The Contentious SQL Debate Between Marketing + Sales (with Bastien Paul)

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack, lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub Heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the Hub Hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub Heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot. And the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer.

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another great episode of the Hub Heroes podcast. And are we all focused and accounted for today?

It's a full house.

It's a full house. We got some usual suspects here. Obviously, George, we've got you. We've got myself, Liz and Max, but we have Chad, we've got back joining us, and his glowing sentient printer in the background. I love it. I love it.

That printer's just gonna get up and walk away midway through the podcast.

It's just gonna pull an optimus, you know, looking like.

It's looking like one of those. It's like one of those new Tesla robots.

That's what I'm saying.

It's gonna pour me a drink, do.

Rock, paper, scissors with me driving printer.

Yeah, it is.

If it was. If it was a printer that could pour me a drink, I would have purchased one weeks ago.

It's true. But guys, we. We. Best behavior today, guys. We got. Got some cool peeps in the house. Who? Bastion Paul of Hub Lead IO, let's go. CEO and co founder, you're here. Joining us from France, where It is, what, 8:00pm oh, that's good.

That's good. I got some oysters and white wine just before. So I'm ready for the podcast.

There we go. Oysters and white wine and Hub Heroes. That's what. I put those together all the time. White wine and Hub heroes.

I've already. I've already censored myself once. Liz, just. Just so you know.

Are you keeping a running count like a clicker?

Yep.

I'm gonna Write down. I'm gonna write down all the jokes. I'm gonna write down all the jokes I would have made if we were not behaving.

Yes.

And then when Liz can't end the podcast again, you're like, well, here we go.

Just going to unload it. Yep, I'll help you.

I'll help you land it.

Good.

Well, before we get into our conversation today about SQL, Sebastian, you and I have had a couple of conversations leading up to today and I have questions before we dig in. First of all, for our listeners at home, you are an authority on SQLs. I want to have this conversation about that with you, but tell us about Hubbley IO and where that fits into this conversation. Who's it for? What problem does it solve?

Sure, sure. So. So before I was working as a growth marketer, so I don't know if you have a lot of that in us. It's more a team where it's building companies and lists for the salespeople. It's not like in marketing team, it's a growth team. It's really like sales support. And yeah, I joined the company, we were like four or five, we raised to 100, raised like 20 million. And I was handing the growth team for building the list for them. And I was sometimes pissed off by sales. And salespeople need something like they need apps, they need to. They were constantly asking us for things because we have everything we had, like BigQuery enrichment thing, everything inside HubSpot, all the tools, you know, connected with your APIs, up your make, whatever you want. But I have no tool just to give them so they can just do their work, have the power of growth and marketing team and we can work on scalable things. And so yeah, that's why we developed hybrid with two co workers. Yeah, that's the way we, after we checked what kind of tools existed on the market and we say, okay, let's try to do something better just for HubSpot. Since I was using HubSpot for four or five years, so I really appreciate that kind of serum. And yeah, that's where. That's where we went.

So there's two things that I love. Technology born out of the fact that I got mad at a sales team and I'm going to build this on HubSpot because over the four years I've been using it, I fell in love with it. So this is already shaping up to be an amazing story. Liz, I know you've got more.

Oh no, I love that it's raging against the Machine but creating ROI out of it. I love that.

Yes.

I mean, I don't know if you do you guys know Gorgias, the company Gorgeous help desk for E Commerce, specialized on Shopify. So it's a French American company and they specialize only on Shopify for help desk for four, five days. Four or five years. Sorry. And after they did other CRMs. So I really liked this kind of company growing, like not so fast, but steady growth. So yeah, that's why we. And you have some company also named Deliver. It's E Commerce Logistics only plugged to Shopify, bought by about 2 billion from Shopify and they did only Shopify. They didn't do any other cms, something like that. So yeah, I think like, okay, we can do something for the CM like that. And frankly like I didn't know there was a huge, huge ecosystem before going down into Hublit. Oh, you got lucky. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. So like happily, of course, Aeros, superhot company like that doing only for HubSpot. So I say, okay, there is something that is, there's something we can do. So, so let's, let's write. And God, I love I got mad from salespeople.

Yeah, yeah, that's the nugget.

So there is one last question I have for you. Bastard. Before we start talking about SQL. One of the things that you are exceptionally passionate about is something that I know George is also exceptionally passionate about. And it's this idea of continuous learning or the way George talks about it on this podcast and on beyond. Your default is getting 1% better every single day. And I know for a while there you did have a goal of three books per month. We're not here to check you on that. This is not a New Year's resolution. Check in. But I would be curious, what is a favorite book of yours that you've read recently where you put it down and went dang, that actually. That actually made a difference in my mindset.

Sure. I don't know, George. You check the Stripe press or the books from Stripe. If you don't, you should. You should. That's amazing. Inside this press you have a bunch of books like commercialized by Stripe. And in this one, the last one of the latest one is Charles Almanac. It's on Charlie's. Charles T. Munger, the co founder of. I mean co founder. I don't know, but a really good soldier from Warren Buffett and like he never wrote a book. He never wrote something, but he just appeared on 10 different conferences where he just Shares his thing, just shared everything. What he learned, how he invests into companies, how he behave, how he learned something. And yeah, this book, like, it was mind blowing. I really like it.

Poor Charlie's Armani. Is that it?

Yeah, it's Charles T. Munger.

Yep.

I'm putting it in the chat for everybody. I'll make sure it's in the show now.

I love that you went in that direction because. And again, I love books. I love listening to books. There. There are so many things we can learn when we do try to educate ourselves. And one of the ones for me, Bastian, that was the most kind of mind blowing. And wow, did I really take that journey was the book Snowball, which is actually Warren Buffett story. And. And as an audiobook, it's. As an audiobook, it's 38 hours that I listened to this book and it was phenomenal. I loved it. I loved it.

Yeah, I loved it. And they have also another book, more related to our business, High Growth Angles and Growth Book from Ella Gill is the guy who created a company. I don't remember the name, but he was bought by Twitter. And after he was DP people of Twitter and he joined Twitter, like at 50 people, and he helped Twitter to rise to like 1000, something like that. And he wrote like a huge book on, okay, how do you structure your board member, how do you hire? How do you implement vision inside your company? And these books are free online, so you can go online and you can read it. You can just buy the book because it's beautiful and I love papers. But yeah, this one was really mind blowing, especially when I was working before in a company to understand, like, okay, how do you grow as an employee inside a company? And yeah, I really liked it. Definitely, like StrikePress every book they have. I want to read everything.

Sebastian, like once a month, I'm basically start having you tell us what to read and what tools to use. Bastion's Corner still recorded late at night, right? That's right. All right, so let's dig in because I. I was very excited about this topic. And I know I say this a lot, but I'm saying I'm excited about this because it comes from a deep reservoir of pain that I have felt at different points throughout my career in marketing. Let me. Let me paint the scene here. Right? So marketing and sales, theoretically on the same team. Theoretically. All bringing in Max. Don't start.

Can somebody tap Liz? I think she's dreaming.

No, theoretically.

She did say theoretically.

She did say theoretically. That's true.

All right, you know what? Let's try to come together, guys.

All right? All right, my bad.

I've gotten to one sentence into the problem, and we're already acting up. Okay? So on the one side, regardless as to whether it's on the other side of the continent or in the same building, we have marketing, right. They're generating leads, they're running campaigns, they're filling up the CRM with potential prospects. And on the other side, we've got sales teams. Right. Who are focused on closing deals. But too often we have a situation where these sales teams are saying those leads are not sales qualified. In fact, 47% of B2B sales teams say that the leads that they are getting that are supposed to be sales qualified from marketing are not sales qualified. But marketing is sitting there going, well, I don't understand why you're saying there's no revenue coming in from our campaigns. We've handed over this many qualified leads, and we all said these were the metrics that said they were qualified. So what's going on? So this is where we're going into the messy middle today, Right. We have two teams who are saying at the beginning, we've agreed what a qualified lead is, but somewhere in that handoff, something's going wrong. Marketing is starting with the lead saying, this is a qualified human, and sales is getting that cue and saying, nuh, absolutely not. So that's what we're dealing with today. What I like to call the sales qualified lead conundrum. Because I can't use swear words in a title.

Yeah.

So that is the closest point to get.

Theoretically.

Theoretically, yeah. If you're Max, you can use swear words in any shape that you want.

To get a crouton in your steering wheel. You're at 15. So let's start this conversation. And actually, George, I want to start with you on this question. Although Bastian and Max and Chad, I know you're going to have thoughts on this, but I want to start with you, George, because you spend every day talking with different sales and marketing teams, right?

Yeah.

So we have sales and marketing teams who have these different views on what makes a lead sales qualified. I'd like to know, in your experience, what are the key factors you seeing driving that misalignment between those two teams?

Oh, man, that's simple. Like the amount of times that I have to state the obvious, I really do feel like I was put on this planet sometimes to be Captain Obvious when it comes to sales and marketing teams. Because the biggest thing is, like, communication can we just sit at a table like adults and actually take the time. That's another formula piece, right? By the way, communication time and strategize what it actually looks like. And when I say what it looks like, what I mean is we are not taking the time to strategize the data points because as soon as we get it down to data points of what we're really going to call an MQL and SQL or whatever l that you want to add to it now we can truly start to do some magical things. But again, it starts with communicate, Take the time, strategize data.

I wanna, I wanna come back around though, because I asked you to tell me what the problem is and you're telling me how to solve it. I wanna know why they're disagreeing in the first place.

I think, I think they have two different language. What's saying, George? Like, and that's something I really understood also when I was in marketing and sales. Like marketing speaking about data and sales are speaking about like feelings or things like that. I don't, I don't sometimes more marketing side. So the beginning of the problem, one of one part of the problem is that different languages between two different team.

I actually totally agree with that. And what's funny is that. And this is not a plug, I am not shilling, but I literally had today a training for the super admin training that we do where we talked about C suite in stakeholder communication and we talked about the different communication styles of like the HubSpot super admin and the actual C suite and how one is like a technical view and one is a business view. But one of the sections in that training we actually talk about when communicating to marketing, do these things when communicating to sales, say it in these ways. And so Bastion, you are hitting the nail on the head like Liz, to answer your question, they're speaking different languages and not taking the time to come to the table to understand the languages that they're speaking to then actually strategize based on common language the data points they need to make a platform work for the process of the people.

Chad, you and your creepy printer right now are being so polite and quiet. I got to know what's going on in that head of yours.

Well, because I was told that you. Good.

You will Chad. So here's what I need you to do. I need you to be quiet. I need you to activate the superpower I know isn't dormant. And think about it from that tactics perspective. Perspective, right. You are a master of Process, Scalable, repeatable process. So where do you see the tactical parts of this process right now?

Yeah, I mean, it's literally kind of like Nick mentioned in chat, right? Nick from Fargo. He was saying, you know, blank starts at the definition of terms. Literally knowing what. The definition for your organization. Because it's different in B2B, B2C. What is an MQL? What is an SQL? And, you know, what. What workflow or what form is flipping the property, right? Like, oh, my goodness. Like, because if you can't even report on the data accurately, you're arguing over imaginary everything. It doesn't even matter if you can't even flip the property at the right time. Like, they're like, oh, we generated this many leads. And then they're like, oh, well, these aren't good leads. And it's like, well, yeah, because we shed their SQLs. But actually they're not. Like, you know, because we didn't even agree, right? That's like the technical part. You need to, like, all just sit down and figure out how to, like, you know, I don't know, just program an AI model where you type in what you think, you know, and then the other side types in what they think, and then it translates, right? And then you guys can actually understand what each other are talking about.

First of all, Max, that is your next skit, brother, where you use GPT's voice assistant to translate marketing speak to sales speak. Like, that would be absolutely amazing.

So good.

It's. It's. But here's the thing. I want to back up before we dive back into this conversation, because obviously this is a podcast for HubSpot users, and Chad just said something on the tip of his tongue, like, it was, like, known to everybody. If you're sitting here and you're like, wait, did Chad just say that I can actually set an SQL based on a form conversion? Yeah, in HubSpot forms, you can do that. And I'm not. I'm not even saying that you got to go do the workflow, but also, did. Did Chad say that we should be focused on, like, an automated process that actually fills the gap for what humans used to once have to do in a drop down in the. Yes, that's what Chad's saying. So, like, please, by all this holy. If you're the HubSpot user that hears that and don't have that, go do that. Like, that's your action item for today.

All right, Max, you are free to speak. Tell us.

I mean, everyone.

Hold on.

My. I mean, my whole Take on the MQL and SQL thing is probably one of just frustration because it's, you know, no one ever defines it the same way, right? Like, marketing qualified lead as a sales qualified lead mean like literally nothing until you get into an organization. Like, you get them to define it and then of course you get in different orders. Organizations that like, don't even call things MQL's or SQLs or have no, a completely different concept of what marketing qualified versus sales qualified is. Sometimes it's like marketing qualifies before sales qualify, but sometimes the difference between MQL and SQL is like, who actually generated the lead. And it's really kind of at the same sort of lateral place. And so to me, it's like, I'm wondering like, how much like HubSpot's life cycle stages in their CM CRM have like, poisoned us all into this, like, argument around what's a MQL and what's an SQL. Because, like, it's something that you saw in HubSpot that had, you know, one came before the other because, like, you got to put it somewhere in the, in the dropdown, right? And then it created this whole, like, there was like a lot of content created about it and then, you know, a lot of confusion because there was no automation that was moving these stages between each other. And you had to build workflows to think about what's this versus what's that and is one better than the other or what? Like, which is why I'm happy that they're like, finally changing like their default lifecycle stages after all these years. And I think they're even just calling it like lead now, right? Like, I don't even know if they have MQL and SQL on there, but I might be wrong. But I mean, the thing is, is like, when it, like, I think there, I think definitions are needed no matter what you call it. Because, like, I do subscribe to the idea that like, what we would kind of consider a lead can have like a couple of different basic things that need to happen, right? Like, we talk about physics a lot on this show, right? Like, I do think marketing's job is to go find people that are a good fit. That's one thing, right? And then take those people that are a good fit or create content for those people that are a good fit and then get them engaged enough to the point that they're ready to talk to sales. If I had to like, boil it down to the most, like, basic, basic rudimentary, like, what's Your job as a marketer. Right. And I think what you kind of call those different stages is, you know, like, for me, I'm just like, dude, do whatever works for you. Right. But a lot of it comes down to, like, is there some kind of, like, rough SLA between sales and marketing? Because that's where the definition of these things get really important. Right. Is because you want to be able to have sales and marketing teams work together effectively. And for teams to do that, they have to be able to come up with agreements on what they're, you know, promising the other side that they're going to do for them. Right. In some way, shape, or form, you know, And a lot of the times it was just like, you know, hey, how many MQLS are we going to create? And as long as we create enough things that we call MQLs, we've done our job marketing. Now it's, you know, sales, you know, you can't close, and that's your fault. Right, Exactly. But it's like, no. You know what I mean?

Well, that's when we get to a root of a deeper problem where we have two teams that are more interested in covering their asses in terms of hitting. Not hitting numbers, and less.

That's toxic. We don't like that.

It's true. It's true. We have two teams where whether it's because there's animosity or we're living in a climate where there's less job security, people are more concerned about making sure, well, we covered our end of the bargain. We covered our end of the deal.

Yeah. And so that's what those numbers get any. Anytime you live, there's two things I gotta say because one's just burning a hole in my brain. But this is what I'm gonna say first. Anytime you live in a CYA culture, you have lost sight of the humans and the importance of actually working as a freaking team. Now, I have to back up for a second because Max says we talk about physics a lot on this podcast.

Hold up.

We might talk about inbound physics, but I don't want anybody to get confused and think that you're going to tune in someday and we're going to talk about Isaac Newton or James Clerk Maxwell or Albert Einstein. That's not the physics that just Dharma Shaw talking about.

Max and I, we got you covered.

Anyway, I want to throw my.

I want to throw my 2 cents in here about. Go ahead, Max.

No, no, give me your two cents, and I'll tell you kind of like how we've done it. Like, we've kind of switched up the way we look at like, leads and stuff. You do your.

Dude, do it. Take it away.

Well, I mean, so like, you know, we've gotten away from sort of that linear model and, you know, like our sales and marketing teams, we're all on the same team. We're just called the GTM team. That's it. Like, we're all going to market together as a, as a group. We're going to go to the market and we're going to get lots of awesome fruits and nutrients and bring it back and we're all going to thrive. That's the way we look at it, right? And so, like, when we think about leads, you know, we've, we've dug a lot into like HubSpot's prospecting tool a lot more lately. And like, we all start there now, right? And the big thing, instead of like thinking of like, how many MQLs did we create, how many SQLs did we create? What we're doing is we're kind of realizing like, there's all these ways we can generate leads, right? And there's different people that are responsible for generating different parts of those leads, right? So, like, there's leads generated from Brian and Joe just going out to LinkedIn and prospecting and like doing their thing. There's leads that clearly come in from the content creation that we do, right? There's leads that find us on Google. There's leads that, you know, hubspotters reach out to me and then I connect them with people. And so like, we've started thinking more about measuring what we're calling lead triggers. Right? And so like every time we generate a lead inside a HubSpot, we have some sort of like trigger where it's like this came from this motion, right? And so like what we're doing is we're carefully looking at all these different motions as these leads are getting generated and then we're kind of evaluating the success of them over time, right? Versus saying like, oh, we got to get up to this stage first and then once they do this, they can move out of this stage. And we're just looking at everything is like what little your path. Like, we don't, we don't do that. It has to be three dimensional, four dimensional. It has to be like way more than just like a straight line. Right.

Almost like physics.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Bastion, it sounded like you like had some thoughts on what Max was saying.

Yeah, I think, I think like the thing of MQS was really to like, you want to have a report a KPI for your marketing team, they have to report to the manager and the manager, like the CMO has to report to the CEO. And at the end, like you're trying to have the best analytics in the world. Last attribution, whatever you want. That's a mess. I don't know. Two weeks or three weeks ago, Adam Robinson from AIRB2B. Just saying, like, I don't track. I just don't track. He has like one of the K followers whenever he posts something. He has YouTube channel, of course it's working. Of course it's building the brand of his company of him. Of course it's generating leads. He's doing content for a specific audience and this specific audience is his ICP. So unless he's doing content on TikTok, for example, where his audience does not slack on it, I think that's okay. So for us, for example, we only measure bottom of the funnel, like ads, things like that. Things you can really measure. Or you want to do some content on transactional, transactional subject, keywords, podcast, whatever you want. But after the end, I think you shouldn't care. Maybe you should look at the amount of signup. Be sure, like your signup is not plenty of Gmail, freemail, outmail, whatever you want. But if you're gathering a good audience on your icp, I think at the end that's okay. And I do agree with Max. I think like having every time, like looking at MQLs, it's good, but it's a mess at the end and you're just losing time. You just need to do more actions than reading the best report with the best funnel. Whatever you you want.

So there's one little piece that I want to add to this where we start getting a little bit into the intangibles of the relationships you have between marketing and sales. And I know we use alignment and like we're going to have revenue team meeting. Ever going to be friends? Like, no. But here's the thing, right? Think about in your personal life, there's someone you don't like. If someone you don't like sneezes really loudly. God, why is that person so loud? Oh my God, they're so disruptive. We're trying to watch a movie, but let's say it's your best friend. Here, do you need a tissue? God bless you. Are you okay? My sweet angel baby, how are you? Are you okay? If your marketing and salespeople do not get along and you have an SQL problem depending on which side of the fence that's on. If they do not have built in trust rapport, if they don't treat each other like human beings, something that is actually kind of like a level one non emergency is going to be treated like a seven because that team already is predisposed or that person is predisposed to not like them, to not trust them. So they're looking for evidence of them not doing their job like that. I've seen this happen. If there is a toxicity that exists between the teams, it is going to be more challenging to solve these issues because there is going to be a resistance to solving the problem and being more interested in identifying problems that exist. So like, and I see this a lot with teams and I've been on a team where this happened. I've talked about this at a company I used to work at where the sales and the marketing team were actually super tight. Personally we hung out, we went to bars, we went to happy hours, we went on trips, we did all this stuff. But when we were in the office, the sales team overall had trust issues with a lot of different parts of the company. They often felt like service or product changes were happening and they were finding about it afterward. They would sell a deal and then be told that that doesn't exist anymore. They would be told by well meaning, they would be told by well meaning marketers, we will absolutely get you that sales enablement piece of content. But then their VP or that C suite above them changed their priorities, told them that someone would communicate that sales and either they did and guess what, that's a broken promise or they didn't. And that's a broken promise with no communication. So what happened? So what happens is that if we have this underlying toxic toxicity. Yes, we have exactly the things that we're talking about, right? There are the definitions, there's the brass tax of if you can't measure it, if you can't document it, if you can't define it, nobody's measuring anything, we can't fix anything. If we have no agreements, what expectations are we holding people to? But if we have two teams where there is toxicity, where they are predisposed to dislike each other, the moment you sneeze is the moment I will make your life hell. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's just, do you know what I'm saying?

Can I shift gears for a second though? Can I, can I shift gears for a second though? Because I don't know, I understand this team dynamic that we're talking about. But I also want to lean into something that Bastian and Max both kind of said, and that was this idea of need for action. And. And let's be honest, like, sometimes does one team lean on another team too much when they could actually be taking the action that they should be taking anyway, and could that action be easier? And what I mean is, when I think about sales, you know, the way that I always make sales, I make sales because I have conversations. And you know what's been increasingly more difficult? Having conversations in a digital world. And, you know, where most of the conversations actually happen, they happen on LinkedIn, to be honest with you, in a digital world, like, unless they're coming to my website. And so if I, as a sales rep actually want to have more conversations, I want to find an easier way to have those conversations, and I know the conversations are happening on LinkedIn, then maybe I use a tool like Hub Lead as a sales rep to have the conversations and take the action that I need to take so I don't have to waste so much on an actual marketing team because I'm out there. Guess what? Being a salesperson that knows how to market myself and sell myself and therefore market and sell my products, I don't know. Maybe that's a novel idea. Like, I live in a world where I wish more marketers would know how to sell and more sales folks would know how to market, and both of them could use a tool like HubLead. Just saying. To actually have the conversations that matter and drive the funnel and drive roi. That's all I'm saying.

Yes, I agree with that. And, Bastian, I actually want to come back to you here for this next question because we talked a little bit. Why are Mommy and daddy fighting? And is it our fault? And what's happening? Right. Like, we're having this conversation about what's going on here between marketing and sales. But I want to get out of the relationship.

I feel like there's cameras in my house when every time she says that, I'm like, are we being documented?

No, I have cameras.

Just kidding.

Sorry. I had to let her.

Cut his mic. Cut his mic. Fashion. I want to talk to you about the lead handoff. Right? Because this is. This is that friction. This is. This is the point where somebody drops the potato and somebody picks it back up, but that drop bruises it, and we have a problem. Right. So what are the strategies or frameworks you've seen that work best to smooth this handoff process out, Whether that's technology or strategy.

Yeah. So at the beginning like one of like we were producing. I just want to replace a bit the context. Like we are producing a massive list of LinkedIn E commerce websites. For my sales we got like 9 bdrs. So 9 SDRs in Paris, 4 in Spain and 4 in UK. You give the list, they called, we were doing only cold calling and we were not. We were like we wanted to say okay, do we target companies with 1 million turnover yearly, on a yearly basis out of 100, how many did you get? And the goal was 20, 20%. So this one was a KPA for the sales team to be sure that the marketing growth team is doing that job. So we were reviewing that KPA's were low, maybe at 15, for example 10%. So it was my fault. So I go back in my desk, work, work, work, work. Doing all machine learning. What do you want? Scraping with semrush, scraping with href. Whatever you want to score a website. Going back to the list and giving to them. But what I really find is I had this communication problem. I had this problem to do a lot of things on my side and not showing to the salespeople. But I missed something big is what kind of KPI do I have to be sure that my sales rep are doing their job? I don't know if you guys have but for me I check online, I check on different contents and I found nothing. I'm just not speaking about different bunch of KPIs but one KPI you can have. And my idea was something like how many the thing was maybe how many touch points did you get on the company? How many decision maker did you find and did you outreach on different channel. Because every time I was sitting next to next to SDR looking at the company and I said hey, you had only one co founder. He said he was not interested. Did you get the other one? No. Maybe you should. Did you get the head of logistics? No. Maybe you should. But the first co founder told me he wasn't interested. Yeah, but the first one, you don't know him. You don't know if he's doing that job, if he's handing the part of the process you want to solve inside the company. You don't know how they are working. You do not have also the ICC information. Like how many orders do they ship amounts for example. So yeah, I was searching for this kind of KPI to have like both one where the marketing team be sure that sales team are doing the right job and the reverse, the reverse sales marketing Job for the marketing. I don't know if you have any KPI like that or. You had this problem before.

Gentlemen, normally you are jumping right in. Why is everybody suddenly being all polite now?

It just makes my brain go in a ton of. A ton of places.

Right.

Is, is like every business is so unique, right? In a way. I mean there's like a lot of industries that are a lot somewhat similar, but like sometimes trying to find out if the sales team is doing what you need them for, the marketing team, I mean it really comes down to like what are they doing and then which things are yielding closed deals.

Right.

So like it's almost like more of a broad analysis to try and uncover that blue ocean of a KPI for your industry, whatever that industry is. Right. So a lot of it is really, in reporting in general, always comes down to asking the right question and then making sure you're accurately collecting the data to answer that question reliably. Right. And so I guess where my brain goes is like, well, what is that industry and what are your reps doing? And do those things have any kind of real statistical correlation to increased numbers of closed deals or increased revenue? Revenue, right.

Yeah, like so, so our industry was so E commerce, E commerce, logistics. So selling logistics for E commerce websites. So you have plenty of E commerce websites, but not because like let's say for example, you want to target 1 million yearly, yearly turnover. It's not you. You can check for the number of employees on LinkedIn, but sometimes you have like 3, 4 people doing 1 million and sometimes you have like 20 people and they are doing 500k online and maybe they are doing a lot of B2B things like that. So sometimes that's relevant and sometimes for a lot of industries, like number of employees is not that relevant. And you still need to call and to identify on the phone, okay, what's your business, how many orders you make, turnover and so on. And our strategy was less inbound, it was more outbound. We had like every BGR was doing like 60 to 70 calls a day. So we had a massive workforce to call, call, call, call. And when you do that, your CAC is kind of high, so you want to reduce it with a targeted list. And at the end having new companies, French companies, was kind of a drug. Like you wanted to, to have your. To sell more. Just go to the marketing and ask for more companies. Yeah, so I wanted to have that. And at the end I checked with some guys from HubSpot, how they do their sales, how do they give how many companies do you give amounts, for example, a quarter of an asset. I really like the idea of how do you know if a sales is good or not. You can check for example, the number of deals they close. But if, for example, they close like 10 deals and the others are doing 5, but the other are speaking with 200 companies and the first who close 10 is speaking with 1000 companies, is he really better than the other? You know, when you go to a sport game, when you look at the sports, you're happy when your team is winning. But how do you think, how do you decide if a team is best better than the other one? It's the one who won the final. It's not the number of match you. You won, you know. So at the end, what we implemented is that, okay, you get 200 companies for a quarter, we're gonna go to high tickets, so CAC will be higher, but we get more revenue. But you stick with it. And you have to convert like, I don't know, 20, 25. You can decide whatever you want. And then you decide, okay, who, which one who's the best sales inside and you can give the best and. And fires is good.

I think that I. So we talked a lot about like fit to something that I like. I've noticed especially like with, you know, we were a couple, few more than a few months into, you know, really starting to hit a good motion with like event happily and selling that. The thing that I've like noticed is, and I'm not sure how great companies are doing at tracking this or trying to figure it out is that I think there's like. Like we talk about lead scoring, right? Fit and engagement. And like oftentimes when we think about fit, we're thinking of like demographic or firmographic fit, right? Like, is this a company in our icp, right, where it's like, okay, right amount of employees, they do this, they do that. Da da da da da. Like for us, you know, does your company do events? You're generally a good fit for us, right? But then what gets like, really weird is that events get so complex, right? That I think there's this like concept of like problem fit. There's probably already a word for it. I don't think I'm making up anything new here, right?

Problem, solution fit.

Yeah, like, like that, like that's, that's the thing that I think is, is. Is sort of like the next thing we got to figure out how to like get ahead of, right? Because we waste a lot of time on calls when we could be getting this information ahead of time, right? Because, like, you know, event, happily, we're great for, like, webinars, in person events, trade show, lead capture. Are we great for, like, a conference yet that needs to do booth management and vendor management and all this other stuff.

Just think of trying to run inbound on it.

You know, sure, you could build it, but, like, we're going to be 1% of that solution, right? So, like, we're not a great fit for that, but, like, you're still technically our ICP because you do events. And so it's like, like, what I'm. What I'm kind of like trying to wrap my head around and figure out is, like, how can we. Is it either like, asking smarter questions when people fill out a form, right? Or thinking a little bit more critically about how, like, you're dequeuing someone in a nice, good way that maybe leaves the door open in the future, but kind of like, politely lets them know your use case isn't a good use case right now and start thinking about, like, cool, we've captured them. We see that they're an icp, we see that they're highly engaged. But before they get sales, is there something that we can do to kind of figure out if they're like, a good, you know, problem fit for what we actually do and what our tool's really, really good at? Right? Instead of wasting a bunch of sales calls on folks that, like, shouldn't even be wasting their time with us, Right? Like, that's, I think, sort of the next sort of level of fit that I want to kind of crack the code on. Right? Because we, me and Joe, we love talking to folks, right? But we have a lot of calls with people that it's just like, man, yeah, we do event management, but your flavor of event management is really, really weird, right? And like, sure. Can we. Can we get you about 1% of the way there? Absolutely. But then, like, you know, I end up wasting a bunch of time having all these esoteric conversations selling HubSpot itself and not even our app, right? And so, like, I think, like, just. Just the idea of, like, problem fit, too, is something I want to, like, pay a lot more attention to. But Bastian, I think you were talking about, like, KPIs for, like, sales reps and stuff like that. And, like, what are you looking at? Are you looking at number of calls, number of questions, closed deals? I don't think anyone is paying attention to, like, you know, the percentage of which customers, like, renew or do Repeat business. You know what I mean? Like, that's like clawback is one thing. Right. But the. But the thing that sucks about sales reps is that, like, it's such a job of attrition and there's so much high turnover that, like, measuring something like, hey, at what rate do the customers that you sold actually renew? Which is probably the best indication that they were a good fit customer. Like when you actually brought them in, you know, after they'd had like a year of the product, or, you know, they buy it the first time and come back and buy it again. Like, that's something that we should be measuring. But it's tough because salespeople are generally in and out. Right. And not there for really, really long periods of time. Sure, there are some that stick around in places for a while. Right. But you tend to already know they're a good sales rep if they've been there for more than two years. Right. So, you know, it's just a couple random thoughts to throw in there.

I love all of that. I want to move from. We're having lots of conversations about the actual definition, but often what will happen where I see a lot of breakdown is like, let's say we have a situation where people are do. Where teams are doing the work that we're talking about right now. Right. But that is status quo. That is present moment. That is if our processes and systems and size stay exactly the same. It's when they start to scale, maybe they act. Maybe the fact that everybody's getting along and agreeing on what the leads are means they're growing in revenue, so their business becomes more complex or their teams get larger or they change systems and. Bastard. This is where I want to come back to you. When you think about the advice you want to give to companies who are trying to scale their lead qualification processes without losing consistency, without creating brand new spicy problems, what are those recommendations that you have for them? And I know Hub lead might be a part of that, but I'd love kind of strategically at a high level, but also into more of that technology.

Like, can we make merch for the show? It's just a T shirt that literally just has brand new spicy problems.

You're welcome.

I feel like that would be awesome.

Sorry, I say that pretty much in every content audit. Don't worry. Once we uncover this, we'll have brand new spicy problems. But that's a problem for tomorrow. Liz, not today. Liz.

Not today.

You're speaking like, how do you scale a sales team? And taking like keeping this how do you evolve your SQL definition? Right, Okay, I think.

And the processes that wrap around it.

Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I think training also your point Max with problem, problem, problem fit. At the beginning. For example, at our company, previous company, we were targeting small business. So you have one or two decision maker. If there is only one founder or two co founder. And when, when we try to go up markets, we were like, okay, it's working with small, let's go. We got our SDRs, we got our market, maybe you will have more decision maker, but we don't care, let's go for it. But after that we had like four or five decision maker. We had more complex setting because for example, in that industry you are on logistics. So when you're speaking with for example l', Oreal, it's not the same thing. When you're speaking with a small brand doing only T shirts for example. So the SQL will be more complex. When you're doing only small businesses. For me, and it's straightforward, it's simple. You have your MQL coming from for example inbound or this company's icp. The same is coding, getting the info or it matches with our service. They are doing like 1 million for example plus small products. They are SQL. I will book a demo for the AE for example. But when you are doing that with big companies, it's not that simple. You might need like two or three meetings. So frankly for when I left the company, we didn't find the solution. I was into hybrid before. We find the solution after like two years in the company. I say okay, that's good to work in marketing team, but I want to build my company. So I went overnight and over weekend working but more in my previous company. I think your process has to evolve and it's what's really hard is to understand that you need to separate your team too. I guess for me, what I understood, one team doing the same thing as you did before small companies and the other one going to upmarket. And for God's sake, not having one people doing two team like this is the worst thing I saw. It never worked. It doesn't work and it never, never will work in every condition for me. So yeah, I think you have to get two teams with two definitions of SQL. For me, what I understood, I might be wrong.

That's fantastic.

No, it's good stuff.

I love that. I mean honestly Bastian, I'm just, I'm putting this out there so you can't say no. And it's recorded and Nick from Fargo in the chat is here as a witness. So this is you verbally agreeing to come back for a second episode for us to talk more about SQL? Because I, I don't know if anybody else can feel the energy in this room, but, like, we have baggage to unpack. Yeah, we have baggage to unpack. Nick from Fargo is saying, I heard nothing. Wow, Dog. Way to just like, wow, that hurts. But that hurts.

Okay, if I come back, Chad, can you just send me an Amazon, the light thing, printer, everything? Like how I can send you a.

Link to the cabinet, to the printer, to the left lights, and then to the stream deck that I use to control it.

So there you go.

I will put a picture of that in the show notes. I just took a screenshot. But, George, we have covered a lot of ground today, and I would love for you, since you are, thank goodness, here to help us land the plane this time and it's not in my incapable hands, talk to us about what you want our listeners to remember.

I mean, the fact that Chad, Max and I, and even Liz to an extent, are sitting here somewhat speechless. Like, that doesn't happen very often. Which means to me, the weight of the problem is a real thing. And, you know, so it, I'm not trying to be funny when I say this, but the, the takeaway that I want the listeners to think about is maybe it's time to get some sales and marketing therapy and I feel like I need it. How do you do that inside of your organization? Like how? Because, like, again, I go back to. And Bastian said it. How does sales learn the language of marketing? And how does marketing learn the language of sales? And how do we come to the table together to actually understand what we call it, what we do with it? Because, by the way, the, the fact that we're so quiet, the fact that this is such a big issue means that the actual people that matter, the humans.

There we go.

Side of your organization, are not getting the experience that they need or deserve. Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode, make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of. Of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend, leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag hubheroes podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course, always be looking for a way to be someone.