Marketing Leads: Where All The Scores Are Made Up And The Points Don't Matter

April 04, 2023

An engineer entering a marketing department should presume (until seeing evidence to the contrary) that all scores are made up.

Your goal is to increase MQLs? Great, let's give eBook visitors 30 MQL points, so downloading an eBook MQLs you.

How do those eBook MQLs perform compared to Contact Form MQLs compared to Webinar MQLs compared to Event MQLs compared to Product MQLs (aka PQLs).

Lol wut why would you want to know that.

What about the rate at which do they convert to sales conversations? What about opportunities? What about closed won deals? What about size of those deals?

Good luck even getting the data in a clean way.

It's not just that people don't know the answers, the systems aren't really set up for you to get the answers either, so people aren't even used to asking the questions.

You may have to do go into the CRM (aka Salesforce), do a regression (tip: dump data into CSVs, open Google Sheets, use INDEX(MATCH()) when you need to join columns together and then LINEST.

Think about the sales funnel like a leaky state machine. And then think the leaks in the way a security pentester would think about running an exploit. Look for the gaps between systems. That's where people are likely falling out.

One gap is the gap between sales and marketing. Leads get handed from sales to marketing, but sales may not be handing marketing leads in a useful way, or perhaps marketing is not sending the right leads to sales, or perhaps Sales doesn't actually know what the "right" leads are.

It's hard for Sales and Marketing to have a conversation around this, because handoff-related metrics are inherently adversarial. Since being able to blame your counterpart might save your job if you don't hit your number.

But you? You can talk to both of them, about whatever you're trying to figure out. After all, you're just trying to figure out how the systems all work together.

Like the Indian-American sociologist who found he was the only person trusted by both (black) Chicago South Side residents and (white) Chicago police, you're the perfect go-between, because your status is illegible. You're an engineer.