Follow 4 New Rules for Pipeline Growth

Demand Gen Report hosted its “Business Insight sand Intelligence” webinar series this week. Triblio’s CEO Andre Yee, former SVP of Product at Eloqua, presented “The Secret Ingredients to a Winning ABM Blueprint.” Read more about how he sees the evolution of MarTech and 4 new rules for the modern B2B landscape below.

“It’s not about hitting your MQL target. It’s about revenue impact.”
Andre Yee, CEO, Triblio

First-gen marketing automation took hold because it equipped marketers to impact revenue. However, MarTech innovators soon realized that pure leads-based marketing will never achieve the revenue impact B2B marketers are looking for. It has a tragic, fundamental flaw.

The vast majority of MQLs get rejected by sales. Acceptance rate estimates range from as low as 12% (TOPO) to 32% (Aberdeen). However, knowing that marketers waste 2/3 of our efforts is not much of a comfort. It’s even less than John Wanamaker’s infamous, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

As Andre puts it, “It’s unacceptable, but we’ve become numb to this fact.”

Modern B2B purchase demands require a more holistic focus on accounts in order to grow pipeline and generate revenue. Rather than have a singular focus on leads, Andre suggests that marketers follow 4 new rules:

1. Identify & Initiate Buyer Engagement without Dependence on Form fills

Triblio client Clarabridge, a customer experience management software, does a good job of engaging both known and unknown stakeholders from target accounts. The company works with long sales cycles, where marketing and sales spend a lot of time educating and building trust. To stay top-of-mind, Clarabridge ran ads with Triblio to specific personas from target accounts. Later, back on the website, the marketing team engaged both view-through and clickthrough web traffic with web personalizations. Then, the marketing team would use account engagement scores to trigger SDR outbound activity, all independent of form-fills. Clarabridge found that meetings driven by account-based marketing converted to pipeline 3x better than the MQL baseline, directly influencing $24M in revenue.

2. Activate Sales on MQAs, Not Leads

When selling to accounts, score buyer activity by account. Triblio clients can score both off and online activity, incorporating anything from case study downloads to booth traffic. Sophisticated clients set thresholds for each account tier, using planning worksheets like the one below.

The results? By scoring accounts, marketing and sales have a shared focus on moving engaged accounts to closed-won.

3. Supercharge SDRs as a Nurturing Channel

In the webinar, Andre says, “The days of long nurture is dead, or at the very least marginalized. No company gets this more than FinancialForce.”

Over the past year, FinancialForce has effectively leveraged its SDR team as a marketing channel. It all started with a misstep – a singular direct mail campaign that didn’t perform due to discontinuity between marketing campaigns and SDR outreach. In response, FinancialForce now has SDRs reporting to marketing and treats SDR outreach as continuity of marketing programs. The new account-based program boosted pipeline by several million dollars. You can read more about FinancialForce’s story in Demand Gen Report’s latest ABM in Action feature.

4. Measure Pipeline Impact, Not MQLs

Marketers can measure in-target pipeline growth in 2 ways. First, see if you’re achieving your in-target account opportunity goals. In other words, are you creating enough pipeline from in-target accounts? Second, measure the efficiency of your pipeline contributions. Is the percentage of in-target opportunities increasing? Are you better able to define what an in-target opportunity looks like?

View the full webinar, which includes a live Q&A with Andre Yee.