MQLs are Out, Buying Groups are In with Terry Flaherty

Terry Flaherty: The process that connects sales and marketing together typically is a process with a really narrow pipe that fits one person that goes through the BDR. And at one person, as soon as that person goes through the pipe, turn off the pipe.

John Common: Welcome to Growth Driver. Where the best minds in B2B or redefining growth. Hey everybody, John Common here. Look, I'm going to start the show today with three facts. Number one, the MQL is 25 years old, but it's still at the center of most companies revenue process. Number two, if you're running an MQL centric revenue process, whether you realize it or not, you're signing up for a one maximum 2 percent success rate, which is the very definition of inefficiency.

Number three, over 90 percent of B2B purchases today are made by buying teams, not a single person. So look, it is time to move away from B2B. from MQLs as marketing's most important metric, but the problem is that old habits die really, really hard, right? So on today's show, we're going to unpack why it's time to move away from MQLs and how to move toward opportunities and buying teams.

You are going to want to save this episode and share it with your friends. with a bunch of people in your company. And by the way, this is not academic theory that we're going to be talking about doing this, moving toward opportunities and buying teams is going to seriously improve your revenue performance, which is what this show is all about.

So my guest today to help me do this. literally created the funnel model that you and your CFO and your board of directors probably use and stare out every day. Terry Flaherty is one of the world's true experts on B2B waterfalls, funnel metrics, revenue processes. And all of the ways that that impacts demand and sales performance.

He's the VP and principal analyst in demand at a little company we call Forester. You've probably heard of them. And before that, he spent over a decade at Serious Decisions where he literally coauthored every version of the funnel model that we have grown to love and sometimes not love. Terry has spent his entire career working on exactly these topics that we're going to talk about today and I could not be more thrilled to have him on the show.

Terry, welcome to Growth Driver. 

Terry Flaherty: Hey John, thanks for having me. Great to be here. 

John Common: Oh man. Hey, first of all, right at the top, I don't know if anybody has said this to you lately, but I want to thank you. And I really mean this, you've been doing this for, I went on your LinkedIn and tried to count. I, I, I, 25 plus years would be I think a good way to say it.

Uh, well, you know, You've been doing this research and work pushing the field of b2b growth and process and data driven revenue performance forward For a long long time and I don't know if anybody said thank you, but I want to thank you just for that man 

Terry Flaherty: Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. That's why I have all this gray hair now.

Oh yeah. 20, 25 years in marketing. Totally. And the last 11, right? As, as an analyst and, and yeah, it's been great. It's hard to believe it's 11 years now, John. 

John Common: Yeah. Wow. Well, you're doing, you've, like I said, you in, in many ways you have helped bring science to the art side of, of marketing. And so that's, it's amazing.

And that's kind of what we're here to talk about is how that's majorly changing. And so let, right off the top, I want to start with. Kind of maybe a provocative question. Why are MQLs causing more harm than good these days? 

Terry Flaherty: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think you hit on the exact challenge is MQLs are based off of, um, the level of detail, the insight, the technology essentially we had 20 25 years ago.

And back then, Um, it was exciting that we could actually see that somebody engaged and fill out a form and capture that information in real time and drive engagement. That's awesome. Um, but, but I think the issue now, as you said, is pretty much every buying decision in B2B is done by a group. And in that group, right, what's changed is over the last, especially 10, 15 years, the buyer is in control now and the buyer is going to do biggest part of their research, uh, anonymously.

They're, they're not going to raise their hand and identify themselves until later in the process. And so when they do, right, that's kind of classically, but we would think of an MQL. Boy, somebody filled out a form and said they wanted to see a demo or something, but they've done it. No. All kind of research in advance, and they've already pretty much made up their mind on who they're going to buy and why, right?

So if we think about kind of that, that last mile research or reach out that happens at the MQL, it's, it's now. You know, the decisions made and they're just, they're just looking for comfort and reinsurance are making the right decision. And so we can't think about starting our sales process. When somebody becomes an MQL, we have to realize that we need to build, and I'm not even calling it a sales process to build a market process.

We have to engage with prospects. We're really in their relationship when they're starting to research. We need to engage with them, but we have to engage appropriately. They don't want 25 calls from a BDR just because they happen to be on your website and look at a white paper, right? They want to, they want to do their research and then they'll engage.

And so, you know, things have changed a lot. And, and the expectations of buyers have changed a lot, but when we're an MQL centric process, the way we're trying to engage with them hasn't changed and it's putting our sales organization at a massive disadvantage if that's the signal or the trigger we use to begin our sales process.

John Common: It's almost like the history of the funnel, the B2B funnel or B2B waterfalls, the history itself starts to show how our own. understanding of the B2B buying buying process and how we match it with the right marketing sales and go to market motions. That history of the waterfall, it's sort of shows our clumsy efforts to try to grow along with that changing buyer that you just talked about.

Right. And so I think it would be useful and maybe, maybe not super lengthy, but like a, like a, like a fairly concise summary of the versions of the waterfall. Cause I, by my count, We're at either four or five. There's the 2006 Series Decisions Classic Version 1. 0 Waterfall. Well, and that was probably 

Terry Flaherty: actually a 2.

0 because there were some rudimentary versions before that. Oh, you would know, 

John Common: yeah. What is there, a cocktail napkin up in Forrester's History Museum or what? 

Terry Flaherty: Well, and the first version I ever saw actually had a picture of a waterfall as the funnel. It had the backdrop of a waterfall. It was pretty hysterical.

John Common: Hence the name, okay, right. Yeah. 

Terry Flaherty: Yeah. Yeah, 

John Common: interesting. Well, the ones that I know, like I'm talking about, like, if you were to go up to the average B2B marketing and salesperson and say, draw a waterfall, they're probably going to draw The the 2006 version the 2012 version in 2017 is when I think it big changes started to happen We called it the you called it the demand unit waterfall 

Terry Flaherty: Yeah, 

John Common: and then and now we're at the forester revenue waterfall talk to us about that progression that evolution 

Terry Flaherty: Yeah, so like you said, 2006 was I think the first officially published version and, and it was pretty simple.

It was, you know, marketing did some stuff and sent things to sales, and sales would qualify close, and, and that was it. So you had MQL and Sal and SQL and close one, and, and that's about the level of insight you had. And in 2012, um, it expanded a little bit to recognize, hey, BDRs are really a lot more important now than they ever have been.

We need to be able to track and understand, um, you know, kind of what's happening from an efficiency perspective in the BDR. And we also, um, had this view that it was important to understand, um, Um, how people entered the waterfall essentially the source of where leads were coming from. And so we had kind of the view of a marketing source and a BBR source and a sales source path on the waterfall that we would track and understand and be able to say what happens if marketing quote unquote sources a deal and the same thing with BBR.

And that actually turned out ironically to be kind of a not the best approach because you know as we'll get into a little bit later. Um, source is a little bit misleading. It doesn't matter how an opportunity or potential opportunity or lead got to us, right? It's a fact that we need to collaborate a lot more than we ever have in the past.

And we're, that, that's going to be later in the conversation. But, uh, if we think historically, 2012 was the one where we add the BBR capability and that insight. And, and, um, that one was in market for probably five years. Um, what was kind of interesting though, it's about 2016 or so we started and then we being me and, and a guy named Kerry Cunningham, he's my soulmate, and Kerry, Kerry is still very much a thought leader, and I think you had Kerry on the show not too long ago.

John Common: That's right. And by the way, we're going to, if, if this, if this episode goes the way I think it might go, I think me and you, and maybe even Amy from Forrester ought to get together and do a follow up episode, but yeah, keep, keep, keep going with the history of Waterfalls. 

Terry Flaherty: So, so what was interesting? We started getting calls in 2016 and people are like, we've been using your waterfall forever, but we need to stop.

And we're like, why? And it's like, well, um, the problem is the waterfall now is making me look bad. And when we pushed on it, one of the core premises when we think about this construct of a lead centric waterfall, one of the core principles or beliefs and foundational elements of it was that every lead, every MQL we got represented a unique deal.

It was kind of this one to one relationship. So if we got 100 MQLs that represented 100, 100 potential opportunities, and that's still the way people think about the MQLs. They think ultimately an MQL represents an opportunity. And so about that timeframe, people started doing this magical thing called ABM.

And they were like, we're going to start focusing on trying to drive engagement. And across multiple people in an account. And, and, and so, you know, we would get three, five, N number, N number of people coming in from that account and they would be considered top of funnel inquiry in waterfall. And in theory, they, because of the way the waterfall was structured in theory, it was like, Oh, we got five people coming from acne.

That's five different opportunities. And in reality, it wasn't those five people where those three people were all tied to the same opportunity. And so if we think about just the conversion logic, if I got one person, then it converted into a deal. Great. That's 100 percent conversion. If I had three people coming in, that's three inquiries.

And, and they converted to one deal. So 33 percent conversion rate, that guy got five people coming in this five inquiries. Now that one deal represented 20 percent conversion rate. So it was completely opposite of the fact that we're doing a really great job in marketing because we're driving engagement across multiple different people in the account, the buying group, but the numbers made it look like we were completely screwing up.

Right. So the conversion rates were going down, yet we were doing a much better job in driving efficiency and targeting that account. And so 2016, 2017, Carrie and I recognized, okay, it's, it's time for a change and we really need to reconcile and think about this being an opportunity for us. Focus as opposed to an individual person focus.

Because, you know, like we said, it's a many to one relationship. Every opportunity is going to have multiple different people. I don't want to be penalized when I'm bringing in more people. I don't celebrate the fact we're bringing in more people. And I want to align to what sales is focused on. Cause sales doesn't care about leads.

They don't care about MQLs what they're focused on opportunities. And so we saw this as sort of two wins, right? Uh, if we start thinking about this concept of buying groups and opportunities, we better align with sales and it also, uh, changes significantly the measurement because now we have that same entity of the opportunity going all the way through the process.

And I'm not kind of faced with this dilemma of converting people, which I've been counting into opportunities when I have, you know, kind of all this emphasis to try to, to go many to one and, and the, and the metrics were completely off. Not focused on that. If I think about opportunity all the way through the process, then it's just so much cleaner.

So that, that was sort of the big change that we did in 2017 when we made the shift to what we call demand unit waterfall at that time. 

John Common: Okay. That was 2017. Which is now what? Seven years ago. So how has that take us, take us to today so that we can complete sort of the history of waterfalls here? 

Terry Flaherty: So, so 2021 was another major milestone and it's been interesting.

Historically, the waterfall was all about net new logo acquisition, first opportunity to count. And, and during that timeframe, the sales and marketing process was pretty much focused on, Hey, marketing, go get new stuff. Don't, don't bring me leads from an existing account, uh, because, hey, I'm sales. I have infinite wisdom about everything going on in this account.

Now that it's my account, I want you to go get new stuff, right? But what we recognized is in a lot of our accounts, you know, 80%, 90 percent of the revenue they're producing come from existing accounts, but they'll come from different buying groups Or even a new solution, right? You have a cross sell, or they'll come from the same buying group, but it's a new solution.

And it's just as important, if not more important for marketing and sales to collaborate and, and focus on existing accounts and growing and expanding within the account than it is net new. And that is 

John Common: increasingly true. Isn't it increasingly true what you just said? If the company you're doing this work with isn't a startup if it's a mid market or an enterprise company The impact of renewals and expansion and land and expand revenue goes through the roof, I think 

Terry Flaherty: Yeah, absolutely.

And and kind of what we saw was there's all kind of different opportunity types. We looked at four And we said, okay, yeah, there's still a need to track net new business. And we call that an acquisition opportunity. But we also could be selling a new solution into an existing buying group, right? That's upsell.

We could be selling, you know, some solution existing, you know, same solution or a different solution into a different buying group in that organization. And that's cross sell. And in a lot of models, we also have the concept of a renewal retention. I sold license for this. You know, solution for three years and so in three years, there's a decision that needs to be made.

Am I going to renew? Am I going to go buy something else? And that's retention. And, and, and what's really important to understand is number one, the way I resource those different paths, uh, those different opportunity types, I may not use BDRs in retention, for example, and that's fine. So it's going to be a slightly different allocation of resources.

And probably as importantly, the conversion rates are gonna be different, right? Hopefully the conversion rates will be better because we've done such a great job at delivering value for the first opportunity that they bought that number one, they'll renew, right? And that renewal opportunity will have a super high conversion rate, but you know, they'll also be, you know, in that buying group, maybe they'll buy something else.

And because we already have a relationship and proof with that buying group that we were successful, I should have great conversion rates on upsell. And maybe there'll be advocates and help promote their, you know, us into other buying groups in the organization, be an internal reference. And again, because we made, you know, their colleagues successful, we should see higher conversion rates on cross self too.

So we recognize me to think of it kind of in four different swim lanes. And when we think about water for fall performance and conversion and all that, recognize that they're going to be different in each one of those different opportunity types and be able to track and you know, how we're doing and how do I optimize along those four different swim lanes?

And so that's got us today. That's where we're at. We call that the B2B revenue waterfall. Um, and it's basically, you know, opportunity centric. Um, but it also is, you know, kind of four swim lanes to recognize that there's four different relationships or four different opportunities that could exist within an account.

John Common: That's great. That is such a great succinct summary, and I think it's really important. I'd love to hear your take on this, right? So, inside the story of the history of funnels, for lack of a better term, uh, is some, some stuff that we have to unlearn. And, and you and I both know, we, I, I see it every single day.

I see companies that are running their go to market strategy. They're running marketing, sales, SDR, and customer success. Literally using somewhere between a 2006 version of the waterfall in their brain or 2012 and you know it because number one from the board of All the board deck all the way down to the daily stress of a demand gen manager Is number one all they talk about is mqls.

That's symptom number one and symptom number two is Um, they continue to talk about marketing sourced versus sales sourced. I hear that 

Terry Flaherty: all the time 

John Common: So we are living in the sins that we created here. How do we, how do we redeem ourselves? How do we unlearn? I won't use biblical language. How do we, how do we unlearn this, this bad, this bad thinking?

Cause it's everywhere. And I think the problem is at the top of the org chart. We have to, we have to help CEOs, CFOs in particular, uh, And the boards that they report to, and then the CMOs and VPs and CROs that they manage, I think that is the place that has to change software. They need, we need to update their funnel operating system in their minds.

Imagine that I, Have the world's B2B CEOs and CFOs gathered. What advice would you give them right now about like, Hey, listen to me. You, you've got to stop doing marketing source, sales source, and you got to get off that MQL crack pipe. How would you say that to them? 

Terry Flaherty: You got to get off the MQL crack pipe because you know, you're running your business.

on a process and a level of insight and technology that's 25 years old and and you're missing so much insight that can be so valuable to your organization to do a much better job of Delivering relevant and valuable experiences to the buyer and that's going to yield to, to revenue, right? When the buyer has a great experience and you're helping them research and you have a sales process that's really aligned and personalized to their needs.

You're going to close more deals. But, but the challenge is you got to get off of that. And so you probably have five questions kind of layered in the question you asked. So let's, let's kind of look at it in some bite sized pieces. Right. Okay. Let's do it. Let's do it. And the first bite sized piece is MQL volume.

Right. And, and, and I think, you know, Forrester, Sirius, we, we, we help, Kind of caused a problem along with marketing automation technology caused the problem because marketing automation technology historically has been around the league and it's something that we can measure and it's something that we sold as the output of what marketing can deliver the organization.

And so for 20 years we've been saying, here's the number of MQLs. that we define or that we produce. Right. But, but the problem is, um, nobody really knows what an MQL is. And there's all kinds of different business rules that lead to marketing, claiming that we have an MQL. And guess what? Marketing is really good at Holy cow, we're going to be below our goal this quarter for MQLs.

Um, we're going to change the business rule just for a little bit to say, hey, content syndication, that's an MQL. Cool, let's send that to the SDR, BDR, you know, because we need to hit our number. And so there's the business logic of defining what MQL is has been completely arbitrary, and it's not defined very well.

And we, like I said, we've kind of changed the rules of what we consider an MQL and sales certainly most of the time doesn't agree with that. with us saying, Oh, this is qualified, you know, the marketing qualified lead, but we do it because we need them to prove that we're adding some value and we need to hit our numbers.

So we get bonuses. Right. So that that's been a fundamental issue is, you know, and, and, and. It's impossible to have a standard everywhere. Right? The standard is, I think this, there's enough insight that I want to get humans involved. Right? But, uh, we, we've been really free reign, I think, on what is an MQL and pretty inconsistent.

What is an MQL? Um, and probably the most important thing is the MQL still is a Only one, essentially one signal about one person, right? Somebody did something, or maybe there's a couple of signals. They did two things or three things, but it's about one person and it doesn't reflect and it doesn't understand that.

You know, one person basing my sales process on the behavior of a single person, that person may not reflect anything about the actual company account business needs, right? They're curious. They're interested. They're out researching this. And like somebody that downloads five white papers is not five times more likely than somebody downloaded one white paper.

Um, what I need to understand what's way more impactful and valuable, um, to our revenue process is recognizing that holy cow, four people from Acme are coming to our website and engaging, right. And they're engaging, you know, maybe four people, you know, filled out forms and identified themselves. But even the fact I have multiple people coming from the same account that are anonymous, I still understand what account they're coming from.

I still understand what content they're looking for. And I get two people that tell us their name and three people that are anonymous. They're all from the same account. There's five people consuming content on a given topic. That's huge. Right? So that's what we need to be focused on is kind of leveraging all the signals we can't signals we can and understanding the context of those signals and putting it together in a way that we can digest it.

John Common: I'm going to piggyback off that. Tell me if this, tell me if you think this is a close to correct, I think there are three big reasons why MQLs are, are tough to kill. Number one, people like some simple things. We are drawn to simplicity. Number two, we like to count. We need to, we need something to count.

We like counting. We can't like blind faith doesn't fly in business. So I got to be able to count something and MQLs are easy and they're easy. And the third reason is we love holding people accountable and we should, we should be held accountable. It's a marketing source, sales source. And so I, I just want to point out that those three things aren't wrong, but the, but.

We have appointed we have pointed those three things at at the mql the old 25 year old old technology And so I think those are the three Lurking down in the belly of the beast reasons that that people are like until you convince me of something what I should do better You, we can't just preach against not doing MQLs.

Oh, 

Terry Flaherty: absolutely not. Right. And, and, and, and so we talked about MQL volume. The actual really scary thing is this concept of marketing source. Right. We make all this sort of predictions and insight based on quote unquote, how somebody got to me. And, and we're worried about this concept of marketing Source where it came from our website or it came from LinkedIn or whatever.

And, and the really bad thing is, you know, we, we look at all these studies that say, Hey, a buying group, you know, you may have eight people, 10 people in a buying group, and there may be 150 interactions that are occurring, um, that we can see, uh, as part of that buying group over their buying history. And, and, and yet we pick.

One thing from one person and put all this focus on that as marketing source. So we did a blog. One of my colleagues did a blog last year and they basically said marketing source is the absolute perfectly designed metric to get the CMO fired. Right. Because it, it just, it puts. All the attention on the, all the focus on that one interaction, that one person, and it doesn't recognize that, that marketing is adding value across all these interactions, across all the entire life cycle.

Marketing gets no credit for that whatsoever. It gets credit for the source. And then, and the thing is like in an existing account, You know, there may be, we may have a portfolio of six different solutions. We sold one, we need to go sell the other five. And yet we have so many organizations where like marketing can't get any credit for quote unquote source.

If it's an existing account, even though they found the buying group or sales might've been the one to put the opportunity in the system, but then there's been lots, lots of engagement, lots of behavior from the people in that buying group. with marketing, but marketing done any credit. So it's just, you know, it, it, it brought up earlier, right?

It's the whole attribution piece. When I think about attributes in the context of scoring, that's another piece that's really broken and causing problems with, with, with this, this whole MQL approach. Right. But you're exactly. 

John Common: Is that one of the five elements you were talking about a second ago, scoring one of those five things that we need to rethink?

Because you said MQL volume is one. 

Terry Flaherty: Yeah, so MQL volume is definitely an issue. The sourcing is an issue. The whole way we think about prioritization. Right. It is a massive issue because, um, what I want to be able to understand, like I said, there's a buying group of multiple different people. They're giving us all kinds of insight and they're sending us all kinds of signals that for the most part we ignore, right?

And, and we don't have polling capability, but you know, what I see across my clients, I ask the question of, Hey, somebody comes to your website and it's anonymous, right? So Acme came to your website and it's anonymous activity. What do you do about that? Do you do anything? And most of the time, it's like, Oh no, we don't do anything.

But they're telling me they're interested. Right? They didn't come to my website by accident. Right? They came and consumed. And that ought to be a really important trigger. Yeah, it's anonymous. But if I'm selling a talent management solution, I should have really good understanding of the buying group roles for an organization of this kind enterprise or SMB, whatever.

I should have a really good understanding of here's the roles that are responsible. Here's the titles that typically map to those roles. And so I'm going to start. You know, kind of recognizing that I've got a signal. Something's going on. Let's start targeting people within the buying group in that account that they're telling me that they're interested, right?

And so this whole concept, I know there's been all this debate around intense signals, interest signals. They're, they're super valuable because they at least help me understand that something's going on there. And what I can do, uh, you know, I, I, I, 11 years, we get all these great analogies from clients, right?

But what a lot of organizations are doing now is saying, Hey, rather than, you know, taking my, my acquisition budget and aiming it at an industry and all the companies in that industry, what we're going to do is target and understand when companies are in market. Um, leverage that signal to go focus on them and put most, you know, a bigger piece of our budget on accounts where I know there's something happening.

And so the analogy that one client used that I stole and I leverage all the time is, you know, we're going to fish where we know there's fish. Versus fish where we see water, and it's much more effective than be able to fish and target a lot of our acquisition budget on essentially trying to drive engagement in the buying group where we know that there's a higher propensity of something going on rather than than just the spray and pray.

Right. So I think that's another key tenet to think about, kind of the recognition that if somebody's in market, that's where I ought to be focused on, um, as opposed to just general broad, um, kind of spray and pray. Yeah, right. And that leads to, you know, and this may come up later. Uh, I've been watching and just been fascinated on this whole discussion of demand capture and demand creation.

That's I was just going to 

John Common: bring that up. All right, you go first. You go first. So, so I think it's fascinating, 

Terry Flaherty: right? And, and I get asked all the time, which is more important, right? And, um, I, I think they're both important, but the thing that just stands out to me all the time is, you know, we can look at the market and debate.

And, and I, and I think it, you know, what percent is quote unquote in market varies on a lot of different factors, but yeah, I think we all can agree some portion of that market. Is in market right now, meaning they at least started researching and considering making a change. Right. And the rest of them are out of market.

And so if I, I look, you know, and I've been focused on this for a long time, I look at the efficiency of, of if somebody tells me their market, how good am I at converting that signal, that knowledge, Into a closed deal, right? And if I go all the way back to the inquiry in MQL, which is, we already know kind of late stage when they're in market, we're horrible at converting organizations that are already telling us we're in market that they're in market.

We're horrible in making that happen, right? Less than 1 percent in many cases. And, and so, you know, my view is we radically need to improve. Our our efficiency in doing much better engagement with organizations that are in market. To me, that's kind of low hanging fruit. Right. And then the other side of the coin is, and you have, um, I, you know, jokingly, I've seen them called the creationists they're out there saying, Hey, we ought to be focused exclusively on let's go get, you know, kind of companies that are in market and convince them to come in market.

Right. And I'm like, okay, you know, we, we certainly want to have awareness and we want to create a positive brand on that, but nobody's going to come in market because of the email I sent them or the display ad. Right. It's just not going to happen. Um, so, so I, I, I would say, you know, yes, we need to, we need to absolutely invest in, in brand and awareness and that positive knowledge so that when an organization is really come to market, they know about us, right?

They're aware of us and they consider us. But I think the low hanging fruit is let's absolutely focus on, How do we really become much more efficient in converting organizations that are in market in the close one deals? 

John Common: Growth driver is brought to you today by the talented and kind people at intelligent demand.

If you're a B2B CMO, CRO, or go to market leader, who's personally responsible for efficient growth. Go check them out at Intelligent Demand. Schedule a free conversation with a growth expert and learn how they can help. 

Terry Flaherty: So we talk about, you know, this addiction to MQLs, right? Well, we really, you know, we have, we've done all this work for the last couple years on, you know, the 32 reasons why you don't like an MQL and all these different variations on this whole catchphrase of, say goodbye to MQLs.

Right. Um, but what we've what we've kind of understood and the number one reason people aren't making transformation to go to signals and buying groups, we touched on earlier, it's culture, right? And it's culture coming from the top. And if we're going to change culture from the top, the thing that's going to get their attention is business impact.

Right. They don't care about MQLs are made up, right? They don't care about MQLs at all, right? They're, they're really concerned and interested about business impact. And so if we can show and promise and have a convincing argument that says, Hey, by making this fundamental shift and, and moving from MQLs into buying groups, um, here's the impact we're going to get.

That's going to start to drive the culture. And so if we think about kind of where this business impact comes from, that there's three different drivers to it. And the first driver is, um, I'm gonna pick a point of the initial discovery meeting that's been set up for sales. Most companies still, that's a meeting with one person because you know, that's what the sales people get is, is information on a single person.

And obviously our, our advice is we ought to be identifying and kind of verifying people in the buying group before we hand it over to sales. If sales receives. You know, a meeting, an opportunity with three people, four people, multiple people in the buying group, they're seeing dramatic improvement in the conversion rate from that discovery meeting down to close one.

And on the low end, I'm seeing, you know, a 20, 25 percent improvement, relative improvement in the conversion rate from discovery to close one by doing what? But I basically delivering sales, the insight about here's three people that we've been able to verify are part of the buying group that I'm handing to you to for your discovery call, as opposed to here's one person that happened to be the MQL and that's what my, my delivery mechanism, if I can give sales insight about multiple people on the low end, I'm seeing like 25 percent improvement, but, but here's, and, and, and, you know, You know, anytime I say this, especially on stage, I kind of get laughed at on stage, but I have clients and these are name brand multi billion dollar organizations, and they're claiming 400 percent improvement conversion rate when they do that.

So that's huge, right? And I think the important thing is they're not saying, Oh, to get a 25%, let's be conservative. You get a 25 percent relative improvement conversion rate. I need 15%, 20 percent increase in marketing budget. No, what they're asking for is we need to change our process. We need to change our culture and we need to be focused on, on MQLs and buying groups.

So, so that's one. Right. And, and then, you know, some of the cynics are like, yeah, but. It's great. Your conversion rate went up, but you also changed the threshold. And so your volume of what you're passing over surely has dropped significantly. And so you're not passing as much stuff to sales. And great, they're converting better, but what about total revenue overall?

Right. And it goes back to kind of the whole big quality versus quantity debate, right? And marketing is always saying, Hey, we want to deliver quality and mark and sales were often is like the heck with caught with quality, just get me stuff. Right. And I'll take it from there. But two other drivers are actually improving the quantity and the quality, right?

And so let's look at a typical marketing program where we get a lot of people to engage. They come to my website. Right, and fill out forms and either never hit that lead score threshold. Right, because it's a single person, maybe doing single action, uh, and we've identified or people coming anonymously that we know they're coming to our site, right, but we just never prioritize them because we overlooked them or didn't think they were significant.

When we change our prioritization to take advantage and leverage the fact that these people are engaging and, and we're going to have programs that. Recognize they're engaging and try to drive engagement across the buying group to hit my sort of private prioritization threshold. What we're finding is organizations, you know, I may have 1000 potential opportunities that are existing in my database where they're telling me they're interested, but we never prioritize because we didn't didn't didn't.

Think about prioritization correctly, you know, if I'm leveraging signals and I'm changing my program strategy to drive engagement across the buying group, some of those opportunities we overlooked are going to get prioritized because we're driving engagement. We changed our scoring. Perfect example. So many organizations can't tell that three people from the same account.

Came even with their names, right? Three people from the same account interest in the same solution came, did one thing each and nobody hit that magical made up MQL threshold. So nobody gets prioritized and it just sits there. And yet three people. Who I engage and identify themselves. That's like exponentially higher propensity to buy that we overlooked.

So just making that change and being able to understand that I've got multiple people involved, that's going to bring opportunities to the surface that I overlooked before. Right. So I'm getting opportunities out of what I engage with. 

John Common: All right. I want to, I want to, I want to underline what you just said.

I'm tell me if I get this right. When you're in a room saying we. Have to move away from MQLs and move toward buying teams and opportunities. And someone says, yeah, but tell me why. What Terry just said is two big, big reasons, and he's got the data to back it up. Number one, number one, by, by handing off as close to the buying team as you can, uh, uncover, multi threading as often as what it's called, but by not all handing off solo MQLs, but handing off, Buying teams, multiple contacts from the same account to sales at a minimum increases ultimate conversion rate by 25 percent 

Terry Flaherty: and on the low end 

John Common: and the way on the low end and the way to sell that is the way Terry just said is, uh, you, would you like to give me 25 percent increase in my demand budget or would you like to make this change, which is about culture and process, right?

So that's it. Okay. So that's number one, hand off buying teams. Not mql's and you and if you're willing to do that You will see a minimum increase of 25 In your ultimate sales conversion rate number two reason to move away from mql's is when you start recognizing and sensing buying signals and multiple contacts or humans from the same account and you start realizing, well, maybe these three human beings from Acme Incorporated are moderately engaging and any one of them in my old world wouldn't have been worthy of an MQL, but in totality, because now I'm thinking about buying teams and signals, holy crap, we got one on the line.

Yeah. That helps you identify more and new and different opportunities. Exactly. So those are two 

Terry Flaherty: reasons. Did I get that right? You got those right. And, and you set it up perfectly for the third, right? Because the first two are people that have engaged with me in some way, right? They found me and then got to me.

The third driver is there's other organizations that are in market looking for solutions like yours. They're not aware of you. You're not aware of them. So you're not. even dancing, you're not invited to dance, right? And so I can leverage, you know, external data sources to be able to say, Hey, these organizations are in market, right?

And, um, just leveraging that insight to say, Hey, these are new potential opportunities that are in the market that I didn't know about that I need to go target. And then that's going to bring new opportunities that never got to us before, right? That I'll then be able to prioritize and add into the queue of things I'm sending the sales.

So it's basically this combination of, of more efficiency on the things that I'm handling the sales, but also the fact I'm bringing in new opportunities, those that are where somebody is engaging me to begin with from that account. But there's a lot of accounts where they're not, and we're now able to, to know who's in market and target and bring those in and that combination then.

Of you know, kind of that efficiency and the increase in volume is how we can say, Hey, when you do this, you know, you're not making a choice of quality and quantity. You're actually getting both, right? Cause we're bringing in, you know, a larger number of new opportunities and we're way more efficient in actually winning the opportunities that we're engaging with.

John Common: And see back. Okay. Call back to this, um, fairly semantic argument about brand versus. Demand creation, demand creation versus demand capture. The third reason to move away from MQLs that you just mentioned, which is that by sensing, but by, by, by improving the, the, your company's ability to sense interest and demand and not demand interest and activity and movement toward a buying journey by improving that capability with intent, with, uh, better processes, with multi threading, you will.

Uh, be able to sense companies and buying teams that are moving into what I would call like the top of your funnel, right? Yeah. Or moving from the top to the middle of the funnel. Now, I don't, I don't care, frankly, whether you call that brand awareness or whether you call that demand creation or you call that influence or intersecting them at the right time.

I, I, and I'd also don't really care who gets credit for it. That's my 2 cents on it. Well, that's, that's the key, right? Yeah. And, but somebody, here's my 2 cents on this demand creation versus I I agree. And especially in B2B, we don't create, need need. Right. You know, I no company, to your point, no white paper or webinar or a astounding speaker deck TED talk.

There's no TED talk that's gonna make a B2B company, um, that didn't need. An enterprise piece of software suddenly need that software, right? They, they, they, they either have a business need or they don't. So we don't manufacture need, but what I think we can do at the top of the funnel or brand awareness or demand creation is we're not doing need creation, but what we can do is start to share our point of view about their problem and warm them up about the options they have to solve that problem.

So that when, and. And if they begin to say, you know what, we're going to prioritize solving this problem out of the stack of problems we have now, I'm now ready. I'm now ready to, to, to be aware of your solution. And so call that whatever you want. I don't really care, but I think it's, it's the thing that the, the, the number three thing that you just talked about, which is pulling people into your process in a way that is, um, Positive and attracting versus 

Terry Flaherty: and the key is build awareness.

Right. But then recognize, recognize the signals that help convert that awareness into a deal. And I think, like I said earlier, the most important thing is understanding that. Early in their buying cycle, they're researching. They need to look at me as a trusted advisor to help them understand as opposed to, we can't think of them as a victim that we're going to sell something to, right?

We need to be partners to help educate them through that research process so that when they're ready to talk to somebody they've learned enough about us and they understand enough about us that they can That they want to talk to us. And that doesn't mean, you know, we could invite him to webinars.

Absolutely. Right. But we don't harass them and go, Oh, cool. Well, here's somebody who signed up for a webinar. Here comes, you know, our BDR team with 15 calls in seven days. They're not, they're not ready to talk yet. And it's probably counterproductive. If I do that, if they're not ready to talk and we're harassing them, that's going to put a bad taste in it.

But if we're inviting them to thought leadership and great webinars and giving them great content and great guidance. When they're ready to talk, they're going to turn to us because we already established that relationship and that trust, right? Which is really important. 

John Common: We need to be faithful to these concepts, these of how B2B buying teams actually buy, how, and when do they buy?

And, and especially in a modern sense, so that we can. Um, set up our processes, our data, our structures, and, and our content and our messaging in a way that, that meets that truth. Um, we have to, we, how do we do this, Terry? How do we, how do we help companies to, to step away from that old approach and step into this new approach?

It's kind of an unfair question, but do you have a thought about that? 

Terry Flaherty: Well, and, and, and I think it comes down to, we have to show them the alternative. Right. And show them, show them the business impact, the value of making that alternative. And, and, and I think one of the things we haven't talked about, which is super critical, we think about this transformation, that there's sort of three changes that have to happen.

If, if I'm going to be successful around Um, you know, just being a lot more efficient in my revenue process. And we, we kind of alluded to, but we haven't talked about a third one, which is really critical, right? So first one, change of focus. And we've talked about that. We're going to change the focus away from MQLs and we're going to think about buying groups and opportunities.

That's great. We, we kind of alluded to, we need to change the culture also, right? And, and changing the culture, a lot of dimensions to it. And a big part of it is thinking about the way we measure. Right. And kind of moving away from that MQL centric stuff into how many opportunities are we engaging with?

What level of interaction do we have? How many people are we engaged with the opportunity, right? Those are important metrics. But the piece that brings it all together. is change the way we work, right? So change the focus, change the culture, but change the way the work is really important. And what we mean when we say change the way we work is we need to break down the silos.

One of the things that, that dramatically changes when we, when we say goodbye to MQLs is the roles and responsibilities of how sales and marketing are going to work together in this process. Right? And in the old process, it was very siloed. There was essentially brick walls between these functions and there was no collaboration across these functions, right?

And we're saying that has to change. Right. And we can't think about our responsibilities being, um, so silo oriented. In fact, we have a couple of clients, um, one, one of our clients last year that won a program of the year award. They don't even call themselves sales and marketing. They're there. They have a group called go to market.

And people have responsibility that are sales oriented and marketing oriented, but there is no marketing department and sales department anymore. It's go to market. Right. And they just think about this unified, um, kind of existence, but it's more than the name. Right. Um, and, and, and, and, and here's a perfect example.

Right. Um, So many organizations today in their existing process. So let's say they get that lead. It gets qualified, you know, scored up, qualified, sent to the BDR, sent to sales. And now I get the second person from Acme that comes in and engages and they hit the MQL steps. They get 100 points and they go to the BDR.

What's the BDR typically doing in the old process? They look at it and go, Oh, look, it's somebody else from Acme. Well, I just sent, you know, sales Acme two weeks ago. So I'm going to disqualify this person because it's quote unquote, a duplicate lead. Right? Or I'll ignore it or whatever, but oh my God, if I happen to send this person to sales as a second person, sales is going to say, why are you wasting my time?

You already sent me Acme and back to sales. I have infinite wisdom. Like go get me new stuff. Why are you sending me this? Right. And so we're ignoring additional people that are part of the buying group. And it's so, so fascinating and or frustrating, depending upon your view, right? The marketing gets that multiple people are involved in the buying process.

That's why we do personas. Right. We understand that everybody, every persona has slightly different interests and needs and we have content specifically for that. Right. And we go out, we market to different personas. Sales, a thousand percent knows that there's a buying group that they had to get consensus from, you know, and, and maybe not everybody can say yes.

But they can certainly say no, and they have to get support, right? Um, but the process that connects sales and marketing together typically is a process with a really narrow pipe that fits one person that goes through the BDR. And that one person, as soon as that person goes through the pipe, turn off the pipe, right?

I think you just, 

John Common: you just brought up something really important too, which is that it's not just One lead it's one lead at one time because yeah, I think you just alluded to this which is hey Maybe maybe we're lucky enough to get a couple of folks from the buying team Into the sales process, but it's not It shouldn't be a bad thing.

If we find a third or a fourth, that's a good thing according to your data But but but for us to leverage that our process needs to allow for the fact that we have latecomers to a great party Yeah 

Terry Flaherty: Right. How do we, how do we 

John Common: account for that? 

Terry Flaherty: Yeah. And so we can't disqualify, right? What we need to be able to do is recognize we have an additional person from this account, interested in the solution, and we need to figure out how we're going to handle that.

Right. And some accounts will send that through the BBR and some accounts will send that directly to sales. But. It's viewed as a celebration as opposed to a penalty that we're getting multiple people engaged. Right. And that's what, why I talk about kind of changing roles and responsibilities. You know, we have clients that have really powerful dashboards where they look at by opportunity in their accounts and by, by role to say, okay, we're selling talent management solution.

There's typically eight people, eight roles in this. We have six out of the eight roles where we verified they're engaged and they're verified as being part of the buying group in this role, but there's still two people that we don't, maybe it's a technical decision maker, right? So we had to get support from the technical decision maker.

How are we going to do it? Right. And what assets, what resources do I have that talk to a technical decision maker to help them make the decision? And how are we going to engage, right? It could be the technical decision maker finds us on their own, and that's great. I got to make sure that sales knows that we now have technical decision maker or, or sales may say, Hey, I need resources.

I need tools, content, whatever we have that I'll carry it to the technical decision maker, but I need help. Marketing, right? To be able to get across that finish line and get support from that technical decision maker. So, you know, we're marketing and sales and the SDR, right? They're going to be there.

They're going to collaborate together across the entire buying journey of the customer. And as we get additional insight that's relevant to the opportunity, we'll make sure that gets connected to the opportunity. So we all benefit from that insight. Right. And that's a major change in the way we work, which also is tied to the culture, right?

Because maybe culturally we're just used to silos or measuring on silos and our process is all silo based. We have to change. Why on earth would we ignore the fact that we're driving engagement with more people in that buying group? It's like, like we said, probably 10 times already celebrate the fact that we're getting people engaged.

Right. But I need to understand the context to do it. Right. 

John Common: Yeah. And in order to celebrate it, we need to make it. We need to architect and operationalize it, which is another way. Let's, let's get technical now. Let's take this episode into, into CRM land for a second. Okay. So if I'm going to take the advice over the last, um, whatever, 45 minutes of our conversation, I'm, I'm ready to do it.

Terry, John and Terry, you sold me. How do I actually operationalize it? And I, let me get, let me get started and then you can help make it smarter. So. I think what you have to have an understanding of is you've got some notion of your ideal client profile That's an account and within that account Hopefully you have a sense of am I am I selling am I trying when I win that account?

Am I selling one product to one buying team around one core need or is it a multiple products over time? So I think you have to get clear about so what is my ideal client profile? And am I only going to really sell one team one thing or am I going to ultimately try to sell? One team many things or multiple teams multiple things.

So get clear about that. 

Speaker 3: Yep 

John Common: Now you've got clear about that then you got to go. Okay Well, if that's my ideal client profile for each of the opportunities or products that i'm going to try to sell them What? define the buying team. It's not just one person. What are the personas on that buying team? And then attach those personas to an object called an opportunity.

Now at the moment, it's not really an opportunity. It's a potential opportunity. It's a structure in your CRM system that says, when we go, when we identify an, uh, an account that fits our ICP, that is showing signals of interest and potential demand, uh, for buying. our product number one because they're using keywords and you know coming to events or data insert whatever signals when we identify them we have to have I think in our CRM system an empty opportunity waiting for that Acme Incorporated buying team persona one persona two persona three and then do we use data and lead management process To incrementally along the buying journey fill out that buying team and update that what what starts as maybe an Empty opportunity, but now starts to collect wisdom and interest and signals Am I, am I thinking about the way you're thinking about it?

Terry Flaherty: Yeah, you're, you're spot on. And it's been interesting. One of, one of the, I think every word in lead management comes with baggage or demand management or revenue management comes with baggage. And, and the, the word that has the most definitions of any of them is opportunity. Okay. And opportunity is kind of used as this magical thing where it's, Oh, it's a deal.

But if I look in my CRM, um, You know, opportunity is also a container. It's an object, right? And, um, so many organizations sort of consider the opportunity, the sacred object. And the creation of the opportunity itself, the opportunity container is this logical milestone, right? And we're like, it's a container.

You have stages in the opportunity that define logical stages, but the opportunity itself is a container that holds stuff just like a contact, just like an account, just like any other opportunity, any object in your system. So. You know, we think number one, yes, that you absolutely want to understand opportunities and opportunities are your system of record.

Accounts don't buy, right? We have to have account, obviously, for sure, billing and legal, but it's the opportunities of what we're focused on. And that really becomes my system of record, essentially. Um, and the opportunities, entity container is perfect because number one, right? It's what sales is focused on, but it contains information about the solution, contains information about the revenue, contains information about the stage of maturity of this deal, right?

You can forecast 

John Common: it. 

Terry Flaherty: Yeah. But, but it also has kind of an infrastructure build around it in all the major CRMs, right? There's, there's some infrastructure capability built around the opportunity container where I can, you know, number one, I can connect multiple different people to that opportunity. I need that opportunity container to hold the information, right?

And my goal is to, I'm going to populate that opportunity container with all the insight that we have about people and logical state and signals and all that, right? And that is sometimes a controversial discussion in organizations, right? And, and. The good news is it's changing a lot. You know, 10 years ago, if we would have said, even seven years ago, when, when we first launched the, the Dominion Waterfall, um, people looked at it like, looked at it like we were crazy when we said, Oh, we're going to use the opportunity entity.

Right. But now, um, probably 75, 80%, if not more of the clients I talked to, the BDRs, when they qualify, they're Uh, they're creating an opportunity container and connecting that one person to the opportunity container. And we'll call it a stage zero, stage one or whatever. But it's basically the handoff between BBR and sales is the opportunity container, right?

And that's great because that's basically sort of a cultural thing that says, okay, somebody other than the sales rep is the one that creates the opportunity. Because a lot of times the challenge is if opportunities are only created in sales. Most of the time, there's opportunities don't even get created until they're at negotiate stage or proposal stage, right?

They just magically appear, right? So we, you want to have the opportunity created early in the process so we can track it, right? And we're talking about extremely early in the process. Now, even that, What we call target stage to say, Hey, this is opportunity we're targeting, right? And, and, and we don't have any signals.

We don't have any people yet, but we know this is something that's part of our addressable market that we're aim at. And, and then, you know, I'm gonna look at all these signals and, and understand the context of the signal. And I think about context is who, where's this signal coming from? What. And what are they interested in?

And that's what I'm going to use to essentially connect that insight, that person to the opportunity container and the opportunity contact role, right? And I'm going to, I'm going to look at every signal that I get and kind of leverage that interpretation to be able to understand, okay, who and what, and what's it mapped to.

So, you know, seven years ago, it was viewed as hard. Um, and, and a hard part of it was just being able to understand the context now, uh, you know, when we ask clients, like, why haven't you made a transformation to, to signals and buying groups and opportunities? It's technologies like the lowest concern of all.

It's culture. I think the key is some of the perception is, Oh my God, this is really hard. It's going to take forever. And it's not, you can plug this into your natural process. And, and, and the key is just this, you're creating the opportunity and the, the, at the right point for you and that opportunity container, right?

That that's really the, the, the secret sauce to go and take it, the, the North compass of what ultimately we're trying to populate and what ultimately is moving through the 

John Common: process. Let me see if I have this right. If you want to really move from MQLs and, and, and unlock the benefits that we've been talking about for the last hour.

Yep. And you want to operationalize it, which is the only way it's going to really happen. So step one is you have to be convinced and the people at the top of your org have to be convinced that, that, that it's the right thing to do, but then how do you operationalize it is stop focusing so much on leads and MQLs and recognize That it takes your entire go to market strategy your entire cross functional go to market team Helps produce and win an opportunity and it's it's not that Marketing delivers random ass leads to sales and then good luck sales, right?

It's now our entire company our go to market Team targets the right accounts and the right buying teams and we create and nurture and fill out this thing that actually is a technically you can point at it. It's an object in our CRM system and it's the one that we all own. It's not just sales that owns opportunities now.

We all own opportunities. We have a role to play in the, in the identification, the filling out of that opportunity, et cetera. And of course, sales is going to win the touchdown, especially if you're doing a sort of a sales centric process, you're not doing product led growth or something, but, but, but you, marketing has a role, product has a role, BDRs have a role, and of course, sales has a role now.

So I really like that. And we've been doing a lot of work at intelligent demand. We're helping more and more companies actually. Do the CRM and rev ops work to make this happen. And it's, it isn't that hard, but it, but it does require a change that, that mindset change that you and I've been talking about.

Um, I think it's really important. I think the other thing I want to point out is, you know, Uh, earlier in the, in the conversation, we talked about the fact that there are four kind of motions, right? There's the acquisition motion. There's the, uh, there's the, um, retention or renewal motion. There's the, uh, expansion motions and so 

Terry Flaherty: on upsell 

John Common: cross sell and upsell.

So I think it's worth talking about the fact that that object. That we attach the right personas or contacts to they're going to they're going to be different by definition when you're going after an acquisition opportunity versus an expansion opportunity. Isn't that true? 

Speaker 3: Um, 

Terry Flaherty: well, certainly if it's a cross sell, the people on the buying group are going to be different because it's a different buying group.

John Common: That was my point. Maybe they're different. Maybe they're not. But I think what I'm trying to say is you need to pause and just ask yourself, is it different? 

Terry Flaherty: Right? 

John Common: And 

Terry Flaherty: you can have a many to one, right? I could have the VP of marketing, right? And that's the persona. And you know, the, the, you know, acne is going to buy, uh, ABM platform, right?

VP of marketing in that case, definitely part of the opportunity, probably the champion or decision maker. Right. We also are going to buy a CRM system still with VP of marketing, but their role in that decision is probably a key influencer. Right. And that VP of marketing is going to be associated with both opportunities and different roles on each one of those opportunities.

Right. So it's a many to one relationship that you need to manage. 

John Common: That's interesting. 

Terry Flaherty: Again, back to what we talked about earlier. If I'm stuck, if I start sharing a revenue process, kind of kick off a revenue process based on the fact that somebody filled out a form and said they want a demo, we're going to call that an MQL.

Go back to the football analogy. You're starting on the goal line, right? And your competitors who, you know, built this relationship, they're down, they only have 20 yards to go to get a touchdown. You're back on the goal line, you have a hundred yards to go. Yeah. Right? Because because your competitors leveraging the insight that's available and they build a relationship and you're late to the party and at a major disadvantage, even the second after they fill out that form, right?

So you so you just have to rethink the whole thing and kind of recognize that it's super critical. To understand signals. And another key thing, right? People, people misinterpret me when I talk about, oh, we got to say goodbye to MQLs that I'm saying goodbye to people. We're not, right? People, we're always marketing to people, right?

People are buying. It's a, it's an emotional decision. They need to have knowledge and insight. People are critical, but what people are craving is context. Right. And so we need to deliver context to the people and that's the win. And when I say context to the people, it's context to the buyer, but also context to our revenue team and our marketers and sellers about here's how to drive the best experience that helps this buyer make their decision.

John Common: That's a huge insight and a huge point. I'm so glad you said it. When you say move away from MQLs, you're not saying move away from people. You're not even saying move away from context. You're saying You're saying recognize that buying is a team sport and therefore go to market is a team sport. 

Terry Flaherty: The, the end goal of marketing should never, ever be, here's a single person, go get them.

No, that's what I'm saying. Goodbye to the end goal is not MQL. The end goal is an engaged buying group that we're collaborating across marketing and sales BDR all the way through to, to, to, you know, ultimately get consensus across that buying group. And then close one. Love it. We, we talked a lot about marketing and sales and the SDR.

Who have we left out that's important from a revenue perspective? Customer success. 

John Common: Well, I was going to say that and I could have said product too. Yeah. 

Terry Flaherty: Yeah. Customer success is critical, especially in situations where, you know, we have six different solutions. We want to sell them to the account.

Probably kind of important that. The first thing they buy, they actually got the value we promised to them when we sold, right? Because it's going to be a lot easier to sell opportunity two, three, four, and if opportunity one is successful and then opportunity successful and all of that, right? So, um, you'll kind of see at summit, we're adding the concept of incorporating customer success as another key element of the revenue process, right?

And, and they need to be coordinated too, right? So it's not just sales. That's right. Hey, everybody needs to be coordinated working together because it's the entire kind of life of that opportunity and opportunity goes from research to buying to implementing to success and advocacy, right? And that's what I need to be thinking about is supporting that process all the way through.

John Common: It's more than just the first S. O. W. Acquisition. It's the end and lifetime value relationship 

Terry Flaherty: that buyer does not end with close one. It shouldn't right on a deal. It should be ending. It should be growing that account and growing that relationship and keeping that relationship going. Alive over time. 

John Common: I love it.

All right, Terry, I'm going to do a, I'm going to do lightning around with you. I'm going to ask you a deceptively simple question. And I'm only going to get one sentence to answer. I know it's very hard. It's unfair, but welcome to growth driver. All right. Uh, one piece of advice. You only get one piece of advice.

I want you to give to CEOs, CFOs and their boards. about moving away from MQLs. 

Terry Flaherty: Focus on delivering customer value. And that customer value is way more than just the value they get from implementing your solution. So I think the one sentence is focus externally on delivering customer value. And it's basically through research, through sales, and through implementation.

John Common: One piece of advice for CMOs and CROs. So imagine you're in front of. the typical enterprise B2B CMO and CRO. And the piece of advice you're going to give them is about moving away from MQLs toward buying teams and opportunities. One piece of advice. 

Terry Flaherty: Help your executives understand that marketing is way more than just net new acquisition and by changing, going away from MQLs and the signals that marketing can be part of the equation on delivering significant revenue growth.

John Common: Okay, that's good. Well, hey, um, wrap up with just kind of a, just a kind of a human point about this, which is, you know, you look over your career, um, You know, what are, what's one of the biggest wins that you've been a part of that you're kind of proud of? 

Terry Flaherty: The coolest, coolest experience I had in my whole career, uh, was 2017 and, and at Serious Decisions Summit Main Stage.

I got to go up with Kerry Cunningham and present, you know, sort of this major transformational thing, the Dominican Waterfall at that point to a crowd of probably 4, 000 people. And, you know, you get up on stage and it's this huge auditorium. And when we brought up the first image of the Dominican Waterfall.

And. Everybody took their cell phone, lifted their cell phone up, took pictures of it. And that was just like, number one, the, the, just the, the being, being on stage, being able to talk about something as. New, interesting, cool, right? Um, in an environment like that with all, all these really smart marketing people all together.

It was great. That was, that was definitely the, the career highlight moment of me. Uh, my life was, uh, kind of that, that main stage presentation. 

John Common: I love that you said that. And let me tell you, I was there with you. I was in the front row. I was near the front row. I was one of the people you need to know this.

I was one of the people holding up my cell phone that day in that room with you. I was one of the 4, 000 and I loved that moment. And in fact, I 

Terry Flaherty: think that because you did a blog right after that, talking about your view of the BB or the mania waterfall and had a picture of Carrie and I on main stage on there.

So there you go. That's right. That's right. 

John Common: Oh, that's great. Well, Hey, what a, what a great place to end. Thank you so much for your time today, Terry. And also just thanks for your kind of scholarship. I think it's a good word to use is your scholarship on behalf of our field around revenue, performance, and also just thank you for coming on Growth Driver and being so generous.

Yeah, it's 

Terry Flaherty: fun. We, we need to do another version and, and like you say, maybe we'll get the band together and, and bring in Carrie and bring in Amy. That'd be fun. 

John Common: We, we, you know what, we will do that. We'll absolutely do that my friend. I'll let you get back to your day and thank you. All right. Thanks, John.

See you, Terry. So, uh, Terry, uh, just, uh, just wrapped up and I'm just thinking about, um, what we talked about. That was information packed just the way I knew it would be. Man, he is so experienced and smart. And, um, look, if you didn't, if you weren't convinced before about the need to expand beyond MQL is the focus and move toward buying teams and opportunities.

Hopefully now you, you, you have, you're armed with enough information for yourself, but also for, for sharing it with your team. And also hopefully you started to get a sense of how that could happen. Um, What a cool episode. What a cool guy. And I love, I love that he ended. I was asking him about, um, one of his professional moments.

He was most proud of. I love the fact that I was literally there in that moment. I had nothing to do with it. I was in the audience holding up my cell phone, taking a picture, but, but I love that. I, uh, I know exactly what he's talking about. Cause I was there. Um, what a great guy. Um, all right. Well, Hey, uh, if you can tell we are.

We love nerding out about go to market and growth and revenue process and revenue performance here on Growth Drivers. It's kind of why we started the whole thing. I hope you find value in it. Hope you enjoy it. And if you do, uh, please follow us, please share, uh, an episode, um, give us a like, and, and maybe most importantly, when you see us out there sharing this stuff.

Comment. I want to hear, uh, what you think. Um, if you have ideas for topics or guests or if you know people who are like, Oh man, we got to get this on Growth Driver, let us know. If you are listening to my voice, you are in the Growth Driver community. And then one other thing I want you to know is that Growth Driver is brought to you by the talented and kind people at Intelligent Demand.

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Thanks again, everybody.