Revenue Starts with Brand. Brand is Marketing + HR.

Brandi Starr [00:00:36]:
Welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host, Brandi Starr and we have another amazing episode for you today. Marketing leaders know that brand drives revenue. HR owns the employee experience or employee brand, and together they shape the full brand story inside and out. So why is it that the people who build the brand are still way too often fighting for influence in the boardroom? Today on Revenue Rehab, we are digging into this disconnect between brand power and decision making power and how marketing and HR can find their voice, combine their influence and drive greater impact where it matters most. So today I am thrilled to be joined by Sherry Grote. Sherry is the creator of the Harmony Hero framework, helping professionals go from unseen to unforgettable. With over 25 years experience driving revenue growth and brand transformation in B2B and SaaS, she's led high performing marketing teams and launched go to market strategies that deliver exceptional roi.

Brandi Starr [00:01:49]:
Through her keynote, orchestrating Harmony from Murmur to Maestro, Sherry empowers leaders to align teams, lead loudly and rise above the noise to make meaningful impact. Sherry, welcome to Revenue Rehab. Your session begins now.

Sherry Grote [00:02:10]:
Thank you so much. I'm so honored to be here with you, Brandi, to have a good conversation today.

Brandi Starr [00:02:16]:
Yes. I had the pleasure of meeting you at an event and when you started talking about the connection between marketing and HR and brand, I was like, I gotta talk to you. But before we jump in, our industry loves its fancy jargon and let's be real, some of the buzzwords are just fluff and they can hold us back more than they can help. And so here at Revenue Rehab, we like to banish some of those buzzwords. So, so tell me, what is one overused buzzword you'd like to erase from existence?

Sherry Grote [00:02:52]:
Oh, wow, that's a great question. I think probably one of the ones that drives me crazy when you're in conversations is amplify.

Brandi Starr [00:03:07]:
Ah, now why don't you like amplify?

Sherry Grote [00:03:12]:
So I think in today's artificial everything world that we live in, it overuses it in every aspect and I think it's lost some of the power. And it's really sad because from a marketing perspective, I have always used that with sales teams about how to amplify our awareness and things like that. And get them to be involved in social selling. And because it's everywhere and everybody's amplifying everything, it's kind of lost its. It's lost its luster for me. And it, it really kind of makes me crazy when I read it everywhere.

Brandi Starr [00:03:47]:
Yeah. And, you know, I think that's how the buzzwords come about. Like, something starts off as an impactful word and then it gets overused to the point that it has no meaning. And one thing I like to say instead of amplify is let's turn the volume up. You know, I am someone who likes music. I like my music loud. And so when I think about getting ourselves up there, it's like, let's, let's, let's crank the volume up as opposed to amplify.

Sherry Grote [00:04:19]:
I love it. Especially since I talk about leading loudly. And leading loudly doesn't always mean. Right? Leading by being the loudest voice in the room. Oftentimes it's about how you use your influence to actually impact people and doing that in a way that gets you noticed. And that is all about what I want to help marketing and HR leaders do.

Brandi Starr [00:04:44]:
Awesome. So that is a perfect transition into today's topic. And so, you know, the right people, having the right voice within organizations is an issue that impacts so many companies and it's often misunderstood or overlooked or deprioritized. And. And so I want to start with what is the most damaging myth about the role of marketing and HR in revenue growth that's holding companies back?

Sherry Grote [00:05:16]:
I think the most damaging piece is thinking that marketing is a faucet that you can just turn on and you will get instant results. Marketing is not like that. It's a pump. It's a. Well, you have to pump it. You have to start doing the things. You have to create an engine that actually generates results. And it's very damaging when organizations swap out people, make changes in marketing in particular, or try to do things that are.

Sherry Grote [00:05:44]:
That are a massive interruption into the business as opposed to making small incremental changes. And from an HR perspective, I think it's by marginalizing the voice of how important it is for HR leaders who are responsible for the people and the culture. And when you don't give them empowerment to have a voice in the organization, it's very damaging to the culture, to the leader, to the people, especially in an artificial everything world.

Brandi Starr [00:06:16]:
I agree. And honestly, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you because you don't hear a lot of conversations that are pairing marketing and HR together. You know, I would, I put them in the bucket of unlikely partnerships. But there is a key opportunity here. And it's not just marketing giving HR tchotchkes to give to new employees, which is so often, you know, where people see the alignment. But there really is a huge opportunity here in driving the overall brand of the organization, which then leads to revenue. And the revenue is, is what we all care about at the end of the day. And so why do you think companies are getting this wrong in not and to use our buzzword, amplifying these voices within the organization.

Sherry Grote [00:07:14]:
So if you just think about how a board deck gets put together, right? If you're sitting in a meeting and y' all are at the executive table and you're all talking about how we're going to do the board deck and how does that look? It looks like, okay, the CFO is going to talk about the financials of the organization because that's important. They're going to talk about sales, what closed, what's coming up? Are we going to hit the numbers for the next quarter? Then you're probably going to, in a B2B SaaS world, you're going to have a product discussion. It's going to be all about how is the technology, what is the roadmap, what new features, what's the user adoption, all those kinds of things. Especially if you're in a PLG motion scenario for marketing leaders, which is a product led growth for those who are not familiar with that. So you have sales led growth and you have product led growth and then marketing, what are you doing to support everybody? Right? And what events are we going to. Maybe that's all they want to really talk about. And hr, we really don't have time for you to talk, so just put your slide in there and we'll just make sure that the board has that. Now is that ever going to change? Because each of those things is important when you're having a board discussion.

Sherry Grote [00:08:27]:
Probably not. But if you could turn up the volume on how the influence of a marketing leader and an HR leader is impacting the CFO and impacting the chief sales officer or the chief revenue officer and then the chief product officer, how you're helping them in your building pipeline for them and you're showcasing how you can impact what they're doing in the product. And now you have a cfo, a CRO and a CPO who are talking about what marketing and the people and HR are doing for them. Now your voice has been turned up, you've been amplified to use our, our bad word. Right. You are no longer just trying to tout your own things in your section, but marketing and the people are being brought up all along the way. And how much different of a conversation would that be and how more holistic would that be to a board listening to how the health of a company really is.

Brandi Starr [00:09:33]:
Very, very interesting because we hear, you know, we see a lot of work where the head of marketing is, has become more collaborative with the head of sales so that they are telling the same story. We've seen lots of conversations around marketing leaning into being the chief Market officer and dropping the ing. And so there's been a lot of focus on that side. We've also seen lots of conversations about CMOs and CFOs being, you know, the, the new wave of partnership. Talk to me more. If I'm the head of marketing and I'm trying to go, you know, support the movement, get a, a better seat at the table. And I'm trying to tap into my HR counterpart to do that. What does that look like? Because this is one that I say I personally have, you know, no experience with.

Brandi Starr [00:10:34]:
Throughout my entire career, the HR partnership has really been how many water bottles do we need to order for the next quarter or the next six months? It has not been a true partnership. So I'd love to hear what does good look like in this scenario?

Sherry Grote [00:10:52]:
Absolutely. So it's interesting for me because as I have built this organization and this initiative and this framework. Right. For. For the Harmony Hero, I looked back and reflected on my career and usually I was very tight with the HR leader in the organization that I was in. We always had a natural relationship. And I don't know if it was because most of the time we were females and usually the only females at the table, or if it was just my personality or what. But I've taken a lot of time to reflect on it.

Sherry Grote [00:11:31]:
And what I have seen is that both marketing and hr, especially a female's, can be the most marginalized voice at the table when they have a seat at the table. So what do you do to make that look like good? You build a rapport with the HR leader as a marketing person or as an HR person, you build a rapport with the marketing leader because the three things you should be most concerned about are people, processes and technology. And it seems that in today's day and age, we're more focused on the technology and maybe the processes than we are the people and the way that we're creating pipeline. And I believe the People, part of it is so crucial in today's day and age. So a great partial partnership for a marketing leader or an HR leader is to one band together because you two have a great synergy of you need to bring the right people into the organization. You need to help build the right kind of culture. The brand connection is very important, and it's more than just to your point. Tchotchkes that are given out at new employees coming into the organization.

Sherry Grote [00:12:44]:
It's all about the brand of the actual company and the tone of voice. And so bringing in the right people, marketing, having a relationship with HR that shares, here's our brand, here's our tone, here's how we want to go to market. This is how we talk. This is how we can internally communicate to the organization who we are and what we really stand for and start building a culture. That's what great looks like when you can build that culture where people really want to be there. And you do get to be a great place to work, whether you've done the survey that gets you that or not. Right. You actually have an organization where people, people like working with each other.

Sherry Grote [00:13:25]:
And I think it can start very simply between HR and marketing, and then it can build through the rest of the organization.

Brandi Starr [00:13:35]:
I definitely see some opportunity there. And your answer brought up a few key points that I'll dig into separately. The first thing is you definitely raised a thought in terms of if this is more of a gender challenge than a function challenge. Because statistically, HR and marketing are the two functions that tend to be more often led by women by comparison to CEO, CFO, CRO, CPO, all of the other Cs. And I'm, you know, it raises the question for me is the challenge that we're having that there aren't enough women leaders and that those women leaders are marginalized, or if we see the same challenges in organizations where it is men in those roles. Any examples that you've seen one way or the other?

Sherry Grote [00:14:42]:
So I think it. I think both are correct. I think there isn't a single one answer to that. I think that yes, we do need more female leaders in different roles within the organization. And I don't think you hire them because they're female. You hire them because they're the right person for the job and you attract that into the organization. So I do think that that is one side of it. The other side is, is that I would love to say that it's just a female thing.

Sherry Grote [00:15:15]:
It's not. And the proof in that is that There are many CMOs right now who have just recently been displaced for one reason or another. Value was not seen, unseen, unheard. And I'm Talking to male CMOs on a regular basis. So I would love to tell you that it's just one or the other. On the HR side, I do tend to see more female just because it's typically that's who's in that role anyway. And I see them. They're also oftentimes more junior, not always, but sometimes.

Sherry Grote [00:15:53]:
And they don't know how to use their voice and find their influence because they were hired as kind of an afterthought of oh, we have to have this right and let's find an inexpensive way to do this. And I don't think they get the value within the organization of hiring high quality, you know, a type A type A personality and incredible strength in those people that they hire. They're. They're just getting, you know, I can get this person for inexpensive and it's usually the females that will do that.

Brandi Starr [00:16:35]:
Very interesting. And you know, I'm glad to see that the challenge does not just exist with women. I feel like when it's a business challenge as opposed to a bias, it is a bit easier to overcome because we're applying more of a logical mindset. The other thing that your last two statements made me think about with CMOs being displaced and the tenure for CMOs being one of the shortest in the C suite, we do often see this something's not working, rip and replace when it comes to marketing. And one of the things, you know, being in consulting, I see how things work in a lot of organizations. And comp structure is one of those things that I see see in many companies is very misaligned in that you will have whether it's the leaders or you know, the people in more of the boots to the ground roles, how they are incented is not aligned across the board. So how marketing is incented is. Is one way that doesn't align to collaboration and alignment with sales.

Brandi Starr [00:17:50]:
And the sales leader may be comped in a different way than the sales reps. And there's like all this sort of conflict that is happening and I would say generally unintentionally, like I don't think anyone is purposefully, you know, driving people in. In different directions. But it's often the head of marketing that really sees this breakdown and challenge and having that real relationship with HR could be an opportunity to help to influence that. Because even when I've heard other marketing and sales leaders Talk about, yeah, there's some places where comp structure doesn't make sense. It's unproductive. It's not incenting the behaviors that we want. It's very much like, not my monkeys, not my circus.

Brandi Starr [00:18:38]:
Like, I don't own that. Like, this is, you know, what I'm given. So I work with it. And that may be another opportunity because that is, you know, if we get everyone incented that we are all rowing the boat in the same direction, there's a huge impact on revenue. And that goes back to what you were saying about the forgotten people aspect. And so often the, you know, CMO is like, oh, marketing's not doing its job. Take them out when it could be marketing's doing the job they're incented to do. They're just not aligned.

Brandi Starr [00:19:12]:
Any thoughts on that?

Sherry Grote [00:19:14]:
I think it's 100% a huge problem that you will see in organizations. Oftentimes I have walked into an organization and for example, marketing was not aligned with sales on, hey, you're supposed to be creating pipeline, right? They were more on lead gen or you know, just MQLs and SQLs and things like that as opposed to actual pipeline. And I have found that when you align sales and marketing on the revenue goals that are required for the organization, it changes the game between sales and marketing. Because now they're speaking the same language. Right? One thing that I have done in multiple organizations that I've worked in is we've moved the BDR teams underneath marketing and they, we changed their compensation plan so that they were incented on opportunities that were created in the system that came from marketing originated sources. And so that right there alleviates friction between sales and marketing because marketing isn't tossing over a bunch of leads that sales isn't going to follow up on. Sales can focus on closing deals, which is what's going to drive revenue. And you have a person in the organization in a BDR role reporting to the person who's responsible for creating pipeline for sales.

Sherry Grote [00:20:43]:
And, and so when the 27 touches are not made, you can go back and say, hey, you're in, you're in charge of this because you report to me. Why are you not doing this? Right? So it's just an amazing transition when you have people aligned on compensation and in doing that and making those transitions in the way people were compensated. I worked with HR because I saw that things were not aligning to where that organization was going to all be focused on the same KPIs, the right dashboards, the, the right Information even to present to the board. Right. And it's just a, it's a very crucial thing and I think so many, there's so many opportunities to fix that in organizations today.

Brandi Starr [00:21:30]:
Yeah, I definitely agree there. And I just did a solo episode not too long ago where I talked about the mdr so marketing development rep, which is exactly what you're talking about. I mean whether you call it bdr, mdr, you know, whatever, whatever, you know, we got all the R's. But having those people directly in the marketing function and able to bother drive pipeline. But also because we know the buyer's journey has changed so much. Also able to really be supportive of the buyer and not pushing so much of schedule a demo, schedule demo, meet with us, you know, Whereas that's where BDRs and SDRs, they're really focused on that. But you've talked a couple times about the Harmony Hero framework and I would be remiss if I did not ask you to tell me what that is.

Sherry Grote [00:22:33]:
Absolutely, I would love to and thank you for asking. So the Harmony Hero came about as I started to put together what are the things that have made me successful in my life or in my relationships. For those listening, I also have a full time caregiving scenario and so that can provide some challenges that and I know there's a lot of people in today's day and age who have to deal with that. And mine in particular is a brain injury that happened to my husband. And so there's a lot of challenges that come with how do you orchestrate harmony in your house and in your work. So bringing in caregiving and career and balancing all these things, I realized that it is these characteristics, it's a heightened eq. You have to be able to read the emotional intelligence, not just the artificial intelligence in the world. You need to drive alignment, which we've talked a lot about today.

Sherry Grote [00:23:29]:
Right. You have to be resilient. So you have to be able to bounce back from the challenges that do happen. You have to know how to motivate people in the right way because everybody is motivated differently. And if you don't identify those differences between your team members or your peers or your executive team or your or you're bored even then you're not going to know how to get the job done. And you have to be very open minded about new ideas and not be stuck in what I call stinking thinking and being listening to new ideas because maybe something from somebody else is going to come in and it'll be 10 times better than what you were trying to do that wasn't working. You also have to be very navigational. You have to be able to navigate either challenges, change or remove obstacles for your team so that they can actually achieve results.

Sherry Grote [00:24:27]:
And finally, you have to be youthful. You have to celebrate progress over perfection. There are too many marketing leaders that I have known in my lifetime, myself included, that want to be perfect. They want to get it right. You don't want to launch until it's perfect. Sometimes it's better to just get the progress, get the motion, get it going. And in today's digital world, you can fix it along the way. So it's really easy to correct any quote unquote mistakes or things that aren't working well.

Sherry Grote [00:24:54]:
And at the end of the day, when I work with either marketing, HR leaders or executive teams and organizations, I want them to walk away with a composed mindset so they think it, they think differently and envision their symphony. They can actually see, see where they want to go and then they want to harmonize their influence and be able to share that like we talked about, so that other people are benefiting from the things that you're doing and you're sharing that with your organization and being able to conduct that with confidence. Actually own it, stand in it. This is who you are. This is what you're good at. Stand in it and own it. And then finally they would walk away with the ability to build their own playlist and live it. They'll have a way to actually have a personalized roadmap that will help them utilize their influence in this way that will make a business impact and drive revenue at the end of the day.

Sherry Grote [00:25:53]:
Because as we talked about, that's what's most important.

Brandi Starr [00:25:57]:
All right, so we've talked about the problem. Now it's time to fix it. Welcome to the lightning round. So fast answers only. Let's make sure our listeners leave with actions that they can take right now to start making an impact. So first one, finish this sentence. If your company has undervalued brand voices, what's the first thing you should do?

Sherry Grote [00:26:26]:
I think the first thing you need to do is ensure that you have built rapport with sales, marketing and HR to be in total alignment.

Brandi Starr [00:26:36]:
What's one red flag that signals a company has a missing brand influence problem but might not realize it yet?

Sherry Grote [00:26:44]:
If your employees don't have psychological safety, then you do not have a culture that is going to have a positive brand influence.

Brandi Starr [00:26:54]:
What's the most common mistake people make when trying to fix this change out.

Sherry Grote [00:26:59]:
A leader before they've had a time to actually make an impact in the business.

Brandi Starr [00:27:04]:
And what's the fastest action someone can take today to make progress?

Sherry Grote [00:27:09]:
I think the fastest thing that you can do is know what your 5% is. That makes you different from everybody else doing the type of job that you do, whether you're in HR, marketing, finance, sales. Know that 5% that makes you different.

Brandi Starr [00:27:27]:
Awesome. Every good session ends with a plan for progress. And so, Sherry, I have enjoyed this conversation. Where can our audience find you to continue the conversation?

Sherry Grote [00:27:39]:
I am on LinkedIn so you can definitely reach me there. I do have a website. It is theharmonyhero.com and I am on all socials at the Harmony Hero.

Brandi Starr [00:27:52]:
Awesome. Well, we will make sure to link to both the Harmony Hero as well as your LinkedIn so so that people can stay connected. Well, thank you so, so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Sherry Grote [00:28:05]:
It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much and I totally enjoyed the conversation.

Brandi Starr [00:28:09]:
Awesome. Well, thanks everyone for joining us. I hope you have enjoyed my conversation with Sherry. I can't believe we're at the end. Until next time.

Sherry Grote [00:28:19]:
Bye.

Brandi Starr [00:28:19]:
Bye.