In this episode of the B2B Marketing Methods podcast, host Terri Hoffman, CEO of Marketing Refresh, interviews Trish Balmos the President & Founder of Vine Sales Consulting. This episode covers the importance of cohesive brand stories, value propositions, and proper budget allocation.
Listeners will learn about the significance of CRM tools, diagnosing brand and audience issues, and overcoming internal misalignments. Terri and Trish also discuss insights on fostering team cohesiveness, conducting brand audits, and crafting engaging messages. This episode also highlights practical advice for involving sales and marketing early in business planning, the importance of trust and soft skills in team dynamics, and how strategic planning impacts a company’s success.
Tune in for a comprehensive guide to achieving seamless communication and cooperation between sales and marketing teams.
- Topics Discussed:
- Sales and marketing alignment
- CRM tools and accountability
- Brand positioning and messaging
- Cost of misaligned teams
- Hiring the right sales and leadership roles
- Leadership’s role in fostering trust and communication
- Overcoming misconceptions about sales
To learn more about Trish, connect with her on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trishbalmos/
To learn more about Terri, connect with her on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrihartley/
To connect with Marketing Refresh, visit: MarketingRefresh.com
Full Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Terri Hoffman: Welcome to B2B Marketing Methods. I’m your host, Terri Hoffman, and I’m the CEO of Marketing Refresh. Let’s face it, embracing digital marketing is daunting. This podcast was created to make it more approachable. Join me as we talk to CEOs, sales leaders, and revenue growth experts who will share lessons learned and tips from their own journeys.
[00:00:24]
[00:00:24] Terri Hoffman: Hello and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing Methods. I’m your host, Terri Hoffman with Marketing Refresh. I’m real excited for our guest today. I’m going to tell you just a little bit about her and then you’ll learn more about her as we go through our discussion today.
[00:00:38] Terri Hoffman: I have as our guest today, Trish Balmos. She is the founder and owner of a firm called Vine Sales Consulting. And you’re going to learn that she is, probably one of the top experts in her field when it comes to the alignment of sales and marketing strategies as well as sales coaching. She works a lot with manufacturing companies, and other types of service providers, professional services.
[00:01:03] Terri Hoffman: She’s also worked with a lot of marketing companies in the past. Some of the topics we’re going to be talking about today are so relevant in the field today. It’s how do you line up the activities and accountability between sales and marketing. How do you make sure those strategies are aligned?
[00:01:19] Terri Hoffman: How do you use CRM tools to reach your goals? How do you communicate what’s going on between those groups to upper management and leadership or your board to ensure that you’re not only communicating what’s going on but also receiving the proper support and leadership from the people who are in those roles?
[00:01:37] Terri Hoffman: So those are just a few of the things we’re going to go over. Thank you, Trish, for being here today. I’m really excited to have you on.
[00:01:43] Trish Balmos: Thank you.
[00:01:44] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. let’s start with getting to know you a little bit. how did you get your career started? Like where did it begin? And I’d love for you to walk us through where it began and how you’ve gotten to the point where you are today with your business.
[00:01:55] Trish Balmos: I was an operations manager for a publishing company for eight years. I got tired of working all the nights and weekends and seeing the sales people work nine to five and make more money than I did. So I asked the president one day, “Hey, do you think I could sell?”
[00:02:09] Trish Balmos: He’s like, absolutely. I went out on my own and my very first sales job was a selling printing, which is akin to insurance. It was really tough and it was straight commission. I cut my chops real early on the hard stuff, but I made it work for my first three years. I made a good living.
[00:02:28] Trish Balmos: I love sales. I love the discipline. A lot of people are scared of it and they have a bad opinion of the sales roles, but it is very much a discipline and not just you’re just born salespeople. And I’ve come to respect, process of sales and how it aligns with, you know, corporate strategies, marketing, all of those types of things and how well it can work, and my career has been with small and medium-sized businesses, typically, usually somewhere in the $30, $25, $30 million range,
[00:03:09] Trish Balmos: the firms I’ve been with. Ad agencies, I’ve been with 2 or 3 ad agencies, a consumer promotions company. I sold some research at 1 Research Products at one point and then I also sold software and specialized in selling to the restaurant industry for about 10 years. Did a lot of enterprise deals. Went out on my own eight years ago,
[00:03:33] Trish Balmos: best decision I ever made. If anybody is looking to go out on their own and you’re afraid, for me, it was a great transition and I love what I do. I love helping other companies understand, how to structure their sales organizations to succeed using best practices and just some of the good work that’s out there.
[00:03:55] Terri Hoffman: Well, my gosh, you’re using a lot of words that may surprise people when they think about sales and revenue growth, right? So process, systems, skills. I think a lot of people have a common misperception like you’re born a salesperson, you show up and you’ve got some skills that you can just take out there to build relationships and build sales.
[00:04:16] Terri Hoffman: Do I have that right? Is that a common misperception? What are some ways that you address that mindset?
[00:04:22] Trish Balmos: That is a very common perception. One of the things that I’m thankful for in my career is that, one of the ad agencies I’ve worked for put me in sales training.
[00:04:32] Trish Balmos: And so I had formal sales training and mentors on a weekly basis for the better part of five years. I went on to teach some of that sales training as well and be an enterprise sales coach professional, trainer in that area. But what I saw often, and this was when they had a lot of customers coming into the sales training from different companies
[00:04:54] Trish Balmos: so we had a nice constituency, we were there and I saw all these companies that, either had bad positioning, bad process, the wrong people, the wrong products, the wrong markets, but small businesses tend to immediately put the lack of sales on to their salespeople and they go to, hey, they need sales training right away.
[00:05:22] Trish Balmos: When in reality, it could be about, some of the most important things. In a corporate strategy, especially in small businesses is that they weren’t positioned. Well, they thought that their new product that they were launching and just hired a salesperson for could go to anybody they weren’t focused on the audience.
[00:05:45] Trish Balmos: They simply had a new great product and let’s hire some great salespeople, put those two together and let’s make the magic happen. And that’s not a recipe for success all the time. Sometimes it is, but the majority of the time it’s not.
[00:05:59] Terri Hoffman: What do you see go wrong when the company approaches it with thinking that that’s the formula?
[00:06:06] Terri Hoffman: Like what are some things that can go wrong with that approach?
[00:06:10] Trish Balmos: Well, the obvious is most of those companies, and I have a couple on mind that I watched very closely and saw them circle through a lot of salespeople, is the opportunity cost of the business that you lost and then just the hard cost of training salespeople, and paying them.
[00:06:30] Trish Balmos: I saw one company cycle through several people. I mean, the cost can be as much as one to two to three to four, some people even say five times their base salary is the cost to replace a salesperson. I estimated this one company probably lost a million dollars and they were only a 20 million dollar company.
[00:06:49] Trish Balmos: The other piece of that is the damage to their brand, right? I believe when you’re talking about marketing and sales together, small business corporate strategies have to revolve around their brand and their positioning, they have to get those two things right, and those have to coexist on the marketing side and the sales side, and they all have to be singing from the same hymnal.
[00:07:12] Trish Balmos: That’s often not the case at all in small businesses. And that’s some of the things that I try to work with, marketing folks and sales folks at the companies I work with to try to fix.
[00:07:23] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, well, that gets right to the heart of the intro that I gave at the beginning.
[00:07:28] Terri Hoffman: And that’s talking about the alignment between the sales strategy and the marketing strategy. So where do you begin? When you walk in and you, just knowing you, like, I know you’re a big, diagnoser, right? You like to get in and ask a lot of questions and really understand the lay of the land, before you start diving in and saying, well, here’s what we think you need to do.
[00:07:47] Terri Hoffman: Once you’ve done that assessment and there’s not like a solid brand story here or they don’t really have clarity on their value proposition. how do you get the ball rolling? Where do you start?
[00:07:58] Trish Balmos: I have worked for a couple of different brand agencies and while I’m not the subject matter expert on that, I know enough.
[00:08:05] Trish Balmos: We typically have to employ the resources of a company like an outside marketing firm, or we have to work with the internal marketing team at the companies to commit to, what is our brand? And when we say brand, the definition that I carry is what is the perception of your company in the minds of your customers?
[00:08:27] Trish Balmos: There’s a lot to unpack there. You have to not only define that message in that brand, but also the audience. One of the biggest things that small and medium-sized, B2B companies do is not focus on an audience.
[00:08:44] Trish Balmos: They’re trying to compete. If you think about, you know, Avis was number two for years, this goes way back. Hertz was number one in the rental car business and Avis was number two, but they can embrace that number two spot, right? That was who they were. That was their brand
[00:08:59] Trish Balmos: and that was successful to them. They weren’t trying to be all things to all people, if you will. They knew they were a solid number two. So many small and medium-sized companies have great products or services and as they enhance those or try to expand into different markets to grow their business
[00:09:18] Trish Balmos: or build new products, they believe that everybody will want it because it’s wonderful. And that’s not the case. There’s usually a specific audience that they will be meaningful to. So, in that audit, we try to find those commonalities on what is the brand? What is it you want to do? What is it you’re profitable at doing?
[00:09:37] Trish Balmos: This is part of the audit. And then who cares, right? What audience cares about what you’re doing and then what is that message? What do they want to hear that’s going to engage them and make your company look unique? And that has that those are all sales messages and marketing messages, there’s no separation.
[00:09:58] Trish Balmos: Good companies will have those 2 things that brand and that positioning really solidified and then marketing sales flows out of that and it should flow naturally and be consistent.
[00:10:09] Terri Hoffman: Because I have a background in marketing, when you explain that, I think that is so like obvious, right?
[00:10:15] Terri Hoffman: And something I see a lot, I don’t know if you run into this is I think oftentimes the leadership team is pretty set. Like we already know what that message is. Do you find that when you go through that process, they’re often surprised by what their brand actually is in the market and what it means, and how they’re perceived?
[00:10:34] Terri Hoffman: And secondly, do you find that there is a gap between what that leadership team knows and what the people who are more like the frontline marketers and salespeople actually understands about how their brand is perceived? Cause those are two things I see go wrong.
[00:10:49] Trish Balmos: Absolutely. That’s a very good question.
[00:10:53] Trish Balmos: I have a statistic that I believe I put on my website that says “80 percent of companies feel like their products are differentiated, but only 10 percent of their customers feel that they are.” So the gap exists. I firmly believe an outside firm needs to be involved in getting voice of customer information, unless you have a really good product team internally.
[00:11:18] Trish Balmos: Getting that voice of customer feedback and really understanding what the vision is for your company and how it fits and what they think of you. And then what they need, right? I had experience at one company where they had this wonderful product, but the world wasn’t ready for it yet.
[00:11:34] Trish Balmos: It was an online product. It was, ahead of its time. And they just put good money after bad, right? The audience wasn’t ready for it yet. So they should have done a slow roll when they went really hard and fast and wasted a lot of money and a lot of time.
[00:11:48] Terri Hoffman: You’ve even uncovered a couple of other little, little details. It’s like you might have in your mind, what you think is going to be an impactful message, but it might not be landing that way with the client, especially if they’re not ready for it. Or, aware of the fact that this solution could meet a need that they haven’t even realized is a need yet.
[00:12:07] Terri Hoffman: I mean, that that’s one of the hardest products or services to market or sell is in that particular category. But I see a lot of leadership teams just frustrated because they understand the value proposition. They’ve talked to their market enough, and they’ve actually done the hard work internally to figure out what that message should be and where it should land.
[00:12:30] Terri Hoffman: But if the people who are actually responsible for growing revenue in the sales and marketing function don’t also have that same understanding. It can be very challenging to make it all work, to make the revenue grow and to have a proper strategy and implementation of what’s in the leadership team’s mind.
[00:12:49] Terri Hoffman: Right. I see that a lot and it can be very frustrating when you’re in a leadership role.
[00:12:53] Trish Balmos: Absolutely. going back to the disconnect, that can happen and the cost. If leadership doesn’t do a good job of defining the brand, the positioning, and making sure that it’s relevant to the audience.
[00:13:08] Trish Balmos: And then developing those messages and making sure that the entire organization is aligned with that messaging and they know how to sell according to that messaging, what that pull through is on the sales side. If they don’t, salespeople will make it up on the fly. So you’re going to have like, whatever messages, Joe decides to have or Jane or whoever, they’re going to do whatever they need to do.
[00:13:33] Trish Balmos: Like the 1st time somebody buys something from them, they will use that sales message over and over and over again because they believe that’s the message that will sell. Right? And that may have just been a 1 off. So it’s really important for your salespeople to internalize the reasons that your products are important to the customers.
[00:13:54] Trish Balmos: That’s part of the sales training part, but that’s all in that bigger strategy and messaging that completely is in the ecosystem with marketing strategy, sales, they all should all be together. and again, aligned, or there’s a lot of costs, a lot of bad messaging out there from salespeople.
[00:14:13] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. I mean, you’re expressing, one of the most challenging parts of taking something to the market is right when the board or the investor or the leadership team is ready to go because they’re on the same page, you’ve got to invest some additional time ensuring that your team and your company and all of the stakeholders involved are on the same page as you
[00:14:33] Terri Hoffman: or that vision can get off track very, very quickly. And it’s frustrating. It’s like, as the leaders, you’re ready to go and now you realize, well, we’ve got to slow down and take the time. And that time can be several weeks, it could even be a couple of months to make sure that that’s properly conveyed.
[00:14:52] Terri Hoffman: And the trade-off between taking that time and the opportunity cost that you talked about earlier is more than worth it. It’s just tough at that stage, to like have the patience and go through that process.
[00:15:04] Trish Balmos: Yeah. And sometimes the entrepreneurs don’t want to hear that the baby is ugly, right?
[00:15:11] Trish Balmos: Like they don’t want to hear that feedback. That maybe their product needs to be positioned differently and that the features and benefits that they feel are important or not as important to their customers. That’s a problem that leads me to the flip side of the sales conversation whereas sales can make up their own messaging to get the job done on the other end of it when you do have a good message, and you do have a good value prop, and you push it out there and it’s not being received well by the marketplace. A lot of times leaders will not listen to their sales people and they a lot of times have that voice of customer in the absence of doing that voice of customer research.
[00:15:49] Trish Balmos: And so those need to be leading indicators of, Hey, is there something real here or do I have salespeople that are just making excuses, ’cause That happens a lot. Right? That’s one of the reasons I have a job is to talk people out of having excuses to do the hard work of sales.
[00:16:05] Trish Balmos: But sometimes there’s some real meat on the bones there when it comes to the feedback from the customers and management needs to pay attention to that.
[00:16:14] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Well, so it sounds like making sure that the brand is solid. it’s clearly identified there’s like a fit with the market that it’s being sold to the market is clearly identified.
[00:16:27] Terri Hoffman: And then that’s all properly conveyed to the sales and marketing team. What’s the next big challenge you typically run into? Assuming that’s all ironed out, you’re confident in how that rolled out. What, what’s the next, hurdle that you find comes up in this whole process?
[00:16:43] Trish Balmos: Probably in order of 1, getting the right team in place and 2, operationalizing it, right?
[00:16:50] Trish Balmos: Getting it functional. Once you get the message right there’s, you know, the three things, your message and your positioning, your team, and then your execution. And so you have the right message and so a lot of people hire the wrong sales people, unfortunately. Not every salesperson that was in the previous position is going to be successful in your company. There’s a lot of fit issues. It’s a little bit science and a lot of theory that you have to go through. It’s a people industry, right? So, very, very messy.
[00:17:23] Trish Balmos: Hiring salespeople is one of the hardest things. But then secondly, having the team, a sales leadership team or sales team that is aligned with and works well with marketing is huge. There’s a gazillion stats on the cost of marketing and sales not working together,
[00:17:40] Trish Balmos: there’s real numbers associated with that. And that can look like marketing generating leads the salespeople don’t use because they don’t trust the marketing people and then that’s a waste of money and there’s an opportunity cost here. Or it can look like marketing not trusting sales and then not working together, putting together messaging and just spinning their wheels.
[00:18:02] Trish Balmos: They say it can cost a business up to 10% and then there’s a lot of stats that show anytime a team is well aligned and they’re working well together and the people trust each other, they don’t have to be best friends. they have to have a really good trust within the team and a mutual respect for the work that each other does.
[00:18:21] Trish Balmos: And they have to be aligned with the same priorities and so making sure that those things happen. So, when you’re building that team, fit is huge. Making sure that fit is there and that you can get either outside resources and inside resources to work well together can pay off in huge dividends for companies.
[00:18:41] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, you said that in such a calming and simple way, but I also know that what you just said has got to be one of the hardest things to figure out. Like, what are some ways that you’re able to identify that cohesiveness and that fit? Are there certain methods or processes you follow that help you zero in and hone in on that fit and cohesiveness?
[00:19:05] Trish Balmos: I do a lot of hiring assist and then also mainly for sales roles, but then also management roles within companies. When, if we identify in the audit process that there are marketing gaps, that is not my expertise, but again, I know enough to say, hey, we’ve got a marketing gap. And so we need to fill that with some talent that can come in and help solve for that and work with the team.
[00:19:31] Trish Balmos: And again, that’s about fit. That is the messy part. I think I read a article that CEOs mentioned the hardest role to hire for was sales. I would think, you know, getting that right and getting those folks, just hiring people was messy.
[00:19:47] Trish Balmos: And it’s hard. I do use, you know, based on my experience, I can spot some things quickly, but in the absence of having that experience, working with good HR people that have, experience in hiring folks, I also use tools like, Desk Profile and some other assessments as indicators. I see a lot of companies using assessments to hire for fit
[00:20:13] Trish Balmos: and some use them as implicit tools that if somebody doesn’t score exactly like this, they’re not even going to be considered. In my experience, that’s a mistake because I’ve seen some people that didn’t fit perfectly that were able to, through their life experiences and who they were, be able to adapt and change and execute well the roles that they needed.
[00:20:37] Trish Balmos: Additionally, I found that group, as much as I hate group interviews, getting people to get a feel for other people on the team is a big deal. Hiring people in a vacuum is never a good idea. You have to make sure the rest of your team feels like it’s a fit.
[00:20:54] Terri Hoffman: Okay. Well, I have a feeling, there are some tools that maybe can point you in the right direction, but if you rely just on the tools and not on, your experience or somebody with similar experience to you to be part of that decision-making process. You shouldn’t just rely solely on tools, but it sounds like there’s also a little bit of skill and experience that you bring to the table, that helps to ensure you’re finding those fits.
[00:21:20] Trish Balmos: Yeah.
[00:21:21] Terri Hoffman: Yeah.
[00:21:21] Trish Balmos: what happens most often is people that hire, hire people just like them. Right? And that’s not necessarily the best fit for every role in your organization. If leaders that are hiring have a self-awareness of that and they hire people that are different than them.
[00:21:41] Trish Balmos: Example, somebody that doesn’t have really a sales personality, a CEO, they might hire a lot of folks on their team that are just like them because they’re comfortable with them in the hiring process. And they need to understand each role that they’re trying to hire for is going to have a different set of skills that may be.
[00:22:03] Trish Balmos: Or a different set of, and it’s the soft skills too, that they have. And look at those profiles, those disc profiles or personality profiles to help understand those differences. Again, those are indicators. They’re not hire, no hire tools, but they are good indicators as a baseline to help start that process of having a good interview and finding the right fit.
[00:22:25] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. I mean, I’ve personally learned that myself. I’m a huge follower of the DISC model. So I tend to, agree with the things that you’re saying, just because I’ve had that experience. And I’ve also watched it, with other companies that we work with.
[00:22:39] Trish Balmos: I use, predictive index a lot too. They do a good job as well.
[00:22:43] Terri Hoffman: Okay. I haven’t really studied that one. Great. Now I have a new personality skill assessment tool to dive into.
[00:22:49] Trish Balmos: Yeah.
[00:22:50] Terri Hoffman: Those are, it’s really insightful though. Like, as you start to formulate the team and, bring people together.
[00:22:57] Terri Hoffman: There has to be some system for accountability, right? What is that? What is your viewpoint on that? How do you start to formulate accountability for these teams and how they’re being led and working together?
[00:23:10] Trish Balmos: Accountability is a dirty word these days. A lot of people don’t like it. Salesforce, when you were asking me a minute ago about how do you pull that through once you have that brand, the messaging, the product, the customer feedback, you feel like you’re ready to go getting the right team in place. The next step is really operationalizing that and doing that involves accountability.
[00:23:33] Trish Balmos: It usually involves a CRM, a list, making sure the list is clean. Another mistake I’ve seen a lot of small and medium-sized businesses make on the marketing and sales side is that their list is not clean, in addition to it not being focused, it’s too broad or it’s not very clean and they’re mailing bad addresses or emailing the wrong people or, targeting the wrong audiences.
[00:24:02] Trish Balmos: So getting that clean. Getting them into a CRM of some sort, making sure that you have the right systems in place to measure marketing and sales together. The marketing automation tools are big, obviously, and they feed both sales and marketing, and then having that weekly accountability with your team on the sales side, especially. Are they following up on the leads that have been generated from marketing?
[00:24:29] Trish Balmos: Are they following up on the campaigns? One of the things that I’ve been a big fan of for a long time, and this is not a new concept by any means, a lot of people do this, is having those coordinated campaigns, between marketing and sales, and everybody knows their lane. Hey, this is, marketing’s putting this together.
[00:24:50] Trish Balmos: This is in alignment with our strategy. Here’s the tactics they’re going to use to deploy the messaging and right behind that is a sales campaign or a call campaign or a trade show, whatever it may be that supports. So it’s all working together and then you’re able to measure the outcomes of that and rinse and repeat the ones that work and work well.
[00:25:12] Terri Hoffman: As I’m listening to you talk about these different stages, Of building a good sales and marketing organization is making me think about I’m reading that book, The Gap In the Game, right now, which was actually recommended to me by a couple of previous guests.
[00:25:27] Terri Hoffman: And I think what I would imagine is really challenging again, for the investor or the board or the leadership team is they’ve got something they’re ready to start growing and the steps that you’re describing, they have to be very well thought through and methodical in a way. And like, calculated, I guess that’s the best word I can think of.
[00:25:48] Terri Hoffman: And so The Gap In the Game kind of gets you to focus on the fact that you’re thinking about the progress you’re making rather than focusing too heavily on what hasn’t happened yet. Where I’m going with all this is, do you find that there’s sort of a life cycle to implementing something at this level that you’re describing?
[00:26:06] Terri Hoffman: Is it like a six month change? Is it a 12 month change? And how do you help coach your clients through that timeline and like what it’s going to take to really do this the right way?
[00:26:17] Trish Balmos: Well, it depends on where they are in the beginning. If they’re, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, at a 3
[00:26:25] Trish Balmos: it’s going to take a lot longer, right? So if they haven’t done that customer work, if they don’t know what their positioning is, if they haven’t done that brand work. Sometimes those exercises in and of itself can be a big change to the business. I had a customer that
[00:26:41] Trish Balmos: they were trying to market to a lot of different people. And narrowing that focus was a real challenge for the internal organization because you’re having to undo the habits of the marketing team, of the salespeople. You’re having to get them to say strategy is as much about saying what you will not do versus what you will do.
[00:27:04] Trish Balmos: And so getting, if, if that’s the case, if they’re too broader and they’re going in the wrong direction, or management wants to go in a different direction, refocusing that team can take a lot longer. On average, I would say, taking somebody from on a scale of 1 to 10, a 3 to, getting them to 8, 9, or 10 is a couple of years.
[00:27:25] Trish Balmos: Right. Doing those big changes is there at a five. Maybe it’s another year, right? If they’ve got the good brand positioning, the audience, they just need to get the team in place and then execute. Additionally, it depends on how complicated their systems are from an IT perspective and implementing, you know, marketing automation tools, marketing tools, that theory from the website side of things as well.
[00:27:51] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. I just, know that might sound like a long time, right? But a lot of wins can come in that timeframe that are small and large. And so as that progress is being made, but I would imagine at the end of that, they’ve got something that can carry them forward for quite a long time.
[00:28:09] Terri Hoffman: As a business, they’ve got a better infrastructure and a stronger and they’re not going to be experiencing those opportunity costs that we talked about at the beginning, right?
[00:28:19] Trish Balmos: Lot of people don’t like change though, so that’s the hard part. Again, you know, we can talk about all the great process and strategies and so on.
[00:28:26] Trish Balmos: What I find in my role is, it’s a people business, your employees and your customers. As a business manager or leader, I’m positive every leader can say that same thing that probably half of their pain throughout the week comes from, people issues, customers, internal folks with the challenges, whatever that may be.
[00:28:49] Terri Hoffman: And, there’s no question. I would put that percentage higher.
[00:28:53] Trish Balmos: So one of the things that I teach and approach to a lot for salespeople is those soft skills, right? And I had somebody, you know, I was lucky enough to have somebody teach me along the way, ’cause I was a little rough around the edges as well.
[00:29:08] Trish Balmos: I tend to be very blunt and so I had to learn to not do that and to, how to soften things and how to approach people to keep them safe and have a good discussion. So there’s just, there’s a lot that goes into that and it’s exhausting for people, but honestly, those are the things that AI is not going to solve for.
[00:29:28] Terri Hoffman: Right. For a lot, for a lot of us.
[00:29:30] Trish Balmos: Right.
[00:29:31] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. But I think you’re right. And it’s funny because when you, when I talk to other CEOs about people issues, it doesn’t mean somebody is doing something wrong or that you have like an HR issue to deal with. It’s usually about communication, right?
[00:29:44] Terri Hoffman: It’s one person thinking one thing and the other person thinking another and you can tell there’s just a gap. Or there could be several people involved that all have a different interpretation of what’s happening and just bringing everyone together and making sure that the actual issue at heart is like understood by everyone involved and that you’re communicating about it.
[00:30:05] Terri Hoffman: That is not something you learn in college, right? And you have to have somebody who’s mentoring you and helping you and teaching you, how to do a better job at those types of soft skills.
[00:30:15] Trish Balmos: Yeah, trust is big. One of the things that comes to mind is the speed of trust.
[00:30:20] Trish Balmos: If you’ve read that book, it’s talks about, yeah, it’s what, what, What Is the Cost of the Lack of Trust In Our Society? It gets very granular in terms of products and people and relationships you know, lack of trust literally costs businesses money. If you have teams that get along and trust each other, that’s huge.
[00:30:42] Trish Balmos: They don’t have to be best friends, but they do have to, at some level, have that professional working relationship and trust. Oftentimes that’s something that leadership is responsible for fostering as well, like, not accepting people that aren’t trusting their teammates and giving them the benefit of the doubt.
[00:31:03] Trish Balmos: So getting a little philosophical there, but honestly, those are the day to day conversations, right?
[00:31:10] Terri Hoffman: Right. Well, I think that the whole conversation has been about a blending of an approach, a process, the systems it takes, but the glue that really holds it all together is what we’re talking about right now.
[00:31:22] Terri Hoffman: Like you could have all of the best of breed in every one of those categories, but if you don’t have that cohesiveness on the trust level, It can all fall apart, right? It won’t work to the degree that it can work if the trust is there and all of those other things are in place.
[00:31:37] Terri Hoffman: I think it hinders the opportunity quite a bit. What for you would qualify as a gratifying coaching and consulting engagement?
[00:31:47] Terri Hoffman: Like what is it that you’re looking for out of engagement that tells you this is a win?
[00:31:52] Trish Balmos: Organizations that have a good product already, they have that part of it figured out. Normally it’s an entrepreneur or somebody that’s in charge of a business, a president or CEO, that is not a salesperson, right?
[00:32:08] Trish Balmos: And they have enough self-awareness to know that they need outside help to implement probably sales and marketing are like close cousins, right? When it comes to leadership understanding, either of those, usually, if they’re not sales. Personality, they’re probably not a marketing personality either
[00:32:28] Trish Balmos: and I’ll even go a step further and say that sometimes they’re the redheaded stepchild, right? Like, in a business, a lot of times the entrepreneur is the engineer of whatever solution’s out there and they were able to sell it because they were the CEO. And then getting the rest of the organization to be able to understand that message and pull that through and getting others to be able to sell it is their challenge, right?
[00:32:55] Terri Hoffman: Well, I think where you were going with it is super exciting because I think it’s a big reason why a CEO who fits the description you just gave is more prone to say, like, I’m just going to hire the salesperson who’s comfortable going in a room and handing out his or her business card.
[00:33:12] Terri Hoffman: Right? Like, it’s not understood what it takes to be successful in there in the same way that they’re able to understand what makes the whole rest of the company successful operationally.
[00:33:23] Trish Balmos: Yeah. And also what, what can happen with those situations is if they have self-awareness, they’re not necessarily marketing and sales gurus outside help to make those functions work.
[00:33:35] Trish Balmos: What tends to happen sometimes also is when they’re recasting their business or reworking their strategy to try to improve sales, new products or whatever, they tend to focus on the operations of the company and they don’t focus on marketing sales. Nor do they allocate budget appropriately for them, especially marketing sales.
[00:33:56] Trish Balmos: I think there’s an expectation that you’re going to have to pay people because it’s a, pay-for-performance. Most of the time, if you sell something, you get paid. If you don’t sell something, you’re going to get fired. Right? But for marketing, because it’s a little mushier, a harder to measure
[00:34:09] Trish Balmos: all of the efforts. They tend to under budget for that, and they’re always trying to squeeze, you know, they squeeze a little bit out of it. And it’s like, no, they need to have robust sales and marketing efforts, in their organizations in order to pull that through. And they need to start sooner.
[00:34:27] Trish Balmos: Sometimes they start late like they’ll get everything else in order and then they’ll be like, okay, let’s get sales and marketing in place. No, they probably should have been along for the ride. So,
[00:34:35] Terri Hoffman: I want that person in that leadership role to feel more confident about their understanding of sales and marketing and feel that it’s more approachable for them, right? Because there’s, it’s very classic problem, but it’s still pervasive today, is there’s just not alignment, not only between sales and marketing, there’s not alignment between those two groups or that one group and the whole rest of the organization.
[00:35:00] Terri Hoffman: What people think sales and marketing is responsible for and what they actually do every day versus maybe the understanding from the other parts of the company or from leadership are a lot of times misaligned. It needs to be made more approachable. And I think the people who are in those roles, like you and me, we are accountable and responsible for making sure
[00:35:22] Terri Hoffman: that the other parts of the company understand what we do, why we do it, how we hold ourselves accountable, how they should hold us accountable. Because one small thing you just said, there was companies under budget for marketing. When I say that it immediately sounds like I’m trying to, generate more revenue for my marketing agency.
[00:35:42] Terri Hoffman: yeah, that is going to happen, right? If you allocate for marketing correctly, but what I really want is to stop watching companies spend what they’ve been able to budget versus spending what is actually going to make an impact because I’d rather just have them take that money and put like a fun little vacation together for the leadership team.
[00:36:02] Trish Balmos: Right?
[00:36:03] Terri Hoffman: I mean, do something else with that. If you can’t allocate an appropriate amount, I’d rather see companies not spend anything at all. Because it’s a disservice if we don’t advise them correctly.
[00:36:15] Trish Balmos: Absolutely. And I think there’s a couple reasons that happens. They don’t get marketing and sales involved as early as they should in their strategic planning process and that’s only some, that’s not all, that’s just a few folks, or they don’t take that part as seriously as they do maybe product development.
[00:36:33] Trish Balmos: I. T. takes up a lot, you know, technology takes up tons of resources and almost every business now. Right? So you absolutely have to put funds and thoughts for that. And there’s a lot of planning that needs to happen. but that same care needs to happen on the marketing and sales side as well. if you don’t in the end, you’re going to end up with that disconnect and it needs to be part of the bigger strategy, especially when it comes to the messaging and how you’re going to send me your strategy.
[00:37:02] Trish Balmos: You have your product, you have your audience, you have your goals and I know a lot of what I’ve said sounds like it’s very hard. But at the end of the day, it’s really not. I see a lot of people making it hard because they don’t do the simple steps. Have a plan, have that strategy, have that positioning, and then work the plan, right?
[00:37:24] Trish Balmos: Plan, team, execution. A lot of them go in circles. The other reason that they, I think, that they fail or struggle with those things is pulling those sales through is, you know, lack of having them involved in the beginning. But the second is, once they do get to it, if they get to it too late, they have a little bit of budget.
[00:37:46] Trish Balmos: And then they hire some agencies or some salespeople, and they, there’s a lot of people out there doing a lot of things. So, I think having some people that they trust and some good advisors,
[00:37:58] Trish Balmos: to help them. I’ve seen a lot of small business CEOs go through a lot of marketing folks because they didn’t know what they want and they didn’t have a strategy and they really have to do that and sometimes those agencies can help them land on that. but they do make it hard and they go through a lot of resources.
[00:38:17] Terri Hoffman: well, and then what’s even more frustrating, from my point of view is I see that a lot. And then I also see that there are a lot of imposters in my industry.
[00:38:27] Trish Balmos: Absolutely.
[00:38:28] Terri Hoffman: they know just the right thing to say. They know the way to pitch themselves, but they don’t actually know how to properly implement or execute and deliver on the results. They’re good salespeople, but they’re not good deliverers. But I see it so often in my industry. Again, another reason I wanna do this podcast is because the people who are making those decisions and who have the budget
[00:38:49] Terri Hoffman: I want them to be better educated about what they should be looking for and how to go about that decision-making process so that they know they’re being led in the right direction for the right reasons.
[00:38:58] Trish Balmos: Mm-Hmm. and hiring those firms with, sales input as opposed to in a vacuum is huge as well.
[00:39:07] Trish Balmos: I mean that talking about that alignment doesn’t have to be just internal folks. It should be sales plus the alignment of outside marketing resources. So having your sales leadership be involved in that hiring processes. I can’t tell you how many CEOs show up and go, I just hired this marketing firm to do this research and we’re going to pay him $30,000 and they’re going to be in next week.
[00:39:31] Trish Balmos: I’m like, oh, great, right? Like, and then you get a $30,000 report that sits on the shelf and collects dust because I wasn’t along for the ride or the rest of the organization wasn’t or the leadership team, the CEO, or the business owner got sold on something. So again, I think interviewing outside marketing firms needs to be as tight as interviewing for internal roles, right?
[00:39:54] Trish Balmos: Need to make sure it’s a fit for the team and that, that’s a big deal. I think that’s a huge tip because they should be an ongoing long-term partner.
[00:40:02] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, I completely agree. Put your time and analysis in upfront so that by the time you establish that relationship, you’re very clear on why you selected that partner.
[00:40:12] Terri Hoffman: Yes, there are a lot of great agencies out there. I’m friends with a lot of them. I’m in several agency owner groups. It’s just that there are also a lot who just know exactly what to say and don’t deliver the value that they should. it’s
[00:40:27] Trish Balmos: It’s just like salespeople, there’s a lot of good salespeople out there, but they’re not all a fit in every organization, the same is probably true to say for marketing firms as well.
[00:40:36] Trish Balmos: So that’s why interviewing folks and understanding what you want and getting that fit and getting a feel for it works.
[00:40:43] Terri Hoffman: Okay, so say your three steps again. Like you talked about kind of three phases of help. Go over that again, because I think that’s huge.
[00:40:53] Trish Balmos: You’re really identifying your brand, what your customers think about you, what that message needs to be, how your product is differentiated. Who cares? What is that message? So the brand and the message positioning all are in the same bucket. The next is the team getting the right team on board, putting efforts towards getting those folks.
[00:41:14] Trish Balmos: And then, next is the execution, which is having all the systems. Sometimes those things can happen concurrently. But again, I think it starts with that brand messaging and audience. Those are the pillars. If you don’t have those right, all those other things are not going to go right.
[00:41:31] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, that’s awesome.
[00:41:32] Terri Hoffman: That was hopefully a good way to summarize the whole conversation. I have some fun questions if you still have a few minutes here at the end. Sure. they’re hopefully way easier than what we just talked about. I’m a huge music fan, so I love hearing this answer from people.
[00:41:45] Terri Hoffman: If you were able to see any musical artist, it can be a band, solo artist, whatever, dead or alive, who would that be?
[00:41:55] Trish Balmos: George Michael.
[00:41:57] Terri Hoffman: George Michael!
[00:41:59] Trish Balmos: George Michael, and he died before I saw him. He’s amazing.
[00:42:04] Terri Hoffman: You want that Wham! reunion?
[00:42:06] Trish Balmos: No, he did so much good work after that. I mean his, you listen to his B-side stuff and it’s so good. Even my husband, he was like, I don’t want to listen to George Michael and then I was playing. He’s like, is that George Michael? I’m like, you know, he’s like, that’s really good. Yeah, I know. He’s, he’s fabulous.
[00:42:22] Terri Hoffman: had a pretty amazing voice.
[00:42:24] Trish Balmos: Yeah.
[00:42:26] Terri Hoffman: You talked about one book during our interview, but is there a book that you find yourself constantly recommending to people as your go-to, hey, you need to read this book type.
[00:42:36] Trish Balmos: Challenger Sale. And then I have another 1, that’s called Aligning Sales and Strategy, I can’t remember the author’s name, but he’s, a Harvard guy, and, he does some of the best writing on sales,
[00:42:51] Trish Balmos: sales execution, sales management, that just rocked my world. I mean, I’ve got copies of it underlined, highlighted. I have one customer one time where we were going through some brand strategy, sales type discussions at a high level, and I bought everybody a copy of it. And it’s just my favorite.
[00:43:11] Terri Hoffman: I need to look at The Challenger Sale I’ve read. I love that book. I’ve read it more than once. I need to get a copy of that second one you just talked about.
[00:43:19] Terri Hoffman: What is your favorite vacation you’ve ever taken?
[00:43:24] Trish Balmos: I don’t think I’ve taken it yet.
[00:43:27] Trish Balmos: No, I haven’t taken it yet.
[00:43:30] Trish Balmos: So.
[00:43:30] Terri Hoffman: Okay.
[00:43:31] Trish Balmos: I’ve had a lot of good ones and a lot of good ones, but we did Alaska this year. We haven’t been out of the country really and I want to go overseas some more, so there’s a lot I want to see.
[00:43:44] Terri Hoffman: Okay. To be determined to be determined on that one. All right. What’s your favorite job you’ve ever had?
[00:43:52] Trish Balmos: I love what I’m doing. A lot of satisfaction in helping people. I’ve made a lot of great relationships. I love mentoring salespeople and creating sales leaders and seeing people make money. I mean, sales is one of the most liberating jobs in my mind because you’re really running your own business.
[00:44:12] Trish Balmos: You either do the job or you don’t. There’s no, it’s math, not English. So, teaching people how to do that and do it well and appreciate it as a career. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve recruited, tried to recruit people within organizations to move from like customer service to sales. And they’re like, Oh, I don’t want to be in sales because they have this
[00:44:33] Trish Balmos: terrible opinion of sales, but that’s because they don’t really know like the discipline of sales and how it is good and it’s not bad and it’s not sleazy.
[00:44:43] Terri Hoffman: The only person who didn’t name their current job said that being a dad is his favorite job he’s ever had and I’m like, well, okay, then we’re going to just count that as a, you like your current job because he’s a dad.
[00:44:55] Terri Hoffman: it has been really fun spending this time together and I appreciate you spending the time kind of sharing all of this information with my audience.
[00:45:05] Terri Hoffman: If somebody would like to get in touch with you, what is the best way to get a hold of you?
[00:45:11] Trish Balmos: My email or phone that’s on my website at vinesalesconsulting.com or on LinkedIn. So thank you, Terri. This has been great. I appreciate it.
[00:45:20] Terri Hoffman: Thanks for joining us today.
[00:45:23] Terri Hoffman: Thank you for listening to B2B marketing methods. Please be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast channel and leave us a review. We’d love to hear from you and connect. You can find me on LinkedIn or visit our company website at marketingrefresh.com.
