Andrew Nadeau on this episode
Andrew Nadeau, founder of Alignly, is a Salesforce ISV partner and revenue operations expert with deep experience implementing lead scoring, attribution, and lead-to-account matching solutions at scale. His perspective on the MQL debate carries credibility built on years of hands-on RevOps work and direct implementation experience across numerous B2B SaaS companies.
The core claim: MQLs are not dead, but the way most companies implement them is fundamentally broken. Rather than replacing MQLs entirely, organizations should evolve how they define, measure, and operationalize them by layering in intent signals, account quality, persona fit, and engagement type. The traditional single-score approach that marketers can game by lowering thresholds creates misalignment between teams and erodes trust.
The reframe Andrew and Mallory explore is that the real problem isn't the MQL concept itself, but that companies treat all leads equally and fail to prioritize based on a multi-dimensional matrix of company fit, persona match, and the type of engagement signal. Instead of asking "Is the MQL dead?" the smarter question is: "What leading indicators should marketing optimize for?" By using Salesforce campaigns as the alignment mechanism, implementing lead-to-account matching, and measuring high-intent engagements within known ICP accounts, teams can create transparency around which activities actually influence revenue.
The episode covers the specific mechanics of broken MQL implementation, why lead scoring fails, how to structure lead and contact objects properly, the role of intent signals and Salesforce campaigns in creating alignment, and how AI-assisted workflows might handle mid-intent prospects that don't warrant immediate sales follow-up.
What we cover in this episode
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3:55
Is the MQL Dead? Andrew challenges the narrative that MQLs should be replaced, arguing instead that they are evolving and require better definition and operationalization.
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8:06
Why Traditional Lead Scoring Fails Single lead score models are gameable and ignore critical dimensions like account fit, persona match, and intent signal type, leading teams to distrust MQL handoffs.
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12:02
Multi-Dimensional Scoring Approach Breaking lead scoring into firmographic, persona, and engagement scores creates better signals, but requires careful calibration of which actions signal true buying intent.
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16:12
Lead and Contact Strategy Andrew outlines his playbook for lead-to-account matching: leads start as junk, auto-convert qualified leads to contacts/accounts, keep leads only for non-ICP prospects and spam.
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23:39
Lead-to-Account Matching Mechanics Real-time lead-to-account matching ensures multiple leads from the same company route to the correct account owner, eliminating territorial chaos and duplicate prospecting.
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29:41
Salesforce Campaigns as Alignment Layer Using Salesforce campaigns to track every engagement creates a history bridge across leads and contacts, enables multi-touch attribution, and allows marketing to measure high-intent signals.
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31:35
Measuring Campaign Effectiveness Instead of raw lead counts, measure how many leads auto-converted due to ICP match, why they converted, and tie campaign metrics to sourced opportunities and revenue impact.
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42:00
AI-Assisted Engagement and Nurture Mid-intent prospects that don't warrant immediate sales follow-up can be nurtured via AI-enriched automation tools, creating a tiered workflow from high-intent direct handoff to AI nurture to marketing nurture.
The lines worth sharing
The problem with that is that's more of a lagging indicator. You still need this leading indicator. That's what I want to explore with you.
Andrew Nadeau · 3:55
If I don't know what leads up to that opportunity target, how can I effectively plan and forecast and hit my goal? It's the exact same scenario for a marketer.
Mallory Lee · 8:06
The issue is actually kind of bigger than that. When you start to break down what is people's journeys when they go and implement MQLs, the engagement thing is still potentially broken.
Andrew Nadeau · 12:02
If I'm a marketer who's just incentivized on MQLs, I might ignore the contacts that already exist in the system that I could be marketing to because they're not going to get labeled as an MQL for me to celebrate.
Mallory Lee · 16:12
Common questions from this episode
Are MQLs dead and should we replace them?
No, MQLs serve a purpose as a leading indicator. The problem is implementation: companies game scores, ignore intent signals, and treat all engagement equally. A refined approach using intent-based scoring, Salesforce campaigns, and lead-to-account matching works better than replacement metrics.
How should I set up lead scoring to avoid false positives?
Use multi-dimensional scoring: separate firmographic score (company fit), persona score (right person), and engagement score (signal intent). Calibrate engagement thresholds by testing with sales; pricing page or demo request indicate higher intent than email opens.
Should we use a leads-only or contacts-only Salesforce strategy?
Neither pure approach works best. Start leads as a junk holder; auto-convert qualified leads that match your ICP into accounts and contacts. Keep non-ICP prospects and spam in leads. This keeps your account and contact database clean and ensures proper account ownership.
How does Salesforce campaign tracking improve marketing and sales alignment?
Campaigns span leads and contacts, creating engagement history and enabling marketers to measure high-intent signals without recreating MQL wheels. Sales sees why someone was passed, marketing can build funnels from campaign membership to sourced opportunities to closed revenue.
What should marketing optimize for instead of MQL count?
Optimize for sourced opportunities and sourced pipeline (board-level metric). Internally, optimize for high-intent engagements within known ICP accounts and personas. Tie these leading indicators to closed revenue to validate that marketing efforts drive actual business outcomes.
How can AI help with leads that are not quite sales-ready?
Mid-intent prospects can be handed off to AI-enriched automation tools (like Clay) that perform better than generic marketing nurture but don't waste sales time. This creates a tiered workflow: high-intent to sales, mid-intent to AI, low-intent to marketing nurture.
SEO meta description
Andrew Nadeau on rethinking MQLs: MQLs aren't dead, but traditional scoring is broken. Use intent signals, Salesforce campaigns, and lead-to-account matching instead.
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Read the full transcript · 48 KB · Andrew Nadeau
SPEAKER_00Welcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting.
SPEAKER_01So welcome everybody to RevOps Corner. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Mallory. It's actually the first time that I have hosted our podcast.
MALLORY LEEAnd so as part of the Union Square Consulting team, supporting Eddie today as podcast host, I wanted to welcome Andrew Nadeau. He's going to join us and talk about a variety of things, not the least of which is answering
MALLORY LEEthe question, is the MQL dead? Do MQLs matter at all?
SPEAKER_05Hi, Andrew. Mallory, excited to be your first guest here. So excited to kick things off. This is a big honor.
MALLORYLEEThis is a big honor. I made sure to invite someone that I agree with almost everything they say, because I thought that would be a good way to ease my way in. Awesome.
MALLORY LEEYeah. Well, thank you for taking the time.
MALLORY LEEAndrew is the founder of Alignly and Union Square Consulting is an Alignly partner. We have a lot of customers in common. We've helped all of them with very similar issues, such as lead routing, figuring out how to convert leads to contacts effectively, measuring MQLs, measuring conversions. And so we wanted to talk about that today. What have we learned together by sharing common customers and helping them with their revenue operations strategies and the tech implementations of that?
MALLORY LEEAndrew, do you want to tell us a tiny bit about yourself?
ANDREW NADEAUYeah, that'd be awesome. So hey, everybody, Andrew Nato, as Mallory said, founder of Alignly. So Alignly is a Salesforce ISV partner, and we have three Salesforce applications on the Salesforce AppExchange. As Mallory mentioned, one does lead to account matching, one does attribution, and then one does auto association of contact roles. So if you think about where we sit in the overall ecosystem, our lead to account matching solution will compete with a lean data, if you're familiar with that solution out there. Our attribution solution will compete with a visible, and then no one's really doing what our contact role solution is doing. It's actually free. So if you wanted to go explore that, you can. And really, our philosophy on our products and kind of our go-to-market strategy is to build really simple Salesforce native applications at a price point that's extremely affordable. So if you don't have the budget for like a visible, but you want to do marketing attribution inside of Salesforce, our product alignment attributions are really affordable, easy to implement solution. Same thing with like our lead to account matching solution.
MALLORYLEEThat's awesome. Yeah, I love the simplicity that you guys use in your approach because you pick a problem and you solve it and you don't try to make it solve every single thing under the sun,
MALLORY LEEwhich I think is just so helpful.
ANDREW NADEAUThat's a great point. I mean, part of, so I come from a, you know, RevOps background, you know, did RevOps for six and a half years within a tech B2B tech, soft PC tech company. And before we started Alignly, like a lot of the trends we saw was all the solutions in our tech stack kind of wanted to become the next big platform, right? So all of a sudden people's tech stacks became five, six, seven tools that all were trying to be these platforms. And our approach was, well, no, some of these things should actually just be like point solutions and not try to be this big platform. So again, like trying to make really simple point solutions that just really simply solve
SPEAKER_20a big pain point for people and go to market ops or RevOps.
SPEAKER_25That's fantastic. Well, it gets the job done. That's the part that matters, right? In RevOps, we get shit done.
SPEAKER_27Absolutely.
MALLORY LEECool. So what we're going to talk about today is the concept of an MQL and is the MQL dead? I think a lot of people would like to say that it is. I think you posted about this somewhat recently out there on the interwebs, LinkedIn specifically. You got a lot of opinions, a lot of good engagement. You've worked with countless customers. So help us think through this.
MALLORY LEEIs the MQL dead?
SPEAKER_31Yeah, so loaded topic.
ANDREW NADEAUBut yeah, you hear all the time, is the MQL dead? Should it be replaced with something? So the post you mentioned that I put on LinkedIn, I asked, should there be an alternative to an MQL? Like if MQL isn't working for people, well, what else should be like the leading indicator of is, are your marketing efforts working? It was interesting. The responses I got back, no one really gave a good alternative. It was really around, well, use things like source pipeline. Marketing should be focused on source pipeline or source revenue or number of ops that marketing is sourcing, that type of thing. The problem with that is that's more of a lagging indicator, right? The marketing you did three months ago, six months ago, is going to be the stuff that's actually resulting in pipeline today. So you still need this leading indicator. And Malie, that's what I want to kind of explore with you is like, hey, what should that leading indicator actually be? And how should, you know, ops teams actually operationalize that and think about that? And then secondarily on top of that is things like, how do you route it to the right rep?
ANDREW NADEAUAnd, you know, how do you actually look at attribution around all of that?
SPEAKER_36Yeah, 100%. So I love the way that you formed the question first, which is, okay, well, if the MQL is
MALLORY LEEdead, then what do you want us to look at instead? What should we be thinking about instead? And you have to, in my opinion, you have to take a parallel jump to the sales funnel to get people to understand it. So if you are a sales rep and your main KPI is a closed one deal, do those just show up at your doorstep? No, you have to first have a deal that's in commit. You got to go through all that legal work and heartache and toil to get the deal done. To even get to negotiation, you have to have an awesome proposal and an interested customer, and you have to have pipeline and opportunities. So if we don't know how many opportunities we are putting into our funnel, we have no way of knowing what kind of closed one business we're going to get out on the other end. It's the exact same scenario for a marketer. You can give me an opportunity target, and I can try like hell to hit it. But if I don't know what leads up to that opportunity target, how can I effectively plan and forecast and hit my goal? I think it's very similar. And so I have the same sentiment as you, Andrew, which is you can't just like put the goal on opportunities and expect everything to change. We're still doing the same work today to try to get those opportunities that we've always been doing. And maybe when we say that MQL is dead, we really just mean it shouldn't be the primary thing that marketing is paid on.
MALLORYLEEIs that what you think people might actually be getting at?
ANDREW NADEAUI think that's part of it. I do think that there is a ton of merit to looking at sourced opportunities and sourced pipeline. Like that should actually be what you're looking at. And not even just sourced opportunities, but like qualified opportunities. Yes. But at the same time, marketing, you know, even if this isn't like a board level thing you're looking at, marketing should still be looking at like, hey, are we doing the right activities to eventually get to that eventual goal? And that's what MQLs were kind of like designed to do. But I think the way people use MQLs and have historically used MQLs is kind of broken. And I'd like to get into why maybe it's broken and then potentially talk about like some better ways of doing it, if that sounds good.
SPEAKER_38Yeah. I think that sounds great.
MALLORY LEEWell, let's start with the problem and then we'll solve it. So what do we, what do we think is broken? What stands out to you?
ANDREW NADEAUI think the big first thing why MQLs tend to fail is I think that like they're gameable, right? You've, you've all had the marketing team that stands up and does their readout and they hit their number, exceeded their number. And then sales is, is drastically missing their number. Right. And you're like, well, why is there this thing? Crying in the corner. So, so like, why does that happen? And usually it's because you see marketing is behind their MQL goal. They go out and they do some things like constant indication and they go source some easy, easy leads that are not ready to buy. Right. They're just, they're just names that you're essentially loading into the system. So that's like the biggest kind of like flaw of MQLs and why people tend to say, Hey, this isn't working, we need to scrap it or whatever, but having, having implemented this at a lot of different companies, I think that the issue is actually kind of bigger than that. Like when you start to break down, well, what is people's like journeys when they go and implement MQLs, it kind of looks like, like this and I'll tell, tell a little story. So usually what happens is you say, all right, we need an MQL number and you say, all right, well, let's do lead scoring. And usually companies will come up with like a single lead score and they say, all right, if it hits a hundred, we're going to call it an MQL and pass it over to sales.
SPEAKER_45Yep. Well, so, well, what goes into that lead score, right?
ANDREW NADEAUCompanies will do things like, Hey, if the company is these industries or it's this size, or they have this in their tech stack, or if a person is this type of persona, or they engage with these assets or open these emails or click these emails, right? All those get points and it scores up. So what tends to happen is with a single score, you pass that over to the sales team and the sales team comes back and says, Hey, you just passed me somebody that has 10 in employees. We can't sell to them.
ANDREW NADEAUWhy are you passing this to me? And then marketing looks at it and goes, Oh, they did all this, all this stuff. That's why we pass it over to you. But sales says, no, this is declining this. Or you inevitably pass over like an intern or a student or something like that.
ANDREW NADEAUAnd again, marketing sales is like, why are you passing me this? It's because it's scored up. Right? So what the next evolution is, is teams tend to say, all right, well, we need to break this out into multiple scores, right? We need to have a firmographic score. You know, is this the right company we're selling to? We need to have a persona score. Is this the right person we're selling to? And then like an engagement score. Is this person actually taking the right actions? And that tends to be a lot better, right? Because now you're saying, all right, we're passing the right type of companies or passing the right person. But then the engagement thing is still a little potentially broken. So what happens with the engagement is something like this, you know, sales might say, hey, this person hit the pricing page. It's like a super high intent thing. Why didn't this get passed over to me yet? And it's because your pricing page doesn't bump them up high enough, right? Because they're an intern who's looking at the pricing page.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, right.
ANDREW NADEAUOr, yeah, exactly. Or, or, or the flip side of that is like somebody, somebody requests a demo and you say, all right, well, that's high enough intents. We're always going to pass that to sales. Or somebody submitted a contact us form. Let's always pass that to sales. Or inevitably you have like a webinar and you say, hey, everybody in this webinar that attended should be MQLs. Let's pass all those to sales. So you end up in a model where basically if somebody's doing something that's relatively high intent, you're going to want to pass that to sales, right? And that's the, that's, I think the missing piece is like that, that intent thing. Because where things tend to fail again is like, hey, somebody opened up five emails and clicked three emails and downloaded this thought leadership ebook and you're passing that over,
ANDREW NADEAUbut they're not ready to buy it because they did a bunch of low intent stuff.
ANDREW NADEAUSo getting that, nailing that kind of that intent piece is, is critical there. And I don't know if you've experienced like kind of the same thing with the companies that you guys have worked with, but that's, those are like kind of the core fundamentals of where I see like people's journey and where things tend to break down. But then there's all a whole other slew of like problems I see with, with MQLs, but I want
ANDREW NADEAUto turn it over to you and just get your thoughts if that's, if that resonates.
MALLORY LEEYeah. Yeah. So what I think you're saying is that obviously it has to be the right kind of person at the right kind of company.
MALLORYLEEBut also the types of steps they take, they matter more than just counting them all up evenly. So if I hit a page on the website 25 times, I could be extremely interested or my cat could
MALLORY LEEbe like stepping on my keyboard, right? That's the joke. I like to say it's like the cat went to the website. It wasn't me. It was an accident. And that can look like a lot of engagement, but certain types of engagements have a higher intent than others. And so I, I agree with what you're saying. You really want to balance the quality with the intent. And it's kind of like in my head, it's a matrix and I've, I've created one of these before. Maybe we can like drop it in the show notes or something, but you have across the top, your quality and across maybe the side, your engagement. And so if you have an amazing quality account and they show just the littlest bit of engagement, you're going to care about that because this is an account you've been trying to get into for ages and they finally hit the website and they don't do a lot, but at least they got there. And so you want to find out more and that's going to be an ideal situation where a salesperson wants to know that information. But if it's a really poor fit company, who's been coming to the website constantly, you should be courteous and answer their question and try to help them on their way. But it's not the same level of excitement of like, yes, that they came, they finally want to talk to us. And so you have to have both dimensions and even a third dimension of the type of persona is something that I think is like, that's a layer even beyond to make sure that you're layering in to just have the full picture. But I agree with you. I think in MQL, it's not quick, easy number of points. Another big flaw that I have seen, and I may or may not have been part of this in my past life, but let's say you set that score at 100 and you say, okay, with score of 100 in the past, we've had approximately 10 MQLs. Well, we need 20 MQLs. So let's just take that score and move it down to 80 and then we'll have all the volume that we need and then sales will be happy. And so you start bargaining with yourself about what counts. And like you said, you can gain it. And so I think that's one reason that it can't be the thing that marketers are really compensated on. It needs to just be like a fact of the situation, a leading indicator, like you said, to help you see if you're going to hit that revenue target. And then hopefully a common revenue target is the thing that everybody's working toward that same goal.
ANDREW NADEAUTotally. I think there's all of that, what we just said. And I think there's a lot of other fundamental problems when this is based off experience of how I've seen MQLs implemented. If you're good with that, I just would like to kind of talk through some of these. And you just kind of brought one up of like, okay, let's move the goalposts down and change the definition just on the fly so that either sometimes that has the right intentions or it's like, hey, we want to meet the capacity of the sales team, but just moving the goalposts down doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be sending quality over, right? But yeah, some of the other kind of like flaws I've seen with MQLs, one is that like, if you do have a scoring model, I've seen companies just basically say, hey, this is an MQL and pass it over to sales. But sales looks at it and goes, I have no idea why this is an MQL, right? Like, what did they do? And a lot of times that might live like in your marketing automation tool, but it's not passed over in a easy to digest way into like Salesforce or if you got, you know, that's your tech stack. So that's like one area where like MQLs can kind of break down and then sales stops trusting them because they're like, again, I don't know if sales, if marketing just moved the goalposts on this or if they just clicked a bunch of stuff. I don't know why this is coming to me. Therefore, I don't trust it. Right. So that's one. The other, the other thing with MQLs, I think the big mistake people make is I've seen companies basically set it up so that like a lead or contact in your, you're using Salesforce and your database never be, only ever be an MQL once. So you basically stamp the first time they became an MQL.
SPEAKER_56And what that does is I think it causes marketing to kind of focus on the wrong things.
ANDREW NADEAUSo if they know that, Hey, nurturing my existing MQLs, isn't going to help me reach my goal. They're going to not focus on that. Right. So they're always going to be focused on getting net new people, getting that new people in the database that could eventually become MQLs. So that's one area where I've like seen people run into problems. The other one is, this is a Salesforce centric thing, but in Salesforce only counting like the actual leads as MQLs and not even looking at the context side of the database. Big, big problem there. Just because like, even though context, most in most situations, contacts will be people that you like historically talk to or product close, lost opportunities. Some companies, those are your best. Those are actually your best leads to be nurturing. You know, sales only wins, good sales team wins 20, 25% of their deals, right?
ANDREW NADEAUThat means 75, 80% of your deals went close, lost, but they could always come back. And in most companies they do, right? So if you're not focusing on nurturing those people, you're missing out.
ANDREW NADEAUWhat else are people making mistakes around MQLs? I think this is a classic one. I think going back to like an MQL, only becoming an MQL once and passing it over to sales. One thing around this is like, should they be recycled, right? Like, should you, should somebody become an MQL again, eventually, like eventually if you nurture them and they do something else? My answer to that is like, yes, you need to incentivize your marketing team to actually like nurture the database and have somebody come back and be counted towards their high level metrics. But the other mistake people make around this is like, they pass it over to sales. Sales, you know, we were taught this by like outreach and sales law, drop them into like the 17 touch sequence and then sales, you know, just pounds them. Right.
SPEAKER_57Yeah. And they do one of two things.
ANDREW NADEAUThey either respond and they book a meeting or they probably opt out. Like that's, that tends to be what happens. And then you kind of lose them from a nurturing standpoint.
ANDREW NADEAUI'm curious if I, if, uh, if you've seen any other like pain points around MQLs, you think I might've missed trying to think what else is relevant here?
SPEAKER_59Yeah, I think generally, well, you know, just to kind of like set the record, I think MQLs
MALLORY LEEare necessary. I think if they are used the right way, they're extremely helpful. We're talking about people using them the wrong way. And another wrong way that I have seen is when the MQL is just a true or false. And we're just telling people follow up on all of them immediately, right away. Don't worry about what they did. Just go reach out. There has to be a level of prioritization, which is hopefully derived from like a score or a grade or something so that you can signal to sales. They did a lot of awesome things and they're a really good fit or they fall somewhere else in that matrix and allow the salesperson to use that information to kind of prioritize accordingly. I think when we, as marketers come in and say, I gave you 100 MQLs and you didn't follow up on any of them, like what is happening? And that salesperson is thinking, okay, I've got all these open deals. All of a sudden now I have a hundred people to call. I don't know where to start. I don't have time to call a hundred people in this like one hour. So if I don't have a way to prioritize my time, you know, maybe I freeze up and I do nothing because it's like, I don't even know where these people work, like leads and companies
SPEAKER_63and contacts, like that's a complex process. Right.
MALLORY LEESo I think my goal has always been make it really easy for salespeople to understand what you want them to do. And an MQL is an MQL is an MQL, but people are all different from each other. And so we have to like include that in the way that we ask our teams to go follow up and generate demand and more data, more context, more segmentation, I think is always the way to make that happen.
SPEAKER_63This is making me want to go down the path of like leads versus contacts.
MALLORY LEEAnd you brought up the fact that if I'm a marketer who's just incentivized on MQLs, I might ignore the contacts that already exist in the system that I could be marketing to because they're not going to get labeled as an MQL for me to celebrate. Now, hopefully we've overcome that, right? We're not paying marketers based on just net new volume. We want to take all the leads we have, all the contacts we have. Let's nurture them. Let's re MQL them to get more opportunities. When we do that, we're actually being more efficient because we paid for that lead a long time ago, right? Somebody who like re MQLs or a lost opportunity who comes back again. Hopefully we don't have to pay their acquisition costs twice. So we're getting more efficient if we get demand from that group. But the process of deciding how do I use leads? How do I convert them to contacts? What's the right way to do this? I just think you have such an awesome playbook on how you recommend for people to handle that. And so as an advocate of your playbook, I thought we could talk about that a little. And just kind of get your take on the best possible way to do this.
ANDREW NADEAUYeah. So yeah, we're talking about MQLs, but like leads and contacts and should you go a contacts only strategy? Like that's another whole big can of worms and always a very debated topic. Having thought a lot about this, having a lead to account matching and routing and auto conversion solution in Salesforce, got strong opinions. And as you mentioned, we have a playbook. So if you go to our website, anybody wants to see it.
ANDREW NADEAUIt's on our website. If you go to resources and then playbooks, you should see it right in there.
ANDREW NADEAUBut my thoughts on this have evolved over time. Core idea here is that if you're B2B, which I think probably most of the audience that we're talking to is, is ideally if any lead comes in, that's part of your ideal customer profile, you should auto convert that, create the account. So that way you have the account in your system. You can enrich it with all the things that you're going to care about, right? Like the right industry, the number of employees, their tech stack, right? And this all ties into what we were just talking around with scoring and all of that stuff, right? So that if you can get your accurate data at the account level, well, what that does is now you can also assign who's responsible for that account. So the way I like to set it up is actually have like, what is your selling team on the account? So you might be set up so that you have a BDR, an AE, and then like a customer success manager, right? And the BDR might be responsible for the account until they create an opportunity and hand it off to an AE. Then the AE is responsible for the account until it becomes close to one customer, and then it gets passed to the CSM. Or if the opportunity goes close loss, you might kick it back to your BDR, right? Classic, going back to like MQL issues, classic problem is companies that don't do this and just stick in leads, they might have five leads that come in from the same company and get assigned to five different BDRs or SDRs, right? And they don't even realize it. And they're all prospecting in. So creating that account is kind of the first step. And then being able to actually use a lead to account matching solution to, in the case of like the five leads that are owned by random people, those should all get matched to the existing account and routed to whoever owns that relationship on the account at that point in time, right? So that will be basically if any new people come in, they will always start as a lead, get matched in real time, and then converted in real time if they match existing or right account. I'm not an advocate for what truly contacts only strategy, which is tends to be when people talk about that in different ways. But that tends to be where everything actually starts as a contact and you actually skip the lead altogether. I'm a big advocate of starting things as lead because you're going to get stuff that comes in your database that's just junk, Gmails, spam stuff, what else would come in, stuff that doesn't match an ideal customer profile. Like ideally, you don't want to go create accounts for everything. And then the other thing I've seen people do, which is I think the wrong way to think about too, is create a contact, but not have it be associated to an account. Basically have like an orphan's contact. Yeah. That causes a whole nother, all sorts of issues. That would really keep me up at night. And so I almost see the ideal scenario is like the lead becomes like a dumping ground or a graveyard of kind of your junk. But as soon as you know, you'll be able to enrich it and you know it's a good account.
ANDREW NADEAUYou're either matching existing account or you're creating the account.
SPEAKER_14And then that way your account side of the database is super clean. Your lead side of the database stays kind of junk. Everything is owned by the proper person.
ANDREW NADEAUThe other thing I see all the time is ownership is just a mess across contacts, accounts, leads. And what I mean by that is like most companies, especially in startups, like things are constantly evolving. People are getting promoted. People are leaving the company. People are changing roles. Territories are changing. Right. And it's a lot for ops to kind of like maintain all of that and make sure ownership is consistent across the entire database. So our app helps facilitate that. But the general idea is that everything should be kind of top down and that as long as you have the ownership accurate at the account level, all of your contacts and match leads and net new leads that come in will route and be owned properly.
ANDREW NADEAUThat's actually one of the areas was there's actually a lot of companies have a ton of slippage just because they're not getting the leads to the right people in a timely manner.
SPEAKER_79Yeah, absolutely.
ANDREW NADEAUSo hopefully that is that we hope that kind of covered the basis.
ANDREW NADEAUThere's probably a lot more we can talk about there.
MALLORYLEEYeah. Yeah. I appreciate it.
MALLORY LEEThat was good. It's, you know, there's so much to it. And, you know, MQL stands for marketing qualified lead. Right. And I think people spend a lot of time getting hung up on, well, it's a marketing qualified lead. What if it's a contact leads and contacts aren't the same thing? What do I do? And I've been sort of, you know, quote unquote, teaching this to people for the last 15 years. I remember back in the day at exact target, anytime we had a new hire in marketing, my job was to sit them down and teach them about Salesforce in their first week. And it was part of everybody's onboarding. And there was like, there's one other thing that was revenue related that I talked about. And then one of the big things that we spent time on was lead to contact conversion and how to explain these objects to people. And I've seen a lot of funny jokes about, you know, when God created lead object, he was, you know, messing with people and like all kinds of funny, funny, uh, takes on it. But what I've always said for the last 15 years is that if we care to know more than one person at this company, then it should be an account with contacts. If we do not care to know more than one person, it can stay a lead. That includes if the lead is a Gmail address, if it's Joe's pizza shop and you know, they're not a good fit, leave it as a lead. But as soon as you convert it and you create that parent account object, it's implying that it's more important and you're going to add more people and you need to form a buying committee and they all need to work for the same place, which is your account, which is owned, where your territories are managed.
SPEAKER_19And so for me, the lead is not just a worse version of a contact that you ignore.
MALLORY LEEIt is a less important way to record names. And it has meaning because it's like, these are meant to be not as important. They're not meant to have a company that can be an account. They're meant to be just names.
SPEAKER_19And so what I like about what you're saying is let's leave that as it was intended, which
MALLORY LEEis less important people, but as soon as we can humanly possibly know that it deserves an account, go ahead and do that quickly.
SPEAKER_84Right.
MALLORY LEEAnd then you've got all of your BDRs, SDRs, a working contacts and accounts, and maybe they don't have to have leads flooding their view. And if it's not leads anymore, then let's call it something other than marketing qualified lead. Let's just find a way to talk about who's qualified, right? And some people use qualified accounts. I mean, there's so many different ways that we could go about this, but I think paying attention to what efforts marketing did to help get someone qualified, period, we need to know that. And we need to be able to report on how often that's happening, how efficiently that's happening,
SPEAKER_68and how those leading indicators help get us more pipeline, more revenue.
ANDREW NADEAUExactly. And so I've been a big advocate. So you probably, there's been a lot of talk on like LinkedIn and the DevOps, GoToMarketOffs community around like this idea of like signals. I don't know if you, have you dug into that at all yet?
SPEAKER_86Yeah, a little for sure.
ANDREW NADEAUYeah. So I've always been an advocate of a variation of that, but using, using Salesforce campaigns as the aligning mechanism for marketing and sales. So let me, let me see if I can kind of explain this real quick. The general idea is, and this goes back to like, hey, if you've come up with what your ideal company is that you want to sell to, the firm of graphics, you understand the persona, the ideal persona. Then the idea is that, well, engagement's the final piece. And that if you use Salesforce campaigns that every time somebody engages, you put them into a Salesforce campaign. Well, that can solve a bunch of problems, right? It can solve the history problem. So helping the sales reps be able to see, well, what were all the things that these people did, but it also solves for the problem of like somebody coming back and re-engaging multiple times. And then our product, Align the Attribution, actually ties Salesforce campaigns and campaign member object to opportunities in Salesforce. So that way we can start to tie through and do multi-touch attribution and understand like the full buying journey and how those influenced opportunities. So hopefully you can kind of see where I'm going with this is the general idea. And then the other thing with campaigns, if you're still using leads, is that they span leads and contacts. So if you get the ownership right and you have lead to account matching set up and you push everything into a Salesforce campaign, you can basically create views for your team that, hey, here are all the people that have the right persona that are in the accounts that you care about. And here are all the high intent things that they're doing. And this is kind of what people are calling signals. But the general idea there is that then marketing can just count, hey, how many people over a certain period of time, maybe it's a month or a quarter, however you want to look at your business, but how many people were added into high intent Salesforce campaigns over this period of time? And then what's nice is you can actually build a funnel off of that. So you can say X amount of people are added. That's this many unique leads and contacts that results in this many sourced opportunities. And then eventually once those go through the sales cycle, how much closed one business was that? So this is something I've advocated for a long time. I think just now is starting to gain some traction within like the go-to-market ops and Redbox communities. But it's a much simpler way of kind of looking at things. And I'll pass it back to you. I'd like to maybe dig into this more if you've got questions around what I just said.
SPEAKER_68Yeah, I like what you're saying. I think I understand it. And I want to make sure all the listeners know how to understand it, right?
SPEAKER_88Yeah.
MALLORY LEESo tell me if I've got this right. Let's say I go to an industry event and I spend $20,000 to get a small booth and meet people and rub shoulders with the people that I know are in my ICP. I'm going to have a little iPad there where people can sign up to be in my newsletter. When I get back from the event, I'm going to upload that list. I'm going to put all the people from the event into a campaign. And the ones who sign up for my newsletter, I'm going to have maybe a campaign timestamp that shows that they did that as well. But I think we all know that not every single one of those people is going to be a brand new lead. There can be some that are existing customers. We love meeting our customers at events. We love influencing the customer relationship in person at events, taking them to dinner and such. Some of them are going to be leads that got created a month ago, six months ago. Doesn't matter. They already knew who we were before the event, but we still saw them there and we still engaged them there.
Yep.
MALLORY LEEWe're probably going to have people on our list that are from current open opportunities
MALLORYLEEwhere the salesperson went ahead and found time with them at the event to do selling. I want to know that too. I want to know all the different statuses of the people who were influenced by an event,
MALLORY LEEbut I also want to be able to explain how many of them were brand new. And so by measuring the campaign and the interaction in the campaign, I can start to segment my data that way. I can see how many of those people got left as leads and they weren't high quality and they didn't deserve to be converted. And they were just new leads. But then I can tell the story of all the other people who did get converted to a contact right away or who did match to an existing customer account right away. And I can start to break down that investment and say, okay, for my 20K, I got 100 names that stay leads that I don't care about right now. I got 10 people engaged from the sales cycle. I talked to five customers and one of them has an upsell opportunity worth X number of dollars. And I've got this number of leads that were automatically qualified because they meet the ICP.
SPEAKER_68And now they're in the sales funnel because they're qualified. Those are the stories I want to tell as a marketer.
MALLORY LEEAnd I think people who come forward and they're saying, oh, we went to an event and we got 800 names and it's going to be great.
MALLORYLEEAnd sales is going to call every single one of them. And then everyone in the room is just kind of like, oh my gosh, like, I don't understand. This sounds like a waste of my time. Which team would you rather be on, Andrew? Like, I think what you're describing is the first setup that we just talked about.
SPEAKER_53You just absolutely nailed it. That's so many marketers don't tell that story. They stop that.
ANDREW NADEAUHey, we got 800 leads, right? And they celebrate. I'll tell you another story. So I was working with a company that had 20 SDRs and they did a huge, huge webinar and they had like a thousand people registered for the webinar. So they're high five and hey, we had a thousand people. And then after we did all the posts, you know, syncing, the SDRs were like, hey, I got two leads. And what happened was when you actually broke it down, just as you said, right? Like 200 of them were existing customers, you know, a bunch of them were open pipeline already, a bunch were like partners, a bunch were like independent consultants. A lot of people didn't even match their ICP. So when you actually broke it down, there were like 50 good, like people they could actually sell to. And that's why the SDRs got a few. So when you look at that and you say, all right, well, what's the ROI or what's like our cost per lead of what's good? You know, you, very different story, very different story. And, and, you know, and then the, then the final piece, and as you said, like, well, how do you actually tie the sales follow-up and then eventually that event to revenue? And that's like what our Align the Attribution app will do. But then you'd actually be able to see like, hey, all the 50, if there's only 50, of the 50, we actually followed up with how many of those actually became opportunities. What's the dollar value of those opportunities. And then in our app, we actually break down what we call sourced. So like if the touch point, like in this case, the event happened before the app was created, we can say, all right, that touch point or that event helps source this opportunity. And then we also have accelerated. So to your point, like if you meet with an open opportunity, you get that face-to-face time, like there's a ton of value there. So we call that accelerated, like did this touch point help accelerate that deal? And then you can tell that story as well. Because a lot of in-person events, the acceleration piece is actually like where a lot of the value
ANDREW NADEAUcould be, especially if you're selling larger deals.
MALLORY LEEThat's great. I know at Salesforce, they have a big focus on accelerating the pipeline as one of their like main marketing goals. So that's awesome that you guys are supporting that use case. And, you know, maybe we're getting closer to our answer here. So like, instead of just looking at MQLs, if we want to have this definitive goal that we've set for marketing, maybe the answer is how many of your leads automatically converted because they were qualified, what's that percentage, right? How many of your leads automatically converted because they were customers? What's that percentage? I'm sure that team who ran that awesome webinar, they didn't have a goal of hitting everybody. They know they had a goal of a certain amount of new people. And if they didn't actually hit that goal of how many new people, then they need to know that for next time. And so just by measuring what kind of leads you get, how fast they convert and why they convert tells you a lot about if your marketing is working and the best marketing campaigns out there, they have high converting leads that get, you know, switched over to a contact and account right away because they're really high quality. That tells you the quality of what you're bringing in. You know, one of my past roles was at Terminus in the ABM space. And we always had such a hard time measuring ABM because it's totally different. You're also doing outbound. You don't know who the person is. And so where do you put that campaign timestamp? There's so many different reasons that measuring ABM is kind of hard. But what I came up with was this concept of a qualified conversion where the lead comes in and we can see right away that they match to a target account that we've been serving ads to. So I really want to work with Coca-Cola. I'm going to show them a bunch of account-based ads because I know they're the best company for me. If I all of a sudden get an inbound lead from Coca-Cola, that's like hitting the lottery. And I want to fast track them to the account owner of Coca-Cola. And I want to go celebrate and take my team out for drinks. But when I convert that lead from Coca-Cola, I'm also going to choose a status says qualified conversion because then I know that's my ABM efforts paying off. Those are people who, you know, potentially saw the ad, potentially got hit by outbound campaigns, potentially saw my billboard or whatever it is and decided to come into us. And so using those statuses, when you convert people, I think each, you know, each big marketing effort, you also want to define your goals in terms of, you know, why am I converting them? What's that status? And what's the reason they get converted? And that's a better way to see if the campaigns are performing the way you want them to.
ANDREW NADEAUYeah, totally, totally agree with that. And then taking it one step further. So like, let's go back to the example of like a webinar, an event, I think, and this goes back to like, it falls around MQLs. But I think like one of the big mistakes marketers make is they treat everything kind of the same. And this goes back to like our conversation earlier on a tent. But like, if you do a big thought leadership webinar, and you try to pass all those to the sales team as like MQLs, they're just going to be like, hey, they came to see this, you know, what this CMO you had talked about brands, they're not interested in our product, but yet you like expect us to like magically create the demand there and get them to convert to an opportunity. Whereas if you did a webinar that talked about like, for example, for a long, we did a webinar talked about how you can implement market attribution within an hour in Salesforce, like people are attending that are pretty qualified and pretty high intent. So one of the things that like I advocate for is actually looking at like all your campaigns and trying to understand what's the conversion. And like, is that a high intent action people are taking based off the conversion? And what's interesting is when you line all these up, you'll see some that just don't convert at a high rate. And then the question then becomes, well, like, is it worth it to pass those directly to sales? Or do they need to express another piece of interest or intent before you then pass them to sales? And that, that has been resonating with people. And then people, once that gets the wheel spinning, then you think people start thinking around like, oh, well, if somebody hits like our pricing page, let's go test that and see like, is that high enough intent? And you might do a task where you say like, hey, let's pass the first 100 people that hit the pricing page to our sales team directly and see if they can convert those. If they can convert them at a reasonable rate, then you say, yeah, it's actually worth our time. That's an intent signal. Let's, let's, let's keep passing those directly to the sales team. So you can kind of like create this, this flywheel and then sales knows exactly why they're following up and they can know, all right, pricing pages convert at 5%. Therefore, they'll follow up with those, right? If they know that and they know that their colleagues are converting them, they'll follow up with that, right? It's not this like black box MQL. Hey, you've got this MQL. So it kind of creates better alignment between, between the teams. And then I'll say one last point here. I think like AI is also going to be an interesting player in this. And what I mean by that is. Absolutely. Is like, let's say, let's say pricing page. If you pass that to the sales team, doesn't convert at the rate you'd expect it to, to actually dedicate human resources to it. I actually see companies start to go down a path where they say, well, let's actually like use clay or some other tool to actually do some like AI enriched automation off of it. That's happening in the background. That's better than what marketing can probably do as like a generic nurture. That's kind of this like middle ground. And I can actually see a world where like only super high intent go directly to sales. There's this like other AI assisted follow-up. And then there's like, Hey, marketing just continues to nurture them.
ANDREW NADEAUAnd I think that's where like the market's going to eventually land pretty soon.
MALLORY LEEYeah, I agree with you. And I think those people who are in the middle are probably going to love that because they probably don't actually want to talk to you as bad as that sounds.
MALLORY LEELike if you're wondering, does this leave want me to call them? And they did not fill out a contact request form. The answer is no, they don't want you to call them.
MALLORYLEEMost of the time people, people are just busy. They're not looking to get on the phone until they're ready to purchase. So I think we've seen that evolve over the years, but I agree.
MALLORY LEEI think AI is going to continue to play a bigger and bigger part in the way that we solve these problems.
MALLORYLEEI will be super excited to see what you do with Alignly with AI. I'm sure there's going to be some stuff coming up.
ANDREW NADEAUWe've got, yeah, we've got some, some thoughts and some things planned. The cool thing is like with all our apps being native Salesforce, you know, we're cleaning your data and making it. I think the big part about AI is you need like really clean, consistent, reliable data. And like our apps are helping to set that foundation. And then now we can kind of build on top of that and do some really cool things.
ANDREW NADEAUCool.
MALLORY LEEOkay. Well, we're coming to the home stretch here. So final thoughts, are MQLs dead?
ANDREW NADEAUSo there's definitely a place for it. I think they're evolving. I think smart marketers are going to start to think about it differently. If they continue to call it MQL, fine. If they use another term like signal or high intent or something else, I think that works as well. I think as an industry, it'd be awesome if we can kind of standardize on this and all get on the same page and have some, some playbooks or frameworks around it. And that's, that's something that we're working towards at Alignly, but, but yeah, I don't think they're dead.
ANDREW NADEAUAnd I think it's, I think it's a short-term thinking to say that they're dead.
MALLORY LEEGot it. I agree. If you had a big marketing team of your own, what would their main KPI to optimize be?
SPEAKER_46So as a business and like what we would communicate up to the exec team and board, it would be
ANDREW NADEAUall around sourced pipeline and big number of sourced opportunities. That would be the number that I would fixate on. Internally on my marketing team, I would want to look at high intent engagements. That's what I'm going to call them or signals. How many of those are we producing each month that are within our accounts that we know we can sell to that are our ICP and the right personas. And the thought there is that if we can get the right people, the right companies engaging with high intent, taking high intent actions or engaging with high intent campaigns, eventually they're going to become, you know, it might take three months, six months, a year, but eventually they're going to become opportunities and close one business.
SPEAKER_25Cool.
ANDREW NADEAUWell said. Thanks.
SPEAKER_25Any final thoughts for everybody?
ANDREW NADEAUNo, this has been great. Hopefully, hopefully the audience gets a lot of value out of it. I like to geek out on this stuff. So if anybody that's listening to this wants to either look at our products or just talk and just in talk in general about their strategy, happy to set up a follow-up call with anybody that's, that's listening.
MALLORY LEEVery cool. Well, we'll give them the website and the playbook that we talked about. Maybe that matrix that shows differences between engagement fit. Lots of good stuff from this chat. So I appreciate your time. Appreciate you going easy on me, my first hosting gig here, but it was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_119Likewise. Thanks. All right.
MALLORY LEETalk to you soon, Andrew. Bye. Bye.
