Podcast: Working with sales and making hard choices as a product marketer
Our co-founder, Raechel Lambert, was a guest on The Winning Combo Podcast, hosted by Keith Washo and Vijay Damojipurapu where they discuss how important it is for product and marketing teams to align before a product launch, and how sales is a key resource to product marketers.
Highlights
03:35 Rae’s mottos
09:13 Always look for alignment across product and marketing teams (Articles launch at Intercom example)
16:39 Marketing best practice: sales is an incredible resource for product marketers and can fast-fail ideas
24:52 Rae’s experience from joining sales meetings — sales calls are like dating, you have to go to more than one to find the good stuff
Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast, the Winning Combo, your home for wisdom on marketing and sales success. Featuring your host, Keith Washoe from Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and Vijay Damojipurapu from Silicon Valley, California. From coast to coast, let the wisdom begin so you can become a winner. Here are your hosts, Keith and Vijay.
[00:00:26] Welcome to the Winning Combo, Sales and Marketing Success podcast. I am your host Vijay Damojipurapu from Silicon Valley alongside my co host Keith Washoe in Research Triangle Park. We are very excited to bring you our eighth episode and this time with a very special guest, Raechel Lambert out of NYC.
[00:00:49] Now, Raechel is a partner at Olivine, a collective of product marketers, designers, and filmmakers that help their companies grow their revenue. Now, Raechel started her career in finance. Then later transitioned to marketing and she worked as a product marketer at Intercom. Now, for those of you listeners who are not familiar with Intercom now, Intercom is a leading software company here in Silicon valley.
[00:01:19] So at Intercom, Raechel brought two of Intercom's largest product releases to market. And after that, Raechel worked as Director of Marketing for a FinTech startup named Jirav, before doing product marketing for tech companies, including Envoy, Gladly, Spoke (acquired by Okta) and many others. Now coming back to Olivine, where Raechel is a partner, she also created the essential product marketer's guide, an e-course to help marketers grow their products and their careers.
[00:01:52] So, Rae, we are honored and excited to have you on our show and super thrilled for you to share your wisdom and advice from your impressive product marketing career with our listeners today. So we've come to the podcast.
[00:02:02] Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be on such an early episode and watch your podcast grow.
[00:02:10] Super thrilled. Thanks again for being here. And I'm sure you'll really bless our listeners today with your insights and advice. Now let's also not forget our Winning Combo podcast show co-host Keith is in Research Triangle Park. So Keith, how are you doing today?
[00:02:23] I'm doing great and super excited to converse with our special guest, Rae and share her advice to help all our listeners with their marketing and sales success. It's going to be a great show. Thank you.
[00:02:33] Perfect. So, Keith, do you want to do the honors and walk Rae and listeners to the show format and what to expect.
[00:02:40] Yes. So today I'm going to do three simple things here. It's our three classic power segments. First Rae, our special guests, will lead off with a top marketing or sales quote that will help our listeners gain wisdom very quickly that they can apply to their life.
[00:02:57] Secondly, Rae will then share a personal story on her marketing or sales success, or failure for people to learn from her experience to utilize for their career. And then lastly, Rae, we'll close with a sharing key marketing or sales best practice so they can remember and apply this to their both, personal and professional life for best success.
[00:03:19] So those are the three things we're going to cover today. Rae, hopefully that's good for you. Are you comfortable with that? Are you ready to begin? All right. Let's kick it off with the power quote segment. So, Rae, how about you share a quote that's meant something to you and your life and career that's really been impactful.
Rae's mottos
[00:03:35] Sure. So full disclosure, I'm not really a quotes type of person, but I do have a few mottos or sayings that come up a lot in my life that I thought I would share instead if that's okay.
Reality is your friend
[00:03:45] So number one, Reality is your friend. I always believe, especially working with large teams, better out than in, the sooner you can address a challenge, a delay or misalignment, the faster you can solve it.
Change before you have to
[00:03:58] Second would be Change before you have to. The only thing constant is change in life and at work, especially in startups. I've just found that it's not the intelligent people that win in the long run. It's those that can adapt.
Build great relationships
[00:04:14] And the third one is “Build great relationships and business will come”. It's a little bit of a take on “Build great products and people will come”. I have found that prioritizing building relationships based on trust, honesty, and integrity, no matter what is happening, and in startups, a lot can happen. People who don't focus on relationships, they might win at half-time, but I don't think they win the game. Great relationships last longer than companies, especially startups. So, it's incredibly valuable and I would love to see people focus on that more.
[00:04:48] Well, Rae, for someone who is not necessarily a quote person, there are some powerful quotes right in there. Thank you for that. I'm going to throw you a zinger here. Based on the fact that you shared three, if you had to choose one of those that for whatever reason right now in your life means the most to you, which one would it be and why, and why do you think is it important for our listeners in terms of how it helps with someone's life and whether it's their career or personal life?
[00:05:18] Totally, happy to share it. I think it's the relationships one. Since I started my own company recently and joined forces with my Olivine partners, I'm finding that relationships I built years ago at old companies have come and gone and not all of them succeeded, the relationships are lasting and they're becoming my clients or they're referring me to new business when I need some like random casting call requests, people respond. So I just think helping people and focusing on relationships, even if it's slowing you down in launching this product or whatever it is you're trying to do and in your existing job, it just pays tenfold down the road to treat people right, and reciprocate and helping every you can because someday they'll help you too.
[00:06:07] That’s great. I can relate to that cause our last interview was based on a relationship we had with Mark Adams who was VP of Creative Labs in Silicon Valley and then became president and CEO of Lexar. And it was based on a relationship from 2006. So again, always build good relationships, never burn bridges, keep in touch, and in life at the end of the day, it's about people and relationships. So thank you for that. Vijay, anything you want to add or follow up with? Any questions or comments?
[00:06:32] I'm actually going to take a quick pass at all three codes that are wonderful codes. Thank you for sharing with our listeners Rae.
[00:06:44] The first one, where you mentioned reality is your friend, reminds me of just being authentic because at the end of the day, being and staying true to yourself, it'll always help you be a marketing leader or a sales leader or a professional. It doesn't matter which career you are in today, but by being authentic and staying true to yourself, we'll help you win big time in the long run.
[00:07:10] Second code that you shared is changed before you have to. It just reminds me of the other code, which is “Change is constant”. So absolutely, the onus is on you as you are looking to build your professional career and build all those relationships. It's always about just keeping track and staying abreast of the trends and then always, constantly looking to change before you have to.
[00:07:37] And just closing in on Rae and Keith on the relationship piece. That's a big, big emphasis for all of us, being in marketing or sales. And that's been our big mantra throughout our podcast episodes, right from podcast episode one to seven, it's all about empathy and how to build that sincere relationship.
[00:08:00] Excellent. That's wonderful. It's a good recap. Rae, anything you want to close off on that and maybe just out of curiosity, in terms of relationship, your relationship with Vijay, and how you became a special guest on the show, maybe you can just share that little tidbit.
[00:08:12] I'd love to. I'm in some product marketing group online on Facebook and Vijay made a call out for podcasts, I guess. And I was like, “Sure, I'll see what this is about”. So I messaged him, we talked and we actually have really similar career paths. Not that we've done the exact same thing. We're kind of rebels though.
[00:08:34] We both did other fields, worked in other industries and then kind of made our way to product marketing. So we've kind of hit it off there and then I'm launching an e-course soon. And part of the e-courses is video interviews of other industry experts, both that are in product marketing and you know, other roles that work with product marketing. So I said, “Hey, come be on my video interview and I'll be on your podcast”. So I put a great start on relationship building and helping each other out.
[00:09:03] That's great. And, on our 10-year anniversary, 10 years from now, because of our relationship, we'll have you back on. That's how we roll.
[00:09:12] Or even sooner. Maybe it's 100 episodes. You never know.
Always look for alignment across product and marketing teams (Articles launch at Intercom example)
[00:09:13] Exactly. Well, thank you so much for that, Rae. How about we shift gears here and go into the Power Story segment. This is an opportunity to share with our listeners a story that you had in your life, whether it's a sales or marketing success or failure, anything that stands out to you that you want to share that you think teaches a valuable lesson.
[00:09:35] Absolutely. So I always think failures are much juicier to share and learn from them than successes. Luckily I did learn from this one and can turn it into success down the road, but when I was at Intercom, I was tasked with launching a new product at the time, it was called Articles, it was a self-service support product.
[00:09:58] And, the story here is about alignment with product marketing and sales. We had done a great amount of groundwork as product marketers. We were writing the story for the product announcement before scope even began. I thought that we were all on the same page, but as we were getting closer to launch, I could feel this misalignment kind of gesturing and the way this surfaces is that a few different people that I was working with specifically on the product team kept kind of repeating the same statement to me.
[00:10:33] They would say “This is not a docs product”, like a documentation product. And I, I was kind of feeling like it was just such a specific statement that it couldn't be a coincidence that it was probably coming from a specific place or person in the company. So I dug a little deeper and I realized we needed to call a meeting with the VP of product, which isn't really someone I normally interact with cause he's way above my pay grade, Paul Adams. Really smart product guy, he’s been leading product at Intercom for a number of years.
[00:10:57] And I'm kind of poking the bear a little, asking some questions and sure enough, Paul says “This is not a docs product”. And I thought “We have found the source”.
[00:11:18] And so I pointed out “Okay, then why does our Help Center, which is powered by this new product, live at docs.intercom.com?” And there were like crickets. The video call was so awkward. You felt like you lost the connection, but you probably didn't. Everyone's tense. And I'm thinking “Oh God, I hope he doesn't fire me”.
[00:11:42] What we're realizing is that there was this huge, subtle, but very fundamental misalignment in what this product was, you know? Paul was saying this isn't a docs product because it's so much more, because there's no dead ends because it's inherently personal, and usually docs, like help centers, are not personal.
[00:12:03] And you know, there's feedback loops and all these things that I completely agreed with and that were true about the product. The thing is we can't really invent a new category for an existing category because customers just won't know what the heck it is you're talking about.
[00:12:20] So we just realized we had a lot more work to do when it came to getting the messaging right, getting the landing page right so that everyone was happy, so that the product team really felt like we understood their vision for what they were building, that it really was challenging the status quo on help center products, but that we knew we were building a bridge from what customers understood to what they expected of this product. So in hindsight, we ended up delaying the launch and in hindsight, that was absolutely the right decision.
[00:12:52] It was very expensive though, and so we had to learn from it. Then, what happened was that for the next launch I was leading, for their inner comms bot operator, which now spans the entire Intercom platform and interacts in the messenger and with every single product, and now after this big learning on Articles, Help Center Articles product, I now have the competence and conviction to really push hard early for alignment across the entire product team.
[00:13:24] I flew out to Dublin to work with the product team really early on and just make sure that everyone was aligned so that we could kind of slow down now so we could go faster later. And it really paid off. Bots are very complicated, but I just felt like everyone felt like they were heard and we were on the same page and just made the launch so much smoother.
[00:13:45] I really loved the way you said “Slow down now, so we can go faster later”. And what I hear is that one of the key takeaways or the lessons learned is to catch things early, be up front and have the confidence to call out any concerning red flags in the beginning of the process versus waiting, maybe if it gets too long at the end, then it can become more costly. I'm curious, is that what you considered the key takeaway here, the bottom line that you want people to walk away from this story?
[00:14:15] Yeah, absolutely. 100% go slow at the beginning and really get alignment. Not just with your direct partners or stakeholders, but just make sure like up and down the organization there's alignment. It can be very daunting to challenge or be misaligned with someone who's much higher up in the organization than you, but everyone will respect you more if you just have that hard conversation upfront rather than waiting and letting it fester.
[00:14:42] Thank you for sharing that. That's really nice. I know it's a personal story and something that our listeners can really take to heart. So Vijay, any questions or thoughts on that story?
[00:14:53] Yes. Several thoughts. Wonderful story Rae. So one takeaway, I think, is what you hit upon, which I would emphasize to all our listeners is when you strongly believe in something, don't hold yourself back. So in this case, Rae, you actually took the courage and took it up to have a dialogue with the VP of product, even though he was up in the hierarchy, right? It's not about hierarchy or the title, it's standing up for what you believe in. And I think you did a great job there. That's one. The second is that category creation versus playing in the existing category are two entirely different approaches depending on which one you want to pursue.
[00:15:45] Right. It's a huge challenge and it takes a huge effort to build a brand new category in the market. Versus, if you're trying to launch and build and grow your market share in the existing category, it's literally easier. So definitely love your story there. And those are the two key takeaways for the listeners.
[00:16:07] Thank you, Vijay. Rae, any thoughts on what Vijay just said that stand out?
[00:16:08] Yeah, I mean, believe me, I'm all about creating new categories when it's due and when it makes sense for the product. I've been lucky, I think Intercom as a whole is, in a sense, creating a new category because of their products, sales, marketing and support, and there hadn't been a lot of products like that. But when the product you're launching does in fact fit very neatly in a category, don't pretend that it doesn't cause it will just create friction for your prospect, from your users.
[00:16:39] I like that. Rae, again goes back to one of your first quotes, which is live in reality, act in reality. So don't try to pretend something that's not really true or so to speak in terms of reality. So thank you for that.
Marketing Best Practice: Sales is an incredible resource for product marketers
[00:16:39] So why don't we shift gears here and go into the third segment of the show. This is the closing Best Practice, sales and marketing takeaway. Rae, I understand that you have a good closing takeaway for our audience today, something that you want to share regarding sales or marketing.
Sales can fast fail any idea
[00:17:05] Yes, I've been very fortunate to work with amazing sales and marketing teams across a bunch of different companies. And I coach a lot of product markers, I work with a lot of new product marketing teams at companies and something I'm always trying to get them to understand is that sales is an incredible resource for product marketers. Here’s a few reasons why: one, sales can fast fail any idea. Before you build the product, before you go do all this landing page work, try to find that forward-thinking, really innovative sales person on the team.
[00:17:52] I'm sure you kind of have a clue as to who they are, if not ask the VP of sales, and just get them to kind of test your messaging a little bit or test this idea and you'll get this instant feedback loop if this is working or not.
Sales will be a source of juicy product insights and customer feedback
[00:18:10] They can also tell you exactly who to talk to when you need juicy product feedback, or if you're trying to launch customer testimonial marketing. Much more effective, just go straight to sales rather than sending out like an email blast to everyone. More than just telling you what are the big logos that are happy, they'll be able to tell you who is charismatic and who is really insightful. That's a great resource.
Sales knows how to create a winning pitch because they are constantly testing
[00:18:32] And then the other thing is they already have a winning pitch or a great way to describe the product because they get to constantly test this messaging. They just forget to tell you about it. You can't expect them to email you “Hey, I sold to a customer today. They got it right away. Here's what I said”. That doesn't happen.
[00:18:48] Often I hear product marketers who are kind of in this position of wanting to audit salespeople to make sure that they're saying “the right things”. And I just fundamentally disagree about that, I don't think that's how the relationship should be at all.
[00:19:09] I think that product marketing and marketing in general should be building a partnership with sales and that you should work together to help each other reach your goals. And if you're constantly saying “You're not allowed to say that” or “Say it this way, instead of…”, you're not doing their job everyday, they know how to close deals, so let them do that.
Sales calls are like dating, you have to go to more than one to find the good stuff
[00:19:25] To build this partnership and to learn from them and kind of vice versa, you need to actually sit in on their sales calls. Often I hear product marketers say that they sat in a call and it wasn't useful. But to me, sales is like dating. You can't just expect to meet the love of your life on the first date, you have to go on a bunch of dates, or go on a lot of sales calls so that you can hear what's happening. And once you start listening on sales calls and you're dialed in there, you're going to get a better understanding of not just your prospects and your customers, but you'll have a better understanding of the feedback that sales is feeding back to you.
[00:20:09] And I have an example for this from one of the clients I was working with, Envoy. I was getting this feedback from sales that a lot of their customers were just not your typical, modern Silicon Valley customer, but they were reaching “old school industries”, like in manufacturing or education and healthcare, and that we needed to tailor our messaging and our go-to-market strategy based on that.
[00:20:37] But since I've pretty much only worked in Silicon valley and in tech, I didn't really quite understand the gravity of what they were saying and like how much they meant it until I was listening in on a sales call with a prospect, big company, pretty old school company, slow movers; they were quizzing the salesperson and I could tell they kind of have this “I got ya” tone, that they really felt like they were pushing the salesperson hard. So the question was “So, are you going to update the software every year?”.
[00:21:14] And I thought “Oh my God! This person doesn't understand SaaS at all”. They were shipping every week. So I'm thinking to myself “Yeah buddy, we'll ship it to you in a box”, but this one little tiny statement that this prospect made, made me understand all the other sales feedback that was happening when they said our prospects are kind of old school and they need more help understanding the product.. We're not just talking about someone who's a little behind in Silicon Valley, we're talking about a decade.
[00:21:50] So that really helped me just internalize their feedback. They had been saying it all along, I just didn't quite grasp how much they meant it.
[00:22:01] That is an incredible closing. A best practice takeaway in terms of what this whole podcast is all about. You started off Rae with talking about sales and marketing, sales for marketing being an incredible resource. Number one. The whole spirit is marketing and sales are partners. We are, what we like to say on the show, like two wings of a dove flying high to success. You've got the left wing marketing, right-wing sales flying together. And I really appreciate how you had that mindset as a marketer of how important sales is as a resource.
[00:22:36] And then your story really goes into the importance of sitting on sales calls, going on sales meetings, to hear the reality, back to your quote, reality is your friend, the reality of what's happening, what people are saying. So I'm really impressed with that. And thank you for that comment. Vijay, any questions or thoughts for Rae?
[00:22:56] I just wanted to echo what you mentioned, it's such a great story. A lot of insights there, Rae, and a couple of takeaways that stood out for me. One, always treat sales as a strong partner, always build that collaboration mindset and pursue that. That definitely stood out for me. And that's been the emphasis and the mantra throughout all our podcasts episodes.
[00:23:25] So super helpful and great that you emphasize that Rae. And second to your point, your story actually reminded me of one of the core values, which I believe in: intellectual honesty. It's keeping yourself humble. Not to always boost your ego, but sometimes you need to question what you thought was right.
[00:23:55] And when you have that mindset, you automatically start to listen and open your eyes and heart to what the other person is saying. So in that scenario when the sales person was saying “Hey, these guys are not Silicon Valley companies”, kudos to you that you actually took the time back, took a stance back and tried to figure out what they really meant. So, great story. Great takeaways there.
[00:24:21] Thank you.
[00:24:22] Anything else you want to add based on Vijay’s feedback?
[00:24:26] Nope, that all sounds right on to me.
[00:24:31] All right. Great. My experiences in doing sales and marketing, when I had the sales hat on, I found it super valuable to have marketing by my side. How often Rae have you been in a sales meeting over your career, even as a marketer and I'm sure you've said something or did something in the meeting that contributed to winning the business.
Rae’s experience from joining sales meetings
[00:24:52] Do you have any thoughts on that? Cause you're very helpful and maybe sometimes answering a question or using the right phrasing that maybe a salesperson might've missed. Any thoughts on that?
[00:24:59] Usually I try to follow a sales person's lead. And as a product marketer, someone who really deeply understands the product, I used to be very surprised at how high level the salesperson stayed.
[00:25:15] That was kind of a note that I learned to follow over the course of the years, not give them like the entire ingredients list, but give them an appetizer. If they want to learn more, obviously you should answer all those questions and be prepared to, but you don't have to give them the entire recipe list right off the bat.
[00:25:36] And then the other thing is, as a product marketer or anyone who works in product or just outside of sales, I've heard from sales leaders and sales reps that sometimes, even if you're saying pretty much the exact same thing as their account rep, just knowing that you don't have a commission on the line, they can sometimes trust you a little bit more, have a little bit more credibility.
[00:25:58] You know, your mom's been telling you the same thing over and over, but you just didn't listen until someone else told you. So, being that kind of outside voice can really help to bolster the sales person and add credibility to the conversation. I wouldn't consider myself particularly experienced in sales, so I usually follow the sales person's lead and usually that goes well.
[00:26:26] Thank you, Rae. And to your point, sometimes just being in the room and when marketing speaks up and gives another perspective on a message or another way of describing the product, that's really helpful to sales.
[00:26:42] That's why sales and marketing, to your point, it's a partnership, it's a team. So, thank you for that. All right. So why don't we proceed here with concluding our podcast? It's been an amazing show. We're just going to now do a summary on some things that stood out, some key takeaways from the overall show.
[00:26:57] Vijay, do you want to share with the audience some things you think are worth remembering today?
[00:26:58] Yes. I'm going to stick with my formula of power of three. So the three takeaways are the following. Number one: relationship. Always treat everyone you interact with, right. And treat them with respect.
[00:27:17] Second, it doesn't matter if you're in product marketing or sales or any marketing function for that matter. But if you believe in something, the onus is on you to stand up and bring the attention of all your stakeholders to that core issue, which you think may affect the launch or a business leader.
[00:27:40] And third is when you are in marketing, always treat sales as a strong partner and vice versa.
[00:27:43] Thank you for that. And what I really appreciate Rae, what you said today that really stood out to me was when you were talking about your quotes, I really like your change before you have to. I've never really heard it said that way and that succinctly and that beautifully and specifically change for the better, right?
[00:28:00] Let's be honest. There is bad change. So continuous improvement or the Kaizen Japanese theory, change before you have to. And Rae, I also really appreciated your slow down now, so you can go faster later. That was wonderfully said. Anything else, Rae, that you want to add to conclude our podcast?
[00:28:18] I think you captured all of it. I guess the only other thing I'd add is that anytime I'm launching a product, whether it's for Intercom or for my other clients, it's always a huge team effort. For example, launching both the Help Center product and the Operator Bot product, there were over 65 stakeholders involved.
[00:28:40] So getting alignment and trying to establish trust with all of those people takes time, but it absolutely pays off.
[00:28:46] Yes. Agreed. And we just want to let you know, Rae, how much we appreciate you being part of the Winning Combo podcast. It's really been a complete honor and joy to have you here.
[00:28:56] You're very articulate. I loved all your stories. You're very colorful in the way you describe things. You got a wealth of experience and I understand you have a closing message here, something special, a special message for our listeners.
[00:29:05] Oh, I suppose. My partners and I at Olivine, we've had really great success over the past couple of years, helping clients with their product marketing strategy. And we can't quite get to everyone. So we decided to launch an e-course, specifically for product marketers to help them grow their products and their careers. And it has a bunch of best practices and downloadable templates that you can just make copies of and make your own, as well as video interviews with industry experts, including your co-host Vijay.
[00:29:39] So if you want to check that out, you can learn more at olivinemarketing.com Thank you so much for having me.
[00:29:45] Excellent. Thank you for doing that. And thanks for being part of the show and listeners out there, thank you for listening to the podcast, the Winning Combo.
[00:30:00] We hope you enjoyed it, and that it's helpful to your sales and marketing careers.
[00:30:02] Thank you to all our listeners. And if you find this episode helpful, please do share and spread the word with your colleagues and with your network. And also don't forget to leave a rating on your favorite podcast player.
[00:30:22] So once again, stay tuned for the next show and follow us, the Winning Combo on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. And remember, keep learning and keep winning.
