About this episode
This episode features Eddie Reynolds, Founder & CEO at Union Square Consulting, and Joel Arnold, VP of Revenue Operations at Union Square Consulting, diving deep into the Revenue Efficiency Pyramid with specific focus on marketing operations. Both are revenue operations experts who have recently published and presented on this framework, and they co-authored the content covered in this episode. The conversation centers on how B2B SaaS companies can build foundational marketing operations that align sales and marketing to create an efficient revenue engine.
The core thesis is that technology should never be the starting point for marketing operations; strategy, process, and alignment must come first. Eddie and Joel emphasize that roughly half of venture-backed startups waste significant budget on marketing technology stacks they never properly implement because they skip the foundational work. This episode builds on their earlier RevOps Pyramid framework (covered in episode 15) but zooms in on the specific elements marketing teams must lock in before selecting tools.
The conversation reframes common marketing pitfalls, particularly the obsession with MQLs as a vanity metric and the false assumption that marketing attribution software alone can drive alignment. Instead, they advocate for a combined approach: tight CRM-to-marketing automation integration, clear pricing ownership outside sales, well-defined ICPs and personas, intentional customer journey mapping, and a shared revenue goal between marketing and sales. The episode walks through the revenue efficiency pyramid's foundational and activation layers, covering pricing governance, ideal customer profiles, funnel processes, website optimization, tech stack prioritization, lead response times, marketing calendar coordination, and attribution strategy.
What we cover in this episode
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2:15
Pricing Ownership and Governance Pricing must be owned outside of the sales organization to prevent erosion and ensure strategic alignment with positioning.
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8:30
Ideal Customer Profile and Personas Defining ICPs and buyer personas is the foundational layer that drives content strategy, channel selection, and all downstream operations.
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12:45
Customer Journey Mapping and Funnel Process Understanding the complete customer path from awareness through purchase and retention guides content strategy and identifies capability gaps.
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18:20
Website as Revenue Engine Hub The website is the central conversion point for the entire customer journey and should be optimized for funnel progression and data collection.
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26:15
CRM and Marketing Automation Integration Building the CRM first, then layering marketing automation on top, prevents silos and enables end-to-end customer visibility across revenue operations.
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32:50
Sub-Five-Minute Lead Response Time Speed to response on inbound leads is a critical lever; 21x conversion lift possible by responding within five minutes instead of 30 minutes.
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37:15
Marketing Calendar and Cross-Team Coordination A shared marketing calendar owned by marketing and RevOps ensures list prep, enablement, and sales alignment on all campaigns.
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42:30
Marketing Attribution and Revenue Alignment Combining attribution software, customer surveys, and sales feedback creates a holistic view; shared revenue goal replaces MQL focus.
The lines worth sharing
Your tools are only as effective as your strategy and process. You really need to set those foundational elements in order to get value out of the tools.
Eddie Reynolds · 5:20
If you don't have someone outside of sales owning pricing, you don't have anybody owning pricing and the erosion that happens within your market can be pretty extreme, pretty quickly.
Joel Arnold · 9:45
Studies show that waiting just 30 minutes to respond to an inbound lead can decrease your conversion rates versus five minutes; following up in five minutes can increase conversion rates by 21x.
Eddie Reynolds · 33:40
Start with your CRM. Don't get in that silo trap; build a system that works end to end by adding the marketing automation on top of that.
Joel Arnold · 28:50
Common questions from this episode
What should be the first step in building a marketing operations strategy?
Define your ideal customer profile and buyer personas before selecting any technology. This foundational layer drives all downstream decisions including content strategy, channel selection, and funnel processes. Pricing ownership outside sales must also be established early.
Why shouldn't I start marketing operations by buying a marketing automation platform?
Technology chosen without strategy leads to waste and silos. First establish ICP, personas, customer journey, and CRM structure. The marketing automation tool should be layered on top of a properly configured CRM to enable end-to-end data flow, not built in isolation.
How fast should we respond to inbound leads?
Target a sub-five-minute response time. Research shows responding within five minutes versus 30 minutes yields up to 21x higher conversion rates. Customers often evaluate three vendors in parallel; speed to response directly impacts win probability.
Should we focus on MQLs as our primary marketing metric?
No. MQLs are a leading indicator but should not be the ultimate goal. Instead, align marketing and sales around a shared revenue target. Measure value per lead by channel and combine attribution software with direct customer feedback to determine which channels drive actual pipeline and revenue.
How do I align sales and marketing operations?
Integrate CRM and marketing automation systems so both teams see the same customer view. Co-own a marketing calendar to ensure list prep, enablement, and sales support for each campaign. Share a revenue goal, not separate MQL and sales quotas. Ask customers how they found you to validate attribution.
What is the minimal core tech stack we need?
A properly configured CRM, a marketing automation platform like Marketo, HubSpot, or Pardot, and one or two point solutions that support your specific channels. Spend 70-75% of your effort getting these core tools set up correctly before adding additional platforms.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds and Joel Arnold explore the Revenue Efficiency Pyramid for marketing: pricing governance, ICPs, customer journey mapping, CRM integration, and attribution strategy.
Target keywords
revenue operations marketing
ideal customer profile ICP
marketing automation CRM integration
customer journey mapping funnel
marketing qualified leads MQL
lead response time conversion
pricing governance sales operations
RevOps pyramid marketing
marketing attribution strategy
Union Square Consulting
Eddie Reynolds Joel Arnold
B2B SaaS marketing operations
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Read the full transcript · 57 KB
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. Welcome everybody to RevOps Live number 23,
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe revenue efficiency pyramid for marketing. We recently put out an article on the revenue efficiency pyramid on overall revenue operations. We wrote an article on that, we did an event on it, the article really, really took off. And so we wanted to dive in deeper here today and talk specifically about the foundational elements of marketing operations and how they tie into overall RevOps. Like all other areas of the revenue engine, there is a fundamental approach to marketing operations. And we're going to cover the basics here that can have a really big impact on your results. I'm here today with Joel Arnold, our VP of revenue operations. Joel, why should people listen today? Yeah, because that fundamental approach, I think, is useful in all of these
JOEL ARNOLDdifferent lines of business. And yeah, we feel like there are some quick hacks that you can do in the marketing world to uplevel the team if you aren't already doing these things. And then, you know, with so many potential options, my goodness, in marketing, there's so many things you could be doing. How do you cut through the clutter? And hopefully we can share some stuff today that provides you that guidance. Awesome. Well, as a brief introduction for anybody not familiar with
EDDIE REYNOLDSus, we are a revenue operations consulting firm. We do this event every week, at least as much as we can. We put this out on a podcast, usually the following day on Thursdays, if we can. And then we publish a newsletter each week on Fridays, oftentimes on the same topic. We're no longer sending out emails to tell you that the recording is posted. We'll do that in the newsletter. So if you want an email reminder, go ahead and go to our website and sign up for the newsletter. Otherwise, you can just subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple. And Sarah will share the links to everything right in the chat. Joel and I are going to talk through this topic. I'm going to pepper him with a bunch of questions. You guys in the audience, feel free to jump in with your questions. Just go ahead and shoot it into the chat and we'll call on you when we're ready and then give you an opportunity to jump on video and ask your question. Or if for some reason you're shy and you want to just have me ask the question, I can do that too. Just put that in the chat. But without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into
EDDIE REYNOLDSthis. Joel, do you want to kick us off? Yeah, I'm happy to, but it's worthwhile mentioning, you know, you had
JOEL ARNOLDprepared and written a lot of articles and new letters for a lot of topics and I've done the same, but this is, I think this might be the first one we co-authored because we both have strong perspectives on some things that you can do to help love your teams quickly. And so we're going to kind of go back and forth and I'm going to pepper Eddie as much as he's going to pepper me with questions about certain areas that he feels strongly about. Well, here's the irony of that statement, Joel. Why is that the
EDDIE REYNOLDScase? Because we've been trying to get our own ducks in a row with our own marketing operation. And I think like the whole vision that I had at least was that you and I would be co-authoring articles. And then by extension, Jerry, who is our technical counterpart, but I think our operation has hamstrung us from doing that. And every week we've gotten a little bit more efficient and a little bit better. And this week we were finally able to like carve out time to both put input in, sync it up, and then be prepared for this call with like both of our ideas. And I do think that like that is largely an element of operations in a way. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. There's,
SPEAKER_14there's so many ways to spend, spend one's time. And I think that's, that's a good segue to the first thing I
JOEL ARNOLDwant to talk about is just like, where do you even begin? Because when you, especially when you think about marketing, the tech stack drives marketing these days. So I wouldn't say completely, but to a, to a really significant degree. And obviously with marketing operations being a huge component of that, you're, you're not only looking at process and the best way to, you know, create an efficient buying cycle for, for it, or, or at least a marketing cycle for a lead, but you're also thinking about trying to weed through potentially thousands of new marketing technologies that are launched on annual basis. I think last year there might've been something like 5,000 and that's not uncommon. So where do you even begin is a really hard problem for a lot of marketing ops people, especially early in their careers at it. So what we're trying to do today is just make sure that we're providing you with some guidance and where you can get the most bang for your buck. And like with everything around the, the revenue efficiency pyramid that we've already published, just starting with the basics and kind of building from there is the approach that you should take. Otherwise you can like technologically drive yourself up a cul-de-sac and get stuck with a tool you're spending tens of thousands of dollars a year on. That's one not optimized, but then doesn't have the flexibility to kind of move with the rest of your team as they develop as well. So that's where we're going to begin as kind of an overarching theme of today's call. And yeah, hopefully that makes sense.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I think so. I mean, I think we're always trying to drive home the point that you really shouldn't start your revenue operations with technology. And I learned this like the hard
EDDIE REYNOLDSway or the easy way, depending on how you look at it, spending three years at Salesforce trying to sell this technology to a lot of B2B SaaS startups. And I remember that I made the mistake when I was first learning how to sell marketing automation of just really jamming it down some customers' throats. And I do remember one customer in particular that I really regret selling to. And I was telling them everything that they needed to hear. Like, oh, we don't have content. We don't have a plan. We don't have a marketer. Don't worry. Your salespeople are already sending out content. Like just take all your contacts and dump them into Pardot and then just create some emails and blast them out. And like, it's so obvious in hindsight that that wasn't going to work. And I would see the same thing on the CRM side. Companies will dive in without any kind of a plan, thinking that the technology is going to produce the results that they want because vendors and salespeople like myself convince them that that's the case. And the reality is, is like all things, your tools are only as effective as your strategy and process. And so you really need to set those foundational elements in order to get value out of the tools. And what I saw in my three years at Salesforce is that about half of the customers that I had in startup land skipped over that. And as a result, they were spending all of this money on this tech stack that they weren't even using. And so we really want to like use this call to help companies avoid that. And then at the later stage, we see a lot of companies that are very mature in comparison to like the earliest stage startups, and yet they're still missing some of these critical elements. And so they have leaks in their marketing engine because they haven't built out the foundation and they may have a huge marketing team and a huge sales team and a huge tech stack, but we're still seeing tons of lost opportunity from these leaks. Yeah, absolutely. With anything else in the operation space, the information flow from one
JOEL ARNOLDend of your funnel, from awareness all the way down to purchasing should be linked together. And obviously with an operations mindset, you're thinking about, you know, maybe a lean, a lean perspective, you know, not having any waste in the system. That's where you want to get to, but it's actually pretty surprising sometimes how little technology you actually need to implement in order to have a sufficient automation and tech stack. You don't need a thousand different point solutions to get that done. And in fact, if you have the top three or four that work for your business, you know, something akin to, you need a CRM in place. You have some significant marketing automation engine, something like Marketo, a Pardot, a HubSpot, and then a couple of point solutions that work for you and the channels that you're, you're defined and working through. That could be all you need. I mean, maybe some data enrichment, maybe a lead routing tool, you know, there's, there's a core set of things where it's worthwhile getting that stuff in place first before going after that, you know, the bells and whistles and the shiny object du jour that, that unless you get that other stuff in place,
SPEAKER_22won't really drive what you're hoping to get.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I, obviously I agree. Well, let's dive into the first piece. I know you wanted to talk about pricing and when you originally put this down, it perplexed me and we had an internal conversation.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt was really interesting. Why is pricing the first thing that you put into this, this format today?
JOEL ARNOLDYeah. Because if you don't get this one, right. And this is actually kind of like a don't do, but if you don't get this one, right, you're going to, you're going to pay for it later. And this is, this is a weird one because you won't necessarily have the right to just like dictate this, but you need, I think you need to figure out who owns pricing and like name that person. And that person should not be in sales. And that's often who ends up owning it. And here's, here's a scenario that's pretty common that I've fallen into is okay. I'm doing sales ops. I'm doing rev ops. I'm doing marketing ops. I will often, especially in an early stage company report to like a head of sales or a CRO, but like a CRO who's really like the sales leader. And what ends up happening is if I am tasked or if no one is tasked with pricing and the person who basically creates the pricing list in the CRM, ostensibly the Salesforce admin, AKA the person that rolls up to me actually ends up being in charge of pricing because they're the one who creates the approval flows and like, like the list price seed and what we have things we have to offer packages or whatever, and codifies them into the thing that the salespeople actually use. And so if you don't have a, an owner for pricing and it almost doesn't matter who it is, as long as it's not in the sales org, then what's going to happen is the first chance that anyone has of doing a deal where, you know, the salesperson's incented to do a deal. The head of sales is incented to do the deal. And everybody gets paid if they do the deal. And if they have the rights to tell us to do the deal, then all of that approval workflow, all of that chain of command is going to just completely get railroaded and you'll end up doing the deal. And so if you don't have someone outside of sales owning pricing, you don't have anybody owning pricing and the erosion that happens within your market around pricing can be pretty extreme, pretty quickly. No, what I'm saying is don't own it. So someone else has to own it. Pricing should be something that a lot of people have a stake in, you know, from the marketing leadership to maybe product marketing. If you have that, um, the product team should care. The CEO should care. Like a lot of people should care. It's just make sure that somebody outside of the sales org owns it at the end of the day and can make a call so that when push comes to shove, you have someone outside of sales that you can point to and ask the question, Hey, CFO, Hey, head of marketing, Hey, head of product, whatever. Should we do this deal or should we not? And that'll avoid a lot of things, obviously downstream to that. So I know I'm going on a little bit here, but I want to make one more point. If you, if you don't have this in place, you will also politically find yourself in a very strange situation as a rev ops leader, because you'll be forced to kind of push back. If it is, if in fact you do own pricing, you'll be forced to push back against your boss. And that could get a little bit strange. And so I know everybody wants to, you would expect a rev ops leader, a director of VP level persons who have the clout within the organization to do that, but you don't want to, you don't really want to be in a position where you're regularly contradicting your own leadership. So anyway, that's, that's my rationale for, for starting here, because if you, if you don't know what your pricing is, you don't have control of your pricing, your pricing will erode your positioning as a marketing leader will fall to the, it'll go straight to commoditization, which is if you're trying to sell a premium product, but that doesn't work very well. And so I, that's why I wanted to start here. It's really key. It makes sense.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd it aligns really well with what I experienced working as an AE at Salesforce. I mean, as you can imagine, there's very stringent approval levels and we would have L1, L2, L3 approvals. And that just corresponds with the, the hierarchy of management. And you would know that like, okay, Q4, I can probably get an L3 approval for a reasonably sized deal, not a small one, maybe an L4, if it's like a whale of a deal. And there's just like really, really tight guardrails there. And then as a result, like you just have a really efficient engine. And of course, like, it's not really just sales approving that. Like we also had what we called sales ops, which I found interesting because they, at Salesforce, the team we called sales ops was really only responsible for contracts and pricing approvals approvals. But yeah, everything you're describing is exactly how like they built the model at Salesforce. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's common sense, but what a lot of smaller companies don't have
JOEL ARNOLDis a clear like pricing owner. It's not something you think about when you're launching a company and it becomes something that you end up getting to later. What, what's unfortunate is that often that's a little too late. So if you're seeking like that product market fits, you get to that stage. Yeah. You typically have your ideal customer in mind. There should be a pricing strategy that aligns to that, that persona, the value you're creating in the go to market motion that you have. And so, yeah, just don't let the rev ops person be the default catcher of all things that fall from the top. And I think you'll be all right. But that does actually transition really well to the next thing I want to get into, which is the most fundamental and basic, like lowest tier on the, on the pyramid. And that's defining your, your ideal customer profile and your personas. And in fact, we've got a little bit of a visual, if it's okay, if I'm sharing my screen here a second. Yeah, absolutely. While you're doing that, I wanted to add, I mean, I do think this is a perfect segue
EDDIE REYNOLDSbecause if you don't get pricing, right, you're going to end up with the wrong customer, right? So if you discount too heavily, you're going to end up with a customer that is not willing to buy your product at the price you really should be selling it for. And then you end up with a lot of customers that aren't right for your business. And then if you decide to try to reverse that out, you get stuck in a really difficult position. Yeah. So when, when we think about this, I think it's, it, again, it's kind of an obvious point,
JOEL ARNOLDbut there's a, there's a lot before we get to the technology that you need to do. And it's super duper foundational for everything else that you're going to do is to understand your persona, because included in that is the understanding for what the pain points are, what problems you're trying to solve, who the person that you're going to be going after is, and the positioning that your product is going to have. It's sort of all contained within sort of that persona or that ICP documentation. And from that, or from that, you'll get, you know, the enablement for your sales team. You'll be able to understand where to put your efforts from a data enrichment perspective. You'll understand what channels you're probably going to go after. It really just drives all of this other stuff. That's going to make it really clear and easy to figure out what the next step is beyond your personas and ICP. So ICP, just ideal customer profile. So one, like day one, and it doesn't necessarily have to take that long of times, just get that stuff organized, agreed upon, documented, and then shared out to all of the, you know, the constituents within your organization, make sure that, you know, okay, marketing has defined, these are our, these are our personas. Is that in line with the product team? Is that in line with our retention team and our sales team?
SPEAKER_17And you just, that's, that's the most basic thing built from there.
EDDIE REYNOLDSJoel, this is the image you wanted me to share, right? Yeah. That's the one. Yep. It's a little fuzzy. And for everybody listening, we're going to put this in our newsletter. I think this image is a little low res, but basically for everybody listening, we're talking about the revenue efficiency pyramid and the first two levels, the first being fundamentals and the next being activation and really just talking about these foundational layers. So the first piece in fundamentals that Joel just covered was defining the ideal customer profile and personas. Do you want to keep talking about that? Or do you want to go into the other pieces of this?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I think, I think I've covered that one. Cause I think most people will just naturally get that.
JOEL ARNOLDFeel free to ask questions if that doesn't make sense, but you know, beyond that, I I'm going to suggest that we understand like the funnel processes and the customer journey. So the lead, the lead funnel exists for your company, the moment you have a company, you may not have visibility to it. It's there. There are people that are aware of you, maybe not many. There are people that are considering you, et cetera. And hopefully very early on, you're actually entering them into kind of that sales funnel as well. So the lead funnel exists and you should understand as early as you can, what is already there as far as a path to purchase, because hopefully you have customers or you do pretty quickly. And then my suggestion is to sort of just map that out and figure out what content or what rationale does someone have to go and learn about who you are? How do people become aware of you? Do you have advertising going on? Do you have word of mouth? Do you, are you getting referrals? Do you have online? Do you have online? Do you have online? Do you have online? Do you have online? Is there a whole lot of content that's going to get people from consideration into a purchasing cycle, but no one's aware that you exist. You need something at every stage of the funnel. And so if you don't have something there that links all of the different pieces of the funnel together, use that as your guide for your content strategy and potentially the technology that you invest in. So obviously get your ICPs and personas in place, but then secondarily start to really spend some time understanding your customer journey and your funnel processes, which we'll get into in a second. But like that will allow you to have pretty clear insight into where the gaps are, what content and what types of content you need to have,
SPEAKER_22what channels you need to go after and what technology will then underpin all of that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. There's a lot to unpack there, Joel. And I think like a couple of the reasons why what you
EDDIE REYNOLDSjust covered is so important are the mistakes that I think a lot of us see in the market, especially with the recent couple of years of heavily funded venture capital backed growth, the growth at all costs mindset. We've seen a lot of sort of spray and pray approach across both marketing and sales. A lot of this concept of, you know, let's get as many MQLs as possible and going back to the ideal customer profile, it really all centers around that. If marketing is not targeting the right audience, if we don't have, you know, the right pricing, if we're not thinking really clearly about who the best customer is for our product, who we want to, you know, laser focus on, then, you know, you know, the messaging isn't right. If we're not thinking about that step-by-step process about how we get in front of somebody, whether it's, you know, social media, whether it's events, it's going to conferences, whether it's paid ads, you want to get somebody's attention. And then as you get their attention, where do you take them? Oftentimes that ends up taking people to the website and then having that middle of funnel and bottom of funnel content, pulling them into your marketing engine, and then ultimately driving them to click a button to request a demo or request a call with sales. And I think that over the last couple of years, we've seen a lot of money flow into marketing and miss the mark there because we're not targeting the right people with the right messaging. And then thinking about the step-by-step process to bring them into the sales engine. And if we're not thinking about the customer journey and the lead flow process, not only are we not optimizing it for the customer's perspective, but also for our own perspective, we see a lot of things slipping through the cracks. So a really common example of this is we spend all this money on marketing and we try to get somebody to raise their hand and say, I want to talk to sales. And then they finally do that. And then they wait and wait and wait for a response. While they're waiting, they end up reaching out to other vendors. And now we've lost the opportunity to sell them our product. Yeah, definitely that happens. I would wonder kind of earlier in the
JOEL ARNOLDfunnel cycle, like what have you seen as far as like a good place to start mapping this stuff out? And you know, how do you find out where your customers are so that you can go after them?
EDDIE REYNOLDSOoh, I mean, I think that that's like the million dollar question, right? So where do your customers hang out? So for us, for example, like we obviously do a lot of stuff on LinkedIn. We're targeting B2B SaaS companies. We know that a lot of revenue leaders are on LinkedIn. There's also other channels like Slack communities, like the whole dark funnel concept. We know what conferences these folks go to. As a company, we haven't done a lot of paid ads, but if you're going to do paid ads, you can hire an agency or a talented marketer that can tell you how you can get those paid ads in front of your audience. There's lots of ways to do that. And I think one challenge we see with startups is oftentimes they may not have budget to hire a very, very senior CMO that can really map this out. And so they may end up hiring somebody who's more of a junior marketer, creating content, kind of putting it out on different channels without really thinking about is this channel the right channel for us to get awareness in front of the audience that we want to target. But I do think like the answer to your question, Joel, is not an easy one and certainly not one I'm an expert on. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we've talked about the dark funnel in the past and trying to like figure out
JOEL ARNOLDanswers to that question. I think this tactic that I'm going to talk about very briefly also helps super early on. Or maybe if you aren't quite sure how your funnel is working right now, just like ask people how they got to. Like if you do have people coming inbound or if you do have conversations with people in a sales process, you can make it very easily for your salesperson or your BDR, BDM, SDR, whatever. Just ask a simple question like, how did you find us? And then that helps you sort of get at least a general sense of the mapping of that. And I think that'll help you to define your funnel. Yeah. And I mean, this goes into attribution, which we'll touch on later, but without going into great
EDDIE REYNOLDSdetail right now, a combination of asking people where you found them and then using attribution software and seeing like what channels people are coming to your website from, and then trying to optimize for that. But let's not get into that yet because we will later. I think that really what it comes down to is defining that ideal customer profile, who the buyer personas are, who the marketing audience is, and then really segmenting that audience with the right content. I think the biggest thing that I see that's a huge miss is companies saying, we're just going to build a big list of people and we're just going to send all of them the same content. And of course, if you're super small, that's all you can do. But as your marketing starts to evolve, you really want to work hard to get the right messaging in front of the right people.
SPEAKER_17Yeah. Yeah. Couldn't agree more.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnything more you want to add on mapping out the customer journey? I'd be curious, sort of like any big takeaways you've had from some of the work you've done in your past companies.
SPEAKER_47Um, you know, I think, I think the, the light bulb went off, uh, for me years ago when I realized that
JOEL ARNOLDdifferent contexts use for different things. And I know that's an obvious thing, but I'm not a marketer by trade initially. Like I was coming to this world via, um, work with operations and strategy route. And I hadn't really spent that much time in the weeds in a marketing organization. We're talking probably like 2015, 2016, when this is going on and just like, we, we had spent so much effort and so much time just generally creating context. And it's like as much content as you can't go. Um, when in reality, it's much better to have four or five pieces of really tight content that pushes someone through a logical flow, logical buying process, and ideally ends with them sort of raising their hand, uh, or looking to speak to somebody on our team and, and get into what eventually becomes a sales conversation. So it's not, it doesn't necessarily, I'm not espousing, uh, more content is bad. I'm just, I'm just saying, making sure that you have all of those linkages in place is what's really going to drive each of the channels that you have. Yeah. Well, I think a big mistake that we see a lot of
EDDIE REYNOLDScompanies make, especially earlier stage startups and marketing is just trying to do everything at once. And the, the concept is like, let's just see what works. And the reality is that if you want to pour your heart and soul into LinkedIn, like I've done for the past couple of years, it's, it's going to work. It might not be a linear path, but it's going to work. If you want to do that on YouTube or Tik TOK or paid ads or email, or you want to go become a conference commando, all of these channels can work. You can look at other companies like yours and see that they have built this out and succeeded at it. But what most companies do, especially early stage, I see is they want to try all of it and just see what works and they don't properly invest in that channel. And they haven't really thought through what this, what their audience needs in order to come through that channel. Like, how did we get the folks to come off of LinkedIn to this event? I don't know that I've perfected that, but there's certainly been a lot of thought that's gone into that. And what I'll see is folks will take, you know, a video they do and just spray it across every social media channel when they haven't really built an audience there. And then they get one or two likes on each of these channels and say, oh, well, this channel can't work. Well, that's not really it. It's that you haven't properly invested the resources to make it work. And where you narrow your focus and say, okay, this is where our audience is. This is the journey that they want to take. They get awareness from us on LinkedIn, for example, or these paid ads. They then come to our website. This is the content that resonates with them. This is what then motivates them to want to get into a sales call with us. This is what they want to see when they come to a sales call. Like, why are they clicking that button to book a sales call? Or if we're going the MQL route and we're going to hand those leads over to SDRs, which of those leads is going to make the most amount of sense? And this is where I'm always trying to fight the good fight against MQLs and say, we need to be really careful here and not set the goal for marketing to be MQLs themselves. Because then what we end up doing is lowering the bar and giving sales, you know, a bunch of leads for people that are really not in any way interested in talking to sales. And then we burn a lot of precious resources trying to call down on them. And then sales is saying, hey, you know, the marketing leads aren't any good. And marketing is saying sales isn't doing their job. And we have the proverbial sales and marketing conflict. Instead, we want to take a step back and really look hard at what's working and what's not and which MQLs, which customers really actually might want to talk to sales and who should we be focusing on. And I just see that being missed so often by many organizations. Yeah, well, it's the classic way of doing it. And we've gotten into
SPEAKER_09this topic, you should go back and listen to some other podcasts, we've dived deeper into this one
JOEL ARNOLDbefore, but just in the attempt to stay high level on it. It's a lot of it's about incentives. And actually, the MQL thing is pretty easy to operationalize, which I think is, especially if you don't have a lot of budget, just do something that sort of defaults is a tactic that works kind of okay. And so it's, it's, it's something that people jump on right away. So just obviously, what we're saying is to take it with a grain of salt, the MQL thing. It's, it's more than just volume. It's more than just volume. I also want to pick up on something that you mentioned there. And you didn't specifically call it out. But I know when you're you wanted to talk about process, and there's a lot of pieces to this. But I think one of the key things that someone shouldn't focus on early on, and it is a little bit technological, but not a solution, is how much time you spend focusing on your website. Because ideally, at the end of every channel, or nearly every channel that you're going to have, and actually website can be various points in the funnel. Your website should be engineered to draw people in, get engagements and push them to that inbound channel. And so I would suggest very early on one of the fundamental pieces that you want to focus on is actually spending a lot of time on your, on your website itself. So I know you had some thoughts about that one.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I mean, I certainly don't pretend to be an expert on web design by any stretch of the imagination. But I completely agree with you that it's really a central point for the entire customer
EDDIE REYNOLDSjourney. It's the central point for the entire customer journey. So when you think about it from a marketing process, your leads are ultimately coming to your website, you're unlikely to get an inbound lead that doesn't come to your website, unless you just have like a huge presence on some social media channel, and they happen to DM you more than likely, they're probably going to check out your website even before doing that. In the sales process, people in that sales process are going to go back to your website time and time again, especially as you have numerous stakeholders in most buying decisions, they're going to go to your website. And then even once you have a customer that you've won throughout the customer journey, they're going to go back to the website again and again and again, especially because if you're selling SaaS, they're probably logging into your website. And so it really becomes a central focal point for your entire marketing engine. And so if you're not thinking about the journey that they want to take and the type of content that they want to get out of your website, then you're really missing the mark. And by no means am I an expert on this. But I think that the right way to approach this is just to simply set some parameters and think about what are the conversion rates from the number of people that visit our website or visit a given landing page to ultimately like, you know, respond to that call to action and book a call or download a paper or what have you. And how can we optimize that journey to get more people that raise their hand and actually request a meeting with sales? And then specifically, how can we get more people that raise their hand to request a meeting with sales that ultimately buy? And so if we set our North star at revenue and design our entire marketing engine and marketing operation around that, then we can reverse engineer what that process needs to be in order for us to optimize that conversion. And so then we think about on the website, what data do we want to collect and when do we want to gate our content? That is a really controversial topic. Some marketers will gate all of their content. I think that that's really largely gone away. Some folks believe we're just going to gate certain pieces of content so that we can collect that information and then connect that with their IP address. And now we know who's visiting our website, which helps us with our lead scoring. Other people believe, hey, like, let's not gate anything. Um, I think I'm a proponent of that. As you can see, like, we don't really ask for anyone's information unless they want to subscribe to the newsletter or register for an event, at which point in time we've collected their information. And even then this gets into what qualifies as an MQL. That to me is not enough for an MQL. Like I'm not going to hire an SDR to start cold calling, you know, every person that joined this event 15 times to see if they want to buy. I don't think that that's what our customers and our audience wants. And I also just don't think that for our own needs, that that's going to be the thing that is going to give us an optimal ROI on our, on our marketing and sales engine. Yeah, there's, I, I have seen it too many times where one of the following happens.
JOEL ARNOLDUm, someone, you know, an organization sends six, their BDR team on literally anybody that comes to the website. So like no intent whatsoever, they may have clicked on the wrong button on Google search. Like you have no idea, but like, you know, release the hounds. Let's get this guy, um, or gal. Uh, and then don't do that. Um, and then also too many times I've seen content put up there in the form of like a hard file, like a doc file or PDF or something. And you, you have content on your website, but like it links away from your website and takes you to another page, um, that isn't part of your buyer's journey and potentially just like downloads a PDF and like says, here, you figure it out. Um, you just need to link this stuff together. Just make sure that you're linking the stuff together. You're tracking this stuff as best you can. Um, that's going to provide you with the information that you need in order to make smart decisions about whether your content and your tactics are working. Um, but then I think, I think that's really just the name of the game is constantly iterating, uh, and trying to do better with it. Yeah. And I mean, like, let's take HubSpot as an example,
EDDIE REYNOLDSright? Like I think that they literally written the book on content marketing. I mean, their, their conference, I think it's called inbound. I interviewed Channing Ferrer who ran their sales operation. And what they found is when they bucketed their, uh, MQLs, they had their hand raisers that wanted to speak to sales. Those were obviously worthy of sales time. And then they had folks that hit their pricing page a number of times, and they found out that those folks were actually really worth calling, but everyone else, even their, their MQLs, the folks that hit a certain score, they found that like the conversion rates were not high enough to justify the investment of time and resources for their SDR team to call down on them. Um, so they really just focused in on as much as HubSpot has perfected this model and has this enormous marketing engine, really, unless you're hitting their pricing page or requesting a meeting, at least according to Channing, when he was there, they're not calling you. Yeah. Yeah. And HubSpot's a good segue, uh, into, uh, we're actually getting,
SPEAKER_09we're actually like closing down the fundamentals component of this. And we're starting to move to
JOEL ARNOLDactivation when you're talking about, you know, having really solid data by having these technologies in place. And, um, HubSpot is one of those really solid, uh, marketing automation tools. And they, they really do know what they're talking about. They have really, really great data sets and they're, they're very well organized. So, um, if it's okay, do you mind if we transition to the tech stack conversation? Of course not. All right. So, uh, we started off the call talking about how the technology, uh, in marketing operations can get overwhelming, uh, because there's just too much stuff really. Um, and more stuff gets added than there are days in a year. Um, and so what we, we would suggest is just making sure that you start from the inside out, that you get the core things in place, the big rocks before you add the pebbles. And, you know, I would say start off by figuring out what your marketing automation tool should be, your core platform. I like Marketo. I've, I've seen HubSpot work really well. Rdot, I, I think integrates really well with the Salesforce ecosystem. And there's a lot of great things that to be said about that, but I'm not going to be a huge proponent of one or the other. I think they can all work, but the key is to like really spend the time to get that honed in and get that stood up correctly and integrated into your CRM to link all of that data flow from the funnel to like through usually like lead stages or contact stages into your CRM so that when you open an opportunity, you can see where that opportunity came from. Really what, at the end of the day, what you're trying to get is a, is a data representation of the end-to-end flow for a person from first time they interact with you all the way through the sales cycle, and then all the way into retention. And that's going to give you the ability to look back and see what things have worked, what has the highest propensity to convert to the next stage and the next stage and the next stage. And it'll really give you visibility to the health of your system or the health of your, your actual funnels. So once you have that in place, then start thinking about these different point solutions, lead routing tools or events technology and all these other things. But really, if you can spend a lot of your time, maybe two thirds, three quarters of your time up front, like actually getting the Marketo or HubSpot thing set up properly, that's going to get an early-ish stage company almost everything that they need to run their organization properly.
SPEAKER_22Yeah, absolutely. Let's make sure not to skip over one point. So in your, your revenue efficiency
EDDIE REYNOLDSpyramid, you talked about the CRM being in the foundation, right? So even before marketing automation, we've got to get the CRM right. So we use our marketing automation, we route a lead into sales, we need to make sure that sales has their ducks in a row, that we know what clearly is qualified to enter the sales pipeline. And then integrating the marketing automation tool properly, we're now able to see how those leads flow all the way through into pipeline and closed revenue, which then ultimately gives us the ability to have goals that are, you know, different than tracking and MQL to see full funnel ROI, et cetera. And I think a lot of the problems we see in not having sales and marketing alignment stem from these disconnected systems, having separate reports, you know, mark, if marketing can't even see revenue or pipeline, how in the heck are they supposed to optimize for it?
SPEAKER_09Yeah, they, this is one of those, you, you are, why is it, you know, Marketo, not the first thing
JOEL ARNOLDthat you do? Why do you want Salesforce or whatever your CRM is first? This is one of those differences between marketing operations and revenue operations. In revenue operations, you are concerned with the entire end-to-end workflow, but as broad as possible here. If you don't have a CRM in place and there's sort of some basic fundamental workflow steps, et cetera, in there, then you won't necessarily, for example, understand the concept of how leads and contacts work for your, you and your business and how you want to set that up. And likewise, if you're just building the CRM without the marketing perspective here, you could also screw that up royally, and it'd be hard to unwind how you handle leads and contacts in Salesforce so that they're, they will link easily to the workflows that are picked out of your marketing automation tool. So you really need to have eyes on both of these things at the same time and build your CRM first and have your marketing automation be a fast follow with the key being workflows that integrate across that transition point between two systems. And you're not building these silos because revenue operations that is very, very core long, long time ago in large part came about because these two different groups would buy two different systems and they would take the already existing sort of silo that that happens between sales and marketing and they would make these systems I'll supply that to the point where you couldn't break it down later without reinstalling or tearing out your CRM or your Marketo or HubSpot. And it's at some point, you're never going to get the political will internally to like rip out Salesforce because you know, there's a slight disassociation between Salesforce and marketing. That's not going to happen. So like you literally created a silo, you could never ever, ever back out of it. So start with your CRM. Don't get in that silo trap, build a system that works end to end by adding the marketing automation on top of that. And then worry about this sort of satellite things that revolve around these two systems. Yeah. And one really important reason why these two systems are so core and so fundamental is that
EDDIE REYNOLDSthis is where your customer data lies, right? So as you know, people come in off of the website, all these tools, I believe I'm no expert in Marketo, but HubSpot, part up Marketo, I'm pretty sure every single one of them is going to take a form fill and connect it to an IP address. And now every single person that's ever visited your website and identify themselves goes into that system. So you want that system then connected with your CRM so that you can have a single 360 degree view of your customer and everybody across the entire revenue engine can see what's happening. And I saw when I worked at Salesforce benefits, even in customer success, when I was trying to grow accounts, you can see, wow, like this person who is a customer, maybe like the CMO is engaging with content and they have our sales tool, but they don't have our marketing tool. How can I upsell and grow them? And this is why, again, it's RevOps and not just marketing ops or sales ops or CS ops. We want this holistic approach. And so these foundational elements, you can then build on top of them and have all these additional tools to augment your data and add contacts and integrate your social channels and your ads and all of these other things. But if you don't know who your customer is, none of that does very much. Yeah. And this, this knowing who your customer is and
JOEL ARNOLDbroadly understanding the mindset of the customer actually leads us to our next hack here because people's expectations have changed. I think, Eddie, you've made a great case for why you need to have these things in place. But I think from the customer side of it, there's a little bit of this step in the experience that also links these two things together. So about in the back of the house, yeah, you've got someone transitioning from Marketo's section of the world or HubSpot section of the world into the CRM's workflow. But the customer doesn't see that. They see, hey, I raised my hand. What are you doing about it? And so the corollary to this conversation of knocking on those silos is actually following up on leads. And I think the biggest lever, and there's so much science and data around this, the biggest lever that you can pull to get improved results with your conversion rates and therefore your funnel metrics is following up on leads better. As simple as that sound. What's actually happening and why I mentioned expectations is that customers, by the time they're raising their hand or they've interacted with you by coming to your pricing page 10 times or whatever and showing a ton of intent is that they have selected you as one of their, let's say three likely to buy vendors. And they're just like figuring out the last steps of the puzzle. They've gone almost all the way through their buying journey in reality, because you can self-serve a lot of this stuff online and they've investigated you. So if you are one of the people they raise their hand for, then you need to follow up with that person right away because they're also reaching out to somebody else as well. So, and they're not testing you for whether your system would work for them. They already know your system could potentially work for them. They already have a need that they've identified. And so they're testing you for the customer experience. A hundred percent. And studies show that waiting just 30 minutes to respond to an
EDDIE REYNOLDSinbound lead can decrease your conversion rates versus five minutes or conversely following up in five minutes instead of waiting 30 minutes can increase your conversion rates by 21x. It's mind-blowing. And here's why I just went through this personally. I booked a sales meeting this morning with a vendor that I'm looking at. And with Sarah's help, we reached out to five different vendors. So I did all my research online. I read all these white papers. I went into all these websites with all their paid ads and their SEO. And we reached out to five different vendors, actually more than that. And none of them responded. One of them finally responded and I booked a meeting. And unfortunately, that company, I can't talk to somebody until next Wednesday, which is super frustrating. So I asked Sarah to go and try to reach out to five more. And I promise you, I do not have the patience right now. All these vendors kind of sell the same thing. I'm going to buy from the first vendor that I can talk to because I'm super busy. I do not have time to go and compare a bunch of different options. It's very commoditized. And the second that I book a meeting and have a productive conversation with somebody, I am probably going to have zero interest in spending another minute talking to a second or a third vendor.
SPEAKER_09Yeah, absolutely. And it depends on how commoditized your businesses and technological solutions like a chili piper or something that lets you set a schedule, they help with their speed to response. So that's
JOEL ARNOLDcertainly important. But as Eddie mentioned, like if what you're offering them is a month from now, that's not going to help either. So you need to also put some thought into the experience from the customer's perspective. Like what are they going to go through? Are you going to are you just going to throw them a calendar and say, hey, you figure it out? Or like you're going to create blocks in people's calendars where they have to make themselves available to take these calls. So like organizing the sales of the BDR team around this stuff, like take that extra step and maybe like the information that how you respond might be a quick email. So there's someone sitting on the BDR team who's handling inbounds and they're tasked with a sub five-minute response time to every inbound reach out and then they send a customized email. So you have a little bit more of a personal touch. There's a lot of ways to do this. Try to put your best foot forward as fast as possible is what I would say. And if you're taking more than five minutes, you probably you're probably losing out on a lot of business and hurting your conversion rate. So take that, take that for what it is. And trust us, there's a lot of research that's gone into backing up that data. The next thing I want to talk about is it's kind of like a linchpin between the marketing organization and the rest of the company that I think marketers don't optimize against. You will probably have within your marketing leadership, someone who owns a marketing calendar that will outline the campaigns, the events, et cetera, that you're going to be running over the course of this quarter, this year and that kind of thing. I don't think people do enough with this. And what I would suggest is that you get with your marketing leader as a rev ops leader and sort of co-own a meeting on a regular basis, weekly, bi-weekly, something like that, where we review the upcoming items on the marketing calendar and make sure that the other components of the business that you need to execute against the campaign well are clearly laid out and they've assigned, you've assigned ownership. So this is a little bit of like a project management function within rev ops. I'll give you an example. We have a campaign coming up in two weeks. Great. Marketing has probably created the concept for that. They probably sort of know the persona that they're going after. They might have a list of names that they're going to email to, et cetera. We might have the ability to get a bigger set of names if we do just like reach out to the people who enrich the system. Maybe you have a data enrichment team. Maybe you have an intern. Maybe there's BDRs that are tasked with this, whatever. Someone is probably like has access to a Zoom info or Clearbit or something like that and can enrich the data and make a bigger list for you to go after as a marketing team. So when you do send out a campaign, you're going to get more responses. You could also use that group to help fill in email addresses that are missing or phone numbers that are missing or verify that the data is correct. There's a lot that you can do about list building in advance of that campaign. After that campaign, yeah, we've got this content that we're sending out into the world. But is there enablement material? Do you expect the sales team or the BDR team to follow up? How are we training them on what to say, how to position that product or that service? What are we doing with the rest of the organization outside of the marketing team? Because marketing should do something, but there should be other teams involved to either follow up or drive a message home or make sure you're speaking from the same script. That's just going to give your company a whole lot more of a, not just a coordinated feel, but the customer is going to experience a consistent approach. You're not going to have marketing reaching out to somebody saying one thing and then a BDR hitting them up saying an entirely different thing. And you're just going to get more juice for your squeeze
SPEAKER_22as a coordinated effort than if you're just kind of each doing your own thing off in the corner. Yeah. I mean, that's a really great point. And that's something that Salesforce unsurprisingly
EDDIE REYNOLDSdoes extremely well. And so when I was in AE there, what I saw was really effective was that alignment
EDDIE REYNOLDSwith the marketing calendar and then understanding here are all of the arrows I have in my quiver to use throughout my sales process. We have this event coming up here. We have this webinar here. We have this piece of content that just came out. And as I'm reaching out to, you know, in my role, I reached out to existing customers as well as new prospects. Here are all of the assets that I can leverage in that process and really being aligned with that, I think was really successful, both from a sales perspective, also from a marketing perspective. I mean, Dreamforce is this enormous conference and they have all these people coming that's partially due to their marketing engine, but it's also partially due to like thousands and thousands of account executives that are personally reaching out to their customers and prospects and inviting them to that event. Yeah. Yeah. And just like the prospecting,
JOEL ARNOLDit takes, you know, five, seven, 10 touches before someone, a sense to do something. And so, you know, marketing can be a couple of those touch points and it levers up your prospecting and vice versa. Your, your marketing can drive a lot of that, but your, your sales team and your SDR team can be essentially doing marketing to support the marketing team at the same time. It just works a lot better with Eric Hover and then prospecting, uh, in coordination. Yeah, absolutely. So before we wrap
EDDIE REYNOLDSand we've only got three minutes, I want to touch on marketing attribution. And the big thing here,
EDDIE REYNOLDSI want to touch on our two things. Number one, the challenge of MQLs that we've talked about. And number two, the challenge with attribution software. And so I think the big thing for me with marketing qualified leads is that it's a leading indicator. And I think it's great if companies want to measure that so long as it's not the ultimate goal. The only way that we can get alignment between sales and marketing is if we have a shared goal. And if we're both working towards the same end and that's revenue, right? And the only way that we can do that is if we have our marketing tools and our sales tools tightly integrated together, and we can do the right attribution. We can see what channels are producing revenue and what's not. And this is really challenging because so much of our business these days comes from dark funnel, other sources that are hard to measure. The attribution software doesn't always do a perfect job of measuring that. And so the common solution that I've seen in the market is that we combine what the attribution software tells us with what we're actually hearing from customers. We can ask, how did you hear about us on a form on the website? We can also train our salespeople to ask that same question. And then we triangulate those data points and we have a much better view of which marketing channels and which marketing campaigns are driving pipeline and revenue. And then we can optimize for that. This then puts the sales and marketing team in the same boat together and they're rowing in unison. And the one big pushback that I hear from marketing that really frustrates me is people will say, well, we don't have any control over what happens after we generate a lead. And I would argue that nobody does. In a modern sales process, especially B2B, on average, you have, I think, seven to 10 stakeholders. There's so many people involved on the seller side as well. It's all a team effort. And we have to wrap in a minute. I want to leave time for you to add anything you have here, Joel. No, no, I agree. I think definitely asking customers
JOEL ARNOLDis a big thing. I think their existence and the growth of the dark funnel and the channels that we can't track. It does diminish the value of marketing attribution techniques and or software. But the more information that you can gather, the better you'll be able to translate whether or not something is working. And at the end of the day, that's what you're looking for. Is this campaign, is this channel, is it functioning at an average or above average level? And if it's not, maybe you want to try something else. I think the easiest thing to do if you're worried about, you know, marketing generates this thing, but maybe it takes 18 months before it's going to close. So how do we know if that's, that's a good thing? Just make sure and sure that you haven't understood all of the different channels that you have and all the different conversion points along the line. So you can see pretty early on whether the leads that you've generated are quality. If they're all dying and getting close, lost by the end of the first stage of the sales funnel, well, something that's, you don't have to wait to see what kind of stuff gets booked. You know, that's not performing at the level that you would expect. And so there's a lot of ways to measure it. Just having a value per lead that you generate is really the key to all of this stuff. And it's not that difficult to put it together. So, um, as a corollary to the marketing attribution topic, I would say, make sure that you
SPEAKER_17understand the value that you have per lead by channel. Awesome. Well, thanks Joel. And thank you
SPEAKER_01everybody for joining us today. If you'd like more on this, check out our newsletter that comes out on Friday and, or we'll see you next week.
