Pipeline Mastery: How Owning the Pipeline Number Transforms Marketing Leadership

Brandi Starr [00:00:34]:
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host, Brandi Starr, and we have another amazing episode for you today. I am joined by MJ Smith. As Colab's CMO, MJ brings a mix of industrial and software as a service experience to her role. Prior to Colab, MJ led sales and marketing at Refine Labs, where she works with 50 plus venture backed b, two b software companies on demand generation. Before that, she spent six years working at FTSE 100 Halma, a group of mid sized manufacturing businesses focused on medical, environmental, and safety technology. MJ, welcome to Revenue Rehab. Your session begins now.

MJ Smith [00:01:24]:
All right, thanks for having me.

Brandi Starr [00:01:26]:
I am excited to talk to you today, but before we jump into our topic, I like to break the ice with a little woo saw moments that I call buzzword banishment. So tell me, what buzzword would you like to get rid of forever?

MJ Smith [00:01:42]:
Yeah. Honestly, I don't know if this is a buzzword, but it's like a word that I cannot avoid using and kind of makes me cringe every time I use it, which is headcount.

Brandi Starr [00:01:53]:
Yeah, head count is a funny one, because when you think about it, I mean, you are literally, like, it comes from counting the heads, but it just is. It is an odd one. Why don't you like that one?

MJ Smith [00:02:08]:
I don't know. You're like, we're talking about, I guess, a future role to be filled by a human being. Referring to, like, a human as a head count just, I don't know, it feels a little bit strange to me. But, I mean, I guess before that role is defined or filled, you gotta, like, put some sort of label on it, which is why I do use that word quite frequently, too. It just. It feels like we could have a more humanized word than headcount.

Brandi Starr [00:02:38]:
Yeah, I think headcount is at least better than when people refer to it as a body. Like, you know, I'm trying to get another body on my team, and it's like, okay, like, that just, you know, I feel like you want more than just a body. Like, it just. That seems like someone to take up space. But, yeah, there isn't a really good way to use that phrase. So I can say that we can avoid talking about headcount today at least, I don't know that we can avoid it altogether.

MJ Smith [00:03:10]:
Yep, I agree. But if anybody has a better alternative than that, let me know.

Brandi Starr [00:03:16]:
Yes, I definitely will take it. And you know, there are some times where people will listen to an episode and I'll get a little note and it's like, oh, I use this word instead of that one. And I'm like, okay, I can get with that. I can adopt it. So now that we've gotten that off our chest, tell me, what brings you to revenue rehab today?

MJ Smith [00:03:36]:
So we're going to talk about owning the whole pipeline number. As a CMO, I think marketing leadership is in the minority when it comes to owning the sales development function. So typically that function would report into sales, but at Colab, it reports into marketing. And so I've kind of been on this journey the last two or three years of owning the entire pipeline number as we scaled both pipeline and revenue ten x in just over two years. And we can talk about some of the strategies that went into that and some of some of the maybe the challenges of leading a sales development from the marketing perspective, a lot of people would vehemently argue that that's not the way that your department should be organized. So yeah, we can dig into all of that today.

Brandi Starr [00:04:30]:
Awesome. I am looking forward to it. I definitely got a $0.02 on this topic, so I'm looking forward to hearing yours. But I believe in setting intention. It gives us focus, it gives us purpose, and most important, it gives our audience an understanding of what they should expect from our discussion today. So what's your best hope for our discussion? What would you like people to take away from the conversation?

MJ Smith [00:04:56]:
Yeah, I think hopefully the type of person who can get the most out of this conversation is someone who is either trying to build a repeatable pipeline generation motion from scratch. So a lot of, I think, early stage, you know, seed stage, maybe even series, a yemenite leaders who will hopefully walk away with a couple of actionable things that they can take away. And then I think there are probably some later stage companies that there are things that maybe weren't built right the first time. And you've inherited some of this stuff and there are some practical things that you can go in and fix to make your pipeline machine just work a little bit better.

Brandi Starr [00:05:38]:
Okay, so I want to start with something you said in the answer to your first question, which I think is important because generally my listeners are heads of marketing, so VP, CMO and so why do you feel that it is important for the CMO to own the whole pipeline number.

MJ Smith [00:05:59]:
I actually don't necessarily think it's a requirement for the CMO to own the whole pipeline number. I think there are advantages to owning the whole pipeline number, which is that you can, at that point, outbound sales basically becomes a channel. And you can think about how to distribute your messaging across that channel just like any other channel. I think there are some real, like, natural overlaps between leading the sales development function and leading the marketing function. And then also you can figure out how you want to continue to invest in the sales development, just like you would invest in scaling up any other channel. Right? So if it's the most efficient, most effective channel and you feel that there is still a higher ceiling to be tapped, then that's a channel you want to invest in. Otherwise, maybe you want to experiment in some other channels. And I think if those two things are owned by two different departments, there's some dynasty building behaviors that might not be the best use of company resources.

MJ Smith [00:07:01]:
So I think, honestly, there's some natural benefits to having the whole thing set under one layer.

Brandi Starr [00:07:07]:
I agree with you. I do believe whether you call them BDR, SDR, MDR, there's all sorts of names that they go by. But I do think that having that sort of, you know, that intro sales role live under marketing, so that that can be a tactic that is deployed where it makes the most sense. I know in my career, that is where I've seen the most successful desks as well when they roll into the marketing function so that you can identify. You know, we focus a lot on the funnel, like thinking about what are the things we do at the top, in the middle, at the bottom. And obviously there's, you know, you can flip it on its side and think about the things that happen once they become a customer. But think about that initial journey. To me, having those sales development reps be a part of that middle of the funnel, like that sort of lower middle to get them ready to actually be an opportunity and talk to sales.

Brandi Starr [00:08:08]:
Seems like it has the greatest effect in driving pipeline, driving velocity and also driving deal size. Have you seen those same things or has your experience been different?

MJ Smith [00:08:21]:
Yeah. So our, I would consider our BDR sdrs to be mostly involved in the top of the funnel. But I also think I'm defining top of the funnel a little bit differently from you. So top of the funnel, to us, is anything basically pre stage one opportunity. And then, you know, stage one, two, three ish, would be middle of the funnel. And that's largely like an account executive led motion. And then, you know, pulling the trigger there in the last couple of stages of the sales cycle would be what I would consider sort of preference, bottom of the funnel. And then, of course, you've got expansion.

MJ Smith [00:08:58]:
So I think one of the key differences between bdrs and perhaps another channel is just like the level of personalization and the amount of research that can go into each touch point. So I honestly think one of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of companies making is hiring bdrs and then just having them sort of fire off thousands and thousands of scripted messages. To me, if you're just going to fire off thousands and thousands of scripted messages, use automation, use ads. Right. The level of personalization really is the advantage of that channel. And so I think companies need to be thinking about how do you train and empower your bdrs to make those touch points maybe fewer, but a lot more effective.

Brandi Starr [00:09:47]:
Yeah, and I definitely would agree. And I think any leader, no matter what function you lead, has been on the receiving end of lots and lots of those BDR outreaches where it is very clear they're given, you know, some specifics on, like what you're looking for, some very loose ones and some messages to send, and there's, you know, no personalization, not really a connection, and they totally get ignored. So I want to talk about the scale that you have accomplished. So ten x over two years is definitely impressive. So I'd love to hear like, you know, where what was happening in the business, you know, when you at the beginning of that two years and what was sort of your approach and strategy to getting there in that two years?

MJ Smith [00:10:40]:
Yeah, so we started from definitely a very early stage. I would say we had just barely achieved product market Fitzhen and really had no go to market engine or go to market fit yet. So it was ten x on a fairly low number. But I think to me, building go to market fit and building like a repeatable engine really has two components. It is defining messaging. So finding message market fit for the product that you have product market fit for, and then distributing that messaging consistently. I think the key is on one channel at first, master one channel at a time, and then once you've mastered that channel, you can kind of scale to additional channels. So for us, it was LinkedIn paid outbound, and then eventually conferences were the first three that we sort of stood up.

MJ Smith [00:11:35]:
But it took a real focused effort in each one of those to make it really perform for us.

Brandi Starr [00:11:41]:
Really interesting that conferences was in your top three because I know a lot of times when you are trying to really hone in that message market fit and really find what's working, a lot of organizations will go with channels that are a bit lower in cost, with a more direct ability to see how it's working. So I'd love to hear a little more around why conferences were a big choice for you and what you saw out of that.

MJ Smith [00:12:16]:
Yeah, I think the risk with conferences that you highlight there is something that's really worth paying attention to. It's like the minimum investment level can be fairly substantial, especially for a small company. Right. Minimum investment level you're looking at, let's call it $20,000 per conference. So for us, what that looked like in year one was we only went to two and we did absolutely the bare minimum investment level. But both of those conferences paid off for us. Both of them turned, produced revenue. And so then the next year we did six.

MJ Smith [00:12:49]:
Right. And we're still kind of operating at that bare minimum investment level. Where I think companies fall down and fail to get the results from conferences is they don't really have a system in place, a, to understand what they even want to get out of the conference, going into it. And they don't have a like, as simple as it sounds, they don't have a real robust system in place for turning like those in person interactions and the energy from that into post show meetings. And they don't necessarily incentivize and measure and track that. And so one of the biggest things for us was just having really clear criteria on what is just like an interaction at the show versus what is actually a stage one opportunity attributed back to this show. And then of course, everybody who is incentivized to get stage one meetings from the show has to hit that criteria, which includes actually having a post show meeting on calendar. And because of that, we were actually able to take that momentum and turn it into momentum that kept going after the show, which I think, you know, it's basic, like kind of Rev ops hygiene in a way, but it is one of the things that I think companies just don't think about.

MJ Smith [00:14:02]:
They don't execute well and therefore they're not able to turn even like a positive conference where your message lands into something that fuels the pipeline.

Brandi Starr [00:14:11]:
Yeah, and I would agree, like when I look at different research studies and things, there are a number of articles that I've seen that, you know, show the opposite, where conference attendance and those interactions have the lowest conversion into opportunity compared to other channels. But it sounds like the way that you have organized things. And I love that you had an agreed on definition of like, where is this an opportunity? And then held those people that were there in person having those interactions accountable to that so that you can then continue it through and measure. Whereas I see most companies, they go in, they get bad scans, they've got, you know, just either some cold reach out afterwards or, you know, just a pretty generic email that gets followed up on and that's kind of it. And then they say, oh, that didn't work. So really interesting that you guys took that risk. I mean, even two conferences in a year as a small company with that level of investment on top of like travel time, out of the office, all those sorts of things, sounds like it was a risk that paid off really, really well. And so how you know, over that two years, as you started to optimize that message? I know, like, you've, I know you guys were able to dominate like that inbound and outbound.

Brandi Starr [00:15:39]:
So tell me more about what you did there.

MJ Smith [00:15:43]:
Yeah, so we started with what I will call like, middle of the pyramid use case messaging. So if you think of a very simple messaging hierarchy or messaging pyramid, you've kind of got like your brand story at the top and then you've got your features and benefits at the bottom. I think what a lot of organizations, especially organizations that don't have a marketer on their team, we'll run into is they'll have this big gap in the middle where there isn't really like a business process focused layer of messaging. A lot of people call this solutions marketing that can connect the features and benefits to the brand story and the ultimate transformation you want to drive, because creating a business transformation is really just transforming many different processes across a business until you see this, like, ultimate outcome. And so what we did was we looked at where is the product used in our customers businesses and we identified three specific use cases. And then we did kind of basic customer research jobs to be done framework. You know, what are the three things that an ICP customer is trying to achieve if they are in charge of this business process? And what are the three biggest pain points that cause them? Frustration when they are trying to achieve that thing. And then we just built campaigns around those messages, right? So we talked about pains.

MJ Smith [00:17:14]:
We blasted those pains out on paid social to the ICP. We pointed them at a landing page that positioned our product as the solution to those common pain points. And if you get the research right and you get the pains right, and you get in front of a large enough number of ICP customers, you are bound to get some hand raisers from that. So we spent about nine months just getting really, really good at that, and we distributed that messaging both through outbound as well as like a paid social inbound digital motion.

Brandi Starr [00:17:45]:
Okay. Yeah. And I think the key takeaway that I have from what I'm hearing is that you guys did a lot of message refining and looking at that messaging at all the layers and, you know, really spending the time testing that across channels. And, you know, it's like, I want to repeat that because I do think that that is something that can be really hard for organizations to do, is to really spend the time, you know, like honing and refining and finding the thing that really works so that you can then scale it. You know, there's always this pressure to do more, move faster, you know, do all of the things. And so being able to, you know, sort of put the brakes on and say, no, this is where we need to focus, and we're going to get this right and then we're going to move on to the next thing. Do you feel like that was the culture of the organization? Did you have to deal with any of the pressures to do more, go faster? You know, it's always interesting to me to see what environment you were in to be able to create these results.

MJ Smith [00:18:59]:
Yeah, I think there was definitely pressure to put points on the board, but in my opinion, the fastest way to put points on the board is to get one thing working as fast as you can. So doing less is actually the key to getting results faster. Now, it feels like a risk if the one thing that you are focused on has not started to pay off yet. So you do have to have a little bit of a stomach for it in the first couple of, first couple of months. But I think what you need to appreciate really early on is validating and shipping. Messaging is a milestone. It's like an early quant, qualitative achievement that you should be measuring almost the velocity of that. Like how good is the team at defining, putting it into some kind of format and then getting it in front of customers really fast? And personally, I think the cycle time on that, from research to, like, landing page and campaign shipped, should be two to three weeks max at the beginning.

MJ Smith [00:19:57]:
And that allows you to, you know, get some stuff out there in front of customers, like go fishing. Right. See if you can get some points on the board, but also get rapid feedback on that messaging. And if you are doing that two to three week velocity cycle, you're going to have opportunities, handraisers within hopefully 90 days, and you're going to have, like, real qualified pipeline within four, five, six months. And then you've got points on the board, and that'll give you a little bit more breathing room. So I will say, like, for anyone listening to this, the first six months is, like, scary, but I think as long as you're able to articulate that you're controlling what you can control in those early days, and that's just like a leadership style thing, then you can navigate that with some grace, and then eventually you'll have some results to back up a lot of the activity that you're doing.

Brandi Starr [00:20:49]:
Okay. And thinking about, you know, some of those typical demand generation, lead generation tactics at the top. I know there's no magic bullet, which. So I won't ask that question. But as you have, you know, as the organization has matured and now that you're in your new role, what are you seeing that is working best in terms of attracting your ICP to you? Are there combinations of tactics that you're seeing that are, you know, like, here's where I double down on because they're working really well. Here's places, you know, where it's mediocre. Like, what are you seeing? Like, industry trends is always a common hot topic in terms of what's really working right now.

MJ Smith [00:21:38]:
Yeah. Like, as silly as it sounds, I think you can pretty much get anything to work if you execute, like, in the top 10% for that given thing. And so, like, LinkedIn ads, right. If you really research your customers and really understand their pain points, even if you segment it to, like, only one Persona or only one business process that your. That your product helps with in the beginning and become, like, the a plus, you know, most creative, best copy, best understanding of the customer for that small segment, then that small segment of LinkedIn ads, you are likely to produce the best results because you're going to stand out in the crowd of everyone else that's using that channel. Another example for us is we started in terms of thought leadership with really only two kinds of content. One was a webinar series where we had one panel and one keynote per quarter. The panel was industry experts from outside of our company, and then the keynote was somebody from inside of our company, and we would actually use the insights from the experts to form our own opinion and then package that up as the keynote, which allowed us to control the brand narrative a little bit more.

MJ Smith [00:22:57]:
That's the only thing we did. We didn't try to run ten webinars. Right? We did two, but we made them great. And actually, with the keynotes, the CEO and I would spend 20 or 30 hours creating the content for those. And so as a result, it wasn't like a boring webinar. That was, like, fluffy stuff. Right. So I think pick emotion that aligns to the skillset of your team.

MJ Smith [00:23:23]:
Make sure the most excellent people in your team are involved in standing this up, because that's how you stand out from. From everyone else trying to do all the same things. Because I think the secret is not. Not to execute some silver bullet thing. It's to actually execute the same things we all know about, just at a much higher level than the competition.

Brandi Starr [00:23:44]:
Yeah. And I think that's really sound advice, because one of the things that I see often is when there is a new thing everyone seems to gravitate towards, we got to do this thing. Like, I can remember when clubhouse came out as a social channel, and all of a sudden, everybody was like, you know, businesses where we got to get a clubhouse community, and what are we going to do on clubhouse? And we need a clubhouse strategy. And, like, there was this rush that there's a new tactic. You know, it's like, there's new tactic in town. We gotta do it. And it seems like people are always looking for what's shiny and new. And what I'm hearing has been the key to your success, has been doing the same things, just doing them better than everyone else.

Brandi Starr [00:24:33]:
And that is much harder than just jumping on, you know, whatever is the latest bandwagon of things that people are looking at.

MJ Smith [00:24:45]:
Yeah, it's definitely much harder. But then once you kind of build the internal core competency to be able to do that, you can almost apply that to any channel. So it's, you know, as with anything worth having. Right. It's hard. It's hard work, but then, like, it's. It is worth having in the end, because you can sort of repeat the same success.

Brandi Starr [00:25:09]:
Are there any new things that you are testing or new tactics, new strategies, new approaches that you are trying to see how they'll. They'll pan out, or are you at a point where you're, you know, in the business just running the tried and true?

MJ Smith [00:25:24]:
Yeah, I mean, I think there are, like, within channels, like, specific things that we're trying to be innovative with and add into our mix all the time. So I mentioned with LinkedIn, we started with just, like, the use cases, where it's like, package of use case ads, points to a use case landing page. Let's try to get people to request a demo for that use case. Right. And that's the core of our motion. But once we got good at that, and I talked about those two to three week velocity cycles of shipping, the landing pages and the creatives, once we got good at that, then we could try some more creative mechanisms to just plug into that system. So one of the things we do is called beat the best ad, and it's a little design sprint. We'll take the best performing creative from the ad platform, and we'll use that as the campaign brief for a design sprint.

MJ Smith [00:26:18]:
And we'll say, what can we change about the copy or the creative here, but not the core message, which is working in order to beat the best performing ad? Like, can we create a version of this that does better than the version that's already the best version today? And so that's been, like, a fun challenge for the team, and it's also a good way to spur new creative based off of validated messaging. So that's one example of something that we'll specifically do in LinkedIn now that we kind of have have a motion that's fun, that's exciting, that's a little bit innovative, and allows us to just continue optimizing those results.

Brandi Starr [00:26:53]:
I really like that because it definitely, I mean, it accomplishes multiple things. It allows you as an organization to continue to be innovating and kind of testing the waters to see how you can make it better. It creates a little bit of internal competition where it is like the team against ourselves kind of thing, which is always fun. And, I mean, to me, that also creates an environment where people want to stay. Like, I feel like that also helps with retention because it's not the same day in and day out. Like, it is a little bit of a challenge, a little bit of, you know, stretching our thinking, getting outside the, you know, another buzzword outside the box. So I think that that is, you know, really awesome. And it's always good to have a mechanism to be, always be innovating, even within the things that you're consistently doing.

Brandi Starr [00:27:50]:
So I'd ask, best piece of advice for those people who are trying to do what you've done and to build that repeatable revenue engine, and they're figuring it out, what is the key advice that you would give them as they're trying to figure that out?

MJ Smith [00:28:12]:
Do fewer things better would be the really high level summary of it. But I think based on my experience, the key to actually doing fewer things better is to be comfortable for short periods of time with the risk inherent in only doing a few things, because it can feel like a hedgehead against the risk if you're doing so many different things. But at the end of the day, that actually ends up being a bigger risk because if you try to do too much, you will not execute any of those things well. So it's better to do a small number of things even though it feels risky really well, because you're maximizing your chance that at least one of those things is going to pay off. But I think people just need to be aware that you're going to be sitting in that risk for the first four to five months, and then hopefully you'll reach the light at the end of the tunnel where you've got one channel working, and then you can go back and start it over on a new channel or a new motion.

Brandi Starr [00:29:13]:
Okay, I love that. And talking about our challenges is just the first step. And nothing changes if nothing changes. And so in traditional therapy, the therapist gives the client some homework. But here at revenue rehab, we like to flip that on its head and ask you to give us some homework. And so for those listening and they're trying to get started, what's that one thing? What's the first step that they should take in trying to be able to drive that exponential growth in a repeatable way?

MJ Smith [00:29:46]:
Yeah, this is probably a big piece of homework, but I would say try to launch a use case campaign. So that use case messaging in the early days was vital for us. And it's really, I think being able to launch one use case campaign end to end proves that you can do the messaging piece of the equation and the tactics of the equation. So whether you actually set up like one or two conversations with a customer, or you just pull five calls out of gong and listen to them, what I would encourage everyone to do is get some raw customer data, like that, customer conversation data, and analyze it and look for two things, like what is the customer trying to do in this process, jobs to be done, and what are their biggest pains or frustrations in the course of trying to get those things done? If you listen to just five calls, whether you conducted them as a customer research call or whether it is a sales call, you will tend to find a pattern. Right. You'll hear the same one or two or three panes repeated. You don't even need to hear it repeated that many times. Two or three times.

MJ Smith [00:30:53]:
If two or three people say the same thing, you're starting to validate this stuff. Then you've got the customer insights that you can plug into an ad, a landing page, whatever, and so spin up those assets and get them in front of people. And if you can execute that whole thing end to end, it sounds like a lot of work, but I think if you really are focused on it, you can get it done in two to three weeks, then I think that's a great thing to do. That full cycle of messaging through, to ship it through to insights. And I think that's something every marketer should try.

Brandi Starr [00:31:23]:
Okay, that one is a big piece of homework. But I feel like people are up for the challenge. And I do think that it is a good opportunity, if nothing else, to try something different. And, you know, even if you've got a current motion, you know, trying this as another way of doing it or using it to see set the foundation of being able to build that out. So I love that we've got our one thing. And, MJ, I have truly enjoyed our discussion, but that's our time for today. But before we go, tell our audience how they can connect with you and definitely give us the shameless plug for collabs.

MJ Smith [00:32:06]:
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. I post probably twice a week, you know, stuff that's going on at Collab, and I try to make it pretty pragmatic and actionable for people. So you can find me MJ Smith Colab, if you happen to be in the world of mechanical engineering, is a design review and issue tracking tool that hardware teams use to manage complex product development processes and ultimately design the best mechanical products possible.

Brandi Starr [00:32:35]:
Awesome. Well, thank you so, so much for joining me today.

MJ Smith [00:32:40]:
Thank you for having me.

Brandi Starr [00:32:42]:
Awesome. And thanks, everyone, for tuning in. I hope you have enjoyed my conversation with MJ. I can't believe we're already at the end. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.