MQLs are dead. I should know, I built them.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another N.Rich webinar. Today we have a webinar with a very interesting topic. I know that on LinkedIn everyone says cold calling is dead, email is everything is dead on LinkedIn. So I was like, should I use these? But I think, yes, I think I should because in this case, I actually believe it's kind of that. And that's why we decided to do this webinar.

As people are still joining, I would love to know on the chat where you're tuning in from, if it's morning, afternoon, or evening for you. I am in Berlin, so it's 5 PM. And Mark here, and I will let him introduce himself in a bit, is 11 AM for him. So good morning, good evening, good afternoon.

Before we introduce ourselves, if you've been to an N.Rich webinar before, you know how it works. If this is your first time, welcome, and I'll go through some housekeeping. Yes, the recording will be available. I wish you stay until the end, but if you need to leave in the middle, don't worry, you will get the recording. Ask any questions you like. You can ask them on the chat or on the questions tab, whatever you like. I will decide if it makes sense to ask Mark the question during the webinar, or if it makes sense to the topic we're discussing. If it's a bit off topic, don't worry, I will definitely not forget about you, and I will ask in the Q&A. So feel free to write the questions throughout the webinar. The more you ask, the more tailored it is for you, for the audience, which at the end of the day, that's what matters, right? We want to make it as interesting and useful as we can.

All right. We do webinars every month. So follow N.Rich and myself to get the next ones if you enjoyed today's webinar. All right, Mark, welcome. Who are you? What do you do at EasyLlama?

I lead the marketing team. Nice to be with everyone here today. I've been with EasyLlama for over 18 months now. We're a compliance and training platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Some of you, I bet, have taken some of our training. Our training is also available in a lot of other platforms like Go1, Open Sesame, Gusto, and Bamboo. It's great to be speaking with you. A lot is changing in marketing and how people buy today for a number of different reasons. So I think this is an important conversation.

I think so too. I've been attending a lot of conferences and we also do dinners where Mark was a panelist in Boston. That's why we decided to invite him again because he did such a great job there. We talk a lot with marketers, whether it's on our events face-to-face or webinars. And this feeling of things changing, I mean, you're not alone. I think everyone is feeling like that, unless you maybe work in a bank, but that's the reality. And that's why it's good that we exchange notes so everyone tries to be as up to date as possible.

Let me introduce myself quickly. My name is Mafalda. I'm the commercial director here at N.Rich. It's an ABM platform, a European one. I lead business development and I do a bit of marketing. I share the marketing responsibilities with my other marketing colleagues. So let's dive into the topic. That's why people are here. What a bold sentence, Mark. You built a playbook around MQLs and now you're also the one saying it's dead. Let's start there. Why is that?

We actually wrote a book when I was at Drift, which was a conversational marketing and conversational AI company that was acquired by Vista. Now it's part of Salesloft. We wrote a book called The MQL is Dead back in 2019. The thinking back then was people don't want to fill out forms. And I think that's more true today than ever. Forms are annoying for buyers and for marketers. They're useful because we get people's information that helps us qualify them. But filling out a form doesn't make you qualified. A lot of what the MQL is predicated on is this qualification idea: you did this thing that's going to predict you're going to become pipeline and therefore have a chance to become a customer.

Now with AI, humans shouldn't be determining that type of stuff, right? The old way to do lead scoring is like a point system. You do this and we'll look at the data and do some regression analysis and other stuff. Just have AI do that now. They're way better at math. They're way better at anything in regards to understanding correlation, causation, and propensity. So that's a reason why the MQL is dead.

The other reason is buyers are basically qualifying themselves today. They're more educated than ever before. I've been saying that since 2010 when I joined HubSpot. But they are now so empowered thanks to LLMs and AI search to be super educated. I'm sure some of you are seeing what I'm seeing, which is when a buyer comes in from an AI search type of experience, or they put AI search in their self-reported attribution field, they have higher close rates and they close faster. We actually had a deal that closed yesterday, a large, five-figure deal, that closed in less than two weeks, which is way faster than normal for our size deal.

Especially in these days.

Yeah, it closed in like, usually it's 45 to 90 days. It closed in two weeks because they were super educated, right? We showed up, they came from AI search. That was actually the software-based attribution telling us that. So it's really more about what is a buyer qualified lead look like versus what marketing deems as qualified. Let your data, your closed won, closed lost data, your churn data, your first and third party signals, give that to your AI tools and say, do an analysis. Tell me what really is a buyer qualified lead and help me understand how to get more of those.

From what I'm hearing, maybe it's not the MQL itself that is dead, but the way we treat it, right? Would you say that?

We love acronyms in marketing. I'm guilty of making up acronyms and making up different labels for things. I think what's most important is what is a qualified lead? I don't care if it's marketing qualified or sales qualified. Those are just stages, typically called lifecycle stages in a CRM, to label data points. In this case, a contact moving through a buying process. What we care about at EasyLlama is whether this lead is qualified. And what makes a lead qualified in this part of the buying process versus this part versus this part? You know, in the latter stages of the buying process, you use deal stages versus lifecycle stages, right? So I think that's what you need to consider when you think about your marketing and sales funnels. What is your definition of qualified? Pre-meeting, pre-having a discovery call, there should be a definition of what a qualified lead looks like for your business and the buyer signals that are helping you understand what that definition is. And then post the discovery call, there's a definition of what a qualified lead is. In the traditional sense, that's the SQL, the sales qualified lead. And then once you get past that part of the buying process, there are other things that make the deal more qualified to getting you to vendor of choice and then all the way to closed won. So it's really coming down to using AI as your partner to help you analyze these larger datasets, helping you understand the definitions of what qualified should be. And then getting very well aligned on what marketing's role is versus sales' role is in helping someone buy.

Before we continue, I have a couple of follow-up questions, but I want to hear from the audience. What's a metric you've been reporting that you secretly think doesn't mean so much? Are they MQLs and that's why we are here? Are there other metrics? I'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, while we see the poll, Mark, do you feel the same about SQLs that you feel about MQLs?

No. An SQL is talking to a human. That's the way I think you should do it. There's a human-to-human conversation, and the sales team has qualified that. And that's really what this comes down to: the marketing team is qualified versus the sales team is qualified. But to have great SQLs, right, you need to have agreement and alignment with sales and what is qualified from a marketing perspective. So I really think of it as simply marketing's job today should be to generate pipeline. I actually think BDRs and SDRs should sit in marketing.

I agree. That's a bit polemic, but I agree. So let's dig on that while people are still voting. Let's compare notes. Why do you think that BDRs should be under marketing and why do you think they are not? I'd love to hear your opinion and then I'll give mine.

It comes down to how do you create a close to ideal, it's never going to be perfect, ideal buying experience? First off, I think a BDR who sits in marketing should not be having calls with anyone. They should be helping book a meeting for the account executive to have that first call. I hate when companies have a BDR call, then say, great, I'm going to set you up with an AE, and then it's another call. It's terrible.

I agree. I agree.

When you think about how AI makes a BDR so much more productive today and how a BDR should almost be like a concierge, basically like a sales concierge that helps a buyer buy, right? A good AE helps a buyer buy the right thing. A BDR can almost be like what I've heard described as a brand concierge. You're basically giving a more VIP, white-glove experience to prospects that you know, going back to ABM, are in your ICP, that are in your bullseye, that are part of your industry vertical list, that are an account in that list. I'm going to assign a BDR to them and give them this really great experience and do some proactive and some reactive things and be very aligned to what marketing is also doing to create that white-glove experience. That's the reason why I think they should be in marketing. And that's why I think sales should be responsible for closing deals and their number is revenue at the end of the day.

Why do you think that doesn't happen?

There are so many reasons. Strong opinions, the status quo, lack of willingness, just lack of education, culture. It really depends on your organization.

At N.Rich, indeed, my BDRs report to me and I'm in the marketing department. So we do agree with that. And it's so much easier to align. We don't have these fights where marketing does one thing and business development does another. We go after different personas and ICPs. That's one of the reasons why I think it's just a very easy way to solve one of the alignment issues between sales and marketing. But I also think the reason sometimes, I agree with you on status quo, strong opinions, culture, all of the above, but also the fact that I think many marketers never did prospecting. So they don't feel safe leading business development reps. There's a bit of reps saying, why would I report to you, head of marketing, who never prospected in his or her life? So that's also one of the reasons why I think it's an easy fix, but I think that's part of the reason.

Let's look at the poll before we move on. So indeed, 25% of people agree. They secretly think that MQLs are like a metric with not much meaning. Email open rates is our favorite, the winner, 50%. They say email open rates doesn't mean anything. And then we have website traffic, social followers, and others, 8% each. So I think that's why people came to this webinar. All right, let's move on to be more specific. Walk me through, because we started with MQLs, but as we saw by the poll, there are other metrics that we used to measure and we changed to another. Let's start with Drift. Why did you go from lead form volume, which you already explained a bit, to conversational engagement? What does it mean and what was the process?

At the end of the day, you're trying to help someone learn more about why they should trust you and why they should buy your product. A lead form is a one-way experience that is not great for the person visiting the website or for the marketer. With conversational interfaces and natural language interfaces, we're in the golden age of them. Drift got there a little bit early and you get so much more data. It's a better experience for everyone involved. You get more data. You can help guide someone to the right outcome.

One thing about EasyLlama that we're figuring out how to do now is really think through the right ways to use chat and to use conversational experiences. I don't think you just want to do it and say, oh good, I put a chatbot up, it's great, it's done. Number one, it could actually hurt conversions because you're not considering people that used to fill out a form and now they're going to chat. If the chatbot's not very good, you're going to lose conversions and pipeline. So there are just a lot of considerations at the end of the day. You need someone to closely watch it for the first three to six months. It's a bit of a growth marketing exercise at the end of the day, but conversational engagement is a must-do today.

Airmeet, you know, event registrations are fine, webinar registrations are fine, but all of these things in that middle column are proxy metrics. I hate proxy metrics. They aren't great. Number one, it's about quality of the metric. It's really about what is the engagement level with someone that registers for the event, right? Either virtual or in person? The metric that I would care most about when it comes to event registrations is: Are these the right people? What's the percent of people registering that match to our ICP and/or to one of our target account lists? And then, well, great, they've registered. Do they do anything? During the event, after the event, et cetera? That's really where we came up with this idea of event-led growth, how to use events to grow and all the data signals that come with events now.

Meetings booked, I mean, yes, sure, meetings are really important. We book a lot of meetings every month, but what are the other things that correlate to pipeline creation that create a qualified lead? We have three other conversion events at EasyLlama that we've identified along with a meeting being booked that help create good quality pipeline. These are the leads, the qualified leads, that sales should be pursuing in a different way versus these other leads, right? I think lead prioritization is one of the things that every company should have its eyes on. And a lot of early stage companies don't. If you want your sales team to be more productive, how do you make sure they're working the right inbound leads, the hot inbound leads, the warm leads? And then if it's truly cold, how do you help them prioritize the cold ones?

If you look at the right column really quickly, all of those things are things you should be doing today, right? It's a collection of all those things and it just depends on who you sell to, what you sell, and your go-to-market setup. One of these or two of these might be more important than the other.

I have a question from Ananda, thank you so much. Mark, you wouldn't stop measuring event registration though, right? You do both event registration and pipeline attribution. What's your comment here?

Yes, you have to measure event registration, but I would focus on quality. Are these the right people? I would enrich everyone who registers for our event and how many match into our ICP. I would then enrich it with third party data and see how many are in the interested phase, the considering phase, the selecting phase, the decision phase, right, or customer. And then I would use that as a way to figure out what should happen next with all those event registrations based off of also what they do during the event itself, right?

So what I mean here on this slide is that a lot of people say event registration, great, we got event registrations, cool. But webinar registrations, we got that. But what's the outcome of getting that registration? To your point?

Makes sense. And in these three cases at Drift, Airmeet, EasyLlama, when you make the shift on what to measure and what to focus on, right? Did you get any challenges with people buying into the new metrics, or did you have any pushbacks? And if yes, how did you go about them? So our audience can also, if they decide to do those shifts, have an idea how to approach their leadership and their peers to say, hey, this is what we're going to do and how.

It's pretty common. Bring data to the conversation, have a debate. I think debates are very healthy and they should be had often in companies. Experiment, right? Try and experiment, bring data, have a debate. If you need to do that again, do it again. But that's how I suggest you do it. It's kind of that simple.

In terms of the data, let's say at EasyLlama, what was the data that you were looking at to make your case from meetings booked to hand raiser? Because meetings booked are actually proper, are hard KPIs, right? Lead volume, not so much. Meetings booked are. How did you make the shift and which data did you mention in order to do that shift?

We analyzed the leads, the conversion events. Which conversion events basically correlated with pipeline creation and qualified pipeline creation? And we also said we need to open up the top of the funnel. If the reps only worked meetings booked and we only optimize for meetings booked, it's going to be a hard thing to grow, right? You're going to need to grow your funnel, right? Your mid and top of your funnel. So we need to find something that's more than just meetings booked. And we found these three other conversion events. It's always the battle, like how best can we nurture and follow up with people who are not explicitly booking a meeting, but even people who book a meeting, people start the process but might not book it or they're demo abandoned. People book the meeting but they don't show up. What do we do with them? So there's even within just the meeting booking one, there are different experiences you have to create with your sales team to make sure you're doing everything you can to try to get that buyer to the point of qualified pipeline.

With this new AI hype, AI is useful and you already mentioned that it's amazing for lead scoring and for making BDRs more efficient. I cannot agree more. But now with this AI thing, do you think there is a new metric that's also going to die or should be dead by now, like MQLs, that is getting a lot of devotion right now that you think soon will be updated?

A new metric? I don't know. What do you think? Do you have something in mind?

Based on what we mentioned, I think with this AI hype, right, I think we have maybe like, for example, I'll give you a specific example. We have conferences, right? We did one in Boston, and we set up a booth and we were doing AI demos for prospects, potential customers. And our CEO was very happy about the product because the product is really good indeed. But we also did the usual marketing thing of like, hey, come to our booth, win a voucher or win something, right? So even though we had a lot of people attending proper demos, showing off the product, so it's a very hard KPI, like meetings booked. If the way they are coming to our booth sometimes is to win something, for example, I'm not sure if those demos, even though it's already on the demo stage, are actually qualified.

Yeah, that's like an incentive-based demo, which you guys have very, very different conversion rates, typically way different conversion rates.

Precisely. So let's move on to account level signals. Do you think about how to approach that account level signal at EasyLlama and how do you think it's going to go in the next few months? I'm not saying years because things are changing all the time, but let's say in the next few weeks and months?

I think AI can help you create a really interesting narrative for each account by looking at all of the people that could be buyers within that account and stitching it together. Here's like nine people over the course of six months, here's things they're doing and we can track it from a third-party intent standpoint. Here's what they're doing on their website. We can de-anonymize them at the contact level. And this is why we think they're in the interested phase versus considering phase versus the evaluation phase.

And then asking AI questions about the data, right? Natural language is so powerful, right? Having your AEs be able to ask questions about, well, why is it over here? Like, who should I reach out to? What should I say? I think that's where, going back to the BDR, like give that to the BDR, they're going to be in a great spot, right? Better than probably ever before.

And so there is also, going back to what we mentioned, there is like we do a gauntlet of signals, right? Marketing loves that. But then there's a combination that BDRs sometimes they don't act on signals. One of the reasons is because they don't report to marketing. We talked about it already. How do you go about this usually?

Sorry, can you clarify the question?

When you're having an account-level signal strategy, we're getting signals, those are the right ones from the strategy that you put together. How do you make sure that sales are cooperating with those?

I think sales needs to own the strategy. Trying to create a strategy for someone and pass it off to them is not a recipe for success. Either they need to create it with you or you need to create it with them. That's just how it is. I'm very black and white in that regard. Trying to influence other teams is something that a lot of folks in marketing try to do, but to influence another team, you pretty much have to get them involved in the beginning. Just like how a creative person does not like to get thrown in at the end of a project and say, "Hey, I need this designed." No, they want to be involved from the beginning just so they can have the full context, full picture, understand the goals and the audience. I think it's really about working better together, honestly.

No, 100%. 100%. How do you make sure that happens between sales and marketing? Because I know it sounds like a simple question, and I've especially, because I'm between sales and marketing, it's been working well for me, but it's a question that I get over and over from our customers at N.Rich, from my peers. How do you make sure that collaboration happens between marketing and sales? What are some good practices you've done to make it black and white, like you mentioned?

Whoever these people report to needs to be involved in this process. So is it the CEO, the CRO, the COO? But that person needs to be a driver in the alignment. Step one is: Is that person doing that? Do they need to do that? And you need to agree and have these healthy debates. I think you need to have debates. I think a lot of people are afraid of having debates and pushing back and challenging assumptions, challenging the why we're doing this.

Additionally, take a data-first approach, right? Bring the data to the conversation. And bring the customer's point of view to the conversation, right? If you record your calls, you have so much information from a customer's perspective that can help inform this. If all of those things don't work, it is a cultural thing at the company, and I would leave the company personally. Because you need to have strong collaboration and you need to succeed. You need to have that, to have strong collaboration and if you've tried to bring the data, have the debate, have other people above you make sure that there is alignment and there's a good working relationship. If it's not happening, then it's a people problem. And that happens. People are people, right? And it sucks, but that's what it comes down to.

Absolutely, absolutely. I've been working with business development and marketing for many years. And I never had those issues, right, when I was in leadership, either from being in charge of marketing and business development, or just business development, but I was working very closely with marketing. So all of the alignment issues that I hear from a lot of people, I didn't have them while I was in leadership because of that, right? Because I was working with people who were eager to do something together and to reach a common goal. But I just ask this because this is so often, I hear this so often from so many different people that I always find it very interesting to hear how companies who are successful in doing this, what they're doing and what their goals and no-gos are.

They're hiring good people. I hate to say it like that, but it's honestly a people thing.

And leadership, as you mentioned, because you can hire two, I don't know, imagine you are the CRO, you have a head of business development, head of marketing. If you don't know the direction as a CRO, it's very easy to have interpretations of the direction from those two departments. And then the whole soap opera starts from there. So that's also 100% like a leadership problem because you might hire the right people, but then leadership doesn't have it together. It's really hard for it to happen organically between departments.

My next question would be on the different sizes of companies, right? So for example, I have this comment here from Stanley. He had to leave, but I think it's a very interesting comment because it's really interesting to me because I don't have experience in companies of the size that have these issues. Do you think from your experience in marketing for the past years, do you think that each size of the company should look at different metrics? Should they look at the same? And what's your take on that? What would be your advice for the different stages?

The answer is both. Each team needs to have their own set of core KPIs, you know, grade one, grade two, grade three KPIs. And then we do a monthly business review at EasyLlama and we bring all those KPIs together. We have daily, weekly, monthly reporting and that's live real time. This is just operational rigor, right? And this is where RevOps is so important today. Arguably I would say RevOps is, you know, it's demand gen, product marketing, RevOps. Those are the top three things I would hire for if I had to build a go-to-market organization, outside of just salespeople, obviously.

We're just talking about marketing here.

Right, those three. RevOps again, share definitions, being able to give your leaders and teams access to the data so they can then play with it, analyze and manipulate it. But yes, I think you have to align based off of again, like who you're selling to, what you're selling, the competitive landscape, your pricing and packaging. How do you want to think about the metrics that matter for your business? And that's where the go-to-market stuff is so much fun, right? It's always different for every single business. And as your business changes, as market conditions change, those things might change as well. And if you don't look at this on at least a quarterly basis, minimum every six months, you're probably missing opportunities. You're missing opportunities to improve volume or conversion rates or ASP. Maybe you're missing an opportunity to reduce your marketing expense. But I look at data every day. Data is like, you gotta be great with data now to be successful.

When you say that, and I would like to dig on that, could you recommend, for example, any tools? For the data point, for the audience, and what you look at when you make your decisions? Feel free to recommend tools, both.

Tools that collect it or tools that analyze it?

Both, both. Just feel free to recommend both tools.

HubSpot's great. There are so many people on this HubSpot sucks train. I don't know, guys, like sure. You can spend time tinkering with tools or you could spend time more with your customers and buyers. I find all these LinkedIn comments so dumb because it's like, I'm going to build all these things, do all these things, but should you? Shouldn't you? The number one thing you should be doing is generating revenue and you do it by talking to people and talking to customers and buyers. So I think the GTM tool bloat is like, and building your own crap, like, again, depending on your stage, it's complete nonsense.

Buy best-in-class technology, keep your tech stack simple. HubSpot, pick one enrichment provider if you need something outside of HubSpot. HubSpot has two-step enrichment. If you need to, we use HubSpot for the enrichment now. So they have that. You can just step one and then you can double verify it with another enrichment source. I think you just have to keep things simple. We put all that data into either Claude or Google Spreadsheets. We use SuperJoin, love SuperJoin, to create real-time reporting because HubSpot doesn't do a good job and most CRMs don't on goal tracking. Where are we pacing to a target and what are the things that are going into us achieving that target in a real-time dashboard? So we use Google Sheets, spreadsheets at the end of the day for a lot of this stuff. We've created a lot of custom formulas and data pulls. And then obviously MCPs just with pulling data to Claude, analyzing it. Of course, you got to be careful to make sure the data is valid. We use LightDash. LightDash is one of these more AI-native tools. That's a BI tool. But I think just keeping it simple at the end of the day.

I agree. And I would like to go back on speaking to customers because I also have my own opinions from the business development side. So I think this could be super useful for the audience, but I want to hear yours first. You mentioned every quarter, which I agree. Do you listen to sales calls? Speak to customers directly, both, or do you do something else?

I had a customer in a webinar yesterday. I've spoken to multiple times. We have a customer community. I think one of the most important things you can do today, if you're past product market fit, even if you're approaching product market fit, build a community with your customers. This is not an online forum. This is not a Slack group. Maybe that's a feature of the community that you get to. But EasyLlama's community, we call it the Herd. It is an every-month gathering of our customers where we're doing different things in that gathering. It's virtual, obviously, right now. But next week, we're doing a Halloween-themed chocolate tasting with some wine. And there's a topic of conversation. There's always a special guest from EasyLlama. The people who built this community with us said, what we want is just to get to know other HR people. Don't make it about compliance. Don't make it about this. Just build relationships. And that becomes a center of gravity for all of our customer stories, testimonials, webinar guests, speaking, all these things.

So yes, we have Gong. We use the conversational AI stuff in Gong. We have stuff, real-time reporting to make sure our data in HubSpot, because you can never trust reps and CSMs with data hygiene and quality. That validates that. But you need to listen more to your customers than ever before. And that also goes for things they're saying outside of the direct things that you're hearing on calls and in other places within your business. It's the stuff that they're putting on G2, it's the stuff that they might be putting on Reddit. You have to be paying attention to that stuff.

Yes, 100%. When you run customer interviews, right, to understand more what's going on. Do you have two or three questions that you make sure you ask them that are really important to you as a VP of Marketing?

What problems are we helping you solve? What value are you getting from us helping you solve those problems? And if you could wave a magic wand, what can we do better?

Amazing. I'm going to give you mine from the business development side. So as business development, right, I want my team to prospect. So yes, I also ask the questions you asked, but I have two that I always, always make sure I ask. And that's an advice that I can give to the audience to bring back. Ask the questions that Mark mentioned in mind next time you speak to a customer, because they are more enlightening than you think.

The first one is, when did you decide to go to a tool like ours? Meaning the trigger, right? So when, or what happened, what happened that suddenly, I mean, not suddenly, you needed a tool like ours, right? Can be us, can be our competitors. That will give you an understanding on the moment and what companies who might go through the same thing that might need your tool. That simple answer can give you a lot of ideas, not only for the BDR messaging and ICP and approach, but also for your marketing content.

And the other one is, why us and not our competitors? We identify the problem. You know, even though we all think our tool is the best, obviously I will always say that N.Rich is the best. We have competitors. So in the end, you had the problem. There are a couple of tools in the market who solve that problem. Why us? And many times that answer won't be the features that you think that you love, right? So that can give you good insights, again, not only on marketing, but also on business development, and maybe even on product. That can be a very good thing to actually share with your GTM and product team.

The key with those questions and the ones I mentioned are to ask follow-up questions, peel back two or three times.

I agree. That's definitely something I recommend people when they interview their customers. Don't get happy with the first layer of the answer because that's usually, they don't, especially when we talk about sensitive stuff and challenges. People like to use short answers and not go much into that, right? So for example, it's a bit like a therapy session. I remember a couple of companies ago, we were selling to CTOs. We were a testing tool and I say, hey, which challenges do you have that we help solve? Bugs. And I'm like, okay, why is that a problem? I kind of know, but I want to hear from you. Why is that a problem, right? How does it make you feel? What are you not doing because you're solving that? So if you dig into the challenge or into the priority, right, then you get the proper answer. So that's definitely a key for a customer interview is not only asking the questions that we suggested, but also dig into those to really go to the root cause. Because many times the challenge or the problem or the priority, it's a symptom of the root cause. And you want the root cause as a marketer, as a salesperson, as a GTM operator.

Well, to get a real answer, the person you're trying to get an answer from has to trust you. So it is going to take time for you to really feel confident that what someone is telling you is the real truth or very close to the real truth.

Yes. For sure, for sure. That's great. So you mentioned as well, you speak to your customers quarterly, you have the community, the Herd. I know Katrina is the one leading that, right?

Yes, yes, Katrina, yes.

So you have the community, you speak to customers, you listen to sales calls as well. Do you join them, Mark?

No, I don't. I don't join calls because I'm just not, I used to when I was sold to, you know, when I sold RevTech. It made sense for me to join calls. I don't join any sales calls right now. It doesn't really make sense.

When do you think that would make sense for a marketer to do that? What's your take there?

If it's going to add value to the call and to the prospect, definitely join it. But if you're recording calls, you can just listen to the recording.

What do you look for when you listen to the calls as a marketer? What are the two or three things that's like, that's what I'm looking for in this call?

It depends on why am I even listening to the call in the first place. Am I looking for competitive intel, positioning, messaging insights, information more about our ICP, their problems? It depends. I'm not going to listen to calls. I will listen to some calls once the analysis is done. It says, hey, these calls made up this dataset. You should listen to these calls because Claude is telling me to listen. I'm going to be efficient with what calls I pick out based off of the data that I can analyze thanks to the Gong and Claude integration now, for example. So I think it's, in the past, yeah, I would just listen to calls and be like, oh, I hope this is a good one. Now you can be way smarter about that.

Good. We are almost approaching the end of our webinar, so feel free to ask us questions. But before we do, I have two questions for you, Mark, to make sure that we have some even more to-do's to add to our audience. The first one is what is one thing that you think marketers should stop doing on Monday and one thing they should start doing on Monday?

Start doing, look at your data and understand how the last week performed and what adjustments you might need to make for this week given your goals and the demand plan and all that other stuff, right? If you're not doing that, I definitely would start doing that.

Stop doing, I mean, it's such a hard question for me to answer given there's limited context. Stop having meetings for the sake of having meetings. Be intentional with your time. Start like pre-planning your week out and stop having anything on your calendar that you don't think is going to help you with your goals, your team's and company's goals. Be more intentional with your time these days because you have so much you could do now with AI on so many different dimensions. Definitely start prioritizing your time and stop working on things that are easy, but not making impact.

Like MQLs?

Could be. I definitely think you need a qualified, you need a definition of what a qualified lead is. But if an MQL is decided by only marketing, you're doing it wrong. It should be decided between marketing, sales, RevOps at a minimum. And this is what a qualified lead is pre-us opening up a deal.

I think that's a great takeaway to actually start being very concrete and to help the misalignment that we already mentioned in this webinar and somehow pops in every webinar. No matter the topic I make. That's fantastic.

Just before we go, we have the next webinar on the 24th of November with Lime. We also launched our N.Rich AI, which is exactly a bit what Mark mentioned, you know, let's make things easy and let's look at the data. We launched N.Rich AI to help with that. You can ask a GTM question like, show me hot accounts that the team hasn't touched in the last 30 days. And then we will give you the answer that you need to decide. And exactly what Mark just mentioned, to make sure that you can take decisions next week that will actually move the needle. So feel free to check it out.

Otherwise, Mark, thank you so much for joining us in Boston on our panel talk face-to-face. Unfortunately, I wasn't there. But my colleagues were very happy that you joined. Thank you for joining again today. I think I can tell, if someone else has a question, feel free to reach out to you on LinkedIn, right?

Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me. It's been a fun conversation.

Amazing. Guys, just to do a quick recap. Make sure that you actually look at metrics and actions that actually move the needle. Pay attention to RevOps, demand gen, have your BDRs reporting to marketing and have some difficult conversations. Speak to your customers. Did I forget anything else, Mark?

We covered a lot. So I'd say, you know, if you send out this recording, take the recording, put it into AI if you don't do this for the audience already and find all the nuggets, the golden nuggets, if you will.

Exactly. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining today. I'll see you again in a month. And as I mentioned to Mark, for me as well, if you need anything, if you have a question, just drop me a message on LinkedIn. I'll make sure to answer. Thank you so much, everyone.

Bye, folks.