Peanut butter and jelly; Bert and Ernie; Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen; Marketing and sales. Some of the greatest duos have the greatest results when working together. But what happens when these duos don’t work together?

Sometimes they do just fine (I mean, peanut butter and banana is pretty awesome) but other times, they realize they are better off working together (Michael Jordan’s post-retirement three-peat). That’s kinda how D. Fish sees the world of marketing and sales. A marketer can be a better marketer by walking in the shoes of sales, and sales can be a better salesperson understanding the data marketers need to bring successful leads to the sales team.

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, we meet D. Fish, author of the book Hyper-Connected Selling, who discusses how marketers needs sales and vice versa, and how we can do our jobs better with each other.

Transcript:

Glenn: Welcome back to the show. Today we’re speaking D. Fish. D., welcome to the show.

David: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Glenn: D., tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

David: Yeah. I’m a speaker, coach, author, consultants. I help organizations and individuals really harness digital tools and old-school human-to-human communication skills to build better customer relationships and move business forward.

Glenn: Wait a minute, you can’t mix technology and old-school techniques, can you? Is that possible?

David: Well, I’m going to suggest that you have to in today’s world. And I won’t say it’s easy, but technology is not going away and neither is thousands and thousands of years of human evolution. So, we have to figure out how to marry those two things together.

Glenn: You know, it’s always interesting to me is, like, so many times when people get technology, they kind of start with the solution rather than the problem they’re trying to solve. And as a result, what happens is, you’re like, oh, we’ve got some great technology, it’s going to solve the world’s problems. They bring it in and nobody uses it.

David: Right.

Glenn: Is there a way to think about it differently, particularly I mean, you spend a lot of time on the sales side and coaching sales people. How do you connect with sales people to get them to buy in to whether a program or – usually some program that marketing is asking them to be involved in, involves with some technology, right?

David: Right. And that idea of going to the problem first, I think, is so important. And I’ve seen this play out time and time again, where it’s the latest, whether it’s a social media platform or another great video platform or there is this new bright, shiny object, and marketing is always on the forefront. And they go, wow, this can really be fantastic! And then they do this whole rollout to the sales team and it’s just crickets. And I think what it really has to be is more – as you said – problem-oriented, but it really requires – in this the marketing team going and the sales team going, hey, what would make your life easier? What would make your life better? What would actually help you have more conversations, better conversations, bring in more revenue? Which is all of our responsibility in this organization. And I think when you kind of go with that kind of service mentality, it then allows, in this case the marketing team to go, oh! you want to be able to share content more easily. Hey, let’s first of all make sure we got the content for you. And then it might be something like GaggleAMP or another tool that will be useful. And so, instead of just going, I’ve got a hammer,