5 Strategies for Generating More Pipeline with Less Budget
While the economy is out of our hands, discover 5 effective levers that we can pull to generate more pipeline with less budget.
Hello, everyone.
Thank you so much for joining.
I've been watching where everyone is from over in the chat.
I see someone is from Pleasanton, which is actually right down the road for me.
Anyways, hello, everyone.
As you've seen in the chat, if you want to drop where you're from, engage in
the chat, please, please do so.
If you have questions throughout this entire presentation, drop them in there,
Justin, I can try to either answer them during or at the end.
We're obviously going to save time for Q&A at the end.
But let's jump into it.
Today's session, we're going to be talking about strategies to generate more
pipeline with less budget for all my marketers that are here.
This is a reality we are living with and how fast this reality is upon us.
For a budget, it's just getting tighter and tighter and you just have to do
more with less and we're probably already sick of hearing it.
But let's talk about it.
Quick intros, my name is Sarah McConnell. I am the VP of Demand Generation at
Qualified.
I have been with a company for about three years now.
Everything we do is focused on pipeline generation.
So I live my days on pipeline and joint is Jess.
Jess, welcome.
Hi, thanks for having me.
I'm Jess Barr, recently ventured out on my own to start a bespoke consultancy
focused on helping B2B marketers really accelerate that revenue generation from
marketing.
Prior to is how to performance marketing at metadata.
So I spent most of my career on the B2B side really focused on how marketing
can generate revenue and often working with small budgets to do outsized things
So excited to be here to chat.
Yep.
And I love that actually that the whole presentation day is how you can do more
with pipeline from a budget perspective.
But obviously as marketers, the closer we tie ourselves to revenue, the better.
So the pipeline we're going to talk about generating. We need to make it
quality, good pipeline. So it can turn into revenue. So revenue suggests I'm super excited to have you here. Speaking today.
Okay, quick agenda check. We're going to talk state of pipeline generation,
which I think we all know what it is, but we'll do a quick recap and then just
jump into the strategies and talk about different things that we are seeing in
the market right now that you can do more with less and drive that pipeline
and revenue. And then obviously at the end, we will answer questions. So please
hit us with those questions.
So first thing on the state of pipeline generation. I think the biggest thing
that is standing out to me here is it's hard to come by pipeline. I don't know
about anyone else that's in this chat. I don't know about you, Jess, but I feel
like as we hit
Q4, we're on a fiscal year that ends at the end of January. Q3 was still pretty
solid from a pipeline perspective and Q4 were doing good, but like it's getting
harder and harder. We're seeing less of what we call window shoppers, which is
people willing to take meetings, but might not be interested.
It's just tough out there. But Jess, what are you seeing from a pipe gen
perspective?
Same thing. It's tough budgets across the border getting cut. I think a lot of
companies are still not sure how their company overall is going to perform in
the recession.
And so they're investing less and less in marketing, or they're taking that
stance off. We want to test new things. We want to try a couple things, but we
're not really all in.
What amazes me too is they're marketers who are going into their new fiscal
year without a budget set. A lot of them know what they might have for Q1Q2,
but it's not really set through.
So it creates a unique situation when you're selling into an audience. It might
be a little harder to get them in the phone, get them in the conversation, but
then you're also working with less resources than you had this time last year.
Absolutely. I could not agree more. I think we're hearing, I have the pleasure,
I guess, of working at a company that sells to marketers. I feel like I'm just
living, brief marketing all day long.
But I feel like we're hearing a lot from our champions and deals that either
they are still going through budget scenario planning or alternatively rare
last year, they had an entire budget. It was like an envelope of money that you
could spend.
Now it's very day by day or quarter by quarter of you have this much to spend
this quarter, but you need to test. You need to iterate before we're at least
more funds to use.
So it's just definitely a tighter budget situation, but silver lining, we're
still seeing movement. Like we're still seeing marketers have the ability to
invest in things they want to invest in.
It's just a tougher conversation of like, is this going to drive pipeline or
revenue? Like is the ROI going to be there for investment?
Yeah, what I've been seeing from a lot of companies is they want to see more
certainty in their marketing activity happening.
So they're saying, hey, we're still going to do ABM. We still want to go after
target accounts, but I want to be sure that this tactic you're doing is
actually going to get a meeting.
It's actually going to be there. They want that higher degree of confidence,
which can be hard on the marketing standpoint. You have so many tools and
levers you can call to really attribute that activity to just one thing.
Absolutely. I think even from like a data standpoint as marketers, I think when
we talk revenue, it's, I know we use Salesforce as our source of truth, but it
's very easy to go into Salesforce and see all of that data living there.
And integrate in that's fantastic. But as marketers, we work in so many
platforms. Like we're in, I'm in metadata during the day. I'm in qualified. I'm
in Salesforce. I'm in, you know, Google Analytics.
And there's just a lot of data in other places. So at your point, bringing that
together and guaranteeing some level of certainty is tough, but I love the
challenge of it.
I feel like it's been a time where if I look at the positive, I'm like, man,
this is making me a lot better of a marketer. It is really sharpening that
skill.
Oh, yeah, 100%. I went through in the past a massive budget cut one year and I
still hit my pipeline quota. And I was like, holy cow, I can, I didn't realize
I could do so much or so little.
I didn't tell that to anyone internally. I said, bring my budget back. Look
what I'm doing like it before. But I think it does. It creates a challenging
scenario.
But yes, you can, if you can get, you know, there's a phrase I'm looking for
that is to give my head. But if you can make it work now and you're able to
kind of get what you can on what we have when you're working with less, when
budgets come back because they're going to come back,
the economy is going to come back, things are going to go. And there's so much
data to that shows that brands that continue marketing and advertising during a
recession during a downturn to recover so much quicker.
So when you have that quick recovery, you start getting more budget, you're
going to lose so much more because you've seen what you can do with less so far
Totally. And I, so I will use that to segue into our five strategies here with
the asterisk that Jess gave of beware when you drive more pipeline with less
budget, you have to answer the question of why weren't you doing this before
and sort of put you in a rock and
our blade but always a good thing as a marketer be able to show you're being
conscientious of that budget and you're still able to do more with less.
So first up, I feel like every, every time I speak, every webinar I've done
every speaking session, this is always the first one that I talk about and it's
because to me metrics is the most important driver of what you should be doing
where you need to be investing what's important.
So Jess, I would love to kick it to you first. You're obviously you worked at
metadata as a performance marketer. You're now working with other B2B SaaS
companies. What are the metrics that you look for when you start thinking about
your strategies.
And so this is also a great one because when you have smaller budgets, you need
to be even more conscious. I think of where you're spending your money on it.
So I always like to look at the full funnel. So ultimately, we want to drive
pipeline that converts to revenue.
So even on that standpoint, where I'm getting my pipeline from, are there
sources of the higher clothes when right? Are there sources bringing bigger
deals?
But getting back from pipeline, also looking at the full funnel. Do you have a,
maybe you have a lead source where you're getting a lot of top of funnel
engagement? A lot of people are coming in, but it's not converting.
Is that still valuable somewhere? Do you have a really high engagement rate in
your target accounts on email? But maybe you have, you know, a different rate
on LinkedIn.
So looking at the different steps in that funnel leading to pipeline and then
the quality of that pipeline when it converts.
But my Twitter handle LinkedIn is literally put a pixel on it. It all starts
with measurement.
So I love that so much. Start measuring. Yeah, for sure.
I would second that. I feel like, I always like to use real world experiences
that I've run into.
I joke with when I get to be lucky enough to talk to prospects or customers
that qualify to always say like, I'm more than happy to be the guinea pig to
learn by mistakes that you guys don't have to.
So I feel like early, what we consider FY 23 last year, when we think about
metrics, my whole marketing team, demand gen team, it was pipeline.
We were like, we're measured on pipeline. Everyone was conked on pipeline. Like
, that was what everyone was hyper focused on, which was great.
I loved having the team really focused on pipeline instead of like leads and M
QLs because I feel like it really motivated people to look for quality and not
maybe like pushing stuff at the top of the funnel that wasn't converting.
However, in the last three months, I've started to find really quickly like we
were always tracking ACV or revenue off of that pipeline, but it was sort of
like a secondary metric to us.
And it was really pipeline and suddenly we're in this really challenging
economic time and we're like, oh man, we got to go back to ACV. Like, we have
to be very, very diligent about every dollar spent is a dollar well spent.
Maybe we can't do as much testing as much spending in certain areas. So we
really need to switch that pipeline and lead with revenue first and then
pipeline secondary.
One of my favorite downstream metrics to look at or upstream metrics is also
account penetration because depending on what you're selling into, you may just
be seeing the sales cycle extended.
So what might have, before it got through legal and procurement and security in
90 days is now going to take 180 days, 240 days.
So also looking at how marketing is helping keep those accounts warm and
engaged when they're in the deal cycle to make sure that they actually do close
Now that fall off because procurement doesn't like you.
So that is leading on more into that too.
I love that metric and account penetration and deal acceleration has been
something that we've talked about a lot at qualified recently where again, like
before it was just pipeline pipeline pipeline pipeline let's talk about that
metric.
But suddenly now we've been pulling all the reports and saying, okay, the
dollars are spending saying like advertising or events which tend to be like
our big ticket budget items.
If we pull apart influence pipeline that maybe was sales generated and we look
at what was influenced by a marketing touch versus a non marketing touch.
What are we finding and we just went through this exercise and found add
influence.
It was three months before the opportunity was open and influenced by an ad
touch.
It was closing at 30 days faster than if it wasn't.
So I was able to go to the offices and say, hey, yes, this is being sourced by
sales and like we're giving this credit to sales, which is totally fine.
But we have data to show it's actually going to progress your deal faster if
you put some dollars into ad budgets.
So I think trying to find that gray area and prove that marketing is helping
move deals faster is something we didn't maybe talk about seven to eight months
ago.
We like knew it, but we didn't have to have so much proof point behind it is
now becoming really important.
Yeah, that's awesome.
And then the last thing here I would say from our perspective and advice that I
would give to anyone on this call.
As times are changing and changing fast, just make sure you're aligning with
your executive team with your leadership team on what is the acceptable metric.
It can be very easy to get lost in your own silo and say like, I think this is
the right metric and then all of a sudden you do a QVR or presentation and you
're like, shoot, that wasn't the metric they were looking for.
So as you guys as things are changing, make sure you're communicating. Hey, we
're going to make the shift. We think this metric is most important. Do you
agree.
So you have that constant alignment.
Yeah, 100% agree with that.
I saw a question come through and love answering as we are in the presentation.
What do you consider account penetration. How do you do that?
So I align with sales on how we're going to define that engagement activity.
You may have accounts that are super hard to get into where if you can just get
any touch your reps are going to love it.
And so that penetration might mean that you've reached them with 100
impressions at like the C suite executive team and they visited three or four
web pages.
I've had sales teams I've worked with, excuse me, where that penetration was a
much stricter definition because we had a lot of qualified pipeline we were
driving already.
So we looked at do we have an account with like five or more engaged people.
Our buying committee was about 20 people.
So do we have an account with like five or more engaged people who are visiting
a list three pages with on the website within a three week period and their
campaign member at least one marketing campaign.
So work with your sellers to your sales leadership to define that penetration
agreement, but it can really it can be kind of broad, but definitely work with
them, make sure it fits your model that you were looking for.
And then I look at all the accounts that our universe were targeting. And of
those just how many has marketing engaged with in the last x amount days.
Yeah, we do something very similar we've aligned with our sales team on and it
's like an engagement threshold. So in our case we use our own product but
qualified signals, but you can use I think any like intent or ABM platform.
But if they reach a certain threshold and we have like a score, a number and we
say like if they've reached this from a threshold that means we've done a good
job of like getting into that account they're showing enough intent.
And that's typically when we start to ping our sellers and say like hey this is
ready for outreach. We also have aligned around definitions on what is a
engaged touch so like if it's an ad touch do we need to have a certain duration
of an ad touch to count it as opposed to like just a click
and a bounce we need to see some like higher engagement threshold.
So I think it depends on the org to your point Jess and getting alignment with
your team is is super paramount there.
Awesome. Okay, so minding your metrics. We got it. We know that's important.
Second up here we have Titan you're targeting Jess I feel like this is just
right up your alley with your experience.
So how do you think about targeting especially when your budget is really tight
This is I think one of the number one spots that I start with with any company
and any marketing team that's saying we're going after a group.
Don't boil the ocean. It costs a lot of money to reach everyone on LinkedIn so
stop trying to reach everyone on LinkedIn.
When the social platforms first came out LinkedIn you know Facebook Instagram
Twitter advertising they would often optimize for your end conversion so people
got really really used to targeting everyone and letting those platforms find
those engaged audiences.
It really works well in B2C still but not B2B you know who you're going after
you know who you want to sell into.
And so if you can leverage intent signals other demographic technographic
information to narrow down and say here's who want to reach we want to reach
our IT decision makers in the info sex space and honestly I don't even want to
touch someone who's not in market.
I don't want to convince them that they need to buy my software that they need
to have timeliness with the software because oftentimes on the B2B side we're
selling into companies when they have that need.
You know you're not going to go through an overhaul your entire IT
infrastructure when it's a five year project you're not going to do it till you
have a need so it's a lot harder so instead of spending time convincing someone
that they have a problem for you to solve.
Find people who have problems that know they have a problem that are looking
for your solution.
You know you can still talk to the other audience have some brand awareness for
them but really focusing on those audiences that are in market that are looking
for your solution that want to buy and have their wallets out and are ready.
That's where you're going to get the biggest immediate bang for your buck so I
'm a huge fan huge fan of any intent data you can pull in.
Use qualified in the past on that side qualified signals fantastic metadata
will let you go through and build audiences based on some of the intent data.
There's other vendors to like primary member that can pull it in but it
definitely can help you get really really targeted with your ads to make sure
you're spending your dollars on those people who are going to convert.
100% that is I feel like from an ads strategy and again like in our case ads is
a big chunk of spend when we look at like our marketing budget.
In times when times are really good and you're trying to go after like a really
large market like okay it's time to like land we call the land grab like we
need more brand awareness we need more market share.
And you can play a little fast and loose with those dollars I think in those
like great times and say like you know we're going to expand out from in market
we want to get people in market that's really expensive and it takes a long
time. You know it's not what is it like 5% of people are in market to buy any given
time so it's expensive to try to push people into that.
So now when budgets are getting tighter that was the first thing we as a
company were like that's got to go we have to focus on people who are already
telling us we might be ready to buy.
It's going to be cheaper it's going to be a faster education process and
usually a much shorter deal cycle.
So any intent whether it's first party intent coming from your website third
party intent if they're searching topics that are relevant to you if they're
searching competitors.
There's so many great intent platforms in places where you can aggregate that
data out there.
I would just work this into your ads as much as possible and just be really
really smart about that spend.
Yeah we had some good questions in the chat around intent in market and using
it I would just jumping in with the best way to find in market buyers third
party tools.
I think our great way to go to it or you know Google search people who are
searching for things but your search audience is pretty small but there's some
really powerful third party tools that are aggregating just a ton of different
data sources together
that can allow you to surface that in a way that's really actionable because
once you have the data you need to be able to do something with it.
Yeah I agree with that.
I think as a small company obviously part of being a small company when I
joined qualified we were very very small so I've been there.
It's hard to invest in an intent tool to start like they can range in price
point I think when you get to the point that this becomes important it is
dollars well spent to get intent tools because it just makes marketing and
sales jobs so much easier.
But to just this point starting with Google search so that was like the first
ad channel that we started when qualified was much much smaller because people
are telling you they're interested without you having to go out and buy third
party data it's what they're searching.
What I will caution here if you're a small company with a small budget and you
're starting to spend time in Google search just be really smart about those
search terms and be even smarter about the negative keywords spend a lot of
time and negative keywords making sure people aren't.
You're not wasting any dollars on a search term like I'm not to play a victim
here but like qualified we got it pretty tough it's a pretty generic term so
yeah our head of digital has like thousands of negative keywords running in
Google search so that we don't waste dollars so that
would to me just be the easiest place to start I think I agree yeah I'm going
to be side definitely Google search it's interesting because a lot of times you
might not think what someone is looking for so I used to run marketing for an
infrastructure company and we're like yeah it's traffic management.
That's what it is because it's all your internet traffic management and then we
looked like oh no we're competing against construction companies because they
're building roads and so we're talking infrastructure like everyone has
infrastructure. Yeah they're looking for highway infrastructure and like supply and so it can
be really you can end up spending a lot of money on Google on things that you
didn't think you were you were optimizing for.
We should be careful if those negative keywords.
Our CEO always told me a story when I first started he was the CMO at Sales
force and before that at the company called campaign monitor that did for us and
he said they spent like thousands of dollars on Taco Bell forms they didn't
realize that they were spending dollars
on the show anyways.
Oh, there it is.
I was very cognizant of negative keywords.
Danica asked about intent data to engage leads.
For me I think taking a step back from how to engage leads with intent data is
thinking about what what would be beneficial for your leads on their journey
based on where they're at in their intent journey so like if someone's showing
really, really high intent they're like super in market we call it like they're
surging or they're hot.
What do you want them to do and so like for us you know book a demo.
Learn more about our company and then start to work with the channels that you
can engage them with so like we do owned events where we invite people to own
events or making sure like you have reports built so your reps can start to
reach out to them and engage them but if someone showing intent for maybe a
topic that's relevant to your business but they've never been to your website.
You're going to want to offer them something different so again starting with
the like what's the offer to them why does it matter to them and then you can
find the right channel to get that to them I think.
Yeah, I was thinking was there almost like giving you a little treasure map and
telling you actually this is a much better example be there telling you what
they want to eat.
And so when you give them the menu if you know that they like grilled cheese is
put grilled cheese options on your menu.
You know if you know that there's intent around cloud computing give them cloud
computing content.
You know it's making it really easy for them to engage with your brand.
Totally.
Derek I see your question about is this more like marketing team and lead
generation versus sales I will caveat this in saying I'm marketing so I always
default to marketing.
With that being said I think a lot of these topics I can try to work in more of
like a sales lens as well starting with this one and tighten your targeting.
Like we don't have any of our sales reps reach out to any accounts that aren't
showing intent.
Like it's just going to make your job so incredibly difficult it's going to be
a lot of time on your part you're going to have a lot of un responded to emails
stuff like that so if anything I think intent data and making it actionable for
your sales team is the first thing to do with intent
data so that you guys can focus your time only on accounts that are going to be
profitable for you.
Yeah and if your marketing team and sales team is using tools anything like
demand base six ends qualified.
There's so many options to where you're going to be able to see what those
intent topics are that those prospects are engaged with to help you craft your
outbound sequencing and craft your outreach to them.
And ideally a way that doesn't feel creepy that isn't I saw you on our website
looking at X, Y, Z comes after me now.
Although this screen.
I will say selling right now into marketing with sometimes our reps will lead
with hey we saw someone from your companies on our website.
You sell the marketers marketers tend to like creepy stuff they're like oh Dan
that's cool like how can I do I do want to do that.
Now before this I sold into CISO and CIOs they do not appreciate that type of
messaging do not recommend.
Oh my god we had a we had a campaign we ran where our reps we write we go
through a blog post for our reps about industry so they could be seen as
experts in it until we would promote the reps blog post on display advertising
to the targeted accounts.
So when the rep would call in they'd have a familiar name at least even if they
didn't recognize the blog post they're like oh yeah I've seen your name around.
And there are people are like this is so creepy how are you following me around
the internet.
It's like well okay I'm not going to go down how that works but they found it
so off putting and it was such a minor thing and we do direct mail into the
same audience and they're like how did you get my address.
You work at IBM like yeah if you're over here.
No where your offices.
But at my job like oh my gosh look how I am and they're like how do you know me
and you're like just like because I'm really good at it.
Eat the chocolates and take a call.
Yeah.
I love that.
Some people find it very creepy.
But as a marketer I'm like so.
Love it.
I'm like oh I've been like it works.
I found me everywhere.
Yes.
Okay awesome.
So the next one I'll kick this one off hold pipeline council.
I admittedly had never done pipeline council before I joined qualified like I
talked about pipeline and we never heard about it before.
And then I joined qualified and we would hold a pipeline council every single
Friday with the entire organization so like our dev team was on our engineering
team and we went through every single deal how it was created how much pipeline
So the whole company knew obviously we've scaled and we're much bigger now and
we can't have everyone on the call but we still hold every Friday a pipeline
council.
And we've gotten to the point where the focus is here's our pipeline goal for
the quarter here's how we track against that goal.
Here was you know our project like our predicted forecast of how each of our
sources are going to bring in pipeline are how are they doing are they part are
they behind.
And then looking at like okay what does this mean how is marketing contributing
to making up any gaps or like what did marketing help do to help over exceed in
certain areas.
And then what is sales doing and we share it with the entire like go to market
team so sales and marketing and rev ops.
And it just keeps the whole company aligned like they know it any given time we
can ask someone on the go to market team how are we doing against our pipeline
goal and they can like rattle that off it's never.
I love having pipeline councils anything that helps really drive that sales
marketing partner channel whatever it is having that alignment because
ultimately we're all one company working towards one goal.
And I think often on the seller side when they don't see their marketing
partner in their QBR meetings in their account planning meetings they can feel
often very alone and then the question is what is marketing doing because I'm
not seeing it. I'm not seeing their activity but when you're on the same room going over all
the deals and marketing saying hey you know you're trying to get into that
account I noticed that they were super active on our website on these five
pages or there's been many times where I have found a contact at a target account
that our reps were not aware of who is engaging in marketing activity but they
weren't maybe in their ideal target persona they weren't the person they
thought was going to be involved.
There's so many times where that happens and those little moments and they help
form a stronger sales marketing relationship that we're all in this together
going after it.
And engineers they often love seeing this side of the house because they know
the product.
Yeah they're like wait how did we get that logo wait what are they doing why
are they asking for this weird stuff oh the seller why did the seller sell it.
Like why is sales selling these things that we don't do and then they can say
like oh I get it now I get it I see why this is a thing yeah anything to drive
alignment and yeah pipeline councils are great.
It also gets everyone the same page with the goal is.
Yeah absolutely and I think on the slide here the recognition part something
that we have sort of recently started to incorporate into pipeline council we
call them plays of the week but we're trying to find ways like how do we
elevate our SDR team we call them QSRs which qualified sales reps but
like our BDRs and SDRs their job is so tough and they're out there grinding
every day at you know Derek's been he mentioned the chat here on the sales side
like how do you how are you personalized how are you like breaking into these
really tough to break into accounts.
And one we wanted to give them recognition because like dang it they're doing a
good job and they deserve that recognition and two we found it was a really
good way to disseminate information to the rest of the team if someone's doing
something really well and putting
that into the next slide.
So we're going to talk about the next slide.
So we're going to talk about the next slide.
So we're going to talk about the next slide.
So we're going to talk about the next slide.
So we're going to talk about the next slide.
So we're going to talk about the next slide.
So we're going to talk about the next slide.
So we're going to talk about the next slide.
So we're going to talk about the next slide.
So we're going to talk about the next slide.
So we're going to talk about the next slide.
And we found that like certain plays will just catch on like wildfire and
people will start using it and we see more pipeline coming from it.
And like this is everyone's favorite part of pipeline council for sure.
Yeah, you know on the marketing standpoint, I'm definitely the school or
marketing exists to help make sales easier.
But a lot of marketing stuff like webinars for example, fantastic outreach tool
for any of your reps.
But oftentimes we're not thinking about how do I use marketing content to break
into new accounts.
They might be thinking I have a conversation and the prospect cares about that
's why I use what content do I have for it.
But we would highlight the BDRs who would prefer using marketing content really
well.
Like this person, you know, Joe got a call at Sony because this webinar.
And here's how he used and re-promoted.
And here's like we're going to take that and turn it into an outreach cadence
in sales after outreach now.
So like go at it because it can be a great way to get those internal champions
for your content too.
And for what you're doing.
I love that we hear all the time you have to have internal champions and like
we talked about this with product adoption.
Like how do you get someone to adopt a new product and it's always like find
someone who's doing it really well and just champion the heck out of them.
And I do love it.
It's like a learning behavior.
Like if we show that this person is utilizing this marketing content really,
really well.
And oh my gosh, look at all the pipeline and revenue that they're driving from
it.
Well, at the end of the day, like that's all these reps are about.
Obviously you want to like be able to open and close deals like they're going
to start to adopt those behaviors.
And when they're hearing it from other people when they're hearing from.
And not running.
Like yeah, from the top rep and they're saying, hey, here's how, you know, we
have a cab coming up and here's how I use the cab to get into a conversation
for an account that I'm trying to upsell that's hesitant.
Here's how I'm using it.
And it's a rep saying it or not just sales leaders saying it because you know
sales leadership always wants to go really short marketing.
But it's actual people that like they're in the trenches with it's a completely
different endorsement that you get than just having someone say like it was a
good webinar.
It's like no, that's how it's changed.
Here's how it's putting coins in my pocket.
Yep.
With it.
That is such a good point.
We, I mentioned just a minute, but we host our own event.
We call it taste qualified.
It's a wine tasting event where we invite to be a gen folks and you get to
taste wine and like network and virtual.
Anyways, it's a great event.
I love it.
We've been doing it for like two years.
But for the first year, we just, we would get people to attend, but sales like
wasn't really biting.
We're leveraging a lot of our like marketing database and all the leads to
invite.
And we were just scratching our heads and we're like, why, this is such a cool
event.
Like I love this event.
Why I would assume other of our persona would, why can't we get people there.
And one event, we, the one that normally ran the event couldn't attend.
So we asked one of our sales leaders to be a substitute and come in and be one
of the speakers on the event.
And he went back to his team and he was like, oh my gosh, this event is amazing
The conversations they're having are so tactical, so important.
You guys need to be inviting your process.
Now we are over subscribed to every event.
And all that took was just inviting one sales person to see how great it was in
champion,
which we'd been like shouting from the rooftops, but they were like, you know,
it's, it's easy for us to say.
We're putting that event on.
We don't have bias there.
So getting the sales team involved and getting a champion of it just made all
the difference.
I think we often forget, you know, being on the marketing side, like we
understand marketing, we get it, right?
Like we love buying stuff too.
We love to talk with like, I had an extension on Chrome for a while until
Facebook killed it.
That made my Facebook news feed entirely ads and I loved it so much.
Only marketers do that.
So for a lot of sellers, marketing is this like confusing black box.
But when they get into and they can experience it and they start to see like
how beneficial is to them.
They're going to run with it.
But a lot of times it's like, okay, marketing just doing this thing in the
corner.
And they're going to go, you know, they're going to go get me a pool of people
to go prospect into.
It's like, well, hold on.
If we go find that pool together and you're helping to find the criteria for it
, it's 100% your audience.
And every single person that pools and we great for you.
But we need to do it together hand in hand, but they still, you know, I think
it's driven from older sales models.
Or reps are also really competitive with each other and it was sales versus
marketing across the board.
But this new kind of collaborative approach to it.
It's the best way to drive pipeline for your company to do it together.
But you got to get them into it often.
And then they'll be like, oh man, why didn't I do this a year ago?
You were busy sending the same email to 50 people on LinkedIn.
I don't know.
It's funny to get to everyone.
So I think for those that are on this call or listening in on this, if you're
not doing pipeline council and these things that we're talking about about like
sales and marketing alignment and like find your champion and sales if you're
on the marketing side or like sales.
How can you work better with marketing pipeline council if you're not doing it
is such a great forum to do this like it allows you to start to bring in these
conversations to showcase this and adjust this point.
If you're on the marketing side, it is easy to forget that marketing is not
well understood by everyone like you live and breathe it every day so it's just
second nature but coming onto a pipeline council really shows you where those
gaps are in communication and where sales might not be understanding what you
're doing and why you're doing it and why it's important.
And it will help you quickly start to find that alignment and always with
alignment you're going to get more pipeline.
Like it is those teams working together to drive more pipeline so without this
requires no extra budget from you.
It's just a form to get the team together to talk about that pipeline and find
what's working.
Awesome. Okay pipeline council love it.
Fourth up we have optimizing your tech stack.
I feel like I have heard so much about tech stack in the last three months as
budgets are getting tighter people are like, is my tech stack working for me.
Can I use it better?
What do I need?
Just how do you think about optimizing a tech stack? I'm sure you have this
conversation all the time.
Oh my god, so often because I think often on the finance side too they just see
every they see marketing as a as a cost center still.
And so like why are we spending this which money on this thing? What's the ROI
of this tool in a lot of tools just they aren't barren and expensive because
they're doing big things for you.
And they're bringing a lot of other things together you want to have access to
so yeah tech expensive tech is always the first thing to try and cut trying to
narrow down the tech stack but I'd like to think.
What do you need to kind of make it complete because there's really not one
tool that will do everything you ever needed to do.
Right if that were the case we'd only use Salesforce for everything. We don't.
You know so I like to be.
No, I like to think about what's the end goal that just what do I need to
bridge between the data I have the data that I want to have and the data you
know data I have the data I want to have and then how I can make it actionable
to get to those to those end users.
With it.
I'm really I know he's thinking about the ROI and your tech stack too. I'm
always it's always to me in red flag when someone's are a specific tool but I
do like to take into consideration if I'm spending X amount on that tool will I
get like a three X return on it.
And how am I am I confident? Yeah.
Yeah.
Am I confident I'll be able to get through so.
Ultimately, I can't imagine running a modern marketing program without at least
like three to five tools that you would need for execution. So I think tools
are needed. There's definitely bloat for a lot of people too but you know I
have some favorites.
I have some opinions.
You also say so much so much human power by leveraging automation for them.
You know like upload manually uploading LinkedIn audiences is a nightmare. It
takes forever but there's tools you can use like metadata for example as one
primer even demand based six cents will allow you to automatically upload
audiences to LinkedIn based on your sales force data so it's dynamic.
So when your sellers come in and they're updating opportunity stages or they're
adding more accounts their patch, you can dynamically make sure that those
accounts are being hit on LinkedIn with updating it. So there's definitely a
lot of great tools out there.
I totally agree. And when I think about this particular slide of optimizing
your tech stack and as it pertains to like tighter budgets and pipeline
generation I'm looking at this in two ways.
The first is what's the tech stack you already have on the field like whether
or not you have bloat in your tech stack. It's there you have it so if you want
to keep it start working now to understand the ROI on it and I'm sure if you
have a tool in your tech stack.
You've got a great CSM hopefully start to really work with them and push hard
on ROI and like I know personally it's really easy with like Martek tools to
get really bloated ROI so I see numbers and I like my CEO calls it a sniff test
If on the sniff test doesn't feel real your CEO is definitely not going to
believe those numbers so start like you're the first line of defense start
pushing back on things that don't feel right and try to get to an ROI that you
agree is the right ROI for that tool.
It's encompassing and it's enough to save it if it's like above is it above the
line when it comes to like is it driving ROI for your business so if you've got
tech now really start to think about the ROI of that stack and is it benefiting
the things that you need right now.
But then as we think about like new budgets as we go into this new year
obviously getting new tech is just going to be harder like that at the end of
the day like it's going to be hard to make cases for tech you're not going to
be able to just as a marketer I love to buy a shiny object.
I don't have that now I have to continue to make a really strong ROI case.
So again like going back to the ROI start your evaluations early and know the
ROI the tool is going to bring his finances going to ask like there's no way
you're going to get through this without finding asking you to provide a
business case.
But to I think from an optimization of a tech standpoint, it's very easy for me
to get lost in like marketing to your point of like you have a whole Chrome
extension to show you ads.
When I go into website and someone shows me like hey this is all the integ
rations we have these are all the things that we do from a tech stack I'm like
oh my gosh that's amazing.
When it comes down to like real crunch time I highly recommend sitting down and
thinking about what are the tools in your stack right now to your point just
that like I cannot live without and I need to bridge the gap on.
So I have a tool that I know and love and I'm evaluating another one that's
going to optimize it or help it or like evolve it.
I don't need that tool to integrate with anything under the sun I needed to
integrate with the tech stack that I have right now and I needed to integrate
well.
It needs to be well built by directional is very little work for me in my ops
team because it's really easy to have a lot of integrations but it's another to
have integrations with the tech stack that you have that are optimized.
This might be a bold statement but I'm going to get it. I don't buy tools that
don't benefit sales and I'll give an example Goldcast is my webinar vendor of
choice and I've been on them for a long time like full disclosure I'm an
advisor. I'm biased towards them because I love them but when I start using them I was
like I need you to be able to drive revenue and I need to make sure all of our
webinar activity and virtual event activity is actual by sellers.
Now if you're on Goldcast and you have a webinar for example and your prospect
is in the webinar the sales rep will get notified on slack that their prospect
is in the webinar and then I worked with them with the sales team to create an
implement content so they have playbooks of how to go engage that person.
Don't try and sell them go and have a conversation with them first you know so
I always look at tools also that the sales team can use and the CS team can use
and how can we kind of complement the entire Oregon set of buying something
that only does like one little function.
There are tools that do one little function while but I want a tool that across
the org will be used because it also makes it a lot more sticky because you're
not taking marketing's tool while you're taking a tool that the entire go to
market team uses away.
Yeah, I could not agree more. Sean I see a comment that says three extra really
strong ROI.
This is the worst answer to get but I'm going to give it anyway I think it
depends.
It depends on what the ROI is of if you're talking like straight revenue to
what you spent on the tool if you're saying I spent X dollars and I got three X
back in revenue that's directly tied to this tool.
There's not too many CFOs out there I don't think that are going to say like no
a dollar spent for three dollars back is a bad ROI but if that ROI is on
something that's not a dollar amount or like revenue that's going to be a
harder case.
I also think it's how fast so is three X really strong like heck yeah but if it
took you three years to get there maybe not but if it took you two weeks.
Like that's a tool that I would buy again and again and again so I think there
's a new wants us to it but like short answer is yes if it's a revenue three X
for sure.
Yeah and I would get a little creative so there's no tool on the market primer
and they will pull together a ton of different data sources and allow you to
dynamically push those audiences into different platforms for display
advertising.
So the tool itself is going to save time right because you're able to automate
things but you don't have to have a license to like 27 different data sources
because they have it.
So when you think about like that for example we don't need a license to Apollo
we don't need a license to you know blah blah blah so there's dollar savings
there and it automatically updates these audiences we have time savings of like
and I would like track your time to come back and say we're saving 20 hours a
month by using this tool automated or 10 hours a week or every campaign is like five
hours and when you start adding up those incremental costs of you know we don't
need these different licensing we're saving this time and now we're able to
launch campaign so much quicker.
I would make that your entire ROI what I see oftentimes is people say I'm using
a display advertising tool so I'm going to take all my revenue that display
touched and then I'm going to include the cost of the tool and that's my ROI
but there's so many other factors that go into it.
Yeah oftentimes our finance leaders are really used to things being black and
white and they aren't familiar with how much time it takes to build a campaign.
So when you sit down and show like here's all the things I take into
consideration they're going into it.
It's also going to help your other partners in the organization understand how
much time you're spending on some of the stuff that they might think takes 10
minutes it really takes a couple hours.
Totally.
Humans are expensive.
Your time is a lot of money and if you can save money there that's still a
strong ROI.
Claire I saw your comment about five tools that we can't live without.
In an effort to be unbiased I will give you five.
I guess areas of tools that I can't live without so to let people make their
own educational decisions here.
Can't or with a few caveats here can't live without Salesforce a CRM we use
Salesforce I spend so much time in Salesforce can't live without it.
ABM platform we're very focused we know our target accounts we know our icedp
technographic geographic.
I don't want to spend dollars that aren't focused on those accounts so I need
to know who they are where they're at in market so an ABM platform that can
help you understand that is huge can't live without it.
Intent tool if it's separate from ABM I need something to tell me and the
sellers where to spend our time.
That is something that I can't imagine doing any marketing campaign without
using that as a gut check in anything we're doing.
The fourth I would say like anything that's what's known as conversational
marketing pipeline generation.
Obviously I work at Qualified so this is my like one biased one is if someone
that wants to buy is on your website make it as frictionless as possible to
book meetings with them like I need pipeline I need it more than ever.
If it's a live chat or a chat or some sort of conversation I don't want them to
fill it for him I want them to talk to my sales team or book a meeting right
now.
That's a huge pipeline driver and then my last one's not a tool but it's Google
sheets I spend so much time analyzing data like I can't live without Google
sheets in its name and it drives my husband's a consultant he hates them in
Google sheets he's like just use Excel I'm like no I love Google sheets I can
share it I can't live without it Google sheets has embedded functions okay I would add
in some customer data attribution platform too can be really helpful so you can
pull your data together from your different sources especially like if your
sales force doesn't allow you to get a great view of attribution based on
accounts that have opportunities and people who are in campaigns.
I've never met a sales rep with good sales force hygiene that has all contacts
on an opportunity so having a CDP will also help you kind of pull that data
together to email marketing we forgot a marketing animations.
I feel like that's a given table stakes yeah everyone's got those totally. Okay
last but most certainly not least being proactive so I kicking this went off I
kind of hit on it with qualified but I think if we're thinking about budgets
are tight.
I think if you have less people we call window shopping there's less people
that have budgets to buy from you right now. The main thing I want to hit home
with this is like evaluate your website which typically if someone wants to buy
they're going to go to your website they're going to start doing some sort of
education they're going to poke around on there.
If they have questions or they are ready for a demo make that process for them
to get to that as frictionless as possible forms still exist they're never
going to go away I still love a form.
But if you have things to supplement those forms and you have ways for them to
get questions answered right now they're going to see more pipeline just
inherently there's like all this research that showing like the first vendor to
respond is like more than 70% more likely to win that deal just because of
timing alone and you get ghosted there's like all this data to support this but like you're
spending a lot of money right now to drive people to your website that money is
now more precious than ever.
If you need to convert that website visitor into a dollar of pipeline and
revenue make sure your website is like over optimized to do that.
I agree giving also people an opportunity to engage with you so I think we've
seen a LinkedIn especially arise in personal brands where sellers marketing
leaders sales leaders just company leaders are making more and more content on
LinkedIn and I've seen impasse roles where deals have been sourced because
the president of the company shared a LinkedIn post about an integration and a
client sought a comment on it.
So creating those opportunities to wherever your prospects are go be active
with them in those communities so they have opportunities to engage with you in
your brand to try and bridge that into a conversation versus waiting until they
've decided they want to come talk to you.
Yep, I doing a good social strategy for your own employees is so impactful and
I will say so stinking hard to do. It is very hard to get your own internal
people to go out there and champion but people who do well do it really well.
You can't go on LinkedIn you know who I'm talking about and they are driving
pipeline from it.
So that is another great way it's free. It just is a time resource to get them
to do it.
But yeah works very, very well.
Anything else to add here just from a proactive standpoint or do you think we
've got it covered.
I think we off top of my head I think we've covered pretty well.
Awesome.
I'm laughing before we started this webinar I told Jess and pavilion I was like
we won't take the baby half an hour here we are almost to the hour I should
know better that I could talk the whole time.
That is all the content that we have obviously we've answered some questions
throughout if there's any lingering questions I'm going to vamp here for a
little bit to see if there's any that get dropped in.
Otherwise find myself and Jess on LinkedIn I love connecting with people on
LinkedIn answering questions if you're like I don't want to ask this in the
chat come find me I am happy to send messages and answer any questions.
Yes likewise.
Let's see lead gen activities reminding that have been most effective. Oh my g
osh great great question Jess do you have I'll let you kick it off.
I was going to say I think we need to look at there's never one touch point
like be to be buyers are never having one touch point and then coming in and
turning into an opportunity very rarely.
I've seen that from virtual from in person events because they're kind of stuck
in your booth for 10 minutes because they want to enter your raffle to win like
the Lego kit.
But often it's multiple touch points I like to think about what activities do
we need in what spots to really create a good experience for them to convert
once they talk to sales.
So I'm going to find webinars this type of activity are great during the
conversation even if it doesn't net new grab someone in they're great for
getting people to eventually to convert talk to them round tables be spoke
events anything to get one to one conversation
is always helpful but also content just blasting a ton of content to your
target audience wherever they are like running Google ads to your target
account list with limited limited keyword targeting a lot of negative keyword
targeting in it promoting content
instead of promoting like the demo across the end call content is a great tool
just to get people engaging with your brand and understanding that you have
value and getting benefit from before actually jumping into that conversation.
Yep, I totally agree I think lead generation activities in general can be very,
very tricky because it's easy to drive leads it's really hard to drive good
quality leads that are going to actually be beneficial for a sales rep.
Events are a great way to get net new leads into your system. I think I caution
spending money on that without having a really solid strategy of what happens
after it's one thing to just put leads in your CRM and your marketing
automation system and then just let them sit
So having good nurtures is super helpful to make sure that you're doing the
right things with them and to just point content like the more you can put out
content and educate people just means the leads you're going to get are already
so much farther down the sales funnel
So the quality of leads that you're going to get are going to be better so I
think starting content first before channel like I can do Derek the example you
gave of webinars executive round tables all super great channels but if the
content's not there and it's not really speaking to your target persona in a
way that's going to give them an affinity for your business or know that you
can solve a problem.
So I think start content first and then figure out the right channel and that's
going to get you better leads and more because people will know your business.
Yeah, if you don't have a way to nurture what's coming in you might as well not
drive it in. Totally.
That is a good start. I remember starting at qualified and we talked about
doing things I said I don't have the infrastructure set up to nurture any of
these leads it would be a waste of money so just be like really honest with
yourself on that.
Because no one wants to stick it in the system and be like I drove a thousand
leads and then you get the question now in tough times.
How much revenue got driven from it you're like zero.
Yeah, no definitely it's yeah.
I've seen really good events that had no follow up and I was like, yeah.
And I think Derek made the point of getting speakers that are really passionate
about a topic.
The last thing I'll say here is use your internal subject matter expert I joke
that I'm like the show pony at qualified but it's because I use our product I'm
our end user and I love this and I'm super passionate about pipeline generation
because it's my job.
But if I was selling into like in my old job.
Information technology lean on someone internal that knows that area really
well because they're going to be passionate about it by a default.
And they cost you nothing and they know your product really well so if you need
to find speakers look internal first you've got them internally you've got the
subject matter experts in your own company.
They might need some some training but they're going to be your your secret
weapon I think.
Yeah, if you have customers that are in love with you already that are going to
evangelize for him like throw customer on there too.
Yep.
Oh, for sure.
Okay, well on that note, I think no more questions are coming in just thank you
so much for joining me today this has been so fantastic I learned a lot from
you already.
So I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me it was great conversation.
Yep, and thank you everyone for joining. If you have any questions can find us
on LinkedIn happy to answer them.
Cool. Bye everyone.
This is a test comment.
This is a longer test comment to see how this looks if the person decides to ramble a bit. So they're rambling and rambling and then they even lorem ipsum.