Marketing and Sales Alignment - How it can impact Customer Acquisition Performance - with Howard Brown - ringDNA

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of RevOpSquared, and host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss what metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks they use to enable better data-driven metrics-informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Howard Brown, founder and CEO of RingDNA. In today's show, we will cover a much-discussed, yet still perplexing topic of customer acquisition performance, and how an aligned marketing and sales strategy, process and organization can accelerate revenue growth and increase enterprise value. We'll cover three main areas with our discussion with Howard today. Findings from recent customer acquisition performance research that RingDNA and RevOp Squared conducted in partnership. discuss a strategic framework to enhance marketing, sales and customer success alignment. And what are the key metrics and KPIs to measure the impact of a well-aligned approach to customer acquisition. Howard, please take a moment to introduce yourself to an audience and share your career journey from clinical psychologist to founder and CEO of RingDNA.

**Howard Brown** (1:34)
Oh boy. Well, first of all, it's a pleasure to be here with you, Ray. Thank you for having me. And my journey certainly isn't the typical one. You don't hear a lot about people who go from being a clinical psychologist into a tech leader, but it was definitely inspired by my absolute desire to be a helper. As a therapist, I learned early on that for me, there was nothing as rewarding as being there for other people to feel the honor and privilege of people sharing their stories and trusting in you to help. And after doing that for a number of years, I also became keenly aware that while most therapists were highly focused on helping, it turns out they were awful business people. They had no idea how to build their practice, insurance verification, billing, those sorts of things. That wasn't their skill set. And this was back in the mid-90s. And the internet was just starting to take off. And I was a programmer as a kid. And I was highly interested in the internet. And I also became keenly aware that two-thirds of the American public, at some point in their life, had suffered from a behavioral health care, mental health condition, anxiety, depression, anorexia, alcoholism, drug abuse.
And outside of, say, Los Angeles and New York, had no idea where to find a therapist. So I decided to essentially create a group of web properties that would act as, one, a place where people could go and confidentially find information about their condition or concern. Two, feel that they're not alone in providing a bunch of free resources for them. And then, three, finding ways that they could find a local provider or resource in whatever community they lived. Turns out there was a real need for this. And long story short, it grew into a network of close to 300 web properties, eatingdepression.com, drugaddiction.com, anxiety.com, and those sort of things. And we had tens of thousands of therapists that paid us a subscription-based model. And it turned out to be a great business. Ultimately, I could not keep both my private practice and my internet company going. And so I had to make the tough decision to leave the clinical profession to seek my larger ambitions, which were to help a lot of people. I miss it. I certainly miss sitting with people one on one, but you get to experience that working with your own staff and team. And, you know, I have three kids. So that's my long, somewhat convoluted journey from a psychologist to a tech entrepreneur.

**Ray Rike** (4:33)
Well, Howard, I think it makes perfect sense of how you transition to founding re and DNA to help business to business sales professionals perform better, because what profession has more stress and more, I'll say, mental health risk than B2B sales. So to me, it makes total sense. And one of the things I was most amazed at when I first learned about re and DNA is how you have millions and millions of transactions and insights into customer acquisition performance indicators across your customer base of world class Fortune 100 organizations. Can you share some of your insights, including the most common customer acquisition challenges and the opportunities you're seeing in the B2B industry today?

**Howard Brown** (5:16)
Absolutely. I think first and foremost, organizations are entirely too focused on their sales process. And therefore they end up being completely misaligned with what their buyers need. You know, going back to the early days in my first company, one thing that I discovered was if you are, for example, a somebody who's suffering from an eating disorder, let's say, and you go to a website and you don't want to fill out a web form. So there's a phone number on there. You call the number and let's assume this is a woman suffering from anorexia. If you route that call to a man, there is a 95% chance that that prospective patient will hang up the phone. That was one of those aha moments for me, Ray, because what I realized is we're so focused on sales, we're so focused on our process that we forget, we need to better understand and better focus on our prospects and customers. So what does that mean? It means that we have to start to understand how they buy, how they collect information, what are they interested in. What I see typically is a lack of proper rep training. I think that we unfortunately don't spend as much time training and coaching. Basic things like business acumen, what true empathy looks like. A lot of us will think true empathy is, oh, I know you're going through a hard time due to the pandemic. That's not really true empathy. That's more of sympathy. True empathy stems from the curiosity and a desire to help. I think if you understand your buyers, if you ask open-ended questions, if you focus on their challenges, that will ultimately help organizations to scale to build better sales processes. Look, buyers are changing both in terms of demographics and their engagement preferences. This is driving the need to change how we look at revenue production models, if that makes sense.