For a business to be effective, all teams need to work synergistically together and avoid operating in silos, especially sales and marketing. Optimizing outcomes for both teams means they need to prioritize constant communication and strong alignment on their end goals.

In this episode, Hannah and Tony chat with Chris Lynch, the CMO of Mindtickle. During the episode, they discuss how sales and marketing teams can come together in pursuit of a company’s mission and vision to work more effectively, how to tell your brand story, the importance of being truthful as marketers and salespeople, and finding success through remaining adaptable to change.

Tony: for a business to be effective. All teams need to work synergistically together and avoid operating in silos.

Hannah: But there are two specific teams that need to work together now more than ever. Sales and marketing? Absolutely.

Tony: And I think to optimize outcomes and meet or exceed sales targets, sales and marketing teams need to be in constant communication and strongly aligned on their end goals.

Hannah: Aligning on desired outcomes, strategies and tactics is key to success in today’s constantly shifting landscape.

Who is Chris Lynch?

Tony: Today’s guest has an intimate awareness of the need for alignment between sales and marketing teams. Chris, welcome to the show.

Hannah: Chris Lynch is the CMO of Mindtickle, and he’s here today to discuss how sales and marketing teams can come together to reach targets and optimize outcomes. We want to start by understanding a bit more about your career background and, more specifically, the things that have happened in your career that really helped you level up and were catalysts for change.

Chris: I’ve been a CMO for about six years now, and I still like to call myself a product marketer in a CMO’s shoes. But that was really never part of the plan. I wanted to be a journalist way before I got into sales and marketing, so if you had asked me back when I was 22 if this is what I’d be doing, I’m not sure I would have said, “Oh, you’re going to be an executive of a high-growth tech company.” I got my start in journalism and was working for a company called IDG (International Data Group). It was a really great experience because I started covering tech companies and asking lots of questions from, at the time, a kid who had never really worked in business. A lot of what I was doing was just sort of learning by observation. IDG let me move out to San Francisco because at the time there were novel companies coming out there — like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — and I ended up sort of falling into business through happenstance.

Actually, I remember that I wanted to do PR and I was really sure I wanted to work at Google. I interviewed with eight people there and I found out that seven out of the eight liked me and one was a hard no. But it ended up being this really serendipitous moment because I was driving around in the valley that day and I met up with a guy named Ross Mayfield and he said, “Hey, I think you’d really have a bright future here.” And what was cool about it wasn’t necessarily great for the company, but it was great for me. Socialtext was one of those cautionary tales of being super early to a market. Your funding is kind of starting to draw down as everyone else is sort of ramping up, even though you had the idea a few years earlier. But for a kid who was then 24, it was an incredible opportunity because I got to work in sort of all facets of marketing. We were a lean team where you had to do a lot.

Most important, and what set the pace for my career moving forward, was that there were two groups that I really enjoyed sitting in the middle of. The cube I was sitting at was right next to the bullpen for sales. I was listening to them pitch companies every single day and some of them would loop pretty much the same narrative as their cold calling and doing outreach. And I could tell, even without being able to hear other people on the other side of the phone, what was going to be successful and what wasn’t.

So I talked a lot with them, and then I also spent this other part of my day with the product designers and engineers, and I applied my journalism skills at it, saying, “Hey, explain to me what you’re working on, what are you doing?” And then I would put that into plain English in our marketing materials. And lo and behold, that got my career off on a track of product marketing that ended up being in the marketing function.

Hannah: I love the fact that you had so many conversations that you could start to tell what was actually happening.

Tony: Can you tell us a little bit more about what brought you here?

Chris: There are two answers to that. The more pragmatic one is I was probably just going to go broke living in San Francisco as a journalist. I still ended up having a ton of fun during that time, but then life becomes complicated for different reasons.

But it really was about looking at sales and marketing as another opportunity for storytelling but doing so in a way where the challenge of persuading people is even harder because they know you’re trying to sell them something.

There was an inherent challenge in the idea of walking into a room and convincing someone that I could fundamentally shift their business and push them into a different stratosphere.

Moreover, working on a product you believe in and seeing that come to fruition is a really cool sensation —especially having that early on in my career. I also thought it was great being at that cross-section where you have the product and engineering on one side and then you have all the external go-to-market functions on the other, getting that context to understand both audiences and help triangulate some of the different types of considerations that people have in a growing business. That was really fun for me. I started to enjoy it. So, I think originally it started out of some basic Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And then, as I started climbing up the pyramid a little bit, some of the work just became more intellectually interesting to me.

Hannah: I’d love you to go into some detail about how you landed the role at Mindtickle. And I’m wondering what drew you to the company. And did you have a giggle when you first heard the name?

Chris: I didn’t have a giggle when I first heard the name because, at this point with tech companies, I feel like I’ve seen everything. My progression to Mindtickle started back when I was at Oracle. I ran global product marketing for the cloud business unit. They were pulling in all these different players in the marketing space. There my job was really to be the chief storyteller. It was figuring out being able to integrate all those products together into one offering. How do you at least make it sound like a cohesive thing?

So I did that, and then I became CMO of a company called Cision, which is in the PR software market. Similar deal They had been acquiring companies like PR Newswire, a slew of different software providers that focus on PR professionals. And again, it was, “How do you pull all of these things together into a cohesive story?” With Mindtickle, there were really two things that drew me.

One was that we have a very comprehensive product that spans a number of different submarkets in the tech space. But really, what drew me to the company was that I’ve lived the problems before that Mindtickle is trying to solve,

Tony: You obviously have a very diverse background and you’ve said some great things about the companies that you’ve worked at. What would you say, though, are some of the qualities that you have that have really contributed to bringing you to where you are right now. I think I have some ideas but it’s always interesting to hear how someone thinks about themselves.

Chris: That’s always a tough one. But if I were to sum it up, I think it would be in a few key areas. One is that I’m honest and direct. I think marketers spend too much time using their positioning and messaging skills internally. And what I would say is that save that for when you’re out in the market competing, leave it all out in the field when you’re in the market, and do the best job you can to position effectively.

I think that, particularly when you’re dealing with sales, it’s really important to be honest and direct. Be truthful about where you are with your performance, where you’re still gapped, and where you’re seeing challenges.

Another key quality for me is that, although I consider myself a humble person, I do feel like I’m on top of my game. I’m probably peaking at my ability to tell great stories and make compelling messaging. I feel like, if you gave me any of our competitor products, I could probably, in a very short period of time, build a really compelling pitch from it. Even more effective than what they might be doing. And that’s with all respect to my competitors — some of them have skills I could never dream of having. But I think that I’m very good at that.

The third thing I’d say is I’m always in it for the team and the company, and I feel like that’s a little bit unusual in this data-driven modern world. For me, the biggest satisfaction is just seeing the company be successful.

Hannah: Going back to when you were talking about your core skillset and your superpowers, you were talking a little bit about positioning and working on the brand. What things do you have in the pipeline from a marketing perspective? And what overarching goals are these things helping to drive towards?

Chris: There are a few things that we have going right now. I’m really thinking through what the next version of our digital experience looks like for our prospects and making that as compelling as possible. Tony’s probably heard me mention this internally at one of the town halls, but like I feel like selling went through this phase of the relationship sale, then there was the value sell — and you can really date yourself in the sales community based on what you say. The relationship sell worked its way even through the 90s where you had the three-martini lunch things… and then the early 2000s were all about the value sell. Like how much value are you demonstrating to your customer? I feel like we’ve moved into the era of the insight sell, where it’s actually not enough to say, “Oh, I can provide value for you.”

The odds are, in a lot of these more mature markets, there are multiple companies that can provide, more or less, a similar value. I think it’s more like, can you tell a prospect something interesting or something they haven’t thought of? As I think about our marketing, for me, it comes down to can we provide experiences that help our prospect deliver more insight inside of their companies.

We’ve been really advocating for this ideal profile concept, right? All marketers have ideal customer profiles. Sales leaders should have an ideal rep profile. We’re working through a digital experience where people can come to our site, get some interesting information about their organization, and then kind of turn back at least an introductory perspective on what their ideal profile could be. So we’re really looking to make compelling content experiences that help prospects have that insight. That’s one key thing we’re really focused on right now.

The other thing is, like a lot of marketing shops in B2B right now, we’re working hard to rationalize what an ideal funnel looks like. I think the emergence of account-based marketing has really created a fervor within the B2B marketing community because, for a lot of folks, particularly those who had worked in the demand side of the house for a while, it ended up being this interesting change of the goalpost. If you had been working in the demand realm and found the grind of just generating leads to be a bear. It’s nice to just flip the script and change the narrative and say, “Oh, well, actually there’s an addressable market of accounts here that we should go after.”

For me, intent models and some of that stuff that the ABM providers have are very interesting and they’re nice guidelines as to where you want to go in market. But I also think that staying very true to the persona you’re trying to reach and through market understanding have people come to your site who you can really solve a problem for. And I want to make sure that our system is flexible enough to accommodate those different people as they funnel through. When I worked at Oracle, I would use the term adaptive. I want our marketing to be very adaptive. I want it to be able to cater to different types of people in the revenue function and make sure they’re getting the experience that they want.

Hannah: Tony, the world of sales and marketing actually have a lot more in common than you might think.

Tony: Yes. As Chris mentioned, both sales and marketing rely on excellent storytelling skills, but even more so in sales because you’re really trying to convince someone to invest in something when they know it’s your job to do so.

Hannah: I think that really underscores the importance of believing in whatever it is that you’re selling because if your passion and enthusiasm for the product isn’t genuine, people might sense that and be less inclined to go through the buyer journey with you.

Tony: Yeah. And Chris is living proof of this relationship as he’s been on both sides of the equation,

Hannah: I think it’s so interesting that he started his career as a journalist and writer. He’s put his skills to good use as a marketer, learning to really tell the story of a brand and the products or services he’s selling.

Tony: So let’s hear more of Chris’s insights from his unique CMO perspective. What are some of the current challenges that you’re facing with your team and your day-to-day role starting from being brand new in the middle of this pandemic and changing roles and a lot of it was not in person. You’re doing a lot of things remotely. So how have you really tried to work through the challenges?

Chris: I’d say the biggest challenge in a company like ours, that is probably growing at a rate that is well above industry standards, is that you have to run this parallel workstream in your day which, on one hand, is very similar to our partners in sales. It’s like, on one end, we’re being asked to hit our numbers, our pipeline goals, all the things that we need to do to contribute to the business. And then in parallel, it’s like we need to build this nice, beautiful house that we want to be our dream home for years into the future. This means things like building a new website, elevating the brand, updating some of the infrastructure, and more glossy initiatives. That itself is a massive list.

And then on top of that, you’re trying to manage the daily grind of the business. And so, for me, the biggest challenge as a CMO is, frankly, that a lot of my day is looking through the prism of should I be telling this person to focus a little bit more on the immediate thing? Or do I have them kind of focus more on this where-we-want-to-be type of project? And there are consequences in both directions. It’s like if you pull them off that, it may have a little bit of impact on some of your day-to-day metrics, but then when you don’t start building the other thing, you’re also creating debt for yourself in a different capacity. So I’d say, at a high level, that’s our biggest challenge: making sure that we’re able to balance where we want to go with meeting the daily demands of the business.

What I’ve observed with marketing so far is that, like with a lot of functions, the pandemic laid bare some things that we don’t need to do in-person — things around budgeting and even media mix planning and some other stuff that we do. It’s worked perfectly fine over Zoom.

There are two areas of my function that I think have been more constrained remotely. One is the creative aspect. There is always going to be a part of marketing that depends on the energy of being in a room with other people while you’re brainstorming a campaign and whiteboarding and putting your computers and iPads and phones down and really all giving all your attention to each other to an idea. I miss that and I’m looking forward to that coming back.

And the second part I would say is the PDR or, in some companies they call it SDR, function that rolls up through marketing. I do think that’s been a tougher function for remote work in certain cases. Not to say that it can’t be done effectively, but I think there’s a real energy to that role when you have a number of bidders sitting in proximity to each other. They’re getting a little bit of that verbal camaraderie and feedback, getting that direct kind of hands-on coaching. I think that, like every company, we’ve done our best to try to use the virtual tools available to us to make that a thing. But I think that’s another area where in-person interaction is super important, particularly if you look at the hiring profile of those types of apps, like where they are in their career — I think in-person matters a lot there.

Hannah: Chris had an interesting point about trying to balance everything that’s happening and the overarching things that you’re working towards, but also trying to meet the demands of the business and sales in a very demanding business unit. It’s an immediate need for a customer who, if you just give me this one thing, it’s going to be millions, right? So there’s always that kind of dollar value that adds to the urgency. What does that alignment look like for you? What does that sales and marketing alignment look like? What are the parameters when you go in? What are the two or three go-to things that you typically look at or try to work at fixing to create better alignment?

Chris: So, I think number one, I like to look at the full spectrum of resources that are made available to sales. So they’re sort of the all-boats-rise stuff — that would be like you’re branding just generally some of your demand programs that you’re running and things you’re doing to drive revenue — to drive pipeline for the business. I like to look at the full spectrum of those things because if I do that, it helps me deal with the case-by-case stuff in a more thoughtful way. And I think that one of the things that will probably always be the hallmark of any B2B marketing that I run is that we go heavy on product marketing investment out of the gate.

Once I joined Mindtickle, not only did we build out new messaging because we have all these innovations in the sales readiness platform, we then built out discrete messaging as well. We wanted to provide a toolset with which customers could scale up or down appropriately. But first, I looked at the whole spectrum. It’s like, OK, what have we provided? And is that getting us 80 percent of what the sellers need in a lot of their deals and pretty much just working tirelessly till we get there? Because then, relative to some of the one-off requests, it makes it a little easier because there’s more back and forth that can happen in that conversation. “Well. Have you used X, Y and Z?” “Yes, I have, and I’ve used that and I still am now at this point” or “Well, by the way, the morale on my team is a lot better.”

Once they’ve already been told that stuff they’ve worked really hard on already got utilized, and they’re still at a point where extra help is required, I manage my team to index heavily on supporting sales. And what I do in my role is I look for patterns. If there’s stuff where I feel like it’s a pattern of this really was available and you just don’t want to employ it. That’s a different problem to software than there being a meaningful gap.

Secondly, in terms of sales and marketing alignment. I feel like it’s actually having a shared sense of failure. In other words, everyone likes to say that sales and marketing alignment is like a shared success, and it’s all about closing revenue — that would be the more popular answer.

But I like seeing shared sense of failure because, in my experience, way more transformational business decisions get made between marketing and sales by looking at your losses and things that didn’t go so well.

Everywhere I’ve worked, there are win notices sent out over email or Slack. We don’t spend as much time sending out the loss notices and talking about everything that went badly. We do win-loss analyses as an example, a mindset. But that’s less of a public thing for all the different reasons, because some of the stuff you get in those interviews is very candid and you’ve got to be thoughtful about making sure you’re not accidentally dressing down someone for something they did or didn’t do. But I do think that having a shared sense of failure and looking at very reflectively across the board at what could have been done better in all aspects of the value chain between marketing and sales is super important.

And in the third place, I would say it’s important that stakeholders manage their teams toward walking a mile in the other person’s shoes. I don’t feel like that happens enough. I think it’s important for marketing to empathize with sales that it is the ultimate what have you done for me lately? And there’s an incredible pressure to deliver, particularly in an environment like we’re in, which is a high-growth business. And I think, you know, marketers get prickly with everyone… it’s a marketer syndrome.

I always joke that like everyone thinks they’re good at marketing. You know, you always hear these different ideas around like, “Oh, if you just did this” or another big one for marketers is all the competitor stuff like, “Well, so-and-so did this.” It’s super important to realize that you know what the other person is going through and that really can be just an automatic compass going into any kind of interaction that you have.

I think sales needs to remember that marketing usually has some spectrum of resources it’s working with, and it’s doing its best to deliver with that resource. And I think marketing also needs to remember that sales is dealing with the cold, hard, brutal realities of the market, which are always going to have some slight misalignment.

Then there’s the academic work that people like me do on addressable market exercises and personas and all of this stuff, and I think marketers, in particular, don’t want to hear it sometimes, but I think that’s just like the way they get irritated with people saying they know all about what should be good marketing. I think they need to be careful about not presupposing that they know exactly always what great selling looks like. Sometimes it’s unnerving for them to know that I feel that way, but that is how I feel.

Tony: You know, being someone on the sales side, it’s refreshing to hear that right, especially the alignment parts. If you really do want to have a well-oiled machine, you do have to have that alignment between sales and marketing. What do you think really are the key responsibilities for marketing in the sales process versus what sales might think they might need to do?

Chris: I think the primary responsibility of marketing is to identify the addressable market, have a really cohesive strategy from a targeting perspective, from a content perspective, from an experience perspective of how to go and reach that target in market. And frankly, place some bets on what you think the majority of those people are missing in their current roles and actually need to see addressed in what they’re doing. I think that’s very much in marketing’s purview. There’s all the classical stuff that has been written about to death, which is all true, right? That more of the buying decision happens before anyone ever talks to a salesperson. I think that’s all true.

But I also feel that it’s important for marketing to bring some point of view to those interactions. It’s not just enough to say, “Well, we think this target will be interested in sales coaching, so we’ll develop a white paper and a webinar around sales coaching and generate keywords and get the machines to notice us in some way.”

But I think that it is on marketing to also come with a unique point of view that they are seeding in the mind of the prospect. So that way, sales peoples’ goal really is to get in there and take that seed that’s been planted and start getting really prescriptive about the strategy and what would be involved in bringing that to life at a company.

For me, that’s where the division of labor is. If we’re talking about B2B, which we are, I think that one thing that is important for sales to remember that, when marketing is building these strategies, there is a point where they have to plan for the what works most of the time as our conversation here, because they’re trying to reach a more mass audience, even with all the data tools and the targeting and personalization and all this stuff. If people are being completely honest with you, there’s still some level of malleability that you have to have in some of your messaging if you want to reach some of these audiences. Then it’s really on sales to take it that level deeper. That is really going to make the value and the insight.

Hannah: So, Chris, now, I’d really love to get your perspective on some of the things that you’re excited about when it comes to technology: the things that are happening in the world that are going to drive and revolutionize marketing and sales over the next two to five years.

Chris: I think one of the greatest things that is going to revolutionize the B2B marketing industry is the revenue technology and the sales technology stack catching up and chief revenue officers, chief sales officers, whatever senior sales titles you can imagine are going to start leaning harder into a more digitally focused way of doing business.

I feel that revenue technology is in a similar space right now where you have sort of this smattering of different providers that are solving the sales productivity and performance challenge from different angles. But we’re going to see more consolidation of that functionality coming together. I also think that that’s going to be an extraordinary thing for marketing as more of the sales process comes out of the shadows and gets brought into the digital realm. I think that’s going to put more context behind the data that we’ve sorely been missing for a long time.

And the last point I want to make is about CMOs coming into the 2000s. You know, they always wanted to just hang their hat on the next brand campaign, the next tagline, that’s going to be my thing. And then they realized “ Oh, actually, I potentially have to be the most digitally first organization.” And what did we see? We saw all this spend that was going toward CEOs start to move over to CMOs. I think the same thing is happening with the chief revenue officers. I think what’s happening is they’re realizing that relying on sales ops or IT to manage all the technology is probably not good enough. I think that is going to be a massive change in leadership role and that they’re going to have to start leaning into this stuff in a way that CMOs did 10 years ago.

Tony: So, Chris, it’s been a great conversation. We learned a lot. I think what we want to do is we’re going to put your CMO superpowers to work one last time. We’re going to go through a very quick, rapid fire round of questions.

Hannah: Okay, so what’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given in your career?

Chris: I worked with a gentleman named Chandar Pattabhiram. He’s now CMO for Coupa Software. Before that, he was CMO of Marketo, so not exactly a lightweight. And he said, “We are always going to perceive ourselves in a slightly different way than everyone else perceives us. The best you can do is minimize the number of clicks you are away.”

Tony: What would you say is your top productivity hack?

Chris: You’ve got to wake up early. I can certainly say that, as the CMO, f you don’t utilize the hours of 6:30 to 9:30 a.m. effectively, I don’t see how you get through your day.

Tony: Top prediction for the sales industry this year?

Chris: I think more noise and more consolidation. Hmm.

Hannah: If you could share a piece of advice to all marketers, what would that be?

Chris: My advice would be make sure to remember that your ideas matter. It’s not simply enough to message value. You need to message sight.

Tony: Where do you go to get your industry news?

Chris: A little bit of everywhere? Maybe just because I’m a little bit of a sentimentalist, I still read TechCrunch quite a bit. And I also read a lot of the digital stuff on The Wall Street Journal. And then generally just sort of a smattering like I set up the feeds where I’m watching specific companies and then I’m sort of kind of plugging through and looking at the different news outlets that are covering them. So those are primary for me, and then I get all my regular news, primarily from the New York Times.

Hannah: What book has inspired you the most in your career?

Chris: Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” has still stuck with me all these years later. I’m sure there’s a lot in that book that has probably been refuted as pseudoscience in a number of different constructs. But I think through so much in my life around initial impressions and reactions to things and how much that shapes you and how much it shapes a lot of your business relationships. And, I mean, that book is probably 20 years old now, but that one has stuck with me this whole time,

Tony: I’m going to throw one last question in. We’re going to go from books to movies since you brought movies up earlier. And this is a question we had asked the previous guest on the podcast. But which term would you use? Always be closing or sell me this pen.

Chris: Sell me this pen.

Tony: That is the correct answer. Chris, thanks so much for your time here on the podcast today. It was a pleasure for Hannah and I to have you on, and we’re looking forward to seeing what you do at Mindtickle.

Chris: Thank you. Thank you both.

Tony: Oh, so had I’ve had more positions than I care to reveal over the course of my career, but I’ve worked with a number of different marketing people… some good, some not as good, but I think there have been a bunch that I’ve worked with that have done an excellent job in setting up and driving awareness. I’ve been at some companies that were very early in the beginning of their fields where you were doing a lot of evangelizing, having to go out and really make sure that people got a first understanding of what the product or solution was that we were delivering. I think the best marketers that I’ve worked with have really done a phenomenal job of getting the name out there and the brand out there and making sure that the customers had a good sense of what it is that we could do. But more importantly, the value that we could provide does that. Does that ring true to what you’ve experienced with any of the marketing teams you’ve worked with?

Hannah: Yeah, I’m with you completely. I’ve had many roles in my own career, and I have definitely been part of organizations where I haven’t known what marketing is doing. I just don’t know. I’m thinking “Are you here? Do you still work here? What are you working on?” And that has worried me, and I’ve been in situations as a salesperson where I’ve been like, “If I say something, am I going to get in trouble because I haven’t heard from marketing? I don’t know what they’re doing. I’m confused.” So I just started developing.

Tony: What they’re doing is getting nice pens and shirts and things like that.

Hannah: I’ve also been in environments in both small and large organizations where marketing are all over you. They’re like, “Here’s a campaign. This is what we’re doing. Here’s the script. Here’s a value prop presented to us. Walk us through a demonstration. Here’s what you should be talking about. Here’s the campaign that’s going out. Here’s the date we’re going to send you a list of people who have opened the email, clicked on the email. We’re going to show you all of their web activity.” So I think there are two distinctions when it comes to marketing people. I’m definitely going to lose followers talking about this, but you’re going to have some marketers who are like, “My job is to make money for the company.” That’s it. And you’re going to have other marketers who are saying, “I am here to drive bleeds,” and I think that’s just a really fine line. And when that revenue org isn’t thinking about numbers, that’s where I see things start to break down because you’re thinking of doing a great job, but there’re no numbers. So that’s my two cents.

Tony: Yeah. And the thing is, you don’t need a huge marketing team in order to have success. I’ve been at some smaller organizations that just have phenomenal people that were very crisp in their messaging and very precise and knew how to target the right people at the right time with the right information. And that’s why sales and marketing are so intertwined, right? Because the outcomes and goals that they’re looking for aren’t really that dissimilar. It’s just really a slightly different approach and what they’re looking to do.

So to me, the best people I’ve really worked with were the ones that were really smart in the way they thought about things and could execute at a higher level to really drive that retention, that information level that people are looking for. You know, I’m a movie guy, as you know, so telling a good story is always very important. But in sales, telling a good story about your brand relies on having a strong belief in the company’s overall vision and mission. I agree with Chris that to optimize sales outcomes and effectiveness, sales and marketing each need to build a team full of passionate people who can really get behind the product.

Hannah: I mean, Chris even emphasized the importance of being truthful and direct, especially when working with the sales team.

Tony: Exactly. And we all appreciate honesty when working with others. But if you really want to get in a salesperson’s good books, it’s important to be upfront about overall performance and any challenges you may be dealing with.

Hannah: Honestly, remaining adaptable and flexible to change is really essential, especially in today’s rapidly evolving world.

Tony: Exactly. Being able to help your customers solve problems as they crop up will help you build relationships founded on trust and credibility and a problem-solving attitude.

Hannah: Thank you for listening to this episode of Ready Set Sell.

Tony: We hope you took away some valuable lessons and insights that inspire you to reevaluate your approach to sales readiness.

Hannah: Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the show when you get a minute.

Tony: And stay tuned for the next episode of Ready Set Sell.