Hot Takes

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

Armando, Massimo & Gary
All Marketing Revenue Sales
Mar 2022, 23

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

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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Mar 2022, 21

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

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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Mar 2022, 17

My data infrastructure kinda sucks–what should I do about it?

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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Mar 2022, 15

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

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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Mar 2022, 10

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

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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Mar 2022, 08

Should every company be a PLG company moving forward?

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

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Mar 2022, 03

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

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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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?

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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Feb 2022, 16

Why are Marketing and Sales constantly at odds with each other?

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…

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