Say It in the Room with Nick Bennett and Christina Nalband

Trinity Nguyen:

Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of The First 100 Days. This season we'll ask revenue leaders to share their stories around building alignment between sales, marketing, and revenue operations. Our guests today are Nick Bennett and Christina Nalband. The two started working together at Alyce, Nick in marketing and Christina in sales.

‍

Christina Nalband:

My name is Christina Nalband. I am the Director of Sales at Alyce.

‍

Nick Bennett:

I'm leading Evangelism and Customer Marketing, but I was hired originally to build an ABM program from scratch and then moved into field marketing, which is what I've done for the last 10 years. And now this, trying to pave new paths. Alyce is a B2B gifting platform, all about the personalization aspect in relating to people beyond just the regular persona that they are.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

Can you share a little bit how you guys started working together?

‍

Nick Bennett:

Christina, when did you join? Because I joined in February of last year. When did you join again?

‍

Christina Nalband:

I joined Alyce in May of last year. So like three months after you.

‍

Nick Bennett:

All right. Yeah, and that makes sense. And honestly, I feel like ABM or field marketing, you're always working with the sales team. The sales team is my internal customer, and so Christina's been nothing but an amazing partner in literally everything that we do. It's funny because I actually go to her more than I go to our CRO, and just being able to have that relationship with sales to be able to push through any type of initiatives from the marketing side. At the end of the day, it's all one team, one dream.

‍

Nick Bennett:

And so if you can showcase how that looks, especially as a product that sells to marketers and sales people, it just [inaudible 00:01:42].

‍

Christina Nalband:

I think the biggest thing too has been, let's say there's an account executive salesperson that has a customer and they have a customer call that they need someone to be on, who's better than someone like Nick, who at Alyce, he not only was a previous customer of Alyce, but his day-to-day is trying to figure out what our potential customer needs. I think our relationship for me formed when we would tag Nick into a call to not sell, but to be like, "Hey, I've been in your shoes before. This is how we're doing this internally," and that just changes the game because it takes that aggressive sales motion out of it and brings a new face.

‍

Christina Nalband:

And I don't want it to be an aggressive sales motion. I just want to find out why gifting would help you and I want to tell you how we can do that. So I think that's when for me, I was like, "Oh wow, who's Nick?" I think the relationship just kind of snowballed from there.

‍

Christian Kletzl:

And that's such a powerful story. I think we should hire more UG users because yeah, ultimately it's like I used it, I loved it, here's why. It's by definition authentic.

‍

Christina Nalband:

That's the best sales story too. Whether it's someone in marketing that you hire that's used the product before, but if you can hire sales people that have been an end user of your product, that changes the game. That's very powerful. When you can get on a call with somebody and say, "Hey, I work here because I love this product and I actually used it before. Let me tell you how we used to use it." So that's super powerful.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

Christian, in case you forgot, I was your first customer in my previous company. He just completely forgot.

‍

Christian Kletzl:

True. True.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

So you guys started working together when you joined Alyce and Nick, you touched on this, you joined Alyce to build out the account based program. How was it before? What drove the need of the organization to put that program in place?

‍

Nick Bennett:

It's interesting. As a gifting company, I'll tell you, our entire strategy before moving to an account based model was very much spray and pray. Let's just gift as many people as we can and book meetings out of it. And that's a terrible use case if you're only relying on that, especially as you scale. And so we moved to an account based model where it was all right, we have three tiers, our tier one accounts, there was 50 accounts. Our tier two, there was probably about 350 or so. And then there's the tier threes, which is your serviceable addressable market, which is everyone else.

‍

Nick Bennett:

And so out of those 50 tier one accounts, we were able to open almost 60% of those in a quarter and a half. The issue was when you have a small team from a bandwidth perspective and resource perspective, I was so focused on the creation of pipeline that I wasn't focused on the acceleration of it. And that's why I think it's so important to enable sales. I think that's a huge piece that goes underrated. Working with sales as a field marketer or ABM marketer or whatever, you have to enable them as well to be successful because what happened was they treated all these opportunities just like any other opportunity that they had. There was no white glove treatment or VIP treatment. The only thing that changed was the budget that we spent for the accounts.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

And from your perspective, Christina, were you already in an account based program before you joined Alyce?

‍

Christina Nalband:

I've done it a couple of different ways. The first company I tried it at, we did not so much leaning on field marketing or marketing efforts, but more of this sales ABM strategy. Each account executive gets 80 to a hundred accounts and we are going to put all of our efforts into making sure that they become a customer. Improving that model out first, and then once we saw a success there, and prove that we could do it, then we would invest marketing dollars into figuring that out.

‍

Christina Nalband:

So I've seen successful and I think maybe this is something we'll get to, but the unique thing about what Nick is doing and what the marketing team is doing at Alyce is we're being proactive about that. Obviously we started with gifting. We're eating our own dog food, as they say. We were gifting as many people as possible, getting the product out there, which helps. It's not the wrong strategy, it's just you can't scale like Nick said doing that. I think it's cool that now we're taking a proactive approach when we think about, okay, marketing is figuring out ABM and now sales is included in the process. I think that's where it's getting sticky and actually fun because we know these leads will be worth it.

‍

Christian Kletzl:

That's always a little bit the issue if you start with one or the other, like if sales starts with the account based program, but marketing doesn't or the other way around is you only get half the treatment. So sales users, their attention and their dollars on this and marketing users, their attention and their dollar on these accounts. And maybe if we're lucky, there's a little bit of an overlap, but ultimately I think that's why a lot of money gets wasted, a lot of effort gets wasted.

‍

Nick Bennett:

I was going to say too, it's like you spend all of this money. If you don't have buy-in from an account based strategy from the top down, it's going to feel, people say there's no silos in their company, but I know that's false because even if you have the best sales and marketing alignment, there's silos somewhere in there. And if you don't have your CEO or CRO or VP, whatever, that's proactively working to push this out as a strategy and embracing it from a company perspective, it's going to fail.

‍

Christina Nalband:

There's so many different pieces of it too. It has to be a company wide initiative because if your executive team is on board, your marketing team is on board and your sales team is on board, but you don't have ops in this and you can't turn back and say, "Hey, how many meetings do we book? What's the conversion?" Then it's like, what are we even doing this for? And I've seen that happen, especially at early stage startups where it's like, everybody's aligned. We all get in a meeting, you're just assuming if it's working based on, "Oh, Johnny booked a meeting yesterday." But I think it's really crucial to have ops involved so you can have a dashboard in Salesforce or whatever tools you're using. So you really can see is this successful and that there's data behind it.

‍

Christian Kletzl:

Very curious in where the alignment falls apart. I think we align is always very, very easy at the beginning, but it's so much harder to say after a hundred days we're still aligned. And I'm very curious about within those a hundred days, what are the biggest challenges?

‍

Nick Bennett:

I think it's just the falling off from the communication perspective. If you're not having regularly scheduled calls with the sales team or your counterparts or whatever, it's just going to go. Things are going to fall through the cracks. People get busy. Sales has deals to close. Marketing it's trying to do 30 different things as well. And if you're not, whether it's a weekly stand up or a biweekly stand up, you have to have something because if communication isn't there and you're not all aligning on the KPIs and metrics that matter, then things are going to start to crumble. And then you're going to wonder a hundred days in, "Well, look, this isn't really moving the needle, but are you trying to use this to move up market or are you trying to use this for your commercial or mid-market type of accounts?" And the deal cycles are going to be completely different. It depends on the industry and all of that as well.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

If I go back to the beginning of building up this program, you guys came from different companies, different experience, you understand the value of being aligned, but the actual of doing it sometimes get really tricky, especially with change management. Sounds like Alyce probably was in a different model, probably the MQL world in the past and now trying to move into the marketing qualified account, MQA. If someone's listening to this right now and like, "Hey, we're going through this right now," like the day one of your first 100 days of building this program, what are the different things you guys experienced, the good and bad that they should be thinking about?

‍

Nick Bennett:

You can actually have a dual funnel and you could use MQLs in MQAs and you could split your funnel where the MQLs are solely going to be hand raisers and you're driving those people inbound. The MQAs will be focused on that outbound true ABM motion. And I think a piece where, and we kind of, I don't want to say a Christina and I misalign, but I think between sales and marketing, there was an issue of what is an MQA? What does it follow? Because honestly, we use an intent platform where all we did was when an account hit decision a purchase within that platform, six QA, and we call it an MQA. But what does that mean? What does the company side? What is the sweet spot that matters for your ICP?

‍

Nick Bennett:

And so there was some bumpy spots. And plus we had a lot of turnover on the sales team, a lot of turnover on the marketing team, where when you go from a series A company to a series B company, some people aren't comfortable with that growth and the pressure from the board to deliver on higher numbers. And that was something where we had a lot of people leave when we made that change last year.

‍

Nick Bennett:

We actually on January 1st kicked off a brand new program. We're actually not calling it ABM anymore. We're calling it targeted marketing because really at the core of ABM, that's what it is. You're targeted marketing to a subset of accounts that are in your sweet spot. We changed what the MQA definition is. And I think Christina and the rest of the sales team is very much aligned with the marketing side of things. And although I don't have as much to do with that anymore, Christina and I still talk almost daily.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

And from the sales side, Christina, how was it from the sales perspective? Sales naturally have target accounts. When putting this program together, what was the sentiment then from the sales side?

‍

Christina Nalband:

Something I would have done differently or I think would help people who may be going through this right now, it all starts at expectation setting and education. And I know what ABM is and I know what building a target account list looks like and I know what an intent platform is, but we have sellers that maybe they came from a different background, or maybe they're from an inbound funnel that they're just taking calls.

‍

Christina Nalband:

I think education on what an intent platform is and why we're doing this. And that would be step one. And I think we did that at Alyce, but I don't think reps were really listening. So like ensuring that was really in their heads, "Okay, why is this so important to us, right? Why are we pivoting our strategy?" See, I think that's certainly something that I would've done differently because reps will take it more seriously.

‍

Christina Nalband:

And the second thing is, don't just start with everyone. I would highly, highly suggest proving out this model with a rep or a couple of reps that you know are good at, maybe they're a little bit more scrappy, entrepreneurial and they would like to take on this initiative, which actually helps with giving people something new to do. Improve it out. It's like, "Hey, these two people did this and they hit X amount percentage over their number." And then it's like, "Oh, how'd they do that?" And sales people want to make money. And if you can find a way to incentivize sales people to do whatever it is that you want, they're going to get interested. I think education and starting with a subset of people are two things that I would've definitely done differently.

‍

Christian Kletzl:

When you don't do the education piece, I think this is super important, but what happens if you don't, or maybe you have new reps that join and didn't get the education, are they going after different accounts, different persona, different messaging, what are they doing and what's the most dangerous one?

‍

Christina Nalband:

Well, I think what's dangerous is they see marketing as "Why is Nick Bennett's team hitting up my accounts?" And this is just the black and white view of it. It's, "I built out my account list and now marketing's sending them emails too." And you know how sales reps get worried. They're like, "Are we bombarding them?" We're targeting them in different ways. And sales can get this ownership of their target account list. And I think that can become a not so great area in a company because it's separating marketing and sales. Whereas when there's education behind it, it's like, "Oh, that's awesome. Nick and his team are hitting up the accounts that are by ICP. They're helping me get into that account." I think it's just the education around it is huge because it can pull the two parts of the business apart versus bring them together.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

Another piece is, and you guys touch on a little bit, is defining what is the ICP and get everyone align on that. And then the target account list is another component. In my previous life, we were trying to build an ABM from scratch and we got alignment initially, we got the target account initially and then marketing went off and [inaudible 00:13:19] advertising and nurture and all that list and low and behold, a quarter later when we look at the number, the sales team actually only worked on half of the list and the other ones are like, "Nah, it's not that interesting anymore." So it was really hard to stay aligned. It's really hard, which Nick touch on the communication and ongoing communication and buy-in and education is so important.

‍

Christina Nalband:

Also, one thing I'm going to add to this because a mistake I've made as a leader is trusting that the accounts are the right accounts that we're going after. If you're not going after the right accounts, you could have a standing meeting every day and we're not going to see success. That is the foundation that you build everything off of. And I would not suggest... It all comes back to education, especially if reps are not aligned with what we're actually doing. Just make sure that the target account list are actually people that you can sell to instead of trusting that they are. I would say that's a huge part of this, which is hard in itself. How do you pick the right account? That's a whole other conversation.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

There were always bumpy starts the beginning of any program or any change management. Give me a moment where there was something that was not aligned or something a little bit bumpy, how the two of you came together to resolve it.

‍

Nick Bennett:

I think one was just around the communication. Before even Christina got there, as she got there, we lost our head of marketing, we lost some people on the marketing side, a lot of some sales reps left. And so I think it was just rebuilding up that trust. And I remember when Christina started, because we had this conversation where she was frustrated, not at me, but as marketing as a whole, "What are you doing? Why aren't we hitting these accounts? What are we actually doing? Does marketing just sit there and send off emails all day?"

‍

Nick Bennett:

And so I think it was just having conversations to figure out what are we actually doing to move the needle at the end of the day? And it goes to the larger conversation of having the alignment or having the communication to be open and talk about challenges and talk about ways that you can overcome it together versus me just being angry and being like, "Screw her. I'm just going to go and continue to do my thing. She doesn't write my check," which I would never say, but I could've. I think that would be some of the things. It was not a weird time that she joined, but there was just a lot of changes and that's a lot of pressure for someone that's expected to come in, lead a team and hit a number. And then someone like myself who's trying to build out a program from scratch.

‍

Christian Kletzl:

Reminded me of corporate bro, of how he talks about marketing.

‍

Nick Bennett:

He hates marketers.

‍

Christina Nalband:

Oh my gosh.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

He's hilarious.

‍

Christina Nalband:

He spoke at somebody's conference recently at like the-

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

Yeah. I saw that, I'm like, "Oh my God, can we hire him? We don't have a conference yet, but can we just hire him?" He's hilarious. So I love that you guys came to an understanding. Nick, you just mentioned you understood Christina joined crazy time, crazy number to hit. That kind of understanding is sometimes we are too busy in our own work and our own team's agenda and priorities that we forget that the other person also have the same amount of pressure. How did you guys reconcile that? Was it over coffee? Was it something else? How did you guys reconcile?

‍

Nick Bennett:

I think it was just through Zooms. She lives in, I think in Florida and she's from the Boston area, but we've actually never met in person.

‍

Christina Nalband:

Well, I think the thing too a lot of times at Alyce [inaudible 00:16:24] in a room, so that's the company wide mantra of please don't hold this in. I think what happens is when I'm new and Nick's been here for a couple months, it's okay, I'm thinking these things, he's thinking other things, but if we're not talking to each other, sometimes you just have to have an uncomfortable conversation. It's like, "Hey, what's going on? Help me help you." Whereas I think people are afraid to have that open blunt conversation and then nothing gets solved. Everything remains complacent, then that's not going to be everybody.

‍

Christina Nalband:

Some people are just going to keep to themselves. And then it's marketing keeps to themselves, sales keeps to themselves and you won't see things change. I really believe that starts at the top. There has to be that like I happen to be this type of person on my own and maybe Nick is too. But when your executive team is allowing you to say it in the room and that's a company wide thing, you feel more comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. That's how you get things done. That's the best way to build relationships is like, "Ooh, I didn't really like that they just said that, but let's work on it." And that's how you build a company really.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

That's so cool. That's amazing.

‍

Nick Bennett:

I was just going to add to that too. It's like, do I always agree with what our CRO says for example? No, but you would think that you would want marketing be more involved since that is the ICP of who we sell to, but sometimes it goes back to that single mindset. I think you have to come together as that's why I'm such a fan of revenue teams. You've got rev ops, you've got sales, you've got marketing, CS. They all are a revenue team. They all roll up under the CRO, but it needs to be taken through KPIs through metrics.

‍

Nick Bennett:

It needs to kind of fall under that one bucket. Because if not, marketing's just going to be like, "Well I'm almost going to pump out as many MQLS as possible." Sales doesn't get paid on MQLs. I was in sales before I moved to marketing. It's so frustrating to when I talk to other marketers, I say, "I'm just going to pump out MQLs because that's all I'm going to be comped on." And they know that's not what sales cares about, but they don't care, they're just looking to get paid at the end of the day.

‍

Christian Kletzl:

I love the fact because we just worked on our OKRs and it was also about like, okay, everyone is really good at doing their own OKRs, sales department does, but are there actually OKRs maybe [inaudible 00:18:31] competitive to marketing or how can you support the marketing OKRs? And so I feel like that's where the leadership comes in once again, because if your goals in your KPIs in marketing or in sales are completely different, then I'm always drawn towards fulfilling my OKRs over helping my colleague. Did something change? I don't know if you worked with KPIs or other types OKRs, is this something that is reflected in the goals that you're setting for the department for the quarter or the year?

‍

Nick Bennett:

Yeah, it is now. It used to be very single minded where marketing had theirs, sales had theirs, people team a theirs, everyone had the individual ones that somewhat rolled up into the business initiatives, but this year we actually just had our kickoff recently. It was a little late, but oh well. And so we're actually now focusing more on a collaborative effort so that everyone's rolls up into core pieces. How can we help the business help marketing, help sales? Everyone's fighting towards that same thing. We all know what we need to achieve now. And I don't know why there wasn't as much alignment before, but it just took some time to work things out. And I think this year is going to provide a lot of success with that new mindset.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

That's one question that I have in mind. I don't know if we have an answer, but the last few years, if you go back to 2017, 15 or so, no one really talks so much about revenue alignment or revenue team as one. I'm kind of curious, I'm like, what changed, what is the reason for this? We understand the value of it. We achieve better when we do things together going after the same accounts, the same buyers, but why no one ever talked about that before? It's very interesting. I'm thinking out loud.

‍

Nick Bennett:

It is interesting. The first time that I really, really focused on it, I was working for a company called Clari. So they're in the rev ops space, they're a forecasting platform. And so our revenue team and literally the whole product was to bring revenue teams together to forecast better through sales, through marketing, make it so you don't have to do it in Excel every single day. And that was really the first time where I was like, "Wow, this is what it actually looks like when it works."

‍

Nick Bennett:

And you see all these customers that are going off to IPO because they can forecast and hit their forecast within 1% five weeks out. It was really nice to see. And then I went on to do marketing for engineers and developers and I realized very quick that is not the audience for me and MarTech or SalesTech is definitely where I belong, but that was really the first one. That was back in 2018 that I really, really saw it work.

‍

Christina Nalband:

I think it has to do with the shift of the world. I truly believe it's 2022, and think about five years ago, things were so different. The whole say it in the room mentality was just not a thing. Look at all of us right now. We're remote. That would've never happened five years ago. Maybe on a webinar, it would, but not working, like never [inaudible 00:21:25]. I just think within the past couple of years and everything that happened with COVID, sometimes things happen because you have to do it. Necessity is the mother of invention. And I think we've been so stretched as a world and as a country and every country has been stretched like, "Oh wow, we have to do this now. We have to think differently because our goals are harder to achieve." Yeah, so I think it's just been a shift in mindset really.

‍

Christian Kletzl:

I think that's such a good call out. I think it's just necessary. Sales is getting harder. It's getting harder to reach people. So out of necessity, okay, I'll talk to marketing. Okay, I'll align with them.

‍

Christina Nalband:

Yeah. It's like, "Wow. My number just thought way harder to hit. Nick, can you help me out with this?"

‍

Nick Bennett:

The issue is all these net revenue numbers go up, but do you think marketing's budget's going up? Absolutely not. It's getting flat or slashed and it's like, "Okay, so you expect me to produce this much higher yet you're not giving me the resources." And so it becomes so hard.

‍

Christian Kletzl:

It's good to know Nick [inaudible 00:22:23] yours as well. If other companies keep the budget the same, we'll keep yours the same as well, Trinity.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

It's already set. But not just marketing. Sales the same thing too. The quota went up, but doesn't mean they can hire as many more reps also. It's just harder for everyone I think. So at the last few minutes, so just some like rapid fire questions before we wrap up. First, I'm trying this, I'm going to just do it for fun and just go along with me guys. So Nick, easy question for you. Has Christina ever had donuts for breakfast?

‍

Nick Bennett:

Yeah, I remember her putting a LinkedIn post. So I'm going to go with yes.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

Damn it. Christina, you want to add anything? Yeah.

‍

Christina Nalband:

I'm a big fan of donuts.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

Donut and coffee. Christina, how old is Nick's daughter?

‍

Christina Nalband:

Nick's daughter is five.

‍

Nick Bennett:

Three.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

Close.

‍

Nick Bennett:

Close.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

Next one. Which communication channel does Christina prefer?

‍

Nick Bennett:

I know it's not Slack.

‍

Christina Nalband:

Definitely not Slack.

‍

Nick Bennett:

Honestly, I can reach her quicker on LinkedIn than I probably can on Slack.

‍

Christina Nalband:

He's right about that. I'm not a fan of Slack. I have to add to this. I'm not a fan of Slack because people create so many different, are they called channels, that it gets watered down and I'm getting so many notifications that it's overwhelming for me. I would say text message is the easiest way to reach me.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

Yeah, she wrote a post about it. I'm like, "Cool." Actually I'm the same way too. I don't pick up phone calls, but I will reply to text.

‍

Christina Nalband:

It's just easy. It's the easiest thing for me. And I guess you could say the same thing about Slack, but I don't know. I just prefer. Maybe Slack has this, but if they had like a, let's say like I message Nick on Slack and it went to his phone if he could set that up, that would be a pretty good thing.

‍

Nick Bennett:

Like an SMS forwarder.

‍

Christina Nalband:

Yeah.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

Your SMS going to blow up once someone figured that out.

‍

Nick Bennett:

True.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

Last question. Christina, does Nick pre-write his LinkedIn content or on the day of?

‍

Christina Nalband:

I don't know. I would say he probably does it on the day of.

‍

Nick Bennett:

Yeah, I don't pre-write anything. I'm terrible at taking notes just in general. So if I don't remember it, yeah, I don't even keep notes on my phone.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

That's amazing. That's a really good skill. My content team is trying to be like Nick and how does he write on the day of? They get so stressed out. Before we wrap it up, if you guys want to give any shout out to any of the programs or communities that you're driving. I know both of you involved in founding communities and different coffee chat sessions.

‍

Nick Bennett:

I launched a brand new community called the Revenue Era. So it's basically for revenue marketers, that mixture of a free job board. We have over a hundred companies that have submitted jobs to it with compensation in a lot of cases, which don't be afraid to talk about comp in a public aspect. But also, it's for people that just want to level up their careers. It's been really, really good. And I've been a huge fan of communities throughout, honestly, COVID. It's just been a great resource for me to meet other people.

‍

Trinity Nguyen:

And Christina, do you want to share about yours?

‍

Christina Nalband:

Yeah, so I launched my first, it's free and it's a course on negotiation. It's nine slides and I'm giving access for now for free. People just want to go to my LinkedIn and check out the negotiation tactics on Gumroad. And I'm also starting a podcast which I've actually recorded. My website is Christinanalband.com and that's where you will get access to it. But I literally just have not set the time to edit my first episode. So just stay tuned for it.

‍

Christian Kletzl:

Thanks for joining us on this episode of The First 100 Days. Be sure to hit that follow button as we get more revenue teams to share their stories every week.

‍