Q2 • 2023


09


our customer so well—and make it available for our sales or customer service team—those are bigger wins with so much value. If it stays in a person’s head, it never benefits the organization.


Q: You mentioned earlier the importance of sales and marketing working together. How do you foster collaboration between the two teams?


FL: People think there should be a natural friction between sales and marketing, but I completely reject that idea. You can’t be successful unless everyone is on the same page, and if the marketing and sales teams are not working well together, the problem is leadership. Personally, I would not come to a company if I couldn’t get along with the sales organization. This means spending time on the front lines together and interacting with customers and prospects as much as possible. If you don’t have an innate understanding of their wants and needs—and if you aren’t able to pitch the product yourself—you’ll never be able to market it well. Understanding all these things helps build credibility within the organization outside of marketing, and so does having accountability and metrics to measure what happened with campaigns. I’m only married to what works. I want to do things that drive business into the funnel and convert.


If I can take expertise from one of the subject matter experts who know this space and our customer so well—and make it available for our sales or customer service team—those are bigger wins with so much value. If it stays in a person’s head, it never benefi ts the organization.


Q: How did you determine what the right North Star was for the company? Did it help to narrow your team’s focus so they were not trying to do too much early on?


FL: Coming in, my first thought when people asked what we should do was that I had no idea! I had to go figure out if events work or whether we should do luncheons or virtual roundtables. There was a lot of learning and failing fast. Twelve months in, we have figured out a number of things that are working, and we are laser focused on getting more “at bats” for sales from our top-tier prospects. We are seeing great results from our events, but to get to where we want to go, we can’t rely solely on the things that have proven themselves—we can’t just do events. So we ask ourselves, “What’s the content piece or the social piece?” We need


to continue to test new areas. We have begun building a true content engine that is now getting leveraged across all marketing efforts and is showing a great deal of promise. To say we have it all figured out would be untrue. We will continue to test and learn from everything we do. Maybe a year from now there will be 80 percent that we know is working. Our sales cycle is six to nine months long, so it’s a while from the first interaction to the conversion, meaning we need a lot of indicators. How much do I know about the buyer’s journey? As you get smarter, you can hone in on it and find the levers to pull and see what is repeatable. In the end, great service also drives referrals, and nothing is better than the head of a legal organization for a Fortune 500 company saying to the head of another organization, “You need to go see PERSUIT.” 


What I Would Do Diff erently By Forrest Leighton


I’m quite pleased with where we are after one year and excited about the rock star team we have in place at PERSUIT, but I would change two things if I were starting again today:


1 | Manage Expectations — Coming into an organization with no marketing structure, I had expectations that people would understand our situation, so I could have done a better job setting expectations across the leadership team. I should have told them, “This is how long it takes, and this is the level of investment.” If you don’t explain those things, people think it will work instantly once you plug it in.


2 | Increase Transparency — I want people on our marketing team to call BS if something we do doesn’t work. We are moving too quickly to waste time on things that do not work, so just say it. That applies to our sales team as well. I would rather they tell me if a marketing campaign does not work well. That type of communication has led to a lot of learning in 12 months and, like anything new, we will continue to learn and evolve.


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