Liz Moorehead
If you’ve ever worked in marketing or sales, you know the story: Marketing generates a bunch of leads, pats themselves on the back, and hands them over to sales. Then sales comes back with, “These leads aren’t qualified.” And marketing? They’re left scratching their heads going:
“Wait, didn’t we all agree on what makes a lead qualified?”
This isn’t just an occasional hiccup. It’s the messy, never-ending handoff drama that plays out in nearly every business. Both teams swear they’re doing their jobs. Marketing’s screaming, “We gave you SQLs!” Sales is shouting back, “These leads aren’t even close to ready!” And the gap just keeps getting bigger. It’s like trying to toss a football over the Grand Canyon—except no one’s catching it on the other side.
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In this episode, we’re rolling up our sleeves and unpacking this sticky, insidious sales qualified lead (SQL) conundrum, and trust me, it’s a conundrum for a reason. We’re not talking about shiny CRM dashboards or fancy reporting tools—this is about the human stuff. The real-world, messy reality of two teams that should be working together but often act like they’re from completely different planets.
George, Max, Chad, and Bastien Paul from HubLead.io tackle everything from why sales and marketing just can’t seem to see eye-to-eye on lead qualification to how this all boils down to broken communication, trust issues, and differing priorities. Spoiler: If your marketing and sales teams don’t actually trust each other, no amount of reporting or dashboards is going to fix the underlying issues.
🚀 Learn More: Why Is Your Sales Enablement Strategy Failing? (+ Examples)
And here’s the thing: This conversation isn’t about pointing fingers. It’s not about, “Who’s doing it wrong?” It’s about figuring out why this keeps happening and how we can fix it once and for all. Because at the end of the day, this isn’t just about leads—it’s about building a culture of trust and accountability between two teams who are supposed to be working toward the same goal.
So buckle up, because we’re unpacking all of it—why your SQL definitions are probably broken, what happens when sales and marketing speak completely different languages, and why no one seems willing to take ownership of the mess. Plus, Bastien shares some killer strategies on how to smooth out the lead handoff process before it all falls apart. Let’s dig in.
Keywords
Sales qualified leads, lead qualification process, marketing-sales alignment, SQL handoff strategies, sales and marketing misalignment, lead qualification best practices, HubLead.io, B2B lead handoff, communication breakdown, SQL definition challenges
What We Cover
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Marketing and Sales: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? We kick things off by tackling the root of the problem. Why is it so hard for marketing and sales to agree on what makes a lead "sales qualified"? Bastien shares his experience from the front lines, where miscommunication and a lack of understanding between teams often derail the lead handoff process. George adds his two cents on why teams need to stop covering their own backs and start working together if they want to actually close deals.
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Defining an SQL: It's More Complicated Than You Think: What exactly is a sales qualified lead (SQL)? You’d think we’d all have a clear definition by now, but the reality is far messier. We dive into how the definition of an SQL can vary from company to company—and even from person to person within the same organization. Chad breaks down why aligning on these definitions early on is crucial for avoiding miscommunication and missed opportunities.
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The Data Problem: Why Do Sales and Marketing Speak Different Languages? Bastien hits the nail on the head when he points out that marketing talks in data points, while sales deals in feelings and gut instincts. This difference in approach leads to a fundamental disconnect, making it even harder for teams to align. George jumps in to explain how using the same data points for both teams can create a common language—and how that’s the key to getting everyone on the same page.
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Where Sales Teams Can Take More Ownership: Are sales teams leaning too heavily on marketing to generate leads? George explores the idea that sales reps need to be more proactive in owning their part of the process. We talk about tools like HubLead.io that allow sales teams to take action by finding and qualifying their own leads, rather than waiting for marketing to hand them over on a silver platter.
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Why Toxic Relationships Between Teams Cause Bigger Problems: Here’s the hard truth: if marketing and sales don’t trust each other, even the smallest issue can turn into a massive problem. I dive into the psychological aspect of team dynamics—how mistrust can escalate tiny disagreements into full-blown wars, making the SQL issue even harder to solve. When teams don’t get along, every missed target becomes a blame game.
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The Importance of Evolving Your Lead Qualification Process: As companies grow, so do their lead qualification processes—and that’s where things can fall apart. Bastien talks about the challenges of scaling a team while maintaining consistency in SQL definitions. He also shares some insights into how companies can avoid creating "brand new spicy problems" as they expand.
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Sales and Marketing Therapy: How Do You Fix What’s Broken? George wraps things up with a call for what he jokingly calls "sales and marketing therapy." But the truth is, this isn’t a joke—it’s a real need. Both teams have to learn each other’s language and come to the table with the goal of mutual understanding if they want to succeed. This episode is a call to action for companies to fix the fundamental miscommunications that are holding them back from hitting their goals.
And so much more ...
Episode Transcript
Liz Moorehead: Welcome back to another great episode of the Hub Heroes podcast. And are we all focused and accounted for today?
George B. Thomas: it's a full house.
Liz Moorehead: It's a full house. We got some usual suspects here. Obviously, George, we've got you. We've got myself, Liz and Max, but we have Chad back joining us and his glowing sentient printer in the background.
I love it. I love it.
George B. Thomas: That printer's just going to get up and walk away midway through the podcast. I'm
Chad Hohn: just going to pull an optimist, you
George B. Thomas: like an
Max Cohen: it's looking like, it's looking like one of those, it's like one of those new Tesla robots. That's what I'm seeing
Chad Hohn: It's going to pour me a drink. Do rock, paper, scissors with me.
Liz Moorehead: printer?
Chad Hohn: Yeah, it is. It's a self copying printer.
George B. Thomas: if it was, if it was a printer that could pour me a drink, I would have purchased one weeks ago.
Liz Moorehead: It's true. But guys, we, we, best behavior today, guys. We got, we got some cool peeps in the house who, Bastien Paul of hublead. io, CEO and co founder. You're here joining us from France, where it is what, eight o'clock at night there right now? Is that
Bastien Paul: 9, 9, 9 PM, man. That's good. That's good. I got some oysters and white wine just before, so I'm ready for the podcast.
George B. Thomas: There we go. Oysters and
Liz Moorehead: I love
George B. Thomas: and hub heroes. That's what I I put those together
Chad Hohn: to go.
Bastien Paul: the best, man.
George B. Thomas: and hub heroes.
Max Cohen: I've already, I've already censored myself once Liz, just, just, just so you know, I'm being a good boy.
George B. Thomas: running count like a clicker?
Max Cohen: Yup. Yeah. I'm going to write down. I'm going to write down all the jokes. I'm gonna write down all the jokes I would have made if we were not behaving. Yes.
Liz Moorehead: And then when Liz can't end the podcast again, you're like, well, here we go.
Max Cohen: Yup. Just going to unload it.
George B. Thomas: I'll help you. I'll help you land it.
Chad Hohn: good.
Liz Moorehead: Well, before we get into our conversation today about SQL's Bastion, I, you and I have had a couple of conversations leading up to today and I have questions before we dig in. First of all, for our listeners at home, You are an authority on SQLs.
I want to have this conversation about that with you, but tell us about hubly. io and where that fits into this conversation. Who's it for? What problem does it solve?
Bastien Paul: Sure. Sure. So, um, so before, uh, I was working as a gross marketer. So I don't know if you have a lot of that in us, it's more team where it's building companies and lists, uh, for the salespeople. It's not like in marketing, it's a gross team. It's really like sales reports and, um, yeah, I joined the company, we were like four or five, uh, we raised to 100, raised like 20 million and I was handing the growth team for, uh, uh, building the list for them.
And I was sometimes pissed off by sales. And say people need something, like they need apps, they need to, they were constantly asking us for things, because we have everything, we had like BigQuery, enrichment thing, everything inside of spots, all the tools, you know, connected with your APIs that you make whatever you want, but have no like tool just to give them so they can just do their work.
Have the power of growth and marketing team, and we can work on scalable things. And so, yeah, that's why we developed a bid with, uh, uh, two coworkers. Uh, yeah, that's, that's the way we, we, after we checked, uh, what kind of tools existed on the markets, uh, and we say, okay, let's, let's try to do something better.
Just for HubSpot, since I was using HubSpot for four or five years, so I really appreciate that kind of CRM. And, uh, yeah, that's where, that's where we, we went
George B. Thomas: So there's, there's two things that I love technology born out of the fact that I got mad at a sales team and, and I'm going to build this, uh, on HubSpot because over the four years I've been using it, I fell in love with it. So this is already shaping up to be an amazing story. Liz, I know you've got more.
Liz Moorehead: Oh, no, I love that. It's raging against the machine, but creating ROI.
George B. Thomas: Yes.
Bastien Paul: mean, I don't know if you do get no gorgeous, it's a company called just hype this for e commerce specialize on Shopify. So it's a French American company and they specialize only on Shopify for help desk. For four or five days, four or five years, sorry. And after that, I did other serums. So I really liked this kind of company, uh, growing like not so fast, but, uh, steady growth.
So yeah, that's why we, and you have some company also named Deliver. It's e commerce logistics, only plugged to Shopify, bought by, bought 2 billion from Shopify. And they did only Shopify. They didn't do any other CMS, something like that. So yeah, I think like, okay, we can do something for, for the CM like that. And frankly, like, I didn't know that was a huge, huge ecosystem before, uh, going down into Hublet.
George B. Thomas: Oh,
Bastien Paul: that's where, yeah, like when I see, I saw that, yeah, so like happily, of course, arrows, super roots, uh, company like that doing only for, for HubSpot. So I say, okay, say something, say there's something we can do.
So, so let's, let's write. And
Liz Moorehead: I love
Bastien Paul: mad. I got mad from salespeople.
George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. the nugget.
Liz Moorehead: So there is one last question I have for you, Bastier, before we start talking about SQLs. One of the things that you are exceptionally passionate about is something that I know George is also exceptionally passionate about. And it's this idea of continuous learning or the way George talks about it on this podcast and on Beyond Good to Fault is getting 1 percent better every single day.
And I know for a while there, you did have a goal of three books per month. We're not here to check you on
Bastien Paul: Yeah.
Liz Moorehead: This is not a New Year's resolution check in. But I would be curious. What is a favorite book of yours that you've read recently where you put it down and went dang that actually that actually made a Difference in my mindset
Bastien Paul: Sure. Um, I don't know, George, did you check the Stripe press or the books from Stripe? You should. If you didn't, you should. You should. That's amazing. Inside this press, you have a bunch of books, uh, like commercialized by Stripe. And in this one, the last one of the latest one is Charles Almanac. It's on Charlie's, Charles, T Monger.
The co founder of, uh, I mean, co founder, I don't know, but a really good soldier from Warren Buffett and, uh, like he never wrote a book, he never wrote something, but he just appeared on 10 different conferences. Well, he just showed his thing, just showed everything, what he learned, how he invests into companies, how we behave, how we learn something.
And yeah, this book, like, uh, it was mind blowing. I really liked it. Uh,
Liz Moorehead: poor Charlie's Armagnac. Is that it? Oh, yeah.
Bastien Paul: It's Charles T Munger.
Liz Moorehead: monger. Yep I'm putting it in the chat for everybody. I'll make sure it's in the show
George B. Thomas: I love that you went in that direction because, and again, I love books. I love listening to books. There, there are so many things we can learn when we do try to educate ourselves. And one of the ones for me, Bastion, that was the most kind of mind blowing and wow, did I really take that journey. was the book Snowball, which is actually the Warren Buffett story.
And and as an
Bastien Paul: I need to read it. Yeah.
George B. Thomas: as an audio book. It's 38 hours that I listened to this book, and it was phenomenal. I loved it. I loved it.
Bastien Paul: I love it. More related to our business, high growth and hand growth book from a lot deal is a guy, uh, who created a company. I don't remember the name, but it was both by Twitter. And that's the, it was VP people of Twitter and joined Twitter, like at 50 people.
And, uh, he had Twitter to write to, uh, like 1000, something like that. And he wrote like a huge book on, okay, how do you structure your board member? How do you hire, how do you implement vision inside your company? And these books are free online, so you can go online and you can read it. You can just buy the book because it's beautiful.
And I love papers, but, um, Yeah. This one was really mind blowing, especially when I was working before, uh, in a company to, to understand like, okay, how do you grow as an employee inside a company? And, uh, yeah, I really liked it. like sweatpress, uh, every book they have, I want to read everything.
Liz Moorehead: Sebastian like once a month. I'm basically you start having you tell us what to read of what tools to use Bastian's corner Still recorded late at night, right? That's right. All right. So let's dig in. Cause I, I was very excited about this topic and I know I say this a lot, but I I'm saying I'm excited about this because it comes from a deep reservoir pain that I have felt at different points throughout my career in marketing.
Um, um, let me, let me paint the scene here, right? So marketing and sales theoretically on the same team. Theoretically, all bringing in Max, don't start.
George B. Thomas: Can somebody tap Liz? I think she's dreaming. No?
Liz Moorehead: theoretically.
Max Cohen: She did say theoretically to be
George B. Thomas: did say theoretically, that's true.
Liz Moorehead: All right. You know what?
George B. Thomas: Go ahead.
Liz Moorehead: together. Guys. All right.
George B. Thomas: My bad.
Liz Moorehead: I've gotten, I've gotten to one sentence into the problem and we're already acting up. Okay. So on the one side, regardless as to whether it's on the other side of the continent or in the same building, we have marketing, right?
They're generating leads, they're running campaigns, they're filling up the CRM with potential prospects. And on the other side, we've got sales teams, right? Who are focused on closing deals, but too often. We have a situation where these sales teams are saying those leads are not sales qualified. In fact, 47 percent of B2B sales teams say that the leads that they are getting that are supposed to be sales qualified from marketing.
Are not sales qualified, but marketing is sitting there going well. I don't understand why you're saying there's no revenue coming in from our campaigns. We've handed over this many qualified leads and we all said these were the metrics that said they were qualified. So what's going on? So this is where we're going into the messy middle today.
Right? We have two teams who are saying at the beginning, we've agreed what a qualified lead is, but somewhere in that handoff, something's going wrong. Marketing is starting with the lead saying, this is a qualified human and sales is getting that human saying no, absolutely not. So that's what we're dealing with today.
But I like to call the sales qualified lead conundrum because it can't use swear words in a title. So that is the closest we're going to
Max Cohen: Theoretically. Theoretically.
George B. Thomas: Theoretically. Yeah. If you're Max, you can use swear words in any shape or form that you want
Liz Moorehead: Get a crouton in your steering wheel. You're at a 15. So let's start this conversation. And actually, George, I want to start with you on this question. Although Bastian and Max and Chad, I know you're going to have thoughts on this, but I want to start with you, George, because you spend every day talking with different sales and marketing teams, right?
So we have sales and marketing teams who have these different views of what makes a lead sales qualified. I'd like to know in your experience, What are the key factors you see driving that misalignment between those two teams? I
George B. Thomas: Oh, man, that's simple. Like the amount of times that I have to state the obvious, I really do feel like I was put on this planet sometimes to be Captain Obvious when it comes to sales and marketing teams. Because, because the biggest thing is like communication. Can we just sit at a table like adults and actually take the time? That's another formula piece, right? By the way, communication time and strategize what it actually looks like. And when I say what it looks like, what I mean is we're not taking the time to strategize the data points, because as soon as we get it down to data points of what we're really going to call an MQL and SQL or whatever L that you want to add to it, now we can truly start to do some magical things.
But again, it starts with communicate, take the time, strategize. Data.
Liz Moorehead: want to, I want to come back around though, because I asked you to tell me what the problem is and you're telling me how to solve it. I want to know why they're disagreeing in the first place.
Bastien Paul: I think, I think they have. Two different language. What's saying George like? And that's something I really understood also when I was in marketing and sales, like marketing, speaking about data and sales are speaking about like feelings or things like that. I don't, I don't sometimes more in marketing side, so, the beginning of the problem, one of, one part of the problem is that different languages between, uh, between two different team.
Yeah.
George B. Thomas: I, I actually totally agree with that. Um, and what's funny is that, um, and this is not a plug. I am not shilling, but I literally had today a training for the super admin training that we do where we talked about C suite in stakeholder communication. And we talked about the different communication styles of like the HubSpot super admin and the actual C suite and how one is like a technical view and one is a business view, but one of the sections in that training, we actually talk about when communicating to marketing, do these things when communicating to sales, say it in these ways.
And so Bastian, you are hitting the nail on the head, like. Liz, to answer your question, they're speaking different languages and not taking the time to come to the table to understand the languages that they're speaking to then actually strategize based on common language, the data points they need to make a platform.
Work for the process of the people.
Liz Moorehead: Chad, you and your creepy printer right now are being so polite and quiet. I got to know what's going on in that head of
Chad Hohn: Well, I was told I had to be, be good.
Liz Moorehead: Chad, so here's what I need you to do.
George B. Thomas: Good does
Liz Moorehead: activate the superpower. I need you to activate the superpower I know isn't dormant and think about it from that tactics perspective, right?
You are a master of process, scalable, repeatable process. So where do you see the tactical parts of this process break down?
Chad Hohn: Yeah. I mean, it's literally kind of like Nick mentioned in chat, right? Nick from Fargo, he is saying, you know, blank starts at the definition of terms, literally knowing what the definition for your organization, cause it's different in B2B, B2C. What is an MQL? What is an SQL? And you know what, what workflow or what form is flipping this property, right?
Like, Oh my goodness. Like, because if you can't even report on the data accurately, you're arguing over imaginary everything. It doesn't even matter if you can't even flip the property at the right time. Like they're like, Oh, we generated this many leads. And then they're like, Oh, well, these aren't good leads.
And it's like, well, yeah, cause we said they're SQLs, but actually they're not like, you know, because we didn't even agree. Right. That's like the technical part. You need to like. All just sit down and figure out how to like, you know, I don't know, just program, uh, AI model where you type in what you think, you know, and then the other side types and what they think, and then it translates.
Right. And then you guys can actually understand what each other are talking about.
George B. Thomas: First of all, Max, that is your next skit brother, where you use GPT's voice assistant to translate marketing, speak the sales speak like that
Chad Hohn: a hundred percent.
George B. Thomas: amazing. It's, it's, but here's the thing I want to back up before we dive back into this conversation, because obviously this is a podcast for HubSpot users and Chad just said something on the tip of his tongue, like it was like known to everybody.
If you're sitting here and you're like, wait. Did Chad just say that I can actually set an SQL based on a form conversion? Yeah. In HubSpot forms, you can do that. And I'm not, I'm not even saying that you got to go do the workflow, but also did, did Chad say that we should be focused on like an automated process that actually fills the gap for what humans used to once have to do in a drop down in the, yes, that's what Chad's saying.
So like. Please, by all this holy, if you're the HubSpot user that hears that and don't have that, go do that. Like, that's your action item for today. Alright, Liz, I'll shut up.
Liz Moorehead: Max, you are free to speak. Tell
George B. Thomas: Oh god, buckle up!
Liz Moorehead: that heart of yours.
Max Cohen: I mean,
Liz Moorehead: Everyone hold on.
Max Cohen: My, I mean, My whole take on the MQL and SQL thing is, uh, Probably one of just frustration, Because it's, you know, No one ever defines it the same way. Right? Like a marketing qualified lead as a sales qualified lead mean like literally nothing until you get into an organization, like you get them to define it.
And then of course, you get a different order is organizations that like, don't even call things MQL or SQL, or have no, a completely different concept of what marketing qualified versus sales qualified is. Sometimes it's like marketing qualifies before sales qualified. But sometimes the difference between MQL and SQL is like, who actually generated the lead.
And it's really kind of at the same sort of lateral place. And so to me, it's like, I'm wondering like, how much like HubSpot's lifecycle stages in their CRM have like poisoned us all into this like argument around what's a MQL and what's an SQL because like it's something that you saw in HubSpot that had you know one came before the other because like you got to put it somewhere in the in the drop down right and then it Created this whole, like, there was like a lot of content created about it.
And then, you know, a lot of confusion because there was no automation that was moving these stages between each other. And you had to build workflows to think about what's this versus what's that. And there's one better than the other or what, like, which is why I'm happy that they're like finally changing like their default life cycle stages after all these years.
And I think they're even just calling it like a lead out, right? Like, I don't even know if they have MQL and SQL on there, but I might be wrong. But I mean, the thing is, is like. When it, like, I think there, I think definitions are needed, no matter what you call it, because, like, I, I do subscribe to the idea that, like, Um, what we would kind of consider a lead can have like a couple of different basic things that need to happen.
Right? Like we talk about physics a lot on this show, right? Like I do think marketing's job is to go find people that are a good fit. That's one thing, right? And then take those people that are a good fit or, or create content for those people that are a good fit and then get them engaged enough to the point that they're ready to talk to sales.
If I had to like Boil it down to the most like basic, basic rudimentary, like, what's your job as a marketer? Right? And I think what you kind of call those different stages is, you know, like for me, I'm just like, dude, do whatever works for you. Right. But a lot of it comes down to like, is there some kind of like rough SLA between sales and marketing because that's where the definition of these things get really important, right?
Is because you want to be able to have sales and marketing teams work together effectively And for teams to do that they have to be able to come up with agreements on what they're you know Promising the other side that they're going to do for them right in some way shape or form um, you know and a lot of the times it was just like You know, hey, how many mqls are we going to create as long as we create enough things that we call mqls We've done our job marketing now.
It's you know sales, you know, if you can't close and that's your fault, right? But it's like what no, you know what I mean?
Liz Moorehead: well, that's where we get to a root of a deeper problem where we have two teams that are more interested in covering their asses in terms of hitting, not hitting numbers and
Max Cohen: Yeah, that's toxic. We don't like that
Liz Moorehead: but it's true. It's true. There, we have two teams where whether it's because there's animosity or we're living in a climate where there's less job security, people are more concerned about making sure, well, we covered our end of the bargain.
We covered our end of the deal.
George B. Thomas: see,
Liz Moorehead: And so that's where those numbers
George B. Thomas: Any, anytime you live, there's two things I got to say because one's just burning a hole in my brain, but this is what I'm going to say first. Anytime you live in a CYA culture, you have lost sight of the and the importance of actually working as a freaking team. Now I have to back up for a second because Max says we talk about physics a lot on this podcast.
Hold up. We might talk about inbound physics, but I don't want anybody to get confused and think that you're going to tune in someday and we're going to talk about Isaac Newton or James Clerk Maxwell or Albert Einstein. That's
Chad Hohn: I don't know. I might.
George B. Thomas: that
Max Cohen: dharma shah
George B. Thomas: about. Inbound
Chad Hohn: got you covered.
George B. Thomas: Anyway, just
Liz Moorehead: I want to throw my, I want to throw my two cents in here about, go ahead, Max,
Max Cohen: No, no, give me your two cents and I'll tell you kind of like how we've done it. Like we've kind of switched up the way we look at like leads and stuff. You, you do
Liz Moorehead: dude, do it. Take it
Max Cohen: Well, I mean, so like, you know, we've gotten away from sort of that linear model and you know, like our sales and marketing teams, we're all on the same team.
We're just called the GTM team. That's it. Like we're all going to market together as a team, as a group, we're going to go to the market and we're going to get lots of awesome fruits and nutrients and bring it back and we're all going to thrive. Like that's the way we look at it. Right. And so like When we think about leads, you know, we've, we've dug a lot into like HubSpot's prospecting tool a lot more lately.
And like, we all start there now. Right. And the big thing, instead of like thinking of like, how many MQLs did we create? How many SQLs did we create? What we're doing is we're kind of realizing like, there's all these ways we can generate leads, right. And there's different people that are responsible for generating different parts of those leads.
Right. So like there's leads generated from. Brian and Joe just going out to LinkedIn and prospecting and like doing their thing. There's leads that clearly come in from the content creation that we do, right? There's leads that find us on Google. There's leads that, you know, HubSpotters reach out to me and then I connect them with people.
And so like we've started thinking more about measuring what we're calling lead triggers. Right? And so, like, every time we generate a lead inside a HubSpot, um, we have some sort of, like, trigger where it's like, this came from this motion, right? And so, like, what we're doing is we're carefully looking at all these different motions as these leads are getting generated, and then we're kind of evaluating the success of them over time, right?
Versus saying, like, oh, we got to get up to this stage first, and then once they do this, they can move out of this stage, and we're just looking at is like, what literally your path? Like, we don't We don't do that. It has to be three dimensional, four dimensional. It has to be like way more than just like a straight line.
Right? So.
George B. Thomas: physics.
Max Cohen: Yeah, exactly.
George B. Thomas: Yeah. Bastion. It sounded like you like had some thoughts on what Max was
Bastien Paul: Yeah. I think, I think like the thing of MQS was really to like, you want to have a report KPI for your marketing team, they have to report to the manager and the manager, like the CMO has to report the CEO. So, and at the end, like you're trying to, to like. Uh, have the best analytics in the world, last attribution, whatever you want. That's a mess. Like, uh, like, I don't know, two weeks or three weeks ago, Adam Robinson from Airbnb, just saying like, uh, I don't track, I just don't track. Uh, he has like one of the K followers. Whenever he posts something, he has YouTube channel. Of course, it's working. Of course, it's building the brand of his company, of him.
Of course, it's generating leads. He's doing content for a specific audience and this specific audience is his high CP. So he's doing content on TikTok, for example, where that the, his, uh, just does not slack on it. I think that's okay. So for us, for example, we, we only measure Uh, bottom of the funnel, like ads, things like that, things you can really measure.
Or, uh, you want to do some content on transactional, subject, keyword, podcast, whatever you want. But at the end, I think you shouldn't care. Maybe you should look at the amount of sign up. Be sure like your sign up is not plenty of Gmail, free mail, out mail, whatever you want. But if you're gathering good agents on your ICP, I think at the end that's okay.
And I do agree with Max. I think like having Every time, like, looking at MQLs, it's good, but it's a mess at the end, and you're just losing time. You just need to do more actions and reading the best report with the best funnel, whatever you want.
Liz Moorehead: So there's one little piece that I want to add to this, where we start getting a little bit into the intangibles of the relationships you have between marketing and sales. And I know we use her, the alignment and like, we're going to have brand new TV, ever going to be friends like, no, but here's the thing, right? Think about in your personal life, there's someone you don't like. If someone you don't like sneezes really loudly, God, why is that person so loud? Oh my God. They're so disruptive. We're trying to watch a movie, but let's say it's your best friend here. Do you need a tissue? God bless you. Are you okay? My sweet angel baby.
How are you? Are you okay? If you're marketing and sales, people do not get along. And you have an SQL prop depending on which side of the fence that's on. If they do not have built in trust, rapport, if they don't treat each other like human beings, something that is actually kind of like a level one non emergency is going to be treated like a seven, because that team already is predisposed, or that person is predisposed to not like them, to not trust them.
So they're looking for evidence of them not doing their job. Like that, I've seen this happen. If there is a toxicity that exists between the teams, it is going to be more challenging to solve these issues because there is going to be a resistance to solving the problem and being more interested in identifying problems that exist.
So like, and I see this a lot with teams, and I've been on a team where this happened. I've talked about this at a company I used to work at where The sales and the marketing team were actually super tight. Personally, we hung out, we went to bars, we went to happy hours, we went on trips. We did all this stuff.
But when we were in the office, the sales team overall had trust issues with a lot of different parts of the company. They often felt like service or product changes were happening and they were finding about it afterward. They would sell a deal and then be told that that doesn't exist anymore. They would be told by well meaning, they would be told by well meaning marketers, we will absolutely get you that sales enablement piece of content.
But then their VP or that C suite above them changed their priorities, told them that someone would communicate that to sales. And either they did, and guess what? That's a broken promise, or they didn't. And that's a broken promise with no communication. what happened?
Bastien Paul: Hmm.
Liz Moorehead: yes, we have exactly the things that we're talking about, right?
There are the definitions, there's the brass tacks of, if you can't measure it, if you can't document it, if you can't define it, nobody's measuring anything. We can't fix anything. If we have no agreements, what expectations are we holding people to? But if we have two teens where there is toxicity, where they are predisposed to dislike each other, the moment you sneeze is the moment I will make your life hell.
Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's just, do you get what I'm saying?
George B. Thomas: Can I shift gears for a second though?
Liz Moorehead: Yes.
George B. Thomas: I, can I shift gears for a second though? Because I don't know, I understand this team dynamic that we're talking about, but I also want to lean into something that Bastion and Max both kind of said, and that was this idea of need for action. And, and let's be honest, like sometimes does one team lean on another team too much when they could actually be taking the action that they should be taking anyway, and could that action be easier?
And what I mean is when I think about sales, you know, the way that I always make sales, I make sales because I have conversations and you know, what's been increasingly more difficult having conversations in a digital world. And you know, where most of the conversations actually happen, They happen on LinkedIn, to be honest with you in a digital world, like unless they're coming to my website.
And so if I, as a sales rep, actually want to have more conversations, I want to find an easier way to have those conversations. And I know that conversations are happening on LinkedIn. Then maybe I use a tool like HubLead. As a sales rep to have the conversations and take the action that I need to take.
So I don't have to weigh so much on an actual marketing team. Cause I'm out there. Guess what? Being a salesperson that knows how to market myself and sell myself and therefore market and sell my products. I don't know. Maybe that's a novel idea. Like I live in a world where I wish more marketers would know how to sell.
And more sales folks would know how to market. And both of them could use a tool like hub lead, just saying to actually have the conversations that matter and drive the funnel and drive ROI. That's all I'm saying. I
Liz Moorehead: Yes, I agree with that. And Bastian, I actually want to come back to you here for this next question because we talked about why are mommy and daddy fighting and is it our fault and what's happening, right? Like we're having this conversation about what's going on here between marketing and sales. I want to get out of the relationship.
I want to get out.
George B. Thomas: in my house. When, every time she said that, I'm like, are we being documented? What is happening?
Liz Moorehead: No,
Max Cohen: I have cameras in your
Liz Moorehead: kidding. Max. Don't tell
Max Cohen: Had to let her know. Had to let her know. Mm
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Liz Moorehead: Fashion, I want to talk to you about the lead handoff, right? Cause this is, this is that friction. This is, this is the point where somebody drops the potato and somebody picks it back up, but that drop bruises it and we have a problem, right?
So what are the strategies or frameworks you've seen that work best to smooth this handoff process out, whether that's technology or strategy,
Bastien Paul: Yeah, um, so at the beginning, like one of, like we were producing, I just want to replace a bit the context, like we were producing a massive list of LinkedIn e commerce websites. For my sales, we got like nine BDRs, so nine SDRs in Paris, four in Spain and four in UK. You give the list, they call, we were doing only cold calling and we were not, we were like We, we wanted to, to, to say, okay, do we target companies with 1, 000, 000 turnover yearly on yearly basis?
out of 100, how many did you get? And the girl was 20, 20%. so you, this one was the KPI for the same thing to be sure that the marketing growth team is doing that job. So we were reviewing that. KPAs were low, maybe at 15, for example, 10%, so it was my fault. So I go back in my desk, work, work, work, work, doing all machine learning, what you want, you do you want, uh, scrapping with Xamarin, scrapping with Ahrefs, whatever you want to score websites.
going back to the list and giving to them. But what I really, uh, find is, um, you had, I had this communication problem. I had this problem to do a lot of things on my side and not showing to the salespeople, but I, I missed something big. is what kind of KPI do I, do I have to be sure that my sales rep are doing their job? I don't know if you guys have, but for me, I check online, I check on different contents and I found nothing. I'm just not speaking about like different bunch of KPIs, but one KPI you can have. And my idea was something like How many, the thing was maybe how many touchpoints did you get on the company? How many decision makers did you find and did you outreach on different channels?
Because every time I was sitting next to, next to SDR, looking at the company and I said, Hey, you had only one co founder. He said he was not interested. Did you get the other one? No. Maybe you should. Did you get the head of logistics? No, maybe you should. But the first customer told me he wasn't interested.
Yeah, but the first one, you don't know him. You don't know if he's doing that job. If he's handling, uh, the part of the process you want to solve inside the company, you don't know. How they are working. You don't have, you do not have also the ICP information, like how many orders do they ship a month, for example.
So, um, yeah, I was searching for this kind of KPI to have like. Both. One, where the marketing team be sure that sales team, uh, are doing the right job and the, uh, reverse, the reverse, sales marketing job for the marketing. I don't know if you have any KPI like that or you had this problem before.
Liz Moorehead: gentlemen, normally you are jumping right in. Why is everybody suddenly being all polite now?
Chad Hohn: It just makes my brain go in a ton of, a ton of places, right. Is, is like every business is so unique, right. In a way. I mean, there's like a lot of industries that are a lot, you know, somewhat similar, but like sometimes trying to find out if the sales team is doing what you need them for the marketing team.
I mean, it really comes down to like, what are they doing? And then which things are yielding closed deals. Right. Yeah. Like, it's almost like more of a broad analysis to try and uncover that. Blue ocean of a KPI for your industry, whatever that industry is. Um, so a lot of it is really in reporting in general, always comes down to asking the right question and then making sure you're accurately collecting the data to answer that question reliably.
Right. And so I, I guess where my brain goes is like, well, what is that industry? And what are your reps doing? And do those things have any kind of real statistical correlation to increased numbers of closed deals or increased revenue, right?
Bastien Paul: Like, so, so our industry was, so e-commerce, e-commerce logistics. So selling logistic for e-commerce websites. So you have plenty of e-commerce websites, but not because like, let's say for example, you want Target 1 million, uh, yearly year turnover. It's not you, you can't check for the, uh, number of employees on LinkedIn.
But sometimes you have like three or four people doing 1, 000, 000 and sometimes you have like 20 5k, 500k online and maybe they are doing a lot of B2B things like that. So sometimes that's relevant. And sometimes for a lot of industries, like number of employees, it's not that relevant and you still need to call and to identify on the phone.
Okay. What's your business? What are, how many orders do you make a turnover and so on? And our strategy was less inbound. It was more outbound. We had like. Every big year I was doing like 60 to 70 calls a day. So we had a massive, uh, workforce to call, call, call, call. And when you do that, your, your CAC is kind of high.
So you want to reduce it with a targeted list. And at the end, having new companies, French companies was kind of, uh, A drug, like you wanted to, to have your, uh, to have to, to, to sell more, just go to the marketing and ask for more companies. Yeah. So I wanted to have that. And at the end, I checked with some guys from HubSpot, uh, how they do their sales. How do they, um, give, how many companies do you keep a month, a month, for example, a quarter. I really like the idea of how, how, how do you know if a sales is good or not? You can take, for example, the number of deals they close, but he, for, he, for example, they close like 10 deals.
And the others are doing five, but the other are speaking with 200 companies. And the first who closed 10 is speaking with 1000 companies. Is he really, uh, better than the other? Um, you know, when you go to sport game, when you look at the sports, you're happy when you, you, your team is winning, but how do you think, how do you decide if a team is best, uh, better than the other one is the one who won the final.
It's not the number of matches you, you, you want, you know, so, um, at the end, what we implemented is that, okay, you get 200 companies for a quarter. We're going to go to high tickets. So can we be higher, but you will get more revenue, but you stick with it and you have to convert like, I don't know, 20, 25, you can decide whatever you want, and then you decide, okay, who, which one, who's the best sales inside.
And you can keep the best and, and fire. So it's good.
Max Cohen: I think that, like, So we talked a lot about, like, fit, too. Something that I've noticed, especially, like, with, you know, we're a couple, more than a few months into, you know, uh, really starting to hit, uh, a good motion with like event happily and selling that the thing that i've like noticed is And i'm not sure how great companies are doing at tracking this or trying to figure it out Is that I think there's like?
Like we talk about lead scoring right fit and engagement And like, oftentimes when we think about fit, we're thinking of like demographic or firmographic fit, right? Like, is this a company in our ICP, right? Where it's like, okay, right. Amount of employees, they do this, they do that, that, that, like for us, you know, does your company do events?
You're generally a good fit for us. Right. But then what gets like really weird is that events get so complex. Right that I think there's this like concept of like problem fit. There's probably already a word for it I don't think i'm making up anything new here, right? um yeah, like like that like that's that's the thing that I think is is it's sort of like the next thing we got to figure out how to like get ahead of right because We waste a lot of time on calls when we could be getting this information ahead of time Right because like, you know event happily we're great for like webinars In person events trade show lead capture.
Are we great for like a conference yet? That needs to do booth management and vendor management and all this other stuff
Chad Hohn: Just think of trying to run inbound on it,
Max Cohen: Yeah, sure you could build it but like we're gonna be one percent of that solution, right? so like we're not a great fit for that, but like you're still technically our icp because you do events, right and so it's like Like what i'm what i'm kind of like trying to wrap my head around and figure out is like, how can we?
You Is either like asking smarter questions when people fill out a form, right? Or thinking a little bit more critical, critically about how like you're dequeuing someone in a nice, good way that maybe leaves the door open in the future, but kind of like politely lets them know your use case isn't a good use case right now and start thinking about like, cool, we've captured them.
We see that they're an ICP. We see that they're highly engaged, but before they get to sales, is there something that we can do to kind of figure out. If they're like a good, you know, problem fit for what we actually do and what our tool is really, really good at, right. Instead of wasting a bunch of sales calls on folks that like, shouldn't even be wasting their time with us.
Right. Um, like that's, I think sort of the next sort of level of fit that I want to kind of crack the code on, right. Because we. Me and Joe, we love talking to folks. Right. But we have a lot of calls with people that it's just like, man, yeah, we do event management, but your flavor of event management is really, really weird.
Right. And like, sure. Can we, can we get you about 1 percent of the way there? Absolutely. But then like, you know, I ended up wasting a bunch of time having all these esoteric conversations, selling HubSpot itself and not even our app. Right. And so like, I think like just, just the idea of like problem fit too, is something I want to like pay a lot more attention to, but Bastion, I think you were talking about like KPIs for like sales reps and stuff like that.
And like, what are you looking at? Are you looking at number of calls, number of closed deals? I don't think anyone is paying attention to like, you know, the percentage of which customers like renew or do repeat business. You know what I mean? Like that's. Like clawback is one thing, right. But the, but the thing that sucks about sales reps is that like, it's such a job of attrition and there's so much high turnover that like measuring something like, Hey, at what rate did the customers that you sold actually renew, which is probably the best indication that they were a good fit customer, like when you actually brought them in, you know, after they'd had like a year of the product, or, you know, they buy it the first time and come back and buy it again, like that's something that we should be measuring, but it's tough because sales people are generally in and out.
Right? Um, and not there for really, really long periods of time. Sure, there are some that stick around in places for a while, right? But you tend to already know they're a good sales rep if they've been there for more than two years, right? So, you know, it's just a couple random thoughts to throw in there.
Liz Moorehead: I love all of that. I want to move from, we're having lots of conversations about the actual definition, but often what will happen where I see a lot of breakdown is like, let's say we have a situation where people are doing where teams are doing the work that we're talking about right now, right? But that is status quo.
That is present moment. That is if our processes and systems and size stay exactly the same. It's when they start to scale. Maybe they act, maybe the fact that everybody's getting along and agreeing on what the leads are means they're growing in revenue. So their business becomes more complex, or their teams get larger, or they change systems.
And Bastiaan, this is where I want to come back to you. When you think about the advice you want to give to companies who are trying to lead, scale their lead qualification processes without losing consistency, without creating brand new spicy problems. What are those recommendations that you have for them?
And I know hub lead might be a part of that, but I'd love kind of strategically at a high level, but also into more of that technology and
Max Cohen: can we make merch for the show? It's just a t shirt that literally just has brand new spicy problems.
Liz Moorehead: You're welcome.
Max Cohen: that would be awesome. Sorry.
Liz Moorehead: that pretty much in every content audit. Don't worry. Once we uncover this, we'll have brand new spicy problems, but that's a problem for tomorrow. Not today. Let's
Max Cohen: today
Bastien Paul: you're speaking like, how do you scale a sales team and taking like, um, keeping this, how do you evolve your SQL definition? Right. Right. Okay. I think,
Liz Moorehead: And the
Bastien Paul: that's a good
Liz Moorehead: that wrap
Bastien Paul: Yeah. I think that's a good point. And I think training as to your point, Max, with, uh, problem, problem. Um, because at the beginning, for example, at our company, uh, previous company, um, we were targeting business.
So you have one or two decision maker, if there is only one founder or two co founder. And when, when we try to go up markets, we were like, okay, it's working with small, let's go. We got our SDRs, we got our market, maybe you will have more decision maker, but we don't care. Let's go for But after that, we had like four or five decision maker.
Uh, we had more complex setting because, for example, in that industry, you were on logistics. So when you're speaking with, for example, L'Oreal, it's not the same thing when you're speaking with a small brand doing only a t shirt, for example. Um, so the SQL will be more complex when you're doing only small businesses for me in the straightforward, it's simple.
You have your MQL coming from, for example, inbound or this, uh, this company's ICP, the, the, the sales is calling. Get getting the info or it match with our, uh, our service. They are doing like 1, 000, 000, for example, plus smart products. They are SQL. I will book a demo for the age, for example. But when you are doing that with big companies.
It's not that simple. You may, you might need like two or three things. So frankly, for when I left the company, we didn't find the solution. I was into Hublet way before we, we find the solution after like two years in the company. I say, okay, that's good to work in marketing team, but I want to build my company.
So I went overnight and how about we can work on that more in my previous company, you know? Um, but yeah, I think your process has to evolve and it's what's really hard is to understand that you need to separate your team in two. I guess for me, what I understood one team doing the same thing as you did before small companies and the other one going to a market and for God's sake, not having what people doing to team like this is the worst thing I saw.
It never worked. It doesn't work and never, never will work in every condition for me. So, yeah, I think. You have to get two teams with two definitions of SQL for me, but I understood that might be wrong.
Liz Moorehead: that's fantastic.
Chad Hohn: No, it's good
Liz Moorehead: I love that. I mean, honestly, Bastian, I'm just I'm putting this out there. So you can't say no, and it's reported and Nick from Fargo in the chat is here as a witness. So this is you verbally agreeing to come back for a 2nd episode for us to talk more about SQLs. Because I, I don't know if anybody else can feel the energy in this room, but like, we have baggage to unpack.
Um, we have baggage to unpack. Nick from Fargo is saying, I heard nothing. Wow, dog, way to just like, that hurts. That hurts, my
Bastien Paul: But if I come back, Chad, can you just send me an Amazon, the light thing, printer, everything like where I
Chad Hohn: I'll send you a link to, to the cabinet, to the printer, to the lights, and then to the stream deck that I use to control it. So there you go.
Liz Moorehead: will put a picture of that in the show notes. I just took a screenshot. But George, we have covered a lot of ground today. And I would love for you, since you are, thank goodness, here to help us land the plane this time, and it's not in my incapable hands, talk to us about what you want our listeners to remember.
George B. Thomas: I mean, the fact that Chad, Max, and I, and even Liz, to an extent, Are sitting here somewhat speechless, like that doesn't happen very often. Um, the, the, which means to me, the weight of the problem is a real thing. And, you know, so I'm not trying to be funny when I say this, but the, the takeaway that I want the listeners to think about is maybe it's time to get some sales and marketing therapy. And,
Max Cohen: feel like I need it
George B. Thomas: do that inside of your organization? Like how, how, cause I, again, I go back to, and Bastian said it, how does sales learn the language of marketing and how does marketing learn the language of sales and how do we come to the table together to actually understand what we call it, what we do with it?
Because by the way, the, the fact that we're so quiet. The fact that this is such a big issue means that the actual people that matter, the humans
Liz Moorehead: There we go, finally!
George B. Thomas: organization are not getting the experience that they need or deserve.
