The Sales & Marketing Lead Engine PDF

The Sales & Marketing Lead Engine – Going
Beyond Ads and Tactics to Create a True Commercial Growth Machine

1. Edition, 1. printing. 2022
Copyright © 2022 The Author & Spintype
Author: Brian Egholm Andersen

Book layout: Spintype.com
Cover design: Per-Ole Lind
Printed by:
Published with: Spintype.com
Editor: Charlotte Ramsby
Proofreader: Spintype Services
Isbn print: 9788771921267

Isbn pdf: 9788771921274
Isbn epub: 9788771921281
Contents
Preface 7
1: The Three Key Principles 10

Principle #1: Lead generation is a sales and marketing
exercise. 11
Principle #2: People and process always beat technology
and tools. 15
Principle #3: Zoom in. All the way in. Then zoom out. 18
2: Strategy & Organisation 21

The lead engine framework 24
The strategic drivers for investing in a lead engine 25
Case: NNIT 27
The new realities of B2B buying 29
In-market vs out-of-market 31
Case: Templafy 33
Build engines that always run instead of running
campaigns 35
The right skills (and people) for the job 38
Insourcing or outsourcing? 41
The lead engine tech stack 45
Core tools and nice-to-haves 46
How do you get it right? 49
The lead engine business case 51
3: Generating Leads 56
The Who: Your target audience 57
The Why: The right call to action (CTA) 65
The What: Messaging that converts 70
The Where: Picking the right channels 74
Wrapping up on lead generation channels 93
Case: Jabra 95
The How: Practically working with lead generation 97
Finding your sweet spot for lead volume and quality 101
Perspective: The role of sales in generating leads 102
Social selling to scale 103
Automating sales engagement 105
4: Qualifying Leads 108

BANT? CHAMP? What is a qualified lead anyway? 109
You, too, can make your own acronym 110
Lead scoring . . . or not? 113
The worst process is the one stuck in your mind 117
Case: Stibo Systems 119
The leakiest part of most marketing funnels 121
Four straightforward ways to get better qualification
rates 122
Speed is everything. I repeat: Everything. 124
Organizing qualification between sales and marketing 125
Principles and strategy before org charts 126
Case: APSIS 128
Qualifying soft leads 130
Who calls who? Getting lead routing right. 132
Examples of qualification processes 135
Perspective: Automation and AI vs. the human touch 138
5: From Opportunity to Sales 142

Building on data from the lead process 143
The buying group and the hidden decision makers 145
Case: eloomi 147
Your biggest competitor is probably inaction 151
Hunters, Farmers, and Responders 153
Case: United Fintech 155
Deal acceleration 158
Succeeding in partner-led sales 160
Lead distribution 161
Staying in contact with the buyer 162
Embedding software or people with your partners 163
Perspective: The bionic seller 164
6: Goals, Analysis, and KPIs 167

What’s the goal? 168
Case: SAS Institute 171
Metrics that matter beyond your primary goal 174
From spreadsheets to CRM and business intelligence 176
Getting your time perspective right 176
When do you drop the spreadsheet? 178
Troubleshooting guide for your leaky funnel 179
Multi-touch attribution modeling 183
Econometrics and marketing mix modeling 186
Perspective: The cookies and privacy challenge 188
7: Where Do You Go from Here? 191

Avoid the death-trap of endless pilots in corporations 199
Enter the dreaded “We can do it as a pilot.” 200
Scaling from 100 to 100,000 leads 201
Scaling lead generation 202
Scaling lead qualification 203
Scaling conversion to sales 203
Scaling goals and analysis 205
Closing thoughts 207
About the author 209
Index 210
Preface
Why this guide?
There aren’t many sales leaders who would say no to more leads,
especially warm ones. And, believe it or not, most marketers get truly
excited about driving measurable business impact. Everyone seems to
be on the same page when it comes to lead generation.
So, what could possibly go wrong?
All kinds of things, it turns out.
We can all agree that generating leads is a great idea. But the
consensus stops there. And unfortunately, more often than not, so
do the results.
In my early professional life, I acted as an advisor to sales and
marketing departments. I then spent seven years building my own
international lead engine.
What I often find is that there’s a disproportionate focus on
minor tactical initiatives, pilots, and technology implementation. Or
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The Sales & Marketing Lead Engine
programs get endlessly mired in disagreements between the sales and

marketing departments, often based on hearsay and anecdotes.
If you want to take your lead generation program from a slideshow
bullet point to something that has real commercial impact, you’ll
have to tackle these underlying issues. You’ll want to get the
principles, channels, collaboration, and process just right.
So, yeah, it’s not easy.
But then again, few valuable things are. Lead generation has arguably
never been more important. Technology is changing how customers
research and buy, letting them go through the purchasing process
largely on their own, withoutguidance. Outbound calling and
travelling field sales are increasingly less effective.
That’s why building a lead generation engine is a fantastic way to
capture the buyers’ interest.
By the way, I don’t use the words engine and building randomly. The
best companies really do take the time to build a true commercial
asset that will pay off for years to come.
That’s the goal.
This guide will set you on the right path to building your very own
commercial growth engine.
Enjoy!
Brian Egholm Andersen

Copenhagen, March 2022
If you don’t get #1 right, forget the rest.
Chapter 1
The Three Key Principles

When in doubt, return here
This is a fairly comprehensive and hands-on guide with lots of tables,

graphs, and information on different channels, strategy, tools, and
more.
Lead generation can feel like a very specific exercise. It’s easy to
jump straight into tactics (“We should collect leads with a pop-up
window!”) or technology (“I found this cool tool that scrapes
decision makers from a website!”). And sure, those things might be
the right things to do, but they rarely make the difference between a
positive return on investment (ROI) or not.
I find that I always return to three key principles. Whenever
you uncover something that isn’t performing, try coming back here.
These three principles functionas a principle stack. In other words,
from top to bottom. If you don’t get the first one right, forget the
rest.
10
1. Lead generation is a sales and marketing exercise. The inherent

collaboration is the root of all upsides and downsides.
2. People and process always beat technology and tools.
Technology is great, but it doesn’t make a bad process good or
turn poor sellers into rock stars.
3. Zoom in. All the way in. Then zoom out. Dashboards are cool,
but there is no substitute for looking at real leads and people.
Let’s sink our teeth into each of these three principles. They form the
philosophical background for much of the practicaladvice you’ll get
in the rest of the book.
While you might feel the desire to jump head-first into Chapter 3
and the best ways of generating leads, I really encourage you to start
here. Take in these principles. They’ll carry you through the rest of
the book.
Principle #1: Lead generation is a sales

and marketing exercise.
If you’re in marketing working on lead generation and you
don’t have full commitment from sales, stop. Get the commit-
ment you need, or do something else with your time and money.
On the other hand, if you’re in sales and you don’t have any idea of
what kind of lead volume is coming from what sources at what time,
the same applies.
At its very core, creating a lead engine is a combination of three
things: generating leads, qualifying leads, and converting them to
pipeline and sales. None of these tasks can be done in a silo.
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This simple model with two overlapping areas of responsibility is the

cornerstone of the book. This is not a marketing book. This is a not
a sales book. Just like your lead engine isn’t either—it’s both.
So why do we get it wrong so often?

Like most relationships, the one between sales and marketing relies
on empathy. If there is no common understanding and respect for
the different roles, it is bound to fail.
Let’s address some of the most common root causes of misunder-
standings below:
• Nearly every marketer I’ve met often thinks sales operates
too shortsightedly. Well, no wonder. If your paycheck is
closely connected to quarterly, short-term sales, you would
probably act the same way. Most sales organizations have
purposefully set up their sales process to be short-term-oriented
in this way—frankly, because someone has to be. No B2B
organizations with complex products function without a sales
team capable of managing and closing the pipeline.
• Conversely, most marketers have to concern themselves
with the longer term. Building a lead engine is rarely all
they are spending their time on. Thinking about the long-term
brand, preparing for product launches six months away,
managing a lot of different stakeholders, and creating creative
assets are all things that affect the next quarters, not the one
we’re in. All of this can be difficult to understand from a
sales perspective. Especially when the length of the sales cycle
often means that whatever marketing does this quarter probably
won’t turn into revenue until two or three quarters out.
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• Many marketing departments are not clear enough on

their purpose and how they contribute to growth. Some
might be philosophically stuck in thinking about marketing as
purely being about communications, high-level brand stuff, the
logo, colors, and making content. All these things do fall under
a typical marketing responsibility, but it is table stakes and
the least interesting part of driving new growth. Modern B2B
marketers must take joint responsibility with sales for revenue
growth.
• Within sales departments, there is also a certain old guard
mentality in many B2B organizations, a longing for a simpler
world where sellers alone held the key to information, a world
of less transparency and the ideal of the lone wolf salesman who
created their own luck and pipeline. This has come and gone,
however. Today, the buying reality is that buyers are typically
70 percent or further into their buying process before they even
speak with a seller.
Closing the empathy gap

If sales and marketing were a married couple, perhaps they’d seek
counseling. If they did, the therapist might begin by closing the em-
pathy gap between them by establishing a common understanding
of each other’s viewpoints before sending them out for a romantic
dinner.
Sadly, there is a significant lack of counselors in B2B companies, but
maybe we can learn from the type of thinking:
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Marketing Sales
Must think longer term Is heavily incentivized to focus on the

short term
Has to see the bigger picture top-down Meets customersone-on-one and work
bottom-up
Feedback loop from data, surveys, etc. Feedback loop directly from customers
Many different stakeholders, mostly Must focus on fewer stakeholders, mostly

internal external
Days of concentrating and collaborating Days of communicating and collaborating
Marketing should not be sales. And sales should not be marketing.

Just like couples, they functionbest when two different individuals
learn to complement each other. The goal is not to be like each other
but to establish common understanding and close the empathy gap
using down-to-earth strategies like these:
• Walking a mile in each other’s shoes. For example, let
marketers call inbound leads for a few days. I guarantee a
revelatory experience. Bring marketers to sales meetings and vice
versa.
• Customer journey mapping. Visualize how most customers
research and buy—almost always a web of marketing and sales
channels. Bring both sales and marketing into the mapping
process to establish a common ground.
• Setting clear, written expectations. How should we actually
work together when it matters? We’ll cover this aspect more in
Chapter 4, using the process of qualifying leads as an example.
• Joint initiatives and subteams. Making a new sales
presentation in marketing? Involve sellers to give input and
be part of the process of creating. Designing an opportunity
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process in CRM? Get marketing input on how to track back to

leads.
• Empathy exercises. I am a marketer, yes, but who am I as a
human? Where did I grow up? What shaped me as a child?
What values do I hold dear? We’re professionals at work, but we
bring our full selves into the office, and the more we understand
and empathize with what drives each other, the better we can
work together.
• Joint process. I imagine there is someone who made a sales
process in your company once. Is marketing part of it? Did you
make it jointly? There is no sales process in any B2B company
that I know of that shouldn’t be 50 percent marketing.
Years ago, in a meeting with a group of sellers, the VP of sales asked
openly in the room: “How many of my opportunities are influenced
by marketing? Does anyone know?”
I didn’t have a great answer then, but I do now. The answer is simple:
all of them. In today’s B2B buying reality, all opportunities are joint,
and all initiatives should be joint. Period.
Principle #2: People and process always

beat technology and tools.
Here’s a secret: The best marketing automation, lead nurture
program, or algorithmic lead scoring is always beaten by a
competent seller just calling the lead within two minutes.
There is no substitute for the right people acting in the right
way—and acting fast.
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To be clear, technology plays a significant part of any lead generation

program. But in all of the sales and marketing organizations I’ve
talked to, I never came across examples where it was the lack of tools
that kept them from success. More often than not, it was too much
technology, often poorly integrated, that kept the programs from
success.
There is often an expectation that tool X or technology Y will make
up for a lack of people and process. Sadly, this is very rarely true.
A personal perspective: When my colleagues and I were starting
a lead generation program back in 2014, we had almost zero
technology in place. We had a LinkedIn account. We had a website
with a form. And we had what is probably the worst CRM I’ve ever
workedwith: an ancient, on-premise version of Dynamics.
On the other hand, we had an idea of a very simple process that was
well documented on the sales side.
And we had the man, the myth, the legend: Brian Young.
Brian Young is a middle-aged salesman from Boston, with a heavy
accent and a mysterious resemblance to the character Ron Swanson
from the sitcom Parks and Recreation.
16
Ron Swanson: Probably Not the Guy You Want Calling Your
Leads
We had a very tight process, simple but powerful LinkedIn targeting,

and incredible do-everything sales skills from Mr. Young. In this way,
we started building the first business cases for our lead engine. Guess
what? We ended up realizing an ROI on pipeline of over 30:1, while
Brian converted nearly 17 percent of all leads to opportunities—we
never re-created that anywhere else.
Brian went on to get promoted elsewhere in the organization (typical
. . .) as we scaled the engine, but he was the perfect example of many
of the principles in this book.
I’ve heard versions of this story in probably 10 other companies
during my research. The moral of the story is simple; you can win
with great people and poor technology, but nobody ever wins with
great technology and poor people.
So, if you find yourself in a rut or a poorly converting engine, trust
me, chances are that people and processes are to blame. Then, look
to solve the problems with tools and technology only when you’ve
proven that’s where the actual problem lies.
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Principle #3: Zoom in. All the way in.

Then zoom out.
Doing lead generation is a numbers game. It lends itself
to dashboards, funnels, pivot tables, business intelligence, and
more. But they never tell you the full story. You should
absolutely have and look at those graphs, but simply scanning
dashboardsrarely gives you anything more but a number to
talk about.
Here’s a quick challenge for you.
Your conversion rates are dropping. There’s fewer opportunities.
The pipeline is drying up. What do you do?
This is where even the best dashboard or business intelligence
platform falls short. At best, they tell you what’s currently going on
when, in reality, it likely alreadystarted happening weeks ago.
You talk to your individual sellers, and you get a plethora of
anecdotes. A string of uninteresting leads today. There’s something
wrong with the campaign. Email is dead—and who even uses this
anymore? Facebook is terrible, so why are we using it again? I know
this other company that uses Vendor X, and we should too. Why
aren’t we on SalesForce?
You must resist the temptation to jump on any of these conclusions.
First, get to the very bottom of things and start looking at individual
leads—one by one, in the hundreds. Compare them with earlier
periods. Are the titles different? The companies? The industries? If
not, move down your funnel, but keep it zoomed in. Listen to
the sellers’ qualification calls. Read the follow-up emails. Get to
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the individual interactions. Are they as fast as you specified? As

on-point? How is their tone of voice compared to earlier?
Years ago, I was analyzing a declining efficiency in a lead engine in
the United Kingdom. Nothing had changed in the lead setup, but
conversions and value were dropping like stones. In the end, it came
down to an individual seller who stopped calling and was lazy with
his follow-up emails. We only understood the root of the problem
once we looked at his interactions with individual leads.
There is immense power in getting to the true bottom of things
before pulling back out to the helicopter perspective. Ultimately,
having a lead engine is a long collection of human contactsand
human interactions, and you must understand its individual parts
before you can understand the whole.
So if there is a problem, zoom all the way in. Understand each
component. Don’t rely on simple dashboards. Nothing beats doing
the real work of looking at hundreds of leads.
The idea of a pilot in the cockpit, turning dials and looking
at instruments, sounds alluring. But in reality, engines are built by
mechanics and engineers, not pilots. And the same is true for your
organization.
Building a lead engine or working with lead
generation in general, really isn’t a strategy in
itself.
Chapter 2
Strategy & Organisation

Starting right here, is half the battle
First of all, let’s be clear: Building a lead engine or working with

lead generation in general really isn’t a strategy in itself. It should
rest on a foundation of strategic context within the overall sales and
marketing strategy.
Every business and industryis different, and every sales and mar-
keting strategy should be as well. However, there are some shared
characteristics and contexts that impact how your lead generation
engine should work:
21
Your business context Impact on lead generation Consider this:
Top-heavy business—most Likely only very few Either focus on

revenue comes from a decision makers in the generating more contacts
short list of customers. world. Maybe not a great fit in each account, such
Think Airbus or Terma. for a true leads engine with as direct influencers of
a large volume. the buying process, or
consider focusing purely on
account-based marketing
efforts.
Broad set of Your market and list With a mixed bag

customers—mix of large of potential accounts of potential customers,
and small. Think Lenovo or is practicallyendless, it’s more important
SalesForce. and you’re the perfect to distinguish between
candidate for building potential self-serving
a true lead generation customersand the ones
engine. who go through a true
enterprise sales process.
Most of your business Likely you will not have Start very small and very
is done through partners, the organization to handle focused with the partners
and you have very little the volume and would need that are most hungry for
to no direct touch with to build it together with new business. You may not
customers. Think OEMs your partners. The potential find that the engine scales
or products for the is still there, but it will be well.
manufacturingindustry. difficult to manage.
Your business is direct, but Strong potential for a You may find that leads are
mostly light touch and with scalablelead engine, but it costly in the short term but
a low average customer relies on a product-driven profitable in the long term
value. Think some SaaS growth path that can if your product is sticky
software or low-margin onboard customerswith enough.
goods businesses. minimal effort—or an easy
transition to self-serve
ordering.
22
You will have to figure out the right balance in your space.
There are myriad ways to apply sales and marketing execution, after
all. This book includes a fair share of case stories from sales and
marketing leaders who had to make their own choices and their own
prioritizations. Draw inspiration from the book and these leaders,
but ultimately it’s up to you to connect the lead engine to your
overall strategy.
The aim of this book is to provide you with the theory, framework,
and tools to make exactlythat happen for your specific company
in your specific industry. In this second chapter, we’ll start by
introducing the frameworkand work ourselves through the key
strategic choices you need to make, such as these:
• Agreeing on the strategic drivers for building a lead engine
• Determining whether you’re running campaigns or building an
engine
• Getting the right skills, culture, and people in your team
• Deciding on insourcing vs. outsourcing
• Designing a proper tech stack for your lead engine
• Building the internal business case
Let’s kick it off by zooming all the way out on a complete framework
of a lead engine.
23
The lead engine framework

If you’re looking for this book in a single slide, here you go:
The Lead Engine
It’s a top-down waterfall for a reason; not a lot of companies

get it right withoutthe proper strategy and organization. Too often,
companies get stuck in pilots or trials because the proper strategic
context, organization to make the scale happen, or management
buy-in was never in place.
The next three parts of the framework—generating, qualifying, and
converting leads—are the actual engine itself. I put them next to each
other because they are equally important to get right and, crucially,
24
get right at the same time. One example many companies struggle
with is that they’re able to generate leads withouta problem, and they
even have strong, motivated sellers at the end of the funnel to convert
them to sales. But because they lack a strong qualification process,
the engine as a whole sputters to a halt. Take any of the three parts
out, and it just doesn’t work.
Finally comes goals and analysis. They’re together because they are
too often apart. Goals that can’t be measured or analyzed for
causation, are useless. “Grow revenue” or “meet sales targets” are
some of those classic, nonsense goals. Ultimately that is our desired
outcome, but since the overall top-line of a company is multifaceted,
we have to take it a step further if we hope to do any meaningful
analysis or optimization.
The strategic drivers for investing in a

lead engine
The sales and marketing strategy must follow directly from an overall
company direction. Are we moving into new markets to capture
growth? Scaling our existingmarkets? Do we need to lower our cost
of sales? “Get more leads and sell to them” is not a strategic driver; at
best, it’s just an empty line—it’s true at all times, but it doesn’t point
you anywhere.
My advice is to clearly identify what the strategic driver for building
a lead engine is.
It will help you anchor it in the overall company strategy, make sense
to the rest of the organization, and can help you make decisions
further down the line. It must link directly to an overall company
25
objective, be easy to explain and have direct consequences for your

lead engine.
While they are difficult to write on behalf of all the different types
of B2B companies out there, my experience is that they broadly fall
into the same distinct categories or types, so take inspiration from the
following examples below:
Company situation Strategic driver Implications for lead
engine
Mature organization and Lower cost of sales; Focus on bottom-line

market looking to add capture more demand in impact and true ROI,
a competitive advantage in the market. including full cost picture
an established market. of sales.
Mature organization and Capture demand in new Grow top line and fast
market, entering new markets in a scalableway. time to new account
categories or geographies. focus, proving new market
potential.
Scaling organization with Grow revenue and Focus on top-line impact

identified product-market customerbase in a and scalability.
fit scalableway.
Early to market stage; still Prove the overall financial Take a more exploratory
identifying ideal customer potential of the company approachwith several
and product–market fit and get product/market markets; target audiences
input from customers and messages.
In this book, you will find a mix of mature organizations (Like SAS
Institute, Stibo Systems, NNIT and Jabra) as well as scaling (eloomi,
Templafy) and early to market (United Fintech). Whatever your case
is, build your lead engine on a strategic foundation that sits squarely
between the situation your company is in, and the new realities of
B2B buying.
26
Case: NNIT
NNIT dials up the lead engine in a complex and top-heavy industry,
using thought leadership and lean tech.
Headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, NNIT is an international IT

systems integrator selling to both public and private corporations
across the world, including complex solutions in the life sciences
industry. Marketing and sales have workedin the past seven years to
build a lead engine.
NNIT targets some of the biggest public and private

organizations in Denmark and life science organizations internationally
with multimillion-dollar, multiyear endeavors. Because of this, its lead
engine approachis built to match. It generates leads primarily
through thought leadership events and publications, online and offline,
based on larger systemic challenges like digital transformation,
cybersecurity, and regulatory affairs. It’s ultimately a consultancy, so
it activates key opinion leaders in industrydebates on its digital
platforms. Its qualification process involves lead and interest scoring,
but it also includes a manual element from marketing to sales, given
the complexity of the sales process, and it keeps leads handed from
marketing to sales to the most relevant only.
Its tech stack is simple and straightforward: Microsoft Dynamics CRM

as the lead, marketing, and sales engine with built-in marketing
automation capabilities from ClickDimensions, alongside common
marketing tools like webinar and website basics. Crucially, Dynamics
started as a marketing-driven tool and was able to move quickly
withoutheavy IT governance to realize behavior-based lead scoring
and meaningful marketing automation. Marketing and sales have joint
leadership teams.
Ultimately, NNIT measures marketing impact through a combination of
marketing-qualified leads, the conversion rate to opportunities, and the
millions of dollars of actual sales pipeline that are driven by those
leads.
“Marketing at NNIT is really a

sales-supporting and sales driving function. If
we want marketing and our lead engine to
work, we have to be proactive and close
projected pipeline gaps before they arise.”
Lars B. Petersen,
VP Communications & Marketing, NNIT
Key takeaways for your lead engine from NNIT:
• It is absolutely possible to drive leads and pipeline in a top-heavy

industry with 50–100 target customers and $10M+ deal size. And
while difficult, it should still be measured on hard key performance
indicators (KPIs) like marketing qualified leads and opportunity
dollars.
• Lead engines in knowledge-heavy industries requires a different

approach in targeting, content, and handling leads between marketing
and sales in a more restricted way. Don’t be afraid of marketing
getting their hands dirty in lead qualification here.
• You don’t need the biggest tech setup or the biggest team in
marketing to generate results. Often, a core set of tools is enough to
get going.
The new realities of B2B buying

In the past few decades, businesses have radically changed the way
they buy. This sounds like hyperbole, but the data supports it.
For one, decision-making is increasingly distributed across the organ-
ization, giving a more diverse set of people influence on what is being
bought and from whom it is bought. Gartner’s research tells us that
the average number of stakeholders involved in a B2B purchasing
decision is 6.8, up from 5.4 in just four years. This is a far cry from
the prevalent thinking in the early 2000s and the idea of the almighty
29
business decision maker, typically a senior executive cutting deals

independently.
Unfortunately, this has also made buying harder: 77 percent of
B2B buyers now say their latest purchase was complex or difficult,
and when purchasing is difficult, we increasingly regret it. I’m sure
your organization has plenty of horror examples with buying either
software, hardware, or core supply chain assets—or all of them.
Multiply the increasing number of buyers and influencers with an
explosion in channels and ways for vendors to reach customers:
virtual events, social ads, traditional advertising platforms, Google
searches, third-party recommendations, email, “request for propos-
al” material, endless meetings, conferences, sales outreach, buyers
guides, and podcasts. While there is more information than ever, it’s
also harder than ever to make sense of.
Finally, COVID-19 pushed all these trends to the extreme. Buying
is even harder in a remote setting, both in terms of dialogues with
vendors as well as in subsequent internal sign-offs and meetings.
And of course the digital channels have made constant calls and
seamless transitions between internal meetings and virtual events and
gatherings part of everyday business life.
In this ever-growing jumble of a buying process, it’s up to sales and
marketing teams to make sense of what’s going on, stop using tactics
that workedin the ’80s, and scale efforts that speak to the promise of
reaching buyers as they are moving in-market.
Building a scalablelead engine is exactlypart of that new buying
reality.
30
In-market vs out-of-market
According to HubSpot, at any given time, only 3 percent of
your market is actively buying—56 percent are not ready, and 40
percent are poised to begin. In other words, most of the buyers are
out-of-market at any given point.
The first time most B2B buyers and marketers hear this, they flinch.
Really? Only 3 percent? It’s hard to come to terms with.
Typically, this is because your own interest in your brand and
products is at a constant year-round high. But your buyers, most of
the time, could not care less. Let’s take an example close to our sales
and marketing hearts to illustrate:
Company X is about to buy a new CRM system, which is a
high-involvement, complex purchase for most B2B organizations.
After months of internal pro/con debates, a proper buying process
begins. It might involve the VP of sales, a marketing representative,
operations, finance, procurement, and IT. In our case, Company X
has even appointed a full-time project manager to see the project
through. It’s a massive change project that will probably run 12+
months from start to finish. The actual in-market vendor process,
however, will only last a few months. There are only so many
relevant vendors out there, and you don’t want too many in your
consideration set. After settling on a vendor, the implementation
process starts, and now Company X is totally out of the market,
likely for more than three years, if not five or more.
Sometimes vendors will pick up intelligence on when the company
is thinking about switching and moving back into the market. Most
times, they won’t.
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The fact that B2B buyers weave unpredictably in and out of the
market is one of the key reasons you need a lead engine in the
first place. You simply cannot reliably guess which 3 percent of the
market is active at any given point. Instead, you have to pick up the
buying signals from the 3 percent by being always-on and available
to capture this demand. In short, build a lead engine instead a
campaign.
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Case: Templafy
Templafy delivers international SaaS growth driven by a seriously
profitable and scalabledigital lead engine.
Templafy is an international B2B software company that offers a

category-defining service to manage business documents, templates,
design, and assets. Its core customersare large, international
organizations that value brand consistency, compliance, and making
their employees effective. In just seven years of existence, the
company has grown to over 300+ employees.
The company is truly born digital, and its approachto demand

generation matches that spirit. Starting small, the marketing and sales
departments have built a true lead engine. The company has scaled
from just a few thousand dollars of monthlyspend to driving nearly
half of new business accounts and revenue directly from inbound,
marketing-driven leads—a truly impressive feat. Templafy combines
the classic inboundmarketing channels like Google, Facebook, and
LinkedIn with a deep customerinsight that ensures relevance and cuts
away inside-out thinking, along with a razor-sharp focus on setting up
sales to win. And the dedicated market development team qualifying
hand-raising leads within five minutes keeps sellers focusing on what
they do best: selling.
The Templafy lead engine operates in a mix between Hubspot as

the primary marketing interface, SalesLoft for rep engagement, and
Salesforce for accounts and opportunities, with a tight integration
among all three. The setup keeps Templafy nimble and focused on the
distinct tasks in generating, qualifying, and closing leads, but with full
visibility and trackability throughout, supported by real-time Funnel.io
dashboards.
With full transparency in all steps of the lead engine process,
Templafy measures its lead engine outcomesdirectly on the top line,
supported by leading indicator metrics like sales qualified leads, new
opportunities, and closing rates.
“The key reasons behind our successful lead

engine is really three things: we keep focusing
on the core process and always-on tracks, we
keep everything measurable and scalable, and
we make sure we understand the buyers and
their journey.
Our biggest failures have been driven by
inside-out thinking, and our biggest wins
have come from a strategic marketing mindset
of understanding the customer pain.”
Glen Hagensen,
Marketing Director at Templafy
Key takeaways for your lead engine from

Templafy
• Get the always-on-track lead generation right, and keep focusing on

improving it month by month. Building a lead engine is a marathon,
not a sprint, and the five-plus years Templafy has spent on refining
the core is a fitting reminder of just that.
• Qualifying and working on inbound leads is not a part-time job.

Templafy dedicates resources and a separate team just for calling
inbound leads, ensuring the focus, skills, and goals are right.
• If it doesn’t scale, you’re about to fail. In the high growth space

Templafy operates in, there is simply no room for initiatives that
can’t scale to 10X—otherwise the opportunity cost is too high for a
small team looking for big growth.
Build engines that always run instead of

running campaigns
Most marketers have been trainedin the School of Campaigns. It is
also, unfortunately, the default tactical answer to many challenges.
Product X is not performing? We must do a campaign. We’re not
getting business in the public sector? Let’s draft up a campaign.
Market share dropping in Germany? Campaign!
It feels good to do campaigns. It is a tangible action to take, especially
in a corporate B2B sales and marketing environment. They typically
35
also tickle a creative brainstorm interest that is common among

marketers.
However, campaigns are time-bound. They start and stop. They
have a fixed budget. A fixed time. A fixed objective. This is simply
not the right way to generate, qualify, and sell to leads. The issues, in
short, are these:
• Campaigns might generate a great amount of leads in
a short time. That’s the purpose, right? Correct, but your
salesforce does not work this way. They don’t call leads for two
months and then do account management for the rest of the
year. Leads have to come in at a steady pace throughout the
year. Too many leads in a short time may overwhelm sales, kill
your qualification rate, and therefore significantly impact your
ROI.
• Generating and qualifying leads is an iterative process. You
rarely get it right the first time. Success is often a result of
making the same ads slightly better or the same process slightly
better, again and again. If you run one campaign in Q1, another
in Q2, and then take a break in Q3, you’ll never get it right.
• There’s no predictability. How many leads, opportunities,
and pipeline will the campaign deliver? Who knows if it’s the
first time we run it?
When it comes to building a lead engine, the hint is right there in the
name. It must be an engine that runs—and keeps running.
That metaphor points us in the right direction. Your engine must be
carefully built, improved over time, and maintained. But with it, you
36
can go further than ever before. Avoid campaign-thinking and build

your engine to keep churning out results.
Characteristics Campaigns Engines
Timeframe Limited—typically no more Always-on—the best run for many

than a financial quarter years
Outcomes Fast and furious Slow and steady
Predictability Low High
Creative focus High Low
Iterative Rarely Always
Investment One-off Continuous
Complexity Low to medium—can be High—requires process

performed withoutinvolving agreements, alignment, and
too many collaboration
Mindset required Creative, launch mode, Tinkering, data-driven,

deadlines, big bang optimization, learning
There’s a reason why all B2B companies don’t run successful lead
engines: it’s hard.
• First, almost all stock exchange-listed (and most non-listed)
companies run on a quarterly schedule, whether we like it
or not. It runs so deep in the nature of most enterprises.
Bonuses might be paid quarterly. Marketing budgets might be
released quarterly. Sales goals are measured quarterly. The lead
engine cannot run on a quarterly basis. It must be a longer-term
investment and project.
• Second, it’s different. It breaks with the inherent desire
typically installed in marketing to make new things. It requires
focus on iterating the engine instead of launching new things
every quarter.
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• Finally, different things sometimes require different

people. Many B2B marketing functions come out of a
sales-support background, where their primary responsibility
was communications, visual identity, and developing sales
materials. The skills needed to run an engine are fundamentally
different.
All in all, we can see how it can be difficult to make the switch to
revenue-driven marketing and taking responsibility for a lead engine.
Let’s look at the people running the engine next.
The right skills (and people) for the job

One of the challenges covered in the first chapter of this book is
the sales and marketing divide, and how it partly stems from the old
guard on both sides of the fence and the lack of empathy between
them.
The remedy, to a large extent, is getting the right people on the team
to work with your lead engine.
In my interviews and experience with sales and marketing leaders, I
discovered the following gaps in setting the right team:
• Not enough “Excel marketers” on the team. While
sometimes used in a derogatory way, being an Excel marketer
is a common term for marketers who are data-driven,
performance-minded, and right-brain-oriented. They have no
dreams of going to Cannes and winning creative awards, and
they are not in marketing to create beautiful things or because
they wanted to work with people. As the name suggests, they’re
more comfortable in Excel than Photoshop. You’re going to
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need profiles on the team that got into marketing because they
wanted to sell at scale, not to do stunning communications.
• Lack of process-driven sellers, especially in qualification
roles. Sales is such a catch-all term that it’s hurting our
understanding of what the practice is. In reality, it’s often as
diverse as marketing. Unfortunately, a common idea of a seller
is a relationship-based smooth-talker. But for qualification roles,
you’ll want people who are both able to make a positive
impression in a few exchanges of words but are also extremely
process-driven. When you get 30–40 inbound leads per day,
anything other than process respect and excellence is going to
result in chaos. We’re going to deep-dive into different sales
profiles in Chapter 5.
• Test for technology and speed. These days it’s kind of a given
that someone knows how to work with CRM or a marketer
can write “Google Analytics experience” on their resume. The
reality is that it’s hard to find people who aren’t at least
familiar with the tools these days. What you instead need to test
and prod for is proficiency and speed. There is a world of
difference between a sales development rep who can just barely
get by in SalesForce and a power user who knows the shortcuts
and makes new opportunities in less than a minute. Again, this
matters because developing leads is a volume game.
• Creators and DIYers. It’s never been easier to get something
done digitally. With the right tools and setup, you can set up
a CRM, connect it with a marketing tool, integrate it with
LinkedIn, run campaigns globally, and create five landing pages
and ads without writing a single line of code or opening
Photoshop, let alone needing to call an agency. The reality in
39
most complex enterprises is that it isn’t that simple. There are

probably some complex integrations here and there. And maybe
some parts are done externally. But you still need doers who
aren’t afraid to plug the holes themselves, go slightly off-script
from time to time and make something happen in a short
timeframe. You cannot staff a lead engine with pure project
managers who only ask others to do something. Get creators on
board.
• Commercial leadership with vision and trust. As repeated ad
nauseam in this book, building a lead engine is a sales and
marketing game. The commercial leaders across marketing and
sales have to share the fundamental vision of building engines,
scaling marketing and sales jointly, and trusting each other.
As the head of marketing at eloomi says, “this is a human problem,
not a technical one. Invest in people before you invest in mar-
keting channels.” Before building different parts of the engine, the
engineerson both sales and marketing sides have to be looking at the
same plans, and you have to make a concerted effort in closing the
empathy gap using the tools in Chapter 1.
When it comes to building a lead engine team, most of us don’t start
from scratch. Realize that the people you have today may not be right
for the engine you need tomorrow. For all the talk of ruthlessness by
employers, I’ve often found the opposite to be true, and I’ve been
guilty of this myself: all employees can succeed in the right context,
but you also cannot fit a square peg into a round hole. If you are
completely withoutthe right competencies, don’t be afraid to make
major changes in your team.
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Insourcing or outsourcing?
With an established need to get the right people and skills onboard,
we also have a dilemma: if you have identified gaps in your
organization, do you insource or outsource them?
In marketing in particular, there is a long tradition for outsourcing
all kinds of things. Some marketing departments consist of razor-thin
crews with just a single or a couple of internal marketers but with
large external budgets to make up for it. In recent years, though,
there’s been a massive in-sourcing trend, for a couple of reasons:
• With media platforms converging into just a couple of key
ones (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc.) instead of hundreds
of local/distinct media, there is less need for complicated
middlemen who traditionally acted as a way to reach the market
through a multitude of channels with special discounting levels.
On the large platforms, everyone gets the same price and the
same experience.
• The shift from analogue media to digital media requires much
more of an ongoing/always-on approach to marketing instead
of a traditional burst/campaign mode. This either drives more
retainer-based outsourcing deals or the requirement to have
internal resources that have their hands on the systems at all
times.
• Pressure on external costs drive business cases that, at least on
paper, are better for insourcing; after all, the per-hour rate of
internal talent will always be cheaper.
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I have a simple rule for insourcing on the marketing side when it

comes to building a lead engine: If you can get capable people, it’s
nearly always best in the long run to in-source.
Even if an external media agency has slightly better buying capabil-
ities, any skill deficiency will be made up easily through aligned
incentives and being close to the business. This is also a place
where B2B lead engines are much different than, say, a simple B2C
webshop. The actual nuts and bolts of adjusting cost-per-clicks on
Google are important, yes, but it’s dwarfed by all the other softer
skills, staying close to the qualification team, adjusting not just for
performance in the CPC sense, but in the sense of what’s right for
the sales team. You just can’t buy that in the long run from outsiders.
On the sales side, there is somewhat less of an outsourcing history.
The outsourcing typically in play for sales teams is either more
telemarketing/outbound-oriented or driven by ecosystem partners,
resellers, and distributors. I don’t know many successful sales teams
that outsource meaningful parts of the direct customerengagement
over time. While business understanding is important on the mar-
keting side, it’s basically everythingfor your account managers, so it
very rarely gets farmed out successfully.
However, what an increasing number of sales teams is realizing is
that the job description of a seller has grown tremendously over the
years. And many of those tasks are not related to the core of customer
engagement:
• Data maintenance in CRM: Most complex B2B organizations
fight a constant battle over data quality in their CRM. One
of the main reasons for the disconnect is that the responsibility
for specific account data rests with individual sellers. They are
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often not particularly data-minded or process-driven and have it

as their absolute last priority in a day filled with meetings and
customer engagement.
• Account intelligence desk research: Ideally every account
manager has complete knowledge of what is happening in their
accounts; they skim their press releases and annual reports,
follow all decision maker movements on LinkedIn, track new
hires, and more. In reality, this intensive desk research work is
rarely kept up over time between deals.
• Production of tender/bid assets: The relationship-based work
involved with getting invited to a tender is often very different
from the production-based work involved with making great
deal-winning material. A minority of B2B companies deploy
dedicated deal/tender teams, but most leave a lot up to the
individual account manager.
As B2B buying complexity has grown, so too has the list of tasks to
be done by the average account manager. This unfortunately leads
to poor execution on many of them. It’s very rare that the highly
consultative, relationship-driven account manager is also great at
keeping accounts up to date in CRM and driving a tender process.
So the trick here is really to identify those non-core parts of sellers’
roles and outsource whatever is possible. At the most basic level, do
you want sellers talking to customersor cleaning up their accounts
in CRM?
For both the marketing and sales aspects of your lead engine, the core
principle is that it has to be an internally-driven initiative because
it’s business-critical and strategically important. And over time, the
core processes have to be run internally. However, there is also a
43
meaningful part of the process that can be outsourced if you’re just

getting off the ground, expanding into new territories, or looking to
focus your internal resources.
Below is a handy overview of jobs-to-be-done for your lead engine
and some pointers from the trenches:
Lead engine Outsourcing potential Things to be mindful of
jobs
Generating Fairly easy to purchase as a Using agencies that don’t have

leads service, but any agency might a full-funnel view and only look
need handholding to understand at the top. Integrate the agency
your business. into your systems as much as
possible, and incentivize them to
focus on your overall lead engine
goals.
Qualifying Deceptive. In theory it The incentive structure you put in

leads sounds easy to source out place and the partner you work
the first 15–20-minute phone with. Don’t view it as a low-cost
conversation, but pretty much alternative—it will likely be more
everyone I’ve spoken to with expensive than in-sourcing, and
experience has been burned and you will need to train them
scarred by it. It’s possible if you significantly in your solutions.
have a simple and transactional
product.
Converting Nearly impossible. Unless you The most common success

leads to have a transactional product or model here is partner sales—if
customers a very strong ecosystem partner you rely on the partner model
network, not a lot of companies for sales, it’s all about making
succeed here. the relationship sticky and being
even more process-driven in your
lead engine. See the section on
partner-led sales in Chapter 5.
Lead engine Possible in the short term, but not Buying this service from someone
strategy and desirable in the long term. A lot of who has an obvious incentive in
analysis companies get external help with how you’re going to execute your
setup and getting off the ground, lead engine, such as a media
but it cannot be a permanent or digital agency or a technology
solution. provider.
44
I truly believe that the long-term success model for lead engines rely
heavily on in-sourcing. This is not your canteen or a reception—it’s
a core commercial competence you have to control yourself. You
can augment points along the way and make sure you get it off the
ground in the right way, but there are no easy solutions like buying
some telemarketing and using that to replace a proper qualification
process and team.
The lead engine tech stack

It goes withoutsaying that an engine requires technology. And so we
must cover which pieces make sense and which don’t. In fact, this is
a crucial thing to get right, and a common pitfall for beleagueredlead
generation programs.
However, most enterprises do not suffer from a lack of technology.
Most suffer from too many disconnected pieces of technology, either
bought piecemeal to solve a narrow problem or as an over-scoped
digital transformation. And most organizations forget the truest of
technology statements: all complex technology disappoints.
Among all the B2B sales and marketing leaders I’ve spoken to,
every single one has battle scars from one or more failed technology
projects: botched CRM rollouts, massively delayed data integrations,
tools that looked great in PowerPoint but poor in reality.
A McKinsey study of 5,400 IT projects once revealed that 45 percent
run over budget, 7 percent run over time, and 56 percent deliver less
value than predicted. My experience and that of my peers tell me that
these numbers are likely much higher. Getting to the bottom of why
this is could fill an entire book. Suffice to say that the more complex
your organization is and the more complex technology you’re trying
45
to implement, the more likely it is that technology will totally fail to

meet your expectations.
With that cautionary tale out of the way, these are the key questions
for our lead engine:
• What core tools do we really need, and which ones should be
considered nice-to-have to meet our goals?
• How do we go about minimizing the risk of being mired in
over-budget, over-time technology projects that take focus away
from generating results?
Core tools and nice-to-haves

First, let’s consider the technology stack of tools that apply and
which ones are must-have versus nice-to-have. Broadly speaking, a
nonexhaustive list could look something like this:
Technology Why? Example vendors
CRM The core of any B2B sales and marketing SalesForce,

setup: leads, accounts, contacts, and MS Dynamics, HubSpot,
opportunities. Zoho, Pipedrive
Sales Makes your salespeoplemore effective by SalesLoft, Outreach

engagement automating follow-up and engagement with
potential leads
CMS/website The backbone of your website; build Wordpress, Drupal

content, landing pages, forms, product , Sitecore, Umbraco,
sites, e-commerce, and more Adobe
Lead capture Make it easy to capture leads on websites Wufoo, Sleeknote,

and landing pages with minimal coding HubSpot, Sumo
Mail Send a mix of mass communication and HubSpot, SalesForce,

marketing and personalized emails to leads and contacts ClickDimensions,
automation ActiveCampaign
Media buying A layer of intelligence on top of the standard Adobe, Deepdivr, Falcon
46
software platforms (Facebook, Google, etc.) , Siteimprove
Chat/conver- Start conversations on your website and Intercom, Drift

sational landing pages either with humans or AI
Events and Engage with leads and contactson On24, Zoom,

webinars webinars and virtual events GotoWebinar, Demio.
Calendar Go from email to booked meeting faster Calendly, Chili Piper,

booking and easier Doodle
CDP Build customersegments, own your Segment, Tealium

(Customer tracking data, understand behavior and , Optimove, SalesForce,
data platform) target clusters more effectively Redpoint
DMP (Data Build up custom audiences for media Adobe, Oracle, Adform,
management booking Lotame
platform)
Video More rich lead/customer interactions Vidyard, BombBomb,

Engagement Bonjoro
Proposals and Make it easy to sign deals withoutcomplex PandaDoc, DocSend,

signatures back-and-forth PDFs Turtl, DocuSign
Sales and lead Get new leads based on titles, roles, ZoomInfo, Sales
intelligence behavior, and responsibilities Navigator, Clearbit
Business Map complex data sources in dashboards Funnel.io, Qlik, PowerBI,

intelligence Tableau
Marketing Understand the full impact of marketing by Bizible, Datorama,

measurement connecting the dots back to sales DreamData
Intent data Get new leads or qualify existingbased on ZoomInfo, Bombora,

behaviors on-and-off your platforms LeadSift
Sales Improve the effectiveness of your sellers by Gong, SalesLoft, Chorus

coachingand understanding what works and managing , Jiminny, RingDNA
intelligence pipeline
Out-of-the-box Get various pieces of software working Zapier, Integromat,

integration together withoutcoding or get your data out SuperMetrics
tools
Phew. I promise that’s the longest table in this book.
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The scary part is that this is just a slice of the enormous ecosystem of
software designed to help you get, qualify, and convert more leads to
sales while understanding what works and what doesn’t. One might
wonder, with all this software available, why we aren’t all realizing
incredible benefits, skyrocketing conversion rates, and explosive
growth in pipeline and sales.
The answer is that a new piece of software isn’t the magic it looks like
in PowerPoint. If you have poorly performing salespeople, the way
to improve their performance is very rarely an advanced, AI-driven
conversational intelligence tracker. If your fundamental messaging,
go-to-market, or incentives are not in order, even the best lead
capture, scoring, and advanced marketing automation will get you
nowhere. And even the most sophisticated marketing measurement
tool is worthless withoutgetting the fundamentals right inside
CRM.
Now the question is, where do you start and what do you prioritize
as you mature your lead engine? My first advice would be to use less
software than you think is needed. Adding software equals adding
risk, complexity, and overhead. And it drains money and resources
from the process of actually getting and converting leads.
My second piece of advice would be to consider where you are
in relation to your maturity and overall volume. Below, I have
contextualizedthe different categories of software in relation to
maturity. Try to see if you can find your own company in this model,
and challenge yourself whetheryou need more or less in your tech
stack:
48
Crawl: Getting started, or Walk: Scaling the engine, Run: Best-in-class setup,
less than 200 monthly or less than 5000 monthly or more than 5000 monthly
leads leads leads
Get the basics in place: Make scaling without Now you have room
CRM, CMS, lead capture, headachesa priority. to experiment with sales
mail software. That’s it. Add sales engagement coaching, intent data, video
software and calendar engagement, CDP, and
booking to become marketing measurement
process-driven, and add software. Some of these
more lead channels investments will not pay off
sources like webinars, chat, at all, but some might give
and lead intelligence. you the small percentages
that add up to a large total.
There is obviously no hard-and-fast formula, and you’re welcome to

break my model apart and install a CDP with 50 monthlyleads.
My advice would be this: more companies fail because of too much
technology than too little. And always ask yourself how many leads
you could get for the cost of this piece of software.
How do you get it right?

Now that we’ve identified some technology that might be useful,
how do we actually go about implementing it withoutbeing stuck in
flawed technology projects for ages? Needless to say, you could write
books on this topic—and many have! I’ve attempted to summarize
the most important learnings here:
• The biggest tech stack productivity hack is simply having less of
it. I know this sounds facetious, but it’s true. When you add
a piece of software, the mental image of a stack is actually
completely wrong. You’re not just putting something on top;
you’re trying to insert something in the middle of a complex,
interconnected web full of integrations and data flows. Even
49
with the best people and processes, it’s not easy. So whenever
possible, try to make do with less.
• Prioritize integration capabilities. As a direct consequence of the
interconnectedness, the most common way sales and marketing
technology projects fail concerns integration. Most pieces of
enterprise software are fine on their own. A CRM isn’t even
that complex a piece of software until it has to import
and export data to five other systems, make sense of it all,
do reporting, and have 500 concurrent users. As such, prioritize
elements in your tech stack that integrate, and above all make
sure you make integration a part of your buying and testing
process. Never trust a “we integrate with X” statement on the
vendor’s website—the devil is always in the details.
• In-house strong tech resources. As Casper Emil Sciuto
Rouchmann, head of marketing at United Fintech says, the
classic gaps between IT, marketing, and business are vanishing,
and companies have to hire internal tech understanding, even in
leadership teams. If you don’t understand what you’re buying
and how it works on a deeper level, you will have a hard time
integrating technology into how you’re working on a day-to-day
basis. You cannot park this competence in IT—technology has
to be integrated part of how commercial teams work
• There are very rarely “out of the box” solutions in enterprise. I
know, it says so on the website—it’s plug-and-play! Except only
the simplest of use cases are truly plug-and-play. Don’t be naïve
and expect to spend real resources on not just the technical
integration, but the organizational one as well.
50
With the strategy, people, and technology in place, now is time to get
your calculators out: it’s business case time.
The lead engine business case

Very few B2B organizations invest significant amounts of money
withoutdoing some sort of business case exercise.
A lead engine needs a business case for two reasons—initially because
you might need a strong justification for getting funding, and
secondly to keep yourself honest as you’re executing: Are we meeting
the goals we’ve set for ourselves?
Thankfully, with the lead engine approach, you’re in one of the
stronger positions to make a case for investment or focus in the
organization. Trust me, it is a lot easier than making a case for
investing in great customerservice or spending millions to build a
brand where you’ll reap the benefits in the years to come.
For the simplest business case in the world, you need the following
figures to establish the unit economics. If you have no existing
data from pilots or old campaigns, use the benchmark figures I’ve
indicated below. Take the friendly range of the estimates if you’re
targeting a very wide set of smaller companies. Take the upper range
if you’re in a more complex industryor targeting companies with
more than 5.000 employees. It’s all guesswork at this stage unless you
have your own data, so don’t get too nerdy about 12 vs. 13 percent.
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Key metric Where to get it/benchmarks
Marginal cost per lead Media/affiliate cost. Based on existingdata, or use a

benchmark of somewhere between $50–300.
Conversion to Existing data, or use a benchmark of 10–15 percent.

opportunity
Cost per opportunity Simple math based on the two prior fields.
Win rate From your existing/projected deals. Use a benchmark of

30–40 percent if you have zero data.
Customer lifetime value From your existing/projected deals. Use deal size if your
business model is project sales.
ROI for revenue Deal size divided by cost per opportunity, multiplied by win
rate.
ROI for profit Previous field multiplied by expected gross margin.
The above will give you a basic idea of whetheror not the lead
engine is profitable on a marginal level. This means that, for every
incoming opportunity you pay for, what the incremental revenue
or profit return is. More established, mature companies may have
higher profit requirements than scale-ups, so it’s important to keep
these basic things apart.
For some lead engines and internal processes, this might be enough;
we now have a simple calculation that hopefully shows a positive
marginal return.
If you have a more stringent internal finance process and need
additional resources or platforms to get your lead engine going,
you may need a second component of the business case: the
establishment of start-up and fixed costs.
52
Cost item What it covers Type
Marketing resource Internal resources, such as media, conversion, Fixed cost

and content specialists, or developers
Sales resource Qualification resources, sales development Fixed cost

reps, etc.
Technology fees CRM, marketing automation, sales Monthly fees

engagement, etc.
Technology setup External help with agencies or similar One-time cost
People setup Onboarding or training costs for One-time cost

sales/marketing
With this data in hand, you now have a complete business case in
hand, shown below with sample data for a 12-month business case:
Lead Engine Case Description USD
Total one-time cost Technology and people setup $100,000
Total fixed cost per year Technology fees and additional hires. $150,000
Total media investment With a target of 10,000 leads at $100 CPL $1,000,000
Incremental revenue Based on 10 percent conversion to $3,300,000

opportunity, 33 percent win rate, and
$10,000 deal size
Incremental profit Based on 50 percent profit margin and total $400,000

cost of $1,250,000
You can add financial complexity to the business case depending

on what your business normally does with cases: pay-back time,
cash-flow analysis, NPV, internal rate of return, etc. as needed. I have
not seen this kind of financial rigor applied to sales and marketing
business cases often, but it does happen.
Finally, a word of advice: The secret to business cases is that
you’re not doing exact science here. Many of the underlying figures
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are based on assumptions, guesswork, and forecasting. All of the

numbers are likely to change once this meets reality. The goal is not
to predict the future as accurately as possible; the goal is to make a
realistic and compelling case that will set you and your stakeholders
off in the right direction and make a frameworkyou can adjust with
real-life data once it starts coming in. This will equip you with the
material you need for additional future investments.
As one seasoned corporate veteran once told me, building business
cases rarely uncovers the absolute truth. It’s about making cases that
are more attractiveand of higher quality than the other business cases
in the business: investing in product, customerservice, etc. This is a
pragmatic take, sure, but it’s often the reality in corporations.
With the proper strategic foundation and a solid business case in
place, it’s time to get into the meat of this book and explorehow we
will go about generating leads in the first place.
If I had to choose between starting with a very
well documented process and starting with a flow
of leads to work with, I’d go with the latter.
Chapter 3
Generating Leads
It’s all academic without a steady flow of
leads
All discussions about a lead engine—its strategic implications, how

you might qualify and score those leads, measure them, and
more—are all academic withouta constant incoming flow of
relevant leads.
Sounds obvious, right? Sadly, I have spent time with very large
corporations with a lot of slides, meetings, and discussions—but not
a whole lot of leads. So if I had to choose between starting with
a well-documented process and starting with a flow of leads to work
with, I’d go with the latter.
There’s five key elements to the generation of leads for your engine:
• The Who: Understanding and getting into depth with your
target audience
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Generating Leads
• The Why: Sorry, not finding your inner purpose, but why your
target audience should care to reach out to you
• The What: Actually translating those concepts into specific
messaging that converts browsers to leads
• The Where: Picking the right channels to invest time and
money in to generate leads that are fit for purpose
• The How: Your own definitions of a lead and the constant
balance of quantity and quality
In this chapter, we’re going to unpack each of these five and provide
you with examples, screenshots, and cases to illustrate how this
process works in reality.
The Who: Your target audience

“Great marketing starts with the Who.”
The first really great Chief Marketing Officer I ever workedwith told
me this on average every three months for nearly seven years. The
sentence carries weight for several reasons.
First, it’s extremelyhard and rare for companies to spend too much
time understanding customersand users. Just compare it to the
hours wasted on picking the right stock photo or A/B testing button
colors. Understanding the buying behaviors, needs, pains, and desires
of decision makers and influencers is often an underserved area.
Second, it really is impossible to do great marketing withouttruly
understanding your target audience. And this is where B2B sales
and marketing stands out. The concept of a target audience in B2B
is not as simple as it is in the consumer space, where everyone
57
understands that mothers with young children buy more diapers

and that heart-shaped chocolate boxes are really popular right before
Valentine’s day.
So before you do any sort of lead generation, I advise you to have a
clear image of the following three key things:
• Segmentation and targeting on a company level
• Understanding where buying happens—the buying center
• Your target buying group and the key decision makers and need
drivers
Let’s go through each of these briefly, using a case based on the
Danish company Dixa, which sells software to help call centers serve
their customersand prospects. It is an SaaS, license-based piece of
software in a growing but also fiercely competitive industry. Large,
global providers like Genesys, Avaya, Amazon, and Salesforce all play
in this space in various ways, as do a long list of smaller companies
like Aircall and countless others.
Segmentation and targeting on a company level

This is right out of your marketing MBA and the most basic level
of segmentation. While it would be great to target the entire, global
market of call centers, Dixa must decide where to focus and point
its efforts. A very simple approachto segmenting call centers can be
done with only two dimensions:
First, a call center can either be in-house—for example, in a bank,
servicing customers—or functionas an outsourcer, which involves
a professional services company that specializes in outsourcing call
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Generating Leads
center services to other companies. These two options pass the

golden rule of segmentation; they are distinct. Their behaviors are
different, their customersare different, and their internal setups are
different. They will likely also buy on different terms.
The second dimension could be the size of the call center. This is a
common segmenting variable in B2B, and it drives distinct behavior
in most cases. A global bank like Barclays with distributed in-house
call centers around the world and complex technology integrations
has totally different buying behaviors compared to a local travel
agency that employs four or five customerservice representatives.
Bringing it all together, your basic call center segmentation map
looks like this:
Size/Type In-house call center Outsourced call center
Inbound Outbound Inbound Outbound
Small
(1–19 agents)
Medium
(20–99 agents)
Multisite
(100+ agents)
Using your market data, you will want to add as much detail to
the relative sizes of the different segments. For example, the small
inboundin-house call center segment might seem great at first, but
isn’t a very large portion of the market. Fill out the market
opportunity and percentage size of each segment to the best of your
knowledge:
59
Small Size: $15M Size: $5M Size: $5M Size: $5M

(1–19 agents) Share: 3% Share: 1% Share: 1% Share: 1%
Medium (20–99 Size: $50M Size: $10M Size: $25M Size: $15M
agents) Share: 10% Share: 2% Share: 5% Share: 3%
Multisite Size: $250M Size: $50M Size: $50M Size: $20M

(100+ agents) Share: 50% Share: 10% Share: 10% Share: 4%
Crucially, everythingyou’ve done so far is based on the market. And

your data should look the same as what your competitors look at.
Now is the time to pick your target(s). Resist the temptation to target
everyone, and take an honest look at your current customers, where
you find success today, and what product–market fit you have. In
Dixa’s case, it might find it currently has the most success with small
and medium in-house call centers simply because it doesn’t have the
scale of enterprise sales teams or solution fit with large multinational
companies. However, it can serve both inboundand outbound
equally well. Its targeting might look like this:
Small Size: $15M Size: $5M Size: $5M Size: $5M

(1–19 agents) Share: 3% Share: 1% Share: 1% Share: 1%
Medium Size: $50M Size: $10M Size: $25M Size: $15M

(20–99 agents) Share: 10% Share: 2% Share: 3%
Share: 5%
Multisite Size: $250M Size: $50M Size: $50M Size: $20M

(100+ agents) Share: 50% Share: 10% Share: 10% Share: 4%
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Generating Leads
Now we have made the most basic of segmentation and targeting.

We understand on an account level where we want to acquire
customers. You may want to build tracks for several segments, but
let’s keep it simple in our example for now. I should note that if you
are this far and have real market data to back you up, you are further
than most B2B sales and marketing organizations out there. Time to
go one step deeper.
Understanding where buying happens—The buying

center
You could do the same exercise as above in the consumer space, and
you wouldn’t be too far off. But to get it right in B2B, we need to
go one level down. The key learning is that accounts and companies
as a whole very rarely buy anything – it’s very specific groups of
people. Let’s use our call center example again, and pick a mid-sized
imaginary bank, Loans & Savings, as an example.
Loans & Savings operates in two markets: Denmark and Sweden. It
has about 200,000 active customersand 1,500 employees. The bank
might be a dream customerfor Dixa. It’s important to understand
that, as a company, Loans & Savings rarely buys anything.
When talking to the senior management of the bank, software used
to run the call center is probably not on the agenda. We must go
one level deeper, to what Forrester Research calls the “demand unit.”
This is where decisions are actually made in modern B2B buying.
Not by companies or an all-powerful individual, but somewhere in
the middle. For Loans & Savings, there might be a different
buying center for each of their two markets. There might even be
one for private customersand one for enterprise customers. Or one
61
for inboundand another for outbound. It might be distinct buying

groups, each with their own needs, decision makers, and solution fits.
For your target account/company segment, understand if there are
different buying centers involved and whetherthis means your
segments should be split up. In the case of Dixa, it might lead us to
rethinkour segmentation and split up inboundand outbound; while
the company Loans & Savings will likely have both, they are in fact
different buying centers with different buying groups.
Your target buying group

Now we’re on the last step of the Who journey: understanding the
buying group and the decision makers and influencers that make it.
Building on our case of the call center in a bank, a nonexhaustive list
of participants in the buying group might include these:
• A head of customer service/care/sales. Holds department-level
responsibility of performance outcome such as customer
satisfaction, but not a user themselves.
• A call center or site manager. Often closer to the actual call
center, tasked with building, developing, hiring, etc. Definitely a
user of the software. There could be several individuals with this
role.
• Call center supervisors. Middle management for call center
agents. Responsible for day-to-day management and coaching,
typically former agents themselves. The buying group might
involve one or more of these to take their decision.
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Generating Leads
• Call center agents. Actual everyday users of the software. Might

be involved heavily in forward-thinking organizations that
involve end-users, or they might not be involved at all.
• IT architecture/project manager/technical product owner.
Responsible for the technical solution, implementation,
maintenance, etc. Very likely part of the buying group.
• CIO/IT director. Responsible for a suite of technology where
this is one of many pieces. Might be heavily involved and will
have preferences according to their IT strategy—whether to buy
or build, extend existing partnerships, etc.
• Procurement/buying manager. Especially in larger
organizations, a common function involved to negotiate
contracts and exert price pressure but in some cases can also be
seen playing a more active role in scouting out new vendors as
part of the buying group.
• Third-party system integrator/advisor. An external
implementation partner responsible either for this system alone
or a larger IT initiative. Might even be actively running
the buying process and inviting participants, or could just be
recommending and advising.
And that’s withoutmentioning legal/compliance, HR, process
consultants, digital transformation officers, and other possible
members of the buying group especially in larger organizations. Dixa
talks to all of the above people and more over the course of selling
call center software. But what does it mean for our lead engine?
It’s all choices, again. There is simply no realistic path to marketing
to every single call center agent, for example. So we get to our second
63
segmentation table, this time on the level of the individuals in the

buying group. Here we add richer information on the pains, goals,
and roles of each individual:
Core Business Audience Core IT Audience Get on
Catalysts for Change Short List
Role Agent Super- Manager/ Head of IT Director IT Project

visor Site Customer Owner
Leader service
Pains Noise Retention Stability Showing System Delivering

value expansion on time
Workload Onboard- Lack of
ing insights Driving CX Budget Integra-
Too many flat tion
systems Attrition Scaling New to existing
channels Move to software
cloud
Goals Handle time Handle NPS NPS Budget Delivery

time scores scores
Satisfaction Internal Happy
Satisfac- Response CX journey feedback agents
tion time
Roles A few Voice of Often Can be Formal Respons-

individuals the catalyst catalyst budget ible
may agents in for new for new owner- for driving
be part of the buying software, solutions. ship. Does project
the buying group. ex- Not not initiate home.
group Strong periences hands-on process Cares
and can opinion on pains with but has about
influence manage- herself demo. short-list ease of
based on ment and hears Formal of imple-
hands-on tools. from business preferred mentation.
testing.A team. owner of vendors. Can re-
few system. commend
individuals software.
may
be part of
the buying
group
and can
influence
based on
hands-on
64
Generating Leads
testing.
In the above shortened call center example, we start to see the Who
come into shape. And we see different personas with different pains,
goals, and roles in the buying group. And while our dear IT director
might ultimately hold the budget, it is clear that she might not be the
one actively in the market for the solution, and she’s probably not the
primary target of our lead engine. In this case, the business audience
are the catalysts for change and the key people start to a sales process
with.
In summary, we now have an excellent grip on the Who:
• We’re clear on segmentation and targeting on a company level.
• We understand where buying happens: the buying center.
• We have mapped out our target buying group and picked the
key personas we need to engage with and their pains, goals, and
roles.
Now, the question is this: Why should they want to talk to us?
The Why: The right call to action (CTA)

The fundamental part of any lead generating exercise is for someone
to hand over their contact information, raise their hand, and want
to be contacted. There are really only three reasons they are going to
do that, and it depends on how far along in their buying process the
group is:
• They’re ready to explore. They are very early in their process,
or no process has even started. Individuals have pains, but there
is no vision, project, or timeline. The solution is not defined.
65
• They’re ready to engage. They are engaged in a buying process

and actively researching solutions, working on their vision,
scope, and supplier set. You can help them advance in that
process or give an enticing enough offer for them to speak with
you.
• They’re ready to buy. They are already very far in their
buying journey, and now they just need the details—pricing,
availability, etc. Really, almost any CTA will do here—you are
just picking up contact details.
Obviously, not all CTAs work for all buying states. In our example
with Dixa selling to call centers, a “free demo/first 14 days” might
be a strong incentive in the latter parts of the funnel, while a “How
Bank X moved their call center to the cloud in four weeks” case study
is more relevant in the earlierparts.
Ready to ... Buying group is . . . Call to action to . . .
Experiencing pains with Download material for early

current solution, getting parts of the buying journey
inspired by peers and industry
at large Attend learning/inspiration
sessions
Researching possible Trial with low commitments

solutions in broad scale;
defining an early vision and Demos either 1:1 or in groups
business case for the future;
Download material to support
looking at possible vendors
vendor selection and scoping
Narrowing vendor list, Trials with commitments: e.g.,

finalizing requirements, proof of concepts.
business case etc.; engaging
directly with vendors where Incentivize to close:
relevant onboarding, free periods, etc.
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Generating Leads
Very few purchases go through natural stages like this in a sequential

manner; they typically bounce back and forth. However, it’s relevant
to think about what stage you’re trying to get leads and matching
your CTAs with it.
What CTA should you pick?

If you’re a knowledge-based company like a management consulting
firm or an architectural design house, chances are you don’t have a
lot of chances with the bottom parts of this funnel.
When you’re selling knowledge, there are rarely standard projects
out there. No buyer has a recurring need for engaging a management
consulting firm; rather, projects are often created in unison with the
advisors and take shape very early in the funnel. There’s a reason
McKinsey doesn’t run free trial campaigns where you get two
consultants for two weeks to see what they’re like. Instead, the key
to McKinsey is getting leads early in the process, when projects have
barely formed, so they can design them together with the customer.
Contrast this with a more standardized, packaged product category
like office rental buildings, printers, productivity/marketing
software, cleaning services, etc. If you offer cleaning services to large
office spaces, there is a clear, well-defined need and demand in the
market, and buyers must actively search them out. There is probably
not a whole lot of exploration going on, but instead the buyers will
quickly move to a defined scope and a process of soliciting offers, etc.
If you’re in this space, don’t make white papers. Make it easy to move
along the buying process, maybe with an online pricing calculator,
an easy-to-start trial, or something similar.
67
Explore stage example Engage stage example Buy stage example
EyeEm wants you to Figma engages directly with a Cognism goes all the
download a trend report and request for a demo. way and gives you the
teases with the color of the first 25 leads for free.
year.
Looking at the above three examples, you can tell how the different
brands are playing in different spaces. All three approaches can work,
but they work because they fit the brands and their sales models.
CTA checklist and cheat sheet

In general, check the following boxing when considering your call to
actions:
• Above all, it must be aligned to your sales model. If the
buying process requires a lot of seller-buyer interaction, support
that by making the bar slightly higher to not waste sellers
time. If it’s mostly self-serve and you can handle unlimited leads,
lower the bar.
• A clear demonstration of value for your contact details.
Give you 25 free B2B leads, a free report, etc. The clearer
the value is, the more information buyers are generally willing to
hand over.
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Generating Leads
• Think in unison with your targeting. Tight targeting needs a

strong call to action with clear value if you want volume (e.g.
a free trial or demo products). Broader targeting can be a slightly
weaker call to action (request for quote, webinars, etc.).
• “Call to action” has the word “action” in it for a reason.
Avoid “learn more” and its many variations like the plague. No
one wants to see your video or read your article. But if I can get
something for free, download a template I can use, or something
similar, I’m in.
Here’s a cheat sheet of the most common calls to action and
recommendations:
Call to action How it works and what it’s for
Request a Lower funnel campaigns. Products that can be demoed in a short

demo time and where seeing is believing. Examples: software or simple
hardware.
Sign up for our Upper funnel campaigns. Show off capabilities in a field by sharing
webinar/event meaningful or interesting knowledge.
Get a free trial Lower funnel campaigns. Typically very high conversion rates. Perfect
for scalablesolutions like software but can work for hardware if the
unit costs are not too high.
Download Can work in most places in the funnel, depending on the content, but
white works best upper funnel in knowledge-heavy industries like consulting,
paper/eBook system integrators, etc. Often does not produce directly actionable
leads.
Book a Very far down the funnel. Can be combinedwith tools like Calendly to
personal book the meeting directly in the seller’s calendar. Can be an extremely
meeting powerful conversion, but be careful with wasting the seller’s time,
depending on your average lead quality.
Contact sales The most cautious you’ll see. Avoid if at all possible, or consider
rewording to more actionable/valuable call to actions. No one really
has a desire to talk to sales—what the buyer needs isn’t a salesperson;
they need to move their buying decision forward, either by getting a
price, a demo, more information, etc.
69
Get a quote Lower funnel campaigns. Might appear silly, but pricing is the
key piece of information, especially for many commodities or lower
interest services. Simply getting a price is part of the buying process
and can work well in some businesses.
Non-product- Offering an incentive to spend time on the meeting, such as a

related pair of wireless headphones, a voucher for lunch, or similar in the
incentive $50–100 price range. It basically relies on a reciprocity law, whereby
you providing something of obvious value means your prospect will be
inclined to repay you. This is a bit of a wild card and can be considered
faux pas in some cultures. It has merit if you address a very particular
niche and perhaps don’t offer a totally must-have product that is also
hard to sell/demo withouta meeting.
Take the test An often-overlooked gem that isn’t used much. Everyone likes to voice
their opinion, and if combinedwith competition, you might achieve the
rare combination of both getting someone’s contact information and
getting smarter about your market and target audience.
Just getting started? Pick the most aggressive and valuable one you
can support and take the learnings from there before you start
limiting your volume. We’ll cover more about how to handle softer
leads like white paper downloads in Chapter 4, but the goal should
always be to have a CTA that smells like hand-raising; the permission
to contact someone directly.
The What: Messaging that converts

Now that we’ve figured out who we want to target and why they
should even bother with getting in touch, we can look at how we can
convince them to do exactlythat.
Having spent some time in this chapter with the Dixa case
of call center software, let’s see what its competitors are doing.
Below are three fast-growing software companies, all with significant
investments in their lead engines:
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Generating Leads
Competitor 1: DialPad Competitor 2: Five9 Competitor 3: Zendesk
Shows product clearly Shows product clearly Shows product clearly
Short confirmation of Social proof with reviews Offers both a self-service

benefits trial and a 1:1 demo
Bold claim and clear
Social proof from positioning: Make agents Strong social proof—
customers 300% more productive well-known customer
brands
Phone and very simple Brief confirmation of
form available—easy to get benefits Short feature list
in touch with
“Get a quick quote” CTA
What are some of the similarities we can learn from?

• Show the product and recap main benefits.
• Make it brief with an ability to dig further.
• Provide social or expert third-party proof.
• Lower the barrier to get in touch.
• Have a clear CTA
These three are all from the same category, so we can expect some
similarities. But let’s examine three additional cases from totally
different industries:
71
Example 1: Cognism Example 2: Gartner Example 3: Jabra
Clear benefit: 25 free Knowledge product: PDF Clear benefit: free trial of a
targeted leads with no download physical product
strings attached
Easy download if you’ve Bold claim: the world’s best
Strong expert downloaded other things headsets
recommendations before; 10+ fields if you
haven’t Less easy to convert:
Clear customersocial has additional fields for
proof qualification
Simple form and clear CTA
We can see many of the same patterns emerging, but there

are clear differences. Gartner obviously relies less on third-party
recommendations, given its incredibly strong brand. On the other
hand, a relatively new brand like Cognism spends more space talking
about reviews and customersthan it does about their product. With
no visual way of showing their offering, it’s also much more
copy-driven than the previous software examples.
Test. Then test some more.

With no single truth in messaging, there is really only one way
forward: testing. Whether you conduct messaging testing before
launch or continuously post-launch, testing must be an integral part
of messaging around the lead engine and one of the primary levels
to pull for optimization. Below are different ways you can approach
your messaging development and testing regime:
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Generating Leads
Testing How Consider
Proposition/mes- The old school: Making the test as real-life as

saging testing Using third-party panels, possible, e.g., by running the
prelaunch agencies, or polling tools; actual ads in a test market
testing different sets of to avoid the biases of survey
messaging against each testing.
other.
The “Mom” test Andreas Obel from eloomi Obviously, you do not need
recommends the Mom to rely on your family
test: Does your own mother members—the essential part is
understand what you’re getting input from non-industry
trying to sell here? Is the insiders, and then not trusting
copy simple enough that them blindly but testing based
you don’t have to be an on their input.
industryexpert?
Controlled A/B testing Clean A/B landing pages Good for simple and
for landing pages using standard A/B tools low-volume communication.
like Google Optimize, Make sure you make the
Optimizely, Convert, etc. B-variants different enough to
get clear learnings. There are
not a lot of companies with
volume meaningful enough to
do green button vs. yellow
button types of tests.
Media platform Facebook, Google, and Not overdoing it. The best
auto-optimization others allow for automatic platforms still need volume:
optimization if you have a 50–100+ conversions per
clear conversion goal. Just variant.
upload different ads, and
the platform will pick the
best one.
No matter how you actually go about testing to get messaging that

converts, establishing a culture of testing is essential here. You can
get far looking at what competitors and other companies do, but
you rarely copy your way to the very best solution for you. Each
industryand product is different, and what works for the leader in
the industrymay not work for the challenger. Here are some ways to
make the culture of testing happen:
73
• Say it! We’re going to commit to continuous testing of

our messaging; we cannot rely on a pre-baked piece of
communication.
• Show it! Change the front page or something very visible a lot
of times in a short timeframe to make it obvious internally that
nothing is sacred.
• Do it! Commit to always having X tests running, and make this
an objective in itself for the team.
With the tools at the disposal of modern marketers, testing has never
been easier. It is frankly a sin if we’re running the same ad and
landing page for years on end. Just remember that we don’t know a
lot of things for sure, but we know it can always be better than what
we have today.
The Where: Picking the right channels

With the right audience, CTA, and messaging, it’s time to get tactical
with the right channels and source of leads. As always, your results
are going to vary heavily whetheryou’re selling to carpenters, CIOs,
or facility services, but there are often more commonalities than we’d
care to admit.
The scope of the book is obviously not to be a complete primer on
advertising on LinkedIn or Google—it would turn into a 1,000-page
tome—but rather to help point you in the right direction and offer
the talking points to engage with the right specialists. These are the
channels we’ll cover and why they’re interesting:
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Generating Leads
Channel Why it’s good Common pitfall
Google High intent, targeting is often baked Prohibitive costs or low search
search ad- right into the search. volume in category.
vertising
LinkedIn Best targeting for B2B, strong lead Very high costs in some niches, lack
gen formats, easy to work with. of scale in some markets.
Facebook Low cost, huge reach, potentially Inability to get quality right, leading
great targeting, and great formats. to many poor leads.
Email cold Low cost depending on lead source, Low success rates.
prospect- easy to scale and personalize.
ing
Outreach Personal 1:1 conversations. Low success rates and potentially

high cost. Requires prospecting
rockstars.
List Easy to do, instant volume. Completely cold. Requires strong

buying outbound sales skills or
combination with other channels.
GDPR challenges.
Intent and Easy and inexpensive, reveals Very hard to act on. Rarely results in
behavior pre-hand raising behavior. actual leads.
data
Physical Soft benefits, can qualify live, Very expensive and requires the
events targeting. Provides a human right people on the ground.
experience.
Virtual Easy to make and execute and get Low-quality leads, hard to follow up
events registrations with the right content. on, no human interaction.
Organic Free in theory. Typically high intent Difficult to convert withouta strong
leads because people seek you out offer; low traffic.
themselves.
SEO and Long-term source of organic leads. Requires quality content and
content Shows expertise in industry. distribution. Can be hit/miss.
marketing
Referrals Semi-qualified by partners. Low Typically low quality.

and effort.
affiliates
Surveys Softer sell and a combinedoutcome Requires fit between incentive and
of lead and market insight the product you sell.
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Let’s dive in!
Google search advertising

In a tremendous amount of industries, for both B2B and B2C,
Google is the first destination for research. In all but the most
complex of industries (like, buying nuclear power plants), search is a
natural part of the research journey.
The buying intent is right there in the action of doing a search.
Someone typing in “call center software” or “conference center in
Berlin” isn’t doing it because they expect entertainment but because
they have a clear buying intent. This is why Google search advertising
is the most obvious and meaningful activity to do for generating
leads in a lot of industries, and the reason it is a popular starting point
for any lead engine.
Over the past years, Google has committed more and more of their
real estate to ads, to the point that ads now cover the full screen (or
more!) when searching on a normal-sized screen. This may be poor
for users, but it does give you even more room to play from an
advertising perspective.
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Generating Leads
Example: Looking for CRM Software? You’re about to Get Some

Ads.
With a pay-per-click model, you only pay for meaningful

interactions, and there’s lots of opportunities for smart marketers to
optimize based on outcomesand ROI instead of simple cost models.
The downsides are that most interesting categories with volume are
heavily contested, sometimes by both vendors and affiliate partners.
This can dramatically increase the cost of a click, in a few unique
categories (e.g., casinos, lawyers, insurance) to $50 or even more than
$100.
Depending on your deal size and customerlifetime value, this may
not be a real problem as long as you keep the conversion flow
onwards from the ads as polished as possible. With click prices of
$50, you can’t leave any stone unturned on the landing page.
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Example: The Three Landing Pages from Our CRM Software

Search—Strong Conversion Focus
Lead generation through Google search advertising is one of the most

purely data-driven exercises you can go about. So get the right team
with you, and take a data-driven approachwithoutgetting lost in the
weeds on long-tail keyword hunting. Focus on a few high-volume
hitters first and get conversion right—otherwise, it’s incredibly hard
to scale.
LinkedIn
If you had to design a new platform ground-up ideal for B2B
marketing, it might look something like LinkedIn.
• Massive volume: 300 million monthly active users and a global
reach. I’ve seen success in the US, Germany, Japan, and China
with LinkedIn.
• Targeting like no other B2B marketing tool: Titles, seniority,
company size, interests, affinity, custom company lists, and
much more.
• Effective paid formats: Lead generation ads with easy data entry,
native sponsored posts, InMails, and conversational ads.
• The best data accuracy: People actively work to keep their own
profiles up to date.
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Generating Leads
• A rare possibility for organic reach: Given the fact that only 1
percent of users are actively posting.
There is only one real drawback: cost. LinkedIn is expensive, and it’s
only gotten more expensive over the years. You can expect to pay
above $50 for 1000 impressions, and more than $10 or even $20 per
click the more targeted your audience is, which, in turn, might drive
lead prices above $200.
However, if you’re looking to target finance directors working for
companies with more than 5,000 employees in Northern Europe
who have shown interest in enterprise resource planning systems and
get them interested in a demo, this is the game you’re playing. It is all
about quality over quantity.
LinkedIn is probably one of the best channels to get started with. It
is very easy to run campaigns, you can get started for just a few
thousand dollars, and you can ensure very high quality and relevance.
Given the high lead cost, I would always recommend a more
action-oriented CTA like booking a demo or meeting—there are
few lead engines that can make sense out of driving white paper
downloads for $50–100 apiece. The lead gen ad format is the most
obvious starting point because it has the lowest barrier of entry to
set up and doesn’t require a dedicated landing page—the user does
everythingon the website.
Facebook
Facebook and its cousin Instagram are some of the biggest ad
platforms in the world. This is especially true for e-commerce
businesses and B2C companies relying on its unique combination
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of unmatched reach with nearly 3 billion monthlyactive users and

incredible targeting. That targeting ability has come under pressure
from Apple, crumbling cookies, and legislation, but it still remains
very strong, and it’s certainly better than almost anything else out
there.
But what about B2B and lead generation? Isn’t Facebook a bit
too consumerish? The short answer is no. The way to think about
Facebook is this: it’s the only medium in the world where you can
reach 100 CEOs for a couple of dollars because almost everyone is on
Facebook. It all comes down to your targeting.
Successful B2B marketers on Facebook have cracked it in two ways:
liberal use of their “look-alike” functionality or broader targeting
combinedwith narrow messaging.
Let me give you an example of both, using Jabra as a case. Jabra
sells to thousands of companies, and it usually wants to start with a
senior IT decision maker. In its CRM, Jabra has a very long list of
past buyers that can be used with Facebook look-alike targeting. By
uploading contact data to Facebook, Facebook will do its magic of
finding similar types of profiles. You can specify how alike Facebook
has to find them, which will either increase or decrease your target
audience and, of course, make your targeting more or less exact.
With broader targeting typically comes worse quality, however, so
Jabra approaches this by making the offer less attractive(“Apply for
a free trial” instead of “Get a free trial”). This way, the conversion
from ad to lead is lowered, but quality is increased.
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Generating Leads
Example: The Facebook Lead Gen Ad—Three Quick Taps, and

You’ve Got a Lead with no Data Entry
Facebook has very strong formats as well, with video, links to your
own site, and the lead gen ad that LinkedIn popularized, which
means the user doesn’t need to do any data entry at all. The user just
confirms the data alreadyon their profile. This dramatically increases
conversion, and it’s no wonder that most conversion-oriented
platforms copied this format.
Overall, Facebook is an incredibly strong medium for B2B in the
right use cases. You’re combining very wide reach and strong formats
for both branding and conversion with an incredibly low cost. The
one thing to get right is combining these things with the proper CTA
and targeting and avoiding the obvious pitfall of a ton of unqualified,
low-level leads.
If you can get this balancing act right, Facebook can be your
most cost effective and scalablelead engine channel because, unlike
Google, it doesn’t rely on active intent and catches leads slightly
earlierin the funnel.
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Email-based cold prospecting

The basic premise of email-based cold prospecting is acquiring a list
of contacts, either from your own database, a broad third-party data
vendor like ZoomInfo, or a narrow industryprovider in your space.
Then you send a string of emails that are typically short, to the point,
and with clear relationship between buyer and benefits.
Here’s an example from Chili Piper, a tool you might remember
from our suggestions for your tech stack.
It’s dead simple. There’s a short intro and a small GIF that demos
the product in 10 seconds. Then, another short message and a clear,
interest-based question at the end: “How do you think this would
improve the buyer experience and the experience for your reps?”
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The goal is not to land a meeting—that would almost be impossible.

Every week, most senior decision makers get several cold prospecting
emails, especially if they’re in sought-after roles like IT or marketing
directors.
Instead, look at it as a way of starting a conversation. The goal is
not to get them to book a meeting. The goal is just to get them
to respond. Gong.io, the revenue intelligence platform, has gathered
data on this particular area, and they report a 2X better response to
cold prospecting emails with an open, interest-based CTA like “Are
you experiencing these challenges” or “Do you think your team
could be interested in . . .” instead of “Book a meeting with me here.”
Prepare for response rates in the low single digits—at best—and
don’t be surprised if it’s lower than 0.5 percent, especially with
externally purchased lists. Above all, make sure you send more than
one email. It is very common to see more than half of your results
come from follow-ups and reminders, not just the initial mail. You
may feel slightly dirty by spamming people, but this is the name of
the game when it comes to email-based cold prospecting.
Personal outreach
In a way, this is the ultimate sales-driven lead generation, and it’s not
very different from how sellers acted for years. The only difference
is how much easier it is to do both research and connections. The
process looks something like this:
• Building on the Who, have a clear idea of the people you want
to talk to.
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• Identify the individuals via Sales Navigator, your CRM,

ZoomInfo, etc.
• Find out where they spend their time online.
• Do a bit of research on the prospect and their business.
• Connect with them directly in a relevant way.
What this looks like in practice depends on your industryand
channel mix. It may be a whole lot of LinkedIn if you’re selling to
marketing professionals, IT, or someone in a similar role or function,
or it may be based on both physical and virtual events.
Anyone who has ever had a title on LinkedIn that smells like “I can
buy something” has experienced the onslaught of cold outreach. In
my previous job as a marketing and digital leader, I’ve gotten a cold
outreach on LinkedIn or email every single day. Just scanning my
LinkedIn inbox, here are three horrible examples:
Example 1: Not even sure Example 2: SEO provider Example 3: Software

company
I got these three within the span of three days, all from “people” on
LinkedIn. What do you think their success rate is? Simply put, this is
not the way to do it. You have to establish a personal connection and
put something more meaningful into the outreach that respects the
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recipient’s time. Base it on something your target has said or written,

a significant event in their company, or a talk you experienced at the
event you attended together. There is a direct correlation between
your success rate and the time spent researching and engaging before
reaching out.
Personal outreach requires prospecting rock stars. Most people are
simply terrible at it, and many attempts to scale it are fundamentally
broken because you lose the very thing that makes it work: the
personal touch and the non-scaling aspect. It can work wonders with
the right people and the right engagement, but it’s probably never
going to power true volume in your lead engine.
List buying
In nearly every industry, you can find a data source for a long list of
names, titles, emails, companies, industries, etc. Simply having a list
obviously doesn’t produce leads—there are three main ways to use
them:
• Personal outreach: Old school—buy a list, and dial for dollars.
Honestly, if you’ve picked up this book and gotten this far in
it, you probably know that the success rate of this is abysmal
and frankly from another time. As we covered in the previous
section, it’s possible with research and effort, but then why do
you need a list of thousands of prospects?
• Email cold prospecting: This is probably your best bet here
if you have a really compelling email-based offer and strong
execution in this channel.
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• Improve Facebook campaigns using look-alike targeting: If

you have a very low volume of emails yourself, this can be a
way of cheating your way to a database of potential Facebook
matches.
Finally, we have GDPR and its growing global variants. Many
vendors of email marketing lists will claim compliance, but you
often have no way of really knowing. Overall, I honestly would not
recommend this tactic unless you are outside of GDPR territory.
You are setting yourself up for legal risk and using one of the least
effective tactics in the book. Just avoid it and make an engine for the
long run.
Intent data
One of the key changes in B2B buying is how much of it is now
done independently of vendors. Buyers are researching on their own,
visiting both third-party and vendor websites, and getting smarter
about the industryand potential solutions before reaching out to
anyone. Wouldn’t it be great if we could pick up the vast majority of
these people that visit us withoutgiving away their email permission
or asking us to get in touch?
This is the core principle of intent data, using either your own site
data or third-party sites to match accounts (crucially: accounts, not
contacts!) with behavior, often with IP tracking. The simplest way
to get started with this on your own website is using one of the
many low-cost tools like LeadFeeder or Snitcher to find out which
companies are doing what on your website.
The output of this can seem really exciting: oh, Apple from
California visited five pages on my website yesterday! The more
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difficult aspect is the next step: Now what? Do you cold email all
your contactsfrom Apple? Sometimes the intent data vendor will
offer a lot of potential contactsfrom the account, but there is no
way of knowing who was on your website. The other option is to
use data from these platforms to customize landing pages, either by
directly calling out their company name if you’re able to track it (can
be hit-or-miss) or by adjusting the content to a particular vertical (the
safer option).
Bottom line, using intent data for proactive outreach requires a lot of
finesse and the right industryfit. If you’re operating in a consolidated
industrywith just 10–30 really key accounts, knowing that Account
X from Sussex in the United Kingdom was particularly active on
your website in the past seven days can actually be very valuable.
You probably know who the main buyers are, and you can use the
information to trigger something personal.
Is this a volume driver? No. But if it’s used correctly in the right
industries, it can and will make you smarter about what exactlytop
accounts are actively researching.
Physical events
Go five years back in time, and it would not be unsurprising to find
some kind of physical event being the single largest cost-driver in a
B2B marketing budget. Fast forward to a post-COVID world, and
we’re clearly in a different place altogether, with both an acceleration
in digital spend and a move to virtual or hybrid events. This book was
written in 2021, and much is uncertain about the future of physical
events, but don’t count them out too soon.
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The reason why physical events work (and why many virtual events
don’t!) is the bundle: it’s a lovely mix of networking, meeting
old friendsin the industry, getting free drinks and food, watching
keynotes, discussing industrytrends, and setting up meetings easily
because everyone else is also there.
For a lot of teams in major organizations, it’s also a social event—a
partial holiday and a chance to unwind and get drunk at a pool bar
for a few days. In short, the event is 5 percent slides in a conference
room and 95 percent everythingelse. Virtual events are almost
exclusively about the 5 percent, and it’s very hard to replace the other
95 percent.
So my personal prediction is that physical events aren’t going
anywhere in the long run. We’re going to have fewer, probably, and
many will incorporate a hybrid set-up where some only dial in for the
5 percent. So the question remains: Should you do events, and how
do you get the most out of them?
The most important thing is to be honest with yourself: Why are we
going to the event in the first place? There is a very real chance that
it’s about a lot of other things than simply getting new leads, such as
meeting old partners face to face, PR, brand awareness, competitor
intelligence, etc. My experience is that most B2B events aren’t really
attended to generate new leads because the direct ROI is often
abysmal given the high cost of attendance, booth design, etc. But if
you are attending for leads, this is what you need to think about:
• Preparation, preparation, preparation. If you attend the
event and have nothing booked beforehand, it’s probably a
disaster already. Do your research on attendees, figure out who
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is in your target audience, have relevant outreach to them, and

try to book as many talks beforehand as possible.
• Reconsider the booth. Depending on your objective of going,
do you really need one? Do you need to present something?
If the goal is getting leads, you want to work the audience,
and it’s a very rare event to have a booth where potential
buyers just come waltzing up to you unless you have something
outstanding (often physical) attracting them.
• Physical + digital. If you’re attending a major event
like CES, Mobile World Congress, or Enterprise Connect,
congratulations; now you have a significant, super relevant
digital audience to target with Facebook or Google using
geographical targeting during the event. Don’t just rely on the
physical floor—work the digital as well.
• Post-event follow-up. If you’re lucky, fast, and effective, you
might get to talk to 1–2 percent of the attendees with your
on-site salesforce. Build a proper plan to prospect all of the ones
you didn’t connect with—now you have a shared experience to
talk about.
There are many reasons why attending events can make sense, but
they are extremelyhit-and-miss and cannot be the baseline for your
lead because event leads are inconsistent, spiked in a very short
timeframe, and often very early in the funnel. By all means do events,
but do them for the right reasons. Don’t expect them to run your
engine, but build one that can handle the occasional lead spike from
a key event.
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Virtual events
Webinars, online roundtables, and other kinds of virtual events took
off during COVID-19 for a reason: we were all chained to our
computers at home, and many marketing and sales teams discovered
how easy they were to execute. What followed in 2020 was probably
a period of webinar fatigue that slowed it all a bit down again. Other
companies kept going and workedto improve production quality
with professional studio settings, better recording equipment,
backdrops, and new virtual event features with audience
involvement, break-out rooms, and more.
One strength of virtual events is how much more effective it is
for everyone: easy sign-up, easy to attend, easy to produce, easy
to execute, and fairly easy to follow up on. The weakness is
how non-sticky the whole affair is—many companies see attendance
ratios of around 50 percent and find it very difficult to get value out
of it; did the ones who attend even watch the thing, or were they
writing emails in the background? They also suffer from the same
problems as physical events: a sudden burst of inboundleads that
take time to process and then zero leads from webinars the day after.
It depends on your type of company whetheryou can look at
virtual events as generating actual leads, soft leads, or just marketing
permissions. I dive deeper into this issue in the next chapter on how
to handle these kinds of leads, but for most engines, it’s going to
be upper funnel/early-stage leads that rely on personal outreach as a
follow-up to turn into action.
Virtual events are essentially no-brainers and should at least be tried
out in this day and age given their extremelylow barrier to entry.
Pick a few hot topics in your industryand make quality content
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providing a razor-sharp point of view. The first few events will give
you an immediate feel of lead quality, relevance, and attendance, all
pointers you can use in estimating future value.
Organic SEO and brand-driven leads

Most of the lead generation tactics we’ve been through for our lead
engine cost money. Advertising on LinkedIn isn’t free, to be sure.
Organic leads are free, at least in theory. Basically, people are looking
for your brand, product, or category via search engines or just going
directly to your website. The goal of almost any business should be
to generate some kind of organic leads over time by building a brand,
becoming a known player in the industry, etc.
I’ve stolen the below chart from Glen Hagensen of Templafy
, who you met earlierin the book. It’s a true whiteboard graph:
wonderfully over-simplified—but with exactlythe right point. You
should absolutely be scaling your paid channels, but always making
sure you also maximize the return of the organic interest you get
from a growing brand and awareness in the marketplace.
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There are only two consistent sources of organic leads: brand and
content.
Brand is self-explanatory. The bigger your brand, the more leads you
get for free. I guarantee you SalesForce gets a lot more leads on its
website than Pipedrive, and it would keep getting a lot more leads
even if it stopped all marketing for the next 12 months. Brand is the
ultimate business lever in this sense, and all companies should strive
to establish a powerful brand in their niche, if not for that reason
then because of the above chart, which absolutely rings true in
practice.
The other way to generate organic leads is content, often driven
by search engine traffic. The formula here is easy to describe and
incredibly hard to pull off successfully in the real world:
• Identify a content space where your audience is interested and
actively searching for knowledge.
• Produce quality content that addresses these needs; guides,
how-tos, tools, utilities, benchmark studies, survey data,
interviews, etc. Build it through insights on actual search
behavior to match your content with what people are actively
looking for.
• Put that content behind a download form if it has significant
value, or pick up leads directly in another way on the page.
One of the best examples of this is HubSpot. Its target audience is
marketers, so for 10 years or more it has written pretty high-quality
content, produced templates, and guides and done studies aimed at
those marketers. All in all, this drives over 350,000 daily visits to
its blog and is obviously a major part of their brand and success.
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Other great Danish-based examples are Sleeknote (another product

aimed at marketers) and Dinero, which makes accounting software
with great tips and knowledge boosters for small company owners in
particular.
Can you replicate this? Probably not. HubSpot, for example, is fully
invested in this marketing tactic and spent over a decade perfecting it.
Its audience (marketers) is also one of the easiest target audiences to
entice with content, and they’re eager to consume it. If you’re selling
to lawyers, technical engineers, carpenters, or oil rig managers, you’re
not guaranteed the same success.
That being said, organic leads are obviously one of the most scalable
and long-term sources of leads if you can check these three boxes:
• You can identify existing search interest in your space by your
target audience (people are actually looking for answers).
• You have the ability to produce content and can commit to it in
the long term.
• You have a meaningful way of converting organic leads in your
engine.
Checked all three boxes? Then you might have a long-term winner.
Can’t check them off? Ignore it for now and focus on your
paid campaigns and building your brand as a whole through other
channels.
Wrapping up on lead generation channels

The list of possible lead sources is long, and your time and budget
might be short. In this section here, I skipped many other tactics, like
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display advertising, Quora, print, Reddit, industryforums, radio,

YouTube, direct mail, and more. That’s because they don’t typically
give volume in a B2B world, but they are still reasonable things to try
under the right circumstances. In the end, these are how to approach
this:
• Don’t feel obliged to do everything. It’s common for the best
lead engines out there to basically rely on two or three main
sources for 90 percent or more of their results. A lead engine is
ultimately about scale, and that means getting a few things right
in a big way.
• Over time, you should try almost everything at least once, but
not at the same time. Everyone is a fan of experimentation,
and with a lead engine in particular, you’ve got strong metrics
to compare channels against. That being said, take the time to
get the channel right, and don’t play around with 10 channels
concurrently.
• Start with high-intent channels and work your way up the
funnel. If you’re just starting out, try making high-intent
and targeted channels like search advertising and LinkedIn work
before you do anything else. Given their scalability and strong
relevance, they are ideal places to get started. Give those a spin
before you experiment with radio ads.
With the Who, the What, and the Where in place, it’s time to tie lead
generation together with a section on the How.
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Case: Jabra
Jabra delivers hundreds of millions of sales pipelines via a digital lead
engine to grow market share in a competitive industry.
Jabra is a global manufacturer of audio and video devices for

both the consumer and enterprise markets. In the B2B space, it
sells contact center and office headsets as well as speakerphones and
video conferencing devices. It’s a growing industrywith a lot of strong
competitor brands and a flurry of product launches.
Jabra’s overall marketing strategy is to capture the existingdemand in

this exploding category, so having an always-on lead engine is a clear
priority to get in front of buyers entering the market before they talk to
other brands or go with recommendations from their channel partners.
The setup is deceptively simple. With a focus on low-funnel CTAs,

Jabra goes broad in the IT and management target audience to get a
large volume of leads across many platforms. The process from lead
to sales is straightforward, moving directly from leads to local sales
reps who dedicate all their time qualifying leads. Using a lead routing
logic, leads then pass to sales specialists for different company sizes,
geographies, and verticals. The lead engine itself is run by in-house
specialists within the digital and performance teams, allowing for fast
turnaround and testing.
Due to the often long sales cycles, Jabra measures its lead engine on
a monthlycadence with net new sales pipeline in mind. This ensures
the right mix of measuring what matters but also getting performance
data back to the engine before the deal closes. The technical
foundation is also simple, resting on Dynamics CRM for the bulk of the
work and Outreach for sales automation.
“The key to our success has really been
simplicity and consistency over time as well
as a ruthless focus on full-funnel ROI. We
have done simple things well and scaled from
nothing to tens of thousands of leads and
$100 million sales pipeline generated every
year from marketing channels.”
Morten Friberg Jensen,

Director of Paid Media and Performance, Jabra
Generating Leads
Key takeaways for your lead engine from Jabra
• Even with high volume and value, you can keep things simple and
avoid complexity in the setup to ensure focus on the key lead
generation and qualification steps.
• In-housing competencies can lower the cost of a lead engine, but

more importantly they are often required to have the right level of
business understanding and close collaboration with local sellers.
• Start low-funnel, and expand from there. In the case of Jabra, the
low-funnel in-market opportunity is so large that there is no need to
expand the funnel with softer leads. This ensures a high relevance of
all leads and a streamlined process.
• Always balance lead volume and lead quality by adjusting channels,

messaging, and CTA.
The How: Practically working with lead

generation
Here are the three key questions you need to ask yourself:
• What is a lead for us?
• How do we balance quantity and quality in the funnel?
• What is our sweet spot for lead volume?
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What is a lead to you?

What kind of information on a person is enough to qualify as a
lead? Is it enough to have a name and an email? A phone number?
Company? Job title? Do you want them to describe their needs?
There is a simple and obvious trade-off here. The more you ask
of people, the fewer leads you’ll get. Some illustrative examples are
below:
Example 1: Gartner Example 2: gong.io Example 3: Jabra
13 fields required Single field: Email 5 fields required
Personal contact details Leads to a meeting booking BANT-related questions

engine that sends you a on product and
Job title, function, and level Zoom invitation ownership—checkmarks
Company information, Asks you for a bit more

including a business (optional) information at
address the end
The right solution for you depends on your industryand

your commercial setup. If you’re gong.io and you prioritize growth
over everythingelse and recently hired tons of SDRs with
your multimillion-dollar venture funding, you can afford to let lead
quality slip because you’ve got the muscle to qualify a lot of
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leads. If you’re in a more traditional space and tight on qualification

resources, your definition of a lead needs to be equally as tight.
The important thing is that you very clearly state what a lead is
to you. I guarantee that if you rounded up 10 sales and marketing
people in your organization, each would have their own take on what
a lead is. There is only one right answer: the one you jointly define
for your own lead engine.
Balancing quality and quantity in your funnel

In this chapter, we covered the key aspects of generating leads:
• Who you’re targeting
• Why they should care (the CTA)
• What you’re trying to tell them
• Where you’re reaching them
These four have to work in a balanced way to get your desired
quality/quantity mix.
A quick example to illustrate: in this chapter we covered Dixa
, the contact center software. It can adjust lead quantity/quality by
turning each of the four knobs:
• Who: Widen its target audience to include not just contact
center managers but also supervisors or even agents who aren’t
directly buyers but influencers. This will widen the audience
considerably but lower the average quality.
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• Why: It can tighten the funnel using a more hardcore CTA like
“Get a quote” instead of “Get a free demo.” Or it can widen it
using “Free demo and onboarding.”
• What: By making the content more nerdy or the form less
approachable, it can increase the barrier of entry and tighten the
funnel to only get the most interested leads.
• Where: It can widen the funnel with broader channels like
Facebook or tighten it by only using LinkedIn.
Think of your funnel like a constantly evolving piece where you can
adjust each of the four stages to get the desired quality/quantity mix:
The Key Aspects of Generating Leads
It’s easy to get more leads: have a wide target audience, a friendly
CTA with “free” included, open and inclusive messaging with few
fields, and a channel with very wide reach. The trick is the balancing
act between these four pieces.
An example from Jabra, the global headset manufacturer, looks like
this: with a very wide CTA (“Get a free headset trial”) and a broadly
attractiveWhat, they keep the Who and Where tight, targeting
directors and up in companies with more than 500 employees on
LinkedIn. When it goes on Facebook, to balance out the widening
Where, it tightens the What, making the form longer, thus requiring
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more of the user, and adjusting the CTA to “Apply for a free trial”
instead.
Finding your sweet spot for lead volume

and quality
The ideal scenario would be that you are controlled only by
delivering positive ROI on your lead engine and are free to scale
both inboundleads and qualification resources as long as your ROI
looks good. The reality for most companies is that hiring additional
people to help qualify and sell to incoming leads doesn’t come easily.
Whether that’s because of tight margin requirements, economic
downturns, cost control, hiring freezes, or whatever else, it means
that most lead engines have to consider a lead volume sweet spot.
Simply put, this is the point where adding additional daily leads
hinder your qualification process and starts killing qualification
rates, essentially wasting leads. In setups with dedicated salespeople
covering inboundleads, I’ve seen this float between 20 and 60 leads
per day per seller. Assuming there are seven productive working
hours per day, 60 leads is just seven minutes per inboundlead,
so there’s very little time for in-depth conversations, and it requires
a lot of automation to make work. This is why most dedicated
inside sellers land around 30 daily inboundleads. If your sellers are
not dedicated to handling leads, you might be facing as few as five
inboundleads per seller—it all depends on the qualification setup,
which we will cover in Chapter 4 shortly.
The important takeaway is this: your limiting factor in the short term
is often your qualification setup, so identify the right balance, using
your inboundlead limit as a guide, and leave a bit of slack in the
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process to allow for internal meetings, vacations, and more. The last
thing you want is wasted leads and lower qualification rates because
you’ve paid for too many leads!
Perspective: The role of sales in

generating leads
When you say “generate leads,” most people think of this as a
marketing task. And it mostly should be—refer again to the first
model of this book:
The Lead Generation Model
However, we shouldn’t neglect the role sales has in generating leads.

A key part of working in sales is to nurture relationships, use referrals,
and do prospecting to uncover new leads. Most of the traditional
ways of doing these things, however, are not very engine-like—they
are truly manual, relationship-based ways of working.
So how can the sales functiongenerate new leads in the engine?
There are two obvious ways to do this: one is automating many of
the one-on-one interactions via sales engagement tools, and the other
is a scalablesocial selling approach. Let’s start with the latter.
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Generating Leads
Social selling to scale

One key thing to understand about social media is this: People follow
people, not brands. As of writing this, Richard Branson has about
100 times as many followers as Virgin on LinkedIn, for example.
And on a (much!) smaller scale; with my measly 2,000 followers on
LinkedIn, I routinely get more engagement and views on my posts
than the company I used to work for, with its nearly 75,000
followers. People follow people, and people engage with people. This
is how social platforms (and their users) are wired, and this is what
social selling can ultimately profit from.
The really interesting thing about social selling is that in many ways
it is just selling, but with a one-to-many amplifier. You would already
expect a good salespersonto share their knowledge, help connect
you to peers, engage in a topical debate, or have an opinion on their
industryand solutions. This is why we value the human connection
in sales—a white paper is great, but it can’t understand your
business, it can’t understand context, and it doesn’t engage you on an
emotional level (but if you ever find a white paper that does, please
let me know).
So social selling is just selling, but in public and with a potential
amplifier. Why, then, are so many salespeopleuncomfortable with
it? It’s true that you find some natural social selling talents from
all kinds of departments who naturally step into public debates, put
their thoughts into writing or video, and are just excellent from
the get-go. We can’t do much for them—it’s better to leave them
alone to do their own thing—but we can help the 99.9 percent
of salespeoplewho aren’t natural talents. Here’s the top three things
you can do:
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• Make it a real effort. You’re pushing people out of their

comfort zones, and it will require training, guidelines, tracking,
celebrating the early opportunities, and ensuring follow-up. For
example, SAS Institute, the software analytics company, believes
so much in social selling that it commits dedicated resources
to develop its sellers and continuously track progress by using
LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index, freely available online. It created
a playbook for sales to encompass its own content but also how
to reach out to prospects in a personal way to avoid the already
bloated LinkedIn invitation spam that most buyers suffer from.
• Create content and opinions centrally, but allow personal
spins whenever possible. Because your average salesperson is
rarely a thought leader in their own right, most people need
help with content, opinion angles, etc. Work closely together
between sales and marketing to drip small pieces of insights,
opinion, or industry knowledge on a regular basis to all sellers.
Keep the tone conversational and encourage sellers to rewrite
the message in their own words.
• Make it easy to action. To help traction on social selling,
many employee advocacy tools make it easy to go from
generic content to personal posts on social platforms. LinkedIn
has its own Elevate platform, but there are countless and more
affordable alternatives like Smarp, Dynamic Signal, Social HP,
EveryoneSocial, and more. Some B2B companies take it a step
further and record small videos on industry topics at a regular
pace, often by scheduling several sellers with predefined content
to shoot on a single day. The name of the game is really to lower
the barriers whenever you can.
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Generating Leads
In summary, within knowledge-heavy industries (as most B2B ones

are), social selling can be a powerful supplementary lead generating
channel. Ignore at your own peril.
Automating sales engagement

If you’re a B2B buyer, you’ve likely experienced an explosion in
personal emails from sales development reps within the past five
years. Thanks to tools like SalesLoft and Outreach, automating what
used to be a personal email send is now easier than ever. There’s a
simple reason so many companies use it: it’s annoying, but it works.
Instead of sending a single email to a single contact, sales engagement
platforms automatically changes names of recipients, company
names, industries, and other content in the email and sends it off on
your behalf from your own email address. It can be combinedwith
several other emails in a timed flow and intercepted by a personal call
or other actions. Sadly, this is often misused by marketers who are
sending out thousands of thousands of personal emails to bought or
owned email lists in overly salesy messaging.
When it works best, it’s done to more targeted segments, in the
actual voice of the seller, by the seller, enabling them to engage both
prospects and existingcustomersat scale.
Again, the premise is the same as social selling. What used to be
a one-to-many medium (a seller writing to a prospect) can now be
a one-to-many platform. This enables sellers to keep in touch with
more than the 10–20 people at the top of their mind but instead
their entire account or prospect base. Writing out personal emails by
hand to 100 different prospects with the hope of getting one or two
responses back just isn’t very appealing withoutthis technology, and
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it turns the individual sellers into lead generating machines. These are
the key things you need to succeed:
• Don’t just use it to do broad mass-mailings. It’s a
productivity tool to amplify every seller.
• Write like you would write to a single person. For some
reason, when we write one-to-many, we often fall into the trap
of dropping our own tone of voice and falling back into safe
corporate talk. Avoid this at all costs. If you use slang or emojis
in personal email, use them here as well.
• Keep contact/prospect lists under control. With the
expansion of GDPR/ePrivacy-like legislation, you can be casual
with your wording, but you cannot be casual with permissions
and contact management.
This is where it gets really difficult.
Chapter 4
Qualifying Leads
Getting quality in your leads and
qualification right
You’ve successfully navigated your way to the hardest part of

building a lead engine. The learnings from both me and peers across
industries all point to the same thing: This is where it gets really
difficult.
Why is that? Well, it’s actually not that hard to generate leads if you
follow the process, use proven channels, work on your CTA, etc.
And if, in the end, you can’t manage to sell to those leads, honestly
your problem is much bigger than simply handling leads, and
you’ve got to ask yourself whetheryou have the right sales team or
product–market fit in the first place.
In other words, qualification is hard. Where does it go wrong?
Common pitfalls include these:
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Qualifying Leads
• No clear owner. Because lead qualification falls directly

between sales and marketing, it can also fall between chairs in
terms of responsibility. Someone has to lean into the problem.
• Lack of alignment and common understanding. What is a
lead anyway? How fast do we follow up? How do we follow
up? What makes it qualified? Are all leads the same?
• Disqualifying leads too soon, often because the first point of
contact isn’t the final decision maker in large buying groups.
• Lack of process and machinery to handle volume. When
you switch gears and start handling hundreds or thousands of
monthly leads, you can no longer rely on one or two
prospecting heroes.
• Not enough tenacity. Response rates on the first call to a lead
can be as low as 20 percent, so it’s critical for you to have a
structured process beyond the first call.
In this chapter I will attempt to address all of the challenges described
above. There is no standard lead qualification process magic, but I
will equip you to make your own key choices and build a process that
works for you.
BANT? CHAMP? What is a qualified lead

anyway?
Before there was SalesForce, Google, Facebook and all these other
cool companies, there was IBM. And some smart people at IBM
came up with a simple model for qualifying leads calledBANT.
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Since then it has become a bit of a sport to proclaim that BANT

is dead and that we urgently need a new model to qualify leads,
including a new acronym:
• BANT: Budget, authority, need, time
• CHAMP: Challenges, authority, money, prioritization
• ANUM: Authority, need, urgency, money
• MEDDIC: Metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision
process, identify pain, champion
• NUTCASE: Need, uniqueness, timing, cash, authority,
solutions, enemies
• GPCTBA/C&I: Just rolls right off the tongue. I am not even
making this one up. Goals, plans, challenges, timeline, budget,
authority, negative consequences and positive implications.
Phew.
You, too, can make your own acronym

In a way, it requires a special kind of hubris to engage in this sort
of behavior of coming up with new models, but the criticisms of
BANT are fair. Why would you ask about budget first? What about
the product–customer fit? What about the competition, or the other
decision makers in the buying group?
The spirit of BANT or CHAMP is as relevant as ever, but simply
including four generic questions for every lead is going to get you
nowhere. It may be doable if you are selling a simple commodity-like
product, but for a more complex sale you must set aside the time and
fields for understanding the buying group as a whole, the business
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Qualifying Leads
challenge and pain behind the need, who you might be up against,
and the decision process going forward.
This speaks to the biggest misunderstanding of these models—that
you just ask four generic, scripted questions and that’s the end of
your qualification. This is a terrible way to have a conversation and
not the intention anyway.
Personally, I find that it doesn’t matter too much which acronym
you go with. In the end, you’re looking to boil it down to four or
five questions and corresponding fields in your CRM. What matters
is your definition of “qualified” in each stage and what you actually
guide your sellers to ask.
Here’s an example of a cheat sheet for your qualification staff:
What you’re trying to What you might ask a lead Definition of
find out qualified (examples)
Budget Whether or not “How far along with the Loose: A rough idea
there is already project are you? Have you of budget frame
budget set aside for defined a budget frame?” “How or cost of current
the purchase, what much do you spend on similar solution
amount is it and purchases today?”
where is it in the Tight: Committed
organization “How do you normally assign budget and owner
budget for this internally?
Authority Who is involved in “What is your normal Loose: Understand

the buying group and decision-making process for the role of the lead
their individual roles these kinds of purchases?”
in it Tight: Identification
“How can I help you sell this of budget owner and
idea internally?” key decision makers
“Who will use this on a

day-to-day basis?”
Need How great of a pain “How important is this project Loose: A realized
the prospect has compared to other things on pain withouta clear
and how well-defined your plate?” solution in mind
the vision for the
solution is “Why did you look for a Tight: Prioritized
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solution in the first place?” need with clear

vision and possible
“What might happen if you solutions in mind
don’t solve this?”
Time When you can “Realistically, when do you Loose: Ambition for
expect the project or want to have this problem an estimated date of
purchase to start and solved by?” implementation
end
“What other things influence Tight: Clearly defined
this project and its timeline?” roadmap and
timelines defined
“When do you have internal
resources to make this project
happen?”
“Do you have a goal for a

completion date?”
“What might delay the

project?”
Here’s the key; you need to modify this model for your own business.
Your definition of qualified might not require that a budget has been
set aside, for example. If you’re selling consulting services, it’s rare
that someone set aside a fixed budget. Conversely, if you’re selling
into repeat purchases like server hosting or keyboards, there likely has
to be a budget set to even begin the conversation.
Go through each of the stages and define your own qualified state or
modify questions to fit with your industryand product. The lower
funnel leads you work with, the tighter your qualification criteria
have to be.
Finally, this is not a script! The letters BANT are in that order
because it sounds cool. I don’t know of a single good seller that
blindly follows a call script in qualification calls, and neither should
yours.
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Qualifying Leads
Lead scoring . . . or not?

Lead scoring is the dream. Leads come in, and they automatically
reveal themselves to be hot or not withouta human being even
touching them. Great! Or, if you have more leads than you have time
to call, it’s a great method for prioritizing your time. We will explore
how to typically go about it, and whetheryou even should.
The idea is to apply some math-based logic, typically resulting in
a counter between 0–100, and then a cut-off rate at which point
something happens. This could be something automated or a simple
trigger that a salespersonshould pick up the phone or write to
the lead in question. Here’s a quick overview of factors that could
determine the score:
Type of data Example data Scoring logic
Lead-entered – Employ- – If employees >500, add 50 to the lead score.

data ee dropdownfield
– Job – Title contains “Director”,
title open text field “VP” or starts with “C-“, add 20 to the lead score.
– Email address – If contains @hotmail or @gmail, deduct 20
field points.
Behavioral – – If lead visited

data Website frequency website more than three times, add 20 points.
– User – If lead downloaded something, add 30 points.
activity on website
– Ad interaction – If lead interacted with an ad, add 5 points.
Data set – User – If company name

matching company name is on our target list of accounts, add 50 points.
– Contact match – If we alreadyknow the person in our CRM,
add 100 points and assign to contact owner.
– D&B match – If industrymatches our target or company
size matches, add 10 points.
Manual – Lead source – If lead is from a VIP event, add 50 points to

scoring the lead score.
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Using the above inputs, a company might make a model such as:
Lead score Activity
0–49 Lead stays in ownership of marketing until further development.
50–74 Lead is passed to relevant seller, but with low priority: call within 2
days.
75–100 Lead is passed to relevant seller with “hot” status: call within 2 hours.
Some companies take the next step from this journey and build lead
scoring based on machine learning or at least some sort of learned
model. For example, while we may think that leads with a Gmail
address are worth less, we don’t really know, and the numbers above
are all arbitrary. A truer way of scoring would be based on your own
data and learnings. This obviously requires a significant amount of
leads (thousands) and a willingness to teach the model by starting out
treating all leads the same.
However you go about it, lead scoring is alluring—the dream
scenario. However, in the murky reality of marketing and sales
organizations, dreams don’t always come true. The pitfalls are many:
• The model is just that—a model. We might assume that leads
that browse the website often are hot, but we don’t know. And
because most companies start with a lead scoring model like the
above, using arbitrary numbers for interaction, we never truly
test whether the model is right or not.
• Lost diamonds in the rough. From my own personal
experience, when I have tracked back some of the largest deals,
they sometimes come from humble leads: a teacher helping
research buying for an entire state, or a New York City police
officer requesting a demo, which led to a multimillion-dollar
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Qualifying Leads
project. These might have been lost in the “marketing owned”

pile with a harsh lead scoring model.
• Systems and data gaps. With the latest privacy regulations,
cookie laws, and more, tracking across devices and sessions has
never been harder. And few organizations have a perfect data
tracking setup, even without the bother of regulators. So do we
really know if all scores are counted?
• The wrong focus. Do you really want to be in endless sales
and marketing debates on a lead scoring model? Trust me, they
are rarely productive and take focus away from marketing and
selling.
• Lazy organization. “We only call hot leads” becomes a
self-fulfilling mechanism where only the hottest leads get called,
which reinforces the data on leads below a certain arbitrary
threshold as worthless.
Consider where you are on your journey in building your engine. If
you’re just starting out, you might want to keep focusing on the
basics—getting smarter and adding scoring later.
An alternative is to start with hard qualifiers like these before you do
anything else:
• Company sizes. If your deals are in any way related to the size
of your customers’ company, maybe there is a hard threshold
where they’re not profitable. SaaS companies that charge per
seat might not be able to run a sales and onboarding process
profitably for a 20-person company.
• Lead sources. Most marketers will at some point have tried to
either directly purchase a list of leads or gotten names, email
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addresses, and phone numbers from a large industry event or

similar. These are rarely actual leads, just contacts. Maybe some
types of lead sources, like industry events, are cold by default
unless otherwise noted. On the contrary, someone who went to
your website on their own accord and filled out a “Contact
Sales” form is probably a hot lead by default.
• Referral programs. If your existing customers or partners can
refer a lead, it might be hot by default because you have
a strong hook to call on or a responsibility to your existing
customer/partner to remain on good terms.
So, lead scoring or not?
My default recommendation is to wait until it’s obvious you need
it. This is quite contrary to most consulting advice in the industry,
maybe because that consulting often comes with an offer to sell you
a model or a piece of technology.
If you are going to do lead scoring, you must develop scoring in
a hidden way to test it out first—what would have happened in
the past three months if we never calledon cold leads? How much
business would we have missed? How much seller time (and thus,
money) did it cost us to reach those leads?
Only with this data in your hands can you make a model based on
your business reality. Otherwise, wait.
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Qualifying Leads
The worst process is the one stuck in

your mind
The biggest mistake I made during my own experience with lead
engines was thinking that it was obvious for everyone else what they
needed to do.
Obviously you call the lead as fast as possible. Obviously you use
the fields right there in CRM. Obviously you put them into the
right category. Obviously you follow up the next day if they’re not
available. Obviously we all agree what “nurture” means. Obviously
this person may not be the final decision maker but is just a window
into the company. Obviously you call before sending an email.
Obviously . . .
Except what was obvious to me wasn’t obvious to others. One
of the most common cognitive biases is exactlythis phenomenon,
sometimes called“the false consensus effect.” It is the tendency to
assume that others are just like you, hold the same core beliefs, see
the world in the same way as you, and will act accordingly. In a lead
qualification process, this is total poison.
You cannot build a house if you allow every carpenter to also be the
architect.
When you catch yourself in this mode of thinking, it’s time to stop
assuming and start making clear and simple processes you can repeat
again and again.
In the next section, we’ll get hands on and cover some of the most
common types of processes, give examples, and offer some templates
for download.
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But the real secret sauce is right here—nearly any documented

process for lead qualification is better than having none at all for
three simple reasons:
• It forces a discussion between the teams and brings them closer
together.
• You reveal the “false consensus” in everyone’s mind when
thoughts turn to boxes and arrows.
• It gives you a starting point for process KPIs: Are we actually
calling, following up, and capturing data as we promised each
other?
In short, avoid the biggest mistake I ever made and go from thoughts
to drawings. I have included sample processes at the end of this
chapter to help you get started.
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Case: Stibo Systems
Stibo Systems organizes for scalablelead engine growth through
marketing ownership and a targeted vertical approach.
Stibo Systems is a Danish-based international B2B software company

that is part of the Stibo Group. Working in the master
data management industry, its core target audience is data-heavy
companies like major retailers and distributors. The company has
experienced growth in its master data management business over the
past few years, driven by the explosion of data it can help customers
organize. Its products can be complex to integrate into businesses, so
the sales process is long and involves a lot of stakeholders and many
sales and marketing touch points.
From a lead engine point of view, Stibo Systems has a clear strategic
rationale with a vertical approachbased on retailers, consumer
packaged goods companies, and manufacturingand wholesale
distributors. Within these verticals, there is a long list of potential
accounts where Stibo software is a good fit and executing lead
generation makes sense, and then there’s a much shorter list of key
accounts where it employs one-on-one account-based marketing.
Stibo Systems has been on a journey away from spending a lot

of money on physical events and onto digital channels to grow its
marketing driven pipeline.
Organizationally, Stibo Systems integrated the inside sales team

directly into marketing, and the focus their energy on lead qualification
using a traditional BANT framework. This tight integration between
lead generation and lead qualification is part of the reason the lead
engine is directly responsible for a third of the total 12-month rolling
sales pipeline. The whole effort is supported by a focused tech-stack
of SalesForce, DemandBase, Hubspot, and various data enrichment
and smaller tools.
“One of the crucial decisions we made was

moving inside sales into marketing to directly
support inbound lead generation. . . . My
own background is in sales, and having that
connection has simplified my conversations
with sales and driven empathy between the
departments. In the end we have to have
the same truth and a single source of data
between sales and marketing.”
Jens Olivarius,
Chief Marketing Officer at Stibo Systems
Qualifying Leads
Key takeaways for your lead engine from Stibo

Systems
• Focus on getting lead qualification right. If leads are a significant

source of the pipeline, it might make sense to insource and place them
close to marketing. As much as possible, perform lead qualification
with dedicated roles—qualifying leads is not a part-time job.
• Create a single sales process that involves both sales and marketing
and document it clearly—going through the exercise creates the right
discussions and bonds between the departments.
• Invest in content generation and thought leadership for complex

businesses, especially to drive a combination between educating
customers and generating leads.
The leakiest part of most marketing

funnels
In a previous company I workedfor, we had three sales development
reps in a particular market. With a very robust dataset (30,000+
leads) randomly split among our three SDRs, here’s what we found:
• SDR #1 qualifies 10.1 percent of leads and converts and 1.3
percent to actual won deals.
• SDR #2 qualifies 9.4 percent of leads and converts 0.8 percent
to actual won deals.
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• SDR #3 qualifies 7 percent of leads and converts 0.9 percent to

actual won deals.
So the difference between worst and best performer all the way
down the funnel is 1.3 percent vs. 0.8 percent. This doesn’t sound
like a big difference . . . until you realize that SDR #1 is a whopping
62.5 percent better. It’s very hard to find a 62 percent improvement
in anything you do—ask any marketer to generate 62 percent more
leads with the same budget, and they’ll think you are absolutely
crazy.
I knew all three of the SDRs in the above example. Just to make one
thing clear, SDR #1 did not quit his sales job and go on to become a
world-class sales coach or revolutionize selling. But he was a bit better
on the phone, a bit more persistent, and a bit more engaged in his
work and collaboration with marketing in particular.
This was not some magic gift he had from birth—it was just better
execution.
If you need to spend more time in one place, this is it. The difference
you can create through better qualification execution is often orders
of magnitude greater than polishing your latest creative ad.
Four straightforward ways to get better

qualification rates
If you’re unsure of where the start, here are four ways to start
working on your qualification rates:
1. Get more to show up for the first call. The first qualification
call has a very high drop-off rate. People either endlessly delay
the call or simply do not show up to the initial meeting because
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Qualifying Leads
you have no history or rapport with them. A simple trick here is

investing a little bit more into the relationship beforehand. The
revenue intelligence vendor Gong sends a simple email before
the first call that includes a personal message and a $5 voucher
for a Starbucks coffee. Not a lot of those vouchers get redeemed,
but now you’re already invested in the conversation, and you’re
much more likely to show up.
2. Keep calling and mailing. A call and a mail or two are not
enough. A standardized qualification flow should give the lead
at least a month’s worth of calls, mails, and follow-up before
trashing. Remember that while the decision maker here is very
important to you, this purchase might be 2–4 percent of her
mind space and can easily be pushed aside by internal meetings,
product launches, travel, sickness, re-orgs, and a million other
things. You must be consistent and keep following up.
3. Invest in people, coaching, and sales training. One of
the biggest issues with qualification-focused sellers is that they’re
often not prioritized for training and coaching. Typically it’s the
sellers who close the big deals or own the big accounts that get
all the training investments. But in reality, the sales development
reps or inside sellers who qualify leads are the ones who talk to
the most potential customers in any given day and, as you can
see from the example above, have a massive financial impact. It’s
just hidden from plain view. Always invest in these people; they
are the bottleneck for so much of the lead engine. Take the
funding from creating leads if you have to—I promise they will
drive a better ROI here.
4. Speed. If there is one ingredient that can add magic to almost
any lead qualification dish, it is speed. Speed is so important that
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I just had to write more than a simple bullet point about it, so
stay with me here.
Speed is everything. I repeat: Everything.

Do you remember what you did online yesterday? What forms you
filled in? Barely, maybe. What about last week? I’m guessing not at
all. When it comes to following up on leads in any shape or form,
there is only one parameter that matters more than any other: speed.
There are different statistics that speak to this. LeadSimple claims
that calling within 5 minutes is 21 times more effective than calling
within 30 minutes. Vendasta show that the odds of qualifying a lead
drops by 80 percent after 5 minutes. And when it comes just to
getting to talk to the person on the other end, leads are 10 times less
likely to pick up if it’s after 5 minutes, according to a study from Lead
Response Management.
Listen, I don’t know which of these numbers are right. Maybe it’s
7.5 times easier get to catch someone instead of 10 times—who really
knows? But the point should be abundantly clear: in the realm of
lead qualification, speed is the one variable that trumps everything
else.
Being the first vendor someone speaks with is theoretically free. It
requires no advanced technology, training, or complicated scripts. It
just requires that you track on speed and ruthlessly follow up on it.
No one remembers what they did online two days ago. But if you call
someone less than a minute after they asked for it, I guarantee they’ll
remember you, talk about you, and buy from you.
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Qualifying Leads
Organizing qualification between sales

and marketing
Let’s revisit the model from the beginning of this book, the two
overlapping triangles and the role of sales and marketing:
Qualifying the leads
Qualification is centered right in the middle for a reason: it’s a joint

exercise. But the question is still, how do we organize and structure
the effort practically? There are three possibilities:
• Marketing-led. This typically takes the form of a dedicated
team of sellers who are desk-bound and only focus on qualifying
leads. It’s well-suited for mass-volume lead engines where
marketing is already an engine for growth and managed with a
commercial mindset. It’s also great because it keeps the focus of
the sellers on the lead qualification task, but it can be poor if the
right management and mindset isn’t in place in your marketing
team.
• Sales-led. Most first-touch qualification sellers are born out
of sales organizations and inside sales teams. With titles
like sales/marketing development rep, they often handle a
combination of inbound and outbound leads. That’s great
because sales leaders are already familiar with this game, but
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they can sometimes suffer from getting pulled into other tasks
and losing focus on inbound leads, or getting measured on short
term revenue contribution, causing qualification staff to ignore
large, long-term, difficult deals.
• Own function in a revenue organization. In B2B SaaS
companies in particular, the role of SDRs/MDRs might be its
own function, reporting to a chief revenue officer or similar.
This ensures these people are given a voice and their own goals
comparable to marketing, account management, and customer
success, and it allows for even deeper specialization for the team.
Principles and strategy before org charts

Each organization is unique, and a lot of this comes down
to individual managers and team dynamics. The principles I would
steer from are as follows:
• The number-one learning from successful lead
qualification teams is that lead qualification cannot be a
part-time job. So place it where it will get the most care and
attention. If your VP of sales is focused on large deals and
account management, they might not have the mind space or
care for the early stages of the sales process, for example.
• You need a more data-driven long-term view. Many sales
leaders are focused on the quarter at hand, which is a difficult
way to manage early-stage selling like lead qualification, where
you don’t see actual sales for many months.
• Look for commercial hybrid leaders. In this junction
between sales and marketing, pick a place in the organization
with a leader who understands the long-term aspects of
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Qualifying Leads
marketing, the top-down numbers analysis, and also the hard

realities of making 50 phone calls per day and talking to
prospects all the time.
Try to resist the default sales-owned choice. While it’s often right, it
can also drive a lot of the wrong behavior withoutthe right leader.
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Case: APSIS
APSIS grows its software business through a unified revenue
organization, targeted go-to-market, and strong pipeline and deal
management.
An international company headquartered in Sweden, APSIS builds and

markets an SaaS marketing automation platform. Founded in 2001,
APSIS has been on a journey of growth and expansion, with thousands
of customersand activities across Europe. Its marketing automation
product is focused on the mid-market in the space between small
mom-and-pop customersand the largest enterprises. Its go-to-market
strategy reflects this, with a focus on a handful of key
verticals that get maximum value from its product, retail, experience,
membership/subscription, and B2B.
Because the sales cycle can be long and expensive, the name of
the game for APSIS is to secure long-term profitable customerswho
stay for years to come while working on lowering their customer
acquisition costs. APSIS has approached this as holistically as
possible by merging the marketing, account management, consulting,
customercare, and onboardingfunctions under a single commercial
organization and leader. This keeps the major customer-facing
functions in tight integration and focused on the same goals and
metrics. Marketing is measured on the real recurring revenue it
generates, and the team is incentivized to keep in close dialogue with
the rest of the revenue value chain, all the way down to targeting the
type of customersthat realistically go through onboarding.
A key unifying part is a mapped sales process from marketing

to onboarding, reflected into how the pipeline management works in
CRM. APSIS has gone through several iterations of its sales process,
making it customized for APSIS, simple and actionable, with an ideal
customeras the starting point. Using a fixed connection between the
required steps to move opportunities forward, the weighted pipeline
impact, and suggested actions for sellers, the process is not just
a standard model but instructive in how sales and marketing should
work in terms of when to demo vs. consult, when an opportunity is real,
etc.
“Marketing and sales are converging—and

that’s a good thing. If we don’t measure the
same things, target the same goals, and work
in the same way, we’re doomed. Organizing
with this in my mind is the only meaningful
path in my mind.”
Jakob Lunøe,
Chief Commercial Officer at APSIS
Key takeaways for your lead engine from Apsis
• Organize for success. The unified structure of APSIS might not be

right for all sizes of companies, but it is the most direct way of getting
a tight integration between all parts of generating new revenue.
• Get the process right. Don’t just adopt a standard sales process, but
make your own and embed it into the systems, pipeline management,
and internal ways of working.
• Measure what matters. If marketing is measured on event

participants, you get more event participants. Get marketing as close
to revenue as possible, and they’ll start engaging with the full sales
process.
Qualifying soft leads

Many companies get two types of leads, often depending on the
CTAs we touched on in the previous chapter. Hard leads like asking
for a quote or free trial, getting a demo, or booking a meeting are
easy, and, in many ways, they’re the most important business driving
leads that define a lot of the processes in this book.
However, most companies also get a number of softer leads, like
white paper/e-book downloads, webinar attendees and the like. In
knowledge-heavy industries like consulting, auditing, finance, and
the like, where knowledge and expertise is often the product in its
entirety, giving some of it away is the equivalent of a free trial.
There are three ways to approachthese types of leads:
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Qualifying Leads
2. In mostly the same way as hard leads. Someone downloaded

a white paper? Get on the phone with them as fast as
possible with a relevant follow-up. For some industries that are
knowledge-based but more transactional and simple in nature
(like accounting for small companies), this can easily work. If
you’re selling oil rigs or management consulting, this might not
be relevant.
3. Invite them to join an inner circle of trust. Someone
downloaded a white paper? Why not have your industry expert
connect with them on LinkedIn with a thank-you note and
something worth their while? If the conversation started with
a customer looking for knowledge, stay in the knowledge game
and give them more—invite them for dialogue and turn that
conversation into a meeting instead of a white paper that would
quickly be skimmed. This approach is amazing if you have
knowledge-heavy specialists capable of this lighter touch, and
it’s frankly terrible and invasive if you don’t.
4. Nothing personal. You can choose simply to treat these
incoming leads as email marketing permissions and hopefully
have a relevant, automated nurture follow-up. There’s nothing
wrong with that approach, except if you’re paying substantial
money to acquire these white paper downloads/event attendees,
you will find that the ROI might not get you anywhere.
And you might consider just ungating the content anyway and
reaching many more people if you’re not intending on a
personal follow-up anyway.
So what’s the right approachfor your lead engine? Some companies
combine the above methods with a lead scoring model that places
them in one of the three buckets. Others do a manual skim of every
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soft lead once per day or week and decide on one of the three paths
from there.
In practice, most commercial teams struggle to get value out of
softer leads. I would recommend either leaning into the problem and
systematically approaching each soft lead with one of the above three
courses of action or leaning out of the problem by accepting that
soft leads aren’t actually leads, but simply a long tail of potential (and
nonpotential) buyers, weaving in and out of your market, chancing
upon content and consuming it.
It is a perfectly valid strategy to not do anything about them and
focus your lead qualifying energy on following up on the hard leads
that are actually asking you to talk to them. Whichever way you end
up leaning really depends on the capabilities and scale of your sales.
Who calls who? Getting lead routing

right.
There’s two extremes when it comes to lead routing: Either one
person (or team) hits every single lead, or you individually parse leads
and distribute them by hand.
The former—treat everyone the same—really works for one scenario
in particular: high volume, low average customervalue/fixed pricing
type of products. Your deal size might not vary between customers,
and you offer almost no customization, so there’s no reason to treat
individuals differently.
Basecamp.com is a great example—there’s one price, no matter
whetheryou’re a Fortune 100 or a five-person creative studio.
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Qualifying Leads
Basecamp: The Simplest Product Pricing Page in

Existence—Treating Everyone Equally
On the flip side, you might have a very high-deal value business
where each individual deal is 10 percent or so of your annual revenue.
Typically, this is combinedwith a very small potential customerbase
and a very consultative sales approachor in some cases an ecosystem
of partners that help build the solution.
With few incoming leads, you manually go through each one
with your experts and uncover the right angle, connections, and
approach, either on a short daily commercial stand-up or a weekly
sales and marketing leads meeting. It goes withoutsaying that this is
labor-intensive and requires one-on-one lead routing the entire way.
A model for lead routing

Most companies fall somewhere in the middle of this; few have
naileda scalableone-size-fits-all model like Basecamp, and even the
biggest and most focused companies typically have a small subset of
key accounts they want to treat individually as well as a long tail of
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lower-value customers. Where you fall on this spectrum determines

your approach:
Lead Routing Approaches
Let’s cover the two most common models, the two in the middle:
• Standardized with exceptions means that most leads will go
through the exact same process, and this is where the volume
and value is derived. Practically speaking, your automated part
is the exceptionally high value targets or strategic segments that
require special attention. One common rule could be employee
size—maybe you have a dedicated team handling global or
international accounts. It could be divided by industry, driven
by a specialization in a public sector or health care, for example,
which may require a separate, specialized sales team. Essentially,
this is a wide-masked net that lets most people through in the
normal process but keeps a few whales in the net for special
attention.
• Individual with exceptions means that your modus operandi is
looking at every single lead by default, but your automation
looks for exceptions that you don’t want to burden the normal
lead process with because it is so labor-intensive. In our case
with SAS Institute later in this book, Nikolaj covers pretty
much this exact process. With a specialized sales team and high
deal size, they look at individual leads and route them with
a human touch, but before they get to this stage, automation
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Qualifying Leads
cleans out the ones that can self-serve without a handheld trial.
Ideally these are the rare exceptions if the targeting is right.
It may seem like there’s just a small difference in wording, but the
mindset is worlds apart. In the next sections, we’ll dig into some
practicalexamples of what this could look like.
Examples of qualification processes

As this chapter has covered, qualification processes can be very
different from company to company. When you get to actually
drawing up the process, check back with the key decisions you made:
• Should anything happen automatically to leads when they land?
For example, should leads be routed depending on a score or an
attribute? Or should we engage in marketing automation before
or in place of a human?
• Should leads be scored? What impact should that have in terms
of manual, automated, or a total lack of follow-up?
• Who calls what? Are all leads called by the same people, or do
rules apply that route leads to other sales teams?
I’ve included three examples below of varying complexity that you
can draw inspiration from along with notes.
Example 1: Keeping it simple

This is a fairly simple lead qualification process from a small SaaS
company with a volume of around 200 leads per month. There are
no dedicated lead responders but an inside sales team that also has
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other tasks. There is not much scoring or automation on new leads

except a simple filter to automatically disqualify noncorporate users.
Simple Lead Qualification Process
It’s simple and easy to maintain, and it fits the team able to act on it
and the inboundvolume.
Example 2: Medium complexity and volume

Here’s an example from a hardware company with a volume of
leads above 20,000 per month. Leads coming in are subject to some
automated rules in the beginning; either a rerouting to account
managers if the lead is on a particular list, or a pure marketing-driven
follow-up if the lead is too small.
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Qualifying Leads
Medium Complexity in Lead Qualification Process
The majority of leads go through the sales development reps who

follow a process based on calls and emails over the course of a month
or so before getting one of five lead statuses with appropriate action.
Example 3: High volume and complexity

In this final example, we are looking at a 40,000-plus annual lead
process for an enterprise software and services company. With a very
large lead volume and tight qualification criteria, there is an element
of lead scoring and more leads held back in a purely marketing-driven
engine.
A lead scoring model is used alongside the introduction of a
marketing-qualified lead concept, where only a certain combination
of data (account, title, potential) is combinedwith behavioral data
(account behavior on website) to move the lead up and down a lead
scoring model before releasing to a sales process.
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High Complexity in Lead Qualification Process
Which one is right for you depends on the volume of leads vs.
your ability to react on them, how much you’re willing to invest in
increasing total opportunities vs. the average qualification rate, and
more. The three basic examples here should serve as inspiration for
making your own!
Perspective: Automation and AI vs. the

human touch
If you get any kind of serious lead volume, it’s easy to start
looking at automation as the holy grail to assist with slimming
down the amount of leads to handle manually. Most leads, after
all, don’t turn into sales opportunities. Wouldn’t it be great if
they just automatically disqualified themselves? Surely with all the
advancements in AI and machine learning, someone must have
nailedthis?
Yes. Yes, it would. It would also be great if Siri could reliably call the
person I wanted while I’m driving, or have a higher than 50 percent
success rate of understanding my words when I write text messages.
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Qualifying Leads
But even with thousands of software engineersand some of the

smartest people on earth involved, it can’t.
The most successful lead qualification automation setups I’ve seen
rely on simple, easily communicated rules that humans understand.
This often includes things like the size of the company, where it’s
placed, what solution they’ve requested information about, etc. This
makes a world of sense. If your sales team can’t support requests
from small businesses, fine, make an automated flow that helps them
in the best way possible and lower their burden. But keep it simple!
I’ve seen incredibly advanced solutions prepared by rock star data
scientists fail miserably because, in the end, buying and selling to
enterprises is also a human game, and if the human sellers don’t
understand why they’re looking at the leads they do, their trust in
the system as a whole erodes. And the significant amount of dollars
spent in developing and maintaining that imperfect automation
could have been turned into a handful of humans who could process
the same information quicker with better customerexperience.
Will there be a breakthrough in this area sometime in the future? Yes,
just like there will eventually be autonomous cars on our roads. It’s
not hard to predict that future. The hard part is getting the timing
right. And the timingfor AI-driven lead qualification is probably still
years away.
So a word of caution: automation is wonderful. It can help
you avoid many tedious calls if you have strong, hard-coded signals
like employee size, lead type, specific accounts, etc. But even the
most advanced automation setup cannot match a skilled salesperson
feeling the prospect out for just a few minutes or a human being
looking up a lead on LinkedIn for 30 seconds and taking action from
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there. Don’t try to solve incredibly complex problems with machines

with millions in investments and month-long projects if humans can
do it in seconds.
The final step in our generic lead engine is
converting the opportunity the sales.
Chapter 5
From Opportunity to Sales

Opening opportunities, closing deals and
a new way to sell
The final step in our generic lead engine is converting the

opportunity the sales. Depending on your qualification setup, this
might be the moment of truth where a hand-over also happens
between a junior seller and a more seasoned account manager.
Whatever the case, this is where we start to leave the realm of the
engine and go into a true one-on-one mode.
In many ways, this part of the lead engine is also the
most well-described aspect, with decades of research on how to sell
complex B2B solutions using frameworks like solution selling, the
challenger sale, spin selling, and countless other methodologiesthat
go all the way back to the ’70s.
I’m a big proponent of solution selling personally, but it’s really
outside the scope of this book to dive fully into what a
sales methodology is and how your sellers should go about moving
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opportunities forward. I truly recommend reading the latest version

of Keith Eades’ seminal book on the topic, The Collaborative Sale:
Solution Selling in Today’s Customer-Driven World, for the full
picture of this.
The reality is that you probably have some sort of sales methodology
or frameworkalreadyin your company. The key part in relation to
the lead engine is really what parts are particular for the incoming
leads that have alreadygone through the process described in the
book.
As such, in this chapter I will touch on the connections that the
sales process should have with the lead process and pull out some of
the key challenges modern B2B sellers face when closing deals that
started with a single contact point. Namely, these are uncovering
the hidden decision makers in the buying group, competing against
inaction, and using deal acceleration techniques to help move
opportunities forward in a joint effort between sales and marketing.
Finally, I have included some example processes and some
perspectiveon where selling off the back of the lead engine is heading
in the future.
Building on data from the lead process

Imagine you’re an IT director buying a piece of enterprise software.
You’ve been on supplier websites, you’ve filled in forms, you’ve
downloaded stuff, you’ve engaged in a chat session, and maybe you
were calledby someone from a supplier after asking for a quote. It
was a junior sales rep qualifying you. Whatever, you know this game.
Now you’re about to speak to an account manager who can give
some actual answers . . . and then he starts from scratch—asking what
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kind of company you work in, what kind of users you have, your
timeline, your needs. How would that make you feel as a potential
customer?
This should be a mortal sin in B2B sales. By the time a lead is handed
over, you alreadyhave a treasure trove of data on the lead from
form information, qualification notes, and behavioral tracking. Your
account reps and sellers should be two or three steps into their sales
process before even talking with the prospect.
The tendency to treat prospects after handover with a tabula rasa
mindset stems from a misunderstanding that making conversation
with customersis always a good thing. But it isn’t. Having to
repeat yourself to several people in a company is not good customer
experience, and we know this well from our private consumer life.
Instead, once a lead is handed over, there must be either a verbal or
data-driven handover between the qualifying rep and the final sales
manager. You can do this manually at first, but my advice would be
to design for the data-driven approach. In your CRM, the lead card
is many things, but it’s also a communication tool to the sales rep.
It must be a one-stop look at what has happened so far and the key
information required in your qualification process.
Start your sales process in the right way—building on data
you’ve collected in the process up until now.
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The buying group and the hidden

decision makers
One of the most well-documented changes in B2B buying is the
explosion in the number of decision makers and the ensuing
complexities in the buying/selling process.
Different sources will give you different numbers. Gartner tells you
that a complex B2B purchase involves from 6–10 people. CEB
surveys decision makers and found that it increased from 5.4 in 2014
to 10.2 in 2018. That probably sounds a bit on the high side, but
speaking as someone who actually made B2B marketing technology
decisions in a large listed company, I can vouch for it.
The 10 people who once set out to buy a marketing

platform
In 2020, when we started looking for a new marketing automation
engine, the buying group included these people:
• Me, a marketing/digital leader
• Three people on my own team, including the main project
driver
• The head of digital development
• Two or three people on his team who changed a bit during the
project due to resignations
• A legal contact to review contracts who thankfully also helped
with GDPR issues
• A person responsible for procurement
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And that’s how we get to 10 decision makers/influencers for a

contract value of around $100,000/year. We’re not even buying oil
rigs or bridges here!
So what does this mean for your opportunity process? Three
implications:
If you’re only in dialogue with a single stakeholder, you have a
problem. You have not even uncovered WHO the others are, much
less interacted with them.
Let’s look at the principles and practicalities you need to change:
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Case: eloomi
Eloomi scales through strong lead engine execution, a
leadership-aligned performance mindset, and a culture of
optimization.
Eloomi is a fast-growing SaaS company born in 2015 in Copenhagen,

and it’s now actively selling to most of the world with more than 500
customers. With a fresh take on traditional software categories like
learning management, onboarding, and compliance training, eloomi
targets a wide variety of organizations and is relevant across many
verticals. It’s a large and well-defined market with a lot of both
traditional and upcoming players, so winning commercially is critical to
success.
Eloomi’s go-to-market model is a direct result of this; it goes broad

in terms of companies and verticals but stays narrow in terms of
target buyers and is focused chiefly on low-funnel activity, including a
very strong focus on Google as a key intent-based source of new
customers. Its goal is not on educating the market in the early parts
of the buyer journey, but on being the best in the industryat
helping people choose the right platform and closing the deal. With its
ambitious growth targets, it works on establishing everyday alignment
between the key commercial teams: marketing, inboundand outbound
sales and product specialists.
Eloomi has a true culture of optimization and scaling. Its eye is on

scaling profitable campaigns as an ongoing process, accepting failure
along the way, and constantly watching the full-funnel impact of its
actions.
“We have to understand that statements like
‘the leads are bad’ or ‘sales aren’t treating
leads right’ are not simple truths—they’re
a symptom of fundamentally misaligned team
expectations and a lack of joint understanding
and goal-direction. This is a human problem,
not a technical one. Invest more in
people before you invest more in marketing
channels.”
Andreas Obel,
Head of Marketing, eloomi
Key takeaways for your lead engine from eloomi
• Understand the wants, needs and desires of the different commercial

teams. Break down the silos
• The separate teams are all looking at the same funnel, but from their
own angles and with their own perspectives. The alignment of the
operational managers is the most important thing.
• Prioritize speed. There is a simple correlation between speed and

conversion rates to get to the next stage in the sales funnel. Get
the inbound resources in place to contact leads in the first 5 minutes,
every time.
• Get to the bottom of your funnel manually if you have to and look at
all costs including the qualification personnel holistically. In eloomi it
is both an automated process as well as a manual spreadsheet driven
process when needed, but it gives a data-driven dataset to look at
jointly in commercial teams, including a forward-looking estimation
of the financial impact of your engine.
• Its easy to get lost in chasing new, small sources of leads.

Instead, focus on smaller specialized teams/groups doing conversion
optimization, making things simpler and A/B testing to squeeze more
performance from the things you already where 5 and 10 percent
increases can make a huge impact on revenue and a world of
difference.
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Expand your view and interaction with the buying

group
Sometimes the best thing you can do is just ask. If you’re engaging
with the marketing director, ask into the issue using open questions
like, “Who else do we need to involve to make this a success?”
If you alreadyhave experience in the field, you can be more
direct with questions like, “In my experience working with similar
companies, there is a legal department that wants to review our data
contract—should we get that planned alreadyahead of time?”
With a less open buying process, tools like LinkedIn and ZoomInfo
/DiscoverOrg can help you identify other key decision makers
through company and contact searches.
Tailor your story

All decision makers are not equally interested in the same things,
obviously. The legal reviewer does not need the full product story,
and the marketing director might not need the entire walk-through
of GDPR compliance. Tailor your messaging and value propositions
to individual stakeholders to increase relevancy.
Make deal acceleration a joint sales and marketing

sport
Not all decision makers can be reached directly by a salesperson.
Modern deal acceleration combines sales and marketing by using
account targeting on platforms like LinkedIn to reach unknown or
untouchable decision makers indirectly.
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Common cases for this kind of deal acceleration are major

opportunities or tender processes where you might have a lot more
than 10 people giving input into the buying process where the total
deal size could be in the millions of dollars. In this case, bring your
marketing colleagues in to help influence the larger decision maker
group indirectly. We will dig further into deal acceleration later in
this chapter.
Your biggest competitor is probably

inaction
Most opportunities and win/loss reporting have too much focus on
competitors: we didn’t get the price right, we didn’t reach enough
stakeholders, our brand wasn’t strong enough, or we lacked attractive
features compared to our competition.
Sales research firm CSO Insights concludes that 50 percent of
opportunities don’t close at projected time or value and that the
single biggest culprit is that the prospect ultimately ends up doing
nothing.
You didn’t lose to a competitor—you lost to risk.
Defeating the inaction competitor by de-risking

This goes back to the fundamental idea that buying is hard. If I’m
buying a CRM system, I’m not just buying software. I’m buying into
a long and arduous process that might last years and involve a lot
of people, change management, and business cases—not to mention
the risk of losing my job if the project is viewed as important and I
mess it up.
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The inaction competitor doesn’t compete on price and features. It

competes on risk mitigation. There are three key things good sellers
do to combat this:
1. Clearly laying out the cost or risk of inaction. There’s risk in
doing something, but often there’s more risk in doing nothing.
Now you are competing truly head-to-head with risk: What
might happen in one or two years if we don’t change that CRM
system now? What if we don’t have maintenance contracts on
the manufacturing equipment and it breaks during production?
What would the financial consequences be of a 1 percent
website downtime during Black Friday? A good sales process
will always uncover the cost and risk of inaction.
2. De-risking the project as a whole by considering the full
buying process. Unless you are selling crude oil by the barrel,
your sales are often a small part of a much larger effort
that might have only started with buying something from you.
In our CRM example, there is an implementation process, an
onboarding process, and adoption process for its users. If your
thinking only goes as far as getting a signature on the dotted
line, you leave the buyer hanging on everything else. But if you
show the buyer a way forward on implementation, onboarding,
and adoption, you’re helping the buyer lower risk, making it
easier to buy.
3. Address organizational challenges like lack of funding and
resource availability. Your product and service is important of
course, but it might fade in significance to five other key
strategic initiatives inside the organization you’re trying to sell
to. If we build on our CRM system example, we aren’t just
competing with another CRM vendor. We also compete with a
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project to refresh ERP systems due to resource overlap or maybe

even product investments due to a lack of overall available
funding. You either need to raise the importance of the project
at hand, tie it into existing strategic initiatives, or come up with
alternative funding mechanisms to compete.
Whatever the case for inaction and no matter where you are in the
sales process, the answer is simply to keep selling against the status
quo, not just your competitors. De-risk as much as possible along the
way and always highlight to your buyer that doing nothing can be
more dangerous and risky than doing something.
Hunters, Farmers, and Responders

There is a very unfortunate stereotypical mental image of a
salespersonthat I think we all know too well: a relationship-building,
extroverted, smooth-operating, fast-talking kind of fellow who
always overpromises and under delivers. But this stereotype is
completely wrong.
About 10 percent of the United States workforce have some kind
of sales role, and they’re as diverse as any other kind of people.
I personally know very introverted yet very successful salespeople.
Sellers who are great at opening doors and sellers that are great
at closing deals. Sellers who are magic on the phone and useless
face-to-face. Sellers who are as technically well-versed as the engineers
who built the products and sellers who have no idea what they’re
selling.
One of the most common mistakes in the making of sales teams is a
lack of consideration of these different kinds of sellers for different
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kinds of roles. In a lead engine setup, you might need totally different
sellers forming a team that sells together:
• The Responder. A must for when you start building volume.
Being an inside sellers calling 30 new inbound leads every single
day as fast as possible with a fixed follow-up structure is not
for everyone. Sellers who succeed here are able to work in a
structured and process-driven manner and are able to make a
personal connection within the first 20 seconds of a call.
• The Hunter. The prospecting hero always on the prowl, able to
stamp their own leads out of the ground or act on the leads who
are not hand-raisers.
• The Product Specialist. Able to give a killer demo who truly
understands the product and how it fits with the technical and
cultural setup of the customer. Reserve the true specialists for
actual opportunities and avoid spending their energy early in the
process.
• The Consultative Seller. If you’re following up on short leads,
you might need to do so with real knowledge and industry
insight. The consultative seller understands the business,
challenges and industry trends in play and can advanced buyers
from a latent to a realized need.
• The Bid Manager. Opportunities might turn into a major bid
or RFP process. Few salespeople are also great at structuring and
answering a bid process. It requires totally different skills and
the ability to orchestrate a larger team around them.
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Case: United Fintech
United Fintech acquires high potential companies and builds
repeatablelead engines to scale globally.
United Fintech was founded in 2020 with a simple yet powerful idea:
acquire fintech companies in the capital markets space that had the
product right but didn’t have the people, tools, or engines required for
global scaling and growth. Some of the acquired companies continue
running their own brands and sales funnels while others are integrated
in a unified master brand.
What this means is that United Fintech is not merely building one
lead engine but finding a repeatablemodel to generate revenue growth
across its portfolio of similar but different companies. It does not
focus on simple hacks or tricks for growth but a longer-term play
where all the parts of its different portfolio companies add up to a
greater whole.
With its unique perspectiveof building scalablesales and marketing

engines across brands, it has a clear view how to make it work in a
repeatablefashion.
“Whenever possible, the mindset we try to
imprint in the teams is full-funnel thinking.
No one cares if we have more leads if we don’t
have more revenue as well. We have to expand
everyone’s view to include the full funnel—all
the way down to revenue impact.”
Casper Emil Sciuto Rouchmann,

Head of Marketing at United Fintech
Casper’s top five recommendations
• Full-funnel thinking. By being open with data from A to Z, United

Fintech makes sure everyone sees the impact of the entire sales funnel
from leads to revenue.
• Strategy comes first. Despite a lot of start-ups employing a “growth

hacking” mindset, Casper emphasizes it’s all for naught without a
clear and aligned marketing strategy.
• Start scaling from the bottom of the funnel. There are so many tools
in the marketing toolbox, so if you’re trying to get a lead engine right,
start at the very bottom of the funnel with simple things like Google
Ads and LinkedIn to get traction and prove a case.
• Combine tech and business understanding in the same team.

Organizationally, there used to be a clear distinction between IT and
business teams like marketing. United Fintech strives to erase those
lines by hiring and training for the combination, simply because most
marketing and selling has an obvious tech angle today.
• Write down the combined sales and marketing process. Simply the act
of documenting how the teams work together is often part of making
the collaboration work.
Your team will be unique, based on your industry, type of deals, and
the size of your lead engine. The main takeaway is that not all sellers
are the same, and not all sales roles are either—you have to structure
the team to match individual strengths.
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Deal acceleration
If we zoom back to the original model supporting this book, we see
marketing still plays a role in converting and closing leads. One of the
ways this happens is through deal acceleration initiatives.
Converting Leads
Let’s pull up an example to illustrate: you’re an account

manager working for Zendesk, a company offering customerservice
platforms. You have a potential customeractively in the market for
this. The customerservice business owner, whom you know, started
the process, reached out to some vendors, and has now involved
marketing, e-commerce, and IT representatives. A semiformal
proposal round has started, and in a few weeks, you’re presenting to
the group.
You can work away at all of this on your own as an account manager,
or you can consider where you can plug in marketing for deal
acceleration in the coming phases of the buying journey:
• Pre-tender, you’ll want to make sure the other attendees know
Zendesk for the right things. If there’s eight people on the call,
you don’t want only three of them to know you. Target key
decision maker groups within the customer through LinkedIn,
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email, display, or similar simply to make sure you’re a known

entity vs. someone they’ve never heard of.
• During the tender process, you can often be forbidden or
discouraged from interacting directly with decision makers, but
your marketing channels are still wide open. However, you can
reach the key people and customize your message to fit with
the pains of the customer to influence them. Often potential
customers put more weight on the information they found
themselves versus what’s actually in the tender material.
• The tender material can be your standard RFP response, or
it can be a bigger package that includes both customer-specific
websites and landing pages, customized layout, additional
material speaking to the customer pains or industry trends, etc.
It might include case material or reference stories from similar
projects. There are a lot of opportunities to stand out in this
regard.
No matter how you approachdeal acceleration, marketing should
add value all the way throughout the customerjourney. Beyond the
immediate benefits from hopefully winning more tenders, working
together on deals also helps address the fundamental empathy gap
identified in Chapter 1. Being part of a full tender process is one
way to help bridge that gap by giving marketers insights into what
a buying process really looks like and opening the eyes of sellers to
what marketers can do for them.
If marketing is not part of your deal domain, you’re simply missing
a trick and an opportunity to bridge the empathy gap.
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Succeeding in partner-led sales

One of the most challenging setups to build a lead engine around is
a partner-led sales and lead process.
A typical example is a company like Grundfos. Grundfos sells
pumps through a distributor, which sells them to an installer,
who finally puts it into your home when you’re renovating your
bathroom. Despite being the final payer, very few homeowners care
what pumps are in their home, so the installer is the one making the
purchasing decision. But the installer doesn’t buy from Grundfos
directly and instead deals with a distributor. This kind of setup is very
common in most kinds of physical goods in B2B, but it can also be
found in software industries.
There are many challenges to building a lead engine in this kind of
setup for companies like Grundfos:
• The lead handover from Grundfos to installers is fraught with
potential errors: whether the installer actually called the lead,
lack of quality control, etc.
• Tracking of success is hard to come by: there is no data on
who bought what and when, and the installer may not be very
data-driven.
• It’s hard to influence the final end customer in a low interest
category.
• Distributors may try to influence the installer toward buying
something else, including competitor products.
There is a reason why a lot of the strong lead generation cases out
there are for direct-sales B2B SaaS companies—physical goods that
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transact through a long partner-driven value chain are simply much

harder to deal with. But it isn’t impossible.
To succeed with a lead engine in a partner-led sales process, you need
one or more of the following:
• A strong lead distribution model and process
• Willingness to invest in staying in contact with the
buyer/decision maker
• Embedding software or people in your partner channel
Lead distribution
If your partners rely as much or more on you than you rely on
them, there is a good chance you can implement a lead distribution
model. Basically, you generate the leads, which are then distributed
to individual partners based on a set of rules. This type of setup
can range from very simple (a new lead is automatically emailed to
a preferred partner in a given geography) to very advanced (multiple
inputs decide who gets what leads, including past performance and
current relationship status).
The key things to get right with lead distribution is a clear definition
of what parts of the engine are owned where, and make sure there’s
a crystal-clear incentive for partners to play along with the scheme as
a whole and, more importantly, track it.
You can help partners if you qualify the leads yourself before
passing them on, vastly increasing the likelihood that the partner is
interested. I have personally not seen or heard of a lead distribution
setup work withoutprequalification because the exact same forces
that make lead qualification hard between marketing and sales is
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made many times harder by the fact that these entities now live in
two separate companies.
The incentive depends on what type of relationship you have. If
you represent a very large portion of sales to your partner, you can
get them to do a lot withoutgiving anything other than leads back.
If your category is less than 10 percent of their revenue, you need
to heavily incentivize partners to provide data back, either through
financial means or sales competitions and the like.
The single biggest pitfall in lead distribution setups is a ton of leads
given out with no data being given in return—maybe they bought
something, maybe they didn’t. The right lead distribution setup and
software make it easier, but fundamentally it often comes down
to whetheryour partner relationship is strong enough to carry this
through.
Staying in contact with the buyer

During my time at Jabra, we had this issue in many smaller markets
where we didn’t have a lot of high-touch sellers and relied heavily
on partners to lead the sale. Leads came in, and we would qualify
them and send them manually to partners who weren’t interested in
a heavy lead distribution process. Great, but how do we know if
something ever turned into a sale?
We solved it in the simplest way you can imagine—just give the lead
a courtesy call a few weeks after the initial hand-off to check whether
they bought anything and what they ended up getting. This was
done by a student, didn’t need to be super urgent, and was a nice way
to follow up with customersand stay in touch.
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The student help cost less than $2,000 a month, and he did tons of
other things and created opportunities worth hundreds of thousands
of dollars and gave hundreds of customersa good experience.
Sometimes you don’t need expensive lead distribution software.
Sometimes you just need to give people a call.
Embedding software or people with your

partners
Finally, there is the option of much deeper integration. If you have
a limited set of very large partners and a healthy lead engine spend,
you can either embed people to qualify and track deals within the
partner company, or you can integrate with their CRM system in
conjunction with your lead distribution setup.
Embedding people is common in the technology sector in particular
and is an obvious win-win; the vendor helps the partner sell and is
much more likely to get data and tracking back directly from their
own employee. The model has its obvious drawbacks; it’s obviously
expensive, heavy to manage, and can’t be duplicated across a lot of
different partners. However, if your partners are few and focused,
this is a path worth treading, and it sends a clear message to your
partners that you’re willing to co-invest to make it work.
Overall, it is possible to make lead engines work with partner-led
sales, but don’t be naïve—it requires more work and almost always
ends up with lower qualification rates.
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Perspective: The bionic seller

Many marketers turned bionic years ago. Most people in marketing
today, even in slow adopting organizations, get their work done with
technological extensions. Analytics. Marketing automation. Mass
communication. Programmatic ad buying. Look-alike targeting.
Design. Project management. Reporting. It’s probably not even
possible to do marketing withoutbionic tools today.
Sellers are still mostly human. They talk directly to other humans, so
in a way, they have to be. And most aspects of prospecting, selling,
and account management can be done with technology that is 10+
years old. The time they spend documenting things in CRM is for
the benefit of others, not accelerating their own sales.
But the best sellers out there are turning bionic, too.
They prospect hundreds of accounts at a time, not just one. They get
real-time, automated feedback in their conversations with customers,
not just twice a year. They amplify content and knowledge to all their
prospects and accounts, not just in the quarterly business reviews.
And they use tech in a smart way to reduce time spent on tedious,
error-prone activities like research, calendar booking, and securing
signatures. They retain the human qualities that made them great in
the first place. And they use technology to scale in a way that
one-on-one sellers never could.
The transition that marketing has been through in the past 10
years is happening for sales as well. We see it in the sales
rock stars already—they’re using tools differently than traditional
sellers withoutsacrificing their personal touch. They’re becoming
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micro-marketers by using LinkedIn and other platforms to build a

personal brand and keep in touch with their buyers in the long run.
The future of marketing and sales is a much tighter and
closer connection, and nowhere is this more apparent than in sellers
becoming their own marketers and turning truly bionic.
There’s a very large variance in metrics we use, and
unfortunately there are also quite a few CMOs
that value metrics that are very, very far from
revenue and market impact.
Chapter 6
Goals, Analysis, and KPIs

Full-funnel tracking, attribution models,
analysis and more
Once every year, Gartner surveys CMOs worldwide in the Gartner

CMO Spend Survey, asking them about their top metrics. The
results come back as a hodgepodge of ROI, MQLs, SQLs, CSAT,
market share, CPM even (who are these people?), cost per lead,
average order value, sentiment, share of voice, and many more, with
no clear winners. The top metric (ROI) is only used by 19 percent of
CMOs.
We can see two major takeaways: there’s a very large variance in
metrics we use, and unfortunately there are also quite a few CMOs
who value metrics that are very, very far from revenue and market
impact.
In this chapter, I’m going to dig into both what your primary goals
should be and how to build a full-funnel view of other metrics that
matter. I’ll also discuss how you can accomplish this using different
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tools. It goes withoutsaying that a small enterprise SaaS is not going

to have the same metrics as a company renting out oil rigs to Shell,
but the important part is really the principles behind picking the
right goals and getting as close as possible to real business impact.
Metrics are interesting for two purposes—one is to prove the
business case you built back in Chapter 2. More relevantly, it’s your
baseline for fixing a leaky funnel or a starting point for optimization.
I’ll cover a brief troubleshooting guide for getting this part right.
Finally, trying to measure the impact of your lead engine is
not always straightforward, especially with more complex and long
buying processes. Leads that come in the door in March may not
turn into business before December. And the lead that came in was
probably affected by a long string of channels before converting.
I’ll dig into some possible answers to this conundrum by looking at
attribution modeling and evaluate whetherit’s right for you as well
as a perspectiveon the measurement challenges provided by cookies
and privacy legislation.
What’s the goal?

The topic of setting goals and getting measurements right is one that
looks simple on the surface (we just have to GROW, okay?), but it’s
devious, and it holds lots of opportunities to get things wrong.
I have three principles to get goal-setting right:
1. Get as close to revenue as possible without losing the causal link.
2. Set goals with organizational tension.
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4. It’s better to measure the right thing inaccurately than measure

the wrong thing exactly right.
“You get what you measure,” as the saying goes. And nowhere is
this more true than with sales and marketing, especially if you tie
financial incentives into it for your team. Want more leads? You’ll
get more leads. Want more qualified sales meetings? Better still. Sales
pipeline? New customers? Revenue? Now you’re talking.
Not everythingis equally easy to measure, though. Measuring the
number of clicks your ads get or new leads in your CRM is trivial.
You get the number right there, every day. Measuring the exact
profit/loss bottom-line impact of your lead engine (or nearly any
effort, for that matter) is nigh-on impossible, and the further toward
the bottom line you go, the weaker the causal link between your
actions and the holistic outcomesget.
As such, the first principle is to get as close to revenue as possible,
withoutlosing the causal link between what you’re doing and the
outcome you’re measuring.
My second principle is to go for goals with tension. What do I mean
by that? Let’s revisit the core model for this book:
The whole point is that building a lead engine is a joint sales and
marketing effort. So goals should rely on both of these departments.
As such, “marketing-qualified leads” is a terrible goal.
I repeat: marketing-qualified leads, or MQLs, is a terrible goal.
Exactly because it has zero tension—it can be delivered on purely
through the work of marketing. It does not require sellers to further
qualify, add pipeline value, or close deals, which is the whole point.
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You solve this by picking goals with tensions—goals that are in the
middle between early engagement and P/L impact:
Marketing-only goals Goals with tensions Company-wide impact
Inbound leads Sales-qualified leads Total revenue
Advertising reach Sales pipeline Total profit
Marketing-qualified leads Lead-sourced revenue Share price
If your marketer complains, “But this is a goal I can’t achieve on my

own,” they have missed the central point and the first principle of
this book: building a lead engine is a joint sales and marketing effort,
and it should be measured as such. Pick a goal from the middle
column or a related one that fits your business model.
The third and final principle builds on these goals with
tensions—because they’re tricky things to measure! We’ll touch on
the attribution challenge later in this chapter, but even with the best
measurement tools in the world, you will fall short of getting an exact
measure of lead-sourced revenue. The reality is often more complex
than our systems and understanding allow: the buying process might
involve a lot of channels and won’t always attribute accurate value to
each of them.
That’s okay!
It’s better being mostly right than exactlywrong.
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Case: SAS Institute
SAS Institute delivers sales pipeline in a complex industrywith a
combination of advanced technology and down to earth sales and
marketing alignment.
A global company headquartered in the United States, SAS is a

leader in analytics software and services. SAS helps a broad range of
industries and use cases make sense and act on their business data.
With 92 customersin the Fortune 100, SAS is primarily focused on the
top end of the market and has long, 12+ month sales cycles and
complex products.
For SAS, generating new leads and business has to be a focused

effort. It plays in specific verticals that require unique messaging, and
it focuses on a narrow number of accounts in each market. Instead
of going all the way down to one-on-one account-based marketing,
it pools similar customersin segments to enable scale. Its lead
generation involves both classic events, targeted digital campaigns,
and enabling its sellers to excel on social media. SAS applies a
rigorous lead scoring model to every lead, using both behavioral and
account-based signals to score, and it continuously adjust thresholds
to match agreed-upon sales volumes. Each sales vertical has a
marketing business partner to ensure quality in alignment and
follow-up on both sides.
As a software company that delivers solutions within this space, SAS

Institute eats their own dog food to a large extent, using many of the
advanced tools and analytics within the SAS CI 360 suite. This is what
enables it to run behavior and account-based lead scoring and provide
a solid view of an influenced pipeline: a cookie-less first-party ID setup
that stays on top of individuals in the buying group as they move
forward in the buying process.
SAS measures the impact of its lead engine through a combination of
directly sourced sales pipeline and indirectly influenced pipeline, such
as new leads attached to an existingopportunity.
“While I think we are quite advanced on the

technology side and get many benefits from
that in our lead scoring and tracking in
particular, you just can’t replace the ongoing
sales and marketing alignment. We run it
with almost militaristic governance, once a
week, going through all relevant leads.”
Nikolaj Slotmann Millers,

Head of Go To Market, SAS Institute (Nordic)
Key takeaways for your lead engine from SAS

Institute
• Lead scoring can be a powerful tool when applied correctly, especially

if your sellers handle a multitude of tasks and account management
on top of new business and leads.
• Nothing can replace continuous sales and marketing alignment.

Purely data-driven collaboration is the dream, but in reality, the
engine does not run on its own. Consider a business partner approach
like SAS if you find yourself in a similar situation.
• Don’t rely on just marketing to generate leads—in knowledge-heavy

industries in particular, you can equip your key sellers to deliver leads
through social selling.
We have to lean into this fact by understanding that the things that
matter can’t always be measured exactly. But I’d rather measure and
set goals on these things and accept inaccuracies because they drive
the right behavior, which is ultimately what goal setting is all about.
Pick goals that are as close to revenue as possible withoutlosing
causality, make sure it has organizational tension, and accept that you
might never get to 100 percent accuracy in measurement because
the goal of setting goals is not accounting—it’s to drive the right
behavior. For example, many companies have trouble measuring lead
engines on sourced revenue due to very long sales cycles; in this case,
move the goalpost one step back to the pipeline, which materializes
much faster, or use weighted revenue figures.
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We’ll round off this topic with an illustrative example from the call
center business, where agents are extremelybehavior-driven by the
metrics they get assigned.
A call center manager wanted to accelerate performance and got a
lot of incoming calls. He looked at his dashboard. One of the metrics
that is easily measured is the amount of time an average call takes;
another is how many calls each agent has done. So he set ambitious
goals for each agent to take a certain amount of calls per day to
incentivize them to solve issues as quickly as possible.
It did not go as planned. The agents quickly caught on to this. They
picked up the phone, then immediately hung up. The customer
would inevitably call back, thinking there had been a mistake or a
dropped call. On the second call, the agent would help them. Now,
instead of one call, the agent finished two calls in nearly the same
time, contributing much more to their performance. “You get what
you measure” is how we started this section. The call center manager
wanted more calls faster, and he got them. But it certainly didn’t
drive the right behavior in the end. With the right goal set, it’s time to
dig into how we are going to keep track of it and optimize our engine
based on the results.
Metrics that matter beyond your primary

goal
Your ultimate goal is where it’s all at, and it’s what you want outside
stakeholders focused on. But it doesn’t lend itself well for analysis
and optimization. For this, you need the metrics that matter in the
earlierparts of the funnel. Here is a non-exhaustive example list you
can use as a starting point:
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Metric What it means
Spend Cost of lead engine; either just marketing costs or inclusive of

qualification
Visits Plain and simple, how many came to your campaign/website?
Leads Raw numbers of leads in your CRM coming from lead engine
sources
- Conversion rate Simple conversion rate between visits and leads
- Cost per lead What did a lead cost to bring in from a media/partner?
Marketing-qualified If relevant for your setup, how many did marketing pass
leads forward?
- Conversion rate Simple conversion rate between leads and MQL
Sales-qualified leads If relevant, how many were deemed relevant at first human
touch?
- Conversion rate Simple conversion rate between MQL and SQL
Sales opportunities Total amount of sales opportunities in CRM sourced from

lead engine
- Conversion rate(s) Lead to opportunity or SQL to opportunity, depending on your

setup
- Cost per opportunity What did an opportunity cost to generate?
Total pipeline value The total pipeline value—weighted if possible
Return on pipeline Early ROI measure—total pipeline divided by lead engine costs
Average deal size Total pipeline (or revenue) value divided by the number of
opportunities
Closed revenue / Total value of all closed opportunities sourced from the lead
recurring revenue engine
ROI ROI measure—total revenue divided by lead engine costs
- Closing rates Simple conversion rate from opportunity to closed deal
New customers Regardless of value, how many new customerswere added?
Lifetime value Estimated lifetime value if relevant to your business
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Very few lead engines rely on all of the above metrics. SaaS
companies might have a slightly more recurring revenue perspective,
for example, or you might have a shorter and more simple lead
process withoutMQL/SQL. The essence is to have a full-funnel
top-to-bottom view documented over time as the baseline and
starting point for your analysis work.
From spreadsheets to CRM and business

intelligence
I’m going to hurt the feelings of some business intelligence
consultants right away: it really doesn’t matter which tool you use
to measure things and look at outcomes. You don’t get inherently
smarter from looking at beautifully designed Tableau dashboards
compared to Excel pivot tables or a Google Sheet.
What matters is your ability to pull the right data together from
the previous section to get a proper, full-funnel view—99 percent of
marketers do this in Excel or Google Sheets to start with, and I’ve
personally seen Excel trackers be the basis of hundreds of millions of
dollars in sales pipelines. If you’re doing this, and you’re experiencing
hardcore data-imposter syndrome, don’t worry. After all, Excel is the
second-best piece of software for everythingin the world.
Beyond just a tool discussion (which we will get into), there is a more
important issue to address: the issue of time.
Getting your time perspective right

First, any kind of analysis or dashboard has to have a time
perspective, typically quarterly, monthly, or weekly. The longer your
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sales cycle and the fewer deals you have, the longer your time
perspectiveneeds to be.
There is no point in doing weekly analysis for complex B2B sales;
leads that landed in your inbox Wednesday have an extremelylow
chance of progressing anywhere in the next two days to be useful to
look at Monday morning. So if you want to optimize something, you
need a chance for those leads to convert through the funnel to make
sense. Conversely, if you’re selling a simple self-serve tool like Hotjar,
maybe weekly analysis is the right way to go.
Once you have a proper time perspective, let’s say monthly, it
actually hard to build the list of metrics on the previous page without
making some key decisions: Which things count, and when? If the
lead was created in April but turns into an SQL in May and an
opportunity in June with expected revenue in October, where does
it belong? There are two paths forward that you need to try yourself
to determine what fits for your company: Either the lead decides
everything(lead, SQL, and opportunity all belong to April) or the
time period decides (the lead belongs in April, and the opportunity
counts in June).
If you’re media-centric about this, everythingbelongs to the first
lead—and the campaign that created it—in April; after all, this is
when you paid for the lead. But as we’ve covered extensively in this
book, simply the act of creating the lead is just the one component
of a lead engine. It also means that your reporting for last month
will always look terrible in long sales cycle industries, which is pretty
useless for reporting. In our example above, April will look terrible
for months.
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My recommendation is to create different views that support the

analysis you’re trying to make. If you’re looking back at the media
effectiveness of the past months, you must start with the lead because
media spend relates to the lead creation date. Conversely, if you want
to look at the overall performance of the lead engine as a whole,
measure things when they happen. If the opportunity is created in
June, count it there. This will create a rolling wave of outcomes,
which is exactlyhow a business functions as a whole.
When do you drop the spreadsheet?

Finally, we can look at how to do it practically. The data for
a full-funnel view like we saw in the last section probably comes
from a lot of sources: your website, three different media platforms,
CRM, and possible even ERP. There are four stages to maturing
your approachhere: manual spreadsheets, data automation, business
intelligence, and predictive analytics:
Crawl: Manual Walk: Data Run: Business Liftoff: Predictive
spreadsheets automation intelligence analytics
Data gathered Data gathered Data gathered Data gathered

manually automatically automatically automatically
Served in a Served in a Served in Served in

spreadsheet spreadsheet dashboards dashboards
Manual analysis Manual analysis Manual analysis Prompted

actions and assisted
analysis
Don’t fret if you’re crawling or walking. My personal take is that

the measurement setup for 99 percent of lead engines have a natural
home around the two middle boxes for the foreseeable future.
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There is a sound argument to using tools like Funnel.io

, SuperMetrics, BetterMetrics, and so on to help you automatically
gather data and do less manual data work once your channels expand.
And there is real value in building dashboardscatered to your
needs by investing in business intelligence and dashboardsin things
like Tableau, Qlik, or Power BI. But take the baby steps toward
dashboardsand look for the ultimate tell; once you’ve done the
same thing in Excel more than a couple of times, it’s time to get into
automation and BI, but not before!
Troubleshooting guide for your leaky

funnel
As we covered in the book, you have to build your own qualification
and opportunity process. Copying something directly from this
book, an article, or a standard model isn’t going to cut it.
That being said, many funnels look similar, and in my discussions
with sales and marketing leaders, we have run into many of the same
challenges.
I will cover each of the key conversion points below with in-field
troubleshooting tips.
From ad/landing page to lead

Landing page not converting? Here are three common pitfalls to
check:
• Simplify, simplify, simplify. Does your mom understand what
you’re trying to sell? Is there a crystal-clear CTA? Have you
removed every possible element of noise?
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• Ensure the highest possible consistency between the ad and

landing page. The user must not doubt for a second that they’re
in the right spot. Don’t be afraid of repeating exactly what the
ad says.
• Make the offer stronger. Tried everything else? Look hard at the
why part—is it a real enough reason to get in touch? Is your give
strong enough? Or are you asking for too much?
Very often, these simple pointers will get you back on track.
From lead to qualified lead

If you’ve got the right leads, job titles, and companies in your CRM
but they aren’t getting qualified, what should you look at first? My
top three suggestions are below:
• Speed: How long time did it take for the lead to get contacted?
• Persistence: Did we follow the lead process and use a mix
of different outreach channels to get in touch (phone, mail,
LinkedIn, etc.)?
• Check your sources: Is this a real hand-raiser campaign? Or is it
just a bunch of people who attended an event or downloaded a
piece of content? Is it true lead intent or just a name and a
phone number?
Again, this is typically where the problems occur. Before you solve
the potentially complex problems of reimagining the entire setup,
check that the above three things make sense.
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From qualified lead to opportunity

Another common stumbling block is low conversion rates from
qualified lead to opportunity. This is a trickier one because it
depends on your qualification process, but here are some possible
pitfalls and solutions:
• Is it really qualified? If there’s a handover involved between
departments or people, do both agree on the definition of
qualified? Is your team measured only on qualified leads? If
so, they may be incentivized to overload sellers with leads that
aren’t truly qualified.
• Did a real hand-over happen? Especially in the early stages of
building a lead engine, the process of handing over and receiving
leads might not be institutionalized, and you need to pay
very close attention to the hand-over between departments and
people.
• Does the receiving seller care? It sounds like a silly question,
but it happens. The leads you might think are important aren’t
always important to the sellers that receive them. Maybe they’re
focused on other customers, deals, or territories. If they’re not
hungry for new accounts, they won’t go through the hard work
of turning leads into customers.
• Check the data, and follow up on individual leads manually.
If you don’t have strong CRM capabilities and processes, one
cardinal sin that happens is sellers breaking the connection from
lead to opportunity, for example, by just creating a brand-new
opportunity out of nowhere.
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As you can tell, this analysis is all about the hand-over process and
establishing a common understanding of what a lead is and is not.
Don’t attempt to solve the problems with your ads or landing page
if this is where it goes wrong.
From opportunity to closed deal

A recurring conversation sales leaders have with their sellers is this
simple question: Why did we lose the deal?
There are different methods to go through this, either driven by the
seller alone or by involving the lost customeron larger deals through
interviews, and in some cases even using third parties to give an
unbiased view. For inbound, lead-based deals, here are some typical
starting points for your analysis:
• Did we truly discover the buying group? The nature of leads is
that we start with a single person, and we know that decisions
are made in a wider group. One thing to look for is whether we
ever expanded our view to the wider group and got beyond our
initial contact.
• Was there a true customer–product fit? In almost all categories,
there are multiple vendors that can deliver the service in
different ways. Was your product truly right for the customer?
• Did we lose to inaction or competition? This will help
guide a lot of follow-up questions; inaction could mean that
we succeeded in addressing the true pain of the customer,
while competitors win for many other reasons (pricing, feature
comparison, etc.). If you lose all deals to inaction, it might
be time to rethink your overall targeting—maybe the customers
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you’re going after don’t have the pains you think or the pains
are not strong enough to generate sales.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in win/loss analysis, but hopefully
it’s enough to get you digging further.
For your leaky funnel analysis as a whole, remember that your best
benchmark is yourself and your past performance. Very few B2B
companies can truly use industrybenchmarks for anything, so keep
honest to your own metrics and business cases.
Multi-touch attribution modeling

If you want to be a little bit controversial, the essence of attribution
modeling is this: The data you’re looking at today is wrong. By
spending time and energy on attribution modeling, you can make it
less wrong, if you get it right.
But before we get too critical or philosophical, let’s look at some
examples of why we need attribution modeling:
• You run a campaign on LinkedIn that gets 100 leads that
turn into five opportunities and $1 million. Great, right? Except
it’s probably not the only thing your company does, and now
you’re left with a lot of open questions: How many of those
opportunities would have come anyway? Did the campaign also
influence other opportunities that were not directly converted
by this campaign? What other activities contributed to the
success?
• You look into your sales pipeline and there’s a massive
opportunity with no source on it. Did your salesperson just pull
it out of thin air? Have we had contact with the decision maker
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before? How many other people in the same account have we

touched to enable the direct outreach?
Attribution modeling attempts to answer these and many more
questions by capturing as many touch points and parts of the
journey as possible, matching them to unique contactsand accounts,
and then applying a model to estimate value.
The starting model is what’s known as last click, and this is
essentially how most leads are counted in B2B today. We don’t
know everythingabout marketing, but we know for sure that this
is a deeply flawed model that doesn’t account for multiple people
researching accounts, having several touch points before converting,
and more.
Instead of focusing on last click, attribution model software applies
either a prebuilt alternative, such as a linear model (all touch points
are given equal weight), a first-touch model (the initial touch is given
most of the value), or a custom-designed one for your business,
preferably informed by your own data.
This way, you can discover value in underperforming campaigns
that play a role earlierin the funnel or downplay campaigns that
only look strong on last click models, which typically include things
like branded keywords on Google. Obviously, someone searching for
“buy X”, where X is your brand, has been exposed to other things
beforehand.
Essentially, this is a dream for many commercial teams, and probably
a worthwhile effort to at least think about for a lot of companies.
If you have the data and the right implementation, you might
be able to uncover significant improvements in your channel mix or
understanding of the buying process.
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A word of caution, however. There are a host of reasons why this is

not particularly widespread yet:
• Complexity in implementation. If you’re using a simple CRM
structure and you have three marketing channels that are all
online, great. If you’re a larger, complex organization with many
offline activities, direct sales engagements, ecosystem partners,
etc., be ready for a difficult project with many data gaps along
the way. You’re also adding new software to a stack that may be
bloated already.
• Complexity with internal stakeholders. Getting a commercial
organization onboard with anything is difficult, and attribution
models are no exception. A lot of people internally will not
understand what’s going on.
• Data quality is going the wrong way. With cookie limitations,
GDPR, and Apple privacy efforts, you’re going to face
headwinds on data collection.
• How do you really know the new model is better? You’ve
hopefully made wrong data less wrong. But you could have also
made it more wrong. There is no easy way of knowing.
In conclusion, should you make an effort to test the waters with
attribution modeling? Yes, if your data is approachable, you have
meaningful volume and channels to mix between, and you have the
resources, give it a go with the purpose of making yourself smarter
and optimizing your lead engine efforts. It’s not an ultimate truth or
a new “big green number” you can show off—it’s a springboard for
even better analysis, evaluation, and discussion.
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Econometrics and marketing mix

modeling
Many marketers have only recently become aware of the attribution
challenge. However, the core question of how we measure the
impact of one particular thing in a complex system with many
variables is not new.
In 1971, the group winning the Nobel Prize in economics pioneered
one way to approachthis exact question using the field of
econometrics. In very simple terms, econometrics uses what is called
a multiple regression model to test hypotheses based on large sets of
data.
The practicalapplication of this in a sales and marketing context
is calledmarketing mix modeling, where users of the methodology
measure an outcome (typically sales or market share) through a large
amount of input data, like advertising, shelf space, promotions,
channel activity, website visits, leads, and much more. A good
marketing mix model with a lot of data from years of analysis can
separate the effects of each of these and tell you what portion of sales
comprises the baseline (i.e., what we would sell if we did nothing)
and what parts are incremental (e.g., from TV advertising).
In our lead engine context, we could ask ourselves, what drives our
business revenue? There are probably countless factors, but what
we’re looking to isolate are the specific outputs of our engine. For
example, we could look at raw incoming leads or sales-qualified leads
and whetherthese correlate with business growth with a certain time
lag variable.
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The strength of marketing mix modeling is that it doesn’t rely

on pixels, cookies, and the proper connections being made in
CRM, for example. Instead of looking at the problem bottom-up
like attribution modeling, it starts top-down instead and asks simple
questions like, “Does revenue go up when we get more leads, keeping
all other things equal?”
The weakness of this approachis the age-old challenge of correlation
vs. causality—after all, you’re building a model built on historical
data. You run the risk of overfitting the model and not getting a tool
that can actually say something about the future: “If I get 50 percent
more leads, what happens to my revenue”?
Traditionally, marketing mix modeling has been very popular in
B2C and retail in particular. There is a future where it might
play a bigger role in B2B as bottom-up becomes weaker and buying
journeys become more complex and untraceable. It’s beyond the
scope of this book to fully explorethese topics, but I would advise
you to dig further into it if you have the following characteristics:
• Problems tracking outcomes due to poor bottom-up data and
gaps in your multitouch attribution
• Large volumes of well-documented, time-stamped data for 3
or more years (e.g., weekly sales per channel, media spend,
incoming leads, etc.)
• Willingness to invest time and effort into both building the
model but also keeping it alive over time to improve it and verify
its ability to be predictive
The future of marketing measurement for the most advanced lead
engines out there may very well be a combination of both bottom-up
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multitouch attribution and top-down marketing mix modeling. The

two approaches complement and inform each other, but for now it
is likely only an approachfor the very few lead engines that can put
a lot of energy into measurement as a practice.
If I have whetted your appetite, there are plenty of tools
and providers on the market, including more traditional ones like
Neustar and Mass Analytics as well as more nimble SaaS solutions
like Proof Analytics. Most major media agencies also provide
marketing mix modeling services.
Perspective: The cookies and privacy

challenge
This book was written in 2021. At the time of writing, there was
a significant regulatory challenge facing marketers. Essentially, we’ve
had many years of the Wild West on the internet when it comes
to privacy. Now, incoming legislation like GDPR, ePrivacy, CCPA,
and more coupled with platform owners like Apple restricting what
vendors can do are going to significantly hamper techniques like
retargeting, list-buying, and generally any use of third-party data.
The years ahead are guaranteed to involve a struggle between the
platforms and vendors that rely on these techniques on one side
and, on the other, regulators and privacy-conscious platforms. We’ve
definitely not seen the last of this battle, and cookie-less solutions as
well as on-platform solutions by Google and Facebook and maybe
even Apple are sure to address part of this.
Overall, while we don’t know exactlyhow this is going to play out,
the writing is on the wall: we are moving toward more privacy, more
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limitations on third-party data sharing, and less Wild West. We may

not all like it, but that’s the way we’re going.
The bottom line is this: my personal advice is to lean into this instead
of fighting it. We may have reached peak data, and there is no going
back in terms of compromising privacy rights.
If you’re building a lead engine that relies on heavy use of third-party
data, cookies, and retargeting, you’re putting your future at risk.
You’re putting your company at the risk of legal impact, and you’re
risking the work you’re doing being wasted. Don’t do that.
Bottom line is; build your lead engine with intent
and buy-in for the long run.
Chapter 7
Where Do You Go from Here?

Thoughts on getting started, scaling,
growing and long-term results
Let’s summarize briefly what we’ve been through in the book.

Starting with Strategy and Organization, we taken a comprehensive
look at how companies generate B2B leads, how you might approach
qualifying them in different ways, and how to optimize the
conversion to closed deals with your sales team. Finally, we covered
setting goals, tracking, attribution models, and building the business
case for your lead engine.
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Now it’s time for lift-off. Whether you’re a small start-up chasing the
first customersor a large industrial player just now getting serious
about lead engines, an obvious question is this: Where do you start?
For perspectiveon this, I’ve personally always found the world of
programming and development interesting. In their domain they’ve
had to reinvent the process of actually building something.
The original development paradigm was taken straight out of how
we build houses and other physical things—there’s a substantial
planning process, with architectural drawings and getting all the
parts ordered and in place, and the construction process is linear.
After all, it’s hard to build walls withouta foundation or put up a
roof withouta skeleton of support to rest it on, and it’s pointless to
paint anything before nearly every other thing is done. The end result
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is that the house is only functional at the very end of the process;
there is zero value for its inhabitants beforehand.
This is probably the right way to build houses, given that they have
to be right from the start. A software bug isn’t particularly nice, but
a collapsing roof is a catastrophe.
When software development teams wised up, they gradually
transitioned to what now essentially goes under the common
descriptor of “agile” ways of working, along with it it’s host of
tools and methodologies: Scrum, t-shirt estimations, post-mortems,
backlogs, Kanbans, sprints, and various concepts like MVPs: the
minimum viable product, which is basically the smallest possible
version of the product that can be used by a customer. If you’ve
heard of it before, chances are you’ve seen it accompanied by this
drawing:
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The Minimum Viable Product
It’s simple, fun, and true. The skateboard is not at all a car, but it’ll
get you from A to B slighter faster than walking, and it’s definitely
faster than waiting for your car to get built (maybe the motorbike is
actually better than a car?). This approachwill also dramatically help
you reduce risk in your outcomesbecause you get feedback from the
customerfaster and you don’t fall prey to having workedlong hours
on a solution that isn’t practicalin the real world.
A similar approachis possible for your lead engine. There are five
distinct bits you need to get right, which we have covered in the book
here:
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• The strategic and organizational background: the core of why

you’re even doing it and who are executing which parts
• A stable source of generating leads
• A reliable way to qualify and process leads
• The right sales setup for converting to customers
• A measurement setup and associated business case
The key takeaway is that the engine needs all five components to
work—you cannot start by being excellent in one or two of these
areas. Unfortunately, however, this is what happens more often than
not—you can dive into the most exciting (and approachable) task of
generating a bunch of leads withouthaving a clear definition of the
following steps.
MVP Model
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A suggested MVP model for your lead engine looks like this: the
core, strategic background is a small but important piece of work that
cannot be stretched—it’s either there or it isn’t. The flexible parts are
the other four. Again, start with the simplest possible representation
of how each of them can work for you.
Generating leads has a very straightforward MVP: one campaign,
one CTA, one channel. As we’ve covered in the book, starting with
your most attractiveoffer on a low-funnel campaign with narrow
targeting using media like Google search advertising or LinkedIn is a
great way to get kicked off. It’s better to have a little bit less volume
but higher quality in the beginning. Resist the urge to start with a
barrage of A/B testing; you probably don’t have the initial volume in
the beginning, so keep tweaking your single campaign until you have
something that works.
Qualifying leads can be trickier to the MVP. If you’re proving
the business case, there’s a very low chance of you getting to
hire a dedicated person for this. Basically, you have three options:
putting the work on existingsellers, taking the role temporarily into
marketing, or getting a more flexible resource, like an external agency
or an intern. All options can work, and while the most common
solution is adding the work.loadonto existingsellers, make sure they
have the right mindset and skillset covered in Chapter 4—this will
make or break your pilot.
Converting to customersis typically the most well-established
functionof the engine alreadyin place. It’s hard to run a
B2B company withoutsales staff, after all. The typical situations
that can ruin a lead engine MVP here are either (a) a
primarily distribution/channel-driven sales setup where your own
sellers rarely talk directly to end customersor (b) a mismatch
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between the customersreachable via lead generation and the target

customersof your sales staff. If the latter is the case, you have a
fundamental strategic disconnect that may invalidate the entire lead
engine promise for your organization. For your MVP, it’s all about
individual sellers—identifying a coalition of the willing who are
hungry for new business and eager to do the work of entering new
accounts. My experience is that you might need to avoid the most
experienced and embedded sellers in the organization who typically
have a vast network to rely on as well as an existingpipeline—go for
the hungry ones!
Getting measurement right is surprisingly complex, however, as we
covered in Chapter 6. All of the meaningless things like website
visits and likes or followers are extremelyeasy to measure, while all
the things that really matter are much harder to get right. The really
developed lead engines grasp for insights here, setting up intricate
dashboardsand performing multitouch attribution analysis or even
econometric analysis. For your MVP, stick to the basics—what
happened to the specific leads you directly created. If needed, do
manual one-by-one follow up on the first 100 directly in CRM
or—yes, you guessed it—Excel spreadsheets. I am a lover of all things
automated, such as dashboardsand business intelligence, but you
can safely park this stuff in the beginning until you’ve passed the first
hundreds of leads.
In short, scale like this:
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...and not like this:
A successful MVP means you have checked off or gotten

significantly smarter on the five fundamental parts of your lead
engine:
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• You have confirmation that your strategy is sound by showing

real-world execution.
• You are able to generate leads in the buying group at a cost
below or close to your business case target.
• You followed up on every relevant lead with a human touch.
• You have direct feedback from sellers who were able to progress
with some of those leads.
• You are able to trace back data and inform your business case.
Are you also ROI-positive in relation to your business case? Did you
also get new customers? These are significant bonuses to you, and
congratulations, it’s time to scale. Didn’t get either of those? Back up
and adjust your MVP, but this may not be a failure in itself. Most
companies take time to get ROI-positive while some hit the magic
combination of marketing and sales right from the get-go.
With the right mindset for starting out, I’ll cover a few pitfalls and
some thoughts on scaling before we close out the book.
Avoid the death-trap of endless pilots in

corporations
Here’s a situation I’ve seen countless times in larger corporations,
and I’ve even done it myself more than I care to admit. It runs
somewhat against conventional wisdom.
Someone in a major organization wants to do something new. There
is not a clear buy-in to do it properly, and there is no real strategic fit
or desire to do something out of the existingframe. But the drive to
do it is great, and managers generally dislike saying no to initiatives
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from employees—most Western-culture managers are trainedto be

supportive and encouraging.
Enter the dreaded “We can do it as a

pilot.”
Low risk, right? We don’t overcommit to anything. We get some
learnings. We don’t really have to change anything fundamental, it’s
just a pilot, after all. We can set goals for the pilot and review them
together. We all agree that trying new things is great.
One company I know of has gone through five or six such lead
generation pilots. It typically enjoys some moderate success but also
shows clear gaps, and then it goes nowhere when the pilot fades out.
While not all pilots are a waste of time, consider this perspective:
it is not a totally esoteric idea to build a lead engine. It’s not
a moonshot—it’s a pretty well-documented, meaningful activity to
drive incremental revenue in a commercial organization. Pilots and
experiments are great for things where you really have no idea what’s
going to happen. Building a lead engine is the opposite.
If you accept the premise that you can run a three-month pilot
withouta clear second phase that involves scaling, you are setting
your company up to fail because many things can go wrong in the
first months. The qualification criteria can be totally off. You will
need to adjust the setup between marketing and sales. It might take
some time to get volumes right. The systems can experience hiccups,
especially if you work in a more traditional, rigid company.
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The bottom line is this: build your lead engine with intent and
buy-in for the long run. Don’t do a small pilot that’s easy to run to
but hard to truly succeed with.
Scaling from 100 to 100,000 leads

If you’ve followed along for this many pages, I’m sure you’ll have
caught on to one of the central points: Each component of the lead
engine has to work in unison. And this is true when it comes to
scaling. The most common pitfall is to scale the generation of new
leads withoutscaling everythingelse. But an SDR who previously
called30 leads per day and now has to call 50 per day is
going to see their qualification rates plummet—there’s less time to
think, research, and follow up, and the focus shifts from quality
conversations to simply getting through every single lead.
The brutal reality of acquiring customersis that the first 100 are,
in many ways, the cheapest. They’re actively in the market and
extremelyhungry for whatever it is you’re providing, and they’re
willing to compromise on brand, product completeness, and many
other things because their pain is great enough.
Over time and with growth, most companies will see an increasing
customeracquisition cost simply because they’re crawling further
up the funnel and engaging with more costly channels as their most
effective ones cap out. In the end, potential customersare coming in
with less pain and less motivation to change, making the sale harder
as well.
So the name of the game for our lead engine is smart
scaling—expanding reach and results withoutexploding our average
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customeracquisition costs. Let’s cover what that looks like for each
of our respective engine components.
Scaling lead generation

Generating leads typically scale in four ways:
• Budget expansion. This is the most obvious one, but there’s a
natural point of diminishing returns. As most people who have
played with paid advertising know, the first $1,000 you spend
are way more effective than your last. But this doesn’t mean
you can’t scale with the simple act of adding budgets to existing
channels.
• Channel expansion. Emptied the profitable parts of Google
search? Time to master LinkedIn or Facebook, or events,
outreach campaigns, etc.
• Geographical expansion. Obviously, this depends on your
company, product, and language barriers. Consider also the
digital savviness of each market—for example, it might be easier
to scale from Germany to Australia than to Italy if you’re
heavily reliant on digital channels.
• Target audience expansion. Maybe you are used to only
targeting IT directors, but if you add IT managers, your
audience explodes, and you might have to work harder on the
sales side. But you can also expand horizontally into other parts
of the buying group. If you’re selling HR software, you can go
from IT to HR leaders and onwards to generic line managers.
Which ones you should go for depends on your unique situation—is
it viable to add more channels and still do them properly? It might
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be easier just to add another geography, especially if it has the same

language and characteristics, but in some cases adding countries is an
enormous task, depending on the complexity of your sales process.
Scaling lead qualification

If you’re expanding incoming leads, you need first and foremost to
look hard at your qualification setup. Is it built for growth? There
are three ways to attack the expansion of your qualification:
• People expansion. Simply, have more leads? Get more SDRs,
MDRs, telemarketers, or whatever their internal designation is.
Keep processes constant, but add volume.
• Automation expansion. If you’re going from 500 monthly leads
to 1,000 but you’re forced to stick with the same people
on the phones, it’s time to get serious about automation or
lead scoring. Analyze the past thousands of leads and determine
which ones convert and which don’t. Now you have a guiding
star for lead scoring or automating low-potential leads in a
non-human way.
• Process expansion (or elimination). The non-obvious way to
scale your qualification setup is looking hard at your process.
Scaling conversion to sales

Scaling your sales component is often thought of as simply adding
more account managers, executives, or reps. While this is often part
of the solution, I would advise thinking about a couple of other
avenuesof scaling:
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• Scaling to different ways of buying. Can parts of your

customer base self-serve? Maybe smaller companies don’t need
the same degree of onboarding, or maybe they can transact
digitally instead, or perhaps they can be moved to an automated
onboarding flow. You might lose a few potential customers, but
you can spend seller time on the potential customers that
matter.
• Adjust your sales process. If there’s one thing COVID has
taught us in sales, it’s that we could do our sales job without
many of the traditionally time-consuming face-to-face customer
visits. Things shifted to require more but shorter customer
interactions, saving all of us untold hours of travel time.
This should inspire us to think about our sales process—can we do
in one meeting what we used to do in two? Is a meeting always
required? One software company moved from hand-held demos to
customer-owned demos and found that most of their potential
customerswere actually capable of demoing the tools on their own,
using their own data and proceeding at their own time, withoutthe
need of an account rep. The seller was then able to spend their time
taking them to the next step instead of running them through basic
onboarding.
The key takeaway on scaling the sales motion is to stop and pause
before hiring more sellers. Remember that while it sounds simple on
paper, getting new reps onboarded, productive, and part of the team
is often a months-long process, not to mention the costs associated
with hiring, training, and paying the rep over time. Take a critical
look at how customersbuy and the sales process you support them
with before defaulting to adding more heads.
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Scaling goals and analysis

Your measurement setup also needs to scale. That manual Excel
sheet you’ve been maintaining with budgets, reporting, and meeting
notes needs a serious upgrade. There’s one magical threshold when
the total amount of data and campaigns is greater than what a single
individual can review, and yet another one down the road once the
sheer volume of activities and campaigns makes it impossible to do
a simple walkthrough of whatever is live at any given point without
tools to help guide you in the right direction.
We covered a lot of the ways to scale your measurement in Chapter
6, including these for a brief recap:
• Consolidated reporting from several channels. Using tools like
BetterMetrics, SuperMetrics, or Funnel.io, one starting point is
to just get all relevant campaigns across platforms into a single
document to easily compare the basic things like cost per lead or
trends.
• Adopting multitouch attribution tools and methodologies.
Attribution is a real challenge for most B2B companies, and one
way to attack the problem is to combine channel data with
CRM data for a longer-term view across channels using tools
like DreamData or Biznode.
• Building business intelligence tools on top of CRM that allow
for an easy overview of key metrics over time and pointing
to areas for in-depth analysis. With platforms like Tableau,
PowerBI, or Qlik, this is becoming a standard fare in more
mature organizations trying to collect and present data across
multiple categories.
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• Marketing mix modeling. Recognize that the outcome of the

lead engine is not only down to your own direct inputs but a
host of other marketing initiatives and the market development
as a whole.
Closing thoughts
If you’re in the mindset of climbing Mount Everest, there are several

significant stops on the way up the mountain. The biggest is base
camp, a campsite used both as a destination for trekkers and the
starting point for climbers going for the top, who use the site for
acclimatization to survive the extreme altitudes and oxygen-deprived
air. It sits at 5,350 meters above sea-level. This is a respectable
altitude, of course, but it’s quite far from the 8,849-meter peak of
Mount Everest.
My own mental imagine is that B2B sales and marketing are nearing
base camp. We’re looking up at the peak of Mount Everest. We have
gotten to base camp because we have strong individual skills—solid
backing in real-world experiences and education, supported by
theory built over the last century. We have a growing arsenal of tools
and technology and a slowly growing understanding of how to use
them.
But there’s still a long, long way to the top. And we’re not getting
there as a group of individual climbers—we’re getting there as a
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unified revenue team. In my mental image, a strong lead engine is one

of the enablers of getting to the peak of your own commercial Mount
Everest. It’s an essential part of a growing commercial function, and
it requires both strong individual sellers and marketers as well as trust
between the parties, a process everyone gets behind, and a common
language to speak together.
I hope this book has helped guide you and your company
some additional meters up your own mountain, wherever you find
yourself on it. And I hope we collectively push our sales and
marketing industrytogether, onwards and upwards.
Thank you for reading. I appreciate any and all feedback. Best of luck
with your lead engine.
About the author
Brian Andersen is an expert in all things B2B sales, marketing &

digital and a trusted advisor for international clients. He is a partner at
Kvadrant Consulting, a management consultancy focused on B2B Sales &
Marketing. Prior to joining Kvadrant, Brian spent 7 years as marketing &
digital leader in Jabra, where he also lead the digital transformation efforts
during a period where the company grew over 300%.
Before this, he workedas digital and marketing consultant and wrote

the book Digital Strategy, providing a frameworkand guide for practical
digital transformation.
Brian holds a master’s degree in Computer Science and Business

Administration from Copenhagen Business School.
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Index
ActiveCampaign 46 Case: eloomi 147

Adform 47 Case: Jabra 95
Adobe 46, 47 Case: NNIT 27
APSIS 128 Case: SAS Institute 171
Attribution modeling 183 Case: Stibo Systems 119
Automating sales engagement 105 Case: Templafy 33
Automation and AI 138 Case: United Fintech 155
Channels 74
B2B buying 29 Chili Piper 47, 82
BANT 109 Chorus 47
Basecamp.com 132 Clearbit 47
Behavioral data 113 ClickDimensions 27, 46
BetterMetrics 179 Cognism 68, 72
Bizible 47 Converting Leads 158
BombBomb 47 Cookies 188
Bombora 47 CRM 42
Bonjoro 47 CRM and business intelligence 176
Branson, Richard 103 CSO Insights 151
CTA checklist 68
Calendly 47 Customer journey mapping 14
Call to action (CTA) 65
Campaigns 35 Data set matching 113
Case: APSIS 128 Datorama 47
Deal acceleration 150, 157, 158 Google search advertising 75, 76
Deepdivr 47 GotoWebinar 47
Demio 47 Grundfos 160
DialPad 71
Different sellers 154 Hagensen, Glen 34, 91
DiscoverOrg 150 Hidden decision makers 144, 145
Dixa 58, 99 HubSpot 31, 46, 92
DocSend 47
DocuSign 47 IBM 109
Doodle 47 Inaction 151
DreamData 47 Insourcing 41
Drift 47 Integromat 47
Drupal 46 Intent and behavior data 75
Intent data 86
Econometrics 186 Intercom 47
Eloomi 40, 147
Email-based cold prospecting 82 Jabra 72, 80, 95, 97, 98, 100, 162
Email cold prospecting 75 Jensen, Morten Friberg 96
Engines 35 Jiminny 47
EyeEm 68
Lead distribution 161
Facebook 75, 79, 109 Lead Engine 24
Falcon 47 Lead engine business case 51
Figma 68 Lead engine framework 24
Five9 71 Lead engine jobs 44
From ad/landing page to lead 179 Lead engine tech stack 45
From lead to qualified lead 180 Lead-entered data 113
From opportunity to closed deal 182 Lead generation 11
From qualified lead to opportunity 181 Lead generation channels 93
Funnel 100 Lead Generation Model 102
Funnel.io 47, 178 Lead routing 132
Lead Routing Approaches 134
Gartner 72, 98 Lead scoring 113
Gartner CMO Spend Survey 167 LeadSift 47
Goal-setting 168 Lead volume and quality 101
Gong 47 LinkedIn 75, 78, 84, 103, 150
Gong.io 83, 98 List buying 75, 85
Google 109 Lotame 47
Lunøe, Jakob 129 Principle #3: Zoom in 18
Privacy 188
Manual 113
Marketing funnels 121 Qlik 47
Marketing mix modeling 186 Qualification processes 135
Messaging 70 Qualification rates 122
Metrics 167, 174 Qualified lead 109
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 27 Qualifying soft leads 130
Millers, Nikolaj Slotmann 172 Quality and quantity 99
Minimum Viable Product 194
MS Dynamics 46 Redpoint 47
MVP Model 195 Referrals and affiliates 75
RingDNA 47
Navigator 47 Ron Swanson 16
NNIT 27 Rouchmann, Casper Emil Sciuto 50,
156
Obel, Andreas 73, 148
Olivarius, Jens 120 Sales 47
On24 47 SalesForce 46, 47, 109
Optimove 47 SalesLoft 46, 47, 105
Oracle, 47 Sales team 153
Organic leads 75 SAS Institute 171
Organic SEO 91 Scaling 201
Organizing qualification 125 Scaling conversion to sales 203
Outreach 46, 75, 105 Scaling goals and analysis 205
Outsourcing 41 Scaling lead generation 202
Outsourcing potential 44 Scaling lead qualification 203
School of Campaigns 35
PandaDoc 47 Scoring 113
Percent 45 Segment 47
Personal outreach 83 SEO and content marketing 75
Petersen, Lars B. 28 Sitecore 46
Physical events 75, 87 Siteimprove 47
Pipedrive 46 Sleeknote 46
PowerBI 47 Social selling to scale 103
Preparation 88 Software in relation to maturity 48
Principle #1: Lead generation 11 Speed 124
Principle #2: People and process 15 Stibo Systems 119
Strategic drivers 25 Zoho 46
Sumo 46 Zoom 47
SuperMetrics 47, 179 ZoomInfo 47, 82, 150
Surveys 75
Tableau 47
Target audience 57
Tealium 47
Technology stack 46
Templafy 33, 91
Testing 72
The Bid Manager 154
The bionic seller 163, 164
The buying center 61
The Consultative Seller 154
The empathy gap 13
The How 97
The Hunter 154
The Product Specialist 154
The Responder 154
The right skills 38
The What 70
The Where 74
The Who 57
The Why 65
Turtl 47
Umbraco 46
United Fintech 50, 155
Vidyard 47
Virtual events 75, 90
Wordpress 46
Wufoo 46
Zapier 47
Zendesk 71

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The Sales & Marketing Lead Engine – Going

Beyond Ads and Tactics to Create a True Commercial Growth Machine

Author: Brian Egholm Andersen

Isbn print: 9788771921267

1: The Three Key Principles 10

2: Strategy & Organisation 21

4: Qualifying Leads 108

5: From Opportunity to Sales 142

6: Goals, Analysis, and KPIs 167

7: Where Do You Go from Here? 191

Closing thoughts 207

About the author 209

programs get endlessly mired in disagreements between the sales and

Brian Egholm Andersen

The Three Key Principles

This is a fairly comprehensive and hands-on guide with lots of tables,

1. Lead generation is a sales and marketing exercise. The inherent

Principle #1: Lead generation is a sales

This simple model with two overlapping areas of responsibility is the

So why do we get it wrong so often?

• Many marketing departments are not clear enough on

Closing the empathy gap

Must think longer term Is heavily incentivized to focus on the

Many different stakeholders, mostly Must focus on fewer stakeholders, mostly

Days of concentrating and collaborating Days of communicating and collaborating

Marketing should not be sales. And sales should not be marketing.

process in CRM? Get marketing input on how to track back to

Principle #2: People and process always

To be clear, technology plays a significant part of any lead generation

We had a very tight process, simple but powerful LinkedIn targeting,

Principle #3: Zoom in. All the way in.

the individual interactions. Are they as fast as you specified? As

Strategy & Organisation

First of all, let’s be clear: Building a lead engine or working with

Your business context Impact on lead generation Consider this:

Top-heavy business—most Likely only very few Either focus on

Broad set of Your market and list With a mixed bag

The lead engine framework

The Lead Engine

It’s a top-down waterfall for a reason; not a lot of companies

The strategic drivers for investing in a

objective, be easy to explain and have direct consequences for your

Mature organization and Lower cost of sales; Focus on bottom-line

Scaling organization with Grow revenue and Focus on top-line impact

Headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, NNIT is an international IT

NNIT targets some of the biggest public and private

Its tech stack is simple and straightforward: Microsoft Dynamics CRM

“Marketing at NNIT is really a

Key takeaways for your lead engine from NNIT:

• It is absolutely possible to drive leads and pipeline in a top-heavy

• Lead engines in knowledge-heavy industries requires a different

The new realities of B2B buying

business decision maker, typically a senior executive cutting deals

Templafy is an international B2B software company that offers a

The company is truly born digital, and its approachto demand

The Templafy lead engine operates in a mix between Hubspot as

“The key reasons behind our successful lead

Key takeaways for your lead engine from

• Get the always-on-track lead generation right, and keep focusing on

• Qualifying and working on inbound leads is not a part-time job.

• If it doesn’t scale, you’re about to fail. In the high growth space

Build engines that always run instead of

also tickle a creative brainstorm interest that is common among