Speaker 1: 0:24

We will get Mike and Naomi soon. Today we are going to tackle a hot topic, one that's been stirring up debates in both ops and demand gen teams. That is, the topic of marketing qualified accounts, or MQAs, and are they the future? And, if so, what happens to MQLs? So joining me are two seasoned leaders and return guests Andrea Fraser, a senior revenue operations technical consultant with deep experience in designing scalable systems and aligning marketing, sales and data, as well as Jessica Fulis, VP of Marketing and Partnerships, known for her strategic work across ABM, demand generation and full funnel programs. They both help clients reframe what qualifies as buying intent and that's kind of what we talked about buying groups last time they were on and how teams can better collaborate around signals, not just leads. So Andrea, Jessica, welcome back.

Speaker 3: 1:12

Thanks for having us, Michael.

Speaker 1: 1:14

Yeah, and we were just talking ahead. So, andrea, I'm going to put you on the spot You're talking about at Mopsapalooza.

Speaker 2: 1:21

I am. I am speaking at Mopsapalooza. I'm very excited. Speaking at Mopsalooza, I'm very excited. Me and my colleague, brian Schmidt, will be talking about how Mops, or marketing automation people any tech people really can up-level their communication skills with the C-suite using AI. So I've been really working on that, trying to figure out what are some ways that we can better communicate so that we are seen as a strategic partner to some of those folks. I'm excited to present and geek out with my fellow marketing ops people, I love it, I love it.

Speaker 1: 1:59

Yeah, that sounds great Actually. I may pick your brain about that when we're done. All right, because I'm not sure I'm gonna make it to Mops Blues yet, so I'm still trying, all right.

Speaker 3: 2:04

You don't get a free ticket.

Speaker 1: 2:05

Michael, there's no free ride he has to fly the plane. We have talked about trying to do a some sort of live episode or something of a podcast, while while there, maybe or maybe like a round table that gets recorded and turned into an episode. But it's all just ideas.

Speaker 2: 2:25

So if people are listening and they think that's a great idea, I think that you should run the red carpet or something like, as people come in.

Speaker 3: 2:33

You can be there, there we go and make that your pop top to the crowd.

Speaker 1: 2:37

I can see it and I am willing to get dressed up in whatever outfit you say to do that. Pay for me to go there.

Speaker 2: 2:45

Yes, I love it.

Speaker 1: 2:48

Yeah, I have no shame anymore, which is like kills my well. I say teenage, but my oldest is no longer a teenager and will soon be a drinking age. So let's you know.

Speaker 3: 3:02

Full adult.

Speaker 1: 3:03

They're like doing this right now, you know, head down, covering their eyes. All right, let's start with that headline. You both said MQAs won't replace MQLs, but they do offer something more. So why don't we start there, like unpack what we mean there and how you guys think about that?

Speaker 2: 3:21

Yeah, do you want me to start?

Speaker 3: 3:24

I can start with this one, but you have to start with the next question Deal. Okay. So we think everybody has talked a lot about in 2025 is that you know the old way of doing demand gen is not feasible, it doesn't work anymore. And, to be clear, I think we've known that for a while.

Speaker 3: 3:47

You know, and I mean you know marketers ever since I've been talking about ABM, we've been talking about how the MQL is not the right way to measure a marketing organization, because that's just one individual. And we alluded to the fact that account-based marketing went to the opposite of the extreme of it's not one individual, but it's a whole account. So we almost overcorrected to say, no, no, we want to talk to a whole account. And now we've come back to the middle and said, well, yes, it's a whole account, but there's a discrete buying group or there might be multiple buying groups in one account that we want to talk to, right? So this really helps solve for that.

Speaker 3: 4:24

So that you know, talking about the MQA, which is a marketing qualified account, is, you know, a level up from an MQL, because it's showing that there's multiple people engaged, because unless you're selling a really cheap monthly subscription, you're going to have more than one stakeholder that's going to be involved in the buying process. So you want to make sure you know, while you're not going to have a fully realized buying committee, probably through just your marketing efforts, you don't want to just have one person, and that's what the MQL really focuses on, and it focuses on people getting people to webinars and, you know, on top of other additional anonymous and intent signals from an account, together creates an MQA, which is now something far more realized that you can share with your sales team, and they're going to have far greater results as far as reaching out when something is an MQA and actually getting that account to engage with them.

Speaker 1: 5:34

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 5:36

Andrea and I would. I would add to that like I feel like there's probably sales, especially sales ops, people they're going, told you so, right, because I feel like for years and years and years, right, there's sales professionals that they're saying that's what we've always done, yeah, marketing would send us Joe Schmo and I knew Joe Schmo was junk. I would go and I would find all these people and I would do it, and so to that I say you got us, you were right, right. I'm someone that likes to hear that if I am right and like, yes, that was valid, and now we are seeing that. Like that collaboration is important, like we see that right in our own orgs.

Speaker 2: 6:11

There's never a time that I'm like solely like I know everything about exactly what we need and I'm not going to consult with anybody else in my organization. That just doesn't happen, even if I am the most technical person at the organization. So I think it's been interesting because I feel like there's salespeople that are going like told you so, and I think the response to that is noted. Let's build that together. I think it's going to grow even more because it's really just shifting more to like a little bit more agnostic signals, right, and every business might have a different offering of signals available to them that can be surfaced in the form of an MQA. So it's really doing what sales probably thinks that they were doing the entire time anyway, Even though they're saying I told you.

Speaker 3: 6:52

so what's interesting is, most sales teams are having a hard time letting go of the MQL. Yes, right, so we all have acknowledged that.

Speaker 1: 7:00

Are they having a hard time of letting go of the MQL, or that's the way to measure marketing?

Speaker 3: 7:05

It's a little bit of both. So, yes, so at the at the executive level, we as marketers said stop focusing on leads and focus on MQL. So you know boards and you know executive leadership teams, all and the CFO, right, have all kind of said well, you've done your job if you hit your MQL number Right. So that's one whole thing. But the other thing is with sales teams, while, yes, they're like, you know, that person who, who you know, registered but didn't attend a webinar, is not really a qualified lead for us, we're still hearing them say but we're not getting enough MQLs, right? So because what they they're saying, I think what they're saying is we want more mqls from one of them account. That's actually going to turn into something for us, right?

Speaker 2: 7:55

I think they want more explicit, like signals, and I think, like almost our language needs to go back, like I remember when I was first in the space of leading implementations and the idea of implicit action versus implicit you know, implicit like the words we were using, the jargon of the time and I almost think we need to come back to that because I think, just to your point, what they're really wanting when they're asking for MQLs is, in a certain way, we've kind of trained that mechanism to like need, like this is a person who did the thing and so I'm going to follow up on the thing that they did, right, and in some ways, depending on how your organization might operationalize something like in QAs, you might need to consider that what's your sales team's comfort level with implicit activity that they can follow up on, like can they make conversations out of that? Do they feel like they can do something with that? Or do they have more comfort in explicit behavior, right? They want to see that John signed up for a webinar and that Mike went to this event and stopped at the booth, those sorts of things. I think they're all valid. I think part of this is figuring out, like, where do you stand as far as comfort level with trying to work an MQA and not having or how many explicit behaviors or specific people with actions that you need to have to feel like you can have a worthy follow up or an impactful follow up as a sales person.

Speaker 1: 9:15

So how do you, how do you differentiate though, between? So I think I agree. I think two thoughts are in my head right now. One is, I think sales teams do want qualified something Right, account or lead, Right, like whatever it is, because they want something they go like oh yes, this is realistically has picked the threshold right, some percentage likelihood to turn into a real opportunity. So, whether that's a person or an account, fine.

Speaker 1: 9:40

The other part and I think this is maybe where this starts from a little bit is that, like I think you hinted at this, jessica starts from a little bit. Is that, like I think you hinted at this, jessica is that um, like the old model of this, lead to mql, to sql, like all that? Right, it's very linear with an. So if you, if your target changes for revenue, right, everything else goes up in lockstep with that, based on your conversion rates, and it creates this incentive to just generate tons of lead volume regardless of the quality. Correct, and I've seen that Um. But it also is like there's an underlying assumption about like this, like this is the danger of the funnel model, right? Is that this is very, this very linear buying process that happens, which is no longer like. That is no longer the case. Right by the time someone's like raising their hand with you, they've probably already done a bunch of their own research. Yeah, yeah, right, and so that's so.

Speaker 3: 10:59

There's probably signals out there that now you're hopefully you're going to connect the dots with that, that person or set of people who are a part of that. So how do you, how do you differentiate between, or how much do you and maybe this is organization specific but like, how do you treat the different signals? Like individual people signals versus account level signals and, you know, mash that together, yeah, so I definitely think that's going to be some trial and error for every organization, right, and it's going to continue to evolve. This is not, I think, a major mistake that a lot of marketing teams made way back. When was they decided on a definition of an MQL? And they let that ride for five, six, seven years, right?

Speaker 2: 11:19

The score was the same. It's always a hundred points and we've reset them every once in a while, but it's always been.

Speaker 1: 11:26

How many times have I told people like we're going to build, we're going to do the lead scoring model, but like don't overthink it, because we are, we can and we will change it?

Speaker 2: 11:34

Totally, and they never opened it again.

Speaker 3: 11:36

No, and it's, it's one of those things that you know, I think it's because it's, it's, it's, it's an exercise and you have to involve sales, and so it's like, oh God, we have to get sales involved, right? So there's this whole conversation, but I think, had we had the rigor of constantly updating it, we would have seen these changes in buying behavior. This didn't happen overnight, right?

Speaker 2: 11:57

This is how we would have heard sales say that they were grabbing the buying group people. Like I was saying, they were doing some of these things in the background. I agree, yep.

Speaker 3: 12:05

And we were kind of pushing them towards that with kind of the practice of ABM, because what they would say to us was okay, great, so you're telling me that we're going to focus on this account, but who in this account? So they would go to your point and find who all those stakeholders were, because we're like you know who they are, like, we'll tell you which accounts are interested. You go figure out who you want to sell to, right, and so now we're kind of meeting them in the middle of OK, now we're going to align around the definition of an MQA, we're going to align around who are all the stakeholders that we want to be engaging? And we're going to align around when is there enough signals, implicit and explicit, that actually define a qualified account, one that is ready to buy from you, or at least have the conversation right? So that's what this MQA is now. So it's the evolution of. You were supposed to have aligned with your sales team on the definition of an MQL. Some did, some didn't. Now you need to align on the definition of the MQA and once again, you're going to set a target, you're going to track it over the course of a quarter and you're going to edit it right. You got to start somewhere, put a stake in the ground.

Speaker 3: 13:24

We here at Inverta we did that. I mean, we had a threshold and it was way too low. It allowed somebody who was just showing a lot of intent on the internet to become a marketing qualified account. Well, we kind of knew inherently that was wrong, but we wanted to see what was the basement right, and so then we upped it. There had to be one known engaged contact, and then we upped it to two known engaged contacts, right.

Speaker 3: 13:40

And now we've hit a sweet spot where our sales team is like, yeah, when I send an email, it's getting some sort of a response. They might not be ready to buy, but I'm getting a response. So we're like, okay, we think we've kind of hit the sweet spot. But so instead of like necessarily evolving it every month or every quarter, maybe we can reevaluate it semi-annually, right. But we're going to continue to reevaluate it because buying behavior is going to continue to change. More people are looking at, you know AI, you know doing AI searches versus going to Google, right? How is that going to impact what you can see? That's happening versus what?

Speaker 2: 14:17

you're only going to get more signals, right, like I think that's what we were talking about before we even started the podcast.

Speaker 2: 14:24

Right, like, our attention spans are rapidly decreasing because there's just so much that we're trying to pack in, and I think the same goes for signals we're going to get more and more. It's all access to data, right, and I don't think that means that you have to have all the data either. I think that's been an interesting thing to think. You know to kind of see as people are adopting this. Like do the people that have access to every single data point see more success than those that don't?

Speaker 1: 14:49

I don't think we have an answer yet I suspect the answer is no. Like it's like the what do they call it? The paradox of choice. Right, right, like people get kind of Right.

Speaker 2: 14:57

I like that about humans, like we're not completely predictable, or once somebody tells us we're predictable, we do something to mess up the matrix and so.

Speaker 2: 15:06

I think that's why we all I mean nerds like me especially like we'll always have some sort of job or problem to solve, because we'll keep creating them.

Speaker 2: 15:15

But one thing I'll touch on you know that your question made me think of and you asked like the difference in follow-up depending on all these signals, and I guess that's been interesting because I think originally I was really staunch on the worst thing we can do is overcomplicate it, because if you were to say, okay, if you get an MQL, I want you to spin around three times, go tap your head four times and then send this email, but then, if you get an MQA with two people, I want you to do this completely separate choreographed dance.

Speaker 2: 15:45

It wouldn't have been realistic and I was really staunch on that, and I still think that is notionally true. But something cool that I've seen and maybe it has to do with the upleveling of AI and the surge of all of that is I think we're actually seeing that we're able, that sales is pulling a lot more strings together and getting excited for the potential here and it's all. I don't know. It's all coming together quicker and that we're not having to make it. So it needs to be the exact process. It has to go this way. I think we're seeing a little bit more flex on marketing and sales in figuring out a new way to really work these. So I think that's been kind of cool, because I would have answered that question a lot differently had you asked me maybe six months ago.

Speaker 1: 16:31

If I'm following you, you're like, instead of having very Like rigid process, prescriptive sort of follow followup requirements and highly, highly rigid templates for followup for different kinds of things, you have things that are like. You have general guidelines. Maybe call them principles, right, and maybe, yeah, the goal is to reply within a certain amount of time, but otherwise you leave a lot of flexibility and trust. Put a lot of trust in the people doing that work too.

Speaker 2: 16:58

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm not saying just say let them do anything, I guess, but to clarify, but it's more just like With guardrails, right Like I'm not either. Well, and also you don't want to say it has to go this way. If we don't know right To Jeff's point, this is going to iterate and change. So feel it out, tell us what you think. They shouldn't be too engaged people and this is what it should feel like. But like, does it feel like that? Yeah, I think the follow-up should be different.

Speaker 3: 17:27

I also think it's a little bit of the teach them how to fish principle. Right, so you know, help them understand how to interpret the intent signals, cause a lot of marketers go. We bought this really cool tool. It's going to give you all the data in one place. Now go nuts.

Speaker 2: 17:43

And this is exactly what you need to do. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 17:46

Assuming that a sales rep is going to know what to do with that, right, whereas you need to enable the sales team and say, ok, here is what in this view, here's what you're seeing. Here's how I would interpret these results. Right, here's how we're interpreting them from a marketing perspective and here's what I would recommend you do. Next, right, and it's going to require a heavier lift on sales as part. Right, it's not just a you know, get an MQL, put them into an outreach sequence, right, or that kind of thing Now. But because they're going to have a lot less, mqls are going to come in a lot, much lower volume than MQL. Wait, mqas are going to come in as much lower volume than MQLs.

Speaker 3: 18:27

So, instead of just trying to put people into these sequences and like, communicate you know, now it's hey, take the time to investigate this account, understand what they seem to care about, so that when you send out an email, instead of saying like, hey, I saw you went to Marquette University, I've got a thing to sell you, which is personalization circa 2015. Now it's hey, you know, I'm guessing you care about this, this and this. Did you know we can help you with that? Here's an e-book that you might find interesting, and let me know if you want to talk, right? Well, hell, I'd respond to that email, right?

Speaker 1: 19:09

I wouldn't totally flush it right at least. I think it's interesting because, like to me, having had an inbound BDR team for a while, I think I was already doing that anyway, volume was pretty low, so I had that advantage. But I think the other piece of this is I like the idea of having general guidelines and maybe even some templates. But the thing I worry about with that is it loses, especially if you've got the salesperson who's going to go out and do that a bit of research you talked about, which I think is would be huge Cause, like you, like I'd like that way more. It shows some effort and so like some time to understand, like I want it to be in their own voice to some degree right Within again within guardrails and guidelines, right.

Speaker 1: 20:05

Like it's the intuition, we started to miss, I feel like and I'm the process queen, I mean, just roll her eyes so hard at me. So I am also a process person, but I also like I think process can be overdone, right when it becomes prescriptive. It signals to me a lack of trust of people right first off, and then also like that we want so much, like we're worried about people being off script or inconsistent. It's kind of the same reason. I've seen where, like knowledge-based stuff being put out on customer support sites yeah, that requires like 14 levels of review. That never makes it out because everyone's worried about the wording being exactly right as opposed to going like let's keep the wording that was originally. The question was originally asked and around 20, around 2018.

Speaker 3: 20:46

I stopped giving sdr teams pre-written emails and scripts I gave them. Here's the bullets you should cover right, because once again, otherwise it sounds like marketing email. So why don't I just send it out for my marketing automation system instead of having a human send it right? And so you know like now, with my sales team, we're sitting down and we're co-developing the dance around an MQA. So when something becomes an MQA right, Once again, just as we've always said, MQLs were never a handoff. Mqas definitely shouldn't be right. And so what does that dance look like? Okay, they hit MQA. What am I going to do from a marketing perspective? What is my messaging going to be? What are my offers? What are all those sorts of things?

Speaker 1: 21:30

What channels are you going to have that messaging show up in?

Speaker 3: 21:32

Exactly. And then what is the dance that sales is going to do to complement it?

Speaker 2: 21:41

And then what's? The data dance to get the contact coverage that's needed for the stuff that still exists, which just to clarify, since we're saying that MQLs aren't completely going away, like there's still the need to communicate with people.

Speaker 2: 21:51

So I think, another piece of it which is cool is like the contact acquisition piece. Right, it's one thing to like surface an MQA, and the first thing we think is like okay, sales conversation, let's talk about it and that's totally valid. But even before that, for most organization it's do we know people at this account? Because you might be able to MQA off of anonymous visits and find out, oh, we have one lady named Sally who quit four or five years ago, right so.

Speaker 2: 22:19

I don't know. I think from the data perspective I'm also getting excited just because there's like more that can be done proactively. That'll support all of those things that will always be important, like keeping our Rolodex populated, essentially.

Speaker 1: 22:32

I'm really excited. I think basically what Jessica was describing too is that, like I think there's a huge amount of possibility of using AI for because what you described right it sounds like a lot of extra, like more work on either your BDR or sales team to do this follow-up right.

Speaker 3: 22:48

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1: 22:50

But if you can use AI to help with, like, give it some of these guardrails here's some bullet points we like and then, but also train it on this is each individual salesperson's voice and the way they communicate now you can do that rather quickly and then you're you're modifying it, um, only as needed. I wouldn't not sure I'm comfortable yet, um, with just having it automatically send stuff, but maybe eventually, yeah, but I think, I think there's some power there. So, like it's like I think that's the other piece of this that is interesting, but so okay, so we I meant we mentioned hand raisers like, like what happens with hand raisers in this where, like, hey, contact me.

Speaker 2: 23:29

Sales team I feel like that's always valid, right. If someone important is saying, contact me, you should contact them. It's not a good I don't, and, jess, feel free to disagree, but I think that's just bad form to have no response at all, even if it's like an automated response to people that might you might consider not valid. But yeah, I don't know, contact me, I have money to spend. Form, right, yeah.

Speaker 3: 23:51

My um. I had a client um in my time here at Inverta who did a really interesting thing. Even before this, buying groups was a thing which they did. They had NQLs, which was just your average signal, and then they had an HVMQL and those were people who requested a demo, a contact me, those sorts of things. So those required an instantaneous outreach. But now even those come in tiers, right. So we haven't talked about it and I don't think we're going to go down this rabbit hole today. It's probably a topic, maybe in another six months when you have us back on Michael. But it's around establishing your ICP, right. What if somebody reaches out to contact me and they're not actually somebody you want to sell to? What do you do then? A student, right?

Speaker 2: 24:41

And what do you do? Autoresponder yeah.

Speaker 3: 24:44

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of people Well, it's students, but also it could just be. It could be, you know, like we sell to B2B companies. It could be a B2B company that's just way too small. They have one marketer or they have no marketers and they just want, and we know that's not a recipe for success for us. So what do you do with that HVMQL, right? So it's baking in your ICP, in who you want to sell to, into all of these motions, right? And so then maybe you have, you know, your, your junior SDR team follows up on those non-qualified or non-ICP ones, because there might be some gold in there. There might be some, you know. But you know that becomes a whole nother conversation now of how you handle, you know, those high value hand raisers that might not be in your ICP.

Speaker 1: 26:24

So maybe it's a combination of like MQA, MQL plus prioritization, right yeah.

Speaker 2: 26:30

I kind of think it ends up being like almost like different flavors of the same thing. Right, we are saying there is a signal that needs responding to.

Speaker 2: 26:39

And in this case we're talking about a hand raising signal or signal, right. That needs responding to. And your question earlier, like, is that outreach different? Potentially we're saying we need to have guardrails, but in general, like, I would argue that even though someone filled out a form, like you should still look at it as a holistic account. Okay, well, what other context do we have here? Right? So I would.

Speaker 2: 26:59

I'm kind of finding myself leaning and I kind of have, I guess, hesitated to decide one way or the other, because it's I can. I can put myself in both corners if I really wanted to. But I guess to me that is an MQA, right, it should be an MQA. It's like this is a really high signal from one person. But there's got to be some other signals there that if you were to look under the hood that you would find. You would find a couple anonymous visits. If you had intent data, probably you might find out information about their organization that makes them a better suited fit for your organization. There's just like a lot there. So I've been leaning more towards treating every signal that we've deemed as worthy of follow up as quote unquote an MQA of evaluating the account, ensuring contact coverage is there and approaching it in that way, because I think that's the shift. I think we are moving towards thinking bigger about what they might need and what kinds of problems they might be trying to solve.

Speaker 3: 27:56

But that's true. Maybe it's almost an if-then statement, right? If this person is in our ICP and they fill out one of these high-value forms? Then, they auto-MQA Right. That's an entirely perfect.

Speaker 2: 28:10

I think of it as flavors, but yeah, I think of it as like pistachios, a type of ice cream, strawberries type of ice cream, you know, and just they're all going to come from ice cream Me. I never understood it, although I do like baklava, which has the pistachios too, and the Dubai chocolate, well, I can't get distracted it um, although I do like baklava which has the pistachios too. So, and the jubai chocolate, well, so, um, it's interesting.

Speaker 1: 28:35

Yeah, I think there's a small thing too, like I've experienced this, having filled out a contact us form before, after doing a bunch of due diligence of my own, and then not getting any response right. So there's a little bit and it ended up the way I got. It was by shaming the company, like on social media, right. So I think there's also a potential reputational.

Speaker 2: 28:54

That's what I think, because what if you went and worked for a huge company later? Right, you would always remember that they didn't respond to you. I don't know.

Speaker 3: 29:00

Well, and we learned that lesson the hard way when I was at Demandbase, because we had put a floor like, if they didn't have 25 million in revenue, we were just like these accounts churn, like they're just too small, they don't know what to do with our data, you know. But we put a hard line in the sand and, to your point, we would just not call them back. And then, yeah, then they started to roast us on LinkedIn, on Twitter. So what we did was we had our junior SDRs who would call them right and basically Now, with AI Wanting our solution- Right, I would argue now with AI.

Speaker 2: 29:35

There's no reason there should be no response to anything Like.

Speaker 1: 29:38

I don't know, Maybe I'm just, I have high standards, but even like, if there's a dentist, right, that doesn't like respond when you do a contact us form, I'm like then don't put a form on your website so I think about this when I had that sdr team, like one, like very often we get, people would ask for something that we this was, we couldn't fulfill it because, like we didn't, we this was a had local market steps. Like we weren't in that market, we didn't have something close to it, or it was just too small for us, or we didn't have the. We are already. Everything was already booked up and what I always did with the sales directors in those regions was say, if we can't help them ourselves, right, do you know who we can point them to? Right, which was another thing, right, so at least we're giving them something to go on? Yeah, but we always responded again, again, relatively low volume, so it was not that hard.

Speaker 3: 30:31

Well, and that's why the ICP discussion should be a whole company discussion, right? Because, looking back on it, what else could we have done? We would have said, sure, we'll sell you, but you're not going to get any of the bells or whistles, you're not going to get a CSM, you're kind of on your own right. Here's all of our self-serve stuff. Right, because it just costs us a lot to service those teeny, tiny little clients, and they had a high likelihood of churning anyway. So are there other things we could have done? So we didn't completely block them out, but you know. So you know lessons learned.

Speaker 1: 31:06

Well, okay, so then you know, kind of pulling on this thread a little more, the this idea of, like an individual hand raiser and it's the only known person on your database for that, like, like, how important is then, um, both for that scenario, maybe in general right To have the full contact coverage for those accounts, and how, like, how, like, how do you think about that and the data that goes with it?

Speaker 3: 31:31

I think this is where now marketers need to be thinking about their marketing differently, right? So, understanding your buyer's journey you know, I think we talked in our prep call around. You know, understand the anatomy of a deal, right, like what does it take, what touches how many individuals, individuals in which roles need to be engaged in order for an account to be a successful opportunity that's going to go to close one, right. Understanding that and then, as a marketing team, understanding, okay, how do we behave differently, right? So, great to your point, somebody, you know an account, let's say you have. You know, four stages. You've got aware, consideration decision, right, and you decide at, you know the consideration phase.

Speaker 3: 32:14

When somebody is in the consideration phase, you want to evaluate all the accounts that are in that phase and say, huh, of these accounts, one third of them have five stakeholders that are known in our database and are engaged. Cool, I'm going to continue to put them in whatever, always on program or whatever, so they stay warm. But we've got a buying committee there. Oh, another two thirds. We've only got one person, right, we know we need at least five for this, you know deal, to have a snowball's chance of actually turning to close one. So now, what do we do different to those accounts in the stage of the buyer's journey? And this is where this is where you turn on content syndication. You know, it's like, it's so funny, it's like content syndication was demonized and then it came back and then it got demonized again and now it's like now. But now I feel like we've got the good use case for it, right.

Speaker 3: 33:09

When you know how much what a buying committee is that you need to sell to and you know that you have accounts that are trending the right direction but don't have the full coverage, that's where you use content syndication, right. So then you start to fill out that. You know you get those names in the door. You start warming them up with your always on campaigns, those sorts of things. Once again, they're not leads. You don't hand them over to sales. This is marketing side of the equation Making sure all these people know your name so that when they finally get to MQA stage, now you've got five or more people engaged, and so when your sales team reaches out to all of them and connects the dots between all of them, right, they go oh yeah, I know them. Yeah, yeah, let's talk to them, right? That's, that's the beauty of how this should play out within a marketing organization. So I love it.

Speaker 1: 35:10

Yeah, I love that. I love remember we talked about that anatomy of a win. I like, I love that. So because I've again actually the same place where I had the str team, like we we started tracking deals that came to fruition that had gone through my team, partially because I I noticed like body language when I would be reporting on you know, attribution type reporting. I'm saying like I like to sales, they just like nobody paid attention.

Speaker 1: 35:38

We started telling the stories about I didn't use the anatomy of a win, but like that's what we did, right, like what are all the things that happen across all our teams? I didn't. It was not a thing about saying, here's, look at all this great stuff marketing did. Like, here's, look at all this great stuff marketing did. Like here's how this would happen. Like what can we take from that and learn from to apply to how we, we both go, we go to market together and I think that was huge right. So, like how it was a pretty manual process to you guys, like how do you approach that anatomy of a win analysis when you do it?

Speaker 3: 36:10

data. I mean, I mean, andrea has created dashboards and spreadsheets, and I mean it is a manual process, right? And once again, you're not going to do it every quarter, but you probably need to do it once a year because your market's going to change. New competitors are going to come in, you're going to start to see different things, but that anatomy of a deal just gives everybody their marching orders. Hey, when should we host a field marketing event? Oh, it's not really a demand gen program, it's more of a pipeline acceleration program, right? Oh, yeah, webinars are here, but here's where we have you. Invite people to our customer advisory board, right, understanding when all of those channels should be turned on to acquire and retain the right customer.

Speaker 3: 36:54

It does take some work, it's a lot of you know. But an attribute, a pure, straight up attribution doesn't doesn't get you there. It doesn't get you there. Attribution modeling doesn't Quite. Honestly, I know, I know, I know like this is a vicious, vicious debate and has been for years, but I'm, I'm, just I'm, I'm a non-believer in attribution. I think you just need calculus.

Speaker 2: 37:21

People are going to come for jess I know, and it's fine.

Speaker 3: 37:24

I mean, calculus lobbyists the data scientists or like yeah, because I'm going to yeah, attribution hater, but I think it's really just looking at, you know, because now the bigger the company, the more closed one deals you're going to have, obviously. But there's definitely trends you can see in what goes to opportunity, goes closed loss versus closed one one, you know. And you know each individual channel holder should have a vested interest in knowing that because that's how you can argue for your budget next year, right? I mean, you know, when I had field marketing, you know, no, I didn't drive pipeline but I said, hey, accounts that attend a field marketing event post-opportunity are 2.5 times more likely to go to close one.

Speaker 1: 38:14

Right.

Speaker 3: 38:15

So now I can ask for my budget. If they just, you know, gauged my team on pipeline, they'd probably completely do away with field marketing right. So it's understanding. That is so, so, so important and yes, it's some work, but it's totally worth it.

Speaker 1: 38:34

Yeah, any additional thoughts, andrea, that you hear.

Speaker 2: 38:36

I mean, I would say like AI is obviously a piece of this puzzle. I, you know I don't load data into every AI tool, obviously for security reasons, but I think you know the more use cases we're hearing around. You know, I know we don't believe in attribution, but you know a lot of it's the pattern recognition.

Speaker 1: 38:55

I don't, for the record, I don't totally disagree.

Speaker 2: 38:58

I'm halfway because I technically I got a like I did my thesis with that in mind, attribution modeling in mind, so I can't ever hate it completely.

Speaker 1: 39:07

But where I?

Speaker 2: 39:08

say AI will be my biggest thing, that's true. Yeah, I think it's my biggest thing, that's true. Yeah, because it's all about, like credit. I think the word credit has just yes, you know, ruined it, but what I think trending and like recognizing patterns is just the huge thing with AI, that's, at the end of the day, the most basic way to describe what AI has provided. It's just faster pattern recognition, right? So I do think there is going to be a world where it's going to be even tinier data points. Right, we're talking about we have new signals, we have first party data, we have second party data and we think we're cool Guys. We're going to be talking about like infinieth party data right, I think by the end of this so I think Inferred things with all that yeah

Speaker 2: 39:49

inferred things. You know vibe reading from AI summaries. Who knows what these signals will be? That will maybe become part of this equation that is MQA, but I think at some point AI is going to take over and it's going to be so many signals we couldn't mention them on a 45 minute podcast. I think the most important thing is for you know to be nimble and curious and be willing to think of it differently. I think in general, that's always been the answer, but now I'm saying it just a little bit more obviously because, like I said, it's been cool to see everyone get excited for a process. I never felt people get excited when I would do an MQL project. Right. We're going to establish an MQL cleansing project, right.

Speaker 1: 40:31

We're going to establish an MQL Data cleansing project, right?

Speaker 2: 40:33

Yes, Like this is when you are changing that status to working and you must do it in 12 hours Like it feels different than that did. I still think I love process. My husband would agree I love process, but I do think it's been cool to see like the human side come out.

Speaker 1: 40:47

People are getting excited again about like, trusting their intuition, feeling out the deal, following these guidelines, but you know, it's interesting to me because in this conversation, right clearly, technology is an underpinning on all this, but it's like it feels like it's not really the most important piece of this puzzle.

Speaker 3: 41:06

It's not the hardest part for sure, right, because everybody goes there. They're like, oh my God, you know, it's like stitching together the technology and surfacing MQAs and creating the formulas and Salesforce or whatever other tool you have, like the. Yes, that's work, but it's the alignment, the agreement, the change management within marketing and how they're going to behave, the change management of sales, right, making sure like they don't pounce on any webinar attendee but rather they wait until it's an MQA. Let marketing do their job, do all that background work before sales goes after them. They're just going to, you know, have a much higher hit rate and you know everybody's going to be a whole lot more efficient at the end of the day, because what we're starting to see is the traditional funnel velocity or deal velocity is and I can never remember it's getting faster Because so much more of that buyer's journey is happening before they ever talk to your sales team. So by the time they talk to sales, you're just in the head-to-head battle against two or three other competitors and it goes real fast.

Speaker 2: 42:12

And one of those competitors didn't respond to a contact us when they worked at a small company.

Speaker 1: 42:17

Five years ago, and so you're already one of two. Yeah, I don't know, so it's interesting. You said something earlier today or early in the conversation, jessica, about marketers will need to help sales teams understand how to interpret all these signals right. It feels like that. The implication there to me is like there's a lot like marketing should be thinking more about sales enablement than they probably have. They always should have.

Speaker 3: 42:45

But yes, now it's very much more important. Yeah, yeah, and it's. You know, like I said, I think it's a lot more sitting down and really talking through things with your sales team, you know, deciding what messages are working, what aren't. Yeah, hey, here's the signals, especially that alignment around an MQA is so critical and so crucial, even more so than the alignment around the definition of an MQL. That definition is going to be so crucial so that everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing and when throughout that buyer's journey. And then making sure that sales know okay, we're tagging you in, we're still on the field, but we're tagging you in to play your role.

Speaker 3: 43:33

At this stage and here's what that looks like and just as it always has been, you want to make sure that they're interpreting the signals the right way, so that they know that their message maps to your message on the marketing side. Right, so it's not being prescriptive, but it's like hey, here's how we read these signals. Here's the segment that we put this set of. Hey, here's how we read the these signals. Here's the segment that we put these, this set of, counts in, because here's what we saw. And now here's some bullets and overall messaging.

Speaker 1: 44:00

Now you go, you go attack them through your channels. Yeah, so the other, like moving from whatever somebody has today even ABM, it sounds like to moving to one that's maybe ABM with MQAs or whatever traditional now with MQAs. That's a pretty big change. Yeah, so maybe how did you approach that change process? And then, with clients, what do?

Speaker 2: 44:32

you find that helps increase the chances of success for that transition. So and Jess, I'd be curious to hear you know your thoughts on this so with I'll speak more to a client that we worked on with this we and I feel very I don't know how to say this I feel really confident that we should never rip out MQLs altogether, and I definitely feel that way as we've been working with clients, I think one we'd never get any client to start a project with us and we said we're going to start by turning off your MQL mechanism. Nobody would ever sign that contract. So that's still there. So I would encourage everyone, like, don't let that stop you. You don't have to turn anything off. You are literally just turning something else on and at first you can just start by listening to it. You don't have to show anybody else who is it pulling up, who is it not pulling up that you think that should have pulled up right, like and doing that evaluation.

Speaker 2: 45:24

And I think with us, jess, if I'm remembering right, we kind of did that where we just like kept looking at it and we're like, hmm, that number seems high, or I'm surprised this account should be there. So, or I'm surprised this account should be there. So it was more like trying to feel out what was too strict of a mechanism for identifying MQAs and what was too loose and finding that sweet spot. And I think we kind of did that even before we brought in sales, just from like a more of a data is this working correctly and seem notionally correct? Then, with sales, kind of the same iterative right, because they have different perspective, different data that they are providing with their intuition and their read on how things are going in those conversations.

Speaker 2: 45:59

So I think from there it is almost a second iteration phase with sales, because they're actually getting that feedback in the moment to tell more succinctly if it was good like yes, positive MQA, or maybe not quite like yes, positive MQA, or maybe not quite what we would expect from an MQA. So I would say just iterating is really the key piece here and not thinking you have to do it all at once. I would just do that and then start to realize, okay, well, now that we have this signal, it kind of means that we don't have this one anymore, because it's essentially now just an aggregated form that swallowed up webinar attendees, for example, like maybe those things aren't separate. So I think it, just as long as people aren't feeling like they have to decide everything out the gate and they're just doing it step by step, I think there's no reason you shouldn't be trying to listen to more signals.

Speaker 3: 46:48

Well, and I think data to prove your case is always going to be the right answer. Right it's whether it's a look back or it's a. You know, six month data gather, the ring period, what you know, however the case may be, however quickly you want to move those sorts of things, but you know, with one client we literally did this in stealth mode. So marketing was doing this but didn't tell sales because basically sales was like I need to see the data before I'm going to listen to you. Marketing people tell me I can't call an account until they get to MQA, like I'm not buying it, right and so great.

Speaker 3: 47:22

So we did our thing in stealth mode for six months and at the end of that six months we were able to show hey, of accounts that you called that were at MQA, you were seven times more likely to get a meeting than if you called them at any other stage, you know, higher up in the buyer's journey. And then they went oh, now this did cost some SDRs their jobs because they were like oh, so we've got our SDRs just doing all this dialing and, like you know, trying to play the numbers game, like we actually just wait until it gets to MQA right, like, oh, we can have a much higher hit rate and we don't need as many people dialing for dollars, I mean. So I mean nobody wants to hear that somebody is going to lose their job over this, but I mean it got. It was that severe of a shift. Once they saw the numbers that they were, they were all in with this approach.

Speaker 2: 48:17

So yeah, it's powerful.

Speaker 1: 48:24

It could be, yeah, it could be Go ahead.

Speaker 2: 48:28

No, I was just going to say, like, the contact acquisition, I think, plays into that too, right? So, yeah, maybe you don't need as many SDRs hitting the phones. Go ahead earlier, pre-mqa stage or an account hitting in pre-MQA stage. So you know, maybe that's classic political AI answer. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're getting rid of jobs. We're just opening up their time to do something else. And I think in this case, I'm really pushing for the contact acquisition because I don't think contacts are going away. I don't think any salesperson will ever want to just go off of vibes and anonymous website traffic, right? Um? So yeah, I think that's where I would say is maybe there's an opportunity to focus on the data with that freed up time, not spending time on the phone yeah, I think they could spend more time doing the analysis and research and really crafting good messaging out right.

Speaker 2: 49:30

And updating Salesforce also.

Speaker 1: 49:36

That's one way to turn off sales. I know that.

Speaker 2: 49:40

I had to say one triggering thing.

Speaker 1: 49:42

Yes, yes, I think we've said more than one Gosh. There's so much more I think we could we could cover, but I think we're going to have to call it a day. This has been just like last time a great conversation. I've learned something and had fun all at the same time, so that's a win in my book. So, jessica, andrea, thank you so much. If folks want to connect with you or learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker 3: 50:05

Well, I have the distinction of being the only Jessica Fulis on LinkedIn, so I'm easy to find. But also, you know, at the same time, make sure you follow Invertacom, because we have lots of great or Inverta on LinkedIn. We've got lots of great content we put out daily. We're not a salesy type, we're just here to help marketers think differently.

Speaker 2: 50:30

Yes, and same LinkedIn. I'm trying to be better at LinkedIn every day. But then also anyone who's coming to mops mops. The police hit up my session. It's going to be a good time.

Speaker 1: 50:41

Yeah Well, I'm not sure what's going on with LinkedIn these days, Like the whole algorithm is all like I see more stuff I can't, I know, yeah, the.

Speaker 3: 50:47

Yeah, the perfect time to have posted something is three weeks ago.

Speaker 2: 50:50

Right, I feel like that anyway, so that actually makes sense. I'm always three weeks late.

Speaker 1: 50:57

Yeah, well, again, thank you both of you. It was so much fun. We'll, I'm sure, have lots of fun. Jessica, you mentioned before this, you might have some resources that we can share with people in our show notes, so we'll try to do that as well. Perfect, yeah, and then thank you to our, our supporters, our listeners, hopefully soon viewers, and we appreciate all your support. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, you can always reach out to Naomi or me, and we'd be glad to talk to you about it until next time. Bye everybody, bye, bye, bye.