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When folks run outbound, they eventually also run inbound. But should those motions really be separate? What would happen if they were merged? And what problems would it resolve?
This and more we discuss in todays episode
This and more we discuss in todays episode
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (00:42) - Hunting Challenges and Reflections
- (02:43) - Transition to Business Discussion
- (02:59) - Outbound vs Inbound Marketing Debate
- (03:42) - Month-End Process and Opportunity Review
- (04:47) - Challenges in Marketing and Sales Collaboration
- (06:12) - Revenue Attribution and Commission Issues
- (10:16) - Strategies for Demand Generation
- (10:56) - Combining Inbound and Outbound Efforts
- (19:41) - Lead Scoring and SDR Integration
- (26:22) - Final Thoughts and Conclusion
***
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Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone. This is Toni Hohlbein. You are listening to the revenue formula with Mikkel and Toni. In today's episode, we talk about inbounds and outbound and why you probably want to merge the two. Enjoy.
[00:00:19] Appropriate jokes always. Appropriate
[00:00:22] Toni: jokes. Always. Best Boss Awards. There you go,
[00:00:24] Mikkel: Well, right back at Ach, ach, ach. So yesterday I was out hunting last night.
[00:00:34] No, no.
[00:00:34] no,
[00:00:35] Toni: Oh, that's right. You don't do
[00:00:37] Mikkel: No, it's, they're not in season.
[00:00:39] They're not in season. But duck and geese, they're in season.
[00:00:42] So I was out hunting and the thing is we got like a heat wave, but you still need to, you know, wear long pants and a
[00:00:51] Toni: gear and
[00:00:51] Mikkel: Yeah, you need to wear all that stuff and protection for your ears, right? If you end up shooting,
[00:00:56] Toni: did you shoot anything by the way?
[00:00:58] Mikkel: So. I was getting to it. I only got one shot. I took it and it was like, it was a layup. It could have, couldn't have been easier. And I missed. I just completely missed. But, but the thing is
[00:01:10] Toni: the good thing when you're alone in the forest, no one is there to tell the story.
[00:01:14] Mikkel: I was there with some others, so, but they didn't see. So I just told them it was really difficult shot. I just decided to take it, you know, but the thing is like with this season standing nearby water in a forest.
[00:01:27] That's mosquitoes. And obviously I had the mosquito spray on me, but I just forgot one spot. My hands. Which is basically one of the only things that were exposed. So yeah, that was really fun to stand two hours just getting drained by mosquitoes.
[00:01:43] Toni: And sweat, I
[00:01:44] Mikkel: And sweat. Yeah, I was, it was okay.
[00:01:46] Once the sun kind of
[00:01:47] Toni: thing sounds like? A really cool thing.
[00:01:49] Mikkel: It's such a great hobby, such a great hobby. No, it's fun. I don't know. I think it's also, I was reflecting, like, whenever I go out hunting, either there's just a lot, right? You know, you have a lot to shoot and you hit a lot of things, or there's just nothing. Nothing happens. You just stand there, wait, and then you also get a bit lazy.
[00:02:09] You like sit down and not really prepared. So if the opportunity arrives, yeah, yeah, exactly, and if the opportunity arrives, you're not even ready. You don't have your game face on, right? So, anyway, I
[00:02:19] Toni: think that's funny.
[00:02:20] Mikkel: I, so, so it's just difficult. It's
[00:02:22] Toni: So this is really what's, what what hunting is about is is scrolling LinkedIn in nature.
[00:02:29] That's pretty much
[00:02:30] Mikkel: That's what it is. Anybody else
[00:02:31] Toni: But a bunch of rules.
[00:02:33] Mikkel: with a bunch, tell me about it. So, and I mean, there are so many techniques. I think what we kind of missed out on, we should have had the, the docs out from the beginning.
[00:02:42] Toni: Oh yeah, it was.
[00:02:43] Mikkel: And, you know, so, and what we're going to talk a bit about today is kind of blending things and about your tactics, specifically, you
[00:02:50] Toni: know what, it took me half a second. It took me half a second. I was about to smash it down and then I was like, oh, wait a minute. No, no, no, this is a segue. It's a segue. No,
[00:02:58] Mikkel: No.
[00:02:59] So the thing is there's a lot being discussed around, Hey, should you run this motion or that motion based on your ACV and blah, blah. blah.
[00:03:07] And
[00:03:08] What's so funny is quite often for a lot of companies, if they're doing outbound, if they can sustain that motion, chances are they're also doing inbound.
[00:03:18] And what ensues is a lot of infighting, right? So I literally had with someone on our team was like, should we do some, some rules of engagement on who gets, gets credit? And I was like, let me sharpen my knives. Let's, let's go. Right. And I think that's, we want to talk a bit about that conundrum today, because Maybe it's time to mesh that even more.
[00:03:40] Toni: Or maybe it's not.
[00:03:41] Mikkel: Or maybe it's not.
[00:03:42] Toni: So I think what would be helpful for folks to understand is so when you were operating a different scale what was your month end process?
[00:03:51] You as a marketing leader together with the SDR leader?
[00:03:54] Mikkel: Well,
[00:03:55] well, well, the SDR leader was literally hey. This meeting that was booked outbound?
[00:04:00] Yeah, that's, that's actually inbound. And then discussion. So we would review hundreds of opportunities and kind of manually move things to inbound or outbound. Honestly, that's what we would do, right? The other thing I would also do is like, hey, how, why on earth are we distributing these opportunities to that AE?
[00:04:19] He or she can't close these type of inbounds. Like, what are we, what are we even doing here? It's like, oh, well, you know. Greg just really needed some pipeline and we're good friends. So, you know, so, you know, that, that, that was kind of the process. And I think it's just, it often gets a bit weird. It's this kind of, you have a very distant relationship somehow of just passing over the stuff and then following up, but there's not really that kind of collaboration happening
[00:04:46] Toni: No.
[00:04:47] And, and you know, there's a lot of LinkedIn at least talking about Inbound led, outbound is I think the newest abomination.
[00:04:56] Then we have like all bound.
[00:04:59] Mikkel: bound. And
[00:05:00] a couple of
[00:05:03] Toni: people are really kind of for all bound and stuff. I totally get it. And maybe I don't actually fully get all bound. Maybe I don't.
[00:05:09] Mikkel: we'll figure it call
[00:05:12] Toni: it. Something else. One, one bound, one bound.
[00:05:15] Mikkel: writers at podcast at roblox. com, tell us if we actually got it.
[00:05:20] Toni: And the I mean, the problem is pretty obvious.
[00:05:22] You do a bunch of activities trying to attract demand. You do a lot of these things, right? It's not just outbound and inbound. You have like many different things to do in outbound. Then you have inbound. What does that split into? Kind of, yes, there's some, you know, maybe paid stuff. There's some you know, organic stuff, maybe have events, maybe have sponsorships that, you know, there, there's so many pieces here.
[00:05:48] And the obvious problem is, is that, well, how do I know which part of my activities is actually driving the most revenue, right? And there's this famous saying of someone saying like, I know for sure that only half of my marketing activities. are driving all of the revenue. I just don't know which one.
[00:06:11] Right.
[00:06:12] And then you have companies that are trying to do revenue attribution for marketers and, and, and sales folks to figure out, well, which activity was it that drove it and so forth. And I think they are fantastic and they're helping. And it's like, no, no, no question there. But also they are also limited only to digital
[00:06:29] Mikkel: Yeah. It's also often, it becomes a very binary thing. Yeah. It's like, well, either it's inbound or it's outbound. And then you sit and look, well, we could nurture the heck out of all the opportunities we have in progress.
[00:06:44] Toni: if you were to call the CMO, you know, Stefan from DreamData, he would say, well, well, well, you can do U shape, you can do
[00:06:51] Mikkel: do W shape,
[00:06:53] Toni: you can progressive, whatever.
[00:06:54] It's like all of those things. Yes, they, they kind of are there, but also they just simply you know, You know, they're still not telling you where, where did this actually come from? Right. So the, the typical thing is we see this on our inbound form is podcast. Thanks, by the way, podcast shows up.
[00:07:13] That's how someone heard about us. Well, but and I don't want to be too technical, but basic on the you know, some, some of those attribution software, they would kind of mark them as organic you know, search or something like that. Let's not go too far into this. The, the other piece then to this is not only, you Do you want to understand which activities are driving the most bang for the buck, so to speak?
[00:07:36] But you also have to pay commissions to people, right? And this is, I think, where most people kind of get it wrong where they conflate those two things. Ideally they should be the same, but for the sake of sanity of that person that you pay the commission to, have to pay commission to people.
[00:07:52] You should, in some cases, be leaning commission wise in that direction, but overall attribution wise, you can be a little bit different about it. So one example and this is rules of engagement. So we literally had a three or four page document, which read like a like a legal text.
[00:08:11] Mikkel: 2. 1.
[00:08:12] Toni: Yeah, no really, yeah.
[00:08:13] And then with instructions how to work through this and so forth. And a large portion of that was who gets credit for like a deal. Not the closed one, but the created opportunity, right? And you can go simple and say like, well, if the last touch of the SDR was 30 days or 90 days or 60 days, it doesn't matter if it comes inbound, it's, it's an outbound, but we all kind of know it probably wasn't inbound in reality, but to keep everyone saying, let's just have that rule and kind of make it so, right?
[00:08:41] Because there's a case to be had that someone in this organization, because of this one unopened email that was sent suddenly had a big conversation in a meeting room around why someone should buy Growbox and then someone else is reaching out. Which probably didn't happen like this, but it might have, right?
[00:08:57] And this then, you know, sometimes leads to, well, you know, all these SDRs getting all this credit, so we should have more SDRs or whatever is getting credit and kind of that's happening. So this is kind of the, I think the number one problem people face all the time. And I think it's actually a little bit wrong to think about it like this, but, but that's kind of what, what I think the the, the main issue is people run into all the
[00:09:18] Mikkel: the time.
[00:09:18] I also just really believe if that's how you're operating, it's binary between inbound outbound, and there's no true collaboration beyond the whatever bi weekly and monthly cadence between sales and marketing. You're gonna have some problems because number one, is there any incentive to do anything for AEs?
[00:09:37] Really? Is there? Is there really any incentive to spend time on case studies? AEs. New decks, paid advertising, whatever, customer marketing, stuff like that, right? So that, that's one. The other is if you strategically want to do something, whether it's enter a new market or what have you, marketing is going to look at that and say, well, it's totally unproven market.
[00:09:59] Are we going to hire a local speaker now and spend money there? And it's going to be totally inefficient. We're going to, our CAC Payback is going to suffer. And, you know, so. I think one of the big issues with having it separate to a degree is making those decisions gets way harder.
[00:10:16] And I think the, when it really clicked for me was we spoke with Harrison Rose and they'd been heavily outbound driven.
[00:10:26] And they had a target account list they were going after. And he was like, well, it's time to build up Inbound. They brought the team in and said, well, who's the ICP? Who do you want? And it's like, this list, here you go. That's, that's actually who we want. And when the first Inbound from that list came, it was like, well, thanks, but we already like had them in our CRM.
[00:10:45] So what do you, the combined effort is actually the kicker all of a sudden, right? And I think that's kind of what we want to get a little bit into. How do we, how do we mesh these things together?
[00:10:56] Toni: while many people think about this as an attribution problem it actually is more of a collaboration problem. And you, you need the attribution thing to be solved to argue for which parts of the funnel should get more funding for who gets commissions and so forth, you know, all of that stuff needs to be done, but to be honest, it's a little bit of a almost like a, like a finance perspective to this.
[00:11:20] It's not a, I understand how the go to market works. And therefore we're doing stuff. It's who needs to get paid and who gets credit. And and I think if, if you're looking at the whole problem like that, throw that away, like that also needs to happen, but that's what the, that's what the admin people you know, that's not the real issue.
[00:11:37] The real issue is actually how can you maximize all of your demand gen effort? That's how you need to think about this. Right. And as a thought experiment. As a thought experiment I want everyone, you know, just for a second to think about what if, and in some cases that's the case, what if the SDR team reports to the VP of
[00:11:57] Mikkel: of
[00:11:58] Toni: What were to happen, right? And I've never done the full thing, but what I have done is I had the inbound SDR team That previously was reporting to the outbound leader, I had that SDR team fall under the marketing leaders budget and remit. And basically You know, with that magically, what was suddenly resolved was the, Oh, we're sending you all of those leads and you're not really working those.
[00:12:25] And Hey, you have 578 webinar leads. You need to work through them, you know, otherwise it's not going to work out. You know, you're not doing your job. That suddenly all went out the window, right? So that, that whole complaining about leads not being picked up fast enough. Well, dear marketing leader, you lead those folks.
[00:12:41] Figure out with those folks how you're gonna make it happen and you're gonna realize there are some issues here that make this really difficult. It can be done, but it's pretty difficult. And then number two people actually looking at the webinar leads and then their conversion and then realizing, you know what, actually, now this is my budget and I can't just complain about it.
[00:12:59] It actually, it actually doesn't work. It actually doesn't work that kind of, they're calling those event leads and trying, I actually can use their time on the phone better doing other stuff than this stuff, right?
[00:13:12] Mikkel: Yeah, or I was going to say, hey, someone out there listening now, they're going to have a marketing team that's cranking out eBooks or webinars.
[00:13:19] They're able to generate a lot of, let's say, right fit contacts, but not to convert them. What happens if you actually work with those SDRs on, well, how can we make it work? So one conversation we had internally was, wow. It's pretty common to, to get a lot of information on the gated stuff you do, right?
[00:13:39] What's your title? What's your blog? A lot of that, honestly, you can get through enrichment tools today, or guess what? Look them up on LinkedIn. That's all very easy to do. But what you can get is information such as, what is your biggest challenge or are you working on blank, which is kind of relevant to what you're selling?
[00:13:58] You can get a lot of qualitative insights that you can then use to your advantage. And I think that was just a point when I also, as I reflected over this episode we were talking about now is like, well, it just opens up the door to a different way of thinking, which is very much needed actually.
[00:14:13] Toni: actually. And this is a thing we're kind of starting to like, okay the way Harrison Rose was actually thinking about this and the team around him at Paddle was actually really in a way that fully owned both of those arms of demand generation.
[00:14:27] Yeah. And.
[00:14:29] The way he was talking about it was such a no nonsense way. And everyone listening to this is like, well, wait a minute. Why aren't we doing like this? This makes no sense. And and the realization actually is, is that you have different channels that can reach, let's just say one account list.
[00:14:45] Let's just say you're not in the super B2C or super, you know, super small SMB. space, let's just say you are in a good, you know, high up SMB mid market enterprise. And let's just say you are able to create a list. And maybe that list is for some of you is a thousand, maybe 2000 accounts for some others, maybe it's 10, 000, 100, 000 accounts.
[00:15:05] But let's say you are able to create that list. Really what you then as a top of the funnel demand leader need to figure out it's like, okay, with the fewest, with the least amount of work, How can we get the most, the most of those accounts to close with us? That needs to be the thinking, And, and then you kind of realize, okay, maybe there's some prioritization that needs to be done.
[00:15:29] Maybe they say, well, what is it that they're interested? What are the, what are the, you know, the lead magnets and all of these things you might be thinking about. And then it's like, well, okay, well, how can I deliver this message to them?
[00:15:40] Mikkel: Yeah. Right.
[00:15:42] Yeah.
[00:15:42] Toni: can I do that? And then the first question, the first thing would be, well, you know, I can I know they're going to Google and looking for this, so let's buy some ad space there.
[00:15:49] Okay. Check. Done. Easy. Next thing might be, Oh, I think they're hanging out on TikTok a lot. Let's try and find a way. How, you know, how could I even target them on TikTok or LinkedIn or whatever you have? And then the list might go on. And then in that list. Someone picking up the phone or sending tailored emails is just one of those other channels, right?
[00:16:09] And then the realization needs to be, okay, out of those, let's say 10, 000 accounts,
[00:16:12] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:16:13] Toni: Out of those 10, 000 accounts, I can split this into A, B, C, D accounts. And I really want to start working with the A accounts because I know this is the, probably the lowest hanging fruit. And then you also realize, okay, wait a minute, maybe it's now only 2000 accounts.
[00:16:29] And I know there might be three or four people per account that, you know, we might be relevant for. And I know that for someone to take action to, you know, for us to pop up on the radar, we need to hit them four to seven times or five to seven times. And those seven touches, this can be display ads, can be Google, can be a phone call, can be an email,
[00:16:52] can
[00:16:52] be a webinar that they attend, can be like a thousand things.
[00:16:56] And that's, that, that's how you should be thinking about attacking that target. And, and now comes the fucked up conundrum. If now someone comes back and says, I want to buy, what did it,
[00:17:10] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:17:12] Toni: what was it?
[00:17:13] Mikkel: But, but I think that's also where we've kind of been taught to find one true answer when the reality is there's plenty of answers as to, because if you just ask that one person, it's like.
[00:17:25] Well, on the form, that person said it was the podcast, but on the last touch, we can see it was this. But they've been with us. So, you know, it's kind of a rabbit hole you run down in run down. And I think that's where, you know, you just gotta accept it and maybe be a little bit more pragmatic
[00:17:42] Toni: think the, I think the thing which is totally fair is, and that's why I don't like this all bound thing. I think this allbound thing sounds. Sounds great from a individual contributor and maybe even a VP perspective, because, Hey, we fight less, we're way more aligned and maybe we're actually doing better work because we're aligned.
[00:18:04] And positive for me, less accountability, less accountability. when you then think one level up and maybe CFO, CRO, CEO, They actually want accountability. And that accountability is driving the team apart, creating misalignment and so forth, right? That's why people get those, you know, shitty targets that they then optimize for and so forth.
[00:18:26] But what I don't like about the Allbond thing is this and yes, there are ways to kind of try and create this, but it's the lack of accountability that comes with it. And then also, if you don't have a mechanism in place that does fight a little bit about, well, What do we, what do we think? Where did this thing come from?
[00:18:46] You are losing the ability to have that be triple or quadruple check by people that have like a financial interest in that number being correct. And then you end up with like, well, you know, since we're doing all bound, let's just keep investing in all the things. And that's not good. This is not what you want.
[00:19:07] This is, this is, again, this is great for some people on the team, but it's actually not great for the
[00:19:12] Mikkel: But you also have to realize there's, SaaS is its own little bubble. There are plenty of industries where they have even less information as to whether the budget is actually worked out, works out in the end.
[00:19:25] So I think, you know, we're, we might be over engineering some stuff here. One other thing it's, it's going to address if you, let's continue playing with this outbound moves together with marketing, we can call that department, whatever, it doesn't really matter, but they're in the same team now.
[00:19:41] Two other problems they can kind of help with is the, let's change the Mikkel definition, lead scoring, right?
[00:19:47] I think so personally, I think lead scoring is about to have run its course if it hasn't already for a lot of folks at least, right? And changing the Mikkel definition real quick when you just say, don't do it, like just stick, pick one and maybe stick with it, right? And then learn from that. I think on lead scoring, what will change is all of a sudden, if you have the SDRs who need to work those leads, Under your wing, so to say, you're gonna hear all the issues.
[00:20:14] And then it gets very real. Again, you're wasting resources that accomplishes nothing at the end of the day, right? And so it can kind of change things all of a sudden. If you have a target list you're working on, why not just say who is hottest on that list? And then the SDRs can determine what they want to work on.
[00:20:33] Forget what the score is or whatever, but they might have, you know what? I really love that company. I myself am very personally motivated to try and book that meeting. So I'm going to give it a go. Right. And I think that's also what we've heard from Jesus Rekenna at some point at Hex, basically having tried leaf scoring and then just defaulting to, you know what, we'll just give them the list and then they can pick.
[00:20:55] I'm not
[00:20:55] Toni: I'm not sure if you said it on the podcast and like, you know, us
[00:20:58] Mikkel: that was proprietary,
[00:20:58] Toni: but yeah, no, that, that's totally a thing, right?
[00:21:00] And and I think this is a good direction, but it's I'm just not sure if this is the solution to the problem. be you
[00:21:06] Mikkel: There has Yeah, I get it.
[00:21:07] Toni: it. So I don't know what it is. And the thing is, it's I think if you have the right setup. Have it, and, and I wouldn't even rec so, you know, I'm a CRO and so I have been and, and, and, and still in, in spirit M but I'm not even sure it's the right thing to expect most CROs, which are sales, CROs to expect them to get this whole thing, by the way.
[00:21:29] So yes, you could make the argument, well, if marketing and outbound, by the way, I think outbound and marketing, depending on this, you know, how much revenue they bring, both should roll directly to the CRO, not, you know, outbound shouldn't through the VPO sales to the CRO. Just saying, if they're there, you know, you could say like, well, the CRO is there to, to, you know, balance these things out and mitigate and so forth.
[00:21:51] I'm not sure if he or she is actually capable of doing that and, you know, has the, you know, frame of mind and be thinking, Oh yeah, no, let me invest some time here because this is, you know, in three months, that's going to be important. They will be sucked into most of the sales stuff. Right. So I think people should seriously consider more often than not running with what I see way more frequently in the U.
[00:22:12] S. To have SDRs as part of the marketing team or have a common leader. Like a demand chain VP or something like this owning the most of the marketing stuff, if not all, and kind of the inbound stuff as well.
[00:22:25] Mikkel: you know what? I think that that can also solve a couple of other things, which is the not a lot of marketing talent is going to enjoy being under a CRO. Just putting it out there. There's going to be lots of issues
[00:22:37] Toni: Unless it's me, of course.
[00:22:39] Mikkel: But there's going to be a lot of challenges with that. Don't want to get into it. But if you were instead to kind of break apart marketing and have one team that rolls to the CEO and then a demand function, all of a sudden you have a setup where there's one person responsible for the Creating the demand.
[00:22:57] And then there's another person responsible for closing it, which is the AE level. Right. And, and I think that just makes it a whole lot clearer. What are the different people's priorities and problems that they need to
[00:23:08] Toni: Yeah. And I think some people just, well, you probably don't have too many marketing folks listening, but some people just lost their shit. It's like, wait a minute, you know, there's the one side of marketing should report there and the other side of marketing should.
[00:23:20] So guess what? We tried this and it kind of can work out, but yes, it, you know, I think it, it comes with all another can of worms like brand versus demand and how to balance that kind of, there are all kinds of other kinds of things coming from this. But ultimately what I would advocate for instead of this all bound thing, Instead of this all bound thing, honestly, is to have inbound and outbound, let's just say those are your main channels unified under the same leader.
[00:23:47] And that leader may or may not be the CRO for, you know, a couple of reasons, right? And then once you have that under, you know, a roof, I think
[00:24:00] the
[00:24:00] collaboration will obviously increase the, the way of working together will increase, et cetera, et cetera, but you can still have some accountability in this
[00:24:09] setup, right?
[00:24:10] Mikkel: I think the problem, if you roll those up to the CRO and they are not on the same team you will have the same issue, right. With collaboration.
[00:24:17] Toni: say that, yeah.
[00:24:18] Mikkel: So I would think long and hard about, whether there's a case to, either create a team solely focused on demand creation or roll it into marketing.
[00:24:30] If you have, so by the way, and this is going to be really important, you need a marketing leader who can actually handle that, right? It is a different game and you need to have a mind for it. Or he or she needs to have someone on the team who can take that part of the function, right? Because you have to realize.
[00:24:44] The SDR function is like very specific what needs to happen. Marketing, you have a lot of disciplines that, and they need to be nailed, right? So I think that's going to be the tricky part. But I do believe if you really want to solve some of these issues with, hey, we're just, you know, Marketing hits target, everyone else fails.
[00:25:03] Are we actually attracting the right ICPs? Do we provide enough, you know, cover for the sales teams, et cetera? I think it kind of makes sense to put some pressure on the marketing team by giving them that accountability. Yeah.
[00:25:15] Toni: And, and equally so, right. I, I'm, I'm not sure if I would, as, as a, let's just say I'm a marketing leader. I'm actually not sure if I would accept the revenue target as my commission payout.
[00:25:26] Honestly, it's, it's cool and stuff and I get it and let's do it for the company and all of that jazz. But at the end of the day, yeah, you're kind of dependent on someone else not fucking up.
[00:25:35] Like you are, you honestly are. So I think in, in this kind of setup, Yeah. Yeah. I think it would be totally fair to, yes, sure, you know, everyone is working towards revenue and you should have a lag in that.
[00:25:46] But the other thing is also in this setup, you can just own the pipeline number or own the, you know, meetings accepted
[00:25:52] Mikkel: but you will also have some leading indicators for us. It was meetings held basically. And I think you are going to have some of those because if, if, if let's say, Hey, everything looks awesome. We're booking thousands of meetings now because outbound is sitting under marketing.
[00:26:06] But then all the AEs are just rejecting it because it's like, wrong, wrong person, wrong company, wrong, whatever then it's not going to work out. Right. So I think there will be some, some kind of leading indicators. And I think you will need to look at that stuff very closely as part of this exercise.
[00:26:22] Toni: No, absolutely.
[00:26:23] Ultimately, I think ultimately we're coming back to, there are all of those inbound outbound attributes, and there's even more channels, you know, but we have like six community led, near bound, whatever. I mean, there's like all kinds of stuff out there. But ultimately, the way you need to actually as a company think about it, And honestly, that's probably how your CEO thinks about it.
[00:26:41] If your CEO is commercially switched on, that's how he or she probably thinks about it is, well, we have this set of customers or potential
[00:26:49] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:26:49] Toni: you know, what is the cheapest, best way to convert them? And then there's an arsenal of tools we can buy in order to achieve that. And those tools, it would be pretty silly if one, Part of the toolset is attacking you know, one account list and the other one is taking a different one.
[00:27:09] Happens all the time. By the way, that in itself, if that happens, You know, you have a you actually don't have like all sales or marketing miscellaneous, no, you have a complete we don't know who our ICP is problem. Because whatever you put on your website and talk about and marketing is marketing to your sales reps have figured out that that ain't working.
[00:27:30] And I'll, you know, these guys will never book with us. It's going to be those guys that book with us and those guys close. So you have another issue altogether. Right. Basically kind of realizing that all of, all of these things that are using to attract customer, that they're just, they're different tools for the same purpose and they should all be trained on the same target.
[00:27:49] And if you do that I think the chances for success go up quite a lot. And the way to achieve that, I, my belief is not to kind of let go of all accountability and say, kumbaya, everything is great. I think the way to do it is to have maybe one dedicated leader.
[00:28:05] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:28:06] Toni: You know, collecting all of those different top funnel tools together and creating cohesion within that bubble.
[00:28:12] Mikkel: I think it's also just one last kind of reflection rumbling around in my head is like, well, if you don't have them together, and there is a challenge in outbound. And you ask marketing to help.
[00:28:24] They're like, I mean, we need to do this other thing. Or, I mean, we can do a, let's do a PDF deck. We'll give you a PDF deck. Right. But if the VP, marketing, CMO, whatever has the responsibility. You know what, that person is going to say, well, that ebook, we need to push it two months. I'm going to take these five people, sit down with the SDRs, we're going to work something out.
[00:28:46] We're good with cameras. We're good with decks. We're good with case studies. We're good with blog posts. Whatever is needed. We'll help with that outreach to find a new path forward together with the SDRs. And I think that's just, for me, that's one of the points where you can, you know, you I think you can lie to yourself and say, well, of course the VP marketing will help us if Outbound has a problem.
[00:29:06] I don't think it's that
[00:29:07] Toni: think it's
[00:29:08] Mikkel: just don't. So, I guess it's time for Rebound, Nearbound, Trickbound,
[00:29:14] Toni: Outbound,
[00:29:15] Community, Growth led, Sales
[00:29:18] Mikkel: the way, what I love if, if, Eventually someone merges inbound and outbound under one team. You know what? Marketing is going to be paid a little bit more attention to internally.
[00:29:29] They're going to get maybe a few more requests served, a little bit more
[00:29:33] Toni: I don't know. I don't know about that. I don't think there's anything
[00:29:35] saving
[00:29:35] Mikkel: say. If you,
[00:29:37] Toni: If you, if you concur with that comment, make sure you like, subscribe, share. You know, send it to your marketing folks. And maybe send us an email at podcast at was it growblocks.
[00:29:48] To tell us, Hey, are you already doing it like this? Because I think like 30, 40 percent of teams might. And now that you're doing like this, do you still have the same issues?
[00:29:57] Mikkel: And actually, would you be interested in hopping on the show and talking about it?
[00:30:00] Toni: Ooh, what a great idea you just came
[00:30:02] Mikkel: Yeah, exactly. Now we're going to get so many inbounds.
[00:30:05] Toni: That's it. Thanks everyone for listening. Have a good one. Bye bye.
[00:30:07] Mikkel: Bye.