About this episode
This episode of RevOps Live features Eddie Reynolds (Founder CEO) and Joel Arnold (VP of RevOps) at Union Square Consulting, breaking down the essential mechanics of sales and marketing alignment. Both are operators steeped in revenue operations strategy, with deep experience across sales, marketing operations, and go-to-market infrastructure. The conversation cuts through the noise that typically surrounds alignment discussions and focuses on what actually moves the needle.
The core insight: people have not changed how they buy; only the technology has changed. This reframe matters enormously because it means your funnel structure, conversion mechanics, and buyer psychology remain constant even as attribution tools, channels, and touchpoints evolve. You're solving the same trust and validation problem humans have always solved—just with different tools available to them.
What follows is a tactical deep-dive into five mechanics that most RevOps practitioners get wrong or overlook: how to calculate true lead value by channel, why attribution models are simpler than you think (and why you shouldn't spend months perfecting them), how to measure outbound prospecting against marketing channels with equal rigor, the real weakness in MQL-centric thinking, and why hand-raisers demand a sub-minute response SLA. Each topic is grounded in data, painful examples, and the kind of operational honesty rare in marketing discourse. By episode end, listeners will have concrete formulas and decision frameworks to implement immediately—and permission to stop optimizing for vanity metrics.
What we cover in this episode
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2:30
How buying behavior actually works People's core buying process hasn't changed despite technological shifts; trust and validation remain the foundation.
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8:15
Lead value vs. MQL volume Move from volume targets to expected value per lead by channel, calculated by multiplying win rate by average deal size.
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15:45
Attribution models: keep it simple Avoid over-engineering; track first touch and last touch, then distribute credit evenly rather than pursue perfect attribution.
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24:30
Treating outbound as a measurable channel Apply the same conversion and ROI metrics to BDR outreach, SDR activity, and rep-sourced deals as you do marketing channels.
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32:00
The MQL threshold problem Lowering point thresholds to hit volume goals destroys lead quality; dial up ICP and persona focus instead of gaming metrics.
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38:45
Hand-raiser response SLA Respond to demo requests and meeting asks within one minute; buyers judge you on customer experience, and first responder wins 74% of deals.
The lines worth sharing
People have always and will always ingest a lot of different pieces of information, assessing the probability of each based on trustworthy sources or friends.
Joel Arnold · 5:30
The only thing about buying that has changed is the technology they use and the access to information they have, not the way they make decisions.
Eddie Reynolds · 10:15
You should understand all the different points throughout your funnel. Set shared goals around expected lead value by channel based on historical conversion rates and deal size.
Joel Arnold · 14:00
Don't get hung up on becoming an expert at a technology without understanding the bigger picture. Understand what new technology replaces the old and how to use it efficiently.
Joel Arnold · 9:45
Common questions from this episode
How do I calculate the expected value of a lead for sales and marketing alignment?
Multiply the win rate by average deal size for each channel. Work backwards from historical data: track conversion rates at each funnel stage (lead to meeting, meeting to opportunity, opportunity to close), then multiply all conversion rates together and apply average deal size.
What attribution model should I use for multi-touch customer journeys?
Track first and last touchpoints, then distribute credit evenly across all interactions. Avoid over-engineering W curves or V curves; they lack scientific basis. Multivariate regression is ideal only if you have massive historical datasets and can wait multiple sales cycles.
Should I measure BDR and outbound prospecting the same way as marketing channels?
Yes. Treat outbound as a discrete channel and track response rates, meeting rates, and conversion to close for each SDR or BDR. Compare ROI per dollar spent on outbound prospecting against marketing channels to optimize where to invest next headcount or budget.
Why is MQL volume a bad metric for marketing performance?
MQL volume incentivizes lowering point thresholds to hit quotas, which floods sales with low-quality leads. Focus instead on lead quality and total lead value generated, which accounts for both volume and conversion likelihood.
How fast should I respond to demo requests and hand-raisers?
Target a one-minute response SLA with a thoughtful, non-templated reply. First responder wins 74% of competitive deals. Buyers at hand-raiser stage are already in active evaluation and judge you on customer experience, not just product features.
How do I handle dark funnel channels like podcasts that I can't track with cookies?
Ask prospective customers directly during qualification calls and on website forms: How did you hear about us? Use free-text fields (not dropdowns) to let them answer naturally, then classify and aggregate the data. Triangulate with sales and marketing attribution data.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds and Joel Arnold break down sales-marketing alignment mechanics: lead value by channel, simple attribution models, and why response speed to hand-raisers matters most.
Target keywords
sales and marketing alignment
lead value calculation
RevOps metrics
attribution model
MQL vs. lead quality
BDR productivity metrics
hand-raiser response time
dark funnel marketing
expected lead value
demand generation ROI
Union Square Consulting
RevOps Live
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EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome 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. Welcome to RevOps Live number 21 on sales and marketing alignment, where to spend your time in marketing. And we're going to share basic tactics in this episode on things to think about having a big impact and achieving sales and marketing alignment quickly. Joel, our VP of RevOps is joining me today. Why should people listen today, Joel?
OTHER GUESTWell, today's going to be really tactical, almost like a lightning round, sort of a format or an FAQ. I have found that people spend a lot of time and effort on things, particularly in the marketing world, that really there are some limitations to, and I would argue maybe they shouldn't spend so much time on those. But there are also small things that can have a big impact that I think people miss or sort of underdeveloped. And so we're going to try and touch on a lot of those things today, trying to get that sales and marketing alignment that we're looking for, and then just marketing fundamentals to begin with. And yeah, I think that's hopefully useful for a lot of people.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAwesome. Obviously, our audience are RevOps practitioners and revenue leaders and CEOs that are trying to figure out how to get more juice out of their revenue engine. And so I think, if I understand what you want to go over today, Joel, the purpose here is to really help folks in RevOps think about how do we align sales and marketing and how do we identify what's working and what's not in terms of generating demand for the revenue engine and some specific tactics to go into to improve the performance there across the board? Yeah, some of it's pure marketing, some of
OTHER GUESTit's sales and marketing alignment. I think all of the things sort of blend together in my mind to a degree. And there's a hint of each and everything almost a yin and yang to it all. But the tactics that we're going to talk through today, we're going to go one by one through some things that I think people should think about. And yeah, we're going to lean, I guess, more on the marketing side with a little bit of alignment included.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYep. And I think I'll add to this is that a lot of folks that are working in revenue operations come from this more sales or sales ops background. I know that for me, that's the case. I had to spend a lot of time trying to wrap my head around what is marketing, what is marketing operations. And I constantly get questions from other people, like how they can make that transition. I also get the same question from marketing ops folks. How do I transition into RevOps and then learn the sales stuff? So it's like, you can't, no matter how you slice it, like you got a hill to climb here. But I think that some of the tactics that you're sharing today, Joel, are really valuable for folks that are in that position, as well as leadership that is just trying to figure this out. So anyway, without further ado, would you like to kick us off and cover your first point? Yeah, sure. So we're going to start broad and kind of narrow down as we go. And I want to start
OTHER GUESTwith the conversation around the way that people lie. I spent a couple of years in an e-commerce platform of software company, B2B typical sort of SaaS business model. But what they were selling was fundamental software that's powered the e-commerce ecosystem. And this was during the first, I would say, 18 months of a pandemic. And so during that period of time, you saw this huge, what people called a fundamental shift in the way that people buy, where people were starting to less, you know, go to in-store environments and spending less time, you know, talking to people or listening to radio ads and TV spots. I mean, they had already transitioned away from that to a degree, but this basically became worthless and people started going to things like their favorite online channel, like a G2 when they're sourcing B2B software. They're looking for a lot more ratings and reviews online, seeing what social media is out there and what people are saying, what influencers are into and sort of tracking celebrity endorsements through that method. And so it sort of looked like this fundamental shift. And you also saw different people at different age groups adopting sort of the digital method for coming to a sale. This is a long way of saying that there's a belief that people have bought differently over the last couple of years than they ever have before. And while there is some truth to that, really what we're looking at is people still buy the same way that they always have. It's just that the technology has changed. You know, just to describe it a little bit more, there's the way that people come to a decision in all cases is not usually they see one thing and then they like completely make a fully formed opinion about it or change their mind about that thing. People have always and will always ingest a lot of different pieces of information, sort of assessing the probability or likelihood of each of those pieces of information based on whether an authority figure or whether they're a trustworthy source or it's a friend, somebody that they sort of gauge like what they're telling me is probably true. You get enough of those probably trues together and you sort of make a decision like, okay, I believe that thing. The path to purchase is the same way and it always has been and always will be. It's just like, what are those things that you trust and place a lot of like, that's probably true in air quotes on it. And, you know, that'll start coalescing around a theme. So maybe instead of that celebrity endorsement on TV that you used to trust as someone who's in the market for buying something, maybe you trust that influencer even more. And so you lean on that influencer more. Regardless of all this, the way that people buy hasn't changed the technology has, and therefore that's why our roles are changing. I just want to make sure that people understand the complications and nuances to that, to that discussion. Yeah. I think that that's really important for revenue operations because we have this tendency
EDDIE REYNOLDSto want to measure everything. And some of these things can't be measured. And it's interesting that I see so many people saying this whole, like, well, it's changed the last few years. Well, I started my sales career in 2000. I paid my way through college and commission only sales. I don't talk about this a lot, but I sold cars, not the, the best connotation that comes with that industry. But even in 2000, people were walking into a dealership with their, you know, Edmonds or Kelly blue book report in hand, all the stats on the car, everything, and then asking these questions. And we would all talk about how the internet has changed sales. And so I just find it funny that people are saying this in 2023 that over the last few years, I'm like, what you mean is over the last few decades, but okay. At the end of the day, your point is valid in that people use the information they have available and the people in their network to validate and inform how they make purchasing decisions. And the only thing about that that has changed is the technology they use and the access to information that they have. And so the way that this is translated is that when the internet took off a couple of decades ago, the first thing people try to do is say, okay, we need to build a website and then we need to drive traffic to that website. How do you do that? You do that with SEO. You do that with keywords. So people started generating content so they could get folks to the website. And in doing that, they suddenly realized, wow, we used to have this problem in marketing where 50% of our marketing worked and 50% of it didn't, but we didn't know which it was. We had billboard ads and radio ads that we couldn't track anything. Now, suddenly we can cookie people's computers. We can gate our content behind forms and we can measure everything. We can know exactly how many people clicked on the ad on Google, went to our website, and then ultimately bought from us. The unfortunate reality though, is we've come full circle back. And we now have all of these online communities where people can talk to each other and ask for recommendations for products. Word of mouth advertising has never gone away. We have this whole concept of dark funnel and now it's very difficult to measure everything. And so what do we do in RevOps? How do we handle that issue that we have this bias towards, oh, we want to do pay-per-click and we want to do SEO and all of these things that we can measure when in fact, some of the most effective marketing tactics are the things that are hardest to measure. And I'm kind of getting ahead of myself here because I know you don't want to talk about that in more detail, but that's what I think is really interesting here. Yeah, it's great. And it speaks to the, like, this is a, I don't know if this is
OTHER GUESTobvious. Maybe it's obvious to the people out there that, that, you know, people haven't changed the way they buy, just the technology has changed. But like, how does that translate into actual tactical stuff that you would go and do? It's, it's, you just need to understand there's, people will always buy the same way. It's like where, what tech is available to you and how do you best use it to do the same things you've always done? So, the funnel is, you know, awareness, consideration, purchase intent, like that's, that's the way it goes. And so, you know, why, what technology is out there today, that's allowing you to, track things is going to change. It may go away. The way in which you generate content for sort of that education or middle funnel component of the process, it's, it's going to change, but that step is still going to be there. So, I would say as a RevOps practitioner, don't get hung up and become just an expert at a technology without understanding the bigger picture, but also try to get a grasp of what's like the new technology that's going to replace the old and how to use that to best and most efficiently kind of attack the same problems that we've always tried to attack. Makes a lot of sense. All right. So, I'm going to, I'm going to kick off to the next topic. And like I said, this is a little bit of a lightning round, kind of a flow. We've got a bunch of different things that, that are just sort of tangentially related around the umbrella of marketing and alignments. And Joel, before you jump in for
EDDIE REYNOLDSanybody in the audience, feel free to send in your questions. If you have any, we can stop mid cycle and let you jump on video and ask your questions. But if not, like I'll pepper Joel with questions and we'll make this fun. I'd love questions. So yeah, absolutely. Jump in if you guys want to. So,
OTHER GUESTthe other sort of main theme and kind of the key thing I want to get over to everybody today is the debate around how do you get alignment and particularly around the idea of shared goals. I feel like this is something that you'll hear a lot of in the market, like, oh, sales and marketing have to have shared goals, have to have shared goals, but no one ever tells you what those goals should be. And if they do, they're probably like bookings or pipeline generation or something like that. I actually don't think that's the right answer. I think that's an incomplete answer. And let me tell you why. So if you, if you have a very fast sales cycle and you can go from lead to sale in a short period of time, and let's say you have a decent amount of volume there, then maybe bookings is a good idea because you can get almost instant feedback on what lead generation translates to. If you, but most customers aren't in, most companies aren't in that position. Once you get beyond, let's say 45 to 60 days, then you've got this like long delay and it's, it's hard to take the data that you're getting and actually make it super actionable. Another thing that you would, would hear is like, okay, well maybe it's pipeline generation then, cause that's more of an instant feedback mechanism to see whether or not that let's say marketing is generating what they should, and that it's aligned to sales outcomes. But you're still sort of in this place where you're assuming that the quality of that opportunity is the same as anything anyone else is opening from any of your other channels that you're doing. So there's definitely a big weakness there that marketing is, is weak or maybe marketing super strong, but you won't, won't be able to measure that or know about that later. And so what I would propose as far as like aligning sales and marketing and having shared goals, one shared goals is the right way to go, but you should understand all the different points without your, throughout your funnel. And if you do so, if you set things up properly, you should be able to say like, when a lead is generated from this channel, the expected value of that lead is X, Y, Z based on conversion rates and deal size changes and the average win and percentage and the average deal size. So if you just spend some time doing the math to sort of work it backwards, once you have a little bit of a data set, monitor that. Cause I think that's really the key. And it'll also help you diagnose problems along your funnel as you go. And so you don't ever have a situation where you're having, you know, sales and marketing sort of pointing fingers at each other
SPEAKER_25without a data set to back it up. So when you talk about the lead expected value, Joel,
EDDIE REYNOLDSit sounds like you're saying we're still taking into account the ultimate revenues. We're reverse engineering it. So the challenge is that with revenue, if we wait, you know, to generate the lead and then to generate the pipe or convert that to pipeline and then convert that to a closed sale that can take so long that we can't really see what we did this month or this quarter in terms of actual lead or demand generation. So we reverse engineer that. And we say, based on historical numbers, this is what the value of an average lead is that looks like this, whether it be channel by channel or some other criteria. And then you can say in this month or this quarter, this is the amount of lead value that we generated. If I'm understanding you. That's, that's exactly right. Yeah. What's the
OTHER GUESTexpected value of a lead by each of the channels as best as you can make it, you know, early, early days, you may not have great data, but if you monitor this kind of thing and you're constantly updating the value on it, you'll be able to like get a better sense and it will get tighter and tighter and tighter over time. And this is also has a lot of great benefits beyond just alignment. It also will help your marketing organization understand what channels are the most valuable because you'll be able to tell like, where are my leads coming from and where are they worth?
EDDIE REYNOLDSHow often would you update that lead value? Right? So you say that the lead is worth $10,000 for example, and then it goes through and it closes and all the leads from that channel end up closing at a lower close rate and a lower ASP than they did last year. How do you account for that? How often do you update that? Weekly or monthly? I think you should be monitoring this really closely over a
OTHER GUESTlong period of time and you're looking for trends so that you can spot before something gets to a lower conversion rate, let's say to close one, maybe something starts leaking out the second sales stage. Well, if you notice that your value from that channel has diminished by, I don't know, 10, 20% over the course of a week or a month, then you're going to be able to make corrective action before it gets to a bunch of not one business later down the line. The weakness that you're going to have in that strategy, and this is the sort of balance to it, is that depending on your volume of leads or your volume of opportunities, you may not see much shift or you may not have enough of a database to be able to tell whether or not like a shift in the business is material or not. So in that case, I would tend toward the once a month view. If you've got a lot of business coming through really, like a really full pipeline, you may want to look at it weekly.
SPEAKER_11I love this because you have a less of a lagging indicator, right? So you're not waiting months to see what happens, but at the same time, you're tracking all the way through to revenue. So you're
EDDIE REYNOLDSseeing like whether this actually drives the result you want. The problem with pipeline or with marketing qualified leads is it incentivizes the wrong behavior because we now look at what is the easiest way to create pipeline or what is the easiest way to create an MQL. And that often ends up being things that don't convert very well. The classic example is, well, if you tell me I need to generate a thousand MQLs this month, it's going to be a lot easier to get webinar attendees and white paper downloads than it is a bunch, a thousand people that are going to request a demo.
OTHER GUESTYeah. You're going to be able to do a lot of stuff with this. So the most simple example is comparing it against cost per lead in that acquisition channel and seeing what has the highest ROI and sort of doubling down on those things. Another way you're going to be able to use this is at planning season, you know, come December ish. If you're on a calendar schedule with your, with your planning and, you know, we have to book a million dollars next year. Okay. Let's break that down and how much pipeline we need to open. That's not a good, that's not a good enough metric. You know, how much pipeline we're going to open because our win rate on average is this. Well, what really, what you really need to do is go a little deeper and figure out how much pipeline by channel. And if you know what the average lead is from each of the channels and, you know, bookings expectation, you can do a lot more surgical job of giving up goals to everybody when you're doing your annual planning and when you're, you know, creating quotas for folks later on in the year.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo how do you go about actually calculating this? Could you walk us through that?
OTHER GUESTYeah, yeah, sure. So it's just a work back from bookings back to the lead source itself. So when you're determining like, what's the starting point? Well, first you have to determine what your starting point is as far as like data capture in the lead funnel. But once you get there and you can tell like this lead came in through such and such a channel, then you're looking at all the conversion points along the way. So how likely did that lead lead to a first sales interaction or a first meeting? I want to capture that because you're going to have a lot of leakage there. You may want to add another sort of sub stage in there right after that, that says, okay, of all the meetings that I set around this type of lead, how many of them actually ended up in meetings that were attended? For some people, they do see a lot of slipping there or leakage there. Not everybody does. It's not something that everybody has to do, but I would recommend at least testing that. And then you want to track your sales stages. So after you're going to have that initial meeting is typically when someone opens an opportunity, if that meeting ends up with a conversation that leads to a qualified individual and an opportunity being opened. And then what are the conversion rates at each stage and all the way to close one. So it's really just like you start off with one and say, okay, 50% of those go forward. So that's 0.5 and 50% of those go forward to the next stage. That's 0.25, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the way until you, so you get to a close one. And then, you know, you have an average win rate by channel by lead. And then you just need to add the, how, how big are those deals when they close on average and you get an expected value for that lead. So to simplify that it's ultimately,
EDDIE REYNOLDSif I'm understanding you, the close rate of each lead in that channel multiplied by the average, average value of a deal. That's exactly right. Yeah. Got it. And then do you advocate that people usually do that channel by channel, or are there other ways that you suggest slicing and dicing it?
SPEAKER_04I would do it channel by channel, but I, I, and we're going to get to this in a little bit,
OTHER GUESTbut like, I, I think BDRs or SDRs, that's a channel. I think rep source deals, that's a channel and I would monitor all of them. It's not just classic marketing. It's, it's, we're, we're our app hops. So we're looking at all the revenue engine. So I would actually monitor this and get expected values on all of those different themes. And even if you want to go a level deeper, like if you've got multiple sales teams, break it down by team or break it down by level.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, this is so valuable because I think that what you're going to find to a large extent in many companies is that if you can get somebody to click the book, a demo or book, a meeting, it's going to be worth significantly more than a white paper download or a webinar attendee by orders of magnitude. And so what this can do for companies is to allow them to say, okay, yes, it may take significantly more time and more effort to generate far fewer book, a demos, a book, a meeting, but they're worth so much more. So let's really focus our efforts on where we can get the most valuable leads and, or the highest ROI on the time, effort, and money we spend to generate those leads. Absolutely. There are a couple of questions that are coming through
OTHER GUESTand I love this. So these are, these are great questions. The first one was a request to add the formula to the chat. I think we can do that, but basically it's, it's really as simple as Eddie laid out. It's what is the win rate by each channel times the average deal size or ASP for that channel. So if you can tell how many, like where someone's, someone's coming from, you just figure out, you sort of cordon off that population of deals and you just figure out the win rate of those. And it's helpful to know all the different conversion points because the math will work out that, you know, if you've got a certain percentage of deals that let's say 75% move to the next thing and 50% move to the next thing, all you have to do is multiply all the conversion rates times each other. Uh, and you'll be able to get to the same win rate that you would otherwise. Hopefully that makes sense. The other question is, how do you know, how do you know what channel something's coming from, especially if you've got multiple campaigns that, that has affected that lead going through. So I, I don't know if we want to jump ahead to that all the, all the way, but my, my recommendation there is it's, it's kind of not a recommendation. So I apologize, Chris, but there are ways that you'll want to set up your marketing organization to be able to report out to the business around what things have, what value or what leads come from what sources. It's not a perfect science. So sometimes, you know, there's a classic first touch or last touch attribution. I don't necessarily love those, but at some point you're, you're going to have people that are interacting with multiple touch points within your marketing funnel, and you're going to have a methodology generally as a business to sort of identify what channel you would, you would call that most commonly. And I don't know if it's like the most advanced way of looking at things, but most commonly it's sort of like, how did they, they come to us? So what was the last touch point on their way to converting to that, to that first meeting? Do you want to just go ahead and jump into attribution? I almost suggest that we take
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat as the next, next bullet point anyway. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. So we'll jump
OTHER GUESTdown to the agenda that we had, but we'll circle back. So attribution models, do you have to understand? And let me just define that real quick and then we'll dive into it. A lot of people are struggling with the same thing that Chris is asking about here. It's like, how do you divvy up, so to speak, credit for a lead that comes through your funnel that hits a bunch of different touch points or maybe interacts with multiple campaigns. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of thinking around this. In fact, if you crack this nut, you've got a billion dollar business guaranteed because there are so many tools that are launched on an annual basis to try and say that they've figured this out. And there are some weaknesses with all of them. And let me, let me try and explain. The, the real only way to know how your marketing is like individual campaigns are affecting win rates and deal sizes and all that kind of stuff. And therefore to really get a sense of it from a mathematical perspective, like proof or close to proof is to have a ton of data to run a multivariate regression analysis or a machine learning algorithm over it and look back after a long period of time has passed, you know, maybe multiple sales cycles.
EDDIE REYNOLDSJoel, I want to dumb this down so that people- Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, I, I'm trying to say weird, like highfalutin language because it's not useful. No, no, it's okay. I mean, just, you know, in case anybody like me is listening, I want them to be able to understand it. Although I do understand multivariate analysis a little bit. So we're talking about multi-channel attribution. And the example is that someone attends a webinar and separately, I don't know, they, they see you pop up in a, in a Google search and they also have like an SDR call them and they get an email and they're just getting touched by so many different marketing and sales channels that when they ultimately come through the funnel, which could happen, you know, in a span of days or weeks or years as they get hit by all these different channels, they come into the funnel and ultimately closes a deal. And you want to ask, okay, who generated that deal? Was it this marketing channel or that marketing channel, or was it our sales team? To what extent do we give each of these channels credit? And how do we, how do we calculate the ROI on each of those channels so that we can determine that we should keep doing webinars or we should hire more salespeople. And that is a really, really difficult question to answer.
OTHER GUESTYeah. What I'm saying is it's, it's impossible for people in our position to do that. And I know that's sort of a negative view of the world, but it, it's really not. It's just like, we need to understand the weaknesses that go along with these things. You know, you, you could have a massive data set and you can run the analysis if you're lucky enough to have that. And there are ways to do that looking backwards, but you're going to have to wait a long time and you're going to have to have a ton of data. And at that point, you're probably past the reporting period or the credit giving period for which you're, you're trying to examine. So you, you will not know down to a percentage basis how to split that credit up because there's too many. Yeah. There's too many variables involved.
SPEAKER_11Yeah. Let me geek out here myself, Joel, you know, basic one-on-one scientific method is that
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou have to have one variable and only one variable. So in this scenario that I painted where this person has 16 different touch points with marketing, which variable are you testing? You can't compare that person to another person unless you have a thousand other people that have gone through the exact same customer journey with only one difference, right? And even a thousand is probably not sufficient. So we're guessing here, the best that we can do with marketing multi-channel attribution is to guess which channels affected, which buyers in what way.
SPEAKER_14Yeah. And so how do you actually, how do you actually use this? Cause this sounds pretty,
OTHER GUESTpretty negative. It's, it's not, it's not, we just need to understand that we are going to be limited about how we give you up credit. And so there are sort of three or four main ways that people do it. And you just need to know the weaknesses with each one. And then you have to make the best decision for you and your business. So one, it actually, if you know this stuff, it actually makes it really simple. You can kind of like check a box and move on and understand like, we're going to do this and we're going to do this and here's why that's good. And here's why that's bad. And, you know, go through this really quickly. And this is one of those places where people spend a lot, a lot, a lot of time. And I'm telling you, you should not spend a lot, a lot, a lot of time, like figuring out your attribution model. The most common solutions here are you figure out and you track who the first person or the first marketing campaign was that that person interacted with. And you give the preponderance of credit there. Some people even say like, that's the most important thing. I don't care about anything else. Okay, fine. The weaknesses are obviously that that person could have interacted with a whole bunch of other stuff. And that first thing isn't necessarily the most important thing. So you're kind of guessing, but it is an important thing to know how people came into our funnel. So that's good. The second most common way is last touch. So it's the same sort of thing. It's like, what did they do right before they either came in through our inbound line and, you know, raise their own hands or what was the last thing that sort of got them to tip over our scoring tool? And now they're called an MQL. What got them to their 50th point, so to speak. Again, same weaknesses. Maybe the stuff that led up to that is really important and more important than that last thing just happened to be that they looked at that white paper right before they made a decision to raise their hand. I think you want to track that as well. So I would, you want to know how people got your system. So track that. I think you want to know what the last thing they did. So track that, which I understand it's like, it's not a great way to give you up credit. And then you've got sort of the proverbial flat distribution, where if they touch 16 things, you take the total value of the deal and you divide it by 16. I think that's actually really good. It's going to tell you a lot more information, you know, path to purchase, which is interesting, but also you're giving a little bit of credit up to each thing. And in reality, each thing probably deserves a little bit of credit. So you're probably getting a fairly good estimate of where the credit should be applied. You're just not going to know if this white paper was 12% of the credit and, you know, that webinar was 16% of the credit or whatever, but it should be directionally right. So you're adding some credit to all the things that they interacted with. So that's, that's actually a pretty good model. And that's, that's what I would suggest is just divvy up credit evenly. That's the third one. The fourth ones is all these different like curves, like the W curve or the V curve. And what these are just like, I'm going to give more credit to the first thing and the last thing that's the V curve and everything in between gets very little credit or the W curves where you're going to give credit to the first thing and the middle thing and the last thing and everything else doesn't. So it's sort of distributed over W curve. I don't find any value personally in those sorts of things. And I don't think there's a scientific basis to like assume that's the path to purchase. But those are kind of all the different ways of doing attribution. I would recommend capture the first thing to touch, capture the last thing to touch. And then if you're doing distribution of attribution, just spread it evenly. Cause it's probably as close as you're going to get without really running some like rigorous scientific analysis.
EDDIE REYNOLDSChris shared another comment to even further complicate. This is thinking about this with a buying committee, right? The average sale is I forget the figure, but there's like 10 to 15 people involved today. It's not like one person anymore. So now we got multi-channel attribution across multiple stakeholders. What do you do about that?
OTHER GUESTYeah. And a good point was made in the chat as well, but like there's so many things that are not getting captured. They're just like, we're talking here. We, I mean, if the podcast goes up, how are we going to know if you listen to the podcast? Like there's a lot of places that are just outside of our ability to capture them. Cookies are going away in the next period of time. I know those are being phased out generally. So there's a lot less things you can capture in a way. And what you're talking about is the dark funnel for anybody, not from here, right? This concept that
EDDIE REYNOLDSthere is a marketing funnel and it's dark in the sense that like, we can't see it. I can't see who is listening to our podcast. Absolutely. And so we've, we've belabored this. Like we've got,
OTHER GUESTI could go on forever about attribution. It's a sticking point for me because people like make a lot of money, like on the new W curve technology. And it's like, guys, you should spend about five minutes on your attribution model as far as like designing what it should look like a lot more time actually implementing it. But I don't think this is a place where people should really like get into the tweaking and like spend days and weeks and hours agonizing over how to, how to set this up. I think this is a quick one. You know, the irony I'll get off track for a moment is that, so we used
EDDIE REYNOLDSto talk a lot about attribution when I raised up venture capital and private equity funds, but from the sense of who can we attribute these investment returns to. And so you'd have a team of people of like five or six folks that would like leave Blackstone and they go start their own fund. And if all six of those people just work together on every single deal, then the investors would look at that and say, we've got strong attribution. But if those folks split up, who the hell knows? And that's literally the way investors would look at it. And they would say, okay, there were six of you and three of you left. And like, how do we know that you're responsible for generating those returns? And so, and I'm talking about some of the smartest people in the world that manage all the money in the world, like literally trillions of dollars. This is how they look at attribution. They say, look, unless all six of you came together, like it's really hard for us to know whether or not you're actually the ones that are responsible for generating those returns. Yeah. I mean, it's absolutely true. And again, you could, it's probably worthwhile if you do develop
OTHER GUESTa large data set to look back and kind of do that multivariate regression analysis, which I mean, it's an, it's an Excel add on. You can, you can learn how to do that. I would recommend it, but it's like, it's, it's not useful in your day to day from a tactical standpoint of actually like running the revenue engine. Just kind of close this out. You still have to understand or decide for you as a business to like, how to identify a lead by channel. And it is really important that you divide that up into discrete channels that you can then measure your basis for doing that is up to you. My recommendation is identifying things probably with like the last stages in the funnel. It's probably the easiest and clearest path, but if your business that doesn't matter as much, that doesn't make sense for you. Don't feel beholden to that, to that advice. I just think that's the easiest and the most common place to start.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo Joel, I don't want to steal your thunder, but I want to touch on the limits of the, the attribution software and that it can't measure dark funnel. So if folks are listening to the podcast, we're not going to see that. What do you do about that? Right? Because I think what happens is the podcast, as an example, ends up getting killed when the CFO is looking for places to chop and they say, well, we can't attribute any revenue to the podcast. So why are we doing that? What do we do about that? Right? You ask. You ask. How do you ask? Unfortunately, you're not going to be able to
OTHER GUESTsurvey everybody that listened to your podcast because you're not going to know them. But if somebody comes all the way to your, to your front step or you get a meeting with them there, it's completely reasonable to ask and document, how did you find your way here? And that's what I would recommend doing. I think that's a pretty common recommendation now in the industry. I know a lot of people are along the lines of that. It won't cause people not to, not to raise their hand. I think that was a concern because the form gets a little bit more complicated, but I think the data backs it up or the science backs it up that you will start capturing good data and very few people will stop the process of raising their hand because of it. Yeah. We see like Chris Walker and her fine labs
EDDIE REYNOLDStalk about this a lot. They run a lot of tests. We do this ourselves. If you go to our website and you try to book a meeting with sales that asks, how do you hear about us? Unsurprisingly, a lot of folks will say podcast or LinkedIn or this like live event, primarily LinkedIn, which aligns really well with all the other metrics we're seeing, given like how much visibility my LinkedIn posts have in comparison to, unfortunately, how many people are listening to the podcast? Cause it's newer thing. In addition to that, I think like asking that in a form. And then like you said, Joel, asking that in the sales cycle, now you have three touch points. You've got your marketing attribution software, you've got your marketing forms and you have sales asking, and you can triangulate those three data points and decide how you're going to feel about where each deal came from. Question I have for you though, Joel is what do you do with all three of these touch points as you're actually trying to put all your data together in aggregate?
OTHER GUESTWell, so I think this is a, another reason why people are afraid to do this is that you actually have, it's, it's, you should be a free text field. You don't want to prompt the person filling out the form by predetermining their ways to get to you. So you're going to have free text data and you're going to have to clean that up and kind of store it and classify it in order to get it into something that's scientifically analyzable. So it's, it's a little bit of effort, but I promise you there's, there's almost nothing more important in the, the marketing side of, of our, of our jobs than understanding how people get to get to the point where the marketing has worked and now we're in a sales cycle. So I definitely think it's worthwhile doing it. Awesome. I am also realizing we've only got 20
EDDIE REYNOLDSminutes left and we're two points into, uh, into eight. So should we dive into the next one?
OTHER GUESTWell, maybe we'll have to have a part two, but yeah, we, we definitely should. We touched on this next one a little bit and I'm, I'm going to breeze over because I think the point is very straightforward is that we should treat all entrance paths to our sales funnel as separate lead channels under themselves or marketing channels under themselves. In a way you want to have these same metrics. You want to measure the path to purchase for somebody that's coming in through outbound prospecting from your sales team. You want to measure this coming from your PDR team, no matter where they live in your organization. And you want to have these same metrics. I know that's, that's obvious, but a lot of people sort of coordinate that stuff off and say, Oh, that sales let's, they just won't pipeline. You need to know how many reach outs you're having, you know, how many different cadences you're putting people in and how effective those things are because you can get a lot of benefit in sort of juicing these areas by monitoring and experimenting, doing A/B testing on different types of messaging by figuring out like response rates to LinkedIn versus email versus voicemails versus phone calls and all this kind of stuff. So you can optimize your and teach your outbound prospectors how to do their work and then measure it. You know, I would be surprised if someone out there couldn't possibly like take the time and effort and money they're spending on their sales team doing outbound prospecting and use that better by hiring more BDRs or spending more money on a certain type of marketing event. You're trying to optimize across the entire organization. And if you're not measuring this stuff, then you've got your salespeople pounding the phones and maybe they're not there. That's not a successful way of doing things. It's not a way of building pipeline effectively, but heck maybe webinars are the thing that's really crushing it right now or in-person events. So balance these things against each other, figure out what it costs to do all of these things, and then look at the whole revenue stack
SPEAKER_14and the ROI of each tactic in a holistic way. Or maybe it is working. You know, I saw a bunch of
EDDIE REYNOLDSposts today from some people I admire and respect talking about how important outbound is even in 2023, but how that tends to lead to, you know, bigger, more strategic deals. And ultimately where a lot of folks wanting to lean towards like product-led growth is really exciting. Like if we could just have sales reps just fielding inbound leads and just closing deals and, you know, hitting 10 million dollars in revenue on a, you know, 150k OTE, like every CEO in the world would be super happy about that. Right. But we can't think about doing something like that unless we're objectively measuring how do we build pipeline and close deals across all of our marketing channels, as well as any outbound sales that we're doing. And then weigh those against each other and say, okay, the next amount of money we have, are we going to hire another account executive or another BDR or invest that in a marketing channel?
SPEAKER_14That's right. That's right. And, and it kind of goes without saying, but it's, it's really tied
OTHER GUESTtogether that we should be looking at this in a capacity model perspective. So the thing you're going to want to balance, like, should we hire the next salesperson is, is there, are there enough leads or can we, by putting them in seed and having them prospect generate enough leads to keep them on track to hitting their goals? And if you don't have the answer of being yes for that, then you can't do the, the, the growth at all costs mindset thing, just like hiring salespeople and hoping that's not a wise use of capital. It's not a wise use of your funds. So having an answer for a leader about like where to place the next bet that they get when the next time they have budget is, is really going to make you look like a rock star and sort of give you that, you know, advisory position that everybody so craves. And this takes us full circle back to the original problem, right? So we hire salespeople and
EDDIE REYNOLDSunfortunately a lot of salespeople, and I've never been in support of this, don't want to make cold calls. So then we like, feel like we have to feed them quote unquote, and we give them all these leads. Marketing has this high MQL goal to hit. So they go and they send a thousand MQLs over to the sales team. So they're busy calling down on these MQLs, these white paper downloads, these webinar attendees, and everybody's super busy, but, and marketing's hitting their MQL goal, but sales is not hitting their sales target. And why is this happening? Because we're not doing any of the things that we just suggested. And we think, okay, we got a bunch of marketing leads and we have tons of leads for salespeople to call, but we don't have the right kind of leads. And what we really in fact should do, if not, you know, cut back on a lot of that stuff is to say, okay, these leads are not valuable enough to pass over to sales. Instead, they could be using their time making cold calls to the right targeted audience and be generating more leads at a lower cost and a higher lead value than what we're getting from white paper downloads, for example.
SPEAKER_14Yeah. Yeah. Maximize that ROI and you will, you will have an engine that helps. I promise.
SPEAKER_02And then marketing can focus on getting more of those like high value leads, like people requesting a demo or a meeting with sales. Yeah. And it's funny because the next point I actually have in the rundown here, if you don't
OTHER GUESTmind me transitioning to it was like, understand the weaknesses and the MQL approach as you approach that for the first time. So like, this is exactly what Eddie's describing here is exactly the weakness in MQLs and everyone knows it. Like all the people that like have a, have a vested interest in what marketing is doing are all really suspicious about MQLs all the time from, from the CEO down to the frontline sales rep, because it's very easy for, and it happens way too often for let's say marketing to set up a certain goal or be given a certain goal. And then as you know, we run behind, oh, we're behind on our MQLs for the month. Let's just lower the threshold. Let's just, you know, we got to get that volume up. Exactly. Chris, like marketing swears by the volume of MQLs. Like the volume of MQLs is not a good measure. It's just a really bad measure of marketing because the, like, it's the strength of the MQLs. That's the most important thing. It's that balance between the number of them and the quality of them. And what you're trying to do is dial that in and keep that consistent around that ROI or another way of looking at it. It's like of the value of each lead from that channel. And so if you just go in there and you say, okay, well, 50 points gives us an MQL. Okay. Where did you get the 50 points? A lot of times you're just guessing. And then you're sort of calibrating that on different things that the person goes, who goes through the marketing funnel does. So they open emails, they attend webinars, they don't let white papers, they do all these things. When do you like diminish the amount of points that they have? If they don't interact with you for a long time, that's important. When do you sort of like reset that number? If they come to webinar and then disappear, what happens when you reach out to them? If they hit MQL and they like, there's all kinds of things that go around all of this stuff, but none of it is improved by just juicing the number that you get. And as long as we understand the fact that the point threshold that we set is a guess, best practice, we don't assign points for anything that doesn't actually show intent. So no opening of emails gets you 50 points. Don't do that. And then that you're constantly just trying to read and react, trying to get better all the time. You're trying to dial up the quality and maintain as high an ROI or a value of lead as possible. You're going to get everybody downstream a lot happier and it's not going to be a question like, did I deliver enough MQLs? I know that's a difficult place to be in for a marketer because you're often judged by things like that. But as much as you can do to try and get other people around you to not judge you by just the number of them, the better off everybody, everybody is going to be and the more marketing will be trusted. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the reason that happens, I haven't talked to a lot of
EDDIE REYNOLDSreally senior marketers that try to stand behind this idea that not only are MQLs valuable, but they're the most valuable thing. And that's what marketing should be targeting. I don't run into that very much. I can certainly see junior marketers, marketing managers that are a year or two into the role falling into that, especially because I think it's more CEOs that are guilty of this, where they're saying we need more leads, we need more leads, we need more leads, and they're turning to marketing or hiring marketing and saying your mandate is to generate more leads. And if you've ever actually called these leads, you will learn why these are so like, not very valuable. So here, let me walk you through this process of what this is like for anybody that hasn't done this, right? First, you get this list and just automatically you immediately, you look at it and it's like, okay, tons of Gmail addresses. If we're not filtering for that, tons of fake phone numbers. So just trying to filter through that, like, give me 1000 leads, like you'll get rid of 900 of them just sheerly by filtering for fake emails and fake phone numbers. Unfortunately, like you don't have a perfect way to do that. So you end up like sending emails and making calls and getting them bounced back. Okay, cool. Now let's get get in front of like the 10% that are actually real. These people downloaded a single white paper or they attended a webinar. That does not mean they are even in your ideal customer profile or the right buyer persona. And even if they are, that they have any interest whatsoever in entering a buying cycle. I think HubSpot is a great example of this, right? So I used to devour HubSpot content when I worked at Salesforce because they put out better marketing on marketing automation than Salesforce does. I used to tell like the head of Pardot this all the time. I'm like, why am I reading HubSpot's content instead of Pardot's content? You guys need to level up your game. I was watching HubSpot videos today. They do a great job. Here's the funny thing though. What else do they do? They don't call these people. I interviewed Channing Ferrer who ran their sales operations for six years on our podcast. And he talked about, they figured out that calling these people wasn't worth anything because they have this giant marketing engine and they have all these people that are downloading white papers and hitting that MQL score. And what they found was, is that wasn't worthwhile. And so what they did instead is they broke everything down into buckets. And I forget, but what bucket number, yeah, bucket number one were people that actually raised their hand and requested a meeting or a demo. Those are really valuable leads and you need to be really careful to nurture or not nurture, but prioritize those leads. The second bucket they found were people that had hit the pricing page a bunch of times. They found that to be really valuable. If you're looking around at pricing, you might actually have an interest in their product. And then everyone else, they just figured like, leave that to marketing to continue to nurture them until they hit that pricing page or go and request a demo from sales. We're not going to call a bunch of people that downloaded white papers because they
SPEAKER_09just have too many of them and they weren't converting. Yeah. Yeah. You're absolutely right.
OTHER GUESTWe'll get to hand raisers here in just a second, because I think that's a really important thing in a way, a way that people have shifted their activity, but just to like, kind of bring this one home. If you, and circle back to something we said earlier, what you want to be able to do. And I think the question that was posted in the chat, like, how do you convince like a CEO, for example, who is mandated MQL numbers? Like, that's not the best thing. You just have to explain that you're going to do, you would like to do it this different way and then try to explain it that different way. And I would suggest the value, the total value of lead method, because as your quality goes up, you want to get credit for that, right? Like you would hate to be a marketer who spends a lot of effort and trying to like dial up and like really focusing on the ICP and persona and like getting great, great leads and then get dinged because you have slightly fewer of them. Like that's, that's not fair. That's not a fair way of looking at it, but like you would anticipate that if they were better leads, that the value of them would increase. And the exact same thing would happen on the opposite side. It's like, if the quality of them goes down, but you get more of them, well, it's probably going to balance out your, maybe your total amount of lead value or value doesn't grow, doesn't grow. And you shouldn't get plaudits for jittering a bunch of bad leads. So I think it's just like, whether you roll up to a CRO or whoever your direct manager is, it's like just trying to sell this idea as best you can. If you're rolling up to the CEO, I think people would be receptive to this idea if it's presented thoroughly. And then, you know, you have to do what the CEO says sometimes. So if you make your case and it doesn't work, well then, okay, fine. Do what you're supposed to do. But I think a lot of people would, would take a second look at something like this and say, Hey, actually, you know what, that's a better way of doing it. Let's, let's see how we can transition to that, that way of measuring things. Yeah. I think if most CEOs see that, okay, we generated 50 leads that were demo requests and
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat resulted in a million dollars of revenue. And we generated a thousand leads that were white paper downloads and that generated $50,000 of revenue. Well, do you want another thousand leads worth 50 grand or another, I forget the number I said, 50 leads that are worth a million dollars? I don't think any CEO in the world is going to, you know, not align with you there. The challenge is, is that a lot of organizations just aren't looking at these numbers. You're not looking at the numbers and the inertia, the way it's been done, you know, has, has a big
OTHER GUESTrule of play. I mean, I would, I once watched someone give the answer, well, that's how he's always done it. And like, seriously gave that as the answer. And I had, I think it was a VP back in the day, just like blow them up. It's like, that is the dumbest reason to do anything. And it stuck with me. And I don't know, it's, you can't replace something without a better idea. I think this is a better idea. It's just a matter of education and I think people adopt it. But one other thing that was mentioned in there, Eddie, as you were going along, and this actually kind of is a good segue into the next point is the hand raiser thing, the hand raiser thing. That's, that's a really big deal these days, especially because if you think about the technology as people have gone through the path to purchase and they're sort of judging the trustability and the probability of an idea being right, when they're thinking about you and your company, they're, they're getting all the way to the end of the funnel in a way they never have before without talking to another person. Maybe they may have like watched YouTube videos or listen to podcasts or come to your website or downloaded that thing or go on a webinar or whatever, but they've not maybe had a conversation with anybody on your, on your, on your team. And so that you want to make that first interaction even more of a great experience versus the way it's been done in the past. And it's that hand raiser moment because these are your most valuable leads that you're going to have. And I'm going to suggest something and it's a little extreme, but I promise you the data is there to back us up is that when someone raises their hand, you should have an SLA of a minute on some kind of thought about like well-crafted response to them. There are tools that you can use. You can have someone follow up like from the sales team or whatever. It's just the data is showing that people are not accepting of a delay there. And it's sort of like by the time that they've raised their hand, you're in the top three solutions that they're going to buy. They're likely in an actual sales level. And so nowadays we're finding that the person that raises that, that responds in the most consistent or quickest way with a good response is the one that wins the business. I think I read it was like 74% of the time. Can I paint a picture of why this happens, Joel? Yeah, go for it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo you think about it like this. Okay. Let's imagine that you have a problem you want to solve and you're going to buy something and you carve off, like you get off this webinar at one o'clock in two minutes, and you have a half an hour to work on this, right? You're going to start Googling and searching around and you're going to find one, two, three, four different vendors, and you're going to reach out to each of them. The person that responds in one minute, all of a sudden they've got you. You have a phone call with them. They set the precedent. They answer your questions. They book another meeting for you to loop in your other stakeholders. They send you over some information. Bam. Here's the end of your half hour window. You got to go on to another meeting. At the end of the day, vendor number two reaches out. Maybe you respond to them. Maybe you don't. Tomorrow, vendor number three reaches out. Then vendor number four. Very quickly, you run out of time and you say, I've got one or two vendors I like. I'm super busy. Oh my God. How am I going to get everything done by Friday? You're not even going to respond to that next vendor. And that is why more than 50% of the time, the first vendor to response wins that deal. Yeah. Yeah. The, the win rates are crazy.
OTHER GUESTThe win rates are way larger than they should be. And what I want to make sure that we understand is like, if they reach out to three, they would seriously consider all three. You're not being judged on the quality of your product anymore. You're all kind of seen in the solution set where they'd be happy with the features and functionality. So what they're looking for is they're testing you for the customer experience that you're going to provide as a vendor of theirs. That's what you need to lead with. So coming out with a really being the first to respond, but having a really terrible experience is just as bad as not responding. So you need to really think about like what a good way to respond is for you. That is like in line with what the customer expectations are in, in your journey, that your industry has sort of teed up for people and try to just be the best, try to be at your best when you respond to these people and not just like send them a link and say, Hey, click a button and figure it out yourself. Yep. Uh, well, Joel, we're at time. So we have to wrap by the way, for everybody
EDDIE REYNOLDSon this, we're not going to send the recording out anymore. It goes straight to the podcast, but if you want an email reminder, sign up for our newsletter, the link is in the chat. It's also just on our website. You need square consulting.com. Click on resources and newsletter. We send it out every week and you'll get the link to the podcast, a recording in apple and Spotify. If you want to listen to the whole thing or forward it on to one of your colleagues. So thank you everybody for joining us. And Joel, thanks for putting this together. Thanks everybody. Great to see you.
