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- [00:00]
A
Marketing influence, I think is really hard to defend in a boardroom because it's usually self graded by marketing marketing saying, oh, look at all of these other opportunities that were created. 50% of them touch marketing. Therefore marketing influenced them. It's hard to defend. I don't see a lot of CFOs and CEOs understanding the importance of influence because just by saying marketing influenced X percent of the pipeline or X percent of the revenue and like here are the campaigns, that doesn't create any sort of causality. Usually what I think a lot of companies would say is sales would have just closed them anyways. Did marketing really do anything right? And so the thing that we built is an influence dashboard that actually associates hard metrics to influence with the ability to segment by geo, by industry, by whatever core segments to say, okay, X percent of the pipeline or revenue, whatever you want to look at, had a signal before it became an opportunity or a touch point or whatever, engagement, whatever you want to call it. And then here's the cohort that did it. Hey guys. Sorry to keep everybody waiting. Amber is in travels this week, so we were just waiting for Amber to get situated. But good to. Hey, good to see you, Nancy. Thanks for being here. We changed the time this week so I'm not sure who will show up, but we pushed the live recording back by an hour because Amber is at Chili Palooza in New Mexico. Tell us what's been going on. So you just got there today then?
- [01:36]
B
Yeah, yeah, I just got off my
- [01:38]
A
flight, just got to the resort.
- [01:39]
B
It's so beautiful and sunny and yeah, I thought I was going to be able to get some lunch beforehand, but that didn't work out. So thanks for waiting on me everybody.
- [01:49]
A
No prob. So we've got a little bit of agenda for today. I would love to do a little bit of a recap. Amber, you and I haven't talked since we both went on our own little vacation. So I want to hear all about it or at least like the highlights from all of that. Let's do it.
- [02:08]
B
So funny, I was thinking we both took a trip sort of at the same time. There was a few days of you were out and I was in and then I was out and you were in, but it was sort of the same time. So I was thinking while we were out, I was thinking, oh, one won't do that again. And then I realized I'd love to hear from your perspective, but I think it actually worked out great and fine. And you were still able to close a new Deal while we were, like, essentially on vacation, so maybe we should do it more.
- [02:39]
A
Yeah, it ended up working out really good. And yes, while we were there, we did. We. We converted one of our Sprint customers to an ongoing contract. So that was just so nice. It felt like such a nice win to have being out on vacation. So what was the. What was the biggest highlight for you? So you were in Costa Rica. But tell me, like, I mean, when I heard your voice notes, it just made me want to go there so bad because you voice noted me one of the days and I could hear, well, beautiful birds chirping in the background. And then also you're like, listen, there's a howler monkey. And I thought that was so cool. But what was any, like, breakthroughs or takeaways or anything like that or any. Just any super memorable points from your trip?
- [03:24]
B
Yeah, I think it's really nice to be able to get into a different environment. And that sounds kind of cliche to say, but if you haven't done it in a while, then maybe this is a reminder to put yourself in a different environment. And I love being in different, you know, new places. Like, I'm definitely one of those people who likes to kind of just see new things all the time, and it helped give me some different perspectives on everything, you know, like, super grateful for everything that we have in the States. Right. So going to a different country, it's, like, really helps set in perspective everything that, you know, I have and how grateful I am for everything. And then also realizing that it really can be anything that I want it to be. So that's been great because I think if I would have thought back to this point a year ago, I was, like, doing my own thing right before coming to Passetto, and it just felt, like, so overwhelming sometimes, and just like, I couldn't catch a break. And even if I, like, from work and even if I did go on a break, it just felt like I was just working the whole time anyway. And so it was just kind of a change of scenery, but I was still stuck behind the computer. And so I made a point, you know, in my intention to say, hey, I actually want to have a different relationship with my business. And here we are, you know, like, making that happen. So, yeah, it's been great about you.
- [04:49]
A
That's so nice. And did you, like, physically like, being in Costa Rica, like, I know you did some scuba diving and things like that. Was that all just, like, amazing?
- [04:57]
B
Yeah, I think I'm ready to go back for sure in a couple Months. We should go together.
- [05:01]
A
I know. I would love to. I would love to. I saw your LinkedIn post, that photo of like that super amazing, like, gym that you were at. Oh, it just looked like totally my vibe. I would love to go there. That's on my. That's on my checklist for where to go next. Yeah, similar. Honestly, I had a lot of, I think, breakthroughs for me, like huge shifts in my belief, in my beliefs that I really, really needed and didn't see coming. All of it was really personal, not necessarily like business related, but similar to you. What I'm trying to like synthesize even like how I felt. I just felt like for the first time I really embodied appreciating where we're at and just being so grateful for everything we've created and also just feeling like anything you want to create or do, like, starts inside you. So if you want to achieve something, if you desire something, you have to embody it. And you have to embody it first, before the universe, God, whatever you believe in is going to give it to you. And so like, that was really empowering to say, like, whatever we want to do or build, I mean, we can go, we can go do that. And I think anybody can do that. And so I thought that that was. I know it sounds sort of like saying it back, it doesn't sound all that exciting. But at the moment when I had that realization, it was just like such a mental shift for me. And I read three really profound books that I want to recommend here. The first is Happy Pocket Full of Money and it's all about wealth consciousness and how you can. How you basically need to embody wealth consciousness before being able to hold and receive money. And so like, that was super. That was a great book. I really enjoyed it. I'm probably gonna read it again. Another book I read was called the Power of Awareness. It was super short. I read it in a day all about just being conscious, living consciously. That was an amazing book. Would recommend that. And then I read for the second time the Art or becoming supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza. It's one of my favorite books. I read it again three years later from the first time I read it. And just like when you reread really inspiring books, it just gave me a whole new message this time versus when I read it last time. So for anybody, not necessarily spiritual, but who? Any, anybody who really cares about living mindfully and wanting to create a future that you really dream of. And you don't know how I would Definitely recommend those books. So that was like my highlight.
- [07:43]
B
I have a funny story about that because you sent me a Dr. Joe Dispenza interview. Oh yeah?
- [07:50]
A
Yeah.
- [07:50]
B
And so I actually watched some of it. This was before we went, we went out on our trips and I watched it. I was like, this is cool. I've never really, you know, followed him. And then it was like a couple years old. The interview you sent me, I think it wasn't a new one. And then when I got on the plane to go to Costa Rica, I happened to turn on the, you know, the screen, the seat back experience the and which I don't usually do. And I happened to say, well, what would I want to consume? Let me see if I can find something on YouTube. And guess what? As soon as I clicked on YouTube, that interview, no doubt, like no lie, was the first thing that popped up.
- [08:28]
A
Seriously?
- [08:29]
B
Yeah. There's no way that Delta knew that I had watched that on my own YouTube account.
- [08:33]
A
Like, yeah, I thought that was so cool.
- [08:35]
B
So I watched it again.
- [08:36]
A
Oh, did you, did you like it? I love, I just like, I can't wait for the day that I get to meet, meet him because I just like he's changed my life for, in so many ways. But yeah, did. What did you take from that?
- [08:47]
B
All about changing your beliefs to change your reality and the brain chemistry behind that which we're, you know, I'm a case study example of and I think you are too. And that reminds me though, I think we should also talk at some point about your journey, your health journey because I don't think a lot of people know about that and it's really inspiring.
- [09:08]
A
Oh, I don't even know what about it. But yeah, we can, we can talk about that. But yeah, I love, I love this idea that he has which is like creating from the quantum field. Like everything comes down to what you believe in your heart and what you believe in your mind. And like everything in this world is created by energy. A chair is really, when you break it down, it's energy. We're energy. Everything is energy. And so operating from the place of where you want to go, because so many of us operate in the past and our body, like you said, our body chemistry doesn't know the difference between imagination and reality. Right. Both imagination and reality create the same emotions. And so when you like relive past things that happen or even just like I think about B2B marketers, like we're constantly in living from like a state of low grade anxiety or panic. We Hear all of those different, like, you know, anecdotes about like how the CEO slacked me at like 2am or you know, where's, like where are the leads, where's the pipeline? What's the roi? It's like we're constantly living with low grade anxiety. At least I was and I see it all the time. And it's just like when you are living in that mental state, you cannot create, you cannot embody your vision for where you want to go when you're constantly stuck in that state. Every time you think about those things, it induces an emotion within us that like literally the circuitry in our body changes. It changes our chemistry, it changes our energetics and you cannot create from that place. It's pretty wild.
- [10:51]
B
It feels like having being shackled basically to something and you're just like, I can't get out. Some people I think are able to take walks or do different things during the day to zoom out. Yeah, I like the hard reset. But yeah, yeah, it's, it's so wild. And so I got so much clarity around, hey, these are the things that you're doing every day. Like stop doing those things. It's not serving you, it's not serving the business. You know, people are even telling, telling you like, stop doing that. Like, you know, take a, a different perspective and why are you still holding on to doing things this certain way? Right. And so it's been really great. Yeah, I love being on this journey. Yeah.
- [11:33]
A
And I, and I drummed up in my mind like, I don't know about you, but when I get in an airplane I feel like I just enter like a different field of creativity and just like thoughts and downloads and all of this stuff. And so like on the way to my trip, I was listening to another Joe Dispenza like podcast episode and I literally like created in my mind this like master mind SL retreat that Petto is going to create and host. And I know we're going to do it and we're going to bring it together. Like minded people who have the same visions and goals for where they want to take their career and want to be around people who want to talk about that and work through challenges. And I'm so excited about that. I don't know when it's going to be. I don't know where it's going to be. But we should basically say on this show that if that's something that you feel drawn to, if you want to be around like minded marketers or rev ops leaders in this space that want to create more out of their career, want to break through some of these shackles or these constraints that we feel we face every day, like the MQL hamster wheel. Well, the best thing that you can do is be around people who want to achieve the same thing and talk through what that that all looks like. And you know, there's gonna be, you know, like content and education around that. So anyways, if that, if you feel called to do that, it's something that we definitely wanna plan. You know, Amber and you and I talked about this, know, send us an email, send us a DM on LinkedIn, drop a comment on the show, whatever you think, tell us if that's a good idea. Tell us if you want to be a part of that or if we're just crazy.
- [13:07]
B
I think it sounds awesome. And doing it as like a super contained, you know, small group. Yeah, sounds like an amazing experience.
- [13:19]
A
Maybe it'll be in Costa Rica. You never know.
- [13:22]
B
I found the place, I'm telling you.
- [13:24]
A
Oh, did you? That's cool. What is it? Is it like a retreat center or something like that?
- [13:28]
B
Yeah, it's a retreat center. It's pretty small right now, but they are looking at expanding. But they were like, we're kind of just getting a lot of interest, but we're trying to still grow slowly. We don't want to grow too fast. I'm like, okay, well, we could still fit, you know, a small group there.
- [13:43]
A
Yeah. All right, well, we should talk about what's new, what we've been working on behind the scenes. Because the one thing I'm also realizing is, well, we're building a lot of stuff in the background. Right. We always talk about like sort of like our thesis or the end result, but we don't share a lot that, you know, we're building a SaaS. We don't necessarily build in public or share to the world. What we're doing, so we're doing right now is actually creating the MVP of our SaaS marketing analytics software. We use it behind the scenes with, internally with our customers. And it's not something that our customers even get their hands on. But like, I think the shared goal at Passetto is that we want marketing analytics, you know, like the way we think about the world. Not MQLs and not marketing source pipeline, but like the full journey. We want that to be accessible. We want it to be like affordable and not this like big, heavy, expensive consulting engagement. So we've been working behind the scenes on the MVP of that and so, like, I'm really excited that in the near future we are going to be like a full fledged marketing analytics SaaS. And I'm so looking forward to it. Like, I'm so focused on what the world of Passetto and what the world of B2B marketing is going to be when we can actually bring that to life.
- [15:06]
B
Yeah, I'm really excited too. It's the funnest part of business for me. I can just tell, like, I love finding that flow where we're on, you know, we have customers, more and more customers who are like just having great results. And so we're saying, oh, great, like, let's be more and more specific as we've done over the past, you know, almost going on a year around exactly what we want to do here, right. Versus trying to just, you know, do all the things that we could do. And so as we're seeing that more and more and you know, customers are just giving us these, all this great feedback, like, wow, this has helped accelerate this in our business and now, you know, we're using all these things, then this could be applied to, you know, any, any company that you're working at right now. It's like when you get to that point where you're hearing those things, it is an amazing experience. And it's something where you always have to evolve and change and say, okay, well, what's next? Or what's right around the corner? And now we're at this point where we can see, wow, what we've been doing with a lot of, you know, a lot of this managed services, right? Consulting, as you mentioned, is now we know like exactly what that is. That is like the highest and best value. And so we can make it more accessible, we can automate more parts of it. Not to say that we take away that ability to have, you know, a very in depth relationship with Passetto, if you want that, but just making it, everything becomes more clear, right? And so when you really take away some of the, the noise or just kind of weed out and then you're able to see over time what's actually there. It's like, oh, now I have so much more clarity on, on what that is. And like you said, now we have a really clear path to be able to offer this to so many more people. And that is. This lights me up. You know what I mean?
- [17:00]
A
I know. I always see how people. Well, we all know, like Adam Robinson, right, like, is just posting about what they're working on week over week, new features, new things like that And I mean we, I don't think we purposefully keep it close to the chest, but I was really excited to talk about it because we basically rolled out like a new feature release. Not that it's really called that because we're not a full fledged product yet. But I want to talk about that new capability in our software that we just unveiled, which is that marketing influence dashboard that we, that we created. We now we did it for one of our customers, but we've also decided, okay, we're going to roll this out for all of our customers who use Passetto. And I want to talk about that because in my opinion it's probably one of the greatest capabilities of like the Passetto analytics, right? So when you think about marketing, right, like right now most marketers are measured on source pipeline, right? Like that's the gold standard. What did marketing source? What you know, what's the ROI on these campaigns in the way of source, that sort of thing. And marketing influence I think is really hard to defend in a boardroom because it's usually like self graded by marketing marketing saying, oh well, you know, look at all of these other, you know, opportunities that were created. You know, 50% of them touch marketing. Therefore marketing influenced them. And it's like, it's hard to defend. I don't, like, I don't see a lot of CFOs and CEOs understanding the importance of influence because just by saying marketing influenced like X percent of the pipeline or X percent of the revenue and like here are the campaigns that doesn't like create any sort of causality. Like usually what I think a lot of companies would say is, well like sales would have just closed them anyways. Like did marketing really do anything right? And so the thing that we built is an influence dashboard that actually associates hard metrics to influence with the ability to segment by geo, by industry, by whatever core segments to say, okay, X percent of the pipeline or revenue, whatever you want to look at, had a signal before it became an opportunity or a touch point or whatever, engagement, whatever you want to call it. And then here's the cohort that didn't and being able to compare win rate between those cohorts. Marketing engaged versus non marketing engaged. Being able to compare the sales cycle length between the two cohorts and then being able to compare the deal size. And when you do that, marketing influence becomes an actual defensible metric. Not just like this fluffy, you know, marketing created this random, you know, metric to try and justify their existence. It's like, oh look at our win rate when marketing gets ahead of the deal, even if they're sales sourced, you know, by your definition, like, look at all of these opportunities that marketing actually did nurture before they were picked up by sales. And oh, when that happens, our win rate is actually 45% versus 30% when marketing doesn't. Our average deal size is 10k higher, our sales cycle length is less, is like half. You know what I mean? Like those are real defensible metrics and things that you can share with your board that show you all of these other things that you're doing to justify brand spend or other investments in, you know, PR or content or thought leadership and all of these other things. So I was so pumped when we rolled that out because I think it's going to be so simple but yet so game changing for a lot of, a lot of companies.
- [20:57]
B
Yeah, it seems to be a really good thing for companies where the marketing department is already has this relationship that they're nurturing with like the sales department where they're already taking this stance around all bound. Right. Or unbound is calling it, but they're already on the same page. Right. So it's not like, oh, it's either or it's like, no, like we're, we're already doing this. Like we're in the same team. Right. And so being able to see exactly where that influence is is actually not showing up and so like how to, how to go get better at that because. And it's wild too to see it's not necessarily what you would think around segmentation. Like there are certain, you know, customers that we're seeing where there's very different results as well, even around that win rate, velocity, influence and impact with marketing and sales working in tandem, where it's actually not a strong, you know, differentiator or correlation. And so you can't just assume that it is. Right. So you got to see the data to really know. And it's wild how even within one company, across different segments, we see things that are very different. So it's. Yeah, it's super cool. Yeah. I also just want to say on terms of what we're working on, which we're sharing some behind the scenes of, but hopefully it's applicable to other people and their experience as well. Is like with SaaS, I don't really care about these topics around SaaS is dead. But it's like great to think about. How can you take whatever it is, the outcome that you're creating for customers and bring it to the Customer where they are. So the software isn't necessarily the service, but the outcome is the service. Right. And so wherever, you know, that visualization ends up living, if it ends up living in your BI tool, if it ends up getting, you know, piped via McP into your CRM, if it ends up just living in your LLM environment, right. And you query it, it doesn't really matter. The whole name of the game is at this point helping drive results for your customers. And so we're going to do that and we might do it, you know, if you want to see it in
- [23:13]
A
our tool, we're also going to do
- [23:15]
B
it wherever else you might want to see it. And so I just wouldn't want people to get kind of hung up around, oh, well, SaaS is, you know, da, da, da. And I think it's everything. Like to some people it is dead. And some people only sell, you know, stuff that is linked through connectors at this point or, you know, goes through a data lake. And then other people only sell the other stuff and it works great for them. So it really just depends where you're at.
- [23:44]
A
Yeah, definitely agree. And I feel like it's such a mixed bag. I think a lot of people really care about having ownership to all of that on their own without needing to, like, hitch their wagon to somebody who, who they're going to have to pay indefinitely to get that. And then we see the opposite. Like, I just had a call recently with a CMO transitioning into a new role where, like, speed is everything. Like, he doesn't want to get bogged down with the technicalities of trying to figure out the data, as we would say. Like, he's like, I've got a plan. I've got a limited window of time to deliver on that plan to like, my PE board and I'm going to focus on what is going to get me there the fastest. Now, he also does want to, you know, not be hitched to, you know, a technology vendor forever. But like you had said, I mean, it really comes down to what, how you want to get at that, what's your priority, you know. Yeah, I think that's important.
- [24:55]
B
Support the bedrock underneath it as well. Yeah.
- [25:01]
A
The other thing too that I'm, I'm thinking a lot about is who is it? Forster just had their conference this week and I was just chatting to, chatting with a former customer of ours recently and she was just saying, oh, you know, like, it's crazy. Like, the big theme at like the Forester conference now is really about how you know, like Last Touch attribution and market measuring. Marketing source is just not like it's now widely understood that the industry is moving away from that. But she had made a comment about how like these are all just concepts. Right. Like the industry has been talking about it, but institutionalizing it and making, making the new measurement model like accessible in, in your own organizations is hard. Like nobody, everybody knows the problem, nobody really knows how to fix it right now. And so I thought that was interesting.
- [26:00]
B
Yeah, that was really cool feedback.
- [26:01]
A
Anything else? I know we had just like a short topic list today for today. Anything else you've been thinking about, Amber?
- [26:07]
B
Yeah, I wanted to go find some of the interactions that we had on the event, the virtual event that we hosted.
- [26:18]
A
Oh yeah, that was awesome. That was so good. And I've. I actually teed up like a sequence or like an email thread after that to follow up with some people who gave us like really good responses based on like what, you know, why they're still stuck with like on the MQL hamster wheel and all this stuff. So maybe we can go back and look at some of those because I got some really good responses as well.
- [26:44]
B
So the event with John Miller was so fun. Amazing turnout and attendance and everyone was really engaged. So the first poll that we ran, this was it, right?
- [27:00]
A
Yeah, that's right. Question what are basically what are your biggest challenges with you know, MQLS as a volume metric in your own organization?
- [27:13]
B
Yeah. So this was a mix of who actually attended. I have to go double check. But a couple hundred different go to market and marketing leaders. This is who is in attendance. Right. Really to talk about the. The death of the mql. So the answers were. Well the, the response options were first of all reinforces expensive lead gen behavior. Don't know our broader marketing influence and impact lose visibility after the handoff to sales. What happened to those leads? Don't know what other KPIs to track. And leadership is obsessed with MQLs. So you want to talk about which. Which answers really resonated the most with this audience?
- [27:54]
A
Yeah, a little bit to my surprise actually the ones that I thought would get more votes didn't. But I circled the. You can see in the two in red the one that got 43% of votes. And by the way there was like over 70, 70 or 80 people that participated in this. So like the engagement on the survey was really awesome. But the one that got the Most votes at 43% is leadership is obsessed with MQLs. So we can Follow up on that in a second because I got a little bit more feedback in some emails that, that I was going back and forth with some attendees on. So that's one which just shows that notion around MQLs as a core KPI and just marketing KPIs in general. Like it extends beyond marketing. Right. Like it's so embedded into like the commercial structure of leadership. So that's one and then the other one which I was also surprised to see a little bit was we lose visibility visibility after handoff to sales. So like what actually happens with those leads which kind of makes sense when MQL volume is up but like the, the conversion rate to SQL is low. It's really hard to understand why that might be or how to affect change or how to do anything differently when you just don't have the granularity in the data to to know what to change. Like why didn't they convert. It's hard to change anything when you don't know why. Like you need to be able to answer the why. So those were the two, the two things that really stuck out to me. So on that maybe I'll read a couple responses right. So I had sent around an email with you know some, some details around that poll response and so in that email I said quick question back to you. Is the problem more that you cannot produce the answer or that you have an answer but leadership doesn't trust it would love to hear where you're actually stuck. So a couple responses somebody wrote back. Scott wrote me and said thanks for reaching out on such a hot topic. Let you let me provide you with the cond been working under he says 40 years spent in the software industry mostly in BU marketing and corporate marketing management positions Target B2B with the biggest person Target B2B the biggest Persona we target our engineers Engineering management C suite C suite Folks in this segment have very little understanding of how marketing functions and its value to the company. Yet they run the company.
- [30:30]
B
Love that.
- [30:31]
A
I think that is really resonating with me in this world everything is all about a design win. The only issue is that the the design in cycle is roughly 12 to 18 months per recent surveys of engineers they will work their way through 50 to 70% of this is really technical device selection process without ever speaking to a vendor the engineers rely on colleague recommendations what vendor they've successfully used in the past, what they have seen or heard in the new products area and technical content on the vendor's website that help them with their design problems. Although I've tried to build marketing campaigns that directly target the top 10 customers, the business units are basing their revenue growth on sales isn't fully bought into why this is something they want to be a part of or waste their time on. My favorite sales line is oh, we know everything at the account already. He goes shaking my head. I've tried to connect marketing effort to a design win. The metric BU VPs and C Suite folks measure sales success. They can count the number of them on one hand over the last 15 years of marketing campaigns. MQLs as we know them are not built to work because they don't have. If they don't have at least a hit rate of 50 to 75% for the sales team, they're a waste of time. Once you have a few salespeople in that mindset, follow up from sales on MQLs won't happen except if it's directly related to them being paid. So no win situation for marketing using MQLs to explain success because you can't get sales to say why they got a design win because of something marketing did. Sales will always say it's because of what they did. It was a painful learning experience and I no longer believe MQLS be a success metric for marketing in the high tech long design and cycle process. Okay, he's. There's even more there but like wow, so great to hear that perspective from somebody who has lived it, especially somebody who seems to have lived it now for a couple, you know, decades. So yeah, pretty, pretty crazy. What do you think about that, Amber, when you, when you heard me explain that?
- [32:33]
B
Yeah, I think it's very specific right to that industry and that business. But I think also it would resonate because that is how it feels. I can share a couple more pieces of feedback that we got in that workshop just around what folks are struggling with. So hopefully this is would resonate with you. You know, like if you're feeling any of these things and just knowing that you're not alone and that there are folks and communities like us that are trying to help provide these next, you know, next best steps and best options for you if you feel like you're in this sort of situation. But we also had someone from a billion dollar fintech company say I'm struggling because it's hard to show the impact of my team because we're stuck with the last touch attribution model which relies heavily on the MQL model and leadership only cares about pipeline generation. So we see that a lot. The disconnect between the measurement model being maybe last touch and then how marketing is also graded being in qls and then the disconnect between what's happening to generate pipeline. We also got something from a services company, $300 million company. This person said they're struggling to integrate relevant data across their systems. You might be, you know, if you're on LinkedIn a lot, you might be feeling like you're behind in terms of being able to just pull data from everywhere and just like visual it everywhere. But let me tell you that that's not how most people are operating or feeling right now. And yes, it is consistently hard. And the reason why it's hard, I will just chime in here to say is because you have these different systems that have different data models. And so it's not just the case of which we deal with all the time. Right. With our own system is, you know, our own product is to say you can't just like pull in all the data and just make it work. Like it actually takes a lot of expertise and technical know how to able to map different types of objects and different relationships and map them on top of each other and show some sort of path or anything that that is going to consistently make sense. So you're not crazy folks are saying, well, if not MQLs, then what? And maybe we can share also like just the. I know we don't share the recording of the live sessions that we do. You have to register for them. But we do have that really cool KPI slide that we can pull up.
- [35:11]
A
Yeah, why don't we do that? Do you have it handy? I think that would be great.
- [35:15]
B
Like all the chat from that is like, well, what other KPIs to track? And so obviously we got into that in the live event. But if you weren't in the live event, let's see if we can shed some light on that for you.
- [35:30]
A
Okay, awesome. So we've got the screen share up, but maybe we can just like annotate what we're seeing. So if you want this, let us know. Shoot me an email carolinaposeto.com I'll send it to you. Anyways, what you're seeing is four columns of KPIs, each column with a title. The first one is Brand Really Brand Health. The second is Prospecting. The third is Pipeline and the fourth is Customer. But although this is not necessarily an area that. Well, I guess we Passetto does support it in some ways. Right? Because we, we really do track engagement at all. The stage But I think in line with what Forrester is saying now, like, Forrester is really leaning into what is the term that they use? Perception marketing, which is really like all of this is, or you know, preference marketing, sorry. And really that is all of these other sort of things that you, you can't necessarily measure in your pipeline, at least not for like 12 to 18 months, right. If you really think about the market right now, right? When you're, when you're mark, when you're really graded on demand capture or marketing source pipeline, like really what you're being measured on is like the last, you know, the last mile or like the 5% of the market that's good is ready to buy, right. It ignores the remaining 95%. We've got another podcast coming out. I just recorded something just today on that. But really it's like, how do you measure what's happening in that remaining 95% of the market that you need to shape perception in right now so that when they are in market and when they do sort of fall into that 5% of, you know, the ready to buy. Well, one, they already know who, who you are. Like this example that I had read, they've already, you know, read your content, you've already established some sort of trust. You, you know, they've read case studies, you know, they, they've learned about you in other places, right? We're shaping their perception of who we are in the market, right. Not all of that is, you know, none of that can be measured through marketing source pipeline or even MQLs. It all happens upstream. And so there's a lot of metrics here around awareness, like aided and unaided awareness, perception, preference, you know, which you can generate through like preference surveys, things like that, share of voice, you know, branded search is branded search increasing in your, you know, web traffic over time, inclusion from like tools like aeo, AI, referral traffic. So there's a lot of ways that you can focus on perception and have, have a way of tracking it. But when deals do become pipeline, eventually when they're ready, right, doesn't matter their source, if they're sourced by your sales team or if they came in through a web form or a free trial or anything like that really, when you measure like all of the web activity properly with proper utms, you can really look back and say, you know, with no sort of look, you know, limit on look, a look back period. When did they first engage? When did they first come to our website? Was it 200 days ago? Was it 30 days ago? Was it 2 years ago? How did they get there? What did they do at the time? What have they done since then? Right. And so I think, yeah, there's a lot of really important upstream brand metrics that, that people can go and track. And then of course, you, you can tie it back to pipeline when it becomes pipeline.
- [38:49]
B
Yeah, that was really great to hear from John Miller's perspective as well, because he has the, the cool frameworks that he's coming out with. You know, he's still building in stealth to an extent, but I'm really excited to see how we can continue to, you know, just align with everything that he's doing because he's so smart. And this is something where, you know, we don't have like a ton around brand necessarily Specifically, we're pretty focused on prospecting. But yeah, like you said, you want to be able to see that long tail either way. And. Super.
- [39:23]
A
Yeah. The one thing I really liked, and I just want to call it out here, is this concept of what Forrester is calling zero party data, which is preference data, which is literally like introducing preference pages for your leads on your website and leaning into that, like hearing from the customer what kind of content they want to consume on what frequency, with what channel, like literally asking your target audience for that information, you know what I mean? And building around that. And I really think that that will probably leans into a lot of what John Miller's new marketing automation platform is doing is shaping the, the journey around the customer. And I know we say that all the time, like it really should, like marketing should center around the customer, but hearing their preference in their own words and not inferring that through first party data. It's like zero party data. It's the customer telling us what, what their preference is and shaping the journey around them and making it really tailored to them. And with AI, there's no reason why we can't do that at scale.
- [40:32]
B
Yeah. So easy to do operationally, so consistently difficult to get approved. I was just on with a customer yesterday going over their deal stages and they're making some shifts, so they want to talk through it. And just another example of, hey, this is a great time to, you know, make some of these things more customer centric. Great example of like the, the whole funnel in general is like, it's just a sales process. And so deal stages tend to be that as well. But at this point, like you want to make it and from the perspective of the customer so that you know where the customer is at each stage, not like what you have to do as a seller. So anyway, I pitched it to the sales leader and he was like, yeah, I would love to do that. But getting that approved, for example, like from would require the CEO, because the CEOs used to seeing the pipeline to set way for the past, you know, years and they've made some, some changes to it and how it actually operates under the hood. But even just changing the title of like the name of the ST is like a no go. So which is why I think in this day it's just so much more important to be that sort of leader that actually is going to be able to communicate these things like zero party, you know, data, customer preference and having a conviction about it and showing up with your experience and conviction because anybody can go do whatever. Like on the technical side, like that's just becoming cheaper and cheaper to do. What's becoming more and more expensive and rarer and rarer is being the type of person who's going to put yourself in that position to say, hey, this is what we're going to do. Like I'm going to advocate for this and having the communication skills and the like live like one on one capability, that's what's going to accelerate your career.
- [42:37]
A
Yeah, I, I agree with that. And I think too like when you look at this, it's really easy to be overwhelmed and just like, I mean we have this such a, you know, a tendency in marketing to have like sprawl. Like we do, we take on way too much. And like we just saw it with a customer last week, like they had just like an insane amount of like campaign sprawl in their paid social. I think they had like 47 paid social campaigns running and we were just like, guys, you're just like, it's way too much. You cannot be effective when you're trying to do everything. And so like with these metrics, there's however many on here, like it looks like at least you know, 40. And the trick is not rocking the boat. You track what the organization has, you know, been tracking over time, but it's like picking the most, you know, what is going to be the most valuable for your organization to go layer in on top of that. And I think from a mark, very specifically a marketing standpoint, there's really three things. Preference, one, measuring that did the buyer know us when they came in? Right. That's influence. Like did they engage with us before this like sales source opportunity for how long? What did they do and how do those deals win versus the one that didn't have any measurable preference. That's one piece of it. Two, did marketing accelerate or expand the deal once it was created? And that just means what was marketing's presence once the opportunity became an opportunity? Did marketing just fall off or did they help drive the deal forward through events, through content, through whatever else that they were doing and measuring that win rate on that cohort of opportunities versus the opportunities where there was no marketing presence? What is the hard metric associated with that? Is it better or worse? And then three is maintaining like did marketing maintain the metric of like did marketing create the demand that wouldn't have existed otherwise, which is basically marketing source, basically what captured that demand before it became an opportunity. So you can see now how just these three metrics alone allow you to really understand marketing's role across the entire journey. Now, this is just new logo acquisition, of course we have like, you know, expansion and all of that sort of thing. But focusing on this, these are three hard defensible metrics that will give you more than MQL volume will ever give you and will give you more than just like a standard, like marketing influencer, you know, multi touch, attribution. Like these are literally justifying and showing your role as a marketing team in that company. How does marketing drive growth? Right here, these numbers. Yeah.
- [45:26]
B
That's so inspiring. I love that and I love having these conversations and seeing how it pans out in the real world. It's really fun. So thanks for being along on this journey with us.
- [45:37]
A
Well, Amber, what's up? What's up for the rest of the day with the conference? Do you guys have anything on the agenda for today?
- [45:43]
B
Yeah, there's a welcome reception and a dinner, so I will be checking that out. I have a couple of recordings hopefully coming up. So recording with my friend Mallory Lee and her.
- [45:58]
A
You are. No way.
- [46:00]
B
Yeah, that's kind of cool. On the full Stack Moms podcast a couple weeks ago and I said, hey, we're both going to be at the event, so let's try to do it here. So we'll see. Hopefully that works out. And then my like, best favorite influencer, Jordan Crawford, he's here. So we're gonna get him on on the show again and do something. But it'll be so much great, like practical AI stuff coming out of this conference too. So I'm really excited and I'm excited
- [46:26]
A
to recap when you go through it all and you know your takeaways, I know you. It's like so great to learn so much from those events. I think somebody just joined, and I think they use that link that you put up on LinkedIn. By the way, Amber tagged me in something, like real time in this. I know. I thought that they had. And so you guys just did it on the fly. We moved the time today. Yeah.
- [46:52]
B
Anyways, I saw this, the right link, so that I stopped, like, sharing the wrong link, but, hey, also, what is this?
- [46:57]
A
I look drunk in this photo, man. Are you guys coming to regular meeting now? And I'm just behind. Yeah, we're just ending it for today.
- [47:09]
B
Well, I will.
- [47:10]
A
I will watch my calendar more carefully. Yeah, we'll try and keep the time, but today we adjusted because Amber's at Chili Palooza for a conference, so you caught the tail end, but you'll get the recording when it goes up. Chili Palooza. Chili Piper. Yeah, the Chili Piper event. Yeah. But. Well, thanks, guys. I'll see you next time.
- [47:29]
B
All right, guys.
- [47:31]
A
Amber, have fun. See y' all later.
- [47:33]
B
Bye.