Fishing in a Desert: The Plea for Quality

We’re all feeling it, volume isn’t what it used to be. If you are in B2B SaaS there are much fewer prospects in an active buying process. The mindset is much less “what can we buy” and much more “what can we cut.”

This means pipeline is looking very different. 

These circumstances can create a lot of temptation to open up the funnel and care less about quality. If you are still looking at volume based goals for your team it almost feels like you have to– but is it worth it?

How do we get our companies and teams to focus on quality even when quantity is going down?

Drive into the conflict

The quality conversation brings up a lot of emotions between marketing and sales. Sales wants as many at bats as possible, as many attempts to close the deal as they can get. If marketing is hyper focused on quality, doesn’t that mean those at bats will decrease? In most cases, yes. 

But, a sales leader that cares about effectiveness and efficiency should care if their reps are on useless calls with ill-fit companies. This is where the conversation can be brought back to your ideal customer profile (ICP). 

“The conversation with sales is around quality, and targeting, even being able to internally understand what our ICP is and what it is not, that is healthy,” says Alex Poulos, CMO of Crossbeam.

Take a hard look at your ICP 

Now that the conversation around quality has been primed, this is the time to get the leadership team together and talk ICP and segmentation.

Questions to open the discussion are:

• Has our ICP changed in the new market conditions?
• Are we seeing new trends in the deals that are progressing? 
• Is there a different buying team than we’ve historically seen (hello CFO)? 
• Are there other personas or markets that we can go after that we haven’t considered?

Understand channel performance

The final piece to the puzzle is understanding which of your marketing channels are driving quality, not just volume. This is where scoring is really critical to understand the quality of the accounts being generated from each channel, campaign and even down to specific posts. 

‍

This allows the marketing team to understand where to allocate budget for future success (not solely relying on historical attribution) based on your new segmentation and ICP. This will also show that volume can decrease and revenue can increase, wild.

Learn more about decreasing MQL volume and driving more revenue here.

This continues to build trust with the sales team that they will be receiving the best fit accounts and leads that are out there. The volume may be lower than they are used to, but their close rate should go way up. Less work and more money, doesn’t sound so bad to me. 

Want to learn more about how marketing leaders are leading efficient teams, see our session at Efficient Growth Tour.