“Shot of tequila? Yeah. Shot of tequila.”

When your team goes through an account-based marketing (ABM) transformation, sometimes tequila needs to be involved.

Terminus co-founder & CMO, Sangram Vajre, recently launched a daily #FlipMyFunnel podcast dedicated to helping B2B marketing, sales, and customer success professionals become masters of their crafts. To properly kick off his podcast, Sangram invited our VP of marketing, Peter Herbert, and chief revenue officer, Todd McCormick to share their story of #OneTeam, an account-based marketing transformation.

Love this episode of the #FlipMyFunnel podcast with @PeterKHerbert and @TMcCormick2011: 3 keys to creating a #OneTeam culture (that goes beyond just sales and marketing alignment) https://t.co/07VMPqoO2f pic.twitter.com/Z5TP3tZnrI

— Terminus (@Terminus) January 12, 2018

Click here to listen to the full episode of the #FlipMyFunnel podcast, and read the annotated transcription below.

Sangram: We are recording this last day of the year (2017). The two people who are responsible for the numbers of the company are recording a podcast. That’s a lot of confidence.

Todd: At this point, we’ve done everything that we can to hit our number, and we’ve got great leaders out there driving this business, so all the confidence in the world.

Peter: Absolutely. When you’re #OneTeam, a couple of the members of the team can get on a podcast, and thankfully the machine doesn’t stop running.

Sangram: That is awesome. One of the key things that we want to do from this podcast is to get real practitioners on to talk about why they do what they do and how they’re doing it. I’ve got the two best people I know who are practicing account-based marketing and living it every single day with this whole notion of #OneTeam.

Sangram: Just a quick throwback before we get into #OneTeam from a sales and marketing perspective. All of us on the executive team were at an offsite, and we were trying to come up with our vision statement and really reimagine what we want to look like as a company. Everybody was talking about how we were trying to unify and wanted to try to bring the teams together. Our vision statement came out to be that we want to unify the go to market teams of every single B2B organization in the world.

I think, Peter, it was you who actually started to say that, ‘Well, that’s really like #OneTeam.’ Everybody agreed. That has really now become part of our culture here in Terminus. Peter, what is #OneTeam and why is #OneTeam really important?

Peter: A lot of us have been at organizations where the go-to-market team, in particular, is not operating like #OneTeam. Classic symptoms of not being #OneTeam are:

• Sales and marketing show up to meetings with different numbers.
• Teams have different goals that are not coordinated or aligned.
• Marketing functions in a silo and reports results.
• Marketing hands off something like MQLs, or some number of leads to sales and sales development, and they kind of take it from there.

I’ve just seen over the years how companies are not able to bring their go-to-market team together and really function at a deep and operational level, as well as an emotional level, and in terms of the attitude of the team and how we solve problems. They just don’t grow as fast. Day 1 for me coming in at Terminus, this was important.

The bottom line is functioning as #OneTeam, it’s about your attitude. When you have challenges and problems to solve, are you acting together for the benefit of the whole team and our customers?

Peter: You can’t just run around and say, “#OneTeam!” and do a fist bump and feel really great, and not have a process underlying it. You have to operationalize. We need the workflow. We need the reports, the visibility. We need to have the same goals. We need to be measuring the same things. Absolutely one of the most important things for us that we’re all chasing the same pipeline of revenue goals and marketing feels as much ownership over that as sales.

Todd: I don’t know whether I’m fortunate or I’m one of the crazies out there, but I’ve always believed in #OneTeam. Back in like 1998, when I was just starting my sales career, the first person I went to was my CMO at the time, Judy Hackett. I asked her, ‘How do marketing and sales work together?’ I knew I needed assets to sell. We need to have programs together. Sales and marketing should be aligned. It shouldn’t just be a sales rep cold calling. Every call should be a warm call because marketing helped with some sort of air cover. It’s been ingrained in me for some time. Getting into martech and selling marketing automation prior to joining Terminus, my goal coming in was to align sales and marketing in our channel team. We did that very successfully, and I saw the power of #OneTeam.

It’s a powerful thing because the entire organization is very much aligned on one goal, one initiative, and that’s growing revenue. It makes it easier for Peter and I to execute with support from the whole company.

Sangram: This reminds me of something Derek Grant said when he was the head of sales at Pardot when I was running marketing. He said, “Hey, look. People who stop by the booth, they’re looking and they’re putting their business cards in a fishbowl. They’re not looking to be your customers. They want that free iPad that you’re about to give. Those people are never going to buy from your company.” The whole idea of #OneTeam really makes everybody accountable, and that changes everything.

Todd: Absolutely. Yup.

Sangram: All right, guys. We’re going to continue this conversation on our podcast next week and we’re going to talk about not only why we need #OneTeam, but how to really build #OneTeam and what kind of buy-in do you really need from across your organization…so stay tuned.

Listen to more of the #OneTeam story and subscribe to the #FlipMyFunnel podcast on iTunes.