B2B CMOs react to new research on attribution, buying committees, BDR effectiveness and more

If you've ever wanted to be a fly on the wall while CMOs react to new research, this is your chance.

We were luck to have Kerry Cunningham join CMO Coffee Talk last week to share some of his latest research on a variety of topics including marketing attribution, buying committee evolution, BDR motivation/efficacy and much more.

Reactions from attending CMOs are in the chat highlights below.

If you're in the CMO Coffee Talk community you can find a copy of Kerry's research presentation deck in the #general channel in Slack.

If you are a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community of 2,200+ of your peers, let me know or click here to learn more and sign up.

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I wonder how big prospects would estimate their buying groups would be??

I think they would underestimate too

I guess it might also depend to which department you are selling to

I think people who haven’t bought software before think the group is small. If you’ve bought a bunch of software, you know it’s not.

Thin air in the C suite... ?????? LOL!

At the SMB level, don't you feel that they send a point person to do initial research, and that's the intent you see

Which is why “Tell me about the last time you bought something like this? How’d that process go?” is a great question for a champion

is there a specific type of profile that is usually underestimated? eg people always forget that role XXX influences

Does this say if you’e selling to enterprise there are 113 people involved??17 known, 96 anonymous?

Is the data specifically from buyers purchasing B2B software? Or other B2B products and services?

Given the data is there a recommended minimum number of buyer contacts you need to be engaging with and in your database for enterprise purchases?

What kind of “challenger” pressure should we be applying to reduce the decision making body at a prospect? I would bet that the quality of the choice is inversely correlated with the size of the buying center!!!!

Is there any data to show how to get people to reveal themselves faster? Does higher value content entice decision makers

Now- buying is often group influenced

These numbers look very similar to what I have seen (in software space). We dropped most of forms and saw greater engagement levels, but about 80% unknown/anonymous.

any strategy that relies on reps making ongoing updates to the CRM makes me cringe a little…

I’m at a 110-person Series A company and our “buying committee” for a sales enablement tool (which we are about to sign next week) was 7 people. So the research data seems right on the money.

Reasonably anxiety inducing having just come out of an analysis of # of contacts on our mid funnel opps

Does “in market” also mean “qualified to buy”?

qualified depends on your ICP and other parameters. They may be qualified to buy SOMETHING but it may or may not be your product.

Also, is ABM what we’re talking about here? Or something totally different. (At my last gig the ABM team mostly only did local events. No digital.)

To me, ABM is about focusing on account-level metrics — going for the ACCOUNTS that are in market/showing intent — versus counting MQLs, leads, number of meetings sales has.

There is a big chunk of that “in market” I probably don’t care about.?This is where ABM strategy is going to be critical.

But the challenge - even with ABM - is you have to have people to go after.?Unless we’re talking digital ads on 6Sense to anonymous buyers from that Account.

I am thinking to also start looking at cost of pipeline dollar as an efficiency metric, anyone else doing that?

Examples of ABM metrics that would be included in variable comp?

we look for companies showing intent, then use 6sense, ZoomInfo or Sales Navigator to “find” the people with the titles that buy from us.

I have been reporting on marketing$/pipeline at the board level for many years (even when efficiency wasn’t as in vogue as it is now) - a very important metric IMHO

Link to the report: https://6sense.com/resources/pdfs/doing-one-thing-measuring-another#page=1

I get the metrics measuring. More interested in examples of how those are put into the comp

Engagement can be defined in different ways -- can also include engagement with ads, content, video channel, off-line events, sales, etc.

Any new tactics for de-anonymizing in market individuals?

With multiple members of the B2B buying group, multiple marketing touch points taking place over multiple months, how are folks dealing with attribution, and ROI calculations.

Am I alone in feeling a big rush of dopamine anytime I get a survey readout?

#datanerds unite!

Would be interesting to correlate with stage in deal cycle…for example, are there a lot of legal and procurement people in larger companies hitting the website near the end when the contract is negotiated

…and security, and IT, …

https://www.pathfactory.com/blog/content-intelligence-report-2023/

Does this apply to *any* form? If so, I would imagine this differs if you've un-gated content (as you should) so only forms are for meetings/demo/quote requests

How do you see this change as it relation to PLG, (free trial) b2b organizations?

This data is making an even more impressive case to ungate content on the website

From our tests the length of the form has major impact. We've seen an increase of 30-50% when we integrate a system that allowed us to get the data without having them to write it all and keep the form to one or two fields

how has that impact downstream conversion rate? Quality tradeoff?

I don't have the data as it was too early to asses, but generally the people we could identify their info by their emails, were typically the ones more relevant for the company

I want to download the report but it requires a business email address. I find this often as I’m between jobs. I wonder if that contributes to the high rate of ‘anonymous’ traffic?

We look at: ICP accounts, ICP Buyers engaged per account.

And so this is “influenced” pipeline

Accounts engaged and avg # contacts per account

100% agree re influenced & boards/sales.

The marketing misalignment is really important to think about. You can’t have healthy alignment with sales without being honest about how well the marketing team itself is aligned

yep.?influence is seen as another vanity metrics.

My CFO straight up said to me a few weeks ago that he doesn’t care about marketing influence

Should measure target account reach, target account engagement and the KNOWN people engaging from target accounts pre-and post opportunity creation

Trying to drive this shift to influenced right now and the eye rolls are annoying. Even worse: I’m in govtech, where we already know every single account in our TAM.

We never say 'sourced' and we never way ‘influenced'

Lift - the old school marketing metric that is still what matters most

Is there a time frame in which you disregard that marketing 'touch' as a contributor or trigger for that opportunity or deal?

So good. Anytime it’s “mine” vs. “yours” you lose.

At the end of the day the CEO and board are still asking for reporting that shows that contribution in as clear a way as possible.

and the timelag between marketing campaigns and sales efforts varies.

I just had this conversation with my Marketing team yesterday.?I don’t give a flying F about “credit” for the MQL.?What I care about is the contribution we make in pipeline and retention!!!

Would love thoughts on evangelizing this POV across the biz. We all get it, I think, on some level. But CFOs, CEOs, etc often still think “Marketing generates leads, and tosses them to Sales, and then they do that scene from Glengarry Glen Ross”

I think the evangelism could come with some quantification of lift, but WHAT exactly is that. Contacts added to a target account? #of incremental nurture touches….

OK...so if we are all under evaluated, what is the best way to measure us so that we all get those performance bonuses :-)

What is the story we can tell regarding the journey that will land with a CEO?

AND the business has to WANT to understand it and evolve…

In many orgs — Marketing Sourced often means prove your worth’ prove to me you, team, $ is worth the spend

if you are part of a PE portfolio with a playbook, telling them you’re not going to put your data into their BI machine, it is a CLM. Over time, I will bring them to the promised land, but for now, we still give the people what they want MCL > MQL > SAL (stage 0) > SQL (stage 1) > etc.

I’m seeing a trend in technical sales BDRs of swapping from sales BDRs to SE-like BDRs to help clients progress without really selling them.

we have clients who now use some of their BDRs to have "challenge the status quo" conversations without expecting a meeting or demo in return.

Gated ROCKS.?Everyone else, If you don't have it - go get it!

our bdrs are Se-like.. we call them project managers instead. They aren't focused on selling, but teaching.

I established the same thing at my company, Had Looker reports and priority reports to show sales accounts reached and activated (used both 6Sense and biziable touchpoints to define reached and activated). The problem was that the activated definition is arbitrary. That said, what we saw in a 6 month timeframe is that our accounts reached converted to S0s faster than then they hit our activated defn; thereby nullifying accounts activated. Then we saw that individuals (Leads/prospects) were converting faster to S0 then going thru MQL to S0 process. So now we had to revert back to the traditional funnel but also reinforce our MDR/BDR/AE teams to work the account priority list. Still a work in process.

For these #s are the mutually exclusive, meaning Inbound reps only vs. Outbound reps only or are they hybrid and how they split their time?

Meetings just don't have to equal demos.

BDR as SE.?Hearing debate about the value of field or traditional enterprise sales (bc $) but it begs the question on the right model to have that more strategic conversation with the customer as BDRs are not it either.

In an Account-Based environment, I would suggest its better that they're hybrid and you assign BDRs to named accounts. So their job is to find ways to penetrate their BOB and if they get inbound on those accounts, great...but they’re responsible for driving results and have to do outbound most of the time.

In our space and segment, picking up the phone and dialing is converting at a higher rate than LI or email right now. This has changed in the last 6 months.

Interesting that phone calls are coming back…

Call connects - SALs on our end are up so far this year

Are they coming back, or just more successful if someone can get through?

Related/unrelated - are there stats on the # of total touches that are average for B2B sales deals? I’ve seen it between 20 and 80 for different companies, but wondering again as we have looked at all these marketing, BDR and sales touches today.

I cut funnel emails after the first welcome and subscribe them to blog updates and newsletters. Improved CTR and reduced unsubs

We saw the suite spot for BDR tenure at around 12 to 18 months;

I’ve had BDRs move to Marketing (Martech company) and CS.?Conversations are important to understand desire.?My BDR kid just went to marketing.

Strongly advocate for establishing a structured development and path program - it doesn’t HAVE to be a path to sales, tho. I've had BDRs move into marketing and customer success, too.

What is the tipping point for “longer in their role” (e.g. 12 months, 6 months, 24 months? Many are fresh out of school and need to learn.

We discuss many career options for BDRs: AE, renewal rep, success, even marketing…

bdrs make the best junior PMMs. And also do great in training/implementation/onboarding roles.

Saw a stat that the number one 'first job' of CEOs was BDR

Especially if they report to Marketing!?And if they are starting to do more SE work…SE if a path too

Our BDRs move into Markeitng, Client Management, Solution Consultants and more!

I love the hunger / urgency you need to be a successful BDR

I’ve worked with BDR’s to get into almost every part of the org. It starts with making it clear from the beginning, the interview and the onboarding, that the sky’s the limit - be successful as a BDR and then all doors could potentially be open, not only sales.

Had a BDR move into managing paid media. Not a typical path, but BDRs get REALLY good at delivering a compelling value prop in a short time. He found that to be a transferable skill.

Relates well to lots of jobs if they can learn more about the product and IC?

I’ve had BDRs in marketing and many moved into product marketing, campaigns teams, etc.