Burning Questions, Counterintuitive Insights and Surprising Datapoints to Spark Your Imagination
Far too often, I’ve started a new role and immediately been thrust into a significant technology migration. The litany of reasons for such a major endeavour is long and often transposable from one organization to another.
More often than not, the justification is encapsulated in a broad generalization like “we’ve outgrown the platform” or “it’s such a mess we should just start over.”
So I was recently at the Forrester B2B summit in Austin and had a blast! It was an excellent opportunity to focus on new thinking in the B2B space, check out the latest and greatest vendors, and reconnect with old friends.
However, it was also an eye-opening experience as I experienced the sales prevention department of several companies in action.
Most operators have a good general understanding of the concept of ICP, but if you ask them “how did you get there?” things immediately become fuzzier.
Most sophisticated operators will tell you that the more articulated and granular an ICP description is, the better. They will also tell you that to get to a high level of confidence in a granular ICP description, the best idea is to ground your analysis in some statistical significance, defaulting to Market Research to achieve that.
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Pricing & Packaging is such a critical part of every company’s GTM (or go-to-market), you could argue that any company at its very core has two existential imperatives.
First: it needs to be able to deliver value to a group of customers (which implies being able to define and reach them effectively). Second: it needs to be able to extract a portion of that value for itself.
One of the conversations I’ve had more frequently in my professional journey is “how do you define what’s a good lead/deal”?
It’s really interesting to observe that most companies struggle in this area, they don’t really have a mental framework for it, tend to use anecdotal information until very late in their lifecycle stage and as a consequence create friction/misalignment that could be very much avoided and that ends up slowing growth down instead, in some cases putting the company as a whole at existential risk even.
Spoiler alert: this is really what most companies are at.
The “big data” narrative from a few years back introduced the idea that ‘the more data the better’, but today’s companies are most likely drowning in it.
Also: the problem is rather around how to store, organize, and complement the data they have.
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TL;DR: It really depends. Also: wrong question.
Conversion rates are interesting, people look at a percentage and take it as an absolute truth, it’s a number after all right?
What most operators miss tho is that every number has a story behind it, a series of assumptions and ideas that were baked into the calculation to get there. Not knowing what that story is more often than not sets you up for failure.
Operators used to think about *the* conversion funnel: you would move from awareness to consideration to conversion.
Then SaaS came around and it was still about that, but also retention and expansion and advocacy. It would be pretty linear, you would move from being Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) into a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) into being a customer within the purview of Success as a function.
Pretty straightforward right?
Except now Product Qualified Leads (PQL) are a thing… so, ugh, where do they go in the conversion funnel? Do they come before MQLs? After them? Do they replace MQLs? Are they something that should exist in parallel to them? How does one turn into the other? If you’ve been thinking that it’s all very confusing, you’re not alone.
Most of us have been on a long hiatus from live events but they are back. Despite many prognostications that gathering in large groups will transition permanently to virtual events our primal social instincts seem to be too powerful.
This reality is where the crux of my position lies. Making connections in real life leads to exponentially more value in every way.
I and the team are attending a ton of events this year and are super excited to do so because:
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Marketing has known this for years: out of 1,000 people that visit your pricing page or view your webinar or download an ebook, not everyone is interest-ED in the same way in you, but not everyone is interest-ING in the same way to you either.
Historically there is no company that I’ve seen, been part of, and/or invested in where this hasn’t happened. As far as I can tell, at its core, the situation is the consequence of two foundational issues – first and foremost, marketing and sales teams are measured on metrics that have a fundamentally different nature: quantitative for Marketing Teams and qualitative for Sales Teams.
More is always merrier for Marketing Teams but for Sales Teams, not so much…