Alignment | How Aligning Sales and Marketing Will Transform Your Business in 2025

Join Lea LaFerla on The SCORRCAST as she discusses the transformative power of aligning sales and marketing for business growth in 2025. Learn strategies to bridge gaps between these teams, enhance collaboration, and drive revenue. Discover how alignment fosters a unified approach to customer engagement, leading to greater success and a stronger competitive edge in the marketplace.

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Hey everyone this is Alec McChesney, your host of the SCORR cast, and I'm so excited for this episode, as well as a few others see right now I am in the headquarters of SCORR marketing in Kearney, Nebraska, and I'm here for a couple of days, and so I've been able to have five or six different episodes with some of the key business leaders at our organization. This episode is going to go into one detail. The next we'll go into another. We're going to talk about branding. We're going to talk about marketing, strategy, business development versus marketing. Talk about what it's like to work at an agency. And I'm just so excited for you to be able to listen to these key leaders at SCORR Marketing. Enjoy the episode. You Leah, hello and welcome to another Okay, well, first of all, you episode of The SCORR cast. I have my boss and my mentor and one of my favorite individuals, Lea LaFerla, with us today. I feel like I've kind of cornered you into being on this episode. We've got these special episodes of this SCORR cast, or in person in Kearney for an all company meeting, and I've finally got an opportunity to say you have to be on the podcast. It has to be in person, and we're going to talk about marketing and business development and the alignment and some of the issues that we see, some of the issues we know that teams have. But before we do that, I would love if you could just give the team that's listening, you know, a little background. Give us, give us the elevator pitch on Lea. did court Listen now you're buttering me up and calling me your mentor, and so I will take that as a compliment, but I am happy to do a little about that friend. I was thinking about this conversation and how unlikely it is for me to sit in this chair as the president of SCORR marketing when I think back on my 25 year career because I graduated from college with a degree in biology and a teaching certification, and thought, Maybe I'm going to teach 10th grade biology for a living, until I actually student taught and realized teachers are saints if I was not on ski, and being a 10th grade biology teacher was not by future, but my mentor teacher, when I did that, was a gentleman who was in the 35th year of teaching and had a daughter that was a pharmaceutical and sales rep, and he said to me, you like science and we like people, you should be a drug rep. So that was my first career college. I spent seven years at Merck as a urology specialty rep and carried the bag. Had the opportunity to cover four different states and talk to urologists about men's health products and pain medication and all kinds of things. Was actually the first time that I was introduced to the discipline of marketing and saw the rug that can happen between the two disciplines. I went through six weeks of training, felt like I could conquer the world. Had a beautiful detail piece, marketing piece that was made by a fancy Madison Avenue agency. I went in to make my first sales call and promptly got laughed at and kicked out of the office. And I called my boss and said, has anybody in the marketing team ever been to Omaha Nebraska and talked to a urologist before? Because I don't think what we're messaging resonates with that audience. So pinned that away from there I met to a biotech company based in Omaha, as a strategic account leader moved into marketing and had the opportunity to be the one that was trying to develop the messaging. And sort of came full circle and realizing how if the two functions are now up working together and communicating, and if you're not talking to your customer, that messaging and that foundation might not be right, and that can cause a lot of tension between the two. So I spent 14 years at that company, had the opportunity to lead marketing teams, to lead sales teams, to lead integrated business units, and about seven years ago, made the leaf over to the agency side, and had the pleasure of working with now host to 50 clients across the drug development continuum as an executive strategist, leading our internal business development teams via service teams and All of our service lines that are developing and deliberating on the strategic projects that we offer here at SCORR. I love it. There's, there's so much goodness in that. And like, four different episodes worth of content. And so I'm going to be the one that somehow keeps us on track to talk about this, this issue with the marketing and the sales teams. And I think it's, it's a hot button topic, where, anytime I bring it up, there's a grown instantly inside our industry, especially. And I'm curious, from your point of view, kind of being on all sides, you know, of this table and in each of these shoes, why is there? You know, you mentioned. The word tension, and why is there just automatically tension before we even get involved, there's just an instant rub between the teams. Why do you see that? I think too many times in organizations, the teams are not aligned, and sales teams are developing their strategy, absent of the marketing team. The marketing team is developing their strategy after them sales team. And so goals, priorities, objectives might not be aligned, right? And I think that there's and coming as a marketer that's pumped on sales, I can say, honestly, I did not understand the value that park he brings to the table as a sales rep until I started in marketing role, right? And so when we think about marketing's role and increasing visibility and thought leadership, and, you know, ultimately lead generation, and then sales job of bringing in new business and closing deals, if things are going well, it's really easy to quite finger at each other. And I think that's can be like, underlying 10th murder, there's a lack of alignment between the two organizations, and then those heights are tough. It's like, well, the marketing leads are shift, the sales people can't close anything, and so we're not singing from the same hymnal. We are operating a completely different universes and pointing fingers. And if that alignments not there, it's really hard to then create that align. I think that's where we hear a lot of times, is that it's already separated. And so restarting that, and even knowing where to start is in some really difficult and so to ask an unfair question, where do you know you come into a team you know, you know, SCORR brings on a new client, and that's, that's problem number one is they don't have that alignment. And they ask, where do we start? Where do we get? I think it's really getting them understanding that whole idea of, like, walking a mile in somebody's shoes, right? So, if I'm a commercial leader for organization, and I'm coming to them trying to understand, I want to understand what the marketing team is doing today. What are they? What's their plan? What are they measuring? How do they find success? I want to do the same thing with the sales organization, and then facilitate that conversation and find out where that commonalities line right. Like sales people are motivated by closing deals, and if the marketing team can demonstrate that you could help in that process immediately you have a thread on the sales team. And so I do think it's understanding, I think that shadow innocence and getting a real taste of what the other role is will go a long way in that. And I mentioned my first introduction to marketing for nut, I made that so called to my manager and said, I don't think a marketing person's ever talked to a urologist in Omaha, Nebraska, and he's like, Great, let's send somebody out. We'll send a field marketing team out who came and didn't write it all and had the opportunity to really see it from my perspective. And that was a game changer in my view of marketing team, and I think their view of what the strongest were in sales. So you think starting with trying to create an understanding and knowing that wealth jobs are challenged, well, especially in 2024 and this is something that we've talked about a lot over the last two years, especially, is how much more difficult this has gotten with budgets being cut and then the economic impact, and then, not to mention all of the new tools and new things that are coming up. And I think you've shared this story with me. You know about how we would even send out a mailer, and that mailer would come back, and we would be so excited that there was a mailer. And now it's like, hey, I need to know every minute of our website what's happening, and I think that's also added turmoil to this relationship on what are we tracking, and what is a lead? Is it a lead? And passing over bad leads to the sales team. And I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, just to expand on the story, you know, again, I have said old enough. So it started in March Lee was before I we send out demo requests at Tri Fold mail in form till and the potential customer would fill out the form and send it back. We'd jump around and Mark and go. We got to lead. You know, flash forward. And now, with digital and tactics, there are so many things that you can measure. And I always say, I've never met a CEO that gets a shit about the non river inflation you get from a digital van, the CEO cares about bottom line and how they can say that marketing is helping impact positive green the bottom so as marketers, I think it's those individual tactics are fully to us on how we make sure that what optimizing what we're doing and and getting the results that We need, but thinking about how we how we report the ROI and the metrics, and who we're reporting to at what level of the organization, and making sure that you're tailoring that message and trying to tell the story of this particular form fill came in from a paid ad downloading a white paper. We've nurtured it through the system. We've. Handed it to sales, and then they've been able to close that opportunity. And I think it's especially challenging in our industry, because sales cycles are a year, two years dependent, and so you have to build that long term relationship and have the tools and the reporting in place to see the long view of it, and not just somebody clicked on a digital ad, yeah. Well, I think the other part of that, especially with the sales cycle, there's not one tip that's going to work, right? And I think that is, I think that's the case for most marketing, but it's really the case here, you know, especially when we're talking about 12 months of the sales cycle, and so much of it's happening online, and then all of a sudden, at the 80, you know, 84th percentile, a referral comes in, and there's so many things that are changing it. So you can't just run one ad campaign and say, Oh, this ad campaign is why. Actually, I met that person at a trade show seven years ago. Yeah, they then followed along. One thing convinced them, another thing convinced them. And so I think so much that goes back to the again, the aligned with the knowing where the best leads are coming from, where the best you know, customers and clients are coming Well, in building that relationship, because I can think back to times in my career where I was managing and I would have a sales rep say to me, well, that's not a lead. I've been talking to them, and I'm like, but you've had a meeting at a trade show where marketing eats for the booths. Yeah, you like going to Orlando in February. You want to justify continuing to come to the show? Yeah, it's marketing's influence on it. And I think you know, when the teams are aligned and everybody sees the value in that, then it's much easier to tell the story. But I don't want to fight with the BB rep there following the deal at the end of the day, our job in marketing is to make that as easy content as possible, because our potential clients understand how we're differentiated. They understand the value that we're going to bring, and they interacted with our content and our thought leaders, even for the sales rep gets the opportunity to have that conversation. So I really do believe that it's our job as marketers to support and make the lives of our BB and sales organization easier. I love that I have to jump to the Orlando Park. How like a little bit of a shot I do. Like going to Orlando in February. I'm looking forward to that again. Yet this year, I think again, going back to, just to wrap up your this conversation, I know that I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make you come back on in 2025 especially if you see, think out of JPMorgan in January, and kind of seeing what some of those economic trends are for 2025 but marketing's job is to support the business development. It's to support revenue. And revenue, at the end of the day, is an organization game. It's a team game, not a we versus them type of thing. And I think one of the things that we've been talking a lot about is, you know, times are tough, right funding across the industry, and that real economic, geopolitical, things like, there's a lot of uncertainty. And I think too often organizations are short sighted. And when they're looking at ways to cut expenses, they look at cutting marketing, not realizing that it's not a faucet. You can't turn it off and on, and so, you know, we can definitely dial down and dive up, but having some level of marketing and when times are tough, or even on a flip side, when times are great, and you thought, well, business that we can handle, there's still this need to think about how you work, telling the story, building your reputation, differentiating yourself and supporting the growth of business long term. And not just at like but long term. Well, I was going to ask you for a final takeaway, and with that, that was it perfectly. And so I think just kind of thinking forward in 2025 to wrap up, if someone was planning right now, and you mentioned it annual planning, you know, sales is doing a plan over here. Marketing is doing a plan over here. Let's just, let's just get those teams together, right, and maybe even have a third party come in and be a part of that, and make sure that, for me, a lot of times, that sales is saying the things that marketing would say, and marketing wouldn't be saying the things that sales would say, but just creating that alive, that before the year. So it's not June 15 and all of a sudden we're all mad at each other, right? That's exactly right. And then having those, you know, building the relationships and having those strategic touch points and the accountability of cross book disciplines is really important, and it's not rocket science. It just takes some consistency. And what are we measuring? How are we reporting? How are we adapting? Right? Because I think gone are the days where you're going to write down a 12 month plan and, you know, execute on it perfectly. You've got to be able to pivot and adapt and hear from your sales team. What's working really well, what messages is, you know, really resonating right now, and let's adapt marketing plan to reflect that so we can be more nimble and agile, or take advantage of different opportunities and more employees selling Lea, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to to sit and talk with us. I know people are really going to enjoy this episode. So thank you very much. Thank you. As always, thank you for tuning in to this episode of The SCORR cast. Brought to you by SCORR marketing. We appreciate your time and hope you found this discussion insightful. Don't forget to subscribe and join us for our next episode. Until then, remember, marketing is supposed to be fun.