During the 20th episode of Addicted to Growth, sales leaders Travis King, and Kevin Mulrane connect with Principal & Founder of JD2 Consulting, Jeff Davis. Listen to learn about Jeff’s story, the biggest misconceptions people have about marketing, how we can create togetherness, and more.

Jeff Davis Short Bio

Jeff Davis is an international keynote speaker, consultant, and award-winning author of "Create Togetherness".  He specializes in helping B2B companies optimize revenue growth by strategically aligning their sales and marketing teams. Jeff pulls from his over 15 years of experience marketing, sales, and business development at Fortune 100 organizations to early-stage startups. He has experience in a myriad of different industries including healthcare, manufacturing, technology, more. 

Jeff has worked with companies such as Salesforce, LinkedIn, Seismic, and Oracle. He speaks regularly on the topic of alignment transformation at large conferences, company meetings, sales kick-offs, association meetings, and more.  He is also the executive producer and host of the fast-growing TheAlignmentPodcast.com which is heard by B2B professionals in over 25 countries as well as the creator and host of the Sales + Marketing Alignment Summit which has hosted an exclusive group of sales and marketing leaders for the past four years. Jeff holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. 

Episode Highlights:

1. How Jeff realized his aim to help b2b CEOs, sales, and marketing leaders strategically align sale and marketing so they can optimize revenue growth
2. How Jeff made the jump from sales to marketing and where he’s at now
3. The biggest misconceptions salespeople have about marketing 
4. They don’t understand what marketers do
5. Marketing & Sales Alignment 
6. Ask what are the possibilities?
7. What does great look like?
8. What can marketing do to make your job easier and help you close deals faster?
9. Marketing's job is to set the stage and create a marketplace where people understand the value of your product or service
10. It’s getting you in front of the types of accounts that you need to talk to
11. Marketing is one to many and sales is one to one. 
12. Sales teams need to realize they’ll never be able to have the reach that a marketing team has
13. Ask “so why are we doing this?” 
14. When you get in front of the right accounts, make sure you are very crystal clear around why they should care
15. The companies getting marketing and sales alignment right are stopping and asking questions 
16. Where most organizations fail when trying to align marketing and sales
17. Majority of organizations don’t do this weel because they look at it short term
18. It takes a lot of stakeholders to agree, time, resources, and are just now recognizing that this is serious enough of an issue that they need to take seriously.
19. What best in class looks like as it relates to marketing and sales alignment
20. Three Pillars of Alignment and Transformation - look at what’s not working and then examine companies you consider best in class 
21. Data
22. Process
23. Communication
24. The cost of inaction around now getting sales and marketing alignment 
25. How to position the sales and marketing alignment conversation internally
26. Trends Jeff is currently seeing 
27. B2B adopting B2C tactics and strategies 
28. How do people buy whether it be b2c or b2b? What is the first very first step? 
29. The Paradigm Shift that must happen in order to breakthrough the alignment noise

Favorite Points:

1. Create togetherness.
2. Ask “so why are we doing this?”:
3. Where most organizations fail when trying to align sales and marketing

Tweetable Quotes:

“As b2b practitioners, we have to recognize that if you were still talking about features and benefits to buyers, you were way behind.” – Jeff Davis

"How do people buy whether it be b2c or b2b? What is the first step What is the very first step?."– Jeff Davis

“Many folks I talked to small business owners especially. I asked them simple, like marketing questions about like, Who's your target customer? What's your positioning? They don't know. So I'm like, that's great that you can scale pushing content and convert that to a sale. But who are you trying to talk to? That's the bigger issue. And if you don't know that, you're just gonna be spinning your wheels.."– Jeff Davis

"Trying to operate a solo silo by yourself, is not the smartest way to move forward, It all comes down to creating togetherness.."– Jeff Davis

Links

Website: meetjeffdavis.com

Social media: @meetjeffdavis (Linkedin, Twitter, IG, and FB)

Podcast: TheAlignmentPodcast.com

Book: CreateTogethernessBook.com (audiobook coming end of July)

Small Business Community: ReThinkSmallBiz.com

Travis King: Linkedin

Kevin Mulrane: LinkedIn