Bring It to Market is a series at Hype where we share marketing advice from top Chief Marketing Officers.
SalesLoft has grown from a handful of employees at the beginning of 2014 to hundreds in 2017. Its culture has earned accolades over the years, including earning Atlanta’s Best Place to Work award. At the helm of this growth is Kyle Porter, CEO and co-founder of SalesLoft. He attributes their success to building an A-team, along with nurturing the companies culture and talent.
“There’s a lot of things that go into a company’s growth,” says Porter. “For us, some of it was locked, a lot of it was getting the right people on board. We have an amazing leadership staff, an amazing team of individual contributors, product market fit, obviously very important.”
Porter says collaboration is essential especially for marketing and sales teams. Bridging the gap between these two key teams can help your company grow more efficiently over time. Porter shares the following CMO insights about helping them work together.
Focus on organizational health
“The number one thing that’s contributed to our growth is our relentless focus on organizational health. We focus on the culture of the business, our core values, and making sure that we’re a well-oiled machine where people can come to work with a smile on their face. Our intention is for this to be the greatest job they’ve ever had.”
Bridge the gap between marketing and sales teams
“We’ve actually got the inbound sales development role reporting to marketing. Because marketing owns inbound sales development they collaborate with sales development and outbound sales development run by the sales organization on a routine basis. We do trainings together, we do lunch and learns together, we do corporate-wide meetings together, and a lot of things to get these two groups together. They use similar training manuals. We do that in order to connect the two groups together.”
Empathy creates collaborative communication
“I think the one word here is empathy. If you’re in the marketing organization, think about the sales organization from their perspective. What are their challenges? What are their pains? What are their fears? I think it’s super important for them to really put themselves in each others shoes and feel their pains, feel their needs, and understand what they’re looking to do.
This empathy of understanding the people that you’re working with — that’s the number one most important thing, hands down. The next most important thing is that there’s collaborative communication.”
Create tools to encourage collaboration
“Our sales organization is constantly communicating with marketing what types of content they would like to see. We even have an app, it’s a Chrome extension, that the sales team uses that marketing created so they can deliver and sort through content while doing a demo or while communicating with prospects.
There’s this real deep-seated connection between the two groups where they’re working together and they’re understanding each other. That’s really the core of having great relationships.”
