Podcasts about mql

#366 | The B2B buyer has gone antisocial. No form fills, no hand raises, just self-directed research through Google, Reddit, and AI before they ever talk to sales. In this session, you'll hear from three marketing pros about how they built a LinkedIn influencer program that doubled branded search volume, why ungating top-of-funnel content drives more meetings - not fewer, and how to build an LLM visibility page so AI models correctly answer questions about your product. Plus the case for measuring trust in hours of content watched, and much more. Featuring Judy Kimball (Consensus), Hunter Talpas (Tekmetric), and Mason Cosby (Scrappy ABM).Timestamps(00:00) - - How the B2B funnel has flipped (05:52) - - Why brand is the new demand (08:23) - - Running a LinkedIn influencer program that moves pipeline (13:19) - - Why ungating content drives more meetings, not fewer (15:57) - - Building for AI and LLM visibility (19:00) - - What an LLM visibility page looks like (24:48) - - Using async video to build trust at scale (29:14) - - Why seven hours of content watched beats 28 touch points (36:26) - - How to get leadership to ditch the MQL model (42:00) - - Measuring demand gen by stage of the buyer journey Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/***Brought to you by:Optimizely - A no-code AI platform where autonomous agents execute marketing work across webpages, email, SEO, and campaigns. Join the next cohort of Opal U, a live 5-day course designed for senior marketing leaders who are ready to ship more with AI, at optimizely.com/exitfive. Vector - A contact-level ads platform that lets you build audiences from actual people on your site, clicking your ads, and checking out your competitors. Learn more at vector.co, and get their new MCP server by clicking here. Customer.io - An AI powered customer engagement platform that help marketers turn first-party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS, and push. Learn more at customer.io/exitfive.Join us in Stowe, Vermont for Drive 2026 - three days away from your desk to learn what's working in B2B marketing from the people who are actually doing it. Grab your ticket at exitfive.com/drive.***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

What happens to all those leads marketing works so hard to generate? More often than not, they go cold. According to Nishi Seth, Industry & Solutions Marketing Lead for Google Cloud APAC, this isn't a niche problem. It's one of the most persistent challenges across B2B, regardless of company size or sophistication. In this episode, Shahin sits down with Nishi to unpack the real reasons leads stall between marketing and sales, from qualification gaps to missing context, and what it actually takes to fix them. Nishi shares battle-tested lessons from scaling Google Cloud's marketing-to-sales motion across APAC, including how AI is transforming BDR productivity right now. Guest Introduction Nishi Seth is the Industry & Solutions Marketing Lead for Google Cloud APAC at Google, with over 20 years of experience across cloud technology, financial services, and travel. She has held senior marketing roles at American Express and British Airways, and is a recognised B2B marketing leader across the Asia-Pacific region. Key Topics Why leads go cold: the two root causes (qualification gaps and context gaps) and why even the most sophisticated B2B organisations struggle with themThe three pillars of an optimised marketing-to-sales handover: lead quality, context, and a continuous review and feedback loopWhy BDRs are the critical bridge between marketing and sales, and how to assess whether your BDR function is actually workingHow MQL definitions should evolve over time: Google Cloud's journey from basic demographic scoring to 48+ real-time intent signals, including account-level qualificationWhat providing context to BDRs really means: enablement calls, campaign-specific opening scripts, and cadences tailored to how each lead engagedThe key metrics that reveal handover health: SAL acceptance rates, SAL-to-SQL conversion, number of outreach touches, and lead velocityHow AI is changing BDR productivity: using automation for low-intent lead follow-up, real-time AI assistants during live sales calls, and AI-powered account research at scaleNishi's rapid-fire take: "strong opinions, loosely held," using AI to boost your own marketing productivity, and why simplifying complexity in B2B is what excites her most Resources & Links Google Cloud — Nishi's base for all real-world examples discussed, from MQL definition evolution to AI-powered BDR toolingGoogle Gemini — Nishi's go-to research tool in place of following influencers; she also used it to prepare for this episode Contact & Credits Host: Shahin Hoda Guest: Nishi Seth Produced by: Shahin Hoda and Alexander Hipwell Edited by: Alexander Hipwell Music by: Breakmaster Cylinder APAC's B2B Growth Podcast is Presented by xGrowth

Going after a new segment sounds sexy… until you actually try to do it.

In this episode of the B2B Marketing Podcast, Richard O'Connor, CEO of B2B Marketing, is joined by Nick Mason, CEO & Founder of Turtl, to explore why traditional, lead‑centric B2B marketing models are breaking down and what needs to replace them. They kick off by unpacking Nick's opening slide for B2B Ignite, drawing parallels between the 1927 Solvay Conference and today's B2B marketing challenges, and arguing that the classic funnel and MQL mindset are no longer enough. Nick explains why marketers must focus on buying groups, intent signals, and “digital body language” to truly influence complex purchase journeys, and why a shared language between sales and marketing is critical to turning data into decisive action. He closes by calling for a new worldview in B2B marketing - one that's brave enough to abandon outdated paradigms in order to drive future growth. Hear more at B2B Ignite on 1 July in London, where Nick will deliver his keynote session. Listeners to the podcast can save 20% on their ticket to B2B Ignite 2026 – simply enter the discount code PODCAST when prompted at check out.https://events.b2bmarketing.net/b2bignite

Description The Future of Tech is Here. Subscribe to our Newsletter:https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this presentation from Ultimate Partner Live, industry analyst Jay McBain breaks down the monumental macroeconomic shifts rewriting the tech sector in 2026. https://youtu.be/r0qTDyw97Gs As the industry rapidly approaches a $6.07 trillion valuation, driven by massive AI infrastructure investments from Sam Altman and the “Magnificent Seven,” traditional sales and channel models are fundamentally collapsing. McBain reveals how buyer demographics have transformed to an integration-first millennial base, why marketplace ecosystems now command over half of all partner-funded deals, and how a tiny elite of just 1,000 tech service providers control two-thirds of global tech revenue. Learn the exact mechanics behind how Microsoft out-partnered AWS to win 26 straight quarters of dominant growth and how your business can deploy an algorithmic early warning system to capture massive wallet share before competitors even step into the boardroom. Key Takeaways Over half of the Fortune 500 companies vanish every 20 years because their leadership fails to anticipate macroeconomic technological cycles. The true opportunity in the $6.5 trillion AI boom lies not in single vendor products, but in the hardware, software, services, and telecom ecosystem surrounding them. Indirect tech sales are undergoing a structural shift toward direct cloud hyperscaler models driven heavily by Nvidia's core infrastructure client base. Modern business deals are won or lost months before the point of sale based on the average of 6.3 partners surrounding a customer’s environment. Over 51% of tech buyers are now millennials who prioritize software integration capabilities and digital marketplaces over traditional human sales interactions. Tech service economics are pivoting aggressively away from upfront margins toward point-based multi-partner funding across subscription cycles. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags Nvidia AI buildout, $7 trillion AI opportunity, cloud ecosystem decade, Microsoft vs AWS growth, multi-partner cloud deals, digital marketplace migration, millennial B2B buyers, B2B tech subscription economics, tokenized micro consumption, tech services wallet share, hybrid cloud infrastructure, 28 customer moments, IT services industry growth, telecom spend breakdown, channel chief strategy, managed service providers MSP, global systems integrators GSI, software integration first, point-based vendor incentives, automated co-selling workflows Transcript JAY McBAIN AUDIO PODCAST [00:00:00] Jay McBain: So to go back to that story about the 53% of companies who are gonna fail, one of us is gonna be asked to write the book, but chapter one is always you Blame the CEO. [00:00:13] Vince Menzione: We just came back from Ultimate Partner live in Bellevue, Washington, where we hosted incredible leaders for two amazing days. Come join us for this next session where we explore the tectonic shifts we’ve all been seeing. With that, I am incredibly blessed to invite a friend of mine to the stage. I have a quick little side note, like I found an old LinkedIn post from this gentleman from like many years ago, like 20 years ago. [00:00:39] Vince Menzione: And I wasn’t really that nice to you on that LinkedIn post. Like, oh, like this is before Jay became the Jay, that we all know Jay to be j. But he was in the space and I was at Microsoft doing something and he reached out about something. It was kind of rude, Jay. I was like, oh my gosh. I can’t believe. But Jay has been a great friend. [00:00:54] Vince Menzione: When we started the podcast back up, uh, during COVID we started doing podcasts together. When we moved to the studio, Jay was the first person in the studio. He’s always got a spot, uh, at our events. He’s s Spot Art, and, and he’s a great friend and supporter of Ultimate Partner Jay McBain. For those of you who don’t know him, Jay, welcome. [00:01:13] Vince Menzione: Thank you, sir. [00:01:22] Jay McBain: 31 days ago, we landed Artemis two. The furthest humans have ever been away from the planet Earth 57 years ago. We landed on the moon in the 56 years. Between those two moments, the tech industry has been the fastest growing industry in the world. Every single year we moved from the space race to the technology race, and we’re just getting started. [00:01:46] Jay McBain: If you’re old enough, you’ll recognize the mainframe and mini era for 20 years. You’ll recognize a young disheveled Bill Gates showing up in Boca Raton, Florida for, uh, August the 12th, 1981 launch, where Bill thought that every one of us would’ve a PC in our home, and IBM thought they were gonna sell 10,000 of them to hobbyists. [00:02:12] Jay McBain: 1999, a small startup from an executive who just left Oracle in San Francisco named Mark Benioff. A couple of years later, Jeff Bezos went into a boardroom and said, listen, we’ve spent a lot of money building infrastructure to our busiest day, Christmas, black Friday. You’re telling me this stuff sits idle 10 or 20% for the rest of the year. [00:02:35] Jay McBain: Why don’t we rent that out to others? Got laughed outta that boardroom and then got made of fun of on magazine covers. Maybe you should just tend the store, let the adults talk about technology. In March of 2023, our neighbors, our friends, our family saw DeepFakes. They saw poetry, they saw music, and they came to us as tech people and said, did we just light up Skynet? [00:03:03] Jay McBain: Now every one of these 20 year eras, this is the Taylor Swift version of our industry. Every single one of these eras triggers the fastest growing product in history. Today it’s actually Chacha bt first to a billion users. It triggers a new, richest person in the world, bill Gates, to Jeff Bezos. Now, Elon Musk is the first to sign a trillion dollar pay package, and it’s not for car. [00:03:27] Jay McBain: It’s not for cars. It also triggers a most valuable company in the world change. And today that’s nvidia. These are monumental changes in our industry and they’re monumental changes in partnering every single time. And it also links to our customers. If you take a 20 year view of business, one era, and, and think about the AI era, you know, at the start of it here, if you’re to grab the Fortune 500 magazine from 20 years ago and start to flip through it, 53% of the companies in there no longer exist. [00:04:06] Jay McBain: Every 20 year cycle, we lose over half of the biggest companies in the world. These are the companies that have very deep pockets to buy their way outta problems. If you’re not in the Fortune 571% of tech companies don’t make it 10 years. These are the changes that cost industries. There are changes that cost really big companies and the decisions we make, the trends we’re in right now, in 2026 will be written about in the future. [00:04:39] Jay McBain: This new era, a lot of big numbers being thrown around. Vince’s best friend talk about a six and a half trillion dollar AI opportunity, but it’s not Microsoft’s tam. Microsoft is chasing about a trillion dollars of this. And the ecosystem, the hardware, the software, the services, the telecom is gonna make up the rest. [00:05:04] Jay McBain: It is an ecosystem. Every time these big numbers are thrown, the word ecosystem is always thrown around it. Not to be outdone, Sam Altman’s talking about a $7 trillion build out. The world economy this year, the world GDP will be 126. These are material numbers to world GDP, but even better, they’re both larger than our entire industry is today. [00:05:27] Jay McBain: So what took 56 years of the fastest growing industry this year will be $6.07 trillion. Big numbers, but it’s easier to think about it in terms of a dollar that our customers spend in that dollar. They’re gonna spend 25 cents on hardware. They’re gonna spend 25 cents on software. So for anyone that read the memo 15 years ago, that software’s gonna eat the world, there’s still a dollar a hardware to run every dollar of that software. [00:05:57] Jay McBain: And whether you’re thinking humanoid robots or whichever future you’re envisioning, there’s going to be a dollar of hardware to run every dollar of software for the next 20 years. There’s over 25 cents now in IT services, and in many cases, these services are growing faster than the product categories and just under 25 cents in telecom, that’s how it breaks out today. [00:06:19] Jay McBain: And this industry, which took 56 years to get to this point, is gonna double in size in the next three to five years. We already have two and a half trillion of that seven raised and being spent. Part of the reason Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world. Now our industry, uh, you talk about ultimate partnerships. [00:06:40] Jay McBain: Our industry traditionally, and world trade by the way, is 75% indirect. The dealerships, the agencies, the brokers, the resellers, the retailers, the franchisees, the gas stations, the grocery stores, the pharmacies, all 27 industries sell indirect. You gotta think back the last time you bought something direct. [00:07:01] Jay McBain: Well, I bought a Dell from that dude in the nineties. Cool. Well, Dell Technologies is now 60% indirect. Well, I bought insurance. Direct is 15 minutes. Could save me 15%. Well, Geico last year sold more insurance through agencies and brokers than they did direct. This is the world now. We used to be 75% indirect four years ago. [00:07:26] Jay McBain: Then it went to 73.2, then it went to 70.1 and it then it went to 66.7. By the way, marketplace is in these numbers indirect. It’s not marketplace causing this change. It’s one company, Nvidia. Nvidia has seven customers. The magnificent seven, uh, half of them are in the room right now that every morning we wake up to a hundred billion dollars press release about this $7 trillion buildout. [00:07:56] Jay McBain: What’s interesting is indirect sales in our industry is growing by revenue. It increases every year, just not at the pace that this AI build out is happening direct with seven companies. But the reason we’re all here, and I think the core reason that Vince is building this community is this, you know, Microsoft forever has measured and been very vocal. [00:08:21] Jay McBain: About 96% of their deals have partners in them. Kind of who cares, who collects the money. We care about the moments, the 28 moments before the customer makes a purchase. We care about every 30 days forever, because two thirds of our industry, over $4 trillion now is subscription consumption based. Winning a customer today is only winning the first 30 days. [00:08:46] Jay McBain: We care about this cycle. We care about who surrounds our customer. So six years ago, I stood on a big stage and said, you know, we went through a decade of sales. You know, in 1999, you thought you were born to be a salesperson. You’re managing your territory with your gut. Well, a few years later, you were introduced to the science of selling. [00:09:07] Jay McBain: You know, 10 years later you thought as a marketer, you sit around a cocktail party joking with your friends, 50% of my marketing dollars are wasted. I just don’t know which 50%. Really funny. In 2009 until every 58-year-old CMO got replaced by a 38-year-old growth hacker. Coming in with Marketo and Eloqua and Pardot and HubSpot, and 15,505 as of yesterday, MarTech and iTech tools, ninjas in marketing, they wouldn’t let a nickel go through without measuring. [00:09:43] Jay McBain: Now we understand 96% of deals and partners that surround it. No deal is gonna be won or lost in this era without partnering effectively. So we had to have this decade of the ecosystem. One of the ways we’re tracking is by outsiders. You know, Salesforce every year publishes the state of sales and they’ve got, you know, the number one CRM in the world. [00:10:05] Jay McBain: So they get to go talk to all the CROs, all the salespeople in the world. And as of this year, a couple months ago, 94% of every salesperson in every industry in the world uses partners every single day. You wanna see what this number was six years ago. Also, 89% of salespeople around the world don’t think they’re going to club this year without partners. [00:10:29] Jay McBain: So this is a big moment for us, halfway through the decade ecosystem, but we’re only halfway through. We’re starting to understand now at a more granular level. What partnering means. It’s not theory, it’s not flywheels. It’s not really cute. McKinsey slides that we keep showing to our board saying how important partnering is. [00:10:51] Jay McBain: We’re trying to get to the very specific level of the 6.3 partners on average that surround the deal and what they’re doing. How their business model works, and that’s average if I’m working on a public sector deal. I was at a Red Hat conference yesterday talking sovereignty. If I’m in an enterprise or a large public sector deal, it’s north of 10 partners in the deal. [00:11:15] Jay McBain: So we’re starting to understand what used to be this, this, you know, you’ve been the fastest growing industry for 56 straight years. Every single professional services person in every industry has come in to join the fund. Over 90% of accountants are tech services firms. Over 90% of marketing agencies are tech services agencies. [00:11:36] Jay McBain: All of this 250,000 software companies, a million emerging comp tech companies, the half a million VAR that have been in that traditional channel. The managed service providers, all of these 20 different partner types, millions of companies, tens of millions of people competing for 6.3 spots. Around the customer. [00:11:58] Jay McBain: That’s it. Luckily, there’s 141 million global customers to compete for. There’s, there’s some open slots that you can go find, and that’s the point. Our industry never had our own Fortune 500. We always talk to, you know, these partners and GSIs are doing this and SI are doing that. And we never really had a view of capability and capacity or what our own TAM was inside of that partnering. [00:12:25] Jay McBain: And so we set out and we would’ve loved, you know, chat GPT or Gemini or Claude or any of those tools to do this. But there’s one problem in partnering with AI is that it doesn’t know one partner from the next. There’s a big digital sameness problem in our industry that every single partner, whether it’s Larry in the White van or Accenture, with 786,000 employees all say they do all things to all people all the time. [00:12:53] Jay McBain: 98% of them, 99% of them are private companies that don’t share their p and l. You can’t go into Microsoft’s LinkedIn system and find out how many employees, ’cause it’s a block system, it AI can’t see into it. So it just sees, and it’s a great pattern matching. Google, SEO can’t figure out who’s who, nor today can the large language models. [00:13:14] Jay McBain: ’cause all the things they’re trying to match, the transformers are trying to match. It all looks the same. Every tweet, every ebook, every website, every digital history looks the same. So this took us thousands of people hours across two years to do, to dig into every p and l to dig into every dollar of what they’re doing. [00:13:33] Jay McBain: But what was interesting is only a thousand partners in our industry do two thirds of all tech services. When you get into enterprise, it goes up to 80 to 90%. The partners in the middle, in Blue do more tech services. The 30 of them than the 970 partners in white on the outside, the 970 partners in White do more tech services than the next million combined. [00:14:03] Jay McBain: This is our industry in a nutshell. Every time we talk to a a vendor, every time we talk to a partner, every time we talk to a distributor, we’re now talking names, faces, and places. You you wanna talk sovereignty. Yesterday in Atlanta, 90% of sovereign conversations in public sector in the globe is handled by these companies here. [00:14:26] Jay McBain: Forget about how much you do with these partners today. You wanna chase the next column, which is the wallet share. And I was a channel chief for 17 years. I get the weekly report and I see a million dollar partner, another million dollar partner, sorted top to bottom. You don’t know which partners which, which of those million dollar partners is doing 1.2 million in your category. [00:14:46] Jay McBain: They deserve a baseball cap and a front row seat at your event as an MVP. The next partner right next to them is doing 10 million in your category. They’re only doing a million with you. ’cause customers are pulling them into it. Nine times outta 10. They’re leading with your competitor. So I don’t want that list anymore. [00:15:03] Jay McBain: I want the new list, which is showing me those $9 million opportunities. And I as a board member, as A CEO, as a CFO, as a CRO, I wanna see this list. And then I want to talk people, processes, programs, technology. What are we gonna do to go get our fair share of that 9 million? Where’s our lowest hanging fruit? [00:15:24] Jay McBain: How do we double our pipeline? How do we double the size of our company in three years? It’s all right here. Let’s have very specific conversations and move away from flywheels and move around from force multipliers and and things like that in partnering. Let’s figure out how this partner community is surrounded. [00:15:45] Jay McBain: What do 10 million people who have to be smart in front of their customers every single day, what do they read? Where do they go and who do they follow? It’s the law of a few. This is the old Malcolm Gladwell of tipping point 10 million people in the broader channel. A hundred percent of our TAM comes down to only a thousand watering holes. [00:16:08] Jay McBain: 12% of that entire audience. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s over A million. People love podcasts. Number one way they learn the Joe Rogan effect. In our industry, there’s 121 podcasts. These are all public lists. You can go get on my LinkedIn newsletter on canals, oia. But there’s 121 podcasts that drive him forward. [00:16:28] Jay McBain: Really high up on that list, actually number one on the list is ultimate partner, Vince. That’s how I met. ’cause I asked people, 10 million people, you love this. You walk your dog, you drive to work, you listen to podcasts. I’m not the biggest podcast fan. It’s not number one on my list, but it’s number one on theirs. [00:16:44] Jay McBain: They say, you know, you gotta meet this guy, Vince. It’s unbelievable how great these podcasts are. They’re ultimate. [00:16:54] Jay McBain: Then I talked to Vince and said, but Vince, you know, 35% of your community, the 10 million people love to come to events like this one. The hallway conversations, the hotel lobby bar last night. This is what we love to do, especially post pandemic. It’s the number one way we learn. We learn from our peers, we learn from those around us, and, and the learn from the conversations we have here. [00:17:17] Jay McBain: We always remember these moments, you know, years and years later. There’s 352 choices. I’m going to five of them this week in five different cities. It’s a lot of coverage, but again, it’s a tighter li list of how people work. The magazine lists 106 of them associations like Conter. Now the GTIA peer groups, there’s 15 different spheres of influence, but only a thousand places. [00:17:43] Jay McBain: I could walk you through billionaire, after billionaire, after billionaire in this industry and show you how they did this. How did Arne Bellini at ConnectWise? How did Austin McCord at Datto, how did Nerdio become a unicorn? How did threat locker and huntress move away from 6,500 cyber companies and become unicorns over and over and over again? [00:18:05] Jay McBain: It’s only one slide. Unicorns and billionaires are made here, and a lot of people don’t get it. So walking away from Bellevue, a thousand partners, top down, a thousand watering holes, bottoms up. You’ve covered a hundred percent of your tam. You do it better than 10% of your competitor, 10% better than your competitors. [00:18:27] Jay McBain: You win. You carry that on your resume into the next company. You get a bigger job at a bigger pay scale. Let’s just walk through some examples. Cyber 91.7% of it goes through the channel. Huge channel audience. You know, if you’re in MarTech, it’s only 10%, but this one happens to be all channel, but that’s not the story. [00:18:48] Jay McBain: For every dollar that the 6,500 cyber companies are trying to close, there’s $2 in services. Plot twist, the products are grown at 11, the services are grown at 12.6. Your partners are growing faster than you are, and they will continue to for the next, at least five years, probably 10. So when I’m here, five years from now, you’ll hear in me talk about a three to one split in cyber and then a four to one split in cyber. [00:19:18] Jay McBain: Now, when we’re in Miami a couple days ago is CrowdStrike, they’re talking about a $7 and 5 cent multiplier, chasing that two to one up higher. You look at managed services. Here’s a fun story. Managed services. 82% of customers who are man, uh, outsourcing more this year than last year. 650 billion in size. [00:19:38] Jay McBain: This is bigger than the entire SaaS industry. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Marketo, NetSuite, HubSpot, 250,000. Others. This is bigger. It’s also bigger than all the Hyperscalers combined, not just AWS, Microsoft and Google, but Alibaba and Oracle and everybody down the list. This is a massive market also growing at double digits. [00:19:59] Jay McBain: So these are some big things and obviously we’re watching, you know, week in and week out, quarter in, quarter out, the Battle of Software and Battle of the Hyperscalers and things like that, and who’s growing at what pace and, and how partnering is connecting to all of this. You know, we watched a moment really early in the pandemic where Microsoft started growing faster than AWS and they haven’t stopped since 26 straight quarters. [00:20:27] Jay McBain: And you ask customers and say, you know, does Microsoft have a better product? And in most cases they say no. You know, AWS had a five year head start. Well, did they have a better price? Well, no, actually most cases Microsoft’s more expensive. Well, did did they have better promotion? Was their Super Bowl ad better? [00:20:44] Jay McBain: No, they’re both kind of crap. So you kind of ask the questions of what’s the only difference that could create growth above the leader in the market? Well, it’s place. More of the 6.3 partners are walking into those keyboard room meetings and drawing clouds up on the wall and labeling the Microsoft than they are AWS. [00:21:03] Jay McBain: Very simple. It’s never been about product. The best product in our industry has never won. And now the best way forward is that partnering moment, and this is the moment. So to go back to that story about the 53% of companies who are gonna fail, one of us is gonna be asked to write the book. And it could be the book like Kodak, they invented the product that ended up killing them. [00:21:26] Jay McBain: And it’s a woe is me story, but chapter one is always you blame the CEO. How could they not see those trends happening in 2026? How could they, you know, were they blind? Were they stuck in their own, you know, innovation chamber? Innovator’s dilemma, were they stuck in their own boardrooms? Why couldn’t they see? [00:21:46] Jay McBain: Well, chapter two, you, you blame the board. They have fiduciary responsibility, outsider view, and how could they not see it? But really, this is the future right here. If you take this slide and apply it 10 or 20 years from now to every failure and every success, these are the chapters of the book. Your buyer is now a millennial. [00:22:05] Jay McBain: As of last year, the 51% of our market is bought by people born after 1982. Different psychology, different behavior, different journey, different criteria, their integration. First buyers. The buy a product, 80% as good as the next one. If it works better in their environment. 94% of people won’t buy a car unless it has CarPlay or Android Auto. [00:22:26] Jay McBain: New Buyer. You have to be more integrated than your competitors. That’s a partnering story. The 6.3 partners. If you heard cyber, you need some great channel partnerships, but you need the other 5.3 partners as well, the consultants, the advisors, the designers, the architects, the implementers, the integrators, the manner service, all of the other partners. [00:22:44] Jay McBain: You need to know more of them than your competitors do, and have them label clouds with your name in them. You need better alliances. Even if you compete, you only compete in the morning. You’re best friends by the afternoon. You have to be tight with the hyperscalers, tight, with the big SaaS platforms, tight with cyber, tight with distribution, there are layers, seven layers to every deal. [00:23:04] Jay McBain: You gotta be tight in and have better alliances than your competitors. And then it all comes to the 28 moments, which I’m gonna end on, but the go to market of all of this, the co-selling, co-marketing, co-innovation, co-development, co keeping. This is it. Your product has to be good enough that somebody’s gonna renew it. [00:23:21] Jay McBain: Your Super Bowl has to be, you know, ad has to be good enough that people don’t, you know, shame you on social media. Your pricing has to be somewhere in a country mile of the bell curve of what the customer wants to pay. But successor failure is just here and platforms are synonymous with partnering. [00:23:40] Jay McBain: It’s our role now in the decade of the ecosystem to drive our companies forward. Marketplace. It’s probably the most predict, you know, great prediction we ever made. You know, growing at 82% compounded, it’s hard to predict ’cause it doubles almost every year. We were almost exact to the decimal point. Five years later now till 2030, we’re watching a second story, which is more interesting. [00:24:02] Jay McBain: If 96% of all deals have partners inside of them and there’s private offers and multi-partner offers and distributor sellers record all these funding mechanisms or services as a product. As of last week, over 50% of all deals in marketplaces now have partner funding. It means that while money changes hands differently, the respect and the recognition of what partners do is in the deal. [00:24:26] Jay McBain: We think that’s going to 59, but at some point, that’s gonna have to hit 96. ’cause to run the best programs, whether it’s an indirect sale, whether it’s a direct sale, whether it’s a marketplace deal, it doesn’t matter how money changes hands. What matters is we recognize the 6.3 partners. They’re not only making the deal happen bigger and faster, but renewing and enriching that every 30 days forever. [00:24:48] Jay McBain: When we watch, you know, billion dollar clubs and when we read all the press releases and all the hubbub about how fast this is growing and who, which companies are behind all this. When I’m quoted in some of these press releases, it’s because of this. You know, CrowdStrike, you know, brags are a billion dollars in a single year, but inside of that, they’re showing that 91% growth in marketplaces, which is pretty phenomenal for any company to almost double in size every single year. [00:25:17] Jay McBain: What’s more phenomenal is they’re growing the channel piece of it, 3548%. That green part of it is growing. Companies that understand platform and have people and processes and programs and technology to do it are winning. And they’re getting recognition and partners are starting to join the Billion Dollar Club who don’t sell a product, but are also winning at Extreme Scale. [00:25:44] Jay McBain: So talk about those partner 1000 and who are leaning in to win at this level. As well as everything changes, traditional billing moved into subscription models, moved into consumption models. Now we’re being tokenized to death multi it’s, it’s in this mode of micro consumption. There’s no chance there was little chance in subscription consumption that would be resold. [00:26:09] Jay McBain: You don’t buy Netflix from the cable guy in the white van. There’s zero chance when you’re buying tokens at a buck a piece that that’s going through any indirect sale. This continues to grow. Now the tectonic shifts is what happens when money changes hands differently. These old programs that we used to all write hundreds of different boxes, we checked every day on deal reg and trainings and all the other things are changing. [00:26:35] Jay McBain: To this, you’ll get these slides, by the way, in high res, inside of this now is the customer. For the first time ever, 45 years later, we have the customer in the middle of what we do, the 28 moments in green before they buy the seven layer stack and the partners inside it. The implementation. The integration, the managed services in a cycle that never ends, and two thirds of our industry. [00:26:55] Jay McBain: With the customer in the middle, we can now move money around to the different moments. It’s not all landing in front or backend margins or market development funds or new customer bonuses or spiffs. It’s landing where it needs to land. Over 400 companies now, pretty much led by Microsoft 400 companies are in a point system right now and 400 more. [00:27:18] Jay McBain: We’re working kind of behind the scenes to get that announced in the next 12 months. This is a total changeover in terms of how economics work and partners are yelling over half of us. I don’t care. Don’t call me a VAR anymore. Don’t call me an MSP. Don’t call me a regional system integrator. I do the consulting over half the time. [00:27:36] Jay McBain: I do the design, I do the implementations, I do the managed services, and 44% of us are vibe coding. On weekends. We’re not happy. Just on the services side. We wanna join the seven layer tech stack as well. These are partners growing faster than their vendors by understanding this cycle and where to show up and where the money is in ai. [00:27:56] Jay McBain: And the number one thing they’re asking for is not more leads, which they did for 45 years. The number one thing is now recognized for what I do. I’ve never just been a cash register. We’re completely now past this idea of a channel being a channel of distribution, and now a channel being this platform for the future. [00:28:16] Jay McBain: As we lay that on top of ai, the first couple of years of AI has really been consumer driven. The 95% failure rate that MIT reported last year is now 70%. That’s the failure to get from proof of concept to production. That 70 will be 50 by the summer we’re moving now in business, the maturity rates are going up at the end customer and in 88% of cases, that’s because of the channel. [00:28:43] Jay McBain: They’re working with partners. They’re not vibe coding themselves and working in little skunkwork groups. They’re working with partners to make it happen, and it now becomes the partner’s number one growth opportunity. I can grow at 11 or 12% in cyber every year. Compounded I can grow in 10% in managed services. [00:29:03] Jay McBain: You know, those are great double digit growth ’cause my customers are growing at 2.7% and I can go four x my customer, but I can go 10 x my customer if I have the right services built around ai. And this compounded growth rate and that big number in 2 20 32, 267 is what’s got those top 1000 partners obsessed. [00:29:25] Jay McBain: And your companies are leading with ai. Now you need to connect to those AI services. You need to get partners on this scale of growth. And they will be adding your name inside every cloud. They write on every whiteboard, but 82% of partners around the world, you know, we survey 25,000 of them aren’t ready, and they’re blaming vendors for not being ready, and they’re telling them exactly the workshops and the training that they need to get ready for this cycle. [00:29:53] Jay McBain: 82% of our entire partner, tens of millions of people, aren’t ready to grow at 35% and they need our help. Last thing I’ll say about AI is it’s the first time from client server to cloud, edge to cloud that it’s been segment driven. SMB alone has one, you know, six different segments, one to nine, 10 to 24, 25 to 49, et cetera. [00:30:18] Jay McBain: Mid-market into enterprise. No one that runs a restaurant is calling Jensen to buy a GPU to put next to the stove. No one’s calling Sam or Dario or anyone at Anthropic or OpenAI directly. They’re waiting. If you run a restaurant with all the people running around with tablets, you’ve invested in toast or square or clover or one of the platforms to run your business. [00:30:41] Jay McBain: A hundred different things. And you’re gonna wait for toast to work with a hyperscaler and build out the capabilities genetically. So when they see a spike in Uber Eats orders, they automatically place a food order and automatically change the staffing to deliver on it. That’s what the restaurant’s waiting for, and there’s no one calling and having a big a agent conversation. [00:31:03] Jay McBain: But even if you go into hundreds of people in medium sized business, every one of the vice presidents have their tech stack already built. I talked about the marketing person already, but the HR leader has one, and everybody’s got their seven layer stack. They’re not calling to buy a GPU and they’re not calling to, you know, bring in open AI directly or, or anthropic. [00:31:22] Jay McBain: They’re waiting for the platform they built to integrate together ag agenta capabilities. Everybody’s in wait mode up until enterprise and public, large public sector. So we are looking at this market and at 90% of that AI market is run by those thousand companies, and the rest of the millions of partners are helping in terms of how these businesses are gonna change at that level. [00:31:46] Jay McBain: Here’s where I end. You know, the 28 moments used to be a theory. It used to be a flywheel. How do we buy a car? [00:31:55] Vince Menzione: Well, we Google it, [00:31:57] Jay McBain: 81% of us now, 94% of us use large language models. We find out that there’s 365 brands of car. I’d have to test drive one every day of the year to get through them all. So we start narrowing these things down. [00:32:09] Jay McBain: We configure it. We put our rims on it, we color it. We download the invoice price. We download the backend rebates this month, whether I buy it in May or June, we find out what 5,000 people paid for our exact car within 50 miles of us. And then we don’t wanna go to the dealer because we know more than the salesperson, the manager ever will. [00:32:26] Jay McBain: We know what we’re gonna pay within, you know, dollars or cents. Just carvana the car. Hand me the keys. Let’s just forget the whole eight hour back and forth. I’ll get you a deal thing. I’m smarter than you in technology. Our customers are smarter than us, smarter than salespeople. That’s why 75% of millennials don’t wanna talk to a salesperson. [00:32:48] Jay McBain: They want to end digitally, and by the way, they’re not gonna send a fax after 28 digital moments. They’re gonna end on a digital marketplace. This is all demographics. It’s not hard to see where it’s going, but we’re getting into names, faces, places again. What if every dollar of your tam, the board, the CEO, runs around with their big multi-billion dollar number, they’re chasing? [00:33:09] Jay McBain: What if every single deal looks the exact same? This is a deal with AstraZeneca, A real deal, real customer spending millions of dollars. We know it starts in October, it ends in April. It’s a six month cycle. We see what they read, the MQ ls at the beginning. We see the sales demo moments. We see ISV, but we’ve never had the light blue boxes. [00:33:30] Jay McBain: What if we as a team could overlay the 6.3 partners in this deal? And when you find out a couple things. Here’s where I end. In December, five deals were one, three of them by NTT. The person at NTT probably coaches AstraZeneca’s, you know, kids’ soccer team. They probably have a cottage together at the lake. [00:33:50] Jay McBain: For the last 20 years, if the person at NTT worked at Deloitte, Deloitte would’ve run this deal. But Software One and Yash are both there, so we understand that when they were drawing clouds up on the wall in the boardroom in December, this deal was won and lost there. It was not won and lost at the point of sale. [00:34:09] Jay McBain: So what if you knew more about this and could see every dollar in your tam? You had an early warning system that this was happening. Two things jump out at this now that we’re in Bellevue. AWS was touched twice in this deal, directly in the marketing cycle and the sales cycle. AWS lost this deal. Here’s an example of Microsoft winning a deal with Microsoft never being touched. [00:34:34] Jay McBain: For some reason, NTT who won, who won AWS’s partner of the year a couple years ago led with Microsoft, so did Software one, Microsoft’s biggest reseller in Europe, and as did Yash, they all led with Microsoft and without Microsoft, knowing Microsoft took a multimillion dollar deal away from their competitors by winning in December. [00:34:53] Jay McBain: That’s one. Second. These partners didn’t just show up other than soccer and cottages. They didn’t show up in December. It went closed one in their CRM system. Back in the summer, August, September, we already knew AstraZeneca was in market, spending millions of dollars. We didn’t need them to read an ebook or go to an event to find that out. [00:35:17] Jay McBain: We knew it because it was closed one. They’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars times five in December to know what to do at the end. This is an early warning system that’s better than any MQL, better than any SQL. And if you could give your company these level of view into their pipeline with an early warning system that I can work with those partners for months before they ever show up at the customer’s boardroom. [00:35:44] Jay McBain: This is it. Talk about 47% winners. This takes you from not only surviving the AI era to being a top five platform winner. Thank you very much. [00:36:01] Vince Menzione: Until next time, we’ll see you in person. Hopefully at our next event.

Automatizar processos nas redes sociais pode transformar a produtividade de qualquer social media ou agência. Mas por onde começar?Neste episódio do Papo Social Media, Rafael Kiso e Marcio Silva mostram como as automações evoluíram do agendamento de posts até fluxos avançados com IA e agentes inteligentes, percorrendo todas as etapas da jornada do cliente com exemplos práticos.Descubra como mapear processos antes de automatizar, usar automações de inbox para nutrir leads, aplicar SDR com IA na qualificação em escala e transformar clientes em promotores de marca. Um episódio essencial para quem quer usar automação como motor de crescimento nas mídias sociais.00:00:08 Introdução00:00:27 O que são automações e por que são importantes para escalar resultados00:01:37 Softwares de automação de marketing: contexto e evolução antes da IA generativa00:02:57 Mapeamento de processos: primeiro passo antes de automatizar00:04:01 mLabs e agendamento multicanal: ganho de tempo e escala na publicação00:06:27 Expansão de canais como estratégia de escala com mínimo custo adicional00:06:49 Agendamento de relatórios: automatizando a entrega de dados para clientes e times00:08:15 Coleta de dados automatizada e análise com IA no mLabs Analytics00:10:38 Criar cultura de relatórios internos, não só para clientes00:11:29 As 5 etapas da jornada do cliente como base para aplicar automações00:12:09 Automação na etapa de Descoberta: agendamento de conteúdo em múltiplas plataformas00:12:36 Automação avançada na Descoberta: monitorar tendências com N8N, Google Trends e IA00:13:56 Ferramentas para encontrar assuntos em alta: TikTok Creative Center, YouTube Studio e VidIQ00:15:07 APIs, Make e N8N: como conectar plataformas e criar fluxos automatizados00:17:19 Automação na etapa de Consideração: engajamento, afinidade e frequência de impacto00:18:59 Automações de comentário para inbox no Instagram00:20:01 Estratégia de conteúdo com gatilho de automação para aumentar frequência de contato00:21:28 Frequência de postagem x frequência de impacto: qual realmente importa00:24:00 mLabs Chat: a nova ferramenta brasileira para automações em inbox e comentários - Conheça: https://mla.bs/f0588e49f500:25:17 Automação na etapa de Conversão: funil de stories com gatilho de palavra-chave00:27:41 Captura de leads por inbox: e-mail, WhatsApp e banco de dados na mLabs Chat00:28:04 Testes A/B com landing pages usando respostas randômicas nas automações00:29:37 Marketing conversacional: reduzindo fricção00:30:20 Cuidados ao enviar links de pagamento pelo Instagram00:31:32 Integração com WhatsApp e definição do limite entre automação e atendimento humano00:32:46 MQL, SQL e SDR com IA: qualificação de leads em escala com automação00:35:44 Automação na etapa de Experiência Própria: atendimento ao cliente e social listening00:38:24 Monitoramento de menções fora do perfil e detecção de avaliações negativas00:41:32 Presença digital depende cada vez mais do que os clientes falam, não do que a marca posta00:42:54 Automação na etapa de Experiência Compartilhada: detectar promotores de marca00:44:03 Comunidade de marca: como reconhecer e empoderar brand lovers00:45:15 Capital social e o que motiva as pessoas a compartilharem experiências com uma marca00:48:44 Pesquisa sobre nova jornada de compra: reputação como atributo intangível de decisão - Acesse: https://mla.bs/7e2ea0c96d00:50:43 As duas formas de gerar confiança: indicação e autoridade de conteúdo00:52:40 Automação com níveis avançados: Cloud Bot, N8N self-hosted e agentes de IA – Saiba mais: https://mla.bs/12037841e8  00:54:45 Mapear processos antes de automatizar e manter o ser humano como orquestrador00:56:20 mLabs Edu, smLab, mentoria, formações e kit de aceleração com agentes de IA00:58:53 EncerramentoPotencialize sua gestão de mídias sociais com a plataforma mais usada por agências e profissionais no Brasil! Teste grátis a mLabs agora mesmo: https://mla.bs/8f82d839

Too many B2B marketing teams are still talking leads when they should be talking revenue. In this episode, Shahin sits down with David Heyworth, GTM advisor and former Head of Marketing at Vocus, to unpack what it really takes to drive commercial outcomes in the second half of 2025. From ditching MQL vanity metrics to building genuine alignment with sales, finance, and product, David brings hard-won lessons from complex B2B environments in Australia. This is a conversation packed with practical frameworks and honest war stories, including one of the most creative ABM activations you'll hear about: a commissioned coin ceremony at the Australian War Memorial, hosted by former Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove, that cemented a 20-year defence sector partnership without a single sales pitch. Guest Introduction David Heyworth is a GTM advisor and CMO with deep experience leading marketing in complex B2B environments across Australia, including his tenure as Head of Marketing at Vocus, one of Australia's leading fibre and network solutions providers. He specialises in go-to-market strategy, sales and marketing alignment, and account-based selling for enterprise and government markets. Key Topics Why agility, balance, and growth are the non-negotiables for B2B marketing teams in the second half of 2025Shifting the conversation from lead generation to revenue opportunities and why talking in dollars gets marketing a seat at the tableHow marketing can own the full GTM motion: building interlocks with sales, finance, and product leadership rather than operating in isolationThe case for an inside sales or sales discovery rep function that sits within marketing and how to prove the model before committing headcountWhy ABM works better when reframed as account-based selling (ABS) and how to sequence one-to-many, one-to-few, and one-to-one engagementBattle-tested lessons from event marketing gone wrong and how champions and pre-agreed outreach schedules turned it aroundA standout defence sector ABM case study: creating a custom commemorative coin and hosting a ceremony at the Australian War Memorial to honour a 20-year partnershipGo-to-market fundamentals that get skipped: market definition, value proposition, messaging frameworks by segment and buyer persona, and why these must come before the marketing plan Resources & Links People Peter Cosgrove-former Chief of the Defence Force and 26th Governor-General of AustraliaSeth Godin - Author and marketing thought leader; David recommends his book Purple Cow on differentiation. Companies & Tools Vocus -Australian telco where David served as CMO.Akimbo -Seth Godin's Podcast Books Purple Cow by Seth Godin Contact & Credits Host: Shahin Hoda Guest: David Heyworth Produced by: Shahin Hoda and Alexander Hipwell Edited by: Alexander Hipwell Music by: Breakmaster Cylinder APAC's B2B Growth Podcast is Presented by xGrowth

How to Connect Marketing to Revenue On this episode host Adam Turinas is joined by two guests who have done the real work of building a model that clearly connects marketing to revenue. First, Paula Cobb, VP of Marketing at AvaSure, a private equity-backed virtual care platform. Paula brings over 30 years of healthcare marketing experience and runs what she calls a peanut butter and jelly go-to-market model, where sales, marketing, and customer success are genuinely inseparable. What he find compelling about her perspective is how tightly she has wired marketing into product decisions and the fact that AI tools have essentially become named members of her org chart. His second guest is Alex Esquivel, VP of Marketing at Luma Health. Alex has an unusual background for a marketer. She came up through finance and operations, which gives her an unusually clear-eyed view of why the traditional MQL model was, in her words, doomed from the start. She describes what a genuinely revenue-accountable marketing model looks like in practice, including how she structures account-based motions, why she does not measure MQLs at all, and how she is moving from slow campaign cycles to fast, iterative content that responds to what buyers actually care about. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen/

Two posts, same week, same effort. One hit 50,000+ impressions with zero pipeline. The other reached 800 people and closed €60K. If you measure them with the same metric, you'll write ten more of the wrong one.In this episode, I lay out the 6-Stage B2B Marketing ROI Framework I use with Microsoft, Marsh McLennan, Delta Holding, and 120+ other B2B companies — and why most teams are running 2012 e-commerce attribution on 2026 enterprise sales cycles.Inside:- Why attribution fails in B2B and what to do about it- Kill the MQL: the Inquiry / Opportunity rebuild that dropped leads 60% and lifted pipeline 40%- The 6 stages: Revenue, Pipeline, Active Focus, Future Pipeline, Cluster ICP, Brand- The software client one week from being shut down — and the €1.4M pipeline that was already building- Why LinkedIn reach dropped 50% YoY and pipeline still went up- ICP Density as the moat, and how to measure it with zero new tools- Q1 2026 search data: Reddit at #2, Wikipedia surging, where AI search actually sits- The 3 rituals that replace 80% of an enterprise marketing intel platform- Diagnostic for finding the one stage that's leaking- A 90-day starterThe best measurement isn't more granular attribution. It's measuring the right system at every stage with the right leading indicators.Everything else is data theater.More: funky.enterprises

This week, I am joined by two guests who have done the real work of building a model that clearly connects marketing to revenue. First, Paula Cobb, VP of Marketing at AvaSure, a private equity-backed virtual care platform. Paula brings over 30 years of healthcare marketing experience and runs what she calls a peanut butter and jelly go-to-market model, where sales, marketing, and customer success are genuinely inseparable. What I find compelling about her perspective is how tightly she has wired marketing into product decisions and the fact that AI tools have essentially become named members of her org chart.My second guest is Alex Esquivel, VP of Marketing at Luma Health. Alex has an unusual background for a marketer. She came up through finance and operations, which gives her an unusually clear-eyed view of why the traditional MQL model was, in her words, doomed from the start. She describes what a genuinely revenue-accountable marketing model looks like in practice, including how she structures account-based motions, why she does not measure MQLs at all, and how she is moving from slow campaign cycles to fast, iterative content that responds to what buyers actually care about.Both conversations offer something different. Paula gives you a vivid inside look at a mature, integrated GTM operation. Alex gives you a sharp, first-principles case for rebuilding from scratch. And at the end of the episode, I come back with five key takeaways from both conversations that I think you will find genuinely useful wherever you are on this journey.If you are a healthtech marketer still working through what modern demand generation actually looks like, this one is worth your full attention.Key Topics:Introduction “(00:00)”The Shift from Lead Volume to Revenue Accountability "(01:00)"The Peanut Butter and Jelly Model at AvaSure "(07:00)"Moving from MQLs to Deep Discovery "(12:00)"Why Customer Success is Part of GTM "(21:00)"AI on the Org Chart "(27:00)"Why Traditional Demand Gen was Doomed "(36:00)"Measuring Stage Three Opportunities "(38:00)"Killing the Traditional Campaign Model "(41:00)"The Power of the Zero-Party Data Field "(53:00)"Hiring for Curiosity Over Skillsets "(59:00)"If you are interested in discussing this or any other topic, let's have a chat.  Reach out to me directly to schedule a no-obligation discussion. This isn't a sales call, but rather an opportunity to talk through your questions and challenges.Follow me on LinkedIn.Subscribe to The Healthtech Marketing Show on Spotify or watch us on YouTube for more insights into marketing, AI, ABM, buyer journeys, and beyond!Thank you to our presenting sponsor, HealthcareNOW, 24/7 expert shows, interviews, and podcasts, powering healthcare leaders with innovation, policy, and strategy insights.

ARR per FTE is the only B2B SaaS metric that exposes whether your go-to-market system is actually working. Annual recurring revenue is annual, but every prospecting, marketing and BDR activity in your business is measured daily, weekly or monthly. The two have never matched, and that mismatch is why most B2B revenue plans quietly miss every year.This episode is for CEOs, CFOs and VPs of Sales who already sense that the dashboard is lying. We unpack why buyer behaviour in B2B looks far more like buying a car than buying a consumer subscription, why social media repetition for B2B is about learning not virality, and why an MQL is one of the least useful numbers on your sales report. We then walk through ARR per FTE as the single number that tells you whether you are building revenue infrastructure or just paying people and platforms to look busy.If your team is still chasing this week's pipeline review with a 1950s cold-calling motion bolted onto a B2C-style MarTech stack, this episode lays out what to keep, what to retire, and what broadcast infrastructure for B2B actually looks like.What this episode coversWhy ARR is annual but every B2B GTM activity is daily, weekly or monthlyWhy B2B buyers behave like car buyers and cannot be compressed into your quarterWhy no is also a decision and how the absence of teaching loses you the dealWhy B2C-style social media tactics fail in B2B and what repetition actually does for buyer learningThe 300-to-1 cold-call ratio and the 33-year maths behind a single BDR working a realistic 1,600-company poolThe sales numbers worth tracking: contacts, impressions, reactions, comments, downloads, conversations, appointmentsARR per FTE as the single metric that exposes whether your GTM model is brokenThe sX Operating System: Reach, Live, Connect, Ops, Hub, CourseThe two choices every B2B CEO faces in 2026Who should watchB2B SaaS CEOs and founders, CFOs and finance leaders carrying the revenue plan, VPs of Sales rebuilding their go-to-market function, CMOs willing to challenge MarTech orthodoxy, and operators planning their 2026 GTM budget.Take the next stepDownload the open-access PDFs, watch the previous shows in the series, and when you are ready, request a GTM Audit. No gating. No cold calls.Download The GTM Revenue Resethttps://salesxchange.co.uk/download/index.php?file=revenue-reset&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=gtm_reset_2026&utm_content=ep08Download The GTM Landscapehttps://salesxchange.co.uk/download/index.php?file=gtm_landscape&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=gtm_reset_2026&utm_content=ep08Download The GTM Architecture Audithttps://salesxchange.co.uk/download/index.php?file=gtm_audit&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=gtm_reset_2026&utm_content=ep08➡︎ Explore the GTM Retraining Academy:Designed to help CEOs and GTM teams replace outdated assumptions, align around a modern operating model, and prepare for wider change.https://academy.salesxchange.co.uk/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=gtm_reset_2026&utm_content=ep08➡︎ Request Your GTM Audit Meetinghttps://salesxchange.co.uk/gtm-ceo/gtm-audit?view=article&id=301:gtmos-audit-questionnaire&catid=52&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=gtm_reset_2026&utm_content=ep08

Is the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) dead, or are marketing teams stuck in a cycle of high-volume, low-return efforts?Marketing economics have undergone significant structural shifts in recent years. With the disappearance of global labor arbitrage and the rise of AI-generated content, the costs of customer acquisition and inbound marketing have skyrocketed. Because of these changes, the once-dominant metric of the MQL is rapidly losing its relevance in today's B2B SaaS environment.In this episode of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks, Brian Graf, Executive CMO of Kalungi, sits down with Stijn Hendrikse, Kalungi's co-founder and ex-Microsoft product marketing leader, to unpack the risks of over-reliance on MQLs. They talk through why marketing teams can no longer win on sheer quantity and speed alone, and how AI and globalization have completely changed the playing field.You'll hear why focusing on "big plays"—low volume, high depth strategies like flagship events or deep partnerships—is key to sustainable growth. Brian and Stijn also detail practical frameworks for shifting away from the high-volume "MQL trap" and moving toward metrics that actually matter: pipeline value and signal-to-noise ratio. By focusing on these deeper, quality-led strategies, marketing teams can flatten the problem of labor arbitrage and AI ubiquity.In this podcast, you'll learn:Why the once-dominant MQL is losing its relevance in the B2B SaaS environment.How the end of global labor arbitrage and the rise of AI have heavily inflated marketing and customer acquisition costs.The dangers of the "MQL trap," where teams are forced to execute high-volume, high-depth campaigns with diminishing returns.Why shifting to "big plays"—low volume, high depth strategies—is the key to sustainable growth.How to transition your tracking from MQLs to measuring the actual dollar value created in your pipeline.The importance of structuring a leaner marketing team that focuses on signal-to-noise ratio and quality-led strategies.By the end, you'll have a clearer view of why the old inbound playbooks are failing and how to build a quality-led, pipeline-focused go-to-market strategy that cuts through the noise.Chapters:00:00 The Death of the MQL08:20 Shifts in Marketing Economics15:29 The Big Play Quadrant20:49 New Metrics for Success25:44 Team Dynamics and Marketing CostsABOUT B2B SAAS MARKETING SNACKSSince 2020, The B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks Podcast has offered software company founders, investors and leadership a fresh source of insights into building a complete and efficient engine for growth.Meet our Marketing Snacks Podcast Hosts:  Stijn Hendrikse: Author of T2D3 Masterclass & Book, Founder of KalungiAs a serial entrepreneur and marketing leader, Stijn has contributed to the success of 20+ startups as a C-level executive, including Chief Revenue Officer of Acumatica, CEO of MightyCall, a SaaS contact center solution, and leading the initial global Go-to-Market for Atera, a B2B SaaS Unicorn. Before focusing on startups, Stijn led global SMB Marketing and B2B Product Marketing for Microsoft's Office platform.Brian Graf: Executive CMO at KalungiAs a CMO at Kalungi, Brian provides high-level strategy, tactical execution, and business leadership expertise to drive long-term growth for B2B SaaS. Brian has successfully led clients in all aspects of marketing growth, from positioning and messaging to event support, product announcements, and channel-spend optimizations, generating qualified leads and brand awareness for clients while prioritizing ROI. Before Kalungi, Brian worked in television advertising, specializing in business intelligence and campaign optimization, and earned his MBA at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business with a focus in finance and marketing. Visit Kalungi.com to learn more about growing your B2B SaaS company.

Every B2B marketer knows the funnel concept is broken. Yet that same model your team is being measured on right now was invented in 1898, and it's surviving because nobody at the top has been given permission to use anything else.Carolyn and Amber react to a recent article in Adweek from Professor Mark Ritson, where he calls the funnel the "cockroach of marketing concepts", a 128-year-old model that has outlived every attempt to replace it. They break down why every critique fails to land, and why the real problem isn't the funnel. It's the classrooms teaching it, the boards demanding it, and the marketers who can't challenge it without risking their careers.Topics covered in this episode:Why a model from 1898 still anchors how B2B companies measure marketing in 2026The gap between what the funnel was designed to do (a market snapshot) and what it's used for (SQL-to-opp conversion, MQL targets)Why every "funnel is dead" critique fails to kill it, and who actually keeps it aliveThe Amazon "full funnel campaigns" moment, and what it says when even the best companies are still using the languageWhy a snapshot in time tells you nothing about where to move budget, why CAC is up, or what to do when pipeline missesIf you've tried to kill the funnel inside your own org and watched it survive every conversation, this is the episode. The cockroach isn't the funnel. It's the system that keeps demanding it.-----------------------------------------------------Want answers now?

We break down what great B2B marketing looks like when creative storytelling meets revenue discipline and tighter sales alignment. Randi Barshack (CMO at Dusty Robotics)and Nicole Fuselier (VP of Demand and Growth at SambNova Systems) share how they measure what matters, build trust across teams, and use AI without giving up human judgment.• creativity plus process as the core of great marketing• “vitamin vs painkiller” framing for product market fit• sales and marketing alignment built on shared definitions and consistency• moving beyond MQL volume toward pipeline quality and true hand raisers• raising the bar with fit-and-intent scoring and later-stage intent signals• brand storytelling that stays authentic for skeptical buyers using customer proof• managing BDR and inside sales feedback loops to improve targeting and messaging• vanity metrics to remove from board decks and brand metrics to defend like share of voice• AI marketing debates on autonomy, fact-checking, and personalization done well• navigating outreach noise with credibility, social channels, and in-person touchBrand or demand gen? Creative or metrics? Most B2B marketing teams get trapped in false choices, then wonder why pipeline feels inflated and trust feels thin. We sit down with Randy Barshack and Nicole Fuselier to talk through the real work: blending sharp storytelling with revenue marketing rigor so sales and marketing win together.We dig into the “vitamin vs painkiller” test for product market fit, what alignment actually looks like when definitions spark conflict, and how to move past MQL obsession without losing operational control. Nicole lays out the first step toward a pipeline-first mindset, how she thinks about hand raisers, and why later-stage intent signals can be more honest than early-stage volume. Randy shares how authentic customer-led storytelling wins skeptical buyers, plus practical ways to keep creative work grounded in performance metrics.Then we pressure-test hot AI marketing predictions: autonomous marketing without humans, hyper-personalization, and a future where procurement filters block cold outreach. The takeaway is not anti-AI, it is pro-accountability: use AI to move faster, personalize smarter, and iterate more, but keep humans responsible for facts, taste, and the “edge” that makes marketing memorable.Randi Barshack: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randi-barshack-431a72Randi Barshack is the Chief Marketing Officer at Dusty Robotics, where they are bringing autonomous robotic layout technology to the construction industry. A 5x CMO, she has guided companies through five major exits representing over $1 billion in value, including acquisitions by IBM, Intel, Appen, Everbridge, and Adobe. Randi is an expert in category creation across nascent spaces like Human-in-the-Loop AI and physical roboticsNicole Fuselier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nsiegalfuselierNicole Siegal Fuselier is the VP of Demand and Growth at SambaNova Systems, a company revolutionizing enterprise AI infrastructure and agentic AI. Proudly calling herself a "Revenue Marketer," Nicole has built and led globally scaled teams through multiple acquisitions and IPOs at companies like Matterport, Magento, and Wurl, while also spending over a decaWebsite: https://www.position2.com/podcast/Rajiv Parikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivparikh/Sandeep Parikh: https://www.instagram.com/sandeepparikh/Email us with any feedback for the show: sparkofages.podcast@position2.com

In this episode of Inside the Funnel, Richard Lane sits down with Rosanne Darrow, VP of Marketing and Communications at Siemens Healthineers, to unpack how one of the world's largest healthcare organisations is rethinking demand generation - and what it takes to drive commercial impact at scale.Rosanne has spent over 20 years at Siemens, leading marketing across global and regional roles. Her focus today is simple: drive demand, enable sales, and deliver measurable commercial results.But in a market that's changing fast, that's easier said than done.Buyers are more digital-first than ever. In fact, 62% of medtech buyers now prefer a rep-free experience at the early stages of their journey.At the same time, sales teams are under pressure to focus on high-value conversations - not chasing unqualified leads.So how do you bridge that gap?In this conversation, Rosanne shares how Siemens Healthineers shifted from a volume-driven marketing model to a more structured, end-to-end demand engine - one that prioritises qualification, nurtures opportunities properly, and delivers real pipeline impact.We get into:Why traditional MQL models were breaking down — and frustrating sales teamsHow SDRs became a critical layer between marketing and salesThe role of digital-first buying behaviour in reshaping go-to-market strategyHow to prove a new model internally without disrupting your sales teamWhat “good” looks like when it comes to alignment, content, and customer journeysIf you're still measuring success

Are you still relying on OCR for your enterprise AI? You're losing critical context.In this episode, Anaiya Raisinghani (Sr. Tech. Evangelist, AI Startups & Ventures at MongoDB) sits down with Adityavardhan Agrawal, Co-Founder and CEO of Morphik. They dive deep into how Morphik is helping developers and enterprises understand complex, unstructured data and automate high-leverage workflows.Adi breaks down the limitations of standard RAG pipelines and reveals why they turned to Vision Language Models (VLMs) to process complex documents like architectural floorplans.What you'll learn in this episode:The OCR Trap: Why text extraction is inherently lossy for complex documents and how VLMs generate better embeddings.The RAG Misconception: Why getting high-quality context requires much more than just plain vector search.Database Architecture: Why Morphik hit the limits of Postgres/JSONB for dynamic datasets and how migrating to MongoDB Atlas simplified their multi-tenancy and querying.Massive ROI: How one manufacturing customer used Morphik to slash their quote generation time from 7 days to under 2 minutes.The Future of Knowledge: Building self-healing, self-updating data layers that leverage MQL.(Want to start building? You can use Morphik's API, Python/TypeScript SDKs, or grab the Docker image from GitHub today!)⏱️ Chapter Timestamps00:00 - Intro: Meet Adi and Morphik01:18 - APIs, SDKs, and Getting Started with Morphik02:28 - The Lightbulb Moment: Why Standard AI Fails on Unstructured Data04:44 - The Biggest Misconception About RAG06:24 - Vision Language Models (VLMs) vs. Traditional OCR08:35 - Reducing Entropy: Combining Embeddings with Knowledge Graphs10:13 - Architecture Deep-Dive: Hitting the Limits of Postgres & JSONB12:06 - Why Morphik Migrated to MongoDB Atlas13:24 - Simplifying Multi-Tenancy at Scale15:13 - Ensuring Data Security and Reliability16:33 - Accelerating Growth with MongoDB for Startups18:10 - Real-World Impact: Cutting Quote Generation from 7 Days to 2 Minutes20:15 - The Future: Self-Healing Data Layers and Native MQL

MQLs and SQLs. Most CEOs don't care about this data, and yet entire marketing departments still optimize for these metrics. Tanya Thorson spent 20+ years moving from retail stores to cybersecurity SaaS, and she's done pretending B2B and B2C are different categories. They're not. It's all B2A (business to anyone) because at the end of every transaction is still a human.Join hosts Nick Paladino and Chuck Moxley as we sit down with Tanya Thorson, fractional CMO and author of "Get Off Your Mass." Tanya breaks down why the funnel we've been optimizing for decades is fiction. Buyers aren't thinking "I'm in the discovery stage, I hope I get a white paper," they're bouncing around like ping pong balls touching your brand 60-65 times before raising their hands. We explore internal friction, which Tanya argues is the real problem: sales and marketing fighting over credit, stores versus digital with competing goals, incentive structures that make people territorial instead of customer-focused. She reveals how moving Network Perception from product-led to buyer-centric doubled their ARR and led to acquisition by tightening pipeline velocity 50%. We discuss why relevance trumps personalization, knowing someone struggles with a specific problem beats just inserting their name in an email. Chuck's ungating case study comes up again, and Tanya flips the script on friction itself.  Her definition: frictionless is fewer second guesses.Key Actionable Takeaways:Align teams around revenue, not meaningless metrics - Replace MQLs/SQLs with meaningful metrics like pipeline velocity, win rate, CAC-to-LTV ratio; get sales and marketing sitting at the same table accountable for the same P&L outcomesRemove dead ends and keep buyers exploring - Ungate content, provide continuous pathways to learn more, and stop forcing premature conversion points when buyers need 60+ touchpoints before they're ready to engage salesWeight relevance over shallow personalization - Address actual pain points and quantifiable outcomes rather than just inserting names in templates; great personalization reduces hesitation by eliminating ambiguity about whether your solution is for themWant more tips and strategies about creating frictionless digital experiences? Subscribe to our newsletter! https://www.thefrictionlessexperience.com/frictionless/Download the Five Step Site Speed Target Playbook: http://bluetriangle.com/playbookTanya Thorson's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanyathorson/ Tanya's Book, “Get Off Your (M)ass!”: https://a.co/d/0bBWNpZWNick Paladino's LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/npaladino Chuck Moxley's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckmoxley/Chapters:(00:00) Introduction(03:12) Tanya's background(07:37) B2A concept unpacked(10:03) Curiosity Creed(11:58) Football field analogy(13:00) Meaningful vs meaningless metrics(14:16) CEO's don't care about MQLs(16:09) Nick admits ignorance(17:08) Merging sales and marketing(18:06) Revenue alignment(20:16) Product-led dead ends(22:20) Dead end friction(24:00) Internal conflict stories(25:01) Incentive misalignment(27:25) Attribution problems(28:30) 60-65 touchpoints research(29:36) Ungating case study(31:19) POISE framework(33:13) Relevance over personalization(34:04) AI and emotional intelligence(35:29) AI doing heavy lifting(37:19) Biggest misconception(38:12) Conclusion

In 2004, Wells Fargo's internal audit flagged a problem: employees felt they couldn't hit sales targets without gaming the system.The scandal broke 12 years later.Two million fake accounts.Thousands fired.Billions in fines.No one set out to commit fraud.They optimized for the metric.In this Sharp Cut, we break down Goodhart's Law — when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure — and show how the same pattern is operating inside marketing departments right now.We examine:Why CTR has near-zero correlation with brand growth (Nielsen, LinkedIn, Tracksuit data)How short-term ROAS creates long-term decline (Binet & Field)Why agency compensation structures reward activity over effectivenessThe MQL trap in B2BThe “cheap CPM” illusion and the cost of dull mediaAnd then we offer a prescription:How to redesign your metrics so they can't be gamed.How to pair opposing indicators.How to measure mental vs physical availability.How to ensure your dashboard actually changes decisions.This is not a rant about bad marketers.It's a structural critique of broken incentive systems.Because marketing doesn't drift by accident.It drifts because incentives are misaligned.Episode 1 of a three part series.Key Takeaways:Incentives can lead to unintended consequences in marketing.Goodhart's Law highlights the dangers of misaligned metrics.Wells Fargo's scandal exemplifies the risks of poor incentive structures.Digital advertising metrics often fail to correlate with brand outcomes.Short-term ROAS focus can deplete future demand.Agency compensation models may incentivize spending over effectiveness.MQL culture can overwhelm sales with low-quality leads.Cheap impressions may not translate to real engagement.Marketers should audit metrics for potential gaming.Effective measurement requires aligning metrics with business goals.Chapters:00:00 - Introduction 02:47 - The Wells Fargo Scandal: A Case Study05:50 - Understanding Goodhart's Law09:00 - The Metrics Trap: Digital Advertising Insights12:01 - The Short-Term ROAS Trap14:54 - Agency Compensation and MQL Culture17:58 - The Importance of Metrics and Accountability20:59 - Recap and Final Thoughts

Qualytics is redefining enterprise data quality by positioning it as a collaborative business function rather than an isolated data engineering problem. Founded at the start of the pandemic by Gorkem Sevinc - a former CTO and CDO who spent years managing reactive data quality firefights - Qualytics emerged from a clear practitioner pain point: writing endless custom rules to catch data issues after they'd already broken dashboards and KPIs. The company raised pre-seed and seed rounds while building with beta customers, then closed a Series A as repeatability patterns emerged in their POC process. Now, as enterprises scramble to operationalize AI initiatives, Qualytics is experiencing explosive inbound demand from organizations realizing their data foundations aren't ready for democratized data access. Topics Discussed The practitioner insight that sparked Qualytics: reactive rule-writing doesn't scale Leveraging existing CTO/CDO networks and PE portfolio connections for beta customers The evolution from free POCs to paid POCs as a mutual commitment mechanism Identifying repeatability through week-by-week POC conversion patterns Building practitioner credibility into the sales motion while hiring for enterprise sales grit The decision to hire sales and marketing leadership simultaneously post-Series A Tracking in-product engagement metrics (DQ operations frequency, anomaly detection, rule editing) as churn prevention Positioning data quality as vertical-specific business problems (premium leakage, regulatory compliance) The timing advantage: AI adoption forcing enterprises to treat data governance as mandatory infrastructure GTM Lessons For B2B Founders Talk to 100 prospects before writing code—even with deep domain expertise: After burning 18 months building a radiology second opinion product that patients didn't want (they didn't even know radiologists were doctors), Gorkem adopted a hard rule: validate with 100 conversations before building. His advantage as a former CTO who lived the data quality problem created false confidence. Practitioners often assume their pain is universal, but buyer awareness and willingness to pay are separate questions. Start with NSF I-Corps-style problem validation: show rough sketches, probe what happened when they hit the pain point, understand how it hurt them financially or operationally. Repeatability appears in micro-conversions during trials, not just closed-won rates: Gorkem didn't declare product-market fit when deals closed—he declared it when he could predict POC behavior by week. "Week two, I'm expecting this. Week three, I'm expecting this." That predictability enabled ROI calculators and internal champion enablement materials. For technical founders, this means instrumenting your trial or POC to track leading indicators: specific features activated, data volumes processed, number of team members engaged, frequency of logins. When those patterns stabilize across prospects, you have a repeatable motion. Use paid POCs as a procurement front-loading mechanism, not a revenue play: Qualytics charges nominal amounts for some POCs—not for the revenue, but to get the MSA signed and force both parties through legal/security review upfront. This eliminates the pattern where free POCs succeed technically but die in procurement. Large enterprises often refuse to pay for POCs, which Gorkem accepts—but only if they commit equivalent effort (executive time, cross-functional teams). The paid POC is a qualification tool: if they won't commit anything, they're not a real opportunity. Hire sales and marketing leadership in parallel and hold them to unified GTM metrics: Gorkem regrets hiring early sales reps before leadership and delaying marketing investment. Post-Series A, he hired both leaders simultaneously and holds them jointly accountable to pipeline generation and velocity—not siloed MQL counts or quota attainment. This structural decision forces collaboration on messaging, ICP definition, and campaign strategy from day one. For technical founders who "figured out" founder-led sales, resist the urge to replicate your motion with more SDRs. Bring in strategic leadership that can build a scalable system. Instrument product engagement as your earliest churn signal—then intervene immediately: Beyond quarterly NPS and executive QBRs, Gorkem tracks granular product usage: how many data quality operations users run, how many anomalies they discover, how actively they're editing rules. When engagement drops, he doesn't wait—he jumps into the customer's existing weekly meetings to diagnose and course-correct. For B2B founders building complex products with long time-to-value, passive health scores aren't enough. You need active usage telemetry and a low-latency intervention process. Translate technical capabilities into vertical-specific business outcomes: Gorkem doesn't pitch "data quality for data engineers." He talks about premium leakage with insurance companies and OCC/SEC data controls with banks. This reframing works because buyers recognize their problem, not a vendor category. The shift requires research: understand each vertical's regulatory environment, operational pain points, and the business metrics executives care about. When you walk in speaking their language about their P&L impact, you're not another vendor—you're someone who gets it. Time your market entry to when "nice-to-have" becomes "must-have": When Qualytics launched, some enterprises called data quality a "nice-to-have." AI adoption changed that calculus overnight. Organizations planning to let 20,000 employees interrogate data through AI interfaces suddenly realized they need robust data governance, quality controls, and cataloging first. Gorkem's timing wasn't luck—he built during the "nice-to-have" phase so he'd be ready when AI budgets made it mandatory. Technical founders should identify the external forcing function (regulation, technology shift, economic change) that will transform their solution from vitamin to painkiller. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

The Deal You Never Knew Existed. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this deep dive, Jay McBain reveals the harsh reality of the “28 Moments” in a modern B2B buying journey, using a multi-million dollar SAP deal at AstraZeneca as a wake-up call for vendors. He explains how traditional marketing leads are failing in the “decade of the ecosystem,” where trusted partners like NTT and SoftwareOne are winning deals in “light blue” partnership moments months before a customer ever downloads an ebook. If you aren’t visible in the seven-layer stack or collaborating with the partners who hold the customer’s trust, you aren’t just losing the deal—you're losing the entire market. https://youtu.be/NO-P6X2dTAo?si=8e_sVesqvwaC0M-E Key Takeaways Most vendors lose major deals without ever knowing a transaction was even taking place. The average considered purchase involves 28 distinct moments of research and influence before a sale. Trusted partners often close the deal in the “middle moments” months before the money is actually spent. Traditional marketing leads (MQLs) are often too “flimsy” compared to deep partner-led relationships. Winning in the ecosystem requires being part of a “seven-layer stack” of integrated technology and services. Data-sharing platforms like Crossbeam and Workspan are now essential to seeing the “invisible” pipeline. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: 28 Moments, Jay McBain, Ecosystem Strategy, AstraZeneca SAP Deal, Seven Layer Stack, B2B Buying Journey, Partner Ecosystem, NTT, SoftwareOne, Channel Strategy, Buyer Intent, Informa TechTarget, Collaborative Selling, Crossbeam, Partner Tap, Workspan, Marketplace Tracking, Co-selling, Tech Integration, Revenue Architecture, Pipeline Growth, Trusted Advisor, Digital Transformation, SAP Optimization, Microsoft AWS Competition. Transcript: [00:00:00] Jay McBain: So if you’re a vendor trying to get into that seven layer stack and you don’t have that relationship, or you don’t have the knowledge that NTT or software one is going in, this will have been a deal that would’ve never hit your pipeline and you’ll have no knowledge. So you will have lost this deal without knowing there was a deal. [00:00:19] Vince Menzione: We’ve been talking 28 moments, but you have a slide. I thought we’d spend some time here because, you know, every conversation with you is about 28 moments, but you finally took the time to analyze one of your deals or one of the deals that was going on with one of your clients and come up with the 28 moments. [00:00:36] Vince Menzione: I thought we’d spend a little time here because this journey slide is a wake up call. Uh, it’s, it’s, it’s all around. Why, why we need to think about all of those. Points we need to think about communities and analysts and marketplaces and proof of concepts and architecture and everything else. I thought maybe you’d take us through this a little bit. [00:00:53] Vince Menzione: ’cause this was for a client, AstraZeneca, by the way. This was, uh, if you don’t know this, ICI Americas was the precursor of mm-hmm. AstraZeneca. It was the first SAP customer in North America. [00:01:03] Jay McBain: Nice. I did [00:01:04] Vince Menzione: not know that. That’s why Microsoft and SAP both headquartered. In that area, near nearby, that client. [00:01:10] Vince Menzione: That’s, uh, news, new news. [00:01:11] Jay McBain: And by the way, this is an SAP deal we’re looking at. Yeah. Uh, so two things here. One is that, um, while I was declaring the decade of the ecosystem, you know, spending time with you and Boca, in between that time we got acquired. Canals, which was Latin for channel, got acquired by oia, part of Informa TechTarget, part of this bigger informa company, which is a Fortune 100 company outta the uk. [00:01:32] Jay McBain: Fantastic. You know, we’re part of this massive organization that is really around buyer intent. How, you know, a tech target and, uh, running hundreds of magazines like Information Week and Computer Week that customers and partners read running hundreds of events, the biggest events on the planet. [00:01:49] Vince Menzione: Crazy [00:01:49] Jay McBain: in B2B, like Black Hat and all these things are run by [00:01:52] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:01:53] Jay McBain: informa. [00:01:53] Jay McBain: So it’s got this massive mountain of data. About the 28 moments. So when you start to think if you’re a CMO and you start to think about the early moments, you, you think about somebody reading an ebook or, um, going to a, a webinar or going onto a LinkedIn live just like this one. Yeah, going to a major event and getting a pair of socks from you. [00:02:13] Jay McBain: Um, but anything early in the journey. These are the m qls. These are the things that I need enough of them to be credible before I hand them over to my sales team. ’cause I don’t wanna be laughed out of the room. Hey, they read an ebook. They must, AstraZeneca must be buying millions of dollars of stuff. [00:02:27] Vince Menzione: Traditional marketing lead. [00:02:29] Jay McBain: Traditional marketing lead. So they’re a bit nervous about sharing that. And then later on, the sales motions, the demos and all the progression of the sales. This was the two decades before us, the decade of sales, decade of marketing. But the 28 moments, just to take a step back, if you haven’t heard, it is just a considered purchase. [00:02:46] Jay McBain: It’s about psychology, human psychology. When you go and buy a car, second most expensive thing that you will purchase you on average will go through 28 moments getting ready for that purchase. Some people go through two moments and they just drive to the Cadillac dealership to see Larry, who’s been selling Cadillacs to the family for 80 years. [00:03:04] Jay McBain: Yep. Some people spend 58 moments. That’s probably me. [00:03:07] Vince Menzione: That’s you, a, [00:03:08] Jay McBain: you know, going through all the depreciation, watching every YouTube video, you know, going to the end of the earth. But the average is 28. So you start to think about this, this is the same buying a car considered purchase, that you would buy a million dollars in software. [00:03:21] Jay McBain: From Microsoft or SAP. So when you look at these moments, you start to think, you know, how is you before you buy that car, downloading the invoice price, downloading this month’s backend rebates. Should I buy it in January? Should I buy it in February? All these decisions you make before you get to that dealership, you’re smarter than the salesperson, smarter than the sales manager. [00:03:39] Jay McBain: You know what 5,000 people bought the car for within 50 miles of you? I mean, you’re just so smart. You actually don’t need the dealership anymore. Just Carvana to me, hand me the keys. Exactly. But now in buying technology, hardware, software services, customers are getting this smart. And here’s all the moments they take to get this smart. [00:03:57] Jay McBain: But the thing we always had in mind in this decade of the ecosystem was the 96% there are trusted people. Yeah. Spending decades building that trust that come in in critical moments. They’re not marketing moments, they’re not sales moments. They are fully partnership moments. Yeah. And they’re on this slide in light blue. [00:04:15] Jay McBain: So if you were to look at this deal and, and somebody in marketing is finding these eBooks and webinars and they think there might be something, AWS got a direct hit on their website. So there’s something brewing at AstraZeneca. It, it might be in, it’s a big pharmaceutical company, so you’re probably spending millions of dollars if something’s brewing. [00:04:31] Jay McBain: Yep. But guess what? At the same time, in December on this six month journey. Partners come in with five different paid projects, consulting, advisory design projects, and in this case it was NTT software one, Yash and uh, ISV was there. Yep. But NTT won three different. Deals right at that critical stage. It wasn’t Accenture, it wasn’t Deloitte, NTT at this particular department of AstraZeneca had spent the decades building those relationships. [00:04:58] Jay McBain: So they were the one, and they won critical part of this. And so that’s when the deal is won. And it’s not at April when the money’s being spent. Yeah, it’s, it’s not in March when a couple more ISVs joined the mix, that seven layer stack that solves this particular problem, it was right there. So if you’re a vendor trying to get into that seven layer stack and you don’t have that relationship, or you don’t have the knowledge that NTT or software one is going in, this will have been a deal that would’ve never hit your pipeline and you’ll have no knowledge. [00:05:30] Jay McBain: So you will have lost this deal without knowing there was a deal, which makes up again, the majority of your tam. [00:05:34] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:05:35] Jay McBain: But what if I did have this agentic ability to see this deal coming, and I’m a cybersecurity company, I’m just competing for layer five of the deal, but I know that it’s all happening in December. [00:05:46] Jay McBain: So the two things that jump out on this particular slide is one, they don’t just show up in December. [00:05:51] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:05:51] Jay McBain: this went closed one in their Salesforce CRM in August, September, well, before the customer ever read an ebook. So now you’re not dealing with a flimsy MQL. You’re dealing with a couple of great, you know, top partner 1000 sized firms. [00:06:09] Jay McBain: One of them is a partner, 30 firm. [00:06:11] Vince Menzione: Exactly. [00:06:12] Jay McBain: That is absolutely going into and earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in services to guide the customer to a millions of dollars in purchase. And, and you can imagine in that boardroom. With A CMO saying, Hey, I got this stuff here. And the head of channels or partnerships saying, no, no, this is real. [00:06:32] Jay McBain: Here’s the names, faces, and places. Yeah. And here’s how it’s happening. And this is exactly, this is the Gantt chart, this is the show up, this is the project, this is the outcome. This is exactly how it’s playing out. Now if I could go back and the board and the C-suite should be asking us, well, how many more deals like this can you see? [00:06:50] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:06:51] Jay McBain: If our TAM is, you know, how many billions of dollars? Could you double our pipeline by seeing more of these middle moments? And if we got a couple of months to spend with these partners before they get in front of the customer, could they build more of our portfolio into the deal so we’re not just layer five, maybe we’re layer three and layer five. [00:07:10] Vince Menzione: This slide screams at me. Integr Tech integration Cha. A partner channel integration of tech, uh, whether it’s Crossbeam, whether it’s Partner Tap, whether it’s work span, or any of these other technologies, tackle any of these technologies that are tracking marketplace, that are tracking partner to partner, co-selling. [00:07:30] Vince Menzione: Getting the integration points. The only way to really understand the situation here, because this is a multinational company. Yeah. It’s being touched at all PO points around the globe. And to understand who’s calling who, who’s influencing who, and getting a real view, you know, a uber view of what that looks like is super important. [00:07:47] Jay McBain: It is. And you know, if I’m trying to sell like a cross beam or partner tab or work span or something into my executive team, I’m just showing them this slide. [00:07:54] Vince Menzione: Exactly. [00:07:54] Jay McBain: Would you like to know about this deal? Like you see, October is the start of the timeline here. Would you like to know about this deal in August, September? [00:08:00] Vince Menzione: Yep. [00:08:01] Jay McBain: Would you like to know about it automatically? Again, we’re not waiting for somebody, a human in a cubicle to go fill out a form. We’re not waiting for them to call somebody at our in, in a cubicle at our company. Yeah. We’re literally age genically sharing platforms, and so when this triggers that AstraZeneca and now triggers in our CRM system as well, our team on AstraZeneca gets notified and it gets notified in September before the 28 moments even starts. [00:08:27] Jay McBain: This, the power of this, of doubling, tripling your pipeline and then winning a bigger yield, a bigger percentage of that pipeline. This is the holy grail of our industry, and no one’s gonna get to a hundred percent. You’re not gonna have a hundred percent of your tam covered by your pipeline. No one’s gonna win a hundred percent of that. [00:08:43] Jay McBain: But again, we only have to be 10 or 20% better than our competitors and we need to start moving on this now. [00:08:50] Vince Menzione: So your imperative for the partners here, well everyone watching here today, I mean, this screams to me build your ecosystem strategy in such a strong and succinct way. What else would you say to them? [00:09:00] Jay McBain: I mean, the second thing that jumps out, you see two AWS direct touches here. This is something that this would be inbound. This AWS would see this deal in their pipeline. [00:09:09] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:09:10] Jay McBain: Because the customer came to them. AWS lost this deal. Crazy. So Microsoft won this deal. I, I mentioned Microsoft outgrowing AWS Yeah. [00:09:19] Jay McBain: ’cause in this particular case, NTT and Software One and Yash came in with Microsoft. Yeah. To solve an SAP optimization, Microsoft, and, you know, seven layer deal. So whether you’re in AWS, whether you’re in Microsoft, whether you’re anywhere else in this industry, you’re thinking like, you’re not gonna probably overtake what happens in December. [00:09:39] Jay McBain: These are the most trusted, smartest people in the room. And whatever happens in those projects is the seven layer stack the customer’s gonna buy in March, April. So I, I start to think about this and go, I need to win. ’cause NTT has a wonderful relationship with AWS. [00:09:55] Vince Menzione: They do, [00:09:56] Jay McBain: I mean, partner of the year level. [00:09:57] Jay McBain: I mean, they’ve got 10,000 people certified. I mean, there’s just a, you know, there’s no one at AWS that, um, you know, would take a, a loss here because it’s a wonderful relationship. And Software One, they [00:10:09] Vince Menzione: go back to Microsoft actually 30, 40 years though they do. They were Dimension data before that. Yeah. [00:10:14] Vince Menzione: And they have the long hit Legacy And Software One. Software one as well. You, [00:10:19] Jay McBain: you know, well Software one is Microsoft’s biggest reseller, uh, in Europe. And now with Crayon, you know, one of the biggest in the world. So I would be nervous if I was looking at this and saw Software one coming in with NTT and watching these things take place if I were able to see this back in September, October and work with these companies. [00:10:38] Jay McBain: That’s where kind of Microsoft came into the picture. And this never hit Microsoft’s pipeline. No Microsoft salesperson ever worked on it, but millions of dollars came to Microsoft. Yeah. Uh, out of this deal. So there are examples of where Microsoft gets touched and AWS wins the deal. So this isn’t meant to say that it happens in every case, but it’s meant to say data rules the future, and agent ai, the ability to plumb in these boxes. [00:11:00] Jay McBain: Working with Informa tech, target people that can plumb in the boxes for you with third party data, helping you with the light blue boxes. We gotta be obsessed over these light blue boxes. [00:11:11] Vince Menzione: It’s incredible. The Ultimate Partner Winter Retreat is gonna be here in the Boca Studio. This is the third year that we’re gonna be here in Boca. [00:11:21] Vince Menzione: This is always a favorite of our community members, our executive members, our sponsors and speakers. We’ll all be here in the studio, which is a really intimate setting. We can see upwards of 40, 50 people. Uh, we’ll be hosting an incredible dinner at the Boca Resort overlooking the golf course. That’s an incredible property and, uh, we’d love to have you join us. [00:11:45] Vince Menzione: Thank you for being part of the ultimate Partner community, and I hope to see you this year at one of our events. Thank you.

Inbound marketing doesn't have to solely depend on human capacity anymore.   In this episode, Maura Rivera, CMO at Qualified, shares how AI SDR agents are transforming how SaaS teams generate pipeline not by replacing people but by working the entire inbound funnel 24/7. She explains why traditional marketing automation and MQL models are breaking down, how agents can follow up instantly across every lead source, and what happens when you redeploy human SDRs to higher-value outbound work. Maura also discusses practical use cases like event follow-up, reactivating dormant leads, and the emerging 'bot manager' role inside modern marketing teams.  

Why B2B Lead Qualification Fails and How to Fix It  Traffic is cheap, but qualified B2B sales conversions are not. Too many CMOs in the B2B space are watching brilliant creative go to waste at the top of the marketing funnel because what's passing through as a “qualified lead” often isn't really qualified. How can B2B marketers identify where the real lead qualification bottleneck is? Why is rethinking how MQLs are defined, scored, and routed one the most strategic fixes a CMO can make to improve pipeline performance? That's why we're talking to Gabe Lullo (CEO, Alleyoop), who shared some insights around why B2B lead qualification fails and how to fix it at the top of the funnel. During our discussion, Gabe challenged the common misconception that poor lead quality is the issue when sales aren't closing. Instead, he emphasized the importance of a clearly-defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), a strong product-market fit, and a well-mapped B2B sales journey. Gabe also stressed the need for A/B testing, identifying and resolving funnel bottlenecks, and using data-driven decision-making to improve lead conversion rates. He underscored the value of nurturing leads and cautioned B2B marketers against dismissing traditional marketing channels without rigorous testing. https://youtu.be/KXVmywNsfP0 Topics discussed in episode: [02:36] Why top-of-funnel lead qualification breaks down in B2B. [16:37] How to define and operationalize your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). [12:17] When MQLs hurt more than they help, and how to fix them. [26:14] How A/B testing and data-driven decisions improve lead conversion. [27:53] Why lead nurturing is critical to long sales cycles. [34:05] When to test (not abandon) traditional B2B marketing channels. Companies and links mentioned: Gabe Lullo on LinkedIn  Alleyoop  ZoomInfo  Salesloft  Adobe  Transcript SPEAKERS Gabe Lullo, Christian Klepp Gabe Lullo  00:00 So we’re doing top of funnel activities, and then we’re sending leads over. The sales team takes them, and then what we find, a lot, we hear this all the time, is leads aren’t closing. And what’s interesting is that it was never a lead problem. It was more of a, you know, seller problem. I don’t mean to put blame on it, but companies come to us saying, hey, my sellers are saying we don’t have enough leads, we don’t have better leads, we don’t have good leads, and they’re the ones complaining about the lead. So they come to us to fix the lead problem. We fix the lead problem, but it doesn’t fix the revenue problem. It’s still not closing. So what is it? Christian Klepp  00:30 Traffic is cheap, but conversion is not too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officer) are watching brilliant, creative go to waste at the top of the funnel, because what’s passing through as qualified just isn’t so how can you identify where the real bottleneck is, and why is rethinking how MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) are defined and scored the single most strategic fix? A CMO can make welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Gabe Lullo, who will be answering these questions. He’s the CEO of Alleyoop, a sales development agency working with industry giants such as ZoomInfo, Salesloft and Adobe. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B Marketers Mission is, and off we go. Mr. Gabe Lullo, welcome to the show, sir. Gabe Lullo  01:17 Christian. Thank you so much. First off, I’m a huge fan of yours, so is my team, and we just appreciate all that you do for the industry. And I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for the invite. Christian Klepp  01:28 Wow, wow. Thank you. Thank you so much. Right off the gate with the praise, thank you, sir. Gabe Lullo  01:33 Well, you deserve it, man, you’re the best. What do you do. I love it. I love your show, and I love being a part of that. Christian Klepp  01:38 I appreciate that. I appreciate that. You know, we really had an awesome, like, pre-interview conversation. I’m gonna say, like, you know, talking about coming up to Toronto and Buffalo and what have you. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation, Gabe, because, man, you know, what? As much as some Marketers probably don’t want to hear this. It’s an, I think this is an absolutely necessary conversation to have. Right this topic that we’re going to talk about, and I will not keep the audience in suspense for too long. I’m just going to jump into the first question, if you don’t mind. Gabe Lullo  02:09 Yeah, no problem. Let’s get right into it. Christian Klepp  02:11 All right, so Gabe, you’re on a mission to provide the ultimate assist to your clients by setting them up for success. So for this conversation, let’s zero in on the following topic of how B2B Marketers can fix qualification at the top. So here comes the first question in our previous conversation. You talked about many marketing funnels being a leaky bucket. Can you please explain what you meant by that? Gabe Lullo  02:36 Yeah, I think companies right now are going to market in a very hodgepodge type of way, you know, ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), you know, we throw that terminal around a lot, and, you know, people think they know what it is, or feel like they have it drilled down, or feel like it’s completely locked, locked in. And then clients invite us in, and we realize it’s not the case, and it’s not just what the ideal client profile is, which, of course, is quintessential to going to market, and it’s really the first step to qualification, isn’t it, right? But on the other side of it, it is, you know, is there a product market fit? Is there a pricing that needs to be aligned? What’s the competitive landscape look like? So when we’re having live conversations, our sellers are making, you know, 11 million cold calls a year. That’s front of the line conversations, right? And we can hear, understand, and truly, you know, debrief with what each call is sounding like, so we can then narrow in what those qualifications should be. You know, a lot of you know, let’s say VPs of sales come into the sales development side of the house or the marketing side of the house, and they apply sales training methodologies to top of funnel qualifications, and it really gets broken as well. So there’s a lot to unpack, but I’ll give you an example. You know, band for instance, but you know budget authority needed timing. Like, is that really the right qualification at the top of the funnel, or does that really, you know, evolve the seller and the demo and the discovery call at that moment in time. So really understanding who’s in charge of that top of funnel and what their experience is also as a part of it, in my opinion. Christian Klepp  04:13 Absolutely, absolutely and you’re absolutely right. There’s so much to unpack here, but I have to ask just from your experience, and I know you have a lot, it seems like it’s just, there’s so many moving parts in this ecosystem, and a lot of like, well, what causes the leaky funnel? I’m gonna say is a lot of the things that you just mentioned, right? It’s a lack of understanding of who the actual ICP is. It’s probably also, especially the bigger the the organization gets sorry to everyone out there, but the lack of ownership and accountability, the lack of an actual strategy, like, where’s this all gonna go? Right? Gabe Lullo  04:54 Oh, it’s interesting. Yeah, I find this to be our except we so we’re doing top of the funnel activities, and we’re sending leads over, the sales team takes them, and then what we find, a lot, we hear this all the time, is leads aren’t closing. And what’s interesting is that it was never a lead problem. It was more of a seller problem. Now I don’t mean to put blame on it, but companies come to us saying, hey, my sellers are saying we don’t have enough leads, we don’t have better leads, we don’t have good leads, and they’re the ones complaining about the lead so they come to us to fix the lead problem. We fix the lead problem, but it doesn’t fix the revenue problem. It’s still not closing. So what is it? It’s the entire channel, right? It’s the entire sales journey, and we have to make sure that all of those things are working like an engine, right? All the cylinders are working at the same time in the same motion, to truly know what the problem may be. So that that’s really exposed a lot when we step in and start doing top of funnel activities, Christian Klepp  05:55 Absolutely, absolutely. And that segues into the next question, which I feel you’ve already answered to a certain extent. But where do you feel the true bottleneck lies, and that may be dependent on the company, right? Because each company maybe has a different set of challenges. And most importantly, okay, where does the bottleneck lie? And how do how can B2B Marketing teams help address the bottleneck and not be part of the bottleneck? Gabe Lullo  06:21 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s an eight step approach to sales. That’s what we call your sales journey, right? You have, obviously, you know, list building, and then we have, of course, outreach, we have qualification, we have discovery call, we have demo, we have, you know, closing or negotiating. We have client success. I mean, that’s the basic funnel, if you will. So is our, I should say, all of those things operating at the best of its ability. And what is broken, and it’s, it’s the old, you know, Henry Ford approach the assembly line. You know, there’s an assembly line and building a car, and there’s an assembly line in sales. And you have to know those steps, firstly, two, you have to know if those steps are working correctly, and figure out where that bottleneck is, and then, you know, take those blockers away so that those cars are flowing in and the production line doesn’t stop and we’re, you know, executing on the results that we need to serve our clients. Christian Klepp  07:16 100% agree. But now I’m gonna throw in another like wild card question, and I know you can handle it, right? When companies like yours come in to help organizations, right, there are times, even from my own experience, where the internal teams look at you and go, What are those guys doing here? Right? Like, is my job on the line. So they feel, they feel threatened, right by by somebody coming in and providing an external perspective. So I guess the question is, how do you deal with that kind of push back to help fix this leaky marketing funnel? Gabe Lullo  07:57 Yeah, it’s very important, right? Because a lot of companies come, you know, come in like us, and say, You know what, we’re going to come in here and try to solve the problem, or rip and replace or threaten the job. And it’s interesting, our point of contact, usually is the person who may be, you know, being fired because of our success. Well, we don’t want to approach it that way. So we set clear expectations that, hey, listen, we’re not here to rip and replace we are here to work as a parallel to what you’re existing doing, so we can A/B test and share best practices and be collective in those results. A lot of companies who have existing teams in place usually put us in scenarios where we’re bringing something new to market, or we’re reaching out to a market that is you know, you know, a new product line or a new segment, and we’re bringing that in. We do, however, see about a 20 to 30% increase in existing production when an outside partner comes in, because, again, we are sharing best practices. We’re all working together, but there is some pressure on the line when they see it. You know, another great player on the team playing ball. However, we did put a mechanism in place that really helps alleviate the fear, if you will, of that rip and replace scenario. Very unique thing to us, only a handful of companies I know about, of hundreds and if not thousands, that do what we do, do this. And here’s what it is, a lot of companies want to hire everything within and bring everything in house, in the sales development side within, because they graduate those people into account executives or closers or higher level performers or managers, so that graduation of career placement is there if you do it in house. So what we say is, you know what? You can have that great feeling of growing and building your team in house with us too. So all of our reps (representatives) who come work here, and all of our clients who enroll with us know that they can hire our reps and and bring them into their payroll and into their in house team with our help. So that’s a really good way of curving the fear, because they know, hey, this person who’s executing this outbound activity could be our next closer, and we can hire them to not take again, to not take away from what their current teams are doing, but to add to and grow that existing team they have. Christian Klepp  10:14 Absolutely, absolutely, and you know where I’m going with this, right? Because, like, you know, far too often, especially the higher ups that are not involved in the day to day, that are looking at this from the, I call it the Mount Olympus perspective, right, looking down at the land of the living, right? Like, why are you bringing in an external partner? Isn’t that your job to fix it? Right? But there are benefits to your point of, like, bringing in somebody that’s external, that’s not privy to, perhaps, some of the bias, some of the, certainly, the, certainly the organizational like dynamics and politics, which may, may be more detrimental than useful, right? Gabe Lullo  10:50 Yeah. I mean, we do punchy contracts, right? We have a six month minimum engagement. But so when we do that, you know, we’re saying, Hey, listen, we’re, we’re going to work with you for six months. We’re going to give it everything we got. And if it’s something you want to bring in-house from our team, great. If it’s you want to continue, great, or if you’ve learned a lot and you’re able to duplicate our efforts, also great too. So again, we’re not going in there saying, Oh, this is our world. Now. Get out of the way. Good luck, you know, and giving pink slips to people, it’s about really, again, how can we help? How can we assist? How can we hit this number? It’s not getting hit. There has to be reasons why. And let’s figure those numbers out, and let’s figure out the reasons why. And then, and then we move on, you know. So there’s short contracts, and then there’s very, very long contracts, you know, ZoomInfo has been a client off and on for the last decade. We’re doing a program right now where they just launched a lot of cool things, and we’re helping them so companies like that, size and stature, still come to outside help when necessary, when the timing is right and the fit is right. Christian Klepp  11:55 Amazing. Amazing. All right. Next question. So why do you believe rethinking how MQLs are defined and scored as the most strategic fix that a CMO can make, and what are some of these other key pitfalls that Marketers should avoid, and what should they be doing instead? I mean, let’s, let’s keep the conversation constructive here, right? Gabe Lullo  12:17 So defining and scoring MQLs is by far one of the first things, if not the most important thing, to start with, right? Because that is, again, the start of that assembly line. You know, garbage in, garbage out. And so if we’re not actually understanding why those MQLs are, the MQLs that we are saying they are, and what those triggering events are causing them to be considered. MQLs could truly dictate whether or not we’re receiving garbage into the funnel versus excellence and extraordinary leads and MQLs into the funnel. So again, it’s going back to that ICP, like we discussed earlier. It’s determining, okay, are these worthy and does it make sense to continue this, lead this MQL down the funnel, and will it produce results? Should it even be in the system at all? So knowing that up front, like I said earlier, it’s like the raw material. You know, if you have really bad raw material that you’re using to build your cars, you know, no matter how great it comes out at the other end, it’s not going to be a quality vehicle. So it’s that, it’s the raw material that we need to make sure that’s first and foremost, because it’s the start of the entire process. Christian Klepp  13:29 Yeah, yeah, no, that’s for sure. Because, you know, how many times have you heard that, right? Like the marketing team says, well, we’ve, we’ve got, we’ve generated the MQLs, we’ve passed them on to the sales team now, so we’re good, yeah, but that’s not where it stops, right? Like, so especially if the MQLs are, like, not qualified, right? Gabe Lullo  13:48 No, I couldn’t agree with you more. And again, having sales and marketing work synergistically in that determination is paramount. You know, so many companies, and it’s the old adage, and I think it’s almost a cliche now, because it’s been said so many times that you know, sales is throwing spears over the fence to marketing, and marketing is throwing another spear back to them, and they’re fighting back and forth over this wall. The deal is, you got to break down the wall and start having conversations. And again, sellers have to give feedback on why we’re seeing this to not be the right fit, and Marketers have to be curious and asking what those things may be happening on those conversations, so they can go find the MQLs that that is worthy. Christian Klepp  14:30 Absolutely, absolutely. And on that topic, what are some of these other pitfalls that marketers should be looking out for, and what should they be doing instead? Gabe Lullo  14:39 Yeah, I think what right now is that you have to really understand your channels. You know, a lot of Marketers right now are doubling down on things that may not be producing the results that they have been expecting. Maybe a year from now, two years from now, every company is different, every ICP is different, and every industry is different. I’ll give you an example. You know, if you’re reaching out to sellers and you know, red. Heads of revenue, you have to have a totally different approach than if you’re reaching out to VPs of technology and cyber security. Now that may sound basic, but if you were coming from a company and you’re in your head of marketing, and you’re coming from a company where your ICP and your persona is all tech based companies, or all tech based personas, and you go into a new industry or a new company, and you come with that lens. It’s not the right approach. You know, sellers like to pick up the phone. They think they’re customers. They use the phone all day long. They pick up the phone all the time. Maybe that’s the right channel, right? CTOs (Chief Technology Officers), CIOs (Chief Information Officers), CSOs (Chief Security Officers), they are not usually picking up the phone. Maybe they’re their channels significantly different, and so you have to realize, understand what your persona is, so you can do marketing activities towards that total addressable market that resonate and hit home and get their attention. And it could be just as much as where they live in regards to where, where do they associate with, what, what channel are they living on? Are they people that pick up the phone? Are they ones that live on LinkedIn? Are they ones that go to Instagram? Are they ones that go to conferences? Where is your audience? And know that first and then go talk to them? Christian Klepp  16:10 That’s definitely a great insight. You know it. I know it. The problem is that there’s so many teams out there that skip this part, right? Like that, like that. That detailed breakdown you just gave us about the different let’s call them like, the different personas, the different behaviors, the different channels, like, Why do you think a lot of teams out there skip this part? Is it because of the the time crunch, the pressure to deliver immediately is all of the above? Gabe Lullo  16:37 Yeah, I think, you know, there’s a lot of boardrooms out there. They come out with this unique product, and then with all they do is they do is they look at the TAM, what’s the total addressable market? But that’s like saying, I want to go catch a tuna fish. But you know, let’s just look at the entire ocean. Like, okay, we have to be more specific. Where do the tuna fish actually swim? Where part of Do they like warm water? Do they like the coast? Are they more towards New Zealand, or are they up towards the Massachusetts? So you have to know where your school of fish are. If you want to go fishing, you can’t just look at the entire ocean as the market. And I think narrowing it down to understand patterns and where people are so you can go talk to them is the right approach, versus this spray and pray mentality that I feel marketing has been living in for many, many years, and now it’s becoming more self evident because of AI, right? Because AI can tell us a lot of these things. AI can do a lot of analysis and research, and it’s giving us insights that we’ve never been able to really see before because of the speed and quickness of it. And so I think we are getting to a point, and I’m hopeful that we are more specific with our total addressable markets in new companies specifically that may not have the experience or the capacity like they used to. And I think it’s exciting. Christian Klepp  16:37 Oh Gabe, you just open the door to another question there. Man. Gabe Lullo  16:37 Like, start with an A. Christian Klepp  16:37 Yeah, it starts with an A. But, like, you know, since you brought it up, I’ve got to ask AI, right? Gabe Lullo  16:37 Yeah. Christian Klepp  16:37 And in terms of, like, helping to fix a leaky marketing funnel, how do you from your experience and your perspective, how do you think AI is helpful, and how is it harmful? Gabe Lullo  17:23 Sure. I mean double edged sword, right? We love AI. We accept it. We know it’s here. We’re not scared of it. We’re not running away from it, but we’re also not ripping and replacing things too abruptly with with the implementation of it, either. For instance, I’ll give you real examples. Are we telling AI to go make cold calls? Well, no, it’s illegal, technically. Secondly, are we using it, though, on the flip side, to train our reps on how to effectively handle great questions and objections through an AI sparring partner? Yeah, we are, and it’s amazing at it. So we actually have our reps when they’re brand new and onboarding or launching into a new campaign. We program the robot, the AI right to be able to have conversations in real life time with our reps, to literally spar with them. And it’s like practice. It’s a sparring partner before they go live onto a campaign, and it prepares them immensely before the live show, before they’re before they’re active, right on the campaign. So this is one way we’re doing it. Other ways, obviously email, messaging, obviously personalization, obviously research, you know, pre-call research, account research, determining who’s picking up the phone when they pick up the phone, how many times does it take to call them? You know, time zones? What’s the best time to call them? And it’s crazy what it could do, but it’s really, really helpful. But it’s not a crutch. It’s an assistant, and that’s how we’re approaching it. It’s not replacing human to human communication. If it was. Maybe you and I would just have our AI avatars do this podcast right instead of we’ll be on a beach somewhere, maybe we’ll be there in the future. I’m not predicting it, but I will say there’s a huge, significant role it plays right now, but it is not a role that’s, in my opinion, supposed to replace everything. It can replace a lot, but not everything. Christian Klepp  20:20 Absolutely. I mean, it certainly requires a lot of like, human intervention, right? And it’s and it’s constantly learning, and it’s learning quickly, which I think is to its benefit, to its detriment. And I think that’s, that’s your point as well. There’s a lot of stuff out there that’s AI generated that just looks off, starting with videos even, even like in I don’t know if you’ve dabbled with Google notebook, right? It can, it can take all that content and turn it into an audio file. And it’s scary. How real it sounds. Gabe Lullo  20:54 It is pretty scary. And I have seen tools like that. I love there’s one right now, where it’s actually tracking not even what someone is saying, but how they’re saying it. So tonality, right is a huge piece of communication, as we know, and so it’s literally listening to calls and sales calls, and not just again, we’ve seen it before, like, you know, Gong and others, where it’s telling, hey, maybe say this. Don’t say that, but it’s also giving that score of how they’re delivering that message, which, in my world, is huge because, you know, I could read a script, or I can, you know, have an amazing performance, and that’s how we approach, you know, the way we communicate on a phone call. So that is why we’re so excited. Because there’s new tools coming out all the time that are really, really impactful, for sure. Christian Klepp  21:42 Absolutely, absolutely. So you’ve touched on this a little bit like in the past couple of minutes, but explain how market research and strategy help to develop a solid marketing funnel, not a leaky one. Gabe Lullo  21:55 Yeah. I mean, I think it’s your playbook, right? You know, you have to have a built out playbook, and it’s your guide. And it’s not just important to go to market with a playbook, but it’s also going to market to scale, right? You know, once you get it to work, the ever everything after that is, how do we duplicate and how do we scale? So the playbook is that design is the architecture behind your strategy. So when we do start pouring fuel on the fire and we’re adding people, we’re adding leads, we’re adding workflows, we’re adding everything outside of that, we still go back to the playbook. It’s like the Constitution, right? Everything based off that in our country. I know we’re in different ones, but my point is is, is you have a framework, right, that we go off of and that playbook is so vital to our importance of market research gives us a great understanding of where that playbook is built and how it’s designed and how it’s architected, and that’s how we that’s how we do it here. Christian Klepp  22:55 And even how the playbook can be iterated, right? Because let’s not forget that it’s not written in stone. Gabe Lullo  23:01 Evolving. Yeah, absolutely. I do want to warn people, though, evolve with time. Be patient, right? You know, marketing, sales, development, it’s not a light switch. Yeah, I always say it’s like boiling water, right? So a watch pot technically does boil. It’s just painful to watch. So, but the point is, is that you have to give it enough time to see if that playbook is yielding results. What you don’t want to do is change the play, you know, too many times in the middle of the game, because then you look confused and confused. People do nothing, right? So, yes, is it evolving? Does it pivot? Does it grow? Do you do you change things up, of course. But also you want to do it in a tactful timeline to make sure that it is truly a working playbook or not. Christian Klepp  23:47 Absolutely, absolutely. And you brought something up, and I have to ask this, this next question, it’s… We know, from a marketing point of view, that rolling out these initiatives and seeing the results takes time, yeah, but we’ve had, I’ve certainly had this experience in B2B, that there are people, again, at the top, that don’t have oversight into the day to day, and probably also don’t understand quite how the process works, that don’t have that patience, right, that are telling you, like, hurry up and deliver like, we want results right now. So what do you say to those, I guess the people that are doubting that this initiative needs more time than they think it does. Gabe Lullo  24:30 Yeah. I mean, I think looking at benchmarks and case studies and past results is very important, like I said, Back to the boiling of water. You can show a thermometer as well, like you can see, is it working well? You can put a thermometer in a boiling pot of water and watch the temperature go up, right? And it gives you a clear indication and forecast, if you will, that you’re going to achieve boiling point eventually. It’s not just again, you put the water in and then. And you all of a sudden, measure boiling. You have to measure along the way, and that’s we want to do. So what the ways we do it specifically is, if we’re working on a campaign that is almost a look alike campaign to another company, maybe it’s in the same industry, same ICP, you know, same your size, same scope, we can look at that historical result and say, Hey, by the way, if we do these, these, these and these, you’re going to we’re going to expect boiling point at this time based on a company that’s very similar to yours. Now, is it identical? No, maybe that company has really bad sellers we talked about. Maybe that company doesn’t really care about content and they’re just missing the boat there. Maybe they have a crappy website, like, I don’t, there’s different levers that could, you know, alter the recipe, but we can absolutely make highly educated guesses, as opposed to just trying to wing it or give false expectations. Christian Klepp  25:54 Yeah, yeah, no, that’s absolutely right, all right. I mean, you’ve given us a lot of, like, recommendations, a lot of actionable tips. So walk us through, and I know it varies from company to company and case by case, but walk us through the process of how you actually fix a leaky marketing funnel. Like, what are the steps? What are those key components that absolutely have to be in that process? Gabe Lullo  26:14 Yeah, you have to, you know, inspect what you expect. You have to understand what your messaging is, and you have to A/B test it all the time. I A/B test everything, whether it’s data vendors, whether it’s email messaging, whether it’s LinkedIn content, what you have, obviously mechanisms, depending on what tech you’re working with, what vendors you’re working with, or your history or historical results are to give you grades and scores and A/B testing everything. So if you have, you know campaigns that are running that are successful, you should be able to know how to measure that. That’s what’s so important. So you have to have inspect, inspection tools in place across everything you’re doing on those campaigns to tell you, Hey, this is broken, this is leaky. This isn’t working. Or on the flip side, this is crushing right now. This is totally resonating right now, and we’re loving these, seeing these numbers, and then pour fuel on that fire and focus on that and remove the other ones, and still A/B test, because you always want to keep getting better. So A/B test everything, define the leaks, and then try to fix those leaks as fast as possible. Christian Klepp  27:23 Fantastic, fantastic. And because we’re talking about marketing funnels, I mean, like, I can’t help myself but ask you, okay, but what about metrics? Because that’s something that people want to see, right? But I’m not talking about like, let’s, let’s come up with this like, laundry list of like metrics, and you go down this deep rabbit hole. Like, what are the metrics that you would say, or you would advise B2B Marketers to look at to say, like, okay, we’re trying to fix the leaky marketing funnel here, and these metrics will help you to indicate that there is progress. Gabe Lullo  27:53 Yeah. I mean, it’s harder now than ever before to metric things out, and it’s because of tech that’s kind of getting in the way. You know, for instance, in an email campaign, there’s been some rules and regulations in the last recent years that prevents us from seeing whether or not there’s clicks and opens that are happening on email campaigns. I’ve actually removed many of those triggers completely away from our campaigns, because it’s preventing deliverability, and it’s preventing our ability to keep domains healthy. So there are a lot of moving parts right now that’s happening because of these AI filtration tools. I just heard Google just released that it’s going to now put disclaimers and emails saying that this was written by AI. And so there’s it’s ever involving so depending on I guess when your listeners are hearing this, it may be completely different in a year, but I will tell you that there are definitely things that we need to metric and we need to have KPIs for. But I think the priority of what we used to measure two, three years ago, is significantly different than what we measure today, because of those rules and regulations. So if we’re talking about emails, I want to know what we’re sending, who we’re sending it to, who obviously is responding. What are those responses look like? Is it turning to an actual lead? Are we turning on warm leads, or are we just looking at set meetings? You know, it’s interesting, right? There is only about 2 to 3% of the market ever wants to truly buy, and they’re in buying mode, and I think a lot of companies are just looking for those people, and about 20% of the market is actually interested in buying and we turn that entire segment off. It’s about 10 times more people. But if we can warm the nurture them correctly, and message them correctly, that’s where the rubber meets the road, and that’s where your gold is. I like to analogize everything. So, yeah, when you have a green apple, right? What do you do with the green apple? You put it on the window sill, and then the sun on the windowsill warms it up. Now, that doesn’t mean you just throw out the apple. That means you have a lot of opportunity. You just have. To nurture, and you be patient. And you have to know that timing is everything in business. So if you’re just looking for the red apples, you’re only gonna get 3% if you’re looking for green apples that turn into red apples, now you’re getting 25% so focus on the 25, be patient. Fix those leaky buckets, of course. A/B test, and then then you measure. Christian Klepp  30:20 Yeah or you get yourself an apple orchard. You mentioned one keyword there, nurture, right? I think that’s the one that’ll I see a lot of, like people in sales and even in marketing, right? They just don’t take that time to nurture those leads. They close in. I keep saying they close in for the kill too fast, right? Gabe Lullo  30:44 Yeah. I mean, go back to that food analogy, that the fruit analogy, again. Christian Klepp  30:49 Sure. Gabe Lullo  30:49 I’m on a roll with that. Christian Klepp  30:50 Please. Gabe Lullo  30:50 It’s the low hanging fruit cliche, right? Christian Klepp  30:52 Yes. Gabe Lullo  30:52 Everyone focuses on the low hanging fruit. They’re not focusing on what else is part of that harvest. They’re not focusing on the nurturing. They’re not focused on watering. They’re not focusing on circling back, following up, checking in, providing value in those checks. Not just say, Hey, I’m following up, no, provide value in those seconds, right? And that’s again, that’s where you see excellence happen, you know? And there’s a lot of young, and I don’t mean to be age, but like tenure, people that are experienced, that are in these experience roles right now, and I feel that they’re just trying to get that quick answer and that quick response. And we’re in this like dopamine, like, you know, hit like social media environment right now. Not to go off topic, but I think people are not again, they’re in this microwave society, and they don’t understand the value of nurturing. And if you do and you treat that part seriously, wow, it usually is a windfall at that time. Christian Klepp  31:47 Absolutely, absolutely. It’s an art, a skill, a craft, isn’t it? Right? All of you love, okay, my friend, we come to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and Gabe, you’ve given us plenty, all right, but just think of this kind of like a recap. If there was somebody listening to this conversation that you and I are having, and you want them to walk away with three to five things that they that they can take action on right now, when it comes to fixing a leaky marketing funnel, what would they be? Gabe Lullo  32:17 Well, I think the best thing is you have to really decide if you have the right people in place, right, and are they? And it doesn’t mean that they are the ones that are going to bring it home. It doesn’t mean that they’re they don’t need support and training and love, like, do they have the commitment? Do they have good experience? Are they willing to roll up their sleeves and get get a little dirty, and if you feel like you have a great team in place of people that are ready to get to work and solve some problems. I think that is literally step one. Step two is, do we have the messaging in the mark, in the ICP nailed down? We really need to know that, because, again, there’s no point of building a campaign if you don’t know who you’re sending it to. And then, thirdly, you really have to make sure that you’re willing to A/B test. It’s hard enough to build a campaign, but it’s much more difficult to build two or three campaigns. Run three campaigns, right as opposed to one, and score each of them to determine what’s working, what’s effective, and what’s not, and then you pivot based on those results. So I think finding a great team is basic and fundamental. Finding a great ice or determining a great ICP is before you build the messaging and then measure the message across multiple campaigns, and then you should be on your way Christian Klepp  33:29 And test, test, test, everything, right? Gabe Lullo  33:34 Yes, it’s great. It could be working. It’s exciting, but maybe there’s a significantly more effective way of doing it, even though it’s still working, and let the data make those decisions for you and drive everything based off data driven decisions, and that’s how you should be operating. Christian Klepp  33:51 Absolutely, absolutely. All right. Here comes the soapbox question, a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with and why? Gabe Lullo  34:05 Yeah, I think the big thing right now, and I have to just kind of talk about my space, because you said in my industries, like, there’s a lot of, you know, people out there soapboxing, to be exact, on things that are dead or not. And I will tell you that, you know, cold calling is dead, emailing is dead. You know, LinkedIn is dead, or all of these things and and when you peel back the onion, you notice that those individuals who are saying that users are trying to sell a book or something, and nothing against selling books, but it sounds like there’s a personal agenda and not actual operational intelligence that is dictating what they’re saying. So to your point about testing everything, don’t assume something is not going to work just because someone said it on the internet. Test it and then decide if it’s going to work. And it may surprise you in a big, big way. Christian Klepp  34:56 I truly believe that, man, I truly believe that. I mean to your point. About, like, email being dead. I mean, I did close one client who was a guest on the show, and it took me a year to close, but I closed it through email. Gabe Lullo  35:09 Yeah. Christian Klepp  35:11 Right. And it’s to your point, it’s sending, sending that person articles that were relevant to that person’s industry and saying, like, Hey, I read this the other day, what are your thoughts on this? And here’s my take. What do you think? Gabe Lullo  35:24 That is the best way to do an email, right? You know, we do a lot of content and on social media, we do a lot of podcasting, posts on LinkedIn, but that’s all great, but where the rubber meets the road is you take that post and you send it in an email or a direct message and say, Hey, listen. This made me think of our last conversation, and I really liked the way that this person mentioned this. Do you think you know that there is, is the timing right here to reopen this conversation, and you feel like the problem is still existing in your world, and love to see if we can solve it for you, that type of content, that type of message, that type of verbiage at the right time in a nurture campaign like we discussed, close one business, right? That’s how it works. Christian Klepp  36:08 Absolutely, absolutely okay. Here comes the bonus question, and for those of you that are listening to the audio version, Gabe’s got two guitars right behind him, so I’m just gonna go on a hunch here that he likes playing guitar, right? So the question is, if you had the opportunity to, like, go on a tour with your favorite guitarist/musician, who would it be, and where would you go? Gabe Lullo  36:36 Wow, I love this question. I do play the guitar. I’m a bet big avid music player. Love Rock as well, but all genres, I will say, in real life, we just actually my family, my wife and daughter and I went to go see Oasis reunion tour, which was in Toronto, actually, out of all places. Christian Klepp  36:53 That’s right, you mentioned it. Gabe Lullo  36:54 Yeah, we went to see that. It was epic. Obviously, the brothers have been apart for many years. A lot of drama there. But yeah, you know, I’m old enough to remember their original songs, so it was cool to reminisce and introduce my daughter to that music, which was pretty cool. We’re gonna go see Paul McCartney in a few weeks. He’s on tour now and never seen him or I’m a big fan of The Beatles, and I think that would be really exciting to tour with him, obviously. And I think those are definitely both of those right there kind of sum up the type of music that I resonate with. Christian Klepp  37:26 Amazing, amazing. I just remember, like, this is, this is a couple of years ago. I think he’s already passed away, but Compay Segundo. Gabe Lullo  37:33 Oh yeah. Christian Klepp  37:34 Buena Vista Social Club. And the guy was in his 90s, and they were, they had a concert, and they they brought him up in stage in his wheelchair, helped him get up, get out of that wheelchair, and they gave him that guitar, and off he went, Man, like, Gabe Lullo  37:48 Yeah, yeah, that’s amazing, man, that’s amazing. Christian Klepp  37:53 Gabe, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on and for sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. So please quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you. Gabe Lullo  38:03 Yeah, LinkedIn is the best way to connect with me directly. I post twice a day, every day. We’re very bullish with our content. There’s a lot of free material there. We have a newsletter, so please take a look at that, and if you like what you see, and he heard today, you know, reach out, and I’ll definitely be responsive. And you know, anyone who is looking or struggling with the after-sales motion, which are after marketing motion, that sales development function, that’s where we play, and we’d love to look at what you’re looking for and see how we can help. Christian Klepp  38:33 Sounds good. Gabe, once again, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. Gabe Lullo  38:38 Thanks, Christian. Christian Klepp  38:39 All right. Bye for now.

In this episode of Disruption/Interruption, marketing veteran Ed Locher pulls back the curtain on B2B marketing's biggest lie: that the MQL machine actually drives growth. As CMO of PureFacts Financial Solutions and author of "Digital Transformation: People, Process and Technology," Ed reveals why 15 years of marketing automation created a sugar rush that's now crashing, and how AI can help fix it without repeating the same mistakes. This is a no-holds-barred conversation about emotional connection, the 95% of buyers marketers ignore, and why marketing tenure averages just 18 months. Four Key Takeaways: The MQL Mirage Is Built on a Lie 8:56Marketing automation promised accountability through MQLs, but overdelivering on MQL targets quarter after quarter never translated to actual revenue growth. The entire system targets only the 5% of the market ready to buy right now—ignoring the 95% who need demand creation, not demand capture. B2B Buying Committees Have Tripled in Size 16:30The buying committee for enterprise B2B purchases has exploded from 5 people to 16. You can't build credibility and trust with 16 stakeholders through email sequences—you need emotional connection and personalized storytelling that speaks to each person's specific drivers (CFO cares about ROI, compliance cares about regulations, operations cares about not making headlines). AI Raises the Floor, Not the Ceiling 29:59AI protects terrible marketers from themselves by raising the quality floor, but it hasn't raised the bar for great marketing. The real opportunity lies 3-4 standard deviations above the mean—where human empathy, emotional triggers, and genuine understanding of customer pain create outsized impact that AI can't replicate. Marketing Attribution Is a Myth 44:13There will never be a "cast iron steel rod of attribution" connecting marketing activities directly to purchases. Marketers who work for leadership that doesn't understand this are doomed to 18-month tenures, chasing MQL targets that deliver short-term sugar rushes followed by revenue crashes. The rare CEO or investor who recognizes this broken motion is the problem—not the marketer—creates space for real growth. Quote of the Show (44:13):"There will never be a cast iron steel rod of attribution that says marketing did X, which led to this person buying something. It just doesn't work that way.” — Ed Locher Join our Anti-PR newsletter where we’re keeping a watchful and clever eye on PR trends, PR fails, and interesting news in tech so you don't have to. You're welcome. Want PR that actually matters? Get 30 minutes of expert advice in a fast-paced, zero-nonsense session from Karla Jo Helms, a veteran Crisis PR and Anti-PR Strategist who knows how to tell your story in the best possible light and get the exposure you need to disrupt your industry. Click here to book your call: https://info.jotopr.com/free-anti-pr-eval Ways to connect with Ed Locher: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edlocher/ Company Website: https://purefacts.com How to get more Disruption/Interruption: Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlDSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Podcast. AI agents are your next customers. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/vEdq8rpBM3I In this data-rich keynote, Jay McBain deconstructs the tectonic shifts reshaping the $5.3 trillion global technology industry, arguing that we are entering a new 20-year cycle where traditional direct sales models are obsolete. McBain explains why 96% of the industry is now surrounded by partners and how successful companies must pivot from “flywheels and theory” to a granular strategy focused on the seven specific partners present in every deal. From the explosion of agentic AI and the $163 billion marketplace revolution to the specific mechanics of multiplier economics, this discussion provides a roadmap for navigating the “decade of the ecosystem” where influence, trust, and integration—not just product—determine winners and losers. Key Takeaways Half of today's Fortune 500 companies will likely vanish in the next 20 years due to the shift toward AI and ecosystem-led models. Every B2B deal now involves an average of seven trusted partners who influence the decision before a vendor even knows a deal exists. Microsoft has outpaced AWS growth for 26 consecutive quarters largely because of a superior partner-led geographic strategy. Marketplaces are projected to grow to $163 billion by 2030, with nearly 60% of deals involving partner funding or private offers. The “Multiplier Effect” is the new ROI, where partners can make up to $8.45 for every dollar of vendor product sold. Future dominance relies on five key pillars: Platform, Service Partnerships, Channel Partnerships, Alliances, and Go-to-Market orchestration. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Keywords: Jay McBain, Canalys, partner ecosystem, channel chief, agentic AI, marketplace growth, multiplier economics, B2B sales trends, tech industry forecast, service partnerships, strategic alliances, Microsoft vs AWS, distribution transformation, managed services growth, SaaS platforms, customer journey mapping, 28 moments of truth, future of reselling, technology spending 2025, ecosystem orchestration, partner multipliers. T Transcript: Jay McBain WORKFILE FOR TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: Just up from, did you Puerto Rico last night? Puerto Rico, yes. Puerto Rico. He dodged the hurricane. Um, you all know him. Uh, let him introduce himself for those of you who don’t, but just thrilled to have on the stage, again, somebody who knows more about what’s going on in, in the, and has the pulse on this industry probably than just about anybody I know personally. [00:00:21] Vince Menzione: J Jay McBain. Jay, great to see you my friend. Alright, thank you. We have to come all the way. We live, we live uh, about 20 minutes from each other. We have to come all the way to Reston, Virginia to see each other, right? That’s right. Very good. Well, uh, that’s all over to you, sir. Thank you. [00:00:35] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you so much. [00:00:36] Jay McBain: I went from 85 degrees yesterday to 45 today, but I was able to dodge that, uh, that hurricane, uh, that we kind of had to fly through the northern edge of, uh, wanna talk today about our industry, about the ultimate partner. I’m gonna try to frame up the ultimate partner as I walk through the data and the latest research that, uh, that we’ve been doing in the market. [00:00:56] Jay McBain: But I wanted to start here ’cause our industry moves in 20 year cycles, and if you look at the Fortune 500 and dial back 20 years from today, 52% of them no longer exist. As we step into the next 20 year AI era, half of the companies that we know and love today are not gonna exist. So we look at this, and by the way, if you’re not in the Fortune 500 and you don’t have deep pockets to buy your way outta problems, 71% of tech companies fail over the course of 10 years. [00:01:30] Jay McBain: Those are statistics from the US government. So I start to look at our industry and you know, you may look at the, you know, mainframe era from the sixties and seventies, mini computers, August the 12th, 1981, that first IBM, PC with Microsoft dos, version one, you know, triggered. A new 20 year era of client server. [00:01:51] Jay McBain: It was the time and I worked at IBM for 17 years, but there was a time where Bill Gates flew into Boca Raton, Florida and met with the IBM team and did that, you know, fancy licensing agreement. But after, you know, 20 years of being the most valuable company in the world and 13 years of antitrust and getting broken up, almost like at and TIBM almost didn’t make payroll. [00:02:14] Jay McBain: 13 years after meeting Bill Gates. Yeah, that’s how quickly things change in these eras. In 1999, a small company outta San Francisco called salesforce.com got its start. About 10 years later, Jeff Bezos asked a question in a boardroom, could we rent out our excess capacity and would other companies buy it? [00:02:35] Jay McBain: Which, you know, most people in the room laughed at ’em at the time. But it created a 20 year cloud era when our friends, our neighbors, our family. Saw Chachi PT for the first time in March of 2023. They saw the deep fakes, they saw the poetry, they saw the music. They came to us as tech people and said, did we just light up Skynet? [00:02:58] Jay McBain: And that consumer trend has triggered this next 20 years. I could walk through the richest people in the world through those trends. I could walk through the most valuable companies. It all aligns. ’cause by the way, Apple’s no longer at the top. Nvidia is at the top, Microsoft. Second, things change really quickly. [00:03:17] Jay McBain: So in that course of time, you start to look at our industry and as people are talking about a six and a half or $7 trillion build out of ai, that’s open AI and Microsoft numbers, that is bigger than our industry that’s taken over 50 years to build. This year, we’re gonna finish the year at $5.3 trillion. [00:03:36] Jay McBain: That’s from the smallest flower shop to the biggest bank. Biggest governments that Caresoft would, uh, serve biggest customer in the world is actually the federal government of the us. But you look at this pie chart and you look at the changes that we’re gonna go through over the next 20 years, there’s about a trillion dollars in hardware. [00:03:54] Jay McBain: There’s about a trillion dollars in software. If you look forward through all of the merging trends, quantum computing, humanoid robots, all the things that are coming that dollar to dollar software to hardware will continue to exist all the way through. We see services making up almost two thirds of this pie. [00:04:13] Jay McBain: Yesterday I was in a telco conference with at and t and Verizon and T-Mobile and some of the biggest wireless players and IT services, which happen to be growing faster than products. At the moment, there is more work to be done wrapping around the deal than the actual products that the customer is buying. [00:04:32] Jay McBain: So in an industry that’s growing at 7%. On top of the world economy that’s grown at 2.2. This is the fastest growing industry, and it will be at least for the next 10 years, if not 2070 0.1% of this entire $5 trillion gets transacted through partners. While what we’re talking to today about the ultimate partner, 96% of this industry is surrounded by partners in one way or another. [00:05:01] Jay McBain: They’re there before the deal. They’re there at the deal. They’re there after the deal. Two thirds of our industry is now subscription consumption based. So every 30 days forever, and a customer for life becomes everything. So if every deal in medium, mid-market, and higher has seven partners, according to McKinsey, who are those seven people trying to get into the deal? [00:05:25] Jay McBain: While there’s millions of companies that have come into tech over the last 10 to 20 years. Digital agencies, accountants, legal firms, everybody’s come in. The 250,000 SaaS companies, a million emerging tech companies, there’s a big fight to be one of those seven trusted people at the table. So millions of companies and tens of millions of people our competing for these slots. [00:05:49] Jay McBain: So one of the pieces of research I’m most proud of, uh, in my analyst career is this. And this took over two years to build. It’s a lot of logos. Not this PowerPoint slide, but the actual data. Thousands of people hours. Because guess what? When you look at partners from the top down, the top 1000 partners, by capability and capacity, not by resale. [00:06:15] Jay McBain: It’s not a ranking of CDW and insight and resale numbers. It is the surrounding. Consulting, design, architecture, implementations, integrations, managed services, all the pieces that’s gonna make the next 20 years run. So when you start to look at this, 98% of these companies are private, so very difficult to get to those numbers and, uh, a ton of research and help from AI and other things to get this. [00:06:41] Jay McBain: But this is it. And if you look at this list, there’s a thousand logos out of the million companies. There’s a thousand logos that drive two thirds of all tech services in the world. $1.07 trillion gets delivered by a thousand companies, but here’s where it gets fun. Those companies in the middle, in blue, the 30 of them deliver more tech services than the next 970. [00:07:08] Jay McBain: Combined the 970 combined in white deliver more tech services. Then the next million combined. So if you think we live in an 80 20 rule or maybe a 99, a 95 5 rule, or a 99 1 rule, we actually live in a 99.9 0.1 parallel principle. These companies spread around the world evenly split across the uh, different regions. [00:07:35] Jay McBain: South Africa, Latin America, they’re all over. They split. They split among types. All of the Venn diagram I just showed from GSIs to VARs to MSPs, to agencies and other types of companies. But this is a really rich list and it’s public. So every company in the world now, if you’re looking at Transactable data, if you’re looking at quantifiable data that you can go put your revenue numbers against, it represents 70 to 80% of every company in this room’s Tam. [00:08:08] Jay McBain: In one piece of research. So what do you do below that? How do you cover a million companies that you can’t afford to put a channel account manager? You can’t afford to write programs directly for well after the top down analysis and all the wallet share and you know exactly where the lowest hanging fruit is for most of your tam. [00:08:28] Jay McBain: The available markets. The obtainable markets. You gotta start from the community level grassroots up. So you need to ask the question for the million companies and the maybe a hundred thousand companies out there, partner companies that are surrounding your customer. These are the seven partners that surround your customer. [00:08:48] Jay McBain: What do they read, where do they go, and who do they follow? Interestingly enough, our industry globally equates to only a thousand watering holes, a thousand companies at the top, a thousand places at the bottom. 35% of this audience we’re talking. Millions of people here love events and there’s 352 of them like this one that they love to go to. [00:09:13] Jay McBain: They love the hallway chats, they love the hotel lobby bar, you know, in a time reminded by the pandemic. They love to be in person. It’s the number one way they’re influenced. So if you don’t have a solid event strategy and you don’t have a community team out giving out socks every week, your competitors might beat you. [00:09:31] Jay McBain: 12% of this audience loves podcasts. It’s the Joe Rogan effect of our industry. And while you know, you may not think the 121 podcasts out there are important, well, you’re missing 12% of your audience. It’s over a million people. If you’re not on a weekly podcast in one of these podcasts in the world, there’s still people that read one of the 106 magazines in the world. [00:09:55] Jay McBain: There are people that love peer groups, associations, they wanna be part of this. There’s 15 different ways people are influenced. And a solid grassroots strategy is how you make this happen. In the last 10 years, we’ve created a number of billionaires. Bottom up. They never had to go talk to la large enterprise. [00:10:15] Jay McBain: They never had to go build out a mid-market strategy. They just went and give away socks and new community marketing. And this has created, I could rip through a bunch of names that became unicorns just in the last couple of years, bottoms up. You go back to your board walking into next year, top down, bottom up. [00:10:34] Jay McBain: You’ve covered a hundred percent of your tam, and now you’ve covered it with names, faces, and places. You haven’t covered it with a flywheel or a theory. And for 44 years, we have gone to our board every fourth quarter with flywheels and theory. Trust me, partners are important. The channel is key to us. [00:10:57] Jay McBain: Well, let’s talk at the point of this granularity, and now we’re getting supported by technology 261 entrepreneurs. Many of them in the room actually here that are driving this ability to succeed with seven partners in every deal to exchange data to be able to exchange telemetry of these prospects to be able to see twice or three times in terms of pipeline of your target addressable market. [00:11:26] Jay McBain: All these ai, um, technologies, agentic technologies are coming into this. It’s all about data. It’s all about quantifiable names, faces, and places. Now none of us should be walking around with flywheels, so let’s flip the flywheels. No. Uh, so we also look at, and I sold PCs for 17 years and that was in the high times of 40% margins for partners. [00:11:55] Jay McBain: But one interesting thing when you study the p and l for broad base of partners around the world, it’s changed pretty significantly in this last 20 year era. What the cloud era did is dropped hardware from what used to be 84% plus the break fix and things that wrap around it of the p and l to now 16% of every partner in the world. [00:12:16] Jay McBain: 84% of their p and l is now software and services. And if you look at profitability, it’s worse. It’s actually 87% is profitability wise. They’ve completely shifted in terms of where they go. Now we look at other parts of our market. I could go through every part of the pie of the slide, but we’re watching each of the companies, and if you can see here, this is what we want to talk about in terms of ultimate partner. [00:12:43] Jay McBain: Microsoft has outgrown AWS for 26 straight quarters. They don’t have a better product. They don’t have a better price, they don’t have better promotion. It’s all place. And I’ll explain why you guess here in the light green line. Exactly. The day that Google went a hundred percent all in partner, every deal, even if a deal didn’t have a partner, one of the 4% of deals that didn’t have a partner, they injected a partner. [00:13:09] Jay McBain: You can see on the left side exactly where they did it. They got to the point of a hundred percent partner driven. Rebuilt their programs, rebuilt their marketplace. Their marketplace is actually larger than Microsoft’s, and they grew faster than Microsoft. A couple of those quarters. It is a partner driven future, and now I have Oracle, which I just walked by as I walked from the hotel. [00:13:31] Jay McBain: Oracle with their RPOs will start to join. Maybe the list of three hyperscalers becomes the list of four in future slides, but that’s a growth slide. Market share is different. AWS early and commanding lead. And it plays out, uh, plays out this way. But we’re at an interesting moment and I stood up six years ago talking about the decade of the ecosystem after we went through a decade of sales starting in 1999 when we all thought we were born to be salespeople. [00:14:02] Jay McBain: We managed territories with our gut. The sales tech stack would have it different, that sales was a science, and we ended the decade 2009, looking at sales very differently in 2009. I remember being at cocktail parties where CMOs would be joking around that 50% of their marketing dollars were wasted. They just didn’t know which 50%. [00:14:23] Jay McBain: And I’ll tell you, that was really funny. In 2009 till every 58-year-old CMO got replaced by a 38-year-old growth hacker who walked in with 15,348 SaaS companies in their MarTech and ad tech stack to solve the problem, every nickel of marketing by 2019 was tracked. Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, HubSpot, driving this industry. [00:14:50] Jay McBain: Now, we stood up and said the 28 moments that come before a sale are pretty much all partner driven. In the best case scenario, a vendor might see four of the moments. They might come to your website, maybe they read an ebook, maybe they have a salesperson or a demo that comes in. That’s four outta 28 moments. [00:15:10] Jay McBain: The other 24 are done by partners. Yeah, in the worst case scenario and the majority scenario, you don’t see any of the moments. All 28 happen and you lose a deal without knowing there ever was a deal. So this is it. We need to partner in these moments and we need to inject partners into sales and marketing, like no time before, and this was the time to do it. [00:15:33] Jay McBain: And we got some feedback in the Salesforce state of sales report, which doesn’t involve any partnerships or, or. Channel Chiefs or anything else. This is 5,500 of the biggest CROs in the world that obviously use Salesforce. 89% of salespeople today use partners every day. For the 11% who don’t, 58% plan two within a year. [00:15:57] Jay McBain: If you add those two numbers together, that’s magically the 96% number. They recognize that every deal has partners in it. In 2024, last year, half of the salespeople in the world, every industry, every country. Miss their numbers. For the minority who made their numbers, 84 point percent pointed to partners as the reason why they made their numbers. [00:16:21] Jay McBain: It was the cheat code for sales, so that modern salesperson that knows how to orchestrate a deal, orchestrate the 28 moments with the seven partners and get to that final spot is the winning formula. HubSpot’s number in separate research was 84% in marketing. So we’re starting to see partners in here. We don’t have to shout from the mountaintops. [00:16:44] Jay McBain: These communities like ultimate Partner are working and we’re getting this to the highest levels in the board. And I’ll say that, you know, when 20 years from now half of the companies we know and love fail after we’re done writing the book and blaming the CEO for inventing the thing that ended up killing them, blaming the board for fiduciary responsibility and letting it happen. [00:17:06] Jay McBain: What are the other chapters of the book? And I think it’s all in one slide. We are in this platform economy and the. [00:17:31] Jay McBain: So your battery’s fine. Check, check, check, check. Alright, I’ll, I’ll just hold this in case, but the companies that execute on all five of these areas, well. Not only today become the trillion dollar valued companies, but they become the companies of tomorrow. These will be the fastest growing companies at every level. [00:17:50] Jay McBain: Not only running a platform business, but participating in other platforms. So this is how it breaks out, and there are people at very senior levels, at very big companies that have this now posted in the office of the CEO winning on integrations is everything. We just went through a demographic shift this year where 51% of our buyers are born after 1982. [00:18:15] Jay McBain: Millennials are the number one buyer of the $5 trillion. Their number one buying criteria is not service. Support your price, your brand reputation, it’s integrations. The buy a product, 80% is good as the next one if it works better in their environment. 79% of us won’t buy a car unless it has CarPlay or Android Auto. [00:18:34] Jay McBain: This is an integration world. The company with the most integrations win. Second, there are seven partners that surround the customer. Highly trusted partners. We’re talking, coaching the customer’s, kids soccer team, having a cottage together up at the lake. You know, best men, bate of honors at weddings type of relationships. [00:18:57] Jay McBain: You can’t maybe have all seven, but how does Microsoft beat AWS? They might have had two, three, or four of them saying nice things about them instead of the competition. Winning in service partnerships and channel partnerships changes by category. If you’re selling MarTech, only 10% of it today is resold, so you build more on service partnerships. [00:19:18] Jay McBain: If you’re in cybersecurity today, 91.6% of it is resold. Transacted through partners. So you build a lot of channel partnerships, plus the service partnerships, whatever the mix is in your category, you have to have two or three of those seven people. Saying nice things about you at every stage of the customer journey. [00:19:38] Jay McBain: Now move over to alliances. We have already built the platforms at the hyperscale level. We’ve built the platforms within SaaS, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Marketo, NetSuite, HubSpot. Every buyer has a set of platforms that they buy. We’ve now built them in cybersecurity this year out of 6,500 as high as cyber companies, the top five are starting to separate. [00:20:02] Jay McBain: We built it in distribution, which I’ll show in a minute. We’re building it in Telco. This is a platform economy and alliances win and you have alliances with your competitors ’cause you compete in the morning, but you’re best friends by the afternoon. Winning in other platforms is just as important as driving your own. [00:20:20] Jay McBain: And probably the most important part of this is go to market. That sales, that marketing, the 28 moments, the every 30 days forever become all a partner strategy. So there’s still CEOs out there that believe platform is a UI or UX on a bunch of disparate products and things you’ve acquired. There’s still CFOs out there that Think platform is a pricing model, a bundle model of just getting everything under one, you know, subscription price or consumption price. [00:20:51] Jay McBain: And it’s not, platforms are synonymous with partnerships. This is the way forward and there’s no conversation around ai. That doesn’t involve Nvidia over there, an open AI over here and a hyperscaler over there and a SaaS company over here. The seven layer stack wins every single time, and the companies that get this will be the ones that survive this cycle. [00:21:16] Jay McBain: Now, flipping over to marketplaces. So we had written research that, um, about five years ago that marketplaces were going to grow at 82% compounded. Yeah, probably one of the most accurate predictions we ever made, because it happened, we, we predicted that, uh, we were gonna get up to about $85 billion. Well, now we’ve extended that to 2030, so we’re gonna get up to $163 billion, and the thing that we’re watching is in green. [00:21:46] Jay McBain: If 96% of these deals are partner assisted in some way, how is the economics of partnering going to work? We predicted that 50% of deals by 2027. Would be partner funded in some way. Private offers multi-partner offers distributor sellers of record, and now that extends to 59% by 2030, the most senior leader of the biggest marketplace AWS, just said to us they’re gonna probably make these numbers on their own. [00:22:14] Jay McBain: And he asked what their two competitors are doing. So he’s telling us that we under called this. Now when you look at each of the press releases, and this is the AWS Billion Dollar Club. Every one of the companies on the left have issued a press release that they’re in the billion dollar club. Some of them are in the multi-billions, but I want you to double click on this press release. [00:22:35] Jay McBain: I’m quoted in here somewhere, but as CrowdStrike is building the marketplace at 91% compounded, they’re almost doubling their revenue every single year. They’re growing the partner funding, in this case, distributor funding by 3548%. Almost triple digit growth in marketplace is translating into almost quadruple digit growth in funding. [00:23:01] Jay McBain: And you see that over and over again as, as Splunk hit three, uh, billion dollars. The same. Salesforce hit $2 billion on AWS in Ulti, 18 months. They joined in October 20, 23, and 18 months later, they’re already at $2 billion. But now you’re seeing at Salesforce, which by the way. Grew up to $40 billion in revenue direct, almost not a nickel in resell. [00:23:28] Jay McBain: Made it really difficult for VARs and managed service providers to work with Salesforce because they couldn’t understand how to add services to something they didn’t book the revenue for. While $40 billion companies now seeing 70% of their deals come through partners. So this is just the world that we’re in. [00:23:44] Jay McBain: It doesn’t matter who you are and what industry you’re in, this takes place. But now we’re starting to see for the first time. Partners join the billion dollar club. So you wonder about partnering and all this funding and everything that’s working through Now you’re seeing press releases and companies that are redoing their LinkedIn branding about joining this illustrious club without a product to sell and all the services that wrap around it. [00:24:10] Jay McBain: So the opening session on Microsoft was interesting because there’s been a number of changes that Microsoft has done just in the last 30 days. One is they cut distribution by two thirds going from 180 distributors to 62. They cut out any small partner lower than a thousand dollars, and that doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s over a hundred thousand partners that get deed tightening the long tail. [00:24:38] Jay McBain: They we’re the first to really put a global point system in place three years ago. They went to the new commerce experience. If you remember, all kinds of changes being led by. The biggest company for the channel. And so when we’re studying marketplaces, we’re not just studying the three hyperscalers, we’re studying what TD Cynic is doing with Stream One Ingram’s doing with Advant Advantage Aerosphere. [00:25:01] Jay McBain: Also, we’re watching what PAX eight, who by the way, is the 365 bestseller for Microsoft in the world. They are the cybersecurity leader for Microsoft in the world and the copilot. Leader in the world for Microsoft and Partner of the Year for Microsoft. So we’re watching what the cloud platforms are doing, watching what the Telco are doing, which is 25 cents out of every dollar, if you remember that pie chart, watching what the biggest resellers are converting themselves into. [00:25:30] Jay McBain: Vince just mentioned, you know, SHI in the changes there watching the managed services market and the leaders there, what they’re doing in terms of how this industry’s moving forward. By the way, managed services at $608 billion this year. Is one and a half times larger than the SaaS industry overall. [00:25:48] Jay McBain: It’s also one and a half times larger than all the hyperscalers combined. Oracle, Alibaba, IBM, all the way down. This is a massive market and it makes up 15 to 20 cents of every dollar the customer spend. We’re watching that industry hit a trillion dollars by the end of the decade, and we’re watching 150 different marketplace development platforms, the distribution of our industry, which today is 70.1% indirect. [00:26:13] Jay McBain: We’re starting to see that number, uh, solidify in terms of marketplaces as well. Watching distributors go from that linear warehouse in a bank to this orchestration model, watching some of the biggest players as the world comes around, platforms, it tightens around the place. So Caresoft, uh, from from here is the sixth biggest distributor in the world. [00:26:40] Jay McBain: Just shows you how big the. You know, biggest client in the world is that they serve. But understand that we’re publishing the distributor 500 list, but it’ll be the same thing. That little group in blue in the middle today, you know, drives almost two thirds of the market. So what happens in all this next stage in terms of where the dollars change hands. [00:27:07] Jay McBain: And the economics of partnering themselves are going through the most radical shift that we’ve seen ever. So back to the nineties, and, and for those of you that have been channel chiefs and running programs, we went to work every day. You know, everything’s on fire. We’re trying to check hundred boxes, trying to make our program 10% better than our competitors. [00:27:30] Jay McBain: Hey, we gotta fix our deal registration program today, and our incentives are outta whack or training programs or. You know, not where they need to be. Our certification, you know, this was the life of, uh, of a channel chief. Everybody thought we were just out drinking in the Caribbean with our best partners, but we were under the weight of this. [00:27:49] Jay McBain: But something interesting has happened is that we turned around and put the customer at the middle of our programs to say that those 28 moments in green before the sale are really, really important. And the seven partners who participate are really important. Understanding. The customer’s gonna buy a seven layer stack. [00:28:09] Jay McBain: They’re gonna buy it With these seven partners, the procurement stage is much different. The growth of marketplaces, the growth of direct in some of these areas, and then long term every 30 days forever in a managed service, implementations, integrations, how you upsell, cross-sell, enrich a deal changes. So how would you build a program that’s wrapped around the customer instead of the vendor? [00:28:35] Jay McBain: And we’re starting to hear our partners shout back to us. These are global surveys, big numbers, but over half of our partners, regardless of type, are selling consulting to their customer. Over half are designing architecting deals. A third of them are trying to be system integrators showing up at those implementation integration moments. [00:28:55] Jay McBain: Two thirds of them are doing managed services, but the shocking one here is 44% of our partners, regardless of type, are coding. They’re building agents and they’re out helping their customer at that level. So this is the modern partner that says, don’t typecast me. You may have thought of me in your program. [00:29:14] Jay McBain: You might have me slotted as a var. Well, I do 3.2 things, and if I don’t get access to those resources, if you don’t walk me to that room, I’m not gonna do them with you. You may have me as a managed service provider that’s only in the morning. By the afternoon I’m coding, and by the next morning I’m implementing and consulting. [00:29:33] Jay McBain: So again, a partner’s not a partner. That Venn diagram is a very loose one now, as every partner on there is doing 3.2 different business models. And again, they’re telling us for 43 years, they said, I want more leads this year it changed. For the first time, I want to be recognized and incentivized as more than just a cash register for you. [00:29:57] Jay McBain: I want you to recognize when I’m consulting, when I’m designing, when you’re winning deals, because of my wonderful services, by the way, we asked the follow up question, well, where should we spend our money with you? And they overwhelmingly say, in the consulting stage, you win and lose deals. Not at moment 28. [00:30:18] Jay McBain: We’re not buying a pack of gum at the gas station. This is a considered purchase. You win deals from moment 12 through 16 and I’m gonna show you a picture of that later, and they say, you better be spending your money there, or you’re not gonna win your fair share or more than your fair share of deals. [00:30:36] Jay McBain: The shocking thing about this is that Microsoft, when they went to the point system, lifted two thirds of all the money, tens of billions of dollars, and put it post-sale, and we were all scratching our heads going. Well, if the partners are asking for it there, and it seems like to beat your biggest competitors, you want to win there. [00:30:54] Jay McBain: Why would you spend the money on renewal? Well, they went to Wall Street and Goldman Sachs and the people who lift trillions of dollars of pension funds and said, if we renew deals at 108%, we become a cash machine for you. And we think that’s more valuable than a company coming out with a new cell phone in September and selling a lot of them by Christmas every year. [00:31:18] Jay McBain: The industry. And by the way, wall Street responded, Microsoft has been more valuable than Apple since. So we talk in this now multiplier language, and these are reports that we write, uh, at AMIA at canals. But talking about the partner opportunity in that customer cycle, the $6 and 40 cents you can make for every dollar of consumption, or the $7 and 5 cents you can make the $8 and 45 cents you can make. [00:31:46] Jay McBain: There’s over 24 companies speaking at this level now, and guess what? It’s not just cloud or software companies. Hardware companies are starting to speak in this language, and on January 25th, Cisco, you know, probably second to Microsoft in terms of trust built with the channel globally is moving to a full point system. [00:32:09] Jay McBain: So these are the changes that happen fast. But your QBR with your partners now less about drinking beers at the hotel lobby bar and talking dollar by dollar where these opportunities are. So if you’re doing 3.2 of these things, let’s build out a, uh, a play where you can make $3 for every dollar that we make. [00:32:28] Jay McBain: And you make that profitably. You make it in sticky, highly retained business, and that’s the model. ’cause if you make $3 for every dollar. We make, you’re gonna win Partner of the year, and if you win partner of the year, that piece of glass that you win on stage, by the time you get back to your table, you’re gonna have three offers to buy your business. [00:32:51] Jay McBain: CDW just bought a w. S’s Partner of the Year. Insight bought Google’s eight time partner of the year. Presidio bought ServiceNow’s, partner of the year over and over and over again. So I’m at Octane, I’m at CrowdStrike, I’m at all these events in Vegas every week. I’m watching these partners of the year. [00:33:05] Jay McBain: And I’m watching as the big resellers. I’m watching as the GSIs and the m and a folks are surrounding their table after, and they’re selling their businesses for SaaS level valuations. Not the one-to-one service valuation. They’re getting multiples because this is the new future of our industry. This is platform economics. [00:33:25] Jay McBain: This is winning and platforms for partners. Now, like Vince, I spent 20 minutes without talking about ai, but we have to talk about ai. So the next 20 years as it plays out is gonna play out in phases. And the first thing you know to get it out of the way. The first two years since that March of 23, has been underwhelming, to say the least. [00:33:47] Jay McBain: It’s been disappointing. All the companies that should have won the biggest in AI have been the most disappointing. It’s underperformed the s and p by a considerable amount in terms of where we are. And it goes back to this. We always overestimate the first two years, but we underestimate the first 10. [00:34:07] Jay McBain: If you wanna be the point in time person and go look at that 1983 PC or the 1995 internet or that 2007 iPhone or that whatever point in time you wanna look at, or if you want to talk about hallucinations or where chat chip ET version five is version, as opposed to where it’s going to be as it improves every six months here on in. [00:34:30] Jay McBain: But the fact of the matter is, it’s been a consumer trend. Nvidia got to be the most valuable company in the world. OpenAI was the first company to 2 billion users, uh, in that amount of speed. It’s the fastest growing product ever in history, and it’s been a consumer win this trillions of dollars to get it thrown around in the press releases. [00:34:49] Jay McBain: They’re going out every day, you know, open ai, signing up somebody new or Nvidia, investing in somebody new almost every single day in hundreds of billions of dollars. It is all happening really on the consumer side. So we got a little bit worried and said, is that 96% of surround gonna work in ag agentic ai? [00:35:10] Jay McBain: So we went and asked, and the good news is 88% of end customers are using partners to work through their ag agentic strategy. Even though they’re moving slow, they’re actually using partners. But what’s interesting from a partner perspective, and this is new research that out till 2030. This is the number one services opportunity in the entire tech or telco industry. [00:35:34] Jay McBain: 35.3% compounded growth ending at $267 billion in services. Companies are rebuilding themselves, building out practices, and getting on this train and figuring out which vendors they should hook their caboose to as those trains leave the station. But it kind of plays out like this. So in the next three to five years, we’re in this generative, moving into agentic phase. [00:36:01] Jay McBain: Every partner thinks internally first, the sales and marketing. They’re thinking about their invoicing and billing. They’re thinking about their service tickets. They’re thinking about creating a business that’s 10% better than their competitors, taking that knowledge into their customers and drive in business. [00:36:17] Jay McBain: But we understand that ag agentic AI, as it’s going to play out is not a product. A couple of years ago, we thought maybe a copilot or an agent force or something was going to be the product that everybody needed to buy, and it’s not a product, it’s gonna show up as a feature. So you go back in the history of feature ads and it’s gonna show up in software. [00:36:38] Jay McBain: So if you’re calling in SMB, maybe you’re calling on a restaurant. The restaurant isn’t gonna call OpenAI or call Microsoft or call Nvidia directly. They’re running their restaurant. And they may have chosen a platform like Toast Square, Clover, whatever iPads people are running around with, runs on a platform that does everything in their business, does staffing, does food ordering, works with Uber Eats, does everything end to end? [00:37:08] Jay McBain: They’re gonna wait to one of those platforms, dries out agent AI for them, and can run the restaurant more effectively, less human capital and more consistently, but they wait for the SaaS platform as you get larger. A hundred, 150 people. You have vice presidents. Each of those vice presidents already have a SaaS stack. [00:37:28] Jay McBain: I talked about Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, et cetera. They’ve already built that seven layer model and in some cases it’s 70 layers. But the fact is, is they’re gonna wait for those SaaS layers to deliver ag agentic to them. So this is how it’s gonna play out for the next three and a half, three to five years. [00:37:45] Jay McBain: And partners are realizing that many of them were slow to pick up SaaS ’cause they didn’t resell it. Well now to win in this next three to half, three to five years, you’re gonna have to play in this environment. When you start looking out from here, the next generation, you know, kind of five through 15 years gets interesting in more of a physical sense. [00:38:06] Jay McBain: Where I was yesterday talking about every IOT device that now is internet access, starts to get access to large language models. Every little sensor, every camera, everything that’s out there starts to get smart. But there’s a point. The first trillionaire, I believe, will be created here. Elon’s already halfway there. [00:38:24] Jay McBain: Um, but when Bill Gates thought there was gonna be a PC in every home, and IBM thought they were gonna sell 10,000 to hobbyists, that created the richest person in the world for 20 years, there will be a humanoid in every home. There’s gonna be a point in time that you’re out having drinks with your friends, and somebody’s gonna say, the early adopter of your friends is gonna say. [00:38:46] Jay McBain: I haven’t done the dishes in six weeks. I haven’t done the laundry. I haven’t made my bed. I haven’t mowed the lawn. When they say that, you’re gonna say, well, how? And they’re gonna say, well, this year I didn’t buy a new car, but I went to the car dealership and I bought this. So we’re very close to the dexterity needed. [00:39:05] Jay McBain: We’ve got the large language models. Now. The chat, GPT version 10 by then is going to make an insane, and every house is gonna have one of the. [00:39:17] Jay McBain: This is the promise of ai. It’s not humanoid robots, it’s not agents. It’s this. 99% of the world’s business data has not been trained or tuned into models yet. Again, this is the slow moving business. If you want to think about the 99% of business data, every flight we’ve all taken in this room sits on a saber system that was put in place in 1964. [00:39:43] Jay McBain: Every banking transaction, we’ve all made, every withdrawal, every deposit sits on an IBM mainframe put in place in the sixties or seventies. 83% of this data sits in cold storage at the edge. It’s not ready to be moved. It’s not cleansed, it’s not, um, indexed. It’s not in any format or sitting on any infrastructure that a large language model will be able to gobble up the data. [00:40:10] Jay McBain: None of the workflows, none of the programming on top of that data is yet ready. So this is your 10 to 20 year arc of this era that chat bot today when they cancel your flight is cute. It’s empathetic, it feels bad for you, or at least it seems to, but it can’t do anything. It can’t book you the Marriott and get you an Uber and then a 5:00 AM flight the next morning. [00:40:34] Jay McBain: It can’t do any of that. But more importantly, it doesn’t know who you are. I’ve got 53 years of flights under my belt and they, I’m the person that get me within six hours of my kids and get me a one-way Hertz rental. You know, if there’s bad weather in Miami, get me to Tampa, get me a Hertz, I’m driving home, I’m gonna make it home. [00:40:56] Jay McBain: I’m not the 5:00 AM get me a hotel person. They would know that if they picked up the flights that I’ve taken in the past. Each of us are different. When you get access to the business data and you become ag agentic, everything changes. Every industry changes because of this around the customers. When you ask about this 35% growth, working on that data, working in traditional consulting and design and implementation, working in the $7 trillion of infrastructure, storage, compute, networking, that’s gonna be around, this is a massive opportunity. [00:41:30] Jay McBain: Services are gonna continue to outgrow products. Probably for the next five to 10 years because of this, and I’m gonna finish here. So we talked a lot about quantifying names, faces, places, and I think where we failed the most as ultimate partners is underneath the tam, which every one of our CEOs knows to the decimal point underneath the TAM that our board thinks they’re chasing. [00:41:59] Jay McBain: We’ve done a very poor job. Of talking about the available markets and obtainable markets underneath it, we, we’ve shown them theory. We’ve shown them a bunch of, you know, really smart stuff, and PowerPoint slides up the wazoo, but we’ve never quantified it for them. If they wanna win, if they want to get access, if they want to double their pipeline, triple their pipeline, if they wanna start winning more deals, if they wanna win deals that are three times larger, they close two times faster. [00:42:31] Jay McBain: And they renew 15% larger. They have to get into the available and obtainable markets. So just in the last couple weeks I spoke at Cribble, I spoke at Octane, I spoke at CrowdStrike Falcon. All three of those companies at the CEO level, main stage use those exact three numbers, three x, two x, 15%. That’s the language of platforms, and they’re investing millions and millions and millions of dollars on teams. [00:42:59] Jay McBain: To go build out the Sam Andal in name spaces and places. So you’ve heard me talk about these 28 moments a lot. They’re the ones that you spend when you buy a car. Some people spend one moment and they drive to the Cadillac dealership. ’cause Larry’s been, you know, taking care of the family for 50 years. [00:43:18] Jay McBain: Some people spend 50 moments like I do, watching every YouTube video and every, you know, thing on the internet. I clear the internet cover to cover. But the fact is, is every deal averages around these 28 moments. Your customer, there’s 13 members of the buying committee today. There’s seven partners and they’re buying seven things. [00:43:37] Jay McBain: There’s 27 things orchestrating inside these 28 moments. And where and how they all take place is a story of partnering. So a couple of years ago, canals. Latin for channel was acquired by amia, which is a part of Informa Tech Target, which is majority owned by Informa. All that being said, there’s hundreds of magazines that we have. [00:44:00] Jay McBain: There’s hundreds of events that we run. If somebody’s buying cybersecurity, they probably went to Black Hat or they probably went to GI Tech. One of these events we run, or one of the magazines. So we pick up these signals, these buyer intent signals as a company. Why did they wanna, um, buy a, uh, a Canals, which was a, you know, a small analyst firm around channels? [00:44:22] Jay McBain: They understood this as well. The 28 moments look a lot like this when marketers and salespeople are busy filling in the spots of every deal. And by the way, this is a real deal. AstraZeneca came in to spend millions of dollars on ASAP transformation, and you can start to see as the customer got smart. [00:44:45] Jay McBain: The eBooks, they read the podcasts, they listened to the events they went to. You start to see how this played out over the long term. But the thing we’ve never had in our industry is the light blue boxes. This deal was won and lost in December. In this particular case, NTT software won and Yash came in and sold the customer five projects. [00:45:07] Jay McBain: The millions of dollars that were going to be spent were solved here. The design and architecture work was all done here. A couple of ISVs You see in light blue came in right at the end, deal was closed in April. You see the six month cycle. But what if you could fill in every one of the 28 boxes in every single customer prospect that your sales and marketing team have? [00:45:30] Jay McBain: But here’s the brilliance of this. Those light blue boxes didn’t win the deals there. They won the deals months before that. So when NTT and Software one walked into this deal. They probably won the deal back in October and they had to go through the redlining. They had to go through the contracting, they had to go through all the stuff and the Gantt chart to get started. [00:45:54] Jay McBain: But while your CMO is getting all excited about somebody reading an ebook and triggering an MQL that the sales team doesn’t want, ’cause it’s not qualified, it’s not sales qualified, you walk in and say, no, no. This is a multimillion deal, dollar deal. It’s AstraZeneca. I know the five partners that are coming in in December to solidify the seven layers, and you’re walking in at the same time as the CMOs bragging about an ebook. [00:46:21] Jay McBain: This changes everything. If we could get to this level of data about every dollar of our tam, we not only outgrow our competitors, we become the platforms of the next generation. Partnering and ultimate partnering is all here. And this is what we’re doing in this room. This is what we’re doing over these couple of days, and this is what, uh, the mission that Vince is leading. [00:46:43] Jay McBain: Thank you so much. [00:46:47] Vince Menzione: Woo. Day in the house. Good to see you my friend. Good to see you. Oh, we’re gonna spend a couple minutes. Um, I’m put you in the second seat. We’re gonna put, we’re gonna make it sit fireside for a minute. Uh, that was intense. It was pretty incredible actually, Jay. And so I’m, I think I wanna open it up ’cause we only have a few minutes just to, any questions? [00:47:06] Vince Menzione: I’m sure people are just digesting. We already have one up here. See, [00:47:09] Question: Jay knows I’m [00:47:10] Vince Menzione: a question. I love it. We, I don’t think we have any I can grab a mic, a roving mic. I could be a roving mic person. Hold on. We can do this. This is not on. [00:47:25] Vince Menzione: Test, test. Yes it is. Yeah. [00:47:26] Question: Theresa Carriol dared me to ask a question and I say, you don’t have to dare me. You know, I’m going to Anyway. Um, so Jay, of the point of view that with all of the new AI players that strategic alliances is again having a moment, and I was curious your point of view on what you’re seeing around this emergence and trend of strategic alliances and strategic alliance management. [00:47:52] Question: As compared to channel management. And what are you seeing in terms of large vendors like AWS investing in that strategic alliance role versus that channel role training, enablement, measurement, all that good stuff? [00:48:06] Jay McBain: Yeah, it’s, it’s a great question. So when I told the story about toast at the restaurant or Square or Clover, they’re not call, they’re not gonna call open AI or Nvidia themselves either. [00:48:17] Jay McBain: When you look out at the 250,000 ISVs. That make up this AI stack, there is the layers that happen there. So the Alliance with AWS, the alliance they have with Microsoft or Google is going to be how they generate agent AI in their platforms. So when I talk about a seven layer stack, the average deal being seven layers, AI is gonna drive this to nine, and then 11, then probably 13. [00:48:44] Jay McBain: So in terms of how alliances work, I had it up there as one of the five core strategies, and I think it’s pretty even. You can have the best alliances in the world, but if the seven partners trusted by the customer don’t know what that alliance is and the benefits to the customer and never mention it, it’s all for Naugh. [00:49:00] Jay McBain: If you’re go-to market, you’re co-selling, your co-marketing strategies are not built around that alliance. It’s all for naught. If the integration and the co-innovation, the co-development, the all the co-creation work that’s done inside these alliances isn’t translated to customer outcomes, it’s all for naugh. [00:49:17] Jay McBain: These are all five parallel swim lanes. All five are absolutely critically needed. And I think they’re all five pretty equally weighted in terms of needing each other. Yes. To be successful in the era of platforms. Yeah. [00:49:32] Vince Menzione: And the problem is they’re all stove pipe today. If, if at all. Yeah. Maintained, right. [00:49:36] Vince Menzione: Alliances is an example. Channels and other example. They don’t talk to one another. Judge any, we’ve got a mic up here if anybody else has. Yep. We have some questions here, Jacqueline. [00:49:51] Question: So when we’re developing our channel programs, any advice on, you know, what’s the shift that we should make six months from now, a year from now? The historical has been bronze, silver, gold, right? And you’ve got your deal registration, but what’s the future look like? [00:50:05] Jay McBain: Yeah, so I mean, the programs are, are changing to, to the point where the customer should be in the middle and realizing the seven partners you need to win the deal. [00:50:15] Jay McBain: And depending on what category of product you’re in, security, how much you rely on resell, 91.6%. You know, the channel partners are gonna be critical where the customer spends the money. And if you’re adding friction to that process, you’re adding friction in terms of your growth. So you know, if you’re in cybersecurity, you have to have a pretty wide open reseller model. [00:50:39] Jay McBain: You have to have a wide open distribution model, and you have to make sure you’re there at that point of sale. While at the same time, considering the other six partners at moment 12 who are in either saying nice things about you or not, the customer might even be starting with you. ’cause there is actually one thing that I didn’t mention when I showed the 28 moments filled in. [00:51:00] Jay McBain: You’ll notice that the customer went to AWS twice direct. AWS lost the deal. Microsoft won the deal software. One is Microsoft’s biggest reseller in the world. They just acquired crayon. NTT who, who loves both had their Microsoft team go in. [00:51:18] Question: Mm. [00:51:19] Jay McBain: So I think that they went to AWS thinking it was A-W-S-S-A-P, you know, kind of starting this seven layer stack. [00:51:25] Jay McBain: I think they finished those, you know, critical moments in the middle looking at it. And then they went back to AWS kind of going probably WWTF. Yeah. What we thought was happening isn’t actually the outcome that was painted by our most trusted people. So, you know, to answer your question, listen to your partners. [00:51:43] Jay McBain: They want to be recognized for the other things they’re doing. You can’t be spending a hundred percent of the dollars at the point of sale. You gotta have a point of system that recognizes the point of sale, maybe even gold, silver, bronze, but recognizing that you’re paying for these other moments as well. [00:51:57] Jay McBain: Paying for alliances, paying for integrations and everything else, uh, in the cyber stack. And, um, you know, recognizing also the top 1000. So if I took your tam. And I overlaid those thousand logos. I would be walking into 2026 the best I could of showing my company logo by logo, where 80% of our TAM sits as wallet share, not by revenue. [00:52:25] Jay McBain: Remember, a million dollar partner is not a million dollar partner. One of them sells 1.2 million in our category. We should buy them a baseball cap and have ’em sit in the front row of our event. One of them sells $10 million and only sells our stuff if the customer asks. So my company should be looking at that $9 million opportunity and making sure my programs are writing the checks and my coverage. [00:52:48] Jay McBain: My capacity and capability planning is getting obsessed over that $9 million. My farmers can go over there, my hunters can go over here, and I should be submitting a list of a thousand sorted in descending order of opportunity. Of where my company can write program dollars into. [00:53:07] Vince Menzione: Great answer. All right. I, I do wanna be cognizant of time and the, all the other sessions we have. [00:53:14] Vince Menzione: So we’ll just take one other question if there are any here and if not, we’ll let I know. Jay, you’re gonna be mingling around for a little while before your flight. I’m [00:53:21] Jay McBain: here the whole day. [00:53:22] Vince Menzione: You, you’re the whole day. I see that Jay’s here the whole day. So if you have any other questions and, and, uh, sharing the deck is that. [00:53:29] Vince Menzione: Yep. Alright. We have permission to share the deck with the each of you as well. [00:53:34] Jay McBain: Alright, well thank you very much everyone. Jay. Great to have you.

A CMO Confidential Interview with Tom Stein, the Chairman and founder of Stein and Jann Schwarz, Senior Director of Marketplace Innovation at LinkedIn and founder of Think tank, The B2B Institute, who join us to discuss the 2025 Brand-to- Demand Maturity and the B2B Buyability studies. Tom and Jann share results showing the need to integrate brand and performance marketing in an era when the marketing funnel has collapsed needs fundamental re-thinking and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are still a key measure (in spite of data showing they've lost their usefulness). Tom and Jann explain why nearly all survey respondents acknowledge a problem but only 20% are taking action. Key topics include: why a good product or service are now "table stakes”; how buyer confidence, human connection and customer experience have become key Buyability differentiators; and the belief that B2B creative is way behind B2C on average. Tune in to hear why “demand-focused marketing" was one of the greatest brand misdirects of all time and a fabulous story of an alter boy accidentally dropping the Baby Jesus. The Truth Behind the Curtain in B2B: Brand + Demand, MQLs, and “Buyability” with Tom Stein & Jan SchwartzDescription:Mike Linton sits down with Tom Stein (Stein) and Jan Schwartz (LinkedIn's B2B Institute) to unpack new ANA research on brand–demand maturity and a bold operating model they call “buyability.” They cover why 80% of marketers say integration matters but aren't doing it, why MQLs are failing modern buying groups, how to financialize creative and brand, and what CEOs/boards should actually measure to accelerate revenue. Chapters:00:00 Intro & guest setup02:36 Why a brand–demand maturity study now05:36 The 80% integration gap07:17 Org design: why teams move slowly09:36 MQLs under fire (and better alternatives)10:45 Creative quality in B2B: reality check13:34 ServiceNow, Idris Elba, and distinctive assets15:01 The CEO/CFO/Board disconnect19:00 “Buyability” explained: becoming easier to buy22:12 Brand as a full-funnel commercial driver23:40 The funnel is broken; AI ups the stakes26:59 Playing offense: fewer, better buyer-group leads28:20 Financializing the case for change29:56 The budget stat that shocked everyone31:41 What to do now: category fame, trust, real metrics34:41 Funniest stories and practical parting advice37:35 Wrap & where to find more episodesTags:B2B marketing,brand and demand,buyability,MQL,pipeline velocity,CMO Confidential,Mike Linton,Tom Stein,Jan Schwartz,LinkedIn B2B Institute,ANA,B2B brand,B2B demand gen,marketing measurement,go to market,Salesforce,ServiceNow,Idris Elba,B2B creative,category fame,board metrics,CFO,CEO,CRO,sales alignment,MarTech,lead gen,buyer groups,brand strategy,revenue growthSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

So, what does Marketing ops actually look like? Atlassian's Head of Lifecycle Marketing Ops Kelly Jo Horton joins Daniel to break down what ops actually is, why it's so complex, and how high-performing teams are evolving the function for 2026 and beyond. She explains why MOPS isn't “just sending an email,” why process is everything, and why marketers need to stop treating ops like a drive-thru and start treating it like a Michelin-star kitchen. She also reveals how Atlassian structures its ops organization and why she believes the MQL is officially dead. You'll also learn: >  What modern Marketing Ops actually does and why it varies by company > How AI can automate repetitive ops tasks (like list cleaning and lead investigations) > How Atlassian uses Jira, Confluence, Slack bots, and Loom to run ops like engineering This is for anyone in Marketing, rev ops, or GTM who wants to build a scalable system…and for every Marketer who's ever said “it's just an email.” Easily record and share AI-powered video messages with your teammates and customers to supercharge productivity at https://www.loom.com/ Follow Kelly Jo: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellyjohorton/ Follow Daniel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-murray-marketing/ Sign up for The Marketing Millennials newsletter: https://themarketingmillennials.com/ Daniel is a Workweek friend, working to produce amazing podcasts. To find out more, visit: https://workweek.com/

Why Sales & Marketing Broke (And How to Rebuild a Modern Revenue System) ft. Tony J HughesMost teams feel the symptoms — pipeline gaps, misaligned targets, MQL chaos, sellers chasing “now or never” deals.But those are signals of a deeper problem: the revenue system itself is broken.In this episode, we sit down with Tony J Hughes and Adem Manderovic to unpack why sales and marketing drifted apart… and how to rebuild a modern revenue system that actually matches how buyers make decisions today.We get into:Why predictable revenue models collapsedHow sales stopped validating the marketHow marketing lost strategic direction to MQL targetsAnd how to replace the old funnel with a closed-circuit GTM system that creates control and credibility again.We also talk ICP, cataloguing, air cover, performance gaps, and Tony's new book Sentient — plus what AI means for the future of selling.Tune in and learn:Why the old sales & marketing playbooks brokeHow to build a shared ICP that actually aligns both teamsWhy cataloguing is the foundation for a modern GTM systemHow to create air cover that supports real sales cyclesThe future of selling in a world of advanced AIIf you're a B2B marketer or sales leader stuck in the old predictable-revenue logic, this episode is your blueprint for rebuilding alignment and revenue performance from the ground up.-----------------------------------------------------

Databox is an easy-to-use Analytics Platform for growing businesses. We make it easy to centralize and view your entire company's marketing, sales, revenue, and product data in one place, so you always know how you're performing. Learn More About DataboxSubscribe to our newsletter for episode summaries, benchmark data, and moreMost marketers are told: “Tie your plan to revenue.” But how?In this fast-paced live episode, Sam Kuehnle (VP of Marketing at Loxo) breaks down a practical, no-fluff process for building a marketing plan that earns buy-in from leadership, aligns with sales, and actually hits targets.No vanity metrics. No fake forecasts. Just real talk on what's working, what's not — and how to plan smarter.In this episode, you'll learn:How to calculate marketing's share of company revenue goalsWhat “bottoms-up” and “top-down” planning really look likeWhy most funnels leak at the demo-to-meeting stageHow to avoid wasting budget on channels you haven't proven yetThe spreadsheet Sam uses to model all of thisThis is your playbook if you're tired of MQL theater and want to lead with strategy, not guesswork.

Refine Labs CEO Megan Bowen joins Evan Kirstel for a deep-dive into how B2B marketing must evolve for the AI era. The conversation covers modern go-to-market models, buyer-centric strategies, and how Refine Labs helps companies drive measurable pipeline growth through data, experimentation, and cultural excellence.1. Speakers and RolesMegan Bowen – CEO of Refine Labs. With 20 years in B2B SaaS at companies like Zocdoc, Grubhub, and WeWork, she brings deep expertise in modernizing go-to-market strategy and redefining marketing measurement.Evan Kirstel– Host and interviewer. Brings over 30 years in tech sales and marketing leadership.2. Topics CoveredThe evolution of B2B buying and selling from the analog to the AI era.Why traditional MQL-based marketing is outdated.The “Brand, Demand, Expand” model for full-funnel growth.Refine Labs' AI strategy and benchmarking methodology.Alignment between sales and marketing in 2025.The future of content creation and human creativity in an AI-driven market.Building company culture around people-first principles.The Refine Labs Vault: democratizing growth frameworks and insights.3. Questions This Video Helps AnswerWhat's fundamentally broken about traditional B2B marketing models?Why is the MQL metric no longer a reliable measure of success?How should marketers adapt to buyer-led decision-making?What is the “Brand, Demand, Expand” framework, and how does it work?How is AI transforming marketing operations and customer acquisition?How can companies build a people-first culture that drives performance?4. Jobs, Roles, and Responsibilities MentionedCEO, CMO, VP of Marketing, Sales teams, Customer Success and Account Management, Marketing Operations and Creative roles, Content strategists and paid media managers5. Frameworks and Concepts MentionedBrand, Demand, Expand (three-pillar GTM framework)Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)Buyer-centric marketingAI-powered benchmarksRevenue funnel analysis and pipeline conversion optimization6. Related ResourcesRefine Labs: https://www.refinelabs.comThe Vault: access to Refine Labs frameworks and community.HubSpot (mentioned as part of inbound marketing evolution)Grandin Holdings (Refine Labs investment partner)

B2B companies struggle to prove SEO ROI beyond basic traffic metrics. Lindsie Nelson, VP of SEO at Symphonic Digital, shares proven frameworks for measuring search success in complex sales cycles where traditional ecommerce attribution fails. The discussion covers implementing MQL-to-SQL tracking systems that connect organic search to qualified pipeline, developing engagement depth metrics that reflect educated buyer behavior, and establishing core content topic measurement frameworks that align SEO performance with business outcomes.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Marketers are hooked on attribution perfection. Meanwhile, your buyers are ghosting and your “AI-powered” campaigns sound like everyone else's. What if the edge isn't more dashboards but it's better judgment?In this episode, Nicole Gates, VP Growth Marketing at Varonis tears up the playbook B2B keeps clinging to. She shows how a “process person” builds a launch machine that actually ships, why tiering by customer impact (not internal hype) changes everything, and how moving SDRs under marketing with real SLAs turns MQL theater into pipeline. We dig into the noisy AI arms race (robots fighting robots), shifting budget from paid-to-play to earned trust via thought leadership, and using AI where it improves outcomes (routing, enrichment, speed-to-lead), not where it creates slop.We also cover:How to tier your launches by what matters to customers, not your org chart.Why the best growth marketers think more like editors than analysts.What happens when you replace data obsession with decision confidence.

Send us a textIn this episode we interview David Malmborg, VP of Marketing and Sales at Boostability, where he oversees a hyper-scalable SEO offering for small businesses. What you'll learn in this episode:Concrete meeting cadences: weekly team sessions and tight one-on-ones that keep decisions crisp and accountable. A shared vocabulary for the funnel: clear, company-wide definitions for lead, MQL, SQL, and deal stages. “Revenue requirements” modeling: start from closed-won, work backward to meetings, deals, and per-source lead targets. Practical handoffs: how marketing returns closed-lost leads to nurture and when sales re-engages. Culture-aware communication: when Slack works, when live meetings win, and how to adapt to the team's habits. Customer-first consistency: align language across marketing, sales, and CS so the experience feels unified. QA at scale: use AI sentiment on calls to spot friction, tighten training, and shorten “issue review” meetings.

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!In this episode of OpsCast, hosted by Michael Hartmann and powered by MarketingOps.com, we're joined by Ellie Cary, Senior Demand Generation Manager at StarTree. Ellie shares her experience navigating marketing performance challenges, including what happens when teams hit MQL goals but still face cuts, and why ROI visibility has become critical for MOps leaders.Ellie discusses the limitations of attribution and reporting, how over-engineered models can create complexity, and what it takes to simplify processes while improving impact. She also shares insights on customer marketing, retention, and how MOps professionals can make their work more visible and strategic across the organization.In this episode, you'll learn:How to connect marketing performance to business outcomesThe risks of overcomplicated attribution and how to simplify itThe importance of foundational marketing processes for measurable ROIStrategies for MOps teams to communicate effectively with non-technical stakeholdersThis episode is ideal for marketing operations, demand generation, and growth professionals looking to strengthen their impact and visibility in the organization. Tune in for Ellie's actionable guidance on making MOps work matter.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals Join us at MOps-Apalooza: https://mopsapalooza.com/Save 10% with code opscast10Support the show

Most GTM teamstoday are missing targets because they're simply measuring the wrong things. In this episode, Carolyn and Amber unpack why attribution is a mirage (it only shows the lucky 2% that become opportunities) and why the MQL hamster wheel keeps smart teams stuck optimizing a tiny slice of reality. We dig into the pre-pipeline “factory floor,” show how to expose the messy middle, and explain why “more volume” isn't a strategy—it's a cash leak.You'll hear concrete ways to replace vanity conversion stats with a causal view of attempts → connects → meetings → opps → DQs (with reasons), what to do about pipeline shock when you tighten scoring, and why pipeline needs a single owner (hint: not “marketing-sourced”). We also talk about modular change vs. big-bang transformations, and where attribution actually belongs (as seasoning, not the main ingredient), dig into where attribution actually belongs in GTM measurement (spoiler: it's seasoning, not the protein), and explain why modular change beats waiting for a full-scale transformation.What You'll Learn:Attribution ≠ answers: It validates the 2-5% that convert and hides the waste in the 98%.Kill the MQL hamster wheel: Measure the journey, not just MQL→SQL%.Instrument the factory floor: Person-level steps that predict pipeline (and the drop-offs to fix).Volume lies: “Do more dials” is a 2012 play—engineer repeatable patterns instead.Pipeline shock is healthy: Fewer junk opps → higher win rate and better CAC.One owner for pipeline: Align Sales + Marketing on quality pipeline, not credit.When to use attribution: After you fix data hygiene and pre-pipeline tracking.If your dashboards keep telling you to “get more leads” or “add more dials,” you're staring at the pipeline mirage. Break free from the hamster wheel, shine a light on the messy middle, and finally see what's really driving, or draining, your revenue.This episode is powered by Passetto, a GTM advisory and software company with a solution that eliminates the Pipeline Black Box™, the critical data hidden inside every GTM engine where leaders are flying blind when it matters most.

#277 Growth | Dave is joined by Emma Robinson, Head of B2B Marketing at Canva, and Kristine Segrist, VP of Consumer Marketing at Canva. Together, Emma and Kristine lead the teams driving Canva's growth across both enterprise and consumer audiences, helping the company scale into a platform now used by over 95% of the Fortune 500.Dave, Emma, and Kristine cover:How Canva balances brand-building with pipeline accountability, and why they view brand investment as long-term growth.The playbook Canva uses to turn bottom-up adoption into enterprise deals, including how product signals guide upsell and expansion.How their team structure, data science investments, and creative bets (like the Love Your Work campaign) work together to scale B2B marketing without losing Canva's approachable brand identity.This episode offers a practical look at how one of the world's most recognizable platforms approaches B2B growth.Timestamps(00:00) - – Intro (03:48) - – Canva's marketing org structure (06:48) - – Blurring B2B and B2C (11:48) - – How Canva measures marketing impact (16:48) - – Turning free users into enterprise deals (21:48) - – Data science's role in marketing (24:48) - – Balancing brand bets with ROI (31:23) - – Inside the “Love Your Work” campaign (38:23) - – How Canva executes large campaigns (42:23) - – Building enterprise credibility and trust (45:23) - – FedEx case study on brand governance (49:23) - – Lessons from Google and Meta (53:23) - – Why creativity is a marketing superpower (55:23) - – Closing thoughts Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***Today's episode is brought to you by Walnut.Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?Come on, today's buyers don't want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.That's where Walnut comes in.Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond. That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what's actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA? Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!

#276 Career Growth | Dave is joined by Kady Srinivasan, CMO at You.com, an AI-first company building infrastructure for enterprise agents. Kady has led marketing at some of the world's most recognizable companies, including Dropbox, Klaviyo, and Lightspeed, where she scaled teams, drove massive revenue growth, and navigated ICP pivots. Now, she's bringing that experience into the fast-changing world of AI.Dave and Kady cover:How to evolve as a CMO across industries, personas, and business modelsThe three core systems CMOs need to scale teams and drive alignmentHow AI is reshaping marketing roles, workflows, and the skills future CMOs will needYou'll walk away with lessons you can apply to your own career, no matter what market or role you're in.Timestamps(00:00) - – Intro (03:03) - – From engineer to reluctant marketer (05:37) - – Gaming years and “coolest mom” cred (07:52) - – The story behind You.com's domain (09:31) - – Why she jumped into AI (12:00) - – Reinventing yourself as a CMO (14:00) - – Fundamentals that never change in marketing (16:13) - – Aligning marketing with company strategy (19:24) - – Pivoting the ICP at Lightspeed (22:26) - – Lessons on cross-functional alignment (25:08) - – Letting go to grow as a leader (27:53) - – Systems every CMO should set up (34:43) - – Why no single playbook works (36:24) - – How AI is reshaping marketing roles (51:04) - – Building an AI-first marketing org and closing thoughts Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***Today's episode is brought to you by Walnut.Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?Come on, today's buyers don't want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.That's where Walnut comes in.Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond. That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what's actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA? Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!

#275 LinkedIn Strategy | In this episode, Dave is joined by Brad Zomick, a B2B marketing consultant and host who has helped founders and executives build their presence on LinkedIn. Together they break down why a strong LinkedIn strategy is no longer optional for founders, it's one of the most effective growth levers in B2B today.Dave and Brad cover:Why LinkedIn is still the best channel for founders to build authority, attract talent, and connect with customersHow to turn everyday founder communications into high-impact LinkedIn contentThe unexpected ROI of founder-led content, from recruiting and partnerships to real-time message testingIf you've been wondering how to turn LinkedIn into a real growth engine for your brand, this episode is your blueprint.Timestamps(00:00) - – Intro (03:48) - – Early days of LinkedIn (09:18) - – Building Drift with founder brand (15:18) - – Why every founder needs LinkedIn (19:18) - – The hidden ROI of posting (27:53) - – Dave's personal posting system (31:23) - – How to never run out of content (35:23) - – Unexpected benefits of being visible (39:53) - – Is it too late to start? (42:53) - – Who inspires Dave today (45:08) - – What's next for Exit Five (46:53) - – Closing thoughts Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***Today's episode is brought to you by Walnut.Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?Come on, today's buyers don't want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.That's where Walnut comes in.Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond. That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what's actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA? Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!

#274 Growth | In this episode, Dave is joined by Sean Lane, Founding Partner at BeaconGTM and RevOps expert, to talk about scaling RevOps in B2B. With over a decade of experience at Drift and other B2B SaaS companies, Sean shares actionable tips for marketers looking to align operations with business goals.Dave and Sean cover:How to build alignment between sales, marketing, and opsWhy early-stage companies must align operational complexity with their growth maturityHow continuous planning helps marketing and ops teams stay agile as business challenges come upTimestamps(00:00) - - Intro to Sean (07:11) - - Going From Founder Led Sales to Having A Professional GTM (09:52) - - How Ops Bridges Business Goals (13:42) - - How To Align Sales, Marketing, and Operations (17:51) - - Why You Need A Clear Marketing Strategy (20:17) - - How To Build A Partnership Between Marketing and Operations (26:41) - - Guidelines for long term vs short term budgeting and planning (32:19) - - Marketing's Role At The Bottom Of The Funnel (37:14) - - How To Get “Hand-raisers” For Your Product In The Customer Journey (41:06) - - Do Engaged Accounts Measure The Success Of Marketing? (42:56) - - Sean's Podcast ROI (45:12) - - AI Use Cases In Ops (50:14) - - How To Hire A Good Ops Person (53:42) - - Closing Remarks Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***Today's episode is brought to you by Walnut.Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?Come on, today's buyers don't want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.That's where Walnut comes in.Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond. That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what's actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA? Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!

#273 Leadership | Matt is joined by Rachel Weeks, a veteran B2B marketing leader with over 20 years of experience guiding companies through acquisitions, layoffs, and tech disruption. Rachel has led both corporate and field marketing teams and is passionate about recognition-driven team cultures that retain and empower top talent.Matt and Rachel cover:How to build a recognition strategy that actually improves retention (without needing a big budget or fancy platform)Why employee motivation dips during times of stress, layoffs, or AI disruption and what great leaders do differentlyThe role of marketing in internal culture: from branding the program to building peer-driven engagementWhether you're managing a small team or leading an entire department, this episode is packed with practical insights to help you build a culture where marketers feel valued, motivated, and ready to stay.Timestamps(00:00) - – Intro (03:48) - – Rachel's background and leadership lens (06:18) - – What actually makes a recognition program work (08:48) - – How marketing supports internal culture building (11:48) - – Recognition during org changes, stress, and funding rounds (14:48) - – The impact of AI on morale and motivation (18:18) - – What happens when recognition disappears (20:18) - – The “10 minutes by Friday” habit (22:48) - – Easy, no-budget ways to recognize team members (25:48) - – Performance-driven vs. values-driven recognition (30:53) - – Monetary vs. non-monetary rewards (and what people really want) (34:23) - – Recognition vs. pay raises: what the data says (38:23) - – Why people leave even when they're paid well (42:23) - – How to ask for (and give) better feedback (47:23) - – Using AI to create space for strategic work (54:23) - – Final thoughts on leadership, retention, and culture Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***Today's episode is brought to you by Walnut.Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?Come on, today's buyers don't want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.That's where Walnut comes in.Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond. That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what's actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA? Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!

#272 Presentation Skills | Matt is joined by Vincent Pierri, a speaking coach who helps executives and marketers craft compelling, high-stakes talks. With a background as a pastor and public communicator, Vincent has developed a repeatable framework that helps B2B marketers improve how they show up in front of a room, whether it's a conference keynote, a boardroom pitch, or a weekly team update.Matt and Vincent cover:The 4-part framework behind talks that stick: Tension, Trust, Teaching, TakeawayHow to pick the right topic for your talk (and avoid cramming in too much)Why authenticity and simplicity matter more than slide design, and how to keep your delivery grounded and effectiveWhether you're prepping for Inbound, Exit Five's Drive, or just your next big internal presentation, this episode will help you nail the structure and mindset behind a talk that resonates.Timestamps(00:00) - - Intro (02:58) - - Vincent's unusual path to speaking coach (06:48) - - Why marketers need this framework (not just keynote speakers) (09:28) - - The first step: pick one real person you want to help (12:38) - - How to narrow your talk down from too many ideas (15:48) - - The 4-part structure: Tension, Trust, Teaching, Takeaway (18:38) - - Why your talk should start with a problem (not your points) (20:13) - - How to build trust by showing vulnerability (23:18) - - The 3 Cs: Catchy one-liner, Creative analogy, Concrete example (30:23) - - How to make your points memorable (and not Googleable) (33:28) - - Why authenticity beats sounding “smart” (35:38) - - What a strong closing takeaway looks like (38:53) - - When (and how) to start practicing your delivery (40:08) - - Why you should build your talk before your deck (42:33) - - How many slides is too many? (46:23) - - Connecting without slides: lessons from the pulpit (48:38) - - Final advice for marketers prepping talks this fall Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***Today's episode is brought to you by Walnut.Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?Come on, today's buyers don't want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.That's where Walnut comes in.Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond. That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what's actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA? Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!

#271 GTM Engineering | In this episode, Dave is joined by John Short, CEO of Compound Growth Marketing, along with Cammy Keiler, Justin Johnson, and Dan Guenet. Together, they break down the rise of GTM engineering, what it is, how it differs from RevOps, and why B2B teams are investing in it.Dave and the crew cover:The core difference between RevOps and GTM engineering (and why the latter is more focused on building than just integrating)Real GTM engineering use cases, from AI-powered sales tools to mid-funnel campaigns that go way beyond ebooksHow GTM engineers are driving higher revenue per employee and why this role should be one of your first five marketing hiresWhether you're hiring or just GTM-curious, you'll leave this episode with a clear definition of the role, real-world examples, and tactical ways GTM engineers drive impact.Timestamps(00:00) - – Intro (03:33) - – Why this topic resonated with 1,200+ registrants (05:48) - – What even is **GTM engineering? (08:03) - – GTM engineering vs. RevOps vs. Marketing Ops (11:18) - – How AI is driving this role forward (14:28) - – Real examples: ABM campaigns, mid-funnel tools, sales call analysis (19:38) - – Tools GTM engineers are using today (Clay, Unify, GPTs) (23:03) - – Role of GTM engineering in revenue per employee (27:18) - – How GTM engineers enable sales + reduce headcount (31:33) - – What Dan actually does all day as a GTM engineer (36:23) - – Custom GPTs for sales and marketing teams (39:38) - – What MCP servers are (and why they matter) (44:08) - – Claude, Gamma, and AI-powered content systems (46:53) - – Why this isn't just PLG (or ABM, or RevOps) (50:43) - – When to hire a GTM engineer (53:23) - – Big feelings about the role (and why they exist) (55:33) - – Closing thoughts + what to take away Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***Today's episode is brought to you by Walnut.Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?Come on, today's buyers don't want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.That's where Walnut comes in.Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond. That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what's actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA? Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!

#270 Strategy | Dave is joined by Holly Xiao, Head of B2B Marketing at HeyGen, an AI video generation platform that helps teams produce personalized, high-quality content, fast. Holly has led marketing at high-growth startups and now runs the enterprise GTM motion at HeyGen, where she blends strategy, creative execution, and AI-powered workflows to reach modern B2B buyers.Dave and Holly cover:The 4 channels her lean team is betting on to drive enterprise pipeline (and what's not working anymore)How B2B marketers are using AI video for event marketing, sales enablement, onboarding, and beyondWhy SEO is falling short and how HeyGen is shifting focus to webinars, events, and YouTube insteadIf you're figuring out how to use AI in your marketing or just trying to do more with less, this one's full of practical ideas to help you think differently about team structure, channels, and strategy.Timestamps(00:00) - – Intro (03:48) - – Holly's nonlinear path to marketing (06:48) - – Getting started in marketing ops (08:48) - – Why she joined an AI startup (10:48) - – How HeyGen's marketing org works (13:48) - – PLG vs SLG: Key differences (15:48) - – The 4 channels driving pipeline (17:48) - – What's working: Events + webinars (19:48) - – Booth strategy that stands out (24:23) - – Brand vs demand events (26:23) - – Building community and user events (27:53) - – SEO is declining. Now what? (30:23) - – Running marketing in 2-month sprints (33:23) - – Aligning product and marketing cadence (35:23) - – Her daily AI tools (36:53) - – ChatGPT vs Gemini workflows (38:23) - – Real AI video use cases (40:23) - – Personalized event promos with avatars (41:23) - – Support, training, and onboarding videos (42:23) - – Fortune telling and music videos?! (43:23) - – Why AI won't replace marketers Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***Today's episode is brought to you by Walnut.Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?Come on, today's buyers don't want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.That's where Walnut comes in.Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond. That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what's actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA? Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!

Stephanie Moyal is the co-founder of Troop, a functional mushroom brand transforming wellness routines through approachable, science-backed gummies. Built at the intersection of personal healing and product innovation, Troop is helping redefine how consumers experience the benefits of mushrooms, one gummy at a time.After exploring multiple career paths and feeling unfulfilled, Stephanie came across a book on mushrooms that sparked a complete shift in direction. What started as a personal fascination with neuroplasticity and brain health quickly evolved into a product mission grounded in education, quality, and access. At Troop, Stephanie leads everything from product development to brand storytelling, helping bridge the gap between skepticism and belief in a growing wellness category.Though she entered CPG without a traditional background, Stephanie brings a founder's resilience and clarity to each challenge, navigating go-to-market tradeoffs, scaling digital alongside strategic wholesale, and building emotional alignment with customers and cofounders alike.Whether discussing how Troop approached product sampling and what didn't work, why the mushroom industry is just getting started, or how therapy strengthened her cofounder partnership, Stephanie offers a candid and insightful perspective on building a brand with both purpose and endurance.In This Conversation We Discuss:[00:39] Intro[00:54] Turning personal curiosity into a company[03:43] Brainstorming product formats in the kitchen[04:19] Navigating the nightmare of early production[06:23] Finding backup production in a crisis[08:02] Pivoting from tasting to paid acquisition[09:31] Expanding across DTC, Amazon, and retail[11:19] Episode Sponsors: Electric Eye, Reach & Zamp[14:38] Focusing efforts instead of chasing channels[16:28] Looping back to what worked all along[18:27] Writing down ideas to filter later[21:08] Bringing on experts to avoid missteps[22:32] Growing stronger through personal challengesResources:Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on YoutubePremium daily mushroom supplements trytroop.com/Follow Stephanie Moyal linkedin.com/in/stephanie-moyal-95a4bb60Schedule an intro call with one of our experts electriceye.io/connectLevel up your global sales withreach.com/honest  Fully managed sales tax solution for Ecommerce brands zamp.com/honestIf you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

ABM programs often fail to deliver revenue results. Nadia Davis, VP of Marketing at CaliberMind, shares her expertise in transforming account-based marketing strategies into effective revenue generators. She breaks down the five most critical three-letter acronyms for B2B marketers today—ABM, CRM, MQA, MQL, and CAC—while explaining how to build holistic omni-channel ABM frameworks that contribute meaningfully to sales pipelines.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on GTM Live, Carolyn sits down with Nick Flamini, host of the Sales Architecture Podcast, to explore the real reasons most go-to-market teams are still struggling—despite all the headcount, tools, and budget. They dig into the myth of “more BDRs = more pipeline,” and why most organizations are missing the data, architecture, and cross-functional alignment required to scale efficiently.Carolyn explains why “go-to-market bloat” is a symptom of deeper system issues, not bad people. She shares how Passetto is helping companies rethink how they connect marketing, sales, finance, and RevOps through a unified GTM data layer. Nick challenges the hype around AI in outbound, and the two unpack why trust, process, and measurement (not volume) are the levers that matter most.If you've ever questioned whether your CAC is actually sustainable, or felt stuck trying to prove marketing's impact, this episode is your blueprint.Key topics in this episode:Why most CRM data is unusable, and what to do about itThe epidemic of go-to-market bloat and over-hiringHow AI is flooding outbound and eroding trustWhy finance must own more of GTM efficiencyThe trap of MQL targets and performance by teamWhat it takes to build a real full-funnel revenue factoryThis episode is powered by ⁠Passetto⁠. We help high-growth and equity-backed companies turn GTM data into better decisions, faster. We unify your GTM and financial data, identify your growth levers, and help you scale. Part SaaS, part advisory. Visit ⁠passetto.com