B2BSMX | The Missing Piece in the Revenue Marketing Engine, with Joe McNeill

well it's great to see everybody I see some familiar faces in the crowd for those of you that don't know me I'm excited to get to know you this week we have our booth out here stop by chat with us chat with our team we can walk you through what this means for your organization um so I'm excited to talk to you about content level intent and how it can help sales overcome their biggest challenges how how we can help further your commercial alignment within your teams and then how we can help you architect campaigns that your CFO will love my name is Joe McNeil I am lucky enough to be cro at influ2 prior to joining inflate 2 I was with two different organizations one I grew from eight to 100 million primarily through outbound another one from 70 to 240 million primarily through inbounds so I've seen both sides of the coin uh I'm familiar with you know the methodology to architect an organization on both sides but today I'm uh excited to talk to you about scaling Pipeline and really in my experience

the biggest challenge with building a hyper Growth Company with building a growing company is scaling the pipeline alongside right the old adage is the best way to hit your bookings Target tomorrow is to hit your pipeline goal today and I think you know for those of us that our fingers on keyboard this is this is the day-to-day Challenge and and for 2023 it's even more challenging right like the 2023 Mantra is hey let's double our pipeline but you have half the resources and half the budget to do so right so it becomes it becomes a lot more challenging what we're seeing is is some of the old things are becoming new again right Pavilion did their June pulse survey and they asked go to market leaders uh what is your biggest initiatives in in H2 right and the overwhelming response was outbound was the biggest one right but then we also see cross-sell upsell ecosystem partnership growth you know some of these other non-standard pipeline generating uh techniques are becoming big because companies are challenged right now right and as outbound becomes more prominent

as as this becomes into focus it becomes more of a challenge right and in my opinion outbound is becoming more of a focus because you know when the Venture Capital Market was hot when it was a buyer's market plg product like growth and inbound became a big area of focus it was almost like a cheat code for growing pipeline right there was a lot of buyers out there it was a budget Rich environment and it was working really well but what we've seen as the Venture Market as tightened as budgets have tightened as you know buyers budgets have tightened it's become less reliable and less predictable and companies have turned to outbound right it's quite a bit more predictable it's a bit more reliable reliable but it's really hard right November Pavilion did a study on how many outbound teams are hitting quota only 27 percent were hitting quota that that you know range has held true throughout 2023 right and sdrs are responsible for a big portion of the pipeline when you look at AE self-source pipeline as well you know 50 of pipeline generation has been on the outbound team and teams are just not

doing great with it right and when things aren't going great with outbound what's the answer you know the answer is usually hey do more email more people call more people more volume right and unfortunately what we've seen time and time again that doesn't work and that's created a really saturated environment I think I think all of your email inboxes can attest to the amount of outbound prospecting happening all of your voicemail boxes right it's hard to even read emails right now so your sdrs your AES can really focus on Crafting great emails crafting good calls but it's hard to get the attention so it becomes really Paramount to differentiate yourself to get eyeballs on those emails to help all right and here's where marketing can help marketing can really help outbound teams succeed by differentiating getting eyeballs back to the sdrs to the AE Outreach and you know they still need to have good practices what they do but marketing can support it a lot right when we look at Str challenges right my my last company we're a Danish company and we would go to Denmark and we'd do our board meetings uh quarterly

and the chairman of the board always asks me hey what keeps you up at night and my answer most of the time was that you know I have you know depending on the year I have between 10 and 50 sdrs and they control about 75 percent of our Pipeline and I love them to death they work hard they're great they're they're a benefit to the organization but they have the least amount of experience in the organization right and they're deciding who our opportunities are with they're controlling 75 percent of our pipeline so we would do everything we could to be more prescriptive how do we give them territories give them Persona Maps give them platforms give them data and find individuals to call but it consumed a lot of our resources where our SDR leaders were spending a lot of time teaching the SDR is to find who to sequence to look at who to sequence to figure out who they should be putting in sequence and instead of here's how you have meaningful engagement with these people to turn them into pipeline today or tomorrow you know when you look at AE challenges it's somewhat the same but the AE role is a very unique role right

most individuals at that level in the org chart they have a very specific project map they know what they should be doing now it can be hard to execute but the AES when they have a day available where their calendar is in full you know they don't have a very scientific method to make the decision of what should I do right now to enhance my pipeline what should I do right now to move my opportunities forward and how do I create meaningful engagement with my with my territory to hit my quota so a lot of it is like licking your finger put it into the wind and you know we've all heard of like random acts of marketing this we're like random acts of sales come out right they they try to be an analyst they try to do things they try to move it forward and a lot of times they turn into kind of busy bees where they're doing a little here a little there and they didn't really get anything done right and here's again where marketing can help is I know it's a big shocker but like you know Udi letter Gore from gong one of the most well respected uh SAS companies out there from marketing standpoint he characterizes marketing's goal is to make sales easier you see that echoed by Dave Gerhart right now shocking thing

for a sales leader to say sitting in a room full of marketers make sales easier right but if we zoom in I think Matt Hines nailed it right how do we do that and he said like all go to market plans come down to answering two questions who to call what to say right and answering that over and over and over again in a more scientific method and if we look at marketers and say how can you help sales how can you really help uh support these AE challenges and these SDR challenges if I wanted to really shorten the SDR and AE challenges it's just who do I call what do I say and what do I call them right and that's how how we can look at marketing and sales alignment right from you know the least aligned marketing and sales team you have the silos right the most aligned marketing and sales team so you scrunch those silos together and still a Venn diagram right you have you have the overlap where they're really aligned but there's still a lot happening outside of the silos and there's been a lot that's happened over the years for this to to bridge the alignment

right go to market teams have adopted a lot of account based methodology and this has helped a lot right the Sixth Sense is the demand base of the world like we're focused on accounts we're taking our Target accounts we're putting all of our bandwidth into focusing on the same counts that sales is focusing on the challenge is sales people don't call Accounts deals don't happen between accounts right in flu 2 and Microsoft don't do accounts happen between people right and the Gap has been how do we engage with the same audience the same people that sales is right and this is where we talk about contact level targeting and contact level intent right how can Market marketing Target the exact same people that sales is targeting and how can we help create a road map for sales on who they should reach out to now the ABM vendors have advertising you know and focuses on IPS sometimes you can Target individuals if they fill out a form and they're cookied but a lot of times it's a little bit of spray and pray right you get some engagement from an account you get some intent from an accountant but it can be hard to action on right where if you look at a people-based

advertising platform you focus on the right message to the right people and its marketing's form of outbound right this is outbound for marketing and this this can help create the roadmap for the sales people right now we have an engagement report the impression and engagement data pushes back to the contact record HubSpot Salesforce wherever your CRM is it creates a priority list for strs on who we should Prospect into on when we should Prospect into and how we should Prospect into them based on where their engagement is right it does the same for the AES you target the buying group of their opportunities you know we know that the more the more individuals you target within an open opportunity increases the conversion rates you see the engagement within the buying group within a buying group there's different messaging and different priorities for the stakeholders in an opportunity right the CFO has different priorities than the VP of marketing than procurement we can align the messaging and we can tell them this is what you should do

right now this is what's going to have the biggest impact on your pipeline this is what's going to have the biggest impact on your your opportunities right and this is going to scrunch together the the alignment right this is where the Venn diagram gets more pushed together and it's not it's not a super foreign concept right sales Loft did a study and they looked at hey what what are contact rates for prospecting based off of how many media types are used right if it's just emails five percent if you add in calls it doubles add in LinkedIn it almost triples right so there's this exponential growth based off of the amount of media types that you use in prospecting but once you get Beyond like the primary three a lot of those media types really impact an sdr's bandwidth so like if an SDR is going to do a customized Vineyard video for everyone you know they're great they work but like is the benefit in conversion rates worth the downside and efficiency and sometimes there's a lot of math to be done to figure out if that's worth it you turn into tiering accounts and whatever but if you can do

another media type at scale then it's a no-brainer it helps with the conversion rates we see this with our own data right the amount of people that you reach out to in prospecting directly correlates with the conversion rate and turning them into SQL and if they're engaged it becomes even higher right the more engagement you create within a buying group the better outside of that if we look at sales Cycles ebsta did their their B2B SAS Benchmark report right the higher the engagement within an opportunity the higher the win rate the more engagement within a buying group the shorter the sales cycle and this benefits marketers too right you improve your unit economics on the on the conversion rate and the velocity side you don't need as much pipeline right so instead of looking at oh we got a double our pipeline again we've got a double our pipeline again if you improve your unit economics you don't need to quite double right and what I've had experience with with marketers is they want to help on the opportunity side the challenge becomes how do we prove the impact we're having right if we're if

we're going to warm up your opportunities if we're going to warm up the buying groups within the opportunities we get to our qbr and we said hey we helped with that the sales reps get a little defensive and they're like no that was all us you know marketing don't take credit for that right how do we prove that we're impacting this and this is where the contact level intent pushing to the contact record really matters right when the fund police show up the chief fund officer Chief Financial Officer shows up and says hey why are we spending money on this like why are we doing this the the sales is already targeting this you know if we're pushing this intent this this engagement data back to the contact record it becomes really easy to provide an influence map of how we're doing this right we look at this is this is real data from a customer all we have to do is we look at hey you know this is over the course of a quarter over the course of that quarter the sdr's reached out to about 5 400 accounts that marketing did not support at all didn't help right cold audience they converted those into opportunities at about about four percent right well how about the accounts that

marketing was was air covering with ads that was creating influence with ads right with this one it was it was fairly conservative model but it was six percent right so we can say that hey we created 40 additional opportunities for 2.6 million dollars in pipeline through our influence here so it's very binary directly from your CRM and you don't need to be an analyst to do this right new product has a dashboard that will track this throughout the funnel it'll show how much more pipeline you're getting what your digital boost is it'll show your opportunity conversion rates they'll follow it all the way down to revenue so everybody can see it and this is this is one of those things where it's like you know if things are great it'll show things are great if not if we need to improve it'll show that to them we're all on the same page we're all aligned in what we're driving towards right we're all driving towards more pipeline more Revenue and with that you know why bother is this is this just for big companies is this just for small companies is this just for specific companies well we did a sample of 14 clients and it shows you know between those 14 clients there's about a 2.25 X boost in pipeline from influenced accounts right and a lot of

times I would say is is it doesn't let sales off the hook the better the better the SDR principles the better the Outreach was before adding people-based ads to it the better it's going to be once you add it so we see it all over the board from you know whether it's you know 1.8 x boost or a 4.29 x boost like like you see it all the way across but you're creating meaningful influence you're adding that road map you're helping not only generate more pipeline you're helping sales velocity you're helping conversion rates you're helping the union economics across the way you can add it to to customers to upgrades to expansions right and then you're doing this all in a way that's scalable from a budget standpoint that you can go to the CFO you can go to the CEO you can go to the founder and you can show them exactly how much revenue you're influencing along the way that's what I got anybody have any questions about how it works what contact level intent is how people-based ads work I have a hunch I know one question but anybody have anything for me

nothing okay all right well yeah in my opinion it's the saturated market right it's it's if you think of like this is this is our ideal customer this is our ideal buyer and this is this is the problem that we solve right so if I talk to a prospect that has this problem it's going to be music to their ears right it's going to really resonate getting to that point is the hardest part right is getting in front of that Prospect being able to talk through that problem because a lot of companies are solving for latent pain right it's you know it's pain that customers have that they've learned they've learned to deal with they don't they're not actively trying to solve so like the cold outbound is really like how do we get in front of these companies that have this latent pain identify what it is show them that we can solve it and then show what the impact of solving it would be the problem is getting to that point is challenging because you know traditional methods of of cold calling quality emailing like the emails aren't even getting read at this point you know

everybody's getting bombarded with LinkedIn with so I think it's it's really like how do we get eyeballs in front of our message and how do we get a conversation and and a lot of times it comes down to focus you know the hard part is is you know when pipeline is light when when times are tough you think we just got to do more we got to cast a wider net we got to Target more people but the reality is like how do we target less people more specifically and more you know where we can speak to their problems uh and usually if you can do that the right way if you can get those conversations if you can get attention to the emails to the linkedins to get them on the phone that that's how you do it we've seen a you know I think the amount of uh touch points you need to generate a meeting with outbound now is something like 13. you know it was eight a few years ago and I think it's it's easy to see I know like at my time at site Improvement we were in the martech space you know I joined there in 2014 I think there was you know something like 600 companies in the martech landscape when

I left there was like six thousand right so I think that that that lie isn't the problem is is just getting to the people and having a conversation because they're they're fatigued from all of the people reaching out and I think you know most companies version of outbound is hey let's hire a couple str's let's get them in Outreach or sales Loft and let's bombard our ICP and Prospects with emails and calls and Linkedin and usually they're not that great right but they get to a point where they it becomes a math exercise like okay we have a one percent conversion right that just means we need to reach out to 100 000 people this month right where where there's not as because it's harder to impact the efficiency anything else well it was good to chat with you all again our booth is out there uh stop by say hi you know happy to talk through what this means for for your organization or what you're doing for outbound or even if you're planning on doing up on what you should think about you know Sam is here he's a good resource on the outbound side as well talk to Sam

but thanks everybody [Applause]