Loading summary
Transcript68 lines
- [00:01]
A
Hey, everyone. Happy springtime. Depending on when you're listening to this, the weather is really starting to heat up here in Atlanta. It's pollen season. Oh, my gosh. I've lived in the south my entire life, but I've been in Atlanta for about two and a half years and this pollen is out of control. Okay. It lasts for a few weeks. It's sort of like being showered with yellow dust and your sinuses go crazy. No use washing the car. No use really spraying off the deck because 10 minutes later it's back on. But you know what? I'm here for it because my son is playing outside. Every day I'm getting more sunshine and I love warm weather and it's going to be a hot one. So I hope you've been enjoying the weather wherever you are. And we've been going through so many questions, growth changes and just new, really new ways of operating at Pesetto that have been really fun to get into with our customers. But we don't want to forget to share with you what we're learning along the way. So in today's recording, we're going through a case study of a company that we recently ran a 14 day sprint with to give you some insights on what's going on out there, what other companies data is looking like, what sort of insights we look for at passetto, what, what KPIs we are looking at to really help inform marketing measurement and the story that marketing is helping to play in driving revenue. So this is a fun one because it's heavily involved with revenue operations as well. Close to my heart. And we hope you'll enjoy it. Let's get into it.
- [01:44]
B
You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passetto.
- [01:53]
A
Hey, welcome back. I'm with Carolyn today. So we have a, a duo here. We're pretty dynamic and excited to get into another case study today, but. Hey, Carolyn, how's it going in Canada?
- [02:04]
B
Oh, it's good. I've been on highs and lows all week because as I've been telling you, it's been warm and then freezing and then warm and then freezing, which really impacts my mood, as you know, from our Florida days, being in the sunshine. So, yeah, I'm just rolling with it, but I'm excited to get back into like, you know, the warmer weather swing of things. I love going out for walks during the middle of the day, so I got to do that a few times, go bike riding with Theo. So, yeah, that's Canada life this week. How about you?
- [02:35]
A
When you Say warm, you mean like actually pretty cold, but warm enough that
- [02:39]
B
the sun comes out warm enough. Like, I know we, we're Celsius and you guys are Fahrenheit, but like, I'm saying, like T shirt weather, you know.
- [02:45]
A
Oh, yeah, that's so cool.
- [02:46]
B
It's your tank top.
- [02:48]
A
Yeah. I just bought little Bruce, my three year old, a bike on Facebook Marketplace today because he's outgrowing his little balance bike. And I went and got it this morning. It's kind of a slippery slope with me with Marketplace because as you know, I like gently used things. And so I've just been on there like, oh my God, I bought something for the yard. I bought. Then I bought him a bike. But yeah, I'm so excited. It's just so fun to have kids and go outside.
- [03:14]
B
I never think about Facebook Marketplace first. Like, people are always like, did you look at Marketplace? And I never do. And I just saw like this super dope, huge three story swing set at Costco. My mom actually sent me a photo of it. She's like, oh, this would be great for the kids. And I'm like, I love that. And it's 1500 bucks. And I was like, that's pretty good for like 1500 bucks. Like, that looks sick. But just until you mentioned Marketplace. Now I'm like, why don't I see if I can find something on Marketplace?
- [03:44]
A
Yeah, you might. It's kind of like you never know what you're going to get on there, but if you find it.
- [03:50]
B
Worth a try. Yeah. So.
- [03:53]
A
Well, I can't believe we're already in Q2. It's been a whirlwind of a year, so yay. Congratulations to everyone. We made it to Q2.
- [04:04]
B
Yeah, it's been fun, but we always say it's a whirlwind because we get out of one chapter and then we move on to the next. And it's just like a constant. The goalpost is always moving. But yeah, it's wild just how quickly time goes sometimes, you know, it's fun
- [04:19]
A
to be so busy and it's fun to be at the stage in the business where we get to continually, you know, build and test and build again. And it just feels like we're taking really big steps and we're love. I love being busy and I love that we're continuing to meet our customers where they are and deliver to them the best value that we can in a lean way. And it feels really fun to be doing that, you know, and just seeing the velocity increase so I love that.
- [04:53]
B
Super, super encouraging. It lights me up too. Every time we do like our sprints. So we talk about those sometimes, right? Like, the way we work with customers is on a two week sprint, basically you come in, you book a two week sprint, we do it and then what happens next is usually like an ongoing thing. But in that two weeks, it's intense. Like, it's intense for the customer, it's intense for us. Right, because we're taking just like a lot of work and packing it into two weeks. And I always say to you, Amber, like, when it's done, like, it's high intensity. Right. So when it's done, it's just like, it does feel like a lull, I guess, but it's just like a lot of work condensed into like just a few days. Right. And so it's such a high. Like it puts you, I guess, in like an adrenaline mode. And so when it ends, I'm always kind of sad because I just love the intensity of it all. It's always nice to like get the work done and everything. But yeah, definitely, like intensity. And I, I live for that.
- [05:43]
A
Yeah, literally a sprint.
- [05:45]
B
So.
- [05:45]
A
Well, we hope that you all listeners have been having a good start to the spring as well, and we hope that you're feeling good energy and momentum in whatever you're working on. So what are we talking about today, Carolyn?
- [05:56]
B
Yeah, well, we are going to do a case study. These are all confidential, as you know, but we like to talk about these sprints and the before and after, like why people came to us, what they learned in the sprint and you know, what they're going to do next. We haven't done these for a while, so we've got a few lined up, but we like to space them out. Right. So we are going to do that today for a recent SaaS company. And this one is kind of interesting because we don't always get our main, you know, stakeholders always like a CMO or VP of marketing. Right. As you know. But this one or, you know, on the odd occasion we get like some Revops people. And so the person who came in to us was a new or is a new VP of RevOps at this company. I think she was like one or two weeks in and she was like, I've been listening to you guys for so long and I'm new to this company and I'm already like starting to see a lot of data issues. It would be great for me to bring you in. So that's just like how that conversation started. What Else. Amber, what am I missing? Just like with the about.
- [07:01]
A
Yeah, it was really great that the RevOps leader came to us because this person has off the gate developing a strong relationship with their executive team as you would do as a new VP of RevOps and particularly with the CMO. What struck me about this was that the RevOps leader brought the CMO into the conversation really immediately in terms of saying, hey, we've been talking about xyz. This is what I see as the challenges to being able to get you that visibility. And here is something that could potentially help us, you know, inform our work that we're doing in these areas that are strategic focused. So shout out to revop's folks who are actually taking a seat at the table to help shape the narrative at the executive level around. Here's how we get from point A to point B. Because sometimes it can be easy to be feel like in a situation while we just have to say no. Or maybe you say yes, but knowing that you actually don't know how to get there and so saying yes to something when you don't necessarily have the expertise or have the answers, it's just a great sign of a leader in general to bring in other people, whether it's hiring or bringing in an outside consultant or an outside perspective around being able to beef that out. So some of the challenges that this company was facing when they came to us was marketing. Sales and RevOps had been tracking metrics and activity in these different sort of silos as we've talked about. But the real pain point here was not being able to reliably connect the dots between marketing and. And revenue to understand it wasn't even about really finger pointing or accusations. Sometimes we see teams in that sort of situation, typically when revenue is down or pipeline is flat or pipeline is declining, you know, something like that. But this is one of those situations where those things were not happening.
- [09:03]
B
So the team like very aligned. Like I was very probably one of the most aligned teams we've ever seen. Because sometimes you do have that divide. Right. It's very common that you do. But they were not like that.
- [09:16]
A
Yes. And I think that's a real credit to the team. But specifically the VP Rev Ops who had come in and really helped before we ever gotten any conversations with this company, rally the team around understanding what the common goals are and where the shared sort of responsibilities for each department could be and really helping to rally that conversation and get those teams fired up about solving it together. Exactly. Which is amazing. So they knew that they were winning more. But certain things such as win rate, how win rate can be impacted by various different factors. Pipeline quality, marketing's contribution to pipeline, pipeline velocity, you know what we call prospecting velocity. All of these things were. They're just unknown, pretty much altogether black box. And they're using this Last Touch model of attribution which credit to the team again getting into some workshops that we did with them throughout the course of the Sprint. You have sales there, you have operations, you have marketing, you have all of these different stakeholders. Everyone is very transparent about the fact that the last touch model is. It's so frustrating for marketing specifically to see the deal source being overwritten or again and not even a disk to sales. But this is just the realities of what's happening based on the systems that they have in place that they're not able to see or they'll see, hey, we just ran this event and then just a couple months later this deal pops seemingly out of nowhere. And like an SDR source deal and not so much that that's frustrating because of again it wasn't really like a credit thing. It's really just wanting to be able to see what's happening and help give those answers specifically to the marketing team around how do we better support our sellers. So that's why they came to us.
- [11:14]
B
Yeah. And the one thing too, like I will say, when people come to us, they sort of fit into like one of two categories usually, which is one, they realize that the way they're measuring stuff is really limiting. It doesn't give em like a lot of fidelity. The data doesn't have a lot of fidelity but performance is good. So it's sort of they're planting seeds for when like performance is not so good. So I think you had called it like an insurance policy, right Amber? Like you had said, it's more like an insurance policy. And then you have this other camp of people where performance has been consistently bad and it's like they need a life raft. They cannot potentially sacrifice their career, have another bad quarter. It's just like we need answers now. So this company felt and fell into the first bucket where they're lucky. Performance has been great, they've been growing. But hats off to the CMO and the RevOps leader there just realizing that we've got to evolve our measurement and we can't do it alone. And so we need somebody to come help us do that.
- [12:13]
A
Yep. And the RevOps leader had already put into place certain key initiatives on the roadmap around. We are Structuring, prospecting, tracking more diligently. And we are planning to do it in this way. We are doing XYZ for, you know, pipeline quality, all these things. But it wasn't really a clear, as I mentioned, really clear path to answer some of these big questions for them. One quote from the CMO of this company, they said we track each stage of the funnel independently, but not across them. When a contact moves from one stage to the next, that's where things fall through the cracks and where we end up doing a lot of duct taping.
- [12:58]
B
Yeah, very obviously like reflective of what we would see with a lot of teams. Oh, but that just reminded me their tech stack. Right. So when we're talking about where are they measuring this stuff? So they use HubSpot as their marketing automation platform, Salesforce for opportunity management and like activity, sales activity tracking gong. And they have this other sales enablement tool called EnableX where they keep a lot of it, what, you know, their battle cards and their marketing artifacts and things like that for the sales team enablement assets. So that was in the mix too. And interestingly as well, I think while the CMO was keen to do this to just get, you know, shed more light on like historically where Pipeline is coming from and what's working for the VP of RevOps, it really was to do the work, to get a blueprint on like what the low hanging fruit is and what to fix first and to prioritize. She's like, I, I have a lot of stuff clearly that I can do, but I would love just like a third party objective standpoint to tell me what I should do first and like what's going to be the most impactful. So like two different stakeholders, two sort of different desired outcomes from the exercise.
- [14:13]
A
Yeah. And I think we're seeing as we're churning out more of these rapid engagements that there's a certain level, another sort of two camps thing where some folks come to the table on the team. This was a pretty big team, probably one of the bigger ones that we've had in the sprint so far. It was upwards of 10 people. And so there's a lot. So there's a mix of different personalities and levels of comfort with what is the data already kind of telling us what state is our foundation in essentially. And so I'm realizing that some folks are a lot more cautious around oh, we need to go do X, Y, Z before we can get any insights out of this at all. Or oh, we've known we need to fix this and this company Specifically had done a lot of work over the last year or so, even before The VP of RevOps came in. Sounds like around fixing some things. But there is still this prevailing thought in the company that like, oh, we just have so much more that we need to do before we can see anything. And that's so relatable because it's so easy to get stuck in that mentality. However, you have to have other people as well who can kind of level set and say, yes, we do know that some things need to be better. We have some gaps, but also we need to be able to set our compass in a direction and move towards that direction versus trying to go do everything or go just fix a bunch of random stuff and not really knowing directionally where are we trying to get to. Is this really going to answer our questions? So yeah, I think that's just a
- [15:41]
B
general theme across the board. It's like sometimes this need to feel like things need to be in a desired place before you take on the work. It's like, oh, we need to go hire out the team. We're still in the midst of hiring or setting the strategy and things like that. But that also reminds me that we call it revenue visibility. Like, revenue visibility is not a light switch where you just do some work and it's done right. Like we know it's an evolution, an incremental process that gives you incremental visibility over time. So it's kind of like start the work now. Because to get from A to B is not going to be just like a one and done. Meaning the best time to do it is the time when you recognize it's a priority, not waiting for the perfect moment.
- [16:29]
A
Oh my God. Just like sales, that's totally the same as sales. You're never going to be like the perfect salesperson. You're never going to have the perfect outbound strategy. You're never going to have everything all figured out. If you wait until you try to figure all that stuff out, it's never going to happen. So you just need to do it. When you think about it, now is the time to do it especially too,
- [16:49]
B
because I think problems, I don't want to call them problems because I feel like that's like really discouraging. But like the things that people have to prioritize are often so much greater than they even think or comprehend them to be. So the best moment to make it a priority is like now just knowing that as we get in the weeds with people too, like on an ongoing type of engagement, there's always new things that come up and they're like, oh, we didn't know about this. Here's the implication of that. So it's just there's no time. Like the present moment, as they say. Oh, okay. So with our two week sprint, we spent the first two weeks doing a lot of workshopping with them, which was awesome. I think they got a lot of benefit just around alignment. And their BDR manager was super involved. I think he was like, it was just great to see that type of involvement from a BDR manager, which doesn't always happen. So, yeah, we had a first. The first week of a lot of workshopping, more technical, which you led Amber. And then in week two, we really got into, like, the data and the analysis and surfacing to them, what we had seen. And I guess the caveat to all of this too, is that the sprint is not always like a rainbows and butterflies type of experience. It's hard work. And we saw that ourselves. Like, we just did the Fletch positioning sprint and, like, by no means was it, like an easy process. It required us to think a lot about our existence and things like that. And so I think the sprint has, you know, components of that. So anything else on that you have
- [18:21]
A
a little bit of a crisis. It was so great to go through the Fletch PMM sprint. Not at all the same kind of sprint that we do at Passetto, but we definitely leveraged their model for their offer when we developed our sprint because we just see how great it is to be able to give such an immense level of value in such a short period of time and just lower the barriers. But, yeah, going through that was like, oh, wow, this is how it feels like. There are some times where I feel, like, really great, and then there are other times where I'm like, oh, no. Like, I'm questioning things, or I'm like, dang. And that's what's great about doing it with a partner that you trust. Like, for us, we did a sprint for positioning for our company with Fletch, because they hold the container for you. They're the experts. They hold the container. They help you get from point A to point B. Kind of like a butterfly in a cocoon. Like, it gets a little mushy in there, but you come out of it. Do you necessarily feel like a butterfly at the end? Not sometimes. Sometimes you don't, but you get to the outcome. Right. And yes, it can be intense. It's not something that you just are wanting someone to tell you how great you're doing, like, don't come to us, definitely.
- [19:31]
B
Yeah. It's just an important preface because we're going to get into some of the findings and like, not all of them are super exciting, I guess you would say, right? Hey everybody, while we're on the topic, and since we're walking through a real client example right now, I I want to tell you very quickly what Passetto's two week Sprint actually is. It's an extremely comprehensive marketing and GTM KPI analysis. The kind most companies just can't pull off internally without spending months, if not years trying to figure it out. So we take all of that complexity out of marketing measurement and GTM measurement, We plug directly into your CRM and your marketing automation platform and in two weeks you walk away knowing exactly which motions are your highest impact, which ones are invisibly killing efficiency, where marketing is actually showing up after the lead handoff, where your biggest data gaps are and how to fix them, and how marketing impact differs across different segments because not all marketing impact is created equal. And so one of our CMO clients just told us this week that thanks to Passetto, it no longer feels like marketing is bringing its own data to the party and that the insights finally feel collaborative and credible to the entire organization, including sales, which we know is not always achievable in marketing. Anyways, that's what this is. We have three spots left. We're booking to June right now. And so if you want to work with us or have been thinking about working with us, now is a great time to plan ahead. All right, link is in the show notes and we'll get back to the show. So the one thing that we do right, most, like I would say 90, what, 99, if not 100 of companies that work with Passetto use last such attribution, right? And so what we say is, listen, we're not even looking at how you measure. We're going to apply our own methodology to show you what's creating pipeline. And so when we do that, what we had seen for these guys was that 31% of total revenue from 2025 last year basically had no traceable source, right? They might have a source, they might say, oh, these were like rep generated deals. But when we look at it, we're saying, listen, we can't even find a source because there is no sales activity before the opportunity was created that we can see. So we don't know how long it took to create the opportunity beforehand. We don't know what initiated it. We don't know how much they had to work to even like produce the outcome, like how efficient that motion was. So for them, that was, you know, right away, 31%. Hey guys, we don't know where this is coming from. Of course, not a moment that any company wants to hear. Right. So for them, the opportunities appeared in Salesforce, and I think we spent some time really talking about that. And that number was growing quarter, quarter over quarter too. So, like, by time Q4, 20, 25 came, that like, bucket of unknown pipeline source basically was the largest category for revenue in their business. So I think they really had a lot of questions around that. But at the end of the day, the takeaway was, well, guys, like, our sales activity tracking is super manual and there's probably a lot of stuff that just never even got logged. So it kind of makes sense that we can't see what happened beforehand. Right?
- [23:02]
A
Yeah. And there's an important thread that I want to make sure. We're weaving between this concept of logging a sales activity or logging a sales email in your system of record and okay, pipeline creation and why those two things are even related. And so what we're saying here is that it's absolutely related because it's all sunshine and roses when pipeline is being created and pipeline is being closed and it's like, oh, great, sales is doing awesome, great, marketing's doing awesome. But when you are actually trying to answer the question of where did it come from? Where do our best performing deals come from? What influences them before they become an opportunity? What is that motion that the market is coming to us, whether they're raising their hand or whether we're reaching out to them, these are all very different reasons, very different messaging that your SDRs might be using, very different performance capabilities, very different flowers growing in your garden of your pipeline, and also weeds. And so when you're just looking at it and you're like, oh, look, it's full, you're not able to really do anything scientific around the doubling down on what works, around cutting waste, around seeing where marketing and sales, or even just marketing can help accelerate pipeline creation, can help accelerate fast close pipeline. These are the reasons that something so seemingly kind of simple and unrelated like sales activity logging come into play. Right. And so with our model, as you mentioned, Carolyn, we are looking at this data, we're taking it in, we're transforming. We have a data model, we have a transformation process. We're not looking at this last touch attribution, we're not doing that. We're given a Totally different perspective. And so in that we're saying this is important to know what's happening before the opportunity. It's just coming out of nowhere, guys. It's coming out of nowhere. It's not being impacted by something even. Like a lot of folks create opportunities when a form is submitted immediately. Some of these things are just you can see in the data a lot of things, you just can't even see it all. And so this was something where they knew, the VP RevOps knew that a lot of this information on the sales side in terms of sales is picking things up or sales is generating pipeline existed in another system, totally separate. If you meet gong, marketing has no access to that. Marketing has no idea what's happening. So they might be influencing, they might be accelerating pipeline creation. You have no idea because it's totally disconnected. So just wanted to kind of connect the dots there into why that's specific.
- [25:49]
B
Yeah, I think that's important to mention because a lot of times people will say, like, why don't you just use like the deal source field? Right. That last touch attribution. And what we're saying here is there's so much that happens upstream that matters. And so like we step back even further than that because it's not just like level of effort through activities to create pipeline, but it's also just the goal of any company. Right. Is to increase quality pipeline. Right. And so sure, a last touch field on an opportunity might tell you who generated it, but we don't know how long it took to create the opportunity, how much effort, how many activities over how long. Right. So when you can actually see the sales activity, you can step back even further and say, oh, you know what? Before that opportunity was created, it actually took us nine months of like trying to get somebody to like agree to a meeting. And it took us, and here's the types of activities that were most effective in that and here's how marketing played a role in that. So allows you to walk back to be more systematic. Because you need to know how long it takes you to be able to forecast how to create pipeline. Right. Like we know GONG, for example, or is it Clary that does, you know, some level of pipeline forecasting, but that's just based on pipeline that you create. And revenue that you close eventually has nothing to do with all of the work that you did before that to create the pipeline. Right, right.
- [27:13]
A
And that's what they had shared as well around, hey, GONG is giving us this insight around what they expect us to create, what they based on what we've created historically. Yeah, like, it's just doesn't know really where it's coming from. Doesn't really know how to get more of it. Doesn't really know what is actually not creating. Not gonna show us all the things that are. Our team is really spinning your wheels on. So, yeah, so that was one thing. But we did also know, based on what this company told us, that in this 31% of one revenue that seemingly just comes out of nowhere, a good portion of it probably is, you know, this SDR leader and the work they've put in, and a good portion of it probably is both their BDR and their AE generated activities. But they don't really know what the mix is. And again, what the pipeline quality is. And so they're seeing things go up, but they're really just running on all cylinders here. And so that's where we're saying, yeah, that's, you know, can't really see any of that and track it that 31%. So.
- [28:27]
B
Yeah. And when we workshopped. Yeah, when we workshop with them too, when we talk about, like, it's easy to just say, oh, that's like BDR outbound or, you know, that's like rep prospecting or rep created or whatever. But there's a lot of nuance under that because when we actually, like, peeled back the layers of the onions for them, it turns out what they had, like four or five different ways that a BDR would do outbound. And obviously not all of those things are created equal. Right. So again, that's why having a lot of precision around what you can track is just so important, especially when it, like, generates that much revenue for the business. All right, cool. That was finding number one. So finding number two was around win rate. So when we do these analyses and these sprints, we look back, you know, like a year or two years or whatever makes sense for the business. But for them, they had, like, historically very high win rates, like in the 70s or 80%. Right. And so it was like, almost like unrealistically high. And we can't assume that that's because performance was better. Right. But for them, we had seen their win rate go from like in the 70s down to like just quarter over quarter, just dropping. Right. And so for us, it was like, why, like, why is that happening for you guys? And the takeaway for them was we don't really have. We don't know what our win rate is because it's always been an issue of how things are inconsistently. The process Inconsistency. Right. And so historically for them, right. They would only create opportunities once they knew, okay, this is going to close. Right. So hence the high win rate. And then in between then like the criteria for which they created opportunities changed all the time. And then they onboarded a bunch of people. And so with all that said and done, they were just like, we have to figure out what our real win rate is. Because none of this really tells us what it is. It only tells us that we have a problem.
- [30:15]
A
Yeah, you, you went from a position of having a handful of seasoned in, you know, had been in the role for a number of years, sales reps who were consistently, like you said, kind of creating opportunity when they were ready to close the opportunity and also they would win them. And then you start to bring in more salespeople and then all of a sudden you're now you're looking at win rate declining. Well, great insight for them because what they turned around and said was, okay, this doesn't necessarily mean that it's just there's nuance in there. It blows my mind how win rate is such a high impact metric. And we folks tend to look at it this like zoomed out layer and it's like, whoa, you really.
- [30:57]
B
Or they don't even know their win rate. Like, I'm surprised how many companies just don't even know their win rate either.
- [31:01]
A
Don't know the win rate. It's like you're looking at a, a big melting pot. And so you really want to kind of separate some of these things out. And one clear takeaway, they had said looking at this data was, okay, well this is clearly telling us that we've probably tried to ramp these new reps too soon. So like you said, a mix of, oh, we've just moved the goalpost for opportunity creation, which we would say is good. You want to create the opportunity before you know if it's going to win or not. But there's a fine line there. But you also, they had said again, they know their business best. This is looking like, this is telling us that we're ramping them too. We put them in there too soon and they're not ready. So having that against.
- [31:42]
B
Yeah, we also looked at win rate on hand raisers. Right. Like their inbound motion was. It performs very strong. We'll get to that in a second. But we had seen the win rate on some of those hand raisers in different industries, specifically because we did look at by industry decelerating. And so what they had said was, I think they what? Round robin, maybe the inbounds. And the takeaway from that was like, listen, an inbound lead is usually one that is. Has a greater propensity to close. Therefore we gotta send it to like, not a rep who's ramping. We have to send it to a rep that we know is gonna close them. Right. So that was a good, I think a good takeaway that they got from that too.
- [32:22]
A
Yes. And some great dialogue from the team there as well, which we oftentimes see is that just having this really focused, facilitated discussion, some other discussions around, well, how do we accomplish that sort of goal of making sure that we're treating these different sort of cases as we need to and getting the resources in the right place to help set the customer up for success while also supporting our team and the way that our team is structured. And so I think they got some really great takeaways from that, for sure. But yeah, great example of what we were mentioning earlier. You don't need to have things pinned down. You don't need to have feel like you've got something put together because you need to have reflected back at you some key metrics that matter. You need to have reflected back at you what some benchmarks are for a company you know, of your size in your position and then start from there and move forward.
- [33:20]
B
Right.
- [33:21]
A
So now they know when rate is XYZ and there are these different layers to win rate. Now they are tracking that moving forward versus just being in the dark or being like, oh, we could track XYZ or oh, we got to go fix xyz. So great example of that.
- [33:36]
B
Definitely. Yeah, that was a, a great discussion on that. Okay. Finding number three, probably not surprising, but they're inbound hand raisers. So people who filled out like a Contact Us or Demo form or whatever was the only motion clearly getting more efficient. So great for their marketing team, a lot of their, like outbound or like rep generated opportunities had a lot of like cloudiness around data quality. But we had seen that. What was it? The inbound web form leads resulted in a 3x pipeline increase over the year with win rates sitting around 30 to 40%. So that was. Has been a really consistent motion for them. I think a win rate of 30 to 40% is above the benchmark range or at least within it. And then we could also see how that trend compared across like their five different core industries. Right. Their biggest industry, their win rates hit 52% from inbound hand raisers by Q4. So that's awesome. It's the only motion for them that was simultaneously growing in volume but also in conversion. So that was a, I think assumed, but for them maybe a little bit of a surprise just on how good it was. Right. So yeah, that was cool.
- [34:54]
A
And remind me, that is the industry that's sort of like their bread and butter, but not really where they're focused on growing. Yeah. So really interesting to see everybody's got their heads turned to this other industry, you know, this other initiative around growing that. And then meanwhile you don't even know what's happening with your bread and butter. Right. Is it going up, is it going down? Are folks really paying attention to that? And so the discussion that came out of that was like, well, we gotta make sure that we're, we are paying attention to this. You don't just wanna leave it sitting there and not really know what's happening with it. So yeah, that was great.
- [35:29]
B
And yeah, the quote from the cmo, I wrote this down because he said inbound is the most efficient form of pipeline because there are implicit buyer intent. Great. We know that the data confirming that in this specific industry is exactly what we needed to see. So I think a lot of times, right, like CMOs and leaders have a gut feeling around what's working, but a gut feeling doesn't hold up in a boardroom. Right. Like anecdotes just don't hold up in a boardroom. So a lot of times just having that validation in data validated by like a third party is sometimes the most important thing that a CMO can have. Right?
- [36:05]
A
Yeah, absolutely. That was very cool to see.
- [36:08]
B
Yeah. All right, two more findings. So finding number four, we did some investigation into like paid search roi and for them I think paid search showed up and did more work than I think a lot of people really realized. But also like it's a double edged sword with paid search. Right. It was doing more work than people realized, tied to more opportunities than people realize, but also like more broken than anybody realized. Right. And so what we had seen for them when we did basically like our attribution type of analysis was that paid search was the first touch point for 76% of pipeline opportunities and 69% of closed one deals. So for them it was, you know, by far the most important pre deal marketing channel in the business, despite the fact that they could never see that on their own. But at the same time several of their like highest volume paid campaigns had like, I think the stat was like 96% of touch points or web visits from those campaigns weren't tied to anything. So like that's pretty significant, like hundreds of thousands of signals and form submissions that that stuff wasn't even making it into CRM. It was just living in their marketing automation platform. Right.
- [37:25]
A
To clarify, when you say the highest volume campaigns had no connection to close revenue and pipeline, what you're saying is it's not, that's not necessarily matter of fact, you're saying that in the data, the data wasn't making its way into the right place to even be able to tell that story. Yes or no?
- [37:43]
B
Well, it's sort of half and half. What we're saying is they were pouring their budget into a bunch of paid search campaigns that were generating volume in the way of like web traffic or like a touchpoint or even form submissions. But what we're saying is that almost all of that had no connection to pipeline or revenue signaling. And for some of those they were using like you know, optimizing from Google performance max, which we always say is kind of, you know, like risky. Right. So the reality for them was they're spending money on paid search campaigns that weren't correlating to business impact for one. But then again there's also this notion of well, what if an opportunity contact doesn't have a record in CRM? Well then their signal is going to be anonymous, therefore we can't see it. So it's twofold. Right. It could be an underperformance for like paid search campaign issue. Could also be like a data syncing issue, a combination of both.
- [38:40]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. There's so much that we do, I know with our model to stitch data together across the CRM and the map and other places. But that's one example of if something is relevant to the opportunity or relevant to the path to the opportunity and it's not in the place where your opportunities are kept, you are in a bad position there with understanding that. So yeah, that's amazing. I didn't realize all of that nuance. So what do they do with that information, Carolyn? Like what's the next step as a.
- [39:09]
B
Yeah, well we gave, gave them a paid search basically like report basically and showed like we could see all their campaigns. We showed them which ones were high performing, had a high connection or correlation to pipeline and revenue. Which ones sort of were like probably need attention. Go take a look at these. Potentially you could optimize them to make them better. And then there was a whole bunch of them that they were running where we said guys, you should go look at these campaigns because we're really not seeing anything in the way of like ROI from them. So for them they were like, this is great. We've never had the ability to do this because they don't have any attribution whatsoever. Right. And so their marketing manager said it's the proof point we always needed that what you spend on digital actually closes deals. Now we can see exactly where it's working and where it isn't. So that was really profound. I think they took a lot of value from that. They got an agency supporting them on paid search. And so I think a lot of agencies also lack the ability to do this kind of reporting too. Right. Because they only get access to what's typically in the map. Right. And so their reporting stopped at basically like lead created essentially.
- [40:14]
A
Yeah. Just to clarify, they do have attribution, but they're using the last touch or they're using the first touch. And so they didn't have anything like this layer of what we do at the sort of end. The cherry on top with Passetto is this journey analysis. Right. Could be considered akin to a multi touch model. We think of it as a journey.
- [40:34]
B
Yeah, yeah. So the irony of that too is you can see paid search showing up for them mostly on like first touch. Right. So if they're using a last touch model, it's. It's no wonder that they wouldn't be able to see that showing up in their reporting.
- [40:46]
A
Right. It's not an either or. Yeah, yeah.
- [40:50]
B
And then finally, I think this was probably one of the things that we spent the most time workshopping with them was that their biggest marketing signal or like, I don't even want to call it a channel, the biggest sort of like way marketing was supporting enablement was not trackable. Right. And so when we apply our framework to the companies we work with, we look at the full buyer life cycle. Right. Basically like from first touch through closed one and we look at it in three distinct stages, basically engagement. So like pre pass to SDR during the prospecting stage when somebody is being worked by an SDR and then through an active sales cycle at the closing stage. And so we like to look at marketing influence or impact across each of those stages. But when we looked at the closing stage, AKA when an opportunities in pipeline, the first thing we saw was that only 6% of their active deals had basically like an a marketing signal that we could see a marketing touch point that was being tracked, which initially looked really alarming to us. We were like, why do only 6% of opportunities have a trackable touch? Point when we're seeing all of the website data coming through and everything from HubSpot, like that was a little bit eye opening for us. So we spent a lot of time talking about that. Do you want to explain, Amber?
- [42:08]
A
Yeah. So yeah, everyone has different tech stacks, so this is something that definitely was not known in terms of there's this tool out there that the sales team uses to sort of sit send assets in the deal cycle, send different things just really targeted to the specific account and the specific opportunity. However, the team is also using that to really house a lot of marketing assets as you mentioned. And so that applies to not just opportunities, that applies to directing someone in a nurture campaign that may be a prospect maybe like way upstream of opportunity creation to certain assets. And so it's amazing that the team is, they love using this tool. However, talk about siloed data, like completely siloed out of their other tech stack that's really connected to revenue and connected to marketing and connected to sales outcomes. And so it's something where they had a little bit of visibility into it because this tool allows them to see In Salesforce, there's like the screen can't remember what it's called, but you can see what's happening. Like you can see the threat of activity. But the catch there is that that data is not actually in a way that you can actually analyze it on your own without having to. Yeah, basically go get it separately. And so that was a surprise to learn that they actually were sending marketing assets through this other thing kind of came out of the blue, but really just a great example of sitting down and thinking about what is your go to market tech stack. Like where are all the different places that your data lives? Maybe it's simple, maybe it's not. Maybe there's something that you take for granted every day that actually could be a huge wealth of information for you that you're just like sitting on no sort of insight around what's happening. Actually that's not fair. The company, the tool does provide insights, but again they're siloed and siloed.
- [44:15]
B
Yeah.
- [44:15]
A
Not connected to revenue. And so yeah, not connected to anything upstream or downstream of that view on that.
- [44:23]
B
Like, yeah, it's so important for marketing to get right though. I, I always say this, like marketing is at such a disadvantage already because of the inherent complexity with how to track what they're doing and tie it to revenue. And so if you're not tracking something, the team that that's impacting the most is your own team. So it's like it's really worth the time and attention to detail to get it right. Because as they had seen. Wow. Like this really makes us seem like we're not really doing anything in, in a sales cycle when marketing obviously is. So it's like if you're doing something, where does that something live? And we gotta get it in a way that allows us to see the ROI of that. Otherwise this is the data point and it's going to be massively misleading and underrepresenting your impact. The other thing too that comes up all of the time is the issue of like a bi directional sync between CRM and HubSpot or whatever your map is. And the fact that if contacts are associated to an account with an opportunity, are those contacts also syncing back to where you're executing your marketing? Because if they're not, there is no lead record for them and therefore whatever they do is going to be anonymous and therefore there is no way to append or know what they're doing and tie it back to the opportunity. So it's very possible for them that a lot of their opportunity contacts just didn't have a record in HubSpot and therefore their signals or their touch points, maybe there were other signals happening, but we don't know because they don't have a lead record.
- [46:01]
A
Yeah, a lot of visibility gaps there in terms of marketing's role in pipeline acceleration. However, also knowing that this team loves that tool, but also knowing that they have a clear initiative and a clear stance as a company, that they want to be able to own their data, they want to be able to have robust systems and architecture that can help them weather the storms and help them be self sufficient for the long term and also to leverage AI and to really drive that train. So seeing something like this, where you have all this data and insight, but it's not in a place that you can leverage it, now that we know that app seto, great, we go grab it API, no problem. But in terms of where they really want to be, it's something that I think was very eye opening for them. And so we ended up advising them on how to get that data into their CRM or into their data warehouse in a way that they can leverage it.
- [47:00]
B
Yeah, great. That was awesome. A lot of really big takeaways for them packed into just a few days. So that was fun. Yeah. So I think as like a takeaway, my interpretation of all of this was they came into the sprint knowing something was off, knowing that they obviously have priorities and Things they need to fix they left, in my opinion, and probably in theirs too, with a really clear diagnosis of what's happening and what to go fix. And one thing that I think that they really appreciated, Amber, was the marketing measurement maturity model that we presented them. Right. It's like a graduated step to maturing. Here's where you are right now. Here's where you can be in like two, three months. Here's where you can be in the second half of the year and here's like the ultimate place that you want to graduate to. And it's like it has to happen in like incremental chunks. It's not going to happen all at once. But I think that they really appreciated a roadmap for how to get there that they didn't have before. Right.
- [47:59]
A
Yeah. And it really speaks to, you know, I credit the CMO too because just seems like such a great leader and able to bring and really rally the whole team. I mean, all of their go to market teams are just stellar and exceptional and it's amazing to see teams working together at such a high level and helping troubleshoot and moving forward together. And I think with the CMO specifically is like they are so focused on what's the best thing for the business and being in a position where it is sort of an insurance policy and you actually are in a position where you can think and plan a few months ahead. Right. And really think about where do we want to be a year from now and what does this business look like five years from now and taking that sort of role in leading the team forward and not fighting fires and not saying, oh my gosh, where's my lifeboat? Not everyone is in that position just by nature of the company or by nature of the market, what have you. But to see someone who is in that sort of position really owning it and saying, I'm not going to just sit on my laurels. I know that my team is doing xyz. We're an excellent team. Things are growing, but I'm not going to settle for that. I have clear standards of where I want us to be by the end of the year. I'd like XYZ to be possible and then that opens up where we could be in two years. And so I just thought that was amazing to see that. And I'm always latching on to that because that's the kind of, you know, it's the kind of executive that I strive to be as well, to be forward thinking.
- [49:32]
B
I think a lot of CMOs do and like Just on that point, the one thing that he had said is, like, guys, I'm watching the way, like, this market is evolving. There's a lot of what he had said, like, consolidation happening, which means right now our sales cycle is this. We have one to two buyers on the decision committee with the market consolidation. It's not going to be like that. At some point, we're not just going to be able to, like, slam the phones and work hard to get a deal. We're going to have to be more ABM focused. And that's not tomorrow. It's maybe not even this year. But I have to equip our organization and just the way that we're tracking everything so that when that happens, we're, like, ahead of the game. Right. I think that is what I would consider a really strategic marketing leader. I don't think a lot of CMOs have the privilege to be in that situation because they're either called in to, like, help fix a crisis. Right. They're coming in to replace other CMOs that have not, you know, met the standards of what the organization needed. Obviously, the macroeconomic conditions in the world right now are not favorable either to marketing. Right. A lot of companies aren't growing. So, yeah, I feel like this situation is sort of like a little bit of an exception to the rule, you know?
- [50:52]
A
Yeah. And shout out to them again because they hired a VP of RevOps, so not going to go wrong there. Totally.
- [51:01]
B
Well, that was fun. We'll definitely make sure to do more of these. I hope everybody here enjoyed that. We love talking about it. We love seeing the outcomes that people get when they. When they put in the hard work. So it's always really inspiring and encouraging for us, and hopefully you guys, too, because we know everybody out there wants to mature how they measure marketing, and that's what we're here to do.
- [51:25]
A
Yeah, that's what we're here to do. So if you got value out of this, drop a comment, send us a message on LinkedIn, reach out to us and let us know what resonated, and we'll make sure to make more content to help inform you along your journey. Thanks for listening, everyone.
- [51:40]
B
Thanks, guys. Bye, Sam.