it's important to know what is working but it's also really important to know what isn't working so that we can cut it out because marketing dollars are spent to do things that don't work SDR time is spent sales is working opportunities that close at a very low rate and when we think about efficient growth cutting out the things that aren't working or the quickest way to start moving in that direction I also want to kind of double click and just note this uh this concept of volume conversion velocity I think that's a really important thing multi-touch attribution is not going to be able to help you get those things we need to be looking at multi-touch attribution is one tool one thing that can give us insights and is good at certain things but then having a pipeline architecture to be able to measure volume conversion and velocity in a different [Music] way this is going to be an action action-packed episode all around B2B marketing measurement and I would even like consider extending the concept to B2B goto Market measurement even further as uh things continue to be a lot more integrated inside of go to market a lot of companies are running hybrid motions with either product Le and sales Le and Partnerships and independent sales prospecting um a variety of goto Market motions that need to be measured holistically need to be able to be able to be looked at as an entire company um we see marketing getting a lot more involved in independent sales prospecting when it comes to email writing and outbound optimization and looking at that data um sometimes Partnerships fall under the sales department other part other times ecosystem and Partnerships falls under the marketing department and so you can see there's like an evolution about what's happening in go to market to be a lot more holistic across the entire team combining the uh all the different go to market teams so looking forward to diving into that um today our guests Charlie and Chrissy the founders of CS2 a leading goto Market operation firm uh they've coined the term go to market operations we actually worked on that together several I think it was up up to a year ago now um to really Hammer home the point that um a lot of things that happen in marketing operations or historically have happened in marketing operations extend much further into Salesforce Administration and looking at the deal flow across sales and I think the expansion from marketing I think marketing Ops people are very well positioned to take over this new role and go to market Ops and look at everything holistically which is very different than having a revops team that does sales commission plans and territory planning and things like that um and so looking forward to diving in they're the founders of of CS2 they work with some of the leading B2B sassin tech companies in the world like gong and drada and sales Loft and so have a lot of experience in very complex U mature goto Market teams um and also very great logos and great companies and so Charlie and Chrissy really happy to have you back for this live event we had a podcast that was published about three months ago that was a leading podcast in terms of views and listens so really excited to have you back on the show for this live event um we're going to have we're going to go through a set of like topics and questions if you all have specific questions relative to your situation or you want something that we talked about do you want us to dive deeper in or to clarify feel free to drop those in the chat straight away Stephanie's going to cue them up when we get into questions uh if you feel comfortable coming on live we'd love to have a live discussion with you otherwise you can just say uh Stephanie could you ask this question and then we'll cue that up and she'll ask the question for you um and so with all that let's get into it um I think the uh I think the first place to start uh Charlie and Chrissy is specifically in your experience you see a lot of companies in a lot of companies and how they set up their data you see companies that are doing it really well you see companies that when they come and start to work with you they have a lot of issues and so would love to sort of just talk through uh what are what are some of the most common missteps that uh that Tob companies make when it comes to their like measurement their data their marketing Automation and Salesforce infrastructure yeah I can kick this off um I think the first one we really see is quite it's quite more of a high level it's not so specific around like the data models but it's more around their just general the approach and like under investing think it's going to be easier than it is and not really trying to build a a scalable data model one that can be repeatable one that they can grow with them one actually give them accurate data um and then due to that underinvestment and and like Chris said we're working with startup scale up B2B tech companies you once they get you know the first couple of rounds of funding they start to grow ARR is going up business getting more complex they kind of miss that opportunity when they could have set up that Foundation at the beginning really well to scale with them then as the business gets even more and more complex it gets more complex to start to implement the right tracking the right reporting the right data models so then as they start to you know get to that point where the board's asking a ton of really complex decisions they've got marketing team asking a lot of decisions sales team now there's a lot of pressure on trying to get the data in a in a reportable format and data that everyone can trust but they don't have it so then that's when we often get brought in to try and fix everything and get everything working but I wish the message should just get out there just like start earlier to build that Foundation before you need it because the time to build everything the time to get everything working in CRM marketing automation all of your Tech stack uh is a lot quicker before that complexity starts to compound and then a lot of the issues around like being able to do like year-over-year reporting quarter over rep quarter quarter reporting when you start to implement new models and now your data starts from that date it starts to create all of this friction points for companies that just want to know what's working and I can't tell you how many companies we start to work with that really big lots of funding hundreds of millions in funding and they can't answer simple decisions about what's working from their marketing programs it's it's crazy that they can they can even get to that point like great for them they got to that point without being able to answer those decisions but then we get brought in it's a massive rush to try and get you know the new CMO that's just come in we need to answer these questions like can you get us this data now and then we now have to build a long pretty longterm road map to help them get there because they they hadn't invested in it earlier I think also um to add on to Charlie's like even if they haven't invested that much into their reporting they might also be looking at their measurement in the wrong way and a lot of the time you know issues across a revenue team we see a lot of time goes back to lack of alignment and a like a unified data model which we be talking about today can really be like a a key alignment maker across the revenue team to get it them looking at the data the same way to be able to report on all of the channels where they're getting you know demand from and sharing that you know set of data across the whole team that they can align on I think a lot of you have probably been in meetings where sales is coming with one number marketing is trying to show their influence and it just creates these conversations where they it feels very disjointed or marketing has just been reporting on mqls but they're not actually looking at you know how can we tie this demand that we're creating all the way back to Revenue um which is where sales is usually focused or is hanging on the hook but really the whole Revenue team like many of you are forward thinking you know demand gen folks and marketers and know that like it's all about revenue for the whole team to achieve against and that's kind of the the key goal and Metric but to date that hasn't been that way like a lot of the times it's just the lowest easyest hanging fruit from a measurement standpoint and historically that's just been kind of mq which is kind of arbitrary and can be you know created with whatever definition they want um where sales is kind of looking at Pipeline and revenue and it's not that tie all the way through so um that's a big issue that we see for clients when we come on board and we kind we try to come in and say well we need the alignment to be better let's have a set of data that the whole team can rally around and use to make better decisions but also just to see you know what's the performance and not having to have different numbers that they need to fight each other over in board meetings and so forth so yeah we're going to get back to a couple of the other like uh common missteps that people make but before that I want to make a little diversion just based on your answers like what what are some of the key questions that companies want to answer that they're not able to answer just to give the audience some context around like what what type of things should we be able to answer what should we have the data to be able to answer and then I'll also note that it becomes very unproductive in in go to market team meetings if you have a pipeline meeting between sales and marketing and sdrs where each of those departments is looking at different data and then you're all reporting on the data what happens is that you end up making no decisions you end up basically the whole meeting is set around not trusting the data that's presented becomes very unproductive um in the human capital that's invested on and then the decisions that are made Downstream so just get back to the the the question and the topic what are some of the key questions that companies are trying to answer that they need to answer that you help them help them get to yeah I can probably start and then Charlie you can add on but um I think the biggest one when we start speaking to CMOS which is usually the kind of key buyer we first talk to but they're really just trying to get a sense for how is everything that we're doing from a go to market strategy and our campaigns and so forth how is that turning into revenue and like I said they don't have that tieback all the way through and they want to know like what channels also then you know down from that which channels as well as campaigns are actually the um biggest sources to convert so and when we think about it like they're sending over different you know leads based on different actions that they're taking to sales or sdrs and they want to know how are those converting should we invest in those um areas um and so that I think that to start just being able to tie what they're doing all the way through to revenue and especially see it at a channel campaign level as well um is typically what what we hear first Charlie if you want to add on to that yeah I think whenever I think of we think of I know we're going to get into this a little bit today the difference between funnel metrics and multi attribution when it comes to funnel metrics there's three major type of funet that I care about is volume conversion and velocity so when you're looking at the buyer stages and then signals that you're sending over to sales so that signal could be you know you know a partner referral it could be a marketing signal like intent or you know demo request or whatever signal you're sending over to sales how many are we getting how much what what is the conversion rate through all of your buying stages to Pipeline and revenue and how quickly are they moving through the funnel and that can then tell you which signals are the best to send sales so you're not wasting sales time so many so many companies out there sending everything to sales their conversion rates through the funnel like 1% and now that's 99% of the time of sales just being completely wasted and sales is not a cheap resource we shouldn't be wasting their time so trying to understand what signals we should be sending to sales to be able to have the highest likelihood of conversion the highest likelihood to turn into Revenue that's one piece of it and then understanding the full buyers Journey so this is more of the multi-touch um side of analytics where we're trying to track all of the different touch points across the buyer journey and then use data models to analyze them like you might want to use like a linear split attribution model or you might want look at influence conversion and we can go into some of the pros and cons of all of the these um and attribution can definitely Lead You astray I know I know Chris talks about that that a lot from the multitouch side but just really trying to understand you know we're doing all of this marketing and sales activity like what actually is working and I think particularly now like back in you know maybe pre-2020 but particularly over the early couple of First Years in in 2020 2021 where budgets were really high and companies like a lot of the companies in our industry were getting hundreds of millions of dollars of funding and we're just throwing a load of money at everything um maybe it didn't matter so much like if things were working or not but now you know growth of at all costs is gone and efficient growth is the new trend we actually need to know what's working like are we getting Roi on our marketing Investments are we actually wasting sales time in terms of the signals we're sending to sales and what shall we actually continue to invest in and what should we cut yeah and then almost as importantly we have to be able to know what isn't working it's important to know what is working but it's also really important to know what isn't working so that we can cut it out because marketing dollars are spent to do things that don't work SDR time is spent sales as working opportunities that close at a very low rate and when we think about efficient growth the cutting out the things that aren't working are the quickest way to start moving in that direction I also want to kind of double click and just note this uh this concept of uh volume conversion velocity I think that's a really important thing multi-touch attribution is not going to be able to help you get those things we need to be looking at multi-touch attribution is one tool one thing that can give us insights and is good at certain things but then having a pipeline architecture to be able to measure volume conversion and velocity in a different way um before we get into actually how to do this just want to talk through what do companies what do most of the companies do today most some people might view that as a as a best practice that is starting to become outdated in this era so like what are most companies doing today so people can understand maybe I'm doing this right now maybe this is what I I think is the best thing and then we'll sort of pave the way of uh the future and then also Al trying to highlight the flaws or the drawbacks to what most companies try to do to get this done today yeah so I mean there there's so many things here but one thing I think might be interesting to start with is around pipeline architecture like you talked about when you're trying to get volume conversion velocity data from the signals that you're sending to sales and then you're able to see conversion rates from that point and then obviously sales efficiency through the funnel Etc so back when we first started CS2 about 10 years ago um the data model that everyone was using for this and and one context here is that all of our clients use Salesforce as their CRM is what we call this siloed linear data model for pipeline architecture where you're tracking all of your data around the signals on leads and contacts and then as you leads turn into contacts turn into opportunities some you got some data on the opportunity object in Salesforce you might have some data on in campaigns in Sal in the Salesforce and you have all of these data silos to show you that that buyer's Journey from when this is what someone did like a demo request from a Google ad they went to sales sales worked them and then moved them through the sales stages at this velocity into pipeline into revenue and that just is impossible to report on when you when you're tracking everything in these different data silos in your CRM so and that used to be the way everyone did it so like many people on this call you may be seen when you do this you have to you're trying to get a full view of your your your funnel data and your pipeline data and you're creating like a lead report and a contact report and an opportunity report uh or you're trying to stitch all of this data together in Excel like my new favorite term is Excel lipics which is like you're doing all these back flips and crazy stuff in Excel to just like get view of just like how all of this is working and maybe you know pre- series a and you don't have much budget to do things fine but like as soon you start to mature and you actually need a robust data set to that everyone can trust you can't be doing Excel Olympics in this unrepeatable way to try and get this full funnel data and stitching everything together some companies also try to stitch together in their bi tour which is okay but again you're stitching in in a place outside of the operator's system as as in the CRM where there's still some reporting requirements in CRM so then gets back to Chris's Point earlier where sales then pulls a report out of Salesforce marketing's pulling a report out of their bi tool they both come to the board meeting with different numbers because the data is being manipulated outside of CRM so we can go into kind of what to do in a lot more detail but really the high level here is trying to unify the data into one reportable object um so you have yeah a record to show you the journey through the final report as opposed to pulling all of these disperate reports and trying to stitch everything together outside of CRM so we can go into a lot more of the details there but high level that's the some of the issues that have been kind of propagated over the last 10 years and and a solution um to that particular issue yeah I think adding on to the unification it's not just like the data model but also unifying the different signals or like channels that you want to report on so I think historically to date teams have been sold this like kind of serious decisions or you know maretto has on you know a funnel in the stages and kind of show it very linearly and a lot of that starts with you know an mql or a lead um and part of the reason why we tried to stray away from even calling it funnel even though everyone in the market still calls it funnels it's hard to fully stray away from it is the way that we would suggest the reporting is not just you know looking at an mql we actually rerm it and call it sales ready because we want to ensure that you're capturing in your data just all of the points in which demand can or someone can enter your like Pipeline and so um a lot of the times the data will be missing out on outbound and the funnels that could be started from there they'll be missing out on partner so deals being sent from Partnerships or your channel um and potentially um even other sources like maybe they have a whole PG model but all that data kind of lives in a desparate system or they haven't figured out a way to blend that into their architecture and so um only seeing things also started from mql you're missing out on a huge part of your business that you're not actually able to then report on all the way through to revenue and we see that a lot uh where marketers are just looking it through that lens um and as we know people can enter the funnel even just on opportunity but we still want that included in the reporting and we can dive into some of how we do that yeah just to sort of recap some of the the challenges or what people try to do today number one is cross object reporting so you take a campaign member report and then try to match it with opportunity data and you're looking at you know five different objects trying to stitch it all together that's one issue um another issue is that people try to just basically try to copy all the data through so they take a lead object and then they'll copy the data onto the contact object when it converts and they'll copy it onto the opportunity date object when it converts and that has its own challenges and then lastly and I want to talk through this in more detail because I actually see a lot of mature companies fall into this trap which is effectively trying to use multi-touch attribution as a single tool in order to achieve this outcome um where you don't get velocity conversion or any of that type of data through multi-touch attributions so would love for you to just sort of highlight the key challenges with this method specifically because I'm not exactly sure how we got here but a lot of companies are totally skipping pipeline architecture they just basically have their sales stages and then multi-touch attribution for marketing it causes tons of tons of Downstream issu so we' love to get your perspective there I think the reason why people do that is kind of an a I was going to say a no reason but that might be the wrong word but like they're doing it for the right reason I think what reason why people go a bit off the deep end with multitouch is and and not want to set up just the basic pipeline architecture that's going to help them um is that with pipeline architecture you are when you think of it as purely a attribution model which it is because if you think of attribution it's it's just saying like one thing led to another and we're trying to relate this thing to this cells outcome right um it's it's a it's it it can be slightly multitouch but it is more on the single touch um side of thing so when you think of like the way that we think about it is we're tracking the signal that leads to what we call the Tipping Point for sales to reach out so like could be like demo request you know paid out like a handraiser or an event could or partner or product like a product mql orct pql and that leads to sales be sales having to follow up and then if you're then using your pipeline architecture only to then say okay this is what I want to invest in there is going to be bias in that because it's going to say like well these are the signals this the one signal that led to the sales outcome and often you know there's certain signals that could be more correlated with that stage of the buyer's Journey for someone to reach out um so that so that is like one downside in it is it is it is a simplification of the buyer Journey kind of like anything is but the thing is then they kind of throw the baby out with the bath water and go well the buyer journey is so complicated having this more single Touch model is useless but I don't agree with that I think you have to try and simplify particularly when it comes to a data model it's like the the George box quote all models are wrong but some are useful it's like yeah you're just trying to create a representation of reality to help you make decisions so you're saying yes this one touch point or this one signal it and its relationship to the cell cycle um but then when they go to the multi touch side so they go okay I don't want that I want to go multi touch you're then going you're giving a you're saying every signal potentially in the buyer's Journey has a relationship to that Sal cycle so it goes completely to the other end of the spectrum where now says everything is working so one thing that we always see between the two different types PIP plan architecture and multitouch is PIP architect is quite hard to set up like for some of the complexities that we talked about but it does give you a more simple data model to help you analyze because you know you're looking at one signal you're looking at the sales process you're looking at conversion rat through the sales process which is another part of it but even really mentioned where it really helps you just optimize the the the the sales process and any bottlenecks within that sales process regardless of what that signal is right if you're seeing a low conversion rate between meeting to pipeline or pipeline to close one that might not even be related to your marketing activities that might be related to sales training issues sales enablement issues process in your sales process so that pipeline architecture gives you all that data to help optimize that um but then the multitouch side it's going to show you all of the touch points across the buyer's Journey basically depending on the model you use kind of tell you everything's working and doesn't give you just like one core data set to help you optimize the signal that you really sent to sales because that's the stuff that's either wasting sales time or not and all of that sales process side so you end up with you know in decent information to help you to see relationship between different touch points and revenue but it's not showing you the relationship between those touch points and the actual sales cycle which I think is the core piece that you need first before you start playing around with multitouch attribution yeah I think the uh I think the key takeaway here is this is not a binary decision and it's not either or which many people make it that way it's having different things set up for different purposes and being able to use them in specific ways pipeline architecture to be able to measure from signal all the way through the sales process and optimize each stage of the process and optimize the marketing activities and the marketing budgets that you use to create signals which by the way is most of the marketing budget and then using multi-touch attribution self-reported attribution and other forms of customer research to look at all the things that happened before the signal and try and look at that data to say what are the things that are influencing our buyers to move in market and treating them as two independent processes rather than trying to blend them together which almost every company does right now um and so with that I think it's a good transition point to start looking at the new model and how companies could how companies could look at that and then after that we'll get into some tactical tips and implementation and I want to make sure and just be conscious because I see questions coming through in the chat that we leave at least 15 minutes a time for questions so let's move into sort of like what your your view of the future and the current new best practices are related to this uh this topic and when it comes to B2B go to market measurement and marketing measurement so I can probably start and um I think our the approach that we're talking about today I think we talked about a unified approach approach our unified uh go to market approach and I I think the to get tactically the what we build and suggest for clients is we're using within CRM uh for most of our clients thoughts uh Salesforce you can probably emulate that in different Crums but using a custom object to be able to track a journey or buyer Journey um starting from when their sales ready all the way through to revenue I think I saw some questions kind of still kind of like is this multi-touch attribution is it not and so I think first we're going to talk about kind of our core place where we suggest to First measure because a lot of marketing teams are like where do I start do I start with multi-touch attribution do I start with um pipeline architecture or you know historically that's called you know funnel metrics it's basically like TR tracking people um through the funnel but the way that we approach it is just a little bit different so it's more unified compared to what has been done historically um so we would start that like what Charlie talked about with looking at tracking and starting the funnel when someone becomes sales ready which could be a signal or a source that then is when someone should get followed up with by sales or starts to get followed up with by sales so that could be marketing uh has you know demo requests that come through they want they say that those are now sales sales ready someone should follow up with them that can be the signal a very simple signal and basic and something that you all are probably sending over to sales and then being able to track that on the custom object we can see how people are flowing from stage to Stage so that can be from sales ready to um working we try and keep things very basic too in terms of our stages so that the whole Revenue team understands like how people flow through your P pipeline architecture so working all the way to that meeting booked to a pipeline opportunity and then close one revenue and then we'll also be able to take that Source data from where that tipping pointer signal was like the demo request which also could be from a certain Channel like you know paid search um and being able to track that on the custom object record and the reason why it's beneficial for a custom object is we don't have to you know Stitch the leading contact together we also have that history someone can have multiple Journeys that they've taken and so you're not overriding his iCal data and all of that lives um in your CRM so you can report back even you know two or three years ago if you have this running long enough um and then another source that maybe don't get you know included are say like outbounds so sales actually decides oh I saw that in the news this company had new funding I'm going to find a contact and go reach out to them with a custom message our you know infrastructure that we' set up once that person gets moved to a working stage that would also then be included in your reporting and you'll be able to track that Journey all the way through to revenue same thing with a partner deal if an opportunity gets created and there's a contact Associated we'll you know track that through the funnel um and so because of this you'll have this one data you know structure or um architecture that the whole team can get insights into from channel to the outbound you know what you're doing from outbound to inbound marketing events so forth um but from what's what's started and what sales is following up on so the difference between multi-touch like Charlie talked about and this is it's more of a getting a sense of what your sales is working or what you're sending over to sales and how that's flowing over you know through to revenue multi-touch is just an understanding of also additional touch points or even pipeline acceleration but funnel metrics are key because not only do they give you insights into that you can see bottlenecks for the business you can see what's not converting you know from sales ready from marketing to you know a meeting booked like is there a stall between meeting booked opportunity are the meetings you're generating just poor so not only does it get you those insights that marketers want to know of like how are things that they're producing getting turned into Revenue it also can give the whole Revenue team insight into their whole sales process which is and you're creating sales process for the team while while you're doing this so that's why we think it's great for marketing teams to start with this model first and then maybe Venture into multi-touch attribution yeah the thing I want to make really clear here is like the the differentiator here is that the old way is track all this data on like the standard objects in Salesforce I'm going to use Salesforce kind of the core example here what we're saying here is you need to abstract the pipeline data so the the signal and pipeline data into a different object so a different data layer to be able to unify that data into in one place so you don't have to run the lead report the campaign report the account report all of those reports and then do excel Olympics unify that data in CRM in a custom object your team still uses the typical objects your sales team is still working leads contacts accounts and opportunities but you're now reporting on a different object which unifies the data and then it really allows you to have this this IAL buyer Journey working within that data model because when you're only looking at opportunities contacts and accounts you can only really report on like lead Source or like the first journey through the funnel or the last journey through all of these stages but as everyone knows right like a lot of times you might send over someone to sales sales might just work them they they kick them back to marketing and there's going to be constant you might have to send someone to sales multiple times before it actually gets to closed one and if you if you're reporting and all of your data architecture is on the standard objects you're just going to be overwriting all of that data and you're just going to be losing a lot of the data I mean so many of our clients when they have it they might have like a hundred you know a 100 meetings in in January and then over time that number actually in the bar chart goes down because someone's come through the cycle and had multiple meetings and they've been reporting on it using their contact data so abstract that into a different data layer as a in a custom object and then you can have a on to many relationship between the person journey through all of your sales stages and the actual person themselves so when sales recy recycles them or kicks them back to marketing and then they become sales ready again you don't overwrite any data just create another record in that data table in the custom object data table so now you can retain both Journeys so it's really it's a really important kind of different way of thinking about how you capturing the buyer Journey particularly using you know Salesforce CRM I've definitely had that happen to me four where like in January report we had 100 demo requests in January but then April rolls around and all of a sudden I'm looking back at our January data and now we only have 90 demo requests and then halfway through the year now it's down to 80 because what's happening is that the people that had a demo request did something else the data got overwritten so it starts taking the historicals back and it puts all of your historical data out of whack it's like the probably in my opinion the number one drawback of using this method if anyone's ever felt that it's real I want want to highlight two other key points for for marketers and demand gen people when we have this data available it allows us to level up from being a marketer to being a business person by being able to look at the entire sales funnel and say hey the conversion from working to meeting booked used to be 6% but now it's 3% if we don't fix this then our Pipeline and revenue is going to go down by 50% if we don't have any more volume through it and being able to diagnose issues across the entire go to market not just looking at our specific marketing campaign or channel that we own I think there's a big opportunity to level up as marketers and become real goto Market operators and go to market professionals and then lastly I want to highlight this point of the unified model that today that sure we have a lot of first-party things that are typically viewed as marketing like form fills and event data um and pql data and event data and things like that but also what's happening in go to market and the majority of the time where sales is reaching out sales now is using thirdparty data they might be pulling data out of Zoom info they might be getting data from trust radius they might just be looking at an S1 report or some financial data and reaching out to their Enterprise accounts they might just have a Target account list of 50 accounts and they're just going through and recycling those accounts no matter what the signal is and we need to be able to have insights around all those reasons that sales is reaching out not just the things that we got sent from marketing um and so with all that I actually think the we could go into more topics but I actually think the most effective and the most valuable for people would would be to transition to questions at this point so I'd say let's transition to questions let's get tactical hopefully we can have some back and forth and help people if you're trying to implement this right now if you tried it and haven't been able to get it to work or if you're facing a specific challenge or just want some clarifications everything is open we'd love to help you as much as we can thanks all for being here all right we're going to start by bringing Tatiana on hi um thanks for having me on I'm in a public place which is why I don't have my camera on and I apologize if the audio drops um so my question is um about Dynamics 365 which is which must be used by Microsoft Partners um because Microsoft tracks their Partners performance remotely um one issue that well multiple issues that we've encountered include the fact that it's not a particularly sophisticated CRM um and when I wanted to implement tracking such as velocity and so on that was literally just it was just not possible um you know the the only answer that I could get out of um out of my colleagues was you know you're gonna have to do this manually in exhale and nobody's going to do it so you're going to have to um the secondary issue is that because Microsoft gauges the caliber of their partners by um the percentage of sqls from mqls what ended up happening is we wouldn't enter contacts into CRM unless we were confident that they well we wouldn't enter leads I should say unless we were confident that they would close so I'm not chastising my employer for this it's totally understandable what they did was they ran a parallel CRM in HubSpot and we called it a marketing CRM and then we had a sales CRM for Dynamics 365 you can imagine what you know the conflicts and the friction that entailed um so is there an answer to this is my question to the hosts um is does this might be considered a Nish use case um but there are thousands of Microsoft Partners around the world so I'd be interested to know what your angl to this thank you yeah it's not as niche as you think I'll pass it over to Charlie and Chrissy to weigh in but yeah this is not the first time I've heard about this well first off it's great to hear another British accent so thanks for the question um uh honestly first off in full transparency all of our clients you sales for so we're definitely not um Dynamics experts the one thing though I'm curious to get Chrissy's point of view on this though um the it's I don't know if if if your question here is that they don't do it out of the box or it isn't possible to do it at all I mean everything we're talking about here in Salesforce is custom like this is not out of the box Salesforce functionality you have to build a custom object there's a ton in Salesforce the automation uh you either use Apex or flow uh we recommend flow and there's a lot of automation built out to be able to track all of this you know there's a lot of kind of sales process that you have to build sometimes this can be like a three to six month project just to get this this this working so I'm curious um if potentially you know there would be a way to actually configure Microsoft Dynamics to be able to do this or was the feedback that you got like it can't even you build a custom object we can't even build automation to track you know progression through through the funnel um and you know I'm not a Dynamics expert to be able to answer all those questions I wish I could help more but that's one thought I had yeah I can probably add on to that too I think within Dynamics you can create custom objects I I think for so I mean if you're looking internally to kind of build out the similar infrastructure we have like it might be you know it it definitely could be possible you need someone though as a partner to kind of figure out how to build that the right way but essentially what you just do is like once you you know you have the data on you know your lead record um you can then start you know associating a custom object record that you can then tie data to at a single point in time um and create the rules for that separate from that I would say like the um some of the question that you had around or the comment that you had around the expectations or um being gold on kind of the performance from mql to SQL and that being low so you're only entering the the you know the leads when you know it's going to close um I would say like this is a common thing like often time we come into organizations and from sales ready or mql to um to meeting booked or to opportunity pipeline opportunity created is quite low um but actually this is even separate than our you know measurement approach but we like to just go in and kind of identify like your definition for who should be sales ready and look at which signals that you have been historically sending to sale just might not actually be intent signals and so you can wait you know to just keep nurturing those people um educating them but actually waiting for when there's a true buyer intent signal that's been done to send them you know deem them as sales ready and that alone that Improvement which we've done for clients has raised their you know double tripled their conversion rates and they don't actually miss out or have an impact on Revenue I think that's even the thing that happens time and time again companies like kind of pull back they claw back because they're so tied to this concept of volume and they're being gold on volume and that's a big problem too they're being gold on like how many mqls can use and and we have these huge s strr teams that we need to feed and that cycle continues to happen and they're still wondering why they're not meeting their goals but they can say hey I delivered on what the executives like told us to do so I think as go to market operators it's a big thing that you can do is to show Even if you scale back that volume and improve your conversion rate how little of an impact it could have on the revenue and actually you might find improvements because you're focusing sales on the true intent sources you're not wasting their time in places where they shouldn't be um and also from a buyer if you're not ready or you're not really showing like active intent lat intent you don't expect to then have like a demo or go straight to sales you want to probably do some research on your own enter communities chat with people um you know have a really awesome newsletter do events like this where you're sharing expertise there's so many other things you can do to you know convert those into sales ready leads but yeah we're handing over those really early so I think it's a lot of Education there like and also some improvements that you can do upfront so maybe not wait until there's a deal you know that's going to convert but maybe thinking through and looking at okay but what actually is some other intent signals or you know that have converted to date that we could prioritize as well but take the rest out and send them you know once they actually are showing int 10 I'll just add a couple of notes from my perspective one man's opinion Dynamics is definitely an inferior CRM compared to the other available tools especially for mature businesses so it's unfortunate that some companies get forced to use it I'll also say that I I know for sure companies that are deep Microsoft integration partners that still use Salesforce as the core CRM so I'm not sure if they're using Salesforce as the CRM and they just have an integration built purely to push data from Salesforce into Microsoft to meet those requirements but I think depending on you know how much you need this that's a potential a potential opportunity I'd highly recommend if you do that to use Salesforce not HubSpot for a variety of reasons um but that could be a potential workaround as well um I don't know exactly what they're doing but I do know for sure that companies that are deep Microsoft Partners still use Salesforce CRM awesome thanks so much Tatiana we're gonna bring Nancy on next morning this is one of my favorite sessions every week so thank you for for um sharing your advice um just this morning I was approached with an exciting opportunity to build a partnership goto as a go-to market uh channel for a company I very much admire so um obviously the measurement will be the contribution having a dedicated partnership person uh building up a partner ecosystem would contribute to revenue growth so so I was wondering if you can give um some advice how I should go about to make sure that we have the proper infrastructure to track and measure um partner referrals yeah okay yeah so I mean there's so so much from infrastructure from just a partner perspective and maybe we'll focus on like the pipeline architecture side of it where um you're probably you either got a partner portal set up or there's partner referrals and you partners are sending you deals and you're collaborating on those deals so our recommendation is that you don't do what a lot of companies do which is you have some of your pipeline architecture working for like Marketing in a certain way and then you build this whole new tracking model and method for the partner side where maybe you're only looking at opportunities or you're only looking at like you create like a whole new custom object just for partner deals or you've got a partner portal kind of running its own thing over off in a silo this is where the unification comes in so um kind of the nuts and bolts of it would be what we talked about before with the custom object so having a new data layer that we're introducing for our pipeline architecture and utilizing that and our typical buying stages to be able to track partner referrals like you would a marketing mql or like you would a product qualified lead or like you would sales outbound so where Christy mentioned you know when when we think of like the start of a funnel or start of pipeline a lot of companies think it's just mql but we like to remove that that's just one type right so we would call that stage sales ready and you could have a partner referral sales ready at that stage and then where what we were talking about before with the custom object when someone hit the partner refers we would then have automation to then create the record in the custom object and then that life cycle or that you know that actual record related to that partner referral would be tagged as you know a partner referral at sales r as opposed to a marketing mql sales ready from like a demo request and then you would use the normal buying stages for sales unless there are like a lot of like nuances that you might have to consider so then when you look at your reporting you can just pull a reporting for this object and go okay what are my conversion rates for partner referrals versus you know marketing mqls versus sales outbound and all of that is built in that same unified data set so you can compare and contrast and you don't have to maintain a load of infrastructure in another part of your CRM reporting in a different way everyone's singing off the same H sheet and it's utilizing the the infrastructure that you have I'll add on to that where a common problem we see too is that from the partner side um they're not think they're not really thinking they're thinking about sometimes as an company based like oh hey there's this company that's showing interest and that could be really hard because it's just like oh it's just an account like how are we blending this into our data so I think the more you can work on kind of facilitating the actual person tied to that company that could be that point of contact the better we have a client where though where sometimes they don't know yet like there's a period of time where they know that there's a company that is interested in their product but they haven't nailed down the buyer I think it sounds like Tatiana has this problem too and what we'll do is that we'll wait until the contact role is then added to that opportunity and we'll still then include that in the custom object reporting and so and for everyone if someone Skips a stage I think that hasn't been clear we'll you know we'll back dat that um that data which sometimes can show some you know velocity kind of issues but really if you're send an opportunity There Was You Know zero velocity between the other stages but that also helps without having lumpy data that's a big also difference that some people have where they're like oh I'm tracking an mql and then to sqls and like why is my meeting and sql's number bigger than our mql number like it should how can I do a conversion rate off of that well it's likely they're not kind of backdating that data so that's the whole thing like someone can join in at a certain stage but we're still then back filling the rest of the data um and that signal that started that would still get the credit so I think the more you can tie these partner referrals back to a person and get that captured up front you know we're partner for tech companies we send over deals it's way better when we can send them the right person to follow up with and there's likely is a person there but if there's not then if once you add the contact later our method that we do would still be able to capture that once the contact rule is associated so I think that should be another one of your requirements if you need that level of sophistication um to account for that uh I'd like to follow up with you on this topic a little bit after the webinar today if that's okay of course yeah it's definitely something that needs a lot more than like a five minute conversation all this stuff there's a lot to unpack sure thank you thanks Nancy all right uh up next we've got a couple clarifications from the earlier topics so I'm going to bring Tony on for those hello team appreciate the conversation uh just a just a quick question going back to one of the uh early comments Charlie made so it it sounds a lot like what you guys are advocating for in terms of collecting touch points right and using that to surface maybe sales and revenue opportunities it sounds like you're advocating for building an infrastructure that collects all these touch points similar to multi-touch attribution but then instead of just sitting in a box and assigning random weight and significant against to these touch points using some sort of machine learning model to do that process better am I hear am I hearing that correctly or am I missing pieces um I think there's a little bit of of nuance there so I still think what you're saying there is a bit of a kind of a blending of the multi-touch and and funnel metrics so so yes we want to capture all of the touch points yeah that's true um when we're trying to figure out what is the touch point the relating to this custom object to be able to track the touch the signal that led to the sales conversation we're not using machine learning for that it's just literally like okay demo request comes in we have rules to say okay when when a demo request comes in we send it to sales or partner referral comes in we send it to sales or right if you might have lead scoring when they hit the thir threshold then we send it Sal and then we're capturing that signal at that that Tipping Point there's no machine learning having to do that but the multi-touch attribution side you can use machine learning to try and understand which of these touch points have had the most influence on the purchasing decision there are tools out there that will try and do that because like as we all know there could be like a 100 touch points before an opportunity is closed how do we know like what actually influenced the purchasing decision so then there's different models like the linear model where you would split the opportunity value by all of the touch points equally there's what I call Lumpy models where you like you know at wshap models u-shaped model models or whatever where you're splitting the touch points by certain stages in the buyas journey I don't particularly like those because I feel like if those touch points are just like random points in time like that are they really the touch points that influence the buying decision or like you said yeah I mean they there can be machine learning models added onto this to try and understand that but there's always going to be kind of volume bias and other bias in that mul contribution data when you're including all of the touch points right so so okay I appreciate that so I guess I guess my question would be then when you're when you're creating these rules for with something get hit on an object and then the sort of if this then that methodology H how are you determining what those rules are I guess one of the biggest issues that I see managing B2B clients is they go through this process of collecting really really robust howy how how did you hear about us uh the different touch points all the way through right and then they sort of make these arbitrary decisions about what these things mean and what lead scoring should and what thresholds I mean it's it's probably one of the biggest things I have to unravel every time with my clients is how did we come to the conclusion about what these things mean so I'm wondering and Chris maybe this is something that you're doing I'm looking at pto's website and and it might be something that is is part of this but how what is the functional process of setting these standards for if this then that throughout the system right because at most of the time my experience and Chris you touched on this a lot it's just sort of arbitrary we're like well they visited the pricing page twice therefore they're qualified that's an extreme example right but how do we go about setting these how do we begin determining the weights and significance of touch points to make these rules that that you're suggesting you build into to your process yeah if you don't mind I'll take a swing at this and then you can can level on because this is exactly what we're working on um so the first thing is distinguishing a touch point from a signal so a touch point is any digital trackable event and there's going to be lots of them a signal is we're investing sales resources in s human capital to be able to follow up on this specific touch point so that's the distinction a signal has a much different cost basis than just tracking a touch Point um from there you can then go and use historical data and look back and you're not going to be perfect most companies have 20 30% signal coverage if they have good data but you can look back historically and connect these signals with these sales outcomes and you can use historical data to say these signals are not productive we're going to stop sending them to sales these signals are productive we're going to continue to use them from there then you have to make arbitrary decisions around these are the things that we're going to send to sales and these things aren't then you're able to track that data over a period of time 30 60 90 or more you track that over a period of time then you have the full data set you can look at these are the low performing signals these are the high performance signals okay now these are the things that we're going to send to sales and then as you introduce a new signal you go through the same process signal and then track it over a period of time look at the outcomes then make a decision whether it's happening and then you can just consistently like I I think over time this will be basically a machine that's consistently looking at performance data and making determinations around what signals should actually go to sales based on the outcomes that are being tracked the problem with today is that companies do not track the data they don't not track the data holistically so it becomes impossible to make the decisions purely Based on data which is why you reference it being more arbitrary Goa qu question follow up on that um because that's that's a good point what's an example of a signal that is not a touch point or a high intent expression of Interest every signal is technically a touch point Thank you just multiple so again so is a signal now multiple touch points or is a signal signals one one signal okay so what's an example of a tou so give me an example of a signal that is a touch of a touch point that is a signal and a touchpoint that is not a signal uh you might decide that an ebook download is a touch Point that's not a signal or an email open is a touch point that is not a signal or somebody registered for your event is a touch point but not a signal so how do we determine those for my my client's asking me to make recommendations for lead scoring weights and what is a buying intent signal and what is not a buying inex signal how do I look at what's currently happening and say we should look at ebook downloads as a signal but we should not look at two or more pricing PID visits as a signal what how do we get to that conclusion one place to start is are they asking to speech sales right is it a demo request is it contact T is it a handraiser like usually with our clients it's like if you want to start somewhere just people ask to spe sales send those to sales because they're good signals right then you open up this whole big can of worms which is like well all of these other touch points are they signals are they not right depending where you are in the maturity of your company or the company that you're working with you do have to kind of draw a line in the sand use a bit of Common Sense and go if I was the person behind this behind the computer on the other side doing this touch point would I want to be followed up with sales and then like Chris said you you create the starting point it is an evolving thing you then you have the architecture to get the data and then you keep on improving it what you start with and what you end up with a year later could be dramatically different if you have the right data to improve it okay okay so Chris don't mean to put you on the spot here a great discussion I genuinely want to ask so a couple years ago your what I remember of your philosophy was that the only uh signal sales signal is somebody asking to talk to a sales team at least for complex B2B SAS how has that philosophy changed now that you and and the community have sort of gotten more and more into this signal based selling because again for me as somebody who has to functionally work with clients it sounds like what we're saying is that there are things a user can do there's web pages they can visit essentially and things they can say in slack maybe with keywords that we can use to surface Revenue opportunities for our clients but we also say that as sales Cycles grow longer and more complex the subjective interpretation of funnel analysis insights leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of what compels a purchase decision so how do those two things how do those two things exist and what's functionally Happening Here Beyond Revenue attribution getting added to like a high intent expression of interest to create lead scoring so first thing is that to recognize that it's a spectrum of performance that a handraiser is probably going to be very high in the Spectrum and then other things will go down and when you think about performance that could be con conversion sales productivity velocity overall Roi customer acquisition cost you have this spectrum of performance where hand raisers become the highest productivity typically um but if you look in historical data many companies the people that attend webinars maybe they don't win at 5% like a demo request from signal to win but you'll win them at 1% which is a lot better than an ebook download that you win from Performance Marketing at 0 1% or one in 10,000 and so then you have to make a binary decision based on data to say at what point at what percentage of signal to win does it make sense for our sales team to reach out is it 8% is it 2.2% and you can do that based on your deal size your sales velocity your allowable customer acquisition cost and other data like that and just to recognize that there's a total spectrum and some companies that are saying hey we can we can spend 36 months to acquire a customer to get to pay back the cost of acquiring a customer might go down to the level where their sales team has to try a thousand times to win one one deal but at other companies they might say we need to pay back the cost of acquiring a customer in two months maybe because they have lower gross margins or for other different business Dynamics and that would most likely force them to only focus on hand raisers and just to clarify my original perspective I just think that from a marketing perspective that it completely changes your mindset when you are focused on getting someone to raise their hand for sales about how you actually execute marketing um and not looking for an intermediate point to say my goal is to get someone to sign up for our webinar my goal is to get someone to download an ebook when you say my goal is to get someone to want to buy to a level that they raise their hand it just changes the way that you think about and how you execute marketing broadly which was my original point a couple of years back completely agree this is all just marketing too like yeah this is are go to market initiatives like outbound there's you want to be a to track in the same Daya model outbound and figure out okay who who should sells be going outbound and what sequences Etc you might have a proded growth strategy so what signals do we have in the product partner we've talked about partner as well those are all signals as well and a lot of those have the same Dynamic where there's like the handraiser type signal where there's like a true partner referral because their partner has actually found someone that wants to buy or the partner's found someone who they think that wants to buy and it's kind of a low intent partner referral that you might want to hand off to SDR versus AE or have these different business rules behind them so I think also just one final thing to add to Tony for you to think about also um to think about fit and that's where we is a is a portion too if marketing is trying to Bubble Up people who are showing signals I think you need to think also about fit because a lot of the time if you have a huge amount of people that are showing these signals even raising their hand to talk to sales there's a potentially a good portion of those that might not be a good fit for the company or they don't mat to a Target account or whatnot so you're probably already doing that but it's like a blend of that too and that's where you can kind of go down those like maybe other signals where if you have a strong element of fit then that could still be a good time to reach out and get in touch with sales just because they're just like perfect you know Market fit you can have a great ABM play across the team to go into that account so that can be when it's worth it and we'll see better conversion totally totally totally I on this I would love for you guys to I would love for you guys to maybe put together one of these presentations where you walk us through at least a slide by slide of how to build that model from somebody who doesn't have it because again for me it sounds like out of all of this it's still we have these various touch points that we assign to account and we need to do some sort of process to determine which are important and which are not and it doesn't involve machine learning so therefore it probably involves decision- making by committee which is not good so there there's still a gap in the decision- making process here of this of this philosophy of this approach to measurement like in terms of how to bridge the gap from the philosophy to the functional execution of it it that that I don't understand and some of my clients don't understand so I'll tell you what I'll attend an event where you guys can do like here's an example and here's point a and here's point B and here's how we got him there that would be super helpful and something that no one else has taken the time to put together in this space yet I think we walked in maybe we didn't but I think we should walk in a date to do that sometime in May because we were hoping to do a joint a monthly joint event with CS2 particular around this topic so stay tuned Tony appreciate you being here hope you're doing well man great discussion also we're like a couple minutes over so Charlie Chrissy thanks for being here thank you for sharing your expertise thanks for the people that stayed on a couple minutes over hope it was valuable to you this will get published on the podcast in the coming week or two it'll also get published on YouTube if you want to relisten so feel free to reference that if there's a certain point you want to go back and learn um so appreciate you all being here and uh we'll see you again for the next event thank you everyone [Music]