Market View
Beyond MQLs: Reframing success in B2B marketing
Sponsored by:
Produced by:
Philippe Ruttens
Chief Marketing Officer at Tyk Technologies
About Philippe Ruttens
Philippe Ruttens is the Chief Marketing Officer at Tyk Technologies, a role he has held for over two years. With extensive experience in B2B marketing, Philippe leads the company's demand management strategies and oversees the entire marketing funnel. He directs teams across content creation, branding, marketing operations, and account-based marketing (ABM) programs. Known for his data-driven approach, Philippe is passionate about aligning marketing efforts with revenue goals and fostering collaboration between marketing and sales teams.
How has account-based marketing (ABM) evolved, and what challenges does it present in implementation?
ABM has grown up a lot, but it's also gotten more complex. The key is to keep it simple and take it step by step. There are four main parts: strategy, people, processes, and tech.
You need an ABM plan, which isn't always easy to figure out. The processes are often tougher to nail down than the strategy itself, usually involving different teams - marketing, sales, and sometimes customer service or account management.
Tech is important too. The marketing tech stack is getting more complex, which is challenging but also opens up new possibilities. There's no magic formula; you need to adapt, customise, and keep improving. A central CRM or ABM tool is essential, and now AI helps predict and score leads at different levels.
The people part is the trickiest because of how we think and act. Marketing and sales teams don't always see eye to eye. That's why it's vital to have shared goals, KPIs, and processes from the get-go.
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ABM has grown up a lot, but it's also gotten more complex. The key is to keep it simple and take it step by step.
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Our stars are pipeline created and deals created. The board wants to know how many deals we've made and the value of the pipeline we've built.
What are the key metrics you focus on as CMO, and how do these align with board expectations?
Our North Star metrics are pipeline created and deals created. Typically, a Board wants to know how many deals or opportunities were created and the value of the pipeline sourced or influenced.. We have specific growth targets and ROI indicators for cost efficiency. For example, if we spend £1 million and create a £3 million pipeline, that's £2 million net - a 200% return. In our world as a Series B software company, it's all about annual recurring revenue (ARR).
The board expects certain performance linked to the budget, along with CAC, Payback, velocity and ROI. For sales, we look at things like pipeline forecast, attribution and coverage, typically a 3-5 multiple, for example, if we're aiming for £10 million in pipeline, we expect about £2.5 million in wins.
From a revenue marketing perspective, performance is also about cost per lead/deal/SQL along with conversion and funnel velocity. Stakeholders are also really interested in how fast we're closing deals across different regions and account types.
How do you ensure effective collaboration between marketing and sales teams in implementing ABM strategies?
Getting everyone to work together smoothly is a big challenge. First, you need a shared vision and strategy, especially for commercial aspects. If teams are split up, focusing separately on outbound versus inbound or on retention versus acquisition, it's hard to bring it all together.
To align everything, you need common goals, KPIs, and dashboards. We use tools like HubSpot to bring together metrics across new sales, pipeline renewal, and partner pipeline. This connects not just marketing and sales, but also product development and customer success.
The people involved need to share a common drive and mindset. It's more about fostering a shared understanding and approach. Sometimes, it works better to pair up team members who work well together rather than relying just on leaders.
It's crucial to manage sales enablement proactively. Keep things simple at first, show results together, and build trust through pilots and shared insights. This means regular communication, joining sales meetings, and being transparent with dashboards. Be open about what's working and what's not, without pointing fingers.
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MQLs aren't dead, but they're taking a back seat to more sophisticated measures like Market Qualified Accounts (MQAs) and Product Qualified Accounts (PQAs).
How do you see the role of MQLs evolving in the context of modern ABM strategies?
The landscape is changing. We still need branding and top-of-funnel activities, but the customer journey is getting more complex and harder to control. You need to adapt your strategies based on different levels of intent at different stages. For PPC campaigns, you have to target both low intent, high volume prospects and high intent, low volume prospects, adjusting your approach based on your commercial strategy.
MQLs aren't dead, but they're taking a back seat to more sophisticated measures like Market Qualified Accounts (MQAs) and Product Qualified Accounts (PQAs). This is especially true in software businesses dealing with product analytics or user trials.
We're moving towards "allbound" marketing, which integrates various approaches. It's not just about the traditional marketing funnel anymore. We're creating dynamic, tiered approaches that tailor interactions between marketing and sales, with different playbooks and scoring systems for each tier.
How is AI impacting B2B marketing, and what investments would you prioritise to enhance marketing efforts?
We're using AI extensively in our marketing. It helps with design, content production, editing, and even summarising videos and creating blogs. We've developed our own AI tool for Slack due to data privacy as well as montag.ai as a “AI Management for Platform Teams” POC for prospects.. In marketing and sales, AI helps us craft and personalise messages, predict and categorise accounts, and generate insights from our dashboards.
If I had an unlimited budget, I'd focus on three main areas. First, accelerating our content creation - packaging, repurposing, and publishing content more efficiently. Second, I'd invest in better and faster buying intent signals to engage with accounts earlier in their journey. Third, I'd put money into personalising content delivery - getting the right messages to the right people at the right time and place throughout their buying journey.
These investments would help us stay ahead of the curve in B2B marketing, allowing us to engage more effectively with our target accounts and drive better results. The key is to use AI and other technologies to enhance our human capabilities, not replace them. We still need the human touch to interpret data, craft compelling stories, and build relationships with our customers.
About Tyk Technologies
Tyk is a leading Open Source API Gateway and Management Platform, featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard, powering API platform teams and developers to manage billions of transactions for thousands of innovative organisations.
Recognised as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for API Management 2023. Tyk delivers the highest technical & business value by making its tooling and capabilities easily accessible to developers, software engineers and architects. Tyk makes it fast, simple and low-risk for mid-size and enterprises to manage, secure, govern and centralise their APIs, enabling businesses to connect systems and services instantly, thereby creating secure, stable and scalable API experiences.
Whether self-managed, cloud or hybrid, our unique architecture and capabilities enable large, complex, global organisations to quickly deliver highly secure, highly regulated API-first applications and products that span multiple clouds and geographies.
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.
