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- [00:01]
A
Hey guys, welcome back. Today we are back with a live audience and we've decided to record with a live audience every Wednesday at 1pm Eastern. So if you want to be a part of that, then head to passetto.com forward/events where you can register and join us and partake in some good dialogue and even just some Q and A. But today we're getting into a few technical conversations. We're gonna be talking about how we're seeing folks use Stage zero for opportunities which we really don't like. So we'll talk about why some of the mechanics for the lead object in Salesforce and just why that doesn't work. Now with non linear buying, marketing automation, platform syncing rules to CRM and how we are seeing a lot of companies get that wrong, which is really preventing their ability to understand marketing impact through the sales cycle. So that's a really good topic. And then we've got some good live audience engagement too. Some stories around, you know, the joys of consolidating data in Excel. So you'll definitely relate to that. And then one final heads up. On April 22, we are doing a webinar with John Miller. He's the original co founder of Marketo. We're going to be talking about the rise and the fall of the mql. It's a big hot topic for us marketers right now. So make sure that you're registered for that. All right, let's get into the show.
- [01:20]
B
You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passetto.
- [01:29]
C
Hi, you're here.
- [01:31]
A
Oh my gosh. I'm. I forgot about like the technical details of how to start this thing because I remembered that anytime we do this, we do it as a meeting and not a webinar. So it's like a little bit different than our normal thing.
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C
Yeah, well, sorry about that.
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B
All good.
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A
You're here now. What's up?
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B
Looking fresh.
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A
I like that you got yourself a little soundproof pod there. That's cool. It'll work. Hopefully other people don't have the same like, issue that you did. I'm reminded that you actually have to like add it to your calendar manually. Right. Hey, Chris.
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C
How's it going?
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A
Good. You got here somewhere. Did you have any issues with the registration process? Not really, no.
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D
It was fine.
- [02:18]
A
Okay, cool. Well, I'm glad you're here. And now hopefully we get some people trickling in. So we decided to do this on a live show again, mostly to keep Amber and I, well, accountable to showing up consistently because sometimes I Feel like when we schedule it just for her and I, it's like really easy to push it out or just say, oh, you know, can we do this in like an hour or can we do this again tomorrow? And then sometimes you lose, like, the things that you really want to talk about. And Amber and I send like a bunch of slack voice messages back and forth every day on stuff that people will probably benefit from hearing about. So that's sort of our idea for doing it live again.
- [03:01]
C
Yeah, I'm excited, super excited.
- [03:04]
A
And I don't know if anybody else is feeling this, but. So I like missed the wave of LinkedIn when people were just getting like crazy engagement on their posts, like a thousand likes and comments and things like that. I sort of like hopped onto the LinkedIn bandwagon a little bit late when the algorithm really started to change this year. And I'm finding more than ever that it is a very saturated platform and I'm feeling a little bit drained and sort of exhausted by reading like this AI slop everywhere. And I'm just like, where are people going to go to really, like, get value? And I'm like, oh, we have the community, it's right in front of us. Like, let's just leverage that a little bit better and more consistently. Yeah, for sure.
- [03:53]
C
I feel like I'm not well, so I'm only on LinkedIn. I'm not, I'm not on any other platforms because they just give me anxiety. But LinkedIn can give me anxiety sometimes too. But it's all about obviously how you use it. And I've totally am like, yeah, I have to start unfollowing people on LinkedIn and like removing content to more curate because at this point it's just so all over the place. And so I do still believe that can be very pointed. So beneficial. Love LinkedIn, but yeah, definitely so much. Not good content, for sure.
- [04:34]
A
Yeah. Chris Walker uses this term of like, people are very extractive in nature, which means consider the motives people have when they go post things. Right. It's all about extracting something from somebody else. Like extracting people to like validate your posts through likes or like, do something, like go download something. Right. And I just see that a lot. Right. But anywho, what's going on this week? You said it's spring break for you.
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C
It's spring break for us in Georgia.
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A
Yeah.
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C
So I'm just staying home but having some fun time with my toddler this week.
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A
Yeah.
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C
You know, in between.
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A
That's amazing.
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C
Meeting.
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A
Is it spring break? Everywhere or just for his daycare.
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C
So they follow the public school calendar. So it is.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And I don't really know how, like the wave of spring breaks that happen across the country, but I'm partially informed that they are planned in waves so that certain spring break, like coastal communities, et cetera, don't get overloaded at any one time. So they like, stagger it. So I'm not sure where Georgia is in the whole stagger things, but shout out to you if you're taking spring break or vacation. And I'm noticing that folks are gearing up for vacations.
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A
Like summer vacations.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And also, I guess spring vacations.
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A
And us too, because we're both going on vacation. So.
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C
Cool.
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A
Yeah. Tell the audience where you're going.
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C
I just renewed my passport, so I got my passport when I was like 15. Shout out to my mom for doing that. And I went out of the country once and then I haven't been out of the country, so I'm going again with my spouse and we're gonna go to Costa Rica. So.
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A
Amazing. And did you guys pick. Last time we talked about this, you were like, not sure where yet we're gonna land. I know Chris gave you like a couple recommendations, most of which were like, off the beaten path.
- [06:27]
C
Yes. You can DM me on LinkedIn if you want to know more, but it's going to be off the beaten path.
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A
Nice.
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C
With Costa Rica, I think their roads are not super developed, so you kind of got to have like a 4x4 vehicle. So that'll be really fun. It's going to be an amazing adventure and first time that both of us will be away from my son. So.
- [06:44]
A
Yeah, I'm sure it'll be like. Well, hopefully it's not like a. It's always hard leaving little kids, especially when you do it the first time. But I think you guys are going to have an amazing time. So I'm so pumped for you to be able to do that.
- [06:56]
C
Yes. And where are you going?
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A
Well, I have like two, as you know, back to back trips. So Matt, my husband, is in sales and every year, like wins the President's club trip and I tag along because spouses are invited. So this year we are going to Sedona in Arizona and I'm reminded too that there's some super cool hiking trails there. I'm not a hiker by any stretch of the imagination, but I definitely want to, like, try maybe like two to three trails while we're there. Something like super hard get up really early in the morning before the sun rises kind of thing. So if anybody here has any cool like Sedona camelback mountain trails or anything you want to share, hit me up on LinkedIn. I'd love for your recommendations on where we should go. And then I come home and two days later I'm going to Turks and Caicos with two of my best friends. So that'll be so much fun. I'm very much looking forward to it.
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C
Oh my God, that sounds amazing.
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A
Yeah. But again, it's like I have two little ones and it's hard to leave them. That's always a hard transition for me. So what's been going on this week? You had mentioned a couple topics that you wanted to get into today. Where do you want to start?
- [08:09]
C
Yeah, I have some revenue operations focused topics and rants that have been on the top of my mind based on conversations, you know, we've been having and just what we see. So nothing new there in terms of the overall theme, but some topics that really just when it comes to marketing, measurement and visibility that we just consistently see these things that are true in your tech stack that are making it nearly impossible to see how marketing is influencing and having an impact on pipeline and revenue. So watch out for these things.
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A
Let's talk about it. Let's go through them.
- [08:51]
C
Okay, so I have a visual that I can share if we want to. Yeah, let's do it. Share it. Okay, so for those of you who are watching and not just listening, you can. But I will try to describe what we're seeing. So this is a visual that we use in our 14 day sprints and we use it to explain what the pipeline black box is. So over here on the left you have a lead. It's not necessarily a lead. Right. So like that word is so loaded. The word lead just means so many different things to different people. If you're in HubSpot, it means one thing. If you're in Salesforce, it means another thing. If you're in marketing, it means one thing. If you're in sales, it means another thing. This is just saying, hey, a record was created. So like start of you know this person. Like you've identified someone, it's a person. That's what that means. And then we have over here on the right, the opportunity creation. So we talk about the pipeline black box a lot, being the black box of what happens up to opportunity creation. What we see is on the sort of earlier stage we see like a lead source being captured or even an original source. And I was Working with a customer this week and going through some of their data with them and realize, wow, this property that is called in HubSpot, I think out of the box in HubSpot, it's called Original source. It's supposed to be set one time, just to be clear, like it's supposed to be the original source, but this company specifically has been overriding it. Like what other things?
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A
Oh, manually. Like they're manually going to change it.
- [10:28]
C
Well, they override it via automation when certain things happen. But yeah, exactly. You, like go and change it, which I didn't even know was possible for that property because, yeah, HubSpot's pretty good about saying, like, actually you cannot change certain things. But anyway, you got this potentially like this lead source or this original source thing over here at the far end of this spectrum on the left. And then you have all this other stuff that happens in the black box, like lead stage or lifecycle stage, and maybe that's also being changed or overwritten. We see the recycle thing happen a lot. I'm not going to go too much into what the pipeline black box is because we have so much resources on that in the podcast already and from workshops. And if you want to know more about that, we can send you some links. Just message us. But then over here you have deal source, right? And so that is again, unique to each company. But it's either like, oh, this was the last interaction, or maybe it's the four funnel model. Like it's sales sourced or partner sourced or marketing sourced, whatever that is. But there's just a bunch of stuff that happens in between that we don't track. But what I want to talk about today is pipeline Stage zero and why I hate it. So to clarify, stage zero is sometimes you call it that, sometimes you don't. But it's essentially when an opportunity record's
- [11:58]
A
created before it's really an opportunity.
- [12:02]
C
Yes, before, whatever. It's just like you don't consider it a real opportunity, but we're putting it in the opportunity because we don't have anywhere else to put it or because it's kind of almost an opportunity. But some things need to happen before we consider it an opportunity. So you end up doing these gymnastics in your reporting that organizations just get used to doing. It's like the status quo, like, oh, how do we report on pipeline creation? We report on it from date entered stage two pipeline, or how do we report on win rate? Well, you can't report on win rate when you do something like that. So you're more looking at like a qualification rate for from stage two to one, which isn't really a win rate. So what ends up happening though is that because you just need somewhere to put stuff, so you put it in the opportunity stage zero and then what you end up missing is what's happening out of that stage zero. Like is it an approval process? What's happening there? You miss these like operational data points around what's making it to like a stage two or a quote unquote real opportunity and what's not. But what I'm really getting at here is beyond like the sales visibility issues that creates. It creates a huge problem for marketing because marketing is so often looking at what's happening up until the deal is created or what's happening when the opportunity cycle is live and, and when you have either a stage zero that's actually more of like not really handed off to sales, but it's like sitting in there. It makes it really hard to look at all of the data and all of the engagement layers and say this is what's happening before we have a real opportunity. Because it's all like jumbled together and
- [13:56]
A
then like SQL or SAL at that point. Right. It's usually like a sales accepted lead by then. Right.
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C
So I have over here lifecycle stages. Sometimes we see an MQL means oh, marketing surface that a sales accepted leads means sales is working it and the opportunity hasn't been created. Sometimes SQL means sales is working it and the opportunity has been created. But these things are just really up to interpretation how the company has done it. There's really no one way to do it, so it doesn't really mean anything.
- [14:26]
A
Got it.
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C
Yeah. I think the only one is that MQL typically does not mean the opportunity has been created. But we've also seen that recently where all form Phils, for example, just go straight to MQL regardless of. And then they go straight to an opportunity as well.
- [14:42]
A
Right, so we've got a question there. Do we want to pause and let
- [14:44]
C
Erin ask her question?
- [14:45]
A
Go ahead, Erin.
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D
It's not necessarily a question. I think this is a great point and I wanted to add, I see a lot of challenges with this, especially with inbound. Like I worked for a company recently where what I'm seeing essentially is I feel too much of this is based around the sales user experience and we're really losing sight of the customer journey and like the potential customer journey. Because for example, there was a big emphasis on not creating duplicate opportunities when inbound hand raisers would come in. But then the challenge with that was well, they're interested in another product line or an upsell opportunity and there was no other mechanism for notifying the sales team. So basically there was no follow up happening, which is a terrible experience for somebody that's in market for your services to just not have anyone responding. And when I would try to raise this, they're always looking for well, what's the volume? Like how much is this really happening? But if you can't even really track it then you can't prove it. And so it's never getting the prioritization that it needs. So I'm just very in general frustrated by the current state of operations and how we continue to focus on the sales user experience.
- [16:25]
B
Awesome.
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A
Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, in the weeds. Love it. What's your role Aaron?
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C
Or what's your expertise? Like are you in marketing?
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D
So I work in marketing operations. I have about 15 years of experience in digital marketing. I spent the first half of my career in B2C and I've been in B2B now since about 2019.
- [16:49]
C
Oh wow. Different perspective, huh? Yeah, I love that you called that out as just focusing on the sales experience. And no dis at sales. It really comes down to operationally we're just using our sort of tech to kind of fill in these gaps in terms of oh well at least now this way they'll get a notification or whatever when there are better ways to do that, to be clear. But we're not using our systems in a way that help us see what the market is doing, what the market is expecting or experiencing and even giving like you said, marketing the data that they need. Right.
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A
So I just put pre opportunity over
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C
here because that's really like you've got sales and marketing, this is like the all bound approach, right? You got like sales and marketing working to create opportunities.
- [17:46]
D
I would use this example a lot when I would try to talk with some of my managers on the Revops team. But earlier on in my career we just did not allow salespeople to have this much decision making power over the CRM and over the data. And I'm seeing just a lot of things that early in my career I never would have seen. Like for example, at the enterprise level some of these companies do a ton of ingestion from events, like collecting data at events. And I came to find out they were trying to do yet another integration at a company that was already having trouble actually getting all of the data from these events into their CRM because the Reps didn't want to collect it, so they just wanted to basically find some app that would automatically find the emails for them and then pass through what would have been two or three APIs into the CRM. It's crazy to me.
- [18:56]
C
Yeah, I know. And then you have issues of, like, well, sales shouldn't be having to do all these things manually and, like, multiple things can be true at the same time. But, yeah, well, thanks for sharing that. Anything else on this topic before I go into the other rant I was gonna add.
- [19:17]
A
So one thing that I've been thinking a lot about, right? There's obviously a lot of people like Erin and everybody that we talk to that's sort of, like, frustrated around how we track things in the system. And I'm on my own little diatribe over here, but last week I was really reflecting on this, really just, like, going deep, because we talk a lot about Last Touch attribution and just how MQLs are a bad metric. And the thing that really got me thinking was I actually. I don't listen to Chris's podcast a lot anymore, but I do, like, from time to time. And I was listening to one episode, it was an interview with him and somebody else. Like, somebody was interviewing him, and they were saying, like, what has basically, like, made you successful at Refined labs and in everything that you're doing? Right? And he's like, you know, I don't just focus on the problem. I question why it is that way.
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C
Right?
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A
Like, why is it that way? Right. The problem with MQLs, as we know, is, well, that was institutionalized by companies like, whether it was HubSpot or Marketo, like, 20 years ago or whatever. Right? Well, why? Why did that work for them? Well, it commercially made sense because of their model for how they make money is based on MQL volume or lead volume or whatever. Right. And. And so he had basically said, like, I really think about why things are the way that they are. And I'm reminded and got me thinking, like, well, the way Salesforce is architected, or any CRM for that matter, it's not just a problem of MQL as being a bad metric for how buyers buy today. It's really the mechanics of how the system was built, however many years ago.
- [20:49]
C
Right?
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A
And it's like, well, the reality is that leads or people that we work between marketing and sales, they go in and out of what we would call a lead life cycle multiple times, sometimes over multiple months. Sometimes, you know, we pass them to sales as an MQL we go work them, it goes nowhere. They disqualify, right? But the typical like way that we would track a lead or a prospect or just like a person in CRM is on one record. One record doesn't reflect true reality of like what happens to somebody. And so the consequence of that when you're tracking who you're working and why they got to pass to sales, right, if you have one record, what happens to all of the historical stuff that mattered? It gets overwritten, doesn't get tracked properly. But it really comes down to how that lead record is built in CRM to begin with. And it's just like, well, if that's such an obvious problem, why haven't companies like Salesforce for example fixed it? Right? And it comes down to, well, they obviously recognize that this is probably a thing and this is a reality for marketers. But if you think about CRM, the thing that people buy, adoption rates are already questionable. There's been data on this for years that CRM adoption is inherently fucking complicated. So what is Salesforce not going to do? They're not going to go make their system more complicated for user adoption. And so that is really like what got me thinking. It's not just MQLs are a bad metric. It's not just tracking stage zero is not a smart move. It's not just all of these things. It's why do they even exist in the first place. And what we're doing is trying to continue to solve problems in what we know to be like a note well architected system to begin with. And that's not going to solve the problem. But I'm done my rant.
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C
Yeah. Not even set up for the marketing team or the growth team because CRM is historically a sales and success tool. Sales, acquisition, expansion and that's how it's been treated. And so we've tried to bolt on and we've tried to integrate and all these things but yeah, Salesforce. But that's why I think that, I think that's why I have a hard time converting leads to contacts in Salesforce. So what's going to change? So also thinking about the most elite organizations being the top 3%, top 1% of companies using something like a Salesforce. Those are the companies that we work with, those are the companies that want to have better visibility. But there's such a huge volume out there of like, hey, it's just we don't care or you know what I mean, like just do CMO turnover every 18 months. Like not trying to fix the root problem. And so it's not really a priority. But growth oriented companies that we talk to every day, they're like, yeah, no, we want to fix this. But I think that's a big reason that we also have shifted over the last year at Passetto to say, we know changing anything in your CRM is a huge deal. So guess what? We're just gonna help you see this stuff without having to do any of that. And some companies are good to go with that, and some companies are like, okay, great. But we still want to make some changes because we recognize the benefit internally in the long term of being able to have that autonomy and not rely on a third party like Passetto or anyone else.
- [24:24]
A
Or even like depending on where Rev Ops sits. Right. We know RevOps has like a laundry list of priorities. Right. And so oftentimes, you know, if you've got somebody over in marketing saying, hey, the way we track the lead handoff to sales and how we work leads before they become opportunities, like, we got to do it a better way. Well, it's sort of like good luck potentially to getting your Rev Ops person to make that a priority. Right. It's a whole, whole other can of worms. Okay, so what is like the other RevOps topic, Amber, that you've been noodling on?
- [24:57]
C
Yeah, so I'll share my screen again here and talk through it for those that are just listening.
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A
So my. I love this. I love this topic.
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C
So often the integration settings are like integrations between tools. And this particular example is talking about a marketing automation platform and a CRM and how those are integrated. So we'll use an example of HubSpot being your marketing automation platform and Salesforce being your CRM. But this applies to any environment where you have marketing data, marketing activities happening and relying on or pushing data to a place where sales stuff is happening. So there is a huge issue with the sync settings between HubSpot and Salesforce, for example, that we see all the time. And it comes down to here's what people typically do. So I'll tell you the typical setup and then I'll tell you what the problem is with this. So over here on the left again, you have the map, which is HubSpot. On the right you have the CRM, which is Salesforce. What people typically do is they say great marketing is going to be generating all these leads. That's what the map is for. So let's take them, you know, and when they're qualified to talk to sales, let's push them over to the CRM. And then great. And then meanwhile we have records being created in the CRM, maybe from partners or maybe from sales outbound, maybe from Intent data, maybe from six Sense, maybe from Clay, maybe from Zoom Info. A lot of different places they could come and they're just going directly into the CRM. And then they say, hmm, so we've set up this sync this way so that all of the contacts from our map that we either all of them or just certain ones, maybe only certain ones that meet a certain criteria go over to the CRM. But no, no, no, we're not going to sync over all of the stuff in our CRM because Salesforce is 15 years old. It's got a bunch of junk data in there. It's got a bunch of old contacts in there. Maybe it just feels like it's a lot. But our HubSpot instance is kind of new and shiny and we just want to kind of keep it clean. And so we're actually just not going to push over anything CRM into our map. And then they're like, yep, sounds good. Because the whole point of the map is to I guess generate top of funnel leads and MQLs. Right? I'm being sarcastic. So that's the status quo. Or if you're lucky, there is a selective sync that's bi directional between Salesforce and HubSpot. Pushing some data into HubSpot maybe for a customer or maybe it's pushing like sales activities to HubSpot to like update activity data. But very rarely do we see what we recommend at Pesetta, which is just take the gates off. Take the gates off. Guys. You need to have a one to one sync between your map and your CRM. That does not mean that every single contact in Salesforce needs to be labeled as a marketing contact in HubSpot. To use the HubSpot example, you don't need to pay to like label all these people as marketing contacts. You should not do that. Especially if they haven't opted in. Don't do that. But it makes much more sense to be controlled around your marketing contacts and being able to have all of these records in your marketing automation platform so that you can see when they engage. You can understand what's influencing an open opportunity or a contact in CRM that's on the buying committee that gets added in CRM via gong. For example, you want to know that they are doing stuff on your website and you will not see that because you will not have a tracking code for them if they're Not a record in your marketing automation platform. And so again, just cutting off marketing measurement at the knees there by not showing them anything after you pass a lead over to sales.
- [28:50]
A
Do we want to show a live example of this? I'm going to share my screen, guys.
- [28:54]
C
Is it this one?
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D
I completely agree with this, by the way. This was actually a big reason why I left my most recent role because people don't think about how this impacts like de duplication, especially when the people in charge of deduplicating are only really coming from the salesforce world. So if you have records that are in your map but not in your CRM and vice versa, you can end up losing a lot of data. And that's. I've seen that multiple times.
- [29:27]
A
Yeah, definitely. Okay guys, so what we're seeing here, this for anybody who might be interested, is a behind the scenes of the Passetto dashboard that our customers use. Okay? So this is obviously confidential. I'm not going to show you who this is. This is for context, a very high acv, low volume business. Okay? But this marketing leader is very like super long sales cycles, right? And this marketing leader knows that she needs to focus on helping the company with pipeline acceleration. Right? And so what we're seeing here is what we call like our signal analytics, A K A, it's our version of multi touch attribution essentially. But what we're looking at here are basically the percentage of pipeline in the last, you know, five quarters that had a trackable marketing touch point in an active sales cycle. So you can see this chart over here, right? This is reflecting and like an aggregate view of the last, you know, four and a half quarters, four and a bit quarters. And what we're saying here is of all of these opportunities that were created, 14 and a half percent out of everything had what we can see has a signal. But what we're saying here is, hey guys, 85% of your pipeline, we can't see them doing anything, not even a website visit. They're using HubSpot, which means that to me is like not acceptable from a marketing leader. Hey, you guys are telling me that of all of the opportunities that are in the pipeline that our sales team is working by count. You're telling me that only 6 of 38 in Q1 had a trackable signal? That doesn't make any sense. I just launched a campaign last quarter, I just launched a webinar. These people showed up. What's happening? Right? And so marketing already has a hard enough time in the boardroom defending roi on the things that they are doing. And so when you see this, if you were to pass this to a leadership team, they would be like, that is unacceptable. Marketing's impact is only 14% across the last four and a half quarters. That doesn't make any sense. Whatever. Right? And this is exactly the problem with the map thing is when you dig deeper. And when we dug deeper, right away we saw that like the vast majority of contacts in their CRM don't have a corresponding lead record in the place that marketing is executing what ends up happening. All of the signals or things that marketing is spending money on are anonymous. So we have no way to say, oh, that signal or that website visit or that webinar attendee or whatever correlates to opportunities because there is no bidirectional sync, AKA anonymous. We have no way to connect activities to outcomes. That's one of the biggest reasons why marketing leaders can't connect activities to outcomes. And then second to that, not only are those things anonymous, but those people are not contacts in CRM, which means we're probably not even marketing to them. So it's like a combination of anonymous activity, but also the fact that the people that you really need to be nurturing and speaking to and meeting them where they're at in the sales cycle aren't in the database where you're executing that. So it's a real problem. And I would say for companies with an enterprise, like selling an enterprise, that's really freaking important to get, right? Like arguably more so than like a low acv, high volume type of business. But in any event, super important.
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B
Carolyn, can I add something?
- [32:49]
A
Yeah, of course.
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B
How are you guys? I turned on my camera, which I don't always do because I have on like my sweaty clothes.
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C
But that's okay.
- [32:56]
A
I got my sweaty clothes too since
- [32:57]
B
it's a small group and I appreciate guys putting the live thing on again. So we had this issue where, you know, it goes into salesforce and they work it and months go by and then they close it because no response goes quiet. And because there was no bidirectional that activity, we never get it back. We call them orphan MQLs because they were an MQL, a real like qualified, you know, met some good criteria, went over to sales and because we couldn't capture that information and all the stuff they did, we couldn't go back and market to them. And this happens all the time. And I know you guys have tried to solve it with customized objects and various things, not just this, but UTM Codes and everything. But it is a level of insanity that I can't even tell you guys. And then another thing that happens is this measurement thing is I worked at a company where revapps, looked at those measurements and said these activities are not driving any revenue, even though it was. And they went up the chain CFO and bypassed marketing, bypassed CMO and got all the budget pulled for every one of those things with that very bad data and it was gone and it was just huge amounts of money. Plus, imagine you have vendors that are doing a multi stage set of webinar, a multi touch activity. You know, you're gonna do an email, then you do the webinar, then you do the follow up, then you do the, you know, maybe the gifting. And, and so what's crazy to me is that there's still these silos that are so extreme. Even though I had fantastic, very collaborative relationships with sales and sales leaders, we were like, people said, oh, this is the best alignment we've ever seen. It doesn't matter because we're aligned, but the plumbing is against us and there's no getting around that, that you just can't fix it even if you're doing some of the right things. And you know, the average sales leader, you know, just doesn't want to even discuss operational data fields. Yeah, they're just like, you know, so I don't know what the answer is, but I just had to throw that in is, you know, it's still this messy middle. And if you guys ever were around in the supply chain days when SAP came in, there was black belt six Sigmas who mapped process flows. And we did logistics and raw materials and ordering and pricing and storage. And we made progress, progress in pieces of it. And it was all this fantastic technology that allowed us to put it in one thing. And there's one really smart marketing ops BP that I know from long ago, long ago, he said if it was up to him, he'd use mailchimp and salesforce and nothing else and only allow Salesforce to be the system of record. And I was like, what are you talking about? He goes, you'll never solve this problem if you don't like strip it down to almost nothing and stop trying to put these horse and buggy things together. I don't know that I advocate for that, but he was very data centric, very capable. So this goes to illustrate that these problems are really challenging to solve. And it's like we need that SAP process flow, mapping that data flow, mapping that systems flow. We Actually need someone to invent some great tool that Accenture wants to deploy and sells it to all the big companies, and we just get dragged along with the magic. Which SAP was painful, but it freed up billions of dollars of productivity. Billions and billions and billions. And I worked at Compaq and HP and Cisco. It was all hardware. So we're talking, you know, like just optimizing shipping costs and storage cost and obsolescence and, you know, having the right materials. You know, do you have eggs and bacon in the place you need them at the right time? And do you have it translated in French?
- [36:40]
C
You know, love the factory analogy.
- [36:42]
B
Canadian French. And it's. And, you know, I 100% agreed with you guys from the very beginning about the factory process. But anyway, it might be something to think about, is maybe we could get some six Sigma process black belts to be part of our community and give us some insights, because that's its own. Those are some very unique skill set. People that look at the world differently and love to think about it, but feel everybody's pain. And we all have the same pain. Big company, small company, and you guys are working at companies sometimes that you can affect more things and you still have major barriers.
- [37:17]
C
Yeah, it's absolutely an operations problem that should be solved by operations professionals. However, the measurement model has not evolved in a decade. And so we're stuck as operations professionals with the demand waterfall, which everything's predicated on that, right? Because with the demand waterfall, an MQL becomes an SQL, MQL becomes an opportunity, and it doesn't go backwards. And so why would you need this bi directional sync, right? It's like, why would you need that? The MQL is going to become an SQL and then marketing is good, because marketing's measured on SQL. So. Agreed. Totally agree, Donna. And so, yeah, it really comes down to what is the practice.
- [38:01]
B
Try and make an interrupt. Aaron, what you put in there is what's making me think about going back to hardware sas, this wild west. When you have hardware and you have manufacturing and you have raw materials, it is a process.
- [38:14]
C
Like, you know, it comes down to magical place.
- [38:18]
B
I mean, think about Nvidia.
- [38:20]
C
You need a way to be able to quantify the problem, and you need someone who's going to stand up and quantify the problem over and over. Or you need some kind of data wizard magician on your team to take all your data, put it into a data warehouse or a BI tool and stitch it together themselves. So we do both, but you could do either or. And it'll get you to where you're going. But you've gotta have a way to quantify the problem and not just say, this is a problem over and over. Like, please stop doing this. This is a problem. You have to be able to quantify it. And that's what we've seen work best. But, yeah, absolutely agree. Carolyn, what other topics did we want to get into today?
- [39:01]
A
This is sort of just like a personal thing, right? I was just going for a run this morning and I do like that. I don't know if anybody here does, you know, like Peloton does these like guided runs on their apps or like bike rides or whatever. And so I was doing like my favorite coach, whatever. And interestingly, he like opened up the run and he had said to like, the group, right? It's a live studio thing. But I was watching the recording. He's like, who here is obsessed with their metrics? Then he started to go on a tangent. But anyways, the tangent that he went on was really specific to athletic runners metrics. And then he went down this path of saying, you know, a lot of people make decisions about their health and their running metrics based on feel.
- [39:44]
C
Right?
- [39:44]
A
And so I was just like, that is so relatable. Are we in marketing obsessed with our metrics? We're obsessed with bad metrics, we're obsessed with legacy metrics. And many of us try and make decisions and optimize performance based on feeling. Nope. Something doesn't feel right. Nope. Our lead volume is not converting the way that we want it to convert. Or we know we're doing good work but can't see it in the active sales cycle. We don't really know how we're influencing deals. And I think that that same analogy, and we've talked about this so many times, but is just so applicable to marketing and marketing measurement. We should be obsessed with our metrics. We should be able to have a pipeline review or a metrics review in 15 minutes and know exactly what's happening. Because if you try and optimize something based on feeling, you are never going to get where you need to go. And I'll look at, like a really specific example around health. Okay, so about 10 years ago, I was having all kinds of symptoms. I have lupus now. I found that out 10 years ago. But for about two years, I was feeling certain things. I was feeling tired, I was having weird symptoms, and I was trying to solve them based on how I was feeling. And research that I was doing, spending hundreds if not thousands on Internet Told me I got to take this supplement, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Went to, like, my gp, did some blood work, nothing came back. Right. But I equated GP with, like, the traditional metrics. But only when I sought out an alternative functional medicine doctor did I get the labs that I needed to get to diagnose my problem. How did I fix my health issue and reverse it? Well, I monitored that over time. Did I get better in a year? No. Did I get better in two years? Yeah, I got incrementally better. But the point of all of this and the point of this whole analogy is that there is no silver bullet that is going to fix GTM performance overnight. And you're going to get where you want to go a lot slower based on, like, optimizing for how you are feeling and what you are feeling is happening. The key to all of this, your health, anything, is that in order to optimize, you have to literally obsessively track the metrics that really fricking matter. Because unless you track that, like what you were saying, Amber, which is like quantifying the problem, you have to quantify the problem with data to actually do something about it. And again, there's sort of like a compounding effect over time. It's not like it's going to improve in a quarter or two quarters, but once you can quantify the problem, you can obsessively track how it's improving or getting better over time. And so just this whole analogy of, like, being obsessed with data, I think is so applicable to our industry, but it's applicable to anywhere in life. If you want to get better at something, you get better by tracking a literal number to make it better.
- [42:39]
C
I love that. Oh, my God. And it's not a number that you probably came up with either. It's probably something that an expert is telling you. This is what you need to be looking at. Right. Not something that you're like, oh, well, this is what I did in my 20s, so I'm just gonna go do this again.
- [42:56]
A
Yeah. And I'm just like. I'm even thinking too, about traditional. I'm a little bit biased. But, like, I find traditional Western medicine typically treats a symptom. We get a prescription, we treat the symptoms. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But there's this whole, like, sort of wave of alternative medicine. The doctors that are trained to come at it from a different angle. And I often think about Passetto as sort of like the alternative medicine to marketing measurement. Right. Because we're not just like leaning into the typical metrics that everybody tracks. We are helping diagnose GTM with a new set of metrics that are literally designed for how buyers buy today. Because we are like pushing the boundary and pushing back and saying, hey, these metrics, the demand waterfall that everything is built around, well, they're not going to give us the data that we need to optimize. Here's the data, Here are the KPIs that we do need to see. And that's why I feel like everything changes for our customers or for people that we work with. When you have a better way to track right. Then you actually can be better and know where to focus on.
- [44:00]
C
What's this new dependency theory that you've been throwing out there?
- [44:04]
A
What did I call it? The pattern dependency. Right. Was that what I called it?
- [44:09]
C
The path dependency?
- [44:11]
A
Yeah. I'm going to just pull up a quick definition because I feel like I'm going to butcher the definition. So the concept of path dependency is a concept where past decisions or events constrain and shape current and future options, even if those original conditions are no longer relevant. So this really goes back, I think, to everything we've been talking about in this episode, which is a lot of us are trying to do better with like, I hate to use the word like a broken framework because I hate just, you know, calling it broken, but like a suboptimal framework. Right. We're trying to get old legacy KPIs or old legacy frameworks to work and it's just like everybody's got to give their head a shake. We're trying to optimize something that was literally built 20 some odd years ago. Right. And that is path dependency in practice. We're continuing to make decisions and we're continuing to do things, hoping for a better result with constrained legacy outdated options. And so that's what I was getting at with that. You know, when I was going on my rant earlier around sort of like the mechanisms of the way the lead object is built in CRM, like path dependency is going to try and like do something different to make it work. And it's just like, guys, that way of tracking leads does not work anymore in a world that was not built for the demand waterfall, a linear process. It's just not that straightforward anymore. Right. And it's really like turning that upside down and saying, okay, well the alternative way that is not path dependent is this. And that's why we exist, right? We exist for that very reason. Right?
- [45:51]
C
Yeah, that makes sense. It's what's familiar, what's easy to remember, what's ingrained in the system. Got a few more minutes to chat with everyone. So yeah. What's on your mind, Erin?
- [46:03]
D
I was just going to add, I agree with taking the data driven approach, but one thing I'll mention is I was actually talking about this last night with a friend who's an engineer is some of these. It's really, really hard to get data in the format that leaders want. Like often they're expecting like quantifiable data like in a dashboard. And one area that this has been really common for me is like with the volume of duplicates. And I was explaining to him, you know, this has happened to me multiple times because I work with really, really large companies where in your platform you have to export every single record. And for me that's in like over a million records and try to use Excel to figure out how many duplicates there are. And so you end up like the RAM on your computer when you're trying to do this, ends up just crashing Excel over and over. Like I've done this where like multiple colleagues and I have been trying to figure it out and I can't get the answer because the systems and the data, it's just too big. And that delays getting the information in the format that they want it. And the whole while the problem is just getting worse and worse and worse. So sometimes I think that kind of also inhibits progress.
- [47:30]
A
Oh yeah, that's the QBR fire drill, right? Because think of how painful it is that exercise, right? And typically because it's so painful, we're forced to do it once a quarter when it's like, okay, great, board meeting is coming up in two weeks. You're going to need to give leadership the metrics that they need. And then here we are losing days, if not weeks, trying to do this fricking, exhaustive, terrible, painful exercise. By the time we pull the data, because we don't have our hands on it, and we try and do all these gymnastics in like Excel, trying to make sense of the story when there's all of these other complexities like duplicate records, blah, blah, blah, garbage leads, etc, and then by the time we get the data, we're looking at in a rear view mirror, realizing at that point, oh my God, this is not a good scenario for us. We didn't hit our target. Why? Trying to figure it out, trying to reverse engineer what happened. Right? The whole situation you're describing, unfortunately is like common practice for a lot of companies, especially those Without a sophisticated rev ops person to help you with that or without the right tools to do it. But I will say, like, Excel is not the place to do any of that. There's alternative options. Yeah, Amber, anything you want to chime in on that?
- [48:44]
C
There's so many use cases and reasons to deduplicate. So what are you referencing? Like, do you have a specific example of why the duplication issue was leading to a dashboard or a report being incorrect or incomplete or misleading?
- [49:03]
D
In my position at that time, I mean, that was part of it. But the more pressing issue was part of their costs were they had to keep buying more contact blocks. And the deduplication, this was Pardot is separate from Salesforce. But every company I've worked for, they seem to believe if they're deduplicating in Salesforce, it's also deduplicating Pardot, which is not true. And there is no way to automatically deduplicate in part at it is all manual. So when you are up into the six figures of duplicates, I mean, I don't know anyone that knows a way to really solve that economically. And then you're just looking at increased cloud costs, not to mention the challenges you have with segmentation and your lists. Like you run into problems with customers complaining about they're getting emails for prospects or vice versa. It's a real mess.
- [50:08]
C
Yeah, I don't have anything specific to offer there in terms of Pardot, unfortunately, but sounds like a huge headache. I think I would assume that those bulk lists or those leads that you're referencing in the hundreds of thousands are not high intent leads.
- [50:25]
D
Well, no, but the thing is, a lot of them are literally just duplicates of, of another record. And so.
- [50:31]
C
But where are they coming from is what I would look at. Like why do we have all these
- [50:35]
D
and what are we actually, they're third party APIs. So like when they decide to add on another application or whatever, and it doesn't have the ability to deduplicate, so it's just adding in all these new records. And what's really bad is when you get systems that are like stuck in this loop where it's like you get a record created here, so it creates another record and so you end up with one that's just creating like hundreds of records. It's insane.
- [51:06]
B
Yeah, Once you get bidirectional synchronization approved on the Salesforce side for even anything, then you exacerbate your own problem because you've got to get the Salesforce team to agree to Dedupe also. And they don't want to do that. The only thing that ever pushed it in some of my companies was marketo costs would just go millions of dollars out of control because it was quantity based, you know, and then they would do it, but they still, because it wasn't their budget, it was sales ops, you know, some other budget owned Salesforce. So just think about how crazy this discussion is on some dimensions. And like Amber, you asked the right question, which is why. But there are 25 reasons including somebody will add a new field and not tell the other 15 systems and somebody will start using that for something like a vertical segmentation that the CEO and the board cares about. And you can never change it and you can never change the way it's been styled because there's too many reports that exist that they have to report again in six months or 12 months because they got funding or something from the board and then somebody else sees the other vertical field and they stop using the correct one. And imagine that over and over and over in billions in huge companies and different regions can do different things and somebody will. Even if you have central global control. It is truly like the Tribble episode of Star Trek, if you remember that.
- [52:28]
D
So yeah, I would describe it working in Pardot now you have to be prepared for like weather events every day. Like you don't know if you're going to get hit with a hurricane or tornado. Truly I was working around the clock because it was the exact same thing of what you're describing.
- [52:47]
C
Yeah, that's the hardest thing about operations for me too in my experience as well. Aaron is being so bogged down in the day to day in the data cleaning. And so I would just recommend to anyone in that position to focus on the highest leverage visibility, whether it's walking back from opportunity creation or it's walking back from closed one. Because starting at this sort of like bottom of the barrel deduplication and leads like you're just going to get lost in a rabbit hole and you need to be able to quantify the problem to leadership so that you can have more resources, whether that's more time, whether that's more prioritization, whether that's an executive champion to sort of bridge that gap for you and approve certain projects or priorities when it comes to your data, whether it's a new hire, all of these things are really just not the expertise of executive. And ELT is typically not their expertise unless they've been an operator for a long time. So it's really surfacing and managing up because you can't do it all at once. And if you're sitting drowning in data and drowning in deduplication, you're not helping move revenue forward for the business because you're just stuck. And I feel that. And it sucks. It's really. I want to stick your neck out there, but we got to wrap up for today, guys. Thanks so much for the conversation and it's been great. Great topics for us to pick back up on next week as well. So, yeah, we'll definitely think about that. Anything else as we wrap up?
- [54:20]
A
Go ahead, Aaron. One final thought.
- [54:21]
C
Yeah, we gotta wrap quickly.
- [54:23]
D
That a common problem is that we tend to change managers a lot. Like both of my recent jobs, I've had like four managers in a year. So that's really hard to, like, advocate for that when it just never stops.
- [54:38]
C
Oh, man, that sucks. I feel you.
- [54:40]
A
Yeah, I feel you too. I've been there. I've lived that world. I know it's super soul sucking at times, right? Definitely feels that way. But guys, if you're listening and you want to hop on the live conversation, get your questions answered or even just a little therapy sesh, head to passetto.com forward/events. We'll put the registration link up there. Good to see everybody, guys. Thanks for coming out and see you next time.
- [55:01]
C
Thanks.
- [55:01]
A
Thanks.
- [55:02]
C
See you next time.