The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unlocking Sales and Marketing Synergy for Business Growth With Adele Crane

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

Unlocking Sales and Marketing Synergy for Business Growth With Adele Crane Salesfocusadvisory.com About the Guest(s): Adele Crane is an esteemed business growth advisor with over 30 years of experience in sales and marketing. As the Director of Sales Focus Advisory, she has enhanced sales and marketing performance for over 200 companies and 11,000 professionals across multiple industries and regions. Adele is the author of three influential books, including "The Sales Focused CEO: Looking at Business Through a New Lens," and is also a podcast host of "Secrets to Accelerated Growth," which provides insights into achieving business success. Episode Summary: Welcome to another enlightening episode of "The Chris Voss Show," where this week, Chris Voss is joined by Adele Crane, a visionary in sales and marketing with a remarkable track record in enhancing business growth across diverse sectors. Adele Crane shares intriguing insights on harmonizing sales and marketing strategies to overcome contemporary business challenges, emphasizing clarity in buyer behavior and innovative methods to sustain profitability in evolving markets. In this episode, listeners gain a wealth of knowledge on the modern dynamics between sales and marketing departments and the crucial role CEOs play in driving alignment and performance. Through an engaging conversation, Adele Crane uncovers the intricate challenges faced by businesses today, such as adapting to changing buyer behaviors and integrating effective lead-generation strategies. Highlighting the content from her latest book and podcast, Adele offers actionable insights that promise sustainable growth and innovative resource management, making this a must-listen for business leaders eager to reclaim their market edge. Key Takeaways: Aligning sales and marketing departments is crucial for enhancing business growth and revenue. Understanding and adjusting to changes in buyer behavior are essential for business sustainability. CEOs must rely on accurate forecasting and horizon management to anticipate market trends effectively. The role of marketing has evolved; generating leads and understanding the buyer journey are now key responsibilities. Agile businesses that adapt quickly to change are more likely to gain market share and ensure long-term success. Notable Quotes: "Marketing departments need to focus on generating leads and truly understanding the buyer's journey." "The cheese is moved, whether you like it or not; you've got to snap along with the world changing." "Sales and marketing must both be responsible for revenue and learn to hold hands and work together as a team." "CEOs live and die by sales forecasts and what marketing is spending versus what it's returning." "Horizon management is critical for CEOs; they need to see trends and make adjustments early to resolve potential problems." Resources: Adele Crane’s Podcast: "Secrets to Accelerated Growth" available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Adele Crane's latest book: "The Sales Focused CEO: Looking at Business Through a New Lens."

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, the true lady sings with them. Makes it official. Welcome to the big show. As always, the Chris Foss Show.

It's been around for 16 years and 2200 episodes going on 2300. We bring you the smartest people, the people that share with you their stories, their journeys, their insights, their expertise to help you make your live life better. Your live life better? Am I getting dyslexic or something in my brain? I don't know, I'm having a seizure. Anyway, guys, it's probably just another show on the Chris Voss Show. So welcome, as always, go to goodreese.com for just Chris Voss, linkedin.com for just Chris Voss, Chris Voss1 and the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the interwebs

in the sky. Today we have an amazing young lady on the show, we're going to be talking about her insights and her business. We have Adele Crane crane joining us she's director and sales or business growth advisor for sales and marketing and she is the director for a consulting firm that assists clients and improve their sales and marketing performance alignment and strategy she had over 30 years of experience in the field and has assisted over 200 companies and 11,000

professionals across various industries and regions to achieve sustainable and profitable growth. She's also an accomplished author of three books, a podcaster, and a blogger who shares her insights and expertise with a global audience. One of her most recent books was out recently, let's see if I can pull it, The Sales-Focused CEO, Looking at Business Through a New Lens. Welcome to the show, Adele, how are can pull it, the sales-focused CEO looking at business through a new lens. Welcome to the show, Adele. How are you? Good. How are you?

I am excellent. I am excellent. Give us your dot coms. We're going to have people to find out more about you on the show. They can go to salesfocusadvisory.com, and there's a lot of information and blogs there available. And we've just launched this year a new podcast, Secrets to Accelerated Growth. And you can find that on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Congratulations on launching the podcast. So give us a 30,000 overview of what you do there at the company. We specialize in sales and marketing, but we work on a very short timeframe.

So being one of the only people who has consistently delivered significant growth in 90 to 120 days, we get to the real things that need to be done and not the noise that a lot of people get involved in. So it's referred to as unvarnished. It's what makes it work and how you make money. What makes it work and how you make money? Now, you've been doing this for a long time. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your book that we cited there and what people are going to find in it, The Sales Focus CEO? The Sales Focus CEO is a book about assisting company directors to understand more what they should be expecting from marketing and sales

departments. There's a lot of rhetoric goes on about what can and can't be done and this book says no this is this is what works this is all the things you need to focus on and you need to match up that sales and marketing department and make them both responsible for revenue not have them disabled in different directions yeah because sometimes they oppose each other right if they don't have the same mission going the same way. We call it the Chinese wall. They just don't want to get together. The Chinese wall. So, you know, there's the territorial nature sometimes of departments, maybe.

It's very territorial. There's a lack of understanding sometimes in marketing departments over what they should be doing to really support sales and sales can be a little dismissive sometimes if it's not exactly what they had in mind so it's about trying to get those two to fit together and understand each other a bit better it's sometimes you know sales can be you know resented you know some people don't like the sales department, sometimes because they've got a little bit of swagger

and they make a lot of money, yada, yada, yada, right? I wouldn't want to have a sales department that doesn't have swagger and doesn't want to make money. True. That's what drives everybody having a job in the business, is that sales department. So we need to make sure that it's the best we can do for them so that they can deliver the results. Oh yeah, totally. Totally. So tell us about some of your history. How did you grow up?

What influenced you? How did you get into these lines of work, et cetera, et cetera? Started off in going down the line of accounting, like all good children, you're told to get a degree so I headed in that direction and realized that sitting behind a desk was not my future so coming from a family of business entrepreneurs it was probably more natural I'd go the entrepreneur line so I owned a few businesses and then in about 1990s became very clear that I had an ability to see problems with clarity and fix them very quickly. So since then, I've been consulting across the Asia Pacific and Americas and had a lot of fun turning around problem businesses. So people would say, is it banks knocking on the door?

What do I do? And we'd sort it out in 120 days and get them back to cash. Oh, that's a nice quick fix. Yes. It's a very rough ride. There's a lot of excitement and a lot of tension, but it's better than losing your business. So a lot of skills learned in turnarounds. Turnarounds are a great way to learn stuff because you can see what people are doing. And sometimes it's, you know, they're just, they're off just a little bit and a little bit of

tweaking can help get them back on track, right? Yeah. Often it's a lack of wanting to let go. So their business is growing, things start to go bad. So they hang on tighter and that's when they need to let go, but then they've got to let go to the right people. So it becomes all about hiring and measurement to make sure that the results are going to come in. Yeah. It's all about the hiring and doing hiring well. We learned that in our businesses that spending the time and effort to hire well instead of hire quickly, do multiple interviews, get to know people before you bring them in. That fixes a lot of problems. When we used to just hire people on the first

interview, boy, we sure collected a lot of problems. Yeah. I always recommend when you're hiring in a field that you don't know a lot about is to bring in an expert from that field, someone that you trust, so they can listen to the noise and work out how much value can this person deliver. It's like if I was to go and hire someone to manage a warehouse, I would not know anything about managing warehouses. So if I don't have an expert sitting in that interview, I could go on quite a journey and an expensive one oh yeah very expensive there's always money you can spend that it's real good money after bad sort of thing absolutely so now you help businesses what do you find most people

are struggling with nowadays in business what do you find that they're coming to you asking for help on mostly? They've failed to catch the change in buyer behavior. So they're applying ideas and methods that are tried and true, but they're from an era that was pre the internet. So buyers are very savvy now. They don't need salespeople. They learn a lot on the internet. So salespeople are late to the dance whereas in years gone by you'd be able to pick up the phone make a cold call an example of me you could ring someone and say hi i'm from xerox are you tired of manually

photocopying things have we got a machine for you and they'd have an appointment now you just can't pick up a phone and start a sale like we used to those unique products yeah and like you mentioned they do their own research now and so they're pretty savvy on different products and what's what's being sold and what's not at least most cases and so you help clients work through it. Okay. And how do you usually work through clients? Do you do a lot of Zoom calls or do you go out to their place? How do you have some of the different formats of business that you use?

Depends where they're located and the degree of challenge that we believe is going to be there. And the number of players that are involved that want to sit around the table that's always a question typically what we always start with is a review of their sales and marketing where are they at what's happening what tools have they got how's it operating how much money are they spending and look at it and develop a plan and say okay this is what we're going to cut this is what we're going to cut. This is what we're going to add, and this is how your life will change. So it's very clear, and it's a case of everybody has to either step in

or find the opportunity of a lifetime somewhere else. Tell us about the podcast, Secrets to Accelerated Growth. What do you plan to do? How many episodes do you guys have so far? I only just kicked off a couple of weeks ago. So we're doing an episode a week. At the moment, we're just getting half a dozen together that give an idea about the bases and principles of secrets to accelerating the growth. And then we'll bring on some sales managers, marketing managers,

and do some interviews around their experiences and share that knowledge so everyone can keep learning. Yeah, the more you know, as they say on all the things. So, you know, you talk about CEOs and the importance of them being able to look through the business through a new lens.

Is that basically like learning to operate outside the box, learning to see your scotomas, your blind spots, trying to see your business from different angles that maybe the consumer is wanting? I think it's more focused on them having the right measurement that's going to give the real facts. I mean, CEO lives by a sales forecast. They live by is marketing generating enough leads? What's going on? And if those numbers aren't coming in, we've got to set up some go-to things that they can look at and say, why aren't you doing this?

What's going here? What's going there? And I call it they've got to do horizon management. They've got to be looking well in advance, not just we made it this quarter. They've got to be able to see the trends and make the adjustments early enough that it's going to resolve any potential problems. So do you find that getting departments together, getting everybody to play in the same field is one of the things that a leader has to kind of try and get people motivated to do? Definitely.

A CEO needs to invest in getting that marketing department and sales department in a project, working together and understanding each person's contribution. The world has changed that much in buyer behaviour that we can't say the sales department is solely responsible for revenue now. We need to say it's the marketing department contributes a far greater amount than ever before towards that revenue number. So they both need to be responsible and holding hands, getting on well, making it work together as a team. And it's sometimes the thing where people are afraid of change. They're afraid of, you know, no one wants to have their cheese moved. What do you tell people like that? The cheese has moved.

Whether you like it or not, that cheese is moving, damn it. This is the whole thing about acceleration. There's no time to just have passengers on the bus. You've either got to be committed to going forward or you need to go and catch a new bus somewhere else. And often when they do leave, they end up there in the same predicament at the next place they go to. The world is changing and you've just got to snap along with it and keep going.

Yeah. The world is changing, ladies and gentlemen. The world is changing. And, you know, if you don't change, right, your competitors will change for you. They'll, you know, they'll enact changes where they, you know, either you eat your own lunch or they'll eat your lunch for you, right? Absolutely. There's a lot of agile businesses out there and there's a lot of very smart CEOs that work hard at taking market share. So you need to be aware of what they're doing and try to keep in the game or ahead of the game.

Yeah. Otherwise, you'll be at the back of the line. Absolutely. Let's see. What else is there to – what else have we covered that we want to talk to people about and get them familiar with your work? I think we should have a brief chat about the marketing side. It's long been held, marketing's about PR and brand management. All those things are very necessary.

But the great marketer of today is the person who can generate leads, who knows how to get the inquiry into the business and understand the buyer journey, where they're at in their process. Are they early researchers, late researchers? And how do we keep grooming them ready to hand them over to sales? Yeah. And so you're pretty sales-focused, it sounds like, in making sure the sales departments are getting along with everybody

and working at their highest efficiency. Yes, definitely. Yeah, definitely, definitely. I mean, what are some other things that you find people are struggling with now today? I think the rising cost of trying to do marketing, which leads into sales, it's a very busy, noisy market out there, and trying to break through a lot of that noise and be known recognized by buyers in in that haven't come across your company before is really difficult

and there's a lot of cost associated with it so you have to be very careful you're not throwing a lot of money in the wrong direction yeah and i see that a lot i see companies saying you know we need to spend more where you know we're spending 10 of our revenue on marketing we need to go to 15 and we can often show no you don't you can go back to three percent and get a better result so what's the key to making that transition more better functional or some of the keys or maybe t-zone clarity is number one people need to know what's ahead okay they need to understand and be able to have enough transparency that it makes sense to them a lot of the times recommendations are made and they don't make sense they're too far off to the right or it's

repackaging some old practice from years ago that's still irrelevant even though it's got new gift wrap on it do you find this because they don't they don't fully understand what they're what they're doing in that case quite often it's they don't understand sales just both sales and marketing so both have come from a background where it's perceived as a mystique type function if you look at finance it's a it's a robotic process there's a discipline you learn it it's like law you learn it sales is and got a lot of innate sense in it marketing's got a lot of innate sense in it. Marketing's got a lot of innate sense in it when it comes to creativity, et cetera.

And I think that's what makes it so challenging for companies is how do you know what's real and what's not real? And from a CEO's point of view they're looking at a two tools I've got a forecast and they're saying this is good or this is bad and I've got an expense sheet and they're saying this is good or this is bad so it's quite a nerve-wracking situation for a CEO who never came from a marketing and sales background do you find that a you find that a lot of CEOs struggle with that nowadays where they don't fully understand the marketing and sales and give it its due?

It is a problem, but the worst problem is sales and marketing can't explain it to them either. Oh, wow. So someone needs to have a lot of sales people and sales leaders most sales leaders come from a sales background they don't come from a management background they're very poor on the administrative side of things and reporting the famous enter it in the crm all those things are not normal to them so they have trouble explaining it all up to the ceo and the ceo has trouble interpreting what they're saying

wow and if you don't have that you don't have sales so anything more we want to discuss and tease out on the show before we go no i'd say we've got an overview of what we're doing, and I think it would be great if people want to follow on the podcast and we flesh this out over a period of time and let them learn a lot more about the depth of what goes on in the sales and marketing side of the business. And so people can reach out to you. Do you do – what are most of what you do? Do you do coaching one-on-one, do you do like courses or anything like that?

We work, we don't do courses. We work directly with the CEO. So if a CEO has a problem or has a concern, is starting to get a bit worried about things, they can reach out. We can have a conversation. And then I can, if we look like we can assist them, organize for a review and then from there on logic applies with what we find.

Alright. Sounds good then. Well, thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Thanks, Adele. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortune's Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortune's Chris Foss and all those crazy places. Be good to each other. Stay safe.

We'll see you next time.