This is the first episode of the “Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast.” Every other Monday, the IEPS posts a new show with Selling Essentials Marketplace partner Julie Murphy from Sage Communications.
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On today’s show, Julie shared some of her ideas on how Marketing organizations are evolving in their critical need to work with the Sales organization to accelerate the path to revenue.
Find Julie on LinkedIn.
JULIE’S TIP: Grab lunch with your best friend in marketing. Or if they’re not your best friend, if you barely know them, you especially need to get lunch, maybe a few lunches. The first step to putting together a really cohesive, effective plan is regular communication.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Julie Murphy, I’m really excited. This is a new sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. We’re going to be posting this show every other Monday. It’s the Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast. I got Julie Murphy. She’s the president of Sage Communications. Julie, every other week we’re going to be doing a show where we’re going to be talking about how critical it is for sales and marketing to work together to help the company achieve the goals. Some people might be thinking, “Well, yeah, sales and marketing should be working together,” but you and I have known each other for a long time. Sage Communications has been a great friend of what was the Institute for Excellence in Sales, and now the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. Sage Communications is a participant in our Selling Essentials Marketplace, which we’re very excited about.
Julie, it’s great to see you. You’ve been a good friend. You are a sponsor many times of the IES. We just had our 15th Annual Sales Excellence Award event, and you were there and you’ve been a great friend of the institute. For people who don’t know you, tell us a little bit about Sage and tell us about how your services support your clients’ selling efforts.
Julie Murphy: I am equally excited to do this podcast with you. We’ve been a huge fan of the IEPS since its inception. We work with sales leaders all the time. I think it’s critical for marketing and sales to be in alignment to maximize revenue. I’m excited to do the new podcast series.
As far as Sage Communications, we are a full service public relations and marketing firm. We work primarily with technology companies and government contractors, and we also do some work with the government themselves. Because we’re full service, it means that we do everything from media relations, speaker placement, award programs, all the way through branding, messaging, lead generation, advertising. I really consider us in terms of sales to sit at the top of funnel. It’s our job to increase your awareness, build your credibility, garner thought leadership, so that way by the time you’re meeting with your customers, they know who you are and they feel good about you. They know you’re an expert.
Fred Diamond: People will get to know you more through the course of the podcast, but Sage has worked with some of the biggest brands in the world to deliver them into B2G and B2B markets. As we go through the shows, we’re bringing on some of your clients and some companies you’ve worked with and talk about how critical it is. I love what you just said, marketing as top of funnel. Marketing is so critical right now, and actually, I’ve known this for a long time, and I’ve talked about this before. There was a classic article in the Harvard Business Review, believe it or not, Julie, in 2004 called Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing. It was a piece written by Neil Rackham, who wrote SPIN Selling, and Philip Kotler, who’s one of the great marketing professors and writers of all time, Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing.
We still see silos and we still see disconnects, and it can’t happen anymore. We’re doing today’s first show in June of 2025. Companies are under pressure to perform. It gets harder. So many things need to happen correctly. We don’t have time. Companies don’t have time to doddle. Everything needs to be about achieving revenue goals, growing markets, launching successful products, et cetera. Let’s get a little bit deeper. Why is it important for sales and marketing to come together today more than ever?
Julie Murphy: One of the biggest reasons why is because your buyers are self-educators now. They’re doing so much of their research before they even get to the sales meeting, that if you are not present where your buyers are learning, there’s a huge opportunity cost. When I say that marketing sits at the top of the funnel, it’s not just for consumers who are buying cars anymore. Technology decisions are very complex, usually lots of layers and nuance in there, and they’re doing all this research before they even sit down with their sales executive. If you are not on that short list because of what they’ve read or heard about you, it’s a real challenge.
When there’s message inconsistency in the sales funnel, so the top of the funnel is talking about issues and trends that are really not the same issues and trends that your sales team is hearing when they’re actually having conversations with their customers, there’s a huge disconnect. The revenue generation is so much more powerful when everything is in sync.
Fred Diamond: You do a lot of work in B2B, but you’re also well known in B2G, business to government. For people who are new to that term, the federal government, it’s Fortune One. It’s the biggest market in the world. It’s a challenged market in a lot of ways. Right now there’s things happening within the government to decrease the size. A lot of companies are faced with some challenges on how to approach the marketplace. Also, other public sector markets include state and local, some cases education, some cases healthcare. It’s a very interesting market in that the mission of those markets, it’s not to grow revenues, it’s not to have profit. It’s to achieve mission. I’m just curious, what are some of the specific ways that you’ve seen and that you’ve helped companies on the marketing side drive sales?
Julie Murphy: You bring up a really good point because marketing has gotten as close to one-to-one as possible. What I mean by that is you really have to speak your customer’s language into their specific challenge. If marketing is very generic, or in the case that you just mentioned, for a public sector organization, if you’re using commercial terms, it’s really not going to be relevant and you’re going to lose that sale pretty quickly. Our goal is to be in sync. There’s lots of different ways that marketing can help with that.
For example, federal agencies, like you said, they’re not revenue driven, but they have specific missions. They may need to meet a specific federal mandate or say a specific deadline. Maybe it’s a cybersecurity deadline that they have to meet. Marketing can do a great job of warming up the market and warming up leads by providing a very well-timed thought leadership campaign. You’re getting those federal agencies information that they really need and want in a very specific window of time, and you’re positioning yourself as the expert, as the go-to helper to these federal agencies. That can be very effective in generating leads.
The other piece too is, as you know, in the public sector market, this is not a quick sale. The sales process is sometimes months, sometimes years. Thought leadership and marketing, it’s another way to keep in front of your customer. You’re not just always knocking on the door like, “Hey, don’t forget about me.” You’re providing a white paper on a timely topic. Or something has come out in the news and you’re providing your perspective on it. You’re there to help your customer learn and educate themselves and you stay top of mind throughout that whole process.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. A lot of B2B and complex B2G sales, it’s a long process, and even B2B, you have to hit multiple places along the way, and you need to keep demonstrating to your customer and prospects that you know what they’re going through and you know the challenges that they’re facing. You can’t just show things like, “We offer great technology that does X, Y, and Z.” You’re right. I love the way you just said, it’s one-on-one a lot right now where the great sales professionals and the great sales organizations, they’re focused specifically on, how am I going to help this customer achieve this goal, or get to this mission, or provide this type of service out there?
You alluded to this in your previous answer, but marketing’s a very broad term. A lot of people, when they think of marketing in the sales world, they think about lead generation and they don’t think a lot more beyond that. That’s a piece of it. You mentioned thought leadership. What are some of the other ways that marketing now has to accelerate the sales process?
Julie Murphy: There’s a whole spectrum that marketing can help you. From the very top line, strategic is the thought leadership. Are you talking about the topics and the challenges that are going to be most interesting to your buyer? Are you really helping them from a topical standpoint? Down to lead generation, if your sales team needs some qualified leads, all the way through what we call sales enablement. We do this with a lot of our clients. This is when you’re really in lockstep with the sales team. You’re helping with everything from pitch decks, preparing for major RFPs. Maybe you have a landing page or a specific campaign around a major RFP, you’re regularly meeting with your sales team on pipeline review, to very specific materials that can be around a specific federal mandate. It can be ROI calculators. It could be scripts and talking points to help frame the pitch.
To me, the marketing team is really embedded into the sales team, and that should be a really close process. Everything from top of funnel awareness building, credibility building, all the way through lead generation and preparing them for the actual sale and conversation.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. It’s gotten so much easier for people on the marketing side to understand a lot of that. A lot of times the marketing people were either in the office or they were at events, and the salespeople were on the field. It wasn’t always easy to bring people together. But now, with all forms of communication, and of course AI, the ability for everybody to get smarter about what the specific customer needs, there’s no excuse for both sides not to enable the other side.
Julie Murphy: Customers are skeptical if they get something that’s too generic, especially in the public sector market. The best way to earn trust is to show that you truly understand your customer. To show that you truly understand your customer, it’s got to be very customized communication. It’s what I call the Super Bowl of marketing. You’ve got a really wide reach. It’s a more generic message across a wide audience. The good news is, is you don’t have to necessarily even have a massive marketing budget in order to reach your goals. You have to have a very targeted, really aligned marketing plan that’s well aligned with sales in order to reach your goals on just the high priority targets.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. As you know, I was the marketing director for Compaq’s federal Marketplace in the mid-nineties. Our big challenge was showing the government market that we were committed to it, that we understood words like GSA, GWAC, Government-Wide Acquisition Contract, IDIQ. You have to get specific, not just into the program, but where the government customer wants to go, and the specific service that the citizens are needing, et cetera. It requires just pinpoint type of precision to get those messages across.
One thing that you talked to me about, you mentioned to me that a lot of times Sage Communications was brought in to a company by the sales leader. Talk a little bit more about that.
Julie Murphy: Many of our clients, a lot of times initially through a sales leader, maybe he or she has worked with us in the past and has gone to a new company. To me, that really validates how well it works when marketing and sales work together. In public sector, it’s not going to work to use the commercial marketing language or something that sounds too corporate or too generic. You have to showcase that you know and understand your customer in the market. A lot of times Sage serves as the arms and legs and the eyes and ears of the companies we work with. We’re also news junkies, so we’re following the stuff 24/7. The federal mandate comes out or something hits the news cycle that’s really relevant, we flag it to our clients, and we’re immediately reaching out to the reporters to help our clients provide expertise on timely topics that are the news of the day. Being able to provide that really positions our clients as experts.
In order to really do that, you have to live and breathe this stuff. It’s got to be something that you understand, that you enjoy, that you’re passionate about. Marketing programs that are built within this context of really deep knowledge of the government and their customer are the most successful, I think. A lot of times it is true, a lot of the sales leaders are sometimes our biggest fans and will bring us in, which we of course really appreciate, but we love working with the sales leaders. I look at it as, if we’re not making our sales leaders successful, if they don’t feel I’m helping them, I’m not doing my job well.
Fred Diamond: You as a marketing agency and the whole marketing organization, the reason that you are around and they’re around is because you got to drive sales. If sales are driven and revenue is driven, we say this all the time, then the rest of the organization can be supportive.
It’s interesting, something you were just saying, the average sales rep needs to understand intimately where his or her customer and where their industry is going. A lot of times when people ask me, how can I have a great career, a long successful career in sales? I’ll say, you got to have one or two things. You got to be really deep in a market or an industry, where you understand where it’s going and you’re embedded in that market. The other thing I say is, or you could be a real expert on a technology or some type of service that will be needed by that marketplace.
Marketing more than ever, I like the way you say it, has to really be students of the market, has to understand globally. Specifically, as you’re working with the sales professionals to understand where their customers are going, all sales is built on accounts. It’s built on how are we winning this business and this account. There’s a global number of what we’re bringing in, but it all gets driven up.
I’m just curious, how detailed do you think marketing needs to be to understand at the account level? Is it important? Let’s say for example, federal, do you need to know department level, or is it important to get down to agency level and maybe even programmatic today? We’re doing today’s interview in June of 2025.
Julie Murphy: Absolutely. You should get to agency and programmatic, and obviously there are so many of those that you can’t know all things. That’s why it’s important to get with your sales team and do that pipeline review, because if there’s one particular huge RFP that’s coming out with a specific federal agency, then we can get smart on that individual agency. What are their specific challenges they’re facing? When is the contract up for renewal? All of these details so that we can put together a really customized campaign. I do think it’s really important to get down to the agency and programmatic level.
Fred Diamond: Once again, this is the first Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast. Every other week, Julie Murphy from Sage Communications is going to come on the show with me, and we’re going to talk about these topics and how marketing and sales can really add significant value to what the company’s trying to achieve. Then we’re going to be bringing on some sales leaders and some marketing leaders to talk about some specific things that they’re doing.
Julie, before I ask you for your final specific action step for people listening to the show, let’s get a little bit detailed here, a little more specific on some joint planning sessions. How can joint planning sessions and feedback loops between marketing and sales improve targeting and messaging for highly specific government or enterprise accounts?
Julie Murphy: I think that the sales and marketing team should be getting together on a regular basis. At minimum, you’re getting together quarterly to talk from a strategic standpoint. Who are our biggest targets? What topics are we aligning with? Is the messaging still resonating or do we need to tweak it there? I think on a monthly, or even a weekly level, you’re looking at pipeline. You’re looking at the tactics that are being used. Are they being effective? Is the market responding how we want them to? Because if you wait six months to have a meeting to say, “Okay, this isn’t really that important to our customer,” and we’re only changing course halfway through the year, it’s a huge disservice. You’ve burned through a lot of budget during that timeframe. Meet on a regular basis is my recommendation.
Fred Diamond: I told this story before. When I was at Apple Computer in the beginning of my career, I was in a junior marketing role, and the various sales organizations in public sector had sales meetings. My boss said to me, he said, “For you to be valuable, you need to be in those meetings.” I started going to the meetings and I would sit on the periphery, not at the big table, on the chairs lining the big table, right by the window. The sales people would look at me like, “What is he doing here?” Then I dug in and started studying the market, and then I would raise my hand at the third or fourth meeting and say something, and then eventually I would be sitting at the table, and then eventually I would be contributing so much. Most of those sales meetings were about the accounts and the pipeline.
My message here to the marketing professionals who are listening to this is salespeople are on the front line trying to get your products and services and solutions into accounts. You got to put in the time and energy and effort to understand the stuff that we’re talking about here. I like how we’re talking about specifically how you can add value to what the sales professional is trying to achieve. Of course, it’s to grow their accounts, pursue new ones, and provide more solutions to them.
This was fun, Julie. I’m really excited for the show that we’re going to be posting every other week. Again, Sage Communications is a participant in the IEPS Selling Essentials Marketplace. If there are people who are listening out there, the IEPS is the resource for all things related to sales. If you want to know more about Sage, reach out to me, Fred Diamond, and we’ll connect with Julie and get her in front of your company. This was fun, don’t you think?
Julie Murphy: This was a blast. I’m really looking forward to it, Fred.
Fred Diamond: It’s going to be great. Julie, as we end the Sales Game Changers Podcast, you’ve given us so many great ideas. Give us one final action step, something specific our listeners should do to take their sales career to the next level.
Julie Murphy: Well, the next step, especially if you haven’t done it recently, is to grab lunch with your best friend in marketing. Or if they’re not your best friend, if you barely know them, you especially need to get lunch, maybe a few lunches. The first step to putting together really cohesive, effective plan is regular communication. That’s the best place to start.
Fred Diamond: That’s smart. We talk a lot about building relationships. Sales also has to help marketing. We’re talking here, there’s a lot of tools, obviously, but tell your marketing people what you need, what you think you need. Again, marketing needs to have the initiative. I think that’s one of the key messages here, to be proactive, to understand the accounts, understand where the company’s going, listen to what they talk about from a pipeline perspective, but yeah, get together, talk, understand, and promote and grow your company.
Once again, I want to thank Julie Murphy from Sage Communications for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo