Transcript: Maintaining Alignment With

Smarketing Meetings

Video 1: The Importance of Smarketing Meetings

Kathleen Booth: Internally, in our business, we have a weekly meeting that incorporates both marketing and sales,
where we talk about what's happening on the marketing side, what's happening on the sales side, and what kind of
coordination needs to occur for the two teams to be working really closely together. We're a small enough business
that customer retention is really woven in already because our sales team stays involved post-sale with clients. Our
marketing team is the same as our customer success or retention team, so that piece is taken care of.

Josh Harcus: It doesn't matter if you're two people. Even if you're two people or one person, setting that kind of
precedent for your company is so key for success because it will remind you of how to keep what's important at the
top.

Hey, it’s Kyle from HubSpot Academy. When it comes to getting sales and marketing working together, maintenance is key. No
matter what other measures you have in place to align your teams — unified goals, shared definitions of leads, an SLA — they
will always drift out of alignment unless you have systems in place to keep them aligned. Here's Doug Davidoff, Founder and
CEO of Imagine Business Development:

Doug Davidoff: Sales and marketing alignment, from my perspective, is a myth. It's never aligned. It's kind of like I
flew to Boston today, and my flight was never on course, or maybe it was on course, from what I read, less than 2% at
a time. The flight is always going off course and there are systems to bring it back on. Understand and accept that
they're not supposed to be aligned. There's supposed to be conflict. You're looking to manage that, and so don't let
perfection get in the way of progress.

One of the most important systems you can put in place is regular smarketing meetings. A smarketing meeting is a time when
sales and marketing come together to discuss problems and collaborate on solutions. This is a non-negotiable part of sales
enablement. When you’re first creating your sales enablement strategy, marketing and sales will need to meet to agree on
goals and define the SLA and target buyers. After that initial groundwork is laid, you’ll need to hold smarketing meetings on a
regular basis to give the teams an opportunity to hold each other accountable and make sure they’re continuing to move in
the same direction.

Smarketing meetings are where marketing and sales will learn how to trust and respect each other. Without these meetings,
each team will return to its own corner of the office, and you’ll eventually return to the status quo that prevailed before your
company started thinking about sales enablement. So be sure to put some thought into what it’ll take to make these meetings
succeed — and then you’ll be able to succeed, too.

Video 2: Planning an Effective Smarketing Meeting

Before we get into the mechanics of making smarketing meetings effective, let’s put a couple of technical definitions in place.
Smarketing should be seen as a team meeting. And “team,” in this case, has nothing to do with org charts or departments. The
research that’s been done on meeting effectiveness makes an important distinction between teams and work groups, and the
distinction is based on how dependent members are on each other.

Work groups are characterized by the least amount of interdependence. They are based on organizational or managerial
hierarchy. Work groups may meet periodically to hear and share information.

Teams are highly interdependent. They plan work, solve problems, make decisions, and review progress in service of a specific
project. Team members need one another in order to get work done.

So think about the typical sales department. Each rep has their own quota, and they work independently to hit it. The group
might get together to discuss progress and challenges, but there isn’t any true collaboration. That’s the perfect example of a
work group.
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Smarketing Meetings

Chances are, most of the meetings you’ve been in over the course of your career have been for work groups. And that’s okay.
Those kinds of meetings can be a great time to report on things that have happened, present new goals and directives, and
recognize high achievers. And those are all things that should be done from time to time.

But smarketing meetings are not the place for that. Smarketing meetings need to be team meetings in the technical sense: A
place where people come together to collaborate on a shared project and actually get work done. At the end of a smarketing
meeting, everyone should come away feeling that the time was spent productively and that each person actively contributed.

So how do you get there? Here are three best practices to make sure these meetings are as effective as possible:

First, focus on solving problems.

Smarketing meetings need to be a place where people and teams can talk about what things aren't working and brainstorm
ideas for fixing them. Here's Josh Harcus, founder of Huify and author of A Closing Culture:

Josh Harcus: In these meetings, it’s extremely important that you make everything, every issue, fair game. The reason
is because as owners, we have a set list of issues that we think actually matter. Employees have a much longer list of
issues that they think matters. If you're not opening that door or that open collaboration, the outcome will be you
don't hear about the important issues because no one's willing to come to you with any issues. Opening the door and
talking about all the issues helps you find a lot of great solutions as a team, even ways to be really creative.

Doug Davidoff: Then just brainstorm where are all the things are breaking down. The longer the list, the better. Then
ask the question, if we could only impact one thing, which one thing would have the biggest impact over the next six
months, or whatever time period? Begin to prioritize along that line.

In smarketing meetings, identifying and addressing problems should be the top priority. It’s good to report results and
celebrate wins and congratulate high performers, but save that for another time. Smarketing should be a time when the
appropriate stakeholders come together to tackle specific problems.

With that in mind, the agenda for a smarketing meeting can be fairly short:

• Identify problems with current goals and initiatives

• Brainstorm solutions
• Make assignments to be completed before the next meeting

That’s a great smarketing meeting. Cycle through those steps for as many problems as you can get through in the time you
have, and you’ll accomplish all kinds of things. That’s what the heart of every smarketing meeting should be.

Next, find a cadence that works well for your company.

Different companies find that different cadences work well for their needs. The standard approach is to meet every two
weeks, but you can meet more or less frequently than that if you need to. But make sure the meetings happen at least once a
month. Any less frequently than that, and you probably won’t be able to get into a good rhythm. Tracy Eiler and Andrea
Austin, who co-authored the book Aligned to Achieve, did a lot of pioneering in the realm of smarketing meetings when they
worked together at InsideView. Here’s Andrea:

Andrea Austin: This is something that we do religiously now. We started every week. We moved it to every two
weeks. We tried a monthly cadence, we realized, "Nope. We needed to do every two weeks." We have different
flavors of it now. Because we've been doing it for about two years now.

You might also consider having multiple cadences, where you meet every two weeks, but once a month or once a quarter you
have a special meeting where you address different topics. Here’s Josh again:
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Smarketing Meetings

Josh Harcus: Weekly helps set that standard of always talking about it and having an open time where it’s like cool, I
have this issue. I know when I can speak about it. You should be talking about it at any time, but if you have a hard
time confronting people or bringing these things up, that gives you a great avenue to do that. Then your monthly
meetings, that's where you're checking in saying, “Okay, how are we doing? Are we on track to hit these certain
things?” Then the quarterly offsites, that's where you're aligning as a team. You’re getting out of the office on
purpose because it's so distracting in the office. You try to put away the laptops for a bit. Maybe one person has a
laptop for notes, and you just really hone in as a team and say, “Okay, let's all align. You know, this is where we're
going, and this is where we're headed.” Your business will see a dramatic increase if you do this.

If you do this, you might use the monthly or quarterly meeting for things like celebrating victories, recognizing top performers,
and reporting progress on a grander scale. But be careful that these sorts of things don’t take up the whole meeting.
Remember, you’re bringing the teams together to address current problems. Everything else needs to take a back seat.

Third, be choosy about who you invite to the meeting. There have been a lot of studies done on meetings and team
productivity, and the general consensus is that productivity plummets once a meeting exceeds 10 people. Google’s re:Work
team summarized the research this way:

When team members report that they are locked in dysfunctional conflict, suffering from indifference, making bad
decisions, or missing deadlines, the first question we ask is “how big is the team?” If the answer is more than five or
six members, especially more than ten, some savvy subtraction or division can create striking improvements. [...]
Leaders become more effective. Efficiency improves. Interpersonal friction wanes. And strangers become friends.

Keeping your smarketing meetings small can be a hard thing to do, but it’s worth the effort. Remember, the purpose of these
meetings is to address problems, and that gets harder as you bring more people into the room. Here’s Tracy Eiler, Andrea’s
counterpart and co-author:

Tracy Eiler: We've been really calibrating attendance at this meeting. It got too big at one point. Our CFO wanted to
come to that meeting. Our CEO, our head of product. What started happening was that we stopped talking about all
the problems that we were having and that we were fixing in the meetings, and started performing, basically, for all
of them. It was like having your dad in room and watching you do your homework. We said, "Okay. No, wait. This is an
operational meeting. We roll up our sleeves, we talk about everything that's a problem. We talk about what worked
well, what didn't work well, etc." We're talking about how the sausage is made. We don't need a bunch of supervision
while we're doing that. We kicked everybody else out.

So, step one for keeping the meeting small? Disinvite the top leaders. Executives have a vested interest in what goes on in
these meetings, but their presence can be stifling. Remember, the purpose of the meeting is to discuss problems, and that can
be a scary thing to do with your CEO in the room. Limit the attendee list to people who can directly tackle the problems at
hand. Everyone else can read the minutes afterward.

Another way to keep the meeting small is to rotate the people who attend. Here’s Tracy again:

Tracy Eiler: The other thing that we've done is, it used to be a kind of leadership meeting. Andrea really encouraged
us to hand pick top performers out of her team and invite them. We do it on a rotational basis, unless they are not as
organized about it as they should be. It worked really well. To have a couple of SDR's in there and a couple of
customer support folks, and big account AEs and mid market AEs and so on.

Rotating attendees is a great idea, not only because it keeps the meeting small but because it reduces the amount of time
team members spend in meetings. The meeting might occur every week or every other week, but individual team members
only come once a month or once a quarter.

But be careful that the people in attendance can help with the problems at hand. Anyone with insights about current
problems should attend the current meeting, even if it isn’t their turn. The team leaders, or whoever determines which team
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Smarketing Meetings
members attend a given meeting, need to be flexible enough to make sure the most relevant people are in the room. That
way you’ll be able to identify and solve problems as effectively as possible.

Video 3: Running an Effective Smarketing Meeting

Now that you know how often you should hold smarketing meetings and who should be invited, let’s talk about how to make
these meetings successful. The most important thing you can do is ensure smarketing is a good place for experimentation. In
order to do that, you have to make sure the atmosphere in these meetings is one of trust and encouragement. Here’s Andrea
again:

Andrea Austin: We're experimenting constantly, because our buyer is changing, our market is changing, and the
competitive environment. We have to constantly experiment. You can't experiment in a toxic culture. People point
fingers when something doesn't work instead of owning it. That, that was an experiment. "Hey. Let's not do that one
again, but let's double down on this one." You need to go back and measure those things. You can't do that when
you're blaming each other. That's a really tough challenge to overcome in an organization. Once it's built, it's so much
harder to overcome it.

The sad reality is, many sales and marketing teams don’t get along, and simply bringing the teams together won’t necessarily
solve the problem. You, as the leader of these meetings, need to ensure that smarketing meetings are a safe place for
problems and solutions to be shared. No matter what the culture is like in the rest of your company, smarketing meetings
need to be collaborative, creative spaces where all ideas are welcome, no matter how crazy they may seem.

How do you do that? First of all, before any of these meetings ever occur, you need to set the expectation that the two teams
are equally important. Even though sales enablement is all about helping the sales team be more effective, that doesn’t mean
the marketing team is in any way subservient to the sales team. The two teams should be seen as equal partners pursuing the
same goal. Here’s Tracy again:

Tracy Eiler: You don't want to have your marketing team running around like a waitress in a restaurant saying, "Oh.
Excuse me ... What would like to eat today?" You want your marketing team to be saying, "Andrea, the fish is very
fresh. That's what I recommend. I know you're hungry for pasta, but it's really not the best dish on the menu." I really
encourage folks to think about that. You want to be recommenders. Sales does not want us running after them and
asking them, "What do you want us to do?" Sales is gonna say, "What the heck? You're the marketing team, you
should know what we should do." That doesn't mean they're not gonna have requests, but we need to be
recommenders. I think there's a certain service level that marketing needs to bring to the relationship.

In order for marketers to feel safe making recommendations to sales reps, your smarketing meetings need to foster
something called psychological safety. re:Work defines psychological safety as “an individual’s perception of the
consequences of taking an interpersonal risk.” Put another way, if a team has a high level of psychological safety, team
members will be comfortable taking risks around each other. They won’t be afraid of getting in trouble for admitting mistakes
or asking questions or suggesting new ideas.

One simple way to foster psychological safety in your smarketing meetings is to make sure everyone in attendance speaks in
roughly equal proportion. If you’re running the meeting, you might bring a list of attendees to the meeting and quietly put
checkmarks next to each name whenever someone speaks up. If someone isn’t participating as much as everyone else, call
them out and say, “I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.”

If someone is resistant to participating, there are a few reasons why that may be. Here are five big ones:

• I have nothing to contribute to the topic at hand. If someone feels like they don’t have anything to contribute, they
might not be fully engaging with the topic at hand. Take whatever problem you’re currently discussing and ask them
how they would solve it if it was solely up to them. If for some reason they aren’t affected by the problem, they
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shouldn’t be in the meeting. In that case, you should disinvite them. Being present is a waste of their time and doesn’t
help the meeting be more productive. In future meetings, replace them with someone who has something to
contribute.
• I can’t get a word in edgewise. It’s okay if people jump into the conversation without taking turns, but you need to
make sure that everyone has a chance to be heard. Identify the people who are dominating the conversation and find
a polite way to reign them in. Again, that might be as simple as calling on one of the quieter people in the room to
hear their thoughts on the topic.
• I’m happy just to watch. If someone says this, tell them you’ll email them a recap afterward. In future meetings,
replace them with someone who can actively contribute.
• I don’t like what’s being said and don’t want to be a downer. This is the most dangerous mindset of all, and depending
on your company culture, it might be the default. Make it clear: Remind people — multiple times every meeting, if
necessary — that this is a time to bring up problems and make sure they get addressed.
• I know what I need to do, and it doesn’t require further discussion. The point of getting everyone in a room is to work
together on a solution. People need to talk through what their action items are and how they fit with the action items
of everyone else in attendance. Coming up with an idea quietly in your own head is only okay if you communicate
that idea to the group and allow for discussion.

But there’s another half to psychological safety as well. If you’re going to call people out, you have to listen to them. If
everybody’s talking but nobody’s listening, the meeting won’t accomplish anything. This is an area where the leader has to
lead by example. If you take the lead in your smarketing meetings, look at people as they’re talking, and repeat the things they
say to verify that you’ve understood correctly. Value and appreciate every effort anyone makes to participate. Doing that
takes only a little effort from the leader, but it can go a long way in bolstering everyone’s sense of psychological safety.

Once that psychological safety is in place, you’ll be able to have conversations in your smarketing meetings that really get
down to the hard parts of getting sales and marketing to work together. Here’s Tracy again:

Tracy Eiler: We go in there and look regularly and see leads that are in there for 72 hours, 4 days, 5 days, a week.
That's just ridiculous. That's when I will have a hissy fit about those. Those leads are the next best pipeline and need
attention. I feel, because we have such a strong relationship around the definitions and hand-off points and other
things. I have no qualms at all in our Smarketing meeting or in other forum to say, "This is a mess. What's up with the
fact that you got all of this unaccepted pipeline sitting there? It's six days old. What have you been doing?" I have no
problem saying that and Andrea will back it. It gets the marketer an opportunity to really hold sales accountable,
which we love. We don't get that opportunity that often.

That level of openness and accountability requires a solid foundation of psychological safety. Without it, the person in the hot
seat will come away feeling angry or depressed. But with psychological safety in place, people on both sides of the problem
can discuss the challenges they’re facing and collaborate on a solution. And once you have that psychological safety
established, these meetings can be a great place for helping people develop leadership and communications skills while
they’re solving problems. Here’s Tracy again:

Tracy Eiler: I would really encourage your listeners to think about how they run that kind of meeting. It's a great place
also for career development for marketers. You might have your most junior person there presenting on "battle
cards" that she wrote on a competitor. It's a great way for them to earn their stripes in front of a sales team. It is a lot
more than a meeting to share information.

So as you plan your smarketing meetings, stay focused on solving problems, find the cadence that is most conducive to
problem solving, keep the invite list small, and do everything in your power to make these meetings foster experimentation.
Taken together, these steps will ensure that your smarketing meetings will be a safe place where new ideas are born and
existing problems are uncovered and solved. If you do these things, your smarketing meetings will become the engine that
drives your sales enablement success- — and, by extension, the success of your entire company.