Kristina Finseth
Combining sales and marketing for business growth
Kristina started out in recruitment for the first 5 years of her career before she entered the B2B SaaS space. She landed at Interseller last January which is a platform for prospecting and outreach for most recruiters. She sits on the fence between sales and marketing in what has become her role ‘growth marketing’ which will include both sales and demand generation for the sales team.
The Summary
The misalignment of top-level goals is often the reason for the conflict between sales and marketing. So having the same goal of revenue means looking at every activity from a marketing point of view and through that lens will it get us any further towards our goals. It goes back to the old question of should marketing be measured purely on MQL’s and no it shouldn’t if those MQL’s are only successful 2% of the time.
If you are working with a leadership team who haven’t previously been heavily involved in the marketing strategy, it’s part of your job to get the buy-in for why you want to do something step-by-step to share that vision.
It helps a marketer to have worked with the sales team. Kristina has worked on the team understands their goals, understands their pain points so it’s really a people relation problem when sales and marketing don’t align. Getting to know each other on a personal level massively helps close the gap.
Everyone thinks they are a marketer, so often sales will come to the marketing team with 100 ideas but making sure the sale team are heard without saying directly no and offending them is important to establish early on.
What makes you a growth marketer?
It’s focusing on everything from awareness all the way down to retention. So looking at how we can affect each stage of the lifecycle. A big project she has on test is customer testimonials as a video rather than text and seeing how that impacts each stage of the company. It means her tasks run in sprints and she doesn’t plan more than a quarter ahead. Doing 2 or 3 tasks at 100% rather than 20 tasks at 14%.
This last year has taught us even more so how flexible marketing needs to be and not holding on too strong to a plan that isn’t working. Every marketing strategy for 2020 has probably been ripped up!
This is not to say you shouldn’t have an overarching goal because you should, but there’s no reason to give up on fun new ideas because the plan is rigid.
Where does email marketing come into play?
Quite simply Interseller is a prospecting and outreach platform for recruiters and sellers. They do all the data finding, email sequencing and sync it all in the CRM. The difference with Interseller is that every email looks handcrafted, not that it’s being sent to thousands of others too.
Kristina’s outlook is different. She encourages people not to talk about their problem, solution or product at any of their touchpoints. This produces for her an 80%+ open rate, an 30%+ reply rate and a 10%+ booked meeting response. She prompts for a call at the end, as an email is a ticket for a call, not straight away the product. You must earn that right to talk about your own product.
There is no silver bullet approach. You’ve got to keep testing things as no two prospects are the same. Her new strategy is to look over the last quarter, who opened the email but didn’t respond or book a meeting. She then becomes focused on those people with lots of touchpoints which are direct.