Hot Takes

Burning Questions, Counterintuitive Insights and Surprising Datapoints to Spark Your Imagination

hot takes

All Marketing Revenue Sales
Mar 2022, 29

Now That You Have Big Data, It’s Time to Talk About Smart Data
Marketing Revenue

Big Data has been one of the major buzzwords of the last 5 years.

Everyone rushed to build all the required infrastructure to support them: CDP, ETL, reverse ETL, data warehouses, and plugging them across their stacks.

Great companies like Snowflake, Segment, and Fivetran flourished in this period helping customers gather, route, synchronize, and store the huge amounts of data that was being generated all across the funnel, from the first touchpoint with a user down to their whole customer journey.

That’s great. I love data-driven companies and I think, at least in the tech space, it’s time to call the Big Data war won. Most companies nowadays have a horde of data about their prospects and customers. 

So…has the time come for celebrations?

Well, no.

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by Massimo Chieruzzi
Mar 2022, 23

What’s a good framework to define what a good deal/lead is?
Marketing Revenue Sales

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.

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by Armando Biondi
Mar 2022, 21

Stop sweating your data; it’s better than you think
Revenue

Dun & Bradstreet put out a piece titled “5 Shocking Stats About the State of B2B Marketing Data,” and I wasn’t shocked. 

Maybe I’m cynical, or perhaps the years of experience at companies large and small caused me to react with a shoulder shrug and “meh.”

The starting salvo in the article was that only 50% of B2B professionals are confident in the quality of their sales and marketing data. Even though over 80% say, it’s crucial to their success.

Here’s why I don’t care–this will always be the case.

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by Gary Amaral

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Mar 2022, 15

What’s a good average conversion rate from MQL/PQL to SQL?
Marketing Revenue Sales

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.

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by Armando Biondi
Mar 2022, 10

MQLs, PQLs, SQLs–how does a modern conversion funnel work?
Marketing Revenue Sales

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. 

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by Armando Biondi

Have a hot take you’d like to see published? 🌶️

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Mar 2022, 08

Should every company be a PLG company moving forward?
Revenue

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now you will have heard about PLG. It’s literally everywhere on B2Tech Twitter, it’s the hottest topic of the moment when it comes to SaaS companies.

It stands for Product-Led Growth, of course… you might have heard about Product-Led Sales or Product-Led Revenue, slightly different flavors for essentially the same concept.

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by Armando Biondi
Mar 2022, 03

IRL Events are more important than you realize and here’s why
Marketing Revenue Sales

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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by Gary Amaral

Have a hot take you’d like to see published? 🌶️

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Feb 2022, 22

Is it wrong to be honest about why a business exists?
Revenue

All things old are new again, I actually just read an article that suggests marketing is all about “storytelling”. 

Imagine my surprise at this being a novel idea, I had always thought of storytelling as a fundamental element of good marketing. 

Similarly, Revenue (profit), is and always has been the objective of a business. 

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by Gary Amaral

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