“Yes, the lead that came through is from a target account, but their title is too junior so we disqualified them”
THAT'S 👏 BECAUSE 👏 LEADERSHIP 👏 HAS 👏 THEIR 👏 TEAM 👏 DO 👏 THE 👏 RESEARCH 👏
Sorry, can you tell this topic gets me a little heated?? 😅
Sponsor: HockeyStack
Attribution. If you want to stir the hornet’s nest with the marketers + GTM leaders at your organization, just bring this topic up in your next meeting. Why is it so divisive? Because so many use it to assign credit to channels and departments + this leads to internal arguments over who should get credit for that 5-6 figure deal that contained hundreds of touchpoints along the way.
Enter: HockeyStack. Hockeystack is not just an attribution tool; it's specifically designed to show the holistic funnel instead of department-level analytics. It is fully customizable, and it's the only product that allows you to build literally any report you need without any code.
So when I told them I didn’t care about using attribution to assign credit to a channel, but that I wanted to understand how channels + departments interplay with one another in order to structure our GTM moving forward in a way that increases the likelihood of us being more successful and they said, “Yeah, we can do that,” you know that caught my eye.
📚 Story Time 📚
A client I worked with a few years ago had an inbound demo request come in from an absolutely *perfect* fit ICP prospect.
...but the job title associated with the submission was "Intern".
They initially disqualified it, but I challenged them to give that intern a call as I told them about how I’ve been in the position before of doing research for the decision-makers.
A few hours later I got a note back from the client…
"We had the discovery call with the intern. They’re working directly for the CEO and researching which solution they should purchase to solve the problem they're going through."
The next call was the demo, and guess who was on it - the CEO.
^^ 3-second depiction of the initial reaction AEs or peers (Nicolas Cage) give me when I tell them to take the call + my reaction (Pedro Pascal) when I say trust me
Here’s the deal
Unless you're targeting small companies (1-10 employees), an effective leader often delegates buying research to the members of their team who would benefit from the purchase.
So while the individual who signs your contracts may be the CEO/CFO/CMO/VP of Sales/etc., more often than not, they're only involved later in the process after their team has done their due diligence.
The decisionmaker is typically too far removed from the problem, so they defer to their team on the best tools/services/etc. that can help solve it, and then come back with a handful of recommendations.
Or, the decisionmaker knows they want to move forward with a tool/service, but understands that there’s a process involved and that they don’t need to be involved in the early stages of it, so they delegate to a team member to get that started.
Don't believe me?
Here are a handful of demo requests I pulled from a quick search looking at this year - and look at what the individuals say about how they heard about us:
Morgan J Ingram also hit on this exact topic in a post on LinkedIn this past week about seeing sellers ignoring junior employees when trying to reach execs:
Takeaways
🙅♂️ Don't automatically disqualify an inbound handraiser who fits your ICP, but their title is "too junior"
🧐 Know the job titles of the end-users of your product within the company and target them
💥 The decisionmaker is often too far removed from the pain - the employees who would benefit from your solution are the ones who will advocate up the chain for you
One book I’m really enjoying right now
I’m not big on business books. Most of them should honestly be 25 pages instead of 250. But Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish has had me underlining + leaving notes on just about every page I get through. It’s not a business book per se, but is more about the frameworks + mental models that help us in business and life in general. Here are a few of my favorite passages:
“The ‘zone of average’ is a dangerous place when it comes to inertia. It’s the point where things are working well enough that we don’t feel the need to make any changes. We hope things will magically improve. Of course, they rarely do.”
“If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results that everyone else gets. Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition, they’re average.”
“Complaining does nothing to change the present situation you find yourself in, though. Thinking about how it wasn’t your fault doesn’t make anything better. The consequences are still yours to deal with.”
See you next Saturday,
Sam