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Hey guys, welcome back. Today's episode is different because it actually wasn't intended to be a podcast episode at all. It's a raw, behind the scenes brain dump. I actually recorded for our video team while I was working through my thoughts for a video on the topic of marketing source pipeline as a key marketing metric, and also what it really takes to make this concept of marketing influence defensible in a boardroom. You guys know Episetto, really our entire mission right now is to make better marketing metrics more accessible to marketing leaders and pract practitioners, make them less complicated and also less risky to your career. The reality is that the metrics that we're mostly using today are really narrow, they're overly short term, and they fail to capture how revenue actually gets created. And so as a result, marketing is often really misunderstood by leadership teams and boards. So we're going to eventually turn what you're hearing today into a more polished YouTube video. But in the meantime, I did want to share with you guys the full unfiltered version with you exactly as it happened in real time in my mind while I was thinking through the topic and then shaping the core ideas for the video script. So it's more candid and definitely more uncurated than the usual episode that we put out here. But I think you'll find it valuable, so I hope that you enjoy listening. Thanks for being here, really appreciate you guys and enjoy this episode. You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Petto. Hey guys, I'm putting some thoughts together on a content topic for a video and it's all around this concept of marketing influence, right? So in B2B SaaS we know that the gold standard for measuring marketing's business impact is on what we call marketing source pipeline. That is basically if something happened that initiated an opportunity to be created, like right before it was created. For marketing, that's usually hand raisers, like somebody goes to an event or somebody, you know, fills out a form and requests like a demo or a free trial and then the opportunity gets created shortly after, after. And so what typically happens in most B2B organizations is that they have like a last touch attribution model to credit a team or a thing, or they have like the three or four funnel model which assigns credit to basically the GTM motion that, you know, created the opportunity. So like if sales was prospecting to a certain opportunity and then that created the deal and, you know, nothing else happened in the last 30 days before great sales is going to get the deal. If an opportunity got created through a demo request. We're going to say marketing got the deal. The biggest problem with that is that it doesn't factor in that the best marketing teams or GTM teams don't really compete for credit. And it's really about knowing that the best teams also leverage both marketing and sales together and not separately. We know that usually marketing at some point touches every single deal that gets created. And you obviously cannot close a deal without sales either. And so trying to, you know, pick one thing as the reason that a deal got created is just, it doesn't help companies create more pipeline. Like if pipeline is down, just saying, well, like marketing source pipeline was down this quarter, marketing, go get more of it doesn't help, it's not productive. It doesn't tell people where to focus. It doesn't tell people why CAC is up and growth is down. Like, it just, there's so many reasons why that approach just doesn't work. And I can send you guys more information just around that, but I think I don't want that to be a focal point because most of the industry already knows that crediting a team or thing for pipeline creation doesn't work. But the other thing is that the other sort of like metric that marketing often uses is they'll usually measure marketing sourced pipeline in revenue, but then they'll also look at marketing influenced. And marketing influence by definition is okay for all of these other opportunities. It came from a different source like an AE or like Cold Outbound or whatever you want to call it. We're going to show you how many of those had a marketing touch point throughout the journey and therefore marketing influenced them. Right. But a lot of teams feel a lot of leadership and CEOs and boards just feel like that's a really fluffy metric. Like what does that really mean? Usually companies report, oh, we influence this amount of pipeline. If you know somebody on the opportunity attended a webinar at some point or like downloaded content, we'll say, oh, you know, marketing influenced them, but it kind of doesn't really mean anything. Just because that person on an opportunity did something doesn't mean we can say marketing influenced it. So it is a very soft metric. It's not a number. And like a CFO might have an instinct to say, yeah, okay, you influenced them. But like that doesn't really mean anything. And it also doesn't mean that your influence caused anything. Like influence does not actually mean causation. So the metric never really answers the question of like the thing that leadership actually cares about which is like, would this revenue have happened anyways? You know, like if, if sales went to go source it, they never did anything with marketing. Well, it probably still would have been an opportunity. Like that's usually the angle that company have and that's usually because there's no incrementality testing, there's no real way to track roi. And so it's really hard to use influence for any sort of decisioning in our opinion. I think a lot of companies use this notion of influence to like describe the past and what happened in like a really generous way. Again, it doesn't mean that anything in marketing caused anything like so to say like 90% of these opportunities visited the website. Does that really mean anything? Did it really drive any sort of influence? Right. It's sort of just like a metric that's left there not really answering like the question of so what? And it's also self graded marketing usually is the team to decide what counts as a touch and how long the look back period should be and what the definition is for influence. And so if they loosen that criteria really like their influence could skyrocket. Doesn't really mean anything. And so like any metric where the team is being measured and they control the metric itself feels really soft even though it directionally might be true. And it also competes with this, what sales is doing. Which sales has this claim of like, well we would have closed that regardless, influence doesn't really refute that. It just kind of sits there awkwardly. And when you compare it to like harder metrics like marketing source pipeline, where marketing actually originated the opportunity, it becomes really hard to defend that metric. It's a really weak thing. I think a lot of people struggle to bring to the board meeting even though it's like the next best thing that they have. So our perspective is that there is a way to measure influence which lands a lot harder and show how influence actually impacts the bottom line. So I want to talk about that. Like how do you actually measure influence when you don't actually source the opportunity? How do you measure what marketing is doing in other places beyond just the last thing that happened before the opportunity was created? Because usually marketing's presence inside a company is really undermined or under, not even underappreciated, but like underreported. And so that's what we want to talk about in this particular video. On a second note, and this sort of feeds into the first thing I was saying is that this is not novel insight anymore. I think Most of the B2B marketing industry has caught on to source attribution being a problem. It's really commonly and widely understood that crediting marketing based on the last thing that happened or maybe the thing that like led to the deal being created is really problematic. I know Forrester itself even just did. You know, this was sort of like the theme at their big like 2026 annual conference. They're talking a lot, and the industry right now is talking a lot about this idea of reference marketing, which really is just like brand, which is marketing sole responsibility shouldn't be just about converting demand. It should be creating your brand as the preference in the market and using zero party data to measure that. And the way that they're saying you should do that and that a lot of people in the industry are saying that you should do that are things like brand surveys or perception surveys or, you know, tracking increases to organic search or even just to website impressions over time, things like that. And there's a bunch of ways to manage your perception in the market because really that's what marketing should be focused on. Marketing shouldn't just be focused on getting, you know, a name and passing it to sales. It should be helping sales be more efficient in their role overall to prospect and create opportunities and close opportunities. Right. And so there is a real shift in the market happening around that. And I could definitely provide more around what preference marketing is. So just reading some stuff that I'm getting from the Internet in real time. So preference marketing is the discipline of building brand preference before a buyer enters an active buying cycle, so that when they do, your brand is the one thing that they already trust, recall, and want to talk to. It's grounded in research from LinkedIn's B2B Institute, most famously the 95.5rule, which observes that only about 5 this is true. And I would agree with this that only about 5% of B2B buyers are actually in market at any given time, While the other 95% are just future buyers. Right. And so the framing around this is basically creating the thesis or the argument that marketing's real lever is brand preference, not demand creation. You mostly can't make somebody need your product, but you can decisively shape who they call when the need arrives. And the reason that this matters more than marketing source pipeline is that marketing source pipeline only measures that 5%. It captures the people who raise their hand in a given quarter, and then it credits marketing for being the first to basically create that touch. But the actual commercial decision, like which vendors am I willing to consider at all, was made months or even years earlier, which is shaped by reputation, peer conversations, their presence in the category, content that they put out, point of view, and whether the buyer had ever even heard of you in a positive context. Right. And so like, it's everything that needs to happen upstream that is usually really hard to get any sort of investment approval for because you usually don't have the ROI on that immediately. Right. You're shaping the perception of the market, which we know 95% of the market is not in market yet. And so it's like you don't see, see the return on that immediately. And therefore that becomes hard to defend in a boardroom. Right. It becomes really fluffy when you can't measure it. Right. And then source, Source pipeline, by contrast, is a harvesting metric. It tells you how good you are at capturing demand that already exists. It tells you almost nothing about whether you're actually creating the conditions for future demand to land on you instead of a competitor. So we've been like championing this as a company for years and we're seeing now a lot of people who never did this back like three, four, five years ago when we first started talking about it, playing catch up now because they're realizing that their competitors are way ahead of them. Who made this change? No, they're not. Right. So like the industry is finally catching on and now this is becoming more commonplace. But organizations have not necessarily caught up to this, and so that's what we're trying to help them do. And so this is just why optimizing purely for source pipeline tends to slowly hollow out a company. Teams that ended up end up getting rewarded for things like, you know, things that are trackable, like a, you know, like an ebook conversion or download or like paid search on bottom of funnel keywords or retargeting people who are already going to convert anyways. So that is fine when the pipeline numbers are fine, but as soon as growth stalls or your CAC starts to get inflated or your win rates go down, none of those metrics will help. They won't tell you what's wrong. And they also cause you to sort of like ignore the 95% of the stuff that you should be focused on. That's why we always say when you run campaigns, you really want a good balance between campaigns that create awareness and then campaigns that capture the demand. Usually what we see happening is the inverse of that. Like people are more focused on capturing demand because you get a name, it's immediate, it's trackable versus awareness. It's sort of like you're doing all this stuff, that one, you can't really measure or tie clearly back to pipeline and revenue, at least not right away. So the argument overall is that if you wait until the buyer is in the market, it's already too late. You have to prime the market well before that. Right. So I think every marketer knows that. It's just now we're moving into an era where that is commonplace, but where we don't necessarily have the best metrics to support that. And marketers are desperate for metrics beyond just saying, like, oh, marketing sourced. It's like, how do we have more concrete, defensible metrics? I guess to sum it all up, the. The real tension in all of this is that when you're thinking about building preference in your market or, you know, running plays that are centered around brand awareness, like, that's just hard to measure. That is the problem. It's hard to measure. So, like, how are you supposed to be good at marketing and do the right things in the market when you can't measure them and when you can't defend them? That's exactly why Finance and most B2B organization refer back to source Pipeline. Because it's legible, it's easy, it's simple to understand, but it also isn't the same thing as important. And a marketing function that can only point to Source Pipeline is basically telling leadership that we're good at the last mile, which is a much smaller job than the one that actually moves the business. Okay, so with all of that said, I guess the real takeaway from this video is how to be more effective at measuring marketing influence in a way that actually is defensible to a CEO, leadership, cfo, whatever. And so the thing that we want to help marketers do, and I'm sort of like rambling a little bit, so I really need you guys to help, like, really synthesize this is to be able to say where marketing had influence and engagement that we can see, how does that actually impact the revenue results? And so what we always recommend doing is looking at marketing influence before an opportunity in what we call the engagement stage. So everything that happened before the opportunity was created. And then also looking at marketing engagement throughout an active sales cycle. And when we say engagement, we mean any trackable thing that we track. This is not the only thing you should measure, by the way. There are things, like I said, brand perception surveys, you know, things like share of search. There are other things that I'm not an expert in that you can do to basically see what your Perception is in the market. But we also want to track everything from website views, what people are doing on your website, if people are showing up to events, if they're registering for events, what kind of events. This is where multi touch attribution and things you can track can be helpful. And so the first thing to do is look at everything that happened before an opportunity was created. And we want to say before the opportunity was created, how long did people engage with your stuff before they become an opportunity? For a lot of companies, this engagement stage is actually a lot longer than they think. It can range anywhere from 100 days to like 800 days, depending on the market or your ICP or things like that. And then we want to track in that stage the average count of signals or marketing touch points that happen. And then just generally understand what channels drove those, what campaigns drove those, that sort of thing. And then we want to do the exact same thing in the closing stage, which is basically an active inactive sales cycle, to say, okay, how is marketing showing up or influencing an opportunity after it's created? Oftentimes like how many signals are those? What are people doing? Where are they doing those things in. In the different stage? Okay, so that's great, that's influence, that's pretty much table stakes. That's what everybody's doing. But here is where it actually builds more credibility when you can look at all opportunities created and closed one and say where there was engagement before an opportunity was created in the engagement stage, how does that cohort of opportunities compare to the ones where there was no engagement? So those would presumably be like sales sourced completely cold opportunities. And when we can compare the win rate on the staff that did have marketing engagement to the stuff that didn't. And right away for a lot of companies, you can see that win rates are higher for the engagement stuff, sales cycles are faster, and in some cases you might even have larger deal amounts. And then to actually be able to create and contrast, here is the pipeline that marketing influenced versus here is the pipeline that marketing did not really shows the effectiveness of marketing. And then to say, okay, within that cohort, what did those people do? Really builds credibility around the programs that you're running that actually drive a meaningful impact on the business that actually holds up in a boardroom that is defensible to say, hey, we need budget to go do more of these top of funnel programs. Because when we do them, even though they might not result in an opportunity right away, maybe they result in an opportunity. Maybe like the CAC payback is like two years or something like that. But when we do these things, hey, we actually find sales is more effective and we're going to close those deals faster and they're going to be valued more and the pipeline velocity overall is going to be better. And then you have another cohort which says hey, when sales just goes and prospects these accounts on their own and we don't get ahead of that with things like running like you know, any sort of retargeting or content plays or anything that you're, you know, like brand keyword plays or showing up at events or anything like that. When sales just goes and sources them completely on their own, while those win at a fraction of the rate, those are harder to work, they're high effort. It takes us twice as long to close those into opportunities, that sort of thing. And so when you can really say hey, this is marketing influence, but this is how this actually impacts the business, it's a lot easier to be seen as bringing value and creating value for the company. That's where you really show up as sort of like a value creation partner and not just a cost center. So I think that's really important. And then same thing that's just top of funnel. But you could do the same thing for like active sales cycle to say hey, when we focus on pipeline velocity and moving our buyers through the sales cycle faster, we close those deals that engage with marketing at this percent better than those that don't. I think a lot of times pipeline velocity or pipeline acceleration programs are undervalued because we just assume, hey, once a deal becomes a deal, sales can take them and close them. But that's not necessarily true. And the data would suggest that too almost 90% of the time or more. When marketing is playing a role in an active sales cycle, those deals close faster and better, faster and at a higher rate. And so that's sort of the takeaway there is like how do you defend your influence with actual hard defensible numbers that aren't just fluffy. And I would say that's it. And then of course you can get extra sophisticated when you can be able to segment that by geo or by like market segment or by industry and really identify where marketing has really good leverage and where they don't. This is sort of related, sort of not multi touch attribution, sort of like where it fails is that it's taking a touch point and trying to ascribe some number or level of importance of it. And where I think measuring attribution can be effective is when you start to understand clusters of patterns or things that actually happen in the buyer journey. So if we can say like 65% of our opportunities have marketing influence and those 65% win three times higher than the stuff that doesn't. And within that we can see that these people tend to cluster around these content themes or these event topics. Right. It's basically using that data to understand their preferences for the things that they consume in the journey, which I think is very different from multitouch attribution, which is trying to say like, oh, this channel gets this amount of credit. We're really trying to understand patterns of things that our buyers are consuming in their journey to becoming a customer and trying to do more, meeting them where they're at and trying to do more of what they find valuable in their journey. And so when you really look at it that way, you can start to see how different clusters of things show up at different parts in the journey. I'm trying to think of a real life example for one of our UK based customers. We could see that there was a particular like topic and ebook and webinar that a lot of customers that engage with marketing we're doing throughout an active sales cycle. And so like that clearly tells you that buyers value this particular thing. And it really wasn't about saying that this thing got the credit. It was just saying like, hey, this influencer or this topic is particularly relevant. How can we weave more of that in to our marketing motion, things like that. So that's one aspect of it. The other thing that Forrester talks a lot about is like creating preference centers, which is different from what we're talking about, but it's literally giving your prospects and your customers a place where they can tell you what types of topics or like content they want to read about or consume and through which channels and how often. And so that's like the place where a customer consciously sets the terms of the relationship rather than have marketers guess. So Forrester is now coming out and saying that is zero party data. That's actually custom. I don't know why it's zero party data, but they're saying it's leaning on your customers to volunteer that information because they trust your brand and because it's distinctly different from first party data, which is collected like as a byproduct of transactions, basically. So the customer in that situation is literally handing over information about themselves and what they want and then the brand reciprocates that with like more relevant, less annoying communication basically. And so it's all about Collecting information directly from them to create personalized experiences and that sort of thing. So I think that's cool. I think that's the direction that we're going in. I think more marketing automation platforms are considering that kind of context when they're creating journeys for how we market to different people. And I think it's putting the buyer at the center, which I hate saying because I feel like everybody lame in the marketing space says put the buyer at the center. It's all about the customer. Although it's true. All right, so just to tie it all back, the perspective we have is that when marketing is really doing its job well, buyers show up already knowing who you are, they're preferring you. They're already on the short list before sales ever calls them. They've, you know, done their research on their own, on their own terms. They've gone ahead of their procurement team and maybe have said, I want to talk to these three vendors. They reply to a cold email because they already sort of heard about you or engage with you. But all that stuff doesn't get logged as marketing source as we know. Direct traffic gets coded as direct traffic, Sales outbound gets coded as sales source, Word of mouth gets coded as referral. And so the deals where marketing did its hardest, most valuable work if they did, is building that mental availability that made the buyer pre decide, which shows up basically everywhere except for like marketing gets the credit for this. And then of course the pipeline that does get source credit is just disproportionately the work of capture demand capture, not demand creation. So that's the things that we can actually capture like ebook download or bottom of funnel, paid search conversion, things like that. It's not nothing, but it's also the easiest, most commoditized, lowest leverage marketing work. And it's the only work that the metric can see. Right? We talk about this all the fucking time. So I like don't want to, don't want to beat a dead horse there, but we still see a lot of companies unfortunately ending up with a measurement system that systematically rewards the harvesting of demand that already existed and then penalizes the creation of demand that didn't. That's really, really important. So I want to emphasize that we should really probably lead with all of that. And so the better that your brand gets, the lower your marketing source number trends because more buyers are arriving pre sold and then, you know, potentially even bypassing the funnel entirely. So we want to help companies basically figure out how to get around that, the reframe that we want everybody to have is to stop asking did marketing source this and start asking three different questions that map to three different time horizons? Did the buyer already know us when they entered the cycle, AKA preference, which can be measured by branded search, volume, unaided awareness, direct traffic, share of voice in the category, that sort of thing. And also like what we're saying, which is did engagement even happen before a deal became a deal? Did marketing accelerate or expand the deal once it existed? That's influence, slash lift, which is measured by win rate, deal size, sales cycle time, unengaged accounts, ideally without a holdout, and then did marketing create demand that wouldn't exist otherwise, which is sourced? Right? That's just marketing source pipeline where basically the deal came in through a webform or something like that. And the source pipeline doesn't disappear in this model. I really want to be clear about that. It just gets basically demoted from the metric to one of three and not the most important one. Boom. I love that. Basically the thing that would land hardest in a boardroom is if marketing source pipeline is your primary KPI, you are paying your marketing team to do the work your brand should be doing for free. That sentence reframes the whole conversation, but I think I gave you some other really good sentences stuff which is basically outside of just tracking triggers or sources. How else can marketing be showing its credibility and role at a company beyond just this really one dimensional metric? Sam.