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If you're still guessing how marketing is really performing, this episode will flip the switch. Spencer breaks down why Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are the most important metric you can track and the best leading indicator of future revenue. You'll learn how to clearly define an SQL, why it matters more than raw lead volume, and how tight communication between sales and marketing turns SQLs into better forecasting, smarter ad spend, and higher close rates. If you want fewer “junk leads” and more projects that actually fit your business, this is a must-listen.
Are you drowning your leads with follow-up after follow-up? It's a mistake many service-based businesses make, thinking more is better. But in reality, too much follow-up could be killing your sales instead of helping them.In today's episode, we dive into a common problem many health and wellness businesses face: low conversion rates after generating quality leads. Lauren shares an in-depth example from one of her clients who was generating tons of leads but only achieving a 5% booking rate. We explore why this happens and how you can fix it. From the crucial need for accurate data tracking to the importance of defining a "qualified lead," we outline the tweaks to your sales funnel that will boost lead conversions and significantly reduce your marketing spend.In This Episode:- Case study of high leads and low conversion rates- Sample lead qualification and conversion framework- Estimating the value of opt-ins- The correct sequence of contacting leads- Episode wrap-up and call-to-actionListen to This Episode on Your Favorite Podcast Channel:Follow and listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/perpetual-traffic/id1022441491 Follow and listen on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/59lhtIWHw1XXsRmT5HBAuK Subscribe and watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@perpetual_traffic?sub_confirmation=1We Appreciate Your Support!Visit our website: https://perpetualtraffic.com/ Follow us on X: https://x.com/perpetualtraf Connect with Ralph Burns: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphburns Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ralphhburns/ Hire Tier11 - https://www.tiereleven.com/apply-now Connect with Lauren Petrullo:Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/laurenepetrullo/LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenpetrullo Consult Mongoose Media - https://mongoosemedia.us/ Mentioned in this episode:We're opening up sponsorship spots for Q1 and Q2! Apply now by visiting www.perpetualtraffic.com https://www.NEXTInsurance.com/perpetualHead to www.perpetualtraffic.com to apply to be a sponsor of this showWe're opening up sponsorship spots for Q1 and Q2! Apply now by visiting www.perpetualtraffic.com
Marketing is drowning in AI sludge, vanity dashboards, and “spray and pray” content. Your brand is getting lost, not because your product is weak, but because your taste is.In this episode, we sit down with Andrew Lee, Partner Marketing Leader at Microsoft, to torch the illusion that more content equals more impact. Together, we unpack why “brand vs. performance” is a fake fight, why taste is the last unfair advantage, and how to build owned distribution that survives algorithm mood swings. Your CMO will either thank you or feel attacked.We also cover:Annual planning as a power move: kill random acts of marketing.Turning founder POV into a scalable channel (without turning them into a dancing bear).How to benchmark “taste” (with simple, brutal quality bars your team can actually use).Converting narrative into numbers: story→search→sales enablement→SQLs.The “No Rented Moats” playbook: email + podcast + events > social roulette.
Most remodelers obsess over cost per lead but that focus can quietly sabotage results. In this episode, Spencer Powell shares The Tale of Two Remodelers to show how two companies spending the same $6,000 on ads can get dramatically different outcomes. You'll learn why tracking sales-qualified leads (SQLs) beats chasing cheap leads, how aligning sales and marketing around revenue transforms ROI, and what data marketers really need from sales to optimize campaigns.
Imagine spending thousands on marketing, going all-in on trade shows, Google Ads, and webinars, only to have no idea if any of it actually drives revenue. You're not alone. In this episode of Predictable B2B Success, host Vinay Koshy sits down with Jason Kramer, founder and CEO of Cultivize, to uncover why B2B CRM adoption and sales alignment are still a massive struggle, even in the age of endless tech solutions. Jason, a marketing veteran with over two decades of experience working with brands like Virgin Atlantic Airways and Johnny Walker, reveals the "aha" moment that led him to launch Cultivize: bridging the gap between marketing spend and provable ROI. From exposing why sales teams resist CRM systems to pinpointing the hidden data points that unlock better lead nurturing, this conversation is packed with real-world stories, sharp insights, and practical playbooks you can steal today. If you're curious about how leading companies actually connect marketing dollars to pipeline growth, how to fix a broken sales process before your next software rollout, or even how AI will soon change your sales teams, you won't want to miss this episode. Grab your headphones, predictable revenue is closer than you think. Some topics we explore in this episode include: Sure thing! Here are the top 10 topics covered in the episode with Jason Kramer: CRM Adoption Issues in B2B: Challenges in getting sales teams to use CRM systems effectively.Connecting Marketing Efforts to Revenue: The common struggle to attribute marketing activities to actual sales results.Importance of Customized Training and Processes: Why tailored training and clear processes are vital for CRM success.Lead Nurturing Strategies: How automated follow-ups and nurturing campaigns drive more revenue.Leadership & Accountability in Sales/Marketing Alignment: The role of strong leadership and culture in maintaining effective collaboration.Marketing-to-Sales Handoff Structure: Ensuring MQLs become SQLs efficiently, with an emphasis on quick responses.Data Hygiene and Segmentation in CRMs: Approaches for cleaning up CRM data and improving its usefulness.Lead Scoring for Buying Committees: Adjusting lead scoring to reflect group buying dynamics in B2B sales.Leveraging Automation and AI: Using technology to boost productivity and reduce manual workloads.Measuring ROI and Key Metrics: Best practices for tracking the metrics that matter, and correctly attributing revenue.And much, much more...
Building a successful sales organization from the ground up is no small feat. It requires strategic planning, data-driven decision-making, and a focus on cultivating the right mindset within your team. In this episode, I sit down with Megan Prince, Chief Revenue Officer of Zeni, to explore how she led her company to 10x their ARR in just a few years through a powerful outbound sales strategy. The Power of Outbound Sales Learn why Megan believes that a strong outbound motion is crucial for controlling your destiny and driving consistent growth. She reveals how 65% of Zeni's revenue comes from outbound efforts and explains why it's their most cost-effective customer acquisition channel. Building an Effective Tech Stack Discover the tools and technologies Zeni uses to power their outbound engine, including: · Orum for cold calling · LinkedIn Sales Navigator for social selling · AmpleMarket for data mining and email automation · Avoma for listening to cold calls · HubSpot for task management · FlyMSG.io for AI Writing, text expansion, sales prospecting training and social selling Designing High-Impact Sequences Megan breaks down their 20+ step outbound sequence that spans 20-30 days, incorporating multiple touchpoints across various channels. She emphasizes the importance of persistence, noting that it often takes 12-18 touches to convert a prospect into a customer. Data-Driven Decision Making Learn about the critical metrics Megan tracks to ensure predictable pipeline generation, including: Point of sale revenue per headcount Total activities to convert one customer SQLs per customer Pipeline to close-won rates Cultivating a Winning Mindset Explore the daily practices Megan encourages her team to adopt, such as gratitude journaling and intention-setting, to maintain a positive attitude in the face of rejection. Whether you're a sales leader looking to scale your organization or a rep aiming to improve your outbound game, this episode offers actionable strategies to elevate your sales performance. Tune in to learn how to build a data-driven, high-performing sales machine that can drive exponential growth for your business. Key Moments of This Episode 00:00:00 - The Importance of Cold Calling in Modern Sales Discusses the decline in email conversion rates and the effectiveness of cold calling for customer acquisition. Highlights the need for persistence in outreach, with 9,000 activities and 12-18 touchpoints typically required to convert a customer. Emphasizes the value of human interaction in sales processes. 00:01:30 - Introducing Megan Prince: From Door-to-Door Sales to Chief Revenue Officer Megan Prince shares her journey from door-to-door sales to becoming CRO at Zeni, a company providing automated bookkeeping for startups. She discusses her experience growing Zeni's ARR by 10x and the importance of outbound sales strategies in the company's success. 00:04:58 - Building a Successful Outbound Sales Strategy Megan explains Zeni's outbound sales approach, including their tech stack (Orum, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, etc.) and 20-step sequence over 20-30 days. She emphasizes the importance of persistence, data-driven decision making, and maintaining a 2:1 BDR to AE ratio for optimal unit economics. 00:34:10 - Key Metrics and Mindset for Sales Success Megan discusses critical metrics for tracking BDR performance, including point of sale revenue per headcount and total activities to convert customers. She emphasizes the importance of data-driven decision making and cultivating a positive mindset through gratitude journaling and intention setting for sales team success. 00:40:44 - Leadership Advice for Building a Sales Organization Megan's key advice for sales leaders: lead with care and empathy to inspire team loyalty. She stresses the importance of balancing data-driven strategies with genuine concern for team members' well-being. Megan also shares her preferred methods of contact and personal insights. About Megan Prince Megan Prince is a dynamic revenue leader known for building and scaling high-performing sales organizations that have driven hundreds of millions in revenue. Currently the Chief Revenue Officer at a Zeni.ai, she specializes in architecting repeatable go-to-market strategies, cultivating customer-first cultures, and operationalizing excellence from the ground up. Megan's journey began in the grit of door-to-door sales and accelerated quickly, rising to VP of Sales at a publicly traded company within six years. Along the way, she's been honored as a 30 Under 30 standout, Director of the Year, and a multi-time President's Club and Million Dollar Club achiever. What differentiates Megan is her focus on the inputs of driving culture, clarity and consistency as the true drivers of performance. She's deeply passionate about developing talent, and is committed to helping others build intentional, high-impact careers. Follow Us On: · LinkedIn · Twitter · YouTube Channel · Instagram · Facebook Learn More About FlyMSG Features Like: · LinkedIn Auto Comment Generator · AI Social Media Post Generator · Auto Text Expander · AI Grammar Checker · AI Sales Roleplay and Coaching · Paragraph Rewrite with AI · Sales Prospecting Training for Individuals · FlyMSG Enterprise Sales Prospecting Training Program Install FlyMSG for Free: · As a Chrome Extension · As an Edge Extension Grammar intention-setting Ignore all Proofread in dialog Settings Disable
Most marketers obsess over clicks and cost-per-lead—but what if you're measuring the wrong things entirely? In this episode of Lead Gen HQ, we dive into 10 advanced data points that reveal what's really working in your funnel. From Lead Velocity Rate to ROAS and SQLs, you'll learn how to stop guessing and start growing.
Marketing Leadership Podcast: Strategies From Wise D2C & B2B Marketers
Laura Erdem, Sales Leader - Americas of Dreamdata, shares how sales and marketing teams can work together more effectively by focusing on shared business goals rather than forced alignment. Laura highlights the role of revenue attribution in helping marketers understand which activities are driving real impact, while acknowledging the complexity of measuring modern buyer journeys. She also discusses the value of correlation over time when it comes to linking marketing activities to revenue, and why simplifying processes and working closely with RevOps teams can help marketers feel more confident about their contributions to growth.Key Takeaways:(01:22) Sales and marketing alignment is about mutual respect, not friendship.(05:05) Creativity thrives when teams have time and space to experiment.(09:19) Marketing teams should collaborate with RevOps to understand impact.(13:10) MQLs need to connect to SQLs and revenue, not just impressions.(15:11) Attribution is often indirect; correlation over time is key.(18:03) Good data enables marketers to take accountability for revenue.(22:00) Using LinkedIn intentionally supports both sales and marketing goals.(24:46) Startup principles help enterprises achieve faster growth.(27:48) Transformation teams test ideas before full-scale execution.Resources Mentioned:Dreamdata websitehttps://dreamdata.io/Insightful Links:https://www.pecan.ai/blog/attribution-marketing-machine-learning/https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/communicating-marketings-impact-revenue-elevating-role-isaac-asendele/https://martech.org/new-attribution-challenge-understanding-marketing-sales-work-together/Thanks for listening to the “Marketing Leadership” podcast, brought to you by Listen Network. If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review to help get the word out about the show. And be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation. We appreciate the enthusiasm and support from our community. Currently, we are not accepting new guest interview requests as we focus on our existing lineup. We will announce when we reopen for new submissions. In the meantime, feel free to explore our past episodes and stay tuned for updates on future opportunities.#PodcastMarketing #PerformanceMarketing #BrandMarketing #MarketingStrategy #MarketingIntelligence #GTM #B2BMarketing #D2CMarketing #PodcastAds
Key Links:Park & Battery: https://parkandbattery.comPark & Battery LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/parkandbatteryBBN | Agency X: www.bbn-international.com/agencyxThis episode Ed Davis rewinds the reel on Cannes Lions to ask whether the festival is finally judging B2B work on its own creative terms. His guide is Michael Ruby, fresh from the Croisette after Park & Battery's Roto-Rooter campaign became one of only a handful of pure-play B2B entries to make the Creative B2B shortlist.The vibe in CannesRuby describes a “whirlwind” first visit: endless content, dizzying networking and—crucially—a palpable momentum for business-to-business brands. With B2B entries up to 415 this year, he believes the new compliance checks have helped weed out thinly veiled B2C work and sharpen the category's focus on genuine business impact.Evolving judging criteriaBoth host and guest agree the jury is learning to look beyond clever execution to lasting impact. Ruby notes that the best-in-class entries marry creativity with commercial proof: not just impressions and clicks, but measurable shifts in buying intent or brand preference. Yet very few campaigns—his own included—are “culturally sticky” enough to be remembered in five years, a challenge he throws down to the industry.Behind the Roto-Rooter short-listerTurning America's best-known plumber into an emotional storyteller started with one insight: nearly half of small businesses never reopen after a major flood. From there Park & Battery pushed a long-trusted client to embrace talking toilets, wry humour and a budget-friendly regional media plan. Stakeholders bought in instantly—as long as every line stayed technically accurate for professional plumbers. Data, emotion and AIThe pair dissect the uneasy dance between performance metrics and brand building. Gartner still says 60 % of martech sits idle; Cannes jurors can hardly be expected to decode MQLs and SQLs, so agencies must translate data into clearly meaningful outcomes. On AI, Ruby sees a gulf between public bravado and private anxiety: smart teams are automating the menial to free humans for concept craft, while audiences begin to recoil at low-grade “AI slop”.Campaigns that raised the barBeyond his own work, Ruby highlights AXA's “Three Words” domestic-abuse clause, Spotify/FCB's “Song for Every CMO” (with just 14 hyper-targeted impressions) and Vaseline's TikTok verification series as benchmarks that blend purpose, precision and share-worthy storytelling.Advice for would-be Lion-tamers“Stop sitting on the side-lines.” B2B specialists have the craft, but must invest time and a modest budget in world-class case films. If Park & Battery can do it four years in, anyone can. The only real barrier is deciding to enter.
In this episode, Justin speaks with Will Williamson, Director and Founding Member of JDR Group, a top-tier UK-based digital marketing agency and elite HubSpot partner. Drawing on over two decades of experience transforming sales and marketing strategies, Will unpacks the persistent disconnect between sales and marketing, and how his proprietary six-step system helps align both functions to drive measurable growth. From myths around sales-readiness to the future of video content and AI's role in marketing, this is a masterclass in B2B strategy for SMEs.Guest BioWill Williamson is the Director and Founding Member of JDR Group, a digital marketing agency based in Derby, UK. JDR Group is a leading HubSpot partner and has helped over 250 businesses optimize their digital sales and marketing over the past 20 years. Originally starting out in business coaching, Will pivoted the company toward digital marketing, developing a proprietary six-step system that is currently used long-term by over 60 businesses. His deep understanding of B2B challenges, especially within SMEs, makes him a trusted voice in marketing transformation.TakeawaysSales vs. Marketing: Many companies mistakenly expect marketing to deliver ready-to-buy leads; real growth requires synchronized sales and marketing efforts.Strategic Planning: Too many SMEs operate without clear long-term plans - planning and execution are both essential.The Six-Step Marketing System: Strategy, content, digital distribution, website, lead conversion, and CRM/sales integration.KPIs that Matter: Focus on touchpoints like visitors, leads, MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, and closed deals.Video is King: It's the most effective content format right now but also the hardest for companies to commit to.AI and the Future: AI isn't replacing genuine marketing yet but offers exciting potential for automation and insight.Chapters00:00 Intro to Will & JDR Group 02:00 The Sales vs. Marketing Disconnect 04:30 Origins in Business Coaching 06:00 The Myth of Sales-Ready Leads 08:15 Building a Sales-Marketing Machine 10:00 Weekly Syncs & HubSpot Integration 12:30 Why Most SMEs Don't Plan Ahead 15:00 The Six-Step Marketing System Explained 18:00 Favourite Client Success Stories 19:15 The Power & Challenge of Video Content 22:30 AI's Current Limitations & Future Promise 27:00 Final Thoughts & Where to Find WillFollow Will on LinkedIn hereFollow Justin on LinkedIn here
"If done right, AI will actually make us more human. It handles the busy work and surfaces real-time insights—so GTM teams can focus on what really drives revenue: building relationships, solving real problems, and creating long-term customer value." That's a quote from Roderick Jefferson and a sneak peek at today's episode.Hi there, I'm Kerry Curran—Revenue Growth Consultant, Industry Analyst, and host of Revenue Boost, A Marketing Podcast. In every episode, I sit down with top experts to bring you actionable strategies that deliver real results. So if you're serious about business growth, find us in your favorite podcast directory, hit subscribe, and start outpacing your competition today.In this episode, titled AI + EQ + GTM: The New Growth Equation for B2B Leaders, I sit down with keynote speaker, author, and enablement powerhouse Roderick Jefferson to unpack the modern formula for revenue growth: AI + EQ + GTM.We explore why traditional sales enablement isn't enough in today's landscape—and how real go-to-market success requires alignment across marketing, sales, and customer success, powered by emotional intelligence and smart technology integration.Whether you're a CRO, CMO, or GTM leader looking to scale smarter, this episode is packed with real-world insights and actionable strategies to align your teams and drive sustainable growth.Stick around until the end, where Roderick shares expert tips for building your own AI-powered revenue engine.If you're serious about long-term growth, it's time to get serious about AI, EQ, and GTM. Let's go.Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01)Welcome, Roderick. Please introduce yourself and share your background and expertise.Roderick Jefferson (00:06)Hey, Kerry. First of all, thanks so much for having me on. I'm really excited—I've been looking forward to this one all day. So thanks again. I'm Roderick Jefferson, CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associates. We're a fractional enablement company, and we focus on helping small to mid-sized businesses—typically in the $10M to $100M range—that need help with onboarding, ongoing education, and coaching.I'm also a keynote speaker and an author. I actually started my career in sales at AT&T years ago. I was a BDR, did well, got promoted to AE, made President's Club a couple of times. Then I was offered a sales leadership role—and I turned it down. I know they thought I was crazy, but there were two reasons: first, I realized I loved the process of selling more than just closing big deals. And second, oddly enough, I wasn't coin-operated. I did it because I loved it—it gave me a chance to interact with people and have conversations like this one.Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:16)I love that—and I love your background. As Roderick mentioned, he does a lot of keynote speaking, and that's actually where I met him. He was a keynote speaker at B2BMX West in Scottsdale last month. I also have one of your books here that I've been diving into. I can't believe how fast this year is flying—it's already the first day of spring!Roderick Jefferson (01:33)Thank you so much. Wow, that was just last month? It feels like last week. Where is the time going?Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:45)I appreciate your experience for so many reasons. One is that—like we talked about before the show—my dad was in sales at AT&T for over 20 years. It paid for my entire education. So we were comparing notes on that era of innovation and what we learned back then.Roderick Jefferson (02:02)Thank you, AT&T!Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:13)So much of what you talked about on stage and wrote about in your book is near and dear to my heart. My background is in building integrated marketing-to-sales infrastructure and strengthening it to drive revenue growth. I'm excited to hear more about what you're seeing and hearing. You talk to so many brands and marketers—what's hot right now? What's the buzz? What do we need to know?Roderick Jefferson (02:44)A couple of things. The obvious one is AI—but I'll add something: it's not just AI, it's AI plus EQ plus IQ. Without that combination, you won't be successful.The other big theme is the same old problem we've always had: Why is there such a disconnect between sales and marketing? As an enablement guy, it pains me. I spent 30 years in corporate trying to figure that out. I think we're getting closer to alignment—thank you, AI, for finally stepping in and being smarter than all of us! But we've still got a long way to go.Part of the issue is we're still making decisions in silos. That's why I've become a champion of moving away from just "sales enablement."Yes, I know I wrote the book on sales enablement—but I don't think that's the focus anymore. In hindsight, “sales enablement” is too myopic. It's really about go-to-market. How do we bring HR, marketing, product marketing, engineering, sales, and enablement all to the same table to talk about the entire buyer's journey?Instead of focusing on our internal sales process and trying to shoehorn prospects into it, we should be asking: How do they buy? Who buys? Are there buying committees? How many people are involved? And yes, ICP matters—but that's just the tip of the iceberg. It goes much deeper.Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:44)Yes, absolutely. And going back to why you loved your early sales roles—it was about helping people. That's how I've always approached marketing too: what are their business challenges, and what can I offer to solve them? In your keynote, you said, “I want sales to stop selling and start helping.” But that's not possible without partnering with marketing to learn and message around the outcomes we drive and the pain points we solve.Roderick Jefferson (05:22)Exactly. Let's unpack that. First, about helping vs. selling—that's why we have spam filters now. Nobody wants to be sold to. That's also why people avoid car lots—because you know what's coming: they'll talk at you, try to upsell you, and push you into something you don't need or want. Then you have buyer's remorse.Now apply that to corporate and entrepreneurship. If you're doing all the talking in sales, something's wrong. Too many people ask questions just to move the deal forward instead of being genuinely inquisitive.Let's take it further. If marketing is working in a silo—building messaging and positioning—and they don't bring in sales, then guess what? Sales won't use it. Newsflash, right? And second, it's only going to reflect marketing's perspective. But if you bring both teams together and say, “Hey, what are the top three to five things you're hearing from prospects over and over?”—then you can work collaboratively and cohesively to solve those.The third piece is: let's stop trying to manufacture pain. Not every prospect is in pain. Sometimes the goal is to increase efficiency or productivity. If there is pain, you get to play doctor for a moment. And by that, I mean: do they need an Advil, a Vicodin, a Percocet, or an extraction? Do you need to stop the bleeding right now? You only figure that out by getting sales, marketing, product, and even HR at the same table.Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:34)Yes, absolutely. I love the analogy of different levels of pain solutions because you're right—sometimes it's not pain, it's about helping the customer be more efficient, reduce costs, or drive revenue. I've used the doctor analogy before too: you assess the situation and then customize the solution based on where it “hurts” the most. One of the ongoing challenges, though, is that sales and marketing still aren't fully aligned. Why do you think that's been such a persistent issue, and where do you see it heading?Roderick Jefferson (08:14)Because sales speaks French and marketing speaks German. They're close enough that they can kind of understand each other—like ordering a beer or finding a bathroom—but not enough for a meaningful conversation.The core issue is that they're not talking—they're presenting to each other. They're pitching ideas instead of having a dialogue. Marketing says, “Here's what the pitch should look like,” and sales replies, “When's the last time you actually talked to a customer?”They also get stuck in “I think” and “I feel,” and I always tell both groups—those are the two things you cannot say in a joint meeting. No one cares what you think or feel. Instead, say: “Here's what I've seen work,” or “Here's what I've heard from prospects and customers.” That way, the conversation is rooted in data and real-world insight, not opinion or emotion.You might say, “Hey, when we get to slide six in the deck, things get fuzzy and deals stall.” That's something marketing can fix. Or you go to product and say, “I've talked to 10 prospects, and eight of them asked for this feature. Can we move it up in the roadmap?”Or go back to sales and say, “Only 28% of the team is hitting quota because they're struggling with discovery and objection handling.” So enablement and marketing can partner to create role plays, messaging guides, or accreditations. It sounds utopian, but I've actually done this six times over 30 years—it is possible.It's not because I'm the smartest guy in the room—it's because when sales and marketing align around shared definitions and shared goals, real change happens. Go back to MQLs and SQLs. One team says, “We gave you all these leads,” and the other says, “Yeah, but they all sucked.” Then you realize: you haven't even agreed on what a lead is.As a fractional enablement leader, that's the first question I ask: “Can you both define what an MQL and SQL mean to you?” Nine times out of ten, they realize they aren't aligned at all. That's where real progress starts.Once you fix communication, the next phase is collaboration. And what comes out of collaboration is the big one: accountability. That's the word nobody likes—but it's what gets results. You're holding each other to timelines, deliverables, and follow-through.The final phase is orchestration. That's what enablement really does—we connect communication, collaboration, and accountability across the entire go-to-market team so everyone has a voice and a vote.Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:16)You're so smart, and you bring up so many great points—especially around MQLs, SQLs, and the lack of collaboration. There's no unified North Star. Marketing may be focused on MQLs, but those criteria don't always match what moves an MQL to an SQL.There's also no feedback loop. I've seen teams where sales and marketing didn't even talk to each other—but they still complained about each other! I was brought in to help, and I said, “You're adults. It's time to talk to one another.” And you'd think that would be obvious.What I love is that we're starting to see the outdated framework of MQLs as a KPI begin to fade. As you said, it's about identifying a shared goal that everyone can be accountable to. We need to all be paddling in the same direction.Roderick Jefferson (14:16)Exactly. I wouldn't say we're all rowing yet, but we've definitely got our hands in the water, and we're starting to go in the same direction. You can see that North Star flickering out there.And I give big kudos to AI for helping with that. In some ways, it reminds me of social media. Would you agree that social media initially made us less social?Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:27)Yes, totally agree. We can see the North Star.Roderick Jefferson (14:57)Now I'm going to flip that idea on its head: if done right, I believe AI will actually make us more human—and drive more meaningful conversations. I know that sounds crazy, but I have six ways AI can help us do that.First, let's go back to streamlining lead scoring. If we use AI to prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert, sales can focus efforts on the most promising opportunities. Once we align on those criteria, volume and quality both improve. With confidence comes competence—and vice versa.Second is automating task management. Whether it's data entry, appointment scheduling, or follow-up emails, those repetitive tasks eat up sales time. Less than 30% of a rep's time is spent actually selling. If we offload that admin work, reps can focus on high-value activities—like building relationships, doing discovery, and closing deals.Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:59)Yes! And pre-call planning. Having the time to prepare properly makes a huge difference.Roderick Jefferson (16:19)Exactly. Third is real-time analytics. If marketing and ops can provide sales reps with real-time insights—like funnel data, deal velocity, or content performance—we can start making decisions based on data, not assumptions or feelings.The fourth area is personalized sales coaching. I talk to a lot of leaders, and I'll make a bold statement: most sales leaders don't know how to coach. They either use outdated methods or try to “peanut butter” their advice across the team.But what if we could use AI to analyze calls, emails, and meetings—then provide coaching based on each rep's strengths and weaknesses? Sales leaders could shift from managing to leading.Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:55)Yes, I love that. It would completely elevate team performance.Roderick Jefferson (18:11)Exactly. Fifth is increasing efficiency in the sales process. AI can create proposals, contracts, and other documents, which frees up time for reps to focus on helping—not chasing paperwork. And by streamlining the process, we can qualify faster and avoid wasting time on poor-fit deals.Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:58)Right, and they can focus on the deals that are actually likely to move forward.Roderick Jefferson (19:09)Exactly. And sixth—and most overlooked—is customer success. That's often left out of GTM conversations, but it's critical. We can use AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants to handle basic inquiries. That frees up CSMs to focus on more strategic tasks like renewals, cross-sell, and upsell.Let's be honest—most CSMs were trained for renewals, not selling. But cross-sell and upsell aren't really selling—they're reselling to warm, happy customers. The better trained and equipped CSMs are, the better your customer retention and growth.Because let's face it—we've all seen it: 90 days before renewal, suddenly a CSM becomes your best friend. Where were they for the last two years? If we get ahead of that and connect all the dots—sales, marketing, CS, and product—guess who wins?The prospect.The customer.The company—because revenue goes up.The employee—because bonuses happen, spiffs get paid, and KPIs are hit.But most importantly, we build customers for life. And that has to start from the very beginning, not just when the CSM steps in at the end.Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:47)Yes, this is so smart. I love that you brought customer success into the conversation. One of the things I love about go-to-market strategy is that it includes lifetime value—upsell and renewal are a critical part of the revenue journey.In my past roles, I've seen teams say, “Well, that's just client services—they don't know how to sell.” But to your point, if we coach them, equip them, and make them comfortable, it can go a long way.Roderick Jefferson (21:34)Absolutely. They become the lifeblood of your business. Yes, you need net-new revenue, but if sales builds this big, beautiful house on the front end and then customers just walk out the back door—what's the point?And I won't even get into the stats—you know them—about how much more expensive it is to acquire a new customer versus retaining one. The key is being human and actually helping.Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:46)Exactly. I love that. It leads perfectly into my next question—because one of the core components of your strategy and presentation was the importance of EQ, or emotional intelligence. Can you talk about why that's so critical?Roderick Jefferson (22:19)Yeah. It really comes down to this: AI can provide content—tons of it, endlessly. It can give you all the data and information in the world. But it still requires a human to provide context. For now, at least. I'm not saying it'll be that way forever, but for now, context is everything.I love analogies, so I'll give you one: it's like making gumbo. You sprinkle in some seasoning here, some spice there. In this case, AI provides the content. Then the human provides the interpretation—context. That's understanding how to use that generated content to reach the right person or company, at the right time, with the right message, in the right tone.What you get is a balanced, powerful approach: IQ + EQ + AI. That's what leads to truly optimal outcomes—if you do it right.Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:19)Yes! I love that. And I love every stage of your process, Roderick—it's so valuable. I know your clients are lucky to work with you.For people listening and thinking, “Yes, I need this,” how do they get started? What's the baseline readiness? How do they begin integrating sales and marketing more effectively—and leveraging AI?Roderick Jefferson (23:34)Thank you so much for that. It really starts with a conversation. Reach out—LinkedIn, social media, my website. And from there, we talk. We get to the core questions: Where are you today? Where have you been? Where are you trying to go? And most importantly: What does success look like?And not just, “What does success look like?” but, “Who is success for?”Then we move into an assessment. I want to talk to every part of the go-to-market team. Because not only do we have French and German—we've also got Dutch, Spanish, and every other language. My job is to become the translator—not just of language, but of dialects and context.“This is what they said, but here's what they meant. And this is what they meant, but here's what they actually need.”Then we dig into what's really going on. Most clients have a sense of what's “broken.” I'm not just looking for the broken parts—I'm looking at what you've already tried. What worked? What didn't? Why or why not?I basically become a persistent four-year-old asking, “Why? But why? But why?” And yes, it gets frustrating—but it's the only way to build a unified GTM team with a shared North Star.Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:32)Yes, I love that. And just to add—sometimes something didn't work not because it was a bad strategy, but because it was evaluated with the wrong KPI or misunderstood entirely.Like a top-of-funnel strategy did work—but the team expected it to generate leads that same month. It takes time. So much of this comes down to digging into the root of the issue, and I love your approach.Roderick Jefferson (26:10)Exactly. And it's also about understanding that every GTM function has different KPIs.If I'm talking to sales, I'm asking about average deal size, quota attainment, deal velocity, win rate, pipeline generation. If I'm talking to sales engineering, they care about number of demos per deal, wins and losses, and number of POCs. Customer success? They care about adoption, churn, CSAT, NPS, lifetime value.My job is to set the North Star and speak in their language—not in “enablement-ese.” Sometimes that means speaking in sales terms, sometimes marketing terms. And I always say, “Assume I know nothing about your job. Spell out your acronyms. Define your terms.”Because over 30 years, I've learned: the same acronym can mean 12 different things at 12 different companies.The goal is to get away from confusion and start finding commonality. When you break down the silos and the masks, you realize we're all working toward the same thing: new, long-term, happy customers for life.Kerry Curran, RBMA (27:55)Yes—thank you, Roderick. I love this. So, how can people find you?Roderick Jefferson (28:00)Funny—I always say if you can't find me on social media, you're not trying to find me.You can reach me at roderickjefferson.com, and you can find my book, Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement Excellence and the upcoming Sales 3.0 companion workbook there as well.I'm on LinkedIn as Roderick Jefferson, Instagram and Threads at @roderick_j_associates, YouTube at Roderick Jefferson, and on BlueSky as @voiceofrod.Kerry Curran, RBMA (28:33)Excellent. I'll make sure to include all of that in the show notes—I'm sure this episode will have your phone ringing!Thank you so much, Roderick. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us. This was valuable for me, and I'm sure for the audience as well.Roderick Jefferson (28:40)Ring-a-ling—bring it on! Let's dance. Thank you again. This was an absolute honor, and I'm glad we got the chance to reconnect, Kerry.Kerry Curran, RBMA (28:59)For sure. Thank you—you too.Roderick Jefferson (29:01)Take care, all.Thanks for tuning in. If you're struggling with flat or slowing revenue growth, you're not alone. That's why Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast brings you expert insights, actionable strategies, and real-world success stories to help you scale faster.If you're serious about growth, search for us in your favorite podcast directory. Hit follow or subscribe, and leave a five-star rating—it helps us keep the game-changing content coming.New episodes drop regularly. Don't let your revenue growth strategy fall behind. We'll see you soon!
This episode features an interview with Jen Rapp, CMO at Superside, an AI-powered creative service, trusted by 500+ top brands. Jen has over 20 years of experience developing and executing marketing strategies for high-growth companies, with a particular focus on working alongside entrepreneurial leaders to scale.She discusses selling the vision and how doing good impacts marketing, sharing her lessons from her time at Patagonia and DoorDash. She also discusses winning on meta through quality creative and driving qualified leads through virtual summits. Key Takeaways:Don't sleep on meta ads. If your ICP is on Instagram, those ads can be some of the cleanest and most effective ads to drive pipeline, especially if you have quality creative. Virtual Summits, or essentially a stack of webinars, are a great way to get emails and drive pipeline if you are truly offering great content. Sell the vision, not the product. A focus on features, instead of stories, is rarely the way to go. Quote:“ I would not have said this a year ago, when I first joined the company - number one is our meta, paid meta spend. I came to this company and I saw how much we were spending on Meta, and I was like, whoa, what the hell are these people doing? They're making mistakes left and right. Nope. We drive a majority, or a lot, I shouldn't say a majority, a lot of our qualified pipeline through our Meta spend. Our Meta spend also acts as our top of funnel awareness driver. When we turn off meta, we basically turn off the ability of our SDRs and our BDRs to convert people to SQLs. It is invaluable. So number one, my marketing team is like rallied around creating incredible creative for Meta.”Episode Timestamps: *(03:51) The Trust Tree: Making sure customers have confidence in you*(12:12) The Playbook: The power of Meta ads*(33:10) The Dust Up: Standing up to brilliant founders*(41:01) Quick Hits: Jen's Quick HitsSponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Jen on LinkedInLearn more about SupersideLearn more about Caspian Studios
Vladyslav Podoliako is the founder and CEO of Belkins.io, a leading B2B appointment setting agency, and Folderly, an email deliverability system. With a strong entrepreneurial spirit and a focus on performance-based results, Vlad has successfully navigated the complexities of pricing in the B2B space. He is passionate about helping companies scale their businesses through effective client acquisition strategies. In this episode, Vlad shares his journey from launching Belkins to evolving his pricing strategies as the company grew. Together, they explore the critical role of pricing in business growth, the importance of aligning pricing with customer value, and the unique challenges of pricing in the B2B landscape. Why you have to check out today's podcast: Understand the significance of aligning pricing with customer value and performance. Discover the importance of testing pricing strategies and gathering client feedback. Explore the psychological aspects of pricing and how they influence customer decisions. “Pricing is like blood in the veins for a growing company. You should have a great pricing model that is scalable and profitable.” – Vlad Podoliako Topics Covered: 01:10 – Vlad introduces himself and discusses the common misinterpretation of his company names. 02:15 – The importance of pricing in Vlad's entrepreneurial journey and how it evolved over time. 04:36 – Overview of Belkins and its approach to client acquisition. 06:51 – Discussion on the pricing model based on sales qualified leads (SQLs) and its correlation with client ROI. 09:32 – Insights into product packaging and the pricing strategy for Folderly. 13:15 – The impact of high pricing on customer expectations and delivery pressure. 15:42 – The psychological aspects of pricing and how they relate to perceived value. 19:41 – Discussion on the entrepreneurial spirit in Ukraine and its impact on business success. 24:21 – In scaling your company, how often should you revisit your pricing? 26:50 – Vlad's advice on being courageous with pricing and testing strategies. 28:01 – Thoughts on ChatGPT pricing for pro. 30:01 – Connect with Vlad. Key Takeaways: “Be courageous about your pricing. Test it out more than you strategize theoretically.” – Vlad Podoliako “(on pricing) It's about how much tries you do before you succeed and how resilient you do that. All of these events, historically, we kind of have this in our blood, adaptability, resilience, and hard work.” – Vlad Podoliako People/Resources Mentioned: Belkins: https://belkins.io/ Folderly: https://folderly.com/ OpenAI: https://openai.com/ Sam Altman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ Google: https://www.google.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/ Connect with Vlad Podoliako: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladPodoliako/ Email: vlad@belkins.io Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com
Mark Herring is a passionate marketing leader with strong technical roots and deep knowledge of how to market cloud and enterprise software to open-source developers and DevOps audiences. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at HiveMQ. In this episode, Mark shares his approach to cold outreach, explaining why leading with recognizable brands before introducing value creates engagement. He explores effective email strategies, emphasizing the power of short, curiosity-driven messages over long, detailed pitches. He also discusses pricing from the buyer's perspective, highlighting how perceived value—rather than just function—drives purchasing decisions. Why you have to check out today's podcast: Learn proven strategies for grabbing attention in cold calls and emails, using brand credibility and psychological triggers like FOMO. Discover how to price based on what buyers truly value, rather than just cost or features, using real-life analogies. Get practical tips on structuring sales conversations to keep prospects engaged without sounding like a typical salesperson. “Try and understand the value in the eyes of your buyer. I think far too many times as vendors, we think there's intrinsic value because it costs us much to produce or we think it looks like that. It's trying to understand from a buying perspective, what is the value you're providing.” - Mark Herring Topics Covered: 01:29 - How his journey from development to product marketing led him to pricing 03:41 - How his early pricing research focused on how customers would use a product rather than explicitly asking about the problem it solved 04:59 - To what is the short tenure of CMOs in B2B and consumer goods attributed to 06:25 - Explaining what a pipeline is and how pipeline generation involves value demonstration 10:38 - Comparing pipeline to running a marathon, emphasizing that while MQLs and SQLs are useful stepping stones, the ultimate goal is generating real sales opportunities 12:02 - Differentiating a pipeline from a SQL 14:18 - Demonstrating how a successful cold outreach combines multiple touchpoints 18:57 - How to make prospects more receptive in a cold call 21:13 - Why he uses big brand names as conversation openers in cold calls rather than starting with a value statement 22:27 - What an effective cold email should be 24:42 - Highlighting the importance of A/B testing cold emails and continuously refining outreach strategies to improve open rates 25:55 - Mark's best pricing advice Key Takeaways: “It's cold because you've never had the interaction, but usually they've interacted somewhere with you. It's like they might have seen you at an event, or they might have seen some of your outreach to you already and going, ‘Okay, I'll give this guy a bone.'” - Mark Herring “One of the sales guys was talking about this [cold calls] at the conference we were at together, and I just loved it. And he is like, ‘Don't over research, because there's never a good time to know everything.' Because you got to keep on dialing.” - Mark Herring “You can't stop doing it [cold outreach] because it's like getting dice and trying to get the six, the more you throw it, the better chance you're going to get to the six.” - Mark Herring “I lead [cold call] with brands, not with value. And when you do that type of thing, they're then shocked going, ‘Oh, he didn't do a sales pitch on me. He's asking me about these companies. Well, maybe it is something interesting.'” - Mark Herring People/Resources Mentioned: FedX: https://www.fedex.com/en-us/home.html UPS: https://www.ups.com/us/en/home Connect with Mark Herring: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/herringmark/ Email: mark.herring@hivemq.com Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com
Not all leads are created equal. In this episode, Spencer Powell breaks down the key differences between Leads, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) for remodelers. With over 6,000 leads generated for our clients in the last 12 months, it's time to clarify what truly counts as a lead. Listen now!
Ralph and Lauren tackle the challenges marketers and business owners face when managing lead generation and sales processes. They break down the critical differences between Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and share actionable strategies for optimizing ad algorithms and leveraging CRM data effectively. The conversation highlights the power of transparency and alignment within teams and with agency partners to maximize ROI. With a focus on practical insights, they also explore how to use standard events in digital advertising to improve lead quality and drive better business outcomes.Chapters:00:00:00 - Kickoff: Welcome to an Unfiltered Dive Into Marketing Strategies00:01:00 - Listener Reviews: What You're Saying About the Show00:03:50 - Constructive Criticism: Turning Feedback Into Actionable Insights00:08:40 - MQL vs. SQL: Why Knowing the Difference Changes Everything00:18:05 - MPI Checklist Unpacked: The Simple Tool to Qualify Your Leads00:19:30 - Lead Qualification Secrets: How to Spot the Real Prospects00:20:45 - Custom Thank You Pages: The Game-Changer You're Overlooking00:22:08 - Campaign Optimization: Attracting the Customers You Actually Want00:28:43 - Standard Events Masterclass: Supercharging Your Ad Performance00:33:39 - Final Thoughts: Quick Wins and Next Steps to Level UpLINKS AND RESOURCES:Tier 11 on YouTubeGet Your Marketing Performance Indicators™ Checklist Now!Tier 11 JobsPerpetual Traffic on YouTubeTiereleven.comMongoose MediaPerpetual Traffic SurveyPerpetual Traffic WebsiteFollow Perpetual Traffic on TwitterConnect with Lauren on Instagram and Connect with Ralph on LinkedInThanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic? Have some feedback you'd like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and leave us a review!Mentioned in this episode:AdCritter for Agencies
Understanding the difference between leads, MQLs, and SQLs is the key to better marketing and sales alignment. Today, we'll break down what each term means, how to define them for your business, and why clarity in these definitions can transform your lead generation efforts. Whether you're looking for more inquiries or ready-to-buy clients, this episode will help you create a framework for identifying and tracking qualified opportunities. Listen now to gain actionable insights and refine your sales funnel!
The B2B SaaS buying journey isn't linear – it is much more complicated than that.At any one time, only 5% of your addressable market is actively in-market and seeking a solution. These prospects are ready to click that “schedule a demo” button after seeing your paid search ad or visiting your website's pricing page. But what about the 95% who aren't ready to buy? This is where demand creation comes into play. Allocating resources and time to create demand will help you be in the top 3 when those prospects become ready to buy. If you don't feed this side, your pipeline will suffer down the road.On Episode 70 of the B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks Podcast, Brian and Stijn interview a special guest: Silvia Parra, an Associate CMO at Kalungi, who is an expert in balancing out these two sides of the buyer journey for B2B SaaS companies.Topics discussed include:Insider tips for correctly attributing traffic beyond simplistic “last touch" into a more nuanced understandingStrategies for nurturing subscribers, MQLs and SQLs as they move gradually through the funnelExamples of paid media and content strategies that workHow founders can correctly monitor and establish data goals that show progress in both demand creation and captureHow to build a pipeline that is filled with both prospects that are ready for immediate conversion and future growthB2B SaaS Marketing Snacks is one of the most respected voices in the SaaS industry. It is hosted by two leading marketing and revenue growth experts for software:Stijn Hendrikse: Author of T2D3 CMO Masterclass & Book, Founder of KalungiBrian Graf: CEO of KalungiB2B SaaS companies move through predictable stages of marketing focus, cost and size (as described in the popular T2D3 book). With people cost being a majority of the cost involved, every hire needs to be well worth the investment!The best founders, CFOs and COOs in B2B SaaS rely on a balance of marketing leadership, strategy and execution to produce the customer and revenue growth they require. Staying flexible and nimble is a key marketing asset in a hard-charging B2B world.Resources shared in this episode:Understanding Demand Creation vs. Demand Capture in B2B SaaSDemand generation is dead5 Key Steps To Improve Demand GenerationT2D3 CMO MasterclassSubmit and vote on our podcast topicsABOUT 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: CEO of KalungiAs CEO of 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.
Marketing Expedition Podcast with Rhea Allen, Peppershock Media
Jesse Navarro is the founder of Cultivate Inbox, where he manages the delivery of 20 to 30 million emails each month. Specializing in client email automation and lead generation, Jesse has worked with industry leaders like Tai Lopez, Sam Ovens, Consulting.com, Pace Morby, Jamil Damji, NewReach Education, Sean Vosler, and Joshua Earp. He's even written video sales scripts for Kevin Harrington, the original Shark from Shark Tank. Jesse helps businesses book more appointments, assists marketing teams in converting MQLs to SQLs, and uses cutting-edge technology to ensure top-notch email deliverability, driving measurable results for his clients.00:00 - 00:16 "If you have an email service provider like ActiveCampaign or HubSpot, you're paying for those active accounts. And if half of them aren't even open up your emails over 120 days, you're paying for literally nothing. So you might as well just remove them and do something else with them.” — Jesse Navarro00:17 - 00:35 Welcome to Peppershock Media's Marketing Expedition Podcast00:36 - 02:24 Jesse's Background02:25 - 08:35 Marketing Essentials Moment: Drone Photography and Videography08:36 - 12:26 Welcome to the show, Jesse!12:27 - 16:01 Fun Fact: Jesse's Pokemon Championship16:02 - 20:37 Involving Kids in Business20:38 – 25:10 Hiring and Managing People25:11 - 33:04 Building a Legacy33:05 - 40:05 Business Journey and Failures40:06 - 46:17 Finding Trends and Opportunities46:18 - 49:45 Segmenting Email List49:46 - 53:55 Personalization53:56 - 54:46 Kitcaster is your secret weapon in podcasting for business. Your audience is waiting to hear from you! Go to kitcaster.com/expedition to apply for a special offer for friends of this podcast.54:47 - 57:54 Strategy for Email Deliverability 57:55 – 1:03:23 Tactics in Growing Email List 1:03:24 – 1:05:44 Reach out to Jesse at cultivateinbox.com1:05:45 – 1:05:15 Launching “The Boise Hustle Podcast”1:05:16 – 1:08:42 Thank you so much, Jesse! Share this podcast, give us a review, and enjoy your marketing journey! 1:08:43 – 1:09:29 Join the Marketing Expedition Community today!
What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Rutger Katz, GTM Operations Consultant. Summary: Rutger helps us cut through the fluff of Lean methodology in marketing and how to spot when process gets in the way of efficiency. His advice is to cut out the waste—whether in your process, your tech stack, or how you measure success. Focus on what drives conversions, keep your systems lean, and use simple structures to maintain speed without sacrificing alignment. We also tackle tech debt and how a top-layer AI interface could simplify the case for a composable martech stack.About RutgerRutger started his career in Neuroscience as a virtual reality developer at two different public research universities to study bodily illusions in VRAs the VR industry was quite immature at the time he pivoted to martech consulting, where he would spend 12 years working with different technology consulting firms getting a breadth of experience across marketing operations, martech, customer data and go-to-market across a variety of clients including Unilever where he focused on social analyticsAnd last year Rutger decided to go out on his own as a GTM Operations Consultant and recently launched NEON Triforce, a boutique consultancy focused on optimizing GTM for B2B scale-upsHe also recently joined The Martech Weekly as Content Lead for EU & UK organizing their first event in London.Lean Marketing in PracticeLean marketing is all about eliminating waste and doubling down on what truly matters. Rutger emphasizes that no matter the size of the company, from a startup to an enterprise, inefficiencies always creep in. These processes—whether learned from someone else or ingrained as “the way things are done”—often aren't optimal. Lean seeks to strip down these ingrained habits, perfecting the path to deliver value to customers.Rutger highlights that lean marketing goes beyond just being "efficient." It is about understanding how every action connects back to the entire organization. The real challenge is aligning marketing efforts with revenue-driving KPIs, rather than fixating on vanity metrics like page views or social media follows. For Rutger, Lean is about cutting through those superficial measures to ensure that marketing impacts the business holistically.What makes lean particularly valuable is that it doesn't stop at marketing. Rutger explains that Lean should apply to your entire go-to-market strategy. This means assessing not just how marketing operates but how it interlocks with sales, customer success, and even product development. It's about delivering maximum value to the customer while ensuring that the organization operates as efficiently as possible in providing that value.Lean marketing is not a standalone function—it's a way to optimize the whole organization. When done right, it leads to higher customer satisfaction, longer-term retention, and ultimately, a more streamlined business. For Rutger, this is where the real impact of Lean lies—not just in marketing efficiencies but in enhancing the customer experience across every touchpoint.Key takeaway: Lean marketing is about focusing on what truly drives value. It's not just about marketing—it's about creating efficiency across your entire go-to-market approach, from sales to customer success, all while tying back to key business metrics.Solving Inefficiencies in Sales and Marketing AlignmentWhen asked about real-world applications of lean methodologies, Rutger didn't hesitate to dig into a common yet overlooked issue: the disconnect between sales and marketing. In his experience, CMOs often claim that everything is running smoothly. But when the conversation shifts towards collaboration with sales, the cracks begin to show. One CMO even mentioned that their sales team requested fewer leads, as they were overwhelmed by the volume. Others spoke of back-and-forth frustrations trying to sync efforts between both departments.For Rutger, the root of inefficiency often comes at the handoff between marketing and sales. He explained that marketing teams frequently misinterpret sales-qualified leads (SQLs), sending what they define as SQLs but which sales deems unqualified. This misalignment creates friction, wasting time and resources on both sides. To fix this, Rutger advocates stepping back from just marketing processes and focusing on sales first. Understanding sales capacity and needs becomes essential to deliver the right leads at the right time.A critical step in this process is optimizing for sales' actual conversion capacity. Rutger highlights that if sales needs to convert 100 leads per month, with a 5% conversion rate, marketing needs to deliver 20 times that amount—2,000 SQLs. He stressed the importance of timely response, pointing out that conversion rates jump by 40% when sales follows up with a lead within 10 minutes. Aligning on this kind of data helps both teams work more effectively toward shared goals.Rutger also urged teams to reevaluate the quality and cost-effectiveness of their campaigns. While campaigns may generate leads, some are far too costly or inefficient, with payback times stretching out to three or four years. Google paid accounts, for example, are notoriously expensive, yet still widely used, particularly in larger organizations. For Rutger, focusing on the most effective campaigns, while pruning inefficient ones, is key to driving sustainable growth.Key takeaway: Marketing and sales alignment is critical for driving efficiency. Understanding sales capacity, optimizing lead delivery, and focusing on high-converting campaigns can reduce friction, improve collaboration, and significantly increase conversion rates.Tackling Tech Debt and Building a Lean Martech StackWhen asked about navigating the complexities of consolidating a tech stack, Rutger didn't mince words: aligning stakeholders across IT, marketing, and sales is often more political than it is technical. Large enterprises, in particular, face daunting hurdles when trying to scale back on overlapping tools. Rutger noted that the desire to build a “Frankenstack”—a collection of fragmented technologies—comes from every department wanting its own ideal solution. As a result, the journey to a leaner tech stack can seem like a never-ending project.Rutger's approach starts with identifying the biggest redundancies. While some overlap is by design, like when one product offers a superior feature, the challenge is to minimize overlap where it's unnecessary. In some cases, up to 60% of a company's tools perform redundant functions. His advice: focus first on those areas where feature overlap is significant, perhaps 90% or more, and tackle these redundancies gradually. Start small, prioritize high-cost inefficiencies, and avoid a complete tech overhaul in one go.Another common issue Rutger raised is "shadow IT"—the tools that departments purchase without full organizational knowledge or alignment. Marketing might opt for a quick-fix solution, or sales might buy something that works for them but doesn't integrate with other systems. These rogue tools further complicate efforts to streamline technology, making the case for better communication across departments.One of Rutger's key strategies is calculating the cost of maintaining outdated systems against the cost of migration. In legacy-heavy sectors like insurance and banking, this is critical. His pragmatic approach weighs the resources, time, and potential revenue impact of migrations. With the rise of AI, Rutger suggests that migration tools could become faster and cheaper, potentially offsetting the costs of restructuring a tech stack. His advice? Keep your options open and l...
Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Senior Principal Database & Security Instructor Ron Soltani, as they discuss how the new Automatic SQL Plan Management feature in Oracle Database 23ai improves performance consistency and simplifies management. Then, Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor Bill Millar shares insights into two new features: one that enhances SecureFiles LOB Write Performance, improving read and write speeds, and another that increases the column limit in a table to 4,096, making it easier to handle complex data. Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-new-features-for-administrators/137192/207062 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and joining me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! Last week, we looked at the Oracle Database 23ai enhancements that have been made to Hybrid Columnar Compression and Fast Ingest. In today's episode, we'll talk about the 23ai new feature for Automatic SQL Plan Management with Ron Soltani, a Senior Principal Database & Security Instructor with Oracle University. 01:01 Nikita: And later on, we'll be joined by Bill Millar, another Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor, who will tell us about the 23ai automatic feature that enhances SecureFiles LOB Write Performance. We'll also get him to talk about the Wide Columns update. So, let's get started. Hi Ron! What have been the common challenges with SQL plans and database performance? Ron: One of the problems that we have always had, if you remember, was when data changes, database setting configuration, parameter changes, SQL that were operating very well could now behave badly using the SQL plan that were associated to them. And remember, the same SQL plan generally Oracle likes to continuously reuse. So the SQL plans were put in the baseline in the past, and we could have those SQL plan baseline, which are a set of approved plans to be used for a SQL from the SQL history stored in AWR, then could be used for the optimizer to choose from. However, which plan to choose and which one would be the best one to use, this is what the problem has been in managing the SQL plan baselines, and a lot of the operation would have been done manually. 02:22 Lois: And what have we done to overcome this? Ron: So now this new system will going to perform all of those operations automatically for us. Now it can search the Automatic Workload Repository. It can find SQL plans for a particular SQL statement, then look for any alternative plans that may available in alternate sources like SQL tuning sets. And then validate those plans and see if those plans are going to be good and to be used as SQL plan baseline for executing SQL statement by the optimizer. 03:00 Nikita: So we now have the Automatic SQL Plan Management Evolve Advisor to help manage operations automatically, right? Can you tell us a little more about it? How does it ensure optimal performance? Ron: This is an automatic advisor that is created that can go look for different plans and validate the plans by examining them, making sure that they are not causing any regression compared to the previous operation, and then evolve that plan into a good baseline. This simplifies management of the baseline repository for a SQL statement. So as data changes, as parameters changes, optimizer could come up with different type of plans that are set within this baseline that has been validated to be good baseline for each situational operation. So this way you reduce a lot of hard parsing operations. 04:00 Lois: And how does the SQL Evolve Advisor work, Ron? Ron: First, it will check the AWR to find what are the top SQLs that has been found. Then it will look to see if these top SQLs who did not perform well with the plan that they have, that's why they're top SQL, have other alternative plans that are stored in the SQL plan history, in AWR, or available in any other sources. Then if it finds any additional plans, it will go ahead and add all of those plans into the plan history. So in the plan history, now you have accumulation of all the plans available in AWR and anything that has been brought from other sources. Then it will test every one of those plans and validate that by use of the plan, the SQL statement will not deprivate and get slower. The performance is either similar or actually better. So normally, there is a percentage that the SQL should improve. So we will then validate these baselines. And finally, once the baselines or those plans have been validated, they will be accepted, and then they will be added as SQL plan baselines. They will remain in the statement history, in the AWR, and will be available for optimizer for the future use. 05:28 Nikita: What are the benefits of this? Ron: Number one is Autonomous Database. As you know, they want to automate all management, including management of the SQL execution due to changes that are happening for the application, for the data, or the database and its environment. It totally eliminates any manual intervention for management of the statement, and it can transparently repair any statement that had been affected by a major change. 06:00 Lois: What sort of problems does this feature solve for us? Ron: Of course, this is a performance consistency. We want to make sure that every statement performed to its best performance and any specific changes that may impact those SQL statements would be taken into an account, and a better plan, if available, would then be available for use. It also improves the application performance level, therefore database service level will get much improvement. And the SQL execution plans will be automatically managed behind the scene by expanding these baselines, by managing all of these baseline history and all of that that is managed by this automatic SQL plan management environment automatically. 06:50 Nikita: And when do we use this? Ron: If there is a change in a database environment, like you add SGA, the change into the shared pool, change in the size of the buffer cache or any type of storage effects. So all of those can actually affect the SQL execution. Now all of those changes, including data changes, can cause a SQL plan to not behave very well or behave as well as it was doing before. Therefore, if particular plans do not perform as well as they did before, that affects the performance of the application. This also affects the performance of the database and the instance. 07:35 Lois: So, how do we use this environment? Ron: Well, best news that I have for you in that is that there is nothing manual needs to be done. All we need to do is, number one, make sure that we enable foreground automatic SQL plan management that we done through the package for the DBMS SPM for SQL plan management. You will use the package with the configure option, and you enable the auto SPM evolve task, and you set it to auto. Once this is done, now the SQL evolve plan management and advisor are enabled, and they will then monitor your statements, review all of the top SQLs as they are found with all of the ADDM operation, and then do their work in looking for better plans and being able to maintain the SQL plan baselines we talked about. Now for you to be able to view, monitor, and see how these operations are going, if it is enabled, you can take a look at the DBA SQL plan baseline's view. There are many, many columns in that particular baseline, and there are also columns that has been added that tell you where is the plan generated from, if a plan is approved, and any other user interaction with the plan or settings can then be verified using that DBA SQL plan baseline view. 09:13 Are you looking for practical use cases to help you plan and apply configurations that solve real-world challenges? With the new Applied Learning courses for Cloud Applications, you'll be able to practically apply the concepts learned in our implementation courses and work through case studies featuring key decisions and configurations encountered during a typical Oracle Cloud Applications implementation. Applied learning scenarios are currently available for General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Accounting Hub, Global Human Resources, Talent Management, Inventory, and Procurement, with many more to come! Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 09:54 Nikita: Welcome back! Let's bring Bill into the conversation. Hi Bill! Can you tell us about the 23ai automatic feature that enhances SecureFiles LOB Write Performance? Bill: The key here is that it is automatic and transparent. There's no parameters set. Nothing to configure in table, no hints, and nothing that you have to do with these improvements. It is tightly integrated with SecureFiles LOB infrastructure. So now, multiple LOBs can be handled in a single transaction and can be buffered simultaneously. This will help with mixed workloads, switching between the LOBs that are writing in a single transaction. The PGA will adaptively resize based off the size for these large writes for the LOBs if you're using the No Cache option. Remember, no cache is going to bypass the buffer cache and does direct reads and writes from the PGA. JSON type will be transformed into the OSON Oracle data type. It is an optimized native binary storage format for JSON data. 11:15 Lois: Ok. So, going forward, there will be better read and write performance for LOBs. Bill: Multiple LOBs in a single transaction can be buffered simultaneously, improving mixed workloads. We just talked about the PGA. Automatically, the buffer is automatically resized. And the improved JSON support. The reason it will recognize, hey, this is a JSON data type. But traditionally, JSON data types were small. So they were small to medium size. So the range from 32k to 32 meg was considered small to medium whereas LOBs were designed for data types larger than 100 meg. So by recognizing this a JSON data type, it can take advantage of the LOB architecture. Other enhancements will also include the acceleration of compressed LOBs, the pen and compression caching, and improves the poor performance of your reads and writes to compressed LOBs. It's faster than previously. 12:24 Nikita: Bill, what do you think about the recent increase in the column limit? Previously, the limit was 1000 columns per table, which sometimes posed issues when migrating from other systems that allowed more than 1,000 columns, right? Bill: Maybe because of workload requirements, the whole machine learning, the internet of things workloads, IOTs can have hundreds of thousands of attributes, dimensional attribute columns for that. And even our very own blockchain tables reserves up to 40 hidden virtual columns, so that takes away from the total amount. Virtual columns count towards the column limits and some applications as they drop columns, what it does, it just converts them to unused, and it still applies towards the limit the number of columns that you can have to that limit. There were workarounds. However, they were most likely not the best way to do it, like column switching, table splitting for that. But big data really use cases, really saw where files have or required more than 1,000 columns. 13:42 Lois: So, now that we can have 4,096 columns in a table, I'm sure it's made handling complex data a lot easier. Bill: So by increasing this, since other systems do support higher column limits, it can-- the increase can make migration from other systems easier and possibly even a little bit more attractive while it can make applications a little bit simpler because the 1,000 column limit was not always optimal for analytics. Where 1,000 might have been plenty for OLTP type environments, but not for the analytics, especially when it comes to machine learning and those internet of things that we talked about, where the previous workarounds, like splitting the tables, really caused more performance issue than anything else. So we want to avoid those suboptimal workarounds. And the nice thing is there's no change to the SQL. So once you have that-- well, if we were doing SQL, if we had tables that were split and we're trying to do things that is actually going to help improve that SQL, now, we don't have multiple objects that we're dealing with. 14:57 Nikita: How do we actually go about increasing the column limit to 4,096? Bill: You do have to have the compatibility set to 23c. Why? Because it's a new feature. There is a new initialization parameter called Max columns, and you do set that. There's two different ways, two different values. We can set it to standard or we can set it to extended. It is dynamic. When it's set to standard, it's only 1,000. When we set it to extended, it's going to allow the 4,096. It is modifiable at the PDB level. However, it will inherit what's at the root level, if it's not explicitly set at a PDB. It can't alter it in a session for that. And multiple instances of the RAC environment must use the same value. Now one thing, notice that it cannot be set to standard if I created a table that had more than 1,000 columns. One thing that might get you, when you drop a table that has more 1,000 columns and you try to set it back to standard, it might tell you, hey, you have tables that have more than 1,000 columns. Don't forget your recycle bin unless you did a drop table purge. 16:09 Lois: Are there any performance considerations to keep in mind, Bill? Bill: There's really no DML or query performance degradation for the tables. However, it might require, as you would expect, the increase in memory when we have the new column limits. It might require additional shared pool, additional SGA with the additional columns, more buffer cache as we're bringing blocks in. So that's shared pool along with the PGA. And also we can add in buffer cache in there, because that increased column count is going to be increase in the total PGA memory usage. And those are kind of expected for that. But the big advantage is it gives us the ability to eliminate some of these suboptimal workarounds that we had in the past. 17:02 Nikita: Ok! We covered a lot today so thank you Bill and Ron. Lois: To learn more about what we discussed today, visit mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Database 23ai New Features for Administrators course. Join us next week for a discussion on some more Oracle Database 23ai new features. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham signing off! 17:27 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. 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On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Jeb Blount engages Denim CRO, Will Yarbrough, in a fascinating discussion on how to sell more and grow faster by linking the customer journey through a One Funnel Strategy. Sales and marketing strategies come and go, but one approach has been gaining traction for its simplicity and effectiveness: The One Funnel Mindset. This powerful concept challenges the traditional notion that more is better, instead focusing on perfecting a single, highly optimized sales funnel. At its core, the one funnel mindset is about streamlining your sales process. Instead of creating multiple funnels for different products or customer segments, you concentrate on building and refining one comprehensive funnel that guides potential customers from initial awareness to final purchase. Key Takeaways: - Unified Revenue Goals: Aligning marketing and sales under a single One Funnel Customer Journey and revenue goal eliminates internal competition and focuses on overall business growth. - Avoiding Complacency: Maintaining a focus on growth and continuous improvement is crucial to avoid stagnation in sales. - Customer Experience: Enhancing customer experience by providing a more unified customer journey. - Human Connection: Despite advancements in AI, human-to-human interaction remains vital in sales, especially for high-value deals. - Preparation and Investment: Sales success often depends on thorough preparation and continuous investment in personal development and training. - Shorter Sales Cycles: Buyers are increasingly making quicker decisions due to more readily available information, making each sales interaction critical. - Manager's Role: Effective frontline managers are essential in motivating sales teams by understanding and aligning individual goals with One Funnel goals and providing tailored support. - Big Pull Concept: Identifying and leveraging what drives each salesperson is key to maintaining their motivation and focus. The One Funnel Mindset: Unifying Marketing and Sales Yarborough introduced the concept of the "One Funnel Mindset," a unified approach where marketing and sales teams work together seamlessly towards common revenue goals. Traditional models often create a divide between marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs), leading to misalignment and inefficiencies. The One Funnel Mindset eliminates these silos, ensuring that both teams are aligned and focused on the same objectives. In this approach, leads are simply "qualified leads," with no distinction between marketing and sales. This unified perspective fosters collaboration, reduces friction, and ensures a smoother customer journey from awareness to purchase. By sharing goals, metrics, and strategies, marketing and sales teams can create a more cohesive and effective revenue engine. Enhancing Customer Experience: The Human Touch Despite the rise of artificial intelligence and automation, Yarborough emphasized the irreplaceable value of human interaction in sales. High-value deals, in particular, require a personal touch to build trust and rapport with customers. While AI can enhance the sales process by automating routine tasks and providing data-driven insights, it cannot replicate the nuances of human connection. Sales professionals must prioritize building strong relationships with their customers. This involves active listening, understanding their pain points, and offering tailored solutions. By focusing on the human element, salespeople can create lasting impressions and foster long-term customer loyalty. Shortening Sales Cycles: The Impact of Preparedness Another significant trend discussed in the podcast is the shortening of sales cycles. With buyers conducting extensive research before engaging with sales representatives, decisions are being made faster than ever. This shift places a premium on preparedness.
We often get asked by prospects interested in working with us, "how long does it take to start seeing results from SEO and content marketing? It's not an easy question to answer because there are multiple factors that go into it:1. What is the definition of results?2. What is the conversion goal? Trials, demos, MQLs, SQLs, etc.3. How many conversions are you already driving through other channels?And more...In this episode, we share a ton of different data to help answer this question. We share our own client data to show how long it takes to start seeing rankings and conversions. We share how we do expectation setting around rankings, traffic and conversions. Then we answer some common questions around does domain rating play into speed and how does keyword difficulty affect rankings?Articles featured in the episode:Disruption stories: https://www.growandconvert.com/content-marketing/disruption-stories/How long does it take for content marketing to work: https://www.growandconvert.com/content-marketing/how-long-does-it-take-for-content-marketing-to-work/
In this episode, Sally delves into the stages of the sales pipeline, drawing insights from the Sparkle Class Academy (SCA) approach. From "New Lead" to "Lost," Sally explains each stage's significance, emphasizing the distinction between marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs). Through practical examples, Sally underscores the importance of strategic follow-ups, effective negotiation, and decisive decision-making processes. Whether you're a seasoned sales professional or an aspiring entrepreneur, grasping these stages is vital for optimizing your sales journey We just got featured on Feedspot's list of Australian women's lifestyle podcasts. Check it out at https://blog.feedspot.com/australian_women_lifestyle_podcasts/ Register here and take the first step towards your course creation success: https://www.sparkleclassacademy.com/infographic Connect with Sally and the Sparkle World: Website: https://sparkleclassacademy.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sallysparkscousins/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SallySparksCousins Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SallySparksCousin
► The importance of measurement in B2B marketing!Sam talks to Vikash Koushik, Head of Marketing @ RevenueHeroThey cover:
If you're measuring everything, you're measuring nothing. It's so important for you to pick a handful of key performance indicators (KPIs) for your team to focus on — or they won't end up moving the needle on anything. But how do you pick KPIs that matter, so you can motivate and incentivize your team to drive customer value (and ultimately, growth)? Instead of transactional measures of success, focus on customer-focused KPIs that let you measure moments of value. You need to know which parts of your product drive customer value and measure your ability to move them from one milestone to the next. In this episode of the Forget the Funnel Podcast — the first of two episodes on customer-led KPIs — Claire and Georgiana define customer-led KPIs and share why metrics that focus on helping customers solve problems are more actionable and motivating for your team.Discussed:The definition of KPIs and why each team needs them.Why focusing on transactional measures is a problem — and why measuring experiential moments in the customer relationship is the way to go.The prerequisites for setting customer-led KPIs and the importance of knowing which parts of your product drive value for the customer.Key Moments:2:30 - Georgiana defines KPIs and shares why they're a critical metric. She explains that when you measure everything, you're measuring nothing, so your team needs to focus on a few KPIs. 3:47 - Claire and Georgiana differentiate transactional measures of success — like trial-to-paid conversions or entering a credit card — from customer-focused KPIs, which measure experiential moments in the customer relationship. 6:40 - Georgiana explains why transactional measures of success can be problematic KPIs (even though lagging indicators like MRR and churn do matter).10:37 - Claire shares why it's a mistake to measure your growth team by lead numbers rather than focusing on lead quality or the value they can get down the line. Gia also speaks to success indicators that can be misleading, like daily, weekly, and monthly users, and breaks down MQLs, SQLs, and PQLs.16:10 - Claire asks Georgiana to share about the prerequisites for defining customer-led KPIs that tie your team's success to customer value.19:29 - Georgiana talks about how common it is for product teams to get so excited about their offering that they throw the kitchen sink at new customers because they're not sure about what parts of their product they should introduce to customers in which order.21:30 - The pair ends the episode by talking about converting customers in a low-touch way: You need to know the parts of the product that drive value and measure your ability to help customers get from one milestone to the next. Follow Georgiana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgianalaudi/ Follow Claire on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairesuellentrop/Check out Forget the Funnel's website: https://forgetthefunnel.com/Get the free Forget the Funnel workbook to help you implement Customer-Led Growth: https://forgetthefunnel.com/workbook
In this insightful episode of the LGHQ podcast, Alex dives deep into the crucial world of lead nurturing. Discover the optimal frequency and methods for following up with leads, a challenge many small businesses face due to limited staff and systems. Starting with a thought-provoking question about your follow-up practices, this episode unpacks statistics on what separates successful companies from those struggling to convert leads. Learn how to tailor a lead nurture strategy to your business model, target the right audience, and understand the differences between MQLs, SQLs, and the ABM approach. Finally, get a walkthrough of a typical follow-up process, empowering you to transform your lead nurturing into a powerful tool for business growth.
Garrett Mehrguth, President & CEO of Directive. This speakers from the Demand Gen Summit discusses how customer generation drives growth. To stay current on our latest events, follow us on Linkedin. Useful Timestamps: 2:03 - Move beyond leads, utilize multichannel marketing.8:23 - The need for a clear North Star metric in software companies and different types of metrics for various types of companies.9:59 - Set goals based on qualified pipeline, efficiency metrics. 11:10 - Strategies for investing in brand, mitigating waste, and understanding the impact of campaigns on other marketing efforts.15:23 - Leverage different parts of distribution in brand video investment and building broader campaigns for brand articulation. 16:01 - Integrated performance marketing, direct response strategies, and generating SQLs and customers.20:48 - Focus on brand building at the top of the funnel, and driving immediate meetings booked from review sites and ads.23:12 -Build out Google campaigns and target specific software types for more relevant clicks.30:19 - Closing Remarks.
Lidia Infante joins Jack Chambers-Ward for the most innuendo-filled episode of Search With Candour ever. Lidia takes Jack through her dating life and how it helped her understand customer journeys and optimisation. Understanding the Sales Pipeline: From leads (MQLs, SQLs) to opportunities and closed deals. Choosing a North Star: The guiding metric that shapes your strategy. Iterative Goal-Driven Optimisation: Experimenting with your strategy to impact your north star. Lead Qualification: Identifying and pursuing the right opportunities, be it in love or business. Red/Blue Ocean Strategy: Standing out in a crowded market (or dating pool). How to use these concepts to grow in your career.
► Wanna turn website traffic into inbound leads and revenue? Sam has an in-depth discussion with Leah Tharin, host of "Productea with Leah". They cover:
Boost revenue and satisfaction with CSQLs. Insights from Monica Trivedi, SVP at JLL Technologies, emphasize the importance of metrics, collaboration, and a customer-centric culture. Plan and involve leadership for successful CSQL implementation.
Today Jeremy and Jack are discussing sales metrics! The two outreach campaign experts are taking a step back and reviewing important metrics that you NEED to know! HERE'S WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE: -Do you have enough prospects and numbers? -What is a good number to aim for? -When should you think about reply rate? -What to ask for when a campaign is made on your behalf -When consistency matters -CEOs vs the campaign managers -Email deliverability stats -Positive replies to calls -When does cold outreach stop? -SQLs and MQLs -Send in your questions for a rapid-fire episode! Ready to use these important stats to build your own campaign? Craft an industry-level cold outreach campaign in just 8 weeks with our Cold Email Masterclass at https://course.quickmail.io/! Try it for 30 days risk-free! Have an email you want us to teardown? Send us your emails, cold emailing questions, and campaign examples at podcast@quickmail.io and it could be featured on the air! Happy Cold Emailing! Jeremy and Jack
Today Andy is joined by Vince Beese, Founder and CEO of Sales@Scale, Anthony Iannorino, Keynote speaker, bestselling author and renowned sales leader, and Mike Bosworth, bestselling author, speaker, and sales philosopher as they discuss the importance of sales leaders thinking critically about how to make their teams more effective. They begin with the headshaking statistic of a 17% win rate and agree that any action is better than leaving your team in such a horrible situation.They emphasize the significance of considering all stakeholders involved in the sales process, including the reps, their families, the clients, and the company itself. They urge leaders to assess whether they are truly helping these individuals and if not, to act before the situation gets worse.The group discusses the effectiveness of different types of sales leads and dig into the data about self-sourced vs. generating inbound leads with lower win rates, and how each of those play out over time.They share stories about the importance of sales effectiveness and learning early on, the need for a solid strategy and theory to guide sales efforts so you don't waste time and resources. They also discuss the value of recognizing changes in buyer behavior, why certain approaches are more effective than others, and that transparency and truthfulness are vital. Not just to clients, but most importantly to ourselves, as they note that salespeople often credit their wins to superior salesmanship and attribute losses to external factors.They also reflect on the common mistakes of rushing deals for quick wins, but losing out on larger long-term gains.Follow Anthony, Vince, and Mike on LinkedInHost Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!Thank you to our sponsors:AllegoClozdCognism
Why do LinkedIn ads crush Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram for return on advertising spend?When it comes to B2B social ads, my guest Ryan Draving believes that LinkedIn is the most effective platform—and in this episode he'll share why.As the co-founder and head of strategy at The Moving Company, Ryan collaborates with B2B marketing teams to drive MQLs, SQLs, and revenue.He'll cover: Why LinkedIn is a great place for early and mid stage content How to gain quality leads on LinkedIn Using LinkedIn for partnerships AB…Z Testing And more
Book A Live Sales Coaching Session with Me: https://selar.co/qhqw?currency=GBPJoin my whatsapp group $32/Quarter : https://buy.stripe.com/eVa8yN6KF27D9SUbIWJoin my whatsapp group N15,000/Quarter: https://app.groupify.co/g/yb8Tqi7iiavV
The Marketing Mix: Thought-starters for B2B Business Leaders
Why are we talking about MQLs and SQLs?Funnel Marketing has dominated the last two episodes. First, it was the interview with Gia Laudi, author of "Forget the Funnel." Then I shared my thoughts on how the Funnel can be used effectively for start-ups and growth companies.Marketing Qualified Leads are a layer on top of the Funnel that bridges the gap between Marketing and Sales teams. So if you've just set up a stand-alone marketing team, or your Sales and Marketing folks just don't talk to each other, MQLs and SQLs can be a great way to improve communication and reduce friction.I explain how MQLs/SQLs work, and emphasize the importance of agreeing on definitions of each, between the teams; and I talk about the metrics to look at around the process.I also highlight some of the time-sinks that exist around the funnel - namely, Lead Scoring and Attribution. They may make sense for Enterprise organizations with well established marketing teams. But for most companies, they just suck up precious resources.I also mention a Generative AI session I participated in, run by Frederick Werhle and the San Francisco AMA. More info here.Some additional reading:Salesken.ai "Marketing Qualified Lead vs. Sales Qualified Lead vs. Sales Accepted Lead"Salesdorado: "Why Your Lead Scoring System is Probably Useless"
As a marketing leader, a large part of your ability to get the job done is in proving that you're delivering value already But it's also an area of marketing leadership that many get wrong Are these 3 communication errors killing your ability to prove the value of your work?1. Stating an observation without impact, importance, or insight2. Using passive vs active voice3. Giving inputs more airtime than outputs
The key is to find a balance between the two methods. Paid marketing can be used to quickly drive traffic, and organic marketing can be used to create relationships and build trust. It is also important to measure the success of each method and adjust your strategy accordingly. In the end, the best strategy is to combine both paid and organic marketing to maximize your results.Duane emphasizes three key points when it comes to marketing: it is never just one lever that creates growth; high tides raise all ships; and you need good quality data. Duane then talks about understanding what works in your marketing channels, looking at the big picture, and establishing clear outcomes. To help with this, he recommends paying attention to metrics such as MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) and SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), as well as conversions. With these metrics, marketers can better understand the success of their campaigns and initiatives.Exploring the Argument of Paid vs Organic Marketing StrategiesUnderstanding the Three Factors of Successful MarketingExploring MQLs, SQLs, and Conversion Rates in Paid and Organic MarketingThe Impact of Paid vs. Organic Marketing on Lead Generation and ConversionUnderstanding the Benefits of Combining Paid and Organic Strategies for GrowthIf you get value from this episode, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with your friends, as we all can benefit from more positivity and leadership in today's society.Be sure to follow Duane Dufault on all the social platforms to get daily hits of tactical advice that you can take action on right awayLinkedin | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Youtube | TikTok
In this week's show, we have a return guest, Andrew Vidler, Andrew is a very successful sales leader who loves all things sales. Especially, the theory behind sales and sales leadership. Andrew often posts really cool tactical advice and ideas on Linkedin and it was one of those posts that caught my eye and made me ask him to come back on the podcast to share what he has been doing with his APAC outbound team.Andrew has been kind enough to fold back the curtain on his and his team's journey from doing 100's of pieces of outreach per week to as few just 15 Including what they were doing, the channels they are using and how they are doing that.Here's the interesting thing.When he scaled back the volume. As a spoiler, they, doing way less outreach, having longer conversations, converting more SQLs to Opps and they have a fuller pipeline whilst burning through fewer leads.Andrew shares how his APAC team did this What they found along the way and what some of the challenges were.If you're interested in building an outbound process for APAC - then this is well worth your time.Stats:
https://youtu.be/xukbZGbHols Marie Hale is the CEO of @revenue, an innovative sales and marketing company that empowers small and medium-sized business owners to create and lead successful sales teams as well as execute full scale marketing strategies. We talk about the benefits of having a solid management blueprint, Professional Love in sales, and the key features in a custom-crafted CRM system. --- Work Yourself Out of Business with Marie Hale Our guest is Marie Hale, the CEO for @Revenue. @Revenue is an innovative marketing and sales collaborative that empowers small and medium sized business owners to create and lead successful sales teams and create and execute full-scale marketing strategies. Mary, welcome to the show. Thank you, Steve. I've been looking forward to this for weeks. Yes, it's been some time that we talked. I think it's even, it was in the old year, last year. So it's great to be back together again. So let's start with your entrepreneurial journey. So how did you end up creating this company called @Revenue and what's been your journey? So, I learned at a very young age that I was highly unemployable. My brain went a lot faster than everybody else's. I always had a bigger vision than everybody else had. And so when I had an opportunity, after trying to admittedly explain unionization to belly dancers, which was not an effective conversation, to start a business, I just kind of jumped in and I was about 22. From there, I had just, you know, when you get in there and you get in with good people, opportunities present themselves. I became the executive director of eWomen Network, which was a national PR, marketing and media company. And really what I started seeing was that there were a lot of random acts of marketing happening. And I saw frustrated business owners everywhere. I saw people that were trying to scale businesses that simply couldn't even get movement, let alone growth. And then I found a CRM and I said, oh, this is my love language, this I understand. And so at that point I started my first agency, which was Lipstick Logic. And in 2016, I partnered with my husband, my life partner, Jim, who was my sales coach. And we put sales and marketing under the same roof, which really revolutionized what was happening in small business. Because typically people point at one another across the hall and say, you don't get good enough leads and you can't close. But when we thread those things together and do it from a place of authenticity and professional love, you create a culture of sales within the organization that everybody can embrace, even the folks that don't want to be thought of as a salesperson. Authenticity in communication is the cornerstone of the modern sales process—listening, understanding emotional needs, and offering solutions that genuinely address personal and professional challenges.Share on X Okay, there's a lot to unpack there. So, so how, so first of all, how do you match marketing and sales? I mean, I often hear marketing salespeople bickering that, you know, the marketing person says that I'm delivering you the MQLs, the marketing qualified leads, and the Salesforce is gonna give me SQLs, sales qualified leads. So there's a disconnect sometimes, and people don't know, okay, what is the turf of marketing? What is the turf of sales? So, tell me a little bit about how that work together. So, I think the worst thing we've ever done is put marketing and sales in two different offices, or even two different campuses within organizations. Because the market changes, especially since the pandemic, the way that people make decisions change. We're all in executive fatigue, right? Like our executive function is not as fast as it used to be. Our limbic system is absolutely wiped out because of all of the change and uncertainty all the time. And when you separate your sales and marketing, those pieces may be felt by sales, where because people are doing things like having a hard time m...
In this episode of the Facility Management Marketing Podcast, we dive into the importance of lead segmentation and how it can take your IFM marketing strategy to the next level. Not every lead is the same, and not every lead source is equal. However, many facility management and property management companies don't take the time to figure out which lead sources are delivering the most high-quality leads that eventually convert into closed-won business.This episode will teach you how to take a data-driven approach to lead segmentation by breaking down leads into different channels, and then analyzing which marketing qualified leads (MQLs) turn into sales qualified leads (SQLs) and eventually customers. By doing this, you'll be able to predict your most successful lead generation and demand generation channels, allowing you to make informed decisions about how to allocate your marketing resources.With a CRM like Hubspot, lead segmentation is easily implemented and can provide valuable insights into the performance of your marketing channels. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your IFM marketing strategy to the next level and maximize your marketing ROI. Tune in to the Facility Management Marketing Podcast now and learn how to make the most of your marketing efforts.
Olivia Fuller: Hi and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I'm Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Creating predictable and scalable revenue is any business leader’s dream, but how can that dream actually become reality? Well, as it turns out, there’s a formula for building and sustaining a winning sales team and I’m so excited to have Mark Roberge, who is the author of the Sales Acceleration Formula here to walk us through what that looks like. With that, Mark, I’d love it if you could take a second and introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit more about your background and your book. Mark Roberge: Thanks for having me. I am an engineer by training, I started my career coding and I did an MBA at MIT. I have close to a decade to start my career in more of a data science-like quant background. At MIT I was classmates with the two co-founders at Hubspot and was recruited to be the fourth employee and first salesperson with the aspiration to build a unicorn. This is in the early part of the century, like 15 years ago, and looking back I’m pretty lucky that I had the background that I had and ended up in that company at that time because little did I know that sales were going through a pretty substantial revolution. We were moving out of this sort of pre-internet age where everything was sold via an outside team and no one used their CRM, sales enablement barely existed and we were moving into an era where CRM adoption was necessary for salespeople to do their job. These tech stacks were becoming pretty advanced, we had a lot of data, and we had internet-empowered buyers who just changed the way that sales had to interact with them. It was sort of like the perfect time for a quant with no sales background to build a sales team from scratch. I was blessed to fall into that role and blessed to be surrounded by the right executive sponsorship and mentorship and investor advice to be successful in it. That’s my background and I did that for like 10 years. We took an IPO In 2015 or 16. I then rested and joined the faculty at Harvard Business School where I still teach. I joined full-time and helped build out the sales curriculum. I do teach a couple of classes in sales and growth. More recently, after a couple of years of investing and advising and sitting on boards and that kind of stuff, I was approached by a former Bessemer investor to start a venture capital firm called Stage 2 Capital, which I’m happy to speak about at the end. It’s the first VC firm that’s run and backed exclusively by CRO, CMO, and CCOs from a lot of the software unicorns that are out there. We’re back about 400 CROs and CMOs from Snowflake, Salesforce, Zoom, and those types of companies. OF: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I’m really excited to have a chance to learn a little bit more about your book. You mentioned that your background is really unique in the sense that you do have such a quantitative lens that you take and your book really walks through that framework of driving predictable and scalable revenue growth from that lens of being really data-driven. You also talked about how sales have evolved a lot since you started that journey of creating that framework and even since you did write the book. I’d love to hear a little bit more about what are some of the challenges that you’ve seen emerge in the last few years that can make that mission of achieving predictable and scalable revenue a little bit more difficult to achieve in today’s landscape. MR: When I wrote the book at the end of my Hubspot journey, it was really triggered by the fact that I started to get pretty well known and I would get calls from different sales leaders and entrepreneurs starting out with the same questions like ‘What do you look for in your first sales hire? How do you set up your first sales com plan? How do you enable your sales team?' I just told them how we’re doing a Hubspot and they wrote back like a month later, saying wow, we did that and it worked really well, thank you so much. I just thought this is working, let me just put it down on paper for people. I give all the proceeds to a nonprofit, so I was just helping out the ecosystem and even to this day it sells almost just as much every year as it did the first year. I’m very humbled that people still pick it up and still find amazing implementation from it. My own models of it have not changed but evolved a bit because at that time I was like 80 hours a week deep on just Hubspot and wrote about that. Now I’ve applied it to 1000 different data points between my teaching, investing, and consulting. A lot of the principles still apply. As far as the challenges of implementing, I guess I’ll answer it this way and this is something that the book itself didn’t address, but you can read the book, and then you can read some of my more recent work. The book just talks about the model as it was at that point. It doesn’t talk about the order in which you should implement things. That’s been my most recent work. While the book gives you an aspiration of where you want to go, how you hire, how you enable, and how you coach your sales team, there’s a pretty precise order in which you build that system and in fact the optimal answers for each of the system components. Let’s take hiring for example. That changes as you progress from a five-person company that is mostly a product team, to a 20-person company that is really in sales mode, to a 2000-person company that is a very complex organization with alignment requirements. Your hires obviously change even on just the same frontline account executive role. That’s probably the difficulty in understanding the order in which you build the components of the system and how the individual component’s optimal design changes as you evolve. OF: That’s very interesting and I think definitely something that goes beyond the scope of the book too, which is fantastic. I would love to dig into the data component of the framework. Tell me a little bit about just the role that you see data really playing today in helping business leaders be able to gather the insights that they need to overcome some of these challenges that they’re facing today. MR: It’s kind of funny and this is right in the heart of things like sales enablement, rev ops, and just sales leaders in general, which is hopefully a lot of the folks that are out there listening. I always kind of joke and observe that sales are a function, something extraordinarily unique relative to things like product engineering, HR, finance, and marketing, is that success and failure in the role are so quantifiable. It’s really hard to walk into a company and here are our engineers and this is Olivia our number one engineer by 7%. Like it’s really hard to claim that right? But I can definitely walk into a sales floor and say here are our salespeople and this is Olivia and she’s our number one salesperson by 7%. That’s like a feasible statement. You’ve got this function where success and mediocrity and failure are quantifiable and that opens up tremendous opportunities in the way we run the team. It opens up tremendous opportunities to draw correlations between hiring attributes that we’re looking for and how strongly they correlate to success in the role. It presents opportunities for us to use data in our sales playbooks to understand which approaches to the market lead to the most successful and best outcomes. It presents opportunities for us to measure the effectiveness of our frontline managers and how effective they are in coaching and developing our people. To be able to literally say like Olivia is a rock star, but I really think that she can develop in the area of a sense of urgency development with her prospects. In fact, I can quantify it, like I know what she looks like relative to our best-in-class people where her stage 4 demo stage opportunities are converting to customers at a rate of 27% and I know with the right amount of coaching she should be able to get that the 35% and that’s going to translate into an additional $120,000 of quota attainment on her part and a rise in our productivity. That’s the level of discussion we can be at and that’s difficult to enable in other functions. That gives you a little bit of an overview of the application and usage of data in our world. OF: Yeah, absolutely. I want to go back to that first tactic that you talked about and you mentioned it and a couple of examples here around sales hiring and really the importance of standardizing what those characteristics are that you’re looking for in your company and making sure that you have a consistent approach to hiring for those criteria. I’d love to hear a little bit more about some of your best practices for really getting buy-in on those characteristics as being the right characteristics to look at and really reinforcing that consistency in the hiring process in particular how can data really help in that aspect? MR: What I’m going to talk about is not necessarily like the absolute world-class, but I think it's a step up that’s easy to conceptualize and rarely followed. When it is followed, it translates into a dramatic acceleration in the performance of the team. World-class hiring is studying at the psychological level, psycho graphics and there are some great tools out there like predictive index etcetera. I’ve spoken to world experts on it and sometimes some of them will admit that it might not be worth it to like take, take it to that level, but what we see in the industry is not a very good approach and it comes out in the aggregate numbers. Depending on which study you read, a lot of them tend to center around an average turnover rate and sales annually of 40%. That’s really bad. Every year 40% of salespeople change jobs either because they fail, they’re fired or they fail and they quit or they’re just not happy with their company. It’s really hard to build a business when you’re turning over 40% of your team every year. We’ve got tremendous quantifiable ROI. There are some trainers out there that claim that the cost of a miss hiring sales is over a million dollars and it’s not that hard to justify that calculation. What I hope we can do is try to move away from the like I’m busy in my day and I’m running all over the place and I have this interview with Olivia and two minutes before I walk in the room I read your resume, I sit down and I’m like hey Olivia, tell me about your career, and then after thinking I liked Olivia let’s hire or I didn’t really like her, let’s not hire. That’s where we’re at. That’s where most people are hiring and all I work on people with and it changes their game is actually just sitting back and thinking about the attributes that we see in our best people and the attributes that we see in the people that don’t work out. At least, can we translate that into just a quantifiable scorecard, can we identify the 7, 8, 9, or 10 attributes that we’ve seen, correlate with success and failure? Can we take the time to define in two or three sentences what each one means so that we’re very clear about what consultative selling means, what work ethic means, what intelligence means, and what coach ability means? Can we take the time to quantify what a high score of 8 to 10 would be like, what a medium score of 4 to 7 would be like, and what a low score of one of three would be like so that a new sales manager going into their first interview can actually know what the heck they’re doing, like what they’re asking and how they’re scoring this person? Over time we can actually see correlations between our scorecard and success and failure. That’s where we need to get to. It’s not a hard leap. It takes an hour to put together and a little bit of discipline to execute, but that allows you to get closer to a 10-20% annual turnover as opposed to the average of 40%. OF: Yeah, absolutely. I love that approach and I think you’re so right, it’s about just really defining what success and failure do look like in particular companies and I think a lot of that also nurtures that success a little bit longer terms after a salesperson is hired and is in their career with a company. A lot of that comes down to sales training and that’s an area where enablement can really help. I’d love to hear your thoughts on maybe what some of the common pitfalls are that you’ve seen and how programs are designed and delivered, that may actually prevent that scalability and predictability, and then what are some of the ways that enablement can help to overcome some of those pitfalls? MR: Yeah, I would say the number 1 thing is we know today something that we’ve talked about anecdotally through the work of Gong.IO and some of these new ai tools that the salespeople that listen more than they talk in the first call or the top performers in the industry and the sales people that talk more than they listen in the first call are performing in the least way. Part of the driver of why certain salespeople decide to speak more than and then lesson on the first call is due to the approach by enablement to training. Some enablement teams look at a new feature product that’s being released, whatever, and take what I’d call an inside-out approach of like, okay, what does this product do, what are its features and benefits, let’s put together a sales deck and then let’s show the sales deck to the sales team. Sounds pretty logical. That’s teaching the sales team to pitch, that’s teaching the sales team to talk a lot, that’s teaching the sales team just like go find 50 prospects in a month and just show the sales presentation and that’s my job and that’s completely wrong. The job is to start off and build trust and develop open-ended questions with the buyer to understand their perspective, and to see what they perceive as their problems. To see if their problems are something we can help with and if they are to tailor our pitch to those problems so they really resonate with their context. That’s what true selling is and that’s what our job and enablement are. It's like helping a 25-year-old figure out how to do that. It starts not with what is our product and what are the features and benefits, and let’s build a pitch deck, but it’s more like who is the buyer and what’s the narrative going through their head before they even know what our product is. What are the common problems they have? What are the ones that were good at solving? How do I ask the questions to uncover that? Once I understand their perspective, how do I customize and tailor the description of our product so it resonates with that buyer so they understand how we solve those problems? A couple of tactics that I’ll throw out there are number one, how much of your enablement and training for new hires is about your product versus your buyer. Most people I talk to are like shoot, you know what now I think about it 90% of our training is how our product works. You are teaching your salespeople how to be bad salespeople. Can you spend more time in your training getting your salespeople to walk in the day in the life of the people they sell to? At Hubspot, for example, most of our sales training was just having our salespeople write blogs and do social media and create landing pages and create automation sequences. Like we turned them into markers so that when they got on the phone with their first marketer or business owner that was trying to do this new-age way of marketing, they could empathize with what that scariness was like and talk them through as a peer. So like can we do that, whether we’re doing network infrastructure or selling lab equipment there are always ways for us to like get our salespeople to understand our buyers. The second tactic I’ll say is, instead of making the cornerstone of your sales enablement playbook the pitch deck, make the cornerstone of your sales enablement playbook, the buyer’s journey. Like, what’s going through their head at the awareness stage when they’re trying to define the problem. Once they’ve defined their problem, what are the different options they’re looking at to solve it, once they know which option they want to choose, how will they make that decision? Let’s teach our salespeople about that and define it and after every single first call, our managers can ask one question which is like where are they in the buying journey? That will force your salespeople to be top performers be discovery, consultative-oriented sellers that first and foremost, understand the context of the buyer. OF: That’s fantastic. It goes right into what my next question was going to be, which was about creating that culture of coaching. You mentioned a little bit of the role that sales management can play in helping to reinforce some of those behaviors with reps, but I’d love to dig into that aspect a little bit more and really hear how sales managers can leverage data to really have more effective coaching conversations. MR: Like most managers, I think do fall into a pitfall, which is the month or quarter is going along, we’re not quite at our goal, we’ve got a couple of reps that are struggling and they’ll say, here’s what we’re going to do Olivia. Invite me to your next five meetings and I’ll do the demos for you. I’ll run the meetings and they become super reps. A lot of things are wrong with that. Number one, you’re not holding your reps accountable for their job. Number two, they get lazy. Number three, they lose confidence because you can do it better than them. A lot of bad things happen and really that’s not our job as a manager. I understand why they do it because that’s how they got successful as a rep, but as a manager, our job is to hire and coach, that’s what it is and it’s up to the rep to succeed. The thing with coaching is that you can’t coach a rep on like 20 things at the time, it’s just not humanly possible to like absorb that coaching. You can do one, maybe two things at a time, and that’s really what the best coaches do. They get a new rep out of training, and usually, there’s like a pretty sizable list of like improvement areas and a good coach will say, I can’t work on all that at once, but here’s the one thing I’m going to work on and they’ll use the data to diagnose that. Usually, if we have basic data of like how many leads are we creating every month, how many become an opportunity, how many become stage three opportunities, and how many become close, we can get some visibility of what the blueprint is for our top performers in the average and where we’re off and that will help understand where we can at least look to diagnose things and figure out what the issue is. What I like to do as a leader is I like to review on the first day of the month all of my manager’s coaching plans with the reps. When I do that review, it forces the managers to have one on ones before our meeting, like in the morning or the day of the first day of the month to have that one-on-one coaching plan creation and schedule the coaching into the upcoming month. So Olivia, if you and I were talking and after reviewing your data together and talking qualitatively about your past month, we do determine that sense of urgency development is the thing we want to work on. Then I’d say great, like why don’t we get together on Friday at three, next Tuesday at nine, and the following Wednesday at noon and you show up to that meeting with a recorded first meeting, and we’ll listen to it together and look at it through the lens of sense of urgency development. That’s a beautiful start to the month, where I’m like, I have confidence that my managers have had that discussion with their reps and we have an entire set of coaching calls set based on data that are attacking the skills that represent the biggest improvement for our team. OF: Absolutely. That’s a fantastic approach as well. I have just one last question for you and it’s really about the last tactic in the formula, which is demand generation. I think a key piece that stood out to me in the formula here was really around the importance of accountability between sales and marketing teams. I’m curious about this in particular because sales enablement can often really be a function that’s kind of in the middle of those two teams, liaison between them, or helping to kind of bridge that gap. I’d love to hear your advice on how enablement leaders can really be that bridge and help sales and marketing teams develop and have that mutual accountability. MR: There needs to be a service level agreement between the two groups and it’s going take a combination of the CEO plus enablement to create that. We just really need the VP of Marketing and the VP of Sales to agree on their deliverables to each other. We need them to both agree on what is an MQL and how many we need from marketing and we need the sales team to agree to, like if we do get an MQL, how will we act on it, how quickly we call it, how frequently call it, and what kind of conversion rate do we expect out of that. That’s our goal. All of that leads to revenue, so that’s really the role of sales enablement is to work with the CEO and the sales and marketing leader to create that quantitative agreement. One area that you can start with, there’s a lot of different pieces to this, but usually when we’re putting together annual plans, and this is pretty relevant to today here in Q4, we’re pretty good at like saying all right, we want to go from 20 million to 30 million, which means we need to add 10 million top lines and last year our reps averaged half a million in productivity each. So I do the math and I have 10 of them, well that adds up to $5 million. I need to hire another 10 more and that will give me my 10 million. We’re pretty good at that like bottoms-up analysis from the rep capacity standpoint. Rarely do we do the marketing piece. So it’s like, yeah I get that my reps are producing 500,000, but how are they getting there? Well, if you look back on the year you can be like, oh my gosh, well half of our revenue came from marketing, and marketing had a budget of $1 million. They generated 1000 leads and the cost per lead was $1,000. If I had my math right, 20% of those leads became SQLs and 40% became opportunities, and 40% closed, so just using those numbers, I can figure out if we’re going to have another year where half of our new revenue comes from marketing, I can calculate precisely how many MQLs I need. Then, similarly, if half of our leads came from our cold calling team, the SDRs, then on average each one set 210 appointments last year the conversion to opportunity was 30% while the conversion of clothes was 20%, so immediately I can figure out like how many SDRs I need each quarter and what those conversion rates need to be. We don’t do that math, it’s simple math and that’s where sales enablement can play a big role. It’s just like let’s go back to the leadership team, the head of sales, the head of marketing, and just say here’s the plan, this is the blueprint to get there from the demand gen side and that helps both sales and marketing to have a quantitative route in what that service level agreement between the two groups can be. OF: Absolutely. In addition to that, it also helps enablement prove their impact to those executive leaders and be able to get a seat at the table in those conversations as really that strategic liaison between those leaders. So that’s fantastic advice. MR: It’s such an important seat because everybody else naturally has a little bit of political bias in the equation and sales enablement can be that sort of like an unbiased judge and jury that’s just trying to educate everybody on the truth. They just know that these are semi-scientists that are like helping us understand our business and hit our goals for next year. OF: Mark, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us. I certainly learned a lot from this conversation so thanks again and I can’t wait for our listeners to hear this. MR: You bet Olivia. Thanks for having me. OF: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders visit salesenablement.pro and if there's something you'd like to share or a topic that you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.
Olivia Fuller: Hi and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I'm Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Creating predictable and scalable revenue is any business leader’s dream, but how can that dream actually become reality? Well, as it turns out, there’s a formula for building and sustaining a winning sales team and I’m so excited to have Mark Roberge, who is the author of the Sales Acceleration Formula here to walk us through what that looks like. With that, Mark, I’d love it if you could take a second and introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit more about your background and your book. Mark Roberge: Thanks for having me. I am an engineer by training, I started my career coding and I did an MBA at MIT. I have close to a decade to start my career in more of a data science-like quant background. At MIT I was classmates with the two co-founders at Hubspot and was recruited to be the fourth employee and first salesperson with the aspiration to build a unicorn. This is in the early part of the century, like 15 years ago, and looking back I’m pretty lucky that I had the background that I had and ended up in that company at that time because little did I know that sales were going through a pretty substantial revolution. We were moving out of this sort of pre-internet age where everything was sold via an outside team and no one used their CRM, sales enablement barely existed and we were moving into an era where CRM adoption was necessary for salespeople to do their job. These tech stacks were becoming pretty advanced, we had a lot of data, and we had internet-empowered buyers who just changed the way that sales had to interact with them. It was sort of like the perfect time for a quant with no sales background to build a sales team from scratch. I was blessed to fall into that role and blessed to be surrounded by the right executive sponsorship and mentorship and investor advice to be successful in it. That’s my background and I did that for like 10 years. We took an IPO In 2015 or 16. I then rested and joined the faculty at Harvard Business School where I still teach. I joined full-time and helped build out the sales curriculum. I do teach a couple of classes in sales and growth. More recently, after a couple of years of investing and advising and sitting on boards and that kind of stuff, I was approached by a former Bessemer investor to start a venture capital firm called Stage 2 Capital, which I’m happy to speak about at the end. It’s the first VC firm that’s run and backed exclusively by CRO, CMO, and CCOs from a lot of the software unicorns that are out there. We’re back about 400 CROs and CMOs from Snowflake, Salesforce, Zoom, and those types of companies. OF: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I’m really excited to have a chance to learn a little bit more about your book. You mentioned that your background is really unique in the sense that you do have such a quantitative lens that you take and your book really walks through that framework of driving predictable and scalable revenue growth from that lens of being really data-driven. You also talked about how sales have evolved a lot since you started that journey of creating that framework and even since you did write the book. I’d love to hear a little bit more about what are some of the challenges that you’ve seen emerge in the last few years that can make that mission of achieving predictable and scalable revenue a little bit more difficult to achieve in today’s landscape. MR: When I wrote the book at the end of my Hubspot journey, it was really triggered by the fact that I started to get pretty well known and I would get calls from different sales leaders and entrepreneurs starting out with the same questions like ‘What do you look for in your first sales hire? How do you set up your first sales com plan? How do you enable your sales team?' I just told them how we’re doing a Hubspot and they wrote back like a month later, saying wow, we did that and it worked really well, thank you so much. I just thought this is working, let me just put it down on paper for people. I give all the proceeds to a nonprofit, so I was just helping out the ecosystem and even to this day it sells almost just as much every year as it did the first year. I’m very humbled that people still pick it up and still find amazing implementation from it. My own models of it have not changed but evolved a bit because at that time I was like 80 hours a week deep on just Hubspot and wrote about that. Now I’ve applied it to 1000 different data points between my teaching, investing, and consulting. A lot of the principles still apply. As far as the challenges of implementing, I guess I’ll answer it this way and this is something that the book itself didn’t address, but you can read the book, and then you can read some of my more recent work. The book just talks about the model as it was at that point. It doesn’t talk about the order in which you should implement things. That’s been my most recent work. While the book gives you an aspiration of where you want to go, how you hire, how you enable, and how you coach your sales team, there’s a pretty precise order in which you build that system and in fact the optimal answers for each of the system components. Let’s take hiring for example. That changes as you progress from a five-person company that is mostly a product team, to a 20-person company that is really in sales mode, to a 2000-person company that is a very complex organization with alignment requirements. Your hires obviously change even on just the same frontline account executive role. That’s probably the difficulty in understanding the order in which you build the components of the system and how the individual component’s optimal design changes as you evolve. OF: That’s very interesting and I think definitely something that goes beyond the scope of the book too, which is fantastic. I would love to dig into the data component of the framework. Tell me a little bit about just the role that you see data really playing today in helping business leaders be able to gather the insights that they need to overcome some of these challenges that they’re facing today. MR: It’s kind of funny and this is right in the heart of things like sales enablement, rev ops, and just sales leaders in general, which is hopefully a lot of the folks that are out there listening. I always kind of joke and observe that sales are a function, something extraordinarily unique relative to things like product engineering, HR, finance, and marketing, is that success and failure in the role are so quantifiable. It’s really hard to walk into a company and here are our engineers and this is Olivia our number one engineer by 7%. Like it’s really hard to claim that right? But I can definitely walk into a sales floor and say here are our salespeople and this is Olivia and she’s our number one salesperson by 7%. That’s like a feasible statement. You’ve got this function where success and mediocrity and failure are quantifiable and that opens up tremendous opportunities in the way we run the team. It opens up tremendous opportunities to draw correlations between hiring attributes that we’re looking for and how strongly they correlate to success in the role. It presents opportunities for us to use data in our sales playbooks to understand which approaches to the market lead to the most successful and best outcomes. It presents opportunities for us to measure the effectiveness of our frontline managers and how effective they are in coaching and developing our people. To be able to literally say like Olivia is a rock star, but I really think that she can develop in the area of a sense of urgency development with her prospects. In fact, I can quantify it, like I know what she looks like relative to our best-in-class people where her stage 4 demo stage opportunities are converting to customers at a rate of 27% and I know with the right amount of coaching she should be able to get that the 35% and that’s going to translate into an additional $120,000 of quota attainment on her part and a rise in our productivity. That’s the level of discussion we can be at and that’s difficult to enable in other functions. That gives you a little bit of an overview of the application and usage of data in our world. OF: Yeah, absolutely. I want to go back to that first tactic that you talked about and you mentioned it and a couple of examples here around sales hiring and really the importance of standardizing what those characteristics are that you’re looking for in your company and making sure that you have a consistent approach to hiring for those criteria. I’d love to hear a little bit more about some of your best practices for really getting buy-in on those characteristics as being the right characteristics to look at and really reinforcing that consistency in the hiring process in particular how can data really help in that aspect? MR: What I’m going to talk about is not necessarily like the absolute world-class, but I think it's a step up that’s easy to conceptualize and rarely followed. When it is followed, it translates into a dramatic acceleration in the performance of the team. World-class hiring is studying at the psychological level, psycho graphics and there are some great tools out there like predictive index etcetera. I’ve spoken to world experts on it and sometimes some of them will admit that it might not be worth it to like take, take it to that level, but what we see in the industry is not a very good approach and it comes out in the aggregate numbers. Depending on which study you read, a lot of them tend to center around an average turnover rate and sales annually of 40%. That’s really bad. Every year 40% of salespeople change jobs either because they fail, they’re fired or they fail and they quit or they’re just not happy with their company. It’s really hard to build a business when you’re turning over 40% of your team every year. We’ve got tremendous quantifiable ROI. There are some trainers out there that claim that the cost of a miss hiring sales is over a million dollars and it’s not that hard to justify that calculation. What I hope we can do is try to move away from the like I’m busy in my day and I’m running all over the place and I have this interview with Olivia and two minutes before I walk in the room I read your resume, I sit down and I’m like hey Olivia, tell me about your career, and then after thinking I liked Olivia let’s hire or I didn’t really like her, let’s not hire. That’s where we’re at. That’s where most people are hiring and all I work on people with and it changes their game is actually just sitting back and thinking about the attributes that we see in our best people and the attributes that we see in the people that don’t work out. At least, can we translate that into just a quantifiable scorecard, can we identify the 7, 8, 9, or 10 attributes that we’ve seen, correlate with success and failure? Can we take the time to define in two or three sentences what each one means so that we’re very clear about what consultative selling means, what work ethic means, what intelligence means, and what coach ability means? Can we take the time to quantify what a high score of 8 to 10 would be like, what a medium score of 4 to 7 would be like, and what a low score of one of three would be like so that a new sales manager going into their first interview can actually know what the heck they’re doing, like what they’re asking and how they’re scoring this person? Over time we can actually see correlations between our scorecard and success and failure. That’s where we need to get to. It’s not a hard leap. It takes an hour to put together and a little bit of discipline to execute, but that allows you to get closer to a 10-20% annual turnover as opposed to the average of 40%. OF: Yeah, absolutely. I love that approach and I think you’re so right, it’s about just really defining what success and failure do look like in particular companies and I think a lot of that also nurtures that success a little bit longer terms after a salesperson is hired and is in their career with a company. A lot of that comes down to sales training and that’s an area where enablement can really help. I’d love to hear your thoughts on maybe what some of the common pitfalls are that you’ve seen and how programs are designed and delivered, that may actually prevent that scalability and predictability, and then what are some of the ways that enablement can help to overcome some of those pitfalls? MR: Yeah, I would say the number 1 thing is we know today something that we’ve talked about anecdotally through the work of Gong.IO and some of these new ai tools that the salespeople that listen more than they talk in the first call or the top performers in the industry and the sales people that talk more than they listen in the first call are performing in the least way. Part of the driver of why certain salespeople decide to speak more than and then lesson on the first call is due to the approach by enablement to training. Some enablement teams look at a new feature product that’s being released, whatever, and take what I’d call an inside-out approach of like, okay, what does this product do, what are its features and benefits, let’s put together a sales deck and then let’s show the sales deck to the sales team. Sounds pretty logical. That’s teaching the sales team to pitch, that’s teaching the sales team to talk a lot, that’s teaching the sales team just like go find 50 prospects in a month and just show the sales presentation and that’s my job and that’s completely wrong. The job is to start off and build trust and develop open-ended questions with the buyer to understand their perspective, and to see what they perceive as their problems. To see if their problems are something we can help with and if they are to tailor our pitch to those problems so they really resonate with their context. That’s what true selling is and that’s what our job and enablement are. It's like helping a 25-year-old figure out how to do that. It starts not with what is our product and what are the features and benefits, and let’s build a pitch deck, but it’s more like who is the buyer and what’s the narrative going through their head before they even know what our product is. What are the common problems they have? What are the ones that were good at solving? How do I ask the questions to uncover that? Once I understand their perspective, how do I customize and tailor the description of our product so it resonates with that buyer so they understand how we solve those problems? A couple of tactics that I’ll throw out there are number one, how much of your enablement and training for new hires is about your product versus your buyer. Most people I talk to are like shoot, you know what now I think about it 90% of our training is how our product works. You are teaching your salespeople how to be bad salespeople. Can you spend more time in your training getting your salespeople to walk in the day in the life of the people they sell to? At Hubspot, for example, most of our sales training was just having our salespeople write blogs and do social media and create landing pages and create automation sequences. Like we turned them into markers so that when they got on the phone with their first marketer or business owner that was trying to do this new-age way of marketing, they could empathize with what that scariness was like and talk them through as a peer. So like can we do that, whether we’re doing network infrastructure or selling lab equipment there are always ways for us to like get our salespeople to understand our buyers. The second tactic I’ll say is, instead of making the cornerstone of your sales enablement playbook the pitch deck, make the cornerstone of your sales enablement playbook, the buyer’s journey. Like, what’s going through their head at the awareness stage when they’re trying to define the problem. Once they’ve defined their problem, what are the different options they’re looking at to solve it, once they know which option they want to choose, how will they make that decision? Let’s teach our salespeople about that and define it and after every single first call, our managers can ask one question which is like where are they in the buying journey? That will force your salespeople to be top performers be discovery, consultative-oriented sellers that first and foremost, understand the context of the buyer. OF: That’s fantastic. It goes right into what my next question was going to be, which was about creating that culture of coaching. You mentioned a little bit of the role that sales management can play in helping to reinforce some of those behaviors with reps, but I’d love to dig into that aspect a little bit more and really hear how sales managers can leverage data to really have more effective coaching conversations. MR: Like most managers, I think do fall into a pitfall, which is the month or quarter is going along, we’re not quite at our goal, we’ve got a couple of reps that are struggling and they’ll say, here’s what we’re going to do Olivia. Invite me to your next five meetings and I’ll do the demos for you. I’ll run the meetings and they become super reps. A lot of things are wrong with that. Number one, you’re not holding your reps accountable for their job. Number two, they get lazy. Number three, they lose confidence because you can do it better than them. A lot of bad things happen and really that’s not our job as a manager. I understand why they do it because that’s how they got successful as a rep, but as a manager, our job is to hire and coach, that’s what it is and it’s up to the rep to succeed. The thing with coaching is that you can’t coach a rep on like 20 things at the time, it’s just not humanly possible to like absorb that coaching. You can do one, maybe two things at a time, and that’s really what the best coaches do. They get a new rep out of training, and usually, there’s like a pretty sizable list of like improvement areas and a good coach will say, I can’t work on all that at once, but here’s the one thing I’m going to work on and they’ll use the data to diagnose that. Usually, if we have basic data of like how many leads are we creating every month, how many become an opportunity, how many become stage three opportunities, and how many become close, we can get some visibility of what the blueprint is for our top performers in the average and where we’re off and that will help understand where we can at least look to diagnose things and figure out what the issue is. What I like to do as a leader is I like to review on the first day of the month all of my manager’s coaching plans with the reps. When I do that review, it forces the managers to have one on ones before our meeting, like in the morning or the day of the first day of the month to have that one-on-one coaching plan creation and schedule the coaching into the upcoming month. So Olivia, if you and I were talking and after reviewing your data together and talking qualitatively about your past month, we do determine that sense of urgency development is the thing we want to work on. Then I’d say great, like why don’t we get together on Friday at three, next Tuesday at nine, and the following Wednesday at noon and you show up to that meeting with a recorded first meeting, and we’ll listen to it together and look at it through the lens of sense of urgency development. That’s a beautiful start to the month, where I’m like, I have confidence that my managers have had that discussion with their reps and we have an entire set of coaching calls set based on data that are attacking the skills that represent the biggest improvement for our team. OF: Absolutely. That’s a fantastic approach as well. I have just one last question for you and it’s really about the last tactic in the formula, which is demand generation. I think a key piece that stood out to me in the formula here was really around the importance of accountability between sales and marketing teams. I’m curious about this in particular because sales enablement can often really be a function that’s kind of in the middle of those two teams, liaison between them, or helping to kind of bridge that gap. I’d love to hear your advice on how enablement leaders can really be that bridge and help sales and marketing teams develop and have that mutual accountability. MR: There needs to be a service level agreement between the two groups and it’s going take a combination of the CEO plus enablement to create that. We just really need the VP of Marketing and the VP of Sales to agree on their deliverables to each other. We need them to both agree on what is an MQL and how many we need from marketing and we need the sales team to agree to, like if we do get an MQL, how will we act on it, how quickly we call it, how frequently call it, and what kind of conversion rate do we expect out of that. That’s our goal. All of that leads to revenue, so that’s really the role of sales enablement is to work with the CEO and the sales and marketing leader to create that quantitative agreement. One area that you can start with, there’s a lot of different pieces to this, but usually when we’re putting together annual plans, and this is pretty relevant to today here in Q4, we’re pretty good at like saying all right, we want to go from 20 million to 30 million, which means we need to add 10 million top lines and last year our reps averaged half a million in productivity each. So I do the math and I have 10 of them, well that adds up to $5 million. I need to hire another 10 more and that will give me my 10 million. We’re pretty good at that like bottoms-up analysis from the rep capacity standpoint. Rarely do we do the marketing piece. So it’s like, yeah I get that my reps are producing 500,000, but how are they getting there? Well, if you look back on the year you can be like, oh my gosh, well half of our revenue came from marketing, and marketing had a budget of $1 million. They generated 1000 leads and the cost per lead was $1,000. If I had my math right, 20% of those leads became SQLs and 40% became opportunities, and 40% closed, so just using those numbers, I can figure out if we’re going to have another year where half of our new revenue comes from marketing, I can calculate precisely how many MQLs I need. Then, similarly, if half of our leads came from our cold calling team, the SDRs, then on average each one set 210 appointments last year the conversion to opportunity was 30% while the conversion of clothes was 20%, so immediately I can figure out like how many SDRs I need each quarter and what those conversion rates need to be. We don’t do that math, it’s simple math and that’s where sales enablement can play a big role. It’s just like let’s go back to the leadership team, the head of sales, the head of marketing, and just say here’s the plan, this is the blueprint to get there from the demand gen side and that helps both sales and marketing to have a quantitative route in what that service level agreement between the two groups can be. OF: Absolutely. In addition to that, it also helps enablement prove their impact to those executive leaders and be able to get a seat at the table in those conversations as really that strategic liaison between those leaders. So that’s fantastic advice. MR: It’s such an important seat because everybody else naturally has a little bit of political bias in the equation and sales enablement can be that sort of like an unbiased judge and jury that’s just trying to educate everybody on the truth. They just know that these are semi-scientists that are like helping us understand our business and hit our goals for next year. OF: Mark, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us. I certainly learned a lot from this conversation so thanks again and I can’t wait for our listeners to hear this. MR: You bet Olivia. Thanks for having me. OF: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders visit salesenablement.pro and if there's something you'd like to share or a topic that you'd like to learn more about, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.
ClearPivot agency Founder Chris Strom discusses 5 common mistakes he's seen clients make over and over in his 13 years as a HubSpot partner, and suggests the best ways to combat them. Come on in, and find out if you've been over automating, leaving SQLs on the table, or doing one of these other common marketing mis-steps!
It's Monday, and you know what that means - Q&A time with industry sales and marketing expert Kyle Milan! When it comes to social media for industrial, is TikTok a big deal?It's still up in the air whether TikTok will significantly impact advertising your business, particularly in the future. For now, the demographic on TikTok is nowhere near as prime for closing deals as it is on LinkedIn. TikTok, however, serves a purpose as a testing ground for entertainment-type clips. Instagram Reels, Facebook, YouTube Shorts, and LinkedIn cater to a more mature audience where you will likely connect to prospects and their cohorts. Once you have successfully built out your content creation schedule on LinkedIn and other established platforms (whether through your marketing team or an agency like MFG Tribe), see what other similar companies in your space are doing on TikTok, then take the plunge. Remember, don't neglect daily content on your leading platforms to tread new waters!What's the best way to work a trade show when exhibiting?Get out there and… work it! You may have noticed at trade shows that many sales reps in booths sit there and wait for people to enter. Do the opposite - go out into the aisle, engage with attendees and pull them into your booth. Maybe they're looking for your product or service, most likely not, and perhaps they'll never be in the market! But you'll never know if they'll close several weeks, months, or a year down the line or know someone who may be privy to what your company offers. So get them into your pipeline. Your booth should be your best foot-forward representation of your company, which extends to you as a representative. Drive forward your value proposition, be prepared, and make the most of your time at the trade show to take advantage of the most underrated way to gain new business outside social media.If you want to learn more about dominating at trade shows, check out our course at training.technicalsalesu.comWhat are some ways to convert marketing-qualified leads into sales-qualified leads?Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) are prime for closing. They have gone through enough of the gamut of marketing, advertising, cold-calling, etc., to be familiar with the product or service you offer and may be interested to learn more. The initial conversation has already been made by marketing. This is where the sales team takes the baton of MQLs into sales-qualified leads (SQLs) and does their best to convert them. The best way for sales to close that gap and bring these prospects into a deal is to continue to follow up with them aggressively. Keep warm calling, connect and message them on LinkedIn, and be omnipresent in any way you can to get them to sign up for a calling session and eventually take the plunge into the product or service you are offering.#industrialmarketing #tradeshowmarketing #technicalsales __________Subscribe For More Video Content :https://www.youtube.com/kylemilan__________Say Hi on Social:LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylemilan/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kylejmilanFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/KyleJMilan/__________Connect For Business:MFG Tribe: https://mfgtribe.comMFG Tribe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mfgtribe/Technical Sales University: https://training.technicalsalesu.com/enroll
Driving Inbound SAOsWe got to chat with the brilliant MJ Peters (VP of Marketing at CoLab), to hear about the 3 main levers she pulls to drive inbound SAOs. Namely: Eyeballs Messaging First Sales Call We'll go through a summary of each of these levers below, and pull out some insights on how she's using them to grow CoLab's SAOs and revenue.How They Improved ItLever 1: EyeballsMJ works to get as many of the right eyes as possible to look at the brand and messaging. This means creating content for 2 categories: Demand capture (e.g. SEO & paid search) Demand creation (e.g. paid ads on social) For demand capture content, she makes sure Product Marketing and Demand Gen work in sync, so the messaging is consistent. The ad should offer a hook or summary, but the site should expound upon it.When she's running social ads, she's looking at engagement & CTR as a leading metric of how it's performing. As it runs, she'll look at profiles of who comments or likes, and adjust the audience over time to make sure it's reaching only the most relevant job titles. For demand capture content (typically paid search or SEO), there's less flexibility over the messaging, because the prospect is looking for a specific thing.So her goal is to respond from a positioning perspective to meet prospects where they're already at.Lever 2: Messaging on the websiteOnce she gets eyeballs on the website, she makes sure what they're reading resonates with them and leads them to convert. At this point, she's used content on outside platforms to catch prospects with a hook and generate demand to learn more. And now that those prospects are on the website, she has a better opportunity to elaborate on the key value points she shared off-platform.To help her craft the best messaging, MJ has 1:1 calls with customers and listens to sales recordings on Gong. First, she identifies the use case they came to CoLab for. Then she sifts through dozens of pains/talking points and distills the top 3 or 4 that come up the most. These will become the 3-4 talking points on that specific use case page.For example, one use case may be using CoLab to lower costs, by designing costs out of their products. So MJ will identify the top 3-4 pain talking points around that, and use them on that use case page.Ultimately, this allows her to have the best chance at saying things that resonate with customers and drive the highest conversion. And as we mentioned earlier, she carefully maps this messaging in the “get eyeballs” stage, so demand gen is more effective and the prospect experiences more consistency.Lever 3: The first sales callOn the first call, MJ makes sure what the prospect hears, lines up with the marketing messaging they saw.In other words:Find the promised value that drove the prospect. Then give them a taste of that value, right away, in the first call.To help her do this, MJ uses different demo booking forms on each use case page. So when a prospect books a demo, she can dig into the CRM to let the rep know what use case the prospect is interested in, and what pages they visited.Consider the traditional experience:The prospect reads a use case page about how your product will help them reduce time and save money. They come excited to learn how you'll help them do that. But on the first call, they get peppered with 25 discovery questions.This is a poor, unhelpful experience.Instead, marketing can dig into the deal in HubSpot and see that the Contact booked a demo on your Solutions page around “saving time”. They can relay that context to the rep, so the rep highlights exactly how the product saves time.By being involved in the first call, MJ's team is better aligned with sales and delivers a more relevant experience for the customer. She feels many companies invest heavily in the first 2 levers, but ignore this one, which results in a leaking funnel at this stage.ResultsMJ only recently started the role, and has spent most of the time heavily investing in refining their messaging on all these levers. But it's already starting to pay off.In all her time in marketing, she's never seen messaging have as big of an impact as it has at CoLab. She's also seen the quality of SQLs and SAOs in the pipeline become much higher, specifically in terms of firmographic fit and qualitative motivation for reaching out.
Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Performance chart Demographics Audience segmentation Make optimizations Bidding/Budgeting AB testing NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript What if I told you that I was going to lay out all the different ways that I handled LinkedIn Ads reporting and optimizations in one single episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show? interested? Let's go. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! One of the topics that we get the most questions on is reporting and optimization on LinkedIn. And it's simple enough to jump in and just build some ads build some audiences. But that means at some point, you have to analyze what you're doing, and decide what's working and what to do differently. This is an episode that was requested by one of our subscribers, Mark Bissoni, who's a digital ads pro in Chester, England. And in this episode, we're gonna go through how you can use all the data that LinkedIn provides, both within campaign manager, as well as some of the things that you can do once you get the data out of campaign manager and into Excel. And also, because building reports is such a visual thing, I'm going to do a series of videos on our YouTube channel, where I walk you through how to build each of the different types of reports that I'm talking about. So make sure you click the link in the show notes to our YouTube channel, and follow that so you can get notified when they get released. This week in the news, I just saw that the link to business manager appeared suddenly in the left hand navigation at the bottom of all of our accounts. So it may still be a feature that's rolling out if you don't happen to see it in your account yet, but it is coming and it's probably out for most. For those of you who don't know, what business manager is, it is LinkedIn is answer to Google's MCC, or multiclient center. Early on, it was a big challenge for agencies who advertised on Google, because they would have to go and grant every one of their employees access to the Google Ads account. And what was especially painful is that once a Google Ads account was connected to an email address, that email address, couldn't administrate or have access to any other Google Ads account. So Google came out with the multiclient center or MCC. And it's a group where you can have multiple accounts granted access to a single email address. And that's how agencies manage Google Ads. Facebook lots of years later came out with business manager. LinkedIn is very, very close to that. Obviously, LinkedIn is following in Facebook's footsteps most closely of all the platforms. And it's making it a lot easier for agencies to grant access to their team, just by adding their team member to one business manager account, instead of adding that same team member to every single LinkedIn ads account that you have. So this is something that the community has been asking for for a long time. And it's a great release. I want to highlight a review that came in this week. It was left by Gabe Harris, who runs Facqt Media, and they're a paid social agency out of Oakland, California. And I got to actually meet him when I was out on a trip to the Bay Area years ago, way cool guy. And he said, "Insightful LinkedIn expert. Indeed, this podcast is like having a LinkedIn ad coach for free. I love how generous AJ and his guests are in sharing their knowledge and expertise. I love how he leaves these experts to offer the best of their knowledge and experience to us listeners. Super insightful, we learned so much." Thanks so much gave, I really appreciate the kind sentiments there. That's exactly our goal. We treat this podcast like training for our own employees. And we don't hold back. I'm glad it's been good for you and your team as well. As a reminder, I love to give a shout out to those of you who leave reviews for us. So please take this as a sincere ask for me. If this show has been of any use to you, please do return us the favor by leaving us a review. I'd love to shout you out. Okay, let's hit it. Starting out with a little bit of a disclaimer, we may not touch on every single optimization or reporting case, but we're gonna hit a lot of the most common ones. We've definitely tried. But I'm guessing that we probably have 40 or 50 different reports that we've built for clients over the years. So my hope is we hit the major ones. But definitely if there's a type of report that we didn't hit on here that you'd like to use, please get in touch and let us know. So let's start out with the types of reporting that we can do from right within campaign managers dashboard. One of the things that I like to do is go in and look in the campaign's view. And I will sort the campaigns from high spend to low spend. What this does, it shows me in case I have limited time, let's say I only have five or ten minutes to look at campaigns in between meetings. If I sorta like this, I'm going to be immediately analyzing the five most impactful campaigns in the account because they're driving the most volume they're spending the most. Also big spenders is how you find out your most expensive mistakes that are going on. So this is a great way to analyze. It can also be really nice to sort your campaigns by click through rate from high to low, because then you're looking at the five most active audiences. Or if I'm looking to improve campaigns, I might sort from low to high. And it's that toggle is a little bit janky on LinkedIn. So basically, every time you hit one of those filters, you never know which way it's going to sort. But if you're looking at your click through rates from low to high, you're seeing those audiences that you may have created ads that aren't hitting the mark, that could be a good clue that those are good ones that you need to go in and adjust, launch new ad copy, consider different offers, really anything to get that back up and performing. If you're using LinkedIn lead gen forms, it can be nice to sort by cost per lead, or lead form completion rate from either high to low or low to high. If you're going high to low, you're seeing your top performers that you can maybe pour a little bit more gas on how to get that fire burning brighter, or the ones with the lowest could be a good one to either launch new ad copy, or consider if that might be the right audience for you. Another sort that we like to do is buy cost per click either high to low or low to high, looking at those audiences that are the most competitive. Plus, that can also show you opportunities if you're paying too much for clicks, that could be campaigns that you want to go in and try to launch ad copy that might be more engaging or evocative. Because if you can get click through rates up, your cost per click are likely going to come down. Now you can go in insert in campaign manager by ads the same way. The big challenge was doing this though, is that if your account is anything like the way that we run ours, you may have a lot of ads. And a lot of those ads might be similar to each other, or even exact copies. And so if you're looking at just your top five performing ads, and three of them are the same thing, it's not going to give you very much insight. So in the second half of the show, we're going to talk about exporting to excel, and the type of ad analysis that you can do there. So we'll wait on that one. But if you are running a very small account with few ads, few campaigns, you can still do this from right within campaign manager. The next area that could be helpful to you is clicking on performance chart. Now, Episode 52 goes into a lot of depth about what you can do with the performance chart. But I like to chart my click through rate over time, because that tells me if my ads are losing steam, people are tired of seeing them, they've saturated that audience. And I can actually see that in real time by charting over time. For budgeting purposes, it's also really helpful to chart your spend over time. If your account is really complex. It's a lot better to do this in Excel. But if you just need a quick look of like, oh, how was my account spending? Or how do my weekdays spend compared to my weekends, it's really nice to do that inside of performance chart. I also like to chart my costs per click over time to see are my audiences getting more competitive? Am I paying too much for any sort of audience, it can be a really valuable one to look at. If you're using LinkedIn lead gen form ads, I like to look at cost per lead, or even lead volume over time. If you were using conversions on the website, this doesn't make nearly as much sense, because there's oftentimes a lag in conversion showing up in the account, or sometimes not even showing up at all, as we're starting to understand what third party cookie is going away is is doing for all of our advertising efforts. But anytime someone fills out a form, LinkedIn knows immediately and so those lead counts are always accurate. Another reason why I don't want to use the performance chart to look at anything regarding conversions is that LinkedIn is definition of conversion is not one that I like to use. If you'll remember, LinkedIn is definition for conversions is all click conversions, plus all view through conversions. And I like to omit view through conversions from my calculations. And so this is a lot better to do by exporting to excel. And then you can use exactly the conversion that you want to use for that definition. One thing I wanted to try to chart inside of the performance chart is frequency. And what I was hoping to see is, as I continue advertising to an audience, how fast frequency climbs. Now, I might be dumb here, but I can't make sense of actually what that chart is showing. So if charting frequency over time in performance charts, if it makes sense to you, please do reach out and let us know how you use it. Like I said I've wanted to use it. I just haven't found a good use case for it. Next, go and click into your add demographics. And it's a button right next to performance chart right there in campaign manager. We went into a lot of depth on the demographics in Episode 54. But here's how we use it. So after we get feedback from a sales team, they'll oftentimes tell us which audience segments are making up higher quality leads or lower quality leads. So if we can look at the ad demographics and see how many of them are interacting with our ads, that could give us the ammo to go and add exclusion segments to our campaigns to get those lower quality folks out. We can also see which ones are high quality, and try to boost those campaigns, it is really important that you have a close feedback loop with your sales team, make sure you have a strong relationship there. It's some of the best advice I can give you as an advertiser. Another way that we like to use the demographics is let's say that you have a high click through rate over the course of a campaign. You can go in and look at who is doing the clicking here. And that can give you a good idea of the personas. Maybe it's certain job functions who are doing the majority of the clicking, or maybe it's seniorities, or job titles, but look at who is actually driving up your click through rates. Are they the right people or the wrong people. Because if you have a really high click through rate, but a low conversion rate, this is one way we can analyze and figure out why it could be that the offer isn't attractive enough. Or it could be your targeting that you're not hitting the right people. They might get to your landing page and realize that it's not for them and disqualify themselves. So double check inside your demographics tab. If it looks like you're hitting the right people, then that might be a clue that your offer needs some work, maybe optimize or change or adjust. But if you're not hitting the right people, your offer could be fine and you might not need to adjust anything there. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into analyzing outside of campaign manager my absolute favorite, The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive. On the front end, at B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way a B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world. We've spent over $150 million on the platform and our official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2linkedin.com/apply, we'd absolutely love to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump into the awesome analysis of ads and campaigns that you can do within Excel. So this may not be evident to everyone. But inside of campaign manager, you have that button that says Export. And if you're pretty good with Excel, chances are you've already used this button a lot. But we actually prefer exporting data rather than using LinkedIn's dashboard. Just because the data is a lot easier to see a bird's eye view and a lot easier to digest. It's also a lot easier to chart over time, because the performance chart is really limited in lots of ways. So here's how you actually get this data out. You click that export button in the upper right of campaign manager. Once you've selected the date range that you care about, then it's going to ask you what kind of report. There are quite a few options there so the two that I care about are ad performance and campaign performance. If I want to analyze my different ads, I go with ad performance. If I only care about the campaign's, then I'll do campaigns. Then it's going to ask you about your time breakdown. If you want to see trends over time, you need to do a time breakdown either by day or by month. And this will allow you to see your changes over time. But if you only need a snapshot of understanding, like what happened during the month of August, for instance, then you can just do time break down all time. Your best friend in Excel is going to be a pivot table. A pivot table allows you to combine all of a certain type of something and have it automatically do all the calculations of adding all that performance together. So if I have 15 ads running in an account, but it's actually only three ads duplicated five times with one pivot table, I can combine all similar ads into one entity. And then it will show me the performance of that ad all the way across the account, rather than having to add them all together myself. With any sort of report that I build in Excel, I'm likely going to add the columns of spend, impressions, click through rate, and cost per click. Spend is helpful to see what kind of volume something is driving. Impressions can be helpful in troubleshooting. But most of the time I'm going to use impressions in some ratio like click through rate or cost per impression. Now these are all metrics around the first hurdle that we talk about sometimes, where we're trying to understand how effective our ads are at getting attention. That's our first hurdle we need to get prospects over is getting them to actually click on the ads. I like to use the color scale in Excel, and color code each of these columns by low to high. So I can visualize a lot easier, which campaigns tend to have higher costs or higher click through rates, then the columns I start to analyze. The second hurdle is what we need to get prospects over is to get them to take some sort of an action that we want like to convert. So I'm going to add things like conversions. And like I mentioned before, I'm going to use click conversions, not just LinkedIn's combined definition of conversion, with view through conversions included. I also want to see conversion rate, but I'm going to build my own formula for that, which if you watch our YouTube videos here that we're going to release, you'll see why. I also want to look at cost per conversion. Now, if the only data you have is data from LinkedIn's campaign manager, then this is as far as you go, you've got both of those hurdles. The click and engagement metrics, as well as the conversions metrics and you can do some cool analysis here. But if you are a master advertiser, Surely you've connected your LinkedIn ads data with your CRM data to allow you to do things like a calculation of what's my cost per marketing qualified lead, or my cost per sales qualified lead, or cost per proposal given or cost per closed deal, that will tell us my ROI. If I have that data, I also want to look at graduation rate from MQL to SQL, or SQL to proposal or close rate, because that's going to teach me if I have one campaign that looks good on a cost per lead, but only 20% of MQLs are becoming SQL files, but my average is more like 50%, then I know there's something wrong with that audience, either the way that we're presenting to them, or the way we're targeting them, or the way that sales is nurturing them. It's also really nice to get counts of your number of MQLs, or SQLs, or proposals, or close deals from your LinkedIn Ads efforts. And one of the coolest things about a pivot table in Excel is that you can just bring new metrics down into your pivot table, to break out your audiences or break out anything that you care about to look at it separately. So for instance, if I'm looking at a whole bunch of campaigns, it's not going to be very meaningful to me, if a text ad campaign has a really low click through rate, and a sponsored content campaign has a really high one. They're just not even on the same playing field. But if I take ad type, and I move it down into my rows, now it will group all of my campaigns by ad type, along with its own nice little summary. And now I can measure my different ad types differently because they all act very differently, they deserve to be treated separately. I also really like to break out these reports, if I'm doing AB tests. So if I could break my As separately out from my Bs, then you can very quickly tell what's working and what's not working, what sort of messaging you can do, there are some great insights you can get from doing that. You could also do a cohort analysis, where let's say you launched new ads this week. And you want to look at how this cohort compares to your last cohort, maybe you launched ads a month ago or two weeks ago, you can then compare them very easily with a pivot table. If you're running multiple offers, it's really nice to segment by offer, so that you can figure out very quickly which offer is performing like we want, which one is not. And if you've segmented your audiences, like we recommend in your account, you can now pull certain things out of the campaign name, allowing you to do these micro segments where you break them out. So you could break out all performance by seniority, or by the industry that you're targeting, or by company size. You can break things out by geography, assuming that you have different campaigns for each geography, you can compare different job titles or different job functions. So this is one that we really liked to do. But it does require that ahead of time you've micro segmented all of your audiences. And if you want to learn how we do that, that's episode 65 so you can go and do the same thing in your accounts. And just another note on combining data from your CRM. In order to do this, you do need to track all of your ads with UTM parameters or some sort of URL parameter. And that's how you can then marry your performance data from LinkedIn to your CRM data. HubSpot actually does a really good job of doing this naturally. So if you're already using HubSpot, you may already have this done for you without having to do anything else. On our own campaigns. We have UTM tracking and leads coming in. But sometimes we'll get leads that have no source of UTMs. But we do have one extra barrier here. We asked on our form, how did you hear about us, and fairly regularly, we'll see people say that they heard about us from LinkedIn Ads, but they didn't come in with tracking parameters. So what that tells us is likely people are seeing and maybe even clicking on the ads, but they're just navigating to our homepage and contacting us there. So it's nice that we don't have to pay for that click for sure if they're not clicking, but it does muddy our data a little bit, because those leads aren't directly attributable to the exact ad or the exact campaign. But in marketing, we do have to get used to that. We do have some attributable results. So just learn how to take that in stride. When we have this data, I do like to look at the different campaigns or audience segments that brought in closed one deals. If we're at the beginning of a campaign, we might not see closed deals happening super quickly, because we're still pushing people through the funnel. But if we've been working with someone for a year, lots of times, we're going to have plenty of that data that we can share, we can also see the individual ads or ad messaging that's driving either a lot of sales qualified leads, or proposals or close deals, we can see the campaign's or the audiences that tend to drive them the highest quality. And of course, once you've been running long enough to have closed deals, then you can do that amazing ROI calculation. That's done by just taking the closed deal value and dividing it by the spend, your organization might want to do a fully loaded ROI calculation. So it's maybe what you're paying for a sales rep to close the deal, maybe what you're paying for an agency to manage it, maybe even your own salary as an internal employee. So just find out from your boss, what sort of ROI calculation they want to see. So let's talk about some of the actual analysis that you can do. One of the things that we've done with one of our clients is, they came to us with a goal, they wanted us to average a $40 cost per lead. And when we very first started working with them, they might have been up in the 50s, and maybe even 60s. And over time, we've been able to optimize those down within range and even below their goal. But even if you don't know the goal that you want to work with, you can definitely just find your current average, and look at the things that are performing below average, and try to cut those out. And then look at the things that are performing above average, and feed those. And what that's going to do is it's going to incrementally improve your performance, it's going to bring your average cost per lead, or whatever metric that you're optimizing towards, down steadily. So what we might do in this case, we might get a report of all of the different campaigns in the account into a spreadsheet. And then we're gonna sort or color by either the highest performing or the lowest performing of campaigns in all the different metrics. In this case, we were looking at a cost per lead. But you could do the same thing with a click through rate or a total spend. And as we're sorting and color coding, what we're looking for are the weak spots. Eric Jones, who's our Director of Marketing, told me, "The reason why I love this is because it helps you find inefficiencies in your ad account." If you have certain campaigns or ads driving costs up, or volume down, for example, you can improve account efficiency by pausing them, or lowering bids and allocating your budget to those that are performing well. So Eric shared a couple of these levers, but think about what are the different levers in your account that control the weak spots that you found. We did a whole episode on optimization tactics. So if you haven't listened to it already, go listen to episode 50. But likely, what you're going to find is you have a handful of campaigns with really high cost per lead, and a handful with really low cost per lead. And if you want to decrease your cost per lead, you want to increase the spend and volume on those that are performing really well. And then restrict the spend that's happening from the higher costs, and then your whole average cost per lead is going to drop. So what are those levers that you can pull? Well, if it's the high performers that you're looking to feed, can you possibly give them more budget, if they are budget restricted? This might be as simple as just increasing your budget on those high performing campaigns, and you just get more coming out. Can you bid them higher without killing their efficiency? So let's say the cost per lead is 20% below average, if you increase your bids by five or 10%, you're still going to be performing below your average cost per lead, which is great. And you'll just get more volume out of it. Maybe you can narrow down what's the best performing ad copy that you're using, and scale that out. So it's running in more campaigns, or you're doing more like it? How about we look at the poor performers, and we're looking for ways to starve them. Eric mentioned a little bit of this, but one of the biggest levers we have is to lower bids. Of course, you can always shut a campaign off. But a lot of the time, it can be better just to lower bids rather than pause. So let's say that you have a really high conversion rate, but you also have a high cost per lead. What that means is you're paying too much, and it could be that you're bidding too high. Anytime our cost per lead is higher than we like, but not egregious. We can always just incrementally lower bids. And of course, my favorite part about this is, as you lower your bids, your account efficiency increases, while your volume gets cut a little bit. Another option you can do to start lower performers is to lower your budget. So, if their bids are already at the floor, and you're still spending too much, then it could be a good idea to lower your budgets. And this is, especially if you have great click through rates and a small budget, you'll probably run into this. If you're not touching your bids at all, this is kind of a lazy or a short term fix to lower your budget. You usually want to lower your budget, at the same time as you're lowering bids if you can. If you're already bidding at the floor or something, obviously, you can't. I mentioned pausing entirely. Now, I don't like doing this usually, because it's a big move, it's giving up on something entirely, and it's shutting off data that you could be using to learn. Episode 65 is all about micro segmenting campaigns, as we talked more about this, so go listen to that if you haven't already. But if you have a continued track record of poor performance, and you've already done a lot with it, you've already lowered bids, you've already lowered budgets, you've already changed and tested a whole bunch of new things. If you have sufficient data to tell you that it's not working, that's a good clue that you can actually pause a whole campaign or a set of ads entirely. Also, if sales or marketing says that an audience isn't valuable, or isn't high quality down the sales process, then it almost doesn't matter what the data says about how people are interacting with the ads, you're probably free to just pause it. Every once in a while we'll have a client come to us and they'll say, hey, my boss just cut our budget so we have half the budget to work with this month. And in that case, you can go through the worst performers, and just temporarily pause those. And what's cool about that, again, is your overall efficiency for the account increases while your budget got cut. Now, as you're going through and analyzing inside of Excel, you're gonna come across different scenarios, that might be a little confusing, or you might not know what to do with them. So let's go through a couple of those crazy off the wall situations that you'll see. One might be you have a really high cost per click, and a high click through rate. The high click through rate means that you should be able to lower your costs. So you can try bidding down or changing your bidding strategy. But if you lower your bids, and your click through rate goes down as well, it means that you're probably bidding for the right spot in the ad inventory and you're essentially paying a premium for that placement. What about if you have a low click through rate, but a high conversion rate? How would you handle something like that? What that tells me is usually the offer, or the call to action is really good, but the ad messaging might need some help. Maybe we're not properly communicating to people what the value of clicking on that ad is. If you're having a hard time generating clicks at a healthy rate, then it's probably something to do with your ad. Or in the case of not getting any impressions, it could be that your bids are just not competitive enough. What about those high volume campaigns? So let's say that you have a strict volume goal, your department is telling you, we need 200 leads per month out of LinkedIn, for instance. Well, if you look and you have one campaign that's driving half of all of that, even if the cost per lead is higher than your goal, you might be okay just continuing to run that high volume campaign, just to not disrupt your volume. In this case, meeting your goals is probably more important than account efficiency. But if you do need to adjust to get higher efficiency, make small adjustments to this campaign, you don't want to kill the golden goose that's laying all those golden eggs. You can try going into the other campaigns on the account and trying to improve performance there while leaving the big driver alone. What about if you have high performance, but you're not getting good volume from it. One of our most listened to episodes is episode six, about bidding and budgeting. That is gospel that you should go and study if you haven't already, but in this case, one of the strategies you can use is going to increase your bids, because that's going to make you more competitive in the auction and all of a sudden your ads are going to be shown to more of the people in that audience that you might not be reaching. If you are budget constrained, which you definitely shouldn't be budget constrained, if you're really on top of things. But if you are, it could be as simple as just increasing the budget on those high performing campaigns that aren't getting enough volume. If it's due to small audience size, let's say the audience that you're targeting has really good performance. But there's only 3000 people in that audience. One thing you could do is you could go try to increase your audience sizes. Now I'm not recommending that you target people who aren't relevant to your audience. But if you can find people who are still relevant that you can add to the audience, all the better. You could also go and test into new audience segments. So analyze the targeting that you're using and See if there's any type of targeting that you're not using to reach your ideal customer profile. If it's a click through rate issue where you're not getting enough traffic from an audience, you could go and borrow what's working well, in other campaigns, maybe there's different ad copy or different offers there that are getting a higher click through rate, and you can move them over and test them to this audience. Now, most of that analysis that I'm talking about has been around campaigns. But like I mentioned earlier, you can analyze your different ads as well. So pivot tables are definitely going to be your friend here. I like to add either the intro or the headline, whatever is staying the same across all of the different ads you're running. I like to add them into my columns. Now I'm combining the performance of each ad individually to compare against the other ads, then I'm going to be comparing things. Whatever AB test I'm running, but I'm going to be comparing, like motivation against motivation, or call to action versus call to action, image versus image, all kinds of different things. And go back and listen to episode 36. That's all about ABX testing if you want more ideas there. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, go subscribe to the B2Linked YouTube channel, because we're going to put videos up here over the next coming weeks and months, showing exactly how we do some of these analyses. I wanted to talk you through it here. But obviously, it's a very visual thing to be working inside of Excel. So go subscribe to the YouTube channel and get notified as they come out. We also released a blog post all about navigating the LinkedIn campaign manager dashboard. So if you don't know where to click on some of these things, check out the link for that in the show notes below. Go read that blog post, it'll be a great one. The episodes that I mentioned here in this episode, there's the performance chart, that's episode 52. There's the Add demographics episode, that's episode 54. There's audience segmentation, Episode 65. There's optimization strategies, that's episode 50. There's bidding and budgeting, which is episode six. And of course, the one we just most recently mentioned, is the AB testing episode, Episode 36. Now, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, go check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there, you can't go wrong. The link for that is right in the show notes below. Also, if you liked what you heard, it probably goes without saying, but do subscribe on using whatever podcast player you're on. And I'm saying this seriously, if you've gotten any sort of value out of this show listening, your fee is to leave us a review. It would sincerely mean a lot to me and all of us here at B2Linked who work so hard on the show. So please don't just think everyone else is gonna go do it. I want you to go leave us a review. That would be the best way you can say things with any questions, suggestions, corrections, anything, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.
Insights on Driving SQLs via LinkedIn Ads:1. Use benchmarks to identify competitive advantages.Look for instances where SQL rate (lead to meeting ratio) is 2-3x higher than average, and come up with a hypothesis as to what caused that growth.Then, see if you can duplicate it in another campaign.Once Remotion finds meaningful variance, they determine if the higher performance was owing to factors that can be duplicated.If so, they'll increase the budget and spin off a new campaign where they lean into the things that made the former campaign perform so well.2. Get qualitative insights into ad performance.His team uses common sense, and deep familiarity with their clients to create a hypothesis of why a campaign saw meaningful change in performance.By talking with clients, they're able to learn what's happening that might be affecting performance.For example, after talking with the client they learn that John – the company's best SDR – is on vacation.This is the cause of lower results down-funnel.And since they have access to their client's CRMs accounts, they're able to be proactive in looking at any other factors that impact ad results that they might not have seen by staring at performance numbers in the Ad platform.3. Remain “strategy agnostic” until you find what works for you.Gabriel has seen a lot of commonly accepted truisms fall on their face when applied to Clients in different countries or industries.4. Look at performance often enough to derive insights, but avoid knee-jerk decisions.Remotion gives each client gets their own real-time dashboard which shows: CPL Last 7-day CPL Trend over last 30 days Comparison to previous 30 days … and more.They know what a client's current CPL is every day.But for metrics further down the funnel, they evaluate them monthly. This helps them make more informed decisions based on proven trends, and avoid knee-jerk reactions to a bad (or good) week.5. Determine your campaign goals early.Most companies run 2 types of campaigns:Direct response = promote your product, get someone to talk to youContent = promote your POV & provide valueEach generates different outcomes, so choose the one that best serves your goals. If you aren't sure which type of campaign you want to run, Gabriel advises running both, then determining the CPL. Benchmark your performance to know if one is higher than the industry average. If it is, use that one.6. What companies get wrong about LinkedIn ads: Under-investing Being inconsistent Being unclear about their goal Not having messaging honed in Having an inactive audience on LinkedIn Not being ready (too early, no product-market fit) 7. Testing messaging through LinkedIn ads can be costly.You need a lot of data to see how it impacts SQO rate.For example, you want to run 2 tests: so you need 50 leads on each (100 total, to have enough meaningful data) > and your CPL is $100.That means 1 test costs 10k. This can be great if you have a 100k budget. But if your budget is 15k/mo, then it means you spent almost an entire month testing 1 message variant.If that's worth it, that's great. But Remotion finds that often, it's not significant enough to justify the investment.
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This episode of Quotaless features Raj Singh, Founder and CEO of Go Moment, which was acquired by Revinate where Raj stays on as their Chief Marketing Officer. Innovation in the hospitality industry couldn't come at a better time when the world was ground to a halt by COVID.Raj shares how Ivy Offer became a game-changer for them and how their strategic partnerships ensured a profitable business model even with the crisis. He talks about the positive impact of their biohacks like the 4-and-a-half day work week and their focus on customer experience and success. HIGHLIGHTSThe shift from Founder to CMOInnovating Go Moment's Ivy Offer to thrive during COVIDAlign sales and marketing and focus on SQLsOn-ramp and create value for customer success Bio-hacks: 4-and-a-half day work week and breathing exercisesQUOTESRaj: "Similar to Go Moment, we didn't just bring a product into the market where four, five alternatives already existed. We created an entire new category of products and that's exactly what Revinate is doing as well, which is bringing in a new category of products into market."Raj: "We created Ivy Offer. We made it very easy for guests to order food and beverage, limos instead of Ubers, all that kind of good stuff, when they're celebrating and, of course, with the pent-up travel demand. And what we saw is in the first 12 months, which was one of our clients, we drove $15 million of revenue for them with this brand-new product we created during the pandemic. In 12 months of the beta period."Raj: "Maybe the most important metric in your entire business, assuming your retention and all that stuff is all taken care of, is sales qualified leads because that's where marketing needs sales. If your SQLs are doing well, your business is probably doing pretty well."Raj: "It's all about the quality of the delivery that ultimately is the best sales tool." Raj: "We're only a couple of months in at this point. We're about a month in at this point, so it's going great and we've actually seen productivity stay very much steady, maybe even going up in certain cases, and I'd say the other thing that's also been very helpful is just having the kind of team." Find more about Raj by checking out the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajsinghla/Website: https://www.revinate.com/
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