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