Growth Driver

The MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a relic from 25 years ago, yet it remains central to most companies' revenue processes. Running an MQL-centric process offers no more than a 1-2% success rate—when opportunities and buying groups can claim numbers up to 400% increases in conversion rates.

It's time to rethink MQLs as the cornerstone of marketing metrics. Old habits die hard, but understanding why and how to transition to focusing on buying groups can greatly improve your efficiency and success rate. Transitioning to a new revenue model involves significant change management, but we’re here today to share a roadmap for transforming outdated revenue processes into efficient, high-performing systems with you.

Our guest, Terry Flaherty, is a titan in the realm of B2B waterfalls, funnel metrics, and revenue processes. As the Vice President and Principal Analyst in Demand Services at Forrester, Terry has spent decades shaping the frameworks many companies use today. His expertise offers invaluable insights into the future of B2B marketing and sales.

Terry is a senior marketing executive with a passion for sales and marketing integration through effective demand generation. His background includes more than 15 years of experience delivering enterprise-level software solutions, including business process management (BPM), IT infrastructure management, business intelligence, and application development.

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Before the pivot into efficient growth, and even before AI, the field of B2B sales has been seriously transformed in the last few years. B2B buying behavior has shifted, away from meeting with sellers and toward anonymity. There has been an unprecedented rise of different GTM motions; account-based, product-led growth, customer-led growth, partner ecosystems... And to top it all off, we’re experiencing an absolute explosion in technology, data, and now generative AI.

Despite all of this upheaval and innovation in B2B, sales and marketing teams still have to deliver growth, and efficiently. The era of siloed heroics is coming to a close, and smart leaders are leveraging alignment to keep up with the demands of efficient growth.

Join guest Dan Gottlieb for a deep-dive conversation with co-host John Common about the vital trends reshaping B2B and how sales and marketing leaders can foster a culture of resilience amid constant change.

Dan Gottlieb is a Senior Director Analyst at Garter for Sales Leaders. He covers a range of topics, from generative AI for B2B sales to RevOps data automations, to conversation and revenue intelligence. He describes the current state of the market in a single word: mayhem. Prior to Gartner, Dan was a Senior Analyst leading research in the sales practice at TOPO.

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What makes or breaks a B2B growth strategy? The pivotal roles of understanding your ideal customer, aligning your product to their needs, and crafting positioning and messaging that not only attracts but wins and retains those very customers. This trifecta can significantly reduce missed revenue, minimize wasted go-to-market spend, and alleviate professional suffering.

But these elements cannot merely exist in theory, confined to a PowerPoint presentation or trapped in the mind of a single visionary. They demand to be operationalized, brought to life in the day-to-day of any B2B organization. We sat down with April Dunford, a widely recognized expert in B2B positioning and messaging, to discuss the details of how to actually do this.

Throughout our conversation, April emphasized the importance of not just developing strong positioning and messaging, but of integrating these elements into every facet of your operation. This means moving beyond the conceptual phase and ensuring that your strategic positioning and messaging are reflected in how your product is marketed, sold, and supported. With experts like April Dunford, there's no doubt that the path to more effective positioning and messaging—and, by extension, more successful B2B marketing—is becoming clearer for us all.

April Dunford is the world's foremost authority on product positioning. As a consultant, April helps companies make complex products easy to understand and love. Boasting an impressive 25-year career as a VP Marketing at various rapidly developing technology firms, she has collaborated with hundreds of growing technology companies such as Google, Epic Games, Postman, and others. April is also the acclaimed author of the best-selling book, "Obviously Awesome," which delves into the art of positioning and the future sales classic, "Sales Pitch," which unveils the secrets to crafting a winning sales narrative in the market.

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The GTM game is changing quickly, and if you’re focusing your efforts on outdated plays, you run the risk of being left behind. That’s why we’re talking through the most important trends in GTM as we head into 2024. It’s time to step back, review the GTM landscape, and make sure you’re not stepping over dollars to pick up nickels.

In this episode we explore 5 strategically important trends with the perfect guest: Craig Rosenberg, a veteran of B2B sales, marketing, and technology and Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture, where he helps portfolio companies build go-to-market machines. We walk through each of the trends in depth, discussing the risk you need to manage and the opportunities you can unlock.

Craig Rosenberg is a veteran of B2B sales, marketing, and technology, with a data lake’s worth of experience and pattern recognition about B2B growth. He’s been a senior market analyst and growth consultant. He was a co-founder of TOPO which got acquired by Gartner. He’s now Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners - where he helps portfolio companies build go-to-market machines.

Growth Driver is powered by Intelligent Demand. Visit intelligentdemand.com to see how we help B2B companies grow revenue.

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The reality for most B2B organizations is that go-to-market teams—marketing, sales, customer success—are still operating in silos, creating inefficiencies that hurt pipeline conversion and customer experience. RevOps is the unlock. Today we’re digging into how RevOps has become the critical, behind-the-scenes growth driver for today’s B2B enterprises. When executed well, it transforms disconnected technology, data, and processes into a well-orchestrated system that ensures the right signals reach the right people at the right time.

But implementing RevOps isn’t just about adding a new role or department—it’s about enabling your entire revenue organization to work as one. Companies that successfully move beyond RevOps curiosity to capability build what Evan Liang calls a “coalition of the willing,” aligning leaders across departments around shared goals and a unified tech and data strategy. This approach not only reduces friction between teams but also eliminates wasted effort—whether it’s lost leads, duplicated outreach, or missed opportunities to engage key decision-makers in a buying group. And the result? A smarter, more efficient revenue engine that drives better growth outcomes with less waste.

To help break it all down, we’re joined by Evan Liang, CEO and co-founder of LeanData. Evan has spent over a decade helping B2B organizations master revenue orchestration, moving beyond outdated MQL-based models to a more intelligent, signal-driven approach. In this conversation, he shares the key trends shaping RevOps today, the biggest mistakes companies make when structuring their revenue teams, and why RevOps leaders are becoming the future CROs.

About the Guest

Evan Liang is the Co-founder and CEO of LeanData. Prior to launching LeanData in 2012, Evan worked in product, strategy, and business development roles at Microsoft, Ebay, Caring.com and Smart Modular Technologies as well as associate positions with venture capital firms Shasta Ventures and Battery Ventures. Evan is often credited with pioneering revenue operations.

Growth Driver is powered by Intelligent Demand, a 2X company. Visit intelligentdemand.com to learn more about how they can help your organization hit its growth goals.

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