Market View
Beyond MQLs: Reframing success in B2B marketing
Sponsored by:
Produced by:
Joey Lai
Marketing Director for Global Programmes at Beamery
About Joey Lai
Joey Lai serves as the Marketing Director for Global Programmes at Beamery, an innovative HR tech platform. With over two years at Beamery, Joey has played a pivotal role in shaping the company's marketing strategies across various sectors. Prior to joining Beamery, he gained extensive experience in B2B marketing, working in diverse industries such as finance, insurance, FMCG, and SaaS. Beamery itself is at the forefront of HR technology, helping organisations adopt a skills-first approach to workforce management, aiming to maximise and effectively utilise talent in the most impactful areas.
Can you explain the shift you're seeing towards account-based marketing in B2B and how it's influencing the way marketing is being measured?
In B2B marketing, there's a significant shift towards recognising the importance of multi-touch engagement and going deeper into each account. This shift has impacted how we measure marketing success beyond traditional metrics like lead generation and MQLs. It's no longer just about sourcing leads but also about how marketing impacts the ongoing sales cycle, influencing deals beyond the initial first touch. The end goal is to gain brand salience across the buying community, which is only increasing as buying cycles become more complex. We're strengthening relationships and identifying champions within organisations, using qualification frameworks to pinpoint opportunities.
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The end goal is to gain brand salience across the buying community, which is only ever increasing as buying cycles become more complex.
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No model is perfect, and marketing is a balance between art and science.
How has this shift impacted the specific metrics and models you use to measure marketing success?
Measuring marketing success has shifted towards a multi-attribution model, which is more complex than just looking at the lead source. It involves examining the first touch and using a W-shaped or custom model with weighted scoring based on various touch points. At Beamery, we've customised it, looking at first touches and preceding touch points, giving them equal weighting until MQL status.
No model is perfect, and marketing is a balance between art and science. We're constantly adjusting the percentage attributed to different touch points based on their value. Fine-tuning this process is key, and the challenge is justifying marketing's impact to the business. It becomes about identifying effective channels and less about distinguishing between marketing-sourced versus sales-sourced opportunities.
What are currently the top three key performance indicators by which marketing is measured in your organisation?
The three main KPIs are marketing-generated pipeline, marketing-generated revenue, and the ROI of each marketing channel. We look at the marketing-sourced pipeline originating from the first touch of a marketing lead. We measure actual revenue, focusing on closed-won opportunities. Lastly, we evaluate the ROI for every channel, aiming for a five-fold return. Performance varies; lower-performing channels might achieve a 1.8 ROI, whereas top performers can reach up to 30 times ROI. We strive for balance across these indicators. There may be some channels that are "underperforming" with ROI below 5, often large trade shows are because of the huge investment needed however they play a strategic role with brand awareness, partner engagement etc. And so, while ROI is a helpful indicator there is a need to consider the strategic importance of each channel.
If you were in the CEO's shoes, what metrics would you put in place to measure marketing's contribution to revenue generation?
The metrics our CEO should focus on are pipeline-sourced opportunities and pipeline influence, viewed together. Focusing only on pipeline-sourced can miss important touchpoints, while focusing solely on pipeline influence can obscure channel effectiveness. Some channels are cost-effective for first touch, while others are more expensive but yield deeper relationships. Understanding the balance and effectiveness of different channels is crucial.
As CEO, I would advocate for a combined view of these metrics and emphasise brand impact, balancing short-term goals with long-term brand building. Measuring and investing in brand impact versus lead generation activities varies with the business's phases, reflecting the need for a strategy that fosters long-term brand endurance.
In your opinion, what are the key trends and challenges that will shape the future of sales and marketing collaboration?
A major long-term trend will be leadership and generational shifts in sales and marketing teams. A new generation of professionals entering these fields influences our target audiences and engagement strategies. This change necessitates upskilling and training our workforce to meet evolving expectations.
Our internal workforce exemplifies a clear division between old-school, relationship-heavy salespeople and data-savvy salespeople who excel at utilising data effectively. The challenge for our younger sales team is leveraging data insights to build long-term relationships.
The incoming generation of buyers engages differently, blending personal and professional lives on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. This shift challenges us to find cost-effective engagement strategies as traditional channels become prohibitively expensive.
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This shift challenges us to find cost-effective engagement strategies as traditional channels become prohibitively expensive.
What are the critical success factors for implementing an intent platform like 6sense and what advice would you give to ensure sales buy-in and adoption?
The true power lies in its adoption by the sales team. While marketers can target the buying committee, increase intent scores, and advance prospects through awareness stages, it's crucial that salespeople are willing to engage with the data and insights provided; otherwise, the accumulated data becomes ineffective, and the engagement we've built up starts to erode.
To ensure success, involve your sales team from the beginning, even before purchasing the technology. Include them in vendor pitches and identify internal champions, particularly among data-savvy younger salespeople. Engage these individuals alongside sales leaders from the start. BDRs also play a crucial role by consistently referencing intent data during handovers. Involve BDR and sales leaders early on, and empower champions to drive selection and implementation.
If you had an unlimited budget, what investments would you make over the next two years to dramatically enhance your B2B marketing efforts, and why?
The focus would be on investing in upskilling and reskilling people in areas such as prompt engineering, analytics, and soft skills like communication, project management, and stakeholder management. The advent of generational AI challenges marketers to be smarter in technology use, reducing time spent on repetitive tasks and enhancing creative capabilities. A marketer's true strength lies in drawing meaningful insights from human behaviour, not just raw data.
In terms of technology, centralising our currently disparate data is crucial, and account-based marketing should help achieve better integration. Our immediate goal is to maintain urgency around our technology offerings, adapting strategies to financial and technological shifts. These would be my top two focuses.
About Beamery
Beamery is a leading Talent Operating System that merges talent acquisition, engagement, and retention capabilities into a single platform. Beamery leverages artificial intelligence and data science to help organisations identify and attract the best candidates, manage their talent more effectively, and create a more proactive and strategic approach to global workforce management. Beamery's platform empowers companies to focus on candidate relationships and experience, making talent acquisition a continuous and strategic function, and designed to help companies make smarter, more data-driven decisions to build their workforce for the future.
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.
