The Death of the MQL? A Journey Towards Data-Driven ABM

I mentioned lead scoring. I was guilty back in two thousand thirteen. I started lead scoring, and I just simply I sat down with my point of view and my intuition and created lead score because at that time, we didn’t have the tools and had a lot of experience with kind of how intuition can be good, but data science can be better. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Sixense investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. So, Saima, can you think of anything where you’ve seen a twenty to one ROI on any investment, anything that you’ve done recently, forever really? I’ll be honest, I can’t think of too many. Oh, well, we’ve got something today. We have Jack Speyer, who is the director of marketing operations at Iron Mountain, talking about their transition to account based marketing and some pretty crazy returns that they’ve seen. Yeah. Over twenty x. And what I love about Jack is I met Jack before he was a customer, almost three years ago, and he’s an ops person. He leads with the data. He identified a problem. He ran some regressions in Excel and figured out that the MQL was in deep debt, and there had to be a better way. And so he talks about his journey of not just making that decision, but getting alignment and then building up an incredibly successful program that generated over 20x ROI. Yeah. And I think it’s really cool because we haven’t dug in on the ops side as much, right, in our conversations talking about the transition ABM. So we kinda really get into the nitty gritty of, you know, what it takes and has a really great conversation about alignment and how he was able to help really drive sales and marketing alignment and adoption at a pretty strong rate. So really good stuff. Let’s dive into it. Let’s do it. Hey, Jack. Good to have you on. You’re one of the first folks I met when I joined Sixense. You were about to embark on this whole journey of moving from traditional MQL based marketing to an ABM program. And what I loved about our initial conversations was you’re obviously an ops leader, and you have an ops focus in the role. So just throw in all of your learnings as related to ops into this whole episode. But I’d love to start right at the beginning and back to the why why you felt at Iron Mountain that you really needed to change the way things were happening? Yeah. Thank you, Sano. I started there about almost three years ago. And when I got there, it was very traditional. There was very heavy MQL focus, and there was a lot of good intuition. A lot of marketers have great intuition but data will always trump intuition. And so when I came there one of the things we did is we were very m q l focused and I quickly got us away from that and shifted to what I would consider impact metrics. So we shifted from measuring MQLs and we measured pipeline and bookings but that really became for me the only true metrics and everything else is activity driving that but that’s your end goal You know, your north star really is bookings. And so we shifted a lot of measurements on that. It was interesting when I got there too, speaking of intuition, they actually looked at lead scoring and it was people’s opinions. So it was a lot of very smart people saying, I think a webinar was worth twenty points. I think an email opens for five points. And we immediately looked at that from a data lens and an ops lens and looked at every type of activity and how correlated it was with opening an opportunity. So even before I heard of six cents, we were really shifting from traditional marketing to much more data driven focus. And so when we started talking to six cents, that was a natural next step. When you talk about looking at the activities and how they correlated to the opening of an opportunity, like, I would presumably say without some form of technology or something. How did you actually go about doing that mapping process? Yeah. At that point, we didn’t have a dedicated BI tool. So we literally did it in Excel using some regression. So we looked at it and said, overall, there was, I think, a nineteen percent change from MQL to an opportunity. And then we looked at first touch to say if they registered for a webinar versus attended, because we all register and then you get overlooked and you don’t debt. Right? So we need different scores for that, different scores from lead source, get points for job title and job function and job level. So we really looked at all the known variables of leads and said, how do those correlate with converting to an opportunity? We to get wonky, we created an index where the average was a hundred percent, and anything over a hundred and twenty had additional points. If it was below eighty, it got less points. So we worked in Excel, but we did a lot of data science to say, how important is each type of activity relating to opening an opportunity? I mean, I love that you took a data driven approach, and oftentimes, that’s what leads the way in terms of, okay, clearly, this isn’t working. We need to do something else. So it’s not a spoiler. You you ended up choosing sixth sense as your tool of choice and then begins the work. Right? Because a tool is one thing, but it really is about the process and the program you put around it. And so talk to us a little bit about the rollout and how you structured that. Sure. You know, we talk about account based marketing, but if you don’t have account based selling partnering with it, you’re only halfway there. So we started talking to six cents, about two years ago, I think, about this time and did a lot of research. Part of that was just simply when I look at vendors, I look at the magic quadrant. And if you’re not in the upper right, I stop talking to you. So that was a quick pass. That narrowed it down to three, and you guys were the leaders as well as kind of the approach fit with what we were looking for. So we implemented that in q four, started in q one. We started immediately training sales and marketing. We got all the demand folks. We had to do it by region. We had a bit of a slow rollout with the demand, but North America took it fairly quick after about a quarter and a half. Really started using it, you know, with any new tool you get some early adopters. So we got some folks in North America specifically in inside sales and the smaller SMB focus. That works great because those deals are fast and they could see results quickly. When you start with enterprise, it may be working, but you can’t necessarily demonstrate that for six to nine months. So we went with the inside sales a lot for us. Seventy five, eighty percent of those deals closed within a month. A lot of them within a week. So we’re very quickly able to show results. A lot of that came from the demand and field teams meeting with their sales counterparts. And again in inside sales it’s a much more direct relationship. It’s a hundred percent marketing said, so they have a really strong relationship. So that was our initial success. Over time, we have over five hundred campaigns in six cents now. And over time, they got the demand the display cost down by fifty three percent. So we didn’t actually save money we simply doubled our reach online and this led to a lot more companies touched reached and increased engagement driving into sales so that was one of the big wins you know with marketing it’s never really cost savings per se because you don’t give the money back it just becomes more effectiveness with your costs and your spend. From there we started working with sales. Sales was a bit more of a challenge because they’re heavy tool focused and we had this was one of many tools So it took a while. We really had great initial adoption inside sales because it was fast. We didn’t really get full sales adoption until we got both sales leadership and marketing leadership, you know, at the VP and C level involved and pushing that. And that’s what really kind of turned the tide for sales. I was just gonna ask you because you were talking about getting folks on board of the VP and C level. But when you came in first and said, okay, this MQL measurement is just not gonna work. It’s not providing us the real data. Did you get a lot of pushback even at that point? Or it sounds like you were just hit the ground running and were able to proof a lot of things out. But was there resistance even to that? I was frank I caught there within a month I sent this, and I was frankly shocked at the time that they just said, okay, that I didn’t really have to kinda demonstrate. I think, you know, and a lot of times, they were aware of it. That was the year at Forrester where the the theme was the MQL is dead. So that certainly helped. But, yeah, I did multiple change, and I was I think they were really hungry for it. I was their first ops leader at the director level. And so I came and we made that shift. I mentioned lead scoring. I was guilty back in two thousand thirteen. I started lead scoring, and I just simply I sat down with my point of view and my intuition and created lead scoring. Because at that time, we didn’t have the tools. And and so I was very had a lot of experience with kind of how intuition can be good, but data science can be better. So, yeah, we switched the MQL driver. We changed those scores. We did have better adoption with MQLs based on that. But, yeah, we got fairly quick adoption with the company because I think when they hired me, they were ready for a change. You know, you bring in a new leader, you’re expecting things to change, obviously. So it was fairly quick on that side. That’s great. You mentioned that the alignment at the top was really what helped drive adoption and the success of the program. What would you say to marketers listening who might not have that alignment? How should they approach a program like this? Because I think to your point, right, like how many years ago the theme of Forrester was the MTO, is that like everyone knows that they need to eventually make a change to ABM. It’s just hard rallying the hard rallying the entire go to market org around it. And so if marketing is looking to dip their toes in or if they don’t have sales on board, what advice would you give them? Well, marketing and sales usually do work independently. Being in marketing, I was able to get marketing adoption much faster. And so for that, we didn’t have to have a full on shift. It was just a slow shift of, Hey, we’re gonna start running some campaigns in here. You know, we quickly realized we could get better at by costs under six cents umbrella through an agency. One, there was better cost overall, and we didn’t have the fifteen percent agency markup. So when they started shifting, we started seeing success. For the sales side, if you’re already involved, yeah, you need to get your marketing leadership to frankly, you know, at the director below, you’re not going to get in front of the c suite or even, you know, a lot of times sales VP’s. So you need to get your marketing leadership aligned and build that out. I would use case studies. You know, there’s a lot on 6sense dot com and Rev City and use some case studies to how it’s gonna work and how you show that to them. I use the analogy of if it’s baseball. If marketing’s throwing the ball and sales isn’t catching, you’re only going to have the benefit. So we got a lot of great we got much better results, lower cost per lead, more MQLs. But for a while, sales was ignoring it. So they were still selling, but they weren’t necessarily saying these are the hottest accounts that are engaging our content. So when they were doing it, we got good results. We actually got over twenty to one ROI. What we’ve just now could potentially be double it. That if sales really is going in every morning and saying, what are my hot new accounts? What’s open today? Who’s done what this week? Even looking at the recommendations says, call this personally, hit this web page. So we’re starting to get that now, and that really is when it really takes off when the sales catches the accounts that marketing is heating up. You just said twenty x ROI, Jack, and I I feel like we need to pause on that for a second. 20x ROI with the tool, and it seems like it was really a shift from activity based measurement to impact based measurement. Talk to us about how overall just marketing performance measurement changed at Iron Mountain. Yeah. So it’s interesting because the benefit of success is you have a massive database of people that are anonymous to us. The accounts when I measured it, it was literally about a hundred to one of people in your larger database compared to in our CRM. So the benefit is over ninety percent of web visits are anonymous. Some say up to ninety seven percent anonymous. Keyword searches. If you just think in your own life, you’re not filling out forms. You’re searching things. You’re hitting websites. You’re not identifying. So six SENSE is able to tell us the accounts that are researching. So we can really see what was invisible to us. Most of it was invisible to us. The challenge there is though, it’s still invisible to us. So I can’t necessarily replicate in my Salesforce the intent and engagement that sixth sense provides. So this is where we’ve had a challenge to show that they have to believe. And so partly initially it was, well, what are you showing Salesforce? And it was not the same. And so part of that was really making sure that all the campaigns at 6sense are replicated in our marketing automation, in our Salesforce, so we can register that. But also getting them to understand that ninety plus percent of all content consumption is anonymous. And the benefit of sixth sense is that you’re going to see and know which accounts are engaging. The challenge for leadership though is believing that because, you know, traditionally, they wanna see it. They wanna see the campaigns in Salesforce. And I think that’s the challenge of marketing overall. There’s no take it as a leap of faith. It’s like you’ve gotta prove your ROI everywhere. So we’re able to do that with the tool, but it was still took a while to get leadership to understand how much of the anonymous activity is driving book pipeline and bookings. So in terms of actually getting showing that impact, you know, again, getting leadership to see it, what was most effective in terms of sharing that and getting that data in front of them to really to highlight and say, look. Here’s what’s happening, and this is what’s we’re ultimately reserving this twenty to one ROI even higher. Like, what was the most successful way you were able to do that? So a monthly report of sixth sense at a glance. It had sort of got multiple categories. A lot of that was showing the pipeline and bookings, the number of accounts engaged and increased engagement. We looked at that really we didn’t count increased engagement on open opportunities, just on new accounts because, you know, you always get the sales pushed up. Well, we were doing that anyways. We’re gonna win that anyways. Right? So we didn’t even try to go down that road where credibility is a challenge. So we’re able to monthly show how many accounts we engage with, how many increased engagement, how much new pipeline, how much new bookings, and show that humility over time. And that’s how we got to the nineteen, twenty times ROI. And really showing it over like with anything. You know, when you’re reporting results, it’s weekly or monthly, and it never ends. You mentioned some of your best success with the sales side particularly was with your demand teams aligning with your inside sales team. Why was that so impactful? Well, it’s a much tighter relationship because a hundred percent of their opportunities come marketing driven. We have an inbound and an outbound inside sales, but for the inbound, it was literally just taking calls and emails and leads and following up. So that’s a very tight relationship to begin with. We also have faster speed to close. So over eighty percent of those opportunities open and close in a month, quite a bit of them within a week, so they can see the results quickly. We were able to show that. And because those are marketing driven, we could show them the six cents key of paying so they’re able to actually see that when they’re looking up leads and accounts in Salesforce. They could actually see what they’re looking at. So that helped it a lot, just direct aspect of that. And, frankly, inside sales in many cases is more younger, more junior salespeople. Sometimes it’s a path to becoming an enterprise rep. So without many, many years experience, they’re more open to doing and changing things. They don’t have ten years of success to look back and say, I’m doing fine as it is. So we got a lot faster change for those folks. Iron Mountain is pretty varied in terms of product services. There’s a lot of different service lines, a lot of things going on. Did you during the implementation or even now that you go through and sort of touch every part of the business, or is it sort of a continuing process of, like, how to touch all these different motions through the the ABM program? We have six different business units per se. Three main ones are in our core Salesforce. Like a lot of people, we have, like, I think four different Salesforce. So we put six cents on the core one, which is the bulk of our business. So records management is what we’re known. That’s boxes and warehouse and shredding paper. Then we now have a digital division that has SAS products and some AI products. And then asset lifecycle management, which is managing not like hardware but software and data. So we’ve been in records management for seventy years, and we have ninety five percent of Fortune one thousand. But the challenge is when we wanna sell those people different products and different business unit products, it’s different people at our customers. It’s the people who are managing paper, are not managing SAS products, are not managing data and hardware. So a lot of the challenge was getting different people at our customers. And that’s where 6sense helped because we have a model for each of the business units. We could see not only where they were looking at those business units but the specific employees that are customers who were looking. So that really aided us in the cross sell even if those people that she knows for demand. Most of those people were not in our marketing automation or Salesforce, and so we’re going out trying to find new people. With six units, we could find the people that were looking at our content that weren’t raising their hands to identify, but we’re still looking. And then that lets sales know who to reach out to even if they had to. And so some of those folks, they would buy the leads one by one. So at the moment, they’re using ZoomInfo to get those leads. I know we can also get them from six cents. So in many cases, it would identify the key stakeholders for different business units and then allow us us to go chase those individuals that would have been anonymous otherwise. Very cool. Jack, you’re like one of those people now who you’re number one, you’re an ops leader who has taken an ABM program with driven it to great success over twenty x ROI. You have helped deliver net new pipeline, cross sell, upsell pipeline. I mean, it’s pretty impressive. What learnings would you have? Meaning, if you had to do it all over again, is there anything you would do differently? Is there anything you would change? Sure. Let me start with one thing. The twenty x ROI includes the overall platform and solution cost. Cost. On the actual display campaigns, it’s sixty and seventy x ROI. But to me, it never felt fair not to include the full cost. So, yeah, on the direct spend, it was through the roof. I don’t like reporting on things because people don’t believe it, frankly. So we didn’t actually highlight that, but internally on the field folks, they use that. As far as for other folks, whether you’ve already implemented or you’re looking at it, the traditional alignment, getting leaders involved early, getting them bought in before you start getting sales aligned, even if it’s, say, you know, hey. We’re just gonna use this one team and prove it out. But getting that ahead of time, we implemented, and then it took a bit of time to get both demand and the sales folks adopting. So my main advice was, if you haven’t implemented yet, spend your time there, get that buy in, get that adoption quick, even if it’s small cherry picked teams, because then you’ve got actual results to show and expand out. So the classic early adopter. If you’re already in and you’re in the marketing side, I think this is often brought in through marketing, go to your leaders, lay out everything that’s working, lay out how it’s being used in a specific roadmap of what you need from both demand and sales teams. So Jack, we’re gonna deviate a little bit here, but we have a question that we ask all of our guests and has absolutely nothing to do with EBM, but it’s more about you. And we always like to ask, what is the most ridiculous thing that anyone has asked you to do in your career? It could be something good or bad. We’ve gotten people smuggling electronics to various countries. We’ve gotten all sorts of different things that have been we had one CMO that worked with NASA, was ridiculous in a very positive way. So what do you got? Most ridiculous thing you can think of that you’ve ever been asked to do? Wow. I wish I had notice of this. I I don’t have anything crazy like that. I mean, I will say not totally ridiculous, but it’s commonly unspoken from CMOs and find a way to make us look good even if you have to fudge the numbers. And I’ve I’ve never heard of that directly, but I feel like most CMOs I’ve worked for, like, just make me look good. And so I’m never willing to incorrectly report the numbers, but, yeah, you end up cherry picking what you report on. That’s probably not a great answer. I was once asked to change the color of a number on a slide from red to green. So I’m with you, Jack. The number was red. I was asked to change it to green. I ended up compromising and leaving it black. So I okay. I had something similar very early in my career. I had a boss who, the same kind of thing, would look at your presentations. So, he gave me feedback word for word. I put that in the deck, brought it back to him, and he corrected it. He didn’t like and I said, well, these are your words, right? And I just, you get some people who just cannot help but giving editing advice even once their own phrasing. So he became a really good friend. Yeah. It was very funny that whatever I will bring him, he would need to change even if it was perfect. That I think it’s all qualified. So appreciate it. And I know we could’ve just threw it right out of the left field for you. So this is great. Really, again, we haven’t had that real deep ops conversation about ABM. So really, really appreciate the deep dive into, I think, some really great actionable insights for folks out there. So thanks so much for hopping on with us today. Thanks for having me. This has been fun. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.