Channing Ferrer on this episode
Channing Ferrer, VP of Sales Operations Strategy and Sales Acceleration at HubSpot (and now CEO and CRO at Built-in), joins host Eddie Reynolds to discuss how B2B SaaS companies should allocate resources between inbound and outbound sales efforts. With six years leading sales operations at HubSpot, Ferrer brings deep expertise in pipeline analysis and revenue operations strategy. The core insight: to make smart inbound vs. outbound investment decisions, you must analyze pipeline health through conversion rates and lead source attribution, not just raw volume metrics like MQLs or activity targets. Ferrer reframes how organizations should think about lead quality, introducing a bucketing system that segments leads into hand-raisers, high-intent non-qualified leads, and lower-intent prospects, then measuring each bucket's conversion to close-won deals. The episode covers a practical six-step framework for evaluating inbound demand health, including MQL categorization by type, engagement rate analysis, lead scoring validation, and attribution window definition. Rather than chasing vanity metrics, both Eddie and Channing emphasize that revenue leaders should use data to guide sales reps toward the highest-converting opportunities and eliminate conflict between sales and marketing through shared pipeline entry criteria.
What we cover in this episode
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5:30
Pipeline health and entry criteria How organizations establish clear, shared definitions for what deals qualify to enter pipeline and move between stages to enable trust and alignment.
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8:15
MQLs and activity targets Why focusing too heavily on MQL volume and outbound call targets can drive bad behavior and misalign sales and marketing priorities.
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14:00
Four sources of pipeline Breaking down inbound, outbound, product-led growth, and partner channel as the primary sources driving pipeline creation and health.
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18:20
Hand-raisers versus score-based MQLs Differentiating between prospects who actively request to talk with sales and those who qualify based on behavioral scoring, and their different conversion rates.
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29:00
Lead bucketing over scoring Why HubSpot moved away from numeric lead scores toward a simpler bucketing model that reps could trust and act on with greater confidence.
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40:30
Attribution windows and multi-threading Establishing a consistent timeframe to attribute leads back to their source and engaging multiple stakeholders within a single account to increase deal velocity.
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48:00
Auto-prospecting and calendar booking How to use automation like HubSpot's auto-prospector and chat tools to sequence outreach and book meetings without creating prospect fatigue.
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35:00
Close-won rates and opportunity quality Establishing consistent close-won rates across lead sources as a diagnostic for whether your sales acceptance criteria are truly filtering quality opportunities.
The lines worth sharing
It's really how do we operate most efficiently? And when you understand where you can see the most dollars within your pipeline, that's how you operate most efficiently.
Channing Ferrer · 24:00
The reps that are underperforming oftentimes had a much higher level of call volume but were smaller transactional deals. The top performers weren't logging the most activity but were building the most pipeline in dollars.
Eddie Reynolds · 27:30
It's very easy for marketing to juice their number of MQLs by adjusting the score. That's not always the right thing. Do we want our sales reps spending time on bad leads? No, we don't.
Channing Ferrer · 33:00
Once you get to op creation, you should be seeing that close rate roughly at 25% of the time. It should be fairly consistent across all the channels.
Channing Ferrer · 37:15
Common questions from this episode
What is the difference between hand-raiser MQLs and score-based MQLs?
Hand-raisers are prospects who actively request to speak with sales through actions like booking meetings, downloading content with intent to engage, or requesting demos. Score-based MQLs are leads who qualify based on behavioral scoring like white paper downloads or pricing page visits. Hand-raisers typically convert at much higher rates and should be prioritized by sales teams.
How should I decide between investing in inbound or outbound sales efforts?
Analyze conversion rates and close-won rates by lead source. Prioritize hand-raisers and high-intent leads first, then move to outbound prospecting only after those buckets are exhausted. The key is measuring what actually converts to revenue, not just volume metrics like MQL count or activity targets.
What is an attribution window and why does it matter?
An attribution window is the timeframe you use to credit a closed deal back to its original lead source. It should match your full sales and marketing cycle length plus a buffer. It helps resolve conflicts between sales and marketing over credit and reveals which sources truly drive revenue.
Why should close-won rates be consistent across inbound and outbound sources?
If one source has a 10% close-won rate while another has 25%, the problem usually isn't the source; it's that your sales acceptance criteria are too loose for that source. Consistent close rates indicate your pipeline entry criteria are working correctly across all channels.
What is lead bucketing and why is it better than lead scoring?
Lead bucketing segments prospects into clear categories like hand-raisers, high-intent non-qualified, and lower-intent leads based on their actions and intent. It's simpler than numeric scoring for reps to understand and act on, and it reduces disputes over lead quality between sales and marketing.
How do I help junior sales reps perform as efficiently as senior reps?
Publish a rep pack showing the top-performing behaviors of your best reps, including key leading indicators like who they call, what accounts they target, and how many touches they use. This helps junior reps accelerate their ramp without waiting 12 months to figure it out themselves.
SEO meta description
Channing Ferrer shares how to analyze pipeline data to decide whether to invest in inbound or outbound sales. Focus on conversion rates, not MQL volume, to drive revenue.
Target keywords
inbound vs outbound sales strategy
pipeline health analysis
Channing Ferrer HubSpot
MQL conversion rates
lead qualification framework
sales attribution window
RevOps pipeline management
hand-raiser leads
lead bucketing strategy
sales acceptance criteria
SDR outbound strategy
sales cycle length
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Read the full transcript · 62 KB · Channing Ferrer
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome 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. Well, everybody, welcome to RevOps Live number eight. I'm really
EDDIE REYNOLDSexcited to be here with you guys, and we really appreciate you joining, and we hope we can make this a really valuable hour, hour and a half of your time. Our topic today is when to invest in inbound versus outbound, specifically how to analyze your pipeline to determine what's working and where to invest to drive more revenue. We have our guest today, Channing Ferrer. Did I pronounce that correctly, by the way? You did. You did. Nice job. I was so afraid of it from the last time. Anyway, I'm Eddie Reynolds. I'm the founder and CEO of Union Square Consulting. I have Sarah our executive assistant basically producing this event. She will be fielding questions from folks. She'll be letting people into the room. If you've got anything you need, send it in the chat. And we are a revenue operations consulting firm. We work with a number of early and mid-stage startups to help them with their revenue operations. And Channing spent six years running sales operations at HubSpot. Your full title was the VP of sales operations strategy and sales acceleration, which is a mouthful. But to summarize it, you were running sales ops, right?
SPEAKER_07Yep. Yep. Yep. Sales ops plus a couple other things.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAwesome. You were the CEO, CRO at Built-in. You're an LP at Stage 2 Capital and an adjunct professor of Revenue Operations at the Sales Impact Academy. So in other words, you've got a lot of experience in sales ops and revenue operations overall. So I'm excited to dive into this with you.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, let's do it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo here's how we're going to run this. I am going to start by sharing some of my thoughts on this topic. I'm going to turn it over to you, Channing, to share some of your thoughts. And then I'll dive into the interview. And hopefully I don't just ask you all the same questions of all the stuff you just covered in your monologue. And then once I'm done with the interview, we're going to stop recording and we're going to turn this over to the audience. The recording will be posted to our podcast, which is called RevOps Corner. You can access it on Spotify or Apple. And Sarah's going to drop a bunch of information in the chat as well. But when we're done with the interview, we're going to turn off the recording so that you guys in the audience can feel just more comfortable asking whatever questions you have. Maybe it's something a little bit sensitive you don't want shared on the podcast. And so that's totally fine. And in the meantime, would encourage you guys to send those questions in the chat. And then Sarah can, A, let me know when we have enough questions that I can stop talking and turn it over to you guys. And B, she can start calling on you guys so that you can ask your question of Channing and or myself. Anyway, without further ado, I'll dive into this. So there's three things I want to share here. And the first thing I want to share is just about the goal of revenue operations. And so in my mind, the goal of revenue operations is to align sales marketing and customer success and ultimately to drive revenue. And we can't do that without a healthy pipeline. You know, if deals are entering our pipeline that shouldn't be there, if deals are lagging that shouldn't be there, if deals aren't updated, we can't trust our data. And if we can't trust our data, we can't see what's working and what's not. And this is where
EDDIE REYNOLDSwe get conflicts between sales and marketing and sales and CS. We can't make smart investment decisions and we can't make improvements in the business. We don't know what's working in inbound, what's working in outbound, whether we should double down and invest more marketing dollars, hire more people, or if we need to make adjustments because we can't trust our data.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo it ultimately comes down to having a healthy pipeline and being able to analyze the data in that pipeline and what goes into the pipeline in terms of pipeline generation. The second thing I want to cover here is just ultimately about pipeline health and entry criteria. So I would make the case that your pipeline health is ultimately, at least in a major part, about your entry criteria, meaning the criteria that you use it as an organization to determine what deals are allowed to go into your pipeline and what deals are not ready. I think even further to that, you have stage entry criteria, the very clear criteria,
EDDIE REYNOLDSshared definition across the entire organization as to what it takes for a deal to move from stage one to stage two to stage three, and also to stay in your pipeline. And when you have a sales and
EDDIE REYNOLDSmarketing team where all opportunities meet the same criteria to enter pipeline and move to each stage and to stay in that pipeline or be moved to close lost, then you're able to drive a sales process, a methodology, whatever it is your organization subscribes to, and really see that in action in your data. If you think about the questions that you need to ask in your sales process, whatever methodology you subscribe to, those questions should translate into the pipeline that you see in Salesforce or whatever system you use. And this enables you to see both the quantitative and the qualitative metrics
EDDIE REYNOLDSin Salesforce. And then you can start to reverse engineer your entry criteria as time goes on to improve your pipeline health. This, in my mind, is really ultimately what you need in order to align sales and marketing. Otherwise, you've got different targets and different ideas in mind as to what
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou're trying to accomplish. And without that alignment, it's hard to trust your data or do meaningful analysis and see what's working and what's not. The third thing I want to touch on are MQLs and activity targets. In my mind, I think two of the biggest problems that we have in sales and marketing are this focus on MQLs and the focus on outbound activity targets. I think it drives the wrong behavior. And that's a personal opinion. I know it's pretty controversial. Sure, these are leading indicators. Sure, we want marketing generating leads. We want our sales folks to be making calls. But if we put too much focus on that, if we measure people's success in their jobs based on these metrics, if we start to compensate people based on these metrics, then we drive bad behavior. People are going to optimize whatever it is they're incentivized to do. And so if you have a marketer
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhere their only goal is to generate MQLs, they're going to go for the low-hanging fruit. They're going to go for the white paper downloads and the webinar registrations over the higher intent leads that are really going to help us generate revenue. Same thing goes for sales activity. If we're telling salespeople to make 100 calls a day, 200 calls a day, 300 calls a day, and that's the ultimate goal in sales, then they're going to start making calls of much lower quality. And we're going to see conversion rates to real pipeline and closed deals go down. At least that's been my experience over the last almost 20 years that I've been doing
EDDIE REYNOLDSsales. Um, I think we really need to couple those metrics with the ultimate goal, which is revenue and think about which MQLs are actually resulting in real pipeline and closed deals and which sales activities are resulting in real pipeline and closed deals and optimize for both. We need to begin with the end in
EDDIE REYNOLDSmind. Anyway, those are my thoughts and Channing. I'd love to turn it over to you. Feel free to just completely negate me or disagree with me in any way. Um, but I'd love to hear your thoughts before I dive
EDDIE REYNOLDSinto the interview.
CHANNING FERRERSure. Yeah, no, um, I thought those are great points. Those three points are great points. So I think I'm going to take a, um, a slightly different angle. It overlaps a little bit, but slightly different angle to how I think of a pipeline health. And I think when I think of pipeline, I'll start at the very high level. There's really four sources, uh, potential pipeline, depending on your business, these can vary a little bit, but there's going to be the outbound source. That could be an SDR. That could be an AE doing outbound. There's your inbound source, which is typically kind of marketing driven inbound. Um, there is your product led growth source of pipeline, which feeds off of the inbound piece normally, but it's, uh, I put that off to the side because product is ultimately kind of driving that pipeline and pipe creation. And then there's partner and channel as your fourth source. So overall, when we're talking about pipeline health, I'm going to focus a little bit more on the inbound versus outbound components. I think those are the two kind of core components. I'm not spending as much time in the channel because the channel is very nuanced, depending on the company and the industry that you're in and product-led growth is only applicable for some companies as well. So when I look at the, um, a pipeline health as a concept, and I think of how do we improve that pipeline health? And by the way, the reason I love this topic, Eddie, is because I've heard this a lot recently. I've been talking with a lot of CEOs and CROs over the past several weeks and months even, and it comes up, um, multiple times in conversations. And it's because the market we're in today is just changing. It's evolving. And it's really hard to get your hands wrapped around the health of the pipeline when the market is kind of moving and that target is kind of gradually moving. So what do you do to effectively analyze that? I think it really stems with your inbound demand. That's the first starting point. How do you ensure that demand is converting at the rate you would want and expect it to convert? And then what we can dig into, um, the outbound component as well. So when I think of understanding the inbound demand and the health of that inbound demand, the first thing I think of is your MQLs. You get your leads and then your MQLs. And I kind of go through, uh, really about a six step process, um, that I'll put, put together in my head here on how to evaluate that, the pipeline again, starting with MQLs. So that first step is understanding MQL by lead type. So I think it's really important to break down MQLs at a more granular level. MQLs often are referred to the same, same way, but usually there's multiple sources. There's going to be an entry point based off a score. There's an entry point to an MQL based off of someone saying, I want to talk to sales. I call that a hand raiser. And those are very different converting types of MQLs. So you need to look at them by type, make sure you've got all your types clearly broken out. Then look at your conversion rate by each of those types. So if you can not categorize all MQLs, the same convert, and that conversion has got to be from MQL to sales qualified, from sales qualified to sales accepted, from sales accepted to up. By the way, up on forward, you should see the same conversion rates. Like we should be very consistent there. Uh, it's worth looking at, but I'm less concerned with that because usually as long as your reps are, are categorizing and accepting leads in a, in a similar way to Eddie, to your point, they should be, um, then we really want to focus on the front end of that prior to creation, those conversion rates. Then our engagement rates, what are we doing to engage with these leads to help drive that conversion? Are we engaging the same way or are we engaging differently? It's really important to understand how engagement changes. Um, so I'd look at engagement rates and engagement rates are going to be, what's your sequencing? What's your, um, speed to respond? Uh, what are the number of touches that you're having on a lead? Those are kind of the typical engagement rates. Uh, lead scoring is another one I'd look at as 0.4 and lead scoring is going to be, how do you define a qualified lead? Often qualified is done through the scoring. Have they downloaded three white papers? Have they been on the pricing page? And all those sorts of things can lead to a higher lead score, but evaluate that. That's something that often gets kind of pushed aside and not looked at too often. And as the market's moving and changing, you need to really rethink that lead scoring. Some white papers might not be relevant anymore and they don't matter. They shouldn't count the same way that maybe we used to think about them. So again, I think it's really important to actually look at that. The fifth one is the one that gets overlooked all the time and it's the attribution window. And it's really important to understand what's your attribution window for marketing versus sales attribution. What I continually see, saw this at HubSpot. I've seen it at built-in. I've seen it at other companies is, um, a sales rep or an SDR will say, oh no, I created that lead. And marketing says, well, actually it's attributable back to us based on what the data says. And it's, it's a little bit messy as to who should actually get the value of the lead. You can think of a lead's journey. They can engage with the website first, engage with the website. Now an SDR reaches out, um, knowing or unknowing that they engaged on the website. SDR sends them a message, send, ask them to download a white paper. They go and download that white paper. SDR does something else to try to drive them towards a webinar. They go to the webinar. Do you give this credit to marketing or give this credit to the SDR? And that can be a little bit dicey in terms of figuring out, but I think it's really important to understand that attribution window to say back to the first touch, what was the
CHANNING FERRERattributable, uh, who is attributable. And that first touch, I usually put a window of time against that because as you get to be a bigger and bigger company, the first touch could have been five, six, 10 years ago. It's really important to look at the attribution window at the individual
CHANNING FERRERlevel, not at the company level also. And the individual level is really key because people move jobs, people move companies. So you're really trying to drive a lead from a person, uh, not necessarily the overall company. Company's obviously important, but you need to get that person engaged. So that attribution window is really critical and the rules around attribution. And then the sixth step around this is just the outbounding strategy. So it's validating, what are we doing with our outbound approach? Um, what are we doing from an SDR standpoint? Once again, what's our, um, SDR, AE alignment? How do we think about that, that structure? Uh, how are we going, who are we going after, uh, in terms of SDRs or AEs? And then what are the touches we're using? So all in all, I'd say there's a bunch of steps that we can go through here to evaluate. A lot of them are better understanding the conversion rates and the attribution components. And then there's a, there's a final step that just says, let's look at the outbound SDR or sales outbound elements of our pipe creation. If you go through all of those effectively, you can get a really good handle on what's working and what's not working throughout the pipeline. And then from there, you can begin to make some decisions on, should we invest more in marketing? Should we invest more in sales? Should we invest more in SDRs or elsewhere? Um, but I think the first step is really understanding where you're getting value before you make those kind of broad blanket investments. So you can invest the most effectively. That makes a lot of sense. Uh, anything else you
EDDIE REYNOLDSwant to share? Should I dive into questions? Uh, yeah, let's, let's dive into some questions. I've
CHANNING FERRERgot a bunch of other thoughts on it, but let's, let's dig into the questions first. Yeah. And I'll just
EDDIE REYNOLDSsay like, as a side note, I think it was just so interesting and nerve wracking preparing for this interview because you put up a bunch of posts on LinkedIn that were very like detailed and thorough. And I'm just sitting here looking at everything that you shared and also thinking about our past conversation on the podcast. And I'm like, where do I start with my questioning? Like I kind of just want to say, okay, just like lay this all out, just spend the next hour explaining that this to us. And then we'll, uh, we'll just take it from there. But of course that's not going to work. Um, so I did come up with some, some questions here, but I think I want to start by just sort of proposing, um, uh, a case. So when we think about like, what is the point of measuring inbound versus outbound? What's the point of measuring our conversion rates on MQLs? What's the point of measuring our conversion rates on outbound? Um, when I think about our low intent MQLs, when I think about the folks that are not raising their hand, they're a score-based MQL. These are folks that are not going to meet with sales without some, whatever you want to call it, some outbound sales activity, right? So would you
EDDIE REYNOLDSagree with me in saying what we're ultimately trying to do is determine these SDRs and AEs that we have that have the ability to pick up the phone or email or LinkedIn DMs or whatever channel you use, they have to decide where to spend their time. And the organization needs to decide where to spend those sales resources. Is that not part of the ultimate question we're trying to answer here?
SPEAKER_23Yeah, no, I think you're spot on. It's really, how do we operate most efficiently? And when you
CHANNING FERRERunderstand where you can see the most dollars within your pipeline, that's how you operate most efficiently. And that efficiency measure is something, by the way, reps are inherently really good at. They sometimes don't realize how they get to that point, but they know that this source is going to convert better for me. They don't have the data behind that. They just know it because they've worked 30 or 50 of these types of leads and they're typically converting better than these types of leads. So what's interesting is reps inherently are actually pretty good at finding the most efficient route to get to their quota. But what's, and those are, by the way, the more senior reps are pretty good at that. The more junior reps take a while to figure that stuff out. So we as leaders, ops leaders, or even just CRO leaders, we need to help give our reps as much direction as possible. So they actually are operating as efficiently as possible without necessarily spending 12 months trying to figure that out. It's all about shortening the ramp to high productivity. And that's where I think the idea of RevOps, by the way, fits in really well. So we're trying to, again, give the direction to folks. So today with the market shifting around, we're essentially in this, what I consider to be kind of a new era of growth. It's no longer grow at all costs. It's grow smarter. And as we think about growing smarter, it's all about finding efficiencies throughout our funnel and throughout our pipeline. And that's going to be where we point our teams so that they can find the highest converting opportunities. And again, as the market evolves, that can change. The answer to that question can change fairly quickly.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I think that that's such an important point. When I started at Salesforce as an AE, I think I had probably 10 years of sales experience at that point, but I'd never really worked in SaaS. I spent a year for a startup, but discounting that, I hadn't had this full B2B SaaS experience, even though I had a lot of sales experience. And I came in the door and I thought, oh, wow, like we've got all these leads. People are downloading white papers. They must be super interested in talking
EDDIE REYNOLDSto us. And to your point, I made a bunch of calls down that list and then realized, wow,
EDDIE REYNOLDSlike these people have absolutely zero interest in talking to us. And this is not only that, but they're oftentimes not the right company, not the right individuals. And it takes so much time. Oftentimes it's not even the right contact information. And so it takes so much time to
EDDIE REYNOLDSsift through that noise to find the right person to call. And then you call them and their interest is so low that you realize just intuitively, wow, I might be better off to just have a highly targeted
EDDIE REYNOLDSoutbound list, but it can take time to figure that out. And so, and I'm not putting that on Salesforce. They weren't calling those MQLs. It's just data we had in the system, but equally they would do a really great job of analyzing their data and coming to reps and saying, Hey guys, like this is what's working. Here's like literally the sick code and NIAX codes of the companies that buy from us most and the ones that don't. And here's what it looks like in your patch and the amount of time that can be saved by doing those kinds of things, especially if you are a proficient rev ops person and you're able to do that across your entire sales team, as opposed to each rep trying to figure that on their own. I think that really combines the best of both worlds. Cause you're right. Reps do understand this intuitively, but how much time does it take for them to figure that out?
CHANNING FERRERRight? Yeah, exactly. And I think we all, we all love KPIs. We all have to look at KPIs and leading indicators. And as a leadership team collectively kind of rev ops or revenue leadership team, we love KPIs. Reps don't really typically think of their day on a KPI or leading indicator basis. But the reality is in the back of their mind, that's actually how they're operating because they know that this lead is the leading indicator. It's a, it's a good metric of success for me. So I'm going to work this most effectively. One thing that I'll say is I love the idea of a lot of data and it's sales at HubSpot. We're a pretty big sales ops team and we would provide KPIs and leading indicators and metrics to all of our teams, our SDR teams, our AE teams telling them, here's kind of where to go and what to do. But again, not everyone has probably the resources that I had at HubSpot. So here's a little, a little tip for everyone who doesn't necessarily have that size of an ops team available is build a set of KPIs for your, um, SDRs and for your AEs that are leading indicators of pipe creation. And that's going to be, um, is it volume based, which by the way, I don't think it is, but if it's volume based, then, you know, measure the volume, the number of touches, is it, um, number of engagements in LinkedIn or something like that. You can look for, you know, what are those kinds of key metrics? And that's a little bit of work to figure those out. There's a few things out there that are always key indicators of success. And just look at your best reps. What are they doing? And then build a rep pack and a rep pack is going to show here's what those tenured reps are doing. And, you know, listing out the five KPIs yourself and then publish that rep pack to the, to the sales order. And by publishing the rep pack, the other reps who are younger or newer, we'll go and follow what the best reps are doing. And those look at that rep pack. We'll call up those reps sometimes and ask them and it'll naturally, um, allow those more junior reps to accelerate in their ramp time and to be much more efficient. And so you can kind of bypass some of the ops work by just publishing a rep pack to the sales order.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's great. And, um, you know, I left Salesforce like seven years ago. So I think you guys are a lot further ahead of the curve versus, uh, what I last saw, but I saw similar things. Um, I know, for example, our sales team had a single dashboard that everybody looked at and it had a lot of those leading and lagging indicators on them. And one of the things that I think was like the starkest sort of slap in the face for a lot of, uh, especially, you know, maybe more junior people that came into the organization was seeing calls to power. So what you would see is that the reps that were performing
EDDIE REYNOLDSweren't necessarily logging the most activity, but they were building the most pipeline in dollars, maybe not even in numbers. They were doing these big strategic deals and this is how they were crushing their number versus the reps that were underperforming oftentimes had a much higher level of call volume. They may even be working more deals, but they were smaller transactional deals. And one of the leading indicators of this was what they called call to power, where when you'd log an activity in Salesforce, they would literally have a field in there to separate. Are you calling to an executive decision maker, or are you calling to somebody else in the organization? And you would inevitably see that like the underperforming reps, the, the new, the new folks, they just weren't comfortable calling executives. And so they weren't able to get these trends, like these transformational strategic deals. And so they would spend so much time and effort, like hammering away these small deals and not getting to their number. And it would be staring you right in the face on this dashboard. And so inevitably most of these folks, if they were able to, would kind of work up the courage and say,
EDDIE REYNOLDSokay, I've got to figure out how to call and do executives because I'm seeing that this is exactly what's working for the top performers.
SPEAKER_31Yeah, yeah, exactly.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, anyway, let's dive back into MQL. So I want to touch on, not touch on, I want to dive deeper into this hand raiser versus score, because I see this a lot. Maybe I'll start by just asking if you could expand on that a little bit. And if you can't, I'll ask some more specific questions.
CHANNING FERRERYeah, definitely. And I think I'll start with kind of the basics, just to make sure we're all aligned on the difference there. So a hand raiser is, as I define it, a hand raiser is someone saying, I want to talk to sales now. They're raising their hand, in essence, and they're clicking on a button somewhere, probably on the website saying, talk to sales, or they're booking a meeting with a rep, or they're in the product and a free trial. And they've said, I want to do X as a follow-on. So they need to talk to someone. So it's very clear that they're engaged and they're ready in a buying kind of mindset. So that's your hand raiser type of MQL. And there's a lot of different types of those. And you should look at each type, because they will convert differently each type. But those typically have a much higher conversion rate than in close one rate, than what we'll categorize as the score-based MQLs. And by the way, it helps out, I didn't call anything an MQL if it was score-based, because we didn't have a high enough conversion rate. We had a conversion rate threshold that we'd use, and we would think of things as roughly over 10%. And that would vary a little bit depending on source and all, but roughly over 10%, we would move it into the MQL bucket. But if it was below that 10% threshold roughly, we would not categorize it as an MQL. It was just a pure lead. And reps could work those leads, we would distribute those leads differently. So score-based MQLs are interesting, and they're worth putting to reps. But I would just be very thoughtful of how does that score align the close one conversion, not just conversion to sales qualified, but a full-on conversion to close one. And do you want reps to spend time? Because what I've found often, and I've seen this at a few companies, is it's very easy. And by the way, I have a great relationship with marketing, but I'll disk marketing for a moment. It's very easy for marketing to juice their number of MQLs by adjusting the score. And you can just tweak that score, and great, now we've got more MQLs for the sales team. You complained we're getting enough, now we're giving you more. By the way, that's not always the right thing. Do we want our sales reps to be spending time on bad leads? No, we actually don't really. So it's really important to understand, are we sending enough quality over to the sales rep? And then the other things, the other leads that aren't necessarily high quality and probably I would define through conversion to close one, what are we doing to nurture them? And how do we effectively nurture those leads? And again, that can vary a little in approach, but I think it's really important to understand those things. One last comment on this is, as you look at that score, and I would just be thoughtful of include as much information as you can. There's a lot of great tools out there that help with scoring. Some of the CRMs have built-in or marketing automation tools have built-in scoring as well. But I would definitely work with marketing, marketing ops on this, but include as much as you can in there. I've found certain things to be oddly important on the scoring. For example, if they've revisited the pricing page more than three times, we saw a much higher probability that close one versus someone who'd never been on the pricing page at all. So there's little things like that that you might think, ah, they're just on the pricing page. That was a much better indicator of a good lead than the download of a white paper for us. You can download
CHANNING FERRERlike multiple white papers. Pricing page was a key driver.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, that's an indication that people might want to buy. Like, well, otherwise, why would you care about the price? But help me understand this and apologies because I didn't. So in case anyone else didn't either, what you were talking about with the close rate. So you're saying instead of using a score, you're using the close rate. But are you doing that retroactively to say that like this group of
EDDIE REYNOLDSleads are considered MQLs because the close rate was over 10%? Like, how did you do that?
CHANNING FERRERYeah. So I would have MQLs were more hand raisers. We actually decided about halfway through my tenure there to create purely MQL equals hand raisers. Those two things are the same because we had so many hand raisers. So we think of hand raisers slash MQL as one bucket. Then we had these high quality kind of high intent leads that were not MQLs, but we'd work those a little differently. So that was our second bucket. And then we'd have all other leads really as kind of our third bucket. And then there was, by the way, free signups was our fourth bucket, which we didn't even touch. So we had four different buckets of how we categorized our leads and the scoring. We tried implementing scoring. We actually backed off of it multiple times because we found the reps didn't believe it. The reps liked the bucketing concept better than the scoring. So they enjoyed looking at the scoring and very rep by rep, but the bucketing was a lot easier for us to message to people and the score. Sometimes they wouldn't understand, well, what does a score of 32 mean in relation to this other score of 37? You know, I'm just pulling random numbers here, but they couldn't really grasp how to differentiate some of the scores. And if we set thresholds for the scores, it was still a little bit kind of confusing. And they would question it because they would see a lead that had a score of 32 become a much better lead than this other lead that was 37. And that might've been just a one-off scenario, but they saw that and that would stick in their minds. They became skeptical of the score. The bucketing was a lot easier because we'd say, on average, these things, these leads that fit into bucket two or bucket three, this is what happens. And it was just, again, we got a lot more trust with the reps and move to a bucketing approach from a scoring approach. Again, scoring essentially drove the bucketing. Um, but that was, that was kind of how I thought of it is, uh, scoring set in the background. Bucketing was more upfront and center for the rep. I really love that. I think that goes
EDDIE REYNOLDShand in hand with a lot of folks that are sort of saying, like saying, you know, the MQL is dead. If you look at like refined labs and Chris Walker, he's constantly talking about his like hero pipeline, which I think it stands for high intent, something opportunities. Um, and he's making the argument that it should convert at 25%. I think he's just picking a round number. That sounds good in marketing content. You know, I see what you're saying with the 10%, but I think ultimately the, you know, the battle he's trying to fight against is to say, well, if you're converting at 0.1%, like you're wasting everybody's time. Um, and really focusing marketing's effort on how do we get more hand raisers, but to the point we made earlier saying, okay, like when we've exhausted all of that, who should salespeople be calling first? And it sounds like if I'm understanding you, you're saying we've got these three other buckets and then kind of decide, you know, does it make sense to tap into one of these buckets or should I just go into my outbound?
SPEAKER_23Exactly. That's exactly the question. And we would give them the sequencing on the bucket.
CHANNING FERRERSay, always work your hand raisers first. Next from there, work these high intent leads, which often people might call them QLs. We call them high intent. You work your high intent leads next. And those two were, um, definitely the priority. After that outbound was probably the next priority. We wouldn't dictate after that. It was really the first two buckets, uh, were the most important, but after that, it's kind of up to their, their discretion. And when we found those reps felt like the next most valuable action for them to take was outbound oriented actions. And because they felt like they could pick and choose much more easily when doing that versus working through just a large volume of low quality. Um, so, and that was, that was fine. We gave them that choice to make that
CHANNING FERRERdiscretion call. So then I assume that you're then analyzing those metrics and you're saying, okay,
EDDIE REYNOLDSso we take that, um, that bucket of folks that hit the pricing page three times. That's your second bucket, right? And then you have your third bucket of folks that, you know, have just done a bunch of different things on the website and have had a score. And you're looking at the conversion rate of each of those buckets. And you're saying that the second bucket with the people that hit the pricing page three times, each of those contexts is converting into a qualified sales opportunity more than the people that we have just in our outbound sequences. Yeah. And that's what we would, we would look at that.
CHANNING FERRERBut again, we would let the sales jobs make that kind of final call. The prospect was downloading a white paper and they downloaded two or three white papers that didn't necessarily lead to a lot of, uh, closed one business and the reps knew that. And by the way, it helps out. We got a lot of content out there too. So you'd get a lot of these folks who are downloading basic content, but they weren't actually looking to purchase. So reps would steer away from that. And what would be nice though, is if the rep could say, here's my outbound list and I've got a hundred accounts I'm going after maybe right now. And let me see on that outbound list that any of them are doing anything from an inbound perspective as well. And they can map those two things together and then proactively reach out. And this is why, by the way, attribution gets really funky because is that if we create an opportunity out of that lead, is that due to the rep reaching out or is that due to the white paper that was downloaded. And it doesn't really matter because we all should be targeting revenue in the end game marketing and sales. And I think the best marketing teams fully understand that and work towards that. Um, but you know, if you decide how do we invest more, I kind of don't care too much. I've always said on that third bucket. And because we need both, you need to have the outbound effort and you need to have a little bit of the inbound interest to kind of create the right marriage for that third bucket. But the second bucket, which is the high intent, I actually call them Hinkle's high intent, non-qualified leads, the Hinkle's and the hand raiser bucket first two buckets. Those are the really important ones. And we wanted to maximize the volume there from the
CHANNING FERRERmarketing standpoint. Now, before we move on to this topic of these, these, uh, high intent
EDDIE REYNOLDShand raisers, um, what are your thoughts on, cause it sounds like you're talking about these folks raising their hands saying, I want a meeting, but the meeting is not booked. So sales has to reach out to find a time. What are your thoughts on, you know, using Calendly or Chili Piper or what have you, instead of having the rep reach out? Yeah. So, uh, we, what we called it was
CHANNING FERRERauto prospector. So we would run our auto prospector, which was essentially that leveraging, we had a HubSpot version, but, um, same thing, Calendly, Chili Pepper, uh, asking to book a time. And we ran auto prospector against our high intent, non-qualified and against the, um, uh, the MQ, the hand raisers that reached out, but then never ended up booking the meeting. So they could, they could essentially ask for a meeting. We would respond to try to get that meeting scheduled and then they would fall off. So we'd run that same thing. Um, or they wouldn't show me before the meeting. So, um, we would do that. But one tricky thing there I always found was reps would also send their own emails. So in both cases, so the rep sees this high intent, not qualified prospectors on the pricing page five times over the past three days, uh, doing, you know, downloading white papers also clearly have some interest and all in a very short window of time. So auto prospector kicks in, we start sending emails to this prospect saying, Hey, we saw you're interested. Can you, you know, can we schedule time? Then the rep gets impatient and the rep sends another email following up on that auto prospector email that would occur. Now the auto prospector isn't aware of that manual email that goes out. So it hasn't sequenced that sends a follow-up email the next day. And then the rep sends another follow-up email, forgetting about the, you know, the auto committed email. So you create a lot of messiness. So we, um, a couple of things that we did there is one, we allowed reps to turn off auto prospector if they wanted to. So we gave them that discretion to say, if you want to override and do the work yourself, you're welcome to, but if you don't turn it off, don't send an email. And we would monitor that to make sure they weren't creating confusion for the, for the buyer ultimately. Um, but some of the better reps would select to turn it off. About 20% of the reps would turn off the auto prospector because they preferred to send their own customized emails themselves. I will say we, we examined the data and we didn't see one approach to be better than the other. The reps that were manually sending it, we're getting about the same sort of meetings booked and closed one as the auto prospector was. Um, but we still gave them
CHANNING FERRERthat option because we didn't want to, frankly, we didn't want to fight with the best reps.
EDDIE REYNOLDSInteresting. Uh, and fair enough. I think what I meant with my question though, was having, you know, a widget on the website where they could just pay the time and book the meeting right there, as opposed to like requesting a meeting. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I want a little tangent with
CHANNING FERRERmy auto prospector. That's okay. It was fascinating. I liked it. I, I'm not the guy that implements
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe tools here. You need square consulting. So I'm like, ah, shoot. Yeah, of course. HubSpot has one of those solutions. And like, of course, like Calendly and Chili Piper has a way to do this, like auto follow-up. And I'm like, I wasn't even thinking about that.
SPEAKER_36Yeah. Yeah. No. So, um, I think the book of meeting, um, uh, is great. The website kind of,
CHANNING FERRERyou can go on and say, all right, I want to, I want to book a meeting calendar. Um, I think it's a great option. You have to make sure that you have a mechanism to fill those meetings, which can get very complicated on the backend. Uh, so if you say, I want to book a meeting, but then are you on a rotator basis? Maybe like, who's going to take that meeting? And is it just one rep? It's one rep is a lot easier because you can link to their calendar. And like, I can do that on my own personal website and it's no problem. But once I have five reps on my team, well, then I need to make sure I've got equitable distribution of the meetings that are being booked. And if one rep decides to take vacation, let's say, but a meeting gets booked for that rep, how do I pull that rep out? Now you can pull people out of rotators and other tools and systems can work well for that, but it can get rather complicated. Um, we ended up having a person that would manually move the meetings around to, uh, to solve for some of the complication we ran into.
CHANNING FERRERI love the idea of it. It's just the backend gets a little messy sometimes. Yeah. It's so funny. Like we have the same problem internally. So we have calendly on our website
EDDIE REYNOLDSand it wasn't working. Cause like I have my calendar full at times. So I'm like, all right, I'll throw our head of delivery on there. But then it's like, he's not really responsible for sales. That's my job. So then I'm like, okay, I'll just move stuff around and I'll just steal the meeting from him. Um, and then we make it work, but it's like, okay, if for some reason I can't make the meeting, he can cover me. Um, but it's, it's just like two people here. It's pretty inefficient.
SPEAKER_23Right. Right. I think the, um, the better approach when you can do it is actually chat.
CHANNING FERRERSo chat, you can build up chat bots that'll automate a bunch of stuff. And I'm not saying necessarily for you and your team, but just in general, when you've got that kind of, let's say smaller size sales team, and you're trying to allow for book of meetings, but if you have a big enough team, because it usually has to be of a certain size, you can also have maybe, you know, a BDR or someone junior here to help you manage the chat experience. And you can push people to chat rather than the book now on the website. And when they go to chat, they can actually go right into that automated sequence of chats and then move to a person once
CHANNING FERRERthey're ready. Say, all right, I want to actually book a meeting. You can either, you know, surface calendar link if you wanted to, but I would probably push them to a person before surfacing the calendar link. And that's what we did at HubSpot is we would have, um, the system respond on certain chats
CHANNING FERRERafter about three engagements. Usually that's about as deep as we go on what was automated. It would usually go to a person, that person then would ask them if they wanted to book a meeting and then manually schedule the meeting via chat with them on the spot. And we found that to work fairly well. People like chat. It's a very non-aggressive way to engage. They can always stop chatting, so they don't feel like they're stuck on a phone call, let's say. And, um, it also feels, um, very simple to do. So, and it's real time, by the way, as well, of course. So we just found chat to be a really good way to engage with prospects, uh, in a very simple way and to lead to the book of
CHANNING FERRERmeetings or meeting book that we wanted. I really love that. I'm a huge advocate of chat and we,
EDDIE REYNOLDSunfortunately, don't have the resources to do it for our own team. Our clients are a different story, of course, but like my personal experience and I'll go off on a tangent for a moment in LinkedIn is, you know, LinkedIn is a chat bot, right? And it is amazing to me how many meetings I can book and also how many meetings I don't book. Cause I don't want those meetings based on the conversations that we have in chat. And I'll see people that will try to prospect into me and they'll send this three paragraph long, like email type message. And it just, first of all, it doesn't even show up in the window. And secondly, it's just like, I don't want that. And when I'm doing my own prospecting, I'll go and send like a one or two sentence message. I mean, that's probably how you and I originally got connected and it just creates this natural conversation. And then it's just so easy to like translate that into a meeting once you're talking to somebody. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
SPEAKER_23It's so much simpler. I love chat too. And it's just a matter of, I want to scale it often. And how
CHANNING FERRERdo you do that with small, really small businesses that can be, can be tricky, but once you get to, you know, five sales reps, one BDR, like that's all you kind of need to be able to manage chat. You don't have to have chat available 24/7. It can be just nine to five. People are very
CHANNING FERRERrespective of that I've found. Yeah. Any experience with, I've seen a
EDDIE REYNOLDSlot of chatbots where I've gone into websites and there's just nobody manning it. And so ultimately it's just the AI and then it'll just say like, give me your email so that I can have somebody reach out to you. Any thoughts on that? Yeah. So we, um, again, at HubSpot,
CHANNING FERRERwe had a weekend, we didn't cover the weekends. So we left them available. We didn't want to ask our, the team I ran to manage it over the weekend. Um, because we get a lot of chats, but it wasn't, we tried it out for a couple months and we weren't getting a lot of meetings booked coming out of the weekends. So we did have that automated process and we had a sample size of about, I think it was about two or three months worth of weekends, um, for how many meetings we were getting booked. And then we looked at when we asked people submit their email and we'd follow up with them on Monday to book a meeting. Um, we had a slight drop off, but it wasn't that noticeable actually. People were still interested in and respectful of the weekends, you know, not working on the weekends. Um, so we still were about 80% of the people that submitted their emails. We get a response back on and we're able to book the meetings. Uh, so I think it works, you know, you see a little bit of a drop off versus obviously the immediacy of booking up right now. Everyone loves. Um, so you'll move a little bit,
CHANNING FERRERbut I think it's a worthwhile approach. Yeah. And if nothing else I've seen,
EDDIE REYNOLDSthese folks have been successful in capturing my email address. And so at least they're one step, one step further down the road. Um, well, cool. This is fun so far. I haven't even gotten to my first question. This is just notes from what you said in your monologue. Um, and I'm only on the first bullet point there. Um, but, uh, the next place I wanted to go to a quick question about close rates. So I was surprised to hear you say that if I understood you, that the close rates from all of these different channels or buckets should be the same. Um, and when I always think about this, I think like, you know, if we get a referral, which is a big part of our business, um, the close rate is super high. It's like 50%. Um, and usually we're not competing against anybody. And that's kind of like sort of the stereotype of referrals. Um, and I don't know if referrals are just the one exception, but I'm just curious, uh, if you could expand on what you were saying
EDDIE REYNOLDSwith the close rates being the same across different channels. Yeah. Yeah. So I think
SPEAKER_36referrals are an outlier to be fair. And definitely it's a good call out referrals are going to have a
CHANNING FERRERhigher close rate all the time. Um, what I was thinking of is more of the outbound source lead flow versus the inbound source lead flow versus even channel source lead flow. Once you get to op creation, you should have a set, um, clearly set up parameters for operation. And those parameters should be fairly strict. So once you create an op, you should be seeing that up close at roughly 25% of the times is my take on it. And that might even increase the 30, 35%, depending on the industry and, and the value profit can bring. Um, but it should be fairly consistent across all, all the channels. So if you're finding, and it's worth experimenting and looking at this, if you're finding that a certain lead source is converting only like a 10% up to close one, the problem isn't that lead source. The problem is the criteria and parameters you've set up and given the sales for why they created that. That should have never been a sales accepted lead probably in the get go because we're accepting too many potential opportunities that aren't, aren't going to close. So I, again, my take here is make sure the sales team is actually using a very consistent set of criteria such that you're fairly strict. Um, when it becomes an op, you've got a high probability of turning that into a closed one deal with, again, a few outliers like referrals.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I couldn't agree with that more. That's perfectly in line with what I was thinking. And I think the delta is like the referrals at 50% and the other deal is at 25% because you might be competing against, you know, competitors or what have you, but they've all reached this criteria, you know, that they have, if we go back to band budget authority, need timeline or med pick medic, et cetera, whatever methodology you use, we've got this very clearly defined entry criteria for our pipeline. That's his deal needs to meet X, Y, Z. And if it doesn't, that's okay. But we just have
EDDIE REYNOLDSmore followup to do before we consider that pipeline. Right. Yep. Yep. Exactly. Um, so
EDDIE REYNOLDSlet's dive into outbound and talk about engagement. Here's another question I have. If we're trying to compare apples to apples, you have an inbound lead that comes in, let's say it's a, um, not a hand raiser, but in your example, the person that hits the website, uh, pricing page three times, or maybe it's the other, uh, the third bucket that's not as, not as, um, uh, not as high intent. And then you compare that to outbound and your experience at HubSpot. Are you guys putting in the same level of effort to call down on each of those contacts? Because I'm thinking about this from a resourcing perspective. And if I got to make twice as many calls to one group versus the other, that does change
EDDIE REYNOLDShow I look at conversion rates. Yeah. Um, we leveraged the auto prospector concepts a fair
CHANNING FERRERamount for the, the lower end buckets. So a lot of those lower leads we would put through a bit of sequence, um, giving them an opportunity to opt out. And in some cases, again, the free signups, like I said, we wouldn't even touch those. We would just let them go through more of an education process, not nothing sales oriented at all. So, uh, we wouldn't encourage our sales team to reach out to just the leads, the raw leads, and we'd auto prospect them and give them some nurture and notification, but that was entirely done through marketing. And then again, sales, we kind of pick and choose of those that they want to go after anymore, more aggressively. So I'd say the level of effort from the sales team was actually very low and less that they selected to go outbound against them. And when we thought of those leads, they weren't ready to engage yet with us. So if a sales that wanted to go after them, it really was more of an outbound motion in that sense. And that's okay. They can pick and choose those, but it wasn't a recommended path.
EDDIE REYNOLDSGot it. Yeah. That, I think that makes perfect sense. And so ultimately what you're just saying is, is like, unless they're high intent, you're just going outbound. Um, did you guys ever, or do you, uh, or would you consider trying to combine that data? Like, I think this is where I always get confused in that we've got this bucket of, of human beings over here that are leads, MQLs, whatever we call them. And we have this other bucket of people that we downloaded off of like zoom info and these buckets overlap with each other. Right? So if I've got like this CXO at my like perfect ideal customer and I've got another person just like them and they just downloaded a white paper, should I prioritize that person to my outbound over the person that didn't download a white paper?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that's a, it's a great call. And it's a good point that, um, as we think about leads,
CHANNING FERRERyou can look at leads through the contact, the individual person lens or through the company lens, and you actually need to look at them through both. And it's something we didn't touch on yet, but I think when you measure, uh, number of leads and any sort of volume measurement, you need to look at both of those things because the number of companies is usually going to be slightly lower than the number of contacts out there. But it's really important to understand how those two are marrying up because ideally, especially if you're selling into enterprise, you need to be multi-threading and you need to be generating lead flow from multiple sources, ideally within one company. So multiple people that you want to be engaging and touching. Um, we would encourage folks to go more senior if you can. So you've got the junior person who maybe reached out, engage with them, but if you also have a senior person that downloaded a white paper, they're only a lead and you got the junior person who's maybe a hand raiser or a high intent lead, um, engage of course with that high intent or hand raise, but then also reach out to the other one and mention the fact that you're having a conversation. And so that kind of multi-threading approach really did work fairly well. Uh, we found.
CHANNING FERRERYeah. I couldn't agree with that more. And I mean, when I was at Salesforce,
EDDIE REYNOLDSI was just selling into S and B granted some of these companies had like a hundred million in venture capital and like 200 employees, which I find it hilarious that you consider that a small business, but, um, needless to say it wasn't enterprise, but at least the solution that, that Salesforce offers, I mean, there's at least six to eight contacts in every company that we're relevant to go to. And you could probably expand on it even further. Uh, and with HubSpot, you know, trying to own the world as well, I have to imagine that, uh, it's the same case for you guys. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, as a buyer of a product, as a CRO, uh, I was very comfortable
CHANNING FERRERwith that. If I knew that my director of RevOps was looking at a product, he may have mentioned it to
CHANNING FERRERme in our one-on-one or something. Um, and, or maybe not have even, and then I got an email from, uh, you know, a sales rep who I didn't know saying, Hey, we saw that your director of RevOps did this or is engaged with us here. Just wanted to give you a heads up. They're not asking for my time. They're just kind of getting on my radar. I was open to that. I wasn't giving them anything back yet, but now all of a sudden I know this person. I've gotten the product name in my head. I've got the person's name in my head and a couple of weeks later I might engage with them. And that's great. Now they've already got some recognition of who they are. So I think as a buyer of this, I actually was very receptive to it. And thus I would push my team to do the same thing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I totally agree with that. Like that's been my experience, both selling and buying. Um, all right. So let's go here. I think we touched on lead scoring a fair bit. Um, but I guess, um, no, I think you answered my question. So I'm going to move on to attribution window. So let's talk about that a little bit more. And you touched on it a little bit about how, you know, what do we do if both sales and marketing, you know, hit that prospect? Um, can you expand on that a little bit on how you think about the window of time that you want to measure attribution and what you do if both sales and marketing, um, hit that prospect in that window?
SPEAKER_36Yeah. So the first thing when I think of the attribution window, I try to marry it back to the sales cycle length and that sales cycle length isn't, um, it's really the sales and
CHANNING FERRERmarketing cycle length, I should say, because there's the sales cycle length, which when the op gets created in HubSpot or in Salesforce, that to close one, that might be 60 days, let's call it. But then there's this also nurture cycle that's going to happen prior to operation. And that nurture cycle might be another 60 days. So you have to look at kind of both of those. That's your full cycle window. And when you think of your attribution window, that's the window of time you should be using to define the attribution window. By the way, the attribution window should be slightly longer than that to give a little bit of extra buffer on the side. So if you've got a nurture marketing, nurture cycle, 60 days, a, um, an opt to close one cycle, 60 days, now I've got 120 day full cycle. I might do a attribution window of 180 days on something like that to give, again, a little bit of buffer on the end. So now I've got a six month attribution window for leads. So I'd go back to the first touch within that six months and say who had that first touch. And then that's where I'll give attribution too. Now, what I'll look at also though, is what was that first touch? So if the first touch or first engagement, it's not first touch, I'm sorry, first engagement was a hand raiser. That's very clearly marketing attributable. If the first engagement was a download of a white paper, but there never was a hand raise that occurred, that's okay. But that actually needs to be kind of jointly attributable. And we're going to give marketing attribution, but we kind of, I would tag those as joint attribution as well. So you've got very clear marketing attribution. You've got marketing slash SDR
CHANNING FERRERattribution, which I'll put into the marketing bucket, but I'd break it into a separate component in there. So we know, and then you've got first touched SDR or AE, and that one's very clear.
CHANNING FERRERSo the middle bucket is really interesting bucket because the two side buckets were very easy to either with an outreach to them, or they did a hand raise with us. That middle bucket is often where a lot of leads land. And that's a really important middle bucket. And it's where the marriage of sales and marketing needs to work most effectively together. But you do need both of them. If you try to think of that middle bucket as purely attributable to marketing, it won't move. You'll lose some of the value. It'll be a leaky bucket, essentially. If you try to think of SDRs and sales reps generating all the value in that middle bucket, you also aren't going to get there because you didn't have that first touch back from marketing. Marketing kind of got some level of interest. So when I look at those three buckets, and I think of that middle bucket, I always try to size how big that middle bucket is. And then we can make some investment decisions depending on those three different buckets that are out there.
SPEAKER_18Very interesting. How do you determine the nurture cycle? Mike Barrett: Yeah. So ideally with your marketing attribution tool, we were able to do this with
CHANNING FERRERHubSpot. We could go back and see what was the original first touch to op creation. We just look at it in aggregate. We'd have a lot of prospects. We could see first touch to op creation and we could see that window. Usually you can do that through your CRM/marketing automation tool, or you can throw the data into a BI Tableau or some Snowflake database with Looker sitting on it and pull that data.
SPEAKER_54I just meant like, how do you define it? Is it every single opportunity that you have in your pipeline
EDDIE REYNOLDSgoing back to the first touch? Or are you saying like, because you can imagine a scenario where you have a short sales cycle, but somebody, you first touched them two years ago. Mike Barrett: Yeah. No, great point. So yeah, it's a great point. I actually would, we would have that
CHANNING FERRERnurture cycle, but we'd actually end it. So in other words, we would say you can have an attribution window of 180 days. And let's pretend 60 and 60, like I mentioned, in terms of nurture and sales cycle. But when I tried to determine that nurture cycle, I would only look at stuff that was knowing to get my sales cycle at 60 days. I would only look at stuff going back about two years. I wouldn't bother looking beyond that window. So I'd have kind of a cutoff because there was plenty of companies, prospects that had looked at us five, six years ago, hadn't looked at us for three years, and then came back again and looked at us. And I wouldn't, I would ignore the stuff from the five, six years ago. So ignore anything prior to two years ago, and just look at the past two years. And then that would, within that two year window, I can determine with the nurture cycle
CHANNING FERRERfor that subset of engaged prospects. Mike Barrett: Okay. Very interesting. Well, I want to be sensitive to time
EDDIE REYNOLDShere and turn this over to our audience. At some point, I still have like a million questions. Is there anything specific that I didn't touch on that you wanted me to touch on here? No, I think we hit on some good stuff. Let's see what the audience has. And then
SPEAKER_23if we have any other time, we can hit on anything else as well. Mike Barrett: Okay. Awesome. Well, for the purposes of the podcast, I'll do our first wrap
EDDIE REYNOLDSup. And so Channing, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you to our audience for joining us. And again, you guys can check us out on the podcast.
