Episode 217: Rewriting the B2B marketing rules with Nick Mason, CEO & Founder, Turtl

And let's just touch on the MQL because the ultimate currency that marketers are using and have used since the waterfall was brought in.

I mean, and it is the absolute demonstration of the funnel that we start with prospects at the top of a funnel and they go through a whole journey of MQLs, SQLs.

But MQL has become the sort of the end of the sausage machine, the factory, the outputs from the machine.

I mean, just talk to us about the MQL because I come from a sales background and the MQL has been a political football that's been kicked around for 15 years between sales and marketing.

Sales don't trust MQLs.

They prefer their own self-sourced leads.

Marketing get frustrated because they put all this effort in and sales don't follow up the MQL.

It just doesn't feel like a very... helpful metric that anyone's happy with.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a tale as old as time, right? The sales and marketing misalignment over the MQL.

I think, you know, it's how we use them and how we think about them.

I mean, I think the idea that marketing plays a role in getting people aware and moving through certain stages of the funnel to the point where perhaps they're ready for a sales conversation is right.

I think that where a lot of the challenge comes in is where the handoff is really a hard handoff.

And it's like, you know, sales don't get involved until that moment because sales then aren't sort of contributing pre that MQL stage and marketing also like their journey ends there.

And so it's a really hard handoff.

I think that just doesn't work for a variety of reasons.

But also, you know, in terms of how teams are incentivized and targeted.

And obviously if you've got a marketing team where their target is MQLs, guess what? They're going to generate a ton of MQLs.

You know, we can all do that.

And then that's the point at which sales say, well, actually these are useless and they're probably right.

and so i think there's that alignment point which is really key and that's why you know i'm really excited to see all of the conversations more recently and you know also not so recently around buying groups which is not a new concept but people have really latched on to it i think what that represents is an opportunity to get sales and marketing working much closer together on something that's real rather than just working towards metrics that don't really align properly

So buying groups, let's talk a little bit more about that.

Definitely an accurate representation of what we're seeing in B2B buying, more and more people involved, more fragmented than ever.

What do you see as the way to cut through that?

Yeah, I think the first thing is asking people to think about how they buy in their business.