Today on stack and growth, Machinela is back for another B2B reality check. He is calling out the biggest blind spot in B2B marketing, demand inputs. While most teams are obsessing over pipeline, CAC and win rates, those are just the thermometer. They don't control the weather.
Map Breaks down the upstream work that actually drives results, first-party research, positioning and measurement, and why AI powered shortcuts are creating a generation of marketers who've never actually done marketing and kind of don't know what it is. Hope you all enjoy. What's going on, everyone? My name is Matthew Schenela, and this is your B2B reality check.
All right, so let's talk about your demand inputs because everybody likes to talk on LinkedIn about outputs. I'm going to go through a couple things that are top of mind from me when I think about the outputs that everyone likes to talk about in completely ignored inputs. Revenue is an output. Pipeline is an output.
CAC is an output. Win rates are an output. Meetings booked, probably the most basic thing you would triage sales with, an output. Meanwhile, those things are like your thermometer, okay?
Like, they just give you the temperature of how well the other things you are doing, how well, how good you're doing those things. So we think about this with things like your product. Do people even want your product as a solve a real problem? You're positioning.
Do people understand it? Do they get it? Your price? Do people find your price competitive?
Can you justify your price with your features or your service or all these other things? Your brand, is it memorable? Do you have distinct brand assets and your sales execution? Are you fast to respond to people who come inbound?
Do you concierge that service? Do you know your ICP fits? Can you be able to really walk them through a sales process effectively? So those are basically the weather.
That's the thing you create. And I want to give a Santa Ghul credit for the thermometer weather analogy. I don't want to steal credit pretty much any wonderful sub stack article on it. I highly recommend people read if they haven't seen it already.
But we talk a lot about revenue. We always talk a lot about pipeline. We always talk a lot about the outputs and we never, ever, ever talk about the inputs. And that's because people think the inputs are easy to get.
And you see this by all of these companies and all of these new fangled tools, or era of gizmo marketing where we're able to just use AI to push competitive intelligence research by scraping G2 and Reddit and WhatsApp and trust radius and Glassdoor reviews and LinkedIn and Reddit. And then we can scrape our C-Rn data. We can get all the med pick data that we want out of it. We can scrape sales call conversations, right?
But all of these people that we're talking to are not actually giving us very structured feedback on our market, on our product, on their buying criteria, on their triggers. All of this at its core is really inferred and assumed stuff. That's why they're called signals. Signals are not signs.
They're not triggers. They're not pain points necessarily even. They're all inferred. We believe them because we think we can harvest it and action it and then measure it, right?
And that's marketing's been on this quest to this. Fostian bargain quest to make everything deterministic and what they do. And this is why amazingly, but funnily, like I'm so astounded that we're back to this over emphasis on last touch attribution and direct response. Like it has just become the only thing I've seen companies really care about in the last 15 months.
I think it is absolutely ridiculous. And what it comes down to is companies just do not have enough of a feeling. They just don't understand marketing. I mean, Mark Ritzen and Ipsos did this tremendous survey just this past week.
35% of marketers do, only 35% of marketers know the basic fundamentals of marketing. No distinctive brand assets, no STP frameworks, no what above the line marketing is. No, what omni-channel is can name the four P's not even define them, just name them. And so this tells me like we're in this place now where like VC funded SAS has basically decided this is what marketing is and is kind of poisoning the well a little bit for other marketers coming up in SAS and then in other places about this is how marketing works.
It does not work like that actually. Marketing at its core and at its best has the word market in it because you actually take the time to understand it. Let me give you an example of what I mean when I talk about I feel like SAS marketing is losing the plot with AI. This is this is one example that I saw, but this is just emblematic of what I'm seeing on Twitter, X and on LinkedIn.
It's one person of multi-time CMO talks about doing a series of CMO interviews. And you know candidates showed slide expectations, just you know, just things that they would do in the world, very classic and in the process. And then one person shows up with a fully functioning website they've I've coded with lovable and they canceled all the other interviews and hired this person on the spot to which I'm thinking like why would a CMO need to do that kind of work and why are we so impressed by that kind of shiny object output? First off, it's not even difficult to vibe code a website using Claude and then putting it on the lovable but are we so impressed with shiny object syndrome that this is how people are getting hired for C level roles?
Essentially like that to me, this is not a good place for us to be in as a as a profession overall. I think we should be raising the bar a little bit for ourselves. I'm not saying that direct response performance marketing isn't always going to have a place in the mix, especially in promotion. And I'm not saying even that I feel like marketers are going to be able to fully control things like price because when you look at VC funded SAS VCs really control a lot of the price because they want to hit a certain multiple to get a new round of funding.
So marketers are really kind of hamstrung in that regard and that's why things happen with such short times fans. But when we go back to our maturity model and we talk about inputs, like one of the first things we talk about from a foundation aspect is your market research and insights. And those should be first party insights, not third party, not web scrapes, not not not things you're getting from review sites, though that is commodity insight. You want unique insight, things where you do the hard work or you work with someone who does the hard work for you to get a unique input that you can then go turn back around align with your sales and your customer success team and go run growth programs.
And that to me is really one of the big aspects that people just ignore. Another key input, measurement. Companies are reverting back. They're not progressing.
They're not even getting into thinking about incrementality or thinking about just go to market. It's still sales worth marketing. Marketing is that it gives me X number of leads, hell or high water. Sales is going to do their thing throughout, throughoutbound programs.
We're all going to use our tech stack and we're going to get there. What really should be happening is both those both of those functions should be aligning on one key metric and that metric is meetings by the way. Meetings both should be the only epic thing that matters for any go to market team who seriously wants to grow and it shouldn't matter whether it comes to sales or marketing. It should matter if marketing can measure in a way that's defensive.
One of sales is getting enough volume of it. So if you want to talk about your inputs, measurement is also an input. And I think a lot of marketers are too afraid to visit their measurement apparatus in a way that's actually going to sustainably allow them to run the programs that they need to because they need to justify it in this neat and tidy bow for C-suite. And they frankly just don't have the sophistication to walk through it with finance or even talk through it intelligibly.
That to me is a huge mess and some of the marketers need to get better and demand better of themselves and stop operating in a last touch mindset. You're going to be doing nothing but running conversation as thought leadership adds and lead gen forms for the rest of your miserable profession of marketing. That is the only way that you're going to look at measurement. There are better, more unique, more durable ways to do it.
That'll frankly allow you to do more creative stuff that'll probably have more long-term impact. And then going back to the org readiness, like just having this discussion upfront, like you shouldn't be afraid of delivering bad news or calling it like it is. This is about marketing operating as a strategic function, being more of a 4P function. I just said that price may not be something you could always control.
But you can certainly do the market research to have price data and see how your price compares. Right? You can certainly ask your market how they evaluate you, whether price even matters. We just did an exercise with doing a market research.
Basically, every single one of the primary influencers said price doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is my team. My team has been with their capacity. It was much more empathetic.
If you look at what everyone else would say because they don't do any market research, they would look at it as the simplest forms of commoditized differentiation that they could possibly come up with. So yes, when we go back to talking about inputs versus outputs, all the outputs that everyone wants, revenue, pipeline, meetings, strong CAC, those things are super highly actually solely dependent on your inputs. So if you're not going to do the work to put the right inputs in, you're always going to struggle to get the outputs you want on a consistent basis. All right.
If you want to solve these problems for yourself, Rafael Labs is the leading B2B demand gen agency out there helping B2B SaaS companies, making $25 million in above an ARR, solve these exact problems. Okay. We have a unique proprietary marketing maturity model. We work with 100 SaaS brands.
We understand how to help navigate and solve these issues for you. So please do as a day to head us up for this. If you want to get more insights like this, subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow me on LinkedIn, Matthew Chanelah, subscribe to the podcast and stay tuned. And we're going to have more here and hope to see you next time on your B2B reality.