The Pipeline Council: Mastering the Art of Alignment
Listen to all-star revenue leaders to hear exactly how they ensure marketing and sales teams stay aligned on all things pipeline.
All right, thanks, Emma.
Thank you so much for the shout out to Qualified Kristen.
And thank you so much for sharing your tech stack with us.
Thank you, everyone, for joining today.
My name is Sarah McConnell, and I'm
the VP of Demand Generation here at Qualified.
And I'd love to introduce Matt Buren, who's
the VP of Global Sales and Customer Success Operations
at Bombora.
Matt, thank you so much for joining us.
Can you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us
a little bit about Bombora and what you do?
Yeah, thanks for having me, Sarah.
So Matt Buren, I had sales ops, CX ops, and sales development
for Bombora.
I've been here for about a year and a half,
and excited to talk about all of the learnings and evolution
that we've had in our pipeline council
and how we generate it.
Perfect.
So I think on that note of pipeline council,
the whole impetus, I think of this conversation,
was sales and marketing alignment.
It's this age old tale.
We hear about it all the time.
But sales and marketing really struggled to stay aligned.
And Matt, I'm curious to hear from you.
What do you think is the biggest driver behind this misalignment
between the teams?
Yeah, I think being at two startups now and seeing
how it's evolved when you start, when you're 50 people big,
to when you get to 2, 3, 400.
It's misalignment of goals, typically,
where maybe a marketing team is held to one very specific goal,
but that doesn't quite jive with how you generate pipeline.
And they become those vanity metrics, right?
And I think that without that close alignment of everyone
working together to build a lead model together,
to work on the operating plan together
for how a business is going to do what they need to do
in a given year, that's the silos and the misalignment
of those goals, I think, of really
what's created the big rub between both departments.
I couldn't agree more.
I think the misalignment on goals
is one of the easiest fixes for alignment.
Like, obviously, there's so much more
that goes into staying aligned from teams,
but really getting the teams aligned around goals,
I think, is like the number one fix you could do
at this moment in time to get the teams a little bit more
on the same page.
So with that being said, I feel like one of the things
that we did here at Qualified and I know Bambora is,
and we'll kind of dive into what they look like,
that we introduced is what we call pipeline council.
So I want to take a bulk of this time today
to talk through what pipeline council looks like,
what are the metrics that we focus on
to help us drive that sales and marketing alignment?
I think pipeline council was a new concept to me
when I joined Qualified actually.
It was something that our founders had done
when they were at Salesforce and they asked
how I was going to run pipeline council and I joined
and I was like, I'm going to run, excuse me, what?
What happened?
(laughing)
It was a really new concept to me,
but in the early days when we were smaller,
it was legitimately the entire company on one call
talking about every opportunity we opened up that week.
- That's amazing.
- Deep detail, 'cause we were like,
how are we going to spend our money in the right way?
Where should we focus our time?
And then here we are two and a half years later
and it's evolved.
So I want to take everyone through kind of the evolution
of where we stand now and what we look at
and then would love to compare it, Matt,
to what you guys are talking about at Bambora.
- Yeah, it's a journey.
I think that's the most important thing
about this whole conversation, right?
Everybody has to start somewhere and once you can get
to the council, I think that's really where you get
that strong alignment kind of where the magic happens,
if you will.
- Absolutely, I cannot emphasize journey enough
because I think I redo pipeline council here at Qualified
every quarter.
It's never looked the same any quarter over.
So it is a true journey and it's a constant evolution.
So I will say here at Qualified,
the first thing we focus on every single week is
where do we stay in quarter to date
from a pipeline perspective?
So the entire company has a pipeline goal
that we set before every quarter.
We know how much pipeline we need to generate
to hit our revenue goals.
And the whole company is aligned around that
and actually say our whole marketing team is
bonus off of these pipeline numbers.
And the whole goal is like,
how do we keep everyone aligned and motivated
on pipeline numbers?
So every single person that joins this call
cares very deeply about this singular pipeline number.
So we'll kick off our pipeline council
and we'll say like, here's our goal,
here's where we stand quarter to date,
here's what we did for the week.
So we can see any like week over week trends.
And then at the very bottom, we have our,
where do we stand from a target attainment standpoint?
And then how much time is elapsed?
So we can kind of see how are we tracking?
And then that's also visualizing that line chart
over on the left-hand side.
You can kind of see like where we need to be
and then how we're doing.
And the red line is like where we're actually at
in the quarter.
And I found like this is the slide when
there's any other questions around how we're doing.
I'll always come back to this slide.
This is what everyone really cares about
is like, how much have we done quarter to date?
And how is that putting us against our goals?
Like how are we stacking up against our goals?
- That week over week change is super important too
because you don't want to just understand
where you are in your target attainment.
You want to understand how are we growing it week over week?
Because I'm scared, I'm sure you've dealt with it.
You don't want to be in that last week of the month
or that last week of the quarter
trying to cram 25% of your goal into one week, right?
So it's a really good call out there
on the week over week change.
I think that one's really important for everybody.
- Absolutely.
There's no spiffs in the world to make up a 25% gap
and the last two weeks of the quarter.
So I think this really keeps the team every week.
Like we're actually on a call every Friday
that wholesale's a marketing team joins.
And so the teams can see here how we're stacking up.
And I think this over time keeps the teams motivated
and just aligned on where we stand.
You know, even if we're over attainment,
we're always on the call and we're going,
is it like keep pushing, we can get over attainment?
Like everyone just really aligns around these numbers.
- That's awesome.
- And then to your point Matt about looking at week over week
attainment here, we'll then start to look at
where is our pipeline coming from
for the first time we've heard about us.
We really have gone through journey, I think,
is the buzzword of this session today.
But we went through this journey of attribute shit
and we're trying to figure out how do we understand
more about our pipeline.
And one of the things we started to look at is first touch.
Originally, we'd only talked about last touch
and we were like, we really want to understand
what was the first time an account
or a person heard about us?
What was the driver of that?
'Cause a lot of times that is marketing.
It's something inbound.
It's something that marketing is doing.
And we felt like without this view, we were very limited.
So then we break into our weekly pipeline view
by first touch and we can see what were the different channels
that we talk about.
And then most importantly, we have a like, what's working?
What did we see this week?
So we have like very specific tactical things
or like events or something that we can speak to
in our weekly first touch perspective here.
And then moving on from that, we talk about what sourced it.
So we talk about our first touch,
that's the first time an account or a person heard about us.
That's tracked on the account record in Salesforce,
the lead record, the contact record.
And then we move on to our source.
So what was the thing that converted it into pipeline?
And we typically see those numbers shift a little bit.
Then all of a sudden we're like marketing has done their job.
They softened these accounts and these peoples
with their activities.
And now we're seeing a lot of sourcing come from like
our outbound team or AEs and our outbound sales reps
because they're using intent, they're using all the things
that marketing is doing to then do effective outreach
to people who actually know who we are.
So we look at that same view when we just flip it
and say, okay, what source of all the pipeline
we created this week, what actually turned it into Python
was the last touch essentially that turned it into pipeline.
And then what worked and what are areas of focus?
Like what's coming down the pipe
that you guys should know about
that's gonna help you hit those goals.
- That alignment's key too, because if they don't know,
if a sales team and an SDR team
doesn't know what a marketing team is putting out
into the ether, they're not gonna know how to formulate
their plan of attack of their messaging,
how they're gonna target that.
They just, having intent I think is one piece of it
about adding this layer into it of that communication
and alignment I think is the other buzzword here.
Really I think helps push this.
And I think it shows in the way that you guys have
this split out and where your guys are seeing it come from.
- The two words alignment journey,
that's the two things everyone can take out of this session.
- And alignment is also a journey.
So they kind of go together like peanut butter and jelly.
- Full circle.
So then moving past that, one of the views that we like
to look at is how are our teams performing?
And we found specifically with our sales teams,
when we talk about our inbound sales reps,
and we will, the next slide,
we're gonna look at our outbound sales reps
and their performance.
Is this a view of how they're stacking up for the week?
How much pipeline did they help source during the week?
And then quarter to date, where are they standing?
And they all have obviously quotas,
that's part of their job.
And these leaderboards have been a fun way
to keep people motivated.
Like when we do pipeline council,
and again everyone's on the call,
it's so fun to watch the Zoom chat light up
because there's a lot of friendly camaraderie happening
between the teams where they're like,
oh, I'm still close, I'm gonna overtake you.
And it creates one, it drives them,
which I think is fantastic.
Like it gives them some motivation
and to see this here.
But I think a lot of people that go into sales
are probably pretty competitive.
And I think this view gives them like a little push
of competitiveness where they're like competing
with their team and it gives the team visibility
and everyone across the company on like,
how are the reps doing?
I know me personally, then I can talk to some of the reps
and say, our top performers say,
what's working for you?
Like how can I learn from you and understand
like what's done really well for you?
And then how can we put that into our enablement
to help our other reps?
- Yeah, highlight it so everybody sees what success looks like
and they want a piece of it too.
Stack ranks are a powerful motivator for sure.
- Absolutely.
And then very similar view,
but this is our outbound sales reps.
So same thing here, we talk about attainment,
how many ops have they created, how much pipeline?
Just a different view with the same idea of how our
inbound sales reps and our outbound sales reps
performing for the quarter.
Now, the last thing I wanna show everyone
before we jump into Matt, what your pipeline council looks like.
And I wanna compare like, what are we talking about?
The same things, like how are different companies doing this?
This is one of my favorite things,
it's called our play of the week.
This is something where every single week we pick out
a handful of our favorite things that happen.
We call them plays, but something that turned into pipeline.
And we call them our plays, like,
what were the actual actions that were taken
to turn this account into open pipeline?
And we get to highlight one of the reps
where we get to show what the pipeline was, what sourced it,
what turned it into pipeline.
And then we take them through what worked.
And I found what's so key about this
is it helps enable the team without them even realizing it.
When we have every single rep on the call
and we run through an entire play and say,
from start to finish, here's how this turned into pipeline,
it gives the other reps ideas on what they can be doing
to also help drive pipeline.
And they start to work it into their playbooks.
And this is everyone's favorite part of pipeline council
without a doubt.
And they're in the chat and they're saying,
"Oh, that was great.
"I love how you did this.
"I love how you looked here and you geolocated them."
And the plays of the week have been a huge hit.
- Oh, it's awesome.
'Cause it's not just how are you doing it.
It's, here's how we tactically walked through
booking this conversation.
- Absolutely.
- Yeah.
- So with that, Matt, I wanna hear from you.
I feel like there's a lot for me to even learn from you.
And we kind of chatted a little bit before this.
And you were mentioning bump wars
in your early stages of pipeline council.
So I would love to have you take us through
what does pipeline council look like for you at Bombora?
- Yeah.
So key here is journey.
You know, it's funny.
I started here a year and a half ago.
All we really talked about were meetings.
And we've really flipped the script on what we measure,
how we talk about it.
And I'll get into that on these slides.
So where we start, it's at the executive level, right?
Because you really, you need that top level alignment.
So when it comes to batten down the hatches time,
that these teams are properly communicating
with each other, right?
And so here you can see where we separate it by team.
And the big thing here is we know,
and we'll get into it in some later slides,
we know exactly how much pipeline we need to generate
for each of these teams in that given quarter
in order for our sales teams to have a shot
at hitting their goals.
But we'll get into a lot more detail
on that on one of the later slides.
- Perfect.
And I love the idea of breaking out into the teams here.
This is something we've been talking about at Qualified.
And I love seeing how you guys are doing it with the teams
because different teams need different amount of coverage
of pipeline, different things matter to them.
So I love that at your top level here,
you have that broken up by teams.
I think that's a huge dig here.
- It's helped a ton because that's how we built,
when we built that lead model from the bottoms up,
we were able to say,
all right, each team needs this,
each team's gonna have slightly different win rates,
they're gonna have slightly different deal sizes,
they're gonna have slightly different,
just sales motions, right?
And so we really tried this year to really combine that
and make sure that we were making sure
that each team was properly set up.
And one thing to know that I did forget to mention,
we do this biweekly with our executive team
during our forecast call,
and we found that that's been a really good amount
of time to spend on it.
We usually spend about 20 minutes on the forecast
in about 10 minutes on this.
And it's really helped keep the executive team in line.
And this also lives on their executive dashboard,
where it shows where that forecast is for the quarter
and how deals are progressing.
So executive dashboards for anyone that isn't doing this yet
is fantastic because it helps keep them involved.
And sometimes it actually creates less meetings
on your calendar, which I'm sure that we'll strive in.
- Which we're all looking for.
So this is our waterfall.
We took a pretty big swing this year.
We said, there's a lot of infighting
and inbound versus outbound.
I'm pretty sure Sarah and I could do an entire session
on the infighting of inbound versus outbound, right?
- Oh man.
(laughs)
- So what we really tried to do was,
we know what number we need to hit.
We know we need to work together to hit it.
So what does that waterfall look like?
So we're measuring meeting set and completed.
How does that convert to SAL,
which is a created opportunity stage zeros, zero dollars?
What is our conversion rate of what we're creating?
So we can measure what is the effectiveness
of the meetings that we're creating?
What is the effectiveness of the ones
that are coming to a state where an opportunity is created?
And of all of that work that we're doing,
how much are we able to turn into pipeline?
And then obviously the big number here is looking at,
okay, it's great, but if you generate
37 ops as you can see here at 25K a piece,
that's only for one team, right?
So you have to make sure, yeah,
we're generating enough opportunities,
but so we have the pipeline coverage in order to hit our goals,
which, you know, pipeline generated
is pretty much our North Star when it comes
to our top of the funnel.
- Totally.
And to your point of infighting,
I feel like hearing you say this and keeping everyone aligned
around one goal and that it was a big swing,
is just, it's so great to me because we've done something
similar qualified where everyone has that big,
kind of mentioned that one big pipeline goal
and we still measure by channel and we still know
what channels are doing and we have that in our
attribution model, but keeping everyone in that one goal
we found pretty early on, there's still gonna be some things
where there's, oh, we thought it should give credit here
and credit here and I don't know we ever overcome that,
but the lining over one big goal does
how the teams work together.
And it just creates one big camaraderie of team
and you're working together to reach this one singular goal.
And I think that's huge to help teams stay aligned.
One day a proper multi-touch attribution model will exist
until then we're just gonna be creative.
- One day, one day, but for now we're just gonna
(laughs)
just make it up as we go.
- Yeah, we've got a lot of good learnings.
I think that'll play into 23 on,
I think we lost sight of a few of first touch,
we still kept track of, but last touch,
I think we maybe lost sight of a little bit.
So, big swing, but that big swing really opened our eyes
to a lot of different things.
So, big swing and we missed on the first few
and we hit it out of the park at the end,
I'm okay with that, right?
- Yep, always learning.
- Yeah.
So, the bottoms and approach I talked about, right?
So, we look at it a few ways.
That last touch attribution is really how we've used the,
where should we be putting marketing dollars?
How should we be focusing the SDR team
behind the marketing efforts?
Rather than marketing doing their own thing,
SDR is reaching out to their accounts
and then hoping that it meets up somewhere in the middle.
So, looking at what types of content works versus doesn't,
what types of SDR activities post that, right?
Because we've noticed after webinars,
we have almost a 0% answer rate when we call,
but we have an infinitely higher response rate on email.
So, trying to measure things like that of,
not every content touch from marketing is created equally
on what that SDR should be doing and how they react.
And the biggest thing that we did here was,
we just said, what's our bottom line revenue number
for each team?
And then we worked up, we said, okay,
what's our average deal size for each team?
Okay, great, we know that it's taught 25K.
What's our win rate?
That gives you how many qualified opportunities
you need to generate.
Then using that waterfall I mentioned in the previous slide,
you're able to say, okay, we need to generate this many,
or we need to generate this many opportunities
to get this many qualified with that conversion rate,
which gives you your meeting.
So, it gives you a good barometer in North Star,
where your team needs to focus in order to generate these.
It doesn't have to be the same marketing tactics for every team,
it doesn't have to be the same SDR tactics
or AE tactics for every team.
But it gives you that here's where we need to be
in that pulse check at all times,
similar to what Sarah mentioned in that previous slide,
looking at week over week,
where you are to goal at that moment in time.
- That's amazing.
And I have to say the next slide I'm most excited about,
because I feel like this is just such a hot topic
amongst demand and marketing.
So, I'm so excited to talk through
how you guys are measuring this.
- Yeah, shout out Refine Labs and Chris Walker on this.
Dark Funnel View, right?
There is so much happening that we can't measure.
You know, there's plenty of great attribution tools out there,
but this is just the straight human interaction
that can't be measured by a field in Salesforce.
So, what we've started doing in our forums is just asking,
how'd you hear about us?
You know, what brought you to us?
And this is a little bit cleaner view than what we use,
because we're able to say, you know,
in that purple you see for ads searching online research,
we're able to dive into that and see the very, you know,
the granular pieces of what makes that up.
You know, and what this enables us to do
is we start to understand,
oh, wow, we're getting a lot of ad in online research.
We're getting a lot of referrals.
So, what it actually pushes to in Q3 was build a referral program.
You know, especially for our customers and our colleagues,
you know, we should be rewarding people
for bringing them to us, right?
And so, that's been a big second half goal for us
of building a referral program around this,
because we know that we can generate a heck
of a lot of pipeline for it.
- Absolutely.
I love this view.
And to your point, like, maybe it's a little messy
on the back end, but so simple.
Just asking, how did you know about this?
- If it's not messy on the backend, you're not doing it.
- You're not doing it right.
(laughs)
And then, you know, this is a pretty straightforward
engagement measurement.
So, we have tiers that we put accounts into.
We've got a, you know, using intent,
intent data, obviously, 'cause Bumbora.
You know, we've decided that these tiers
really show how engaged an account is.
So, we're not even just measuring necessarily a person, right?
It's becoming, how can an account become qualified?
And looking at things like content downloads,
webinar attendance, how many, you know,
high intent forms has that company
filled out holistically?
And this gets built into our lead scoring,
which is, you know, the golden rule
behind our prioritization,
because qualified Bumbora, you know,
this space doesn't exist without us focusing on
who is likely to buy right now.
And the cool thing is we've been able to build out
some qualified experiences for each of these engagement buckets.
So, if you're highly engaged,
we're actually feeding you different content
based on, you know, what it looks like
that your previous activities have been.
- To your point, like peanut butter and jelly earlier,
qualified and Bumbora, they just work so well together.
So, Matt, thank you so much for joining us.
I have to say when you first told me
you were just starting your pipeline council journey,
and then we went through all the things you talked about.
I can't wait to see where you go with your pipeline council,
if this is just your starting point.
So, thank you so much for joining us.
Up next, we're gonna hear from our team
and Melissa Phillips Robinson at Adecco
and how they turned their website
into a pipeline generating machine.
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