MQLs: Are They Leading Us On, with Alex Pappas and Anna Tsymbalist

[music] Hi everyone, my name is Anna Symbbleist. I'm joined by Alex Papas today, an amazing amazing marketing practitioner with um I think already nine years of experience, right? About nine years. Yeah, coming up on it. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining. Um, Alex has experience in um, creating and implementing go-to market strategies that that are accountbased and actually he's he does that from the first impression like from the first pipeline generation touch point to expansion and I think that actually explains a lot the topic that we chose today because um, today we're going to talk about MQLs and well why we hate them so Um, and before we jump before before we jump into the topic, let me just give you a brief overview of what you signed up for, Alex, today and what you guys

can expect from this podcast. So, um, in this podcast, we want to talk about sometimes tough, sometimes controversial topics without glossing over stuff with buzzwords. So when we say things like, "Oh, we made sure all of the stakeholders are aligned." Well, we're actually going to go deep into who are those stakeholders? What does alignment mean in this situation? How do you actually measure it? And what are the top five things you do to create this alignment? You know, so if that's something that you're interested in, please stay with us. Um, and let's let's go. Let's um let's let's hate on some MQLs. Um, so I think [laughter] I think a good uh way to start um doing that is actually talk about why we like them because a lot of marketers, me included, I was in love with them at first and um that was a system that we

worked on for a very long time and I know that a lot of marketers are still working using that system. Um some hate it in the process, some love it in the process. So, Alex, what do you think? Well, first let me say thank you for having me on. I'm excited to be here. Question around first impressions, what was it? Uh, why did we end up with the MQL model? How did we end up with them? Like, how come we are like everyone knows what that is, everyone uses it, everyone, you know, it's it's a staple. It's a staple. Everyone is obsessed with it. At some point, everyone was obsessed with it. Now we're moving away from that I feel but to my liking at a very low pace. I would agree with that. Um I think one thing that stands out about MQLs is that um they're they're very easy to measure. And so when you look at early on you have marketers, you have CEOs, you saw MQLs as this neat little way to kind of quantify interest, you know, kind of

that tangible badge of a prospect buying in and saying yes. And you know, you always want that. Yes. And um it's easy to get seduced by that because it's it's very easy to to gravitate towards like high volume uh metrics like that. And so when something feels easy to measure and it's easy to report on, um I think it's it's really hard to get away from that because when you shift into a different model, say like an MQA or um when you're mapping a buying committee, you're not always looking for volume. And so people get scared about that. Am I doing enough? Are we doing enough? You know, and you know, over time the allure of like the simple numbers and the early stage validation is almost like uh I think we talked about it before. It's kind of like a love affair. It's like very straightforward. It's very easy to communicate to the board and it really is that promise of a quick win. Um but uh you know it's it's it's really hard to translate that into into revenue. And

I think most teams find that they are having to manipulate it at some point. Right? So regardless of of how qualified we feel they are not, you know, you might get sales complaining at one point that the volume of an of a of a marketing qualified um you know, lead funnel is is too low, right? And so when that happens, you know, there's not enough marketing activity to support sales. And so fingerpointing starts happening. And um when that happens, you just lower the standards of the scoring model for an MQL and all of a sudden voila, you're flooding them with a high volume of of leads again. Um I'm guilty of that. That happened [laughter] in my life. I wasn't the decision maker. Who's not guilty of doing that really? Like if you're in the marketing space, if you're in demand, gen like who has not had to throttle the scoring model to to meet volume goals, right? The vanity. You also talked about, you know, it's easy to present to the board, right? And I feel like it's this blanket that you

pull over your stuff when someone's coming over. Like you have all kinds of stuff just shoveled in one pile and covered with a blanket and that call that blanket an MQL. That's that's your that's your scoring model of having an MQL. And it also gives this um like feeling of things being predictive because you're like, "Oh, I know my conversion rates from MQL to SAL to SQL like whatever whatever um you know, whatever kind of funnel you design." But that's actually not the case when you've been when you tried doing it because MQLs come from different different sources very often and those sources like you can never control you can never control the quality and that means that not all MQLs are equal and that's um where your conversion rates somehow you know shift quickly. you had a very high conversion rate into

anal and then something changed in your strategy but you still call it an MQL but those are completely different leads that you are driving. So yeah, I just wanted to add that and kind of interrupted you. I'm sorry. Not at all. I think it's a great point. I mean it's it's it's kind of this way that people think they're exercising agency over their market and in reality you don't really um you're not really adjusting the strategy. you're not really adjusting anything that um like nothing of value of really is really addressed when you do that. And so I think I think you bring up a good point that not all MQLs are created equal either. And when you're not putting it in context of a an account and your footprint at an account, then you know, it almost doesn't matter how much engagement you get from an individual lead. It's it's not indicative of the mindset at an account if that's really what you're you're focused on. If you're so myopic on one lead at an account, they might be super engaged, but if you if you don't have the right footprint there, if you don't have the right relationships built, um it's very easy

to to fall in love with that one lead and then miss out on the party, right? Like, so I think it's it's it's very easy to get enamored with a single lead, but it's usually again not indicative of a mindset and you often miss opportunities by having that hyperfocus on an individual. Yeah. the the MQL the MQL strategy it doesn't align with the actual B2B decision maker making I think because I mean at this point we're all very educated we all know about the buying committee about the buying group decision makers all that stuff we call them influencers users like all of you know we have all of those terms and yet we still want to rely on on the leads and I just want to I yeah I want to make comment so people who use MQs don't feel personally attacked here but I it's a completely um like it's logical when you change your qualification to bring more MQLs because in that

moment I think marketing is under a lot of pressure because their CEO or someone comes in and they're like the sales are doing nothing we need to give them something to work on and you're like I mean if it's like low season or you know something changed why Why don't you just give them some leads? Maybe something comes out of it. But then and it's logical in that moment like it's you you are extinguishing the fire that's happening. But what that leads to is then sales start ditching MQLs. Sales just disqualify them immediately. They don't want to be wasting time on that if they have experienced that volume of lowquality MQLs. Agreed. And I actually I want to also touch on something that you mentioned earlier around the predictability. Um especially when it comes to presenting to to your executives or or the board in particular is again it's very easy to translate volume based goals to them. They feel like oh it's up to the right you know we're up um you know 110% on

our MQLs. Like you don't always have that type of reporting when you do an accountbased model. And so it's very easy for people to get nervous when they don't feel like that activity is matched with the volume, right? Like you were saying, make sales feel like they have something to do when in reality, um, you don't necessarily report on on the number of of contacts within an account, right? Like it's not something that you're going to present to the board. So, but it's something that you can incentivize with your sales team. And so one of the ways that you want to try to maybe shift it is in like how do we report success because I run into this too where people want to know how many MQAs can we expect to have month over month quarter over quarter like they want to have that mindset of of predictability and when you're when you're working on business you know B2B deal here in enterprise um you know it's it's like it it's it's very easy to go back to volume based goals there even though it's not again indicative of of that account. So,

um, you know, it's like an account being in market is more valuable than a bunch of MQLs coming in from accounts that aren't in market, right? So, like it's kind of like dating somebody at the right time. Like, no matter how compatible two people are for each other, if it's the wrong time or the wrong interaction, then sparks probably aren't going to fly. So by not focusing on accounts that are in market and focusing on vanity volume based goals like MQLs, you actually leave a lot more pipeline on the table and it's it's hard to translate that in the normal reporting that most teams do. And so I think a a shift like a fundamental shift in how people report on things is also going to be key to how do we kind of move away from that model. Yeah. Some of the things some of the things that I think are worth looking at is the account engagement, right? Are you are you penetrating the account? Are you engaging them? Is there intent that you've generated? Is there a demand that you've generated? And looking at your buying committee as um you know as like

a whole thing with personas. Obviously, you're going to have different personas that you have to approach uh with different content, with different strategy, right? You're working you're working with different titles most probably. But looking at your at your account that you're after, for instance, if you're doing MQL, I mean, why don't you just um you know, see if you have different MQLs from the same account that are your decision makers. Um but the thing is, if you are going after um you know, senior titles, you're not going to get them very often. You're not going to get them um sign up for something. They won't give you their information for a report. I mean, I have a I have a fake email that I use to download stuff. I'm sure if you're like a VP level marketer, um you I'm bombarded with calls, with emails, with like with any sort of outreach, with gifts. We have a channel where our CEO

shares like some of the outreach that he receives for us just to take a look. Some of it's funny. So um like you're not going to you're not going to submit a form who you will get to to convert is someone on a lower level in the organization and um you know if your sales know that that lower level won't get them the deal and if they're after the more senior people they are going to disqualify that lead there like the chances that they will be like oh I'm going to work this lead get the insights like in an ideal world yeah oh I'm going to talk to them I'm going going to learn everything about the company and then I'm going to use that information to go into and try to build a relationship with someone more senior. Well, you have to have like really really good sales. [laughter] Like you have to have you have to have really good sales to do that. That's difficult. Like I'm not saying that's just like high quality difficult work that needs to be done. And you were mentioning even like all the different tactics that people can

use for a particular lead too. you're mentioning gifting and emails and you know we're trying to get these people's attention you know in so many different ways and you know I heard an expression you know have you heard love bomb when somebody gets lovebombed. Yep. Very similar. like you're just like you're bombarding them with things and it's like that's a lot of resources and attention to give to somebody who if you're not mapping it back to the account or you're or you're not looking at somebody who's in market then it's like like yeah you can shower them with all these things and all this attention but like to what end right like that's I think you have to match it to to like we have we have tools now we have data to show accounts being in market we have ICPs like there's no reason to do that kind of uh love bombing for an MQL for lack of a better term. Uh when when you don't need to, right? Like that's that's just a lot of activity that doesn't translate into anything for anybody, right? Um so what happens? Let's just give let's

just give a quick overview. So we think MQL's are predictable. They're not. Actually, I could share I can share a personal example. We once um made a strategical shift at some other company, not where I'm working now, I won't tell you where. Um so we did content syndication. We're like we need to you know make uh make this quarter more productive. We need to give ourselves more uh leads to work on. So we um you know we did some research. We selected one of the best uh one of the best places where we could do some content syndication and we exceeded our MQL goal by I don't know like 300% like the spike was insane but our poor sales they spent I think like two for two months they had to go through those trashy leads [laughter] through those trashy leads just disqualifying them. I mean, if I were

the if I was in that situation, I would just delete the Excel spreadsheet that we sent them to work on because and I think that's the reality for many many sales people. Uh so, so yeah, they're not reliable. Like when let's say you change the source of where they come from and suddenly you exceed your goals, but then the quality is um you know, horrible. They can get pretty picky at that point, right? Because they don't want to just accept everything. They're going to they're going to want to pull the plug on something a lot sooner based on criteria, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, um I think qualification here, it's not the volume, it's the quality that matters and sales people actually understand that. So very often an ex if it's like a you know a fresh salesperson they'll um you know they'll do what you ask them to do but a lot of senior sales people mostly rely on their

um network and on their connections and on their own efforts to hit their quota because they know like [snorts] from the trenches. they know the difference between high quality leads and random MQL that just dropped into Salesforce, right? Um so yeah, they they ghost them. They ghost them. Um I'm very much involved with our sales department and with our SDRs. So I well I interview them because I need to I need to build those processes between marketing and sales so that we're aligned. So I interview them like what do you think is best? Like what are the processes? What what do you want? And yeah, they tell me, "Girl, we we we just we just drop those Excel spreadsheets into trash immediately on [laughter] immediately when receiving them." Um, but it's also an issue when you are sending um, you know, intent. It's something that can happen not just with

MQA, I think, but also with intent. Um, especially on account level. If you get that wrong, if you get that setup wrong, if you don't know your keywords, if you um you know, if you if you can sometimes mistake people logging in into your competitor with with intent of researching your product. Alex, I actually know that that's something you've set up in the past and um you have a very sophisticated model for intent and engagement capturing. Could you tell me more about that? Yeah, absolutely. Um, and you bring up a good point around um, intent kind of being for intent's sake, you know, and uh, what what I've noticed now at at a couple different um, organizations that I've worked at is that people like to set up intent very generically to show interest, but it's showing interest is not the same thing as showing intent. And so from a marketing orchestration standpoint, if you're getting very highlevel broad intent around maybe your

brand or your category, you might see that people are interested, but you have no idea if they're in market or what they're trying to solve for, right? And when we've designed intent, we've really had those two things in mind is how do we surface accounts that are in market and then how do we help identify what they're likely trying to solve for and where we add value. And we've done that kind of a number of ways. One is we've actually aligned intent to our solutions and said, "Okay, what are the use cases associated with them and how can we say, hey, I see this at my account. I know what it means. I know what they're trying to solve for, and I know who likely cares about it at that corporation or that that account. And what do I want to say about it? Where do I add value there?" Um, I think people rail against intent sometimes. I've seen a lot of conversations on LinkedIn around how it's ineffective. um over relied on, but I think by and large people are not leveraging intent properly and that's why they're not seeing the returns. Um they don't like the anonymity of of intent either. But

when you can cluster intent keywords around use cases that are aligned to your solutions and you identify and you kind of align it to how people are doing their research and how they buy, not how you want to sell, but how they want to buy. um it's a lot easier to translate that into um more digestible data that's more actionable for your sales team and better for your orchestration. Um so really it's like you kind of have to start from scratch and understand like what value do we add to the market? What are problems that people are trying to solve for and organize your intent around that versus around your brand or just competitors or the the industry itself. And um I think when you can identify the specific use cases, you can also take a a pretty educated guess on who likely is trying to solve that within an organization down to department or persona and sometimes even titles. And when you can directionally give that to your sales team, now they're looking at intent with a new lens and they're building it into their

processes to say, "I'm not just looking to sell them or or or asking qualifying questions around our product." Um if you're surfacing intent around things that we know are use cases for say automation or visibility or efficiency or um um compliance purposes depending on their industry. right now the conversation has shifted to what are you trying to solve for and where do we add value not talking about yourself right like and I think that's that's a fundamental shift that we've seen where we've not only surfaced accounts that are more in market but we're having better conversations at the sales level because of that because we're talking about what people want to talk about we're not talking about ourselves right that's ultimately a better experience for both parties that's that's better for the customer that's better for your prospect and it's better for the sales team. They're not cold calling. They're not wasting their time. Um, you know, they're not speed dating through stuff anymore. It's it's really like I can get to my qualification questions a heck of

a lot faster by doing it that way than by by having to, you know, look at an MQL who who, you know, spent a little bit of time on our website or something, right? Like or or downloaded an ebook. Like it's very hard to understand the mindset in an account by a single interaction. So that cumulative look is really really helpful not just for marketing but also from sales. So so let's let's summarize. We kind of hated on MQLs for a while and I think we're gradually moving towards the alternatives that are available there right now. So we figured out that you know we can't rely on MQLs. They're not equal. It's a vanity metric that we come up with basically just to have something to lean on as marketers because very often we don't have enough um we don't have our foot in in the sales process. Um so what is the alternative right now? So from what you say um you're suggesting that first things first looking at intent and looking at an

account actually not looking at intent looking at accounts and being aligned with your sales team on the accounts that you're after. So we're kind of moving from seeing who comes to us to trying to convert uh the accounts that we actually want to convert. Um but it's well it's kind of like comparing two different things you know inbound and outbound. Um but what I notice um a lot of marketers sometimes do is they also confuse they confuse inbound and outbound and they try to get form fills in outbound. So basically you are going after accounts that you're not trying to catch people you know you're not just waiting for them to flow into your you know flow into your net you are trying to catch them right but um you are still expecting them because we're so accustomed to this um to this approach

of capturing um capturing leads basically that we transfer this inbound approach into into our outbound. Um, [clears throat] so let's talk about what we can do to avoid that and how we could actually build something measurable uh that can replace MQLs. Uh, no, it's a great question. I think um the first thing we do is is have a fresh look at our our market, right? And I think one of the ways you do that is understanding not just who's a great fit. Everybody has their ICP exercises but um it's understanding where your accounts are in market right like who actually need to be nurtured down who need to become aware of of the use cases or challenges maybe who even needs to become more aware of your brand and the category in some um industries and you can kind of start to understand where you want to um pull the different levers from a marketing standpoint to show impact. Are you nurturing accounts down

um into the lower funnel stages, right? Are we showing increases in engagement? Um this this goes back to how you want to fundamentally change how you're reporting on things. What are your leading and lagging indicators? Um for say like top ofunnel accounts where you want to see increased time spent with you, right? So what are metrics that you can start showing around that increased highv value um uh engagement like are we seeing website lived? Are we seeing accounts that are new to site um during a campaign? Are we showing um accounts that are u returning? Are we showing accounts that are starting to trend in certain intent? Right? Like um that's where we can really start to to understand are we resonating in the right way and are we doing the things that are moving an entire account, not just a single lead down into um kind of that buying territory. Um, I think oftentimes when people report on campaigns, they report on the volume based um, metrics, right? Like how many

leads do we get from it? How many MQLs do we get from it? And and that shouldn't be the goal of campaigns moving forward, I think, is is really really the crux of that. Then for the accounts that are in market as you're talking about those lowerfunnel metrics, right? Like you really want to start um identifying things like like how many opportunities are coming from what we consider inmarket accounts. Um you know how many um how many contacts are on these opportunities, right? Like can we incentivize the right behavior? What do you mean by incentivizing the right behavior? [snorts] Well, I think I think often times, you know, especially with sales and it's not it's not just with sales teams, but it's it's often with marketing, too, but um people can mistake um activity with productivity, right? So, it's just like if we're doing a lot of things all at once and you know, we look busy, right? People think that we're, you know, we're we're we're going to be successful. Um, and when we talk about like the sales process and where this fits into to their day-to-day, right, is like if can

you and start incentivizing things that de um, you know, deprioritize just a bunch of tasks and focus on the right tasks and sometimes that has to translate um, in different ways, right? So, one of those is like, can we can we get them to start being um spiffed on having opportunities with more than one uh contact on that opportunity? Um, can we incentivize them working and converting what we consider like an MQA, right? How do you start, especially if you're starting new and you're starting fresh with a program? Like if you want to get that type of behavior built, like get alignment with your SDR leadership, get alignment with your revenue teams and say like what are things that we can do to help build this into your processes and incentivize that behavior. So um sometimes people you think oh they're just going to do it because this is the new rules of engagement, but you know one you know old old kind of uh uh old habits die hard and you know it's hard to break them. And then a lot of

times people don't want to look like they're not doing anything right. So if they feel like well we don't we used to have all these tasks and now we don't like you still have a lot to do. You still have a lot to penetrate into an account but how you report on them I think has to be reflected in and then can you get alignment on the incentivization around um doing the right things to the right people at the right time and having that reflected in your pipeline and your conversion. I think those are the things that really get people to buy in. Um and and it's not just a marketing thing. Again it's like it's a sales thing. So, um, yeah, it's it's almost a necessity now, too, because if you just rely on task based, um, prospecting, then, yeah, they're going to probably just flood that entire account regardless of their title, their persona, they're just going to start hitting everybody in the account with the same thing, the same time. Like, yeah, well, I'm working the account, like you said. It's like, no, like you're not. Like, you're actually you're just flooding them, right? And and that's that's looking very busy, but it's not being very productive. So, it's all about building the right habits.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, while you're explaining this, I'm like, this is kind of what they were supposed to do with MQLs, but then we, you know, we we messed that up sometimes. When you if you mess up MQL system once, then you lose the trust. You have to come up with this another system that you have to persuade them to follow. Very true. But yeah, kind of. But then it like the new system I think is a lot more reliable and kind of reflects the B2B buying cycle a lot more. Well, and you also don't want the sales team or anybody else drowning an opportunity, right? Like like you might have a great tech stack, you might have a lot of tools at your disposal, right? But like if they don't know how it fits into the process or who to use it with or how to prioritize them, then then a lot of times you get teams that are you know kind kind of like le in terms of how they are using gifting or using emails or using webinar invites or or what have you right like the gifting example like so couple different places I've worked at we've used either um uh

Postal or Senoso doesn't really matter you can use Reach Desk you do with anybody but they have gifting guides that you can develop up for your team to say instead of just sending out, you know, $10,000 worth of um e gift cards to people to try to get a meeting, which obviously sounds a little desperate, right? Like how do you actually align it with where they are in the market and how do you add value? And so, you know, when we talk about multi-threading and and how that can be multi-channel is like you have to align the tactics to where people are or where where an account is in the market. And we when we developed the gifting guide with that in mind, it was like what are the qualifying criteria to actually warrant sending a gift. And it's not always an e gift card either. Like it's easy to do that over email. I get it. But it's also very easy to ignore. And so one of the things we did was we set criteria around what journey stage should the account be in. Right? We don't want to just be sending a bunch of e gift cards to top offunnel accounts who've never heard of us before. Right? You're just kind of throwing money away. Then when you get

down to milestones and timing, like were they part of campaigns? Were they um the right persona? Um is it the the right time around um uh timing of the year even? And then what's the objective of the gift? Is it to follow up after a webinar? Is it to um celebrate um an event that you found on LinkedIn Sales Navigator to help break through? Um, can you talk about something that they posted on LinkedIn around an interview or a podcast or any PR that came from the account that you saw that was like a big milestone event, like make it relevant to them to to, you know, kind of like help celebrate. And when people see that, not only does it show that you did your homework, but it breaks through in a way where like just a regular eg card to say, "Hey, I'd like to understand your priorities. You know, here's $10 for coffee. Want to chat about it?" Like, no. Like that's that's kind of lame, right? So it is really it's desperate. It's desperation. Desperation is trying to

drive them for it for a discovery for nothing. Yeah. And when you talk about senior leadership oftent times like that's not enough to break through anyway. So if you can actually get a gift amount like we also gave them here gifts amounts based on the personas and the milestones and where an account is in their journey that would vary, right? And so we also gave them kind of recommendations for um you know different personas, different things. And then we encouraged them to do their homework on the account and say like hey are they interested in the outdoors? Like could you send something that's more outdoorsy for them? Um do you know if they have an interest in particular like like movies or shows or something like that? Like cater it to them in a way where it's not just like it's it's actually personal. It's not just personalized. And I think that's another way to help break through. And then also how do you measure the impact of that? like how many additional meetings did we get from sending these gifts, how many were actually attached to opportunities? Um how many follow-on items did we get from this? So like you also align measurement not just to was the gift accepted or how many were sent

out but to what end? And and I think that's also where we got buying where um it was a tool that was available to to the sales teams. But, you know, if you kind of just leave them to their own devices or or you just make it very generic and and you just pepper people with e gift cards, like you're desperate, you're wasting money and you're not breaking through. And I think when you start giving people those those kind of like multi-threading guidelines, you can actually activate a tactic like gifting in a really effective way. Uh yes, I'm actually developing a giftgiving strategy right now. Um, so that is a very hot topic for me and I do agree that anything um less than a personalized gift and top of funnel to an account that you sort of already have a relationship with is desperation and it's probably not going to turn into a customer. I think you will have, you know, you'll have the MQL situation. You'll have them accept the

gift. You'll have them, you'll measure how many you send. Um, when I'm measuring stuff, I like to have a control group and I like to have, you know, the group that has been, you know, exposed to the tactic that that I'm using. But that is again not ideal I think because in B2B marketing like the deals are so complex with so many people involved that I think they are being influenced by a lot a lot of different factors and sometimes you can do you know you can do a flip but then it it won't translate into revenue just because just because it's the wrong timing or they had management change or something. So I and like a lot of there there are some products in the market already that do this, but measuring your influence rather than um rather than doing attribution uh I think is the way to measure your activities because

you can measure your influence, you can um compare it to other opportunities but then when you measure influence you can look at everything that you've done for the account because it's not like oh you had it's not the B2C situation where like where you you know you snap interest and they buy your shoes whatever deals can like deals can go on for half a year for for two years even and obviously marketing is doing something for this all of the time like the entire cycle and saying and then imagine you come in and you say, "Oh, we closed this enterprise because I sent them this note card from a you know, I sent them I sent them this note card, so I think this is the attribution. This is and and this happens when you have this attribute like with every attribution model when you're doing attribution not influence, you kind of uh you kind of drop into

this into the strap. you you walk into this trap where you're like, "Oh, if it's first touch attribution, oh, we met them at the event." And that was a person who left the company like two years ago, right? Like that's not that's not when it started. That's not when it started. Or last last touch point would be like this gift giving card. You're like, "Oh, it's the gift card. Why don't we invest two billion dollars into the gift card?" You know, right? It's an incomplete story. Yeah. Absolutely. It's it's an incomplete story. Oh my god. We are off topic. I think we're going to have to call the episode how MQOs's are leading us on and some other stuff that we discuss and [laughter] some other some other stuff that we think that we like talking about. Um, okay. I have actually have a question because I asked you uh what do you think is the alternative to the MQL? You gave me a nice description of how we should go on about it. But what do you do when you don't have enough accounts with

intent and you have a quota? That's where you are in a situation like I know guy I I know that you have uh probably I mean according to your um experience you work at larger companies where you have like the type of the product that you sell you have a huge total addressable market right you can you can assess the market and then you can pull the accounts with intent have you ever been in a situation where you're like well the accounts with intent are not giving us enough enough revenue. We need to you know we need to either generate intent somehow or we need to build like a more aggressive strategy with going after like a tier one account so we have to convert to hit our quota. Oh yes. Uh in fact when we did the initial overhaul um when I joined Venify we actually had we I would say we overcorrected the criteria for what

constituted an MQA and um we shrunk the volume to the point where people were like that's not enough that's that's that's not enough pipeline that's not enough counts to work right like I think we shrunk it like it got to like 12% or something like that from where it was previously which is like little bit of an overcorrection. So the problem that we had before was that we had too many MQAs. The criteria was very broad. They weren't actually in market. And so sales had lost confidence in the model saying like I'm not going to work a bunch of accounts that just spend a bunch of time, you know, on on venify.com or or um you know, doing like very high value things, right? Those are not in market, right? They don't even know what some of our products were. And so when we put some of this rigor around the criteria, it was like they had to have certain um you know engagement minutes through fan base. We had to have certain um intent surface for them within a given period of time. And to me it's always kind of like striking a balance of like do you

have enough of a body of work there at the account to illustrate mindset and engagement? um you know is like a roughly 3-month period to show like is there consistent interest in this area that you can you know still prospect into and still market to them in a in a thoughtful way. But if you keep it too concentrated or too um if you if you have the standards that are kind of like too much rigor there, you can really kind of uh miss out on on some of the interest and opportunity there because um if you get too specific like you you just really you might you might actually miss the opportunity to to talk to them about something that adds value. So, um, we throttled back a little bit on some of the criteria, like we adjusted the engagement minutes. We adjusted some of the intent, um, and we kind of started to see more of a predictive, um, volume of of MQAs that started to flow through, um, that were were meeting the the the the rules of engagement that we asked

the SDRs to go through. So, they weren't feeling overwhelmed, but they weren't feeling like they had, you know, too few to work. So we're striking a good balance there. And then when we saw the quality, you know, we started to assess the quality of the accounts. It was well, are we having enough conversations there where we feel like we're actually capturing accounts that are in market? And and more or less the answer was yes. Like we were having more productive conversations. We were talking to more of the right people because the intent that was surfacing at the account was more aligned to the personas that we cared most about. And so, um, you know, it was obviously something that was evolving and something that we were updating quarter by quarter and re-evaluating, but I remember when we first kicked that off, we were like, whoa, that volume is not going to do it. So, um, you have to kind of have a good feedback loop with your with your with your sales team. And then you also have to kind of evaluate, um, the volume in a way to say like, hey, are we actually like missing opportunity here by being too stringent? Like, are my standards too high? um you know so you it's always about striking a balance and and making sure you're looking at the data

consistently with the teams. Yeah. But what you're saying is that you again I think I think you have uh I have I think you have the luxury of a large total addressable market. So you could adjust the criteria of how you qualify and like how you identify intent. Um so basically by changing the criteria of measuring intent you were able to find this balance with your sales team to give them over um QAS right intent. Yeah. I mean it was it was also first party engagement. It was time spent and it was the frequency of this too. So it wasn't just certain activities. it was like do we actually have um high value um engagement and intent happening within a given period of time with the right frequency. So, I think that's something you can't really throttle when you're looking at an MQL is like you don't always say like within a time frame and you're also looking at

um the quality of the of the engagements um to get the volume that you want. Like I think you have a lot more leverage that you can pull and a lot more data points that you can look at from an account standpoint especially when you start incorporating intent. And then I think the other thing I would like to add too is that it has to align to your go to market goals, right? So, um, sometimes it's going to to to dictate if you do like more of a one to few versus a one one in certain cases. And so, like where do they spend their time? Do we have a go to market goal about penetrating a particular um vertical or industry? Are we trying to expand within one? Um, are we doing a competitor takeback campaign? Like what is something that we can also point to that you can align it to versus just like the overall holistic um, you know, demand genen. So it it can also depend on what your go to market goals are too, I would say. All right. So what are the lessons learned that you think that you think people should take away from this episode? Um I think you know some of the lessons

learned that we talked about was like marketing being involved at every step of the journey um for an account is is obviously really important and how you measure success across that journey shouldn't be uniform, right? And I think a lot of the reporting that we're doing now for a campaign is often times focused on volume of MQLs um converting MQLs and things like that, right? But it's not telling the whole story of of that campaign or the journey of an account or set of accounts, right? So um the other thing is incentivizing the right behavior. Um making sure that you're you're aligned with your sales team around the right types of behaviors that you want them to do and not just making sure that teams are busy or not. Like I think that's a surefire way to lose trust with the with the sales team if you're just lobbing stuff over or you know they're trying to feel busy and um you know can you get multiple contacts on an opportunity? Can you get spiffs around um you know reps that are getting MQAs to convert forward, right? Like get them excited about it. I think it's it's important. And then one thing that we

didn't touch on but I want to make sure I I mention here is making that there's consistent reinforcement with these teams kind of across um across the year and across the quarters, right? Like how are they leveraging the tools at their disposal? Um optimizing the processes um you know understanding and getting good feedback loops around the the data that they're getting back on their accounts, the questions that they're having on their calls. It's all very important, right? So this is never like a set it and forget it. It's always a reinforcement there. And then um the fact that multi-threading should also be multi-channel and setting in some really good criteria around when to use certain tools and and to what end and how you want to measure them. So um you know MQLs are are are easy to report on, but they're also very misleading. And so find a way to take it a step deeper. And with an accountbased model, you know, you really should be looking at the buying teams and the quality of the the footprint that you have there. and how do you actually penetrate an account and not just not just report on vanity metrics because it's very easy to be led

astray by a single lead no matter how engaged they are right it's not indicative of a mindset in an account so Alex um have you ever been led on by an MQL in your in your from your experience well not me personally but one of our one of our best reps one of our our best AES was working um an enterprise uh energy company one of the top energy companies and had um done an incredible job of prospecting and built a really solid foundation with kind of like a mid senior manager on their IT team. And um she was incredible. Like I remember the the lead had like validated use cases. She was eating up all the content we were sending and sharing. You know, she had kept in in consistent contact for several weeks. You know, it's kind of like everything you would want in a in a solid lead, right? Like um so you're thinking all things are great and but we were so enamored with this one lead and this one relationship and nurturing it that we stopped

prospecting into the account and we stopped, you know, asking for introductions and doing these things, right? We were kind of hitching our wagon to this one lead because they were so great. But what we were not privy to was that one of our competitors was also um working this account and they were working at a level higher. I think they were at the VP level and the mid to senior level manager was unaware of this. Right. So while she was all excited and and and doing a great job of trying to, you know, facilitate things, um we were kind of like lingering with these promises of introductions unaware that the competitors had penetrated the account as well at a higher level. And when those introductions didn't come, we ultimately lo we ultimately lost the deal because um again we had hitched our wagon to the wrong lead and we were unable to align their leadership and facilitate introductions or meetings. So, you know, even all this to say is that I would, you know, even a great lead, no matter how engaged they are,

can lead you on. And you have to be very careful with um, you know, focusing and being too myopic on one lead, no matter how great they are or how great they seem. Multi-threading. Multi-threading is the answer. Multi- threading always comes down to multi-threading. Yeah, it's true. All right. So, um I guess that's it. We are at time. Um Alex, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your experiences and expertise with us. Um well, I'm I hope we'll do that again someday. It's been my pleasure. Thank you for the conversation and absolutely look forward to the next time. Yeah. All right. [music]