Is the MQL dead? (with Freya Ward, Headley Media)

Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Look, I hear about AI agents every single day on the internet, in the X5 community. But it's confusing. It's a little bit overwhelming, which platform should I be using? Which agents are actually worth building? How do I even set this up? There's a lot of noise out there. It's kind of hard to tell what's actually going to make the job easier versus what just can be another thing to manage. Or is this just a cool little thing some guy wrote about on LinkedIn? Well, Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. You can build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. This is really smart. They also just launch virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that can learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your whole website optimized. Humans, that's us, of course. 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It's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company and from there decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer before a demo before a sales call before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists, which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams used to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI search, govern your content and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at Webflow.com/4/exit5. That's Webflow.com/FOR/exit5. You're listening to the Dave Gerard show. Hey, it's Dasha. In all today's episode, I'm talking to Freya Ward. Freya is the Associate Managing Director at an agency called Headline Media. They help B2B tech companies get their content in front of potential buyers to generate leads. Before she worked in an agency, Freya was a marketer and she got so frustrated by how the sales team was treating her leads that she actually stopped being a marketer and joined the sales team instead. She has been on both sides. She really gets it. We spent today's episode talking about a topic very near and dear to my heart, sales and marketing alignment. We talked about whether the MQL is really dead and what Freya has been suggesting clients call the MQL instead. But probably my favorite part is Freya shared specific tactics that you can try with your sales team today to build good alignment. I shared some of the things that have been working on our team as well. I think you're going to walk away from this episode with a few things that you can implement right away, especially if you're tired of the same argument from the sales team, which is just, you know, these leads are not good enough. So enjoy the show. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let me know what you think. Freya, welcome to the podcast. So excited to chat with you today. Let's get you introduced, Freya. Who are you? Where do you work? What do you do? Amazing. Thank you, Dasha. So I am Freya Ward. I'm the associate managing director at a company called Headly Media. We are based in the UK, but we're a global company. We support marketing managers that are working at B2B technology companies who are looking to drive marketing qualified leads or MQLs, whatever they want to call them. Leads are at that early stage in the funnel. I'm ready for further nature and conversion. Let's talk about that. What is your typical client look like? Who is hiring you to do this type of work? Yeah, of course. So we work with B2B marketing professionals. It could be anyone from the head of marketing. It could be media buyers. We also work with agencies as well, some media buying agencies. In some instances, we work with kind of founders. It really depends on the size of that business. Our sweet spot is really in that mid-market enterprise company, but the practice of what we do is applicable to any company size, really. When you say mid-market enterprise, give me like numbers. What is the typical head count at a company like that? And then I'm also curious, who on that team are you working with? Is it the demand-gen manager? Who are you getting plugged in with? So we tend to look at the marketing department as the overall head count for our ICP and who we're targeting who we're working with. The campaigns that we run tend to work most effectively when you've got a head count of more than three marketers, but some of the clients that we work with might have five, six hundred marketers in their department. It really depends. It's often more siloed when they're a larger company, so that's more of a not an individual relationship. We'll have a global footprint with that kind of account. The job titles that we tend to work with is anyone from demand-gen into the head of marketing. It could be your paid media specialist and then agency side. It's more account managers, account directors, account execs in some instances. And yeah, it really is split. It really depends on the responsibilities of that individual, whether they're focusing on specific emerging markets. For example, there might be a marketer that's focused purely on those new markets or it could be a head of marketing that's just trying to pull something together globally. Often it's the more senior titles of work with us when they work on a global campaign and they're looking to then pass it down into their field marketers to run the execution of it. Got it. That makes sense. And then what is the problem that they're trying to solve when they hire your company? So a couple of different problems is either they are looking to open up a new territory and they don't really have a footprint in that territory. They're trying to understand who their potential buyers could be, who their audiences that they need to target. So their work with us to replicate where they've already had success in one market. They'll look to replicate that and we understand the local nuances, especially when it's local language content syndication and lead generation. It has to be done slightly differently from a compliance angle, but also from an audience angle. Job titles don't always transfer too cleanly across different Geos in different markets. So it could be focusing on that side, the net new acquisition, or it could be that they have had a poor experience in the past with contents indication and lead generation and they're looking for a vendor that truly understands it owns their own portfolio of publications and can support them in a trusted partnership as opposed to over promising and under delivering like, unfortunately, a lot of vendors in our space do. And at these companies, what does their funnel look like? I'm curious like before they start working with you, where are their leads coming from and who on the team is touching them and what does the handoff look like? Yeah, of course. So generally speaking, our ideal customer will have a marketing automation system in place. They will be looking for top of the funnel leads that are a little bit more educated than like a programmatic or display activity. Maybe they've seen traffic drop on their own website. They're not generating as many inbound leads and they need to turn something up when it comes to outbound. So they'll be reaching out to us with a gap, essentially, that they need to fill. If they have a marketing automation set up in place, then that can work really nicely with the type of leads that we generate because they need to be nurtured. They're not sales ready opportunities. They're very much marketing leads are ready for further nature, more content, multi-channel exposure and everything else. But we do also work with clients that have a challenge when it comes to providing the sales team with leads. We do a lot of expectation setting and we'll support a lot of our clients in, sometimes just backing the marketers up when they're talking to their sales team or the BDRs or the SDRs, whoever it is that they're now reporting into. I mean, a lot of marketers in the space are now reporting into revenue metrics and that can be quite a tough adjustment. Our aim is to put control back in the marketers' hands and help them build alignment with their sales team and generate leads that maybe when we deliver them, they're not quite ready for sales conversations, but with some further nurture, they'll be ready to hand over with maximum intelligence. They meet the ICP, they're engaging with content and maybe we understand their challenge, what they're looking to address, why they're consuming that client's content so that when they do go over to sales, there's a little bit more alignment and they start to see that success. A lot of the over and above work that we do to support the marketers, I mean, we're pretty much all marketers at headly. So what's the saying? A wolf in sheep's clothing. I'm a marketer, but I wear a sales hat really, so I did the jump from marketing over to sales. Mainly don't tell my sales colleagues, but mainly because I became frustrated that salespeople weren't doing the things that I thought they should be doing as a next step with the data that I was generating. So I made that jump into sales, but with a marketing attitude and created that alignment and I'm trying to support my clients in doing the same thing. Well, we're some of the frustrations that you were feeling as a marketer. That made you make the jump. Oh, there's quite a list. I mean, I'm not going to throw salespeople under the bus. I will speak negatively about them. I am one of them, but I think that gives me a bit more of a pass, right? So I would say the most common thing that used to frustrate me and I still deal with on behalf of my clients now is the salespeople saying, you know, marketing needs don't work or marketing needs don't convert or being able to just Tile them all with the same brush, all the leads with the same brush is probably the most frustrating thing because the reality is if a salesperson is approaching a marketing lead in the way of a traditional sale, you know, if you treat a lead that's come through a LinkedIn campaign, for example, in the same way that you treat a lead that's filled out contact us from on your website, they're not in the same headspace, they're not necessarily saying "I've got my amics out, I want to invest, especially when we're working with tech companies, you know, they don't necessarily want to invest and displace one of your competitors and invest in a multi-million dollar deal, just off the back of one piece of content or you know, a DM on LinkedIn." So the biggest frustration for me is or was, salespeople just hiring every marketing active do the same brush, the biggest frustration now is probably the reputation of mql's inside of not only the marketing department but outside of that as well, it's got a terrible reputation and it's not necessarily the tactic that's the problem of my opinion, it's just that it's a really easy thing to say that marketing leads don't work or marketing, you know, whatever marketing is doing isn't working because it's not meeting the stage that sales expect that activity to be at. Let's talk about that because any social media platform without seeing the mql's is dead, death to the mql, so for real, it's the mql dead and what do you mean when you say that it's got a bad rap, talk about that? Mql is not dead, maybe the terminology is a little bit redundant, a bit tired, I believe the reputation is associated with the framing of it as opposed to the actual tactic itself. I mean, I speak with, be to be marked as every single day and every single one of them even sometimes inside of the same company has a different definition for what an mql is. I was on a panel this week and in that we debated a little bit about is the mql dead? Is it not and one of the fellow panelists said, well, no, we don't measure our success on mql's anymore, we measure it on qualified, they actually called it qualified opportunities and when I pressed her a little bit harder, it's basically the same thing as an mql, they've just called it something different and that has had an improvement for her. We do the same thing at Headley, we call them qualified outbound leads, it's a psychological shift, we're not looking to just rebrand, you know, as marketers, we love to rename something, we love to repurpose and rename it and rebrand it, but qualified outbound leads set an expectation to the sales team, A, it's qualified, so it meets the ICP, but B, it's outbound and if a salesperson hits a word outbound, that's speaking their language, they understand that it isn't something that's come to them and instead they need to treat it in the same way as they would, if they were called prospecting, so you position it in the right way, I think it can be well received, I've seen it with my own clients, they've seen an uplift in relationship, internal comms and engagement through that shift and that rename, you're absolutely right, Dasha, you can't go on any social platform without seeing some form of debate about the mql is dead, what I mean by reputation is exactly that, it's actually really damaging to the reputation of marketing as a whole, because an mql is a marketing qualified lead and what we don't always take into account is by tarnishing the name of something and joining in that debate is actually really damaging for the internal stakeholders' impression of the marketing department as well, is an interesting one for sure. You have this idea that as marketers we have to be bilingual, talk about that a little bit, what do you mean by bilingual in a marketing world? Yeah, I absolutely do, so I believe marketers have to be bilingual nowadays, what I mean by that is not other languages, I mean, props to anyone that speaks any other language, I am terrible, I can just about order a glass of wine in French and I think I can order a beer in German and that's about it, what I mean when I say marketers need to be bilingual is internal language, so marketers need to be able to speak finance, they need to be able to speak stakeholder and C-suite, they need to be able to speak sales in a language in a way that they can translate marketing achievements, marketing goals, marketing tactics in a way that the recipient of that information understands, that's the biggest way that I think marketers can win, what I mean by that is, I mean, there's a great article actually by a gentleman called Gareth James, he works at a company called Halem and he wrote a piece recently about, it's actually, it's a really good article, you should definitely check it out. Well, look at him, the show looks amazing, thank you, it's about how if you are a marketer and you're going into a budget meeting with finance, how to translate your marketing budget requests essentially into a language that finance understands, so he talks about profit and loss, you know, he talks about all of this terminology that finance will understand and I think internal marketing is one thing, but actually articulating in a way that the recipient will understand will help you get buy-in, it will also prevent the role creep, and what I mean by that is, I think everybody listening, everyone I've ever spoken to in the marketing world has someone in the C-suite or someone in the sales team, someone in finance that thinks they're a marketer, when it comes to reviewing a budget or the tactics or whatever it might be, I mean AI is only fast tracked this, and someone actually referred to it yesterday as a Claude, so Claude audit basically, which is their C-suite using Claude to audit their marketing, and it's like, oh, I've done a Claude, that's the one of the threats for us, right, is there's all these AI models that will help non-marketing folk understand a little bit more about marketing, but certainly not enough that they've done a degree in it, they've spent years in their career and they've earned their place, and this role creep comes in all too often, and I think part of that is because as marketers we over articulate the metrics that matter to marketing, almost as a justification, because it makes sense to us, but then we find ourselves having to explain more about traffic and more about all these different measurements and share of search and everything else, and that doesn't always make sense to someone that hasn't studied it, doesn't live and breathe it and isn't as passionate about it to you, so what I mean by marketers need to be bilingual is I think there's two different areas of marketing, there's the operational and tactical elements which absolutely should be discussed inside of the marketing department, but then there's the output and the results that should be discussed in a way that the stakeholder understands. I think that's so true, also show me any other department where a company, everyone outside of that department is like, I think I could do that job, like I'm not going up to finance and saying, oh, I could totally, like a model, sign me up, you're right, marketing is one of those things where someone will just walk by and say, I think I can do that job, it's harder than it looks, but it's so true, I mean the metrics that I report on to our leadership team, like in our leadership team meeting are so different than the marketing metrics that I'm reviewing with our marketing team, those are far more in the weeds than the ones that I'm, when I talk to the leadership team and I give a Monday update on how we're doing as a marketing team, I have exclusively talking about, this is how much pipeline we've driven, because that's really all we care about, like are regenerating enough pipeline for our AEs to hit their number. And with the marketing team, we care about traffic and we care about share of search and we care about hand razors, we care about so many metrics, so I think you're right, like the level of altitude and how much you share. We say, especially in remote world, like over communicate, over communicate, but I don't think that means just word vomit every single metric that you're measuring to leadership and expect them to care or understand how it ties to the overall business, at least not with educating the teams why those things matter and how they apply to the broader business strategy. So that makes a ton of sense. What I would also recommend doing is that cadence. So as I mentioned earlier, great opportunity to align at the top of the year, you would not believe the amount of marketing people I spoke to at this event. I went to this week that said that they haven't sat down with that same group of people since their kickoff in January. We're getting close to Q4, like we're pretty much in Q4 and the amount that has changed in the B2B landscape in the last six months, let alone nine months is wild. And if you're working off of the same definitions criteria, touch points and metrics that you were at the top of the year, that might be fine for your specific niche and industry, but you've got to check in on it. You've got to check in on what's going on on the sales side. What is the pushback? What's the leakage? What's happening? How do we need to refine this criteria to qualify these leads before I deliver them back over? So the cadence is probably even more important than the rebrand. It always surprises me as well when I talk to other teams, how infrequent their communication is. So I have a few suggestions that people can steal from what we do at our team. Our team is smaller, I will say. We are a team of about a hundred people in between marketing and sales where there's probably like 15 of us. And what we do, we have a few rituals in place to make sure that marketing and sales are working in block step. So the first thing that we do is I sit in, we have a weekly deal review where we review every deal at our funnel with the sales team and marketing is an active participant in that. In fact, when we first started deal review, I actually let it, which I thought was cool. Like you've got your head of marketing, running deal review and asking reps, like, how's it going? What do you need help with on the deal? What's the risk on the deal? I played such an active role in understanding what was happening, where were deals falling apart? What stage were we struggling with? I no longer lead deal review, which I know. is fine, but I sit in on it and so do a lot of marketers on the team. The other ritual we have is a weekly show and tell, which is where a wrap will open up Gong and they'll play a meeting on 1.25x speed that they've done and we pause to give feedback and ask questions, which is so important for marketers to be a part of that to see how is the sales team actually talking about the product? How are they selling it? What objections are they having? Helps inform so much of our content and then every morning we start with a sales standup and every wrap just says here's what I'm doing today and by the way like I have a question we're like I'm stuck here all of our marketers are part of that as well. I think we obviously you know we're a smaller team where we can have meetings like that but there's a version of that that can be true at every team size and so we are iterating on our messaging and like how we demo I'm not even joking every single week every single week we are changing our messaging we're changing something about our strategy we are not waiting for a kickoff call it feels so natural now that it's kind of wild to me when I hear like oh we're gonna like revisit what we're doing a quarter from now like why would you wait when there's probably so much insight that you have that you're sitting on that you're just like you're just waiting why so that's my little rant I think there's like a lot of rituals that teams can incorporate to make sure that sales and marketing are talking more often than a sales kickoff once upon time in January yeah that's such a good example I mean yeah that's such a good example and I think what you've done inside of your company is you've just normalized communication between the two departments right so now by you leading that initial one as well it's like oh okay they do respect marketing they understand where we're coming from they understand okay they're part of the team and now you blood the lines which is the dream right is that we all worked towards one go and we can have those conversations and give feedback both ways and it's so helpful because the sales team when they see marketing as part of the team and granted like I've always positioned marketing internally like our job is to make the role of the sales team easier whether it's making more of the market aware that we exist educating people before they show up to talk to sales or you know doing something along the sales process so I think sales sees marketing as a true partner but that all sounds great like how does that work in practice just this week someone on our sales team was like hey Dasha this thing I said on a demo I tried it for the first time it really resonated you know we already have drafted a blog post addressing that very thing he was saying I didn't really realize this was like a real value add but I've said it a few times now and it's really relating like maybe we can do something with that which is great because it's a feedback that goes both ways and that feedback loop is so important so I think yeah if you make communication regular and casual like it's just a slack message that's in exchange now not like a formal kickoff where we're like all buttoned up on a zoom there's so so many benefits to doing that hey it's me Dave this episode is sponsored by zoom webinars zoom webinars lets you host polished engaging webinars that actually drive pipeline we recently switched to zoom webinars for exit five live I don't know if you've seen this it's been everywhere I think our conversations about webinars everyone's talking about webinars right now let's do great webinars that's what we're talking about right I've been super happy 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of AEO modern paid advertising strategy and a dedicated go to market engineering team everything CGM does gets tracked measured and improved over time that means more pipeline for you in this works because they were started by a former VP of marketing like I said john he really gets this space I think that matters by the way for B2B tech companies CGM has a special offer for people who listen to this podcast you can get two free sessions focus on media planning to learn what channels are driving the best ROI how much you should be investing in demand capture versus creation and how to invest up funnel effectively hey this is a really smart offer so go check it out compound growth marketing dot com slash exit five go check this out get some free help that's compound growth marketing dot com slash exit five bye bye I wanted to ask you I'm sure you've seen a lot of mql definitions are there any of that like really resonate with you that you think would work like let's say a company listening to this or market or listening to this their company is struggling to define an mql is there starting point that you suggest like something that would work for the majority of teens like how individual does it have to be I think the actual exercise of establishing your mql is applicable regardless of your company size like if you're a startup if you're one man or one lady band wherever you are in your journey or you're working for a large enterprise business the exercise of establishing exactly what criteria goes into your mql should be universal I mean if you're a startup then I'm to a degree slightly ambiguous because you haven't got the historical legacy information and legacy experiences that you have to either undo or retrain instead you've got that opportunity to really set those boundaries and define what success looks like and potentially be more agile flexible with it but it can still happen inside of large enterprise businesses and everything in between the criteria that I would look at the first thing I would do is visit your sales data so visit the success stories and actually speak to those customers as well because there's so much that can be gained like I'm a big advocate of businesses allowing their marketing people to do market research with their established relationships you know why do you keep coming back can you remember how you're originally found us what is something that we do that for you ideal customer is different to others in the space why haven't we been displaced by a competitor what is it is it the relationship with your account manager is it the actual product and the solution is it the price point what is it that keeps you here and also potentially incentivising lapsed accounts as well to get that same intelligence because if you only know what you're doing well you don't know where you're going wrong so there's opportunity there as well but if I was building out a framework for an mql definition I would look initially in that success data interestingly there's a big debate going on that I'm seeing a lot about at the moment about buyers personas and if you've been in the marketing space long enough then you remember CEO Colin and finance Fran and the personas that you know like drinking coffee and they have two dogs and this and the other and all of that irrelevant information there's a new thing or an emerging thing coming through about synthetic personas and I think that that's quite an interesting approach I'm certainly not an expert in it I have only started exploring it this week but I think that's also a really nice place to start so check it out do some searches on synthetic personas they're head of marketing actually in Amir for Samsung is talking about it a lot of events at the moment and I think it's a really interesting topic that's using LLM's to role play your personas and to really get to know your customer and your ICP but yeah the first place I would start is in that success data how did they get there what can you map what can you attribute but also remember that not everything is able to be attributed so remember the dark metrics as well especially where we are right now with AI and AI models and search behavior and everything else but try and build a picture from your success data and what good looks like and start there and then look to fine tune it I was going to say I think if you're a marketer and you have the luxury of sitting on even a year's worth of data but probably more you can use AI to tell you in reverse engineer what an mql actually means for you and then obviously use your human judgment to make sure this makes sense and it's looking at all the right data but we're living in a world where you can use AI to actually tell you in reverse engineer what a success looked like historically and almost like package it up for you and create those definitions and then get in a room and pressure test it too but I think that's great everything you're talking about we've done in practice and it's worked really well for us I'm curious to get your opinion our BDR's sit on the marketing team someone listening to this is going to be like well what we have BDRs that report into marketing which has worked really well for us we split our world into two universes so one marketing is responsible for pipeline generation and sales is responsible for taking that pipeline that marketing creates and converting it into closed one revenue and it's worked really well for us and by those two definitions BDR kind of like oh makes sense yeah BDRs help judge and rate pipeline, they get interested people on the phone for the sales team to then convert into customers. But in our CRM, we have everything is just to leave. And the lead is either totally coal, which we call identified, like we've identified them as a lead, or they're aware that we exist, or they're interested, or they're considering, or they're selecting. And so it's kind of like your classic ABM definitions of like how warm is a contact or company on their buying journey, and also those levels indicate what is the value of reaching out, right? Like the value of reaching out to someone who's interested or considering is so much higher than someone who's like, we've just identified them. And you're gonna do different things based on where someone is in their journey. You're not gonna use the exact same strategy for both. So I think there's so much value and just spending time defining those things and building a strategy around outreach for them. Rather than just treating every single contact at every single company in the exact same way. And with AI, we actually have the ability to do that even with a small team. But if you have a big team, even better, you've got more horsepower, more brains to come up with these definitions and put this all into action. We spend a lot of time talking about marketing and sales alignment. And I wanted to make sure that we talk about the specific ways to fix sales and marketing alignment that you felt in practice have actually helped. Do you wanna kick it off and give us number one? - Yeah, for sure. So the first thing that I would say, there are many ways to build sales and marketing alignment, but I think three great places to start or three things that I've seen move the needle the most or quickest. The first is get buy-in from the sales leader for you to create one simple mandatory field in the sales CRM. That field has five, six different reasons for rejection. So if you are providing your sales team with a marketing lead and they are rejecting it, it means that they can no longer reject it without putting it into one of these five or six different buckets. Those five or six different buckets should represent the most common reasons you suspect for rejection. For example, we do this at Headley, we have ghosting, which is a gentle away of saying, or I think most people know what ghosting is now, but a gentle away of saying that person's just completely ignored you. So with ghosting, we have not right now, we have no budget, we have gone with a competitor, and then we have, well, I'd say those are our top four. We have a couple of other ones, but they're quite prescriptive for our solution. So those top four are all indicators of actually the stage that essentially they're not at the right stage to speak to sales. What happens then is our sales team are tasked with selecting one of those four different reasons. The marketing team then has workflows that compete against those or counter argue against those reasons for rejection. So ghosting is like a long workflow. It's a multi-channel approach. It combines email, social, it trickles them into all of our programmatic ads, everything else. My favorite is not right now, because that does not mean that that person doesn't want to buy your product. It doesn't mean you're too expensive. It doesn't mean they've gone with a competitor and they've given you intelligence. It just means something has changed and they can't commit to working with you right now. That's the re-nature. That is the warmest re-nature. It's for me the highest indicator for our marketing team to keep providing them with content resources and everything else. But also, we have it in our system that it automatically sets a reminder to the salesperson to re-engage that contact in three months time. So we've done some benchmarking and we see that three months we tend to book our client's quarter on quarter. So it sets them a reminder to reconnect, so it actually repriortizes it back to sales at the right time, hopefully the right time. You have the budget one, which again, lots of budgets change, priorities change. That's absolutely fine, that's intelligent. So that goes back into the marketing workflows. And what happens when you add in a mandatory field, it makes sales more accountable for their reason for rejection and it enables marketing to ask more questions. So if you have a fractious relationship and you're not going to be able to get that regular cadence with the sales team or maybe the sales team is huge and remote, your remote and your solo marketer, there's a lot of barriers that are potentially in the way. If you can convince the sales leader to put this mandatory field in, it then brings that, what do we say? Maybe your rejection rate is 60%. It brings that 60% down into smaller buckets that you can then actually do something with and re-nurture back into a later opportunity for the sales team. Yeah, I think that's like a note reader in such a low-lift way. Sales people are already filling out fields. What is one more field, especially if it, I think the reason too, like if I was positioning to my sales team, you can already hear the eye rolls, like, oh, one more field. But the promise is like, look, this is gonna help me understand why things are not lending so that I can get you the best leads ever so that you're not wasting your time. Your time is valid, but I want to make sure I'm sending you the right leads. This is a feedback loop for you. So yes, I get it, it's one more field. But this field is actually gonna help me and my team, like, calibrate so that we're sending you leads worth your while. Just before we jump into number two, we also communicated it to our sales team that they would retain that lead. So if marketing are then able to re-engage that lead, it comes back to the salesperson that rejected it. So there is that benefit for the salesperson and it will come back warmer, it will come back more engaged and you've already potentially built a rapport with them if they're not in the ghosters field, right? So it's not a case of your just helping marketing. So the perception for sales is more positive because it's, okay, well, if I give you this feedback, if I can get you a reason and give you this feedback, that could be a much lower hanging fruit for me at a later stage. You're gonna do the nurturing for me. That worked really, really well for us and it encouraged that feedback loop. In the absence or the addition of conversation, because if it just becomes, well, like your example, Dasha, you've made your regular cadence and check in with your sales team a habit and that field isn't even noticed by our sales team now, like it's just part of the process when they're rejecting a lead. - I love that. Yeah, I mean, getting to keep the lead that is a gift to the route, rather than like having it be round-robin to someone else. Like you already have the touch point. The momentum is there, you get to keep it. I love that. All right, what's number two? - So number two is signing a nurture manager. So I'm not trying to add more responsibilities to marketing boat. I know that we're stretched, we're overworked undervalued, all of the things, but assigning a nurture manager. So what I mean by that is you set up the mandatory field, you set up the process. Now someone has to re-nurture these leads. If you make it nobody's responsibility, then they will just go into a workflow, whatever cadence you set up for that workflow. Say it's four emails, set number of impressions, and then they're done off of that workflow. If that doesn't re-engage that audience, then those leads turn into lead leakage, and they're just throwing away, they're just wasted. If you assign a nurture manager, they become part of their responsibility is to dive into this data. So it is to evaluate those workflows, it's to optimize that campaign, it's to check in with sales as well, and say, hey, BDRA, I noticed that 40% of your leads are being rejected because not right now or not the right fit. Can we dive into those in a bit more detail and just get a bit more intelligence and insight? And then maybe they find that actually, they were just putting them into that bucket, 'cause it was the first one in the list, and it was convenient for them. That starts to warp the marketing data right. So having a nurture manager that is assigned and responsible for re-engaging this, what would otherwise just be lead leakage, can really change the game. Where my clients have done this, and where we've done it, we have seen an uplift in re-engagement. That has brought our overall cost per lead down, that has brought the cost per acquisition cost down, that has also built more of a rapport with sales, because sometimes an entire marketing department or a head of marketing, talking to BDRs, talking to the sales team, talking to the AEDs, especially if you've already got that friction in your relationship, it can create a lot of push and pull. Whereas if you have someone that is accountable for this part of it, and they start getting wins in for sales, and these leads are coming back around again, we've done some tweaking here, some optimization there. Maybe create some specific content for these four, five, six rejection reasons. That's a win for marketing, and overall it's a win for sales, it's a win for the overall revenue and the overall business. - Who is this person in the marketing org? Is this a new hire, or is this an additional kind of hat that a marketer starts to wear? - I don't think it has to be an additional hire. It depends on the size and scale of your marketing team, of course, if you are a one man or one woman band, and you are already really stretched, then maybe work with AI a little bit to build out some of the workflows, to build out that side of things, that can be a real assist and a real help. If you are able to make a hire, then absolutely this is a great hire, but I would be expecting them to do a lot more than just nurture the lead leakage. So I think it's an additional responsibility, but I think it is a worthwhile investment of time, because you only have to look at benchmark reports. I'm not going to quote them off the top of my head, but if you look at benchmark reports when it comes to lead leakage, it's the lowest hanging fruit, and there is such a wastage. That individual, if it was an additional hire, could also focus on legacy data within your CRM, re-engaging that. We work with clients that only focus on net new contacts and net new accounts. Some of those clients are the largest enterprise businesses in the world. There are only so many net new companies and accounts that don't already know and aren't already in the CRM. of X enterprise company. So what are they doing with that data? How many people are actually mining that data, nurturing it, re-engaging it, reprofiling it, they're sitting on an awful lot of data and I think every marketing department, every CRM is sitting on so much data. You only have to have a subscription with a CRM system to see just how much data you're sitting on and how much that data is actually just sat there stagnant, not moving, and probably not even in a workflow. So if it is an additional role, then I would be giving them the responsibility of being the nurture manager, but that expands to more than just lead rejection and instead it's focusing on legacy data and cross cell up cell, the low hanging fruit in the B2B space. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I'm just thinking it aloud. If it's me, I think I'm having a hard time in general like getting head count approved. Based on what you're describing, if it were me, I would probably just create a claw agent inside of Slack, get up to HubSpot, which is our CRM, and then have it run a weekly cadence where it's looking at the reasons, tagging the rep responsible and just asking the questions. We've set up similar agents inside of our Slack for like sales competitions. It's so easy to set up. I do think you have to be a clawed admin to do exactly what I'm describing with clawed tag, but what you're describing sounds like a great role for an agent to roll up to a human to review. And so the work of collecting the data, adding in the data, looking through it, you can 100% delegate that to AI, but then just have like a human oversee it. And it sounds like a big responsibility and it is, but I don't think it has to come with like a lot of demand on someone's time to actually run something like that. I'm taking that back to the team. I'm going to do that. Well, before we jump into number three, I think that is a great idea. And I think it is. There are so many different places for AI inside of the business, right? And there's so many different ways that it can be used and leveraged as an assist. And I think one of my favorite ways is something like that. So it is. Okay, well, I'm going to need to sense check this. Of course, anything AI should be sense checked. But the data exists is already there. This is already happening. They're already being rejected. I've set up the mandatory field. All I need to do is get some more action happening around that particular account, those contacts. And AI is, yeah, I think I'm excited to hear how you get on with it inside of your company. I'll circle back. Maybe I'll do like a LinkedIn most on it. But yeah, I think it's like a no brainer. I'm delegating a lot of like number crunching and data analysis that lives inside of our CRM to AI and having an agent roll it up to me. Just things that I always kind of knew in the back of my mind would be helpful to look at, but didn't have the time to collect is now just being pushed out to me. It's great. Okay, round us out with the third thing. I'm excited to chat about this one. Tell me about it. The third thing I would say is basically find your friend. And what I mean by that is building sales and marketing alignment is like, okay, my job apartments are so far apart. Right. This is just an example. But if you're sat there thinking, my departments are so far apart. We're so disconnected. I'm just one marketer in a band of many marketers. We all feel the same, but the sales people aren't listening. We've got all of this traditional and legacy team and they sell in a certain way. We can't influence that marketing is way down the hierarchy. I can't do this. I'm here to tell you you can you can do it in small tiny pieces. So and this is actually the same if you are a small team and you have great harmony as well, but find your person. So what I'd recommend in any of this is find an SDR or a BDR and I love the BDR's feed into your marketing department. I think that is so smart and it makes total sense. If your business is set up in the way that you explained dasha, then it makes total sense for them to sit on that side. It's like the pre and post is the before and after and it just makes sense. But I think a lot of businesses don't have the opportunity to set that up. So I would say find your friend find an SDR find a BDR speak to the sales manager and say I want to run a pilot with this individual for three months, six months. Look at your sales cycle. See how long that is take that into account in the time frame that you're suggesting that you run this pilot for as you probably should with most activity, especially if we're talking about pipeline and things like that. But work with that individual to support them. So build an ally. Basically, you know, we're here. We're marketing. I'm a marketing person. You're a BDR. What's going on when you're making these calls, who are you speaking to and build that and invest that time in that individual explain the content that you've got the resources. Not just send them an email with the SDR enablement piece and say his piece of content because somebody asked for it. Instead it somebody comes through to you because they've engaged with this piece of content. This is what it was written for and this is what it indicates stage that they're at what they're researching and why what their pain points might be really build that relationship with them. If they're having a call, ask them if you can either shadow, if you can't shadow, can you watch it back? Can it be recorded? Can you have the transcript? If nothing else, but show them along the way why letting you in helps them in turn because they're starting to get richer data or they're getting. You know, you might add in a profile in question into one of the campaigns that you're currently running to build intelligence about the stage of that lead and then you're going to articulate that to that individual and explain it. Treat them as a really close colleague and as a friend and as an ally, it's only going to take that individual starting to get success, starting to book more meetings, whatever metric they are held accountable for. The AE then praises that BDR SDR because they're getting richer prospects coming through and suddenly the SDR goes, well, I've been running this trial with or this partnership with marketing and this is how they help me. You're then going to have a seat at the table because the sales manager is going to go, okay, well, how do we turn this up? So if you can pilot it, find your friend, pilot all of the nurture, all of the support, the ideal sales and marketing alignment with that individual. It's only going to take a couple of really positive outcomes for that to then, you know, the other at BDRs or want a piece of it, the AE's will then want a piece of it and then that friction starts to break down a little bit. They all have thought every marketer needs an SDR bestie or a BDR bestie, whatever you call it at your company, they're also on the front lines, you can learn so much by being close to the BDRs. That's another reason I love having them report into marketing is because they're hearing the objections, the real objections on cold calls so much earlier than the rest of the company and they're having a volume of conversations. No one else is having so, so helpful, I love that tip for a I can talk to you all day, I think you're navigating in a world that is so interesting like sales and marketing, I think it's a tail as old as time like there's always going to be a healthy amount of friction there. And yeah, I mean, there's like so many different tangents I wanted to go on during this conversation if people want more Freya, where can they find you? What's the best place to link up with you in your company? Yeah, of course, so you can find me on LinkedIn, I'm super active on LinkedIn, so just search up Freya Ward, I'm the associate managing director at Headley Media. And if you want to check out the company and the work that we're doing, then look up Headley Media, which is H-E-A-D-L-E-Y media. And you'll find everything about us, we also run a podcast, which is called B2B marketers off the record, which is all about honest conversations with B2B marketers talking about shifts in buying behaviors. It's not very tactical, but it's more so opinion based and experience based, so you can check us out there as well. Awesome, thank you so much for coming on the show Freya, this was a lovely, lovely chat. Thank you so much for having me, it's been a real pleasure. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast, if you liked this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review, because I don't really care about that, I have something better for you. 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