Hey everybody welcome to our latest deck in growth live. I'm Cassidy. I'll kind of moderate this session and we'll introduce Sal and Sydney or in Carl here in a second or better yet. I'll let them introduce themselves.
Super excited about this topic. So you all know our point of view from refine labs around creating demand and manufacturing revenue and the need to obviously capture that demand. Declared intent or high intent leads, people raising their hand on the website coming inbound so forth and so on. We all know that story.
We love seeing marketers who are adopting this both within our clients and within our community. It's fabulous. But one thing that naturally falls out of this is like what happens after somebody comes in and raises their hand through the sales process. I've lived this myself as a CMO where we were able to create a very strong demand creation engine only to have to go figure out how we make the sales process efficient.
Carl and I talk about this every day at refine labs because we run the same motion within our company and then obviously Allison and Sydney see this every day with our clients. So what we thought we'd do is just have a conversation about what this looks like, what needs to change. I would like this to be very back and forth. And so one of the things I'm working on inside I get the audience more engaged in terms of asking questions.
So I'll be doing that from time to time so get your questions ready. So before we kick off into my questions, I want to have everybody introduce themselves. I'm going to start with Carl. Carl, introduce yourself and kind of give us one thing that you see as a challenge between kind of the marketing and sales relationship and this kind of demand creation world.
Nice. Thanks Cassidy. Carl Freire here. I lead the sales org at refine labs.
I've sold into the kind of the marketing persona. If you want to say that for most of my sales career, came from HubSpot previously. And the one thing that I think harms the cohesiveness or relationship between marketing and sales, especially when it comes to buying process and crafting a a well designed inbound buying experience is just trust. And I think we'll dive into that a little bit more.
But there's trust that's been harmed between the two silos or organizations, I think historically, and there's some work to do and some tips and tricks, at least from the sales side here that that marketing teams can do to rebuild some of the trust that's been eroded over the years. I love it. And we obviously can't have this conversation while I was salesperson on the phone. So Carl is our representative.
Allison, first time in a live session. Happy to have you here. Usually our customers. We love it if you introduce yourself.
Hi, my name is Allison Lomond. I've been with refine labs for over a year now, started as a director of demand generation and now AMBP. So I've got a team of amazing directors and performance marketing managers and we're supporting anywhere from eight to 12 clients. So the main reason I'm excited to be here is my entire career.
I've always been really focused on creating alignment with sales. I always saw that as a way to earn marketing's respect and place within an organization is to earn that trust of the sales team and the sales organization. When I think about the biggest breakdowns that I see typically when starting to really create that demand and that influx and that increase in high-intent hand-raisers, that biggest breakdown is really the prioritization. So getting the sales team to potentially rethink the way that they're prioritizing their outreach to these hand-raisers, particularly if that team has been really heavy outbound or maybe they've worked exclusively within an RFP motion.
They tend to be more enterprise-focused. So it's really shifting that mindset of treating these high-intent prospects with that same level of care that you would get an outbound motion. That's usually the first break down. I love it.
Allison's crushing it and she's a great following her turn so make sure you follow her. And last but not least is Sydney. I can't do a live session without Sydney even though she tries to get out of them every time. So Sydney, welcome back.
Love you to introduce yourself. Thank you. For the record, I don't try to get out of them every time, but maybe like 15% of the time. No, I love it.
I'm trying to get better at live events as well. So it's good for me to talk to you all and get feedback. So anyway, I'm Sydney Waterfall. I'm the general manager here at Refine Labs.
So I oversee a team of VPs and associate creative directors that oversee our large book of business. And I also started as a director of demand here at Refine Labs. The biggest disconnect, I would definitely agree with you know Carl and Allison here too. I think when you transition or you want to transition to a more create demand, declared intent, that type of funnel only and move away from lead gen.
The first thing that I typically see is sales leaders, SDRs or EEs depending on how and when leads get routed in your sales cycle, kind of freaking out about the volume. Like you're already giving me leads and they're already crappy and now you're going to tell me that you're going to give me less leads, but then you're going to promise me that they're going to be better and convert better. It kind of feels like sometimes maybe like a bait and switch or like I'm going to hook you on this awesome offer and then I'm not going to follow through. So I think that kind of plays into the like trust aspect and prioritization aspect, but I feel like that's the first hurdle to overcome with like a revenue organization.
So that's what I say. I love that and you tee it up perfectly. So what we want to do in this discussion is kind of paint a little bit of a picture of like the current state, which I think we've all been doing here. And then we're going to walk through kind of a framework of how to think about this within your own company and then how do you kind of drive that change on the back end to make sure that what you want to do actually happens.
And so to open this up, I want to turn it to Carl because Sydney kind of gave a view of like the world from the marketing perspective that like what's going on in the sales team's mind when you hear this notion of create demand, like where are you in kind of your current state as a sales leader? And what are you thinking when you hear this from the marketing team? Yeah, well, I mean, the marketing team has you know fed the sales team not great leads for many, many years. So I'm skeptical, right?
I think we have to go back in time to where sales and marketing historically have kind of come from sales has become in many organizations, this entirely self-sufficient machine, right? Where marketing is really just like actually just an extension of sales. It's like, yeah, get some leads, throw some content out there, clean up my sales decks, get me one-pagers, right? Almost like administrative and subservient to sales.
Sales has evolved in such a way that they've even in some organizations stood up their own internal marketing teams inside sales, right? I mean, when you think of big brands, sometimes I think of like the salespeople who are really active on social, I don't even associate, I don't even know like if I've ever seen an ad from, you know, some bigger brands, I'm like, oh, I know one of their top salespeople or one of their BDRs that does a lot of social selling, et cetera. So when sales is this completely self-sufficient machine and historically marketing just serves us, as horrible as that sounds, yeah, it's jarring to hear, oh, now all these leads are coming in and now all of a sudden they're going to be high quality and we need to channel switch or context switch to now sort of like create an entirely new process, motion, and mindset around receiving these supposedly high-intent leads in a more frictionless manner. Yeah, we're skeptical for sure.
I think you're being a little nice, Carl, something to come back to you. So when we think about the relationship that you have today with marketers, kind of pre-creating demand, so you're getting these leads, you're going to be thrown off the book, webinars, whatever, low kind of low quality leads, walk me through kind of like in your mind, what is the process you have set up or a typical salesperson has set up that kind of support leads that are given to them from marketing? So there's kind of an aspect of sales doing their own thing, but when it comes to the relationship with marketing, kind of what's the mentality of the sales team in terms of like that handoff? Yeah, it's deprioritized.
It's not important. I mean, it really is, it's the least of what it is that I'm going to feel like I have a very packed day. My sales manager is measuring me on outbound activity on there. We're looking at forecasting, so things that are already in my pipeline.
I'm focused on that. And so I've got my target account list. I have bought marketing automation software, AKA outreach, right, for myself. So I'm doing my own high volume email blasting and et cetera.
So when I, when you see leads trickle in that historically waste my time or are not the right fit or are like a junior person where I can just go pick up the phone and call the chief growth officer at Refine Labs, Cassidy Shield. Why would I bother with this Carl Ferrera who came inbound is only as a director title, right? Like, so there's just like a major deprioritization. I think it's just an afterthought.
If I'm being super blunt, you know, it's, it's an afterthought and it forces me to contact switch. I have to now step out of what I'm doing with my day and go and find where these leads are, sort through the notifications and hub spots, see what the lead score is, et cetera. It's just jarring to my flow, which historically hasn't produced any fruit for me and my time is very valuable. I'm paid on deals that close.
And so my time is naturally going to gravitate in that direction. I appreciate that, Carl. So you paid it a very clear picture, but I want to kind of balance that. Something to go to Allison.
Allison is carving overly harsh. I mean, like, kind of how do you see this when you buy a large, when you enter a new client? And I know obviously our mentality is a change to this relationship over time. How consistent or inconsistent is what you've seen and experience from what Carl is saying.
So I think skepticism is the right word to use here. Thankfully, when clients sign on with Refine Labs, I actually see a lot of excitement because usually if you're working with us, you're, you're bought into this idea of change. Everybody wants to have that change happen within their organization. So there is this initial period of like very high level of excitement, but that skepticism is always sort of the underlying elephant in the room.
So I think one thing that has been I've learned through trial and error is to always have the sales, someone from sales representing the sales organization on these calls where you're really influencing, trying to influence change and move to a demand generation model, because I'll give you like a very quick example. You know, if you ask a marketing team what the ICP is, they're going to tell you what the ICP is, but a salesperson like there's an ICP and then there's like the ICP, like a sales person knows, yeah, we might be going after these industries, these very close these segments, but like these are the people that close every time or these are the people that I personally am really good with. And so I think that just an example of if you don't have that insight, you're going to not nail it as quickly as you could if you're sort of bringing that insight in. So I think there's ways to sort of get in front of what could be a more like sort of slower start to the effectiveness of your demand generation efforts.
If you're involving that sales leader in from the beginning to sort of speak on behalf of really where we should be going with the strategy. Let me follow up on that. Do you find in those situations that that involvement exists or is that something you have you as coming in as a change agent push for? So where's like the awareness level within a typical marketing organization that that relationship should be in place or exist?
In my experience, actually, like I've never met a salesperson who didn't want to be part of marketing conversations. I actually think it's the fault of the marketing function in general that we don't actively seek those relationships out. I think there is a lot of fear there that maybe fear of not speaking the same language as sales, not being as product knowledgeable as sales or even as like business minded as sales. We tend to be more of like the creative or the looked at as more of the creative or maybe like some of the funnel before the funnel people.
So I think there's sometimes a little bit of fear of like exposure that oh we're not going to be able to talk the same talk of the salesperson. So I'm just not going to get them involved. And I think that's a major miss on the marketing function in general. And if you I don't think sales will necessarily volunteer like they're not going to give away their time if they're not asked.
But I found that if you build that relationship and ask they're actually more willing and they're more invested in the program when you get them involved. I've experienced the same thing as a marketer and obviously running sales teams that the sales folks are typically very giving in their time up to a certain point. Obviously they want to see something change out of their the time that they're spending with the marketing organization. So it might come a point in time when nothing is changing.
The sales team is deemed this relationship not worth their time. But I do agree usually at front. They're willing to spend a lot of time. The funnel before the funnel I had to write that down.
So we'll come back to that some other time. That is a great line for another conversation. Sydney one of the things obviously gets in the way or one of the ways to change behavior is through how we measure marketing and sales. So maybe share with us the current state versus how you would see the future state in terms of evolving the measurement here to better align the two organizations.
Yeah, I think previous states, at least how I've been measured and how I've done different things before in my earlier in my career, was definitely around lead volume and volume. No conversion, no quota to hit minimum conversion to hit a quota, nothing like that, just pure volume. And then even metrics before that. That's I think where it starts.
And obviously the sales team is not measured on leads. I measured on revenue and how much quota that they can attain and some even have win rates or conversion rate, qualified into their comp, right? There's so many different measurements of that goes into their compensation package, which is ultimately how they're going to get paid. And that's where the disconnect drives.
I've been in rooms with VPs of sales, my CEO before, previous companies, and they're just literally how many leads, what source, and then oh, it sells problem after that. And I just think that's so drives the wrong behavior. So when we want to think about how we should be measuring, I can definitely go on a full rant around that, I'm going to get into that in that topic. But it's pipeline and revenue.
And a lot of marketers are saying, oh, no, I drive leads, I can influence revenue and I can influence all of these things with assets I'm creating or different campaigns. But I also think influence revenue has not helped marketing and sales alignment either. I think it's actually driven it even further apart. See that last point again, this was like an interesting the concept of influenced revenue from an attribution standpoint.
So I'm a firm believer that you should look at how revenue was sourced, where did it come from, a source point, where did it enter in the pipeline and not influenced. So a lot of marketing teams will look at, oh, this campaign influenced this opportunity. And it's like they saw, we served one display ad to a target account that was already in the pipeline. And so now we're going to take a credit for we influence tax amount of this revenue.
And I think that by doing an influenced model where we're just arguing over what percentage of the revenue we already closed. So it's already in the past that we've already closed, doesn't really align sales and marketing. They just start arguing over, no, I've worked that deal for eight months. I know all the decision makers, you sent one email and you're going to say, or one event that they happen to show up to, and you're going to say, you guys close the deal.
So I think that is really also like spurred fuel on the fire from an influenced revenue point of view and reporting. Yeah, so this is spurred a few questions. So I appreciate folks putting those in the chat. Let me so first one is, so the clarifies to the, are you suggesting to measure marketing by revenue or opportunity sourced?
And then there's like a comment around first touch or last or both, or maybe that's not relevant. Yeah, so I can speak to how we recommend and how we actually look at revenue here too. That's kind of what we recommend. We recommend measuring marketing on what we call hero pipeline and revenue associated with that pipeline.
So we don't necessarily look at first touch or last touch. We're looking at what we call the conversion touch. When they converted, it could be the 27th touch, no one cares. When they converted, when they come to our website, and then they filled out that book, a strategy call, and they go over to Carl's team to book a call immediately, where did that come from?
And that's how we look at conversion touch. And then we're looking at the pipeline source, that's associated with that. So when we say pipeline source, we're talking about, did that come from our website? Did that come from outbound?
Did that come from an event? Or maybe you have partner, you're going to have only probably four to five core go-to-market sources. All of our news flash, most of our revenue comes from our website, which would be our what we call pipe, our go-to-market framework. So that's how we kind of had a high level measure revenue.
Obviously, we can get into exactly how we do that and how marketing looks at it, how Carl looks at it. But that's something that interestingly enough, here marketing doesn't report on the hero pipeline, Carl reports to the organization on the hero pipeline generated. So I think that's an interesting dynamic as well. I love that.
I would like to get into that too. And so the last question, are you splitting events and digital pipeline? I think the hearing answer would be yes. We would like to get sources differently.
Yeah, if you have an event in field motion going in your business, I would categorize that as one go-to-market source for someone coming from into your website and converting. So let me kind of pivot this conversation. We'll get into more measurement here shortly. And that is like, I'm going to frame kind of the situation as we talk through.
So we have the status quo. Carl's out doing his own thing, not really paying attention to marketing in a traditional world. It leads to he gets from marketing, he doesn't have a lot of respect for it. But now, marketing's kind of shifted the strategy for creating demand, we're getting hand-raisers through the website on a digital channel, people saying, I want a demo.
We've educated it properly, we got buyer enablement set up, we see the demos increasing. This is great. People are getting excited for the some optimism brewing. And then we see that these demo requests or hand-raisers don't convert the revenue.
And so this is really what we want to start talking through is how do we ensure that we're capturing this demand all the way through the revenue? So we're going to talk through that now. And we thought we talked through it a few ways. One is kind of how to establish a mindset across sales and marketing.
They go tackle this. We'll come back and talk through measurement in a more detail. What do you think you should be looking for across marketing and sales? And then we'll talk a little bit about execution and that one car will kind of walk through.
Once he gets on board with us, once he starts observing in the sales process, it needs to change on the sales side to enable this more efficiently. So with regard to mindset, I'm going to ask Allison to kind of walk through, how do you think about when you're in an account, you're talking to a client, establishing this kind of different perspective of how marketing and sales should work together? So you're kind of the mindset that you're trying to instill and incorporate within the team. Sure.
So for me, it's kind of two important things right off the mindset is that there has to be agreement between marketing and sales and really the whole organization, but mainly those two groups. So what is a high intent conversion? So everybody has to agree that a demo form requested demo form is your high intent conversion. I mentioned that because with the increase recently in like freemium or free trial or PLG motions, there's actually several steps above that that demo potentially.
So it could vary across the organization, but you want to have that alignment. I was like, what is that high intent conversion? What does that signal that everybody agrees is going to be treated as high intent? That's kind of the first mindset you need to get into make sure you have the alignment there.
The second piece is make sure that someone from sales or growth ops revops has reviewed any reports that marketing plans to use to measure success. I have been in way too many report conversations or QBRs where the conversation immediately goes to that's not the report I would use. Like you forgot this filter, you're not looking at it this way. So always make sure you have the mindset of like we're aligned on what filters we're using to report on this and how we're defining success and how we're defining revenue and everything through the funnels.
I think those are the two mindsets you have to be locked in alignment on those so that the story and the narrative that you begin to observe is widely accepted by everybody. I think the other kind of important part here is, and I know Carl will get a little bit more into this, but who's owning the handoff process? I've been in a lot of companies where I actually used to be the person that was passing out these leads. Is that effective for your organization?
How do you fast track that? How do you add in automation? Get these leads to the right people in an appropriate amount of time. Those are some of the early mindsets that you want to be focused on is who has ownership of that?
If it's a collective ownership that both parties have the ability to affect the change that needs to happen, not just from capturing the intent, but then moving it through the funnel. There has to be mutual respect for the changes that are going to be recommended. It can't just be one team making all the requests and the other team not having a voice. I love the fact that these not only do these teams need to be aligned, but they need to be aligned on the specifics.
That's kind of what I heard from you. It's almost like each step who's accountable and who owns that. I suppose there's also some education you're doing up front based on what do we expect to have happen once this machine starts rolling? Whereas the sales team may not be really thinking about how would this impact their sales process?
They might be thinking, yeah, you give me leads today and I have an SDR or you have the SDR call, but I have the SDR call and that's good enough. So Allison, you'll just give me these leads and I'll just do the same thing. It's probably what's going through their mind, which I'd assume you would say is not exactly how this process should be run. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, you've likely heard members of refined labs talk about this before, but if you have decided and you've agreed that this is a high intent, good fit for your ICP, you really from a sales perspective need to be thinking critically about who is that first touchpoint that the client has interaction with. Are you going to make them sit through a discovery call before you show any part of your product? Those are the things that the sales leaders should feel really passionately about. They should say like, how do we give this handerys are the best experience possible?
What reorganization do I have to do on my team? If marketing can commit to bringing these high intent opportunities as a sales leader, what can I do to commit that they're going to get the best experience and not fall through leaky cracks in the funnel? And so I think that's another area of mindset is they should be prepared to do a little bit of reorganization within their current workflows to really treat these leads as gold. I mean, they should be everybody should be invested in testing this out.
Like what it should be a level of excitement. How can you give them the best experience? Because I think everybody's invested in making something like that work. Nobody wants to see marketing disappear, that tap turned off.
So how do you effectively move them forward? Also, there's a question I want to ask you that Karl and I were riffing on earlier. And that is, I don't know if we've really talked about this. And that is, do you see the make up or the mix of a high intent lead differ from a low intent lead?
And to be more specific, my experience has been, and to call that a sample size of a few companies, is that not only is the person have high intent and they're ready to talk to somebody and we shouldn't send them to an SDR, but that there also tend to be more senior than what we typically get from the marketing lead. So it's not the junior person grabbing an e-book to educate themselves. It's typically a director or VP or somebody with buying authority who's raising their hand to say, I'm ready to talk. You see that?
It may that doesn't play out that way across most of our accounts, but I'd love to have you elaborate on what you're seeing. I do see that. I also do see more like, you have to be cautious with just looking at title because a lot of times I see roles in the organization that have been empowered by say a VP of sales, VP of HR clients or folks in the IT space. So sometimes they'll empower someone at maybe like a manager role, or even a specialist role to do some of that initial research and bring options to them.
So I do think you want to treat those people with the same level of respect regardless of title if they've submitted that form. They're likely being told to do so or it's part of a larger program. So I do see both. You'll see the higher titles typically at maybe a smaller company and then sometimes if it's a larger company, you do see more of those like manager coordinator specialist titles.
And so to me what that comes down to is it's not that they can't go to an SDR, just make sure that your SDR is empowered to also show them the product. They should be able to do almost everything in AE can do maybe without the ability to close or necessarily give formalized pricing in some places, but they should be just as educated and just as intellectually able to sell the benefits and the features of your product as an AE so that they could do that in the first call if asked. Less hoops that the client has to jump through just makes the AE's job easier at the end, but they likely will still have a big lift in working through pricing, getting referrals, some of the more like bottom funnel closer, you know, further down the opportunity stages. So that's kind of like where I see, I see that as it's not that I can't go to an SDR, just make sure that your organization's empowering them to act with all the tools that an AE would have.
It's just a good time for me to share my wild ideas, it's a good time to discuss what you and I were riffing on before this call. By all means, let's hear it. This is a Carl exclusive. This is Carl exclusive here.
And we do this at Refine Labs. So like I've seen at work, I think and believe that there's not enough creativity actually and mindfulness and thoughtfulness that goes into lead routing to begin with. It's the wrong question, I think, to ask, should this go to an SDR or an AE? That's the wrong question, right?
If Cassidy comes inbound, let's say I sell for Clary, forecasting technology plugs into Salesforce Awesome platform. If an SVP of sales comes inbound and it really gets routed to me and I'm a really great AE, blah, blah, blah, I went to P club last year and an SVP of sales comes inbound and I look, I do some pre-call research and he books time on my calendar and I see that he's got 200 sales people. I have never forecasted for 200 sales people. I have no experience doing that.
So why would I, even as an AE, want to take that lead? Why not route Cassidy to a subject matter expert and have space or bandwidth on our sales team to route a CMO that comes inbound like to refine lives. If you come inbound and you hit certain criteria, you're not going to talk to me. You're going to route straight to an expert, somebody who has been there, done that because we really, really care about the contents of that first conversation.
So I don't know, it's a little bit wild of an idea here, but I want a CMO to come in and talk to and have a discovery call that they would have paid for, that they would have paid time for, right? I want them to walk away from that call whether or not they hire refined lives, right? Who cares? I want them to leave with a couple of new ideas that they can action on or maybe they can help them to understand their own problems from a different lens, whatever it is.
And that's very differentiating and actually helps that mindset, helps us to close a lot of deals to begin with. But I don't feel like we don't allow space for that and B2B really. It's like STR or AE. I think there's something else altogether that we could be thinking through that makes a lot more sense and that doesn't, that actually serves a buyer, I think more effectively and also helps the sales team close more deals, right?
You're going to talk to an AE if you go and talk to any other agency, right? You're not going to talk to an AE if you come to refine labs, right? We don't really have A's. And there's something there that I think is, and that changes your hiring profile too.
I don't hire traditional sellers typically. I hire really good marketers and then I just teach them how to sell. That's much easier than me going and finding a subject matter expert, if that makes sense. So I don't know, maybe a little wild, but I just wanted to throw that in there that we should allow space for that because I think it's compelling.
Well, yeah, you have a few people here who like your IBA. Keep the comments coming. If you want to ask a question of Carl, jump on, I will say Carl is very accurate forecasting for a sales team of two. So that's good.
You have somewhere to start Carl. 100% every month. You got to start with two before you get to 200. That's right.
All right. So we have a question. Jonathan, Carl stated his skepticism of quality of lead. Why would this be worth his focus or time?
Do any of you use scorecards to see if some sales are having higher conversion rates on M-fuel hand raisers? So when could then ask, why are they having success? What's different? I can start to tackle that if you want.
I think, again, it's that trust piece that I brought up in the beginning. I mean, from a sales perspective, we can see very quickly if the quality shifts from what we've gotten historically to what we're getting now is a big dramatic shift in in inbound, like let's say, like at HubSpot, okay? So back in the day, if someone's coming inbound and I'm taking like demo requests from job titles, it's an easy one to kind of suss out, right? Marketing manager, et cetera.
I love marketing managers to death. They don't typically buy things necessarily, right? There's a larger group. And so when you start to see an influx of demands coming inbound that's like CMO, SVP, BP, this budget, that budget, there is a market difference in the inbound when you're doing demand well.
And I think that builds trust pretty quickly. And then again, this goes back to the Sydney point reporting, right? When you're aligned with the marketing team on what you're reporting and marketing says, sales, I'm going to help you increase your sales velocity, your average sales cycle is 45 or 60 days on your outbound stuff. I'm going to bring you stuff that's going to close in three weeks.
All right, I'm skeptical, but I am paying attention now. And then when those deals start closing, these buyers come in and they're like, ready to go, I've done my research, you're going to start to pay a lot more, you know, as a seller, you're going to start to pay more attention. That transformation can happen very quickly. We've seen it happen very quickly in our own customer base.
My sense is this is an iterative process. So what I was to mention at the beginning, you have a common definition you've agreed on between marketing and sales and you're going to continue to evolve that definition based on what the actual performance of those leads coming in and how they convert through the pipeline. At least this has been my experience when I've done this myself in terms of you start out with probably a broad definition. But as you find out what's working and what's not working, that definition becomes more specific and nuanced.
Can I? Jonathan, no scorecard. We don't have a formal scorecard. I think it's like, are we on the same dashboard looking at what success is and seeing that these certain types of deals, unless of a scorecard, more of a dashboard that we agree is marketing and sales that is our single source of truth for anything, I would say is, I guess you could call that a scorecard, but it's more of alignment on that core dashboard that we're using together.
We'll say in the beginning too, when you are starting this journey and starting maybe trying to get that trust, you might not have the time to wait till sales velocity, depending on your sales cycle of your sales cycle of your sales cycle is 10 months or something. It's always important when you are going to say, hey, I want to make this change and here's why. You can bring data to show this is why these leads are better. This is why it's going to be a better use of your time and better experience for you.
And then Carl, you can go, it's going to be less number of leads. We're going to have a meeting book rate or they're going to go to stage three up rate at a different percentage than you're typically used to getting. And that is going to be what we're going to look at first. So I've done this with a couple of clients as like, let's just look at the meeting book rate as like, you know, we can get that immediately.
If they're not booking that meeting from these people within, you know, they should be booking it right at form conversion. But if you don't have that set up, if our average meeting book request to meeting book rate is seven business days for all these leads, we want to get that to two business days. And that would be like a measure of that if it's a better use of your time. This is just kind of an example of a metric that you could use.
And then you could go back and literally you need to follow as a marketer, you need to follow those leads, every single one that comes in, and you need to make sure that it is getting followed up on. And if it's not getting booked, you're digging in immediately and asking why you're understanding that. You don't just set it and forget it come back to sales and talk two weeks later and say, Hey, did we hit this number or not? So depending on yourself, likely you might need to look up a metrics that you're going to look at, but that would be a recommendation.
You need to always have something that you're going to get agreeance. If we do this, this is the outcome. Are you good with that outcome? Yes, sales, I want that outcome.
That sounds good. Great. I'm going to do what it takes to get that outcome for you now. That should be more of the rhetoric there.
I love that. And I really appreciate the chatter. The back and forth is great. That was kind of a just got a long discussion on mindset.
I think we're here in that point home. I'm going to go back to you. So need to pick up where you just left off and talk about like, what is this measurement? Like, what is this same dashboard or same to you that Carl's looking at that Cassie looks at that we should be looking at when it comes to measurement.
While you're talking about that, you can naturally talk about how does Alex or somebody get a hold of what are the definitions of hero pipeline and the breakdown and so forth and saw another question while back and make sure we circle back to it. So I'll go through it first, but it's actually four core metrics. Let's stay with the core metrics. We don't need 17,000 metrics, but it's the core of it.
It's four core metrics that we're going to look at, but we call it pipe conversion. Notice that there's no, we use the word conversion, not lead. The pipe conversion is a declared intent conversion. So just like Allison was talking earlier, what does that agree to upon declared intent, meaning they are telling you that they're what their intent is and filling out that form on your website, how many of those are beginning per month per quarter, then the next step is a pipe qualified meeting.
So this is of those people, they need to be, you know, thermographically fit that they're, you know, someone that you can sell to and they need to book time on your and schedule time on their calendar. So this would be like the first meeting, the first meeting in your sales process. I know that there's a bunch of different sales flows and sales processes of how you might structure that internally, but that first initial, because if they're not even getting to that first initial agreement of time, it's not the quality, we need to re-optimize what we're doing at the top of the funnel before bringing in those people. So that's the second phase, pipe qualified meetings.
The next phase is what we call pipe hero, which is a high intent revenue opportunity. And this is going to be unique to each organization. So a high intent revenue opportunity is that has a rolling sixth month win rate of greater than 25%. So the reason that it's structured around win rate is again, quality of that, and the predictability of that, right?
Rather than just saying, oh, it's a stage two. Well, what is your stage two convert at? Oh, it's a stage four. Oh, it's a proposal.
It's this. There's so many different definitions of pipeline. So we centered around of those, how many did that rate typical that we see for a sales led organization that we work with is going to be around stage two or stage three. But again, you need to do that analysis.
And then close one, type close one. So those are the four core metrics that you should be looking at. Again, this is all based on the conversion point and what we call the pipeline source, not necessarily the first touch that came in or channel or program level. None of that, we want to see what's coming in from that intent through the website.
So that's a very simple, high level definition. We do have a whole another talk on YouTube about this. We're actually going to some slides we can share where there's like screenshots of the actual framework, the definitions, and then I'll drop it in the chat here too, so you guys have it. But there's some examples of like how to calculate your hero win rate and what this means and things like that.
I could go on and on, but that's kind of the core definition. And that's what we report on is every month and quarter, how we're pacing to our hero pipeline and our close one revenue as the core two things. Yeah, Carla reports on all of it, but main thing is the hero pipeline and revenue, forecast revenue as well. I love that.
So I also hope that answers on how you get a hold of this. You can also just fall sippy and ping around LinkedIn. She talks about this a lot, but then both publicly and privately with our customers. Allison, there's something you want to elaborate on here?
Yeah, so this was kind of the big unlock for me when I started working at Refine Labs because before I'd always been in house and when you come to play Sucker Fine Labs, you're surrounded by marketers, which is wonderful, it kind of really helps you up your game and you get all of these great philosophies. And this was something that was so interesting to me because I had always been saying like, demand does it stop at the form, Phil? Like you have the best demand generation marketers are the ones that are creating demand at every stage of the funnel. And I think breaking it down into these four metrics that Sydney is referring to, it's like, you have very clearly defined stages now of what efforts do I need to put towards these to make sure that somebody's moving from conversion to pipe qualified meeting to a high-income revenue opportunity and then to close one.
So it really allows the marketing team to then brainstorm with sales and say, all right, we're not getting meetings booked here. What's going on? What are the tools we need to have? What are the routing rules we need to have in place?
Do we need to have something like Clearbit on the back end that's filling in data that we're not capturing on the form, Phil, so that we're routing the best possible leads to the highest potential sales folks, the highest subject matter experts. Like there's a lot of internal discussion that you can start to have at each stage. All right, they aren't moving to high-robes. Why?
Why are they getting stuck after that first meeting? Well, what does the follow-up look like? Do we have enough case studies for this particular industry to compel somebody to continue moving forward? Do we have references customer advocates that can support this motion?
So there becomes a lot more conversation you can have than just like, we'll go run more ads in LinkedIn or go spend more on Google. Like you start to actually be partners of the sales team and there's like very clear touch points. If you can't move from conversion to meeting to opportunity, there's very easy places you can look to start fixing things. And so I think that was a big unlock for me as like, oh man, as a marketer, I don't have to just stop at brand awareness and getting people in.
I can continue that whole journey with the sales team. That's where it becomes really fun and really effective. I love that mental model. That is great.
Every marketer, every demand-get-marketer should be thinking that way through the complete life cycle of pipe conversion all the way to revenue, well said Allison. All right, so I know I have a few minutes left. I want to kind of hit a few points on some tactical execution. So let me kind of turn to Carl.
So Carl, what I want to know is why we have now as marketers generated a lot of pipe conversion metrics as Cindy pointed out, but our PQM or qualified meetings are low. Why can't you get these folks on the phone, Carl? What are you doing? Why are we not converting them to the revenue marketing has done their job?
What are the typical things you see kind of go off the rails in the sales process that you've so well fixed here in the fine labs? So working progress. I really wish marketing would just close the deals too. You know, I'd like us to evolve eventually there.
That's why Carl brings marketers onto the sales team. So yeah, marketing closing deals. I get to take credit for all this attainment. All I do is just bring in Allison and Sidney and everyone else onto calls.
I'm a slacker for sure. But it's just because I don't know what I'm talking about as well as Allison does when I'm talking to the CMO of a 1,000-person company. It's like, you should talk to Allison or Sidney or Evan who came from the AWS. It's just, I don't know what it is.
I don't know if it's like a pride that prevents sellers from doing that or what it is. But at the end of the day, you have to say, hey, if I really want to close this deal, I really want Cassidy to have a really awesome experience and make a good business decision. And I might not be the perfect person to guide him on that journey. That's okay.
Team selling. I noted it in the Slack here, not the Slack, the channel, the chat that everybody's in marketing and everyone's in sales. And when you kind of adopt that mindset, things get a lot simpler. So Cassidy, you asked a specific question and we have five minutes left.
What goes off the rails and why don't I convert people to opportunities? Yeah, maybe just big two or three kind of classic places that you would look at first in terms of trying to optimize the execution. The first thing is maybe a mindset thing again. That's so critical to this entire conversation.
But you hear this a lot on LinkedIn. Speed to lead is important. I think speed to lead is like the completely wrong metric to measure. If Brendan converts and raises his hand, he wants to buy something.
And again, let's get like built trust with marketing and this is really good demand coming in about, right? And we've gone to that point. This man wants to buy something. There should be no speed to lead here.
It should be how quickly can I enroll Brendan in a high value conversation? It should be speed to conversation. I mean, it is not 1998 anymore Cassidy. There's no reason for Brendan to fill out a form and wait.
You know, like you all over the lows and you want like you're in lumber and you're trying to get like a board cut and you like cannot find somebody in lumber. You're like walking in your steps and you're like walking down the aisle trying to find somebody. You've got to walk all the way to cabinets to see if somebody there can call lumber. That's the experience that we give to our customers.
They convert. They want to buy. They're excited. They want more information.
They want this. They want that. And we're like, cool, you just wait. Stay in the waiting room while we route a lead and find an SDR.
It's insanity when you say it out loud. It's almost embarrassing. You know, so I think that's the first thing you have to clear up how quickly can we get Brendan the information that he's looking for. Let's get him into that high value conversation with an SME.
Let's maybe follow up after he books the meeting with an email that says, Hey, here's some stuff to review before our call. If you if you sell SaaS, Hey, here's a quick overview of our week. I do this in my own selling here at Refine. I send a Google doc out after they book the meeting.
I send a Google doc out. I'm like, Hey, here's a little bit about us. Here's some of the pre-call research I've done on you. What this helps us to do in the discovery call is jump into the deep end.
I don't need to give you an overview over fine labs, right? You read the document. You don't need to give me context that I can find on the internet of your company. Let's jump into the deep end and figure out what we can do here and if the partnership makes sense.
So speed to a valuable conversation. That's not just a chili Piper tool on your website. It's also the mechanics of the discovery call, which is arguably an entirely other conversation. How do you run effective discovery that gives more to the buyer than the seller takes, right?
I don't want to waterboard somebody with bands. I don't want to ban Alex to death here in water boredom. I want Alex to deeply understand if the fine life is going to be a good fit or not. And I want Alex to walk away from this call with two or three things that he can execute on and produce better outcomes on his own without me.
That's a win to me. And that closes deals. I'm rambling thoughts on that Cassidy. I've added the band waterboard to the funnel before the funnel as the two things I'm taking away from this call.
Nobody wants to be a point of order. I know there's more things we can talk about in execution. We didn't quite get the like how do you drive this change. But I think a lot of the answers we gave around mindset, measurement and execution, exhibited how to have these conversations to get marketing and sales aligned and so forth.
Any parting questions from the audience? Carl, if you want to hear more from Carl, Carl is also a sucker for outbound. So if you want to test an outbound message, just send it to Carl. He responds to everybody.
If you're selling some newfangled technology, you'll probably want to take a look at it. He's always pitching me on buying more technology. So Carl is a sucker for the. That's the hard sell for sure.
Yeah, I don't want to talk to anybody about new technology, but Carl will. All right. So let's go around the horn. I'll serve with you, Alison.
Any parting thoughts words of wisdom besides the funnel before the funnel that you want to mention? If you're a marketer on this call, my advice is don't be apprehensive to work with sales. I think that's the first roadblock to get over just mentally. Think of them as your partner.
And if you're selling to yourselves on this call, give marketing a little bit of grace at times as they start to influence this change. It's not going to be perfection right off the bat, but you're open and honest and constructive feedback. It will make the programs better. So don't shy away from doing that.
And I think most marketers want the feedback. And if you don't, you're probably in the wrong field. But I think that's just, yeah, find ways to work together and encourage each other to be better. Not just one team or the other.
I think both teams can sort of rise to the top in this situation. Well said, one of a sudden, Sydney, the last thoughts is your goal should be that your sales team comes to you as a marketer and says, Oh my God, these leads are great. Give me more of them. So if you get like, that's the end goal, like in Slack, we get messages or our clients will get messages from their sales team.
And that's like, you completed it. You completed the ship. Well, that Carl, anything, anymore besides that waterboarding? Yeah, let me know if you have questions.
I have these conversations all the time. I promise I won't ban to you on the first call, at least second one is no rules. I can call my bank you then. But yeah, happy to chat with anyone offline about any of this.
We construct at Refine Labs inbound buying experiences. And so happy to chat what that looks like. And I won't charge you personally, you know, a lot of money, some, but you know, a lot. So I love that we're all available.
So if you want to talk more about this, this was a very entertaining conversation. Appreciate all the commentary, but can I focus on LinkedIn and we're happy to help in any way we can. Thanks everybody for joining. Have a good rest of the day.