Renee Cohen on this episode
Renee Cohen, Vice President of Marketing and Operating Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, brings deep expertise in B2B SaaS marketing and revenue operations strategy. Her background spans enterprise search platforms like Lucidworks, and her current role positions her to advise 200+ portfolio companies on scaling revenue efficiency. She is the principal researcher behind Norwest's 2023 B2B Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report, which surveyed portfolio companies across venture and growth equity to understand benchmarking, lead generation, and sales execution in today's market.
The core insight is that marketing organizations still rely on MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) metrics despite years of industry critique, but they should instead combine owned intent data, account-level engagement signals, and high-intent inbound leads to create unified target account lists for coordinated outbound campaigns. The traditional MQL definition remains arbitrary and incentivizes low-quality lead volume over genuine buyer interest.
The deeper reframe is that most inbound leads fall somewhere between true hand raisers and pure outbound prospects. By layering website engagement, pricing page visits, LinkedIn ad interaction, multi-contact account activity, and firmographic data, teams can score accounts rather than individuals. This shifts the conversation from cold-calling content downloaders to strategic, high-touch outbound directed at warm accounts showing real momentum.
The episode covers how to build this account score framework using existing martech tools, why benchmarking matters less than baseline measurement against your own data, the optimal routing of inbound leads to senior salespeople rather than SDRs, and how AEs and SDRs should collaborate on joint prospecting within defined territories.
What we cover in this episode
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2:50
The case for benchmarking Why Norwest created its 2023 B2B Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report and how portfolio companies use it to calibrate spending and KPI targets.
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6:45
Redefining the MQL MQL definitions remain arbitrary and behavioral. Marketing teams incentivize lead volume over quality by controlling their own scoring criteria and thresholds.
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10:53
The lead scoring problem Proprietary lead scores combine firmographic and behavioral signals in subjective ways. There is little correlation between an MQL threshold and actual conversion rates or sales interest.
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15:30
Account-level intent signals Shift from measuring MQLs as individuals to analyzing multiple contacts per account, pricing page traffic, and LinkedIn ad engagement at the account level to inform warm outbound lists.
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21:31
Owned intent data activation Companies have untapped owned intent data available in HubSpot, Google Analytics, and LinkedIn Ads Manager without purchasing external intent tools like Bambora or Sixth Sense.
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28:02
Cost per opportunity and CAC Benchmarking conversion rates and CAC is less useful than modeling what improvement in your own baseline would mean to revenue. Different selling motions and company stages require different targets.
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32:15
Building warm target account lists Combine anonymous website visits, multi-contact engagement, pricing page behavior, and LinkedIn ad interaction to score and prioritize accounts for coordinated sales and marketing outreach.
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41:05
Routing inbound to AEs True hand-raisers and high-intent demo requests should route to the most senior relevant person, not to SDRs, to improve customer experience and close rates on warm inbound leads.
The lines worth sharing
It's so ironic that there have been headlines about the death of the MQL for five or six years, yet companies still report it as their top KPI.
Renee Cohen · 6:45
When you have a sales target to hit and you control the definition of an MQL, the likelihood that you are going to hit that thousand MQLs is essentially 100%.
Eddie Reynolds · 10:53
Most of what companies call inbound leads should be looked at an account level to inform the outbound call strategy.
Renee Cohen · 15:30
Companies absolutely should not be purchasing any intent tools until they start to measure and make decisions based on their own owned intent data.
Renee Cohen · 32:15
Common questions from this episode
Is the MQL still relevant in B2B SaaS marketing?
Yes, but it needs redefinition. Most companies still use arbitrary lead scoring based on form fills and page clicks. The real opportunity is to focus on true hand-raisers requesting demos and combine individual inbound signals with account-level intent data for warm outbound targeting.
What is owned intent data and how do I activate it?
Owned intent data includes anonymous website visits, pricing page traffic, LinkedIn ad engagement, and multi-contact account activity. Most companies can measure this using existing tools like HubSpot, Google Analytics, and LinkedIn Ads Manager without purchasing external intent platforms.
How should I build a target account list for outbound calling?
Layer multiple signals: anonymous website visits, multiple contacts per account engaging with gated content, pricing page visits, LinkedIn ad company engagement, and firmographic data. Score at the account level, not individual level, to prioritize warm accounts for coordinated SDR and AE outreach.
Should inbound demo requests go to SDRs or AEs?
Route high-intent inbound leads to the most senior relevant person, ideally the account executive or subject matter expert, not the SDR. SDRs should handle outbound prospecting and account development, while AEs manage pipeline and close deals.
What cost per opportunity or CAC benchmark should I target?
Benchmarking CAC across companies is less useful than understanding your own baseline. Model how changes in your conversion rates and pipeline efficiency would impact revenue. Then run tests to improve against your baseline, not against industry averages.
How much should B2B SaaS companies spend on sales and marketing?
There is no universal percentage. Judge spending efficiency by measuring pipeline quality, win rates, and forward-looking indicators rather than revenue multiples. Companies should tighten spending discipline and only scale after validating that investment drives measurable pipeline growth.
SEO meta description
Renee Cohen on why MQLs persist despite years of criticism, how to build warm account lists using owned intent data, and designing inbound-outbound strategies for efficient B2B SaaS lead generation and routing.
Target keywords
MQL definition B2B SaaS
marketing qualified lead scoring
account-based marketing ABM
owned intent data
target account list TAL
inbound lead routing
lead generation strategy
Renee Cohen Norwest
revenue operations marketing
cost per acquisition CAC
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Read the full transcript · 57 KB · Renee Cohen
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. Today, we're discussing the death of the MQL and how we should be redesigning the lead generation funnel for more effective results. Our guest today, Renee Cohen, Vice President of Marketing and Operating Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, is also going to share with us her findings from Norwest's 2023 B2B Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report. Hope you enjoy the episode. Hey, Renee.
SPEAKER_01How's it going?
SPEAKER_02Hey, Eddie. Glad we can finally do this.
SPEAKER_03I know we've been talking about it for a little while, so thanks for having me on today.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I was excited to dive into this. So we've known each other for quite a while, and you guys came out with this benchmark report, the 2023 B2B Sales and Marketing Benchmark Report. And I read through it, got very excited about some of the findings that you guys had from your research with your portfolio and reached out and we wanted to chat about it. And then this evolved into this discussion primarily on inbound, but also inbound and outbound. And I'm just really excited to dive into that with you.
RENEE COHENYeah, me too. And that benchmark report felt like a capstone on my year last year. And we got so much great feedback from folks about it. And it was really important for me, too, to make sure that we were representing a sales
RENEE COHENand a marketing view in that data as well. And so I'm glad you found value from it, too, and excited to dive in.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I mean, I think people are always interested in benchmarks. So let's dive into that. But first, could you share for our audience just a little bit about who you are, who Norwest
SPEAKER_11is, and what you guys do and what you do at Norwest?
RENEE COHENYeah, and I think that's part of the reason why we were uniquely poised to create a report like this. So I am Renee Cohen, for those in the audience who don't know. And my background is as a marketer. So I've been in B2B marketing for pretty much my whole career, primarily tech and SaaS marketing as well. And so prior to Norwest, I was leading marketing at an organization called Lucidworks.
RENEE COHENSo it was an enterprise B2B platform for search engine applications, you know, used in e-commerce use cases, customer service use cases, and employee knowledge management use cases as well. And so I joined Norwest in summer of 2022.
RENEE COHENAnd Norwest is a venture capital and private equity investment firm. And we have a pretty diverse approach to our portfolio. So we invest early stage and late stage. We also invest not just in B2B, which is my background, but we have a consumer sector and healthcare sector. And as you can imagine, I spend a lot of time on the B2B side. And so some companies that are probably familiar to your audience are, Gong is one of our current active investments. MindTickle is one. We just, Spiff just left the portfolio. They were acquired by Salesforce here in January. And Engageo is another investment of ours that's now rolled into demand-based. So lots of familiar names, I think, to your audience there. And so, yeah, that's just the context for why are we poised now to kind of build a benchmark report like this is as I dove into my role at Norwest, my job is really to be an internal advisor to all of our 200 plus active portfolio companies.
RENEE COHENAnd one of the most frequently asked questions I started getting very early on into my role was around benchmarking. Companies want to know, what should I be spending? What should, what's good look like in terms of performance KPIs? And it was really kind of hand-to-hand combat where we would have a conversation, get some data and kind of anonymize it to be able to share out to folks. But we didn't have an aggregated source of knowledge that we could bring back to our companies to represent maybe more of a collective whole of how companies are looking at resourcing sales and marketing. And that was the goal of the benchmark report to really dive in and give our companies some more tools to make those decisions in their business, especially if things have been changing quite a bit in the last couple of years, just macroeconomically, folks are looking to have more objective sources of working with their finance teams around how they should be thinking about their teams and how they should be measuring the impact of their organization.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. This sets us up for a question I wanted to ask that I hadn't thought about until now, which is like, every time I talk to someone in the investment community, I'm always thinking
SPEAKER_11what's been changing in the market since we had, you know, the crash, so to speak, of the
EDDIE REYNOLDSB2B SaaS industry, the funding drying up, et cetera. My impression from everybody I talk to is that there's still investments being made, companies still have access to capital, they still have the ability to grow, to hire in sales, hire in marketing, and to fund this growth, but it's much tighter. I would love if you could just share a little bit about like Norwest perspective on that and
SPEAKER_11how your expectations might have changed for companies over the last couple of years.
RENEE COHENYeah, and I want to be careful not to represent Norwest's overall perspective on that, but I can kind of give a few things that I'm observing in my role and as I work with our investors
RENEE COHENand I work with our companies is everything is getting, it is getting leaner.
RENEE COHENAnd I think that the way that marketing and sales leaders have been used to running their teams and kind of throwing bodies at the problem, right? Like, so if you think about like, hey, we've got a sales target to hit, let's just go and hire like 10 new AEs, right? That's not necessarily going to be the way that things work and, you know, at least currently in the short term because cash runway is, you know, being more and more protected, right? We want to make sure that our companies are spending conservatively. And I'm seeing, I think from the Norwest perspective, because we invest on in the venture side, as well as our growth equity arm, there's often a lot of differences in how like an EBITDA positive organization who's, you know, maybe a little bit longer tenure, how they resource their marketing teams, how they resource their sales organizations. And they tend to be much more conservative with when and how they add on to those teams and when they unlock budget. And we're seeing some of that discipline being brought into the venture companies as well, where we're not just going to pour dollars on top without having a tight handle on how are we able to measure the impact of those dollars? And are we able to see more predictability in our modeling of what's going to come out the other side, which I think is really a tight tie into having a strong revenue operations function and having discipline around what are you measuring? Are you set up to measure it effectively and what business decisions are you going to take out of that? So does that start to answer the question a little bit about how like things are changing some?
SPEAKER_13Well, that's a perfect T-ball for us. I mean, it's obviously like our belief system around RevOps.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe're going to the market and saying, we want to try to help these companies operate more efficiently. We want to help you generate $1 revenue at less cost, more reliably, more repeatably, more scalably, et cetera. And this segues into the conversation I wanted to have with you today, which is how do we do that in marketing? So one of the things that you found in your benchmark report was that MQLs was the top KPI still today that marketing organizations are using to measure their success. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, and I have said this a few times because I've put this report on a roadshow a little
RENEE COHENbit. We had an event last fall where we gave a sneak peek of the results. And that was one of the things that I called out. It's so ironic that I think it's been at least like five or six years that there have been headlines and articles and blog posts written about the death of the MQL. And there's a lot of LinkedIn posts content out there around that. And I anticipated that we would see fewer companies relying on that as their top metric.
RENEE COHENAnd that's not the case, which is kind of surprising in some ways and not in others, because as I work with companies, it does still continue to come up as something that they're wanting to measure. But the thing that surprised me, that's another data point from the survey, was not so much that they're reporting on it as their number one KPI, that they're kind of measuring the performance of their org against. But when we asked about the definition of the MQL, I also expected, well, maybe they're getting a little bit tighter on how they define these, right?
RENEE COHENLike, as I think of like the old content syndication plays that companies would make where they go and, you know, sponsor an industry report, and then they get 200 guaranteed leads for that sponsorship, and those become MQLs. I thought we were throwing that away. And apparently, that is not the case, because companies are still primarily calling an MQL something that based on a proprietary lead score. So they're going and measuring, okay, did they download an ebook? And did they register for a webinar? And let's give them, you know, five points for this, 10 points for that. They're still using the old playbook for this. And I was really surprised after having heard for so long that we're all pretty jaded about this approach that nobody has really implemented much change in their organization about around
RENEE COHENwhat they're measuring and how they're defining these things.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And so let's just like dive into that for a second. So what we're talking about is somebody goes to the website and they download a white paper,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhether they came from an ad or it was organic social, or they just happen to be on the website for another reason. They download that white paper and they get 50 points, let's say, for that white paper. They go and they click on the pricing page and they get 100 points for that. And then when they reach a certain threshold of points, we're calling that an MQL. Yep. And the question that I have, and I think I know the answer to this, is who decides how
EDDIE REYNOLDSmany points equate to an MQL?
RENEE COHENI just had a conversation with another company this week who they were telling me their marketing leader was kind of showed under the hood a little bit of an old scoring rubric exercise
RENEE COHENthat her rev ops and sales team, it was a collective effort. They were all working on it together and it was completely arbitrary. It truly was. I mean, some of it's sometimes done by like a retrospective. Okay, let's go look at like the last year of what came in for opportunities and trying to kind of piecemeal the customer journey. But it is still arbitrary as to like, you know, is one weighted more highly than the other?
RENEE COHENAnd I'll say I've seen so many different opinions about that. Some of which, you know, I agree with on in some principles. So one being, well, maybe we give activity that's, that requires more effort on the part of that lead more points because they're spending, you know, there's a higher threshold of what we're asking of them for either their time or their level of engagement. So for example, if somebody is going to sit for 30 minutes live on a webinar, that's probably
RENEE COHENmore valuable than if they just clicked on, you know, filled out a form on LinkedIn and got an email of an ebook sent to them. But again, it's still completely arbitrary at the end of the day and it changes company
RENEE COHENto company.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, and one of the big challenges that I see with MQLs is that you're giving marketing a target that they need to hit and you're allowing them to define that target themselves. So if I have to hit a thousand MQLs and I control the definition of an MQL, what's the likelihood
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat I am going to hit that thousand MQLs?
RENEE COHENYeah, exactly. And so then I've seen it over-weighted.
RENEE COHENSo usually there are two things that go into a lead score. You have your firmographic and your demographic criteria. So there's some level of scoring there. And then you have your behavioral criteria or engagement criteria. And that's also kind of what we were just describing as fairly arbitrary.
RENEE COHENAnd so I've seen, even in some cases where there's a little bit of sandbagging going on where, well, it meets all of our criteria as a target account, good title. So they theoretically could be a buyer. And then we're just, any one engagement will ping them over the line of an MQL, regardless of how many or the quality of that activity as well.
RENEE COHENSo there is quite a bit of sandbagging that happens for sure.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThe biggest problem though that I have with the MQL number being the top target for marketing is that now I'm incentivized as a marketing leader to prioritize that number. And so think about how difficult it is to get somebody to go to the website, to click on the book of sales call or request a demo versus getting somebody to attend a one hour webinar versus somebody to download a white paper. If that white paper is the easiest way for me to rack up MQLs and hit my target to get recognition in the company and save my job, then I'm going to start pushing white paper downloads, even though that's probably going to be the least indication of interest and buying intent that we can possibly have.
RENEE COHENThat's right. And then the pressure tends to get kind of put downhill onto the SDR team that's being
RENEE COHENasked to follow up on that white paper download, drop everything, a white paper download came in today. Why aren't you following up on it within the first five minutes of that download, right? And so they're then getting pressured on their SLAs and if those aren't converting at a certain rate, right? So if we're, you know, seeing only 1% conversion on white paper downloads, it tends to be a lot easier for the marketing team to go and poke and say, well, actually, are we following up on those fast enough? And let's go and like, look over there. Look at what the SDR team is doing with these leads rather than maybe adjusting the conversation to the fact that we shouldn't be maybe optimizing our programs just for that number of white paper downloads. We're missing mid funnel and bottom funnel content that are going to create more of those
RENEE COHENinbound hand raisers for us.
SPEAKER_13Yep. And I don't know about you, but I'm so excited about the concept of putting in my name and
EDDIE REYNOLDSemail and phone numbers that I'm going to call five minutes later for reading a white paper.
SPEAKER_12Right. Or five minutes later and then you're still getting the call like six months later. I think, you know, I, I still get like SDRs who are calling me just because I downloaded
RENEE COHENsomething like six months ago. So I'm like, I really was just researching. Sorry.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, and it's funny. I was just looking through our HubSpot just like a few minutes before this and we don't even ask people's names. Like we don't gain any of our content. The only way we collect emails is if you want to sign up for our newsletter and we literally just ask for the email address. We don't even ask for your first or last name, let alone your phone number. And I see all these people, all these Gmail addresses, because I think people are so conditioned to like, oh my God, like these people are going to spam me or they're going to, you know, try to call my organization. We don't do that. But I just think that like, I know for me, I'm never putting in my like key contact information to those forms.
RENEE COHENRight. Well, and even if you are, I think that that level of, as a buyer savviness, so it's so jaded now where folks just don't even want to, you know, we look at the data around phone call connects and, you know, email response rates just plummeting because folks don't really are jaded in that like cold pitch. And then even, even, Hey, I just kind of maybe had a faux pas calling it a cold pitch. Because our SDRs are typically being given these as inbound leads, right? In theory, they should be warm. But to me, as a, as a, you know, potential buyer who might be really high up funnel, really just starting to do my research.
RENEE COHENI'm so jaded that I'm really not going to be willing to kind of engage in that conversation until I'm right at the cusp of buyer intent. Because then I'm kind of ready to actually start doing a little bit of more of my due diligence around that. And I do see a lot of companies just really missing the steps in between each of those different sections of that buyer journey on the B2B side.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. And I want to dive into like what's inbound, what's outbound. I've got a strong opinion on it. I know you do too. But before that, this conversation is making me remember a podcast we did with Channing Ferrer, who ran operations at HubSpot for a number of years. And what he shared with me is, is that they have sort of like a few different buckets. And their first bucket were hand raisers, people that requested a call or a demo with sales. The second bucket they found, people that go to their website and click on the pricing page a certain number of times actually did exhibit a certain amount of intent that it was worth picking up the phone and calling them. And then their third bucket, he was calling like their MQLs, the people that had like a lead score of whatever. And he said that they found, at least at HubSpot, at least at the time that he was there, those people weren't even worth calling. The sales team was not calling those folks. And I know HubSpot has a huge marketing engine. They're going to get a lot of MQLs. But I like that because that, to me, then puts the onus on marketing to say our job is to get people to fill out those forms and request a call with sales. And that is what we're optimizing for, or in their case, at least like hitting the pricing page a number of times and actually having real interest in understanding what the product is and how much it costs.
SPEAKER_12Yeah, that starts to get on what I, and it's not a new playbook per se, but what I'm shifting
RENEE COHENthe conversation towards and maybe kind of the missing piece of this playbook is the
RENEE COHENquestioning, I guess, why are we scoring these MQLs as individuals when those individuals are part of organizations or accounts that are the buyer, right? And so when we think about like the old ABM playbooks, I know that's, I think maybe where
RENEE COHENsome of that has fallen down is folks kind of equate that with the technology.
RENEE COHENThey equate that with demand-based and success and all of the ABM tech platforms. But there's a lot that companies can be doing to optimize for getting top of funnel metrics around account intent and interest without even buying into any of the technology. And that was another data point in our report, our benchmark report that I was surprised to see so few companies doing account level measurement. Because to your point around looking at those kind of super low intent marketing content consuming
RENEE COHENleads, which is what I would call those MQLs, as an individual, each of those people probably, like when we look at conversion rates and I look at, you know, different companies that I audit from our portfolio and even past roles that I've had, those conversion rates are sometimes sub 1%, right? And the level of effort when you're paying, especially if you're paying like a US-based SDR organization, a warm body to go and call down those leads, the return on their connect rates is so low. If you're running it on an individual MQL to MQL basis, where I've seen it move the needle
RENEE COHENis looking at that data at an account level.
RENEE COHENSo you can start identifying some trends. And this is where partnering with RevOps, I'm so passionate about this because there's so much that companies can be doing to measure how many different contacts at an account are
RENEE COHENmaybe engaging in that marketing content, right? And looking at other high intent data sources like pricing page information, are we seeing a certain account engage with our ads or, you know, videos that are ungated, maybe that
RENEE COHENwe're putting up on LinkedIn, but all of those things are measurable for most companies without
RENEE COHENbuying any new technology other than their current marketing automation platform, looking at their LinkedIn company engagement history on their ads platform.
RENEE COHENAnd if they were measuring, if I've seen starting to measure that and feeding those leads to your SDR team as their kind of warm outbound list at an account level, then that allows them to be much more strategic at which accounts they're going to go and prioritize for outbound, even though these are maybe historically called inbound leads. And so that's maybe a roundabout answer to your question there that I think what we typically call like that 80% or 90% of the bucket that most companies are calling inbound are really
RENEE COHENnot. They should be being looked at an account level to inform the outbound call down strategy.
SPEAKER_13I absolutely agree with that. You know that I have a strong stance on this. I think that if somebody with few exceptions, we talked about the pricing page, but let's just
EDDIE REYNOLDSsay by and large, if they're not requesting a meeting with sales and MQL to me is just another form of outbound. And it's crazy to me that we have an inbound team that is effectively making cold calls to people that do not want to talk to them because they downloaded a white paper. We have this separate team called outbound that is making outbound calls to people that they downloaded off of Zoom info and they're running in these silos. Why don't we combine that data along with all the past sales and marketing engagement, you know, all the firmographic and technographic data, the intent data, whatever data we deem to be relevant. Let's put it all together in one giant list and let's analyze that data and let's figure out. And I like what you said on an account by account basis, which accounts are the best accounts
EDDIE REYNOLDSfor the limited resources we have to be calling on.
RENEE COHENYep, exactly. And frankly, I think it's even diminishing returns just based on the inefficiency of the pitch in that first email too. Right. So rather than it being a, hey, I saw you downloaded our white paper 30 minutes ago, can you know, you're ready to get on the front and talk? That's going to black hole because it hits the mental spam filter and I'm not going to reply to that at all versus something that was much more intentional and showed some level
RENEE COHENof like research had been done on the account. Maybe you're cross threading into a few folks within that account as well. You can be much more strategic about how you even approach that first conversation so that
RENEE COHENit doesn't feel as spammy to the person on the other end if we do it this way as well. Not only, so not only are they spending their time on the accounts that are maybe more likely
RENEE COHENto be in that kind of mid funnel research mode and on their way to purchase intent, but I think they can also be more impactful in how they approach that first conversation as well.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And the other problem that I think this solves for that we see is that if you don't have great lead routing and lead management processes, the real inbound, the folks that are really interested in talking to sales, they should get a response within five minutes. Yes. But if you give your sales team a hundred new leads and only one of them is a high intent lead that requested a meeting, how likely are they to get that quick response that they need? Whereas the last thing I want is a five minute response if I download a white paper.
RENEE COHENThat's right. I mean, that's another example of like the diminishing returns too, right? Because it's just creating so much noise in the process for the team as well.
RENEE COHENAnd I've seen that challenge as well, where you've got the SDR or just kind of sorting through really bad data infrastructure in the CRM and their lead queues are just not set up optimally. And their data is not even getting necessarily enriched properly too for them to, to be able to call down effectively on maybe those tier three inbounds, which really should be outbound. Are they, are we enriching that data at the account level to show the account level engagement and interest so that they can have a better conversation? They're really spending more time kind of hunting, hunting information down and making those context switching decisions or hurting their efficiency as well.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And so let's talk about how we actually do this. So it sounds like we're on the same page here. We take our very high intent MQLs and we call that real inbound. The folks that requested a meeting from sales, maybe there's another indication where we have extremely high conversion rates, like people hitting the pricing page multiple times. And those are our real inbounds. And I would be all for reverse engineering that and seeing if we can bucket and slice and dice our NQLs in different ways, which ones are actually converting at a much higher rate than sub 1% and are worth like prioritizing and calling right away. And then what are the rest? And the, one of the hypotheses I have is why don't we compare that to our current outbound program? So if we are calling folks that we bought off of zoom info and it takes us, I know Jeremy Donovan published this 1,000 to 1,400 calls to generate an opportunity, which is crazy to me. And that's a separate topic.
SPEAKER_47That's benchmark data right there. It's insane.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think that that has to do with a lot of folks pressing send all because you just do the math. And if you want 10 ops per SDR per month, and you're looking at like almost a thousand calls a day, it's impossible to do that without pressing send all. And personally for me and the limited outbound that I do, I know I've got like the CEO title and like a big LinkedIn presence. So it helps, but like I'm doing like five to 10 calls a day if I'm lucky and I'm booking like one or two meetings. So like the fact that it takes 1400 calls to book a meeting is insane to me, but that's off topic, getting back on topic. If we actually have a really dialed in program and let's say it takes us 200 calls to book a qualified opportunity, I'd love to compare that to what we're doing with MQLs. Or if we mix them all together, by definition, we're comparing that, right?
SPEAKER_51Yep.
RENEE COHENYeah. I agree with that as well. And I think a lot of companies don't slow down enough or take the steps that are needed to actually go and benchmark and understand this is actually getting into. Slightly another one of my soapbox topics, which is I I'm so glad that we did this benchmark data. But the other piece that I've been coaching a lot of my leaders on is it's important to understand your baselines benchmark against yourself. So what you're just describing there is like, understand truly, like, what does it take from, you know, from a conversion rate standpoint, the number of touches and the number of activities on the marketing side, the SDR side, all of those different things.
RENEE COHENAnd then come up with your hypotheses, which is what you're describing there of, hey, what if we were to split these and go and run a test for a quarter and see what that test did to improve against your own baseline benchmark?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And it's interesting. Like, I'm always leery of benchmarks. I think that they're really interesting. You can make important decisions. I mean, for example, we spent a god awful amount of money to me as a small business owner redesigning our website. And we did that because we looked at the benchmarks for conversion rates on websites, which is like somewhere between, I read two to 10%.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'm by no means a website conversion expert. No, that's, that's Stan.
SPEAKER_54Yeah, go ahead.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, we were getting a half a percent and granted, like, I think we drive a lot of people that are like rev ops managers and they have no buying intent and they just want to like see our information, which is our goal, which is great. But I thought, you know what, like if we could double it to 1%, that would be worth this investment. That's right. And we did. And we are at over 1% right now. I don't know if 2% or 5% is ever realistic for us. So I try to take it with a grain of salt. It's like, where is that benchmark coming from? What kind of companies is that covering?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so I'm always leery with benchmarks in that regard. But at the same time, I think it gives you something to at least start with.
RENEE COHENWell, and that's actually one of the reasons why I was, when we were going through the process of building the strategy for our report last year, there, there are a lot of my companies who want to know what is good MQL to opportunity conversion rate? Or recently hearing a lot of questions around what is a good cost per opportunity benchmark, right? Like what's a good cost per opportunity benchmark? And honestly, it might feel like a cop-out, but the website example that you just gave is a perfect reason why, you know, to back up my stance on it, is I didn't want to go and benchmark a bunch of performance KPIs for the very reason that you kind of pointed out, that it's so wildly different company to company depending on what their selling motion is, what their ACV is, how efficient is their marketing engine today, how efficient, how tightly aligned are their marketing and sales organizations. There are so many variables that go into what those conversion rates look like from stage to stage of a lead or through to an opportunity that I think it's really hard to kind of set that bar based on, you know, what a bunch of other companies are saying they're doing when really your time is better spent in digging into your own data.
RENEE COHENSo, number one, if you're not measuring it today, which actually a surprising number of companies don't have this data at their fingertips and they're not measuring it effectively. So, let's get the processes in place in place to be able to measure each of these different stage to stage conversion rates.
RENEE COHENAnd then, two, to your point, like, hey, let's go model out if right to, you know, today we're sitting at 1%, what would happen to our numbers if we could increase it to 3%?
RENEE COHENAnd that might be better than saying, well, well, we're way below the 10% benchmark.
RENEE COHENWell, does it even matter?
RENEE COHENIf you're sitting at 1% today, I don't think it's realistic for you to try to get to 10% tomorrow. So, yep.
SPEAKER_13And as the owner of my business, I'm also looking at this through the finance lens, just as I assume you guys are, I know you guys are looking at it as an investor.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo, like, one exception I might want to propose here would be cost of acquisition, for example. You know, how do you guys feel about a company that is spending too much money to acquire customers? And one of the things that I thought was really interesting, somewhat shocking, less shocking in your report was the amount of money that companies are spending as a percentage of revenue, especially sub-10 million, sub-20 million dollar revenue on sales and marketing.
SPEAKER_21Yes. I was surprised as well.
RENEE COHENAnd I have a prediction. We put a little bit of editorial span.
RENEE COHENI tried to kind of balance it out of, okay, how much of the reporting the news are we doing versus our perspective on this as well? And my perspective is, and we do plan to, we're in the early stages of defining what our benchmark report is going to look like this year or the survey questions that we want to ask.
RENEE COHENI predict that number is going to come down this year because I think there was still some lagging trends in terms of the marketing and sales spend last year. And you had asked the question about kind of macroeconomic environment and what that's doing to kind of change some behaviors in companies. I do think that number is going to be coming down this year as companies continue to get a little bit more lean and just tightening the belts a little bit on where do they choose to invest and how quickly do they ramp up and scale that investment. And they have to be able to measure the impact before they go and just start to scale.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIs there a number at which, like a percentage of revenue that folks are, that companies are spending on sales and marketing, at which point you guys start to raise alarms and start to push back and say, hey guys, you really need to cut budget here?
RENEE COHENI can't say that I have, I don't have a specific number in mind. I think it is kind of on a company by company basis where we, and it really is going to depend too on what does it look like in terms of, maybe not in terms of their current revenue number, but looking at what their actual weighted, you know, qualified pipeline is and looking at kind of how confident are they in how, what are their win rates looking like?
RENEE COHENRight. And so if we're starting to see indications that they're being inefficient at building forward looking pipeline, and there's a lot of spottiness and in the winds, that's when we kind of say, hey, we got to figure out like if this level of investment is right for what the leading indicators are looking like.
RENEE COHENIt doesn't look like you're going to hit your target this year. And so therefore we need to kind of reset on the sales and marketing side.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhich sounds more like a forward looking measurement of CAC, if I'm understanding you. It is. Yeah. A little bit. Yep. Or cost of acquisition. I try really hard to like stay away from the acronyms for anybody listening here that they're like, what is CAC? What is EBITDA? Which by the way, anybody listening, that is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, which is essentially kind of sort of cashflow, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Kind of sort of cashflow. Exactly. Yes.
RENEE COHENAnd most venture backed companies are not running at a positive EBITDA, right? Like they've got cash investment and they are burning cash kind of with the objective of, hey, we're going to accelerate growth to the point of building value and achieving, you know, a successful exit, whether that's a public offering or acquisition.
RENEE COHENOr some companies do get to the point of growth where they do kind of flip the switch and they do go positive.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAs a side note, when I was a 22-year-old junior banker, my senior banker would always tell me I didn't pronounce EBITDA right. And so this day I'm nervous about it.
SPEAKER_64Well, where the T and the D go is where.
SPEAKER_13Yeah. I don't know. Maybe I'll never get it. Anyway, not in finance anymore. So moving on.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. So taking this back to marketing, how would you want to build a target account list for cold calling that would combine MQLs and our sort of outbound Zoom info? You talked about firmographic data, technographic data, marketing engagement. I'd just kind of love to chop this up with you. Yeah. Come to your head right now. If you wanted to like build this list, how would we do it? I'm ready. I've been, yeah, I think I'm ready for this.
RENEE COHENSo I would start, the thing that I would start with is I think a lot of companies hear the word intent data and they automatically, their head goes to Bambora and Sixth Sense and all the companies that have done a fantastic job of associating themselves with that principle and enabling the ability to aggregate and act on purchase intent. However, back to your question, I think there's a ton of what I call owned intent data that companies do not activate.
RENEE COHENAnd I tell each of my companies as they're kind of maybe looking at purchasing one of those solutions that they absolutely should not be purchasing any of those tools until they start to measure and make decisions based on their own intent data. And some of those decisions would be, are you using your own intent data to build these target account lists for outbound? And so the things that I would look to measure are kind of first anonymous website visits. And that's actually going to be getting a little bit harder, I'm sure, more and more as we end up in this cookie-less world.
RENEE COHENAnd so this is becoming even more important for us to get our handle around our own data, but anonymous website visits can be measured using a lot of the tools that companies have in place today using HubSpot, Marketo, even Google Analytics.
RENEE COHENSo you can get some of that data without purchasing another tool like Clearbit, for example, that are account intelligence tools that will even add more confidence to those anonymous website visits. But you don't even have to purchase one of those. You could start measuring that using the tools that you have in place today with your marketing automation platform and your web analytics platform. The other thing that I would look at is most of these companies are running, especially in the B2B space, they're spending something on LinkedIn to target some of these target accounts, especially to warm them at the top of funnel. And so marketing and rev ops and marketing ops should be working together to pull any of that data from the LinkedIn ads manager around the company engagement metrics.
RENEE COHENAnd that is available. There are things that you can do in LinkedIn to go and load up a matched audience of, hey, here's our, you know, let's call it 5,000 target accounts for our company. And that might not be your tier one target accounts, right? That might be everyone. You load that into LinkedIn with the different titles that you're looking for out there, those accounts, and you can start to see which of those companies are starting to engage with your ads, even without having filled out a form. And so you could be running things like video ads and pointing to ungated content and then seeing which accounts are starting to engage. And I've actually done some checking spot, checking on this to kind of validate and see, oh, wait, we are starting to see these accounts heating up. And sure enough, we start to see inbounds coming from those accounts, those inbound hand raisers coming from those accounts. So there's a really strong correlation I've seen to some of that ad engagement data that could be used to go and form these top call-down lists for leads as well.
RENEE COHENThe other thing I'd measure is how many contacts per account have been engaging with even some – there's always going to be some gated content, right? Like, so I'm a big fan of ungating almost everything, but if you're running something like a webinar or you even mentioned your newsletter, there's always something where you just functionally have to have an exchange of information to be able to deliver it, right?
RENEE COHENLike, I have to collect your information so I can send you the webinar registration link. And so looking at that data of any of those gated assets that people are filling out their forms, how many of those contacts across a different account?
RENEE COHENIs it one contact per account? Three contacts per account? Maybe the accounts where there are three or more contacts you should be putting high up on this target account outbound list. And then back to website business, you already called it up. This is on my list as well as giving extra weight to any of those high intent pages on your website like the pricing page or maybe even like a how it works product page where there's maybe some more like deep dive research going on on the product, validating what the product does for you. That maybe you kind of weight that a little bit more highly than people who are just visiting your blog content.
RENEE COHENSo I think that's a good starting place for a lot of companies because several of the ones that I talk to, this is kind of a new approach for them to kind of go and implement this.
RENEE COHENAnd I recommend that every company do this before going and then purchasing and adding on some of those external intent tools that really just prop all of that up even further.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo where does the rubber meet the road here? Are we talking about ultimately creating an account score similar to a lead score?
SPEAKER_21That's what I think makes sense to do, right?
RENEE COHENAnd that way it becomes a conversation point for your marketing and sales leadership team when it comes down to territory planning, when it comes down to any sort of high touch activities around outbound or if marketing is going to do kind of a joint sales and marketing enablement program where maybe we do kind of a, so I've done this in the past with direct mail.
RENEE COHENSo a perfect example, actually, I could kind of give a little case study here is we were running a direct mail campaign for the first time in a company that I worked at previously. And we were working with our sales leaders to define which accounts should this go to, and it was like a VPC level direct mail campaign. And what we were getting back from our sales AEs were their wish list of like, all right, this is my territory. I'm based out of Chicago. Here are my, you know, top five companies that I really want to break into. But we had no indication that those top five companies even knew who we were. I mean, maybe there was like a little bit of like data that we saw, but we went back to them and said, well, why don't we try it this way? And so we had really a lot of conversation around this where we ended up splitting the list of kind of their wish list accounts. But then we gave them a list of accounts as well. And one of those accounts on that list was Crate & Barrel is a good example for this. Crate & Barrel had come into, you know, several different marketing activities over the course of like six months. And we had like one senior manager who downloaded a piece of content, one director who downloaded a piece of content, a different senior manager who went to a webinar, and then someone who had stopped by the booth at one point. But there was nothing going on. There was no opportunity there. Nobody had really gotten any. They had followed up with each of those individuals, but nobody had gotten anyone to bite and take a meeting. And so we had this warm account list, and we had our cold account list that we sent this direct mail out to. And we had about 20% engagement through to meetings, and most of those meetings did turn into opportunities on the warm account list compared to the cold account list, where, honestly, I don't remember to this day like what the exact number was, but it was almost zero engagement on that cold account list. And Crate & Barrel, and Crate & Barrel, actually, we sent something to their VP of e-commerce, and they were running an RFP. We got the meeting. We ended up closing that opportunity, but it was like our use case for putting it in front of the sales team to shine a light on.
RENEE COHENSo this is why it's so important for us to look at account engagement when we're doing some of these high-touch outbound activities, whether that's marketing or sales doing them.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI love that, and I really love the fact that you touched on the need to engage with sales. And for me, I think it's a balancing act between the data analytics and what salespeople are seeing, because if you think about it, salespeople have their own data. It is qualitative data and not quantitative data. It's anecdotal data and not large data sets. But at the end of the day, no sales rep can see all of the data that ops or marketing can see and analyze it in a way that they can analyze it. And at the same time, ops and marketing cannot see what is happening. I mean, I know we have Gong and things like that, but you can't see to the same extent what's happening in these sales calls and how people are responding. And so I'm a huge believer that we really have to work together to figure out how we identify the best lists.
RENEE COHENI want to switch topics because I have a question for you, but it's been burning on my mind. But we've talked about the definition of changing the definition of an MQL to be that true hand raiser and those inbound like, hey, I want to talk to sales, I want to demo leads.
RENEE COHENAnd then all of this, we've spent a lot of time talking about how we can shift, I think, on its head, the warm accounts. But back to those hand raisers, I know you're a proponent of just route it to an AE, route it to the person that they need to be talking to rather than just kind of like SDR, picking up the phone and saying, I saw you filled out our demo request.
RENEE COHENCan I screen you with five questions?
RENEE COHENThat kind of call. Tell me more about that and then I have a follow-up question for you.
SPEAKER_13Sure. Well, my company, we route it to the CEO, which is me.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, it's interesting. I will also say that we're getting a lot more leads this quarter after we redesigned our websites. It's starting to change my perspective. There we go.
SPEAKER_79I think that you want to route the leads to the most senior person that you think it makes sense to, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so for me, especially when we weren't getting a large number of inbound leads, I was taking those phone calls.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI was experiencing that as a fruitful conversation. And from a customer perspective, of course, that's what they want. I don't want to talk to SDR. And in fact, we did a round robin with our lead forums and they were coming into my VPs of consulting as well. My VP of strategy, my VP of systems. And so we actually closed a couple of customers off of that where they're coming in and they're going right to the person that they're going to work with. The subject matter expert. Yeah. Yeah. And these are not salespeople. I love my team. They're great, but they're not trained salespeople. But the fact that they're talking to somebody that really knows what they're talking about, that adds a lot of value. That being said, I'm also starting to see a lot of leads we're getting that are maybe not the right types of companies for us. They're not maybe the right personas for us. And so I think that you want to look at that through that lens. But if you've got your top ICP account and you've got the buyer persona and they're coming in and they're requesting a meeting with sales, you're going to say, let me go route that to the most junior person in the company. Which, by the way, it is crazy to me that you get promoted from inbound SDR to outbound SDR. So hold on a second. We're spending all of these marketing dollars to route them to the absolute most junior person in the company. And then if you don't completely screw that up, then we'll let you start calling people that don't want to talk to you. Right. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
SPEAKER_48So why don't you burn those reps on cold prospects first?
SPEAKER_76Or maybe we don't have them at all, right? Like we've talked about today. It's like maybe it's not two separate teams. But go ahead.
EDDIE REYNOLDSMaybe it's not two separate teams. Maybe certain leads go to the AE. Maybe if it's a certain title or whatever. Like I would default for lack of a better option to let's just send all the inbound leads to our AEs unless we have such a large number that that's not feasible. Because I also believe AEs should be making cold calls. And so you're telling me as an AE that I should go and make 20 cold calls a day from 8 to 10 a.m. Before I start like working my pipeline and doing all my sales calls. But like don't give me that person that just asked specifically to talk to me. Come on.
SPEAKER_21So the reason I think that I triggered, sorry, this is a little bit of a diversion in our conversation was when we were talking about marketing and sales partnership.
RENEE COHENWhich I've always had such a fantastic relationship with my AEs and I believe so strongly in that. But it's a challenge sometimes to kind of get breakthrough a little bit of like the habits and the process and get them to understand kind of the work that we're doing on the marketing side that's all going to be in support of them. And one of the challenges that I see, especially in enterprise sales cycles where there's very complex sales, maybe there's POCs going on actively.
RENEE COHENAnd as we're getting to kind of end of quarter, there's a lot more meetings and crunch time, you know, within that last month of the quarter to try to get these deals over the finish line. And that's what I've had a little bit of like tension and struggle with of this idea of like routing these really high intent, ready to go.
RENEE COHENBut really at the beginning of their journey in terms of a long sales cycle for these products that are like six, eight, 12 month sales cycles.
RENEE COHENSometimes it's hard for the AE to kind of like break out of all of the stuff they're trying to do to close what's in pipe right now to then shift to the context switching of shifting to, hey, this lead came in today.
RENEE COHENI want to make sure that I don't sit on it for eight hours and wait to, you know, for a day, two days to get back to them. So I've measured some of the effectiveness around that.
RENEE COHENAnd I've been a little concerned sometimes with looking at how quickly or slowly really it takes some of our AEs to get back to those. And I found the ones that are fastest to get back to them are the people who have not much in pipe right now. And the people who have a lot in pipe that they're trying to close have a harder time of getting back to them in a timely fashion.
SPEAKER_13Yeah, I don't know what to say to that. I feel very unsympathetic.
SPEAKER_48Like my reaction is like, welcome to sales, Renee. I have an idea.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhy don't we make this the highest paid job in the company? And then we set high expectations of people. I don't know.
SPEAKER_21You can say that. I can't say that. All I know is what I've observed and how I try to say, hello, it's on your target account list and they're raising their hand.
SPEAKER_41Maybe you schedule a call with them.
SPEAKER_11Yeah, I say that tongue in cheek, right? Because I think from an individual perspective, I don't have a lot of sympathy for that AE.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think it is extremely stereotypical that when you have a large pipeline, you're not prospecting. And then you end up not having a large pipeline in the next quarter.
SPEAKER_89And then you're on this roller coaster.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd the best AEs find a way to balance that. And that context switching is really difficult. From an organizational perspective, we can hem and haw about what people should do. But we have to look at what people actually do. So I think that there's a balance there. And that's why I say I think these leads should be routed to the most senior person where it makes sense.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I think it does depend on the organization. Yeah, I think it all continues to come down to how can we incentivize and optimize all of these processes by giving people the tools, the process, and the enablement to be more effective at how they're spending their time, which is kind of bringing us back to today's topic.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut, yeah, I don't know. I don't have so much sympathy. I mean, like, I'm getting these inbound leads, and I'm jumping on top of them. I'm calling them. I'm, like, going into, like, lead IQ and finding their phone number and saying, like, hey, I sent you an email. And I'm doing this while trying to manage a small business, which is infinitely more difficult than being in AE.
SPEAKER_48No offense. I've been in AE. I spent decades of my career doing it. It's really hard running a small business, and I still manage to follow up with these leads.
SPEAKER_13So you're not going to get a lot of sympathy from me there.
SPEAKER_62All right. I feel co-signed on that side. I'm going to point people back to this.
RENEE COHENNext time the topic comes up, I'll be, like, listen to the last 10 minutes of the podcast.
SPEAKER_11No, but so people don't hate me. Like, you know, you're an enterprise rep. You're trying to close a million-dollar deal. You're flying halfway across the country.
SPEAKER_07You're on an airplane all day today. Like, yeah, you're not going to be able to respond to that lead in five minutes. Well, in that case, maybe you've got kind of backup in place, right?
RENEE COHENLike, so, you know, you've got an SDR team. You should be partnering with your SDR as well and coming up with joint prospecting strategies with them, right?
RENEE COHENAnd I agree, too. And we are seeing in our companies, and that was part of some of the benchmark data from our sales leaders as well, is that they are expecting their AEs and their SDRs to be doing a lot of the sourcing of what's coming into the pipeline. And they're expecting that of their AEs as well to be doing the prospecting to make that happen. And I think AEs who effectively work with their SDRs on that strategy within their territory, and they're looking at the marketing data together, and maybe they're coming up with a strategy of, you know, how are we going to, you know, reach multiple buyer, multiple decision makers within this account. So I've seen it be very successful where the AE takes kind of the senior level, VPC level, and outbounds from there and works their network of contacts to try to get into that. And then the SDR is working kind of in partnership at maybe some of the line of business decision makers or influencers in that account. But if they've got that strong partnership, maybe, you know, another approach is being mindful of your schedule and saying, Hey, this week, next week, SDR, I need to take point on anything that comes inbound, knowing when you're in crunch season.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And it also like, you know, we're talking about enterprise, like that SDR may have more training, more experience. I mean, I've seen the extreme version of this at Salesforce where, you know, you're going after General Electric, for example, and you have a global AE, and then you have a national AE responsible for, you know, all of the US and a European AE. And then below that, you have like a junior AE that they used to call, I forget the name of it. And they would call all the subdivisions in the company that were too small for like the national AE to call. And they would literally sit down and like subdivide the account and like cut it up in a custom way. Because you have like 10 people just working General Electric across the globe or maybe more. And so there's extreme versions of this. But I think like, you know, if there's enough money to be made in that account, it makes sense to allocate your resources in that way.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYep. Agreed.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I know we're running up on time here, Renee. I'd love to cap this off by just asking, where can people find out about your benchmark report?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd is there anything else you'd like us to share in the show notes that people should check out after listening to this?
RENEE COHENYeah, that's a great question. So I think, folks, you can look me up on LinkedIn. So that's kind of number one. I'd be happy to connect with you. So my name is Renee Cohen. I'm at Norwest. So you can link to me, I think, in the show notes. And maybe we could even link directly to the report. But it is also the top featured link on my LinkedIn account. And we also actually, I think that link goes to a pretty lengthy blog post that we wrote up about this, which also has a webinar that we hosted a month back, where I co-hosted that with David Runisky, formerly of Salesforce and several other public companies as well. He was the CRO there. He is my sales counterpart at Norwest, the sales operating executive.
RENEE COHENSo David and I co-hosted a webinar last month where we dug in into some of the top insights from this benchmark report as well. So if you hit that blog link, I think all of the report, the blog itself, and that webinar recording are all linked from there.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAwesome. We'll make sure to share all of that in the show notes. And I really appreciate you joining us, Renee. Yeah, thank you for the time, Eddie.
SPEAKER_41This was a lot of fun. Yeah.
