Mallory Lee on this episode
Mallory Lee, SVP of RevOps Strategy at Union Square Consulting, joins host Eddie Reynolds to examine why traditional lead qualification and routing practices fail most B2B SaaS companies. With years of experience building go-to-market systems at scale, Lee brings a data-driven perspective to a problem that costs organizations millions in wasted effort and missed pipeline. The episode deconstructs the MQL myth, showing how disconnects between marketing and sales create bloated databases of low-intent prospects that drain resources rather than drive revenue.
The core insight: every lead costs money to acquire, and optimizing how you qualify and route those contacts across inbound, outbound, and account-based motions directly recovers ROI on past investments while improving future efficiency. Lee and Reynolds explore why high-intent leads, those hand-raisers who fit your ICP and buyer personas, should be routed to your most experienced sellers, not junior SDRs. They break down the numbers: personalized outbound campaigns convert at 7.45%, while unfocused spray-and-pray approaches hit 0.05% or lower. Yet most teams squander high-intent inbound leads by mixing them with thousands of unqualified downloads and hoping busy account executives will notice them.
The conversation reframes the relationship between fit and intent, showing how to separate leads into actionable segments: those ready for immediate sales engagement, those needing marketing nurture, and those simply not a fit. Lee and Reynolds challenge conventional wisdom around ICP definition, pricing-page visits as intent signals, and the real cost of misaligned marketing and sales goals. The episode includes a practical exercise listeners can run this week to establish conversion-rate benchmarks and start iterating toward a more efficient lead management process.
What we cover in this episode
-
0:51
The MQL Problem Why traditional MQL definitions are broken and what happens when leads are nothing more than downloaded names.
-
3:26
Fit vs. Intent Framework How to distinguish between customer need and customer fit, and why both matter for conversion strategy.
-
5:58
Inbound vs. Outbound Efficiency Comparing conversion rates and resource allocation between inbound hand-raisers and outbound prospecting.
-
11:19
High-Intent Lead Routing Why hand-raisers in your ICP should go straight to experienced AEs, not junior SDRs.
-
15:44
Lead Scoring Gaps Individual lead scores miss the buying committee. Moving from person-level to account-level engagement scoring.
-
25:44
ICP and Personas Beyond Basics Why headcount, revenue, and title alone are insufficient. Adding technographic and intent signals.
-
27:46
Account-Based Qualification Measuring engagement and fit at the company level to identify true buying momentum.
-
31:00
Practical Iteration Exercise Establishing conversion benchmarks, segmenting leads, and re-allocating resources based on actual performance data.
The lines worth sharing
Every lead you have is a lead that you have paid for. Whether you spent money on an ad or bought their name or met them at an event.
Mallory Lee · 0:51
If you have a good definition of ICP and buyer personas, high-intent leads should convert at an extremely high rate. If they don't, your definition is bad.
Eddie Reynolds · 11:19
7.45 percent of prospects in a cold calling campaign with personalized outreach were converted. Compare that to 0.05 percent with spray and pray.
Eddie Reynolds · 5:58
When some people are celebrating hitting MQL targets and other people are rolling their eyes because they have no pipeline, that's how you know your go-to-market needs a lot of work.
Mallory Lee · 24:35
Common questions from this episode
What is wrong with the traditional MQL process?
Traditional MQL definitions often capture low-quality leads like Zoom Info downloads or random white paper downloads with no buying signal. This creates a disconnect where marketing celebrates hitting MQL targets while sales has no useful pipeline, and conversion rates are unsustainably low (often 0.01-0.05%).
Should high-intent inbound leads go to SDRs or account executives?
High-intent leads that fit your ICP and buyer personas should be routed directly to experienced AEs or placed on their calendar immediately, not mixed in with 99 other unqualified downloads. These leads convert at 20-30%+ and deserve your best resources.
How do I know if my ICP and buyer persona definitions are good?
If leads matching your ICP and buyer personas are not converting at a significantly higher rate than others, your definition is too broad. Move beyond industry and headcount; add technographics, intent signals, and buying-committee dynamics.
Why is account-based scoring better than individual lead scoring?
A single person hitting a pricing page once matters less than five people from the same company engaging. Account-level scoring reveals buying-committee momentum and is a stronger conversion indicator in B2B.
Should I ignore leads outside my ICP if they raise their hand?
Route them to a lower-cost resource or nurture stream. You never know if they will move to an ICP company or if market conditions change. But don't inundate your AEs with every hand-raiser; be disciplined about where premium resources focus.
How do I start fixing my lead qualification process right now?
Calculate conversion rates for different lead segments (high-intent ICP, pricing-page hitters, outbound vs. inbound). Establish a benchmark. Then segment further, compare inbound to outbound, and reallocate resources to what converts best. Iterate weekly.
SEO meta description
Mallory Lee reveals how to optimize lead qualification and routing to improve CAC and close rates, moving beyond the broken MQL process.
Target keywords
lead qualification
lead routing
MQL process
ICP definition
buyer personas
account-based scoring
high-intent leads
conversion rates
CAC reduction
RevOps
Mallory Lee
sales and marketing alignment
Read the complete conversation
Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly cleaned. Expand to read or search inside.
Read the full transcript · 45 KB · Mallory Lee
SPEAKER_00Welcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAll right, welcome to another RevOps Live. Wait, I keep saying RevOps Live. Another episode of RevOps Corner. I'm here with Mallory Lee, our SVP of RevOps Strategy. Mallory, thanks for joining me today. Hello, good to join. So today we're going to follow a little bit different format.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOver the past number of months, we've been doing interviews with some go-to-market experts, investors, CROs, et cetera. Today, we're going to talk about our own stuff, about a newsletter that we wrote. We're going to break this down and elaborate on it more, talking about lead qualification and routing. Mallory and I are going to go back and forth, sort of point by point in what we shared in our newsletter. You can read that if you want more information. But we're going to go deeper here in this podcast for those of you that want to spend probably about 30, 40 minutes with us getting deep into lead qualification routing. The reason we're doing this is because the problem that we're seeing again and again with companies, not the best companies, not the perfect companies, but the other 99% is that the MQL is often meaningless. Sometimes these leads are nothing more than contacts downloaded from Zoom Info. Other times there are folks that downloaded a white paper. We can't make heads or tails of it. There's a disconnect between marketing and sales. There's an unfocused, expensive strategy to acquire new customers that is unsustainable in today's market. And on top of that, we don't have a process that enables us to take the best leads, the ones that are actually going to convert into revenue and maximize our chance of converting those leads.
SPEAKER_04There's a lot of things that are broken here today.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo we're going to dive into it in a little bit more detail. Mallory, what gets you excited about this topic?
MALLORY LEEYou know what gets me excited about this topic is that these are people who, whether they've shown interest or not, they are a contact that we have somehow paid for. We either spent money on an ad to generate them, or we bought their name from a data provider like Apollo or Zoom Info, or we met them at an event that we paid a lot of money to be there at. What I love about qualification and routing is that it can be applied to all of those leads and contacts that you've already spent money on. So this is a way for us to reach back to our previous investments and get more out of them to drive efficiency instead of just making changes that are only going to help us on a go forward basis.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo interesting. And it sounds like such a perspective from somebody with a strong background in marketing. Me as the sales guy here, I'm sitting here thinking like, I don't care how much we spent
EDDIE REYNOLDSon leads. I want to close some deals. I want to hit quota. I want my bonus. As a revenue leader, I want to hit my target. I don't care what we spent last year on our marketing campaigns and on the leads we downloaded
EDDIE REYNOLDSfrom Zoom Info. I just want to close some deals.
SPEAKER_13Yep. That's why you need both of us to make it work.
EDDIE REYNOLDSExactly. All right. So let's talk about some stats here.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo part of where I'm coming from with this is that I recently met somebody, and this is not an uncommon example, where he shared with me these 5,000 or 500,000 leads. I think it was 500,000 leads that they had accumulated across the organization, which included nothing more than people downloaded from Zoom Info. People that are nothing more than a name and an email and a phone number. All right. What do we do with these 500,000 leads? Where do we start? Then there's other companies that don't make that mistake. I'm really not a big fan of this, but we still have all these MQLs in our database. Some of them are converting at 0.01%. And so let's share some other stats here. This really resonated with me when I saw 30 Minutes to President's Club share some stats, which I think was originally from an outreach study, that 7.45% of the prospects in a cold calling campaign that involved personalized outreach were being converted. Meaning that if you get a hundred contacts on a list and you do all the right things and personalize your outreach, you can convert 7.45% of them. That blew my mind when you compare that to the unfocused strategy of sort of spraying and praying. And now we are converting 0.05% or something like that. It's such an incredibly small number, right? So when we think about our addressable market and how many organizations and people we can go after and what those organizations are worth and how we prioritize them, and we have the opportunity to have a 7% conversion rate or a sub 1% conversion rate, then wouldn't it stand to reason that we want to identify the absolute best folks to go after? And now whether that's sort of an outbound strategy that we talk about, like we're going to download contacts from Zoom info and run them through a sequence or a cadence, or whether that's inbound, and I use air quotes here, in the sense that they downloaded a white paper and they don't want to talk to us and we're going to hit them with 5, 10, 15 somewhat cold sales activities to try to convert them into a meeting. It's a lot of work, whether we're talking inbound or outbound, and we need to think about how we focus our energies to maximize our conversion rates and also how we do that in a way that is sustainable from a CAC perspective, right? Yeah, and I think the reason you so often see people deploying both strategies is because
MALLORY LEEthere's an aspect of customer fit and there's an aspect of customer need. The people who have a strong need, they're the ones that are going to be coming to you. They're the ones that are filling out the forms on your website, asking for a demo, and you know that that need is there. They want to talk to you. That's why most of the time when you do a cost of acquisition analysis, your inbound channels are so much more efficient because those people say yes to getting on the phone a lot more often. Now, how many ads did you have to serve to get that person? It could be tons because the ad is not necessarily shown to only the people who are a good fit. So I might be showing a thousand ad impressions and not all of them are a good fit, but the ones who have a need are going to come in. The inverse is when we're doing our outbound messaging, we have a much higher propensity to know that they're a good fit. And then we're rolling the dice to see if they have a current need right now. Or if we're really good at what we do, we're getting that need identified and created. And we're trying to spur them into having a need, even if they didn't have one that they knew about. So if you are taking your shortcut to something that is a good fit and you can grade it and you can see and score and say, okay, this is a good fit account. Let's go generate that need. You're already in a much more focused place. And so it doesn't surprise me that if you do that personalization, you can get up above that benchmark of where you would expect your conversion to be.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. And if you don't do that personalization and you're getting a 0.5% conversion rate versus a 7.5% conversion rate, then by a factor of 15, if I'm doing the math in my head correctly, you are missing 14 out of 15 of those potential great accounts. If you can somehow identify the best possible accounts just by nature of the fact that you're going for quantity over quality, you're missing 14 out of 15 of those amazing accounts. And instead, you're spending all this time and money to go and land meetings with folks that are far outside of your perfect customer. So one of the places I want to start here is with a target conversion rate, thinking about what percentage of our quote unquote leads should convert to pipeline and revenue. The reason that I want to think about it this way is because this is another way of looking at our cost of acquisition, right? You have to have a certain conversion rate in order to have a certain CAC. Another way to look at this is comparing inbound and outbound. Now you say, Mallory, that in your experience, inbound is more efficient. And I would argue it should be, because if I can make a thousand cold calls and generate X dollars of revenue, and that is more dollars of revenue than I can generate by making a thousand calls to quote unquote inbound leads,
SPEAKER_18then why in the world would I want to call inbound leads?
SPEAKER_27Because there's not enough outbound people with a need right now. So to overall incrementally grow, most people need both.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI don't disagree with you there conceptually. What I'm saying is that let's say that we have an outbound team and an inbound team, and what we find is that for every thousand calls or every day or every month that each rep is working those accounts, they're generating more pipeline, which results in more closed revenue. And then we've got an inbound team doing essentially the same activity. They're calling the white paper downloads, et cetera, and they're converting to less revenue. And now we've got budgets to hire yet another SDR. Which team do we want to put that SDR on? Sounds like outbound to me. Now let's reverse engineer this a little bit. Okay. We don't have budget for another SDR, but we know that our outbound team is producing more than our inbound team. Wouldn't it make sense to take one of those inbound SDRs and shift them over to outbound?
MALLORY LEEI think it could. I mean, it's a balancing act, right? You've got to serve the market that is interested in your category and you have to be targeted in the way you go get the top accounts that you want to have as customers.
MALLORY LEEFor any given 50 accounts that you put on your target list, you know, 20 of them are stuck in a contract with your competitor. So take that 20 off the top and go focus on the other 30. Out of that 30, maybe 7% of them are going to be ready to meet with you or they're going to have a need or they're going to want to take the call.
SPEAKER_35If that number is enough to satisfy your sales team and your capacity and the things that you need to fill the funnel with, then that's great.
MALLORY LEEI think in my experience, though, what we find is that there's never enough demand out there to satisfy these ambitious growth targets that we have. And we don't want to accidentally miss out on what else is out there in the market that might not be on our target list. And so when you have people knocking on your door and saying, hey, I want a demo of your software, it's really hard to not necessarily invest the resources behind that. So I think we want to take care of those inbound people, but we have to have a mechanism to help us see how much of the inbound is actually a great fit for our business and how much of it is maybe outside the ICP.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And so let's start by separating out these high intent leads, these hand raisers, so to speak. I think that if somebody is in your ICP and your buyer personas and they raise their hand and say, I want to speak to sales, then you should have an extremely high conversion rate.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIf you don't, then you have a poor definition of ICP and buyer personas by definition, right? Like your ICP and your buyer personas are defined by the people that are going to convert into customers at the highest rate. So if they're not doing that, then you have a bad definition. If you have a good definition, then you separate those out and that should be priority number one for every single revenue team, right?
MALLORY LEEYep. And I think what I'm hearing you say is like, take that amazing rate of your best scenario and then put some standard deviations in place where you say, okay, two standard deviations below this.
MALLORY LEEIt's not worth the conversion rate. Because the conversion rate is so low that it would be better for us to take that time and pour it into outbound where we know the better fits are. Is that kind of what you mean?
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's exactly what I'm saying, right? So let's say that, for example, we are getting white paper downloads and that hits a score of 100 from marketing managers in manufacturing companies, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd we look at that and we say, these leads are converting at 0.01%, meaning that if I can do the math in my head, for every 10,000 leads, one of them turns into a customer. All right. That is massively expensive to have a bunch of SDRs calling these 10,000 leads. And if we're charging $50,000 ARR, I can't do that math in my head, but I'm thinking that doesn't add up. I'm thinking we're losing our shirts having SDRs call that lead. So now we take a look at it and we say, you know what? Why don't we have those SDRs make outbound calls to CFOs of tech companies? And I'm just imagining this scenario where CFOs of tech companies are our perfect ICP and buyer personas and marketing managers and manufacturing companies are far outside of that. Or there's some other signal that we can use to indicate that we have a much, much better chance to convert that outbound lead than that inbound lead. And so now we're pushing ourselves above a threshold where it is financially sustainable to pay a rep to call somebody. When we talk about our inbound leads, sorry, our high intent leads, people raise their hand saying, I want to talk to sales. Well, as far as I'm concerned, if they fit into our ICP and buyer personas, then we should just take that call. Like there's no cost to setting that call up. That's not already a sunk cost. We don't have to pay an SDR to chase them down.
MALLORY LEEI really agree.
MALLORY LEEAnd that's why the inbound process just goes faster because in theory, there's less convincing needed to get them on the phone. But I've said this a lot, whether it's, you know, somebody starting a free trial and you have a PLG motion or it's someone who's kicking the tires on your website or they come meet you at a booth. Like all leads can kind of just be treated as quote unquote equal, as long as you're scoring their fit and their engagement. And you can see these two dimensions and you can say, you are a great fit for us. And you're really interested in us. You are fast tracked to the sales team immediately. You are not a great fit for us, but you're really interested. I do need someone to like acknowledge your existence and tell you, Hey, we're not really the best fit for you. Here's a partner you can talk to, right? You don't want to ignore those people, but if you're a low fit and low interest and you just exist in the database because you're just a random name, don't put any resources there. It doesn't matter where they came from or how they got to where they are. We just want to look at the merits of the person right in front of us and then decide what's the best course of action to qualify and route that person.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that's exactly where I'm going with this, right? And so I think we want to separate these high intent leads, these hand raisers, and we want to say, okay, for the folks that fit our ICP and buyer personas, we want to route these to the most experienced sales rep that can handle that lead flow.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo typically what organizations do is they route these leads to their inbound SDRs, and oftentimes these are the least experienced people in the entire company. I mean, you could have a CSM talk to them and they'd probably be more experienced at the pain points that these folks are facing and the potential solutions than the person that was just hired last month fresh out of college, right? I'm not trying to knock inbound SDRs, but if I want people to learn and grow, I don't want them learning and growing on the people that are raising their hand and saying, I have such a burning need. I want to talk to sales. They're our best leads. So if we have an experienced senior account executive that can handle it, why would we not route that directly to them or use Calendly or Chili Piper and put it on their calendar and get that person in front of an experienced sales rep as fast as humanly possible?
MALLORY LEEYeah, yeah, it's a great point. I have seen companies that are doing this more frequently. We used to have these predefined rules of inbound goes to the SDR and outbound goes to the BDR and you're mapped to this territory and you call here and you call here.
MALLORY LEEBut, you know, as you take a step back and think about just putting the best resources in front of the right people, I think you end up exactly with what you're talking about, which is get the analysis done. If you have someone who's a good fit and they're interested, skip as many steps as you can to get them into the hands of a salesperson because they're pre-qualified enough where we don't need to spend the extra steps interviewing them up front. Most of the time these days when someone finally goes and fills out the requested demo form, they are ready to talk to someone fast. And so if we know enough about who they are, we should honor that and we should get them to sales as fast as we can. Now, what that means is that as a management team, we need to have a little bit of bandwidth available for our reps to be able to take those calls, because the worst thing you can do is route it to the rep and then they don't see it or they don't follow up fast enough or they don't make that person feel as important as they actually are. And I know a lot of people who say, well, everyone goes to the inbound SDR because I can be 100% sure they're going to get followed up with quickly. And so there are sales reps out there who are getting these golden leads, but maybe due to, you know, bad system, bad process, they don't find them as fast as they're supposed to. So you really have to help them get to that last mile of like the fast follow up if you're going to do this model.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, and I think that's exactly where I'm trying to go with this conversation, because if you take that high intent lead and you mix it in with 99 other white paper downloads, and then you surface that up in a list view in Salesforce, and you expect a busy senior account executive to filter through that and find that, that's not going to happen.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut if you send an email to an account executive or a Slack message or there's a dashboard, whatever, in Salesforce, and it says, we have this hot lead ICP buyer persona once a meeting. And I'm speaking from personal experience, I personally get all of these leads that come off of our website, with the only exception that we do have some system in Calendly, which I didn't set up, Jerry set it up, so that you, Mallory, and Jerry will take these calls if it won't fit on my calendar. But we are literally routing these leads to the most experienced people in our organization, and it's not a waste of our time. These are converting at 20, 30% because these are people in our ICP and buyer personas that are asking to speak with us. Like, what could be more valuable than that?
MALLORY LEEI mean, I don't think anyone sets out to overlook them, obviously. It's never on purpose, but I've spoken with companies who told me that they inadvertently misplaced 40,000 leads, literally just misplaced them. And it's because our systems aren't talking to each other correctly. We don't have the right alerts in place. We don't have a data model that allows us to see things come in the front door and, you know, leave through the side door, like get to the finish line.
MALLORY LEEAnd so, you know, that can cause a lot of hiccups in the way that you want to surface these things and respond quickly.
MALLORY LEEAnd we've all seen the stats about the more quickly you follow up, the better propensity you have to get that person on the phone. And the first vendor to respond always gets the deal. You know, we know these like adages of how fast you have to be. And some people are just depending on sales reps to like read someone's mind that there is this like amazing lead there that they need to go chase down. When really, you know, we should be putting the bells and whistles in place to alert them.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And I mean, this is something I experienced as an AE at Salesforce. I would get one of these maybe.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd yes, to be clear, it did go through an inbound SDR. But I would get these leads, if I was lucky, maybe two, three, four times a month. So you think about like all the time I'm spending all day, every day trying to hit quota. And I get two or four of these a month. I'm jumping on this with every ounce of energy that I have, right? Yeah. Now, if you're giving me 100 white paper downloads per day, that completely changes the scenario. And I think that that's why I want to separate these out and say, okay, well, once we have to pick up the phone, I, as a senior AE, I'm putting myself back in my shoes 10 years ago at Salesforce. I don't have time to call 100 white paper downloads. I've got more promising prospects. I've got pipeline to follow up with. And this is why we have SDRs, right?
SPEAKER_17But now it costs significant money to call them 5, 10, 15 times.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd that's where I want to look at the conversion rates. And I want to compare inbound to outbound. Or maybe we have an account-based motion, which we'll get into in a moment. And we look at what level of effort does it take to convert these leads? What is the total conversion rate across our entire inbound or outbound or all of our leads if we separate out the high intent? Because the problem is, is if we've got, like, these high intent leads that are making up, like, 90% of our closed one revenue, then we're not seeing the problems that exist with the other 99.9% of leads that are only making up 10% of our revenue. Maybe the cost of acquisition is too high. Then I think that we should try to break this down even further. And I'll give you a tangible example. I interviewed Channing Ferrer, who ran sales ops at HubSpot. And he said that they did a similar exercise where they bucketed their leads into the high intent we talked about, the MQLs, so to speak, the people that hit a certain score. And then this bucket in the middle where they hit the pricing page, like, multiple times. I think it was three times. And they found that this bucket in the middle of the pricing page, those would convert. They could call those folks and they could convert them into closed one revenue at a reasonable rate. But every other MQL, they realized they weren't worth calling because HubSpot had this massive marketing engine with all these MQLs doing what HubSpot says everyone should do, creating these leads that weren't even worth the time of the sales reps to chase down.
MALLORY LEEYeah, and I think in those examples, you either want to deploy a much more affordable resource, even if it's like an intern, right, to go mine that list and look for the needle in the haystack that could be there. Or you're simply waiting and you're nurturing them and you're waiting for them to hit the pricing page because if they're a good lead, who's interested, who's learning, then maybe they still do hit that pricing page a few weeks later. And that's your signal, right? So finding those signals that are applicable and studying the conversion rates based on that, I agree, is a great way to go to figure out where you deploy resources and how fast you go after those leads.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, and then I think this kicks back to marketing, right? So if we're not holding marketing accountable for an MQL goal, if we're saying, hey, your job is to generate revenue and qualified pipeline, then now we bring this back to marketing and say, okay, these leads are not ready for sales to call them. These leads, whatever you want to call them, these need nurturing from marketing. So what can you do on our website? What can you do in our email nurturing sequences? What can you do as marketers to try to get these folks across the line? And that to me is where you get the real ROI of marketing by focusing marketing's energy on thinking, how do we get these folks ready to talk to sales?
MALLORY LEEI think that the for salespeople, it's pretty easy to set the goals, right?
MALLORY LEEWe know the quota. We know the ASP. We know the number of deals. We've got kickers. It's pretty clear. Setting goals and figuring out how to incentivize marketing is entirely different. And, you know, back in the day, I was dedicated to marketing as a marketing ops analyst, and I would have marketers coming to me lobbying to change a lead source on an opportunity because that's how they were going to get paid. And it had nothing to do with, are we going to win the deal? Are we not going to win the deal? They needed to be the lead source. And so I saw how silly that was, and I realized for marketers, it's different. Like, we have to be able to measure so many different things. We have to understand the conversion through the funnel from a variety of different channels and see how those compare to each other. And we have to be focused on generating revenue. We have to have the same goal where revenue is the number one priority. When you have marketing teams that are purely focused on generating MQLs, and that's their sole metric that they define success by, it's a recipe for trouble because, like you said, if your MQL definition is way off, then you've got marketing over here celebrating, shouting from the rooftops. We hit our target. And then you've got a bunch of hungry sales reps with not enough pipeline who are rolling their eyes, and they're like, okay, well, I don't have anything to go sell. And I've seen that a lot of times where it's just completely mismatched, and that's one way that you know that your go-to-market needs a lot of work is when some people are celebrating and other people are not.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's such a great point. That's such a great point. So we've talked about setting a target conversion rate or having some idea of what your CAC is or how these leads should convert, whether it's working or whether it's not, and sort of backing off of that and deciding at what point in time a lead should just continue to stay in marketing before it's handed over to any type of sales.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe talked a little bit about defining ICP and personas. Let's go deeper into how to define ICP and personas. One of the biggest problems that I see with companies is that oftentimes it's nothing more than industry, revenue, and or headcount, and title. And that's where we stop. So we sell to B2B SaaS companies between $100 million and $10 billion of revenue in North America, and we sell to CXOs. And that's it. To me, that's woefully insufficient because that represents a collection of companies that are both really great and really bad to try to sell to because we're not going deep enough. We're casting the net too wide, and we're focusing our resources. We're not focusing our resources on the best possible accounts.
MALLORY LEEYeah. This is tough because there's only so much publicly available information, right? And for private companies, there is even less. So I think I understand why people get into this trap of being like very high level with their definitions because it is what allows them to use a third-party tool to analyze the total addressable market and state what it is.
SPEAKER_60And I think you and I have both been part of enough investor meetings where if you're going to raise money, you want your TAM to be as big as possible, right?
MALLORY LEESo you have a broad definition there. The mistake is when we never drill in deeper than that, and we never try to understand what is it that makes these people tick? What needs do they have? Is there any way that I can track what that need is? Maybe it's the technology they use on their website. Obviously, for us, most of our clients are using either Salesforce or HubSpot. We can go buy that information. I can tell you how many CROs in North America use Salesforce. Some of those things, you've got to work really hard to find the signal, but I agree it's absolutely worth it to get a little bit deeper to get that more targeted definition.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, and I think that there's a big difference between going to an investor meeting and saying this is our total addressable market and saying this is where we want our salespeople to focus their time.
EDDIE REYNOLDSTotal addressable market talks about sort of like the growth potential, where this company could be. If we have a 35% market share, what is the denominator there? This is a good example of this where pretty much any company on earth that's B2B and has salespeople can use Salesforce, as well as a lot of companies that aren't. When I was at Salesforce, I covered every industry under the sun with a couple exceptions that were carved out as dedicated industries. Everything you can imagine. At the end of the day, though, where did I focus my energies? On high growth B2B SaaS companies. Because we all knew that those are the folks that buy from us the most. Now, if somebody, I remember I had this deal with this like air conditioning installation company, and that came inbound. And so, sure, like, I'm going to jump on that. It had the right revenue. It had the right number of people, et cetera. I'm going to try to close that deal. But I'm not calling those folks outbound.
MALLORY LEEYeah, I'm with you. I have worked with a few friends in the past who joked about targeting boring buys. And it sounds offensive, like, on the face of it. But it was actually this concept of working B2B companies that were not necessarily high growth tech. They were still high revenue. They were still big, complicated, complex companies. But they were not in technology. And so people didn't gravitate towards them at the same rate. And we actually found some pretty good success converting those because they just weren't so saturated. And so I think whatever it is, you've got to, like, find this angle where you can get a little bit more detailed in who you want to go after. And then we've got to work with our partners in product marketing and product to make sure the value prop is there. The more targeted we are on who we're going after, the more we can tailor that messaging, the features in the product, the way we name things and talk to people. So, you know, you want to get down to that level of detail as often as you can.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I don't mean to insinuate that high growth tech is the ICP for every company. It just happened to be, like, when I was trying to sell Salesforce at the time I was selling it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd it happens to be what we focus on in our business. But, you know, I, like, we used to do some work in commercial real estate. And we'd run into this company called Yardi. And I remember I was trying to explain this to a Salesforce rep. They're like, we're Salesforce. We're the big 800-pound grill. We have a 35% market share. I'm like, yeah, well, Yardi has, like, a 70% market share in the property management industry. I know you've never heard of them, but they absolutely own that industry.
SPEAKER_20I think just defining that and then using it is the important thing, right?
MALLORY LEELike, of course, it'll change over time. Of course, things go in and out of style. But if you have an ICP, you've got to leverage that. And you have to either grade or score or evaluate those leads and contacts in your system against that because it'll help you prioritize. And one thing I love about inbound marketing is that it leaves that door open to other industries who might be starting to take notice of who you are in your category. And they weren't previously in your ICP. But if last month you all of a sudden got 10 universities that came inbound in a row and they're starting to adopt the same, you know, techniques as these B2B growth companies, it's like, okay, great. We see an opportunity in education here. They're coming and knocking on our door. We didn't think they were part of our ICP, but let's explore this and see if something's there.
SPEAKER_56That's a great way to use inbound as a testing ground for, like, new industries, too.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And I would even also break it up with, like, what RevOps can do and what the sales rep should be doing manually, right? So there's sort of this line in the sand where, you know, we can get the firmographic information, like what industry they're in, what their revenue is, et cetera.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe can get the technographic information, what tools they're using. We can buy third-party intent. We can look at our own first-party intent, meaning the engagement with marketing. We can take all this data, and we can aggregate it, and we can try to identify the best accounts for our reps to go after. However, there comes a point in time where we have to pass that baton to sales, and they need to do one-to-one account research. They see all this, and then they go to the website, and they realize, wow, this is a shit website that hasn't been updated in 10 years. Maybe that's a bad thing. Maybe that's a great thing. But that is something that you're not going to identify in RevOps, but that doesn't mean it's not important for the rep. And so I think what we want to do in RevOps is try to lighten the load and say, hey, AE, SDR, you don't need to do all this manual work that we can do for you. But now we've called the list down as much as we can. Now it's time for you to go do your account research, and you might disqualify this lead or move it out of your outbound sequence because you immediately identify that this is not going to be a good prospect.
MALLORY LEEAnd I think to bring it home, like when you're assigning just every single lead to one team and potentially inundating them with all kinds of variety, they might not be spending the time researching the right ones. And so it really is just about deploying those resources in the smartest way so that the account research time that an AE spends, we know it's more expensive than the account research time that an SDR spends. So let's put the sure thing accounts to get researched by the AE where we already know enough to say, like, this is going to be a good fit. The company that we've never heard of before, I have a good story about this. When I worked at ExactTarget, we had an inbound lead, little company we had never heard of before. They were really interested in us and their name was Groupon. And all of a sudden, you know, we signed them up when they were really small and they became our biggest customer quickly because that business just absolutely exploded. So had we totally ignored that Groupon lead, we would have missed out on that opportunity. But at the time, they didn't look like a great lead for us. So, you know, we kind of have to, like, look at that appropriately and say, OK, this doesn't look like it's a good lead. Do we want to completely ignore it forever? Probably not because they're interested. So let's have a lower cost resource. Go assess that. Figure it out. We want to follow up with them. People who are raising their hand, everybody deserves a callback, right? And you never know. Your next Groupon could be in there. So I think it's something that you just have to, like, scale it according to how sure you are.
SPEAKER_56And that's the risk assessment.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYep. I think that's a great point. And this brings us into lead scoring. And because we've only got eight minutes left, I'm going to even jump ahead into account scoring. You and I have talked about this a lot offline.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'm not going to attempt on this podcast to try to explain to people in detail how you do a lead score. But if anybody's listening to this and they're not familiar, you basically just take different points, like they downloaded a white paper, they hit the pricing page, you assign some points to it, it adds up to a score. And once the score is high enough, it becomes qualified and gets passed over to sales. Where I think this falls short is not looking at this holistically across an entire account. What would you rather talk to? A company where one person has hit the pricing page and downloaded a white paper or a company where every executive in the organization has done that?
MALLORY LEEYeah, that's a great point. Even in a PLG motion, product-led growth, like I came from at Nihilus, where we had a free trial, we had to understand how many of the same, how many people from the same company started a trial? Because that gave us an indication of a buying committee. And so, you know, account-based marketing is a buzzword. But at the end of the day, you have to be able to understand both. You're selling to humans. You've got to understand what humans care about and what they are doing individually as they engage with you. But if you're in a B2B model, they all work at a company. And we have to have a full view of that buying committee. So, like you're saying, taking those individual scores and then tabulating them in some way to figure out a broader account engagement is really important. And then the next step is, how do we look at this account? Do we have five people interested from an account that's totally outside of our ICP? Or are they in our ICP? And we think they're a great fit and it's a hot lead and we need to get the account team on it right away.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, and this, I think, is a point of confusion that I personally have. You know, if the account is not in your ICP, I tend to lean towards just saying, well, look, like, this is just not qualified.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYour score is zero. In our example, we sell to B2B SaaS companies and companies that have, you know, revenue teams that operate like a B2B SaaS company so that we can do our best work. If a manufacturing company came and filled out a form, I guess, to your point, you're right. I'd probably talk to them. But if I was trying to systematize this more, I just would say, like, we don't even call them. Like, just send them an email and say, I'm sorry, you're not a fit. And I've had people do this to me. I think you send them an email and, well, you know, I think you get in touch with them, right?
MALLORY LEEYou find out what the question is or what the need is. Do you invest as much time? No. Maybe it's a triggered email. Maybe it's something that, you know, isn't as big of a lift. But if there is some kind of reason that these people are reaching out to you and it's multiple people from the same manufacturing company, then do you get curious?
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's such an interesting question for me because, like, I lean more towards no all the time just because now we're stretching resources.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe don't have the marketing collateral for them. We land the deal and now CS is struggling to, like, try to serve them. I did this a couple of times as a prospect. I remember I reached out to Emily Kramer, who is a marketing thought leader that I really admire. And I was like, hey, could you maybe help us? And, like, just quick LinkedIn DM. Sorry, you're not a B2B SaaS company. We don't work with – we only work with B2B SaaS. And for a second, I was just like, oh, well, fuck you then. But then there was another part of it that was like, man, I respect that. You are laser focused on where you play best and you're not going to try to, like, fumble through or trying to help our professional services organization modify everything you've learned and everything that you do to fit our needs. And then now it's just difficult on both of us.
SPEAKER_30Yeah, I see both sides of it.
MALLORY LEEI mean, if you start to stack up, like, 10 different manufacturing companies that are starting to knock on the door, maybe you think about it again. But you have to have, you know, a plan for finite resources and how they get deployed. My thing is, like, I still want those people in the CRM. I still want to score their engagement. Their engagement could be off the charts. They could open every newsletter we send 18 times. But their account, the fact that they're a manufacturer, their company, that's the thing that has a lower fit score. So it's really kind of two planes that you have to be able to measure. Because what if the CRO from that manufacturing company, all of a sudden, next month, he works at, you know, Gong. We want to talk to Gong, right? So now we've got an advocate, a fan who likes us, who's moving to a company that's in our ICP. That's the reason why I think you never ignore those people. You never let them go. You always want to know who they are because people don't work at the same place forever either.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAt the end of the day, it just comes down to an organizational decision of, like, where do we focus our resources? What is our ICP? What are our buyer personas?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWho will we take calls with? Who will we chase down? Who will we not chase down? And this goes back to the thing that we're always preaching of documenting this out and deciding, like, where's the line in the sand? And I think, to your point, that changes over time. Your ICP can evolve. Your buyer personas can evolve, for sure. I mean, Salesforce is another great example. They started off selling to salespeople. And by the time you and I worked there, they were trying to be everything to everybody on any revenue team. Sales, marketing, CS, you know, the tech team. I mean, heck, like, they built a platform for software developers on Heroku, which I still don't understand what it does. You know, like, these things evolve, right?
SPEAKER_74What's that? It does.
MALLORY LEEYeah, I said Heroku is out of both of our scopes. But you're exactly right. Like, things change. And so what that means to me as an operator is, like, let's just get the systems talking to each other. Let's get the data flowing. And let's have visibility so that anything becomes possible. If you decide to never score anyone who comes from a manufacturing company, or if you somehow just delete that person, or if they're disconnected from all the different data sources that are important, you might not see the fact that they move to a new company that matters. So for me, it's like just having visibility into everything so you can do what you need to do.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLove it. All right. So we're going to leave our audience with a little exercise. So you're listening to this and you're thinking, wow, like, our leads are a mess.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe've got to do something. What can we do? Right now, quickly, maybe not so quickly, but reasonably quickly. I think you start by thinking about the conversion rate, whether that's having a conversation with finance, measuring the conversion rate, comparing inbound to outbound. Have a sense of what these leads need to convert to in order for this to make sense for you to continue to have your reps calling down on these people, not talking about high intent leads. So take those leads out, right? Filter out the leads that are not ICP and buyer persona and just look at the ICP buyer persona leads that have a certain score and figure out, are these converting at a sufficient rate? Then start to segment those leads by different types. Think about what might work in your business. They hit the pricing page three times, or they're a CXO instead of somebody more junior, this, that, or the other. And start to look at what conversion rates look like with different buckets of leads so that you can try to understand what's working in your marketing and sales engine and what's not. And then if you're not already doing this, compare the inbound to the outbound. And if your outbound efforts are yielding a much higher conversion, think about maybe reallocating resources and come back to this after having a conversation with leadership on what your definition of a qualified lead is. What should be required for you to pay money for sales reps to chase down these leads? That's my thought. Any parting thoughts for you, Mallory?
MALLORY LEENo, I love it. I love the idea of finding that benchmark of what converts really well and then consciously deciding we're willing to accept four points lower than this or 10 points lower than this.
MALLORY LEEUse your own data as that anchor because, as we've talked about in a totally different newsletter, benchmarks can be tricky. So you sometimes need to use your own metrics as your benchmark.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. And I think it's a constant iteration, right? You set that account score and then you surface all these leads and you hand them to salespeople and then salespeople say, I call all these leads and these were worthless.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOkay, cool. This isn't set it and forget it. You keep iterating until you get to the point that salespeople are saying, yeah, we're calling these leads and they're converting and everybody's happy.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then guess what? The market's going to change. We're going to have a recession and we're going to have to redo it all over again. But that is the nature of go to market, right?
SPEAKER_78That's why we still have jobs.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYep. Well, cool, Mallory.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThis was fun. If anybody wants more information, you can check out our newsletter. I'm sure we'll put some links in the show notes and we'll see you guys on the podcast next week.
SPEAKER_79All right. Thanks. Bye-bye.
