Winning Pipeline in Today’s Market

[Applause] all right it's good to be here uh good to see some familiar faces in the crowd as well and those of you I haven't met yet looking forward to meeting you at the networking reception so uh as Kathleen mentioned I'm Joe mcneel cro of influ and we do contact focused advertising so we target named list of individuals uh we push the engagement back to the contact record and then we measure the the difference in conversion rates for the folks we're targeting versus those were not so the reason I'm telling you that is is I get the chance to work with a lot of sales and marketing leaders and look under the hood of their pipeline engine so so what I want to present is really what I'm seeing out there that's working and also what I'm seeing that's not working right I feel like a lot of pipeline discussions right now center around what not to do so I'm hopeful to give you some ideas on on what you can do as well so prior to influ 2 uh I led sales at site improve which was uh primarily an outbound Focus company I think we went we went from 8 to 100 million uh almost exclusively through outbound prior to

that I was with a company called protolabs and we went through an IPO primarily through inbound so I've seen both sides of it and I think really in today's market you can't be successful with a single discipline Focus like we had at site improve or at peaps so building on that I I believe commercially the hardest element of scaling a company is scaling the pipeline engine scaling pipeline growth alongside growth of the company uh and I think right now in today's market it's harder than it's ever been primarily for two reasons so reason one is I think you know when funding was was very prevalent a lot of companies spent their way through it right like the quality of your pipeline engine a lot of times are related to the size of your War chest how much how much pipeline can we buy how much how much revenue can we buy which I think we all know that that's that's not an option anymore uh and execution really matters in addition um Chris orlab had a LinkedIn post and he said this a lot more eloquently and

smartly than I could put it so I'm just going to steal his wording that you know a couple years ago we were in a demand positive environment right right now we're in a demand neutral or demand negative environment and so a couple years ago I think a lot of our pipeline teams were more pipeline collectors I'm going to go collect the buyers rather than pipeline creators and I think in today's market people are a lot more diligent in the tech they add and the things they buy and you really need to work a lot harder to create that pip P line in addition um really the buyer Journey has changed which I think I have on another slide uh it's turned into like this convoluted mess right where where really the way that a lot of organizations are measuring pipeline right now is through like that that single discipline attribution right and and I believe that that single Source attribution is really like one of the most damaging things to pipeline strategy today it really causes a lot of optimization in directions that

aren't healthy for pipeline so so if we want to talk about what what is over or what isn't working I think we can refer to you know inbound outbound plg partner any of these strategies in a vacuum I think they don't work really a successful pipeline program to me is really the sum of all of its parts right how do you build Synergy amongst all of the different pipeline programs to support one one another um you know if you look at like building out a sequence right the sequence is the sum of all of its parts so you know what I see over and over again is if someone calls and leaves a voicemail their email per performance goes up right but if you were to look at that individually you'd say no one ever calls us back why do we leave voicemails it's a waste of time right if you zoom out to pipeline strategy almost every time an organization adds outbound sellers inbound leads go up right anytime marketing launches a campaign goes to an event does webinars outbound conversion go up right yet we still look at success in a vacuum in a lot of ways

and really only attribute these things to One Singular event so one one thing that's really divisive right now is outbound right like there's a lot of eulogies being written on LinkedIn about the death or impending death of outbound right and and a lot of these a lot of these posts really center around the declining reply rate of emails and the declining engagement to sdrs right it also looks at you know how how efficient are our SDR teams and how many sdrs are hitting their numbers right the funny dichotomy to that is sorry let me all have to go back is that you know Pavilion did their PLL survey around June last year about go to market leaders uh top initiatives for H2 outbound was the top one so like it's dead but it's also very popular right and and what what I think is happening here is you know a lot of these inbound and plg organizations that were very well funded before are running into diminishing returns on scaling their Pipeline and they don't

have the war chest to scale the inbound or plg motion as efficiently as they could before or or just exponentially as they could before so a lot of organizations are adding outbound just talk to one at lunch right um unfortunately some of the way that they're doing it is just kind of adding it in its own little vacuum so like you know I could spend the rest of the time talking about this slide here but I'll I'll try to keep it keep it brief you know to summarize sort of where we're at it's you know to me the reason email reply rates are going down is because when budgets go down emails go up right emails cheapap people are getting peppered with emails so I think it's it's only natural that reply rates are going down because spam is going up so email can work but it can't work it can't work alone it has to work as as a piece of the overall puzzle in addition adding sdrs and putting them in a room over over here and giving them a sales engagement platform and saying you guys go you guys and GS go Source pipeline that doesn't work either right so what

does work is building this pipeline motion that is the sum of all its parts and build Synergy right this allbound motion doing that and layering an effective outbound within that is incredibly hard we see it's incredibly hard but the way I like to look at it is is incredibly hard is a huge opportunity for all of us in this room right when something is very hard it presents the opportunity for operators and companies that can execute right there's an incredible opportunity to differentiate yourself as a company if you can execute a very quality pipeline motion and build pipeline because a lot of your competitors can't you know two years ago everyone was winning but it was smoking mirrors it wasn't sustainable so right now is the time where if we build this that we can really do it in a way that differentiates ourselves so what do I see is like the internal building blocks at the highest level and I'll zoom in right one thing that we see is that the companies that are winning are focusing

on how are we influencing prospects in a number of ways to get them into our pipeline you know if someone raises their hand on your website or if a bdr calls them and they agree to a meeting it's not that one individual activity but that's the reason they came into the pipeline it's all of the parts together right it's also how do we measure the pipel line quality in a way that everyone's aligned on that's very B binary and easy to Define this one might be a little divisive but like what I see is goals are throttled by Revenue attainment right if you have an SDR leader and they're comped on a number of opportunities that they hit hitting that goal alone gets throttled by the company's revenue attainment or their territory's revenue attainment for that quarter so they keep the big picture in mind all the time and then Sam's talked about this a lot but it's just building a go to market team building a pipeline team that wins together or loses together right you can't be at a board meeting or or or a qbr and sales is 65% to Target but marketing is 170% to

Target right you can't be in those situations everybody wins together everybody loses together uh and here's the here's the the chart I talked about the other piece is is how much support is the pipeline team getting right if we think about Enterprise sellers in an organization you know they're very experienced how many resources does it Enterprise seller have at their disposal to get an opportunity over the line you know CEO will jump on a call product lead will jump on a call the board will sometimes influence it right anybody within the company they have solution narchitects they have everything anybody at the company is there to hop in and help them close that deal now let's look back how much how many resources does an Enterprise SDR or that Enterprise AE have in creating an opportunity can they draw upon anyone in the company's Network can they bring anyone to the table to help get that opportunity created uh Mark Wayan the C box was here last year and he said something that really resonated with me and he talked about how they

really fixed a lot of their pipeline problems is they created this idea that everyone in the company is a part of the pipeline team the pipeline is everyone's remit so if there's someone in the product leads Network that can help get a deal into an opportunity then they're responsible to jump in and help so I think a big thing of what I see is the companies that are doing really well view pipeline as a company problem not just like the pipeline team over here not the top of funnel team so to zoom in a little bit and if we think about executing a successful pipeline motion more uh at the Frontline level and specifically you know on the outbound side the top the the top companies have a very prescriptive I ICP right that is here's who our top tier customers are or prospects are and here's who they are not right there's a lot of this that that's a mile wide and an inch deep right now right I think sometimes when pipeline is challenged the natural

reaction is I need to do more and I need to go wider when in reality a lot of times it's opposite of that it's like we need to be more prescriptive and more focused that ICP needs to be aligned across the entire org if you ask sales leader marketing leader post sales leader product who is your top tier customer who is your ICP the I'll say the same thing right within that ICP we want to have a grading scale like not not all accounts are created equally within that and then on top of that we need to have the buying groups mapped right people buy not companies so who are our primary buyers within that account who are the people that influence deals and who are the top people we want to get all the way down lastly and this one sounds really obvious but this is like the most common issue I see amongst companies who are struggling on the pipeline side is Marketing sales they're focused on different audiences right you cannot build an effective pipeline motion or all about motion if you're targeting different folks different companies different

personas on top of that positioning in messaging within those Persona groups needs to be aligned amongst all those groups you see that sometimes too where they have different positioning different messaging marketing says something different than what sales does right the second piece this one's specific to outbound how are the how is the outbound team deciding who to put into a sequence or a Cadence right this is hard to see but Matt Hy has a quote that says all go to market motions come down to answering two questions who to call and what to say right are you building systems and infrastructures to answer those questions for your team providing them a prescriptive list of who the warmest people are within their ICP to call or do you have sdrs answering that question for you right I love sdrs to death but they tend to have the least experience in the commercial team so do we want them to be the ones answering the most important question do we want them to be the final decider of who they're going to put in a sequence or a Cadence or do we want to put systems in play to answer this for

you another piece is how focused are we on maximizing outbound and sort of prospecting conversions right I think all of us are our remit this year is building efficiency through through our sales Cycles right and I bet if I asked any one of you what is your opportunity conversion rate you could write me a dissertation on it right you could tell me what are the influencing factors what is it per company what is it this quarter versus last quarter maybe even what is it per sales rep but if I asked you what is your prospecting conversion rate could you answer that could you answer what what are the factors that cover it because prospecting conversion rate has a profound impact on on your sales unit economics as well so I can give you a couple ideas of what we see through our data uh multi-threading is not just an opportunity thing right we all know that multi-threading opportunities creating more engaged contacts within an opportunity has a very big impact on conversion rates what we see is it also has a big impact on prospecting rates if you reach out to multiple people within the same account

while you're prospecting you will convert higher that doesn't mean send them all the same email though which I'm sure we've all experienced um so Persona specific messaging on top of that if marketing has created engagement with those folks even better right lastly sales has a study that the amount of media types you use in your Outreach process basically exponentially increases your connect percentage so prospecting we have phone call we have email and we have LinkedIn so that's the SDR sort of core three right this chart goes up to five so what other support are they getting from media types that the prospect can put together as a cohesive process that can help it there are you know are your ads connected are you doing any mailing campaigns gifting campaigns videos there's a lot of different things you can do but are you leveraging those cuz like if you want to differentiate leveraging those is important I think another thing that we see is is you know core fundamental is is about five years ago when I was really deep in the SDR world at my past company like personalization was how you

differentiated yourself in the market right like no one could personalize its scale so if you wanted to prove that you were different than the endless spam they were getting you personalize the email right now for better or worse AI has sort of created a scalable and efficient way to personalize that scale so like you can spam more personalized emails so what I see is like the companies that are winning right now are humanizing the prospecting process right if you can prove that you are a human trying to connect to another human you know the same people you understand their business and you want to talk to them about how you could impact that you're going to be like in the top 1% of Outreach that that person is getting so so humanization how you humanize it really matters that'll that'll impact your conversion this one is less on the prospecting side this is more in the sales process but I just wanted to talk about how aligned you know in aligned motion here can impact your efficiency is that you know this is EPA study but it talks about engagement impacting win rates and velocity right so if you can create that

engagement earlier and you can get your sales and marketing teams working together you're going to improve your your outbound conversion rates and your conversion rates through your your pipeline gen but those conversion rates are going to follow you through the sales process so you're really effective your sales efficiency throughout the funnel and then lastly you know we've seen a lot about the bow tie funnel but like customer acquisition process really impacts the organizational health and the post sales process as well and sort of everything I've talked about rolls into this concept right it's that if we're really good at Target selection if we're really good at positioning if we're really good at all these things we're going to acquire healthier business that healthier business we will more likely impact which will more likely uh lead to renewals and expansions and and you know more renewal and expansion revenue is table Stakes now but like it will also help you in the future with your with your top of funnel goals right if your unit

economics improve on the post Sal side you don't need to outrun it on the new business side right so the more you can optimize your customer acquisition process looking at the long game the better your top of funnel goals will be moving forward so I'm going to go through this really quick because I see I got two minutes left um how we're doing it at influ to right I mentioned contact focused advertising right there's a time and place for for account-based advertising that's more on the demand gen side we're we're we're leveraging our advertising efforts to Target the same people that our sdrs are reaching out to you know we're feeding those engagements into Salesforce and we're giving them a list of here are the most engaged folks within your territory who you should reach out to right now right so they don't have to decide who should I call they know who they should call and they see what the people are engaging with so they know how to to reach out to them on top of that we're tracking all of the marketing and sales engagement and Outreach at the contact record so we can

see sort of the sum of all the parts of the of what's happening with it not just what sales doing with them or what's marketing doing with them how much engagement are we creating both on both sides of it so I will skip through some of this and I will close it at what we're doing from there is we are showing how all of that is impacting conversions right so we just look at marketing is creating engagement with this audience what will our conversion rates look like sales is sometimes grabbing cold targets that they want we should be targeting them but we're not what are those conversion rights and what we typically see with us and with our customers is that when marketing creates engagement with an audience they convert on the prospecting side about two to four the rate that they do when they're cold Outreach and that's consistent amongst I think we measured $8 billion with the pipeline in that study so it's pretty consistent along the way so not a Magic Bullet but it is a scalable approach to how you can increase your conversion rates on the prospecting side

questions all right thank you