Megan Tonzi, Director of Marketing at QuotaFactory - The B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast

The B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast

Megan is the Director of Marketing at QuotaFactory

As the Director of Marketing at QuotaFactory she’s responsible for the startup’s marketing strategy, which includes: content marketing, social media, sales enablement and demand generation. Megan is a marketing/sales alignment and social selling thought leader and prolific blogger. Her work has been featured by Hubspot, AG Saleswork, Salesforce.com, RingLead among many others.

Press Play! Start listening to Megan Tonzi share her sales & marketing wisdom for FREE! 20 minutes of pure gold and if you want preview some of her best nuggets from this podcast just check out: QuotaFactory Podcast Summary

Beginning of Transcript

Megan Tonzi: Yeah. So I’m the director of marketing at QuotaFactory. I oversee the marketing strategy. I execute on strategy and I also manage sales enablement responsibilities. QuotaFactory is a sales acceleration platform and methodology. It was formed due to success in technological advancements from its sister company AG Salesworks, and I’ve been working with QuotaFactory and AG Salesworks for about 1-1/2 year now. So it’s been pretty exciting to fill these advancements we’ve made, and for 2015, I’m really optimistic. I think this is going to be a really big year for both sales and marketing.

Jeff Zelaya: Now Megan, over the past few years, I would say that the sales environment has been changing dramatically. I mean we’re seeing more talk about social selling, about sales enablement, and just the buyer has fundamentally changed as well, the way the people are making buying decisions. How have you seen it change, and you know, what kind of advice would you have to organizations that are trying to adapt to these changes that are happening in the sales culture?

Megan Tonzi

Megan Tonzi: You know Jeff, I think this is a great question, and without taking up the whole time, I’ll try to be brief in answering this. It seems that sales is not only the department that’s been in transition, but also group marketing into that question and ask how has sales marketing changed and how have those two impacted each department. I believe that sales and marketing are just in terms of segmenting and prospecting and they’re diving deeper into buyer personas so they’re getting better insight on how to really help our prospects out with their challenges.

And I mean in addition to that, we know more information around each contact gathered from social, from behaviors on websites, so it’s making the prospecting efforts more personable and impactful as well. So I think you’re going to see the segmentation in sales and marketing, and you’re also going to see that the more personable approach within that prospecting efforts whether it’s from the top sales and marketing down to sales.

Jeff Zelaya: I agree. I mean the personal approach for me has worked very well, and then you did a blog post about that recently, about you know, a lot of sales people are very sometimes generic with their cold calling efforts and those folks are not sending out their noise, but the ones that take the time to be personal and really are targeted for who they’re reaching out to, those are the ones that stand out and the ones that you respond to. So totally agree on that point. And another kind of trend that we see a lot of talk about, very, it’s emerging, and I think this is a huge year for sales enablement and what… You know, first of all, for the people that don’t know, what is sales enablement and how does it tie in to your job, and why is that important at all in the B2B space?

Megan Tonzi: Alright. Well, sales enablement. We actually did a guide on sales enablement with our sister company I found at AG Salesworks site. So I actually pulled it up and this a definition that we gave to sales enablement because there is a ton floating out there right now. So to us, sales enablement is an alliance cross function of sales and marketing that drives company revenue by improving sales performance with process, tools, technology, and in training. Ultimately, sales enablement enhances every buyer and their action by focusing on optimal communication imparting best practices for engaging with target audiences and advancing prospects through the sales funnel. Some people say that sales enablement is sales mailer’s responsibilities in a company, and then some people say it’s more of a department. So it depends on what company you’re at, how sales enablement is going to be within that company, and how it’s going to work fast for them too. And sales enablement relationship between marketing intelligence can make or break your company’s prospecting efforts so it’s really important to make sure there’s established relationship between the two.

Jeff Zelaya: And I’ve seen a rise of these positions, these sales enablement positions, and some of them are owned by sales, others by owned by marketing, but there’s a lot of focus around, you know, content and having the right technology in place. And like you said, a lot of those fundamentals that are going to empower the sales people to be more effective and to focus on what they do best which is sell and have those real conversations with their prospects and clients, so great to see your companies adapting to this change in sales. And marketing. You know, you mentioned marketing working closely with sales. You know, that’s something that we’re seeing more and more each day. What are your recommendations for how this marriage between marketing and sales that we’re seeing… It seems like in the past, it used to be marketing and sales were on two different teams, and they had a wall up in between and didn’t really talk to each other much. How is that changing and what can we expect in the next year or so around that?

Megan Tonzi: So I think sales and marketing are going to become best friends. It’s always been a love-hate relationship, you know, pointing the finger, but most importantly, it’s not that hey, we’ve got a great relationship between the two. It’s how functional is that relationship, and I think that’s a huge piece of the puzzle that people end up missing. And I feel like, you know, you really have to sit down with both departments and walk through, you know, your sales funnel with both sales and marketing in the room starting at the very top so it’s very transparent, you know, marketing efforts, who’s responsible for what and when, when is that handoff from marketing to sales, at what qualification level does that hand-off take place, you know, going through so everybody can see everybody else’s responsibilities, so everybody gets a better understanding of what it is, and everything is clear. I think that’s a huge aspect that people seem to just overlook and assume, and then to leave that gray area for interpretation. And I think that’s where some of the sales marketing tension seems to grow, so you just have to make sure that that relationship is a functional relationship.

Jeff Zelaya: Yes, and I think another way to keep it more functional is to have meetings together. my last organization that’s something that we started sort of to implement, and it was fantastic that the sales people would voice their feedback and marketing with voice or [0:06:53] [Indiscernible]. It will be more collaboration so that open dialogue, I think, is key to, you know, having a structured policy obviously, note it’s leaving out the gray area, but also communicating frequently to achieve better results. And I know it seemed like almost yesterday where B2B organizations didn’t think much of social media, right? We didn’t see a lot of B organizations embracing it and using it effectively, but I think that’s really changed drastically over the past few years where more B2B organizations are getting onboard and B2B salespeople are getting onboard with social media.

How is QuotaFactory leveraging or planning to leverage social media and how are salespeople, the ones that you’ve seen that are effective and successful, how have you seen them leverage social media and why is it important for them to use it?

Megan Tonzi: So I’m a big advocate for “social selling.” I think it’s really important. I think it’s very necessary to… You know, every person, every “prospect” is different. Their social profiles are going to display that. They’re going to have, you know, their unique characteristics, their traits, their different backgrounds. So it’s a huge professional advantage to take a part of that and figure out hey, you know, we’ve got this solution. How is our solution going to help the business [0:08:10] [Indiscernible] challenge for somebody. I mean how most are you going to leverage your knowledge of that prospect? I mean I think there’s nothing worse than when I get a phone call and I’m asked, “Hey, you know, is this Megan Tonzi?” And I’m like, “Sure.” Like, “Well, I just want to get some fair knowledge, you know. What do you do exactly at QuotaFactory?” And I think right then and there, you know, you could have visited the website. You could have visited my LinkedIn account, my Twitter profile. There’s just all these other avenues out there that sales and marketing professionals can use it to help them in not only communicate with the prospects, but just gain some insights.

You know, if your solution is really going to help that prospect, you know, check out with their background. Let’s check out with the company. Check out their file on the company website if you can. I think those aspects of sales and marketing are huge right now, and you know, if a company feels that they don’t want to leverage that, I think they’re missing out.

Jeff Zelaya: And that’s why I’m such a big believer in social selling because it’s effective against results. And you’re absolutely right. I dread… I no longer do cold calls because cold call always infers that you go in there having no type of background or a knowledge, and with Google, with LinkedIn, with social media that’s no longer an excuse. You need to be prepared for every call that you make, and every call should be warm because you have a background on who Megan is and what she does, and you already have ideas of how your product or solution could help out her company, and you know other people that you guys maybe share mutual connections, etcetera. So there’s so much to do nowadays.

Megan Tonzi: Yeah.

Jeff Zelaya: With social selling, we can go into that like when the people call and ask you those questions, that’s an automatic risk like that’s not someone you’re going to work with.

Megan Tonzi: Exactly. And I mean the information is right there, and say you have a lot of phone calls to make. We all pick up the phone. In sales and marketing, you have to. But at that… Then, you know, segment your list. Segment is by your persona, by the title, by the industry, by certain pain points. I mean have some relevance when you make that call in order to have that relevance, and to make that connection, you need to use that information, and it’s so easily available that, you know, I think it’s kind of… It’s sad that people think that they don’t need to use that.

Jeff Zelaya: Right. And it doesn’t stop you when you got the appointment or you’ve got the demo set up. I mean that’s just the beginning of the dialogue. I think content, you know, becomes important throughout the conversation, and knowing what content to share, depending on where the wrap in the buyer’s journey is key. So what advice do you have around, you know, knowing what type of content to share with that prospect to get them moving, right, to get them to that next step in the buyer’s journey or in your funnel?

Megan Tonzi: As you were speaking to earlier about sales marketing, I also have meetings with our sales team here, and it’s great for me because not only do I sit there and I, you know, communicate with them and tell them hey, we’ve got this new piece of content coming out. Here are the highlights. I’ll send a copy to you. Take a look at it. You know, use this in your prospecting efforts. I also listen to them on, you know, what’s the feedback with our content. What type of comments are you receiving? Was this really helpful to this prospect? What other information did you send them? Do they have any reaction to it?

You can get great feedback regarding your content from your sales team. And using that, use that knowledge so when you’re trying to move a prospect down the sales funnel, you know, you should map your content with your sales funnel. So you know, top the sales funnel content middle and then lower. So you should have enough pieces where it’s, you know, segmented that way, but then also per challenge too. So that’s kind of what we do here at QuotaFactory is that I have all of our content map, and you know, it’s there in the middle and they’re deciding a challenge has already been discovered. You know, how else can I help them? What else can be sent them that’s going to, you know, address some meet, address some interest? I mean content nowadays, there’s just so much of it out there. It just has to be very relevant and it has to address an interest or a pain, or challenge, or a need. So I think those are the key issues with, you know, people just sending [0:12:28] [Indiscernible] left and right. You just have to make sure it’s the right one.

Jeff Zelaya: Exactly. And the ones that are closing the deal and getting the sales are the ones that have that like a treasure map of how to find that treasure, and the map has your content, you know. It tells you step by step like if someone’s, you know, going in this direction or has these questions, these are the things that you should be sharing with them. They’re looking at these competitors being is this content would be helpful at that point, or if they are looking for this type of validation, you know, let’s get them on this webinar, or let’s get them to download this white paper. So yeah, I think having them…

Megan Tonzi: Exactly.

Jeff Zelaya: …is essential. Great, great feedback. Thank you.

Megan Tonzi: You’re welcome. And it’s funny because a lot of people tend to asks these questions because we have a ton of content and it’s just, you know, how to use this, and you know, what do you say to your sales team, how do your sales team use this? Just have conversations about your prospects together. You know, a lot of times, sales members would come in. they’ll just grab to see me in my office and we’ll talk about a specific situation or scenario of hey, you know, these are their challenges. How can we help them? Have you written anything that addresses these feeds, or maybe it’s not [0:13:35] [Indiscernible]. Maybe it’s more the title, you know, seeing all of them facing new challenges now. So what else can we send them? So I think you really have to work together as a team to make sure that, you know, the optimal content at the right time too.

Jeff Zelaya: Megan, 2014, I think, was a huge year for you. I mean I was looking at a lot of your blog posts and articles. You were on fire. You wrote some amazing posts and I definitely recommend that you follow Megan on LinkedIn or Twitter because she’s got just a lot of great things to say, and she’s sharing all types of great content. You’ll learn a lot especially if you’re in sales. You’ll learn a lot from following her. And one of the questions I have is, you know, looking back at this very successful year for you, like what would you say has have been some of the most effective marketing tactics that you’ve put to use and that you’ve seen generate a reward for you and a return for you like what would you say are your top, your most effective marketing tactic of 2014?

Megan Tonzi: That’s a really loaded question. But first and foremost, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. For me, I think the past year, it was really just… It’s writing about relevant… content relevant questions that, you know, other people within, you know, within my situation would be facing, you know. What worked for me? What hasn’t worked for me? You know, I think and I do a lot of sales enablement responsibilities. I do a lot of sales function. I oversee the marketing function. There’s a ton of questions. There’s a ton of situations, you know. What’s going to be the better choice for us? You know, choice A or choice B? So for a lot of my blog posts, they spend a lot of time from questions from, you know, just coming from organizations. So I think, you know, in 2014, I wrote a lot of, you know, what worked, what didn’t, and then on top of that, it’s just more human, like I don’t want to stuff my blog posts with a ton of sales and marketing jargon that you know. It looks great. It’s very formal, but realistically, if I’m going to be searching for blogs to read every morning, I want to read something that’s either, you know, has a little bit of an add to, a few little more, you know, fun to it, and that it’s real, like I can take, you know, the advice here and I can put it into practice, you know, tomorrow.

So I think, you know, a lot of people have these grand ideas and they’ll put them in blog posts which is wonderful, especially for strategies [0:16:04] [Indiscernible], but I like a lot of actionable things. So if I read something, I want it to be OK, how can I put that into action tomorrow? How can I make my strategy better using this? You know, I ask myself a lot of those questions before I sit down and start to write.

Jeff Zelaya: Now that we’ve taken a look at this pasture, let’s look, you know, at the year ahead of us. What do you see on the horizon for content marketing and for marketing in general and for your company, and what are some of the things that you guys are looking forward to, and you personally are looking forward to in 2015?

Megan Tonzi: So I think that content marketing is prude, that it’s not about quantity, rather than quality relevance, and that being served up at the most appropriate time. So I think nailing down those key ingredients are going to make or break a lot of different strategies in the coming year. Everybody’s got a ton of content. People are going to start reading out that content and grabbing on to the quality content, and then that quality content, how much relevance does it have to people situations and business challenges, you know, right now? So you have to makes sure that it’s updated, and then, you know, it has to be available when people aren’t looking for it. Certainly now is the perfect time. You know, those are three very, very difficult things to achieve and to achieve them all at once. So I think, you know, in 2015, that’s what I’m really going to work towards.

Jeff Zelaya: Having the right content, showing it to the right person at the right time, that is a huge challenge but something that if you tackle head on and master, it will forever change your marketing and you will be a very successful marketer. You heard from Megan, and Megan, thank you, again, so much for jumping on this call, for doing this interview. I learned a ton from you. I look forward to your amazing marketing success with QuotaFactory and wish you nothing but the best in 2015.

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