Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Small bites of insight to unlock your pipeline strategy
Where GTM Leaders share their secret ingredients for modern pipeline generation—a flavor for every diet.
Andrew McGuire:
From scaling outreach from zero to 10 million in just two years to challenging conventional wisdom about ideal customer profiles. Our guest today has consistently been ahead of the curve in understanding how technology reshapes GoTo market strategy, a transformative figure who's about to challenge everything you think you know about pipeline generation in the AI area. If you're ready to challenge your assumptions about what drives predictable pipeline growth in this crazy AI era, you're in for a freaking treat because please join me in welcoming Mark Kosel glow to the show. Welcome, mark to GTM snack.
Mark Kosoglow:
I'm pumped. I only have one problem. You did your research, but I think half your data was right. I'm really not that good.
Andrew McGuire:
You are that good. That's the point. I've been looking, I've done all the research, I pulled it all into that story that I shared with everybody. And if it's all wrong, I don't know, man. I don't know what to do.
Mark Kosoglow:
Well, let's get into it, brother. I mean, yeah, the world is changing. The world has changed. It's just are you going to adapt? And unfortunately, for a lot of sales leaders, not only has it changed, but it continues to change. And my tagline on LinkedIn used to be sales has changed. Do you love it? And most people don't. And I think that right now we're seeing a lot of sales leaders suffer from the fact that they're trying to use strategies and tactics from five years ago that are now obsolete and ineffective.
Andrew McGuire:
Well, the hat I'm wearing, I actually got from corporate Bro Ross,
It says, smile and dial, sweet Comish sales are dope. I got this at that go to market, but after the adventure that it had at Saster, but smile and dial, to me it's smiling and dialing, but it used to be just to get people to pick up the phone. They don't pick up the phone anymore. And now we've got the great ignore where it's not just not picking up the phone or emails. We're just talking to Morgan j Inger about this in a different episode where it's all about dropping audio notes in LinkedIn. Dms. I was going to be talking to Darren McKee about he's using video in dms, right? So talk to me about, that's the tactic, but how do we know who it is that we should be going after? And I think the definition of how you're redefining what an ideal customer profile is really important that the sales world understands how things are changing and how to stand out when we have the great ignores stirring us in the face.
Mark Kosoglow:
I think there are some very hardcore bleeding edge revenue leaders that over time have decided that the current way that most people do ICP stuff is wrong. And I think that that shift is accelerating right now. And listen, everything kind of starts with your ICP. And what I mean by that is there's a problem in the world. Somebody creates a product or solution to do it. That product or solution defines your market. You can't sell to that entire market. So you narrow it down to ICP. But let's talk about what really ICP is most people know it as ideal customer profile or customers or accounts that we would want to be customers based on some kind of attributes of them. But let's look at what they use. They use firmographic and technographic data, for example, at outreach. We know that's they sales force and that they have, that's
Andrew McGuire:
What we've had.
Mark Kosoglow:
That's all we've had. We've had to assume it's so assumptive, Andrew. This is a little weird metaphor, but it's like racial profiling. It's saying because somebody looks Middle Eastern and has a turbine and they walk through the airport security, they get pulled over more than someone who looks like me. That's wrong. It's assumptive, it's all these bad things, but yet that's what we do for ICP. But because they use Outlook and they have Salesforce and they have salespeople, they must need, must have this problem that we solve
Andrew McGuire:
Or they just got a round of funding or whatever the thing is, right? The signals and all the signal data, it's so freaking noisy, right? And you have your ZoomInfo, you have your CRM, you have the foundational layer of accounts and contacts, then you layer in the signal data, and now with all this crazy personalized at scale stuff, which doesn't with signal data and trying to personalize each message, it's just, it's challenging to get anything to actually work.
Mark Kosoglow:
Well, I think what ends up happening is when you say, well, our customers look like this, therefore any company out there that also looks like that probably has the same problems was the best that we could do. That was the best. But now there's so much data, there's so much that's publicly available, there's so much content out there, and AI can help us comb through, summarize and figure out what's important and all that. I think that that definition of ICP is now super antiquated. And if you're using a tool and saying, well, listen, they have 500 to 2000 employees. They use Salesforce, they've recently got their series B funding and all that kind of stuff. You are just being a racial profiler just for ICP people and not for actual humans.
Andrew McGuire:
Careful. I don't know if we're going to go down that rabbit hole of
Mark Kosoglow:
That might be a little tricky profiling, but you get my point.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah, I get your point. Yes. So tell me what is the new way of doing this and what are you doing at Operator that allows us to think about this differently, to actually stand out in the crazy amount of noise that we have?
Mark Kosoglow:
After hundreds of conversations at Operator, it became very clear to us what is happening, which is a generic, and assumptive messaging has such poor reply rates, let's call it on average about 1% and about 0.3% on positive reply rates. That if you do the math of generally accepted benchmarks for conversion of like, this is how many accounts we need to book a meeting, and this is how many meetings hold and this is how many meetings qualify, and this is how many deals we want. If you have to deliver for a $30,000 a CV product, 5 million of revenue through your email channel, Andrew, the numbers say that you need 180,000 companies in a quarter and to send 45,000 emails a week in order to get those type of conversion numbers to result in closed one business,
Andrew McGuire:
45,000 emails a week.
Mark Kosoglow:
A week. That's what the number said. I just did a post on this. You can go check my math. It is an obscene amount of it is, let's not call it an obscene volume. It has a word. It's called spam. That is called spam.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah. Well, that's why we have, I didn't want to get into this, but that's why we have companies that are literally just building email infrastructure for people to have hundreds of domains to make. It's just ridiculous. To me, it's the complete opposite of what we should be doing. But that exists with Clay and this go-to-market engineer role, and now all the noise of Sure sign up for email infrastructure or you get a hundred
Mark Kosoglow:
Domains and a thousand emails. Dude, what we're doing is an alcoholic buys a little thing of vodka and after a while that doesn't get him drunk enough. So he buys a huge handle of vodka and he downs it. That's what these people are doing is they're like, well, listen, you can't get what you want doing this ugly, nasty thing that nobody wants done to them more faster. We're just going to let you do it more. Yeah, do more and faster.
Andrew McGuire:
Well, tell me what, let's go to AA and tell me what the recovery process looks like and how we can get out of this cycle where we all wake up with headaches and migraines and have to drink at 9:00 AM to just keep going. What's the red pill if you go down the matrix rabbit hole of trying to do this differently?
Mark Kosoglow:
Well, I think that instead of saying, these look like our current customers, therefore let's assume they have problems. And we're seeing that when we send emails to those people that there are converting at such a low rate that we have to find such a massive amount of accounts that it doesn't really work. Rather, what we should be doing is saying, can we, using private data sources, public data, can we identify that there's an indication of a problem we solve and that there's proof that they're suffering from it? And that's what operator has built as part of what we do is we will go out there and create what we call value scenarios. Value scenarios are combinations of metrics that we have in our system and can go fetch. And when those metrics look a certain way and are combined a certain way, they say that there's a problem there and suffering is happening. And so what our system does is it takes a list of companies and it can find the exact companies that are not only experiencing, but they're suffering from the problems that your product solves. To me, that's what ICP is ICP is finding people that you can help, not people that you may be able to help just because they look like your other customers
Andrew McGuire:
And we don't need to go down the toaster and the Porsche, I'll put a little clip in there of you talking about it for people to understand but not knowing what exists and that you could be in the market. You are the right person. So help me with how someone was going to come to operator. How should they be thinking about how you're visualizing ICP and what that means to be able to understand this new way of thinking? Can you show us that?
Mark Kosoglow:
Yeah. If we look at the buyer's journey, there's 70% of people are unaware they have a problem, 20% are aware, but it's not a priority and they're not doing anything about it. 7% are aware and they're actively considering what should I do about this problem? And then 3% are in an evaluation where they're talking to people about actually solving the problem. Most signals based solutions are working in that lower 10% of the funnel where people are putting out signals. What then do you do to the upper 90%? Well, the thing that you have to do is you have to be compelling, unique, and relevant and show them that they have a problem that they shouldn't have to suffer from, but they are, and you don't have to be assumptive with that anymore. Now listen, can we do that for 180,000 companies a quarter? No, that's not possible because there's probably not 180,000 companies that actually are suffering from the problem that you have to the degree that they're ready to do something about it. But what we can find you is, oh, do you need to find a couple million dollars a month for a rep or two that really pinpoints exactly what accounts they should go after? That's what we can do for a teams of reps.
Andrew McGuire:
So I ask every guest this question, so what is the number one belief about pipeline generation in 2025 the market has wrong and how should companies be thinking about it differently to unlock the next big opportunity? And we've been talking about what I think is what you believe is the number one thing, but talk to me, is there something else where there's one belief that everybody who just has completely wrong?
Mark Kosoglow:
Yeah, I think most people think that they're targeting accounts that can convert, and if you looked at their metrics, you'd find out that their conversion rates are really, really bad, and that's because their targeting is off. In order to have a successful targeting situation, you have to have two things. One is what is the bullseye? And the other one is, what am I shooting at it? And so if you don't get the bullseye or the target correct, that means that you're not going after the right company if you don't get the arrow right or whatever you're shooting at the target. If that's not right, then what ends up happening is you don't hit the target that you're aiming for and you don't hit it in a meaningful way. And so that is the thing that I see wrong is most people think that they're targeting correctly, they're not.
Most people understand that their messaging and stuff is off, and of the reasons it's off is because they're trying to take a huge swath of people and get as many of them interested as they can versus creating highly tailored audience of one messaging for a single company or companies that are very, very similar. I'm not talking technographic or firmographic, I'm talking about similar in the problems that they're suffering from. And so that's the kind of stuff that I think is a huge misconception right now is just because you don't have a well-defined ICP doesn't mean that they have the problems that you solve.
Andrew McGuire:
Well, thank you, mark, for joining us on another episode of Go-To-Market Snacks, small Bites of Insight, ICP Insights to unlock your pipeline strategy, and we will see you on the next one. Thanks everybody for joining.