The Contentious SQL Debate Between Marketing + Sales (with Bastien Paul)
Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge.
Intro:Never fear, hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub Heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording.
Intro:This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer.
Liz Moorhead:Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another great episode of the Hub Heroes podcast. And are we all focused and accounted for today?
George B. Thomas:It's a full house.
Liz Moorhead:It's a full house. We got some usual suspects here. Obviously, George, we've got you. We've got myself, Liz, and Max, but we have Chad back joining us and his glowing sentient printer in the background. I love it.
Liz Moorhead:I love it.
George B. Thomas:That printer's just gonna get up and walk away mid waves of the podcast.
Chad Hohn:It's just gonna pull an optimist.
George B. Thomas:You know?
Max Cohen:It's like
George B. Thomas:an art It's looking like
Max Cohen:it's looking like one of those it's like one of those new Tesla robots. That's what I'm saying. It's gonna
Chad Hohn:pour me a drink, do rock, paper, scissors with me.
Liz Moorhead:Driving printer.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. It is. It's a self copying printer.
George B. Thomas:If it was if it was a printer that could pour me a drink, I would have purchased one weeks ago.
Liz Moorhead:It's true. But, guys, we we best behavior today, guys. We got Hi. Got some cool peeps in the house. Who Bastian Paul of Hubly dot I o.
George B. Thomas:Let's go.
Liz Moorhead:CEO and cofounder. You're here joining us from France where it is, what, 08:00 at night there right now. Is that correct?
Bastien Paul:Nine nine. Nine PM. Oh, gee.
George B. Thomas:That's good.
Bastien Paul:That's good. I got some oysters and, white wine just before, so I'm ready for the podcast.
George B. Thomas:There we go. Oysters and white wine and hub heroes. That's what I I put those together all the time.
Bastien Paul:That's the best
George B. Thomas:White wine and hub heroes.
Max Cohen:I've already I've already censored myself once, Liz. Just just just so you know I'm
George B. Thomas:being a good boy. A running count, like a clicker?
Bastien Paul:Yep. Like,
Max Cohen:I'm gonna write down I'm gonna write down all the jokes I'm gonna write down all the jokes I would have made if we were not behaving. Yes.
Liz Moorhead:And then when Liz can't end the podcast again, you're like, well, here we go.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Just gonna unload it. Yep.
George B. Thomas:I'll help you. I'll help you land it.
Chad Hohn:Oh. Good.
Liz Moorhead:Well, before we get into our conversation today about SQLs, Bastian, I you and I have had a couple of conversations leading up to today, and I have questions before we dig in. First of all, for our listeners at home, you are an authority on SQLs. I wanna have this conversation about that with you, but tell us about Hubly.io and where that fits into this conversation. Who's it for? What problem does it solve?
Bastien Paul:Sure. Sure. So so before, I was working as a growth marketer. So I don't know if you have lots of that in US. It's more a team where it's building companies and lists, for the salespeople.
Bastien Paul:It's got it's not like in marketing teams, a growth team. It's really, like, sales support. And, yeah, I joined the company. We were, like, four, five. We raised to 100, raised, like, 20,000,000.
Bastien Paul:And I was handling the growth team for, building the list for them. And I was sometimes pissed off by sales, and salespeople need something. Like, they need the apps. They need to they were constantly asking us for things because we have everything. We had, like, BigQuery, enrichment thing, everything inside of the bots, all the tools you know, connected with your APIs that you make, whatever you want.
Bastien Paul:But I have no, like, tool just to give them so they can just do their work, have the power of, growth and marketing team, and we can work on scalable things. And so, yeah, that's why we we developed, have been with, two coworkers. Yeah. That's that's the way we we after we checked, what kind of tools existed on the market, and we say, okay. Let's let's try to do something better just for HubSpot, since I was using HubSpot for four or five years.
Bastien Paul:So I really have appreciate that since that kind of CRM. And, yeah, that's where that's where we we went.
George B. Thomas:So there's there's two things that I love. Technology born out of the fact that I got mad at the sales team, and and I'm gonna build this, on Hub Spot because over the four years I've been using it, I fell in love with it. So this is already shaping up to be an amazing story. Liz, I know you
Liz Moorhead:Oh, no. I love that. It's raging against the machine, but creating ROI out of
George B. Thomas:of it. I love that.
Bastien Paul:Yes. Like, I mean, I don't know if you do you guys know Gorgias? It's a company, Gorgias, help desk for ecommerce, specialize on Shopify. So it's a French American company, and they specialize only on Shopify for help desk for four, five day for five years. Sorry.
Bastien Paul:And after, they did other CRMs. So I really liked this kind of company, growing, like, not so fast, but, steady growth. So, yeah, that's why we and you have some company also named Deliver. It's a ecommerce logistics, only plug to Shopify bought by about 2,000,000,000 from Shopify. And they did only Shopify.
Bastien Paul:They didn't do any other CMS, something like that. So, yeah, I think I think, like, okay. We can do something for for the same like that. And, frankly, like, I didn't know there was a huge, huge ecosystem before, going down into Hublit. Oh, you just got lucky.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. You got lucky on
Bastien Paul:that. I saw that. Yeah. So, like, Happily, of course, errors, company like that doing only for for HubSpot. So I said, okay.
Bastien Paul:There is something there is say something we can do, so so let's let's try it. And got I love that. I got mad from salespeople.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Yeah. That's the nugget.
Liz Moorhead:So there is one last question I have for you, Bastia, before we start talking about SQLs. One of the things that you are exceptionally passionate about is something that I know George is also exceptionally passionate about, and it's this idea of continuous learning or the way George talks about it on this podcast and of beyond good to all this, getting 1% better every single day. And I know for a while there, you did have a goal of three books per month. We're not here to check you on that.
George B. Thomas:This is not a New
Liz Moorhead:Year's resolution check it. But I would be curious, what is a favorite book of yours that you've read recently where you put it down and went, dang. That actually that actually made a difference in my mindset.
Bastien Paul:Sure. I don't know. George, did you check the Stripe Press or the books from Stripe? You should
George B. Thomas:if you
Bastien Paul:don't, you you should. You should. That's amazing. Inside this press, you have a bunch of books, like, commercialized by Stripe. And in this one, the last one of the latest one is Charles Almanack.
Bastien Paul:It's on Charlie's Charles Timanger, the cofounder of, I mean, cofounder. I don't know. But a really good serger from Warren Buffett. And, like, he never wrote a book. He never wrote something, but he just appeared on 10 different conferences where he just shows his thing.
Bastien Paul:Just shows everything, what he learned, how he invest into companies, how he behave, how he learned something. And, yeah, this book, like, it was mind blowing. I really like it.
Liz Moorhead:So Poor Charlie's Arbonnet. Is that it? Poor yeah.
Bastien Paul:It's Charles Keymonger.
Liz Moorhead:Keymonger? Yeah. Yep. I'm putting it in the chat for everybody, and I'll make sure it's in the show now.
George B. Thomas:I I love that you went in that direction because and, again, I love books. I love listening to books. There there are so many things we can learn when we do try to educate ourselves. Yeah. And one of the ones for me, Bastian, that was the most kind of mind blowing and, wow, did I really take that journey was the book Snowball, which is actually the Warren Buffett story.
George B. Thomas:And and as an audiobook to
Bastien Paul:read it. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:It's as an audiobook, it's thirty eight hours that I listened to this book, and it was phenomenal. I loved it. I loved it.
Bastien Paul:Yeah. I loved it. And, they have, some other book more related to our business. High growth and good and growth book from Elad Gill. He's a guy, who created the company.
Bastien Paul:I don't remember his name, but he was bought by Twitter. And after he was VP people of Twitter, and he joined Twitter, like, at 50 people. And, he had Twitter to write to, like, 1,000, something like that. And he wrote, like, a huge book on, okay, how do you structure your board member? How do you hire?
Bastien Paul:How do you implement vision inside your company? And this book are free online. So you can go online, and you can read it. You can just buy the book because it's beautiful, and I love papers. But, yeah, this one was really mind blowing, especially when I was working before, in a company to to understand, like, okay.
Bastien Paul:How do you grow as an employee inside a company? Yeah. And, yeah, I really liked it. Yeah. I think definitely, like, surplus, every book they have, I want to read everything.
Liz Moorhead:So, Bastian, like, once a month, I'm basically you start having you at tell us what to read and what tools to use. Bastian's Corner. Still recorded late at night. Right? That's right.
Liz Moorhead:Alright. So let's dig in because I I was very excited about this topic, and I know I say this a lot, but I I'm saying I'm excited about this because it comes from a deep reservoir pain that I have felt at different points throughout my career in marketing. Let me let me paint the scene here. Right? So marketing and sales, theoretically on the same team.
Liz Moorhead:Theoretically, all bringing in and Max, don't start.
George B. Thomas:Can somebody tap this? I think she's dreaming.
Liz Moorhead:No? Theoretically.
Max Cohen:She did say theoretically to be sure.
George B. Thomas:Did say theoretically. That's true.
Liz Moorhead:Alright. You know what? Let's try to come together, guys.
George B. Thomas:Alright. Alright. My bad.
Liz Moorhead:I've gotten I've gotten to one sentence into the problem, and we're already acting up. Okay. So on the one side, regardless as to whether it's on the other side of the continent or in the same building, we have marketing. Right? They're generating leads.
Liz Moorhead:They're running campaigns. They're filling up the CRM with potential prospects. And on the other side, we've got sales teams, right, who are focused on closing deals. But too often, we have a situation where these sales teams are saying those leads are not sales qualified. In fact, 47% of b two b sales teams say that the leads that they are getting that are supposed to be sales qualified from marketing are not sales qualified.
Liz Moorhead:But marketing is sitting there going, well, I don't understand why you're saying there's no revenue coming in from our campaigns. We've just handed over this many qualified leads. And we all said these were the metrics that said they were qualified. So what's going on? So this is where we're going into the messy middle today.
Liz Moorhead:Right? We have two teams who are saying at the beginning, we've agreed what a qualified lead is, but somewhere in that handoff, something's going wrong. Marketing is starting with the lead saying, this is a qualified human, and sales is getting that hue and saying, nah. Absolutely not. So that's what we're dealing with today.
Liz Moorhead:What I like to call the sales qualified lead conundrum because it can't use swear words in a title.
Bastien Paul:Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:So that is the closest point to get
George B. Thomas:to.
Max Cohen:Theoretically. Theoretically. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:If you're maxed You can words in any
Liz Moorhead:shape Max.
George B. Thomas:That you want to.
Liz Moorhead:Get a crouton in your steering wheel. You're at a 15. So let's start this conversation. And, actually, George, I wanna start with you on this question. Although, Bastian and Max and Chad, I know you're gonna have thoughts on this.
Liz Moorhead:But I wanna start with you, George, because you spend every day talking with different sales and marketing teams. Right?
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:So we have sales and marketing teams who have these different views of what makes a lead sales qualified. I'd like to know in your experience, what are the key factors you seeing driving that misalignment between those two teams?
George B. Thomas:Oh, man. That's simple. Like, the amount of times that I have to state the obvious, I really do feel like I was put on this planet sometimes to be captain obvious when it comes to sales and marketing teams because because the biggest thing is, like, communication. Can we just sit at a table like adults and actually, take the time? That's another formula piece, right, by the way.
George B. Thomas:Communication time and strategize what it actually looks like. And when I say what it looks like, what I mean is we are not taking the time to strategize the data points. Because as soon as we get it down to data points of what we're really gonna call an MQL, an SQL, or whatever l that you wanna add to it, now we can truly start to do some magical things. But, again, it starts with communicate, take the time, strategize data.
Liz Moorhead:I wanna I wanna come back around, though, because I asked you to tell me what the problem is, and you're telling me how to solve it. I wanna know why they're disagreeing in the first place.
Bastien Paul:I think I think they have two different language. What's saying George? Like and that's something I really understood also when I was in marketing and sales. Like, marketing speaking about data instead of speaking about, like, feelings or things like that. I don't I don't sometimes more in marketing side.
Bastien Paul:So the beginning of the program, one of one part of the program is that different languages between, between two different team. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:I I actually totally agree with that. And what's funny is that, and this is not a plug. I am not shilling, but I literally had today a training for the super admin training that we do where we talked about c suite in stakeholder communication, and we talked about the different communication styles of, like, the HubSpot super
Bastien Paul:admin and the actual c suite and how one is
George B. Thomas:like a technical view and one is a actual c suite and how one is like a technical view and one is a business view. But one of the sections in that training, we actually talk about when communicating to marketing, do these things. When communicating to sales, say it in these ways. And so, Bastian, you are hitting the nail on the head. Like, Liz, to answer your question, they're speaking different languages and not taking the time to come to the table to understand the languages that they're speaking to then actually strategize based on common language, the data points they need to make a platform work for the process of the people.
Liz Moorhead:Chad, you and your creepy printer right now are being so polite and quiet. I gotta know what's going on in that head of yours. Well, I'm totally glad that I love about you too.
Chad Hohn:Be good.
Liz Moorhead:You're welcome. Oh, okay. Chad, so here's what I need you to do. I need you to activate the superpower I know isn't dormant and think about it from that tactics perspective. Right?
Liz Moorhead:Oh, yeah. You are a master of process, scalable, repeatable process. So where do you see the tactical parts of this process right now?
Chad Hohn:Yeah. I mean, I it's literally kinda like Nick mentioned in chat. Right? Nick from Fargo, he is saying, you know, blank starts at the definition of terms literally knowing what the definition for your organization because it's different in b to b, b to c. What is an MQL?
Chad Hohn:What is an SQL? And you know what? What workflow or what form is flipping this property. Right? Like, oh my goodness.
Chad Hohn:Like, because if you can't even report on the data accurately, you're arguing over imaginary everything.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Sure.
Chad Hohn:It doesn't even matter if you can't even flip the property at the right time. Like, they're like, oh, we generated this many leads. And then they're like, oh, well, these aren't good leads. And it's like, well, yeah, because we said they're SQLs, but, actually, they're not. Like, you know, because we didn't even agree.
Chad Hohn:Right? That's, like, the technical part. You need to, like, all just sit down and figure out how to, like, you know, I don't know, just program an AI model where you type in what you think, you know, and then the other side types in what they think, and then it translates. Right? And then you guys can actually understand what each other are talking about.
George B. Thomas:First of all, Max, that is your next get, brother, where you use GPT's voice assistant to translate marketing speak to sales speak. Like, that would be absolutely amazing.
Chad Hohn:So good.
George B. Thomas:It's it's but here's the thing. I wanna back up before we dive back into this conversation because, obviously, this is a podcast for HubSpot users, and Chad just said something on the tip of his tongue like it was, like, known to everybody. If you're sitting here and you're like, wait. Did Chad just say that I can actually set an SQL based on a form conversion? Yeah.
George B. Thomas:In HubSpot forms, you can do that. And I'm not I'm not even saying that you gotta go do the workflow, but also did did Chad say that we should be focused on, like, an automated process that actually fills the gap for what humans used to once have to do in a drop down in the c yes. That's what Chad's saying. So, like, please, by all this holy, if you're the HubSpot user that hears that and don't have that, go do that. Like, that's your action item for today.
Max Cohen:Alright. I'll shut up.
Liz Moorhead:Max, you are free to speak.
George B. Thomas:Tell us what's going on in
Liz Moorhead:the heart of hearts.
Max Cohen:I mean Everyone hold on. My I mean, my whole take on the MQL and SQL thing is, probably one of just frustration because it's, you know, no one ever defines it the same way.
George B. Thomas:Mhmm.
Max Cohen:Right? Like, a marketing qualified lead as a sales qualified lead mean, like, literally nothing until you get into an organization. Like, you get them to define it. And then, of course, you get in different organizations that, like, don't even call things MQLs or SQLs or have no a completely different concept of what marketing qualified versus sales qualified is. Sometimes it's like marketing qualifies before sales qualified, but sometimes the difference between MQL and SQL is, like, who actually generated the lead.
Max Cohen:And it's really kind of at the same sort of lateral place. And so to me, it's like, I I I'm I'm wondering, like, how much, like, HubSpot's life cycle stages in their c m CRM have, like, poisoned us all into this, like, argument around what's a MQL and what's an SQL because, like, it's something that you saw in HubSpot that had you know, one came before the other because, like, you gotta put it somewhere in the in the drop down. Right? And then it created this whole like, there was, like, a lot of content created about it. And then, you know, a lot of confusion because there was no automation that was moving these stages between each other, and you had to build workflows to think about what's this versus what's that, and is one better than the other or what, like which is why I'm happy that they're, like, finally changing, like, their default life cycle stages after all these years.
Max Cohen:And I think they're even just calling it, like, lead out. Right? Like, I I don't even know if they have MQL and SQL on there, but I might be wrong. But, I mean, the the thing is is, like, when it like, I think there I think definitions are needed no matter what you call it because, like, I I do subscribe to the idea that, like, what we would kind of consider a lead can have, like, a couple of different basic things that need to happen. Right?
Max Cohen:Like, we talk about physics a lot on this show. Right? Like, I do think marketing's job is to go find people that are a good fit. That's one thing. Right?
Max Cohen:And then take those people that are a good fit or or create content for those people that are a good fit and then get them engaged enough to the point that they're ready to talk to sales. If I had to, like, boil it down to the most, like, basic basic rudimentary, like, what's your job as a marketer? Right? And I think what you kinda call those different stages is, you know like, for me, I'm just like, dude, do whatever works for you. Right?
Max Cohen:But a lot of it comes down to, like, is there some kind of, like, rough SLA between sales and marketing? Because that's where the definition of these things get really important. Right? Is because you wanna be able to have sales and marketing teams work together effectively. And for teams to do that, they have to be able to come up with agreements on what they're, you know, promising the other side that they're gonna do for them, right, in some way, shape, or form.
Max Cohen:You know, and a lot of the times, it was just like, you know, hey. How many MQLs are we gonna create? And as long as we create enough things that we call MQLs, we've done our job marketing. Now it's, you know, sales, you know, you can't close them. That's your fault.
Max Cohen:Right?
Chad Hohn:Exactly.
Max Cohen:But it's like, look. No. You know what I mean?
Liz Moorhead:Well, that's where we get to a root of a deeper problem where we have two teams that are more interested in covering their asses in terms of hitting not hitting numbers and less
Max Cohen:than certain. We don't like that.
Liz Moorhead:It's true. It's true. They're Yeah. We have two teams where whether it's because there's animosity or we're living in a climate where there's less job security, people are more concerned about making sure, well, we covered our end of the bargain. We covered our end of the deal.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:See? And so that's where those numbers get
George B. Thomas:Any anytime you live there's two things I gotta say because one's just burning a hole in my brain. But this is what I'm gonna say first. Anytime you live in a CYA culture, you have lost sight of the humans and the importance of actually working as a freaking team. Now I have to back up for a second because Max says we talk about physics a lot on this podcast. Hold up.
George B. Thomas:We might talk about inbound physics, but I don't want anybody to get confused and think that you're gonna tune in someday, and we're gonna talk about Isaac Newton or James Clerk Maxwell or Albert Einstein. That's not the physics that Max is talking about.
Chad Hohn:Max and I, we got you covered.
George B. Thomas:Anyway, just I wanna throw my
Liz Moorhead:I wanna throw my 2¢ in here about go ahead, Max.
Max Cohen:No. No. Give me your 2¢, and I'll tell you kinda, like, how we've done it. Like, we've kinda switched up the way we look at, like, leads and stuff. You you do your
Liz Moorhead:Dude, do it. Just take it away.
George B. Thomas:Well, I
Max Cohen:mean, so, like, you know, we've gotten away from sort of that linear model and, you know Mhmm. Like, our sales and marketing teams, we're all on the same team. We're just called the GTM team. That's it. Like, we're all going to market together as a team, as a group.
Max Cohen:We're gonna go to the market, and we're gonna get lots of awesome fruits and nutrients and bring it back, and we're all gonna thrive. Like, that's the way we look at it. Right? And so, like, when we think about leads, you know, we've we've dug a lot into, like, HubSpot's prospecting tool a lot more lately, and, like, we all start there now. Right?
Max Cohen:And the big thing instead of, like, thinking of, like, how many MQLs did we create, how many SQLs did we create, what we're doing is we're kind of realizing, like, there's all these ways we can generate leads. Right?
George B. Thomas:I believe.
Max Cohen:And there's different people that are responsible for generating different parts of those leads. Right? So, like, there's leads generated from Brian and Joe just going out to LinkedIn and prospecting and, like, doing their thing. There's leads that clearly come in from the content creation that we do. Right?
Max Cohen:There's leads that find us on Google. There's leads that, you know, HubSpotters reach out to me, and then I connect them with people. And so, like, we started thinking more about measuring what we're calling lead triggers. Right? And so, like, every time we generate a lead inside of HubSpot, we have some sort of, like, trigger where it's like, this came from this motion.
Max Cohen:Right? And so, like, what we're doing is we're carefully looking at all these different motions as these leads are getting generated, and then we're kind of evaluating the success of them over time. Right? Versus saying, like, oh, we gotta get up to this stage first. And then once they do this, they could move out of this stage, and we're just looking at everything.
Max Cohen:It's like, what little your path? Like, we don't we don't do that. It has to be three-dimensional, four dimensional. It has to be, like, way more than just, like, a straight line. Right?
George B. Thomas:Almost like physics.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:Bastian, it sounded like you, like, had some thoughts on what Max was saying.
Bastien Paul:Yeah. I think I think, like, the the the thing of MQS was really to like, you want to have a report, a KPI for your marketing team. They have to report to the manager and the manager. Like, the CMO has to report to the CEO. And at the end, like, you're trying to to, like, have the best analytics in the world, last attribution, whatever you want.
Bastien Paul:That's a mess. Like, and, like, I don't know, two weeks or a few weeks ago, Adam Robinson from Airbnb just saying, like, I don't track. I just don't track. He has, like, one of the key followers. Whenever he posts something, he has YouTube channel.
Bastien Paul:Of course, it's working. Of course, it's building the brand of his company, of him. Of course, he's generating leads. He's doing content for a specific audience, and this specific audience is is high CP. So unless he's doing content on TikTok, for example, where that the his, just not does not slack on it, I think that's okay.
Bastien Paul:So for us, for example, we we only measure, bottom of the funnel, like ads, things like that, things you can really measure, or, you want to do some contents on transactional subject keywords, but guess whatever you want. But after at the end, I think you shouldn't care. Maybe you should look at the amount of sign up. Be sure, like, your sign up is not plenty of Gmail, free mail, or to mail, whatever you are you want. But if you if you're gathering good good agents on your ICP, I think at the end, that's okay.
Bastien Paul:And I do agree with Max. I think, like, having every time, like, looking at MQLs, it's good, but it's a mess at the end, and you're just losing time. You just need to do more actions and building the best report with the the best funnel, whatever you you want.
Liz Moorhead:So there's one little piece that I wanna add to this where we start getting a little bit into the intangibles of the relationships you have between marketing and sales. And I know we use it for alignment and, like, we're gonna have revenue TV and we're gonna be friends. Like, no. But here's the thing. Right?
Liz Moorhead:Think about in your personal life, there's someone you don't like. If someone you don't like sneezes really loudly, god, why is that person so loud? Oh my god. They're so disruptive. We're trying to watch a movie.
Liz Moorhead:But let's say it's your best friend. Here. Do you need a tissue? God bless you. Are you okay, my sweet angel baby?
Liz Moorhead:How are you? Are you okay? If your marketing and salespeople do not get along and you have an SQL problem, depending on which side of the fence that's on, if they do not have built in trust, rapport, if they don't treat each other like human beings, something that is actually kind of like a level one nonemergency is going to be treated like a seven because that team already is predisposed or that person is predisposed to not like them, to not trust them. So they're looking for evidence of them not doing their job. Like that, I've seen this happen.
Liz Moorhead:If there is a toxicity that exists between the teams, it is going to be more challenging to solve these issues because there is going to be a resistance to solving the problem and being more interested in identifying problems that exist. So, like and I see this a lot with teams, and I've been on a team where this happened. I've talked about this at a company I used to work at where the sales and the marketing team were actually super tight personally. We hung out. We went to bars.
Liz Moorhead:We went to happy hours. We went on trips. We did all this stuff. But when we were in the office, the sales team overall had trust issues with a lot of different parts of the company. They often felt like service or product changes were happening, and they were finding about it afterward.
Liz Moorhead:They would sell a deal and then be told that that doesn't exist anymore. They would be told by well meaning they would be told by well meaning marketers, we will absolutely get you that sales enablement piece of content. But then their VP or that c suite above them changed their priorities, told them that someone would communicate that to sales, and either they did, and guess what? That's a broken promise, or they didn't, and that's a broken promise with no communication. Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:Yeah. So what happened so what happens is
George B. Thomas:that if we have this underlying toxicity, yes, we have exactly the
Liz Moorhead:things that we're talking about. Right? There toxicity, yes, we have exactly the things that we're talking about. Right? There are the definitions.
Liz Moorhead:There's the brass tacks of if you can't measure it, if you can't document it, if you can't define it, nobody's measuring anything. We can't fix anything. If we have no agreements, what expectations are we holding people to? But if we have two teams where there is toxicity, where they are predisposed to dislike each other, the moment you sneeze is the moment I will make your life hell. Like, you know what I mean?
Liz Moorhead:Like, it's just
George B. Thomas:do you know
Liz Moorhead:what I'm saying?
George B. Thomas:Can I shift gears for a second, though? Sure. Yeah. Can I can I shift gears for a second, though? Because I don't know I understand this team dynamic that we're talking about, but I also wanna lean into something that Bastian and Max both kind of said, and that was this idea of need for action.
George B. Thomas:And and let's be honest, like, sometimes does one team lean on another team too much when they could actually be taking the action that they should be taking anyway? And could that action be easier? And what I mean is when I think about sales, you know the way that I always make sales? I make sales because I have conversations. And you know what's been increasingly more difficult?
George B. Thomas:Having conversations in a digital world. And you know where most of the conversations actually happen? They happen on LinkedIn, to be honest with you, in a digital world, like, unless they're coming to my website. And so if I, as a sales rep, actually wanna have more conversations, I wanna find an easier way to have those conversations, and I know the conversations are happening on LinkedIn, then maybe I use a tool like HubLead as a sales rep to have the conversations and take the action that I need to take so I don't have to weigh so much on an actual marketing team because I'm out there. Guess what?
George B. Thomas:Being a salesperson that knows how to market myself myself and sell myself and therefore market and sell my products. I don't know. Maybe that's a novel idea. Like, I live in a world where I wish more marketers would know how to sell and more sales folks would know how to market. And both of them could use a tool like HubLead, just saying, to actually have the conversations that matter and drive the funnel and drive ROI.
George B. Thomas:That that's all I'm saying.
Liz Moorhead:Yes. I agree with that. And, Bastian, I actually wanna come back to you here for this next question because we talked a lot about why are mommy and dad egg fighting, and is it our fault, and what's happening? Right? Like, we're having this conversation about what's going on here between marketing and sales, but I wanna get out of the relationship.
Liz Moorhead:I wanna get out
George B. Thomas:cameras in my house. When every time she said that, I'm like, are we being documented? Who's that?
Max Cohen:No. I have cameras in here.
George B. Thomas:Just kidding.
Max Cohen:Sorry. Don't tell him. I had to let her know.
George B. Thomas:I had
Bastien Paul:to let her know.
Liz Moorhead:How does Mike how does Mike fashion, I wanna talk to you about the lead handoff. Right? Because this is this is that friction. This is this is the point where somebody drops the potato, and somebody picks it back up, but that drop bruises it may have a problem. Right?
Liz Moorhead:So what are the strategies or frameworks you've seen that work best to smooth this handoff process out, whether that's technology or strategy?
Bastien Paul:Yeah. So at the beginning, like, one of like, we were producing I I just want to to request a bit of context. Like, we are producing a massive list of LinkedIn, ecommerce websites for my sales. We got, like, nine BDRs, so that's nine SDRs in Paris, Four in Spain, and four in UK. You gave the list.
Bastien Paul:They called. We were doing only call calling, and we were not we were like we we wanted to to to say, okay. Do we target companies with 1,000,000 turnover yearly on yearly basis? Out of 100, how many did you get? And the goal was 2020%.
Bastien Paul:So you this one was a KPI for the sales team to be sure that the marketing, growth team is doing their job. So we are reviewing that. KPI is well low, Maybe at 15, for example, 10%. So it was my fault. So I go back in my desk, work, work, work, work, doing all machine learning what you want.
Bastien Paul:You do you want, scrapping with, scrapping with, whatever you want to score a website, going back to the list and giving it to them. But what I really, find is, you had I had this communication problem. I had this problem to do a lot of things on my side and not showing to the salespeople, but I I missed something big is what kind of KPI do I do I have to be sure that my sales rep are doing their job. I don't know if you guys have, but for me, I check online, I check on different contents, and I found nothing. I'm just not speaking about, like, different bunch of KPIs, but one KPI you can have.
Bastien Paul:And my idea was something like, how many the thing was maybe how many touch points did you get on the company? How many decision maker did you find and did you outreach on different channel? Because every time I was sitting next to next to SDR, looking at the company, and I said, hey. You had only one cofounder. He said he was not interested.
Bastien Paul:Did you get the other one? No. Maybe you should. Did you get the head of logistics? No.
Bastien Paul:Maybe you should. But your first cofounder told me he wasn't interested. Yeah. But the first one, you don't know him. You don't know if he's doing that job, if he's handling, the part of the process you want to solve inside the company.
Bastien Paul:You don't know how they are working. You don't have you don't have also the ICT information, like how many orders do they ship amounts, for example. So, yeah, I was searching for this kind of KPI to have, like, both. One, whereas the marketing team, be sure that safety, are doing the right job and the reverse the reverse sales marketing job for marketing. I don't know if you have any key share like that or you had this problem before.
Liz Moorhead:Gentlemen, normally, you are jumping right in. Why is everybody suddenly being all polite now?
Chad Hohn:It just makes my brain go in a ton of a ton of places. Right? Is is, like, every business is so unique, right, in a way. I mean, there's like a lot of industries that are a lot, you know, somewhat similar, but, like, sometimes trying to find out if the sales team is doing what you need them for the marketing team. I mean, it really comes down to, like, what are they doing and then which things are yielding closed deals.
Chad Hohn:Right? So, like, it's almost like more of a broad analysis to try and uncover that blue ocean of a KPI for your industry, whatever that industry is. Right? So a lot of it is really and reporting in general always comes down to asking the right question and then making sure you're accurately collecting the data to answer that question reliably. Right?
Chad Hohn:And so I I guess where my brain goes is like, well, what is that industry, and what are your reps doing? And do those things have any kind of real statistical correlation to increased numbers of closed deals or increased revenue? Right?
Bastien Paul:Yeah. Like so so our NDC was so ecommerce ecommerce logistics or selling and logistic for ecommerce websites. So you have plenty of ecommerce websites, but just because like, let's say, for example, you want to target 1,000,000, yearly yearly turnover. Instead, you you can check for the, number of employees on LinkedIn, but sometimes you have, like, three, four people doing 1,000,000. And sometimes you have, like, 20 people, and they are doing five k 500 k online, and maybe they are doing a lot of b two b thing like that.
Bastien Paul:So sometimes that's relevant. And sometimes for a lot of industries, like, number of employees is not that relevant, and you still need to call and to identify on the phone, okay, what's your business, what are you how many orders do you make, turnover, and so on. And our strategy was less inbound. It was more outbound. We had, like every BGR was doing, like, 60 to 70 calls a day.
Bastien Paul:So we had a massive, workforce to call call call call. And when you do that, your your CAC is kind of high. So you want to reduce it with a targeting list. And at the end, having new companies, French companies, was kind of a a drug. Like, you wanted to to have your, to have to to to sell more, just go to the marketing and ask for more companies.
Bastien Paul:Yeah. So I wanted to have that. And at the end, I checked with, some guys from HubSpot, how they do their sales, how do they, give how many companies do you keep a month amount, for example, a quarter of an asset. I really like the idea of how how do you know if a sales is good or not? You can check, for example, the number of deals they close.
Bastien Paul:But if for if, for example, they close, like, 10 deals and the others are doing tight, But the others are speaking with 200 companies, and the first who who close 10 is speaking with 1,000 companies. Is he really, better than the other?
George B. Thomas:Mhmm.
Bastien Paul:You know, when you go to a sport game, when you look at the sports, you're happy when you you your team is winning. But how do you think how do you decide if the team is best, better than the other one? It's the one who won the final. It's not the number of match you you you won. You know?
Bastien Paul:So, at the end, what we implemented is that, okay, you get 200 companies for a quarter. We're gonna go to high ticket. So can we be higher, but we get more revenue? But you stick with it. And you have to convert, like, I don't know, twenty, twenty five.
Bastien Paul:You can decide whatever you want. And then you decide, okay, who which one, who's the best sales inside? And you can keep the best and and find out the the the so it's good.
Max Cohen:I think that I so we we we talked a lot about, like, fit too. Something that I, like, I've noticed, especially, like, with, you know, we're we're a couple few more than a few months into, you know, really starting to hit a good motion with, like, event happily and selling that. The thing that I've, like, noticed is and I'm not sure how great companies are doing at tracking this or trying to figure it out. It's that I think there's, like, like, we talk about lead scoring, right, fit and engagement. And, like, oftentimes, when we think about fit, we're thinking of, like, demographic or firmographic fit.
Max Cohen:Right? Like, is this a company in our ICP? Right? Where it's like, okay. Right amount of employees, they do this, they do that, da da da da da.
Max Cohen:Like, for us, you know, does your company do events? You're generally a good fit
Bastien Paul:for us.
Max Cohen:Right? But then what gets, like, really weird is that events get so complex, right, that I think there's this, like, concept of, like, problem fit. There's probably already a word for it. I don't think I'm making up anything new here. Right?
Chad Hohn:Problem solution fit.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Like like that like, that's that's the thing that I think is is is sort of, like, the next thing we gotta figure out how to, like, get ahead of. Right? Because we waste a lot of time on calls when we could be getting this information ahead of time. Right?
Max Cohen:Because, like, you know, Event Happily, we're great for, like, webinars, in person events, trade show lead capture. Are we great for, like, a conference yet that needs to do booth management and vendor management and all this other stuff?
Chad Hohn:Just think of trying to run-inbound on it.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Sure. You could build it, but, like, we're gonna be 1% of that solution. Right? So, like, we're not a great fit for that.
Max Cohen:But, like, you're still technically our ICP because you do events. Right? And so it's like like, what I'm what I'm kind of, like, trying to wrap my head around to figure out is, like, how can we is either, like, asking smarter questions when people fill out a form. Right? Or thinking a little bit more critical critically about how, like, you're dequeuing someone in a nice good way that maybe leaves the door open in the future, but kind of, like, politely lets them know your use case isn't a good use case right now.
Max Cohen:And start thinking about, like, cool. We've captured them. We see that they're in ICP. We see that they're highly engaged. But before they highly engaged.
Max Cohen:But before they get to sales, is there something that we can do to kind of figure out if they're, like, a good, you know, problem fit for what we actually do and what our tool's really, really good at, right, instead of wasting a bunch of sales calls on folks that, like, shouldn't even be wasting their time with us. Right? Mhmm. Like, that's, I think, sort of the next sort of level of fit that I wanna kinda crack the code on. Right?
Max Cohen:Because we me and Joe, we love talking to folks. Right? But we have a lot of calls with people that it's just like, man, yeah, we do event management, but your flavor of event management is really, really weird. Right? And, like, sure.
Max Cohen:Can we can we get you about 1% of the way there? Absolutely. But then, like, you know, I end up wasting a bunch of time having all these esoteric conversations selling HubSpot itself and not even our app. Right? And so, like, I think, like, just just the idea of, like, problem fit too is something I wanna, like, pay a lot more attention to.
Max Cohen:But, Bastian, I think you were talking about, like, KPIs for, like, sales reps and stuff like that. And, like, what are you looking at? Are you looking at number of calls, number of closed deals? I don't think anyone is paying attention to, like, you know, the percentage at which customers, like, renew or do repeat business. You know what I mean?
Max Cohen:Like, that's like, clawback is one thing. Right? But the but the thing that sucks about sales reps is that, like, it's such a job of attrition, and there's so much high turnover that, like, measuring something like, hey. At what rate do the customers that you sold actually renew? Which is probably the best indication that they were a good fit customer, like, when you actually brought them in, you know, after they've had, like, a year of the product or, you know, they buy it the first time and come back and buy it again.
Max Cohen:Like, that's something that we should be measuring, but it's tough because salespeople are generally in and out. Right? And not there for really, really long periods of time. Sure. There are some that stick around in places for a while.
Max Cohen:Right? But you tend to already know they're a good sales rep if they've been there for more than two years. Right? So, you know, it's just a couple random thoughts to throw in there.
Liz Moorhead:I love all of that. I wanna move from we're having lots of conversations about the actual definition, but often what will happen where I see a lot of breakdown is, like, let's say we have a situation where people are do where teams are doing the work that we're talking about right now. Right? But that is status quo. That is present moment.
Liz Moorhead:That is if our processes and systems and size stay exactly the same. It's when they start to scale. Maybe they maybe the fact that everybody's getting along and agreeing on what the leads are means they're growing in revenue. So their business becomes more complex or their teams get larger or they change systems. And, Bastian, this is where I wanna come back to you.
Liz Moorhead:When you think about the advice you want to give to companies who are trying to lead scale their lead qualification processes without losing consistency, without creating brand new spicy problems, what are those recommendations that you have for them? And I know Hubly might be a part of that, but I'd love kind of strategically at a high level, but also into more of that technology and
Bastien Paul:technology.
Max Cohen:Can we make merch for the show? It's just a T shirt that literally just says brand new spicy problems.
Liz Moorhead:You're welcome.
Max Cohen:Feel like that would be awesome.
George B. Thomas:So I say that
Liz Moorhead:pretty much in every content audit. Don't worry. Once we uncover this, we'll have brand new spicy problems. But that's a problem for tomorrow, miss. Not today.
Liz Moorhead:Let's
Max Cohen:Not today.
Bastien Paul:You're speaking, like, how do you scale a sales team and taking, like, the keeping the how do you Let's evolve your SQL Yeah. Definition right right okay.
George B. Thomas:I think
Liz Moorhead:And the processes that wrap
Max Cohen:around it. Yeah.
Bastien Paul:I think that's a good point. And I think training as to your point, Max, with, problem problem, improvement fit. At the beginning, for example, at our company, previous company, we were targeting small business. So you have one or two decision maker if there is only one cofounder or two cofounder. And when when we try to go up markets, we were like, okay.
Bastien Paul:It's working with small. Let's go. We got our SDRs. We got our market. Maybe you you will have more decision maker, but we don't care.
Bastien Paul:Let's go for it. But after after that, we had, like, four or five decision maker. We had more complex setting because, for example, in that industry, you are on logistics. So when you're speaking with, for example, L'Oreal, it's not the same thing when you're speaking with a small brand doing only, T shirts, for example. So the SQL will be more complex.
Bastien Paul:When you're doing only small businesses for me and straightforward, it's simple. You have more MQL coming from, for example, inbound or this, this company's ICP. The the sale the sale is calling, get getting the info, or it match with our, product, our service. They are doing, like, 1,000,000, for example, plus small products. They are SQL.
Bastien Paul:I will book a demo for the AE, for example. But when you are doing that with a big companies, it's not that simple. You may you might need, like, two or three, meetings. So, frankly, for when I left the company, we didn't find a solution. I was into happily doing before we went we find a solution.
Bastien Paul:After, like, two years in the company, I say, okay. That's good to work in marketing team, but I want to build my company. So I went overnight and over weekend working, but more in my previous company. You know? Actually, I think your process has to evolve, and it's what's really, hard is to understand that you need to separate your team too.
Bastien Paul:I guess, for me, what I understood, One team's doing the same thing as you did before, small companies, and the other one going to upmarket and, for god's sake, not having one people doing two team. Like, this is the worst thing I saw. It never worked. It don't doesn't work, and it never never will work in every condition for me. So, yeah, I think you have to get two teams with two definition of history.
Bastien Paul:For me, what I understood, that might be wrong.
Liz Moorhead:That's fantastic.
Chad Hohn:No. That's good stuff.
Liz Moorhead:I love that. I mean, honestly, Bastian, I'm just I'm putting this out there, so you can't say no, and it's reported. And Nick from Fargo in the chat is here as a witness. So this is you verbally agreeing to come back for a second episode for us to talk more about SQLs because I I don't know if anybody else could feel the energy in this room, but, like, we have baggage to unpack. Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:We have baggage to unpack. Nick from Fargo was saying, I heard nothing. Wow, dog. Way to just, like wow. That hurts.
Liz Moorhead:That hurts my guy.
Bastien Paul:If I come back, Chad, can you just send me an Amazon with the light thing, printer, everything, like, where how I can
Chad Hohn:I'll send you a link to to the cabinet, to the printer, to the lights, and then to the stream deck that I use to control it.
Bastien Paul:So there you go. I will put
Liz Moorhead:a picture of that in the show notes. I just took a screenshot. But, George, we have covered a lot of ground today, and I would love for you since you are, thank goodness, here to help us land the plane this time, and it's not in my incapable hands. Talk to us about what you want our listeners to remember.
George B. Thomas:I mean, the fact that Chad, Max, and I, and even Liz, to an extent, are sitting here somewhat speechless. Like, that doesn't happen very often. The the, which means to me the weight of the problem is a real thing. And, you know, so it I'm not trying to be funny when I say this, but the the takeaway that I want the listeners to think about is maybe it's time to get some sales and marketing therapy. And how do you do that inside of your organization?
George B. Thomas:Like, how how because, like, again, I go back to and Bastian said it. How does sales learn the language of marketing, and how does marketing learn the language of sales, and how do we come to the table together to actually understand what we call it, what we do with it? Because, by the way, the the fact that we're so quiet, the fact that this is such a big issue means that the actual people that matter, the
Bastien Paul:humans.
George B. Thomas:There we go. Of your organization are not getting the experience that they need or deserve. Okay, Hub Heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast?
George B. Thomas:Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes. FYI, if you're part of the league of heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox, and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag, hashtag hub euros podcast on any of the socials, and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next.
George B. Thomas:Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and, of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.
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