Market View
Beyond MQLs: Reframing success in B2B marketing
Sponsored by:
Produced by:
Ashley Levesque
VP of Marketing at Fuel50
About Ashley Levesque
Ashley Levesque serves as the VP of Marketing at Fuel50, bringing extensive expertise in marketing technology, brand development, and communications strategy. With a remarkable career progression from Executive Assistant to executive marketing leadership in just five years, Ashley has demonstrated exceptional professional growth and adaptability. Prior to joining Fuel50 in June 2024, she spent three years as VP of Marketing at Banzai, where she specialised in creating and analysing engaging audience experiences through marketing technology platforms.
How has your approach to measuring marketing success evolved, and what challenges have you encountered in implementing new measurement frameworks?
We've evolved to focus 100% on pipeline as our main metric. While we still use MQLs as a leading indicator of what our pipeline will look like, ultimately, we're measured on pipeline generation. The transition hasn't been without challenges, particularly on the technology side. Our systems aren't fully built for the account-based approach we're moving towards. We use Salesforce and are currently in the process of eliminating the lead object and building lead-to-account matching to better align with our strategy.
Our biggest hurdles aren't in gaining buy-in from leadership or developing the strategy—they're operational. It's about implementing what we want to do through our existing tools. We primarily use first-touch attribution to understand where interest originated, both at the contact and account level. While we can track marketing's influence across the buyer's journey, we've decided not to prioritize measuring every touchpoint.
Rather than getting caught up in measuring brand awareness and numerous marketing interactions, we focus on tracking the main milestones that bring someone to pipeline. We've condensed our approach to make it more trackable and meaningful.
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Rather than creating a list of vanity logos, we worked with sales to help them understand the value of intent-based target accounts that are a little bit more fluid and moving.
In a marketplace where 84% of buyers have largely decided on their preferred vendor before making contact, how are you positioning your marketing efforts?
I'm familiar with this research from Gartner, and it significantly influences our approach to early-stage marketing. This reality highlights the importance of investing in top-of-funnel brand-building activities that might not be easily measurable. When it comes to campaigns, messaging, positioning, or building our narrative, these elements are crucial even without a clear one-to-one ROI.
Many marketers struggle to create a business case for these investments precisely because they can't demonstrate immediate returns. They argue "We need to do this," but can't fully quantify why, except by citing research showing prospects already have a shortlist when they reach out.
In this environment, marketing's responsibility has become much more robust—we need to educate and answer every question upfront. Sales is no longer the gatekeeper to information but rather a guide through the buying process. We're working to make information more accessible before prospects engage with sales by developing product demos and self-guided website experiences—because by the time they talk to sales, it's often too late to influence their decision.
How do you approach the alignment of marketing and sales teams, particularly around target accounts and buying groups?
We built our target account list collaboratively with sales, focusing entirely on intent-based accounts within our ICP parameters. Rather than creating a list of vanity logos, we've helped sales understand the value of intent-based target accounts that are more fluid. Sales appreciates this approach because these accounts are warmer by the time they engage—they're showing signs of interest. Marketing benefits because it accelerates the sales cycle, and we can quickly assess what's working.
We're leveraging multiple intent data sources like ZoomInfo and G2 to create a comprehensive strategy where we can examine different levels of intent across the buyer's funnel. G2 provides bottom-of-funnel insights—showing us people comparing us with competitors or looking at pricing. ZoomInfo topics help us gain a top-of-funnel view—revealing what people are searching for.
Once we have these intent signals, we use AI tools to create content and leverage campaigns targeting these accounts. We recognize we're still evolving in how we engage buying groups. As we move further into an account-based strategy, better engaging multiple stakeholders within an account is our next step. Our intent-based systems already allow us to identify multiple contacts showing signs of intent across the buying journey.
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Marketing's responsibility has become so much more robust in needing to not only educate but also answer every question, so that sales is no longer considered the gatekeeper to information.
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Marketing and sales are coming closer and closer together, in terms of function and responsibility as BDRs and SDRs kind of go away at many organizations.
Looking ahead, what significant changes do you anticipate in B2B marketing, and how is your organization preparing for these shifts?
One of the most significant trends I'm seeing is that marketing and sales are converging more closely, particularly as BDR and SDR roles disappear at many organizations. There's still a need for outreach, but it's increasingly unclear where this responsibility falls. This shift is creating a more unified revenue function where marketers are now doing outreach, and traditional closers are now hunting.
We've experienced this firsthand after eliminating our BDR function. This quickly raised questions about how roles would change and highlighted the need for sales and marketing to collaborate more closely—meeting weekly to discuss market dynamics and prospect interactions.
In this new environment, having clean systems has become our greatest challenge. As our functions become more integrated, we have higher expectations for our technology. It needs to provide real-time insights to each function so we can continue to move quickly. This is why we're investing in technologies like Jeeva for multi-channel outreach spanning email and LinkedIn.
The shift from human-driven to technology-driven outreach also reflects a practical reality—when faced with spending budget on personnel versus technology, I'm increasingly inclined to test our outbound strategy with technology before committing to hiring. This approach allows us to validate our strategies more quickly and cost-effectively in today's rapidly evolving B2B landscape.
About Fuel50
Fuel50 is a global leader in talent intelligence solutions, dedicated to solving the skills crisis with the industry’s only expert-driven skills ontology. By offering curated skill development, career pathing, and actionable insights, Fuel50 helps organizations close skill gaps and build dynamic, successful teams. Fuel50 helps leading global brands such as Johnson & Johnson, Fidelity, and Meta achieve measurable results such as increased internal mobility, reduction in employee churn, and improved employee engagement.
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.
