How PMs Can Unify Marketing, Sales, & Customer Success to Deliver Impactful Projects

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Galen Low: Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Low with The Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident, and get connected, so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world. If you want to hear more about that, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership.

Okay, today we are talking about a growing trend of breaking down the silos between digital marketing teams, sales teams, customer success teams, just about every team, and how a blending of those worlds is changing the way digital products are being taken to market. I'll, of course, be applying a project lens to the conversation, but I've also brought in one of my favorite digital marketing and agency operations experts.

Joining me today is Jessica D'Amato Crosby, Director of Digital Marketing at Vye, Certified HubSpot Expert, and a seasoned agency operations specialist who actually got her start in marketing and, guess what? Project management. 

Jess, thanks so much for joining me today. 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Galen. It's fun to be here and I'm excited to chat today. 

Galen Low: I'm excited to have you on the show. Jess and I worked together on a few projects back in the day, not too long ago, I guess. So yeah, she's been my client. She's tough. But tough in a good way. 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: You're like, you don't want to work with her. 

Galen Low: She's got grit. She knows what she's doing. No, you push the work forward. You, yeah. 

I wanted to dive into something that you and I have been jamming on, right? This notion of like how the blend between different teams, especially in the marketing space, digital marketing, especially in sales, especially in customer success and other teams. And I think, you've been deeply involved in the sort of marketing automation and B2B multi-channel marketing strategy space for years now.

So I thought maybe I'd just get us going with one big question. And I know that some of this like blending between teams is not necessarily like a brand new, earth shattering thing that's happening, but it is becoming more important. And I thought I'd just ask you, why is it so important now that digital marketing teams, sales teams, customer success teams, and other teams stop thinking about themselves as separate teams and start working as a blended team? What are the main benefits? 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Yeah, it's such a great question. And I think, like you said, it's always been important. And I think more so companies are starting to realize how much, if they haven't traditionally broken down those silos, they're realizing the gaps in their communication and the way they're able to tell the story of their business.

If marketing is working within its own function, it's only telling the story of marketing. If sales is only working in their own function and only telling the story of sales, then it's this fragmented perspective of your business. And yeah, it just leads to a lot of gaps that, again, don't tell the full story.

I think benefits when it comes to breaking down those silos and working together is you just get a much better internal experience with departments collaborating together and working towards a goal. And then your customers also feel that they will feel from the start, like when they first convert on your website or first hear about you all the way through to when they become a customer, lifelong customer and stay with you for years, they will feel that seamless experience because teams have considered everything from the first point of contact and the first time that they hear about your business, all the way to that they've converted to a customer and kind of live the journey as a customer. 

So I think two benefits there just between internal teams and then also the customer, which why we're all here, we're working towards getting customers and creating a really good customer experience. So yeah, I think that's probably two of the biggest benefits. 

Galen Low: I'm totally with that. 

I love watching this sort of ongoing customer centric revolution. A lot of people are like, that's old news, customer journey, blah, blah, blah. But there's two things that keep on getting deeper and deeper in these companies is one, the savviness of the customer.

I love that you called out that they will remember that moment they onboarded. And then guess what? A lot of, B2B digital products, they're like subscription model. You're talking about recurring revenue. So you're dealing with retention. You want people to stay. That's like that revenue stream.

And so that retention play has to carry all the way through with this very savvy customer that like has rather high expectations in a good way. Right? We want to be able to build strong products and their voice helps. But then you see this fragmentation still in the structures as well, rather than these organizations.

They're like, they might believe it, right? Yes, we're customer centric, but they might not be structured in a way to support that. 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: And it's funny what you just mentioned about, like you said, there are businesses that are doing this and actively practicing this, but it's still surprising me because there's still thousands of business that aren't functioning like this.

They are still very much like siloed within each of their departments and no one's communicating. And so, like customer service ends up with customers who don't under, they purchase something they don't know what it is, or they're unhappy with their subscription or, whatever it might be.

And it is still an issue that a lot of businesses face and they don't know how to address it. And it takes internal champions to really start to break those silos down to work towards a better relationship between departments. Because each of them informs the other, like a new product needs to be released.

And then therefore product team needs to talk to CS and talked about how we're servicing customers if we bring this new product to market. And product needs to talk to marketing, to talk about how we're going to talk about the GTM strategy behind that new product in marketing and sales needs to talk about if we're going to market this product, well, how are we going to sell it?

And who are we selling it to? And who's the right fit for it? Is there an actual viability for this product? And so you start to see this team events when you really start to break down the silos of how each department can support each other and inform the other and create a really strong feedback loop with all departments.

Galen Low: I love that. Like it needs to feel cohesive for the customer, but in order to do that, you need cohesion between the teams. I really like that you let it into how, because in the green room, we were talking about, okay, climate crisis, everyone knows it's something we need to solve, right? No one disagrees on that, except arguably people don't believe it's happening.

Don't think we need to solve it. But you know, with the customer centricity, I think, a lot of organizations agree on principle that's, the right way to look at it. And as to how do we solve this? That's the barrier in some organizations, not necessarily unwillingness, but just like a lack of awareness of how to get that started.

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Yeah. And it can feel like a really big thing because especially the larger the organization is, it's mean, that's where they bring in change management consultants. That's where they bring in, just operating consultants to say Hey, we know we're not functioning the way that we should, how should we be focusing or how should we be structuring our business?

How should we be communicating? Because it is a massive project when it comes down to, again, the size of the organization and I think the extent of it too, like how much needs to change. So it's, for smaller organizations, some of it is just taking small steps of like how you can talk to the other departments or, what processes touch certain departments and how to work with that department to figure out and streamline that process, et cetera, et cetera, so yeah. 

Galen Low: I love that you took it to sort of change management piece, right? Like sometimes we need to bring those external consultants to sort of do a transformation or drive a reorg or change the org design. But I like that sort of notion of what are the little steps? 

And I know you have seen this quite a bit in other organizations with your clients. What are some of the biggest cultural barriers that you see agencies and product companies encountering that are preventing effective cross-team collaboration from taking place? And what are some ways that you see these teams taking those small steps to build bridges to overcome those barriers?

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: I think organizations who don't make it a priority, that's one of the biggest barriers because it starts from, well, it can start both ways. It can start with somebody who's seeing success. And I read this book, I can't remember who the authors were. I think Chip and something, but they talk about bright spots in either projects or in organizations.

And these bright spots are things that are going really well and people are recognizing that. I think that can be a catalyst for some of this change or a catalyst for people to understand how the impact of that one little thing that people are doing can impact the entire organization. So I think that can happen either at the individual contributor level or from a leadership perspective. 

If you have a champion who's in leadership, you can say, Hey, why aren't we talking about this? Like we should talk about this. It's totally, there's no feeling involved. There's a business issue. Let's sit down. Let's figure out how we can collaborate together to, work through this issue.

One of the things that I've always, in a lot of the organizations I've worked at we've always operated off of EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And one of the things I love about that system is the issues list. Because it forces you to talk about things that are going wrong and to figure out how to write those and to also ask is this an issue or is this just something that we need to change about one thing or the other?

And so I think those types of conversations can help lead into better communication, more effective collaboration, just again, breaking down those silos to have different departments start to work towards a cohesive ecosystem within the organization. 

Galen Low: I love that duality of the bright spots. What does good look like? And sometimes we overthink it, right? Or it's okay, we have to paint a picture, this big mural of what good looks like and what success looks like. Whereas actually just noticing the small things that are going right and then reverse engineering them is it's a great way to, A) build that culture and make it a priority.

Oh, here's what, people have been agreeing that this is what we want. We want this customer to have said this about us, right? This testimonial or wow, like this experience has been so cohesive. Everyone knows what's going on or, our retention is up and new signups are up and we're doing something right.

So let's figure out what those things are. And the opposite, what are those things that are like holding us back? What's on that issues list that, is contributing to us, not achieving that every time doesn't have to be just to be bright spots. We want the whole thing to be bright, right?

Got to find the spots and then we got to make it bright everywhere. What's stopping us? Cause we know we can achieve it, right? Because we have bright spots. So how do we reverse engineer those bright spots into something that's uplifts everything?

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Yeah. And I think a lot of the times too, like another, I guess, cultural barrier I have run into before is that sometimes it's uncomfortable.

Sometimes it means you're reaching out to ask somebody for what feels like a favor when all reality it's no, this is how we work together. This is how we create strong relationships. And this is how we build that connection. So it makes it easier and easier for each of us to reach out to each other because we know we're both working towards the same goal. Because at the end of the day, we all are. We're working towards a successful business, a successful department, generating revenue, and a great customer experience. 

Galen Low: I love that. Yeah. It's like egos aside, right? Sometimes that's the biggest barrier that can come up is just this sort of this is my domain. You stay out. Everyone has to be willing. It has to be a priority to like actually talk to one another. 

It actually reminds me, I've seen some teams and their tooling actually reflects how siloed they are, and they're like, Oh, well, we take that task out of JIRA from the other team and we put it into Asana over here because we don't use JIRA. We use Asana. It's probably common and not problematic example, but it just sort of shows that, there's these like tool structures that reflect the fact that the work being done is quite siloed. 

And you've been working with platforms like HubSpot and I'm sure touching a lot of other sort of MarTech platforms, like how is technology like this tools like CRMs, tools like, know, all-in-one marketing or MarTech platforms. Like, how is this enabling and supporting the blend of people, other teams working together? 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: You are so right. Technology plays a huge factor in this. That's one of the things that I think I've always really loved about HubSpot is that it is meant to help break some of those silos down and I promise you, nobody has paid me to say this from HubSpot. So I'm going to just, disclaimer. 

Not sponsored, although open to it. 

Galen Low: HubSpot, call us. 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Just kidding. I think the thing that I love about HubSpot so much is that all of your data is in one place. There's, of course, going to be additional tools that you probably integrate with HubSpot.

But I think because it is so integration friendly, it allows you to connect those other team members that maybe are working in another department and set up workflows that still play nicely with something like HubSpot or something like Salesforce and creates that unified workplace. Cause you're right.

If people are working in one system that's not talking to the other system, like a customer service system isn't talking to say like marketing and sales is in HubSpot. And then CS is working in a completely different tool. If we're not creating that bridge between what happens when a deals goes one, it actually moves into a customer.

Then we have a gap in the way that our customer experiences and our internal teams experience that handoff between sales and marketing to CS. And then unintentionally, it leads to probably gaps in communications, maybe frustrations on the customer's end, or just not a streamlined communication. So I think the other side of this too, is, how we connect that technology.

The last couple of years, this role has just started to continue to pop up more and more is that RevOps role, that person that's helping create the bridges, because we can sit here and talk about connected technology all day long. But somebody has to connect them and somebody has to make sense of what's flowing in one and what's going into the other.

And that's where that RevOps role starts to become a really important largely for sales, but it's also understanding, okay, if we have these integrated systems, how are we using them? How's that feeding data in marketing? How's that feeding data to sales? And then therefore to see us like, is the data that we're feeding into sales and marketing complete?

What is the integrity of that data? And then how do we carry the integrity of that data down the line to CS? So, we can talk about technology, like I said, all day long, but there's also going to be somebody there helping support the integration and connectivity of those platforms in the way that data is utilized.

Galen Low: As you say, it's becoming more common to have this RevOps role, like the bridger, right? The one that's sort of overseeing the entire piece. And it makes sense that like organizations, I think there's some extreme examples. I think Canadian airline WestJet, like they reorgs around the customer journey.

So your department, stopped being whatever, ticketing, and started being whatever the stage of the journey is. And and they assign owners to each stage. Don't quote me on all of that's just the story I was told. But I like the idea, but it's also very dramatic, right? It's oh wait, so we need to like, call in external change consultants to like, zero base our org chart.

Let's throw away everything, nobody has a title anymore, and we're just gonna recreate it. That would definitely be a massive undertaking that I would procrastinate on as a business owner for a long time versus, something like installing a new role. That's yes, you have to carve out the job description.

Yes, you have to carve out, like how all the reporting lines are going to work, but having just that sort of bridger and understanding the value of someone who sees it as an entire picture to oversee that. 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Because that's the trick to this person who's sitting in this role, they have to have a really intimate understanding of the way that a business works.

And they have to be able to break down those bridges and inform each department of we're pulling in this data or we're connecting these apps with the intention of doing X, Y, and Z. And the output should be A, B, and C. And somebody who, doesn't have that experience or isn't able to really connect that and also tie that all back to revenue and how we're tracking your revenue performance.

Wow, this is going to sound really harsh, but they're probably not going to be successful. 

Galen Low: I mean, harsh and true, right? 

 What's interesting about us, and I wasn't going to take it here, but actually, like I promised I'd put the digital project management lens on it. And I realized that, you know what? A very common digital project that people in my community are running are like CRM implementations, right? And this sort of understanding and awareness of what stakeholders need to be involved. 

Like it's not just a CRM, it is the bridging mechanism from a tool standpoint. And in a perfect world, your primary stakeholder will be this RevOps person, right, who understands how it all needs to plug together, understands all the different stakeholders that need to touch it, can inform how, training is always that thing that somehow gets missed.

Right? It's oh, wait a minute, we're launching. CS hasn't even seen the solution yet. You're like, what do you mean? Oh so just having that whole cohesive understanding and someone who champions that, again, just really hammering home the importance of understanding the bigger picture, even as a project manager, doing an implementation like this, or interfacing with these teams as stakeholders.

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Some of the best project managers I've ever worked with have had that understanding. And maybe it's not the business level, but they understand it beyond just a service offering. They understand of what the impact is on the business, or on the certain department and they're able to make those connections between the stakeholders involved on the client side, but also the stakeholders involved, if it is an agency project on the agency side. 

Where they're able to effectively move and ask for the right things at the right time, because they just know it so well. And they're again, have that a little bit of a bigger perspective on what that thing is and what it's ultimately trying to accomplish versus just, going through a task list.

Galen Low: Absolutely. I love that. 

In fact, let's go there because, we've been talking about this like RevOps leader and I'm like, Oh, in a perfect world, that'll be your primary stakeholder. You're good. But what if that role doesn't exist? And you're a project manager and you're trying to see the bigger picture, but this is a new space to you.

And there's no one who, is helping you put all the puzzle pieces together. What do digital project managers sort of need to be thinking about? And what mindset do they need to have to make that project happen and sort of deliver value successfully when every team is like saying something different, not working together, they don't have that cohesion to even inform a cohesive solution.

Yeah, what would you recommend to a project manager in that scenario? 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: I, that's a good question. I would say be the bridge. I think if I'm like imagining it, like the PMs all in the Ted Lasso locker room, and there's that sign above the door that says, I think, can't remember what it says in the actual show itself, but be the bridge.

Everybody smacks it all the way out to the pitch. That would be, I think my advice. I think, PMs have this really unique view of the business and they interact with all the stakeholders that are involved with the project. Whereas a copywriter might not always interface with an AM or might not always interface with the client.

And so I think as a PM, it's our responsibility to say, okay, how am I going to get this person all the information they could potentially need to complete this task to eliminate back and forth or to eliminate any like confusion or to make sure that we are operating in a seamless way. And the same can be said when you're creating relationships across departments, find 30 minutes, just have a call with a director of a different department and ask what their pain points are when it comes to either service offerings or how products are ideated and developed or, whatever that looks like the conversation looks like.

And make that time to understand across like what each department is going through so that you can then better triage either certain projects that are coming in or services that are coming in that we're trying to execute on. It will make you a better communicator. Again, that uncomfortability of reaching out to different people and asking for certain things will start to banish, banish.

Maybe there's always that little uncomfortability, but, and then you will become this kind of champion internally as a person who knows how to reach out to developers, who knows how to talk to copywriters, who knows how to talk to operations, who knows how to talk to sales. Again, be the bridge between those departments to break down those silos.

Galen Low: I love that sort of interfacing privilege, I would say, right? To your point not every role gets to talk to all these people and, some folks listening and some folks in my network, their immediate reaction would be like, yeah, but that's not my lane. That would be me jumping way out of my lane.

It's not in my scope to call somebody and talk to them for 30 minutes to figure something out. And I, I think that sort of bigger picture that you mentioned earlier, right? Like that understanding of the bigger picture of what the mission, that's where the value comes from.

Not just because, you spent 30 minutes, you hadn't planned on spending talking to somebody. You may have just amplified the value of what you deliver by, 10x, 20x, a hundred X, just by having that conversation and like developing that understanding. 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Exactly. And those are those bright spots, like 30 minutes with somebody can go a long way and just building that relationship.

And when other people see you taking that type of initiative or building those types of relationships, they'll go, Oh, shoot. Well, I'm going to do that too. I want to be able to have really effective communication and great relationships with other departments. And then, it can lead to this domino effect in a lot of different ways of the way, other people approach certain situations or conversations or relationships, whatever that looks like.

So yeah, like tying it back to that bright spot. Small things like that go a long way. 

Galen Low: Love that. 

I had it in my mind to like maybe put you on the spot and walk us through what good could look like for as an example, right? All of these teams working together, right? A digital marketing team, a sales team, a customer success team, and other teams along the way. Like what in a perfect world would that high level pipeline look like and how would it be sort of experience internally to support a customer as they go through that journey?

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Yeah, that's a great question. Recently in my role at a SaaS company, which is where you and I worked together largely. Everything that we were touching from a marketing perspective, we always like my head of coworker that I worked with and we'd always sit down and go, okay, we're thinking about doing this thing.

But who does this impact? Do we need sales? Do we need customer service? Do we need to talk to our CS team about, different again, like for a simple example is we would do these customer interviews where we would either fly out to see the customer or we would sit down on a zoom call. But we wanted to talk to a sales did they have a good sales experience?

Would they be somebody that would speak highly of us? And then how is their CS experience going? Are they having success with the platform? Are they enjoying it? Are they having, building good relationships with our CS team? And then we would talk to, a couple of other internal stakeholders just to say again, what is the viability of this customer?

And should we move forward with doing this customer interview? Again, this is like a very basic example, but it helps demonstrate all of the departments that we were thinking of just this one initiative and how it could impact them. Because at the end of the day, if we pick a customer that had a poor sales experience, isn't having a great time in CS, and is having issues with billing or invoicing or something along those lines, then well, egg on our face because we didn't do our due diligence of connecting with the other departments and building those relationships to help them understand not only what we're trying to do, the value, what we're looking for from a customer story perspective.

And a lot of the times, we would do that outreach, like the other person, the other department, we get jazzed about it. They'd be like, Oh, my gosh, we just did this for this customer. And we have been talking about this. They would love to talk to you and brings them into the process. And they get excited about it.

And the quality of that initiative, whether it be customer interviews, would it be service offerings I think you said this earlier is 10x, 50x, 100x, whatever that multiplier is.

Galen Low: I really like that it starts with this risk management Ooh, what if we talk to somebody who didn't have a good experience, which is a very, solid logic. That's very, on point. And then sort of sparks into this enthusiasm of wanting to share, because of course sales has those people that are like, you got to talk to this person Oh, they had a great experience. They love us. And of course the CS people want to be like, yeah, here's a success story. This person has been with us for five years, like they're pushing up our customer lifetime value single handedly, right? Talk to these guys and then bringing that all together. Cause then everyone's, they were asked because they would be impacted and they feel a bit more together because they get to tell that story, as a journey through that.

It's like extra steps, right? It's probably feel slower. And especially for a SaaS company, you go from like bolt of lightning and early stages, right? And then it kinda, as you grow, it slows down and it feels a bit heavy, but I like the way you frame the value of that. It's it's actually the right weight.

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Yeah. And then, when you actually release some of those projects or some of those service offerings, the celebration internally is totally different than if you had just championed something, not brought anybody else in or not considered other departments and how it might impact them and everyone can celebrate together.

And again, you're just furthering your relationships. 

Galen Low: I love that. How's that for a bright spot, right? 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Hey.

Galen Low: A bit cohesive celebration. Everybody gets to celebrate. It's not one team's win. It's everybody's win. I love that. 

Listen, final question from me. Asking for a friend, I am not a digital marketing person. I'm just barely a product person. But for folks listening who are digital project managers, who are a bit new to this sort of SaaS model, new to the idea of working, with a digital marketing team and a sales team and a customer success team and potentially a RevOps team, like how can they learn a little bit more about this or what are the important things for them to learn and figure out about how these teams work together?

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: I would say be a sponge. There's a ton of material, a ton of resources, whether you're working in HubSpot or Salesforce or any of those other tools that have like academies that you can leverage that have role specific courses that you can take. But I think the most learning comes from just being a sponge and talking to other people and talking to other department heads, understanding how they're functioning.

And that will start to bring allow you to connect and put the puzzle pieces into place as you grow in your career and as you take the next leap inbound with whatever role comes next. 

Galen Low: I love that. Your job is not to deliver off a checklist. Your job is to be the bridge. 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Yes. 

Galen Low: We'll make that banner that we can slap.

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Yeah. Handle them all.

Galen Low: Jess, thank you so much for spending the time with me today. It's always a lot of fun chatting with you. 

Jessica D'Amato Crosby: Likewise. Thank you, Galen. I appreciate you having me on the show. 

Galen Low: All right folks, there you have it. As always, if you'd like to join the conversation with over a thousand like-minded project management champions, come join our collective. Head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership to learn more. And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch on thedigitalprojectmanager.com.

Until next time, thanks for listening.