Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:02.348)
If you're business owner struggling to measure the true impact of your marketing efforts beyond vanity metrics like MQLs, then our guest, Carolyn Dilks, is going to give you a simple win that you can implement today. She is the founder of Pissetto and she comes with a wealth of knowledge when it comes to tracking. So Carolyn, a big welcome to the show.
Carolyn (00:24.645)
hey, thank you. Thanks so much for bringing me on. I'm excited.
Adam O'Leary (00:28.098)
Awesome, well Carolyn, your background as a four-time head of marketing gives you a unique perspective on the pressure of business leaders face to hit their numbers. Can you talk about the common disconnect you see between a marketing team's metrics and the actual pipeline growth a company needs to see?
Carolyn (00:47.246)
Yes, to put it very, very simply, the model and how we measure marketing specifically, or just go to market in general, so that includes sales and functions like customer success, that data model for how we track performance and measure teams is literally archaic now. So the model existed from back in 2015. I say this a few times, but basically my second head of marketing role,
I remember in my interview, I was walking through that model, right? It's the demand waterfall. And I knew it inside and out. And that was like 15 years ago, okay? So a long time ago. And you know, we're still using that today. So the long and short of it is the way we are measuring marketing and revenue today is for a totally other era that is now long gone. Buyers have changed how they buy.
and how they want to be sold to and how they educate before becoming a prospect. And so we need to evolve our measurement and our tracking to reflect how people buy today. And we just haven't yet. I think probably about 10 % of go-to-market teams have adopted that, but many are still stuck in this legacy model from 10, 15 years ago.
Adam O'Leary (02:07.738)
That's amazing. And can you kind of go into the demand waterfall that you just said there? What does that mean? can you just kind of break it down for somebody who's listening?
Carolyn (02:15.98)
Yeah, so I guess the old sort of thinking around how buyers buy and how we measure marketing really is this notion of a funnel. Think of a funnel, right? Or sort of like an upside down triangle. At the very top, you have basically awareness, right? And that is where marketing is measured a lot on MQL volume, leads. That is still a metric that we use heavily today. But just to sort of like fast forward a little bit, what we know to be true now is that
MQLs are a terrible metric. They're a terrible metric when they're not used with other complementary metrics because most times, MQLs are literally just cold names of people who are not in market, right? Most of our people that we're targeting and engaging with fall into that category, right? And yet we're still measuring teams on MQLs. And so that's sort of like top of funnel. You can definitely move down funnel, but basically if you think about it, think about how you move from sort of like awareness to...
education or you're problem aware to more like consideration and then decision, right? Decision being like the, you know, two to 5 % that are actually in market to buy. And so traditionally that's basically how we measure marketing and sales. Marketing gets the MQLs, we nurture them, they become an SQL, they become an opportunity, right? And when you do that, you really have, you know, these conversion metrics that go from, you know, MQL to SQL and the conversion rate might be, 5%.
And then you measure MQL to opportunity. It's like one to 2%. Right? It's very limited because if you look at how, you know, we're measuring how people move through that old funnel, you have all of these leakages, all of these ways that we're wasting resources that people are falling off. We don't really know why. So that old model is not very, you know, complimentary to today's ecosystem where people just don't buy that way anymore. That used to work at one point in time, that model works.
It just simply does not anymore.
Adam O'Leary (04:13.945)
Absolutely. And you've coined the term the pipeline black box to describe kind of this problem that you're discussing. Can you explain what that is and why focusing on the black box is so important for businesses that want to grow?
Carolyn (04:27.325)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we use it a lot. And the reason we coined that term is because after working with, you know, over a hundred, maybe close to 500 companies from like Chris Walker's Refine Labs days back in 2019 to today, 100 % of companies don't track what's in the pipeline black box. And so what does that mean? It means that gray area between, you know, when a lead becomes a lead and when an opportunity becomes an opportunity, what actually happens to it?
And in the real world, inside of that process, you have millions of activities that are happening between people, between your tools and your tech. Think of like 30, 40 tools in your tech stack sometimes. You have different teams. A lot of shit is happening to take that MQL and turn it into an opportunity. Yet none of it is tracked in sort of like a unified, stitched together way that brings it all together.
and actually shows you, I don't want to say a linear path, but shows you that path that somebody takes from that very first interaction that they had with your brand, right, through to opportunity creation and closed one. And so the pipeline black box is basically, it's basically your prospecting motion, right, all of the things that you're doing to convert that lead and get a meeting booked and understanding exactly what is happening there.
Adam O'Leary (05:48.762)
Amazing. I guess looking at this, so if MQLs is not something that we should necessarily be tracking or we shouldn't view as like the holy grail, what other metrics should somebody be tracking other than MQLs to kind of help them understand the health of their go-to-market engine?
Carolyn (06:07.967)
I think MQLs can be a good metric when, like I said, when they're complemented with other metrics, right? The problem is, and just to back up a little bit, the problem is most companies don't have alternative ways or additive KPIs, and so they very heavily over-index on MQL generation. And just to unpack that a little bit more, generating leads in today's market is extremely expensive, and it's like,
the fast track to CAC inflation basically. And that's why we always have like CFOs or finance hammering down on marketing saying like, do you really know your ROI? You're spending a shitload of money. What are you getting out of it? They want basically business metrics to quantify the performance, right? And so when you're saying MQLs, like that literally means nothing when one to 2 % of them are converting, right? So another way to look at that is one pipeline.
first and foremost, right? Like most companies also split the pipeline by the department that sourced it, also, you know, problematic. So one pipeline, but alternative metrics to look at might be if you start to track the pipeline black box or what's inside of it, that prospecting sort of like stream of things that happen, you can start to track, you know, what trigger led to...
you know, eventual opportunity creation. And we're not just talking where did the lead originate. We're also not talking what was the last thing that happened. We're talking about what was the trigger that got the sales rep or the AE or BDR or whatever to start working that person that, you know, led them to believe, hey, we should call this person. What was the reason? Right? So a lot of companies don't actually track the reason, the trigger. And then, so that could be one metric, like what triggers are actually coming from marketing.
And another one would be, what is the qualification rate from that trigger to pipeline? Right? Is it 2 %? Is it 50 %? Right? Aiming to get better and higher at that is another great metric to leverage. Another one might be the time from initial attempt to call that person to meeting booked to qualified pipeline. Is it 200 days? Is it 30 days? The objective is to get more volume of people.
Carolyn (08:26.286)
that convert and a more better volume of people that convert faster. So it's starting to think about the dynamics of how people become pipeline, not just where did they come from.
Adam O'Leary (08:37.817)
Absolutely. OK, super neat. And this is very interesting. guess, looking at this, what is some actionable insight, I guess you could say, that our audience could use to boost their meeting to pipeline conversions, right? So instead of just looking at the data, how can we actually look at this to say, let's actually start increasing the sales output, right?
Carolyn (08:59.212)
Well, I think you got to track it first, right? Every company is different, right? So first and foremost, it's like being actually able to track some form of that to be able to make like decisions around it. Cause like I said, the dynamics company to company vary so much. But the thing I want to emphasize here is what this allows you to do is actually start to like split the data and segment it based on like different dynamics. And so oftentimes as companies, look at like,
dynamics more like holistically, like what is holistically, what is the conversion rate from like our SDR outreach to, you know, qualified pipeline. And so when you look at that overall, say that, you know, the conversion rate is like 10%, once you start to measure this and then can look at, you know, different qualification rates by different SDRs or look at, you know, number of activities by SDRs, you can really start to see that sometimes it might be like one or two things that are actually carrying the performance.
and then you've got a whole bunch of underperforming things that are happening inside of the system. And so the biggest takeaway is measure that and first address the underperforming or the drag on the business. And that in and of itself can be huge for a company. So it's not necessarily about adding more, doing more, it's fixing what's broken that you didn't even know you had.
Adam O'Leary (10:14.19)
That's amazing.
Adam O'Leary (10:19.873)
Absolutely. No, that's great insight. And I guess for Pesetto, how do you guys typically work with clients?
Carolyn (10:27.232)
Yeah, so we have a few ways. One is that most companies don't track this at all, right? Their data's a mess. And so we have a proprietary data model where we can take that messy data and in two weeks, stitch it together with our data model and basically come back to our clients and say, here's what's in your pipeline black box you didn't know and serve them up immediate insights so that they have actionable things that they can do literally tomorrow to fix it.
A lot of times too, people want to fix the data inside of their own systems and also just build the right process. so we help our customers do that too. Typically in Salesforce, that means standing up a custom object. sounds complicated. It's not, it's really straightforward, but basically like a dedicated object or space or container to track this sort of thing, much like we track opportunities or contacts or accounts. And HubSpot is great because it already has.
an object stood up to do this. It's called the lead object. Most companies just don't architect it or use it properly. And so a lot of times too, we help our customers set that up, you know, and measure things the right way.
Adam O'Leary (11:37.657)
Super cool. what has been like the biggest result that you've seen from your clients that have worked with you?
Carolyn (11:45.673)
Yeah, I think great question because I think results are huge here. Well, first and foremost, the biggest thing that sort of like the biggest outcome that we see oftentimes is like just alignment across the board. Like oftentimes, you know, you have a GTM, you've got sales, you've got marketing, CS is in there too. And for the first time, you stop having teams like fight for credit or, you know, debate what they should do based on like gut feel. It's like
that's the data, we gotta do this, we gotta fix this. so like cohesion, collaboration, people working together, like a true system, I think is one of the biggest outcomes because you actually have the ability to move faster. And then of course, like a tangible result of that would be like increases in like key metrics, like pipeline actually starts to increase like huge.
new ARR starts to increase huge. I'm just consulting with a company right now. I have a call after WeChat here. And like for the first time in several quarters, they've actually hit their like new logo ARR target. Huge, right? How did they do that? Right? And so other things like sales cycle starts to speed up, qualification, you know, from meeting booked to pipeline starts to speed up or improve. Win rate, like this company's win rate year over year improved by 157%.
So they actually don't even need to get as much pipeline anymore, because their win rate has improved. The quality of their pipeline has improved. So things like that, like those key performance indicators really start to improve, because now you can literally measure everything.
Adam O'Leary (13:24.633)
super nice and where should people go to learn more about you?
Carolyn (13:27.894)
Yeah, thank you. You can always come find me on LinkedIn, Carolyn Dilks. I'd love to chat and meet you if you're interested. And our website is pesetto.com.
Adam O'Leary (13:38.714)
Well, thank you so much, Carolyn. It was a pleasure to have you on and signing off for now. Have a wonderful rest of your day and looking forward to seeing you on the next episode of Simple Wins.
