The Future of Pipeline Generation
Sarah McConnell, VP of Demand Generation at Qualified, believes everything you do as a marketer should be about pipeline.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries Live from Dreamforce
at the Pipeline Summit.
Woo!
And I'm joined by our amazing guest,
Hera, how are you?
- I'm doing good.
Thank you, Ian.
How are you doing?
- You know, it's great.
And I'm so excited to chat with you
'cause you are truly the pipeline visionary of all.
We're running Pipeline here at Qualified
and we're talking the future of Pipeline Generation.
So gosh, what a better person to have than you, huh?
- Also, so pleased to be here
because I've been listening to this show
since I joined the company.
I joined like three and a half years ago
right when what was previously demand-gen visionaries
and now it's been rebranded as Pipeline Visionaries,
was coming to fruition.
You had like four episodes
and I listened religiously for every season
and I remember going into my interview
and I had those first three episodes just memorized.
- So it's like a full circle moment
three years later to be here and being interviewed.
- Indeed and it's always fun talking a little meta
about Pipeline at Qualified
because, and I've said this before,
that I really just think that the Qualified Marketing Team
is the best in the biz
and so it's always just so fun talking shop
'cause I learned so much
and we have bounce ideas off
and obviously like our two teams work with each other
every single week. - Yeah, absolutely.
- And so it's fun, you know, blending this content
and Pipeline and where do they fit
and how do they fit together every day, every week
and so, you know, again,
who better chat with than you.
So, Zoom and how, how did you get started in marketing?
- Got started in marketing right out of college.
My now husband and I moved to Tucson, Arizona,
had no idea what I was gonna do for a job,
got into PR and quickly realized this is not for me.
So dabbled in PR for about eight months
and then went into digital marketing
and then it kind of stuck around in like digital
and then that evolved into demand gen ever since.
I've been in SAS for six years now.
Prior to that, it was kind of B2C
which has been really fun to transition into B2B.
Although I realized it's all the same.
Everyone's looking to do the same thing
which is drive new business and drive pipeline
whether it's B2C or B2B.
- And what's your pipeline generation strategy?
How do you think about pipeline and Qualified?
- Such a good question.
The way that we are defining pipeline of the company
and our Craig, our CEO, he defines it this way.
He says, do we have an app bat?
Like a real app bat with this company
to have a chance at winning their business
and that's how we're defining pipeline.
But from a strategic standpoint,
it's interesting I mentioned my backgrounds
in digital marketing.
So that's kind of where I started when I was here three years ago
was like, let's just take tiny amounts of budget
and see where we can start to drive
a little bit more high intent.
Can we capture those high intent leads, bring them in?
But now as we've grown, we're doing things
like this pipeline Summit Live
and pipeline Summit at Dreamforce.
And there's so many pieces that are going
into the demand-gen strategy
that span beyond what I would have normally considered.
Demand-gen, which is events and content.
And even our product marketing every time we do launches,
we put our stuff out on social media
that all is coming together like holistically
as part of a larger demand-gen strategy.
- Yeah, I mean, it feels like when we launched the show
originally that one of our thesis was
that the people who are heads of demand-gen
are the best suited to be CMOs
because the importance of pipeline versus some of the other
like vanity-type metrics that some companies were looking at
essentially makes a better marketer.
It makes a more sales-driven marketer,
which is what we're trying to do here.
And so, flash forward to now,
and it feels like that hypothesis I think is pretty true.
And then now, especially in the current
like kind of like microclimate in tech
where everyone is trying to do more with less,
everyone is trying to figure out how pipeline
is affected by different things.
What can you cut?
What can you not cut?
Uncuttable budget items, timely.
And so, what do those changes look like for you?
What are you seeing?
- Yeah, so I think the biggest changes in,
I kind of mentioned when I first joined
very, very little budget.
As a startup, I was the second marketer.
It was very, very small amounts of money
and we're just doing small tests
and like digital and events.
And I think our first time we spent any money on event,
we spent like $10,000 at Dreamforce to sponsor a party.
And that was like the first time we'd written a check
for marketing and we were all so nervous.
And then, I think there was a time about a year ago
where it was kind of that growth at all cost mindset
that everyone was like living the dream,
where it was easier to spend money,
there was easier to bring in business
where we started to really expand, spend in all areas.
We were all of our content production,
the events that we were sponsoring,
that ad spend, the ABM, we were just ramping up,
spend across the board.
And then fast forward to where we're at right now.
And I think we're starting to be a little bit more
diligent in how we're spending that money,
which I think everyone is. - Yeah.
- Everyone's taking a beat and saying,
we're gonna talk about, I know uncutable budget items,
but what is cuttable?
So really looking with hyper focus on
what's benefiting pipeline,
but also at the bottom of the funnel,
like what's capturing that pipeline
and that's a little bit easier to measure
as like source pipeline, but at the top of the funnel,
where can we feel really comfortable
spending money on things that drive brand awareness,
but don't feel too big,
because I just don't feel like we're in a place
in this current day and age to take big bets
on brand awareness, except for things like owned events,
which we'll get into as part of like
our uncuttable budget items.
But I think just being a little bit more diligent
about spend and being really cautious
and always looking at the data
and coming back and saying, is this working?
And never straying too far from that.
You mentioned how product marketing, content marketing,
these things drive pipeline.
They are really part-demand, right?
So how do you think about that within the company?
I mean, clearly you have great relationships
with people like Emma on content marketing side
and you've cultivated like really good relationships
there to like build together,
but not all dimension folks sort of have that opportunity.
Yeah, I'm really lucky that our CMO Mora,
she is very product marketing background and brand
and that was is really her background.
And so when I got hired, that was the sort of issue,
was like, I'm gonna work on product marketing and brand
and then you're gonna focus on demand-gen and pipeline
and then we've sort of built the team from there.
But to your point, when budgets have gotten
a little bit tighter and from a demand-gen standpoint,
I can't spend as much necessarily on brand awareness,
but there's still free brand awareness plays
which is product marketing.
Like we can still do big product launches,
we can still make big splashes without the dollars behind them.
And so I think to your point of cultivating those relationships
with the product marketers, the content marketers,
because we have to rely on things
that are a little bit more free right now.
Things that we can make a splash organically,
we can make big noise out in the market
with product launches, with good content,
with good owned events that maybe don't cost quite as much
as we used to spend money on.
So I think maintaining those relationships
with my product marketing team, the content marketing team,
everyone works so closely together,
it's just imperative to driving any sort of pipeline.
- How do you think about attribution?
- Oh my gosh, such a good question
and I could talk about attribution for the next hour,
but I won't.
We've gone through a lot of evolutions
of how we talk about pipeline.
At the very beginning, it was all source pipeline.
Like that's all we really cared about
is what brought you through the door.
And that's kind of how I think about source
is what was that last action before an opportunity
was opened up because when we were smaller
and we had limited budget, that's all we cared about.
And we were just gonna double down on that thing
that's bringing you through the door.
Then fast forward, okay, we really feel
like we've got that nailed down,
we know it's bringing people in, okay,
well then how are they learning about us
and how long is that journey of when they've learned about us
to when they walk through that front door?
So then we tried to bring in a little bit more
first touch as well.
So we still talk about first touch,
but where that starts to get tricky is first touch
has just gotten so, it's so messy.
Like some of them might hear about us three years ago,
but you can't buy and then all of a sudden here we are
three years later and they're buying,
but they might not remember that moment,
we might be tracking an attribution.
So we still have it in our talk track, we still look at it,
but it's not what we lean on as heavily.
And then we just look at all the touch points in between.
So that influence pipe or how we're influencing,
because there's so many touch points as our team has grown,
as our marketing has grown and our demand agenda has grown,
it all matters.
And I joked on LinkedIn recently,
I'm in mind just because we can measure it,
it doesn't mean we should era.
We have all of that data, which is great.
I know the last touch, I know the first touch,
I know all the touches in between.
Having that readily available to talk to,
if someone asks, if my CEO asks, if my CMO asks,
but really looking at that sourced pipeline
is still where we've spent a lot of our time.
And I still think that's like our most telling of,
at the end of the day, we still need to bring business in,
and that's our most important thing
that we want to double down on.
So the data's all there, we can talk about it at any point,
doesn't mean we spend a ton of time on it every single day.
- Yeah, and I think that what we're learning
in the current sort of like microclimate is that
the action of the person like raising their hand
and saying I want a demo might be more situationally
or it might be driven by the source reason, right?
It's like, was it that webinar that got them over the hump
or was it the fact that it's budget season
at the end of Q3 right now?
And that they're finally ready to say like,
"Hey, I want to talk to a salesperson,"
whereas like for the last four months,
I just needed to do my job.
- Totally.
- And so those sort of things I think are
like endlessly fascinating to me obviously.
And how we're trying to say like,
what was the actual reason?
Like is there something about that webinar
that like got someone, some light went off in their mind
that that was the thing that they needed
the final piece of information that they needed to know
to reach out to sales, or was it a timing thing
or was it, you know what I, you know, interesting story.
So we had someone who listens to the podcast,
I won't say her name, but shout out for listening.
That reached out and was like,
"Hey, I just moved companies and I've been a fan
"of Qualified for a long time 'cause I was listening
"to the podcast I didn't know who they were.
"And now that I'm at my new company,
"I can finally like try 'em 'cause my old company
"didn't use Salesforce."
- Yep.
- And I was like, how many episodes did you listen to?
You're just like, oh listen everyone.
- That's amazing.
- Yeah.
And she's like, I would have loved to have bought Qualified
but I didn't--
- We couldn't.
- Couldn't work in the company.
- And she's been sitting for three years
just thinking about it.
- It's your point of when I think about attribution
and we think about it from a terminology standpoint,
you talk about the first touch, the source,
or the last touch and all the influence,
that's great, it's how we define it as a company,
but as a human being, as a buyer.
I don't know, like when I ask you,
how'd you hear about us?
That could have been their first touch,
it could have been their last, I don't know,
it's just whatever stuck in their brain
as the most impactful thing for them.
So me trying to put into a box was that the first touch,
was it the last touch, was it somewhere in the middle?
It doesn't really matter,
it's just whatever stood out to them.
So I feel like anytime I talk about attribution,
I love it 'cause I'm really data driven
and I live in the data every single day,
but I can also recognize that it's never gonna be perfect.
And I don't think any market is gonna look at you
and say like, I have the perfect attribution strategy
figured out because when you think you do,
something changes and it's just,
it's never gonna be 100%.
So it's just, it's so messy that I'm like,
I just wanna know as much as I can
and then use that to build hypothesis
on where we need to double down
or where we can pull budget back from.
- One of the things that we've seen recently,
'cause we started doing self-reported attribution
and that people get it wrong.
- Oh, totally.
- Which is so fascinating.
So like we've had people that have said
that they found out through like Google ads or an AdWords
and it was actually organic or vice versa.
- 'Cause they don't know.
- Like, well, so they'll say Google, whatever.
And then you go back and you look and you're like,
oh, actually, like you like listened to a podcast a while ago
or whatever it is.
And that stuff to me is so fascinating
then you look at like, oh, actually we're like,
connected on LinkedIn or whatever.
So it's so complex and so multi-factorial at this point
that you just need to surround these people
with as many or with your prospects,
with as many opportunities to get them to raise their hand.
- And I love self-reported attribution
'cause I do think it's interesting
'cause even if it was what sourced them
or the first touch, it's just whatever stuck out to them.
- Yeah, exactly.
- But as someone who I, early days in my career,
I decided to get my sales force,
admit admin, certificate, like whatever training,
because I was like, I'm in here every day,
I wanna know how to use it.
And it's still stuck with me,
and I'm in sales force all the time.
So as someone who's in there all the time,
self-reported attribution just makes me start sweating
because people can't spell, you give them a pick list,
but like they don't use that pick list exactly
so you leave it open field and then they,
and it's such messy data.
And so I always feel so bad for any open field
sourced after you ask people how to hear about us
'cause I'm like, oh gosh, my poor rev-ops or data person
is like, I hate this question so much.
- Yeah, it's true, this is a great point
because it's so valuable to leave it as an open question
'cause they can put a variety of different things,
they can put whatever, and if you, I forget,
it might've been the episode of pipeline visionaries
with closed, but I can't remember,
but they're saying that the data that they saw
was that people most often like clicked option one.
- One, always, yeah, you give them an option
to drop down, they're always gonna pick one.
- Yeah. - 'Cause easy.
- And so you're like, gosh, how messy is that?
- Yeah. - So you're like, well,
which is more or less messy.
And again, it's like, this is, in my opinion,
it's like part of what is so difficult
about being a sales rep is this stuff is really, you know,
confusing and convoluted and all that,
and you don't know who should get, quote-unquote, credit,
but at the end of the day, like,
the business doesn't serve up credit, right?
- It's a matter of business, the pipeline.
That's all we care about.
At the end of the day, everyone needs pipeline
if they need revenue, which is every single company,
so I think you make such a good point of,
I hate to say it, but like, who cares?
It's great to have, it's good to know,
it helps us directionally, but at the end of the day,
we're all working together to drive pipeline,
and that's all that matters.
- Yeah, I think also too that
so many data, or so many marketers have become data-driven,
that it's borderline data-reliant,
but so you still have to have a reason
for doing something, right?
- You still have to have a gut instinct for something.
- Yeah, like, why are we here at the MoMA right now
versus somewhere else that we could have been?
- Totally. - And like, those sort of things,
like, yeah, there is gonna be trailing data
and indicators to that stuff,
but you still have to say, like,
is this something that is worth doing
that our customers or prospects would care about?
- Yeah, for sure.
- Let's get an uncuttable budget, I just--
- Okay, I love this section.
- What are your, it's the best, right?
- It's the best. - It is.
- When we create it, we're like,
we just, everyone wants to know where other people are--
- And it's always different answers,
which is fascinating.
Everyone's got something different.
- I love it when you'll have a guest that says one thing,
and then the next guest will say--
- The next guest will say exactly.
- That's the first thing I'd cut.
- That's the first thing I'd cut.
- Content syndication is like, always,
it's like very, people always say it's very--
- It's a very polarizing topic.
- And then some people are like, yeah, no, it works great.
You're like, ah, it's crazy.
But anyhow, what are your uncuttable budget items?
- So I have a few, I think the first one is owned events,
and I have to say that 'cause we're at Pipeline Summit,
Ed Dreamforce, which is owned events,
but we've been doing owned events in different facets
for a long time, it qualified.
It started when I first joined the company,
we started something called Taste of Qualified,
which it was during COVID, people couldn't get together,
and we're like, we wanna bring together
demand gen folks to share ideas,
'cause we feel very isolated right now,
we're not getting a chance to network,
we don't have a chance to talk to people,
there was really good communities built for CMOs,
but not really for demand gen folks.
And so we were like, how can we bring people together?
And we used this question in Taste of Qualified,
which is uncuttable budget items,
and we said we're gonna bring together demand gen folks,
or people in revenue marketing,
and send you a couple bottles of wine,
we're gonna bring out a wine,
the winemaker from the winery to do some tasting notes,
'cause you can't go to a winery right now,
you can't go to nap other clothes,
you can't go into a winery,
and do a virtual wine tasting,
and then in between tastings have demand gen folks
network with each other, and just share ideas
and ask questions of, hey, is this working for you,
is it not working for you?
Because we made this assumption,
people are really missing that networking,
and that was the start of our own event strategy,
and we still do Taste of Qualified's every single quarter,
they're still super successful, people love them,
they help us progress pipeline and create pipeline,
so we've really doubled down on that,
and then we've grown it, so now we're doing our own
own events, we have our virtual pipeline summits
every quarter, we're dabbling here for the first time
with an in-person pipeline summit,
and I think having our own name, our own brand,
everything is us, we know who's here, is so important,
and we talk about puffing up, it just makes us look bigger,
which is fantastic, so that's really important,
I think that own events is one that we'll just never cut,
let's double down here.
Let's dig in.
So I totally agree, I love the own events,
I get hit up, 'cause I host the show,
and I'm a divisor at Qualified,
so I get hit up by people trying to get on the pipeline summit,
speakers, which, if you're a good speaker, we'll take you.
Not from the people, I'm constantly pushing people in,
I get rejected all the time, no I'm kidding.
But it's really interesting how quickly you built a brand
around pipeline summit,
how well it works in concert with pipeline visionaries,
and that these two plays run simultaneously
and how they feed each other,
guests from pipeline visionaries go on a pipeline summit,
people from pipeline summit come on a pipeline visionaries,
it also feeds into Rise of RevOps, which I also host.
I've done sessions of pipeline summit,
but also a bunch of the content is not me in there,
which is cool, and I think it's really innovative,
and again, building the one giant user conference once a year
is cool, but if you don't have that presence,
the 365 presence.
People are thinking about it.
One of the blessings of working at Qualified is I work for a CEO
who used to be a CMO, so he gets marketing, he knows marketing,
and it's a blessing and a curse sometimes because he pushes us,
because he was a marketer, so he knows this space,
and I remember we started with, obviously,
it was demand-gen visionaries, and then the reason we rebranded
partially to pipeline visionaries is one, pipeline is just so important,
and two, we started to build this larger brand of pipeline summit
visionaries, we have a live demo that we do every month called
pipeline cloud and action, so we're starting to bring this into all of our
different events,
and I remember when we started to formulate pipeline summit,
the first virtual one that we did, and we're trying to figure out what we were
going to do,
and Craig, our CEO kept pushing us, how does this all hang together?
How is everything working together?
At first, I was like, they don't, and then we really just sat down
and started to piece together, okay, to your point,
if we only do pipeline summit in November one time a year,
how many other things are happening before that next November,
that people are going to forget it ever happened,
and it feels like it loses momentum, so if we do them every quarter
and they're sort of like medium-sized,
and then we've got our pipeline visionaries that come out on a weekly cadence,
and then we've got these other smaller webinars or events that happen on
biweekly cadences, and then we've got pipeline summit at Dreamforce,
which is once a year, and it's a little bit bigger,
they all work together, but it took a long time of playing almost like,
like Tetris, of like piecing everything together,
but you're right that it keeps everything top of mind,
and it gives us, as a business, we always have a reason to reach out.
I never don't have a reason to email our database with something that I think
is useful,
I'm not just emailing you just anything,
there's always something to invite you to, something where you're going to come
learn something,
so I think that's why, as part of a larger strategy, these owned events
have just been a huge game changer for us.
Yeah, I would add that it just allows people to opt in in a way that they want
to consume things,
and some people like to say, "Hey, I'm going to block four hours of this day
from 10 o'clock Pacific to two, and I'm going to just go in there,
and I'm going to learn for four hours, and I can binge it,
and I can just go sit in there. It's always on demand, so you can come back at
any point. Yeah, you can come back and like go listen to a session,
I can be in the chat with other people, so I can be live,
and it holds your self accountable.
You know when you have other people with you, that's why webinars are never,
ever, ever going to go away,
because people see Clive interaction, which is great,
and people are up in the chat for Pipeline Summit.
And then another thing too is that the way that you branded it was not the Qual
ified Summit.
It wasn't qualified visionaries, it wasn't qualified summit,
it was all like nested in this broader goal of evangelizing how important
Pipeline is, and the different stakeholders that play into Pipeline,
which is to man-gen as part of it, but it is RevOps, it is sales obviously,
it is like different functions that all play at this,
and so you can have a broader content theme, but it still has a very coherent
brand,
and again when people reach out to me, they're just like,
"Hey, I want to be on Pipeline Summit, or hey, I want my CMO on Pipeline Vision
aries."
It all works really cohesively, and most people, most companies,
you have to back off the ledge, be like, don't name it something silly,
don't name it the name of your company, don't do that sort of, not that that's
wrong, it's not wrong, but the way that you did it I think worked really well.
Totally, and it was definitely intentional when I, again,
my background is in digital marketing, so I do a lot of advertising,
and when we were running ads at Qualified, I'm always trying to look for the
messaging
that's resonating, and it can be hard to test that, but what I've noticed them
atically,
no matter what, is it's Pipeline. If I put an ad in market that says,
"increase your inbound Pipeline," or "never miss your inbound Pipeline" number
again,
anything that says Pipeline, by far and above would always have
a way higher view-through rate, click-through rate, engagement,
like that's what people are interested in because it's the thing that keeps
demand-gen people up at night, it's what keeps rev-ups up at night, it's what
keeps sales up at night,
is, "Do I have enough Pipeline? Am I driving enough Pipeline?"
So we realized when we did the naming of this, your point, it could have been
demand-gen, it could have been Qualified, but Pipeline is
the one word that like threads through all of those departments, and means so
much of them,
and it's so important for their jobs, so.
What words were I'm working?
I think demand-gen does a little bit, but really it was like Pipeline.
And anything Pipeline, that's what works.
That's great.
All right, Second Uncuttable.
I think Second Uncuttable for us is Qualified Studios,
so we do a lot of our content in-house, whatever we're not doing with Caspian,
we do all of our, we look, I mean, if you go to our website and you're looking
at
our homepage, we do all of that in Qualified.
So our Web Dev team is internal, our creative team is all internal,
and whenever I talk to other marketing folks and they ask how our team is
structured, they're always shocked when I tell them how many creative folks we have or how
many Web Dev we have.
But one, we feel like we have such a tight grasp on our brand.
We always know what is out there, what's happening, and I would never cut it
because
I'm in a very unique and fun position where I market to marketers.
Before this, I used to market to security and as much as I loved it.
IT people just don't have the same, it's not as fun as marketing to marketers.
I'll say.
Because we love it.
Because we love it.
Like, look at the ads, we're like, oh, is that good?
So when you market to marketers, they're like looking for good stuff and I know
that I can impress other marketers because we love a shiny object, we love something
cool,
we like to see other brands doing great stuff and we pay attention to it.
So I think for me with Qualified Studios and doing all of that internal, like,
coming back to our homepage, a couple months ago, we said, can we do a demo
video on our
homepage and bed it so it looks seamless when you're scrolling down our page?
Can we do it all in house?
So we filmed all of that in Qualified Studios.
It's me and our CMO up on a green screen with a demo, but we built all of that
in house and the number of people we have that reach out to us and say, your homepage is
amazing.
What agency do you go through and we say, we don't go through one?
So I think for me, being able to create really beautiful and eye-catching
marketing when we
market to marketers just sets us apart.
Because people know our brand, whether they can buy us right now or not, when
you think about like only, what, five or 10% of people are in market to buy and all of
that stuff.
If I can impress that other 90% of people with our marketing, I know when the
time comes
that you can buy, you'll probably think about us because you've come to our
website, you
looked at our marketing, you've looked at our content to learn something, to
see what we're
doing.
So I really want to keep that content engine back Qualified Studios constantly
going and
convincing our executive team that we needed Qualified Studios because it's a
pretty big
investment up front to get like all the camera equipment and the stuff that we
have in our
team.
They were pretty skeptical at first and now we've been able to prove value and
we're
like, look at all the customer stories we've put out, look at all the content
that we've
put out, look at we're doing headshots here at Pipeline Summit at Dreamforce.
Like we can do all of that with our own team and I think the ROI on that is
just invaluable.
I couldn't agree more.
I think you have some of the best designs.
Thank you.
I don't do it.
It's all my creative team.
No, it's incredible.
And the website is made every time I'm like showing off Qualified Plus to
someone and
I'm like, look at how beautiful all this stuff is.
Look at how cool this site is.
Look at all of this.
And like years before a lot of people were doing this, especially at the size
that you
were at, I couldn't agree more and obviously we work every single day with the
Qualified
Studios team.
So I'm biased there for sure.
But it's great.
And like when you're looking for competitive advantages versus your competitive
landscape,
design is one.
Yep.
Quality is one.
Does this company care about this stuff?
Like if you are chopping out blog posts that you pay $10 for with no design, it
looks bad.
It reads bad.
If you're creating really high quality customer videos and obviously all of the
keynotes and
all that stuff they all do is really, really cool and looks awesome.
I heard someone earlier today.
I heard a CEO of a company was like, oh, I watch all your videos, Craig.
They're awesome.
And I think it's a CEO.
The beauty of it is we can be agile too, which I love.
Like we can formulate an idea and say we want to film this and because it's all
in house
and to your point, we're not.
It saves us a lot of back and forth of like proofing and editing because
everyone that
works here knows our brand.
They know our product.
So we can move really quickly when we come with a new idea and so we can beat
people to
market a lot, which is really cool.
We can think of something quick and just turn it out in a way faster time than
if we had
to go back and forth with an agency.
I've worked with great agencies in the past.
I know there's a ton of value to them.
I just think with where we're at as a company with how we're trying to build
our brand,
having it all in house has just been something I've never had the beauty of
having before
and it's been such a blessing.
Like you said, it's a big investment.
Totally.
And you have to know the people and obviously like you have really awesome
leaders that
have spent a lifetime of trying to find the best people in those fields.
They have such a relationship with these people.
So, yeah.
Okay.
Number three.
Okay.
Last one.
Obviously qualified and I can't.
I know I'm biased, but I actually was a customer of qualified first before I
joined.
So, I had this unique experience of using the product and seeing it firsthand
before
I moved over to the company and I joined when we were really small and I always
joke with
people when I was interviewed by Craig and Mora and they're going through the
interview
process and they asked them, I said, "How much pipeline do you have right now?
What's your current pipeline?"
They said, "Zero dollars."
And I was like, "Sign me up."
Like, I guess I'm joining but I still, I'd seen the product.
So, when they told me we have no pipeline, I was still willing to join because
I knew
how impactful it was and I think fast forward three years, the problems are
still the same.
Like, if anything, it's even more impactful in that everything I do, I'm
driving people
to my website.
I want you to come check it out.
I want you to come to our homepage.
I'm driving you through ads, through events, through outbounding.
And there was a point in time where we were like, "Well, forms, forms might be
dead, but
like, forms still exist."
And then what I was like, it's just convert people.
Like, how can we convert you into pipeline?
I don't care.
Every person's journey is different.
You might want to have a live conversation.
You might want to engage with the chatbot.
You might want to fill out a form.
I don't really care as long as I can qualify you and turn you into pipeline.
I'm going to give you as many avenues as possible to convert and for me, that's
what it's
all about is you're coming to the website.
When I make this a personalized journey for you, I've got all this data.
It sits in my CRM, sits in my ABM platform, sits in my marketing automation
platform.
If I can bring that all together and give you as a buyer a personalized journey
and then
give you a multitude of avenues to convert, I don't care how you do it as long
as you turn
into pipeline.
In one of our newer products, we have qualified meetings.
We went back and forth on if we wanted to release and where it's been a big
game changer
for us is you come to the website.
You might fill out a form.
Suddenly you hit submit on that form and I know you're from a target account.
I've been outbiting to you.
I have all of the state at sitting in those systems.
I just want to book you right now.
I'm going to offer a calendar.
I'm going to let you book time with me in this exact moment because I think
more and
more with every passing day or attention spans, just get shorter and shorter.
The second I leave the website, I moved on to something else.
If I sleep for a night, I forget what I was doing the day before.
I want to capture you at any point in any way when you're on the website and
showing
some interest.
I wouldn't have got qualified at my previous companies.
I definitely wouldn't cut it while I'm here, obviously.
Yeah, obviously.
That would be tough.
That would be really tough.
Can you imagine that conversation with Craig?
Yeah, that would be tough.
I think that the same thing when I talked to Craig years ago and he was telling
me about
the company, if the CEO of your biggest prospect walked in the door, what would
you do?
Like roll out the red carpet and offer them a drink and all that.
If that person came to your website, what would you do?
If they're saying, "Hey, I want to buy from you," would you be able to book a
meeting
right now?
Yeah.
It's this logical progression of, "Of course you would want to do that."
It blows my mind how many gates that we want to put up as marketers just to
figure
out if our money is being well spent, right?
Yeah.
That's for me.
It's not for you as a buyer.
It's not at all.
It's the only self-serving for me to get that data.
Yeah.
Then your sales team goes, "Oh, well, that webinar had 160 signups.
That's amazing.
That's awesome."
You're like, "That is awesome.
No doubt."
But we didn't need--
But then what?
Yeah, but we didn't need to gate any of that sort of stuff.
We have offered that same exact content on the website without being ungated in
real
time or whatever.
They watched 16 seconds of the video and go, "You know what?
I'm not going to do this.
I'm just going to book a meeting right now."
That's way better.
I think that there's just an evolution of what marketers should be doing in the
buyer's
journey.
What's so funny about Qualified, for me, is that we know how important it is to
shorten
the buyer's journey.
We know how important time kills all deals.
We know that.
And all of these tools are built to do that.
So it's like any way that I could make someone buy faster or talk to someone
faster or get
their answers questions-- or their questions answered faster, you want to do it
Absolutely.
And I think to the point of being uncuttable, what's been interesting in this
time where
budgets are tighter and spend is getting more highly scrutinized and bringing
on new vendors
is really, really hard.
The thing with Qualified that has been impactful for our businesses, has been
impactful for
our customers' businesses, is-- I hate this saying, but the proof is in the
pudding.
We can actually look at numbers of what we're sourcing from a pipeline
perspective, and that's
why pipeline is so important.
Our product touches so much pipeline and can help you source more pipeline.
And I manage our budget a lot at our company.
I work with our CFO really closely.
And even though budgets are tighter, he'll ask me, "If you bring me a product
right now,
that you can guarantee, well, 3x my pipeline or 4x, I'll give you budget."
You just have to guarantee that you can bring in more than what is costing us.
And that's really hard to find in products sometime.
There's products that help in so many ways in like efficiency and productivity
and those
things, but it's not this like tangible dollar.
And it was really interesting, like, six months ago we're looking at budgets.
And our CFO looks at me and he goes, "What else can you go buy right now that
can guarantee
us 3x to 4x pipeline?"
And I was like, "Nothing."
But if I was somewhere else, I could probably say that about qualified because
it does source
pipeline, because it's on your website, because it's giving people more avenues
to convert.
I had this epiphany where I was like, "I could go, if I was at another company,
I could probably
bring this to a CFO, say this is my forecasted increase in pipeline, and that C
FO would give
me budget, and now I'm looking for other things that can do that for me."
So I was like, "Oh, it is uncuttable because I have so much value that is an
actual dollar
that I can bring to our finance person to prove that it's working."
You know, so funny, we just did an exercise for Caspian about the ROI of video
podcasts.
And what we found out was that, generally speaking, our customers can convert
about 10%
of the guests that come on their podcast.
So you're like, "And so then we started doing sort of like ACV size and all
that sort of
stuff doing the ROI calculation."
And we've never really done that before.
And it has completely changed the way that the deck that goes to the CFO of the
prospect
that they have that conversation, because they don't care about the 20 slides
and all
that other stuff.
They're just like, "Show me there."
"Show me the money."
That's all they care about.
Whereas like every end user, yeah, of course you care about that, but you're
also like a
true believer.
I know that this needs to exist, right?
And how important is it just getting that slide in your deck that goes directly
to the
CFO and says like, "This tool will add X for Y," right?
Oh, there is a time where that's all our sales team asked for.
Was we just need ROI slides.
That's all we needed.
We redid like, when the market started to shift, we did like this full overhaul
We had an ROI calculator.
We redid it.
We revamped it.
We put all this like data behind it because we knew.
If we knew this was going to come up all the time and we wanted to give people
an easy
way, like the slides in the first call pitch deck, you can come to our website,
use our
ROI calculator because we knew this was going to be the question moving forward
And I'm really grateful that the team recognized it early and jumped on
creating the slides,
redoing that calculator because we knew suddenly CFOs were going to be in every
single conversation.
Yeah, that's great.
Most cuttable budget items.
What are the things that maybe you're not going to be investing in?
That's such a, I love this question, content syndication, we've never done.
And I'm just saying it because that's the most loaded one.
But interestingly, when I worked in cybersecurity, it was our most uncuttable
budget items.
So I think it just depends on segment.
Things that we pulled back spend on when we started to look at budget, brand
awareness
ads.
So again, it was a hard pill for me to swallow as a digital marketer.
Google SEM was always an easy one.
We're like, we know this is driving pipeline for us because it's an immediate
action because
they're already at the bottom of the funnel.
They've already searched something.
They're coming to your website and they're ready to buy.
But those things that are at the top of the funnel when they're doing their
initial research,
it's hard to prove value of those.
And if we're going to double down on things like our own content, we're going
to keep
putting things out there organically.
Maybe we don't need so much of that brand awareness ads.
But what's interesting when I say we cut it, I'm also a little biased here.
We pulled back on a bunch of our ad spend specifically around our branded name
and, you
know, brand awareness people searching qualified.
And then we also pulled back a lot on our ABM ads a couple months ago, and it
was about
six months ago, and we pulled back all that spend.
And we're like, we, Craig would ask, can you prove without unreasonable doubt
that this
is good spend?
And we're like, let's test it.
Let's pull this back.
And then what we noticed is we started to see a dip in people searching for
qualified.
So these things like went hand in hand.
So we're like, okay, we can cut these like brand awareness ads, these ABM ads.
But then we noticed on our bidded brand name qualified, that traffic started to
decline.
And it took a couple months of like a lagging indicator for that to decline.
So we've cut that, but now I'm coming back, I'm like, should we bring this back
You know, like it's hard.
It's not a direct correlation, but we think there's causation there.
So that one's sort of with an asterisk on it where we cut it, but I'm wondering
if it's
time to bring that back.
What else would I cut that we haven't already cut?
It's hard because we've cut so many things that we went through and just said
like this
is, I think tech bloat.
We kind of went through a tech stack and we're like, where can we consolidate
things?
And if stuff isn't absolutely necessary, and again, we can't go to the CFO with
that single
slide that said, here's the ROI, it's probably going to get cut.
Yeah.
Any final thoughts on pipeline generation or anything we missed so far?
No, I think from a pipeline generation standpoint, I know everyone listening to
this, it is
always interesting because you get very different answers from different people
If what I'm saying right now of like, this is my most cutable and uncutable,
take it
to the grain of salt, you know your audience better than I do.
And I kind of mentioned like when I used to work in cybersecurity, what an IT
person cared
about and what our demand and strategy was, was vastly different than what I'm
doing right
now when we market to marketers.
So find birds of a feather, find people who are marketing to your same persona,
ask them
questions, find out what they're doing.
But if you're marketing to a totally different persona and you're listening to
my answers
right now and you're like, that's not working for me.
That's okay.
What you're doing might not work for us either.
Or better yet, go back and listen to other episodes of pipeline visionaries.
Yeah, go find another pipeline visionaries one with someone that's in your same
industry.
And that's really smart though.
If you go through all these podcast episodes and you find companies that are
like minded
as you are selling to the same type of people, it makes sense to listen to
those episodes.
Sarah, I love it.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Yeah, absolutely.
Any final thoughts, anything to plug?
Nope.
I think qualified, go check out qualified.com, join our next pipeline summit.
I'm going to make a pre-plug that my content person is glaring before.
In November, we're doing a virtual pipeline summit that's all about AI.
I know the shocker of all shockers, everyone's talking about AI.
If you're interested in coming, we have some really great speakers lined up for
pipeline
summit AI in November.
Come to qualified.com.
We'll be promoting it.
I love it.
Thanks so much.
Thank you, Ian.
Take care. [music]