Hi, my name is Sydney Waterfall. We're here with Sacking Growth Live. Today I'm joined with Cassidy and Carl, my two favorite sales and marketing duo here. Today we're going to be talking about pipeline sources and pipeline velocity.
So we're going to talk about the showdown between different sources and velocities. We've got some really cool data to go over. But before we jump into that, I'm going to have Cassidy and Carl introduce themselves. So Cassidy, go ahead, take it away.
Everyone, it's Cassidy, Chief Growth Officer at Refine Labs. Looking forward to having this conversation like always and hearing all the wonderful questions and commentary from the audience. So I think this will be a good one. There'll be a lot of questions I'm sure and a lot of commentary.
So we can forward to it. Hey, Carl Ferrera. I lead the sales org here at Refine Labs. I'm super pumped to meet you all and answer questions.
I'll be in the chat and I'm curious to hear which pipeline source everyone thinks is going to win. So we've got some pretty compelling data to show some really cool insights. So excited to dig into it. Awesome.
So let's get into it. We did make some slides here since we'd have some data to show and go over. So we will jump into it. So first and foremost, let's talk about pipeline sources.
Before we jump into the data, I want to just touch on the concept. You've probably heard us talk about this before, or if you listen to one of our podcasts, we've have a couple of episodes on it. But just a level set here, pipeline sources are the way to capture demand and how the buyer actually comes into your sales pipeline. So we have some examples of the main pipeline sources here.
But each of these sources are going to have a lot of different dynamics, not only in terms of just sales velocity, other sales performance metrics, activity metrics, marketing metrics, and even the way in which you construct your lead flow, sales flow, sales follow up is going to look a little bit different for each of these sources. So here's a couple of the ones that we're going to dig into today. Pipe, which is declared intent website conversions, enterprise outbound slash ABM, ABX, ABE, whatever term you want to call ABM these days, or kind of like engaged accounts. And then you might also have a partner motion with your business, events, field, and then you might still be doing the intent lead gen as well.
So those were kind of the core pipeline sources we typically see. And really your business should only have anywhere from like three to five, maybe six of these core pipeline sources in your go to market strategy. So that's what we mean by pipeline source. So let's jump into the data, and then we will go back and forth and kind of talk about it.
I'm curious to get all of your guys' questions as well. So I was pretty curious of how to look at across a variety of different companies, different industries. How do these all stack up, right? Primarily we're going to be looking at pipe declared intent outbound and low intent lead gen, and you'll see the breakdown of all of this data in the next couple of slides.
The ability of the podcast, I definitely recommend to like jump on the visual here and watch the recording. But essentially it's a smaller data set. So this is definitely not like a huge data study, but we want to pull some data and just have a conversation about it. So we reviewed six companies, they're all B2B SAS companies, mostly sales led.
There is one or two that also do have a pretty strong product led motion. And ranging industries, ranging average ARR, for example. So you'll see this in the data. We just kind of randomly selected these six companies.
You'll see in the data it was definitely not cherry picked here, which I think is important. We want to show you guys real data. The time period where we pulled all of this data was 12 months. It was going to be June 2021 to June 2022.
And we look at a lot of data points. Obviously not all of these we're going to show you. We're only going to show you a couple of core ones and the anonymized data version of this. But we looked at total opportunities created, as we know, every company defines an opportunity differently.
So then we also pulled hero opportunities specifically for the pipe funnel, which is any opportunity that has a trailing win rate of months for greater than 25%. We also looked at total pipeline created and hero pipeline created, win rate, average recurring revenue for each of the contracts. And this is annual recurring revenue. Sales cycle lengths.
And then we eventually wanted to calculate annual pipeline velocity. I've got the definition and the calculation up here on the screen. One thing to call out whenever you're calculating it pipeline velocity, whatever time period you're calculating it over, you just want to make sure you divide by that time period. So we did 365 since we're looking at annual.
If you're looking at quarterly, that number in this calculation would change. So there's one kind of level set with the data before we start jumping into things. Okay, so this is a fun part. And there's a lot of numbers on these next couple of slides.
So take it all in. I'm going to kind of go through my observations, ask Carl and Cassidy some questions as we kind of go through this data. But I think it's super interesting. And honestly, like this is the stuff I just personally like geek out over, I can go down rabbit holes.
And I did go down rabbit holes when looking at all this. So we have six companies that we're going to look at. We've got three companies on this side, slide three companies on the next slide. And at the top of the chart here, you'll notice this is semi is just pipeline velocity annual is just all summed up.
So we took for every company that we looked at pipe, we summed that up, everyone that looked it out down, we summed that up because the calculation is so specific to win rates and are you can't really aggregate and velocity across multiple companies, because there's so many factors. So before I get jump into the data, I want to talk about pipeline velocity and like, why we think this is a good metric to look at, why we think this is important, while you guys are kind of consuming this data on this slide. So I'm going to jump over to Cassidy. And I would love your point of view on why you recommend pipeline velocity and why it's important for all written terms.
Yeah, I think this data really shows why I love this metric. And that is the components are valuable. Ops, win rate, there are sales cycle. This often is what we talk about.
We talk about pipeline and we're looking at performance, and I say we meaning the marketing and sales team. And when I say when, I'm like weekly, monthly, even quarterly, we're thinking of it in this terms. But the calculation is important for the comparison because you can not often see that in the number. So like you may look at company A here and say, well, I'll bound perform better in terms of ARR.
But type inbound had a higher win rate. And then there's a single sales cycle. So when we look at that, we're trying to judge like in an unbiased way, how do we compare these two things, you look at the calculation and in each one of these cases, you can see the difference in pipeline velocity between declared and 10 inbound versus outbound and support and so on. And so this allows you to compare different data sets or different segments to each other.
And in this case, we're comparing cut inbound versus outbound. But you could do this by company size, you could do this by sales territory, you could do this by product, you could be able to build products in your company. And so what I'm about pipeline velocity, the calculation is it kind of normalizes those comparisons. But I also like the elements that break pipeline velocity because that's what you're going to be talking about with your sales team day in, day out weekend, week out month over month.
So it's just a very powerful metric kind of holistically and in its components. To me, it's super insightful because a lot of people hone in on one or two components that are versus looking at it a little bit more holistically. Like we recommend when you're looking at pipeline source, pipeline velocity is something that you can look at, like, how is my strategy for each pipeline source going? And are we increasing this quarter over quarter?
Are we not? What is this compared to where other pipeline sources and our resources allocated correctly based on the pipeline velocity, which is a value, essentially about pipeline coming into your business? The data, your question here, just to clarify, are using date of operation as a marker for pipeline velocity? Good question.
Yeah. So in this calculation, the date that the opportunities are created in that time period, so the time period that we pulled was annual. And then exactly like the win rate calculation for that time period, what was the win rate over that time period? Cassidy dropped how we calculate win rate is you exclude open opportunities.
It's only a closed opportunity to get our true win rate, things like that, for example. Sydney, what David's asking is more of like, how are we defining opportunity in that column? Are they like sales qualified opportunities? Or is it just like any trash that's been opened up by a seller or I'm thinking that the hero as QO type ops, but I'll let you answer.
Yeah. So ideally across every business and every pipeline source, it would be a standardized way. The reality is all of these companies don't measure things in a standardized way. So we're going off opportunity creation for these four pipe.
We're looking at just a number of opportunities generated. When we start actually drilling into the data, we definitely look at what we define as hero pipeline, but not all companies and the data set can get that data or get that through their data. So we are working on a standardized way to do this across businesses, because I think that's one thing to call out. But yes, when you're doing this in your business, I would highly recommend to do this off of your hero opportunity, which you can calculate for any pipeline source.
You can calculate for outbound at what stage is my hero opportunity and maybe at stage four. And then that would be how you would calculate it. Does that answer your question, David? I think you do.
Yes. And what you say about normalizing around 20% of opportunity is kind of the answer. But the question comes up because increasingly one is reading, hearing the idea of bypassing the lead object altogether and just creating opportunity objects and building out from there. So you might use an account process and you've got 500 data counts.
So there's an opportunity object open for all of them. But the data isn't, you don't want to use that open date. What you're suggesting is when some kind of opportunity gets to the 25 or 20% hero marker, that's when you need to trigger that date, which then therefore means you probably want to have an associated date for when you get to that point. If you haven't created that already, it makes it much easier for you so that you can go back and know what that date was when it happened.
I had to present agree. I had the same experience in the last company. We were pretty liberal and getting pipeline open, basically a conversation. So to your point, like you started looking at, you started calculating this on when pipeline was open, it would skew versus trying to find a 25% kind of stage, what best stage to stage three instead of highly recommend that.
Yeah, we recommend to actually stamp date stamp all of your opportunity stage progressions because you will see like your hero date might change. Last year, your hero date might have been stage two, and then you started creating demand, running better programs or your outbound got more efficient. Now, for pipe, it's stage three, but outbound is actually stage four. So that might vary also by pipeline source versus nuance there, which we have some interesting ways to calculate all that, which we'll be publishing in the future, timeline TV.
We're working on it for you guys. Let's just say that. All right, let's just jump into the data. So you guys have had some time to kind of look at this.
Here's a couple, just like when I look at the data, just like Carl said, Company A, like hmm, outbound's got a higher average AR than inbound in pipe funnel, but pipe is generating more opportunities at a higher win rate and a faster time to close. So that's essentially why their pipeline velocity is higher. So curious Carl, in your perspective, from like why outbound might have a higher AR, because that was a little surprising to me, I would normally think that, but I'm just a marketer over here. What does the sales guy think about that?
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I was actually surprised in the opposite direction that pipe outperformed outbound from an AR perspective in some of the other companies. Yeah, it makes sense because in outbound, you can just be a lot more surgical with who you choose to open conversations with, right? Even when you're running really good demand, and demand creation, your website's dialed in, your ICP is dialed in, you still kind of get what you get that comes inbound.
So when you have good demand, Jen, in place, it frees up the outbound team, the sales team to not have to spray and pray, right? So that they can actually be like, okay, you know what, a lot of my quotas hit from inbound, so I can choose to make the margin by going outbound and working with my SDR team to be actually strategic. When you don't have good demand, what you see in organizations is the outbound team with the sales team has to make up for all of it. They have to create demand, they have to capture demand, they basically have to do the work of marketing.
And what you get is a lot of spray and a lot of the outreach that we all in this call, for the most part, hate. Again, good demand, Jen leads to actually improving your outbound because now as a seller, you're like, cool, I'm probably going to hit quota up potentially off of just inbound most quarters. So I can go and hunt really strategic accounts and have a plan and have the time to think through really creative outbound motions, etc, which results, I think, in those higher AR amount that you see there. That's one reason that I believe is why we see that in Company A.
Definitely not being the chatterers with you there as well. Company B is interesting. So they have a couple more pipeline sources and a little bit more of a mature organization. They've got four pipeline sources here.
You'll see actually their partner technically has the higher ARR, but it's actually pretty similar between pipe outbound and partner like within $1,000, $2,000. So ARR is pretty similar between outbound and pipe. However, win rate and sales cycle pipe is outperforming everyone, which is leading to the higher pipeline velocity. But this is interesting.
You can see the amount of outbound opportunities is much higher even compared to pipe, right? So when I looked at this, I'm thinking like, how much is this costing Company B to have double the amount of these opportunities open at a lower win rate, same ARR. And that's where my thought would go next. It's like, how much is this costing the business to run outbound versus pipe?
And then start looking at that, that customer position costs against the value of the pipeline. So that was like where I went to a little bit on this one. Curious if that Cassidy or Carly have any thoughts on this company based on data versane? I can share a thought.
Yeah, you're actually right. I mean, as a sales leader, when I look at that number of ops, 1600 to only close 7% and they're taking, I mean, what is that 30? percents longer to close? That's catastrophic.
You know, you got to imagine how much time sellers are spending working those. It's just like floods the pipe. I got to forecast those with my sales manager and tell them all these good things that are happening when really they're not. That is like the cost, like you said, Sydney, there is the cap on those 7% of deals for highly paid salespeople.
Who salespeople are paid some of the highest amounts in any organization. And so when you break down into an hourly rate, how much time is invested into deals there that are never won? That's super frustrating. Also, just like, you know, I think about, like I say, prayers, right, for Company B sales team, because you got to think about the morale too.
How many deals do I have to run to win? One that's exhausting, right? The morale is probably pretty low, actually, this company on the sales team. And I would expect that they likely don't, they have pretty high turnover.
They're probably not like a super high revenue score for their sales. Just looking at some of these numbers. So that's the first thing that I noticed. And then obviously, as if I was a CEO of this company, I'm like, now what are we even doing on outbound, right?
For 12 million in pipeline velocity and the cost of that, it's probably not even necessarily a profitable endeavor. Yeah, when I look at B, I'm like, this feels like what I would assume would be a normal set of metrics for outbound. And when I look at like A and C, I'm actually impressed with some of the numbers when it comes to outbound. And it seems like they're running a pretty efficient process.
I think we're always going to see the sales like a longer on outbound, good inbound. I think to Carl's point in some of the commentary, we would tend to hypothesize that ACD or AR would be able to hire on outbound and win way, going to be lower. And I think A and C hold up really well in terms of the motion versus what I would consider in B as kind of a typical outbound process, what I would expect to see across more companies, just hype off of this anyway. And there's a lot of variables that go into these companies, like how they were set up, how they were structured in the beginning, how they scaled their initial business, right, to wherever they are now.
When did they start their outbound sales motion? When did they even start their marketing motion? There's many different variables, which is super interesting here. On company C, you'll see like the win rate very much higher on Pike.
One interesting thing that I was shocked over, I think we all were shocked over was the Low Intent Lead Gen AR was actually highest, although pretty similar to a pipe and outbound. But in this example, outbound and Low Intent Lead Gen pipeline velocities are very similar. And then you've got Pike being the top performer of the business. So that's an interesting conclusion.
This is atypical. We don't typically see this with most companies running Low Intent Lead Gen whatsoever. But for where this company is and what they have been doing and how they're approaching it, doesn't surprise me a little bit there. I'm obviously we got to keep this anonymous.
Is there any on color or commentary you can give the kind of a journey of some of these companies? Like where do they come from? Where would you consider them and kind of their move? Obviously everybody knows where a company that's moved will be trying to move companies more declared intent inbound demand that converts the revenue.
Have some of these feel like they're in various stages of that journey on if there's any kind of commentary you can give on that. Yeah, so definitely company is kind of typically what we see has started with outbound as their main motion. And they have been investing in marketing for quite some time. But actually kind of recently started looking at demand creation around three to five months ago.
So if we rerun this, I would definitely expect to see pipeline velocity even further increase. Company B started their journey probably with like a more of a demand generation about a year ago. And we're definitely seeing that payoff and pipeline velocity compared to their outbound channel. And their percentage of revenue is actually going up in the business percent of revenue source from marketing in the website.
That contribution percentage is much higher than it was two years ago. So there's always evolutions to where any customers, because client see this company, huge, huge investment in a traditional organic SEO in the beginning and now we're shifting to more dark social pre-demand channels, which is super interesting. Hey, Sydney, there's some questions in the chat that are really good on how we're defining low intent lead gen. And I sort of defined it in the chat as like your direct response, you know, awareness channels, deep up downloads, demo requests, marketing source.
Is that how you define that or did I totally lie? Yeah, and you did not like Carl. So thanks for not lying on a live event. I appreciate that.
Yeah, it's as we into low intent as someone not asking to talk to your sales team. And then lead gen is the method in which you're going about capturing that contact. So that's going to be your ebooks, any exchange of data for content or a webinar for any exchange that is not proactively declaring intent. They're asking to talk to your sales team, that your sales team's just going to go follow up with those.
So like a traditionally gen model, which is pretty so empty. Well, how most people define empty wells? Yes, which is why we recommend that you have your pipe conversions, which is your declared intent conversions. And one insight that we'll get to is should you even be passing these leads or should you just let sales be doing out?
We're a little halfway through. So we should jump to the next couple of companies here. Yeah, here's a good question. I just saw so how is low intent lead gen different from events?
Aren't all events a sub case of lead, low intent legion? They can be. But so you're generating leads typically, we separate out events and field because you will have multiple typically budgets are separated that way. Teams are sometimes separated that way.
But you can have field events and things and not be just capturing leads and immediately following up. I would say that's definitely the old school model is like how many badge cans are we going to get? But you can actually host meetings and engagements and events without the traditional lead gen model, which is why we've separated it out because that's definitely where the future I think of events and field is going. Of how do we create great experiences and then how can we track the people that interact with those experiences in person, virtual things like that?
I'm sure we can do a whole thing on events and field. What does that look like? It's very much different at a lot of companies, but we'll agree with you Max, like traditionally, just like get as many badge cans as you can, passing the sales team, throw them an email nurture and see what we can get up. Yeah, where's Nick?
I've been in this chat right now. I would say, Sidi, I would guess you'd also want to track these separately because the cost of acquisition would be different as well. So you want to be able to pair obviously pipe performance, but then kind of acquisition cost to that. Yeah, acquisition costs, you're going to see different like funnel engagement rates too.
Like you're going to see different pipeline velocity. So I definitely think events and field like have the potential of done correctly or done in a more biocentric way, experient way can definitely kind of be a great, great, efficient source of revenue for your business. But historically, they have just like most marketing historically has just all been about gathering email contacts and having sales all that. What's up with company F?
What's your story? Yeah, so this one company F, clearly they only have eight outbound opportunities for a whole year. So they have a very small sales team not super focused on inbound. They've been historically marketing driven marketing led in a lead gen approach and about six months ago, about six, eight months ago have just kind of started on their journey to transition from lead gen to create demand strategy.
So that's an interesting one you can see like not much going on on outbound. You'll see the win right there is that's the only case in this small data sample or win rate is higher, but it's based on eight opportunities. So it's easy compared to 491. So take that with a grain of salt in that in that data set.
We wanted to show you guys multiple different data sets real data, real company setups. Okay, this one's interesting company E has significantly higher opportunities 229 versus 36 compared to their pipe website declared intent. 4.4% win rate. Ooh, Carl legitimately asked me if this data was correct when he saw that, but their pipeline velocity is actually higher in outbound mainly due to the fact that these are huge, huge deals, right?
Almost 150 to 200k ARR. So this company has been traditionally sales led all outbound and just recently has started their marketing engine. So right now is a good benchmark, right? Like, okay, right now here's our pipeline velocity.
Here's our numbers between outbound and pipe and then quarter over quarter and year over year, we want to check in on these and we should. If you're doing marketing effectively, you should see this pipeline velocity increase and then eventually increase above outbound. One seventh of the opportunities, but pipeline velocity is about what? 55% of outbound.
So it's a big, I mean, the potential is there if obviously this company can drive more opportunities on inbound. Yeah, they're clearly able to close like hit revenue targets outbound. Just imagine they could do it a lot more efficiently with that win rate of 21, almost 22%. And if we just scale the number of opportunities and educating the market correctly, it's a huge growth number for this company.
So there's a good question in the chat for Max. He said, do we often find that it's difficult to kind of scale type or inbound with these companies that have really big kind of longer sales cycle enterprise deals? That's a good question. We get this a lot, which is another reason why we wanted to show a bunch of data for a bunch of different types of companies.
So the metrics are the same, the strategy is similar, right? We always tailor strategy for the company and the personas of course, but it just takes a little bit longer time. So if you're running 160 day sales cycle compared to a 50 day sales cycle, you're not going to see some of these metrics of qualified pipeline, hero pipeline, all these types of things, it's going to take a while before you're going to see that actually impact. So I would say number one, you have to have the mindset and the philosophy locked in at the leadership level, because you need the time to prove this out.
Of course, there's other metrics that you can look at that are more leading indicators. Are we getting more conversations with our customers? Are we educating more people in the buying committee? Are we able to see increased qualified meetings booked for our inbound pipe funnel?
Those are leading indicators, but you definitely need to have that leadership support, or else stuff's going to get cut before it has enough time to even hit pipeline. Also, sitting to add on that, a company, so interesting, if I was a CEO, I would be fascinated by the fact that pipeline velocity for pipe is not that far behind. So when you think about the math of the equation, the pipeline velocity equation, and a 21% win rate and a 4.4% win rate, it's actually going to take that many more ops, you match or tie outbound in this case. And I'm at the make wild guesses here.
But if you were to bring in CAC into this equation, pipes can scale likely a lot more affordably and profitably than outbound. You know, it's one for one, it's linear growth, you have to add a salesperson to get a million bucks a year in revenue or whatever your quotas are, where it's not the same. It's much more nonlinear with marketing. And so I think being able to punch this in and tell this story to your executive team, it's like, we don't need to actually reinvent the wheel with marketing.
If we got this to 45 ops, it would probably be really, really getting a lot closer to the 4.5 million dollar pipeline velocity mark as outbound with a much smaller marketing team than the sales team. So anyways, my additional peanuts from the gallery. I love it. I love the peanuts.
I think what you're outlining is very important though, like what is the equal comparison there? And like, yes, you would love to have your inbound generating as much as many opportunities as outbound. But that's the power pipeline velocity, being able to look at that comparison to see from a least a presidency perspective. And they compare that to your cost structure, more than you sit in these kind of two methods.
Max, I would say I don't know if there's any, I think the hypothesis you have of like, they're unbiased as hard to have high ACV products coming inbound. I think that's a real kind of diff or hypothesis. But in my experience, not seeing any evidence that's true. We are a high ACV company and all our revenue comes inbound as an example.
And my past company, we're selling hundreds of thousand dollar deals on inbound. It is double up. Nice, Max. All right.
So we're just kind of some key takeaways. We looked at a bunch of different data, bunch of different unique setups, but when we were kind of looking at this holistically, there's some key takeaways that we aggregated. So WinRite was higher in all but one company for pipe. So that's what we would expect to see.
I don't think anyone, Gassie or Carla or I were surprised by that. ACV was higher for outbound sources or very similar in values. And Carla touched on this earlier as why we think that might be. They can definitely go kind of search the best opportunities they're going to get there before the buyer is researching and educating themselves.
And they can really give that personalized one to one learning of the prospect and like what they're going to need and recommend a more whole solution rather than the prospect maybe educating themselves and thinking they only need one thing when they come inbound. Sales cycle was an interesting one. So most of the time, the sales cycle was lower in pipe, but we did have a couple outliers there. So there wasn't really, I mean, this is a small data set as well.
And then overall annual pipeline velocity was higher in five of the six companies we touched on why the one that was higher was outbound was very, very, very early. And then this one was a big one, the one thing that I wanted to touch on that we analyze low-intently gen all the time outside of these six companies. And this is pretty consistent with what we see is that low-intently gen is almost lower performing or the same as outbound. So that begs the question of like, why not just go let yourselves team do outbound right?
Like what are your thoughts on that Carla? Yeah, I mean, I always get, I'm afraid to share my thoughts on this sometimes. But you know, I, we run this data in our own sales cycle and our own sales process at RefineLives. We look at this data and a lot of times I ask myself the question, why is there a marketing team at this organization?
You know, because if they're running low-intently gen and it's like, doesn't even perform as good as outbound, I'm like, what's the point of the marketing team? You know, I can't always say that. Obviously I'll laugh. But that is the reality.
I think that's why a lot of marketers struggle to gain influence in their organizations or build trust with a C-suite to come and go and run like really cool at new like growth experiments, etc. It's because they're stuck on this like low-intently gen hamster wheel and the math is pretty clear that it just doesn't add up. It's not even as valuable to the organization or to the pipeline as a bunch of a handful of SDRs, just making cold calls, right? So it's really important.
And when you look at the math, it's definitely humbling and you have to ask yourself, okay, what is it that we're doing here? And how do we transform to begin to gain a little bit of more trust, you know, so that we can be at least better than outbound? And again, if nothing else, when you do really good demand, and you're focusing on high-intense demand, it improves outbound, right? That's like, outbound doesn't improve marketing, but marketing can not only improve and create pipeline for itself, for the organization in and of itself, but it also improves outbound.
It's incredibly strategic and invaluable to move away, you know, from low-intently gen. So anyways, I don't want to offend anybody. I got to check the chat now. I'm scared.
But I'll jump in on that, Carl. I think if you want to change the mindset and your company of what marketing does, they give up low-intently gen and hand it over to the sales team. And then that will force you to create demand that drives high-intense inbound demand that you turn the revenue. If your marketer didn't try to explain both of these things to the CEO or the leadership team or the board, it's confusing.
So just do the analysis and show them there's no reason to collect email addresses to get into sales, but sales can do this more efficiently. And I would argue, and I know there's some debate here, cheaper these days. They're running low-intently gen. Give it up.
Give it to sales, especially if you have a decent outbound engine already. And then you focus on creating demand that turns into high-intense inbound. So, Cassie, we had a good comment here. John Beasley is challenging or disagreeing with this.
John, we love it. He said low-intently gen is cheaper than sales. And I would argue that. I don't know if I agree with that.
Maybe in some organizations, but a lot of the math that I look at, John, I don't know if people can unmute or not. I'm happy to hear from John and hear from his experience. But a lot of times, we'll look at these funnels from marketing teams that come inbound and they're spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on paid advertising to get these conversions at three, four, five hundred bucks a pop that never close. And it's maybe the marketing team is smaller than the sales team, but there's a lot of spend happening to generate this contact information, essentially, that you could get from somebody like Rocketreach for 30 cents, right?
I can get Cassie's mobile number and email for 30 cents, if I'm an SDR from Rocketreach, where his conversion on an ebook is going to cost, I don't know. City, what's an average conversion cost I've linked in like three, four, five hundred bucks? Not that high aggregated, but I mean, I'm linked in. You're going to pay around 100 to $150 cost per dollar, obviously, there's some companies that can probably get pretty efficient around 40 bucks, but certain personas, you're going to pay for that like, hi, we.
John, you're on mute, sir. We'd love to hear from you. Any additional thoughts? We love it.
Yeah, thanks guys. I mean, what I've seen out there is that it often depends on who's running the low intense side of things. If it's sales and they own it and they go hire a bunch of very inexperienced SDRs that matrix to the sales rep that supports them, roll up to the sales manager, odds are they're just an extension of the salesperson doing cold calling, doing cold outbound. They may leverage what marketing has, but it's often viewed as cheaper than a sales guy sitting and banging the phone and getting nowhere than having them do it.
I think when you move that function, the SDR function to marketing, they're much more inclined to try to get them engaged in things like following up on webinars, following up on e-book downloads, really trying to more financially justify what marketing is doing. That was why I was looking at that. It's cheaper than a sales rep, but again, I think it has to do with where do they report up to if it's for marketing? There's a lot more cost associated with that to back up what they're doing.
That helps. Great thoughts. I think in some instances, it definitely can be cheaper to run it for marketing when you've got a couple of marketers at a maybe entry level. You're spending not a lot of money in your ad platforms.
Sales can definitely be bloated. I wish if Sydney have ever got to it. It's pretty difficult to calculate CAC. I think especially because we don't have access to financials necessarily for our customers, but a holistic CAC study would be fascinating to do if we ever were able to do.
We can get there in a roundabout way, look at how many sellers are on the team, et cetera. We know how much they're spending in ads, but still a shot in the dark. But yeah, it's fascinating. I think you owe me a debate on a podcast about this topic.
Bring hands on the cost. I'm more to come on that. I think we can do some back-to-the-end blow map and have a good discussion on this. Yeah, I think we could.
We try to do it in our own sales processes and look at how many salespeople, et cetera. Yeah, it always depends on how much salespeople are paying too. You could say you'd be like, okay, you've got 20 SDRs and their OTs are, let's say, 90k, but if none of them ever hit their numbers and the company does get off cheap, it's really just paying a bunch of kids, not kids. These are grown because these are grownups, but I guess I'm aging myself.
I'm dating myself. But yeah, if you're only paying these people 40, 50k a year to generate a lot of just low-intent legion, then yeah, that's affordable, except for cheaper than advertising. So I take away, it would be, I would just like to see you with debaters. I think you should do both.
I think you should have a strategy that's high-intent inbound driven by marketing, and you should have a strong outbound sales motion. This seems, the data seems to kind of imply that you can run these two things efficiently together. It's a good combination. My question to you is, one, do you agree with that?
And two, like, cactically, would you or you fish in the same pond on the strategy? Would you go outbound to the same kind of audience or segments that you're going out inbound to, if that makes any sense? Any advice on that from what you've seen kind of best practice in the field? Yeah, I definitely think that they can work together once your marketing team is focused on that high intent.
I think historically, it's been a clash because it's low intent and we're trying to take credit for inviting over credit, right? If you're thinking about it as one revenue team, those are just almost two different approaches. So it's definitely not like, high-first outbound sucks. You shouldn't be doing it.
You need to probably do both efficiently. But I kind of look at it like a Venn diagram, right? You got your market, your core, ICP that you want to go after. Marketing can support creating demand for a wider market, and then your outbound team can then focus on a subset of that market, right?
So it's like a circle within a circle, if you will. And they can really specialize or niche into certain areas or focus on certain industries or products where marketing's job is to create massive demand. And outbound can create demand too. Sales teams can create demand as well.
They just do it in a different way. They also capture demand in a different way than a marketing team would, right? So, yeah, I would say that strategy needs to be an alignment of what's marketing focusing on. And then also, if sales is focusing on this piece of the pilot, is there activities or people that can support that as well?
That's on the marketing team. So we had a comment here, and I love you to kind of address it, if you wouldn't mind. And that is, I made this comment about just changing the mindset of the organization around marketing. But what if you're not asked as a marketer to do that?
What if you're like, you're in this situation and you want to change? How would you see maybe taking this type of analysis, either in your own company or at a benchmark, to try to drive that change? Well, nobody's asking you to change. That makes any sense.
I think that's the difference between a business leader and whatever position you're currently in. If you can show that you are thinking about the business and not just your role, your age is going to get a lot further in your career in general. But you should take credit standing up and saying, I did this analysis. This is not profitable.
Here's the strategy that we should do. And even if you're a marketing manager, talk to your CMO about it, talk to your VP of sales about it. I mean, I think that's like how you really make an impact on an organization. Most of the time, people are not going to ask you to do things.
Like you had to figure out what I should be doing. That's going to make the biggest impact, thinking like a CEO or thinking like a leader of a business. So just do it. Don't wait for anyone to ask.
Yeah, I would add that you need to be able to show clearly that what is being done does not work. And that's very difficult. You may be in this role for a year or year and a half and you're basically going and saying, you know what? Like, here's what I've learned.
And what we're doing is not effective. And this is why. And if you have the data and you show that to senior leadership, and you have a plan for what to do or try as an alternative, most leaders I know will lean into that. But you also have to put your ass on the line and kind of say, listen, what we've been doing has been working.
And this is why I get it. Yeah, we have a bunch of chatter in the chat about the stuff. You know, marketing leaders, like trying to bring transformation to their works. And you've got C suite that is just assigning them to basically sales support, build decks for sales, support them, get them leads to call, et cetera.
And it's a really challenging, we've got a lot of content on that that we can share out is a challenging position to be in. I think the Cassidy's point is how can I run a small experiment? How can we prove with data that what we do isn't enough to produce the outcomes that we need to produce to win to lead our category, whatever it is, which goals are important to the C suite. And then, you know, how do we run small experiments?
How can I do something really low cost? That isn't like, I want to transform the entire marketing strategy. I want to go higher with fine labs or I want to go and do like these large lifts. What's like one thing that can be done affordably?
Cassidy pushes me to do this all the time, because I always want to just go buy new software and hire more people for stuff. And Cassidy, right, you are you this, you tell me this all the time, like what is one thing that we can do that's next to free that proves or validates a hypothesis so we can get positive signals on something, and then we can begin to put a little bit more financial resources behind it. I think that's where any leader that's maybe middle management or not a C suite like me, or a lot of marketing directors, etc. Then I have to start there.
Side note to that if you're selling sales or marketing software, Carl is a sucker man. He'll pick up a phone, he'll answer your email, he'll pitch his boss. Oh, here we go. Yeah, he'll make your numbers like good.
I love to go call myself. He's on my LinkedIn profile. I want to hear all of them. We have a kind of question from Alex about following up on like kind of measurement as a specific their question is if you if you're not running down on the ebook ads, or you're trying to prove an experiment, maybe, how do you measure the success of paid marketing campaigns if you're not doing lead gen?
We have a lot of content on this as well, but what we do is, number one, you can set up some tracking and platform. It's not going to you can get some view through data. It's not going to be that great in social platforms. But number two is we look at, okay, our advertising costs on link on paid social is here or just in paid in general, and how much are we increasing our high-intense demo requests, right?
And then we look at that as a advertising cost per type conversion, for example. And as we shift the strategy and as we run experiments, are we able to see that scale at a cost per type conversion we're comfortable with? And then the second answer is self-report attribution. If you need to be able to show and your marketing later, your business later is not bought in and they're really caught up on attribution, implement self-report attribution, which is how did you hear about us on your form?
And you will start saying something that came in organic and direct said LinkedIn, I know what do you know? One month ago, you started on gating all of your content and educating your buyers, and they're coming to you and bound. Those are the two ways that we run that and justify the spend and can map it back to the strategy. Oh my gosh, there's so many questions you guys.
I can't even keep up with this chat. I love it. Let's see here, we've got another one. See, Todd, I don't know if there's any other ones.
I'm just scrolling through. Okay. There's one city from a while back around just, how do you think about pipeline velocity for really long cycle times? Does anything matter?
What if it's like nine to 18 months, sales cycle link? Just extend the timeframe for kind of the calculation or how would you think about that in terms of pipeline velocity? Is it changing anything? Or no?
Yeah, you could change your time period, right? We did annual, but you're dividing your sales cycle by the time period that you're measuring it. So even if your sales cycle is higher and you're dividing it by a quarter, the calculation will adjust. It's not you're only dividing it by 365 days every time.
Obviously, you probably want to look at like six months or annual when you have a much longer sales cycle, but the calculation takes into account the time period that you're looking at it. And so someone also had a question on here, like, why aren't you showing the calculations behind the data on the slide earlier in the presentation? We did show the calculation behind the data pipeline velocity. We'll drop a YouTube link in here as well, how we calculate.
It's like a deep dive video of how to like literally pull the reports, types of reports and calculate it. So we'll definitely drop that in here as well. See if I can find it while we're in here. Cindy, we've got a couple details, questions from Connor Griffith around.
What are we including in pipe and like our heroes, etc, like high-intent conversions and he's asking live, so do we lump in paid and organic hand raisers into pipe? Yeah, it's blended. That's why we look at the pipeline source and not the lead source or the channel or the program level. So we're looking how many people came to the website, organic direct paid referral, whatever, and filled out your declared intent form on your website.
The reason we do that is because it's a shift in the mindset. When you're looking at how are my core go-to-market strategies performing, you need to look at it blended and then you use the program and the channel level data and the capture demand and create demand attribution to then optimize your programs within those channels. You're going to be running a bunch of different things to generate pipe conversions, right? So we use that more for optimization and then we also acknowledge that a lot of the stuff that is effective cannot be tracked.
So if you're only using data points in your CRM, you're going to be missing a lot too. So short answer, it's blended through all sources and that's kind of the shift of to pipeline source. Hey, Cindy, last question I have for myself is like, what next one is data? Are we going to try to do this across larger sample size?
So you publish it? What's next? Do you have to put it on the spot? There wouldn't be an event that you didn't.
So let's go. Though I would definitely say we are looking to expand this. So first and foremost, we're going to be releasing a data standard pretty soon where we have a little bit more standardized way to pull all of this data. And then once we do that, we're going to aggregate it and start publishing some pretty cool insights.
So all of that is coming. But another key action is that you can pull this data yourself on your business and that would be a huge takeaway. If you've never seen some of this data, start pulling some of this and start understanding your business from a pipeline source perspective as well. Great.
Matthew, I got your question. Why don't we, we can take that offline and be able to post on it for an episode. It will tell you in on it. It's just looking for maybe some good pilot examples of creating demand that you can use to get started.
So yeah, follow up with that on a post. Awesome, everyone. I know we're a little bit over, but thanks everyone for staying. I hope you found it valuable and we'll be stacking growth live again next in two weeks.