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- [00:00]
Host
Foreign. You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Pesetto. Hey Carolyn, welcome to the Growth Activated show. We're so excited to have you here today.
- [00:16]
Carolyn Dilks
Hey, I'm pumped to be here. Just coming off a Labor Day weekend. It's a good way to start a new week.
- [00:21]
Host
Absolutely. Well, thanks for starting your week with us. So I'd love to dive into your background a little bit, tell us about the background in your career and, and where you're at today for sure.
- [00:32]
Carolyn Dilks
So I've been in the B2B tech world actually started in sort of like the VC space, probably coming close to about 15 years now. And so that's sort of my background. I've been exposed over the years to a lot of different scale up B2B tech companies. And right now I'm the CEO and co founder of a company called Passetto. It's one of Chris Walker's companies. Yeah. Helping to solve a lot of really critical problems that B2B tech companies, SaaS specifically are struggling with.
- [01:04]
Host
Interesting. And when you were at all of the tech startups, what did you specialize in?
- [01:09]
Carolyn Dilks
Yeah, head of marketing. Thanks for calling that out. Yeah, so I'm a four time head of marketing, most recently a VP of marketing at a series B govtech company.
- [01:18]
Host
Amazing. Okay, and then what led you to the change with running Petto? That's a big shift to move out of marketing. Although I know that it's a marketing agency. Right. Or I guess go to market.
- [01:29]
Carolyn Dilks
No, not. Yeah, not specifically marketing. We work with revenue teams like across the board. Not specifically marketing, but certainly like marketing leaders I think are the people to feel the problems and the symptoms of a dysfunctional GTM the most. I certainly did. So like I had said about three, probably about four years ago now, I was VP of marketing at a rapidly growing technology company and we had gotten multiple rounds while I was there of funding over the years. Series A, Series B, a second series B. And so there's a lot of pressure obviously with investments like that, especially from the board, from the investors. You know, you get all this money and then it's like, okay, now grow fast. And so that was sort of my role for a while. There was, you know, a lot of new bets, build brand awareness and you know, ramp up revenue in a short amount of time. And a lot of pressure, external pressure from obviously your investors. And with that obviously comes a lot of challenges.
- [02:29]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [02:30]
Carolyn Dilks
When you're making new investments and needing a way to explain or show are these investments having an impact or not. And so, yeah, that's sort of my background. And it sort of came to, like, a point when everything was culminating where we didn't have the data architecture needed to be able to basically explain or show impact across the board, right? What was working, what was not. And I guess that's what we see a lot of times at Passetto. And at the time, I brought on Chris Walker's former agency, Refine Labs, to help accelerate our demand engine, right? And with that, we are pouring a lot of new dollars into new programs to build brand awareness, to convert demand. And the pressure was on, like, where are my leads?
- [03:18]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [03:18]
Carolyn Dilks
We hear that all the time in marketing. Like, where are the leads? Where's my a hundred new leads that you promised me? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And at that time, and I still believe this heavily, like, leads are the gold standard of marketing performance, but they are a terrible metric. And so I really needed some new ways to show that my new investments were having a positive impact on the business. But leadership was very much glued to, like, this legacy way of measuring marketing lead volume.
- [03:47]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [03:48]
Carolyn Dilks
And so, yeah, that's sort of my background at the time. I really started to feel the pressure and sort of, like, the misalignment with that metric specifically. And so I started really consuming Chris's content. I mean, this was before Refine Labs and just seeing what he was doing. And I was sort of, like, trying to fix that problem as sort of like a side of the desk sort of project at my company. And so I was showing up to all of these shows just like, consuming, consuming, consuming this content just because I felt it in my soul. I was like, oh, I feel this problem. And so I was really admiring what he was doing. And I sort of went out on a whim, like, just feeling like, you know, I just am not aligned to how we are solving this problem and just really feeling like I want to be a part of this thing that Chris is doing over here and solving that problem because I'm so passionate about it. And so that's sort of like how I wound up at Pesetto. He and I had, obviously, a little bit of a relationship through hiring Refine Labs, and so we kept in touch. And at the time, he just so happened to be starting Pesetto and was looking for, you know, somebody to join him, join the team at the company. And that's sort of how I wound up at Pesetto. And just, it was really like a, I think, a matter of divine timing for anybody who feels that it just the stars aligned Everything worked out perfectly, and that's how I got there.
- [05:07]
Host
That's amazing. And I really appreciate and admire Chris Walker's content too. I was a big or am a big fan. I noticed he stopped posting on LinkedIn for a little while earlier this year, but otherwise, you really enjoy his content. For those who may not know Chris Walker, do you want to give just a quick snippet on sort of what he stands for? I know he's got a big LinkedIn.
- [05:28]
Carolyn Dilks
Following, but, yeah, so he has a huge presence on LinkedIn for a long time. He was really known for, like, B2B marketing strategy, you know, demand strategy. Coined this term, the MQL hamster wheel. And so he was the founder and owner of Refine Labs, which I think he was around from doing that from around 2019 until he just sold his remaining shares of that company just a few months ago. So that's sort of like where I think he gets his reputation really pushing back against the status quo with, like, demand gen sort of like, flipped that upside down. And I think, yeah, he got a lot of traction because he spotted problems in marketing and in demand gen much earlier than the rest of the market. And so I think it was quite a provocative approach or just like a really counterintuitive approach to how people were doing marketing. And so I think it stirred up a lot of. Not controversy, but it just stirred up a lot of conversation in B2B marketing and in the B2B tech space, too.
- [06:29]
Host
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so fast forward to today. You're the CEO of Passetto. Tell us a little bit more about what you specialize in. When does Passetto come into revenue organizations and to solve which problem?
- [06:41]
Carolyn Dilks
For sure. Yeah. So Passetto is part advisory, part instrumentation software. We sort of like, bring the two together and help companies solve this problem that we've coined the pipeline black box. It's just this period of time before an opportunity is created that is very poorly tracked. I have yet to see a company actually track this stage well, if at all. And so we help sort of companies start to track that and see the data that they cannot see before an opportunity gets created so that they can very clearly answer this question of what is working and what is not working in my gtm.
- [07:17]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [07:18]
Carolyn Dilks
Every company that comes to us either feels like their pipeline is falling flat, or they're measured on the wrong metrics or growth is going down. But it's amazing. Nobody can answer what seems to be, like, the easiest question.
- [07:29]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [07:30]
Carolyn Dilks
They can't measure it because they're measuring the wrong metrics, they're not measuring what's inside the pipeline black box. We expose that and basically give companies the data that they don't have to make smarter strategic decisions to optimize their pipeline factory.
- [07:44]
Host
Okay, so the pipeline black box is how your pipeline gets created, how it comes to get created into an opportunity or how are you defining that?
- [07:54]
Carolyn Dilks
Yeah, good question. And let's unpack that a little bit more. So think about what happens in a go to market organization every day or you know, across the period of several months. You've got your SDR team, you've got your AES, you have a mix of people, tech, now AI tools, doing this thing that is basically trying to get a meeting, get people on the phone with your target market every day. Millions of interactions, right? Millions of emails sent, phone calls logged, LinkedIn messages sent. You've got marketing over here sending emails. You've got just a shitstorm of stuff that's happening across sales and marketing, right? We might track touch points over here in marketing, we'll track leads generated. But in terms of all of the activities that happen to try and book a meeting, very poorly tracked. It's tracked in multiple different tools, tech, different places. And what we need is a very simplified, stitched together view of all of that to show exactly what's happening before an opportunity is created. Why did we think it was a good idea to reach out to this person? What was the trigger that caused our BDR or SDR team to reach out to this person? How long did it take us to connect with that person? How long did it take us to disqualify that person? Why did we disqualify them, right? How long did it take to book our first meeting? It sounds so simple, but there are so many breadcrumbs of absolutely critical data at that stage that goes untracked, right? And so when we can see like our leads are up but our pipeline is down, what the fuck is happening? It's hidden, it's hidden in plain sight, yet we just don't have the ability to track it. So, so we can't say, well, we generated 3,000 MQLs, but only 1% of those converted to pipeline did we know that. How many prospects did our SDR team work? How many of those converted to pipeline? What happened in between? There is basically a causal map of the patterns and the things that produce pipeline. But yet when pipeline is down, we don't have the ability to say, to answer why our win rate is down. Why? Like these are basic fundamental questions. That we can't answer. And so we think of the pipeline black box to be very similar. Similar to like, we always use like the manufacturing factory analogy.
- [10:07]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [10:07]
Host
Okay.
- [10:07]
Carolyn Dilks
If you're running a factory, like a car manufacturing plant, whatever, right? You get a bunch of stuff into the factory, you've got all of your different suppliers providing you parts and all kinds of other stuff, right? And then you get on the line and you have a such rigorous process to track everything on the line from production to quality assurance to testing, and then it comes out the other end, you have the finished product.
- [10:30]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [10:31]
Carolyn Dilks
And we do that like a science. We produce cars over and over and over again with the same quality standards. They meet the same, like, testing standards, all of this stuff. Why is pipeline any different? We have the ability to engineer and to manufacture pipeline the very same way, but we just throw a bunch of shit into the factory, hold our breath, cross our fingers and think it's going to come out the other side.
- [10:53]
Interviewer/Co-host
Pipeline, right.
- [10:54]
Carolyn Dilks
But when shit goes sideways, we have no ability to figure out what's happening on the line, to actually improve it. And so that's what we want to do is provide the visibility that teams need to have that rigor to engineer pipeline on a recurring predictive basis.
- [11:13]
Host
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's definitely probably the number one pain point I see for sure within organizations. Major pain point. And I'm so curious when you think about. Because you're right, there's so many factors and a lot of times I see that oftentimes even people are just looking at channels or teams in order to sort of point attribution credit. And we're fighting over the same. We're fighting over the same pipeline, which is so silly, but how granular are you guys aiming to get? Like, are you even sharing what tools and technology in the tech stack had a hand in pipeline creation? Or are you really even just trying to untangle the channels that a prospect engage? Like the different channels, the different teams and that level, I guess. How deep are you going?
- [12:03]
Carolyn Dilks
Yeah, good question. So I think when you're talking about all of these different, like, touch points or things that might happen, that's where attribution comes in. Like, we hear that all the time, right? Marketing teams think that attribution is going to solve their problem because it's going to show them all of the stuff that happened before a deal was created, all of the interactions or signals or touch points, whatever. Whatever you want to call it, because everybody's using all kinds of terms now to define that. But then you have all of that stuff, or your account data or your signal data. You know, whatever's happening in Clay, you have all of these things over here as you're trying to engage a prospect, and then you have this definitive period where you start working somebody, whether it's because marketing passed them over to sales and said, this person has reached a score, they're qualified, go try and get a meeting with them. Or because Clay said that this person had these different signals, go work them. Or because your intent platform said, oh, this person changed a job, go work them.
- [12:55]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [12:56]
Carolyn Dilks
So you have all of this stuff over here, all of these tools or tech or whatever, feeding the system, and then you get on the line and you start working, calling, interacting with that prospect. We want to know the actual thing that triggered them, what triggered them?
- [13:13]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [13:13]
Carolyn Dilks
Was it a pure cold lead that your SDR team defined to be an ICP match for whatever reason? We want to know that. Was it a lead that raised their hand on a book demo form? We want to know that was a random person that reached a score threshold of 100 points, and now they're considered an MQL. We want to know that. We want to know exactly what the independent trigger was, not the team that sourced the deal. These are two different things. We're not talking about, like, last touch attribution. Who was the team that credited, you know, gets the credit for that? It's not about that at all. What was the thing that led a SDR or AE or BDR to reach out to that person to either get the meeting, not get the meeting, and then what happened thereafter?
- [13:58]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [13:58]
Carolyn Dilks
It's sort of looking at, like a causal chain of things that happened.
- [14:02]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [14:02]
Carolyn Dilks
And so you have attribution data to look at the channels and campaigns and all of the other interactions that happened before that. But we want to know how efficient is your ability to basically get a meeting, convert that person or that account to pipeline?
- [14:16]
Host
Okay, so you're coming in to solve that, to help solve that, or bring visibility to that point in the process. So when you talk about the causal map and things like that, are you just looking at that last trigger point, or are you also looking at the activities, maybe regardless of team to your point, but also looking at the activities that might have led them to take that trigger action?
- [14:39]
Carolyn Dilks
No, that is where I think a lot of people get us confused or think that they need attribution. I get that a lot of times we get a lot of marketers who come inbound saying to us, I need help figuring out where do I put my investments in 2026? Like, I have no idea. In marketing, like, do I do more events? You know, do I scale back on the paid search? Do I do more paid social? Like my data, I'm only looking at Last Touch attribution and like, I don't know, right? And so what they think they need is attribution to basically give them some like arbitrary weighting to all the shit that they're doing. And it's going to give them the answer, right? And that's not us. We're not an attribution platform. We never claim to be. That's important. But in my view you are not going to get the answers that you are looking for in attribution. It's sort of like ancillary, it's secondary. The first thing you need to do is figure out, do you have a marketing problem, right? And so how many of the people, like, let's just use scored MQLs as an example, right? That is the gold standard for marketing, right? They're out there, they've got an MQL target, they gotta hit it. So they're doing a bunch of shit in the market, they're going to events, they're getting these names and they do a bunch of stuff. They reach a score and on X date they become an MQL because they've done X, Y and Z to show some level of intent, right? And so they pass them to sales and your SDR starts to work them. Maybe the SDR sits in marketing, I don't know, right? So they pass them and then pipeline is down and marketing is pointing fingers at sales saying, sales is not working my leads. Sales is pointing fingers at marketing saying like these leads are shit, right? And so this is exactly why now you have this silo or this friction between two teams. Well, do we know if the MQLs are garbage leads or not? Do we know what's actually leading to meetings? Do we know what's effective in terms of who we're working? And so we've worked with a plethora of different companies and some MQLs make up the largest share of what a team is working, right? If you have say 10,000 individual prospects that are being worked in a quarter, I'm talking like 300 of them, get a meeting. Like the conversion rate is so bad for those, right? And think of how many investments we are putting into that. And marketing teams have no idea of just how crappy that is. Sales teams have no idea. The go to market leader, whoever that is, has no idea. And so like, that is the first thing that we want to isolate instead of defending all of the stuff that we're over here doing in marketing to get more budget or to figure out, you know, how to reallocate my budget, whatever. I think the reality is that we need to see is like, well, how effective is that marketing engine in general? How many resources are we spending to work those leads that are going nowhere? That is the first thing we need to hear. Or maybe they are going somewhere. Like, I've also consulted with a number of clients that their MQLs convert at like 25%, which is pretty excellent.
- [17:34]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [17:35]
Carolyn Dilks
And so I think that's the first thing we need to see and then work our way back to say, okay, well all of these poor quality leads that are like pretty cold, what are they doing before? Can we recognize any patterns there? Or what are these like leads that are converting really well and moving to become an opportunity fast? What are they doing before? And so I think the reality first is you need to understand how well that prospecting engine is even operating to then figure out what to do next versus trying to solve a broken engine to begin with.
- [18:03]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [18:03]
Carolyn Dilks
Like, why are we, why are we fighting over what channel to spend on when just like all of these leads that are coming from that channel are going nowhere? That is the core thing that we've got to solve.
- [18:13]
Host
Okay, so I think I'm tracking with you. So if I'm understanding correctly what you're suggesting is that from marketing leaders, I guess from the B2B marketing perspective, don't just stop at the MQL, really try to dig in and understand which, what percentage of the MQLs are converting into a meeting in order to understand how the marketing engine engine is performing and delivering again from our perspective as a part of the overall engine, if you will. And then once we know what's performing and not then look at attribution data to see which channels were leading them to MQLs. Is that am I, am I following correctly or am I missing something?
- [18:49]
Carolyn Dilks
Yeah, I would say even go a step further.
- [18:51]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [18:52]
Carolyn Dilks
Because MQLs are sort of like a precursor to like actually becoming a prospect.
- [18:56]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right, Right.
- [18:57]
Carolyn Dilks
And MQL is like a pretty, it's a name at that point where a prospect is a little, little further down funnel. But yeah, I think you're not going to find the answers that you need in attribution data. And I'll tell you why, because I think a lot of marketers might challenge me on that. But we've had a number of marketing or of go to market teams come to us, they want help. They already have an attribution tool and they can't get the answers from that.
- [19:22]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [19:22]
Carolyn Dilks
And so the biggest unlock is as soon as you have visibility into your prospecting efficiency. And I don't even want to call it prospecting like the sales to marketing handoff or just all of the people that you're working to get a meeting with before an opportunity becomes an opportunity. Like as soon as you open up that can and shine a light on like that data, it's absolutely illuminating what a company can learn when they expose that or just have the ability to measure it.
- [19:50]
Host
Give us some examples. What are some of the most interesting learnings from recent clients that you've had?
- [19:55]
Carolyn Dilks
Yeah, love to do that. Okay. So one client that comes to mind their a hundred million okay CLM platform. Their pipeline when they came to us was decelerating and like sort of like a mix of like slow deceleration and like a plateau. Okay. And like every company that comes in, they had said, okay, we're using like the three model, three funnel model or four funnel model, right? Measuring like marketing source pipeline, sales source pipeline, SDR source pipeline, like partner pipeline or something like that.
- [20:25]
Host
Okay.
- [20:25]
Carolyn Dilks
We can't figure out why our pipeline is down and like CAC is going up and our growth rate is slowing and like this is a problem. I can't understand what's broken inside, like my marketing team or sales team or whatever to figure out what's happening. And like marketing is over here banging on the drum like well we're hitting our MQLs like up into the right. Like that's the problem, right? You come to these board meetings and every team is basically defending themselves saying oh well what we're doing is working. What's like I don't understand what the problem is. And so yeah, when we got in in the door with them, the first thing we had realized is like you've got attribution that's not giving you your answer, but you have no idea what before an opportunity becomes an opportunity. Like what's creating that.
- [21:06]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [21:07]
Carolyn Dilks
And so we exposed their pipeline black box and started to measure that and actually learned very quickly that this particular company has a pretty solid marketing engine. Their MQLs were converting to qualified pipeline at about 16 or 17%. So like a little bit of room for improvement there, but like pretty that's a lot better than like a lot of other companies we look look at and what else their hand raisers were converting at a super high conversion rate when we could see it, oh, I want to say over 40%, 50%. Great. How do we get more of those? And so then we looked at basically the sequence of things that those types of leads were doing before becoming an opportunity compared to, you know, these like, randomly scored MQLs noticed some really good patterns there on like the types of signals those people had.
- [21:58]
Host
Okay.
- [21:58]
Carolyn Dilks
We also could see cold outbound, right? Who was coming into the funnel from cold outbound, really low conversion rate. But then to see like a huge volume of prospects were being worked by the sales team, like, extremely inefficient. So a lot of, I think, nuances. And this is not just like a department source thing too. I want to be very clear about this. It's not just marketing sources, sales sources, but really understanding the nuances there. And like seeing that hand raisers move through the funnel in like 12 days.
- [22:28]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [22:29]
Carolyn Dilks
MQ move through the funnel in like, I want to say 130 days. Right. And so seeing that while your team is spending a lot of time working on MQLs that take multiple months to convert at such a low rate, like, it's extremely inefficient to go about your go to market that way systematically. And so really trying to help the see a team see now like the system as like an entire factory versus marketing sales lifecycle basically, and understand, okay, as a system, as a, as a go to market factory, we got to do less of this, more of this and be comfortable with metrics like MQLS to go down. Because we're shifting how we do things. And we know that MQLS might go down over here, but our win rate.
- [23:18]
Interviewer/Co-host
Might go up, right?
- [23:20]
Host
Yeah.
- [23:20]
Carolyn Dilks
The volume of people we have to work to get those meetings might go down. Like, these are all like systematic changes that come along with doing things differently as a, as an organization.
- [23:31]
Host
I love it. I love it. Okay, so what are some of like the major metrics that you guys go in and look at as a part of the go to market factory idea? And I'd love to even just hear like our organizations naturally looking at those. I mean, a lot of what you're saying, I would say yes, but maybe they're not looking at it in terms of efficiency the way you guys are or really understanding, like going a layer deeper. But would love to hear your, love to hear your opinion, like, what are the major KPIs everyone should be looking at?
- [24:01]
Carolyn Dilks
Okay, so first things first. We don't necessarily like, encourage teams to like, Rip out their metrics, but just like layer in some new ones.
- [24:07]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right, okay.
- [24:08]
Carolyn Dilks
And so the thing we immediately challenge is pipeline. Like it's very difficult for Passetto to work directly with a marketing leader specifically unless the marketing leader is responsible for pipeline as a whole.
- [24:22]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [24:22]
Carolyn Dilks
And so we almost like to channel up to like who owns pipeline overall for both sales and marketing. And so we challenge the status quo to say, don't look at pipeline by whatever source.
- [24:33]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [24:34]
Carolyn Dilks
A lot of companies use last touch, like some sort of last touch model to figure out what team source the pipeline or first touch or whatever. We just say remove the department source fallacy or whatever you're using on pipeline. We're going to look at just pipeline overall, how much pipeline are we generating?
- [24:50]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [24:52]
Carolyn Dilks
Then when we think about the pipeline black box, we want to understand basically the sales trigger, what was the trigger that got the meeting? We want to understand, you know, the time to going from working to connected. What does that time period look like? We want to understand connected to meeting booked or meeting held, that sort of thing. We want to look at the number of days to becoming qualified pipeline. We want to look at the qualification rate to pipeline. We want to look at the disqualification rate to pipeline. We want to understand, well, what sequence did that? Was that, did you get a meeting because of some sort of sequence that that person responded to in sales loft or outreach? What sequence was it? What channel was it? Was it an email that they responded to? Was it a phone call? Was it like a LinkedIn DM? Like what was it? What did they respond to? And so from that we wanna look at everything before opportunity creation and understand, okay, like are there two or three recurring patterns of things that happen that happen really fast leading up to pipeline creation that we can like recycle and put on autopilot? So like we're now engineering predictable pipeline. What are those two or three patterns where people just go from sales ready or working to like opportunity creation and closed one really fast. And then can we isolate any resource strains or resource sucks where we're just leaking pipeline because we're focusing on the wrong things like what are those patterns? And so when we see those metrics, we have a really quick way to help the team uncover, like where are you really efficient and where are you super inefficient? And of course we look at other operational metrics like win rate, like sort of down funnel metrics like win rate, sales cycle length, acv, close one, revenue, things like that.
- [26:35]
Host
Okay, super interesting. So from a marketing perspective, I guess what is your first recommendation or what should B2B marketing leaders take away from this conversation and start going to do immediately within there? Because I think you're right. A lot of times marketing leaders don't necessarily control pipeline. What do you think they can do to immediately help understand what's happening within their go to market factory?
- [27:02]
Carolyn Dilks
So I think some level of accountability, like I think as marketing leaders we're very like they have one of the toughest jobs in the GTA TM because they don't have metrics to arm them and to arm their decisions. So they're going off gut feel a lot. They're going off shitty metrics that are like from 15 years ago, that worked a decade or more ago, they don't anymore. And so I think one of the biggest thing, most impactful things that a marketing leader can do as a responsible executive is to assume some level of accountability or responsibility and say, hey, maybe these MQLs that I'm creating are not good quality MQLs. I think marketers are very quick to get on the defense in terms of like what they are doing. Whereas if you approach this with curiosity, maybe ask the question or like the metrics, I'm looking at doing a disservice for this business that I'm responsible for when it comes to pipeline. So I think that's one and I think two is to challenge attribution. If you have an attribution tool and you're not getting your answers, well, there's, there's sort of like one thing to consider. Challenge that and bring in somebody like your CRO or whoever you report into the CEO and get them curious too. Like, hey, there's this set, there's this, you know, set of data we might not be looking at. Like we should go out and get it. And it doesn't have to be this whole like restructure of your CRM or you know, retooling and all of this. Sometimes the answers you need are like hidden in plain sight. You just have to go approach it with curiosity and try and get those answers.
- [28:36]
Host
Yeah, I just, I was actually doing a marketing assessment a couple weeks ago and I was meeting with the director of Demand Gen and talking to him about the efficiency of his work and he was talking about, well, 80% of the leads I drive in convert into MQLs. It's like, okay, cool, but how many of your MQLs convert into pipeline?
- [28:54]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [28:55]
Host
Or convert into meetings? And he didn't know the answer. And so I think this is a great point. I think it's a great thing to, for us to be thinking about is just going the extra mile, really understanding what's happening and being open to it. So I think that's great. One of the things that I keep going back to as you're talking is in the instances where because I also I'm a huge proponent of marketing figuring out who makes it to a meeting. Right. As opposed to mql. I agreed. I think MQL is sort of useless in a lot of ways. And if you can't get someone to a meeting, then what. What good was that anyways? But I'm curious just knowing that a lot of marketers and marketing leaders don't push for a meeting and often stop at an MQL that may not be a hand raiser. Like let's take away contact forms, you know, on your website of people who want to talk to you and let's think about all the MQLs, the people that are. Maybe they've engaged with a piece of thought leadership or they've attended an event or things that perhaps are meaningful, but it is not the meeting that they made it to.
- [29:57]
Interviewer/Co-host
Mm.
- [29:57]
Host
In that instance, it almost seems like when you come in and you're identifying the pipeline black box that teams that define MQLs like that. Am I right in understanding that they may not like sort of achieve critical mass within the trigger points? Like they may not. Marketing may not be a main way in terms of how people are triggered into booking a meeting in those instances, if they're doing a lot more of sort of top of funnel activities. Is that. Do you see that? And if so, is it that I guess is your analysis that marketing is not really a significant part of the engine or in those instances maybe they are. But it's just they may not be triggering, but they might be the causal. They might be a part of the causal map of why someone before someone triggered. They took all those marketing actions, they attended an event, they downloaded a piece of thought leadership and then they took the meeting through the BDR when they reached out to on out on LinkedIn, I guess how are you thinking about or weighting those differences?
- [30:56]
Carolyn Dilks
Yeah, so I think that's where, you know, an attribution capability does come into play. And I think it depends on, you know, like the type of organization. Are they product led? Are they sales led? Are they SDR led? Are they marketing led or inbound or whatever you want to call it. A lot matters there. And so a tool like attribution can be really helpful where if like your SDRs are driving the lion's share of pipeline being created through cold outbound or whatever, usually you can layer an attribution later to say, okay, well are they really cold? Are they doing stuff before that or are we having a greater impact down funnel through the sales cycle? And so yeah, attribution can be really key there to understand the impact or the influence or what have you of marketing and sort of like what is that journey looking like? And I think that that's an important part of the process. But if you're a company that has a pipeline problem and you don't know how efficient you are at booking meetings or what's driving the meetings, like, you need to orient yourself around that fact first. Like a lot of those organizations may not know. Are we inbound led? Are we SDR led? I think that is the first thing that we want to figure out what is coming from where, like how are we getting stuff on the line to begin with?
- [32:07]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right?
- [32:07]
Host
Yeah.
- [32:08]
Carolyn Dilks
And I think signals or attribution are getting even harder to track, right? Because a lot of companies now are moving towards like ungating their stuff. You know, dark social is even more profound than ever. Web sessions are getting even harder to track because of, you know, like cookies and all of that. And so yeah, like touch points are important part of the journey, but they're not going to give you the answer that you need to know. That's, that's the important thing.
- [32:34]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [32:34]
Carolyn Dilks
I think at the end of the day, something that every marketing team should strive for is generating hand raisers. Marketing helps you do that. The stuff that you're doing in the market can help you do that. But like generating leads from like a white paper download or from like a badge scan at an event like highly inefficient today in today's ecosystem. Yet that's how a lot of people are still measured. And if we're talking about CAC and efficiency and all of this other stuff that's going to impact your EBITDA margins or your profitability and all of these other really important businesses metrics, like we need to think long and hard about the types of investments we are making because demand conversion is really expensive, very expensive to run paid search lead capture on LinkedIn. You know, getting this big booth to have a presence at an event like all this shit is really expensive. And for What? To get 3,000 names a quarter that either don't go anywhere or that take us like 350 days to nurture and warm. There's just a. I think a lot, a lot more and better ways that we can operate in the market today, in today's ecosystem. It's very different from the way it was, you know, even just a few years ago.
- [33:46]
Host
Totally, totally. And I, I don't disagree at all. And I think that's, I think that's really clear in terms of making sure that we understand the hand raisers to the, the meeting. One thing I would be curious to get your, your insight on is certainly a lot of the things, certainly we all know brand is hard to track. And I've heard you loud and clear that you're not really an attribution firm. So maybe this is, maybe this is not really in your wheelhouse. But I know from following you that you obviously have a podcast. Do you focus on LinkedIn? Like you do a lot of brand type marketing activities, but it certainly, I'm sure, drives pipeline for you. How do you personally think about the brand side of marketing when you're entering into these pipeline conversations? Or is that sort of a totally separate equation that we would, you know, that you would encourage, go to market leaders to look at differently?
- [34:39]
Carolyn Dilks
Yeah, it's certainly something that's really important to me. But like that's not the thing that Passetto is wanting to solve for.
- [34:45]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right?
- [34:45]
Carolyn Dilks
Like you've got like, you know, amazing companies out there that solve that problem. Refine Labs being one of them. They know how to help you create and execute really fucking dope brand campaigns to build awareness in the market. I think that that's important and that's why I think marketers, that's where their superpower is.
- [35:05]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right?
- [35:05]
Carolyn Dilks
So I don't think that marketers should be caught in this like web of trying to figure out the data.
- [35:09]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right?
- [35:10]
Carolyn Dilks
That's why we bring on Rev Ops. That's why we bring on companies like Passetto. That's where we bring in GTM engineers, people like that to help solve that problem. Because that is obviously huge. Especially now. Like buyers are now doing their own research. They're not, you know, clicking on a white paper and downloading it anymore. They're going to Reddit, they're going to, you know, chatgpt to do their research. They're going on LinkedIn, they're consuming content, they want to educate at their own pace and they will talk to sales when they're ready.
- [35:39]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right?
- [35:39]
Carolyn Dilks
So I think all of those things are really important and I think now more than ever is where like strategic messaging and positioning and all of that really comes into effect. Like we're about to go through another huge shift, if not like already going through that with AI.
- [35:56]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [35:56]
Carolyn Dilks
And so clarity around our message is absolutely vital. How we show up and educate our prospects is absolutely vital. Like those things really matter. Those things are obviously a lot harder to track. I've heard that there's two. I've not used this tool, but I've heard that there's tools like, you know, things like my telescope, where you can start to. I might be misspeaking here, but start to see how much people are searching for you.
- [36:22]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [36:22]
Carolyn Dilks
Like there's things like that where I think we have roundabout ways to track that. And naturally I think we will see a lift in pipeline creation, pipeline velocity, win rates, things like that, when we nail it, when we do a really good job of it. But again, like, that is not the same thing as lead creation. Two different things, right?
- [36:42]
Host
Yep. Okay, Fascinating. I'll have to check out my telescope. I don't think I've heard of that one yet, but go check that out. This has been so great. Any other final pieces of advice or words of wisdom? As I know annual planning's right around the corner, as you're seeing in your own company, what's working, what's not. Any final thoughts for B2B marketing leaders that you think we should be thinking about?
- [37:04]
Carolyn Dilks
Yeah, I mean, I've had a lot of conversations specifically with VPs and CMOs in the last two weeks and a lot of the very, like, very similar trends across the board. And so one is like, if you're measuring by department, source or last touch attribution, and you're struggling with how to make, you know, smart decisions going into next year, I would say I encourage you to challenge that because you are going to be at a disadvantage if you don't now.
- [37:33]
Interviewer/Co-host
Right.
- [37:34]
Carolyn Dilks
So I think that's one thing. The other thing is to sort of challenge this belief that attribution is going to be the thing that helps you. I think attribution can be great. I personally have been the person to believe that attribution was going to solve my problem and help me understand my impact on pipeline creation. And let me just tell you that that is a secondary thing to layer on once you have the data architecture, the basic operational data that you want to track. Tracked. So that's my. My second piece of advice. I think if you are a marketing leader, and I know there's many out there, don't be afraid to challenge a status quo. Sit down with your CRO and just say, like, listen, I don't think that these metrics that we are measuring are doing me any favors. I want to make data informed decisions. There's a better way. I know there's a better way because we've done this now 30 plus times in the last year. Yeah, I would just say push for change if you know that something isn't, isn't working. Like, try and get folks and create some groundswell around it because your instincts are probably right. My instincts are right. I see that across the board with other companies. But I think the biggest thing is not letting inertia, I think, get in the way of that. It's very hard for companies that are over 150, 200 million to do this kind of thing. And so it's usually a lot of legacy thinking, inertia, you name it. There's a lot that can sort of prevent teams from measuring different things and sort of looking at GTM a little bit differently, but, yeah, absolutely.
- [38:59]
Host
Well, amazing. And I know you have your own podcast, so if people want to learn more from you, tell us the name of the podcast that they can go check you out on.
- [39:07]
Carolyn Dilks
Oh, yeah, for sure. Thank you. So our show is GTM Live, and I host that with my two co founders, Trevor and Amber. So, yeah, come check us out. We'd love to have you listen to our show.
- [39:18]
Host
Yeah, absolutely. Any other places you'd send people to to learn more about you and Passetto?
- [39:23]
Carolyn Dilks
Yeah, you can check out posetto.com, that's our website, or reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm Carolyn Dilks. I love when people come to say hello and just introduce themselves, so I'm always down for a conversation there.
- [39:33]
Host
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Carolyn. This has been so wonderful. I learned a lot. I appreciate your time today.
- [39:39]
Carolyn Dilks
Awesome. Thank you. I love chatting with folks in marketing, so that was great. Thanks for the time and thanks for having me on.
- [39:45]
Host
Absolutely. See you soon.
- [39:47]
Carolyn Dilks
Okay, cool. Thank you. It.