(189) The Secret to Fixing Your Funnel - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RxzJH6BvK0

Transcript: (00:00) I wouldn't do anything net new, right? I would take stock of what you have in market and you're investing in today and then renovate. I'd go like now's the time like to use the housing example, right? Like interest rates are high. Don't go buy a new house. Get a fixer upper or fix the house you're in, right? And I think the same applies here. (00:25) And you know, I think a real life example I'm seeing a lot of is like growth is getting harder to come by from a marketing perspective, but yet when you look at a team and what they're doing, you know, at a like you said, say hundred million dollar ARR company, they have field marketing, they're running performance ads, they're doing LinkedIn, they're creating content. (00:43) Think about how those things work together and is there opportunity to connect them better so that ultimately the customer gets a better experience. One tactical example is I talk to a lot of sales folks who say, "We want more like private dinners. We want more bespoke experiences and opportunities to get in front of prospects." And then I ask marketing. (01:07) I say, "Okay, well, how are you identifying prospects for sales to invite to these dinners?" And they're like, "Well, we're not." [Music] Hey, Steve, welcome to GTM Live. Thanks so much for being on today's show. Hi. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, we're just recording now, but we've been um we've been bantering back and forth now for a few minutes, and it's been fun. (01:32) Um learning a lot about Steve's uh agency, 12th agency, and you know, looking forward to having Steve on the show today. Um a little bit of a background. So, I had posted something on LinkedIn maybe about a week or so ago, and as always, you know, good comments, insightful comments. um you know people engaging with the post. (01:53) But I thought Steve you had a really solid well-written response to one of my posts just around like MQL volume and you know your MQL to pipeline conversion rate. Um and that sparked a really good conversation in our DMs and from that I was like oh damn like Steve would make a great guest on GTM Live. So here we are today. I'm glad it worked out. That's awesome. I know. (02:14) It's funny when you know when you go and you comment something. I didn't quite think that that would be the outcome, but now one little LinkedIn comment has turned into a conversation and now we're here and we're connecting. So, it's it's pretty awesome. Yeah, we get a lot of comments, too. I think um a lot of folks like agencies or you know like solo revops people who agree. (02:36) Um but it's really rare I think that you get like a really thought like well-written thoughtprovoking comment like you had. Um, and also the thing is I think our perspective uh it diverges from like the status quo thinking in GTM a lot and I don't see a lot of people that really understand it really really well um like you do and so I think it would be just be super helpful to our audience to uh dig into that and more so like practically like how you're sort of approaching these problems and these GTM challenges in (03:10) your roles. But before we get into the Q&A, like can we can we talk about your career a little bit cuz you're an exooler which I think is super cool. Seven years I think um I had seen like in a demand gen role. Love that. Um where are you now? Like tell us tell us a bit about your background. Yeah. Yeah, for sure I can. (03:29) Uh actually I'll go back a bit. I actually started in sales. So, I was an SDR for a a travel expense management software company and was selling to CFOs just getting hung up on all day long for for two years and wanted to get into marketing the whole time, but couldn't find a role in marketing or any company that would hire a fresh graduate with no experience. (03:58) And so I actually went and started a a blogpublishing website uh with some family and we grew this little website to um you know about 30,000 in traffic uh per month which at the time was pretty good and we started looking into like affiliate advertising and stuff. Taught myself marketing essentially. Um and then spun that into a into a corporate job. (04:17) then went into agency land for about five years and landed at Google after that and spent seven years leading demand and growth teams for different products. Um, so I was on Google Cloud Platform for a couple years, then went to workspace, uh, and then ended my time there on Chrome and Android Enterprise. Um, really building their ABM function. (04:44) And so that's where I developed this kind of passion for ABM, but also a real conviction that this is the way to do it. And we had built this best-in-class program at enterprise scale. And last year when I left corporate world, I thought, you know, how could I transform all of those principles and tactics and learnings into something that's applicable for more of a growth stage company in a company that could derive some real value from from ABM. And so that's where I landed on 12th. (05:11) Um 12 is actually a reboot of a agency I tried to start 15 years ago, which was called uh 12th Street Digital. So I shortened it, modernized it and this this is the reboot of that and uh yeah we we essentially do ABM uh for growth stage uh technology companies. That's awesome. The dream never dies. It just comes back in a different form that you didn't know gone. I love that. That's right. (05:34) It was awesome. Can you tell us more about 12 because I'm sure you know folks have seen you out on LinkedIn and they're going to go look you up now. Um but yeah can you tell us more about the problem that you solve at 12? Yeah yeah yeah I can. Uh so where we like to operate is actually in like outcomebased marketing. (05:59) So we are often talking to sales leadership and marketing leadership together and we're coming in on day one and saying let's diagnose what challenges you're having today. Typically, it's around um pipeline creation, pipeline velocity, setting meetings, and like a number of other like quality indicators. (06:18) But I I like to I love the phrase like start at the end. So, we start with the outcome. Like what is it you're trying to um what is it you're trying to to to do and within what time frame are you trying to do it? And then we work backwards and think, okay, where and how could our account-based approach fit in? and then even taking it further and saying how could we potentially forecast the results from it using um best practices and existing client data. (06:45) And so we we start with that problem identification and then from there you know tactically uh we'll run um you know top offunnel campaigns acquisition you know whether it's LinkedIn ads um programmatic ads syndication that sort of stuff to drive top offunnel activity and then build and manage midfunnel life cycle programs um bringing in all of your field marketing webinars content marketing into that mix. uh and then as well as a sales enablement. (07:15) And I I say the differentiator is is it's it's built on data and signals. And so for each client, we're going deep into their ICP and their um their target market to try to identify like what is it about the accounts you're trying to target that make sense for us to reach out now and what is that message that we reach out with? And you know in layman's terms it's like you're essentially prioritizing accounts by priority um presumed stage that they're in and then designing uh different you know multi- channelannel campaign experiences based (07:49) on those signals and then and then running those. And so uh it you know I like to think of it as like I think the like ABM has changed from this big exhaustive thing that you do. You like build it for 6 months and then you launch it and you watch it for 6 months to this more iterative agile process of identifying an insight pulling that in insight through the buying experience and the campaigns that you generate launching it and iterating it. So, you know, like we're setting up and launching campaigns within 4 to 6 weeks. (08:22) We're optimizing towards leading indicators in in another 4 to 6 weeks. So, like we we push on that approach. And once you get a few of these going, few of these campaign plays, you start to see what's working and what's not. And then you go and you you fix what's not working and then you double down and then reinvest in what is working. (08:40) And so, it's like a portfolio. You continue to add campaigns to it that that work for you. Okay, that's so cool. So can then just to double click on that ABX not a term that I'm really familiar with right not a marketer by trade. So can you just further elaborate on accountbased marketing and ABX and how these things two things are related but different it sounds like. Yeah. (09:06) So, so ABX and ABM, I mean marketers just for whatever reason love their acronyms and you know there's also accountbased GTM in the mix and I've in that contactbased marketing I mean there's just there's acronyms everywhere but my my philosophy on this is you know ABM if you if you look at it on paper is is limiting. (09:29) It's saying that marketing is going to do this account-based thing, right? And I think that's how it was in the past. Marketing did this ABM stuff and they did personalized ads and landing pages and they changed marketing, but nothing in sales changed. Nothing in the lead flow, nothing in lead qualification changed. And so that's why it failed. (09:47) And I think you have a lot of sales leaders and go to market leaders that say, "Oh, we tried ABM and it didn't work." And my response is, "Oh, you tried marketing and sales and it didn't work." like how else do you grow a company because ABM is just marketing and sales. You're targeting accounts and so some things change uh along the way. (10:08) But I I like the term ABX because you know X standing for experience where I really think that if marketing and sales and operations as a um you know behind the scenes foundational layer can operate together to create an experience that that makes that account feel like it is unique. That that's a win. (10:31) That's like the holy grail right there, right? Because you think about what you need to do in order to achieve that. Like you need to have really good data, really good insights, really deeply understand your ICP, you need to understand where they consume content, how they consume content. You need to match your message to all of those things. You need to distribute it efficiently. (10:51) Like it is it is so so much an iceberg, right? Like ABX is at the top of what you see, but then behind the scenes is this whole orchestrated approach that if done correctly will give you that unique account-based experience. I love that. I love thinking about it as an experience and like we call it the revenue factory, whatever you want to call it. (11:11) It's teams working together collaborative collaboratively using the same set of data like super aligned on ICP and what they're saying and how they're saying it. But I've always sort of just had this opinion and feel free to challenge me on it is like isn't that just how like the new logo factory or like sales and marketing or GTM like just should operate? Like why why do we call it something else? You know what I mean? Like that to me just feels like a dope sales and marketing strategy in general. (11:41) Yeah. Yeah. I I mean I I agree like I think it is just the world we live in, right? where where people can understand and and grock a a term like oh ABM like oh yeah we do ABM or or we do ABX right it it's just it's cooler than saying we do best-in-class marketing and sales right like I I don't know I think it's uh it's hard too because sometimes I get frustrated right where like I'm I'm talking to someone and they're like ah ABM's not a fit for us and I'm like well define ABM like what does that mean to to you Right. And maybe what isn't a fit (12:19) for you is is you know something that is not ABM. So it's it's a tricky I don't know it's acronyms and marketers. It's like demand genen. It's like it means so many different things to so many different people. (12:40) But it's also like table stakes like you should just have like a solid demand generation play inside your organization if you want to scale. But um one of the things that you had said when you were explaining your agency is like the first thing you do is go you sort of like back into what's the objective that you're working towards and you collaborate with both sales and marketing together which I really like because a lot of times you see sales and market sales and marketing working in like these in a vacuum basically. (13:06) What are some of the mistakes that you can very quickly see or challenges that you can very quickly see when you go in and you talk to both of these stakeholder groups? Do you see any trends there or any themes that often come up? Yeah. Yeah. This is a good question. Honestly, the the number one place I go to first is is the handoff like between marketing and sales. (13:26) And you know, I want to understand what the what the like outputs are and and the outcomes they're trying to generate. But I'll I'll very naturally say like, okay, well, tell me more about when a lead gets sent to sales. And what I'm curious about is like what is the lead scoring if any that marketing has? How is that score developed? um what sort of um like you what sort of data goes goes into that score? Um what what tools exist on both sides of that handoff? how is marketing enabling sales and like what processes exist around that handoff and you you'll learn a ton right there in (14:10) that moment because you know number one they're either siloed or they're not right if I say oh like tell me more about like when you marketing how many MQLs did you send to sales last last month oh you know like uh 250 okay awesome like what happened when you guys talked about those 250 MQLs and it's like uh well you know sales did this and I don't know like you know Mary got back to us next week like right away I'm like okay they're they're not meeting they're not tactical enough in this handoff. Um there's no like robust process around it. So that's kind of red flag right (14:43) there. Um, and then from there you can, you know, kind of like incrementally go up the marketing chain or or down the the sales chain with your questioning and your your pursuit of data because it'll it all in my opinion kind of starts with that problem. And you you'll learn from there like how bad the root problem is and which is then typically uh informing what the like the symptoms are that you're seeing, right? And like an example, a symptom could be um maybe their their SQL rate is below what they want it to be. And the this the symptom (15:20) is like SQL rate is low and the blame typically immediately goes to all right the marketing these these leads are low quality and then marketing says well no like SDRs aren't following up and using our scripts but meanwhile the scripts aren't good anyways because they don't understand the ICP and so like you know you just you start to peel the onion back but but from that middle handoff point and I also find that like the data doesn't lie right we see so often that marketing actually is prematurely sending leads like (15:51) very commonly we see this to sales and even though that there are SLAs's that require a rep to call them within a defined period of time they stop doing it because they already recognize like these leads are garbage so I'm just going to you know stop prioritizing them and I I agree with you we call that that messy middle that gray area between sales and marketing the pipeline black box because it really is like where your leads go to die cuz they fall off and then we just never surface what actually happens. So, I really love that you're making that a priority to really start and zero in on (16:29) that and uncover what's actually happening there. Mhm. Yeah. I I love the term the messy middle. It's it often, you know, and I I actually just thinking out loud here like it's it's almost always messy at some point. (16:48) like it either starts messy and you have to clean it up and organize it or it becomes messy because maybe you're you're growing faster than expected, but at at some point you have to continuously go back and improve that messy middle in order to make everything else prosper. So, it's uh yeah, it's it's almost like we should have a sticky note like on our monitors like messy middle and like you know once a week or once a month whatever just think about that like is this as optimized as it could be? Yeah. (17:13) I talk about my experience being a VP of marketing in a series B company because not unlike many companies in this space there is a lack of alignment between sales and marketing and I definitely felt that in my own organization but um close to the time that I exited the company uh we really started to get that alignment and when we did it was literally aligning on a single source of truth and sitting down in a tactical meeting every week scrutinizing that messy middle and like sales gives feedback, marketing gives feedback and we learn in real time what's actually (17:46) happening. And once we started to do that, um the alignment that we built and the cohesion that we built across both of those teams changed so much because it was no longer an argument of marketing pointing fingers at sales saying you didn't pick up this lead fast enough and then sales pointing fingers at marketing saying like, "Oh, we sourced this. (18:09) Why are you taking credit for this lead?" and whatever other [ __ ] that comes up once you actually sit down and look at that data and start to have conversations around it. I feel like um it really like carves out this path to be successful in an organization and I just love I love to see that. Yeah, I I mean I couldn't agree more. It sounds like our you know arrival on this this thought or this principle was the same in that uh I you know when I was uh on running demand for the chrome team we had you know I I started as basically a team of one and and built up the demand function and along the way uh figuring (18:42) out how to work with and support sales was was a challenge for a good like 18 months and then we continued to invest and this was during COVID when you know budgets were available and so we were we were growing and scaling like crazy but meanwhile ignoring that messy middle space and it it put real strain on the the funnel um quantitatively but but also with the relationship with sales and it wasn't until you know I basically like undid the whole thing and went to like the VP of sales at the time and was like our teams need to work together (19:17) like I need someone on your team who's like you know head of BDR SDR in working with me day in day and then my team and and their team like meeting regularly. We need at least one sync per week and we ended up having two standups like digging into all the data. Uh, you know, that took some time to get going too. (19:41) But it wasn't until I saw that working where I was like, "Oh, oh, all that stuff they say about marketing and sales alignment, it's actually true. You actually, you do need that and it is this intangible thing that's so critical. Otherwise, I don't I don't see how you can operate a go to market without it. Wow, this is fire. (19:58) I had no idea that a company like Google would have struggled with something so similar that we see every day. So, that is my thoughts too. I just have to take that. I mean, they're they're just a company at the end of the day, you know? Uh and I think it's you know, companies are made up of people, right? And people will always have their egos, their habits, and you know, the pros and cons and all this and that. (20:21) And so it for me it's easy to see how especially in in like the enterprise space these problems could become like really systemic right like when you it and sometimes these companies are so big the problems don't show up until it's really really bad right because you can you can almost outspend you can spend your way out of some of these problems right in from a marketing seat you can dump a ton of money into ads. You can put a ton of money into resources. (20:52) You can throw people at problems and on the surface they they sort of solve or get better. But with the stuff we're talking about where you're trying to build an enterprisegrade funnel, like eventually that thing breaks and you you end up with like a house of cards, I used to call it. And it's like you just keep throwing these cards on top and that the foundation is still really not not strong. (21:16) And so you've got to start over, right? you got to renovate and and redo. That's actually funny, Amber, because I actually have the had sort of like the complete opposite perspective on that where it's like I'm not surprised that a company of that size would have those problems because of everything you're explaining. (21:34) And I just talked to a friend of mine who um runs performance marketing for like a very large bank basically and she was telling me that when they like put together like a campaign plan or whatever, it takes 16 months to get it approved. Can you even [ __ ] believe that? That's insane. 16 months. (21:55) So, if we're talking about a company of like that size, so you notice a problem and you think about how long it might actually take to actually reverse it and correct it knowing that sometimes approvals, uh, layers of management, all of this other like stuff is actually working against you. So like it's almost like smaller companies like within I don't know like 30 million to 150 million to 200 million maybe even 200 million is too high but they have the ability to actually uh be really nimble and fast in terms of like making making changes otherwise you're dealing with a lot of I think bureaucracy and you know (22:34) legacy systems and you know all this other other stuff that sort of like gets in the way. want to get into more tactical stuff from Steve, too, and so we can dive into that. I know we have some great takeaways uh planned for the episode, so I'm excited. Um yeah, but it seems like this this theme of experimentation and not just like throwing stuff at the wall, but actual experimentation, which requires a starting point, you know, inputs and then evaluation to see what changed. Sounds like that's really important to (23:06) you as well, Steve. And um we hear a lot about like you know loops uh HubSpot just came out with their loop marketing as a way to sort of like replace the flywheel um which is interesting because it's like a lot of these things are easy to talk about but then what we're trying to do more of Pettto is release the information and and share the information about how do you actually accomplish um some of these uh ways of evaluating your performance and so um excited to get more into that. But Caroline, I think you had wanted to dive (23:36) more into the the story of what what brought us to Steve. Cool. Yeah, I can do that for sure. Um, so I had posted something maybe like a week or two ago. Um, and my post opened up with this. A CMO told me that their MQL to pipeline conversion rate was 2%. (23:56) They wanted to use a certain type of tool to tell them what they should be doing to increase that percentage. Okay, we see that all the time. And I asked, "What about the other 98%." I saw a comment from Steve saying, "It's like flipping your conversion rate. Instead of analyzing your 15% SQL rate, go study the 85% rejection rate. (24:15) You will learn a hell of a lot more, but you need to have your CM CRM objects in order, write data fields, and sales hygiene. Otherwise, you find a giant bucket of rejected leads with no insight." So, that's that's the the backstory of how uh Ste Steve and I sort of got into the LinkedIn DM conversation. Yeah. So can you tell us more about that Steve? Like what led you to think about go to market data and performance this way? It it really does feel like flipping it on its head, right? Because we all want to focus on what's working, how do we get more budget or reallocate like what's working, what's working, how (24:47) are we winning, how are we winning, but well there's a whole lot of stuff that's usually not working. And so how did you land at that? Yeah. Yeah. Uh I guess yeah for starters I I got to give uh like you know your your crew some some kudos. (25:09) I I've also been a fan of refined labs and Chris for a long time and like at the time when I was running these demand genen programs you know I guess it's it was a result of kind of three things like one recognizing that we as a team were like doing more and more and more but not seeing the incremental improvement as I would suspect right meaning like putting more budget into things more people on the team more campaigns more vendors But yet the MQL rate stayed the same. (25:37) It's like this doesn't make any sense. Like why are we not finding and acquiring, you know, better quality um contacts, right? We were we were acquiring a lot more contacts but not necessarily better quality. And so um then it's the other uh input here was I was in the process of making a really big pitch to like basically double my team and I wanted to hire a bunch more full-time operations folks like um like marketing ops data analysts a data scientist and I I had this vision for what the funnel could become if we (26:12) became really strategic with the data and so I was making this this pitch but meanwhile I had been on a bit of a spending spree and now I'm asking for more. And so I started down the path of developing this narrative of like well if you gave me these resources uh which you know have a you know opex of of of why um here's what I think I could do improving the funnel. (26:41) And as I started building that narrative I thought well well [ __ ] I actually really do need to improve the funnel. So like what am I going to do? And somewhere I think it was like in a conversation with sales uh we had learned that the re when we looked into the rejection reasons of that 85%. It was like 60 or 70 or something like that. (27:01) Uh there was a whole slew of data that we had never looked at like and and it was in Salesforce it was labeled rejection reason but each one had a field each field had a definition and and some more insight into it. So that got me thinking like, oh well, what if we reduce that rate from say 80% to 60%. That would then improve the MQL rate materially, a couple percentage points. (27:27) And at enterprise scale, a couple of a percentage points improvement could be tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. And so I was like, aha, this is this is my idea. I got to run with this. So I like weaved all these things together for this this big ask. Uh, and this is what we're going to do in the funnel. And then we're going to we're going to improve these rates. (27:44) Like that was kind of my main headline in the in the deck was like what if the MQL rate was, you know, 25 in instead of 15. Uh and and materially we changed it, right? Not just adjusting lead scoring to like send more MQLs and like hit the volume. So um that that's kind of where it came from. Yeah. I have to clarify that because uh I honestly I've done that before, right? you're you're in a pinch and you're like, "Gosh, [ __ ] I need to I need, you know, I'm short 100 MQLs. If I just dial this score down a little bit, I'll I'll hit my target." (28:14) Um, don't do that. If you're a marketer listening, don't don't ever do that. It'll always come back to bite you in the ass. Um, but yeah, that's where it started. And then, you know, I'm happy to go more into the like the process in which you actually move that, right? Quick follow up there. (28:34) So, in that example, where did you focus? So you said, "Hey, we've got 85% I think you said, you know, not qualified, disqualified rate." And so then how did you narrow into say how we're going to move this by turning this lever versus versus this other one, for example, is it a sales enablement problem or is it a marketing targeting problem or was it a little bit of both or something else? Yes. (28:59) Yes. that honestly that is the the golden question and I think for for anyone like wanting or feeling motivated to do this like that's the question to answer and from my experience it was it was actually a lot of of all of the above it it was everything and so some some real examples right when we started actually I'll tell you it started from the SDR team giving feedback saying like these these leads won't pick up they won't answer our emails when we do get them on the phone, they're not interested or they they don't remember engaging with the thing in marketing that you said they did. And we we had all of these reasons that we got (29:38) qualitatively from the SDRs in our in our weekly sync. So that then kind of put marketing on on our heels a bit. We were a bit defensive and say, "No, no, no, like this is who we're targeting in all of our campaigns. this is who you told us to target, you know, yada yada and and a little bit of back and forth. (29:56) But what it got me thinking was, okay, where can I find actual data on this, not just, you know, opinions between the two teams and that that data existed in that rejection rate. So, it was a label, a field in Salesforce that every time an SDR made a call or an email, they ran their their cadence, right? the the steps that they had to execute and then at the end of that they either they either qualify and they progress or they reject or they decline. (30:25) There's there's a few steps they can take, right? But I was most interested in that rejection rate. And when I looked at all of those fields, we had we had like 12 or or 13 different rejection reasons, which one I was like, this is this is madness. How does an SDR pick one of these? They're moving fast. (30:44) they're, you know, just trying to get move on to the next thing. So, that was a problem. And then the other problem was that there was a few of these reasons that kept popping up over and over again. And like one of the big ones was called uh it was like not a fit. (31:03) Um, which kind of broad, right? Like what does that mean, not a fit? So, we dug into that more and the SDR would tell us like, "Oh, th this is actually this is a a a good lead. They're a VP of something. they have responsibility da da but they are not the person I can sell to like I can't sell Chrome products to this person so that was a huge aha and and this was kind of along the journey of ABM where you know in marketing we felt well you should still call that person like run discovery on that person see what you can learn use that as a way to to get into figuring out who the real decision maker you know now known as multi-threading right like this is before I even knew what that word meant and So that that became like (31:40) a huge aha because then we could go up into marketing into targeting and all the campaigns and we found that we were spending millions on a on acquiring these influencers which sales wasn't equipped to sell to. Um you know so then we learned like okay SDRs aren't using the right scripts. They don't actually know how to do this multi-threaded sale. (32:00) These are just churn and burn SDRs. like they get them on the phone, they run a B script and then and then they progress them forward to an AE. So the whole thing was insightful in that we learned like yeah Salesforce wasn't set up great process issues on the SDR side, targeting issues on the marketing side. (32:18) Uh and it that that sort of started to unravel the whole thing. Wow, you're amazing. when you're saying this, I'm like, this is such a great like practical example of that illustrates what we talk about, which is there is just so much nuance and like breadcrumbs of insight in that data that most companies just don't even acknowledge. That's amazing. (32:43) So much micro there's so many micro feedback loops that are happening inside your engine. And I feel like what Steve, you just gave us an example of here's how we honed in on a loop that was happening, right? But we couldn't see that our efforts on the marketing side were not like why were they not converting? And so you did some, it sounds like internal customer interviews with the SDRs. (33:08) You did, you know, a lot of data, I'm sure it was a lot of manual data hauling that you did too while you were creating a case for this. So, thanks for sharing that and hopefully it's helpful to our listeners as well. Uh, quick pause before we go into the next uh topic for Steve is very practical, right? You can go into your CRM right now and go look and see what's happening with the prospects that your team is working and you can go look and see. (33:39) Maybe you have a disqualified reason, maybe you don't, but go look and see and double click on that or get someone to pull the report for you and you can inspect for yourself. Does this match what you're actually seeing in the call transcript, the email history, etc. Does it match first of all? Um, is it consistent? And what are those little micro stories that you can find to tell you what's happening in that feedback loop? Because what we tend to see people doing is reporting on, oh, we had a 12% conversion rate to to SQL. (34:10) That's it, right? And so, yeah. Well, the other thing to add to that, too, is if your leads are disqualified, go disqualify them. Don't leave them sitting open and have marketing wondering what the hell happened with that person. Disqualify them and obviously log a reason so that we can all benefit from it. (34:35) I've seen that so many times where leads just sit open and eventually recycle them or whatever happens, but we're not actually like closing that out and understanding what actually happened there. Um, and then of course marketing keeps market, you know, sending them stuff. It keeps pushing them to sales and you know there's uh there's no real like feedback loop there. Yeah, that's a great point. (34:53) I mean marketing really needs that feedback, right? And and they should be asking for it if you're not seeing it. I think if you're in marketing, don't point the blame on on RevOps or the SDR team and say like, "Oh, the data is a mess and like nobody updates Salesforce or CRM and whatever." Like, go and do something about it. (35:13) Go, like you said, go pop open the CRM, start looking at these fields, start asking sales about certain accounts and say, "Hey, this account was on our tier one. You know, they received a ax experience like what gives why why is there no loop closed here? Why is there no feedback on it? Yeah, for sure. (35:34) I love what you said too about having that cadence because it it's so I found it can be in uh incendiary to say, "Hey, what happened? What happened with this? How about with this?" Versus what you mentioned in the beginning of our chat is we have a cadence where we review this. And so everything's up on the everything's out on the table. We're making sure that all the voices are heard, but having that cadence so that it's not like um oh this just coming out of the blue and I'm just going to like throw this at you sales or I'm going to throw this at you marketing is is critical. And so I think a lot of times teams have a hard time uh a lot of times leaders I think have a hard time getting (36:12) that time blocked because it is a leadership you know meeting in a lot of cases. And I found that when you do run it well you get into a cadence where you can start to async some of it and you can start to do that sort of one-on-one a little bit less often. But the FaceTime is still really important. (36:31) But I think that's where people get hung up is like I got to put another meeting on the calendar. But when you really start to see how many meetings it saves you as well and that quarterly scramble and the headaches and the uncertainty that it starts to save you, it's well worth it. It's a gold mine though. (36:50) Like it shifts you from just getting arbitrary feedback from the sales team and these like quarterly meetings. Even if you have just like a one-to-one standup with your AEES um depending how large your team is every week or every two weeks like there's just it's a gold mine of data for informing campaign planning messaging you know enablement everything and I think it should be a priority just because of how much you can actually absorb from that. Um, Steve, question for you. (37:15) So, we still see so many teams obsessing over like the actual conversion to pipeline SQL MQL, like whether it's 2% or 15%. Like, why do you think people are still so hung up on that metric versus flipping it the other way around and looking at like the disqualification rate? Why why do you think that is? Yeah, I mean I from my own experience it was being afraid to basically open up the floodgates on our mistakes, right? Like when you when you promote, oh, we it was, you know, 15% last month and it's 15.8% this month. We're we're doing something (37:56) good. And it's like just an easier story to tell versus owning the fact that mistakes is maybe too heavy of a word, but like thing things were tested that didn't pan out that we put too much faith in like we we should have cut some stuff a long time ago and and maybe you don't really have a robust testing philosophy or process, right? Or maybe failures aren't welcomed within the team, right? like there's some dynamics there that I think from a you know corporate culture perspective can get kind of tricky but ideally I think (38:28) that's what it is right you go to this meeting and especially if you're in marketing you're a little bit intimidated by sales and it's it's just easier and better to show tiny little improvements in that MQL rate versus addressing like the big elephant in the room which is like why why are we spending money to disqualify 85% of our leads. Yeah. (38:54) And you know what I think I think in the age of GTM right now where there's so many different channels that we can leverage for growth. I think a lot because we have don't have great data. I think a lot of times marketing leaders feel like they should do a little bit of everything. (39:10) I've certainly heard that from a lot of CMOs like marketing isn't black and white. We have to do a little bit of everything. But I sort of want to flip that on its head because I've seen a lot of very high-erforming like elite revenue teams that sink their toes in maybe like two to three things and do them really well. (39:28) Like one of our customers does paid they don't do any paid social. They do paid search. They do some events and they've got like a killer content marketing engine and it's dope. And they don't have to like spread theirelves thin over all of these channels because those things are freaking expensive. (39:47) It's expensive to go out and acquire leads and we should know without a shadow of a doubt like what are the two to three things that we can do really really well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And think of think think about that too. I mean it's a great point of if you're already investing in a channel which you had to get budget approval for like you put you and your team on the line. There's executive stakeholders that are watching it. (40:07) I think then you just you almost want to hide from the mistakes or you want to hide from the challenges within that channel where instead of going and just trying the next thing, put that time, money, and resource into making the other thing the the best it can be, right? Um I I definitely agree with you. I see that as a huge miss. (40:31) It's it's like too easy to get caught up in the we should be doing, you know, this this this and this and just trying all this stuff. You really shouldn't until you've exhausted what's existing and get that to a place where it's steady state, right? And then then go on and try to to build on top of it. Yeah. It's that healthy balance between like really wanting to look good like what executive doesn't want to look like they're doing a a great job to their seuite, right? And so when you look at bad data, you have to be like humble enough, I think, to acknowledge that that's your responsibility. And I've seen a lot of times where, you know, if we're working with a demand team and (41:03) we're serving them up data that tells them that, you know, their strategy could be improved upon, it's really easy to say like, "Oh, I don't I don't believe that data because it's risking your like optics of what your team is doing. Um, but I think the most like the leaders I think I value the most are the ones that are just like own it and take accountability for that. (41:26) " Yeah. Yeah. And I I totally agree and I I always aspired to be that kind of leader. Like I'll be honest, I have a little bit of like shiny object syndrome. Uh and I do as an entrepreneur. Like it's it's fun to chase the cool exciting thing. Um but you it's like really disciplined. you know, if you like let's say you're you're a VP of marketing and you're running a team of 10 people, like if you're not disciplined in how you approach these things and like why expect your team to be, they're going to follow suit and they're going to, you know, get distracted and do all these different things and meanwhile that that (42:00) uh that like disqualification part of your funnel is going to just continue to erode and grow and like not serve you well. Yeah. So, how do you implement that for your customers at 12 and look to learn more about that? So, we talked a lot about the first sort of piece of your process, which is coming in involves multiple pieces, but you're flipping things upside down to say, "Hey, let's take a good hard look at what's going on here. (42:25) " Um, what's working, what's not working right now, and then from there, how do you help teams to be able to guide the decisions moving forward? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. This is the question of like, okay, this is all great, but like what do you do about it? And I think there's two things I'll share. (42:46) One is in the effort of analyzing the go to market and looking through sales and marketing data and customer data. Um what we're actually trying to find is the uh I call it like the the intersection of signals across all this data which will tell us what your most profitable segments are. And so when we're when we're building a program from scratch, that's where we start is like, okay, these two or three segments are where you are winning today. The ICP is very clear. (43:17) There are other companies out in the market that look just like these ones and we can get data on them. So now let's start there, right? Um so we're we're developing those segments and then you know each of those segments is going to get that full ABX um experience. (43:40) Um but the other part of it is like how do you how do you kind of like manage the funnel against this this like um you know disqualification rate or like lack of conversion rate. Um the thing that we we do and like it works for us is um shifting the approach from like leads to MQLs to SQLs and you know meetings etc like your traditional contactbased funnel to more of an accountbased funnel. (44:07) And so what we do is actually map all of the accounts in our target account list um by by stage and we define each stage. So awareness for example might mean that um you know early stage top of funnel stage they've they've never received any contact they've never engaged with anything um never received anything they're completely cold right whereas uh maybe an account that is marked as engaged they've consumed some marketing they haven't really um converted into a into a sales conversation yet but they're they're doing something right um and then and then so forth so you track that all the way through and then what we propose is as a go to market team, your (44:45) job now is to move accounts from the prior stage to the next stage and so forth. Like we are now looking at this at an account level and we're analyzing the baseline of progression between those stages and then looking at which accounts are progressing above that baseline or below that baseline and then we can rightsize the optimization accordingly. (45:11) Right? you have like your kind of like your your bottom 50, your top 50, and everyone else in in the middle, and you can optimize accordingly. And a lot of the the infrastructure they might have in place like lead scoring and that sort of stuff can still exist, but we're now we're moving away from looking at it at an individual level and more at an account level of like, you know, what does the engagement profile look like across this account? Like who within the account is engaging and who that is engaging is more important than others, right? if we can get our decision maker engaging that's that's worth more than um you (45:42) know end users influencers that sort of thing. So it's a bit of like a mental shift than a and a process shift towards uh towards looking at it that way. Okay. Awesome. Yeah, I can see how that's very different than the way that we see a lot of companies running that generic sort of nurture sequences etc on the contact based level. (46:02) So I I'm I'm reminded of So when I was trying to like hack together a solution for fixing this temporarily when I was in house, one of the things that we did was at the account level like score it was it like a red, green, yellow um account and then I'm just thinking about how we automated some of that. (46:26) So at the the contact level, the engagement score sort of like drove um the the account score. I'm just uh thinking about my own experience. But what that's sort of reminding me of, not that I would ever suggest sort of like just doing this as a side of the desk fix because I think that's really hard. Um is just the importance of data hygiene in general which I think a lot of times sales teams and people are just like I don't have time to clean the data or to maintain the data like my job is to be here to sell. What is uh your point of view on that? um both of you you guys like Amber and (46:57) Steve I want to know what you think about that. Yeah, go ahead Amber if you want to start. That was um I I don't really know whose perspective that was from. I guess like uh in any organization that wants reliable data like there is some level of manual work that goes into that right like not everything can be automated operator in the house. Yeah. (47:22) So I feel like it's a living system. That's how I think about it. And leadership often try takes this approach where to no fault of their own, they sort of try to set it and forget it in terms of like your measurement systems and stuff like that. But it's alive. So you got to have somebody looking after that. (47:40) Um yeah, I think leadership shouldn't be in the weeds. A CMO should not be in there in the data every day trying to clean it or um interpret it, try to make a story out of it, right? you don't want your CMO doing that, but you do want your CMO to be equipped with the information that they need to make those strategic decisions. (48:02) And so, um, the reality of it is we we need as, you know, operations teams, like we need the leadership at the table to help set that vision and strategy for why are we doing this? And then you can start to give your team some more autonomy about, you know, going about and doing it. But um a lot of things can be automated these days, but that doesn't mean that you can't you don't have to oversee it. (48:24) Um so yeah, I'd say it's a it's a leadership level decision as to why it's a priority and why we're looking at the metrics that we are and what they even mean. Um but from there it becomes easier for your teams to justify the maintenance and you know make that a priority to look back and see what these experiments are showing. (48:48) What about you, Steve? What do you think? I agree, Amber. I was just thinking like the the fields that you know, you sitting there listening or thinking about your company, like the fields that you need are probably different than someone else. And to your point, uh is leadership aware of what those data requirements are and can they or are they in a place to support that? because you do need, you know, I think on both sides like two examples come to mind, but you know, my story about the uh the rejection rate or the disqualification rate like that was a super critical (49:22) field that we needed SDRs filling out accurately for every single lead that they touched. Uh and I needed the VP of sales to enforce that top down and say like if you do not fill this out, like you're not meeting your SLA. This goes against your performance. like this is a critical field, right? On the marketing side, I think um we often get like lazy in um some of the basics like like campaign nomenclature, right? Like especially if you're doing this stuff at scale and your UTM's RMS or you know uh campaign codes or IDs, however you're (49:59) doing it or are RMS and then you're you're pushing all that into the CRM and then you're trying to do analysis on it which you're going to get asked for. uh and you can't because like all the nomenclature is a mess. Like that's that's sort of inexcusable. (50:18) Like go and fix that fix that data on the marketing side if you're going to ask sales to fix things on the sales side. And then you know if leadership is aligned like you said Amber they should be enforcing that not like clicking around in the CRM looking at you know ID1 versus ID2 and that sort of thing. Yeah. Oh man, we see that with UTMs all the time. So low tech, so important like just be one of the most underutilized. You Yeah, you need an M framework. (50:45) You need to use it consistently and effectively in order to be able to see what's going on. And it's like one of those old school sort of practices that's still very important. I want to um I want to I want to come back to something that you guys were talking about earlier around operations. (51:05) So, Steve, you had said in one of your roles, you're making a basically a business case for why you needed to hire an ops person. And I will say that if I were to go back in house and do this all over again, the very first hire I think I would make would be somebody in an ops role. But unfortunately, that was the last hire I ever made to my team. (51:27) I had seen a team overseen a team of like 10 15 people at one point. Never had an ops person. And everything changed when I actually had one because of the data that I was able to get my hands on because I am not that person, right? And I don't think a CMO should ever have to be that person. (51:45) And unfortunately, I also think it is one of the hardest roles to build a business case for. I remember how much push back I got on that because it's basically the opposite of volume. Like why don't you just go hire somebody who could get us more volume? Why do you want to focus on this thing instead? But I loved the recommendation you made, Steve, which was um frame a business case around the disqualification rate and potentially improving that. So it's not just, okay, we're going to go hire somebody to get us more volume. (52:14) We're actually going to fix this thing here and that's actually going to unlock more pipeline and revenue just by virtue of fixing it. So um I thought that that was just something that really hit home for me. I've been thinking about it through this entire conversation just because of how impactful that was. Yeah, it's a good point. (52:33) Actually got me thinking of, you know, when when a marketing leader is thinking about hiring, there's there's like two sides of the coin. It's are you hiring someone who's going to create, you know, incrementally net new growth for the company or are you hiring someone who is going to like fix problems and solve challenges and that sort of thing? And I feel like it's it's a little bit easier to go and make a case for the person who's going to drive that new growth, right? Versus bringing in someone who's more of a um you know, like a technician who's going to be uh you know, you know, maintaining. But it like my opinion, it's absolutely critical. Uh and I'm with you. I I think (53:11) the first hires I'd make would be operational um followed by data because unless like you're a data scientist, how are you going to understand these vast volumes of data? Yeah. Yeah. That's great insight. I think for folks listening uh one more question we want to wrap up with one more question. (53:30) What do we think? Yeah. Yeah. Fire one more. Yeah. All right, Amber, I'll let you have this one. Oh my gosh, so many good things to think about. Um, yeah. I'd love to know because you have a pulse on a lot of different things that are going on um in the marketing world and in the ABM world, like where do you feel like the biggest opportunities are for folks to really just take advantage of what they already have, for example, um that that they're just sleeping on right now? Yeah, I I will I'm going to give maybe a bit of an untraditional answer here in the spirit of our of our talk track. Like I I wouldn't do anything net new, (54:11) right? I would I would take stock of what you have in market and you're investing in today and then like renovate. I I'd go like now now's the time like to use the housing example, right? Like interest rates are high. Don't go buy a new house. get a fixer upper or fix the house you're in, right? And I think the same applies here. (54:35) And you know, I think a real life example I'm seeing a lot of is like growth is getting harder to come by from a marketing perspective, but yet when you look at a team and what they're doing, you know, at a like you said, say hundred million dollar ARR company, they have field marketing, they're running performance ads, they're doing LinkedIn, they're creating content. (54:59) Think about how those things work together and is there opportunity to connect them better so that ultimately the customer gets a better experience, right? And I like one tactical example is uh I talked to a lot of sales folks who say we want more like private dinners. We want more bespoke experiences and opportunities to get in front of prospects. And then I ask marketing, I say, okay, well, how are you identifying prospects for sales to invite to these dinners? And they're like, well, we're not. (55:24) sales just goes through the CRM, picks random people, and send them sends them invitations. It's like, just think about that for a second. Like, why wouldn't you design your entire marketing experience towards getting someone to say yes to a dinner if that's how sales wants to sell and that's where million-doll ACV deals are coming from, rearchitect your whole marketing to just create dinners, like like why not, you know? And I think when you shift your mindset, it's like, oh, okay, well, you know, if the dinner is (55:55) in San Francisco or New York City, we should target that geo and what's important to them. Are they a SAS company? Are they a healthcare company? Do we have other prospects and customers we can surround them with that are non-competitive? Do we have an advocate, you know, in the company within a customer that could help us? It's like just your whole marketing strategy changes um towards identifying that you know somewhat of a unique um signal. Mhm. Wow. That's so cool. It makes me think of like gorilla tactics inside (56:25) your own organization and um I love that. So if you're in a position as many are right now working on next year's targets and growth goals and for maybe you have a CEO telling you like hey we got to increase our MQL volume by 30% or what have you just remember that you you can also use Steve's approach which is to say okay and also look at this and if we improve this for example disqualification rate by a fraction of what we're currently seeing that would actually do more or the same as investing and placing our bets out here to try to drive more volume type of (57:03) funnel. So, we learned so much from you today, Steve. Um, thank you so much. But before we let you go, where can listeners find you and anything exciting that you have coming up that you want to tell us about with 12? Oh, geez. Uh, yeah, find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there. That's that's where we all met. Uh, send me a message, too. (57:26) I I love just just chatting and shooting the [ __ ] with other marketers. Uh let's see what's coming up. Um if you are in Colorado, uh I co-host a monthly meetup in Denver in Lo. Uh it's all software technology marketers. We're doing a panel in October. We talk about marketing and AI and some other cool topics. Um but we do these meetups every single month. (57:49) Um me and my partner, we buy the drinks and food and host the space. You just get to come and hang out. It's not a pitch. We're just literally hanging out. So, um, send me a message if you're interested. Would love to meet some people in real life. Very cool. I love that. Yeah. I'm say I'm telling you, I think meetups and like in-person interactions are like matter more than anything now, which we're all we're all craving it, so we're trying to meet him there. Yeah, for sure. Well, I love that. Steve, thanks so much for coming on today. Um, yeah, folks, I hope you (58:20) enjoyed this episode. I certainly did. and I thought it was a great conversation. So, appreciate your time and uh catch you all again soon. Yeah. Thank you guys. [Music]