Episode 180: Lifecycle marketing in 2026: How to engage with buyers in AI era with Ashley Faus

This is the Full Funnel BTP marketing podcast, brought to you by full Funnel Dot Yo. Let's starve, I have one and welcome to the new episode of Full Final Life. After a short break of our from our Full Funnel signate and because of the easter, we're back with the new episode and today we have one of our speakers, Ashley Fowles. Probably some of you have attended Ashley session and our signat and today we are gon kind of talk or dive a little bit deeper into that topic.

Also just ask the life cycle marketing in twenty twenty six and beyond tend As always, you guys are very welcome to ask any questions. Ashley, thanks a lot again for joining me today. Yeah, thanks for having me cool. So guys as always, Yeah, welcome to ask any questions in the chat and let us know.

I see that slowly people are joining us live. Let us know where you all join us from. And while you're type and I would love to ask or basically kick off our chat with the question about the life cycle marketing. So the idea behind the life cycle marketing was always to deliver the right message at the right time to the right person, right according to the journey stage.

But honestly, maybe I'm wrong. I'm just sharing my subjective opinion, right, But with Yeses, kind of the entire idea behind the life cycle marketing completely transformed, and we developed these stages, We developed the metrics MKL, SQURL, etc. And many companies became so obsessed with these metrics that we build all go to marketsgy around it. And I'm seeing sometimes kind of situations that you can't even imagine, especially in enterprise organizations, where marketers try to gamify the game just you know, to hit the engagement score, because whenever a specific contact will hit eighty points, they will get a credit for this, and they have the stage one, stage two you know in sales force, so they could report on it, but there is no real joint collaboration and revenue creation.

So I feel that this entire framework on generating mkls convert on them in sqls basically let us to focus on volume and automation and the kind of the goal to hit this engagement score. My question is how did we get here? Yeah? Oh man, so many things to unpack in all of this.

I think. The first thing that I think we should kind of talk about is like, what is life cycle marketing and how is it different from product marketing or performance marketing or brand marketing or content marketing. Right, Like, there's all of these different disciplines, and I feel like life cycle marketing is kind of an interesting space, in large part to your point with this evolution of like such a strong focus on that MQL or SQL conversion. Historically life cycle marketing and this is like a very you know, B to B SaaS thing, right, you know, I won't touch the consumer side of it, but this idea of the lifetime value of the customer.

And so life cycle marketing was actually originally meant to kind of combat this MQL SQL like short term demand gen conversion mindset because we realize, particularly in SaaS, that we have to keep winning and rewinning the hearts, minds and wallet of our audience. And so we were like, well, how do we balance that need to grow these people long term with our need to generate revenue in this quarter? Right, And they were like, new plan, We're going to make up a new term. It's going to be life cycle marketing.

And historically life cycle marketing was actually for growth expansion, cross selling, up selling. Right, It's like, cool, we're going to have demand gen and performance marketing to land the net new logos. Those people just need to get the initial sale and then you know, we're going to have these other people who focus on actually growing and retaining these customers. And unfortunately, because of that, it means that any of the adoption onboarding time to value all of those types of metrics that are actually kind of hard to measure and take a lot more time.

They started to go over into the life cycle side and got separated from revenue, and then you have this, you know again, as it happens every five to ten years, something happens where it's like, oh, no, there's a money crunch, there's a funding crunch. We're not growing fifty sixty percent year over year. Okay, life cycle marketing, you guys need to be generating revenue too, And they're like, well, we were with our upgrades and our cross seals and our and our uh, you know, expansions, right, And so somehow it like came full circle back into basically demand gen and they were like, well, life cycle, how do you prove that you were generating long term revenue?

And so they ended up stuck back in the same bucket of like, okay, well we have to have leading indicators. We're going to do this idea of implicit intent instead of explicit intent, And so they basically fell into the same trap as demand gen, performance marketing, et cetera, that as marketers, we want proof that what we're doing is working so we can do more of it, and so we need some leading indicators. And unfortunately, when you think that. You have and something easy to met you know, easy to meture, easy to show in a dashboard, and in theory, easy to game basically, or the charitable version, easy to influence, that becomes the north star instead of a leading indicator that you are directionally going in the right right way right.

And so from my perspective, that's how we ended up here. We started it's kind of the same way that we ended up separating brand from demand gen and performance marketing. Right. Brand is like long term and they need the.

Freedom to not be so focused on, you know, short term revenue, and brand has basically come almost full circle to be like, you guys need to prove that you're driving revenue right life cycle. Same thing it was like, we need to look at the lifetime value of the customer, but we've come full circle. So I think it's a combination of the time that we're in right now, particularly with AI, has put a lot of pressure on traditional marketing thinking, practice, metrics, tactics, strategy, et cetera, and so we basically are just everything right now is moving into what is the easy is to measure that appears to have a direct one to one correlation between a dollar spent and hopefully more dollars out.

So a little bit of a big answer. I'm like, let's sit back and talk about what lifecycle marketing was actually meant to do. But I think that that context really matters when we talk about how do we get here with We've circled all the way back to the MQL being the north star, when in fact that was always meant to just be a leading indicator for directional strategy and tactics. Yes, I thought I'd like a here as you and you mentioned and obviously today I actually read a post right before our podcast, and I think it was from jen aland Note and she said that she's talking now to companies and they say, hey, if like if your product can be integrated with Claude or Gonku're not buying it.

So it's like, literally and you probably have seen the memor right that now like all linkedn't feed is just cloud, right, everybody has cloud headshots, et cetera. So indeed, aiware and it seems that, I mean, there are tons of products which I'm observing and I'm using the air and AI features which honestly shouldn't be edited at all because they don't bring any real but that is what it is. AI is here. So a couple of questions, what's the role of AI in live cycle marketing?

And what do you need to have in place to make AI working for you? So one thing I went on a whole tangent in a conversation yesterday, this idea that like AI has this separate role, right, that it's like this new thing. And and the analogy I made is, if you're building a house, the hammer does not build the house. Frankly, the general contractor does not build the house, right, the general contractor is generally doing all the planning and coordinating and running the crew and making sure they have.

The tools they need. Right. The way that nails actually get hammered into wood is that a human picks up a hammer and literally bangs on the nail and puts it into the wood, right, And so I feel like it's the same question with AI, right, this idea that AI is the hammer that's just magically doing all of this work, and like, how do we get the how does the hammer build the house? Like in any other context we would.

Never say how would how does the hammer fit in to build a house? It's like a human grabs a tool for a purpose and uses it. And so I think that. The reminder that AI is a tool that humans use and should be a our ability to get something done, you know, faster, with higher quality, et cetera.

So, when we think about this from a life cycle marketing perspective, one of the biggest things that life cycle marketing is able to do because they are usually working with existing customers, we have a lot more information about what these people are doing inside the product, how they're using it, what problems they're solving, who else on their team they're bringing into the products. Et cetera. And so because of that, in theory, we should. Be able to deliver more of the right message at the right time in the right place because we have more information.

And so that context is what we need as the foundation to make AI useful in this discipline, to personalize, to make the right recommendations, and to help hone things like the product tours, the onboarding emails, all of that. It's not just okay, they've taken the five actions that we know generally precede someone being willing to upgrade or expand. Haha, now is the time for us to send them an email that's like upgrade, right, Like, yes, you can use it for that. However, you should also be using it to improve your product tours, to improve your activation, to improve your monthly active users, right, to deliver educational content to the person to help them get more value faster from the product.

So, from my perspective, AI, particularly for life cycle marketers, is very useful in personalization, true personalization to. Help someone solve the problem. And a foundational element that you need is making sure that you have all of the context and all of the clean data. So again, particularly in a larger enterprise SaaS.

So if we think about it lastly, and for example, we have a number of different products. Those products are highly integrated and most of those products work better together. Right if you have GIRA and confluence and loom. With AI, you can now turn that loom note taker that you bring into your meeting, it'll do tasks.

You can literally have it create, you know, a project plan for you in confluence, you can convert that information into jeer at tickets right, Like that is very powerful. In the past, a human had to sit there and take notes or furiously type or watch the recording and try to export the transcript and then say, Okay, we said Andre was going to do this work. I now have to go assigne a ticket to Andre. Right, That's that use case for AI helps the humans do things.

And I now know, because I have full context, Ashley and Andre work together on these types of projects. Andre tends to handle these types of tasks. Ashley tends to handle these types of tasks. Right that level of context, it's now, okay, AI paired with the life cycle marketer is now helping Ashley and Andre do their work better.

Like that's a completely different mindset. Then I saw Andre logged in. Haha, I can show it an upgrade message. Now it's like, dude hasn't done anything right and again knowing which product to recommend next.

Okay, actually, an Andre or Marketers, we should if they have. Confluence, we should probably recommend loom not Bitbucket. Like why would we. Recommend a code repo to the marketers.

We wouldn't do that, right, So that's like a very basic example. But again being able to coordinate all of these signals to help the audience take an action that solves their problem. And yes, maybe that means they need a higher addition for more users or more features, but the mindset is really about that context to help the user get more value, not just like waiting to pounce until we can show them the right upgrade, expand cross sell message. It's a fantastic example to be honest, And you said you need to have clean data, right, you need to have the context and direct me if I'm wrong.

But that means that you need to have a close work with the product team, so they need to pringk you the data about the behavior of these users. And I'd say I was always voting for this because first of all, okay, we we operate an enterprise world and a lot of companies they think about expansion, right, but how expansion happens, it's in many cases it's very similar to what you have described. Was the only difference that account executive receives an account with a note, Okay, this is our existent customer.

They bought this and you can sell way more things to them, right, So what an account executive what they're doing typically, right, they just try to find all other buyers and just send them the typical outbound candants, right, maybe seven to ten touches and nothing. So there's no real use is decomposition, right, there is no understanding of who are the power users? Like you said, Okay, we're in market and we're doing this and that, right, So for us, this is our value right there is I mean, we can maybe put away the entire expansion play.

But what I feel where the biggest gap is is this context right about how the product is being used for what specific purposes? Right, how often and by whom? And this is the key because let's say if you have I don't know, a stakeholder who just locks into the product once a week or once and once to look at the dashboard and then move away, right, you don't need to attack with all the kind of tiny features. Hey, you can do this and that, and even more so this is this is kind of the biggest problem, which again leads us to the entire philosophy of how the team should be organized, cross functional collaboration.

Right, So maybe the main question is any you can share your experience at a classon or maybe any ideas, any tips how to achieve this cuss financial collaboration and get this context. Yeah. So one thing that's interesting that I think for us, we actually have an advantage in this, and that's because we started with product led growth. So for a fair portion of our history we were exclusively PLG.

We didn't have a sales team, we didn't do outbound like, we didn't do that style of marketing. And because of. That, we have a really strong understanding and you know, interest in those product metrics. And it's it's interesting I see a question here in the chat about like what are the pipeline stages in life cycle marketing and the metrics for BDRs, And for me coming up with such a PLG focused mindset, I'm like, no, you wouldn't.

This isn't about basically like, it's just fascinating for me, right because because to me, this question from a sales led perspective and the mindset that you described, where an AE basically gets a list of the accounts and it's like, Okay, here's the customers, here's how much they're spending today. Here's their market cap or their revenue. This means that they have the potential to spend this much money with us. Go chase them, and they're basically just flying blind to your point.

They're going they're trying to identify other buyers, et cetera. Right from a PLG perspective, we almost exclusively rely on the end product metrics and so understanding. We call them sticky actions. What are the things that people are doing that indicate that they are using the products and that they are getting value from them.

So, for example, in Gira, creating your first project, that is a sticky action. Inviting a team to collaborate rate or assigning a ticket to someone that is a sticky action. Right, same thing in Confluence creating your first page, tagging somebody on that page, publishing that page, sharing that page. Those are very sticky actions because they start to bring other people into the product.

And so. It's in terms of how to organize the team. We have historically actually collaborated very closely with our product marketing folks because they are the ones who are influencing a lot of that onboarding and product tour and those kinds of things, because historically there was no sales team, right, it was basically PMM and PM saying how do we how do we make the product sticky? And so I think there's a variety of different ways to organize the team.

I have seen life Cycle sit more in a Demand Gen type of team because again, when you think about it, with the traditional looping decision journey, which uh we have. I have some aversion to the traditional linear funnel and the looping decision journey because again it's very focused on marketers forcing people down this buy intent path instead of letting them chart their own path. But I've seen life Cycle basically sit with Demand Gen because they are considered in a looping decision journey that cross sell, up sell expansion motion.

So you've got traditional demand Gen. That does the awareness consideration decision portions, and then you PLoP life Cycle into that and then it starts it over right. I've also seen life Cycle sit in more of a customer success organization because again, the understanding that value precedes expansion, and customer success is traditionally tasked with ensuring that customers get value before they will buy. So I've actually I've also seen life cycle sit in a CSM organization very rarely more in smaller organizations, product marketing will take on a lot of the tasks and metrics associated with life cycle marketing, so things like monthly octave users, things like upgrades, things like you know, optimizing kind of the end product experience to show like hey, would you be interested in, you know, inviting your teammate or would you be interested in sharing this page?

Right, like take the next sticky action that often sits in PMM, particularly in smaller organizations. So I don't think there's a right structure. I think that the hard part is again that mindset shift around value, not just immediately selling the very next thing, right. So yeah, it's it's it's an interesting thing in terms of where it should sit and how it should be structured.

But I've seen it different ways, just depending on how the organization thinks about it. If if they're more on the PLG side, I've seen it tend to sit excuse me, more in either product marketing or customer success. In a more sales like organization, it tends to sit in the demand and organization. I think I do think in both cases collaborating very closely with PMM.

Depending on the function. In a PLG organization, PMMs tend to act more like a general manager of their business line, versus in a sales lead organization, PMM tends to do more sales enablement, battle cards, market research, competitive research to inform what sales is going out with. So some of it I think does depend heavily on how PMM is organized, But I do think in either side either organization, those should be very closely tied. I love it.

Before we'll move forward, I have a few questions from our community just to part of the topic of metrics and c IM set up. So the question from my how to valid gaps opportunities with our and NORCH and life cycle programs. And the second question is what are the top level metrics you are tracking. In terms of gaps?

Can you can you repeat the question about gaps? Yeah, how to avaliate the gaps and opportunities with how and NARCH and life cycle programs. Okay, so I think there in all cases, Uh, my approach is to use leading and lagging indicators and then to match those metrics with the core intent. So one thing as marketers, we struggle with a little bit.

Right. We love a buy intent CTA, right, sign up, upgrade, contact sales, et cetera. We also love a use intent CTA, so log in, use the template, book office hours, if you're a services provider, et cetera. But the reality is there are more intents besides just buy intent and use intents.

So one is a trust or affinity intent. The other is true learn intent, which is based on the practices, the communication, the process, et cetera. To help somebody improve how they work. And then the final one is help or remediation intent.

So something's broken if you forgot your password, if you don't know how to set something up bags another intent. So we want to match our metrics, both leading and lagging indicators to each intent. And the thing that gets a little quirky with kind of nurture and life cycle programs. Even this idea of nurturing right that is also used in demand gen So how do we nurture somebody to go from awareness to consideration, from consideration to purchase.

The metrics that are associated there generally are focused more on buy intent metrics. Book a demo, contact sales, activate a free trial, request, a proposal, et cetera. From a life cycle perspective, we tend to focus more on the use intent metrics. So sign up, book a, you know, start a project, create a page.

If you're in a CRM, right like export or report would be would be a use intent hint metric. So that's that's what I would say, is basically understanding the intent of your metrics. Again, for life cycle, it tends to be primarily focused on use intent. I do think one thing that we see and there's you know, a lot of data on this from a number of different communities.

The more people are involved in the community, the more sticky they are in the product. And this makes perfect sense. Right If you're just going at it alone, you log in, you have no idea what you're doing, and you're kind of like, I'm just going to bubble around in the product to where I'm going to go look at the documentation separately, you're a lot less likely to get value versus it's like, oh, Andre, I have a question, how are you using this thing? Right?

You and I start talking, We have a relationship. You show me your cool use case, Right, I trust you because you're also a customer. You're my peer, we're in marketing together, right, And so basically, you know, one of the leading indicators, which would actually be a learn intent indicator, would be something like how often are these people engaging in the community. And so it's.

Counterintuitive where maybe in your nurture or your onboarding onboarding program you actually say, go to the community or meet Andre and see Andre's top use case. Right, You're a power user, you're a community champion, and I actually say, we're doing an AMA with Andre, join us. That is really hard to track in a dashboard that you joining that AMA with Andre significantly increases the likelihood that you go back into the product and take an action that is sticky that adds value to you and ultimately increases the lifetime value of the customer.

Right. So I do think that looking at those learn intent and use intent metrics is the better way to approach life cycle marketing instead of basically just trying to look at buy intent metrics around upgrades, expansions, you know, contact sales, et cetera. Because those learn intent and use intent metrics show an increased likelihood that someone is actually sticky in the product, they're getting value. And then obviously you know retention, churn, et cetera.

Those lagging indicators around you know, customer satisfaction. There's a new newer term or I guess metric that people are using, a SEQ, which is basically the ease of use. So it's not just net promoter score or customer satisfaction of like will you tell other people about us? How satisfied are you?

The ease of use metrics are really around is the is the product giving you value? How disappointed would you be if you were no longer able to use this product? Right? There's a psychological principle about basically, you fear and feel a loss more than you love and feel a gain.

And so nps and CSAT are primarily focused on asking about gains and benefits. SEQ you tends to focus more on that loss aversion, And so it's actually flipping it and kind of leaning into that psychological principle of like, we want our customers to feel sad if they lose the product, because that's a much more powerful feeling than just feeling happy or fine that they have the product. Right. So it's a really interesting shift and the idea that this is part of their daily work or their regular habitual use that's a lot more powerful indicator that they're getting value and thus they won't turn and they are more likely to upgrade than saying, you know net promoter score, will you tell everybody else about us?

It's like those are actually different things. So those are some of the leading and lagging indicators. And I think the big mindset shift is around not just trying to look at buy intent, but looking at use intent and learn intent. I love it, and honestly, I feel that literally everybody who is listening to us I will be listening to the record that would I create.

The biggest problem though, is not the mindset of marketing leaders though the truth to be said, I'm experience and still with some of the clients where the leadership has been changed recently that the new marketing leader comes and kind of pushes for the let's say obsolete way of thinking about life cycle marketing. But that's not the case for the majority of our listeners. I think the biggest problem is for many B to b cmos or the piece of marketing is that when they join a new company, right they become the kind of first let's say, real owner of the life cycle marketing.

But the problem they are facing is that they're supposed to fulfill this linear funnel, right, then they dealing with the massive data. It's probably the case for too many B to B companies. Even I would say at full funnel despite a small organization, still we don't have perfect data. It's good, but it's not perfect.

So what to say about the bigger organizations? Right? And they have the targets, they have the pressure to deliver, right, So everybody kind of quite often I feel that we don't have realistic or we can't make realistic set up realistic expectations of what can be achieved in this case. So let's say if you were wearing these shoes, right, and in ninety days you have the board medium where you need to kind of present the reality of what could be done in the first Yeah, what would you do?

What? How would you set up the expectations? What would you say? What is possible and what is important to change?

And why? How? By the literally that conversation. Yeah, it is a hard conversation, and I think that first you have to start from shared definitions of what these things actually are.

When you say MQL or you say a LEAD, what do you mean by that? Do you mean contact acquisition like you literally have a name in an email? Do you mean. Somebody who is engaged and has actively raised their hand and clicked contact sales or requestner FP or book a demo?

Right? Like? What is that actual definition and what goes into it? That's step one, same thing, customer, What do you mean by that?

Do you mean somebody who has one hundred free users? Ten free users? If you've got a free tier? Do you mean people who.

Are paying you a minimum amount of money? Do you mean people who have been in the product a certain you know when you when you say active users, like, are you looking at a certain number of daily, weekly, or monthly active users? Like, let's get very clear on what we mean because frequently, and I've talked with a couple of different organizations about this, those definitions are not the same. Right.

I talked with one company I was doing a little bit of consulting as a nonprofit, and marketing was basically counting any email address that they received as a lead. You will not be surprised to hear that sales said those leads were junk because they were not, in fact leads. Anybody who fills out a form is not a lead, right, And so the conversation at the board meeting was really around changing that definition of an MQL to being like, no, these people actually have to do more than just one time give us their email.

Right. Again, we have a whole separate conversation about mqls and. Scoring and all of that. I have some pretty foundational problems with that whole mindset because again it's marketers trying to like into it that someone is ready versus giving them the option to say no, I'm actively ready.

So that's the first thing, is like documentation around what the actual definitions are. Once you have agreed on that, then you go. Into your CRM or your marketing automation platform however you're doing this, and you understand what it is actually capturing so you can build your lead reports however you want. I full disclosure, have not been poking around in HubSpot or MARKETO or Salesforce for many years.

I you know, especially working in a bigger company. We have air ops team that does that, right, So it's been quite a while since I've gone in and actually pushed all the buttons in those systems. But you know, you get to set whatever your definition of an MQL is right, You get to set whatever your definition of an SQL is in those systems, and so making sure that what you have agreed on as the definition is actually what is being tracked in the CRM, because frequently people want to hack it.

Right, Oh, we're gonna just decide that my webinar today is worth forty points, and then Andre is going to decide that this LinkedIn. Live is worth sixty points. Why why is when I show up on the computer worth forty points and when Andre shows up on the computer worth sixty? Like what are we talking about?

Right? So going in and. Making sure that things are actually reflecting what those shared definitions are. If they are not, then step one is now you've got to go do a whole audit and clean up, and you got to rebaseline because I find it in a lot of cases the metrics that are having to grow twenty thirty, fifty one hundred percent your over year the definition has changed over time and or the tracking has changed over time.

And so again, if you're going to change the definition, you got to change it in the system too. You can't just change it in the board meeting or on the slides. So realistically, honestly, that first ninety days. That board meeting is basically like, let's be clear on the definition, and so let's be clear on what our system is actually tracking.

Let's be clear on what our baseline is. If those things are out of whack, you go go on a data clean up project, right, and I get it. You still have to spend money, you still have to grow revenue, et cetera. The other piece of this from a business standpoint is basically looking at you know, things like campaign efficiency and understanding if a customer is truly profitable just because they spend a lot of money with you, if you have to spend a lot of time on the customer's success side or the support side, troubleshooting, et cetera, because they're not the right type of customer no matter how big the spend is.

If the cost is out of line, they are not necessarily a profitable customer. And so looking at that on the back end to say, you know, what is our mix? Are we actually hitting our revenue targets just because we happen to have one customer who's spending a ton of money with us, that's a massive business risk. And again, if we're spending tons of man hours and tons of compute to support this customer they might not actually be particularly profitable, and so really understanding on the back end what is that customer mix, what is that revenue mix, and what is the true profitability mix of our customers and our business.

So, yeah, that's that's kind of what I would do in the first ninety days. And then obviously from a what's possible in a year? I think it kind of depends on like what are you dealing with when you. Do that audit?

Uh, and you know, how. How open is the leadership team to potentially taking radical action to fix something. And obviously the larger the company, the more difficult it is to make these changes because you've got something that's working. If you're a public company, you have to report publicly on what you're doing, how it's how it's doing, why you're doing it, et cetera.

So like this is very complicated, Like this is not an easy thing, and it's it's very easy for me to sit here and say like, yeah, just use you know the playground, just ditch litt your funnel, right, just follow the metrics that actually matter. But I am under no illusions that, particularly in larger enterprise companies, this is a very difficult discussion, and untangling the messy data or putting the infrastructure in place to ensure that you're able to have honest conversations and actionable conversations like this is not a small problem.

And so I think to your point, the ninety day mark and the one year mark are actually indicative of you thinking correctly that these are long term projects. Not okay, in your first thirty days, what are you gonna do listening to her? In your first sixty days, what are you gonna do? Reset strategy?

Ninety days? See impact? Like, that's that's way too short of a time horizon for most larger companies, especially if they already have something going. Again, if you're.

Just building, like sure, take your shot, But if you're having to understand, potentially undo and then rebuild, that's a very different conversation. Makes perfect sense, CENTI. Why I would love to move next is the concept of playground that you presented at our assignment. You talk about it on linked In, on other podcasts, et cetera.

Right, Basically, the entire idea of playground is just given the buyers the opportunity to buy the way they want right, and we shouldn't create any friction. We should allow them to enter our final or move away from it and come back anytime they want. Just any simple word. Basically you said they can go in any order and engage with you, not the way you like, right, the way we prefer.

It makes perfect sense. But again, what if the company operates on the old system, right, that the one that we have discussed, And what if sales treat every signal like you said, oh you locked in. There is an opportunity to upgrade, right, But in sales world or in our scenario, it's completely different. So they just use it as an opportunity to immediately pitch the demo right, any website, visit any I don't know, email, open whatever, any linked and like it's an opportunity.

Hey you like this post, Well you like to have a demo with me? Write something like this. So basically it requires a lot of change management. I'm just wondering, right, because we spoke about life cycle marketing and the metrics, the definition, et cetera.

But now it just also it requires the wemb of how sales are also thinking about all the signals about sales clients. Basically, any client facing functions, right. So I'm just wondering how would you do the change management in the organization right around the concept of the playground, right, because it's not only about the advice and get all your content and allow them to do whatever they want, right. So it's about how can we align and match our marketing and sales processes with the way how our buyers are buying.

So I'm just curious to chat with you about this and listen to your experience. So the one. Benefit of this approach of like you liked my LinkedIn post, do you want to buy my product? Now?

The fact that that fails so often is actually a really handy starting point with sales. But they're like these leads are junk, and it's like, what do you think you mean by lead? And they're like. I have literally I had a discussion with a marketer that was literally like, can we go can we use AI to basically scrape all the people who left a comment on this person's LinkedIn post and like pass that off to sales as like a list to go outbound to.

I was just like, do you understand that you will fundamentally destroy all trust and the relationship if you do that these people have in no way at all indicated that they are interested in anything that you were selling by you know, again, it would be the equivalent of like me looking at all the people who have commented on any of your posts and being like, yep, they're ready to buy something that makes absolutely no sense, right, So the one I mean, if you want to be spicy about it, you know what you do that, see how that goes for sales.

It's gonna absolutely tank clearly, right, and sales is going to come back and be like that lead list was crap, like we're not doing that, right. So I actually think that as much as there's friction and it's a trope, right that, like marketing hits their lead goals and sales says the leads are junk, right, good, If sales is telling you that they can't close these leads, it's not that they're all literally the likelihood that your entire sales organization just fundamentally can't sell that seems unlikely, right, So that actually does open the conversation to say, what does a good lead look like?

And like, shocker, if somebody hits contact sales, book, a demo, activate a trial, shocker, that those close at a higher rate than people who you outbound or cold prospect to. Right. So we have some baselines for this, and I think that understanding the full journey to really look at what are those touch points that influence the journey. What content is consumed frequently in closed one journeys but is not necessarily from a last touch attribution or a first touch attribution.

I mean, I think this is the other thing. We can have a whole conversation about. Which attribution model you're using, but this content is frequently you know. Again I go back to the community, right, We see that people who are engaged in the community tend to spend more, get value faster, have more monthly active users.

Right, So that conversation about what other actions are people taking besides just the traditional hand raiser action or buy intent action. That's where you start that conversation from with the sales team. Perfect example that I give in terms of the funnel being outdated or and why you should use a playground. So pricing is traditionally considered a bottom funnel or a decision level or purchase level conversation.

And yet if you. Need to go get budget, like how are you going to do that if you have no idea about ballpark pricing. So I had this experience we were going to buy a tool. My manager said, you know, we're going to finance to ask for the budget.

How much budget do you need? And I'm like, I don't know. So I start googling around. I reach out to a bunch of the big players in the space and I say, Hey, can you just give me a ballpark for this mini licenses at this service tier?

And they all came back and said like, oh, you need to book a demo. Oh you need to read this thought leadership report. And I'm like, I. I have no budget.

Guys, like, I know BANT. I know we're not using BANT these days. I think medpick is the new standard. But like ban is budget authority, need and timeline.

I have no budget currently. I have no authority because I'm not the you know, I don't have the authority to sign off on this. In terms of the need. Like I have the need, but if I don't have the budget authority and then timeline until I get BUDG, I have no timeline to buy right.

So me reaching out to these people, I am not a lead just because I'm asking about pricing. If you come back and you tell me that it costs one hundred thousand dollars and I can only get budget for one thousand dollars, it doesn't matter how much I agree with you that this problem is worth solving, I fundamentally cannot afford to buy. Like we're a hundred x off. I am not a good lead for you if I think I could solve this problem for one thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars and your minimum spend is one hundred thousand dollars, right Like, So again those types of examples where we say someone reaching out to you for pricing does not automatically make them a lead because they might not have one of the key elements required budget.

And no matter how much you try to sell me the value, if we are that far apart, I cannot buy from you. I am not a legitimate lead for you. Right So, I think some of those hard examples of what content is being consumed in the journey? What is that sales close rate?

Is it steady? Is it dropping? Is it above or below your peers and your industry benchmarks? Right?

Is there one salesperson who is just completely killing it on their quota and everybody else is tanking. Okay, what is that person doing differently? Frequently they're taking the best leads? Great, how are they spotting that from a sales perspective?

How are they filtering out the junk? Let's see what we can do to scale that mindset, not tell all the rest of the sellers that they're terrible and put them on a thirty day pip that they can't hit their quota. Right. So there's a lot of diagnostic tools that we can actually get from the salespeople to then take that back into our lead scoring, into our marketing programs, right, And what we see frequently is that it actually behaves like a playground.

Oh I met this person an event two years ago. I sent them our state of industry report, you know, I sent them the Gardner and Q or the Forester Wave if they're an enterprise. None of those assets closed them. But then we got on the deal and they were like, oh yeah, I remember, Andrea.

I don't remember it, no if you remember, but like we met each other at you know, Unbound Hubspots. Hubspots conference is now Unbound. I met you at Unbound two years ago, right where where does that show up in the system. It might not, like maybe we didn't scan a badge, or maybe you didn't put me in the system as somebody that you met.

But being willing to look at the verbatims and look at that journey, all of that starts to point. To the fact that we need to have leading. And lagging indicators across multiple intents. And that's how you start to have that conversation.

Depending on the size of the organization and how entrenched they are with their you know, strategy, tactics, metrics, et cetera, it's a hard conversation to have because, as you note, if you suddenly tell an organization that their mqls are going to tank. Like nobody wants to hear that right the volume going down. But it is interesting, I think, especially if you're able to take let's say an emerging product product line and. Fundamentally rethink how you go to market with that product from a metrics standpoint, an asset standpoint, strategy tactics, et cetera.

That starts to prove out this mindset shift, and then you can expand it to your larger product lines. So it is a tricky balance, but I actually think that in some cases sales complaining that like the leads are bad or things aren't converting is actually a really great conversation starter to say. Is it because our criteria is wrong? Is it because the way we are thinking about this journey is wrong?

And what if we thought about it this way? What would our metrics look like? What would our strategy look like? What would our goals look like.

I have a strong opinion that if you don't ayitiate this conversation, and if you just try to survive one more quota right, I will hit my target this quat and next quotter, it will be better. I feel it's just kind of similar to rearrange and the you know, the chairs Titanic, because no way you can. But again it's just my subjective opinion. I feel I simply don't see a way how you can be successful long term as a marketing leader, as leading marketing function right under these circumstances.

Do you say the same or do you feel there are some workarounds that can help you without having this kind of tough conversation. Oh man, this is hard. So I think the average CMO tenure these days is like eighteen months maybe twenty four months. Right, I thought recently Stockport, Yeah, so eighteen that was.

Data like a minimum. We can at least a year and a half, right, I think that the fact that CMO tenure is the shortest of all of the c suite, and that is that short, you know, eighteen months of quite short fifteen months, I mean, good lord, like you've barely even ramped up on. The organization by that point. So I agree with you.

I think that it is very difficult to have these conversations. It is very hard to shift, you know, not just the mindset, but the strategy, the data, the tracking, all of that, and particularly in larger entrenched organizations. So I agree with you. I mean, and the reality bears it out right with the shorter CMO tenure.

Full disclosure that I have not been a CMO. I have not been the person that has had to drive this from the top down. And my what I have. Seen is that traditionally this goes better in smaller organizations.

Again, when you're trying to come into a large organization multiple product lines, it is basically terrifying to say we're going to fundamentally shift how we approach this and how we are measuring it. It's got to be done incrementally, and if you have emerging products or emerging teams, that tends to be the easier place to make these types of changes because it's seen as more of a pilot you have. You don't have that baseline of like we've got, you know, millions of dollars coming in every single month or every single quarter for these products.

And now you're telling me you're. Gonna shift how you do your measurement, Like is that ultimately going to tank the revenue? And so the hard part of basically like separating out which of those metrics are actually showing real, profitable, sustainable customer relationships versus which ones are just showing. Junk is hard.

The other way to do this is, and again I get it, you can't do this across the entire org. But take one program or one channel or one campaign and either go super big or turn it off. And I find what most people do. Let's say, I don't know if you're familiar with the ten dollars game.

This is like a well known kind of game in product management, and it's like, if you have ten dollars, how are you gonna spend that ten dollars. If you put one dollar on ten things, obviously you're not gonna get that much return. If you put all ten dollars on one thing, that's one huge bet that's either going to be amazing or it's gonna fail catastrophically. Right.

So what most people try to do is say, I'm gonna do three dollars on three things, and then I have a dollar leftover, so I'll do fifty cents, right, And they basically place their bets equally. What I would recommend is find one program where you're like, I think that I'm seeing some early signals, or I've seen this work in the past, or I think this has potential. You know what, blow it out, put a ton of money, triple. Your budget on it.

Do you get triple the returns? Or if you're like, it feels like this is just kind of limping along. But we surely we can't turn it off. What if it's working?

What if you kill it? What if you do just turn it off? What bad thing is going to happen? Now that's terrified, because what if that's the one thing that's working well In theory, If that's the one thing that's working, it's gonna show up fast enough that you can turn it back on right and if it's not working, great, you've just killed it.

Right. So I think that this idea of finding something where you can go very big or go very small and just completely pull back is a really good way to start to test some of those assumptions with a little bit of that safety net that you're not going to just completely kill an entire business or you know, an entire set of strategy and tactics that's actually working. Yeah, And I think kronesty, it's all about the efficient answer, right. Everybody thoughts about AI will bring that EFFICI answer, so we can do more.

But the question is do we really need to do more? You needs to excel at several activities actually create the revenue, right, that lead to revenue. That's the key. So quite often like there are fundamental activities, we all talk about it awareness, right, print activities, I don't know, account engagement, a count research.

But then like in ABM, we talk a lot to sales reps. Have you done that account research? I didn't have time for this. Have you engaged?

Have you done Multiustralia? Oh? I didn't have time as as okay, A country search was AI probably is not excuse anymore. But let's say engagement, multistradia, et cetera.

Nobody has time for this, And then the question is why, right, why don't we kind of allocate time to activities that actually lead to the revenue. The same in marketing, right, So do we need to do the hundreds of these things that we do just to tick you know, the box and now a zero conference or whatever, right or asana instead of like focusing on what really kind of helps us to hit our targets. So totally ACQUI with you and thank you so much for sharing this. I feel it was a brilliant conversation and I also coming from Valeria, she enjoyed it.

Thank you so much for joining us. I think it was a brilliant I don't know what you have shared on the signate and guys, thanks a lot for coming and asking your questions. Was fun. Thanks so much for having me and continue in the conversation.

It's definitely a big one in the industry. Yeah, absolutely, Thank you so much and we'll continue our chat on linked in. Thanks soul and see your problem one week.