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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to GTM Live. Today we have a super special guest, Ashley Lewin. She is the head of marketing at Aligned, and she has such a unique perspective because she's seen inside over 30 companies during her time at Refine Labs, and now she's building the marketing function from the ground up in her current org. We're going to talk about why the obsession with MQLS is keeping so many teams stuck. But more importantly, we want to talk about some of the changes that she's made at Aligned, from standing up the lead object in HubSpot to tightening the sales handoff and more. So I think you're going to love this one. But first, I want to tell you that next week on October 8th, we're running a live virtual workshop to share some of the frameworks that our most successful customers are using in their own orgs and the KPIs that they're aligning themselves around. We heard you guys. You want more takeaways and we want to support you. So depending on when you're listening to this, head over to passetto.com events and get yourself on that registration list. All right, let's go.
- [01:04]
B
You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passetto.
- [01:13]
A
All right, we have Ashley Lewin on the show today. It's Trevor, myself and Ashley joining us, and I've got to say, I'm super excited for this. I asked Ashley to join us on the show a couple weeks back and. And she excitedly said, yeah. So thank you, Ashley, for coming on today. Very pumped to have you here.
- [01:32]
B
Likewise. So excited to jam out with you both on this topic.
- [01:37]
A
Yeah, totally. And for those, if you're not following Ashley Lewin on LinkedIn, I would say definitely go give her a follow. Her content on LinkedIn is amazing. That was one of the reasons that actually inspired me to reach out and get Ashley on the show because it's very clear that her perspective aligns so heavily with the pains and the challenges that many marketers are working to solve right now, especially to Passetto. But, Ashley, you're no stranger to Passetto or to Trevor. Why don't you guys take us back? How are you and Trevor all connected?
- [02:11]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So a little bit about background about me. So I previously had been working with Trevor at Refine Labs. I was there for about three and a half years. And so kind of my career is I've been in marketing for over a decade. I've worn nearly every single hat there can be from, like, graphic designer, copywriter, marketing ops for A brief moment. Thank goodness I was introduced to Trevor later in my career. But I was at Refine Labs for three and a half years and then also had been at a series A through successful acquisition SaaS startup as well, where I truly got to create the demand and the paid and the marketing ops engine from scratch. Honestly, just googling my way through it for the first time as a, as a young marketer does. And there was a lot of things back in that time where it was the traditional acquisition mindset. I could feel the pain of it. I saw it in the data. It's what attracted me to Refine Labs to like what I call challenge my thinking, challenge my playbooks and go to market strategies. So headed over to Refine Labs where I got to meet Trevor and work on some of the largest clients over there and then some special ops projects as well. So that's where we met. And then I have transitioned over to Aligned, which I can get into in a second.
- [03:30]
A
Love it. So you guys go back a few years, but Aligned is also now a client of Passettos. And so you and Trevor are working super closely now and I've been so inspired. Although I'm not in the weeds with you all, I'm inspired by some of like the really good wins that you've all had so far. But this conversation today, we can ask some of those questions later on in the show, but I really just want to, for the sake of our audience, like really double click into what you're focused on at Align and just really understand more about how you're bringing your perspective as sort of like a change maker in GTM to Align. So Ashley, can you give us like a 30,000 foot view of your role as head of marketing, Ad Aligned? Sort of like how you got into that role. I think you've been in there for about half a year or so. What has that been like so far?
- [04:21]
B
Yeah, I can't believe it's already been half a year. What do they say in startup world? It's like seven years already. So a little bit of background about Aligned. So we are a buyer facing workspace for deal management and execution. So we're really here to help project manage complex sales. Sales. And so the product is really what kind of excited me and brought me into considering Aligned. And as the head of marketing, I came in, built the team from scratch, so came in, identified what's working, what's not, what are the goals, what are the programs that are working, getting just a true lay of the land. And then it was so critical for me to build out just an exceptional team from there, which is a mix of internal but also external as well through a, through agencies and contractors that we highly trust. But really kind of my core responsibilities here at Align is to drive growth. At the end of the day, that's what we're here for in marketing. And so that can include a lot of different things, including shaping our messaging and positioning our strategic narrative, forming our product marketing engine, working on our programs, which includes a heavy emphasis on LinkedIn, thought leadership and paid running thoughtful campaigns. And then we also have a really cool influencer engine that's working really well for us as well. So it's truly just kind of looking at the entire engine that's making up this marketing motion and understanding where to scale, what to tweak, what to optimize and what to hire for.
- [05:53]
A
So when you came in, I'm going to just ask the question, what type of measurement, stack or system did you have in place to be able to inform some of those early investment decisions around what you're going to prioritize?
- [06:06]
B
Yeah, so we are primarily working with HubSpot at current moments and then we also have unique product data that I'm working with as well via tableau. But truly this is where I initially got flagged immediately for Passetto's help because the foundation of your infrastructure is just so critical to make those strategic decisions. And so I was working with a little bit of what I had. And so with any Data I've audited 30 plus different companies at this point. There's never been a perfect system. So if you're listening to this and oh, it's not perfect, I think you strive for it to be, but I've always kind of had that background of trust what you have work on getting it better. And so I consulted with our CRM to understand what the motions were, how are they performing, following them down the funnel in what I call split the funnel analysis. So all the different like touchpoint or like ways in the roads in to a lead and to for us were half PLG and half sales led. So what drove someone into the product? What drove someone into pipeline? What were those motions and how did they, how do they keep moving down the funnel into revenue either via self service or via sales. And so that was kind of step number one to understand the true lay of the land. That's also where I flagged immediately we needed some rev ops help and Passetto definitely was one of the first that came to mind for that.
- [07:32]
A
I love that I Love that you thought of us as like a foundational first investment to help establish the right like basically infrastructure within your organization. But the reason I asked that question is sort of like a lead in because one of the posts that you recently did that I know got just a ton of engagement and so many comments, so many likes, reshares and things like that is your post that started with when I retire, I hope I never hear the word MQL or lead ever again. And you went on to explain exactly like what your perspective on that was and just it was such a sharp, well articulated POV that I loved. And I want to like click into that a little bit more and just ask sort of like what inspired that to begin with. Is that something that you saw yet again out of line when you went into your role? I know it's likely that you had seen that a bunch of times with clients at Refine Labs, but walk us through what ignited that.
- [08:32]
B
Yeah, I had had a post a week prior really just asking what was the biggest headache Demand gen marketers like if someone could come in and fix it for you, what's the biggest headache you would like solved? And I think I've been talking about this topic for over five years at this point. To me it feels almost archaic. Oh, every single company has adopted this by now, right? Or it's been talked about too much. But that's the funny thing is when you it's the brand repetition piece of it, of when you feel like it's been talked about too much, it's just like scratching the surface. And so companies are still feeling this pain very deeply and it's still still the reality for most companies as well. So I wasn't shocked that the resounding response for that was on the lead side, especially on there was a couple of different responses that we will get into in the near future here. But Leads was a big one of them and so that kind of inspired it. Where I felt like this conversation, I've been having it for so many years at this point. That's kind of, that's what inspired it. And also I was seeing it a little bit in the PLG world too. When we look at just total signups versus some more qualitative quality metrics of those PLG signups such as Activated, Engaged, et cetera, it's always important to remember what's the end goal that we're measuring against and ensuring that the leading indicators aren't treated as harshly as the key performance indicators. I think that's the biggest differentiator I see within companies where they put too much of an emphasis on those leading indicators, which oftentimes is leads, when leads isn't inherently bad. It's just the importance and the importance that gets put on it without reminding yourself what the end goal is.
- [10:19]
A
That's really interesting. And I don't want to spend too much time on, like, why this model is flawed. I think most people who are here listening to this already know that. But I'm intrigued to just dig into how you're approaching the solution, like, either on your own or with the help of Pesetto, because I think most people who are in roles like you want to better understand the solution path versus, like, the problem. We already know the problem. It's just like, how do you go about fixing it?
- [10:46]
B
Right. Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead, Trevor.
- [10:49]
A
Yeah, you. You unmuted. It looked like you had a thought there.
- [10:52]
C
I haven't spoken up yet, but obviously this is a part of this conversation that I'm heavily involved in and feel strongly about. And, you know, so I'll chime in a little bit and Ashley can fill in the gaps. Just sort of my thoughts as I got involved with align with Ashley and the team. You were trying to identify where do we really not see what we need to see in the process? And there were some gaps there where we had some of the fundamentals available to us, but then there are these sort of empty spots in our visibility of the process, as we like to say, the black box of pipeline generation. And so we went and started to look at what are these pieces that really are sort of like, we're putting stuff into it and then stuff coming out, but we don't really know what's happening in the middle there. And so we identified some of those gaps and started to really head toward a world where we think of leads and feel that is very different things. They have their own processes, they have their own milestones, and all these sort of very specific metrics to each piece. And that's what I've been working with Ashley and the team on to really make sure we're all speaking the same language. We can track the individual part and get that machine running like we need it to. And inputs and outputs make sense, and the middle is visible.
- [12:20]
A
So with that said. Right. Like, I think the thing that Ashley is emphasizing here is that when she went into the role, you really didn't want to think of, like, leads generate as a. As like a gold standard metric for your organization. So what do you think then would be like those two, three, maybe even four plus like core metrics now that you're taking to the CEO and to your QBRs and things like that that you want to be held accountable for in your role instead of just MQL volume or market source this or conversion to pipeline. Like how are you thinking about that?
- [12:57]
B
Yeah, so with us being half and half, we're a hybrid of PLG and then sales assisted. It kind of gets broken out between the two. And if you're listening and you are either sales led or you are plg, I think it depends. There's a little bit of nuance there. On the sales assistant and sales led. I always like to be held against qualified pipeline. So that's any deal stage that converts at 25% or greater to get that quality threshold that is one of the most important ones to have. It's that leading indicator for what we then need to be held against, which is the lagging of revenue. But oftentimes you have long sales cycle and so on. So you need that leading indicator to be held against as well, which would be pipeline for me. And then on the self service and the PLG side it's on leading indicators for the lagging of self service revenue which would be activated signups. So for us that's when they have seen their aha moment within the product and I've done the breakdown of the, basically the conversion rate to customer and it's, it's wildly different once they hit that milestone. Like Trevor mentioned, you need certain milestones to be held against. So for me that's the, the engage. So we have activated and then I have a couple of others that I will look at but they're not as important. You start to stack, rank the metric depending on what you're looking at. And then all this to say, I feel like a big conversation in the marketing world right now is, but what about brand awareness? Like, are you not tracking that? That's just as important. And it is, it absolutely is. And it, it affects these lagging and leading indicators I'm talking about right here. But at the end of the day this is what we really need to be measured against. Knowing that that impact on brand awareness is going to impact these, it's going to make them go up or down if you're not doing it correctly and so on. So I just wanted to put that little bit of asterisk in there because it's an argument that I've been seeing quite frequently lately.
- [14:49]
A
Yeah. So in a PLG like sales assisted GTM environment, how are you looking at marketing's contribution to those metrics?
- [14:59]
B
Yeah, so we own the self service revenue, so we have that target that we are being measured against. Of course there's other leading indicators within there, there's that activated engaged accounts, it's total new accounts that have signed up for the product for the freemium version as well and then also being held against pipeline as well. So there's truly like two, two goals I'm being held against which is the sales pipeline since we are dual motion and then the self service revenue and self service revenue. We also co own it with our product growth team as well. But obviously you need to drive the engagement into the product. The self service even happens. So it's a co owned goal for with each of us.
- [15:38]
A
Love that. And so when you do that, when you're looking at those sort of like free signups, what metrics from marketing are you looking at in terms of the journey for how they got there? Yeah, walk us through that a little bit more.
- [15:52]
B
Absolutely. So we're looking at how they came in. So what was that last touch attribution that drove that sign up? And that's not perfect by any means, but it does give us a little bit of a piece of the puzzle that we're trying to solve for. So we're knowing that there's other indicators that I'm looking at within each of the programs. So what you would call quote unquote vanity metrics, I'm also tracking within each of the programs to drive those signups. And then I'm also watching for that brand lift as well, which I'm typically looking at from a direct and organic search attribution. So when you start to see that list, I have a correlation with that with brand recall and recognition and coming inbound directly typing in your URL, et cetera, Again, not perfect. I'm hoping we advance this in the future, but as we're starting out, it's a good proxy.
- [16:39]
A
Yeah, I think that's the important thing too. Right. Like when you came in, in the role you have, you are basically building a department from the ground up. Right. Which is, I just want to call that out like very different obviously from an organization that has accumulated years and years worth of like technical debt. Right. It's a very different landscape, I think, and a unique set of challenges to be in. The reason I'm asking that is because I'm sort of wanting to. I'm thinking about this post around when you retire, you hope you never hear the word MQL again and Just your role at Refine Labs and obviously all of the stuff and the knowledge that you accumulated from working with those customers and in general, like whether that's inside of aligned or just broadly speaking, I want to know your point of view on what you think separates companies that scale revenue successfully versus those that fail. Like how are you thinking about that? Obviously it's something that you're bringing into this role right now.
- [17:35]
B
Yeah, this is a fun one that I saw repeatedly with my clients at Refine Labs. I think it was a unique advantage to be able to see that pattern recognition at scale through so many different industries and companies of various sizes to see this. And in my opinion, the companies that are scaling are not getting so obsessed with those leading indicators. They're using those as guidance for the lagging indicators, which at the end of the day is the top line revenue. Right. And so I've seen different companies where they obsess over the leading indicators and they lose sight of the bigger picture and oftentimes what you are sport against. So for instance these leading indicators, if it's MQLs, it drives the output and the strategies accordingly. Because if I'm held and I'm getting comped or whatever it looks like for a lead volume, probably going to be doing very different marketing than if I'm getting comped on total revenue. One is driving short termism a little bit, if that's even a word or a phrase. But you're trying to basically acquire as many leads as possible in a certain time frame in a very cheap way. You're probably doing it through a lot of paid acquisition. The other one is taking more of that strategic approach and understanding the buyer's journey, which is no longer, well, it's never been linear at all. But truly understanding, okay, where does our audience reside? What are they interested in? How do we just deliver our content in a memorable and unique way? We're not trying to drive a specific action every single time. Sometimes that action is just consumption. Like they need to read this, they need to consume it, they need to become aware of the category problem we're solving for and then just keep reminding them and having that consistency for brand recall and recognition so that when they do come inbound, they're coming in pretty hot. And so sales becomes almost like a guidance versus having to pitch them. And that just. It improves tremendously when you take a different approach to the strategic side of marketing versus. Okay, well, how many leads do I need to drive came from exactly this platform. I need to drive X amount from paid Ads, Google Ads, et cetera. I think it's just, it's just the difference of the output for sure.
- [19:48]
A
I love that you have such a sharp perspective on that. One thing that I see a lot of from my role and just talking to Dozens of other B2B SaaS companies is just this over emphasis on volume and doing more. If our leads aren't converting and pipeline is down, our instinct always is, let's go hire more reps to call more people. Let's go pay more on these channels to acquire more leads. The missing piece, and I think the thing that every like CFO or CEO would be so, so quick to scrutinize is the inefficiency in that. Right. Like most companies, I think typically convert around maybe 1 to 2% of their MQL to actual pipeline. Yet think of how much companies are wasting on their resources, on their program spend on the 96 to 98% of people that didn't amount to every. To anything. Right. So I think it's a really big shift in thinking for people in a marketing position like you. I want to ask a question for Trevor because I'm sort of on the other side of it, right. In my role at Passetto, I sort of act as like a principal consultant. Once companies have this data and can analyze it, Trevor very much facilitates this change in organizations that are either building something from scratch, like you all were at Aligned, or wanting to change their measurement model. And so what is like Trevor, in your opinion, what is that catalyst where something changes and then companies have like that aha moment to realize, wow, how we were doing things really wasn't helping us, was almost doing a disservice to the organization.
- [21:32]
C
Yeah, it's sort of one of the challenges is hard to imagine what the ideal state is until you see it because there's a lot of moving parts and there's a belief often that you're doing what you're doing is maybe good enough or maybe the only way or whatever. And you know, you do have to get the collective thinking about that change first and really make it clear to everybody that we're trying to get to this sort of new, better, more detailed, more accurate outcome. And so it becomes really exciting when you start to see the after we can now see all the reasons why we're working on things and all the reasons why those things aren't working out or are working out and how long it takes and all those kinds of things. These are things that you maybe don't realize you need in such detail. Or that you'll benefit from in such detail. But then you start to see it, you're like, wow, you know, this is. This is just an amazing bunch of insights that we didn't have before that maybe we didn't know we needed before, etc. And, yeah, so just getting everyone to, like, really visualize that. That future together and work toward it is. Take some work, because we're all set in our ways of how we've been doing things, and we've got systems that do those things. So, yeah, it's a bit of a journey, but it's a worthwhile journey for sure.
- [23:00]
A
We're also talking about modern measurement. Right. Like, we acknowledge all the time that the way GTM systems are built are very much like 15 years ago. And so while people understand the need for a shift, I think not a lot of companies know actually how to get from point A to point B. And so there could be. It could be a little bit of a bumpy road, because practically speaking, you might understand where you're trying to get to, but there's a lot of moving parts, I think, in reality, to actually, like, make that. Make that come to fruition.
- [23:33]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the key points you sort of made there is that there is this legacy way of doing things that was sort of just born out of necessity there. You know, the tools can only do so many things in so many ways in the past, or the sort of function in general was still very, very early, sort of in its infancy. And so, you know, good enough was maybe good enough. And we did have this sort of cultural belief that throughout the sort of Go to Market team years ago, that volume was all that really mattered and that you just put things through and we'll see what comes out the other end. And as long as we put too much or enough through, we'll get the result we want. And we know it's not that simple, and it was never that simple. But I think it's just a bunch of people in these roles that are relatively new roles with relatively new systems and so on, years ago, where things are cobbled together and they stuck and they worked well enough, but it doesn't have to be that way. And, you know, we talk a lot about that sort of in various episodes of this podcast that, you know, there. There's almost always a better way. It takes a little bit of work, but. But we're. We're past that. Like, we have the systems, we have the tools, we do have the knowledge to do those things. And now it's time to actually accept that we should change.
- [25:00]
A
So in your org, Ashley, was everyone at aligned aligned with the changes?
- [25:08]
C
Oh man, the amount of times that.
- [25:11]
B
We make that pun is wild. But yes, no, we were not all aligned actually. And it did take some change management to get buy in for it. So when I came into the role, there was a couple of ways that I was approaching this. One is I wanted to understand what was working, what was not. Obviously I understand the lay of the land, who I was working with, with the product, et cetera, protect what was working, do some optimizations, build out the team which was critical, and then the third or the other one is make one large strategic bet. And that strategic bet for me was fixing our infrastructure, which is really where this project came in. Because I've seen where you have a really solid infrastructure, it drives much better decision making. You have much more, you can be much more educated with it. So then you're going in the right direction. Also the other big one is improving the lead handoff process and the demand pool. I've seen that as such a huge lever to pull, especially for relatively, I would say quick ish pipeline. As you're building that demand at the brand awareness level, what are the other levers that you can pull down funnel to create that pipeline? And improving that lead to handoff process is a critical one that is often overlooked. A lot of times that's due to feeling like it's the gray zone between marketing and sales. You might feel like as a marketer you're overstepping because you're going into sales territory or sales might not know like fully how to optimize this process, et cetera. So this is where I identified this large strategic bet that if we can improve the infrastructure, one that'll help us with better decision making and forecasting. But the biggest one was to improve the lead handoff process. We weren't all aligned on this because systems had been created. I think you hack things together when you are a startup and they work a certain way and you get accustomed to that, you get accustomed to reports and so on and it is a big time left, this is a big time left to kind of overhaul. But over time, as we kind of kept pointing out the pains in the current systems, we got into that, into that buy in and got all aligned.
- [27:24]
A
I would love that you said something like I just took a note there because I think it resonates so much is just that gray zone between marketing and sales because I think just what we see with Organizations that we work with, that is always the thing that we come to. Because you have currently like this is not a blanket statement. You don't see this in every organization. But you have marketing generating their leads, you pass them to sales, sales works them and then pipeline either goes up or down or it's flat. And that's always the thing that companies want to fix is like what do I optimize, what do I stop doing? And they just don't have any good way to see that until they really like peel back the layers of the onion and see what's actually happening in that handoff process. Are the leads being picked up fast enough by sales? Are they like poor ICP matches? It could be anything. But you don't know until just anecdotally can you think of like any. And Trevor too by the way, any examples of how that can be actually pretty disastrous to a company when you don't track it?
- [28:29]
B
Yeah, I mean you don't know if your leads are being followed up with step number one. So if you're spending all acquisition budget on driving leads into your system and if you don't even know if they're being followed up with because it's not being tracked in your system, that can be detrimental. The other thing too is the missing feedback loop. And so have that ICP fit like you mentioned or maybe a certain opt in or whatever it looks like is not converting really well but you keep pouring more money or more focus over there. And so the feedback loop is critical between sales and marketing as well. The other thing that I've seen is segmentation of follow ups too. So if you notice a certain bdr, ae, whatever, however you have it, routing lands better with a certain segment. They have a higher, you know, let's say lead to meeting booked or meeting attended conversion rate. You can get smarter about the segmentation. Maybe they work a certain bucket or whatever it looks like that's another cool lever you can look at. If you can improve just small percentages of the qualified leads that you are bringing in to that meeting booked and meeting intended conversion rate that can be huge for your pipeline. So I think that's my gosh.
- [29:41]
A
Yeah, I love that. I'm just thinking through an exercise that I actually just wrapped up this morning with a client. Their revenue and pipeline is down from their SDR like cold prospecting motion. And the team was very much like okay, let's go hire four new SDRs so that we can hit our 2025 targets. Because they're like whatever percent towards target right now. And when we actually looked at the data that we now have, we could see such volatility between each of the SDRs in terms of activities that they're doing conversion to meeting, like ranging from anywhere from 3% on one SDR down to a 0% conversion to meeting. And when you change the average across all SDRs, I think their average conversion rate to everything they're working to meeting booked right now is 1.5%. If you change that just by a per half a percent or even a full percent or 2%, the downstream impacts, the positive impacts that actually has on like meetings booked or meetings scheduled to pipeline is huge. And so I always think like the nuances in that data that you're talking about just around segmentation and the trends that you can see, I mean you would never know that if you didn't track that, which is just so wild to me.
- [30:59]
B
Yeah, I think another huge highlight there. I had a client that generally they were doing really great. This was like in the height their performance, they were a quote unquote unicorn startup valued at seven plus billion dollars. And they were looking at everything generally like, like you just mentioned, look at it holistically. This is the problem when you don't dig into your data with like a spotlight and really comb through it is you could have performance that's just carrying you. But if you see these holes, that's a huge flag. And so if you're not looking at each one of those or each roads in on, on the lead types or how they're converting through the funnel and you're just looking at averages holistically, that's where a lot of the leakage is going to occur. And you might have market headwinds that you are doing successfully as a business, but as soon as that demand starts to simmer out, that's when you're going to see all the holes and you really want to get ahead of that first or seasonality comes in and that's where a lot of pain comes as well. So just looking at that holistically versus like all the little nuances you mentioned is so, so, so critical within any piece of this.
- [32:11]
C
Something you just said there actually that right at the end there you sort of said like essentially it's all good until it's not basically. And then, then you got to scramble. And I've personally seen that a million times as well in organizations where I've been in house and the Refine Labs world and the Seto world and all that. And it's always the same story, like we don't care about all this nuance intel. We're now desperate and we're, we're trying to scramble and figure out a way to fill this gap. Obviously that's the wrong time to do it, but that's what everyone does. And so we certainly do recommend, like, think about this. When times are good, when things are working well, that's the time you actually have to actually get these things in place when you're not scrambling. And I think that's an important thing that I think everyone needs a reminder of that every once in a while.
- [33:04]
A
Yeah, definitely. What else haven't we dug into on this topic before we switch gears? Any early insights that you've benefited from now that you've sort of done this initial work? And just to set the stage here, I think the biggest project that Passetto supported, aligned on, was to basically stand up the lead object in HubSpot. Can you give us the super high level view of what that is from your perspective, Ashley, in general, sort of layman's terms?
- [33:37]
B
Absolutely. So to kind of set the scene here, when I came in, we were creating essentially we were manipulating our deal pipeline, our opportunity pipeline to support what essentially the lead object in HubSpot should be doing. It was just set up from a historical agency. Like Trevor mentioned earlier in this session, the tools have evolved a lot and we had been trying to make tools do things that they probably shouldn't have been doing. I think everybody's system is doing a little bit of that, being honest here. But we came in, I saw this, it made management and also reporting so fuzzy and there was so many nuances to it. It wasn't impossible, but it just added a really thick complexity to it that you had to have all that nuanced understanding. So Trevor came in, identified implementing the lead object, which also helped our BDR team out tremendously because they had set leads to work versus kind of a cobble together system for one, sourcing the leads but also working the leads. We didn't have a ton of insight into if a lead was qualified or disqualified. We kind of sat in for a while or indefinitely. So we were missing that again back to that feedback loop to understand what was working or what was not. So really I think the biggest impact here was on the sales team and their workflows to make less time doing manual, manual work, to even work their leads, to understand what's working, what's not, where if someone has re engaged as a lead because you could disqualify as a Lead and come back in as a lead. But I think really the biggest piece here is just on the sales management and fixing the system that was forced to do something that it shouldn't have been doing.
- [35:26]
A
Yeah, Trevor, maybe you can explain this. Like what was that forced thing that it was doing that it shouldn't have been doing?
- [35:31]
C
From my perspective, there are a few sort of key things, sort of fundamental, maybe philosophical things that needed to be different. Thinking of the leads and deals as different things. You already mentioned it, Ashley talked about it. These are not the same process and they couldn't be in most orgs. They're worked by different teams. There's a handoff point in between them. And we acknowledge that to work a lead has different stages to it than to close a deal. And so you're really getting into that and saying like, well, this is what we do when we're qualifying a lead. This is what we do when we're closing a deal. And they're very different stories and you want to be able to measure each separately. Actually already talked about segmentation piece, being able to understand what's triggering our leads. Why are they being disqualified, what stages are they making it to? All those kinds of sort of operational things around the lead factory process that we think about. Then another fundamental thing was, I use this term which you hear out in the software world, fail fast. We want to get to a place where something comes into the system, into the process, becomes a lead or makes it to becoming a deal. We want those things to fail fast so we can move on and go work the next most important thing and sort of push those things back into the marketing world to try again later. And that's not what was happening. The general approach before was to say, well, this might be business, let's keep it open forever essentially until it becomes business. Which I understand the mentality for it, but my argument is that's a CRMs are for. We know the history, we can go build segmentation that says, here's the deal, here's deals we lost because of this lost reason. Let's go do something with them. In the marketing side, here's leads that came in and were disqualified because the timing just wasn't right. Okay, let's go do something with that in marketing and so on and so on. And so we want to know pretty quickly move those things through those processes, fail fast, disqualify as lead, close those deals as lost. So that each individual BDR or AE has their queue of things they're actually working and things don't get lost in the big pile of things that they might be working. And you know, I think that going we're already seeing an improvement there. But long term for the align team it's going to be huge because it's much easier to manage the sales team that way. Okay, let's talk every week what things you have in your pipeline you're actually working. Why aren't they moving forward? Which ones are really going to close? Sort of you're really active sales management kind of style and same with a BDR leader. They can do the same thing but for leads. So that we can understand how long is it taking for you to work each of your leads that come in, we know how many you're getting every day. Is that too much? We need to do something about capacity. Do we need to automate further? Do we need to tweak how we're identifying leads to begin with? Is our scoring mechanism over optimistic and all those kinds of things? We can know those things and by disqualifying those things quickly we get that feedback loop back to the marketing team really quickly versus this thing might, might materialize into something six months from now. Marketing can't know that. All they can know is this thing's been sitting forever. And so we really want to have a fast feedback loop that is detailed and clear that we can then act in in other parts of the go to market machine.
- [39:27]
B
I want to emphasize Trevor's fail fast fail piece right there. Because as much as we can perfect the CRM and the infrastructure, there's also this like if you want to be that GTM change maker, the strong, strong partnership with sales because if we're not running a super clean process at the same time it's going to skew our insights as well. I've been inside of orgs where they do not close loss like they want to hoard as many deals as possible so your win rates look fair, fabulous. You're not losing a ton of them. Or I've seen on the flip side where a team is so afraid to open a deal as well so they wait to the very last minute to open that opportunity again. It skews all of the insights that you're trying to gather to perfect your go to market engine. So there's so many nuances here that having that strong partnership with sales and the process as you are fixing the infrastructure is just so critical.
- [40:26]
C
Yeah. And I think one additional point there is, you know we're talking a lot about like systems and process here. Of course we think A lot about those components here. But what we're talking about here is cultural too. This is really important. The I'm afraid to open a deal or I'm afraid to close the deal. That is because I feel like I am going to get in trouble for say losing a deal. So I'm not. I'm either never going to close it or I'm never going to open it until I know I'm going to win. That's a cultural problem. That is the sales team feeling like it's their fault or they're going to be blamed or losing a deal. And it can't be that way. It absolutely shouldn't be that way. We measure, we iterate, we improve. And it's not the individual salesperson's fault alone. Right? There's so many moving parts and I think that's important. Like from the top down, sales leadership and above need to make that clear that we've got this process, you should use it and it's okay to disqualify that lead or it's okay to close that deal. We have a marketing engine to go deal with that and do something different.
- [41:38]
A
I'm thinking about what I'm hearing right now and Ashley, I think what I respect so much about you and your role is just the ability to truly have a vested interest in the entire factory of teams and people that go into producing Pipeline. Believe it or not, I think that that is an anomaly still. Like, despite the fact that you posted that thing About MQLs on LinkedIn and you had hundreds of comments and likes of people who obviously acknowledged that to be the truth, right now I think where things still feel broken is that despite us talking to many people just like you every week, you care about the whole system. A lot of marketing leaders that we care care about marketing. And when we start talking about prospecting, every B2B organization has some sort of prospecting motion. Like, that is fact. Leads just don't go to sales and become deals. You have this middle process where they have to be worked and qualified and et cetera. But as soon as we mention that so many marketers eyes gloss over because they're like, that's not marketing. That team doesn't report into me. I don't give a fuck about that. Like, I'm going to go find now somebody else who can really answer my question of like what do I do in marketing to make it better. And it's just like you're just thinking about this whole thing wrong because it's a causal chain of Stuff that happens to produce pipelines. So like, what is your perspective on that? How did you get to, to have that mentality that you have today?
- [43:12]
B
Yeah, first of all, focusing on this like quote unquote unsexy part of marketing, I'm a little bit of a nerd, so I love this part of it as well. It's my background too. But when you focus on this and you make changes here, it actually frees you up more to do the quote unquote fun parts of marketing where a lot of marketing teams want to spend more time. If you can improve these conversion rates and improve your pipeline, you're going to have more budget to do the wild, daring campaigns that you want to do on the brand side to test new programs. This is a piece of it to free you up over there. And so I think that's a critical, just kind of like understanding to have is this is a little bit of that byproduct. But I've gotten here because I do think it is really, really fascinating to see the impact of. If you are working so hard and marketers work so hard to generate this interest, it's never been more loud in the market. There's never been as many businesses and products, etc. So you are working so, so, so hard to generate that interest. You want to see it through. You don't want to work for nothing either and put all that blood, sweat and tears into it. So I think that's another kind of like mindset shift I've had as well of if you're doing all the hard work, don't just kind of like drop it off on the doorstep and not even ring the doorbell for someone to come answer it. That's, that's one way that I could, you know, just add to that conversation.
- [44:38]
A
Yeah, it's such an important perspective. I've worked with a lot of revenue oriented marketers as well as the non revenue oriented marketers. And the non revenue oriented marketers are the ones that do just that. Okay, well, I am responsible for content. Just like a newspaper, I write the story. I'm not responsible for what happens with it. Right. And I think that is a very important, I mean, perspective that I think all revenue leaders who want to be successful should have is to think about their team as a system and how they contribute to what actually goes on the doorstep of the people that are prospecting and what happens to it. Like, don't we care about the quality of the work that we're doing in the market and what that is producing so what would you say then? Like what would your perspective be? Be that you might share to other people who are feeling this thing in the market but maybe haven't yet gone down the path of like solutioning a fix to it?
- [45:41]
B
Yeah, I mean I would hire someone who is passionate about this is my first response. So if you don't have a demand marketer on your team as your counterpoint or counterpart, that's a good step. Get someone who is passionate about this. There's things in the marketing world that I it feels like I'm pulling my hair out, I want to watch paint dry. Everyone has that. There's pieces of the function that you either really enjoy or it's just not your favorite. And so that's part about leadership is you hire for your weaknesses and someone smarter than you in those areas. So I mean if that is something that someone is struggling with and they are getting that glossed over eyes, find someone who is kind of nerdy like myself here and that gets really excited about this process that can be your partner in crime so that they can free you up to do more of the work that you are wanting to do and want to put focus on.
- [46:34]
A
I really love that. I think that's a really responsible way about looking at it. And Chris Walker, when he was doing revenue vitals, the show, the one thing that he was really like hammering home for a while there was that when we think about marketing there's really like the art side of it and the science side of it. And rather than like brand versus demand, which in my opinion is. Is kind of confusing, there is the pipeline aspect and that involves sort of like I think an engineering mindset, like a very data oriented mindset. And then you have the art or like the brand which is the messaging, the positioning, the creative. And in my opinion I think it's really hard to be both. And I think to run a really successful marketing organization or marketing function, it's nice to have various leaders to own those different functions. So gosh, we went through a lot which I love before I have some wrap up questions. Anything like that's coming to mind for you in this conversation that maybe I didn't ask you that you have some.
- [47:43]
B
Thoughts on one of the other topic or like just notes that I want to leave. You know, anyone who's listening to this if they are struggling in that MQL hamster wheel or the lead, the lead wheel is that it really starts from the top down and so you need to change your scorecard before you can just rip the band aid off, what you're measured against is what you're scored against. And so it's really starting at the top, at the executive leadership. And so it's slow change and it takes a lot of work to get there. So pitching via your data findings of like, what I call splitting the funnel and following them fully down to revenue, presenting that in a, hey, here's what I'm seeing. What are your thoughts in a very collaborative way versus just like, like pushing it. I think that's been something that I have found successful. These are the findings slowly start trickling in these insights in your POV so that it's repetition, too. So you're not just pitching it one time, but it truly has to start at the executive level because they're helping set your KPIs, your OKRs, et cetera. And if those don't change away from leads, then you can't move away from this motion. And so that's critical. It's where your budget's coming from. It's how your growth plan is set up. So it's not just an Excel drag into the right formula. There's a lot more nuance to it. So that first needs to occur before you can rip off that band aid. And I want to also mention it's hard. It's really, really hard to do that. So just a little bit of empathy for anyone who may be trying to do it as well is it's hard, it'll take time, it's not a quick fix. But once you can get past that, there's so many success stories that you can see on LinkedIn. I was just reading one from Alice from Cognizant, where she was just talking about this. She has a great success story of them switching from the lead, the MQL motion to this, you know, the different motion here and what it took to get there. So if you're also kind of curious of that, she has a really great following to read through as well. So that's just one last thing I want to leave the conversation with.
- [49:50]
A
I think that's really important. And we've certainly seen that in our world too, where there are change agents like you that do fall flat because just the inability for the leadership to rally around the change and just, I mean, the status quo for many organizations, I think is old and archaic now. We can acknowledge that. But change is scary and it's more importantly risky, right, to really rethink and restructure how you measure your performance and start making decisions differently. I mean, it can be disruptive if it's not done. Right. Right. So, on that note, any sort of, like, tips or things that made you successful in your ability to actually do that in your own organization?
- [50:37]
B
Yeah. I think you also need to remember the psychology of who you're presenting to. So at the end of the day, a lot of executives, especially if you're pitching to the CFO or the CEO, they want some type of predictable growth equation. So the MQL has always been such a defaulted one because, okay, MQL's opportunity is X percent. We know we need to grow by this. This means this. We need this many SDRs. It's a plug and play Excel file. And so thinking into that mindset, that's really what they're trying to get to, is how can we tell our board what we're expecting or what type of investment do we need to get to our growth equation? So you need to be able to have that answer ready to go for when you switch it. I think a lot more executive teams are actually open to this idea if you pitch it the correct way and think about what they actually care about. So I think that's. That's a big piece of the puzzle that's often missed or falls flat when a marketer is trying to pitch this shift.
- [51:33]
A
Yeah, I definitely think it comes down to dollars and cents, and you can sort of, like, go on a merry go round of conceptually, like, the changes that this might bring to an organization. But the moment you can actually quantify that, I think is massive. It's, like, illuminates the problem so much better when you can tie dollars and cents to it. So I love that. I love that perspective, and I love that you have been successful in doing this too, which is huge. Thank you, Ashley. We appreciate having you on. I think this is a great discussion. I think we could have gone on for multiple hours because you just have such a unique and successful backstory. So maybe we can have you back on the show one day.
- [52:13]
B
Thanks for having me. Always happy to jam out with both of you.
- [52:16]
C
Thanks, Ashley.
- [52:17]
A
All right, y'.
- [52:18]
B
All.
- [52:18]
A
Thanks for tuning in. See you all next week.
- [52:33]
C
Sam.