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In this episode, Erik J Newton, CMO of Hubilo, stresses collaboration, breaking silos, and productivity. In the podcast, he shares experiences of eliminating divisions, fostering unity, and gives growth campaign insights. Connect with him on LinkedIn or email for details.

Effective communication is crucial in any organization and especially in a go-to-market team. In a go-to-market team, individuals from different departments such as sales, marketing, product, and customer success come together to achieve a common goal - to bring a product to market successfully.

However, communication barriers can hinder the team's progress and lead to misunderstandings, conflicts, and failure to achieve objectives. In this article, we'll discuss how to break down communication barriers in the go-to-market team for better problem-solving. Identify communication barriers The first step in breaking down communication barriers is to identify them. Common barriers in go-to-market teams include language barriers, cultural differences, misinterpretation of information, lack of feedback, and poor listening skills.

By identifying these barriers, you can create a plan to overcome them. Establish clear communication channels Clear communication channels are essential in a go-to-market team. As a team leader, you should establish communication channels that are accessible to all team members. This could be through email, instant messaging, phone calls, or face-to-face meetings.

Ensure that all team members are aware of the communication channels available and how to use them. Encourage open communication Encouraging open communication is crucial in breaking down communication barriers. Team members should be encouraged to express their thoughts and ideas freely. As a team leader, you should create an environment where every team member feels comfortable sharing their ideas.

This could be achieved by organizing team brainstorming sessions or one-on-one meetings with team members. Clarify objectives and expectations Clear objectives and expectations are crucial in breaking down communication barriers. Team members should have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities. As a team leader, you should ensure that every team member understands what is expected of them.

This could be achieved by creating a go-to-market team charter that outlines the team's objectives, roles, and responsibilities. Provide feedback Feedback is essential in breaking down communication barriers. Team members should be given feedback on their performance regularly. As a team leader, you should provide constructive feedback to team members on their communication skills.

This could be achieved by organizing communication skills training or providing resources such as articles and books on effective communication. Empower team members Empowering team members is crucial in breaking down communication barriers. Team members should be empowered to make decisions and take ownership of their work. As a team leader, you should delegate responsibilities to team members and provide them with the necessary resources to achieve their objectives.

This could be achieved by providing training, tools, and support to team members.

Breaking down communication barriers in a go-to-market team is crucial for better problem-solving. By identifying communication barriers, establishing clear communication channels, encouraging open communication, clarifying objectives and expectations, providing feedback, and empowering team members, you can create a team that communicates effectively and achieves its objectives.

As a team leader, you should lead by example and ensure that you communicate clearly and effectively.

Remember, effective communication is crucial for the success of any team.

Thanks for listening and hit me up if you have any questions!

Episode Transcript

The database records are worth about a dollar each. But what's really valuable about the database is the intent. Score is the lead score and so you can go out and buy intent. You can say these Google knows these people are closer to ready with this keyword. You could pay a lot for that, or you can buy those leads and you can work them yourself. That's nurture.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Confessions of a B2B Market podcast. We have a big one today, a new marketing leader that went into a large ish sass company. I think around 300 employees and literally tore down the walls between the commercial departments, between marketing sales and the customer success and why he did that and how he did that in this episode.

But before that, we need to talk about our sponsor hockey stack. Now these guys have been on a brutal hiring spree. I'd recommend searching hockey stack and LinkedIn following people in the company and just look at who they're hiring. Flash signing on as advisors. Massive market hires massive sales, hires massive advisor hires They're bringing corporate bro on as an advisor to the business, so something is going right over there.

Remember, hockey stack helps you attribute better with talking attribution 2.0. This software does stuff that you would not even believe. Jump over there hockey stack dot com or search hockey stack on LinkedIn. Now let's jump into this discussion with Erik.

Erik, welcome to the show. Glad to be here, Tom.

So, Erik, you recently, two months ago, I think. Got a new job.

Is that right?

That's right. I became CMO of Hugi Court and one of the first things I read on LinkedIn Apparently that you did is that you eliminated the team that you were being hired to lead.

Yeah, specifically, you read words that said that. But I didn't eliminate the team. I eliminated the marketing division. And the most important word in that statement is the division. If a CEO is gonna start with a company, particularly a startup, that's gonna be 5, 10, 15 people. And then you're gonna create divisions. I don't think people should be surprised that you get divisive behaviour that you get factional behaviour.

And in our case, my predecessor and geography is a whole bunch of things kind of increase the amount of factionalism the marketing department had between the other go to market groups between customer service and sales and even with product. So when I came in as I went through the interview process, they said they really wanted to check.

Are you comfortable with your collaborators?

They did an incredible number of back channel reference checks to find out.

What's it like to work with Erik?

Luckily for me, I'd had really good relationships in other companies, too. So when I got here, I said, OK, well, it's not marketing and sales. It's marketing and sales together, it's marketing sales. And then we said, Well, see, make sure we include CS. So what we did was we created the Max Group MA CS marketing accounts, customer and sales as one group. Together we held our O. K. R.

S as one group, and when we presented our O. K. R.

S, we kind of collapsed. So it wouldn't be like nine different people on the executive team presenting It was like much more. It was three or four groups. We aggregated design, engineering and programming into one group and Macs into one group. So it was just this rush to be more integrated with other teams. So that's the beginning of divisions are divisive.

It was so clear that if you call me marketing and you call my partner in sales and we present different things, the chance for misalignment starts right there. If our O. R s aren't the same ok, R, if we can't pick three or four metrics, well, sure, we could be at odds with each other, and it's very frustrating for the people lower down in the organisation.

It's not so bad at my level because the execs have a lot of meetings together and they're kind of good at problem solving. But people in the middle level often get caught and they get stuck.

So were you planning this before you joined or you arrived and saw these issues that were due to the divisions?

It was spontaneous. That's a great question, Tom. It was a sort of a a moment for me. I started in the company about one week later, I went to India, I went to Bangalore and I was dealing with a lot of jet lag.

13 time zones of jet lag after I hadn't been on a long trip like that in a in a long time, and I could just hear the number of things they were wanting me to solve. They were hoping I could do better than they'd done in the past, and it just got really obvious, like in a moment. The problem is the division.

The problem is that you're looking at me as a different group, and if I look at you as the same group, then your goals are my goals. My goals are your goals. My resources are your resources and your resources are my resources. But I was sort of working at a deficit like marketing hadn't been staffed in three or four months with a division head.

So I was digging out and the way to dig out was just get arm in arm with my sales leader and my CS leaders say like we're in this together and get a line before the O. R.

So no, it came to me in an instant.

I mean, I like to be collaborative. I like to work together with people who are hustling, for sure, but I didn't see this get rid of the divisions. I've worked in some companies that they were set up as more Darwinian. They were more capitalistic and Darwinian, and they liked the competition between the groups. If you don't do it, they'll do it. They'll get more resources.

It was sort of a Game of Thrones environment. And that's clearly not the culture we have here at Hube. And so the sales yourself and she points to the CE I So you decided this. And then you like, went to C. A's office and explained, Like, Look, we now have this new team.

No, there we were all sitting in a meeting. We were in the conference room in the Bangalore office. The product leader was representing the development side. And I'm like, Well, then we should consolidate, too. We're the same. We're gonna present the same thing. We're not gonna be serial. We're gonna be conglomerated together. And then the funny thing was coming up with a good name.

You take the acronym and come up with something clever that doesn't sound funny or overly contrived. But Max is a really cool word because it sounds like MA X max and Macintosh is popular with people. And so it's a familiar word. It wasn't like, too contrived. And then within minutes the entire executive team started referring to the Max Group and the Deep Group, and that represents eight groups in two groups.

And it actually started a little bit earlier with marketing and like, marketing is kind of fun to say, but it's kind of embarrassing if when you hear other people say it, it's a little bit awkward because it's so goofy. But Max sounded like a real thing, and marketing sounded like something that hotspot made up about 89 years ago. And just to clarify the acronym for the other side of the business.

Yeah, deep, I assume that includes engineering and product. Maybe design, engineering and product. Got it.

OK, so you had to put a double E in that to make it sound nice.

Yeah, that's right. We came up with some other acronyms that didn't land, so we use them for about a day, and then we got these two. Once you get the acronyms, right, it really helped with the adoption. The whole group was enjoying and kind of the way you and I are enjoying talking about it now.

We were all enjoying it every time we said Max, I call my partner and sells my Max brother. It's a complete like it's a cult Now Max is a cult within our company. I think that's a really he's kind of not really a market thing. But like internal communications like naming things with abbreviations is super interesting. So that's like an aside insight for the audience.

My next question is just to, like, really understand what the difference is. Now is it just that OK R s are gonna be set as the Max team, as opposed to in the three different teams.

Or like what else is different?

It's profoundly different, Tom. Everything's different. So the first thing was, my team was not happy about this change. They did not think that I think particularly covid post covid people wanted things to be as they did like segmentation. This is my work. I'm gonna knock out my deliverables. I'm good.

I'm like, Yeah, that's not really enough. We gotta knock out the company's deliverables, which are the results, which are the growth. So we gotta think about internal customer service like we're in the Max Group. We work for sales, We're up funnel from them. They need stuff from us and they're like, Well, no, that's not how we've been doing it.

I'm like, Well, new guy, no new CMO new thought process here is that we are one team and if sales is customer facing, we support them. And I had a lot of pushback, honestly, but change.

I mean, there's always change New boss, new ideas, the way the reason they came around to liking the Max Group. And I guess we'd have to really double check with them if they really do like it was that I was able to solve problems. I was able to clear blockers really quickly with my partner in sales Depo so they would get stuck with something. There's a gap. Somebody's not responding.

I'm like, Hey, Depo. I text him in, like, 235 minutes later, the work is moving again because Deep and I are that close. So if you escalate something to me, I can get it moving for you. So that was the beginning. There was resistance and then it was a learning curve, and it became out of. It's very out of fashion to blame somebody else in Mac.

So we say Max Marketing or Mac sales.

If you really need a distinction, you make it by using the group, the true group, the master group and then the subgroup or we say Max Up, Funnel Max Down Funnel If we're trying to refer to slightly different people in the process, but we're all working the funnel together, right?

Got it.

OK, so more than just OK, ours is like the whole structure of the team.

Well, it's the feeling of the team. It's the emotional, it's the reaction. It's the context change the O. K. R s was They're as painful as they always were. But we held them together so there were less OK k r s in terms of how we did the exact team rollout. We didn't have to do eight consecutive.

We did the deep group, we did the Max group and we did a couple other groups, so we went a lot faster and it was a lot better and you didn't get as exhausted doing that. And then we rolled it out to the master team. We had the MAX Group in Bangalore, like 80 90 people all together, and the three of us sat at one table and rolled it out.

And interestingly, you asked about the CEO before he came to our meeting. He sat behind us to the left, but he didn't speak. He just sat and watched and a little bit of an endorsement that like, Yeah, this is the new thing and then went out of fashion was blaming people.

Oh, they don't do their stuff. They didn't keep their commitment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because it just doesn't play anymore.

It doesn't play because you can't hang somebody else out if they're all the way in your group, right?

If you're really a teammate, what's the point of doing that?

Just go fix it.

Yeah, it's a nice move by the sea.

Yeah, right, because he's there. The fact that he's there like gives us time for approval. But if you were to talk, then that would, like, take away from your leadership. It's another non marketing insight for the group, or if any leaders out there, that sounds like a really nice move.

Um, I assume he was happy with the outcome of the meeting. He was really happy.

Yeah, there's a little bit of a funny, uh, local joke at the end of the off-site. He came up to me at a party and he said, Erik, you hit a six. It's a cricket term for a grand slam. Like you hit a cricket, you hit a six that you've hit it over the wall essentially and you get your maximum. That's your best stroke. You can do so.

He was very happy with the change. This is the way the change felt. And then I started writing about it, and I started calling people and telling them what we had done and that helped memorialise it.

I mean, one of the things about off sites is some of the feelings are mildly transitory, right?

You get in the moment and you get back to work, and it can flatten out a little bit. So kind of recording it. And taking the pictures and putting up the LinkedIn articles and things was also and the videos we shot too, were, uh, kind of showing the new structure.

Yeah, and I assume that business is also getting some like increased awareness right through all this essentially PR publicity work you're doing about that change, which is like a hidden benefit.

Yeah, that's part of my thought leadership. It's part of my PR strategy is to share as much as I can with the community, with people who know me with people in the broadcast community like you to put the ideas out there without giving away proprietary company without it being too proprietary to the company.

What did we do?

What did we try?

But it just feels so much better to be part of the go-to market team instead of marketing, especially in a B2B environment marketing can be marketing can be subjugated. Marketing can be deprecated below other divisions, particularly if marketing rolls up to C R. O. That's a really difficult position to be in. You don't have. There's no glory there.

It's really getting into a lot of marketing ops and a lot of field ops. Then without a CMO at the top. So we've got the perfect structure. We've got head of sales head of marketing, reporting to the CEO, but working very closely together. Got it.

Now why do you think that this has been so beneficial?

E g.

Why do you think that divisions form in the business and how these can be divisive?

Yeah, I mean any blocker in any system. If you think about water flowing, any blocker you have is going to disrupt the flow and decrease the amount of work you can get done. Decrease the amount of results you can get put together. I think to me it just feels better.

It's more fun and exciting and comfortable to work on a team where we've broken down that silo where things don't get stuck where you don't hear a lot of excuses, you hear, Let's get a solution.

Hey, let's get him on the phone. Let's get her on the phone. Let's just work it out. It's a more human way to do things. Divisions. There's no real precedent for dividing into nine divisional groups and fighting over resources. That's not how any plans or troops or, you know, any of our ancestors in any of the cultures. I don't think that's how they behaved. I think they held together to protect.

They needed to be, uh, well aligned to protect each other right, You go back to Paleo Times, but apparently in groups of up to 100 and 50 we're supposed to be able to all know each other and get on Well, yeah, you're talking about Dunbar's number, and this is a number that's been that was popularised in the nineties.

And anthropologically, you will see groups of bigger than 100 and 50 tended to split off into new tribes. They tended to relocate to new hunting areas and new areas for space. But I think that that's a living arrangement. But I think within a company, I think the groups are even smaller.

I think if you're when I've been in startups that have gone through, like the 40 to 300 range, and you definitely feel a difference over when you're in different rooms. Once you physically aren't in the same room with, say, finance or accounting or product or engineering, people get factional, your conversations become more cloistered. As you talk to people about marketing things, you start to talk.

You start to dump a little junk on other groups that because they're not there, they're not in ears shots, so the conversations become more parochial I think groups of less than 50 I think, have a tendency towards e even 50 would have a tendency towards factions, and I think groups of maybe less than 20 2025 would can break.

Also, Jeff Bezos said that he didn't want any of the Dev groups to be larger than, UH, two pizza groups. If you couldn't feed him with two pizzas, we probably have too many people here and you. If people aren't busy doing the work of the company, I think they have a chance to think bad thoughts and gossip like idle hands. Devil's Workshop kind of common.

I don't wanna be too preachy, but people like to be busy. They like to have responsibility. They like to be having an impact in their group, and if they're not, they sort of have time to create trouble. So don't make the groups too big and keep things lean and keep people moving fast and stay aligned and just don't gossip.

I mean, any time I'll let people blow off steam for a couple of minutes, and then it's like, let's get back to it.

The Honey Badger video, right, Tom?

Yeah, yeah. So At some point I just say to people Yeah, yeah, yeah, honey, Badger Don't care, honey. Badger don't give you Just get back to work and figure it out. At some point, I want to be empathetic and I wanna to listen, but we're here to work. We're getting paid to solve problems. Exactly.

And do you think that the increase in remote work is having is like making this more of a problem or less of a problem?

I think the remote work creates a really nice intimacy between a few people at a time. And I think you can get divisions within a group of 12. Now. I think we can prove this somewhat by, like, the conversation you and I are having, even though we're doing it in front of other people. This is we're getting to know each other quite a bit.

How your mind's working at your questions and what I'm responding is interesting. In a two person group, we're getting to know each other. If we added seven more people to this, how many of those people would actually be in the forefront of the conversation developing an understanding of each other by talking and listening actively.

What do you What do you think, Tom?

Two or three?

Yeah, I reckon, like 50%.

Yeah, about half would be engaged. So it starts to say that the group, the remote group, could be four or five. And then you get a little subgroup where they've got some common thread or they work together more often.

And what's missing?

What's obviously missing is we're not seeing each other physically. We're not sitting next to each other. We're not as familiar. We're not going out to lunch. We're not going out to dinner as much. I went out to dinner with my team last week, and I just sat next to somebody I work with really often on my team.

And I sat to his left and we just had a little time to chit chat totally different. It's just a totally different experience of him and his competencies and how his sense of humour and his humanity, I think that's we lose. The humanity is what binds us and what could make us into a stronger, bigger group. But we have less of that when we do these.

When we do remote communication, totally agree OK, so it seems like we've been through the theory now.

Can I give you a practical test?

I'm up for it. Let's go. So let's say we are a marketing leader in a 200 person SAS company that is hybrid. So both in the office and remote. And there are some challenges with communications. With the sales team sales keeps saying the leads are not good enough. Marketing is saying that the leads are great. And then there's also some communication challenges, maybe between sales and customer service.

What would you say if someone wanted to implement this and have more synchronicity between these teams?

Maybe even break down divisions?

What would be like the step by step?

Or the first few steps that the marketing leader would need to take?

OK, I think you get together with the sales leader and we start with the divisions or divisive. Let's try not to have these divisions. Let's come up with a name for our division. We're go to market. We are demand. All of us are in the demand business, every one of us.

So if you change the name and then change it on all the org charts and then announce it a couple times and do that together with your partner in sales. And if you're gonna include CS in that include them in that process, people will be so relieved just at that. So we talked about that part.

Now what do you do with job roles?

What do you do?

I think the next thing you think about is transparency and planning horizon. A lot of the stress from doing things together that we want to blame each other for is because we ran out of time or we work too slow or both. So with a better planning horizon with the road map of communications programmes with field events with marketing campaigns, with Spence, we can get out in front of people.

And once we get 68, 10 weeks out, people can take a breath and look at that plan, and they can start to ask questions about it. So after you have a plan and you're presenting a plan, ask for approval.

How do you get buy in?

And if you can be humble about what you're doing that you just does sales wanna do this?

Trade show marketing doesn't particularly want to do a trade show. It just becomes a reflex that we say. I've got budget. I've got O. R s. I'm going to this trade show and then you set up a show and SA says we don't want to staff that.

No, those leads don't look good to us.

Put that map in front of them before you sign the contracts and say, Do you want to do this one?

And will you staff it with us like we can't have just the up funnel part of the max group staffing an event without down funnel people that the handoffs are gonna be their handoffs are gonna break most of the leads and the flow in the conversations.

So that's the other thing is can you be humble?

And I think that's the hard part for people is No, no, no. My partner in sales gets There's 23 votes here. We don't get a majority here. If he doesn't vote.

Yes, I'm just gonna strike it. Let me take that off. I'm here to help. I'm here to do the company's work, But I'm also here to get things up funnel that people want down funnel and I want to hear as little as possible. The leads are no good. There's not enough leads. The quality is not right. So let's decide these things together.

Let's you get a vote, you get a voice and let's do that. Then implementation staffing plans have to be managed, so everybody's got skin in the game. I think another thing Tom that you have to change in is rules of engagement. So in your experience in B2B.

A S, is it OK for me to reach out to an S D.

R as the CMO?

I'm gonna say no because they're not in your team.

Well, so you're saying no, because you know my team. I'm assuming that you as the CMO. Would be in the marketing team and therefore you reaching out to the S. D. R. Which my assumption would they would be in the sales team, so that wouldn't be appropriate.

Yeah, I think most people would find that a little bit weird.

I think a lot of junior people would say, Oh, why is the CMO calling me?

And maybe I'm calling because I wanna hear from somebody who's on the phone, who's dialling 100 times.

Who's in 10 conversations?

What are they saying about the product?

What are they saying about?

Hey, I came up with that value proposition.

Is it any good?

So to me, there's no boundaries, but rules of engagement are particularly when you become a senior executive, your moves are amplified and they freak people out when you go in. And you know, if you get you get you lean on.

Somebody put a little bit of elbow into something like, Hey, this needs to get done right?

We are on deadline here.

Can you get this done?

Do you go directly into the Org?

Is that your rule, or do you go back through your partner and go down?

They're both of them. Could be OK, but your partner at the other side of the funnel has to be really responsive and go take your message and go right to it and can't just, like, blah blah it away.

But what about in your experience, Tom, where you've worked like would was it fluid or was that awkward?

If people went across sales and marketing and CS Yeah, I think so. I would had a marketing I guess the go to market function was probably 10 people.

So we had, like, three in marketing. But we did. All this was before Covid and we all sat at the same desk. And so literally from like a metre in front of me was the F D. R. And this is like very underutilised meeting the marketing media should have. It's sweet. Have to ask if they know more about the customers than anyone. So then it was fine.

I actually don't think we even had a sales lead then. So it was very easy to just go and ask them a question. You were the go to market. You were the Max group that was your max group and you sat together pre-covid. But now we've got a group that's maybe 80 90 people all over the world. Almost everybody remote.

Then you need different rules of engagement, so people should be OK with like, Oh, no, no, no, no like, and people will gauge their reaction by the reaction of their leader in their department or their side of the go to market group.

So if my reaction is like, oh, it's totally fine If Depo wants to reach out to you, and then Depo might say, Oh, it's fine if Erik wants to reach out to you and that's gonna reset the way the person thinks about the distance like, Oh, these guys are roughly the same guys here.

This is our group, So why wouldn't you be able to reach out?

It's unnatural to create these things where you gotta be a little bit careful. You can create. It can be disruptive. You can go in and sort of do the wrong thing on something that's been fairly, well calibrated, a little bit of a downside to it, too. But I like loose rules.

My PR agency is free to communicate with anybody in marketing in deep Group Max Group in the down funnel, the only one I curate sometimes is the CEO, but they're free to reach out to him also. I just don't like these restrictions because I just think it takes you to lose a week in a day you lose a week after somebody gets blocked, two people. Then somebody goes on vacation.

The other person goes on those two weeks later, everybody just likes to do it as a matrix go ahead and just be agile.

Jump in, reach out to each other, Don't wait for permission, ask for forgiveness and apologise when you step on a few toes. That's my take on it. I'm sensing a very like, action-orientated vibe from your like, leadership style. You say that we're paid to solve problems. We're gonna listen to gossip for one minute, and then we're gonna get back to work.

Would you agree?

Oh, yeah, definitely. I get satisfaction from doing work, and I love doing work. I love. I work. I love management work. I love strategy. I love it all, but yeah, we are here to solve problems, and no CEO ever. Almost none of them think that there's enough output for how much payroll they have and the bigger you get, particularly over that 1 50 over that 50.

And that 1 50 because the CEO remembers when there was 35, 10 people.

And now, like your payroll is 5 $10 million and seems like you're not doing this. Seems like it's going slower and you're not getting more work for having five times 10 times as many people. My CEO told me that if he says my target speed is 100 I need to get 100 things done in this quarter.

Then the next level down, it will end up being something like 50 and then the next level down, it will be something like 25. There's a massive entropy as you go down through this daisy chain. So that's why a lot of CEO s seem completely unreasonable, cranking things up to two or 300 so that they can try to get 100 near the middle of the organisation.

It's a CEO tactic is to be somewhat unreasonable because they're expecting a certain amount of attrition of urgency. As things go down, the org got it off. Script question.

What are you from your part of the Mac team?

What are you most excited about in terms of like a growth campaign or programme that you think is gonna yield the most results for hula?

So I'm thinking that our field strategy, a combination of webinars using the Hubie platform to drive pipeline, accelerate pipeline and revenue is part of it. But combining that with field. So just like what we're talking about here combining it's the hybrid lifestyle that we're all we're all living now is that we do want to interact with people. Each part of that plays a different role.

So my field strategy is a multi strategy, and I've got a road map of a series of events and guest speakers, and then we're going out in the field and we're doing experiential events.

One of the things we did is we took some people out to drive Lamborghinis and Ferraris on the track in Las Vegas, and it's a pretty attractive change of pace to say, Hey, instead of Do you want a demo?

Do you want a demo?

Do you want a demo?

It's like, Hey, do you want to drive a Lamborghini?

And we had some really happy customers go out on the track with us, and we got that emotional excitement and engagement that made us feel like we'd known them a long time. It moved our relationship forward in the way that sometimes that being in person does that is more potent than what we do remotely so I'm excited about that. The other thing.

I don't know if excitement's the right word, but it's nurture. There's a one colleague. I had said that the database records are worth about a dollar each, but what's really valuable about the database is the intent.

Score is the is the lead score, is it?

And so you can go out and buy intent. You can say these. Google knows these people are closer to ready with this keyword. You could pay a lot for that, or you can buy those leads and you can work them yourself. That's nurture. But nurture needs to happen in the marketing department needs to happen in the sale in the outbound department.

Part of you know, Macs or sales, however you want to say it and it needs to happen with the A's. They need to keep nurturing anything that's in the pipe. Everything's taking longer, however you want to measure it. Whatever you want to say is the cause, like committee decision, making covid people being remote, not being able to get people's phone numbers through the receptionist anymore.

These are all things that are causing things to take longer. But what we're finding is that you need to think about pipeline end to end about 100 touch. It's a lot higher than the 89 15 20 that we were talking about 10 years ago. It's just there's a lot of competition for attention, so nurture is critical, and I think nurture might be the cold calling of the marketing group.

What I mean by that is everybody wants nurture. Nobody wants to make them. So I am now hiring specialists and experts to build nurture campaigns, specific, nurture campaigns and giving them nothing else to do, because I find that if anybody has anything else to do, they'll do that first. Sort of like cold calling clearly agree.

Wow, it seems like it's gonna be a big quarter.

Well, it better be now. You've made these drastic changes, Erik.

Well, we're making progress. I've been on the job a little less than three months, and expectations are high and my own expectations are high. But business environment. It definitely could be better when the business environment turns. That would help a lot, too.

But we got to do everything we can to get the juice from the squeeze, right?

Exactly right.

Well, Erik, I love bringing people on this show that think or do things differently. So as soon as I saw the article, I was like, We gotta bring er Erik on and you didn't disappoint.

It's, uh a lot of it makes a lot of sense to me. And we even put out insights that were, like, leadership or communications related.

We obviously we'll link to the LinkedIn article, your LinkedIn profile who?

Below below.

Should we link to anything else?

Yeah.

I mean, people who want to reach out to me, You can just find me at ER. I k at hube dot com. You can find me on LinkedIn at slash Erik new Erik Newton Let me know that you're coming to me from the show, so I'll know that Tom sent you. Amazing.

Erik, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. Good to be with you. And thank you so much for listening. That was an awesome discussion with Erik.

Really, I hope gave any B2B marketing or sales leaders out there something to think about regarding communication within functions of the go to market team breaking down those walls, getting rid of those barriers in order to all those functions to perform better and As Erik said, You're getting paid to solve problems so you'll be solving problems faster as ever. We have links below to everything that Erik mentioned, et cetera.

Go and check out Erik. And of course, hockey. Stagger sponsor will be linked below. Go and check them out.

And, of course, thank you for listening.