Market View
Beyond MQLs: Reframing success in B2B marketing
Sponsored by:
Produced by:
Aaron Tanner
Vice President of Revenue at BlueOptima
Market View
Beyond MQLs: Reframing success in B2B marketing
Sponsored by:
Produced by:
Aaron Tanner
Vice President of Revenue at BlueOptima
About Aaron Tanner
Aaron Tanner is the Vice President of Revenue at BlueOptima. With extensive experience in scaling global sales teams and driving significant growth in annual recurring revenue, Aaron oversees the entire revenue function at BlueOptima. His role encompasses managing diverse teams across Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Data Science, and Professional Services. Aaron is passionate about enhancing predictability for renewals and new business and is crucial in driving BlueOptima's financial success and strategic growth.
How has your approach to marketing and sales alignment evolved, and what impact has this had on your business outcomes?
Our approach has transformed significantly over the past few years. When I first joined BlueOptima, we were primarily focused on outbound efforts with minimal marketing involvement. However, we've since shifted to a more integrated approach, recognising the importance of synchronising our marketing efforts with specific accounts.
This evolution was driven by the need for greater efficiency. We initially scaled through hiring, which led to a large outbound team, but we began to see diminishing returns in pipeline generation. We realised that scaling through headcount alone wasn't sustainable.
The key to our new approach has been ensuring alignment between marketing and sales efforts. We've moved away from siloed teams, which created inconsistency across customer touchpoints, to a more unified strategy, aligning our messaging, and we've seen significant improvements.
A particularly effective tactic has been refining our account prioritisation process. We've introduced a scoring system for accounts, which has transformed how we allocate resources and allowed us to be more strategic in our outreach.
While it's still early days, we're seeing encouraging indicators. Prospects are moving through our pipeline more quickly, and we're experiencing an uptick in meetings generated and inbound enquiries. These early signs suggest that our more aligned, account-specific strategy is resonating with our target accounts.
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By aligning our messaging and ensuring that both marketing and sales were 'speaking the same language,' we've seen significant improvements.
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Our current system, with its manual acceptance step, strikes a balance. It may not be infinitely scalable, but it eases tensions by creating a clear handoff point.
How do you manage the handover between marketing and sales, particularly regarding Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)?
We've addressed the historical tension between sales and marketing teams regarding MQLs by implementing a process where our SDR group manually reviews each MQL. This brief step serves multiple purposes.
Firstly, it ensures basic quality control. We check if the lead is from a target account and meets other fundamental criteria. But more importantly, this manual check creates a sense of ownership and accountability within the sales team.
This initial "tick of approval" from sales effectively says, "You've acknowledged this lead meets our criteria, and from this point forward, it's the sales team's responsibility." This approach has significantly reduced inter-departmental friction.
That said, I believe a certain degree of healthy tension can be beneficial. Sales will always push for better leads, more senior contacts, and bigger deals. This drive for improvement is inherent to the role and can lead to better outcomes overall.
Our current system, with its manual acceptance step, strikes a balance. It may not be infinitely scalable, but it eases tensions by creating a clear handoff point.
How has technology supported your shift towards increased contribution from new business revenue?
The impact of technology has been partial but significant. We're utilising multiple tools, with Hubspot serving as our primary platform for lead and customer management. We've fully integrated our sales process into Hubspot, and we're in the process of expanding its role across our organisation.
We're leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to initiate content creation, followed by (significant!) human editing. This approach has streamlined our content production process significantly. Additionally, our ability to track MQLs more effectively suggests that technology has been impactful.
The impact has been transformative from an automation perspective. However, we're still in the early stages of adoption; for instance, our Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy is still primarily managed through spreadsheets, so I can’t describe us as working at the cutting edge just yet.
In essence, technology has been a significant enabler in our back-end processes and automation efforts. However, we're still exploring ways to further integrate advanced technologies into our frontline marketing and sales operations.
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Marketing's responsibility transcends demand generation or capture. They are, in essence, the custodians of how we communicate with the market.
How do you perceive the role of marketing beyond lead generation, and what value does it bring to the business?
Marketing’s role extends far beyond just generating MQLs. I see immense value in its function as a guardian of quality control and consistency in messaging across our organisation.
Our marketing head acts as the arbiter of quality control, ensuring our brand guidelines are rigorously implemented. This maintains consistency in our messaging across all touchpoints, from external communications through to internal documentation.
The rationale behind this approach is that marketing's responsibility transcends demand generation or capture. They are, in essence, the custodians of how we communicate with the market. This is a profound responsibility that goes to the heart of how our company is perceived externally.
By taking this accountability seriously, marketing shapes our company's identity and market perception. It's about creating a cohesive narrative that resonates across all customer interactions, regardless of the department involved.
This role in maintaining communication quality and consistency is just as critical as lead generation. Every touchpoint contributes to our company's overall perception and, ultimately, our market success.
About BlueOptima
BlueOptima is a pioneer in software development analytics, specialising in objectively measuring software developer productivity and code quality. Leveraging the world's largest dataset of enterprise software engineering, BlueOptima provides comprehensive analytics that enables businesses to make informed decisions about their software development resources. Their solutions are designed to increase efficiency and productivity, offering clarity and transparency into the software development process. Headquartered in London, BlueOptima continues to innovate and lead in developer analytics, helping global clients achieve operational excellence and enhanced software development capabilities.
About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.
