Fortella, which I’ve served as an advisor over the past year or so, makes a revenue intelligence platform. The company recently published an interesting survey report entitled The State of B2B Marketing: What Sets the Best Marketers Apart? Rahul is super passionate about marketing accountability for revenue and the use of AI and advanced analytics in so doing, which is what drew me to want to work with him the first place. He’s also an avid Kellblog reader, to the point where he often reminds me of things I’ve said but forgotten!
In this webinar we’ll drive a discussion primarily related to two Kellblog posts:
That pipeline isn’t a monolith and that we need to look inside the pipeline to see things by opportunity type (e.g., new vs. expansion), customer type (e.g., size segment, industry segment) and by source (e.g., inbound vs. partners). We also need to remember that certain figures we burn into our heads (e.g., sales cycle length) are merely the averages of a distribution and not impenetrable hard walls.
By decomposing pipeline we can identity that some types close faster (and/or at a higher conversion rate) than others, and ergo focus on those types when we are in a pinch.
While there is a strong argument that buyers should be nurtured before, during, and after the initial sale, I’m going to speak in this post about pre-sales lead nurturing, the purpose of which is to turn prospective buyers into marketing qualified leads, or MQLs.
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead judged more likely to become a customer compared to other leads based on lead intelligence, often informed by closed-loop analytics.
An MQL is someone judged to be more likely to buy than the rest. That works for me. Typically, MQLs are defined by a set of rules like:
“Raised their hand.” Took activity that indicates interest (i.e., they are not just a name on purchased list) or increasingly, took multiple actions that accumulated points in a behavioral tracking system that exceed some threshold.
The first point (the newness criterion) was a trap that I slipped in to see if you were paying attention. While some marketers will argue that MQLs need to be “new” (and there are some good reasons for this) others will increasingly question — in a lead nurturing world — what “new” actually means and why “new” matters.
After all, what should matter is that we have found a person more likely to buy than the other people. Whether they’ve been in our database 2 hours, 2 weeks, or 2 years shouldn’t matter. Or should it?
I think it does matter because:
Marketing needs to watch its image in front of sales. Declaring someone who’s come to our last 3 annual roadshows an MQL strikes me as a “Kick Me” sign, regardless of whether she’s just accumulated 50 points. There is a difference between someone who is new and someone we’ve been recycling for several years.
Marketing needs to track how many are new vs. recycled (1) to avoid a seemingly in-built tendency to be new-obsessed, (2) because few companies actually want 100% of either, and (3) because new and recycled MQLs will likely show very different downstream conversion rates, which should not be averaged away.
That’s why, in my view, a “new MQL” is a contact who has become an MQL for the first time (i.e., they are not necessarily new to our database, but they are new in hitting the MQL criteria). After that, if they don’t buy on the first round and if they later come back to life again (by accumulating enough points in the nurture system), they are a “recycled MQL.”
MQLs = new MQLs + recycled MQLs
When I first heard the term “nurture” about a decade ago, to me it was all about recycling. Nurture was what you did to people who were interested in your stuff, but who weren’t ready to buy now. The purpose, then, of nurture would be some combination of (1) maintaining awareness and positive opinion so that the customer would call when they were ready to buy, and (2) attempting to accelerate the customer’s buying timeframe by marketing the benefits of acting sooner rather than later.
Nurture, then, was a process that should take quarters or years — not days or weeks. Nurture could include emails, but it wouldn’t be limited to them. We might invite nurtured leads to local events, mail them schwag (aka, “dimensional pieces“), and even call them from time to time.
I now call this path “slow nurture” because marketers seem to increasingly define “nurture” as the process by which you take a new inquiry (or name) and turn them into an MQL. It becomes largely about email and is a speedy process that executes in hours, days, or maybe weeks. I now call this “fast nurture.”
Both types of nurture should involve point accumulation, use tracks, and be A/B tested. But there is a fundamental difference between fast nurture and slow nurture, related primarily to frequency.
This is what fast nurturing all too often feels like:
That’s why I also call fast nurture speed-bagging.
If you speed-bag someone who plans to buy in 12 months, what happens? You irritate the heck out of them. “Hey, I just wanted to read that white paper and you’ve emailed and called 4 times in a week. Go away.” Then they hit unsubscribe or junk-sender.
And that’s it. You’re done. You spent real money finding someone, they were the right person, they even have plans to buy — just not now — and you speed-bagged them into blocking your communications. Epic fail.
That’s why marketers need to think about Nurture, Fast and Slow. They need to never fast-nurture slow-nurture prospects. And they need worry about just how much they are speed-bagging even the fast-nurture prospects. Particularly in markets where the challenge is more finding the right buyer at right time than simply finding the right buyer, matching the pace of the nurture to the pace of the buyer is everything.
I’m Dave Kellogg, advisor, director, consultant, angel investor, and blogger focused on enterprise software startups. I am an executive-in-residence (EIR) at Balderton Capital and principal of my own eponymous consulting business.
I bring an uncommon perspective to startup challenges having 10 years’ experience at each of the CEO, CMO, and independent director levels across 10+ companies ranging in size from zero to over $1B in revenues.
From 2012 to 2018, I was CEO of cloud EPM vendor Host Analytics, where we quintupled ARR while halving customer acquisition costs in a competitive market, ultimately selling the company in a private equity transaction.
Previously, I was SVP/GM of the $500M Service Cloud business at Salesforce; CEO of NoSQL database provider MarkLogic, which we grew from zero to $80M over 6 years; and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues. I started my career in technical and product marketing positions at Ingres and Versant.
I love disruption, startups, and Silicon Valley and have had the pleasure of working in varied capacities with companies including Bluecore, Cyral, FloQast, GainSight, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, and Tableau.
I currently serve on the boards of Scoro (work management) and SMA Technologies (workload automation).
I previously served on the boards of Alation (data intelligence), Aster Data (big data), Granular (agtech), Nuxeo (content services), and Profisee (MDM).
I periodically speak to strategy and entrepreneurship classes at the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley) and Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC).
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