What's really common is this disconnect between the marketing department, sales department and just kind of departments overall and what we have heard constantly and like struggles, especially like in person, that these events throughout the year was like marketers, one needs to do a better job of communicating the value and effectiveness of marketing to sales.
And but then on the flip side, like sales needs to do a better job at communicating like their insights to the marketing team in this moment when they were trying to rank fives all the time and it's collaboration. And if you just say you're aligned, it doesn't hold you accountable to saying that you're actually, like, working together, just like we're aligned. But it's like, are you really? Hello, fellow marketers and listeners, and Happy New Year.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Call to Action. I'm Janet Mesh and the CEO of Aimtal and the host of the show. Aimtal is the integrated marketing agency. We specialize in building marketing processes and strategies for B2B companies. And then we launched their first marketing campaigns and programs. So super excited this year to do a lot of that in this show.
And each episode of Called to Action, we analyze and discuss the latest trends, and research in B2B marketing and across the industry as a whole. So we conclude every episode of Called to Action with one call to action to you, the viewer, that means you'll get some ideas and tactics from myself and my, co-hosts and our guests today on what you can do, in your own marketing in 2025.
So I'm thrilled to be joined by my co-host Tucker Delaney Winn, Growth Marketing Lead at Aimtal, and our special guest, Dylan Rhudd, our integrated marketing strategies that aim to sell. Dylan, if you remember, he was in episode three where we dived into all things video marketing. So if you didn't catch that episode, definitely check it out. We shared a lot of really interesting insights across creating a video series into webinars.
So it's a goldmine of, tactics and, strategies that you can apply to your own marketing and plans this year. But today we're going to be chatting about some top highlights from 2024. So, taking kind of a look back and what that means of a look forward into 2025, and especially how marketing and sales, leaders need to prioritize their own, you know, plans, their own strategies together and what that will look like for the growth of your business. Awesome. All right.
I'm going to pass it over. Let's do some brief intros. Just. There may be some folks listening in who don't know who we are. So we always like to share a little context so you can, kick us off. Tucker. Hey there. Tucker. Delaney in Aimtal's growth marketing lead and a name. Telfer. Almost four years based in Boston. Yeah. Been, lately focused on creating marketing strategies, running lots of campaigns and driving marketing and sales alignment, which I know we'll be talking a lot about today.
But yeah, very excited for this one and very excited for Dylan you to be back on the program. I'll, pass it over to you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Tucker. Glad to be back as well. Yeah. My name is Dylan Rutt, and I'm Aimtal's integrated marketing strategist. Also just past my four year mark back in November, I believe. Yeah, time really flies. Really pretty crazy stuff.
I work very closely with Janet and Tucker and the rest of our internal team to create full scale digital marketing strategies for our clients, across a variety of different service lines email, social media, paid ads, and more. And yet 2024 was a pretty big agency year for us and for the industry as a whole. So I'm really looking forward to taking those learnings and using them to, like, really strategize and plan for 2025 with our clients and our community overall.
So yeah, should be a fun episode. Yeah, yeah, definitely a ton of takeaways. 2024 I think, you know, there's only so much we can cover in less than an hour. And so definitely check out past episodes that we've, this is episode six as of today, which is really exciting. 2024 was a year of great change, in my opinion, and and honestly, I think a little bit turbulent and a lot of uncertainty, unfortunately. But there were a lot there was a lot of, you know, innovation throughout the year.
So past episodes was an overall, you know, the rise of AI and marketing. I feel like, you know, generative AI has been out for a few years, but we really saw it come to people actually like starting to use and apply it. And really kind of taking a more like critical look of how to incorporate it into their marketing. Video continue to be center stage. I think we've been saying this for years.
I just like, you know, you invest in video, if you do invest in video, it's pretty much, integral must have of any content strategy and marketing strategy. And I think it's we're seeing like there's the search engines are changing with the impact of AI and just the traditional ways that we saw that, things worked kind of got a little bit flipped on its head, especially with the Google ads that came out this year. Shout out is always a spark.
Toriel and the data team, who did like, a lot of, analysis on that, you can go like, take a look at all the content they put out this year for, like, a deeper dive into, well, the kind of impact of SEO and, website traffic. So in terms of this episode, we'll, we'll talk through some of our predictions and share some of our lessons and stories from 2024. And from that, what we're seeing will kind of evolve and continue into 2025.
So, some areas what we're going to cover today are the continue to rise of in-person events. You know, it's four years since we all survived, global pandemic. And, you know, we really noticed that there's a continued strong desire for more in-person connection and community, very much this kind of concept of personalizing your messaging. There's a little bit of a rabbit hole will go into, when you're, you know, connecting with your prospects and customers.
And I think the third one here, which will also share kind of what I actually like, how and why and what it actually looks like to like align marketing and sales teams. So I think we talk a lot about like alignment, alignment. But what do you actually need to do for that to actually happen for your team in 2025?
And then finally, which is one of my I love this topic, is just, you know, we all talk about the actual like, technical aspects of marketing, but really like what are the operations people, communication channels of these teams that are working together and how that can lead to success. So we're going to share a lot around that. Excited to dive in. But before we get there, we'd love to hear from you both. Tucker and Dylan. What is your, like B2B marketing resolution of the New Year?
Like, what's something that you're is even something that you want to focus on professionally going into 2025? I'd love to to hear from both of you of like, kind of what you're thinking through and what you're going to prioritize in the new year. Yes. I would like to focus on creating HubSpot AI agents, and specifically ones that make sales reps like, easier. I'm still pretty fired up by Dharmesh is keynote from HubSpot inbound, even though that's almost three months ago.
At this point, it's still ringing in my ears, buzzing in my head where he, we actually talked about this on a past episode, Janet, but where he talked about there used to be that phrase. There's an app for that, but now it's there's an agent for that. We've been poking around and HubSpot starting to use breeze, starting to play with HubSpot AI. And I'm really fired up to start building some agents for their team.
Of course, that can support the sales team, doing things like buyer intent, competitive intelligence. I think there's some great opportunities there. And we're going to get into how marketing and sales can better align and better collaborate with each other. And this is one area where I feel like marketing can bring some real value that will really help sales in the sales team. And I'm excited, excited to explore that. So, Dylan, what about you?
Yeah, I think you actually touched on this a little bit earlier. Jenna, in terms of like that urge for like in-person connection and connecting with community and stuff, I definitely think that's something I want to lean into a lot more in 2025, just leveraging the marketing community in my city more often, you know, attending more events, connecting with some of my alumni from my school, connecting with Philly's marketing experts on a more regular basis.
I think over the past couple of years, I was really laser focused on building up more of my online presence, you know, because a lot of things did shift online. So naturally there's that pivot of like, okay, maybe let me be more active on LinkedIn, more intentional with my socials and things, but I really don't want to neglect the connections and the resources right here in the city of Philadelphia either.
So I really, you know, fired up about just getting more involved in general, you know, connecting with maybe the chapter of the American Marketing Association that's near me. And, you know, overall, this is really fun to like, learn from other marketers and share some knowledge as well is definitely the to insight. But yeah, I'll pass it back to you. Actually, Jen, I'm curious to hear your answer to this question as well. So I'm going to start with mine's kind of similar to yours actually done.
I think I just sharing knowledge forward and more expansively, especially to larger audiences like continuing call to action and civil and professional and overall goal. And also I would I would love to speak at like in person conferences and events this year. So I think that's like one of my goals is like, if I can get, you know, like a speaking or like a workshop or something would be really exciting.
But I think a part of that too, is not just like a professional goal is like, I want to help amplify like other people in the industry to, I think would be really exciting. And that's what we're part of our vision for call to action, as well as to bring on some guests, industry leaders to like, speak and share, like, their own opinions. So, yeah, I think I'm, I'm, I'm similar to you or sharing that knowledge forward and wider. And if you're if you're listening this watching I guess I got a plug.
Anyone who's listening, watching, following us. If you want to be a guest and hang out with us for an hour and talk shop, hit us up, we would love to have you on on here. Well, I guess in terms of the trends, learnings from 2024 and then trends we're seeing going into 2025, I think a big one is, around people want to connect with other people, especially back to in-person. And of course, it's like, you know, there's very much the online community is important.
And, you know, this is a where we focus, but where we're seeing is kind of that trend and what's going to be really important for marketing and sales teams is that integration between that online and in-person experience, you can't just do like one or the other really should think of it like holistically.
It's like kind of where those keystone moments of events that you have throughout the year and then like, how do you kind of do the before, during and after as part of your whole, like marketing campaign messaging and plan? As well as on the sales team? So, I mean, I guess in terms of like what we did, like in 2025, a that was I, we took some big bets is what I'm referring to, what I am. So like we attended a number of events.
I feel like I was traveling for like straight up for like three months straight, went from to Boston, New York City, California, Washington, all over. We tended, Toronto with Toronto. We went a lot of places. And so everything we really saw that, you know, across the HubSpot inbound conference, the B2B marketing process, summit and then just a range of, you know, events, small ones, to where I'm based here in Boston. So there's always a lot going on as well.
So as we saw this year, there are a lot of events we went to a lot. I know, like companies were investing a lot, kind of this big return for years later. And I think this is what we're just going to continue to see this going into 2025. So curious to hear what your thoughts are around this as well. Tucker. And a little bit of, you know, from your experience or what you're seeing. And for you, Dylan too, you guys can jump in and, share what your predictions are based on what we saw in 2024.
Yeah, I'm right there with you, Janet. It was. It was nice to hop around to different cities, get on planes, trains and automobiles to, go to different events. And just echoing your sentiment that I think we saw and felt a real a hunger from other people to also be connecting face to face, especially in the sales and marketing world.
In the tech industry where we work, there's a lot of people who work remote or maybe work in hybrid environments, but I think there was a real enthusiasm and warmth that I certainly felt from people to be like, oh, finally, let's really connect again. Let's get a drink, let's talk to other people. So that face to face time that people are craving, I think is really happening. And I just totally agree that I think we're going to see more and more of that as we head into 2025, as well.
Yeah. Dylan, I know you were at a few events as well. Know if there's anything you'd want to add. Yeah, no, I would I would absolutely agree with that. I think just from the events that I've attended in the past couple of months, I've definitely felt a big difference between those in-person interactions versus, you know, being able to tune into a webinar and kind of attend and get that same information virtually, I think.
And as we'll talk about a little later, there is value in, you know, both approaches. But I think there's definitely just having that in-person human interaction is a huge, huge difference. Being able to learn from other marketers and have those conversations face to face and, you know, being able to exchange information, I think there's just a lot of value there that that just really doesn't always translate fully when it comes to like, online, events and networking conferences and things.
So, I could see that being a huge, huge surge going into 2025 as, people kind of do a little bit more of a safe way back into the in-person experience. So, yeah. And I applaud this, kind of first report research from visible the event company. They so they haven't come up with our 2025 trends report as of the moment of us recording this. So it might be live and we'll share it in the show notes, once it is live. But one of the they did do like a webinar.
So something they did like online kind of to share some of the data already. And the question is like what do you think will be the top event trend in 2025? And two of the ones of the five listed here that are like our standing out are one networking opportunities. So, you know, folks want to network, create meaningful connections with others. And then the other one is micro events. So communities are more you know, they want to people want to be attending almost like smaller, more local events.
So I think we're you know, we definitely saw a lot of that. And we even hosted some of that as well. We'll get into in a moment, and share some real lessons learned and what people can do in 2025. But yeah, I think what you're saying, Dylan, is true, like a hybrid or a hybrid approach is still going to be a thing. And you, you do really need to do both because you want to you can't just only, you know, focus on a local community.
You you know, most companies, they want to not across United States but multiple countries. So having that hybrid approach really does help with that kind of convenience of the virtual events, but also bringing that in-person connection. Yeah, it's definitely really helpful to kind of have the best of both worlds there because there are pros and cons to to both sides of the coin. Right. But I will say you miss that hybrid approach.
I think there's also going to be an increased importance in like the integrated communications, you know, before, during and after each event, just to make sure that the online experience and the in-person experience, they all feel very seamless.
You know, like what with your in-person interactions, the online interactions shouldn't feel siloed from those you really want it to feel, again, very seamless and personable in order to really have the desired impact on, you know, both sides in-person and online. And there's actually some, research from McKinsey and company.
I go ahead and pull up that well, they mentioned that 78% of consumers have already said that, like, personalized content makes them more likely to revisit and repurchase from a company. So, you know, the way that people are communicating, it influences not only their initial decision to purchase to engage with the organization, but also can lead to long term brand loyalty.
And even, as you can see in the bottom left, like, you know, referring and recommending to other employees to their, family and to other lender, networking thing. So there's a lot of, value that comes from just really being intentional with your communication. When it comes to events like audiences can really see through the more generic responses.
If you think about like, you know, like the automated message you might get after an event or something like that, or if it just feels very copy paste. Thank you blank for attending blank. You know, like audiences are really starting to see through that a lot more. So I think, you know, going back to kind of what we're seeing going into 2025 for the event experience, I really believe that words are going to matter a lot more in the follow up correspondence.
And, you know, being able to take the time to personalize that experience a little bit more is definitely going to go a long way. Yeah, we have some examples because I feel like I've experienced that firsthand, attending other people's events this year and I know talking to. But the personalization thing, I want to sit here for a moment because the personalization, topic is an important one because this is a trend that is confusing in my opinion and contradictory.
So, for example, I'll pull this up. This is from, Qualtrics. They did a 2025 Global Consumer Trend report. And yes, it is true that consumers want personalized interactions with brands. So 64% of consumers prefer to buy from companies that tailor their experience their wants and needs, however, and they call this the personalization paradox, which I love. And on of so 64% of people say they want personalization.
However, 53% of those same people surveyed are concerned and not willing to share information about themselves in order to receive that personalized experience. So it's really interesting because, you know, on the one hand, people are saying like, no, I want this. It needs to be personalized. You need to know who I am and get me. But then with data privacy laws, I'm just not even sharing this data. People. There's no way for brands even have that information to be able to like personalize.
We do have some ideas in mind. I don't know how like I think this is a scalability issue. I think the trend that we're going to see and the challenge that brands will navigate is that it's going to become harder and harder to navigate this kind of personalization paradox at scale, you know, and making sure that you're kind of, you know, hearing and understanding what, the person you know, your prospect or your customer really does want without them giving you that information.
And so I think, you know, unfortunately, we're kind of almost maybe we're going into the dark ages a little bit. Oh, lot more guessing it's 2025. Could be the dark ages. Unfortunately. I like medieval history, so I'm okay with dark. Yeah, right. Well, there are pandemics. And now look at that. We're just pretty much reliving history. Friends circle like themselves. Yeah, yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. That's what we're going to. We're going to learn from it and not repeat the mistakes.
Yeah. I mean, I was on the receiving end of this lately. I think if you start with a personal connection, you have to kind of keep it personal for a little while before you go into, like, the branded experience. So I went to a marketing conference, recently, attended a great presentation from this guy once I who okay, keep names out of the situation. Loved his presentation. Yeah, me hook, line and sinker. I was writing down notes. I was ready to go, so I sent him a LinkedIn message afterwards.
Been like, hey, I loved your presentation. That was awesome. And the only thing I got back was, it's just a thumbs up emoji. Those are like not no, no lines of text, just a thumbs up emoji. And it it brought me back to maybe my like high school and college days where you're texting someone and they text you back just the letter K. Yeah. Like, you guys have got that right. You know, you're like, I okay. So we're like, not friends. Like you and offender conversation.
And the conversation is okay, we're never texting again. You're not going to come to my barbecue. So yeah. But then the funny thing is, the very next day, after my my thumbs up emoji message back, I got a marketing email from the same company, this person's company asking me to request a demo. And I was like, come on, you know, I think that's your email. Did you give your email from the event? That must have been it. It must have been from me. Okay. But it was just such like a cold experience.
Like, I think I wanted to connect a little more with this person, or at least. And I actually did this with several, several events that I went to or several sessions. And I was just like, hey, loved your event, you know, connection request on LinkedIn. And the other even just a simple like, thanks, like, great seeing you makes me totally happy. But just something about just the thumbs up emoji just basically felt like I was getting ghosted.
Followed up by this like very branded, not personal request a demo. I'm definitely not ready for that kind of thing. I think to what you're saying, Janet, it's like if you we know we need to create a personal experience and if you want to do that, you have to put in some human effort in there and some human communication. It can't just be, you know, oh, immediately put them into this list. That's an automated email from the brand that really rubbed me the wrong way.
And I know that a lot of other people would feel the same way. And I know, Janet, that you've had similar experience. Yeah, yeah, I did have a similar one in the like the event season this fall. It was in between inbound and the marketing Profs conference here in Boston and a company read. So actually it was like so the thing that was interesting is like, I mean, as a marketer, I can tell obviously, the 1 to 1 email looks like a real person, but it's kind of a mass email, which we do as well.
Like obviously like you're sending it to multiple people, but it was like a plain text email that was like an invitation to a dinner. And so I, I was pretty excited. I was like, oh, cool. Like I go to a dinner like, that's really nice. And so I responded. So the, the messaging I would say in the invitation was confusing where it was like, hey, you're invited. And then like the landing page was also like, you're invited. Register here.
It didn't say to the effect of like, it didn't give any like context of thought, like you need to be like approved for it was the dinner like real? It was like the invited. Yeah. But then like, I didn't get any other communication after that. And to be honest, like I'm busy and I didn't really like I just kind of assumed like, I mean, I can think this has happened to me before, so I do have the context.
But when I think of someone who's never experienced something like this, you're kind of like waiting around, like, am I invited to this dinner? Should I block off my calendar for Tuesday night? Like trying to arrange for childcare, like what's going on?
And then what happened was that the day of the morning of the event, I got an email that said, like, hey, unfortunately like this, due to demand and like, like capacity, like we can't, have you like, you're like pretty much like you don't have a seat at the table. And it was like, okay, interesting. But it was like the communication wasn't like that. It was like, you're going to like, analyze the list. And it's like you reach out to me and kind of situation.
And it's one of those things where they're like, you know, they're looking at, I think like title and location and probably like mass send it out. However, similar thing happened to you that happened to me. I received the pretty much like the know that morning and then three hours later from the same company, I received their email newsletter promoting, like all the things that the company and all their product stuff. And I was like, that's a poor experience.
Like, I agree, like we need to automate and like do things at like scale, but just like think for a moment. Like what? That like take an empathetic approach of like, what is that experience for that person? Like, you can't, you know, it's like this fine balance. I think in 2025 people you need to figure out. And if anything, it's just like having a conversation with your internal team, like what time is that going out? Should we, you know, like, are you like that?
Just show to me that, like regardless of the size of the company, big or small, they're just not connecting the dots between like they're event people and then like their email, whoever's writing their email newsletter of like, when are we sending these things out? Is it the same day or not or whatever? Absolutely. Yeah. Pretty pretty. And that is a wow. It's there. I feel like. Yeah. But as you both kind of alluded to it, it's those little details that really go a long way.
You know, you can't overlook the small things, even down to the timing of when certain correspondence is going out, as you mentioned, Janet, like, you know, with the whole paradox idea, I think that's definitely important to keep in mind, like personalization is getting harder just because of like the general lack of voluntarily, like share data and stuff. But like as you can see from both, your example is like when that like one on one interaction and that like post impacts online experience.
When they don't agree with one another, you're left with like this weird awkward communication that just misses the mark when it comes to like interacting with someone who could have been a hug, you know? So I think and one thing you mentioned, Tucker, that I wanted to circle back too quickly was just the idea of like starting and leading with personal connection. I think that's a good way to circumvent that paradox a little bit.
You know, even just calling back to one of our previous call to action episodes where you kind of get that balance between like, automation and the human touch, I think that's like so, so important to kind of find that like, you know, fine line between the two because again, it's impossible to personalize everything at scale. But you also don't want to just like hit the button and send the same thing to everybody on your list.
Like there's some there's like a happy medium that you really want to hit in order to really, like, get a good balance and get some good, consistent communication out there, I totally agree. I mean, I think I've heard this phrase before that like sales is 1 to 1 and marketing is one to many. But I think even like even just getting rid of the sales versus what sales versus what the marketing. But think about that 1 to 1 versus one to many.
And maybe a good way of thinking about it is like, well, how did they come to interact with your brand initially? Did they meet a certain person because you might want to keep that 1 to 1 connection and conversation going a little bit, or did they come and sign up for our newsletter? That's kind of a one to many interaction that they're finding you. Maybe that's okay to kind of first keep interacting with them from a one to many standpoint.
But regardless, I think the thing we're thinking about here is that you have to be really thoughtful about when to do 1 to 1 versus when to do one to many. Otherwise, you can very quickly make people upset and a little bit, just disenchanted with, with your brand and your personal brand too. So yeah. Absolutely. Great point. Yeah, I wanted to share. I can show ask about a little because I wanted to show how we did this at Ames Hall, actually. So we did host our own events and, this year.
So we attended a lot of conferences and events. What we did was like the first time this year we like like I said, we did some big bets. We hosted a mixer, inbound. And then we also did a mastermind dinner here in Boston as well by in November of this year of 2024. So I wanted to kind of show you kind of just concerns we're talking about like what that follow up looks like.
So we realized that, like it's a little hard to read here, but like, so we obviously like as you can see, like this is a branded email that we send. It's like from me, but it is like stylize and our brand and everything. However, like we didn't send it like automated like thanks for attending our event. Like great to see you took the time to like we built it out, but then the next day we like thought about like, okay, how like it wasn't even the next.
I think we sent it out like 1 or 2 days later. Like, I think that's something to keep in mind. Like, it doesn't always have to be this, like, immediate. Like the person walks out of the room, they get an email from your company. Like you can give it a little space to be honest. But also like what I wrote in here was like for the dinner was like, thanks for attending.
Like our dinner debates on everything from thought leadership to brand vision to reducing reducing friction between sales and marketing. We're full of laughter and helpful solutions. I hope you're fired up about 20, 25. You know we are. And then, you know, we just add a little bit more like first, like we even added pictures on the event.
Like we want to be able to do any of that or like do a little bit of a recap of the discussion or what was talked about, unless we like, took a moment, met internally again as a team and then revised this and like shared it out from after the call, like after the event in person. So I guess the point is like we didn't schedule out everything.
There was obviously reminder schedules, but then the follow up we made sure this is another one was our, B2B marketing and sales mixer we did at the inbound conference. And I also added in here and wrote like a very specific thing to the topic of what what came out of the how spot conference and also the conversations we had in person. And for example, I wrote here, I was happy to hear many conversations about I focus on the concept of the quote unquote human touch.
Like AI isn't going to replace the role, the marketer or the sales leader founder. It's really going to help, like, you know, make things, you know, more efficient and really bring our expertise forward.
So we wanted to be able to do something like this and personalize it without, you know, taking a moment to like, pause and then like having a discussion internally and making sure also making sure that other emails weren't going out to the same people at the same time, because that's just confusing there.
People will expect you to give them something as a follow up, but if you're hitting them like we experienced with like a product demo or totally different email newsletter, you know, it's just going to kind of go a little. It just it's confusing. It's confusing, and it just seems a little tone deaf in a way. Yeah. No, I totally agree. Well, and I think as we're talking about this, it's like personalization. How do you how do you actually make personalization happen. We're talking about it.
You're mentioning it in the communications Janet, both before and after to make sure that it feels personal. I think even in the networking itself in the report, one of the reports we looked a little at a little bit earlier, the concept of micro networking, has really stuck out to me. I think that's what we did with our mastermind dinner. There was another larger event, hundreds of people going, I'm kind of getting into this phrase of bio networking, right?
If you want to have a little more of an intimate networking experience, go out and create that. That's that's exactly what we did. And shout out to to you, Janet and the email team for making that happen. But that's one trend that I really see happening more and more. And I think it's a really good opportunity for marketing and sales teams to start thinking about, even at HubSpot, inbound, within inbound, they had these smaller meet ups. There was a small but mighty marketers meetup.
There's a working parents meetup I loved, you know, get some tips on what to do when your baby naps, how to get some work done, then, and, you know, inbound to it's crazy. There's a DJ going, you feel like you're in a club. So to have a little bit of a smaller, kind of meetup is really nice. And I actually made some of my best connections and, contacts that I've continued to have relationships with afterwards.
So I think that's structured networking, that micro networking is something that we're really going to see, moving forward. And they even that these meetups had some kind of cued up questions for us, which as a Virgo, I love some good structure. So that was really nice.
The one other thing that I wanted to say, you know, you're talking about Janet spending some time afterwards to think through the conversations that you had at these meetups and, you know, right out a little bit of what happened, but that also requires people at the meetups to go and really have a personal connection to say, hi. So you and I went to a couple parties this year, a couple of mixers, Janet, where the the hosts of the party never even went and talked to us. Yeah. Crazy, right?
We were so we were standing in there like a networking. It was like a happy hour, but it was like small. It was like, not that it was like a small space. Like you could see everyone in the room, right? And we like we were saying there for about I think it was like at least ten minutes, maybe not more. Yeah. And like someone didn't from that their company didn't walk up and like greet us and say like, welcome. Do you get a drink? You know, and we only ended up like talking to someone.
The first person we talked to is like, because they walked in and they were from that company, but it's because, like, they kind of walk in the space when we were in that general area. Yeah. And then I think they, you know, kind of start a flow a little bit, but it just it's something that's like that makes a difference, like feel, make people feel welcome. Like you went well and there was another party where there was probably 4 or 5 people from the company hosting it.
There were like checking us in and they were all clumped there and said like a two second hand walked in, and then no one from that group ever came in and talk to us. We played darts for like an hour. I would have loved to for someone to come in. I was very interested in this company. What they did right, never given and talk to us. And so it's kind of like, well, why are you even hosting this mixer? Why are you spending money?
Yeah, they sent me an email the next day to request the demo, but there was such a great opportunity to forge a real connection, to build some trust and to share, you know, some actual real info and gather some info about the people who are attending. None of them. I'm not just talking about work either. Like, it's not just about like, what's your pain point solution challenge show like your day to day job. It's like, do you want to talk about darts? Like you want fact?
I was I was in a dart league. Like, you want to figure that out if you play darts with me now you know, what's your dart strategy. What's your dog walking strategy. What's your favorite musical theater number? If it's not defying gravity, what's wrong with you? You know, these are the kind of things that you're not going to get from a schedule a demo with us marketing email the next day. So yeah, I think it's a real lost opportunity.
So understanding how to approach these structured networking, these micro networking opportunities is going to be key for both marketing and sales, as we for sure that. So that brings us to our next topic. And I think what we've seen in 2024 industry and for 2025, I find that unfortunately this is like always like something that everyone really like says and needs to happen.
But I think it's gotten like worse and worse over the years, unfortunately, which is marketing and sales alignment in an organization. So let's switch gears to this. And kind of we can kind of we started touching on some tactical things. I think that some of the issues that they're people maybe it's like very kind of this like high level conversation, but people are like, well, what do we actually do together? Like, how does this actually work?
So hopefully that's we want to share some ideas for 2025 for you, and reflection of the past year as well. But I think what, you know, what's really common is this disconnect between the marketing department, sales department and just kind of departments overall. And what we have heard constantly and like struggles, especially like in person at these events throughout the year, it's like marketers, one needs to do a better job of communicating the value and effectiveness of marketing to sales.
And but then on the flip side, like sales needs to do a better job at communicating like their insights to the marketing team, but can't really communicate the value without understanding what are these conversations like? What I, you know, the sales salespeople are having those like direct conversations with prospects and customers. Sometimes marketing doesn't even have access to that information. So it's a two way street.
And it's something becoming more and more of a priority, and like necessity of 2025. So yeah, let's open up to you guys of kind of what your, what you've seen. I think, Dylan, you wanted to pull up a little research from Data Box. Just to emphasize what we're talking about. Absolutely. They actually just had a great deep dive into this same topic. They surveyed over like 170 different companies about like how they approached their sales and marketing, alignment on their own.
And they compiled a bunch of key takeaways from their teams as well. I do agree, by the way, Janet, that just like that alignment is more important than ever. That's like the real foundation of strong synergy between sales and marketing team to just really make sure that that and marketing decisions are able to impact the bottom line, but also that, like any sales insights, are helping to inform the marketing efforts in return.
It definitely is a two way street, so I don't know, maybe we should change. I think like in this moment, we need a safe return to if it was on alignment. It's collaboration. Yeah. And if you just say you're aligned, it doesn't hold you accountable to say that you're actually, like working together, just like we're aligned. But it's like, are you really. That's true. Just understanding it. That's a good point. I like collaborating. Yeah, I mean me anyways. But everyone uses the word alignment.
But it's like it almost is like to surface level in a way that's that's a good like global of 2025. Yeah. I think everyone should. Yeah. Use that one for sure. But yeah, looking into some of the data that we've seen from data backs here, one that really stood out to me as like, you know, a very common strategy that a lot of people are using is, you know, the idea of data platform and CRM sharing as a strategy for sales and marketing alignment.
You can see here that integrated CRM and marketing automation tools, I think that's a huge one, because being able to have the same data between the two departments just really allows for a more cohesive performance tracking and goal setting. We're all working towards the same thing that way, you know, you don't get stuck in the silos between marketing and sales. Everyone's looking at the same information and reacting to the same information.
In that same vein, just having shared goals and metrics, you know, like when when sales and marketing teams have different ideas of the right path to take or what their goals are, it just really becomes challenging to please both sides. So being able to mitigate this issue by just from the very beginning, giving both teams the same KPIs to work from. I think that's a huge, huge step towards making sure that companies can, align their sales and marketing efforts with one another.
And the other one, okay. The other ones are interesting because, like, regular sales and marketing means isn't the top then collaborative content creation and cross-departmental training sessions, collaboration, like people just need to talk to one another. It's not groundbreaking. It's not innovative. You just need to like, talk in person and online and just make sure everyone is on the same page in the same CRM as you just described.
Dylan. Like, I feel like sometimes I'm like, this is not this shouldn't be that difficult. But I understand, like, it can be like there's, you know, politics and turf wars and confusion and time zone issues and all that good stuff. But it's like there's one thing get people in the same room physically or virtually, to talk and look at the same information and plan together. For sure. For sure, it is easier said than done, to your point.
But I do think that like taking that step back and just realizing like, oh, it's just about having a conversation to start instead of thinking like to granular about like how to solve this big issue really is just about communication, as you mentioned. And I think it's a good way to frame it for sure. And, Tucker, I know you actually had a lot of information coming from the marketing perspective before, about this same topic.
So if you want to talk us through some of those key takeaways, we'd love to hear from you on that topic as well. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think as we're like, I think everybody listening would probably agree with us or like, oh, we need to align, we need to collaborate. But I feel like so got to go to the Marketing Profs B2B forum.
Shout out to and Hanley for just created an incredible, an incredible conference and really bringing in tons of great speakers, including this guy named Kyle Lacey, the CMO of jellyfish, who had a lot to say on how to get marketing and sales to collaborate more effectively. So Kyle had this quote, pretty straightforward, kind of aligned with what we're saying. But sales and marketing alignment is built around revenue.
So just to make things really concrete here, using revenue as the primary metric, primary thing that sales and marketing teams are aligned on. And he said, look, the ultimate goal of marketing is the same as the ultimate goal of sales, which is the same as the ultimate goal of every single business side from non profits, which is to make money. So you should align yourselves around the largest business outcome you can.
Right. And I think when marketing and sales are tracking different metrics, we know that that causes huge frustration. And honestly, when marketing isn't analyzing, revenue isn't even trying to make those connections. It makes marketing look really bad. We talked a lot about transitioning marketing from being seen as a cost center to a profit center. Start there. Start with trying to analyze and show the impact on revenue. I know it can be hard, especially in big organizations.
I know it can be hard, but it is possible and you really have to do it. So just to help make this a little more concrete, the other thing that that Kyle said that I thought was so interesting is, yes, of course, sales and marketing should be meeting either weekly, bi weekly or monthly. But who owns that meeting? This is where it got interesting for me, he said the team that should actually own and lead those meetings isn't marketing, it isn't sales. It's the ops team.
So that would be marketing ops or rev ops revenue operations because that team typically owns the CRM. They're the ones we're kind of in charge of setting up the processes, and they're also going to be a little more objective. I think sales is going to bring their own biases. Marketing is going to bring their own biases to those meetings. They might be jockeying for credit and their armor, like the different, you know, marketing aspect. A diplomat at the table, pretty much.
Yeah, ops is the diplomat. Ops has a little bit more clear headed objective view of this is what's going on. But I will say that I think is we're going to get into marketing teams, have an opportunity, to be a little more in the operations, starting to really take charge of the CRM. We know sales teams don't necessarily want to be, you know, messing around in the CRM all day. They want to be going out and doing sales.
So if marketing teams can get a little more savvy, a little more technical, that may be an inroad for them to start collaborating more effectively with sales teams. Yeah. Oh, I feel bad though, on the sell side, honestly. Like if you're out all day having these in-person conversations or like on calls all day, like you don't want to turn around and having to like do a bunch of like data management, uploading, cleaning, all that.
There's two different brains I was there to keep keep track of your stuff. But I love that concept of like marketing us being that kind of like linchpin of the teams and driving that collaboration and bringing the full picture together. Yes. Absolutely no, of course. And I think marketing really should be helping sales make their lives easier. Kind of like what I was saying at the beginning of the call.
One other great speaker I really loved was, was this guy a judge who had an awesome presentation, similar things. You know, how do we make this concrete? How do we make marketing and sales collaboration actually concrete? He also talked about using the CRM as that command center where marketing and sales is collaborating. Obviously, that means they're both using that CRM, not different CRMs. He also talked about how do we transition marketing from a cost center to a profit center.
I loved what he said to that. As marketers, you need to push yourself into sales meetings. And it reminded me of the latest Batman movie where he's talking about got push myself. I felt all fired up. But, you know, push yourselves into those sales meetings, understand what's driving revenue, share your prospects pane their language, how they're talking about things.
The one other little nugget that that Ali Judge said that I thought was so good was if you're trying to figure out how to show marketing's impact on sales, start with a sales report. Take an existing sales report.
If you can add a column into that spreadsheet, or add a widget into that dashboard that's already exists that the sales team already looks at, that starts to show what was going on earlier up in the top of the funnel in that journey, what website pages were they visiting, what, you know, whitepapers where they're downloading that that eventually, you know, this person, then, you know, signed a deal. Also you what is like a timeline to where it's like what events are be hosted.
Then we saw this like increase here. Like where where those buttons come from. Oh, because a lot of people like the sales team was talking to a bunch of people. If you were going to a website that were hitting all these other channels and like showing that correlation. Yeah, absolutely. Another one comes to mind is like when we were talking about events earlier. Right. So sales teams were like, oh, you know, we we met these people, this event. Awesome.
Did you know that this person, you know, had opened and clicked and read seven emails prior to the event? Did you know that they booked a meeting from an email to meet with you at the conference? That's just helpful things to bring in the full picture of that journey. And it's not a marketing journey. It's not a sales journey. It's a customer journey, you know? Right. Exactly.
What was interesting about that too, though, like kind of is, I think, you know, talking about like, marketing is help sales, but sales also needs to help marketing and understand that, like, not everyone is ready to be like, pitch to and ready to buy. Like we just explained that like we met someone for the first time, we weren't ready for a demo of their product. Like, we didn't even really have a full conversation or anything.
And there was another at the B2B marketing forum conference by marketing process. There was another, I think it was in the keynote. Tucker. Right. Hi ho from the B2B Institute, like LinkedIn's think tank, they were sharing this or this, which we, we we grabbed that. You're a future buyers like 95%. It's like they call the 95 to 5 rule. And 95% of your potential buyers aren't ready to buy it.
And that just comes back to like, there's why you need to, like, nurture and create content and educate them, entertain them. And then you can activate them into, you know, a sales qualified lead and pass them over to sales. But just because someone takes some sort of action, like one action does not mean that they're ready to like, I mean, there will always be, I think an anomalies like someone might see something and they they're ready to buy, but that's very rare.
I think overall like what you see more so is that you really need to nurture, build that relationship, plant those seeds, educate them, and then they'll be ready to like talk to sales like people. We talk about this in other call it action episodes. Like it's a known fact that like buyers want to educate themselves.
They want to come to these meetings feeling like they can, like, pretty much meet the salesperson at the table and have like a next level conversation about, like the solutions and offerings of your product or service. They don't want to like go through the like introductory pitch or you know what, they can just get on YouTube from a video they want to like go right into it. So I think this is, something that we constantly see.
And, you know, if you can start to try to build out your you can build these things out with, like, visualize your pipeline in HubSpot and start to show this, like we have 75 marketing qualified leads. And out of that we have five sales qualified leads and that we got one opportunity or whatever. Like it is bringing that together. And like visualizing that as a team will be really important. In 2025. Totally agree. Absolutely.
Yeah. So I love this is you talk all day about this but I think recap in this this section, when we think about the three priority areas for marketing sales teams to prioritize and focus on, we head into 2025. Let's facilitate consistent meetings to like a pipeline to review activities, really connect between marketing and sales, have those consistent meetings weekly, biweekly or monthly. Number two, using one collaborative space. Ideally, that's one CRM for marketing and sales to use together.
Could be HubSpot. Could be others. But that way we're making sure everyone's looking at the same data in the same place, talking about the same things. And then finally, I think especially for marketing, being able to measure and even, well, just as importantly, measure and show how marketing is affecting and impacting sales. Really? Yeah. Like the goals, the KPIs. So like I think what we're saying is like it shouldn't be like just marketing versus sales goals.
It should be like business goals, like what are the business goals and how our teams like individually and collectively helping to influence and achieve those. All right. Our final like observation from 2024. And then just like I think priority goal like maybe priorities for 2025 also like trends. But you know we always think about and talk about like the very tactical like specific things you can do in your pipeline and your strategy and in person online.
But I think what we see is one of the most integral things and needs to be prioritize and try to drive is like the collaboration, communication and even like technology that supports that teamwork and that you can actually like operate as these teams together and as a business.
So I like to kick it over to you, Dylan, just to share and kind of get your thoughts like you have a lot of our clients also think through the kind of the process side of how we're going to do and achieve these things together. And a lot of the time we find that they're just they're using they're they're all over the place sometimes.
So let's jump in and kind of conclude this, call it action episode of all around the collaboration, communication and teamwork necessary to achieve this level of success.
Absolutely. Yeah. This is actually something I know we touched on this a little bit earlier as well, but I think just the idea of clear, intentional collaboration, even outside of just sales and marketing teams, that's a priority across all departments in order to make sure that the work is just being done in a consistent and seamless way.
I think, just as you mentioned, with the strategy work that I've done, this is something I've definitely realized over time in our collaborations with our clients that like the operations, the people, and the collaboration tactic that really serves the foundation for success, across all departments of any organization, really.
Again, we mentioned it a little bit in the context of marketing and sales, but going into 2025, I definitely think that this is something that all organizations should think of at scale in terms of, just like how departments can work, with, with one another, in the most seamless way possible.
I know there's a report from Gartner, actually, that I definitely wanted to pull up because they do a great job of that, breaking down three key priorities that people can kind of consider for how they will look to deliver market excellence in 2025. You can see there's like all three different parts of the same machine. All of these cogs like, work within one another, which I thought was a really cool way to illustrate it.
Number one, you can see the idea of bridging marketing strategy and operations by really dedicating resources to strategy management. I think that's a huge one, just like the short term and long term approach to how you get the work done, you really want to bridge that gap between the marketing strategy and the operations. And, I think you just mentioned this earlier as well. Kind of having that is like the linchpin between two teams.
I think that's like a really great way to think about things in terms of making sure that the work is being done in an efficient way on a consistent basis, leading marketing to deliver differentiation as well by really infusing like brand and customer insights into the strategic business decisions.
Again, something that we kind of saw with that marketing and sales conversation, like making sure that sales was able to bring their insights back to the table for marketing teams, the same goes across multiple different teams as well. Just having those brand and customer insights at the center of your strategy is always going to be vital to make sure that your audience is consistently being seen and heard. And then finally prioritizing customer journey investments is a huge one as well.
You really want to audit those existing touchpoints and understand, like what can be improved, what needs to be polished a little bit more to make the work, happen a little bit more seamlessly? This is something you say a lot, Janet, that always resonated with me since I kind of started with the team. Like if you are kind of looking at a process, you're like, oh, that's it. We've always done that.
Your first time to say like, okay, let me visit this and see what can be changed a little bit, you know? So, yeah, I think that's really, really important as well to just have those existing touchpoints audited on a regular basis and understand, like how you need to work cross-functionally to really deliver that value to, to your team and to, external parties as well. So, yeah, this is a great, great find from Gartner.
I thought this was a great graphic that, you know, teams should always kind of have in the back of their mind going into 2025. Yeah. We brought this up in the call to action. Someone actually, our first ever episode was all about this cross-functional collaboration. And this was a report by CMO. So curious. Tucker, going to kind of like, elaborate on this one as well, because I think this was very much kind of like a prediction for 2024. Definitely.
We saw that, with our clients and, and it's going to definitely continue into 2025 as like something that's overlooked but really integral to the success of a company. Yeah. And I think about the word cross-functional collaboration. I feel like a through we all love where it's, you know, it's just thinking about that specifically cross-functional. I feel like teams understand and team leaders understand, like my team needs to have great processes.
My team needs to, like, really be structured really well, but they don't necessarily think about how their team needs to work with other teams, and that your cross-functional cross team collaboration needs to have the same level of processes and structure that you've developed for your own teams.
And so I think one of the big takeaways from this report that we had looked at, Janet, was that marketers have the opportunity to be the pioneer for developing and shaping and driving cross-functional collaboration so that it's not just a beautiful structure within your team. It's a beautiful structure that's happening across teams. And they, you know, they had this phrase to collaboration drag.
And it made me think of teams I've worked with where, you know, there's a demand gen team that's doing ads and they're driving leads and they're driving mql, but then they're not really talking to the sales team. They're not having cross-functional collaboration and conversations with the sales team. So you've got thousands of Michaels, but you're not really understanding that none of them are very effective for the sales team.
And what's happening in sales is just like, all these leads are terrible, right? And why? Because those two teams are not in the same platforms. They're looking at data in different places, and they're not meeting regularly. So suddenly the Demand Gen team is getting a ton of scrutiny, a ton of frustration, understandably, because they're cold, because it's kind of not working and budget pulled.
Ultimately, the end of the day, six months down the line, CFO comes along is like, well, I don't see how this is resulting in anything because it does often end up looking at sales numbers, which are more hard and concrete. And if they're not seeing anything, then boom, budget gets pulled away. So that to me, I think as the marketers like we said, have the opportunity, but maybe even the necessity to drive cross-functional collaboration.
And and I do love, I think the, the following, another graphic that was from this same report, you know, looking at these, these leaders who are standing next to their, you know, their direct reports and chairs and helping drive strategic clarity, helping them drive strong processes, not letting them take it for granted. Because as we've seen, you know, if, if, if, collaborative processes get neglected, that can be a real negative impact on revenue and profits.
So those marketing leaders can really be the ones who are giving their teams, given entire departments, the tools and processes to work effectively and cross-functionally. And that's that is absolutely paramount for avoiding that collaboration. Drag 100%. Now, I like this this one a lot. Definitely shout out to Gartner. I really like how they think about the idea of, organizational barriers and how teams can work.
Cross-functionally I would say definitely this third bullet stands out to me a lot about the idea of aligning your rules, roles, and processes to like, really reinforce that desired culture change. And I think that also speaks to the idea of keeping that tech stack consistent across departments as well. I've seen so many different organizations have like one team using one tool to track their work in progress. Another team is facilitating their day to day within a completely different tool.
You know, like having that really help. Like not. I've come across a lot of companies. I have different knowledge bases, which is insane. Like your knowledge is in different places in the same company. Exactly. How to how to make Janet's head explode at multiple. It's I it's like really hard for me to fathom. Yes. I got multiple knowledge bases. You're off base. Well, it's funny, because then there's a tool to then connect all of them.
So it's like instead you could just have the one tool instead of having, like multiple tools with another tool on top of it. Exactly. Like why even add the extra layer? Exactly, exactly. It just makes it such a pain to, like, find information and like. Yeah, to that point, I think just having that shared collective visibility, it's the best way to prevent any communication from getting trapped in those silos again, you know. So for sure. All right. Well, we covered a ton today.
I think there's like so much that changes in marketing. And sales in the industry as a whole and B2B. And so we try to just give a little bit of focus and prioritization of where you should look. So we hope you all have a very successful year. Definitely let us know. Like what you want to see this year. If you want to be a guest on the show, we will be inviting us to join Call to Action and share your industry knowledge and insights.
But as we always do, we're going to conclude the episode with one call to action. So, I'll kick it over to Tucker to, let us know, what's your call to action for viewers and really, what should they prioritize across marketing sales this year? Okay, so it is garlic season. And while I haven't seen Gladiator two, one of my favorite things from Gladiator one was the strength and honor. So shout out to Russell Crowe. Let's tag him on LinkedIn.
But I think about marketing and sales unity needs to happen. Gotta make sure that we're not working in silos, that marketing and sales teams have shared insights and shared KPIs and are working in a shared collaborative space. That's key. That's my call to action. Whether you're on a marketing team or a sales team. Make it happen. Dylan, how about you?
This one is not from Gladiator, but, with that, I think my big takeaway from this, this whole episode would be just not neglecting your operations like that has to be the foundation of everything you do. How you do the work is, in my opinion, just as important, if not more important than simply being able to like, finish and complete the deliver. You need to make sure that, like each segment, each handoff, within a process is as seamless as possible.
Everybody within your workflow knows exactly what they're jumping into. They have all of the full context behind the project you're working on, just really making sure that your operations are the centerpiece of all of the work you do. I think that's going to be a vital part of a really successful, operation going into 2025, and I'll pass it to you. Janet, would love to hear your takeaway as well. All right.
My call to action to the audience, I think it's I think this is my call to action for episode one. So I'm start trying to find five of the similar. I want to just talk to each other. Yeah. Talk to people. Not just like internally either. I think talk to the people who were like, if you're going to events this year like get in the same room as them, like go up to people like get out of your comfort zone. Like, don't be the people who had a bunch of folks showing up to happy hour
and never even introduce themselves. You know? But also like kind of put yourself out there trying to make connections internally. Like if you're doing off sites like as an internal team, make sure that you're like setting up time to like, strategize, get to know one another. So it's it's a little bit easier online once you go back online if you're doing a hybrid work or whatever.
But really, at the end of the day, I think it's just like making sure you're having the right conversations and the right people are in those rooms as well. And I think that touch on all the trends that we talked about and all the priorities across marketing and sales, your own internal operations and just events as a whole, as a pick up the phone, pick up the response, but don't give, don't give. Tucker. Okay. Text. No. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you for listening.
Have you been with us till the end of this episode? We really appreciate it. Do let us know in the comments. Like, what's working for you? What do you plan to take action on in 2025? Where do you need to prioritize and what are you planning? We'd love to hear it, so reach out in the comments. Reach out to us directly. We have an exciting year coming up for Call to action, as I already mentioned that have been teasing throughout the episode. We are planning to bring on guests this year.
So an industry leader. So if you have like research reports or trends that you're seeing that you really want to bring forward to an audience of marketers and sales leaders like we would, this is your invitation to reach out to us. We would love to have you on the show. Thank you, Tucker, and thank you, Dylan, for joining me on this first episode of 2025. I feel feel confident and excited, with a little bit of undertone of still, you know, a little like, how's it going to go?
But I think that's kind of the point. And why we created this show is to keep a pulse. To really have is open conversations, share what we're seeing and hope that you all share that back with us as well. So share the knowledge, like and subscribe to, the channel. We're going to be sharing episodes every month. And we don't want you to miss one. So until next time, we'll see you on the next episode of Call to Action. Thank you.