Will MQAs Replace MQLs? with Andrea Frazier and Jessica Fewless

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

We will get Mike and Naomi soon. Today we are going to tackle a hot topic, one that's been stirring up debates in both ops and demand gen teams. That is the topic of marketing qualified accounts, or MPAs, and are they the future? And what, if so, what happens to MQLs? So joining me are 2 seasoned leaders and return guests, Andrea Fraser, a senior revenue operations technical consultant with deep experience in designing scalable systems and aligning marketing, sales, and data. As well as Jessica Fulis, VP of Marketing and Partnerships, known for her strategic work across ABM, demand generation, and full-funnel programs. They've both helped clients reframe what qualifies as buying intent. And that's kind of what we talked about buying groups last time they were on and how teams can better collaborate around signals, not just leads. So Andrea, Jessica, welcome back.

Thanks for having us, Michael.

Yeah.

And we were just talking ahead. So Andrea, you're— I'm gonna put you on the spot. You're talking about at Mopsapalooza.

I am. I am speaking at Mopspalooza. I'm very excited. Me and my colleague, Brian Schmidt, will be talking about how MOPS or marketing automation people, any tech people really, can uplevel their communication skills with the C-suite using AI. So I've been really working on that, trying to figure out what are some ways that we can better communicate so that we are seen as a strategic partner to some of those folks. So I'm excited to— Present and geek out with my fellow marketing ops people.

I love it. I love it. Yeah, that sounds great. Actually, I may pick your brain about that when we're done. All right, because I'm not sure I'm gonna make it to Mopsaloozy yet, so I'm still trying. All right.

Oh, you don't get a free ticket, Michael.

There's no free rides.

He has to fly. He has to fly the plane.

We we have talked about trying to do a some sort of live episode or something of. podcast while, while they're maybe, or maybe like a roundtable that gets recorded and turned into an episode, but it's all just ideas. So if people are listening and they think that's a great idea, let Mike know.

I think that you should run the red carpet or something like as people come in, you can be the little—

there we go.

And make that your podcast.

Talk to the crowd. I could see it.

And I am willing to get dressed up in whatever outfit you say to do that.

Heard it here first.

Pay for me to go there.

Yes, I love it.

Yeah, I have no shame anymore. Uh, despite like it, which is like kills my— well, I say teenage, but my oldest is not gonna— is no longer a teenager and will soon be of drinking age. So let's, you know, but they're full adults, they're like doing this right now, you know, head down, covering their eyes. All right, let's start with that headline. You both said MQAs replace the MPLs, but they do offer something more. So why don't we start there, like unpack what we mean there and how you guys think about that? Yeah.

Jess, do you want to start? Do you want me to start?

I can start with this one, but you have to start with the next question.

Deal.

Deal?

Okay.

So I think everybody has talked a lot about in 2025 is that, you know, The old way of doing demand gen is not feasible. It doesn't work anymore. And to be clear, I think we've known that for a while. And I mean, marketers, ever since I've been talking about ABM, we've been talking about how the MQL is not the right way to measure a marketing organization because that's just one individual. And we alluded to the fact that account-based marketing went to the opposite extreme of it's not one individual, but it's a whole account. So we almost overcorrected to say, no, no, we want to talk to a whole account. And now we've come back to the middle and said, well, yes, it's a whole account, but there's a discrete buying group, or there might be multiple buying groups in one account that we want to talk to, right? So this really helps solve for that so that, you know, talking about the MQA, which is a marketing qualified account, is, you know, a level up from an MQL because it's showing that there's multiple people engaged, because unless you're selling a really cheap monthly subscription, you're going to have more than one stakeholder that's going to be involved in the buying process. So you want to make sure, you know, while you're not going to have a fully realized buying committee probably through just your marketing efforts, you don't want to just have one person. And that's what the MQL really focuses on, and it focuses on people getting people to webinars and, you know, those sorts of things, which are all important signals that roll up to an MQA, right? So that's why we're saying the MQL doesn't go away. But it's really in aggregate, on top of other additional anonymous and intent signals from an account, right, together creates an MQA, which is now something far more realized that you can share with your sales team, and they're going to have far greater results as far as reaching out when something is an MQA and actually getting that account to engage with them. Yeah.

Andrea, do you have anything? And I would, I would add to that, like, I feel like there's probably sales, especially sales ops people that are going, told you so, right? Because I feel like for years and years and years, right, there's sales professionals that they're saying, that's what we've always done. Yeah, marketing would send us Joe Schmo and I knew Joe Schmo was junk. I would go and I would find all these people and I would do it. And so to that I say, You got us. You were right, right? I'm someone that likes to hear that if I am right. And like, yes, that was valid. And now we are seeing that like that collaboration is important. Like we see that right in our own orgs. There's never a time that I'm like solely like, I know everything about exactly what we need and I'm not going to consult with anybody else in my organization. That just doesn't happen, even if I am the most technical person at the organization. So I think it's, it's been interesting because I feel like there's salespeople that are going like, told you so. And I think the response to that is.

Yeah.

Noted. Let's, let's build that together. I think it's going to grow even more because it's really just shifting more to like a little bit more agnostic signals, right? And every business might have a different offering of signals available to them that can be surfaced in the form of an MQA. So it's really doing what sales probably thinks that they were doing the entire time anyway.

Even though they're saying, hey, told you so, what's interesting is Most sales teams are having a hard time letting go of the MQL.

Yes.

Right? So we all have acknowledged that—

Are they having a hard time of letting go of the MQL, or that's the way to measure marketing?

It's a little bit of both. So, yes. So at the, at the executive level, we as marketers said, stop focusing on leads and focus on MQL. So, you know, boards and, you know, executive leadership teams all, and the CFO, Right? Have all kind of said, well, you've done your job if you hit your MQL number. Right? So that's one whole thing. But the other thing is with sales teams, while, yes, they're like, you know, that person who, who, you know, registered but didn't attend a webinar is not really a qualified lead for us. We're still hearing them say, but we're not getting enough MQLs. Right. So because what they're saying, I think what they're saying is, we want more MQLs from one account that's actually going to turn into something for us, right?

I think they want more explicit, like, signals. And I think, like, almost our language needs to go back. Like, I remember when I was first in the space of leading implementations and the idea of implicit action versus implicit, you know, implicit, explicit was like the words we were using, the jargon of the time. And I almost think we need to come back to that, because I think, Jeff, to your point, what they're really wanting when they're asking for MQLs is, in a certain way, we've kind of trained that mechanism to like need, like, this is a person who did a thing, and so I'm going to follow up on the thing that they did, right? And in some ways, depending on how your organization might operationalize something like MQAs, you might need to consider that. What's your sales team's comfort level with implicit activity that they can follow up on? Like, can they make conversations out of that? Do they feel like they can do something with that? Or do they have more comfort in explicit behavior, right? They want to see that John signed up for a webinar and that Mike went to this event and stopped at the booth, those sorts of things. And I think they're all valid. I think part of this is figuring out, like, where do you stand as far as comfort level with trying to work in MQA and not having, or how many explicit behaviors or specific people with actions that you need to have to feel like you can have a worthy follow-up?

Right.

Or an impactful follow-up as a salesperson.

So how do you, how do you differentiate though between, so I think I agree. I think 2 thoughts are in my head right now. One is I think sales teams do want qualified something, right? Account or lead, right? Like whatever it is, because they want something they go like, oh yes, this realistically has picked the threshold, right? Some percentage likelihood to turn into a real opportunity. Yeah. So whether that's a person or an account, fine. The other part, and I think this is maybe what, where this starts from a little bit, is that like, I think you hinted at this, Jessica, is that like the old model of this lead to MQL to SQL to like all that, right, is very linear with an ex— so if you, if your target changes for revenue, right, everything else goes up in lockstep with that based on your conversion rates.

Yeah.

And it creates this incentive to just generate tons of lead volume regardless of the quality, right?

Correct.

And I've seen that, but it also is like, there's an underlying assumption about like this, like this is the danger of the funnel model, right? Is that there's this very linear buying process that happens on, which is no longer like, that is no longer the case, right? By the time someone's like raising their hand with you, they've probably already done a bunch of their own research and Right. And so that's— so there's probably signals out there that now you're hopefully you're going to connect the dots with that person or set of people who are part of that. So how do you— how do you differentiate between, or how much do you— and maybe this is organization-specific, but how do you treat the different signals like individual people signals versus account-level signals and, you know, mash that together?

Yeah, so I definitely think that's going to be some trial and error. For every organization, right? And it's going to continue to evolve. This is not, I think, a major mistake that a lot of marketing teams made way back when was they decided on a definition of an MQL and they let that ride for 5, 6, 7 years, right?

The score was the same. It's always been 100 points and we've reset them every once in a while, but it's always been 100 points.

How many times have I told people like, we're going to build, we're going to do the lead scoring model, But like, don't overthink it, because we are, we can and we will change it. Totally.

And they never opened it again. No.

And it's, it's one of those things that, you know, I think it's because it's, it's, it's an exercise, and you have to involve sales. And so it's like, oh, God, we have to get sales involved, right? So there's this whole conversation. But I think, had we had the rigor of constantly updating it, we would have seen these changes in buying behavior. This didn't happen overnight. Right? This is happening.

We would have heard sales say that they were grabbing the buying group people, like I was saying, they were doing some of these things in the background. I agree.

Yep. And we were kind of pushing them towards that with kind of the practice of ABM. Because what they would say to us was, OK, great. So you're telling me that we're going to focus on this account, but who in this account? So they would go, to your point, and find who all those stakeholders were, because we're like, you know who they are. Like, we'll tell you which accounts are interested. You go figure out who you want to sell to, right? And so now we're kind of meeting them in the middle of, OK, now we're going to align around the definition of an MQA. We're going to align around who are all the stakeholders that we want to be engaging. And we're going to align around when is there enough signals, implicit and explicit, that actually define a qualified account, one that is ready to buy from you or at least have the conversation.

Right.

So that's what this MQA is now. So it's, it's the evolution of, you were supposed to have aligned with your sales team on the definition of an MQL. Some did, some didn't. Now you need to align on the definition of the MQA. And once again, you're going to set a target, you're going to track it over the course of a quarter, and you're going to edit it. Right? You got to start somewhere, put a stake in the ground. We here at Inverto, we did that. I mean, We, we had a threshold, and it was way too low. It allowed somebody who was just showing a lot of intent on the internet to become a marketing qualified account. Well, we kind of knew inherently that was wrong, but we wanted to see what was the basement, right? And so then we upped it. There had to be 1 known engaged contact, and then we upped it to 2 known engaged contacts, right? And now we've hit a sweet spot where our sales team is like, yeah, when I send an email, it's getting some sort of a response. They might not be ready to buy.

Right.

But I'm getting a response. So we're like, okay, we think we've kind of hit the sweet spot. But so instead of like necessarily evolving it every month or every quarter, maybe we can reevaluate it semiannually, right? But we're going to continue to reevaluate it because buying behavior is going to continue to change. More people are looking at, you know, AI, you know, doing AI searches versus going to Google, right? How is that going to impact what you can see that's happening?

Mm-hmm.

Versus what you're seeing.

We're only going to get more signals, right? Like, I think that's what we were talking about before we even started the podcast, right? Like, our attention spans are rapidly decreasing because there's just so much that we're trying to pack in. And I think the same goes for signals. We're going to get more and more. It's all access to data, right? And I don't think that means that you have to have all the data either. I think that's been an interesting thing to think, you know, to kind of see as people are adopting this, like. Do the people that have access to every single data point see more success than those that don't? I don't think we have an answer yet.

I suspect the answer is no. Like, it's like the, the, what do they call it? The paradox of choice, right?

Right.

Like people get kind of—

I like that about humans. Like we're not completely predictable, or once somebody tells us we're predictable, we do something to mess up the metrics. And so I think that's why we all, I mean, nerds like me, especially like we'll always have some sort of job or problem to solve because we'll keep creating them. But one thing I'll touch on, you know, that your question made me think of, and you asked like the difference in follow-up depending on all these signals. And I guess that's been interesting because I think originally I was really staunch on the worst thing we can do is overcomplicate it. Because if you were to say, okay, if you get an MQL, I want you to spin around 3 times, go tap your head 4 times, and then send this email. But then if you get an MQA with 2 people, I want you to do this completely separate choreographed dance. Like, it wouldn't have been realistic. And I was really staunch on that. And I still think that is notionally true. But something cool that I've seen, and maybe it has to do with like the upleveling of AI and the surge of all of that, is I think we're actually seeing that we're, we're able— that sales is pulling a lot more strings together and getting excited for the potential here. And it's all, I don't know, it's all coming together quicker and that we're not having to make it so it needs to be the exact process, has to go this way. I think we're seeing a little bit more flex on marketing and sales in figuring out a new way to really work these. So I think that's been kind of cool because I, I would have answered that question a lot differently had you asked me maybe 6 months ago.

If I'm following you, you're like, instead of having very Like rigid process. Prescriptive sort of follow-up requirements and highly, highly rigid templates for follow-up for different kinds of things. You have things that are like, you have general guidelines, maybe call them principles, right? And maybe, you know, the goal is to reply within a certain amount of time, but otherwise you leave a lot of flexibility and trust, put a lot of trust in the people doing that work to—

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm not saying just say, let them do anything, I guess, but to clarify, but it's more just like—

With guardrails, right?

Like, I'm not either. Well, and also, you don't want to say it has to go this way if we don't know, right? To Jessica's point, this is going to iterate and change. So I think I've noticed that it's been better for saying, you're going to get an MQA, feel it out. Tell us what you think. They should be 2 engaged people, and this is what it should feel like. But like, does it feel like that?

Yeah.

Do you think the follow-up should be different?

I also think it's a little bit of the teach them how to fish principle, right? So You know, help them understand how to interpret the intent signals, because a lot of marketers go, we bought this really cool tool. It's going to give you all the data in one place. Now go nuts.

And this is exactly what you need to do. Yeah.

Yeah, assuming that a sales rep is going to know what to do with that, right? Whereas you need to enable the sales team and say, OK, here is what, in this view, here's what you're seeing. Here's how I would interpret these results, right? Here's how we're interpreting them from a marketing perspective. And here's what I would recommend you do next, right? And it's going to require a heavier lift on sales' part, right? It's not just a, you know, get an MQL, put them into an outreach sequence, right? Or that kind of thing. Now, but because they're going to have a lot less, MQLs are going to come in a much lower volume than MQAs. Wait, MQAs are going to come in as a much lower volume than MQLs. So instead of just trying to put people into these sequences and like communicate, you know, right, right now it's, hey, take the time to investigate this account, understand what they seem to care about so that when you send out an email, instead of saying like, hey, I saw you went to Market University, I've got a thing to sell you, which is personalization circa 2015. Now it's, hey, You know, I'm guessing you care about this, this, and this. Did you know we can help you with that? Here's an ebook that you might find interesting and let me know if you want to talk.

Right.

Well, hell, I'd respond to that email, right?

I wouldn't just totally flush it, right? At least I would keep it. I think it's interesting because like to me, having had an inbound BDR team for a while, like I think like I was already doing that anyway. Volume was pretty low. So like, I had that advantage. But I think the other piece of this is I like the idea of having general guidelines and maybe even some templates. But like, I always— the thing I worry about with that is it loses, especially if you've got the salesperson who's gonna go out and do that a bit of research you talked about, which I think would be huge. Because like you, like, I like that way more. It shows some effort and like some time to understand. Like, I want it to be like in their own voice to some degree, right? Within, again, within guardrails and guidelines, right?

Like, it's the intuition we started to miss, I feel like. And I'm the process queen. I mean, Jessica would roll her eyes so hard at me.

I'm allergic to it.

And so I'm also a process person, but I also, like, I think process can be overdone, right? When it becomes prescriptive, it signals to me A lack of trust of people, right? First off. And then also like that we want so much, like we're worried about people being off script or inconsistent. It's kind of the same reason I've seen where like knowledge-based stuff being put out on customer support sites that requires like 14 levels of review, that never makes it out because everyone's worried about the wording being exactly right as opposed to going like, let's keep the wording that was originally, the question was originally asked. Yeah.

Around 2018, I stopped giving SDR teams pre-written emails and scripts. I gave them, here's the bullets you should cover, right? Because once again, otherwise it sounds like marketing emails. So why don't I just send it out from my marketing automation system instead of having a human send it, right?

Yep.

And so, you know, like now with my sales team, we're sitting down and we're co-developing the dance around an MQA. So when something becomes an MQA, right, once again, just as we've always said, MQLs were never a handoff. MQAs definitely shouldn't be, right? And so what does that dance look like? OK, they hit MQA. What am I going to do from a marketing perspective? What is my messaging going to be? What are my offers? What are all those sorts of things?

What channels are you going to have that messaging show up in?

Exactly. And then what is the dance that sales is going to do to complement it?

And then once the data dance to get the contact coverage that's needed for the stuff that still exists, which just to clarify, since we're saying that MQLs aren't completely going away, like there's still the need to communicate with people. So I think another piece of it, which is cool, is like the contact acquisition piece, right? It's one thing to like surface an MQL. And the first thing we think is like, okay, sales conversation, let's talk about it. And that's totally valid.

Totally.

But even before that, for most organizations, it's, do we know people at this account? Because you might be able to MQA off of anonymous visits and find out, oh, we have one lady named Sally who quit 4 or 5 years ago. Right. So, I don't know. I think from the data perspective, I'm also getting excited just because there's like more that can be done proactively that'll support all of those things that will always be important. Like keeping our Rolodex populated, essentially.

I'm really excited. I think what basically what Jessica was describing too is that like, I think there's a huge amount of possibility of using AI for, because what you described, right? Sounds like a lot of extra, like more work on either your BDR or sales team to do this follow-up, right?

For sure.

But if you can use AI to help with like, give it some of these guardrails, here's some bullet points we like, and then, but also train it on, this is each individual salesperson's voice and the way they, communicate. Now you can do that rather quickly, and then you're modifying it only as needed. I'm not sure I'm comfortable yet with just having it automatically send stuff, but maybe eventually. But I think there's some power there. So I think that's the other piece of this that is interesting. Okay, so we mentioned hand raisers. Like what happens with hand raisers in this world? Like, hey, contact me, sales team.

I feel like that's always valid, right? If someone important is saying contact me, you should contact them. It's not a good— I don't— and Jess, feel free to disagree, but I think that's just bad form to have no response at all. Even if it's like an automated response to people that might, you might consider not valid, but yeah, I don't know. A contact me, I have money to spend form is— Right. Yeah.

My, I had a client in my time here at Inverda, who did a really interesting thing, even before this buying groups was a thing, which they did, they had MQLs, which was just your average signal, and then they had an HVMQL. And those were people who requested a demo, a contact me, those sorts of things. So those required an instantaneous outreach. But now even those come in tiers, right? So we haven't talked about it. And I don't think we're gonna go down this rabbit hole today. It's probably a topic—

Yeah.

Maybe in another 6 months when you have us back on, Michael. But is around establishing your ICP, right? What if somebody reaches out to contact me and they're not actually somebody you want to sell to? What do you do then?

A student. Right.

And what do you—

Autoresponder.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a lot of people. Well, it's students, but also it could just be, it could be a you know, like we sell to B2B companies. It could be a B2B company that's just way too small. They have one marketer, or they have no marketers, and they just want— and we know that's not a recipe for success for us. So what do you do with that HV MQL, right? So it's baking in your ICP, in who you want to sell to, into all of these motions, right? And so then maybe you have, you know, your, your junior SDR team follows up on those non-qualified or non-ICP ones, because there might be some gold in there. There might be some, you know, but, you know, that becomes a whole nother conversation now of how you handle, you know, those high-value hand raisers that might not be in your ICP.

So maybe it's a combination of like MQA, MQL plus prioritization, right?

Yeah, I kind of think it ends up being like almost like different flavors of the same thing, Right? We are saying there is a signal that needs responding to. And in this case, we're talking about a hand-raising signal, or signal, right, that needs responding to. And your question earlier, like, is that outreach different? Potentially. We're saying we need to have guardrails. But in general, like, I would argue that even though someone filled out a form, like, you should still look at it as a holistic account. OK, well, what other context do we have here? Right? So I would—

Yeah.

I'm kind of finding myself leaning, and I kind of have I guess hesitated to decide one way or the other because it's— I can put myself in both corners if I really wanted to. But I guess to me, like, that is an MQA, right? It should be an MQA. It's like, this is a really high signal from one person, but there's got to be some other signals there that if you were to look under the hood that you would find. You would find a couple anonymous visits if you had intent data, probably. You might find out information about their organization that makes them A better suited fit for your organization. There's just like a lot there. So I've been leaning more towards treating every signal that we've deemed as worthy of follow-up as quote unquote an NQA of evaluating the account, ensuring contact coverage is there, and approaching it in that way. Because I think that's the shift. I think we are moving towards thinking bigger about what they might need and what kinds of problems they might be trying to solve. But that's just—

maybe it's almost an if-then statement, right? If this person is in our, in our ICP and they fill out one of these high-value forms, then they auto-MQA, right? That's an entirely perfect way.

I think of it as flavors, but yeah, I think of it as like pistachio is a type of ice cream, strawberry is a type of ice cream, you know, and just, they're all going to come from all these.

Who makes pistachio ice cream, Andrea?

Me! I never understood it. Um, although I do like baklava, which has the pistachios too. So, all right.

And the Dubai chocolate. Well, we can't get distracted.

So, um, it's interesting. Yeah, I think there's a small thing too. Like I've experienced this having filled out a contact us form before, after doing a bunch of due diligence on my own and then not getting any response. Right. So there's a little bit and it ended up. The way I got it was by shaming the company, like on social media, right? So I think there's also a potential reputational—

That's what I think. Because what if you went and worked for a huge company later, right? You would always remember that they didn't respond to you.

I don't know.

Well, and we learned that lesson the hard way when I was at Demandbase, because we had put a floor. Like if they didn't have $25 million in revenue, we were just like, these accounts churn. Like they're just too small. They don't know what to do with our data. You know, but we put a hard line in the sand. And to your point, we would just not call them back. And then, yeah, then they started to roast us on LinkedIn, on Twitter. So what we did was we had our junior SDRs who would call them, right? And basically—

Now with AI—

Wanting our solution.

Right.

I would argue now with AI, there's no reason there should be no response to anything. Like, I don't know, maybe I'm just, I have high standards, but even like, If there's a dentist, right, that doesn't like respond when you do a contact us form, I'm like, then don't put a form on your website.

So I think about this when I had that SDR team, like one of the, like very often we would get people would ask for something that we, this was, we couldn't fulfill it because like we didn't, we, this was a, had local market stuff. Like we weren't in that market. We didn't have something close to it or it was just too small for us or we didn't have the, we were already, everything was already booked up. And what I always did with the sales directors in those regions was say, if we can't help them ourselves, right, do you know who we can point them to? Right. Which was another thing, right? So at least we're giving them something to go on.

Yeah.

But we always responded again, relatively low volume. So it was not that hard.

Well, and that's why the ICP discussion should be a whole company discussion, right? Because Looking back on it, what else could we have done? We could have said, sure, we'll sell you, but you're not going to get any of the bells or whistles. You're not going to get a CSM. You're kind of on your own, right?

Right.

You know, here's all of our self-serve stuff, right? Because it just costs us a lot to service those teeny tiny little clients, and they had a high likelihood of churning anyway. So are there other things we could have done so we didn't completely block— lock them out? But, you know, so, you know, lessons learned.

Well, okay. So then, you know, kind of pulling on this thread a little more, the, this idea of like an individual hand raiser and it's the only known person on your database for that. Like, how important is then both for that scenario and maybe in general, right? To have the full contact coverage for those accounts and how, like, how, like, how do you think about that and the data that goes with it?

I think this is where now marketers need to be thinking about their marketing differently, right? So understanding your buyer's journey, you know, I think we talked in our prep call around, you know, understanding the anatomy of a deal, right? Like, what does it take? What touches? How many individuals, individuals in which roles need to be engaged in order for an account to be a successful opportunity that's going to go to closed won? Right? Understanding that, and then as a marketing team, understanding, OK, how do we behave differently, right? So great, to your point, somebody, you know, an account, let's say you have, you know, 4 stages. You've got Aware, Consideration, Decision, right? And you decide at, you know, the Consideration phase, when somebody is in the Consideration phase, you want to evaluate all the accounts that are in that phase and say, huh, of these accounts, 1/3 of them have 5 stakeholders that are known in our database and are engaged. Cool. I'm going to continue to put them in whatever always-on program or whatever, so they stay warm. But we've got a buying committee there. Oh, another 2/3, we've only got 1 person, right? We know we need at least 5 for this, you know, deal to have a snowball's chance of actually turning to closed won. So now what do we do different to those accounts in this stage of the buyer's journey? And this is where, this is where you turn on content syndication. You know, it's like, it's so funny. It's like content syndication was demonized and then it came back and then it got demonized again.

So true.

And now it's like, now, but now I feel like we've got the good use case for it, right? When you know how, what a buying committee is that you need to sell to, and you know that you have accounts that are trending the right direction, but don't have the full coverage, that's where you use content syndication, right?

Mm-hmm.

So then you start to fill out that, you know, you get those names in the door, you start warming them up with your always-on campaigns, right? Those sorts of things. Once again, they're not leads. You don't hand them over to sales. This is marketing side of the equation, right? Making sure all these people know your name so that when they finally get to MQA stage, right now you've got 5 or more people engaged. And so when your sales team reaches out to all of them and connects the dots between all of them, they go, oh, yeah, yeah, I know them. Yeah, yeah, let's talk to them. Right? That's, that's the beauty of how this should play out within a marketing organization. So, yeah.

I love that. I remember we talked about that anatomy of a win. I like I love that. So, because I've, again, actually the same place where I had the SDR team, like we, I had, we started tracking deals that came to fruition that had gone through my team, partially because I noticed like body language when I would be reporting on, you know, attribution type reporting on such things. Like I like to sales, they just like nobody paid attention. We started telling the stories about I didn't use the anatomy of a win, but like, that's what we did, right? Like, what are all the things that happened? But across all our teams, I didn't— it was not a thing about saying, here's what— look at all this great stuff marketing did. Like, here's how this one happened. Like, what can we take from that and learn from to apply to how we both go to market together? And I think that was huge, right? So like, how— it was a pretty manual process. Do you guys— like, how do you approach that? anatomy of a win analysis when you do it? Data.

I mean, Andrea has created dashboards and spreadsheets. And, I mean, it is a manual process, right? And once again, you're not going to do it every quarter. But you probably need to do it once a year, because your market's going to change; new competitors are going to come in; you're going to start to see different things. But that anatomy of a deal just gives everybody their marching orders. Hey, when should we, when should we host a field marketing event? Oh, it's not really a demand gen program. It's more of a pipeline acceleration program, right? Oh yeah, webinars are here. But, you know, here's where we have, you invite people to our customer advisory board, right? Like understanding when all of those channels are, should be turned on to acquire and retain the right customer. It does take some work. It's a lot of, you know, Yeah. But an attribute, a pure straight-up attribution doesn't get you there. It doesn't get you there. Attribution modeling doesn't, quite honestly. I know, I know, I know, like, this is a vicious, vicious debate and has been for years.

This is a safe space.

But I'm just, I'm a nonbeliever in attribution. I think you just need to—

The calculus people are going to come for Jess.

I know, I know, and it's fine. I mean, maybe that's—

Calculus lobbyists, hear her out.

The data scientists.

Or like, yeah, because everybody's—

Attribution hater. But I think it's really just looking at, you know, because now the bigger the company, the more closed won deals you're going to have, obviously. But there's definitely trends you can see in what goes to opportunity goes closed lost versus closed won, you know, and, you know, each individual channel holder should have a vested interest in knowing that because that's how you can argue for your budget next year, right? I mean, you know, when I had field marketing, you know, no, I didn't drive pipeline. But I said, hey, accounts that attend a field marketing event post-opportunity are 2.5 times more likely to go to closed won.

Right.

So now I can ask for my budget. If they just, you know, gauged my team on pipeline, They'd probably completely do away with field marketing, right? So it's understanding that is so, so, so important. And yes, it's some work, but it's totally worth it.

Yeah. Any, any additional thoughts, Andrea? Like you—

I mean, I would say like AI is obviously a piece of this puzzle. I, you know, I, I don't load data into every AI tool, obviously for security reasons, but I think, you know, the more use cases we're hearing around You know, I know we don't believe in attribution, but, you know, a lot of it's the pattern recognition.

I don't, for the record, I don't totally disagree.

I'm halfway because I technically, I got a, like, I did my thesis with that in mind, attribution modeling in mind. So I can't ever hate it completely. But where I say, I think it's been, AI will be my biggest thing.

That's true.

Yeah. Because it's all about like credit. I think the word credit has just, yes. You know, ruined it. But what I think trending and like recognizing patterns is just the huge thing with AI. That's at the end of the day, the most basic way to describe what AI has provided. It's just faster pattern recognition, right?

Yes.

So I do think there is going to be a world where it's going to be even tinier data points, right? We're talking about, we have new signals, we have first-party data, we have second-party data, and we think we're cool guys. We're gonna be talking about like Infinieth party data, right? I think by the end of this. So I think—

Inferred things with all that.

Yeah. Inferred things, you know, vibe reading from AI summaries. Who knows what these signals will be that will maybe become part of this equation that is MQA. But I think at some point AI is going to take over and it's going to be so many signals we couldn't mention them on a 45-minute podcast. I think the most important thing is for You know, to be nimble and curious and be willing to think of it differently. I think in general, that's always been the answer, but now I'm saying it just a little bit more obviously, because like I said, it's, it's been cool to see everyone get excited for a process. I never felt people get excited when I would do an, an MQL project, right? We're going to establish a MQL—

Data cleansing project, right?

Yes. Like, this is when you are changing that status to working and you must do it in 12 hours. Like, It feels different than that did. I still think I love process. My husband would agree. I love process, but I do think it's been cool to see like the human side come out.

People are getting excited again about like trusting their intuition, feeling out the deal, following these guidelines, but, you know, it's interesting because in this, in this conversation, right, clearly technology is an underpinning on all this, but it's like, it feels like it's not really the most important piece of this puzzle.

Like, it's not the hardest part for sure, right? Because everybody goes there, they're like, oh my God, you know, it's like stitching together the technology and surfacing MQAs and creating the formulas and Salesforce or whatever other tool you have. Like, yes, that's work, but it's the alignment, the agreement, the change management within marketing and how they're going to behave, the change management of sales, right? Making sure like they don't pounce on any webinar attendee. But rather they wait until it's an MQA, let marketing do their job, do all that background work before sales goes after them. They're just going to, you know, have a much higher hit rate. And, you know, everybody's gonna be a whole lot more efficient at the end of the day. Because what we're starting to see is the traditional funnel velocity or deal velocity is, and I can never remember, it's getting faster. Because so much more of that buyer's journey is happening before they ever talk to your sales team. So by the time they talk to sales, you're just in the, you know, head-to-head battle against 2 or 3 other competitors and it goes real fast.

Right.

And one of those competitors didn't respond to a contact us when they worked at a small company 5 years ago. And so you're already one of 2. Yeah. I don't know.

So it's interesting. You said something earlier today. Early in the conversation, Jessica, about like, we need to— marketers will need to help sales teams understand how to interpret all these signals, right? It feels like that the implication there to me is like, there's a lot like marketing should be thinking more about sales enablement than they probably have.

They always should have. But yes, now it's very much more important. Yeah. And it's, you know, like I said, I think it's a lot more sitting down and really talking through things with your sales team, you know, deciding what messages are working, what aren't. Yeah. Hey, here's the, here's the signals when, especially that, that alignment around an MQA is, is so critical and so crucial, even more so than the alignment around the definition of an MQL. That definition is gonna be so crucial so that everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing and when in that, in that buyer, throughout that buyer's journey. And then, yeah, and then making sure that sales know, OK, we're tagging you in. We're still, we're still on the field, right? But we're tagging you in to play your role at this stage. And here's what that looks like. And just as it always has been, you want to make sure that they're interpreting the signals the right way so that they know that their message maps to your message on this, on the marketing side, right? So it's not being prescriptive.

Right.

But it's like, hey, here's how we read these signals. Here's the segment that we put these, this set of accounts in because here's what we saw. And now here's some bullets and overall messaging. Now you go, you go attack them through your channels.

Yeah. So the other, like moving from whatever somebody has today, even ABM, it sounds like to moving to one that's Maybe ABM with MQAs or whatever, traditional, now with MQAs, like that's a pretty big change.

Yeah.

So how, how do you, how maybe, how did you approach that change process? And then with clients, like what do you, what do you find that helps increase the chances of success for that, that transition?

So, and Jess, I'd be curious to hear, you know, your thoughts on this. So With, I'll speak more to a client that we worked on with this. We, and I feel very, I don't wanna say I feel really confident that we should never rip out MQLs altogether. And I definitely feel that way as we've been working with clients. I think one, we'd never get any client to start a project with us if we said, we're gonna start by turning off your MQL mechanism. Nobody would ever sign that contract. So that's still there. So I would encourage everyone, like, don't let that stop you. You don't have to turn anything off. You are literally just turning something else on. And at first you can just start by listening to it. You don't have to show anybody else. Who is it pulling up? Who is it not pulling up that you think that should have pulled up? Right. Like, and doing that evaluation. And I think with us, Jess, if I'm remembering right, we kind of did that where we just like kept looking at it and we're like, hmm, that number seems high, or I'm surprised this account should be there. So it was more like trying to feel out.

Yeah.

what was too strict of a mechanism for identifying MQAs and what was too loose and finding that sweet spot. And I think we kind of did that even before we brought in sales, just from like a more of a data, is this working correctly and seem notionally correct?

Yeah.

Then with sales, kind of the same iterative, right? Because they have different, different perspective, different data that they're providing with their intuition and their read. on how things are going in those conversations. So I think from there, it is almost a second iteration phase with sales because they're actually getting that, that feedback in the moment to tell, you know, more succinctly if it was good, like, yes, positive MQA, or maybe not quite what we would expect from an MQA. So I would say just iterating is really the key piece here and not thinking you have to do it all at once. I would just do that and then start to realize, OK. Well, now that we have this signal, it kind of means that we don't have this one anymore because it's essentially now just an aggregated form that swallowed up webinar attendees, for example. Like maybe those things aren't separate. So I think it just, as long as people aren't feeling like they, they have to decide everything out the gate and they're just doing it step by step, I think there's no reason you shouldn't be trying to listen to more signals.

Well, and I think data to prove your case is always going to be the right answer. Right? It's whether it's a lookback, or it's a, you know, 6-month data-gathering period, what, you know, however the case may be, however quickly you want to move, those sorts of things. But, you know, with one client, we literally did this in stealth mode. So marketing was doing this, but didn't tell sales, because basically sales was like, I need to see the data before I'm going to listen to you marketing people tell me I can't call an account until they get to MQA.

Right.

Like, I'm not buying it. Right? And so, great. So we did our thing in stealth mode for 6 months. And at the end of that 6 months, we were able to show, hey, of accounts that you called that were at MQA, you were 7 times more likely to get a meeting than if you called them at other, any other stage, you know, higher up in the buyer's journey.

Right.

And then they went, oh. Now, this did cost some SDRs their jobs. Because they were like, oh, so we've got our SDRs just doing all this dialing and like, you know, trying to play the numbers game. Like, we actually just wait until it gets to MQA, right? Like, oh, we can have a much higher hit rate and we don't need as many people dialing for dollars. I mean, so, I mean, nobody wants to hear that somebody is going to lose their job over this. But I mean, it got, it was that Severe of a shift once they saw the numbers that they were, they were all in with this approach.

So.

Yeah, it's powerful.

Yeah, I think it could be, yeah, it could be a bit.

Go ahead. No, I was just gonna say like the contact acquisition, I think plays into that too, right? So yeah, maybe you don't need as many SDRs hitting the phones, but I think now just what you brought up earlier of like, Maybe there's now the ability, it opens up the potential for people to be doing contact acquisition when we have someone hitting a, you know, an earlier pre-MQA stage or an account hitting a pre-MQA stage. So, you know, maybe that's classic political AI answer. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're getting rid of jobs. We're just opening up their time to do something else. And I think in this case, I'm really pushing for the contact acquisition because I don't think contacts are going away.

Mm-hmm.

I don't think any salesperson will ever want to just go off of vibes and anonymous website traffic, right? So yeah, I think that's where I would say is maybe there's an opportunity to focus on the data with that freed up time, not spending time on the phone.

Yeah, they could spend more time doing the analysis and research and really crafting good messaging out, right?

That's the—

And updating Salesforce.

Also, that's one way to turn off sales. I know that, right?

I know. I had to say one triggering thing.

Yes. Yes. I think we've said more than one. Um, gosh, there's so much more I think we could, we could cover, but I think we're going to have to call it a day. This has been, just like last time, a great conversation. I've learned something and had fun all at the same time. So that's a win in my book. So Jessica, Andrea, thank you so much. If folks want to connect with you or learn more about what you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that?

Well, I have, I have the distinction of being the only Jessica Fulis on LinkedIn. So I'm easy to find. But also, you know, at the same time, make sure you follow inverta.com, because we have lots of great— or Inverta on LinkedIn. We've got lots of great content we put out daily. We're not, we're not a salesy type. We're just here to help, help marketers think differently. So.

Yes, and same. LinkedIn. I'm trying to be better at LinkedIn every day. But then also, anyone who's coming to Mopsapalooza, hit up my session. It's gonna be a good time.

Yeah, well, I'm not sure what's going on with LinkedIn these days.

Like, the whole algorithm is all like, I see more stuff that's 2 or 3 weeks old.

Yeah, the perfect time to have posted something is 3 weeks ago.

Right? I feel like that anyway. So that actually, that makes sense. It's, it's, I'm always 3, 3 weeks late.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, again, thank you both of you. It was so much fun. Um, we'll, I'm sure, have lots of fun. Um, Jessica, you mentioned before this, you may have some resources that we can share with people in our show notes. So we'll, we'll try to do that as well.

Perfect.

Yeah. And then, um, thank you to our, our supporters, uh, listeners, hopefully soon viewers. Um, and, uh, we appreciate all your support. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, you can always reach out to Naomi. Or me, and we'd be glad to talk to you about it. Till next time, bye everybody.

Bye.

Bye.