Welcome back to the second growth podcast on Cassidy Shield Growth Officer at Refine Labs. In this episode, my co-host, Sydney Toriancaro, joined me for our first Stacking Growth Live event, where we chatted about the five biggest good of our current mistakes we see today, and how to overcome them with your team. The conversation was lively, and the audience engaged, I'm confident you will enjoy it. Welcome everybody, this is our first Stacking Growth Live session, we're all happy to have you here.
I'm Cassidy Shield, I'm the Chief Growth Officer at Refine Labs. Nice to meet all of you for this way. I'm having a chance to connect with. What I love about podcasts is that, from a selfish perspective, you can invite whoever you want to come talk to you, and that's what we did today.
So I'm thrilled to have Sydney, Tori, and Carl on the podcast. We're also co-host of this podcast, so we'll be hearing much more from them in the future. The topic we want to get into is, the five biggest go-to-market mistakes we've all made or are making today, and what we can do about them. So I look forward to having that discussion.
The way we'll run this is, we'll start a dialogue between the four of us, going through these different mistakes that we've uncovered, and kind of sharing our perspectives and so forth. The idea is to get the audience warmed up, so you can start jumping in and asking questions and bring your own expertise to the conversation, which we very much would appreciate as we go forward. So with that, to get started, what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna ask each one of the guests to introduce themselves, and I'm gonna ask everybody, and something about themselves, so that you may not know. So I'm going to start with Sydney.
Hi, everyone, Sydney Waterfall, VP of Demand here at Refine Labs. Something you may not know about me, probably some of you might know, but for the listeners, they probably don't know. I have a mini farm, and I just got pigs, and we're raising pigs, so that's a fun fact. That's amazing.
My mother or my daughter and my wife are be jealous. That's their lifelong goals to have a farm. Tori, you're up. Hey, everybody.
Tori can like VP of Demand at Refine Labs, and my fun fact for today, I'll continue on with Sydney Steen, who's a dog who sounds a lot like a pig. He's a French bulldog, and he's one eye. His name's Filbert. He's not in here with me today, but maybe future episode although I haven't joined me in the background.
Make it out loud enough. And last, I'll turn it over to you, who I like to refer to as the one and only Carl. Carl, go for it. Hey everyone, Carl Ferrera, Director of Sales here at Refine.
One thing that a lot of people know about me that leads into the thing that people don't know about me is first one is I'm a dad, so I have two little girls, and so what people don't know is that when you become a dad, you really like lose like your own identity, and all of your hobbies, and everything kind of goes away. So what you have to do is kind of invent new hobbies. So I actually solve Rubik's cubes for like at speed, and so if anybody ever wants to compete, we'll do it live on LinkedIn, and we'll go for it, and I'm open to challenges, so feel free to shoot me a message and we can do it live. I talked to Carl five times a day, and he has never dropped that fact in any of our conversations.
That's impressive, Carl. It's impressive and embarrassing, so it's like I have very mixed feelings about it. So I only share it selectively, and I thought today was a good time. Between your soccer skills and your Rubik's cube skills, you'd be my son's idol, so I'll have to mention this.
I'll teach him. All right, great. For me, I guess fun fact is I have more animals in the house than I have kids, I have three kids, and we have five animals, I wonder one roof. Okay, let's get this thing started.
So five biggest go-to-market mistakes. When we sat down and we talked about this, we're gonna start with number one. I mean, we feel like number one kind of sets the tone for the other four, and as we get through this, I think what you'll start to see form is maybe a framework for how to think about this as you go back to your organizations and your marketing teams. So the first thing that we wanna highlight is that we largely as B2B marketers have forgotten how to create demand.
And so we wanna get through as this notion of what is creation demand versus capture demand. And we've all seen the stats when we think about capture demand at any one time, there's one to 3% of a target market out there looking to buy something that you may be selling. And there's 97 to 99% of the market is not looking to buy. And that is the opportunity we see four B2B marketers and all of us to be more aggressive and more observant of how do we go about and create demand in the markets that we're going after.
And in fact, if you go back and you look at the definition of marketing for the histories of Peter, and so forth and so on, it all ties into this idea of creating and building demand for your company and for your products. And so that's the first thing we wanna get into. I'm gonna put Tory on the spot here. Because what I want him to do is I want him to define what do we mean by creation of demand and capture demand?
He just did a very good podcast on this. So if you wanna go in depth, you can listen to 45 minutes of Tory going through this with our team, the intricate details, but for this audience, Tory, take it away. Yeah, sure. And by the way, it's not 45 minutes of me talking, thanks goodness.
I've got a couple of my very intelligent colleagues that are really leading the way. I'm just there kind of guiding them along. So yeah, with demand creation, right? It's about playing a long-term game, being forward thinking, trying to create a brand that is notable, one that is synonymous with the challenges that your clients, your audience are trying to solve.
So that if you're consistent and you're putting your message, your content, your value proposition out there in front of them, when it does come time for them to enter that buying stage, they're gonna know exactly how to get in touch with you and who you are. The demand capture is exactly how you get them in, right? And so it's that conversion point, the number of tactics that are a little bit more short-term focus, but that are intended to find the people that are raising their hand, or those that are sending some other type of signal suggesting that there is legitimate and short-term buying intent, and finding a way to get them in touch with the people that can solve their problem, and help guide them to the purchase that hopefully they're looking to make that your team is certainly willing to help them really make an intelligent and educated fashion. So I think that's probably a high-level way to summarize it, but yeah, we could certainly go into some deeper nuances of that.
Thanks, Tori. So why then do most of us not focus on the creation of demand and most of us than focus on the capture? And maybe I'll turn this to Sydney just to kind of have her way in on this topic, and can you give us a perspective of creation? I think this is why we got into marketing to create demand and do these things that are building brands and sustainable agencies for the companies we're at, but then the reality is we don't do that.
And so why? I think the why is, I've reflected I look back at my career and what I've done at marketing and other companies, and it's literally what I've been told to do, what I've been educated to do is really focus on that conversion point and focus on getting the lead in. And I think a lot of teams have just naturally been trained to do this, not even marketing teams, like if you think too about this can apply to sales teams as well, but really the whole business has been focused on, at least in the last 10 years, I would say has been really focused on capturing the demand. I mean, people say like, oh, brand awareness, right?
And that's not exactly what we mean when we talk about create demand, but how technology vendors have been marketing to us, how we've been trained to do marketing, what's been ingrained in our heads has been fully around capturing the lead and then getting information and getting someone straight to a buying decision or buying conversation. So that's something that I had to like unlearn and rethink about, think about logically of like, why that's not maybe the best area to spend 90% of my time in anymore as a marketer. Maybe I need to start transitioning that to 50, 50, 50, and then maybe start moving that percentage up towards capture demand to really play the long game. So I think the main two reasons is that's kind of how it's always been.
And also that's how all of the KPIs that marketing teams have been measured on are only around creating demand and what you can, or I mean, capturing demand and what you can track when you are running those types of channels and those types of plays. So I only thought it was the sales teams fault. And so Carl, as I represented in sales, I mean, isn't this what you want from marketing? Just give you the leads, just capture what's out there, people who are willing to buy right now, what's your reaction to that?
Contrary to popular belief, I think we don't want that. I've spent many, many hours combing through earlier in my career, combing through MQLs and things like that. It's a huge time suck. And it's like there's guilt there too, because it's like, Missyney got these for me, you know, like I need to get through them, you know, as like a part of my duty as seller.
But you know, at the end of the day, it kind of wells down to incentives and I'm incentivized to close deals and marketing's incentives and measurement is maybe not always aligned to that. And that's where I think that this going to happens, where it's like, there may be a line to a measurement that says, you're successful if you generate this many MQLs. And then sales is successful when it's like closed deals, right? It's what's in the pipeline.
And so when those aren't matched up and they don't have the same goals, there's a lot of problems. There's a lot of waste. You have SDRs doing a lot of work that doesn't produce a lot of fruit. And so yeah, that's my position on that.
That's why I had chatted incentives and measurement that really kind of guides why I believe that companies over-index, not just marketing teams, but sales teams do over-index on demand capture activities versus creation activities. What I find interesting in this discussion is that it implies there's an assumption that there's a lot of demand to capture. Yet oftentimes we're all in companies who want to change the world. Most of the folks here are probably in early stage companies or mid stage companies where you join this company because you believe in the mission and how they're going to make the world better place.
And that usually manifests itself in one of two ways. There's this notion of you have decided to create a category as a company. This often happens maybe 10, 20% of the time where you've built something that's fundamentally new, that there is no demand for to capture. So by default, you need to be able to create it.
The other type of company out there is one who's redefining the current segment. So it's not that you're trying to compete in the mature statement, the segment going against the incumbents. It's what you're really trying to do is carve off a peach of that segment and redefine it or reposition it, of which case you also have to create the man for that redefinition of the segment that you're creating. So the paradox I find in small companies or emerging companies who want to change the world is there is no demand to capture first.
You have to create it first. So that's a monologue. My end, what I would love to do is take that and put it back to Tori and say, how do we actually do that? We know this is a problem.
We're incented to capture the man. We know for most of us there isn't a lot of demand to capture. It's really about creating the demand and then capturing it. How do we change our mindset to be able to do that?
How do we have those conversations with senior leadership? Tori, putting you back on the spot. Yeah. I think the mindset change that has to start certainly with the folks at the top, that senior leadership, that's not always an easy task is changing the minds of those folks.
They really look at a lot of their portfolio, their investments from dollars in dollars out perspective. So if I invest this much money, this is exactly what I expect to see return to know how quickly it's going to be returned. I think a lot of marketers and sellers and anyone focused on this kind of go-to-market strategy needs to really think about is, how do we go about changing their mind? How do we go about helping them understand that this is much more of a long-term game?
And I think the, tying it back into what Carl was saying before, how do we incentivize the right behaviors? So it's about getting away from those short-term mindsets, right? Breaking free of the whole MQL hamster wheel that you've heard many of us that are finding out for a long time now and really trying to figure out what is our legitimate total addressable market here? What is the segment that we want to go after?
But more importantly, what's the corner of the marketplace that we know that we can go today and that we can win? And trying to maybe put some numbers behind that, right? Because that's what a lot of our leaders, our boards of directors, our investors are looking for his numbers and data. And so trying to really help them understand that, yes, while we want to sell to everyone, who can we sell into right now?
How can we win right now? And trying to put a little bit of data behind that and saying, okay, this is the group we're going to go after. This is what we feel like is achievable this year. And recognizing that this is a journey and that we're going to be continuing to evolve.
This is time goes on. Not exactly moving the goalposts here, but really thinking about it in terms of an evolution of not just your targets, but your total addressable market. It's a tough challenge that many of us are faced with. And I don't think that there's an easy answer there, but it starts with having those tough conversations with the leadership team and helping them understand that just driving some of these lead-gen numbers and trying to look at things in terms of predictable revenue is not going to get you very far.
You're going to burn out quick and you'll probably burn through your cash even quicker. So one thing I'm going to try to hit on a comment Chris made in the messaging. And that is we've outlined the kind of fundamental shifts. And maybe this gets into our second kind of go-to-market mistake around positioning and messaging in that.
But we're trying to capture the demand. We kind of throw out a net, a big one, and we try to get real people in who are ready to buy what we have. And what you're saying is something different. You're saying, I think, niche down into where you can win first in an emerging market or a new entrant into a small market, win there, so in the pond, and then move out from that.
And so how do you work with clients to do that? Because that's a pretty big shift from like vanilla messaging where you sound like everybody else in the category. And you throw out your e-book at your webinar and you try to get the leads and you get in the car and you say, car, I'll work your magic. What you're trying to say is actually be differentiated in a niche segment and win there first.
And frankly, from what I've seen in my experience is like, marketing isn't great at that level of positioning and messaging and differentiation. Yeah. So one of the tactics that I've used in this exact scenario is looking at, as let's say two different campaigns, right? One of them is going to be your broader, more awareness-focused campaign, the one that's meant to get out in front of the entire audience, your current audience, maybe your future audience as well.
The idea there is to continue putting your brand out there and making sure that you're top of mind. And then the second one, maybe that's where you're getting more granular, right? Where you're trying to find a portion of that market that you're going to go after, making sure that you're messaging, your value proposition, your creative, everything from top to bottom in the campaign is focused on a specific, much more granular detail and letting the data present itself to the leaders, right? Helping them understand that, okay, this broader message, you know, where we're trying to be everything to everyone, sure, we're serving impressions to a lot of people, but we're not getting a ton of engagement.
It's not really driving a lot of traction or inbound to our website, whereas this other campaign, okay, the audience is smaller. But if you look at things in terms of a percentage, we're getting much better engagement with going after something like that. We're starting to really get a sense of, is this corner of the market the right one for us? Are we making sense?
Are we resonating with people and not necessarily pitting the two campaigns against each other, but putting them right next to each other and saying, hey, look at the data for yourself. We can continue going down this path and splitting out our budgets, our funds, our campaigns, our resources in half, or we can double down on this smaller approach that looks like it's starting to gain some traction here. See what comes of it and figure out how we scale up instead of starting broader and scaling down. I like that approach.
I think the kind of takeaway I have that kind of crystallizes this for me is as you move to creating demand, it is going to put a premium on your ability to segment, target, position, and message into those segments. And that in of itself is one of the magic tricks of marketing that you're going to have to flex if you want to create demand. Is that fair thing to say? Yeah, very fair.
So we created this motion that we want to create demand. We're getting better at kind of the segmentation and positioning and targeting and messaging. We keep coming back to this idea of needing to change measurement and kind of the way we measure create versus capture. So Sydney knows this is coming.
I'm going to turn it over to her and to talk about like, how do we do that? Like, how do we do it today when we think about measurement for capture? How do we propose we should think about this as we move to create demand strategy? Yeah, one of my favorite topics as always is a measurement.
So if you think about traditional funnels, probably all the metrics that everyone in here is tracking your MQL, your SQL, all the way down to even pipeline and revenue, all of those, you can only track what attribution vendors or what you have internally at your CRM can attribute, right? Which are capture demand channels. So those are going to be your direct response channels or your direct response campaigns on certain channels. So everything that is currently trackable is skewed and heavily weighted towards capture demand.
So that's how everyone's used to reporting on this by channel, by source, what's the cost per lead, what's the ROI, all of that. And that's how you track capture demand. When you make a shift into creating demand, and obviously you need both, you're not going to just create demand and then have no way to capture it. So you need both.
It's an and. So when you move into this, your metrics and your viewpoint on how this funnel and how you're going to track if the strategy is going to work needs to change. And it doesn't need to completely 180. I would say one of the terms that we kind of talk about internally is hybrid attribution.
So that's the key here is looking at metrics that actually can give you some insights into what's happening on the create demand side, which are often less trackable things, podcasts, this event, text messages, communities, you know, all of the millions of examples that we've reached about tracking those is very hard. So we recommend implementing a field called, how did you hear about us? We call it self-report attribution. That allows you to get insights on what's actually going on, like in this top section here, which before they actually enter into capture demand channels.
So what is actually driving people to learn about you, consume your content, to even enter into a capture demand channel to even Google you, right? If you're waiting for someone to Google a term or a keyword or your brand, you're too late. That's capture demand. You need to focus on educating the market to getting them to come into that.
So that's what self-report attribution can help us understand is what's working well in a less trackable funnel, which would be created and now we still use our normal sources that we're traditionally used to to understand what channels actually capturing the demand. Again, it's an and, not necessarily one or the other, to give you a more holistic picture of your entire strategy and how it's working together. Now when we get into the funnel, instead of looking at things very segmented and channel-specific and only looking at things from capture demand sources, we want to look at things blended and holistically and from a high intent perspective. We recommend we have a new framework coming out soon, so we'll give you more information on this.
The next event will actually dig into this a little bit more here, okay, but we recommend looking at this blended. How many people are coming to your website and converting and asking you to talk to your sales team? Don't care what source they can from, you'll have your self-report attribution source and then you'll have your capture demand source. So you'll have those data points and then map that all the way to revenue and you'll be able to have a very clean view of what's actually happening and how your investments are working together to create that demand strategy.
So that's my overarching viewpoint, but happy to go into more questions as well. I think one of the things that we often hear quite a bit is this idea of self-reported attribution versus kind of capture demand attribution from vendors. And I know Tori, you're writing kind of the book on how to do this for us, for our customers to be able to do both of these things and Sydney you alluded to it. Any kind of tips or tricks Tori early on on just like what you would advise folks to do to be able to kind of take advantage of both these forms of attribution?
Yeah, I think first step right is obviously making sure that you're able to capture that information. And so Sydney mentioned, you know, how did you hear about us field on your forms? That's the quickest way to get started and start collecting those insights. It can be challenging to aggregate all of that qualitative feedback that you're getting.
And so the other part of the implementation that we're recommending is to create, you know, using your automation platform to create some type of workflow or automation role that's going to help you categorize that free text into a pickless value. So that it's easier to report out on and socialize those insights. The other part that I think is really understanding what you're seeing, right? So there's going to be the obvious trends that your self-reported attribution data points are not going to line up with some of what your attribution data is telling you.
A lot of what Sydney just talked about, right, where all the credit is going towards that conversion source instead of what a person is reporting out as their most impactful touch point. And so really just understanding that the difference between the two, but then to me, I feel like maybe the most valuable part in all this is how you leverage it to impact your future facing strategy. In particular, one of my favorite ways to use the self-reported attribution data is to identify if you've got some new ideas or concepts that you might want to be utilizing for your content strategy, right? So finding the sources, the channels where people are talking about you and your brand and just spending some time in these channels.
You don't have to go there to try to sell people, you don't have to go there to pitch your product. You just want to go there and spend some time and maybe start some conversations, participate in them, or just watch and take notes and see what people are talking about. Are there people, let's say, it's a Reddit community that have a lot of clout there? Well, guess what?
Maybe just found someone that you want to invite on your podcast or that you want to co-create some content with, because this person obviously has a little bit of poll in a community that is really impactful. So this is kind of a way that you can start to take that data and those insights and utilize it in a way that is not going to be abrasive or not going to be kind of overstepping your bounds, but instead is going to be meeting your clients or audience where they are, helping them to create content that they care about and doing so in a way that is really community driven. And I think that that's what the self-reported attribution data starts with a very simple question how did you hear about this can then go lead into an entire strategy pivot for your content, for your demand gen. There's a lot of possibilities with how you can utilize some of this data.
Or I want to hit on a question that's tactical on this topic from John. So self-reported attribution more important than name, email, title, etc. Maybe just give us a minute overview of how you suggest this gets implemented in relation to other pieces of information that are collected. Yeah, I think for those of you that are using some type of enrichment software or even if you're using HubSpot and some of the out-of-the-box enrichment there, you can probably make it work with just a few fields like first name, last name, email and how did you hear about this?
And you'll be able to append a lot of that other information. Now that's not the same situation that everyone is facing right now and sometimes there are some other data points that are needed for your sales team, for your follow up exercises. But I think the question you really have to ask yourself is, is this a piece of information that you need to be capturing on a form or is it something that can be uncovered during the sales process? A lot of this is kind of tied back to just maybe an overcomplicated sales follow up process to begin with.
We've got a really big team of sales reps and we need to know exactly who to deliver this lead to and make sure that we can do it as quickly as possible when the reality is the people that are following up on those high-intending degrees, maybe it doesn't matter a whole lot about if you have the 10 different fields that you want to collect on the form and most of that is just going to get uncovered through conversation anyway. So I think part of it is a little bit of introspection right and saying how much of this information do we really need right now, but the other part of it is really thinking about what you want to do with it and if it's just trying to categorize someone so that you can try to sell them in a different way in a faster way instead of actually having a conversation with them when they come inbound, maybe you need to look at them here a little bit and figure out is this form filled with a lot of different fields and data points that are just not going to be relevant or that could be uncovered other ways. And if that's the case then putting something like how did you hear about us, you can easily replace one of the existing fields on your form or you can just tack it on there at the end with the realization that when someone comes inbound, if your marketing is good enough, that one extra field is probably not going to deter them from coming in and wanting to do business with you. And if it did, then they probably weren't going to do business with you anyway.
If they see, oh, well, this company's asking for six fields instead of five, there's no way I want to work with them. That's just not the reality of how people are doing business. It's probably more of a reflection of how good the marketing actually is to get them in to consider if they want to speak with your team or not. Yeah, Tori, I think this is a critical point that I know we say this a lot, but it always comes up.
Number of fields on a form. This may be important when you're capturing low-quality leads of people who don't really want to engage with you. They just want your ebook. Form count is probably critical.
But if somebody wants to do business with you to your point, they don't care. They'll fill out six fields versus five fields. And if they don't, it's a good indicator that they're not serious. So I appreciate that example.
So we kind of hit on this notion of create demand. We've hit on the importance of segmentation targeting and positioning. We've hit on kind of measurement and attribution. Carl, I'd love you to kind of share your insight.
So you're in sales and you have demand coming at you. Some of this demand is our MQLs, your classic model. Some of this is high intent, which is kind of the notion of creating demand in the framework that you talk about. Some of it may be coming from your outbound team who've kind of set up a meeting.
What is the chatter in the sales organization in terms of like the quality of these leads and the reality and who you want to follow up with? Yeah, good question. I think a lot of it really like what sales people pay a lot of attention to is how that lead came in, right? I remember at HubSpot, we used to get lists built for us all the time of things that are like these people, Cassidy, in your territory, joined signed up for this webinar, right?
And it was always like these aggressive kind of, I love HubSpot, by the way. There's a lot of water bottle right there. So there's kind of like these more like aggressive outbound campaigns towards these lower intent channels, I guess you could say, you could call them just these lower intent campaigns that we ran. And it was always like a lot of eye rolling that happened, right?
Whenever we had to be like, Hey, blitz these 10 people that joined this webinar that's like how to stand up your inbound marketing strategy or whatever. And the reality is that those people were courteous. They liked HubSpot. Sometimes they wanted to talk to somebody from HubSpot because they thought we were cool.
But the reality is not a lot of them kind of generated any revenue, right? And so we always wanted more time and more enablement to create demand with target accounts and specific targets that we at surface because a lot of time sellers have a lot better, I don't want to say better, but more like boots on the ground insights sometimes than marketers do as to like who in a territory is really ripe. We're looking in LinkedIn sales now. We have a lot more data points.
And I think marketers typically don't go into LinkedIn sales now. And are finding small trends where a salesperson is doing that, they're painting a much more detailed picture of who actually might be a good fit for what reason of the service. So, you know, again, do we love a nice, high-incense demo request? Of course, we're going to jump all over those.
We're going to be a lot more sluggish to follow up on things that are webinars or e-book downloads, even if it's some kind of a piece of content comparing you to Marketo or whatever it is. So, again, more enabling kind of alignment to allowing us to create demand in our territories as opposed to dragging us into some of the capture activities. So one of the things I wanted to get your thoughts on when we think about trying to now, we have this kind of new approach we want to put in on marketing and we want to line up with sales. I have my own point of view on this, but isn't as easy as just we're going to bring more high-intent leads of sales and that's going to drive better alignment or is it more complicated than that?
Meaning, it's the alignment issue really just because there's two separate organizations who kind of look at the world differently. Marketing's thrown over a bunch of low-intent poor-quality leads, expecting sales to do something with it versus just changing the mindset of being, we're going to pass you leads that are high-intent. Or what's your reaction to that? Yeah, I think my reaction and goes back to my original content earlier in this session was that we're just gold on different things.
And there's just a lot more pressure sometimes with sellers where if I don't hit a certain number, then I probably don't have a job, right? And I know it's scary to kind of mention that when I'm surrounded by my friend who's here on this call, aka the marketers. But it's like, I have to go and be very specific about how I use my time. And so when marketers want to think about, hey, I want to align with sales, yeah, we're definitely going to be just wanting, we're going to be biased towards what's high-intense.
But here's one mistake, since we're talking about go-to-market mistakes, one mistake where the sales team fails, the marketing team, I think, is really being a partner with them when it comes to creating demand. I think we think of that's like marketing's job to create demand. And what you see a lot, we've all been prospected, I was actually sharing some cold emails that I got this morning with Cassidy. And the thread through all of them at this are very like demand capture types of emails.
Hey, Carl, notice you got, I got blazed in the last three months because I'm newer in this role, right? And a lot of it's like, hey, Carl, notice your director of sales now, congrats. I'm sure you're growing the team. Would you be interested in hearing about how we help directors of sales grow their teams XYZ, right?
It's a very demand capture message. If you send a message like that, very low value, inviting to a meeting, if you send it to a thousand sales leaders, there's a good chance that five of them are in market for that product. So that BDR will then hit their meetings quota. But what about that huge missed opportunity of learning how to craft messaging and sales that creates demand, that doesn't just capture it, right?
That creates not buying intense necessarily because I think that comes a little bit later. But what about creates an intent to explore? I love good cold emails or cold calls or texts that like get me a little bit curious, like get me to explore something like, Hey, I'll go check out their website. That was kind of interesting.
Even if I don't respond to the SDR, which I do always respond for the most part, unless it's horrifying. So sales, I think, again, to circle back a go to market failure that can happen is just to say demand creation falls with marketing only and sales just closes. I think you get a lot of friction between teams there. And I think sales should step up and do an enormous amount more of creating demand because you think about one SDR Cassidy that has their own software that's very similar to marketing automation software, right?
Outreach and sales law, I mean, this is basically like HubSpot marketing hub, right? And so they have this super powerful software to get messaging very quickly. You think 50 to 100 emails a day per SDR and a 50 SDR is such an amazing opportunity there to test demand creation messaging and get that feedback to marketing, right? Because you're going to get a much faster feedback loop in sales and you aren't marketing a marketing, you're looking at things like click through rates, sales has words from prospects responding to them either very negatively or very positively.
And so I think there's just a big miss there. And I think that's a big piece of this alignment conversation that's often not had. Yeah, I love that. I'll give you my three steps or my four steps for a line with between sales and marketing and people can weigh in on this, including or, you know, sitting in Tory.
One is marketing from a measurement perspective. It's pipeline. And we can talk about what that means as a marketing source of pipeline or do you want to be more aggressive and say, is it all pipeline? Because really what sales is focused on is revenue, closing deals.
If you've been in the company pay a lot of attention to sales conversations, they're only looking at pipeline to pipeline movement is a level of detail they should. So I'd advocate marketing, take all of it. We can talk about that too. We've talked about segmentation and positioning messaging, user sales team.
The first person I go to to get feedback on our message and how it's resonating is the sales team, because they're having conversations every day with prospects. So what's working, what's not. Third, I think Carly hit it perfectly. Marketing should get involved without bound and not to do the work for sales, but to really understand what's working and use some of the stuff you're doing from a demand creation perspective in market in the sales channel and get feedback there and see how that resonates.
And then the fourth is from a demand creation perspective, I'll put Carl back on the spot here. What's easier for a sales person selling with a brand like HubSpot or selling with a brand where nobody knows who you are? Oh, I mean, of course, option A, right? There's already demand at least that's created there, right?
You think of like a what's the one most important factor that will drive you to open an email or to read it, right? It's who it's from, right? You could send the worst, Sydney could email me the worst, most garbage email in the world, but Sydney sent it. So I'm going to open it and I might even give her a meeting because I can send it, you know, like of course, yeah, what's up?
I'll hear you out. And so it's selling for a brand like HubSpot. Obviously it's going to be a lot different. I remember when I used to go out out on HubSpot, it was so funny because everyone's like, Hey, does anybody have a hub spot?
I was like, yeah, we go out on all the time, but it's totally different, right? Because somebody might answer the phone and they're like, Yeah, we love HubSpot. Yeah, we talked to all the sales reps that have been in your territory for the past 10 years. We just can't afford it or whatever it is.
That's totally different than a new marketing automation player that's going to step into the space. And so and that's a wonderful problem to have as a sales person because the conversation is going on differently and that's just a result of a good marketing org. But there's still hope for the new brands on the block that are struggling to differentiate or they're not the market leader in their category yet. And I think it has to be the messaging in those in that outreach has to change.
It has to transition from demand to capture types of messaging, which typically gets deleted or moved to spam or unsubscribed from it has to move to demand creation. Like increase like spark my intent to explore, which is I think a step before intent to buy, right? Just give me interested in something. Most prospects are agreeable.
They'll meet with you or chat with you via email. If you have something interesting, if you share, I, I share this with you all the time, like share with me a non obvious insight. I'm hungry for those. Most sales and marketing leaders are hungry for those.
Like let's take the conversation there. I'll chat with you all day on LinkedIn with a BDR. If they're sharing something with me that I don't know already, the problem is they don't know anything that I don't know. So they're just scraping the bottom of the barrel for whoever is in market at that time.
And that can work, but it's not a long term play. I love that. I'm going through. So feel free to ask questions if you want to come on.
We're happy to do as well. I have one here from Elizabeth. The huge problem is that many marketing teams do not solicit feedback and insights from their sales team. There's no formal process.
And so it's not ever in best practice. I've talked a lot of marketers about this, but let's hear from Carl. I got on the other side of this. Like what?
How should marketers get insights from sales from a sales perspective? Yeah. I mean, I'd love to hear what some of the ways that are being practiced out there. I mean, I was like, if a market reached out to me, which is extremely rare, like in HubSpotland and even before that, I think that's super exciting.
So I don't know if there's like a fear there. If you have a bunch of salty sales people on your team that don't want to talk to anybody else outside of their own organization, but I was always down for that because that makes my life easier. If I can empower marketers with more information about what's happening in the sales process, they're going to be able to do their jobs better, which is going to make my life a lot easier. I think another thing that marketers can learn from sales people is how they do research.
Sellers are very good at research. They are listening to calls all day, right? Whether it's in their conversation intelligence software, they're in LinkedIn sales, and they're very, very effective at research. So they often will see things that a marketer may not catch.
They'll know ideals get lost, you know, and a lot of this stuff never really makes it into the CRM or it's in like a transcript or in a notes that's a thousand words long or it's not a note at all, depending if you're saying maybe your seller doesn't even long notes, right? So it's like how does a marketing team extract all these insights and knowledge? It's a well, it's a treasure chest of knowledge that just kind of dies inside the sales or somewhere and never gets surfaced. And I think those are some of the most important insights that marketers should absolutely begin to mine.
The second tangent that I'll go on very briefly is the sales people doing the same thing with customer success, right? There's these two like untapped, undiscovered, sunken treasure ships of insights that are just never, never harvested, you know, and it's a travesty. Yeah, I would add to that just, well, most companies have something like Gong or MoMA or some kind of call recording software. But when I find shockingly, it's how few marketers actually listen to those calls and they need to be doing that.
And you can do something like that when you listen to four calls a week. And in a month, you'll have a lot of insight way more than you've had the month before. Yeah, another idea there, Cassidy, if I'll add is like, you know, so many call recording software is out there so cool. Like even just starting like what we do with like a VOMA, like having playlists and then sharing certain playlists to Slack so that Tori and Sydney and whoever else is on the marketing team doesn't have to like go into the call recording software, they can send the good stuff to Slack and let people consume from their surface the best stuff.
But nothing ever is going to, I think, replace just hanging out with the sale. We like to talk as you can tell them, we'll talk forever. So come talk to us, you know, we want to share our knowledge, we have a lot of opinions. And so the advantage of it.
I'm not sure this is a term but Carl huddles me five times a day. So he likes the ones you answer. So I think my answer rate on our huddles is like 40%. So it was a lot more that are initiated.
I'm trying to increase my conversion right there, for sure. I love that. So Sydney, I have a question for you and then I have a few more here on lining up from the audience. We're obviously a big advocate of kind of moving towards kind of pipeline as a key measurement and marketing source pipeline.
And we have a definition for this. But in this transition, that can take some time. So the question I've gotten is, is there a leading indicator to pipeline that we should be trying to optimize? And at the same time, you know, align with sales and kind of the executive leadership team around, how you move kind of up funnel and what should you be looking at and should make this transition?
Definitely. Yeah, depending on your sales cycle, you know, that may take X amount of days. We don't want to wait for that long. I do think the metric that is a little bit more top of funnel that you should be looking at needs to be a shared metric.
It needs to have sales interest in it as well in order for the whole go-to-market leadership to agree that this is a metric that we can start seeing key indicators on, right? So for us, what we would recommend is our high intent meetings booked, what we call pipe qualified meetings. And you can, yes, also track meetings attended, but the reason we typically won't always look at just number of demos is because we're focused on quality and getting quality conversations that are going to turn into pipeline and revenue. So if you just look at number of demos, that's a pretty easy number to game a little bit as a marketer.
And sometimes we see like the actual number will go down, but our conversion rate to meeting and to pipeline goes way up. And that's what we're trying to align on and solve is better at bats and better opportunities coming into the sales team to close for that high intent funnel specifically where marketing is focused on. So that's kind of that key point. The people are filling out your forms and they're not even agreeing to a meeting.
It's not quality. And you got something going on that we need to fix it even further up the top of the funnel, like, you know, could be targeting could be a whole bunch of different things there. But I think that's the easier metric to start looking at before it hits your pipeline. Well, I like about that.
I think there's a key piece of what you said here. It needs to be a shared metric. I think this is how you start creating one revenue organization is when you're finding the core metric that you're going to share between what's called the marketing and sales team where marketing has responsibility for obviously bringing leads in to get to the meeting. But the sales team is identifying if these are meetings worth having.
And that's a good place to align. So thanks for that Sydney. Toria, I have a good question here from Tracy that I probably can't even wrap my head around. That bet you could.
So here's a question. Would you guys think that an account sign up in product leg should have a form with least resistance or include self attribution? So in a product like growth motion, do you use self attribution or self reported attribution or not? Good question.
We were exchanging a couple messages in the chat about that. So my feeling is short answer. Yes. I think that a lot of it will depend on what your true focus is.
Is it on generating those initial signups or is it on trying to really convert those initial signups into paying customers? Because I think that there's really different strategies for each and maybe what type of information you collect at the forefront would have an impact on that. Having said that, I still see this information as extremely valuable because if you're tracking the how did you hear about it, that self reported attribution all the way through. Not only are you going to know where those initial signups are coming from, but when they do inevitably convert into paying customers into moving through your product leg growth motion, you're still going to be able to follow that original source, that self reported attribution source all the way through to a paying customer.
So it doesn't stop with the inside as far as where the lead came from. It can also be looked at as in terms of the pipeline, the revenue that's coming from that original source as well. So I think that the answer there is yes, there's still a lot of value that can be had there for product leg growth motions as well. Tracy's that any follow up to that that you want to add?
Any debate? No, that answers the question perfectly. That's kind of the advice that I gave and I was like, after thinking about it, I was like, dang, maybe that was bad advice. But I kind of, I wanted to maybe not quite as articulating it quite as good as Tory, but pretty much that same essence.
So that was helpful that I steered her in the right direction. That's awesome. Very good advice. Yeah, thanks for the question.
I have another question from Ryan. So this is, I've been thinking about this question. I've read it a few times. Sales and marketing often see different parts of the buying journey.
So the perspective is on what the buyer cares about is often different. It's kind of a statement versus a question, but I'll turn it around as a question and maybe lob this one to Sydney. Is that true? And if it is true, how do you kind of reconcile that in kind of our marketing sales kind of revenue organization?
I think historically that can be true and in probably more organizations, it may be true. I think the key thing is they care about different buyer journeys, sure. But if we align to the metrics for success, that argument goes out the window. And if both teams are incentivized on the right metrics, that is going to solve that problem, I think internally for teams.
And again, it's going to allow teams to, we recommend high-intent revenue pipeline generated because that metric has a lot of different buyer journey phases and where they are and what type of intent they are. That covers it all. That's all we care about is getting them to that point. How we do that and strategies that you might deploy are going to maybe be different from a sales and marketing perspective, but they need to be working together.
Just like Carl's point earlier, we could be using sales to help us push out some of these create demand channels and create demand events and podcasts and insights and resources to the market. That's a perfect example. Who knows what buyer journey phase that is, but is it helpful to the business to move that number? Probably.
Yeah, the thing that goes through my mind that I've seen some good messages on this is it's not as linear as we hoped it would be. So some people may be coming inbound with high intent after an awareness or a beginning of a consideration phase. Others may have done a lot of research, maybe even buyer committee research before they come knocking on your door. So I think what we find is, I'm going to turn this to Carl because you can dispute this, is that the sales team is really interacting at various stages of this buyer journey, especially from an inbound perspective.
It's not always going to be, I'm very mature, I'm ready to buy and everybody's on board now. I want to talk to sales. That's why we love it. We may be dealing with inbound and you're coming in that are highly interested, but are still in the consideration phase.
Yeah, I think the original, I'm going to be at the spicy take here that the original comment, I would challenge it a little bit because again, it operates like just saying, hey, sales and marketing see different parts of the customer journey that operates under the assumption that there is this linear buying process where it's like marketing, it's touching it, and then it gets thrown over to sales to a high intent inbound form or something like that. But in the sales community, you hear it all the time, like outbound causes inbound and this can cause some friction where it's like marketing gets credit for the demo request, but really I cold call them six months ago and talk to their CEO. And so I think it's a lot more complicated than just saying marketing sees a different part of the journey than sales. If both teams are creating demand, I think sales could absolutely be there at the very beginning of their journey.
In fact, the best sales people are, they're going to shape the entire buying experience, they're going to shape the criteria, the RFP that gets sent out to four different vendors was going to be eight vendors. But you've got a salesperson that has, again, given that company a different lens in which to view their problems and it's totally shaping that entire buying process and it's going to win that deal, does marketing support, something like that, of course, especially when you have buying committees where I might reach out to a director of sales or a VP sales or somebody like that, and then they share it in Slack and they maybe share my deck or my one pager or my LinkedIn post. And then the CEO is like, okay, that's kind of interesting. Then they go to the website.
And now marketing actually is nurturing them in some way. Now everybody's getting retargeted with ads. And so I think it's a lot more complex than to say that they see completely different parts. I think there's some truth there, but it's not that cut and dry.
I like that, Carl. So in your respectful time, I know up against the hour, there is one topic we didn't get to that I think for our team would be a great podcast going forward. And that is when you're creating demand, what is the relationship between a brand team and a demand team? And are they one and the same?
So I would love to get into that now, but we're up against the time. So what we'll do is we'll take that offline, we'll create a podcast about it. Maybe we'll have a live session about it. And I could be the next one.
And we'll dig into that topic. So I think it's fascinating and it's imperative that we understand how those two functions together as we create a man. So thanks everybody for the sticking with us. Please provide feedback on how to make this better.
It's the first time we've done it, but love all the interaction and appreciate the time. Thank you.