Welcome to ChannelWaves, the podcast where channel leaders share success strategies, best practices and emerging trends, brought to you by StructuredWeb. Here's your host, Stephen Kellam. Welcome, everybody, to ChannelWaves, StructuredWeb's view into everything channel. I'm your host, Stephen Kellam, and very excited to have Tina Gravel joining me today. Welcome, Tina. Hi, Steven. How are you? I'm doing really well. How are you? I'm good, thanks. Do I have any lipstick on my teeth?
No, you don't have any lipstick, by the way. We're going to leave that in, folks. Tina and I, it's been a minute, but we've done this. I think your teeth look great. Tina and I have done several of these, so hang on, this should be interesting. It's no holds barred. She'll say whatever she wants. We'll make it... So Tina Gravel, Vice President, Global Head of Channel Sales at Quantexa. That's it, that's the name.
Headquartered in the UK, not as well known here in North America, but coming up fast. We're a unicorn company. With our recent round of funding, we are now considered a unicorn, billion dollar high growth firm. Our job and our lot in life and all of that. We have a platform which enables decision making, takes data and transforms decision making with data. We wouldn't be anywhere without data, and in this world, it just keeps proliferating and proliferating.
But the issue is the quality of the data and the questions you ask. And Quantexa is the best company I've ever seen at being able to help with that, to help customers protect and optimize and grow with their information and then third party information, like from one of our clients, like Moody's and so forth. I asked her to join me for a couple of reasons. One is she's in sales, and I interview a lot of people or work with a lot of people that are in marketing.
You're in sales and there's this whole thing going on between sales and marketing, so that was one thing. And two, your company is very interesting in what it does with data. So sales and marketing, they have to work together. I believe, everybody's talking about it in the channel. From your perspective, why is it so important that sales and marketing work together in the channel today? Well, in the olden days, five years ago, I was about to say, you have to define that, don't you?
It used to be your funnel was your funnel, and your silos were your silos, and everything sort of worked that way. Things would come into the funnel that marketing would generate, you'd know, what to do, and then sales would pick it up and sell. Right? And you didn't have to be quite as aligned if you weren't sharing themes of ideas and, well, bad on you. But I look at it now, it's no longer the funnel, it's what people call the lifecycle of a customer. Some say flywheel.
I like lifecycle better than flywheel. I do, too. I'll start the flywheel. I like lifecycle. I do, too, because flywheel to me is like it seems like it moves, and I'm not sure it moves it quite as fast as that. But without this continual discussion, shared goals, you're going to have inconsistent responses, you're going to have mistakes made, you're going to have duplication of data, you're going to have problems with customer handoffs.
It's just no ROI or bad ROI or downright fictional ROI, as it could be said for many companies. So with that, I would say that those are the biggest challenges with being not aligned. When I talk about what are the biggest pitfalls or whatever, what can happen, I can think back of a discussion. And by the way, this wasn't at a company I was at. So I don't want anybody that hears this running around upset that I'm talking about somewhere I used to work.
I was at a meeting, a big meeting with lots of companies and lots of heads of channels and alliances, and the overriding sort of discussion and the controversy that kept coming up was all about attribution of leads, because if you're both support organizations, I.e. Channel and Marketing, to me are the support organizations of sales. Right.
You're both looking for who gets credit, right, and when, and then you have the direct salespeople, many of which have large egos that want to take credit for the whole thing and don't want marketing or channels to be represented at all. It becomes a real nightmare and lots of fighting, and some of these companies aren't that big. Come on. You should not be fighting with each other. You've got the world to fight with. Come on. So that's on my mind today, is that we only have so many leads.
We have to do all this work up front because we know the customer is looking very early in the sales cycle. Now on his own or her own. They don't want to be talked to right away. They're going to do 70% on their own. Right? We know this. There are facts that show this. Well, if you're getting paid by the lead internally or you're getting credit somehow by the lead internally, how do you decide who gets credit for it? Very interesting problem.
And by the way, I don't have an answer for this as great as I am. Well, here's my answer. I run both sales and marketing where I am, so I cannot think of a deal. If I have done attribution correctly, and I take it far back, we can talk about your sales cycle. I'll talk about my sales six months easy, right? Right. Probably years of building a relationship. If I really dig into it, I can find sales and marketing's footprints and handprints across almost. Of course you can.
It's got to be able. Sure. You have to have metrics, right? What is an SQL? It's so funny, right? And how do we work it all back? Maybe it's a maturation thing. When I get older, as I've gotten older, I'm more interested in being a point guard and distributing and rising the tide versus just what I assume that if something does well that I've influenced, it's good for everything. Maybe it's an ego thing, but actually, I don't know. Is it? Well, to be fair, it is.
To be fair, I think it goes well beyond the ego when you're getting paid for it. Yeah, and we have had that issue in marketing and sales and channel in many places that I've worked in, where we've had a comp plan like that. I haven't always had a fight on my hands, but that's what it is. You and I coming from a different, let's say, generation than the folks that are just coming in now. Yeah, I think our egos are different at this point in life, I really do.
And you're right about the rising tide. If everybody benefits, everybody will rise and it's better for the whole. But when you have companies that are trying to make sense out of how do we pay someone in channel, how do we pay someone and how do we give MDF, how do we apply that? Right. Then you get into these issues.
And that's where I said I don't have an answer because if I were very simplistic and I'm not saying you're simplistic, but I could say yes, everybody's involved in it and all over the place, right. But when somebody doesn't pick up the phone anymore or deletes your email and they're looking at you at a white paper on an obscure site and you don't always get the cookie or the tracking anymore. Right. If they say no, I'm not willing to be to let you know who I am.
How do you know that the salesperson didn't send them to that website or the marketing person didn't send them or it's very difficult. And I would say one of the reasons that I wanted to I was offered this job and this company is fantastic and so I took it. But my real desire was to do CRO work because I think that marketing, sales and channels, if done right together, could be game changing.
But I haven't seen a company do it right yet and so I'm very desirous of trying and it wouldn't be without difficulty to get them all working together and to get them working together well. But I think I've got two of them already figured out and that is the alignment with channels and channel sales and sales, direct sales. Okay. To me, I think I know how to do that, right.
And then to be able to have the challenge of bringing in marketing the same way and having them all be on one team, that to me, sounds like fun and sounds like a way you could really make the world a better place if you could figure out how to do that better. I don't know companies that do it really well. You may because of what you're doing but I haven't seen it. So you tell me. I think it's pretty broken but I see it moving in that direction.
I think once again it starts at senior leadership and to listen and being willing to adapt but then also maintaining some consistency from my perspective and then realizing if something's broke, fix it, but give it some time. I do see salespeople starting to understand that marketing isn't a competitor. It is in their hip pocket. This is what they need and the easier a marketer makes it to get to them to do that the better it is.
Look, I think it's not only the comp plan but it's the culture of an organization and how people are praised and rewarded. It even goes down to recognition. So many marketers that I know, look, they just want to know that they got an assist. This is like hockey, right? Scoring a goal is great but Wayne Gretzky is just as well known for his assist. Right?
As a matter of fact, if you took all of Wayne Gretzky's goals away he would still be the greatest scorer in the history of the NHL just on his assist. And he's the greatest hockey player ever. I'm sure somebody listening might disagree. I'd argue with that all day long and I'm not even a hockey fan. So to me that assist is becoming so important. I think the issue is we all have this technology out there and we've been able to track it so that you can get that marketing assist. Right.
And I think it's all starting to get there so you can start to do that a little bit better. Absolutely. It's one system by the way for PRM, for sales forecasting. And I think Salesforce wants to be the system. I'm not sure it is. I'm not going to get into that controversy. But that's the other issue. Okay. If your systems are in silos, I don't care about your organization. If you can't share information easily then to me there's a lot missing.
If you don't have the automation and the right process. You got to have the right process before you automate or yeah, before you automate. Some would say that's backward. Let's automate and then fix the process. I suppose you could do it that way. But I don't know. I've always been process first. I'm an automation guy. I've been selling some form of automation for 15 years. Me too. And I totally agree with you. Right. Don't automate for automate sake. Automation sake.
I think you can do it on the same time. But if you got a bad program and a bad system or what I've seen is you have automation over here in sales, you have automation over here in marketing. You have sales operations here. And once it's siloed, I got to tell you, in today's world with APIs and integrations, it's getting better. But there's really not much excuse for not sharing. The only reason not to share is internal conflict and lack of alignment from an internal perspective.
And that would go to senior leadership on what are we measuring and rewarding and what are our KPIs and OKRs, right? Right. Well, come on. Let's also remember one thing and I don't have my direct sales hat on right now. I have my channel hat on now and this isn't about Quantexa or the company that I just left after seven years. But if you do not have at the top recognition that the indirect channel is critical to the business, force-multiplier, leverage, all of that, you'll never get it either.
It's a constant struggle. I am on a number of groups where women and it's mostly women's groups now at this point in my career. But I hear them talking about the disrespect that their channel is facing and their channel team faces and it's because and by the way, I was there for 15 years because all I did was direct and I thought the channel was a joke. I thought they were ambulance chasers. And I think marketing has a similar disrespect in many cases.
Because if you aren't giving leads on a regular basis to the kings of the company direct sellers, you don't matter who are the first people to get laid off, by the way, in companies? Okay, there's redundancy, but then when they have to cut hard, where do they go? They go to marketing and channel and channel. Okay. Do you think they're doing in channel right now? Yes. Well, yeah, I've seen it. I have seen it with my own worse than the other side? Yes, worse than the direct.
Because when you get bare bones, you still need some sellers, close business, but the rest of them are just sort of nice to have in companies minds. And that has to change. That has to change. That whole idea at the top has to change because if you are a business, a going concern and you don't have that indirect channel wired down and you don't have marketing wired properly, you're going to suffer and you will never get beyond the crisis you're in, right. It's just never going to work.
So get yourself recapitalized. Put your organizations back in place. They don't have to be big. They could be one, two people, but you've got to have them because if you don't, you're going to suffer later on. You may not suffer today. You're already suffering. You have to lay all these people off, right? You're suffering. I get it. But it is a very short term fix and then you'll be in trouble. You won't grow. You just won't grow. So there you have it.
That's my advice for those in crisis is that I understand you have to cut off the arm in order to save the body, but you better get a prosthesis pretty quickly. Okay, I was going to ask you to wrap this up with one last thought, but is that going to be your last? That sounds very boring. I'm going to give you an opportunity to do a different analogy on that one, but I'm going to leave that one in. Okay, let's see.
Get yourself annual, regular cadence with marketing if you're in sales and whether if you're in a regional sales role. Get yourself with the regional a field marketing team, but also meet with the head of marketing so that you're all in sync. And if you can do it in person, all the better. I was just at an SKO this week and I will tell you that COVID did us a disservice for so long, it felt like you're breathing again because you're in person again. It's just so different.
Yes, we do it on Zoom, but we don't do it the same way. There's just something important about seeing and being with the person and not just the head on a video. Get together. If you do it in person, great. Start talking. Share your goals. Make sure your goals are in sync. Try to beat those silos down. All right, Tina, thanks for joining us today. Listeners, thanks for joining us.
We are going to do a part two and we're going to get deeper into technology and we are going to chat about chat GPT and AI, AI in general. And then we're going to talk about what it really means for the channel. Thank you for joining us again. What's the best way for people to reach you? I'm on LinkedIn and my email address is Tinagravel. All one continuous word there, Tinagravel@quantexa.com.
I also have a website, Tinagravel.com, if you're just looking for me and nothing to do with my business. All right, thank you once again. Thank you. Thank you, listeners. Viewers, have a great day. Thank you.