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- [00:01]
Carolyn
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show. If you're a CEO or revenue leader, watching your sales and marketing teams compete for credit on a deal, listen up. We call it the black hole of go to markets. That messy, critical stage where your BDRs or SDRs are working leads to qualified before they become opportunities. But it's also where marketing is often scrambling to prove impact. In this episode, we break down how to track this phase as a journey, not a handoff, and how better visibility can remove the friction between teams. Let's get into it. Enjoy the show.
- [00:34]
Trevor
You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Pesetto.
- [00:43]
Carolyn
We've got a live audience today. Thank you everybody who shows up every week. We appreciate you. We hope you find this week's episode valuable. You're all used to Chris Walker hosting the show. If you didn't listen to last week's episode, please go back and check it out. But ultimately what's happening is Chris has passed the baton to Trevor and myself, Carolyn. We are the co founders at Pesetto, going to be your new host of GoToMarket Live. If you still want to listen to Chris, he's got another show. More info on that soon. But we have decided to keep this show in the revenue vitals feed mostly because we get a weekly listenership of about 2,000, 3,000 people every week who tune in. Want to hear about B2B marketing, go to market strategy, rev ops, all of that fun stuff. And so we want to maintain that and sort of keep this thing going. So welcome and topic of today's episode, go to market signals. What are signals? Why do they matter? Why are we even talking about signals? And how can you use signals to make smarter investment decisions when it comes to your go to market? So with that said, I think our general statement appiceto and sort of like the viewpoint that we have and Trevor, feel free to chime in, is that if we really want to know where to make our next go to market investment down to the actual channel, we need to measure more than last touch attribution or deal source. And we need to consider signals as part of that full journey. And I'm not just talking about what's happening during the sales cycle or what are the few things that are happening before the sales cycle. I'm talking about the full pipeline process from the time in which you are targeting and engaging your prospects to the time in which your sales team starts to work them throughout the prospecting process through this whole sort of duration of the sales cycle. What are Your prospects engaging with to what extent and why. Right. I think when we can measure that sort of the full story zoom out, we have a better understanding of what are the things actually driving momentum in your go to market other than hey, here's the last thing this person did leading up to the deal being created. So I'll pause there. Trevor, feel free to chime in, let us know sort of what I've missed in that explanation.
- [03:02]
Trevor
I think it's a great explanation and I think we're headed into what I'm about to mention as part of this conversation. But it isn't just about signals, it's about the efficiency of those signals as well. So it's not just what's happening but what did it cost you to get there and is that actually worth doing? And so on. So we'll talk more about how those sort of two things merge into the middle to tell a bigger story. But yeah, we're trying to get into the weeds of signals here today. But I just wanted to make sure to round that out with it's not just about signals, it's about all the moving parts and signals is a big piece of that.
- [03:41]
Carolyn
Right. I think this also really ties back to this theme around how efficient is your go to market. Anyways, we saw a post, I think it was last week David Spitz put out a new chart basically looking at the trends for cost of growth or basically how much are go to market teams or org spending to produce new logos relative to the revenue they're getting back. And you can see that number year over year climbing. I don't know exactly what the stat is, but it's significantly higher in 2024 than it was in 2020, 2019. And what I make of this is that go to market teams just simply aren't looking at what they are doing relative to unit economics. Unit economics matter. And what I think where the flaw is with the way a multi touch or attribution is used currently is that it's happening to some extent in a silo. We're not able to look at all of those different interactions that somebody is having with your brand and tie it back to the business's financial performance or the unit economics. That's I think where rubber meets the road. And what we really want to get into today is how are signals performing relative to what's happening in the business and being able to make smart decisions around what you're investing in, knowing that impact.
- [04:56]
Trevor
Absolutely agree. And I think one thing I'd say about this, this idea of Signals is. It's not exactly a new concept. We all in the marketing go to market side of the business have been trying to track what people interact with for years and years and years and years. So it should be probably familiar to most of you as a concept where we're trying to make a difference here is to put clear guidelines, boundaries around what is a signal, what information do we need to know about that signal and how does it sort of play with all the other pieces of go to market, your prospecting that you're doing, your closing pipeline and all that, and of course, the cost angle that we've been talking about. So one of the things I think we'll, we'll end up digging into today is what are the things we think you need to know about a signal and how, how should that be structured? How might that be slightly different from what you see today in some of the platforms that are available? Or how, how do we use some of those platforms that are available to try and get at the level of detail that we want to get at? And it's not always easy. So we'll dig in.
- [06:07]
Carolyn
This brings me back to, I think, where we might start the conversation on signals and get a little bit deeper is why do they even matter? And I am reminded about a conversation that I had with a colleague at one point in time in my past where we were putting together, you know, a board deck for the board and some investors and reporting on pipeline and revenue. And at the time, the comment that was said to me was, I don't care about attribution or what happened. I just want to know who sourced the deal. Was it partners? Was it, you know, the BDR team, Was it the AES or was it marketing? That I think is something that we see so commonly with a lot of the customers that we work with. I see it all the time. I just participated in a CRO course that talked about, you know, revenue forecasting and, you know, how you should plan for sort of your revenue to come in. And again, reiterating this methodology, this antiquated methodology of planning by the department source. And I also think that's how we actually look at investments historically too is like, what department spent the money? But I digress on that. Who sourced the deal? When you're looking at that, you're traditionally, and it's not always the case, you're looking at what was the last thing that happened before the deal was created. Let's just give the credit to that person. And that's limiting and it's A small smidgen of the truth as to what is actually working in your go to market. We know that the revenue factory process is much more complicated than that, especially when you're working with enterprise deals. It's multifaceted. There's a lot of decision makers involved in that process. And so to say I only want to see who sourced the deal, I don't really care about all of the other things that happened is a very limited way of looking at things. And that might work while revenue is going up and you know, you're successful at acquiring new logos. Where that will break down is when you want to optimize, when you want to improve deal velocity, when you want to improve win rates, when you want to get better as a go to market organization and scale faster. How do you do that to say, oh, let's just optimize what our BDR team is doing. You know, they seem to be generating a lot of logos. What is happening before that? Are they having some sort of signal interactions leading up to that? How are they sort of generating awareness about your brand? Those are the things that signals tell us that the antiquated view of looking at go to market does not. Trevor, anything you want to sort of chime in there with your background and where you come from. Maybe what you've seen here at Passetto too.
- [08:42]
Trevor
I have personally implemented what we'd call attribution, which is signal adjacent. It's really sort of the same general concept, but a little smaller view of the world I've implemented a few times at different organizations. A while back before, we all sort of really had a good idea of how to use it and what I found. I was sitting in a weekly business review with our VP of marketing at the time and she showed a set of numbers that we got from Bizible, which is what we were using at the time, that just basically ended up being presented as this is what marketing sourced out of the pipeline. And CEO immediately responded in that meeting to, you know, in front of everyone, like, no, that there's no way that's right. I don't believe that. Why are you even showing me this? And it was just the wrong way to go about it. And you know, that wasn't this marketing leader's fault. We were all getting the hang of it back then. But I think we have a better, better stance on it today that it's not to be used for that it's not to be able to say, here's the total pipeline, here's the portion of those dollars that ended up source by marketing. And here's the dollars that came in through, through sales. We have to look at it as a coordinated effort. And so we need to be able to show that in a way that people can digest. And that's, I think, where, where things get really tricky and where we're really trying to, to make a difference with our customers is how do you really visualize that? You know, you've got all this information, hopefully about the things people are interacting with. You might have an attribution solution that's trying to tell you some kind of dollars story related to that. But if you just show that on its own, you're really just perpetuating that. Us versus them, sort of, here's what we did, here's what they did, which one's better kind of story. And we want to get away from that. And we're here talking about signals, but I can't, I can't really talk about signals in the balance view without coming back to if we know signals and we want to tell a better story with those. We also have to know that prospecting layer that I talked a bit about last week, and I'm sure I'll talk about some more here today. You want to be able to overlay those two things together, which is what Carolyn was saying earlier. Like, it has to be. Here's why we're going after people for prospecting. And then here is what happens underneath leading up to it during prospecting. And once the prospect is qualified and handed off to sales, we need to know all the signals across all three of those phases and find a way to tell this story that says, hey, this is, this is why the BDR team went after this one. Great. They did their job, they got it qualified, they pushed it to the pipeline as a new opportunity. Let's then double click into that and understand the journey that people are taking with those individual signals. Content, they're engaging with, events, they're going to, all those kinds of things, all those channels, sort of channel type, tactical items that you on the marketing team are executing. We want to say like, and here's how those contributed to the journey, not here's how those things source this prospect. So, yeah, we're telling a different story at the prospect layer, which I won't go into quite yet.
- [11:58]
Carolyn
Right. So I think what I'm hearing, and we'll, we'll dive into this a little bit more. But what we're saying essentially is you've got the signal, otherwise known as attribution data, sort of collecting all of the different interactions, large and small, that are sort of happening in the entire process. And then you have the prospecting data layer that sort of captures the reason why a REP or a bdr, somebody from sales would have reached out in the first place. And I guess as I'm talking about this out loud, those two things can be different. The last interaction that somebody had with your brand could have been, hey, we attended a webinar. And then there could be a completely different reason which led to the prospecting process actually happening with a sales team member.
- [12:44]
Trevor
You know, I feel like we're, we're talking at a lot of concept level here still, and that's also really important. But I'm feeling now like, okay, maybe, maybe now's the time to talk a little bit about, okay, what, how are we defining these things, these prospects, these signals, et cetera. And why do we think that the way we've defined it leads to filling out a greater story that doesn't conflict with each other? So let me go into that a little bit. So I'm going to talk about the key pieces of the overall factory and sort of level that down into the weeds as we go here. We've already talked quite a bit about the unit economics and the efficiency at the top level. So we start at the top and we are looking at ultimately the question is, are we growing, how are we growing? Et cetera. And then we're looking at what are overall go to market costs. And then we're bouncing those against each other saying, hey, how efficient is this growth? And that's great for a top level story, but pretty immediately you end up saying, well, what's driving all of that? So then we get into the more tactical layers and think of the factory as these sort of three key stages. We've got a slightly more complicated take in some cases, but I'm going to boil it down to three that I think are the most important and in buckets. Sort of that engagement phase, sort of pre prospect, the prospecting phase, when the BDR team or SDR team is actively trying to determine is there an opportunity? And then the pipeline phase, which is you've got pipeline, you're trying to close those as real closed one deals. And so breaking that out, thinking about opportunities. First I'm going to go backwards at the opportunity level. You need to know a few key things that sort of level up to this bigger concept of the overall factory. You need to know what is the objective of this opportunity. And that we would say is as simple as are you trying to close a new logo? Are you trying to expand an existing customer or are you trying to renew that customer? Really the first two are things that we pay more attention to where we don't specialize in the sort of renewals part of that whole process. We can talk about it, but we really play in the let's close and expand customers side of the world. And so yeah, you want to know, are we closing new logo with this op? Is it expanding customer or is it renewal? And you also want, and this is something we see way too complicated in a lot of our customer environments, is the way you track amount for those opportunities should really easily translate to how you think about overall business results. We see all sorts of different ways that the opportunity amount is stored that don't end up rolling up to say if you looked at new ARR in your. In your ARR data, you need to be able to tell that story sort of rolling up and down through different data sets within the factory. So those are the things we need to know about the pipeline stage, the prospecting stage. This is the part that we often see really isn't covered well. No one's really using Salesforce leads anymore because it's super old school. It never really worked the way anyone really wanted it to and so on. And so instead you see a lot of status fields on the contact record. You see some attempt at stamping some information about, about that prospecting effort on the contact. But at the end of the day, it's not doing a good job at really showing you the depth and breadth of information you really want to know about the work that is prospecting. It is its own task. It deserves its own way of tracking. Just like closing sales does, they have opportunities. You really need something that is transactionally based, just like an opportunity is. You know, one account can have multiple opportunities over time. One person could be prospected to multiple times through their relationship with the organization. We need to be able to track that in a really clean way.
- [16:51]
Carolyn
When you think about the sales cycle, we have so much granularity in CRM to be able to track how a prospect or how an account moves through the opportunity creation process to close one. Right. We've got all of these different sales cycle stages. We usually understand the conversion rate between each of those stages, how long it's going to take. And then, you know, as you're working backwards, you get to this prospecting component where it kind of just feels like a black hole where we have very little visibility into what's happening. And I Had an observation sort of as you were talking about this Trevor, which is when a prospect is actually sitting in there and you have very limited data to tell you what's happening throughout that process. I've seen a lot of inefficiency too and how a BDR SDR team interacts with those prospects because you've got all of this marketing interactions, these people have interacted with your brand, whether they've clicked on an ad or had some sort of website conversion or whatever. But because the data architecture is so poor, you've got somebody sort of reaching out to them with no visibility into all of these other things that they have potentially been doing which could make that process of prospecting to them so much better.
- [17:58]
Trevor
Exactly. It's a thing that's bugged me for many, many years of owning and managing CRM systems for go to market teams. I've never felt good about what I was able to see, track, manage, et cetera around the prospecting process. And what we know is most organizations have some sort of comp structure based on this data for their SDR team. And so it gets really touchy and leads to all sorts of conflict as I'm sure many of you have, have experience. And so you're, you're going into this sort of very, very high stakes, someone's, someone's paycheck is on the line kind of thing and you're using inferior data, an inferior solution for tracking that information. We should fix that. The ddrs will thank you and the business overall will definitely benefit from knowing those greater depth of information. So when we think about tracking prospecting, what do we think is most important? First off, we've already sort of said it, but I'll be clearer. We think this needs to be its own object. This should be a list of records of each time you prospected to an individual and what happened. It is a transactional thing. I think of it as sort of a queue. In a perfect world your BDR team can go to a queue of things that they are currently working or need to work, ideally even see the history of what they did work in the past. That's where the many current solutions just looking at, hey, show me contacts where status is prospecting that gets you sort of a queue but then you can never really see after the fact when was that thing last in the queue and so on and so on. So that's one thing we want to know. It should be this transactional separate object that is tracking prospecting as a specific thing. And within that object we want to see a number of things. We want to see some stages because, of course, like the sales opportunity process, prospecting has its own stages. We generally recommend a pretty simple set of stages, I don't think. And actually my personal recommendation would be to not get too complex on the sales opportunity stages either. But definitely prospecting. There's only so many things you need to break out into buckets. Is this thing sitting there waiting for you to pick it up? Has it been picked up? So that might be the sales accepted lead sort of stage that people are used to seeing. Sales looked at it and said, yes, I'm going to start working this thing. So could be accepted, could be working. However you want to think about it in a perfect world, I think you also want to know whether you actually successfully connected with that individual during the prospecting process. That is a place where, of course, much of the prospecting efforts will drop off. Hey, we picked this thing up, we could never get a hold of them. We had to abandon it. It's now disqualified. And so it'd be great to know we passed. You know, we identified this many people for prospecting sales picked up this many of those. Some subset you actually connected with and another subset of those you end up qualifying. So you want to sort of see that drop off across that entire journey to understand, are we, are we passing stuff that's good quality? Is the sales team picking them up in a timely manner, are they making it through the stages, et cetera.
- [21:16]
Carolyn
What I think is particularly useful about doing it that way is we have a tendency to only really look at, like, what has worked, why has something made its way to sales? Why has a deal been created? We have a tendency to not look at all of the waste or inefficiencies. What is all of the stuff that a BDR team is doing that's gone nowhere and that is appearing to be inefficient, maybe we should stop doing it differently. And so I think when you look at this component of the process as transactional, you're able to see the dichotomy between what's worked, what hasn't worked.
- [21:49]
Trevor
Yeah, exactly. And sort of at the end of the journey within this prospecting cycle, we end up at either qualified or disqualified. That is saying, yes, this thing was real, it turned. We turned it into an opportunity and here's the opportunity it became. Or we're saying, no, it's, this wasn't qualified. Maybe it goes from new to disqualified right away because sales says, no, this is not real, I'm not working this and that tells you something. Maybe it goes from working disqualified and that's because they could never connect. Maybe it goes from connected disqualified because you did talk to them and it wasn't a thing, it wasn't a potential deal. And so each of those facts tells you something different. And then introducing a disqualified reason that is required when you move to disqualified, that gives you that sort of level of analysis like you would do with win loss reporting in an opportunity. But it's telling a different story about than when loss would. This is telling you, yeah, I couldn't get a hold of them or they told me there's, there's no interest or so on and so on and so on. This is a different set of explanations for why this thing died even before it made it to a sales opportunity.
- [23:02]
Carolyn
Thinking back to like a real life scenario that I had seen last week when we were working with a customer, we were looking at sort of like all of this life cycle data, right? And we were sort of analyzing what are all the things that are happening to sort of create a prospecting life cycle to exist and sort of like what's not really going anywhere. And in that we had discovered a lot of times reps are initiating a prospecting life cycle because marketing has said, hey, this lead reached, you know, a scoring threshold. We're going to kick it over to sales. They're ready to be worked, right? So they go over to sales and the ready to be worked category and we can see that it's creating pipeline. But although so sort of still early days, no revenue has actually come from that trigger for the prospecting process. And what that tells us pretty early on is are you prematurely scoring your leads? Are you prematurely kicking this over to sales? They're not ready yet. Are you too generous with your scoring criteria and that somebody attends a webinar and you immediately sort of award them 50 points for that. And so I think that when you do it this way, like I had said previously, you have this ability to see what's not really working in that process and be able to optimize how you're going to market from that perspective.
- [24:17]
Trevor
I've been reading the comments as Carolyn's been talking, and I think now is a good time for me to pause as well and address some of the questions. We've gotten some great tactical questions about what I've just been saying about a custom object and all that. So let me, let me talk a little bit about that. And why would I be pushing people toward what might be seen as a more complex way of doing things. So I've covered it a little bit already in how I was explaining it, but I think a finer point on it, I've seen attempts after attempts after attempts of trying to just use the leader contact object to tell the story. And what I find is a number of things, really. It does an okay job at telling you what is happening right now. So I can use that, a status field and maybe a last prospecting date field or whatever to tell a pretty decent story of, hey, here are the prospects, here are the people that are in prospecting right now, and here's when that cycle started. You can do that, and that will work pretty well. It will not help you with historical measurement of all that kind of stuff that we've just described. You want to be able to know, you want to be able to know about the number of times this individual has gone through prospecting. Why did it die last time, how long did it take through each of these different stages in the process. And to be able to tell that whole, whole story, you'd really need to have an overly complex implementation on the leader contact as well. And, you know, from a data architecture perspective, and that's sort of the background I come from, so I have strong opinions, like, it's just the wrong architecture for this kind of data. This is transactional data and it belongs in its own table. If you're doing this in a spreadsheet or you were doing it in a database, you do the same thing. You would say, this is a different kind of thing we're measuring and it deserves its own, own entity, own object. And so that's sort of the way I think about this. And I think at the end of the day, you know, some of the comments about, well, this sounds complicated, it doesn't really need to be. So I think my, my simple answer to that is to get the same level of detail that we're saying you, you do want either solution is complicated. This is the more buttoned up, more architected version of complicated. And so I don't want to promise that it's just all super, super easy and whatever if it was, we would all just be doing it. And so that's the sort of real answer there. And then another question, really good one, glad it was asked. Isn't this just campaigns in Salesforce? And so I say no, not really, partly because I think you want to know a whole lot more about that prospecting process. You could make the argument, and many, many have, and it's been done a million times that, hey, well, just, just raise a campaign for whatever prospecting thing you're going to do, add people to it and have the salespeople work through the people on that campaign. It's a valid way of doing it for these very point specific campaigns where you're setting off on a specific goal to convert some people. I think that is true. I don't think you'd do that anymore if you had this other object. But if you don't have the object, yeah, that's, that's probably fine. However, that doesn't address the other things that might drive people to need to be prospected too. The way we're seeing this is the object, this prospect, this idea of a prospect. It's driven by a bunch of different reasons. It's not just the outbound team choosing to prospect. It's the web form fills, it's the scoring model, it's partner referrals. It's all these other things, which is. Actually, I didn't quite get to my final set of dimensions that I think you, you calculate on or track on this prospect object. But that's one of the other things is where did this thing come from? So we've got this prospect, what stages is it in? What are the dates that it moved between stages? All that stuff. Like I was saying, why is it disqualified? But one other fundamental thing that you're able to track there is the why made us pay attention to this person in the prospecting realm. So we have standardized a list that I think will change over time as we continue to identify things that could be legitimately prospect driving. But it's things like submitting web forms, your scoring model, true cold outbound, where the BDR is just picking something intent data, internal lists which might be, hey, these are opportunities we lost last year. Let's load those in as prospects this year and put them in and explain that that's why we're following up with them again. And so we think you want to know all of that. And that becomes a lot harder to do if it's just a big old bunch of campaigns. It's, you know, you're sort of having to bounce between, you know, big old database of different campaigns and records and so on.
- [29:18]
Carolyn
Would that as well? Would there be limitations, Trevor, in being able to see, like the actual process of prospecting? Like, how long did it take for the person to respond? Where are those people sitting in those different stages that you had mentioned? Ready to work, working, connected, so on and so forth? I think you using sort of campaigns as A workaround would limit you from that perspective. Yeah.
- [29:42]
Trevor
And I think the other thing I'd say about campaigns is I actually see those existing in the signal realm. Those are a better representation of what did the person do. So you know where prospecting is, what are we doing and why to connect with them and qualify them as an opportunity signal is how did that person interact with us and what did they do and so on. That's what campaigns really are about. That's why the why the default statuses are sent and responded. We are trying to track that they responded to this thing. And so, you know, get into as we talk about signals, the how and why tactical detail signals that comes into play like how do we use salesforce campaigns for that? And so that I would talk about in a bit. Another good question. Is the salesperson logging these or logging the why and how is the why determined? In a perfect world a salesperson could log a prospect. So when they're really just like pulling something out of the database for their own reasons, they would probably log that one. But generally most other things can be pushed to them. And that's the other thing we definitely want to be able to do is take the sort of recordkeeping overhead away from the bdr. I mean they're going to have to do some record keeping no matter what. Obviously it's part of the job. But they shouldn't have to be the ones that are logging most of the initial prospect record. That should be automations like your web forms and marketing automation. That's a clear scenario where you can know in your systems, yeah, here are all the forms that when submitted should result in a prospect. So we're gonna, we're gonna do what we need to do to create a prospect. From there we're gonna set the why as they submitted a web form. Same with your scoring model. That's a lot of automation that's already existing. If you have a scoring model, you are creating that prospect from the automations that drive that scoring model. Again setting the why as a person scoring imagine, extrapolate that out to all the other different things that might drive a prospecting cycle Automations around how does a partner send you a referral? Or how do we use intent data, an intent data platform to sort of scoring model adjacent to create or task a salesperson a BDR to follow up on that potential intent, so on and so on and so on. So in a perfect world that BDR is mostly working a queue and they're able to come in there and see hey, here's stuff I haven't touched yet. Here's why they came in, here's when they came in. And then of course you probably are tracking all sorts of other things both on the contact record and through whatever other platforms that are enriching your information about people. But that salesperson BDR comes to their queue and says like this, this is the thing I'm going to pick up next. I'm going to mark it as accepted or working and I'm going to get started on it. I'm just looking at lots of great questions here. I want to make sure I answer them as much as I can here. All right. What is the relationship between the new this tracking object and the lead object? So I'd say they are different. It's been years since I've seen a really good use case for the lead object in Salesforce. Around the time that marketing automation came onto the scene is where I think it sort of stopped being useful in a lot of ways. Now that's a blanket statement that's not always true, just to be clear. But I'd say by and large what I generally have seen is once you start getting into marketing automation, hooking in and other platforms hooking in, the idea that Salesforce had around the lead object stops working fairly well. You end up with lots of duplicates and so on and so was not right for everybody. I definitely see most orgs trying to get to a contacts only world in Salesforce. Just sort of forget the lead object completely. And again, I'm oversimplifying that a little bit. But as like a general conceptual statement I would say yeah, that's where I think most orgs want to be. HubSpot as Stacy mentions here, you know, HubSpot though I'm not a. I'm not always a huge fan of HubSpot. In some ways I think they do have it a little bit more right, more modern let's say how I think about just there's contacts and there's companies and that's the world that you're playing in when it comes to a CRM side of the environment. And so you would end up having your leads and contacts represent a single person. You're. You're really trying to get there. In my opinion, that is where we always wanted to be with CRM in general. Like here's John Smith, here's everything I know about him. I really just want one record to represent John Smith and it's sort of in its entirety. And then as the prospecting object comes into the Scene that's just another related list. Ultimately, like all the other things, you know, the activities and events and campaign membership and whatever that would exist tied to that person. And you could have multiple prospecting records for that person over time. Not at the same time, theoretically, you really shouldn't, but you might have talked to that person last year and it went nowhere. And maybe that that person's more ready to talk this time. And we know that happens. So that's how you want to. That's how I think you'd want to see it.
- [35:13]
Carolyn
I just thought of something as you were talking about that, Trevor, and this seems like it would be so obvious, but one of the, I guess the core principles or best practices that we should probably acknowledge is that when you're wanting to track signals, which we'll get to in a second, when you're wanting to track signals that are happening at the contact level and be able to associate those with an opportunity or account, there needs to be an association between the two. And again, it seems like an obvious thing, but one thing that we persistently see is a lack of associations between contacts and accounts. Contacts and opportunities. Right. That I would say is like, if you want to take away something that you can put into practice today, start ensuring that your contacts are associated with opportunities. That can be sort of like one of the think best practices that sort of gets us to where we want to go and something that is not truly enforced a lot of the times at a lot of the companies that I've seen.
- [36:14]
Trevor
It's a good side note. Absolutely. You know, it's sort of tangential from everything we've been talking about here, but yeah, it plagues us in every. Every single engagement we have pretty much like, that's always a weak spot is the, the full understanding of who are you really selling to? And so you take that into the prospecting world. It's sort of, you know, a similar statement, like, we feel that there's a big gap in really understanding who you're actually prospecting to. We have these conversations with our clients all the time. I ask, how do you. How do you know who you're prospecting to today? And the answer is almost always, like, you know, we sort of look at some people that are in sequences or we, you know, have a. Have a field on the. On the contact or whatever. And they're just always unsatisfying answers. And the customer's unsatisfied with it too. They ultimately acknowledge, like, yeah, we can't really see the things we want to see. We don't really know it works well enough for our BDRs to find who they need to call today, but that's about where it ends. So, you know, we've gone on a bit of a tangent here, and I'm realizing we're running out of time. The clock is definitely ticking. We've ended up talking a lot about prospecting, which really wasn't the intention, but I think that goes to show just how important that ends up being in this bigger, bigger go to market factory thing. It's at least as important as signals. They are in parallel, really, as I've said multiple times in, in this discussion, they both carry a lot of weight and they're measured not separately, but sort of together to tell that story. So I don't even know if we really want to go into signals or say, hey, that's what we meant to talk about today, but maybe it's next week instead and really just pull this, this topic across a couple episodes.
- [38:04]
Carolyn
I think that there's so much to say about signals. When you think about signals, I think about, you know, attribution, because in some ways signals, essentially our attribution. And I think there is so much that can be said and unpacked and probably a lot of questions. So I'm with you on that, Trevor. But this sort of like, as we round out this topic, I'm sort of going back to reasons why a BDR or SDR would start reaching out to somebody and working them to basically lead to opportunity creation. And a lot of times we think, hey, you know, that was pure cold outbound, right? Because if we don't have the data or sort of like the underlying architecture to see all of these different moving parts and what's happening, we lose visibility into potentially all of these other things that they are doing to create sort of like this ideal journey of what happens when somebody's learning about your brand and then, you know, interacting with a BDR and then going on to talk to an ae. And so one example, and I had put this in our promo last night, but in a company that we were actually working on this week, we were sort of leaning into their prospecting data. And a lot of times we saw, hey, this prospect record was being stamped with cold outbound as the reason that was sort of triggering the sort of prospecting effort and then going on to create an opportunity. And what signal data will eventually tell you, as I said before, is this underlying story about all of these other interactions that are happening throughout that process. And so when we analyze this particular company, the inference is that the BDRs are chasing cold prospects and they're creating opportunities. And it's like, okay, let's give BDR teams the credit. Do we really even need marketing? You know, what's market marketing doing? They're not warming these people up. And so I think that that's what you can infer when you see, hey, this was like a cold outbound opportunity. But when you go back and you layer in signals into that story, we actually saw. So I think for this particular company, about a quarter of a million was close one revenue in, like, the most recent quarter. We were looking at that show to be coming from cold outbound. And then when we look at that, we actually saw that there was a whole bunch of signals that we could see sort of underlying. I think 50% of those prospects had attended an event. So not even just registered. They actually showed up and attended an event. When we look at the channel data, I think 50% of that revenue that was cold had an associated paid social campaign to it. And so I think that there's a lot that we can glean. When you sort of peel back the layers of the onions and look at the signals with the prospecting data that Trevor's talking about, it's not really like one or the other. It's what do these things sort of tell as a cohesive story.
- [40:45]
Trevor
Yeah. And you, I think you already said it earlier in that example that you just gave. It's again, not about like, oh, well, you said it was called outbound, but it was actually marketing. It's not that. It's, hey, we see these things like, they're not really cold. We ended up talking to them. One other question is we ended up talking to them in the prospecting cycle. Did they go anywhere? But let's assume they did go somewhere and it was useful. Well, maybe that tells us that our scoring model should actually value some of those interactions higher so that it got to sales sooner. And it wasn't this. We just picked it out of a pile thing. And it was more the. This is why we ended up talking to them to begin with. A lot of great chats here. They're getting my attention.
- [41:28]
Carolyn
So do we want to address some of those?
- [41:30]
Trevor
Yeah, I think I want to at least call them out. I don't know that we have time to actually get into them, but people took the time to put in some great questions here. I want to at least acknowledge them and make sure that we're following up with them next week. So Evan had Asked how might tighter alignment between finance and GTM teams transform an organization's relationship with their target customers? It's a great question. I think that's almost a topic in itself, really. I think you've hit a really important point that takes a different tactical angle. If we're thinking about the overall factory and efficiency, investment and results and all that, how should we operate differently between teams? So I'm not going to answer that now because that's a long answer and I think a good discussion to have. But, Evan, we will take that one away, add it to the topics list and make sure that we get into it, because I think it's an obvious, like, really clear question that needs to be answered. That. Yeah, you've really. You really hit the nail on the head there.
- [42:28]
Carolyn
I think too, like, we're talking a lot about data architecture today and sort of like the underlying components. I think to what you're just saying about Evan's question, this all feeds into that conversation. I feel like this is sort of like a prerequisite potentially to the topic of go to market efficiency overall. I'll leave it there.
- [42:46]
Trevor
Absolutely. And then another thread that we've got going on here in the chat is around visualization of these concepts. So totally, I get the feedback. We will provide some stuff. We do have visuals a lot that we use internally with clients and so on. So we'll. We'll pick through some of those and find a way to like, hit just the right, just the right set of visualizations for this topic. I think we can share some next week and maybe even kick things off with a. Okay, this is what we've been saying in words. Here's the picture. And we can, we can go from there because, yeah, we. I definitely do understand. It's. It's a little. I don't know if it's abstract, but it's. It's at least hard to visualize because there's a lot of moving parts. So let's, let's take that away and, and produce some stuff that people want to see. Cool.
- [43:35]
Carolyn
I love that. It's a great suggestion. Anything else? I see notifications still popping up. I know you're combing through them. Trevor.
- [43:41]
Trevor
Yeah, I will be honest to everybody. I'm still getting the hang of balancing both the chat and, and participating here, so be patient with me. I think you have been so. Thank you. I'm getting better every time, so. But we will definitely take these away, add them to our list right before we wrap.
- [43:59]
Carolyn
Does anybody want to come on live and riff with us for a few minutes. The option is there.
- [44:04]
C
I'll jump in. I have one thought you initially wanted to talk about signals. And I just wanted to mention as more and more of our customers are using ChatGPT and various AIs, those things don't send signals to the intent engines like six Sense or Bambora. So just a thing.
- [44:24]
Trevor
Yeah.
- [44:25]
C
The dark funnel is getting darker.
- [44:27]
Trevor
It sure is, yeah. And I think we'll take that as a takeaway for next week's signal more signal focused topic as well. You know, this idea that we do have to acknowledge that not everything can be tracked. The dark funnel. Dark signals. What? Well, can't be a signal if it's dark, I suppose. But yeah, it's a really good point. And so I think we'll plan to talk a little bit about how do we think about that. If you know that your data is incomplete, your signal data set can't have everything, what do you do with that information? So it's something that comes up all the time as well. So thanks, David. That's important.
- [45:02]
Carolyn
I think we can wrap up this conversation again. I know the intention here was to talk about signals. I think we can tackle that next week. If you've got questions specific to signals based on what we've sort of talked about today, feel free to message either Trevor or I on LinkedIn. Send us an email. Drop it in the chat too. And looking forward to continuing this particular theme in the next week. And again, thank you everybody who showed up for this one. I think we've got some new faces on this week's call. If you're listening back to the recording and you want to jump on live with US Every Tuesday, 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific, go to the Pasetta website. There's a forum there. You can register. And it's great to always have a live audience here with us. We like to see your faces and have these interactions. So thank you and yeah, great participation.
- [45:49]
Trevor
We really appreciate it. It really drives the conversation along. So thank you all.
- [45:53]
Carolyn
All right, thanks y'all. Have a.
- [46:02]
Trevor
Page.