positioning is wonderful, you know, for the analyst and to relatively position yourself in a marketplace relative to a competitor, but as you said, and I find all too often and I’m sure you do as well. Is that, you know, you hand over the that corporate messaging, you know, that’s going into press releases is the boilerplate and so on and so forth and it’s needed and it must be there but those aren’t the sales messages, those aren’t the conversations that salespeople are going to have with people that are in the buying process. Now, those sales messages all have to align with that, you know, corporate messaging and positioning. But, so many times I see, you know, that’s a broken-in that that doesn’t translate down to sales messages. And, you know, if there’s a great product marketing team in place or a lot of times, they know that part of their job is to provide that content for those messaging programs. But if you don’t have somebody that has that mentality, or you’ve got someone that’s not skilled in that area, it’s really it’s really a waste because you’ve got someone who’s running lead gen on-demand creation. As I call, you know, that’s really empty because they don’t know what to communicate and then that’s when you got this, you know, finger-pointing back and forth you know, sales and say in the marketing team doesn’t do anything or the creating you know the opportunity that doesn’t have any knowledge or interest in our particular solution and so on and so forth. So it’s really those sales messages that kind of the sales team cares about, at least from you know, building a pipeline, right point of view.

Andy Paul: So last question on this sales marketing quick references, who owns it? Who should who has ownership of creating it marketing?

Peter Buscemi: You know, it, what I always say is, you know, there’s, it’s really a consensus, marketing needs to drive because it’s just, it’s just that way, but what I always say is, you know, the marketing team tries to, to sort of bring that framework and you know, adhere to that, corporate messaging and positioning and what have you. So they own that and they also have an arm into the demand creation piece. So they got to create the programs and sometimes as we said earlier, you know, depends where demand management those SDRs and BD ours and so it’s multiple functions within marketing.  But, then also the sales team because it’s, it’s like, okay, you know, it has to be believable, it has to be real, I have to know it. And as well, you know, that product marketing product management team, because it has to be true, you know, so what I say is, it’s really those three functions that sales marketing and the development team that really have to come together and validate it, you know, but marketing has to drive it.

Andy Paul: Okay. Peter, now, when we get to the last segment show, I got some standard questions I ask all my guests and the first one, you sort of getting to step outside and take off your marketing hat and put your sales hat on. And this is a hypothetical scenario that I’ve now asked about 400 people. It is In the scenario, you’ve just been hired as a VP of sales at a company whose sales have stalled out, CEO on the board are anxious to hit the reset button, get things back on track. What two things would you do your first week on the job that could have the biggest impact?

Peter Buscemi: You know I think the, the first thing that I like to do is I like to go back to point a, and just sort of do a reset and sort of, you know, understand where, where you actually are, and those are all the basic things. It’s like, that the specific market that we’re focused on the specific use cases, the differentiation, the value drivers, the buying process, and, you know, if all of those things line up, then we can start talking about some other things in it, but a lot of times it’, maybe you want to be in the industry, you want to be in life sciences. But if you really don’t have a specific use case that you can solve for where you your solution has unique differentiation, and you can have value driven conversations with the various people in the buying process that communicates economic value to their organization and why they should act now. It doesn’t matter you know, because typically what happens is right, I mean, you just go okay, you know, what, what guys less than 80% of the number okay, fire them. okay, let’s hire some new guys, let’s go spend some more money on some lead gen, we need more leads. And it’s like okay, wait a second, let’s make sure we’ve got the guns focused in the in the right direction. I think then after that, now, it’s sort of that sales process in terms of have you know, nail it, scale it right. A lot of people like to scale it before they nailed it. And it’s like if you’re hiring salespeople, and you know, giving them the Yellow Pages and saying and the white pages and saying, okay, great, you know, call me that does nobody good. So until you have, you know, a proven onboarding process, and I always have this discussion with folks, not sure where you stand on Andy, but I have a feeling I know where you do, but my thought is, you know, with a new rep, you’re, you’re scaling them, whatever, 25% 50% 75% over three months, six months, nine months, so in that first three months, you know, how much time are you investing in them? You know, and some companies will Oh, yeah, no, we do a lot. You know, we bring them out to corporate for a week or two weeks. And I said, okay, well, what is that such training situation looks like? Oh, well, we have here for a week and you know, when you look at it this poor person has, you know, eight sessions a day for five days and 60 PowerPoints in each session. And they saw, you know, 5000 PowerPoints, and they heard, you know, whatever it was 40 different speakers over four days or five days, it’s impossible. No, and then they go back, and a lot of them are home-based or whatever. And it’s like, Well, guys, wait for a second, why don’t you? Why don’t you go way deeper on, you know, one topic, and over the course of whatever it is, you know, that first three months or six months, you know, build that. So, you know, if I come out here, we’re going to focus on one set of products, or we’re going to focus on the sales process or in you know, the deal. It’s like, we’re going to talk about product. We’re going to talk about your quarter, we’re going to talk about sales for the sales automation system. We’re going to talk about it and it’s like, there’s no way you can it so, you know, I think less is more. And so I’d say is one is go back to the just go to market fundamentals, make sure that you really have something you know you’re focused the guns on the right place, you know that if you got an opportunity that met this criteria yes, you’re going to close it, then you know, look at you know the sales process, then then I think that’s when you and ideally you’ve engaged with marketing people don’t like to hear but ahead of time because you want marketing to sort of soften the earth you don’t want you know, a sales guide to have to, you know, spend a lot of time and effort doing these basic fundamental things because they’re just too expensive to do it. So that’s my short answer.

Andy Paul: Not that’s good, it probably wouldn’t surprise you that the only those guests that have really a marketing orientation include coordinating with marketing in their answer. So FYI there’s the symptom and the problem right there. Okay, I’ve got some like a four sort of rapid-fire questions you can be one-word answer. You can elaborate if you wish to end up the show. So the first one is when you Peter are out selling your services, what’s your most powerful sales attribute?

Peter Buscemi Just, you know, people I work with, I mean, I get referenced in it usually by salespeople.

Andy Paul: Okay, who’s your sales role model?

Peter Buscemi: My sales role model, I’d have to go back to the people at Oracle in the 90s, they were just phenomenal. You know, it was George Roberts in the central run branch in the east and Joanne Evans in the West. I mean, those people would just classic, 

Andy Paul: Excellent. One book, every salesperson should read. Oh, man.

Peter Buscemi: I’m looking at a wall of books. You know, one that I always go back to it. It’s an oldie, but it’s really good. It’s called Marketing Plans by Malcolm MacDonald.

Peter Buscemi: It’s Yeah, It’s an oldie but a goodie.

AP

Andy Paul: Marketing Plans by Malcolm MacDonald. Okay, good. All right, I think the first time I mentioned but it definitely go on the list. And last one tough question today what music’s on your playlist these days.

Peter Buscemi: So funny because I just went in the garage and my wife told me to throw it out to use it and so I just brought up morons receiver on table. My old the Senate have two columns, speakers and the first album, I grabbed vinyl is Neil Young and Crazy Horse live in San Francisco.

Andy Paul: Great album. Great. Okay, yeah, I could listen to that all day long too. That’s great. Well, good. Well, Peter, thank you for joining me today. tell folks how they can find out more about you or connect with you.

Peter Buscemi: Sure, it’s a I run a website called fourquadrant.com which is dedicated to providing go to market resources for sales and marketing professionals, where you can email me at Peter@fourquardrant.com

Andy Paul: Excellent yeah people, definitely check out the website great tools there especially if you’re concerned with any of the things that we’ve talked about today, great resources. So, again, thank you, Peter. And remember friends, thank you for spending part of your day with me and make it part of your day every day to deliberately learn something new to help you Accelerate your success and easy way to do that. Take a minute subscribe to this podcast Accelerate. And that way you won’t miss any of my conversations with top business experts like my guest today Peter Buscemi, who shared his expertise of how to accelerate the growth of your business. So thanks for joining me and until next time, this is Andy Paul. Good selling everyone.