Latest / Sales Pipeline Radio / Lead Management Directly Leads to Revenue Impact for Palo Alto Networks
Transcript
- 0:15Matt Heinz: All right.
- 0:15Welcome back to the, uh, marketplace floor here at B2B summit from Forrester.
- 0:20Very excited to be doing a series of Sales Pipeline Radio interviews and episodes
- 0:25from a series of Forrester analysts, attendees go to market leaders, and
- 0:30with us here from Palo Alto Networks.
- 0:31Very excited to have Lauren Daley and Jeremy Schwartz, the Director of
- 0:35marketing operations and senior manager of Global Lead Management and Strategy.
- 0:39Respectively.
- 0:40Thank you guys for being here.
- 0:41Jeremy Schwartz: Thanks for having us.
- 0:41Lauren Daley: Thank you.
- 0:42Matt Heinz: Yeah, this is exciting.
- 0:43This is exciting for us to do this formally here on the floor.
- 0:45Excited to integrate with different people and just get a lot of
- 0:47conversations, especially for those of you that are award winners here.
- 0:50So congratulations on your B2B ROI award.
- 0:54Super excited to see your team present that tomorrow and
- 0:57talk about what they're doing.
- 0:59Talk a little bit about the programs that got you on stage tomorrow.
- 1:02What are the things that you're working on, you're so excited about?
- 1:05Lauren Daley: We have been on an 18 month journey to shift from an MQL
- 1:11focused funnel to buying groups and thinking about how we collect all
- 1:16the buying group signals together.
- 1:17Package them up, and send them over to sales.
- 1:21Jeremy Schwartz: Yeah, absolutely.
- 1:22I think that you know, this transformation, I call it a
- 1:25seismic shift in marketing.
- 1:26I'm gonna date myself and say that I was around when pixel tracking was
- 1:29invented and I thought that was awesome.
- 1:31And then ABM was invented, and that was an awesome way to track accounts.
- 1:35But now when we think about the buying group and being able to focus on
- 1:38buying centers within large accounts, that's really transformational.
- 1:41Matt Heinz: Yeah.
- 1:42The game key's changing, right?
- 1:43I mean, what worked before doesn't work today, or I guess maybe what we
- 1:47thought worked before doesn't work today, where we sort of like you
- 1:49got an individual that we're single threading at a large deal and just
- 1:53hoping that that white paper download.
- 1:55Is actually gonna turn into something.
- 1:56We're not really working in that kind of a world anymore.
- 1:58How have you guys adjusted to the new roles of the game and what are
- 2:01some things that you can point to that have helped you be successful?
- 2:04Jeremy Schwartz: Yeah, I mean, we think about it this way.
- 2:07Marketers are hyper-focused on MQLs and what is an MQL?
- 2:10It's a guy who filled out a form, maybe two forms, and that person is usually.
- 2:15The lowest man on the totem pole, he's usually the researcher.
- 2:17His boss got a job from his boss who said, do this research.
- 2:21And the guy goes out and does it, and that guy becomes an MQL and
- 2:24we send that guy to sales and we think that's gonna make a deal.
- 2:27But that person usually does not have BANT.
- 2:29That person is the researcher.
- 2:31So if we start to think about that, maybe he shared an ebook or a solution
- 2:35brief or a white paper with his boss and his boss downloaded that.
- 2:38Well, he's not gonna score up to MQL and in an MQL centric world,
- 2:42you're ignoring that person in a buying group centric world, you
- 2:45can think about that as a signal.
- 2:48Should we send that person to sales?
- 2:49Now, should we surround them with marketing tactics?
- 2:52But if we start to think that way, and we think beyond the MQL, because no single
- 2:56person buys Palo Alto software, right?
- 3:00Matt Heinz: Yeah, and I think that the buying committee and the buying
- 3:02group, I thought they did a great job in the keynote earlier today.
- 3:04Not just talking about that internal group, but talking
- 3:07about the ecosystem that exists.
- 3:08'cause there's the people inside the company that care about that,
- 3:11that might benefit directly.
- 3:12But then there's the whole ecosystem of analysts, of influencers and other people
- 3:17that indirectly are going to influence whether that deal gets done or not.
- 3:20Lauren Daley: Yeah, so we've been talking a lot about known and unknown
- 3:24visitors and making sure that we're surrounding everybody and taking those
- 3:30unknown visitors and identifying the accounts that are in market and how
- 3:35do you convert those unknown visitors into known visitors, and that's.
- 3:39Yeah, a shift, a mindset shift that is happening within our marketing org today
- 3:45because many of our campaign managers are hyper-focused on known visitors.
- 3:50Did they fill out my form and did I get credit for that form fill in MQL?
- 3:54Jeremy Schwartz: Yeah I'll expand on that.
- 3:55When you think about a typical MQL, and let's use the most valuable
- 3:58MQL someone request a demo.
- 4:00So wow.
- 4:00A demo that's gonna auto MQL every time and it's gonna go to sales and the
- 4:04seller's like, wow, that's terrific.
- 4:05But if you look at that person and you say, well, he's a networking admin
- 4:09and there's no other people from that account that are interacting with us,
- 4:12and there's no signal on our website, what does that demo request mean?
- 4:16Versus that same person where you might see three or four people.
- 4:20Returning visitors to the website, unknowns never submit a form
- 4:23looking at the same product line.
- 4:24You see these people engaging with us or people who might
- 4:28fill out a form and not MQL.
- 4:29If you start to look at that full signal, that guy who's looking at
- 4:33the demo becomes much more valuable because you see a buying group forming.
- 4:37So being able to discern that is the first and foremost.
- 4:40But knowing that.
- 4:41It's not critical to convert those unknowns.
- 4:43It's critical to focus on those unknowns.
- 4:46It's critical that we are able to be in front of them.
- 4:50Someone who sees our ad. Is great 'cause they're getting a brand touch.
- 4:55Someone who clicks on the ad even better.
- 4:57'cause that increases our signal.
- 4:58And I almost call that compounding interest on our marketing signals.
- 5:02And then finally, if someone submits a form, that's really fantastic.
- 5:04But every one of those pieces is important.
- 5:07The guy who sees our ad but doesn't click on it could be a decision maker.
- 5:10And that brand touch could be what makes him move over the top.
- 5:14Matt Heinz: And some of those
- 5:15signals are false signals, right?
- 5:17Someone could attend your last three webinars, not because they're
- 5:19qualified, but because they're bored.
- 5:21Right, or someone could be interested in a topic for themselves, but
- 5:25not be representative of the priorities of the organization.
- 5:28Whether it's not a priority or there's not budget there, how do you separate
- 5:32at an individual level as well as at the group level, the signals
- 5:36that matter in a collective way?
- 5:40Lauren Daley: Great question.
- 5:41And that's where we started to think about a buying group score.
- 5:45And we've used Forrester, Gartner as, you know, a,
- 5:49Jeremy Schwartz: sounding board
- 5:50Lauren Daley: Yeah.
- 5:50Or a structure to think about different cohorts.
- 5:53Almost like the magic quadrant and looking at the intent as well
- 5:59as the completeness to start separating out the groups of people and see if
- 6:05somebody has very low intent and low completeness of that buying group.
- 6:09Let's just let brand take care of them.
- 6:11There's not a lot of point in spending marketing dollars there.
- 6:14Whereas if we see a buying group forming and there's high intent, low engagement,
- 6:18that's where our teams can go in and try to drive up that engagement.
- 6:21If we see that the completeness is there, that's where we can
- 6:24pass that off to field marketing.
- 6:26So we're starting to think about buying group scores and really look at intent,
- 6:31completeness, propensity to convert into an opportunity and what's the engagement?
- 6:36Engagement.
- 6:37Yeah.
- 6:37Yeah.
- 6:37Jeremy Schwartz: And, and the difference, this is the other
- 6:39problem with the MQL world.
- 6:41The MQL world is focused on a scoring model that is passive.
- 6:47Someone has to do something.
- 6:48I come in, I download a white paper, I get 20 points.
- 6:51If I don't do anything else I never move forward.
- 6:54Our new scoring model is using signal that's active all the
- 6:57time, and so by looking at.
- 7:00Fit.
- 7:00Looking at intent, looking at engagement, and looking at completeness and combining
- 7:05those in these different cohorts that Lauren mentioned, we're able to activate
- 7:08accounts and then the people within those accounts, and it's always on the move.
- 7:13Every day we're looking at these accounts and moving people into
- 7:16different programs based on the signal, and so I come back to that.
- 7:20Idea of compounding interest on the signal.
- 7:22If we are putting ads in front of accounts that are showing signal and people are
- 7:26engaging with 'em, that signal go up.
- 7:28Mm-hmm.
- 7:28And so it's, again, it's this rinse and repeat cycle.
- 7:31And if we focus on that entire buying group and we look at
- 7:34people who are engaging and don't necessarily wait for them to score
- 7:38up, we're getting ahead of them.
- 7:40We're giving people to the sellers.
- 7:42We're putting people into marketing campaigns where it makes sense.
- 7:45We're not trying to surround everybody.
- 7:47We're surrounding those folks and those accounts that are
- 7:50showing that high signal.
- 7:52Matt Heinz: We are here live at the Forrester B2B Summit Marketplace
- 7:56with Lauren Daley and Jeremy Schwartz from Palo Alto Networks, winners
- 7:59of the B2B ROI award for 2025.
- 8:02Lauren, you mentioned a word that gives heart palpitations to
- 8:05marketers everywhere, and that is credit, so we're talking about.
- 8:09Not just single motion programs, right?
- 8:12This isn't an email campaign that generated Pipeline.
- 8:14This isn't a event activation that generates Pipeline to do this well.
- 8:18You have a lot of different people involved.
- 8:20Assigning credit becomes, I think, a kind of an impossible task.
- 8:24You've got this body of work and it's a team effort to do all of this, but
- 8:27how do you figure out, like, how do you think about attribution at Palo Alto?
- 8:34Lauren Daley: So we're thinking about it from multi-touch perspective.
- 8:38And we're really looking at where are we influencing ahead of opportunity
- 8:43creation and then after, and that's what we call bookings influence.
- 8:47And that's where the buying group is super important to the bookings influence.
- 8:50'cause that's where when we can build out the buying group, we notice
- 8:53that they move into our forecasted Pipeline at a much higher rate.
- 8:57But also extending that buying group on those opportunities is
- 9:01where we're seeing the deal size grow, the win rates increase.
- 9:04And so that's the bookings influence and that's the Jeremy and I
- 9:08talk about this all the time.
- 9:09Our team used to do a lot of fuzzy matching for attribution.
- 9:13And this is direct attribution.
- 9:16Yeah.
- 9:16That sales understands and you can explain it in 30 seconds to a
- 9:19sales rep and they're gonna get it.
- 9:21Jeremy Schwartz: And it's not only the attribution and believe it.
- 9:23Yes.
- 9:23And that's true.
- 9:24So sellers hate fuzzy match.
- 9:26They don't believe it.
- 9:28Hey, we did some marketing activity and that meant something to the
- 9:30deal, even if it never got to it.
- 9:32When we do this.
- 9:33Expansion of buying groups, not only does it create direct influence where
- 9:37we can say this person was added to this opportunity, but it provides more
- 9:40importantly, the context to a seller.
- 9:43When we can tell a seller that an important persona took an action and
- 9:47we weren't waiting for them to MQL, that there's an open opportunity and we
- 9:51see that a VP of cloud infrastructure downloaded a total cost of ownership
- 9:55ebook, and we can send that to a seller and attach it to his opportunity.
- 10:00They love it.
- 10:01I had an anecdotal statement that I tell all the time, A BDR attached of
- 10:06this story, the VP to an opportunity.
- 10:08The seller said, thank you.
- 10:10I know that guy.
- 10:10I have a meeting with him next week.
- 10:12Now I know what to talk to him about.
- 10:14And his opportunity's been stalled for three months.
- 10:16Yeah.
- 10:16And guess what?
- 10:17That opportunity moved forward.
- 10:18'cause he had the context,
- 10:19Matt Heinz: I love the word influence.
- 10:21You have the bookings influence, not full credit, not like this is what's
- 10:24gonna get all credit for the deal.
- 10:26But to know that this is a team sport.
- 10:28And some of that is around how you treat the data, some of that around the language
- 10:32you use around different campaigns.
- 10:33Some of that is just culture, right?
- 10:35Like what are some of the key elements of having a culture that can embrace the fact
- 10:40that this might be a little messy, but if we can treat it and manage some of the
- 10:44messy, but also know that it's gonna be a body of work, we're gonna be much better
- 10:48at creating Pipeline in a complex market.
- 10:50Yeah.
- 10:51Lauren Daley: Yeah.
- 10:52And at our company sales already gets this concept, they're already doing it.
- 10:58Right?
- 10:58All of our sales reps sell to a buying group.
- 11:02It's just the nature of our business.
- 11:04And so it's really been about getting marketers to shift their mindset.
- 11:08And a lot of it comes back to how you target them.
- 11:11And honestly, we do still have MQL targets, and Jeremy and I have been
- 11:15campaigning for that to move away from MQL targets into more of the
- 11:21opportunity creation with a buying group and getting marketers to think about
- 11:25those outcomes from their campaigns.
- 11:27And Jeremy, do you wanna expand on your campaign to opportunity conversion?
- 11:32Jeremy Schwartz: Yeah, absolutely.
- 11:32I've been talking to marketers about changing the way they think.
- 11:36And you know, when we think about marketers today, it's, I generate
- 11:39MQLs and I get opportunities.
- 11:40So MQL to opp is usually the most important metric that marketers focus on.
- 11:44But if you really think about that, well, if I generate a thousand interactions
- 11:47and they converted a generous 10%, that's a hundred MQLs and a generous 10% to
- 11:52opportunity that's 10 opportunities.
- 11:55But what about the other 900 people?
- 11:57So maybe some of those people actually belong in those 10 opportunities We've
- 12:02seen when buying groups are present, that deal sizes increase by 2, 3, 4 times.
- 12:07So take some of those people and put 'em in the existing opps.
- 12:09Maybe there's a bunch of people.
- 12:11Who, none of them, MQL, but there's a buying group in there.
- 12:14We can pull those over.
- 12:15So instead of operating on a hundred people and getting 10 opportunities,
- 12:18you cannot be operating on 2, 3, 400 of those people on the accounts
- 12:23and generating 15 or 20 opps.
- 12:25And those are bigger opps.
- 12:27So by focusing on campaign to opportunity instead of MQL to opportunity,
- 12:31you're able to start having marketers think about it in a different way.
- 12:35I'm almost having to disguise some of these conversations because
- 12:39you don't wanna scare marketers.
- 12:40Yeah.
- 12:40I actually, when I said I was doing a presentation and I said,
- 12:43well start to think beyond the MQL and the person I was doing the
- 12:46presentation with said, don't say that.
- 12:48That'll scare the team.
- 12:49So I said, okay, we won't say that.
- 12:51We'll say.
- 12:52How do you make more things happen with your interactions?
- 12:55Well, if you focus on buying group signals, you'll drive more MQLs.
- 12:58And they were like, okay, I like that idea.
- 13:00So we're actually like almost disguising it in a way.
- 13:03It's silly, but that's how you change the culture because if you try to
- 13:06move it too fast, people get scared.
- 13:08Yeah.
- 13:08That's something we have seen.
- 13:09Matt Heinz: Yeah, that's really great.
- 13:10The status quo is powerful.
- 13:12The status quo is powerful when you're trying to sell your status quo is powerful
- 13:16when you're trying to change inside.
- 13:17And I think MQL is such an, I mean, we're literally sitting at the conference.
- 13:21That years ago when it was SiriusDecisions Summit, they invented that acronym.
- 13:25I mean, I'm old enough.
- 13:26I remember when the waterfall covers came out and the idea of an SQL and
- 13:29an MQL was, it was transformative.
- 13:31And here we are sometimes saying, well, it's a vanity metric.
- 13:33Well, only if you let it.
- 13:35Yes.
- 13:35Like I don't think the MQL's the be all, end all of what marketing
- 13:37does, but I think it has value in the context of like finding the right
- 13:41person at the right company that might be leaning in a little bit.
- 13:45That doesn't mean they're sales ready, it doesn't mean they're
- 13:46gonna close next quarter.
- 13:48But I think if you have the right definition and put that
- 13:50in context, it's still useful.
- 13:51But again, we're getting back to everyone on the same page.
- 13:54With that definition, everyone able to think about that together.
- 13:58Just a few more minutes with our team here at Palo Alto, I wanna ask the question
- 14:02around the data behind all of this, and I believe fundamentally, that data
- 14:06is becoming one of the most important things for B2B marketers to manage.
- 14:09How do you attempt to corral the data across all the different
- 14:15platforms, across all the different functions to tell and activate on a
- 14:19complete picture of your customers?
- 14:22Lauren Daley: Well we have a great tech stack at Palo Alto Networks, so we use
- 14:26Demandbase, TechTarget what others?
- 14:31Jeremy G2, G2.
- 14:32Jeremy Schwartz: Our own website.
- 14:33Yeah.
- 14:33So we use first, second, third party signal.
- 14:35Sure.
- 14:35And that really helps us to hone in on what's happening.
- 14:39Around an account, not just in one area, you know we use Demandbase.
- 14:44Doesn't matter what your platform is, your intent platform that shows
- 14:46you that third party intent signal.
- 14:48We use TechTarget, we use G2 for that second party, and then our own data
- 14:52and those unknown website visitors.
- 14:54It's critical data that helps us to understand the buying
- 14:56group, our new scoring model.
- 14:58Is really designed to capture all this.
- 15:00So we've worked to create this model so that we can look at an account and say,
- 15:05well, we have five primary product lines.
- 15:07What is the buying group score in this account for each of those?
- 15:11And through that, we use that for activation in different platforms.
- 15:15So we'll use that for activation in Marketo.
- 15:17We use that for activation in Demandbase.
- 15:18We'll use that for web personalization, for chat
- 15:20personalization media personalization.
- 15:23And it really goes far.
- 15:25In understanding where the people are in their journey.
- 15:28So activating the account and then activating the people based on
- 15:31where they are in their journey is really fundamentally important.
- 15:35I think one of the other things that we've done is we've created some really
- 15:37amazing dashboards and that's allowed us to measure the success and we really
- 15:42focus on a couple of areas there.
- 15:44One is we do a lot of comparison between opportunities with no buying
- 15:48group with one or less contacts.
- 15:50And you might be surprised, but there's a lot.
- 15:52Of opportunities that have zero contacts on them.
- 15:54Mm-hmm.
- 15:54And then we look at the ones that have two or more.
- 15:56And you know, we look at things like progression from omitted into Pipeline
- 16:00progression to future stage deal size, and closed won in almost every case in
- 16:06almost every segment for almost every product at all of those numbers are up.
- 16:09Yeah.
- 16:10So that, given.
- 16:12Yes.
- 16:12You know, when we start to show that to leadership, they get it.
- 16:15Yeah.
- 16:15And that's the data that we try to compile.
- 16:17Now our scoring model is pulling all these pieces of data together and, you
- 16:21know, gosh, I wish we had a CDP Lauren.
- 16:23We've been struggling for that, but you can do it without it.
- 16:25We've pieced it together in our cloud platform with a custom app
- 16:29and we bring that signal in and we come up with this cohort score.
- 16:32And I think that's been a real win for us because at first when we were thinking
- 16:35about these four individual signals.
- 16:38It was confusing and we really wanted to make it easy for marketers.
- 16:41Hey, I want to activate on people who have high signal and everything, or I wanna
- 16:45activate on people who have high intent.
- 16:48And doing that has allowed marketers to really start to understand how
- 16:51to move people down funnel to really focus on full funnel marketing.
- 16:55If you drive in thousands of leads and content syndication, you can't
- 16:58possibly retarget them, right?
- 16:59But if you look at the accounts that are represented there and you say,
- 17:02well, 20% of them or 10% of them are in market, I'm using generous numbers.
- 17:08And you surround those, you can afford that.
- 17:10You know, Lauren says it a lot.
- 17:11It's free.
- 17:12You don't need more money to do this.
- 17:13It's about optimizing your spend, especially in the
- 17:16middle and lower funnel areas.
- 17:19Matt Heinz: Last question, I think I want to let you guys go for you, Lauren,
- 17:23big achievement of all the different programs to be on stage tomorrow.
- 17:26So congratulations on that.
- 17:27But I'm curious, as you think about the next 12 plus months, what are the things
- 17:32that are gonna help you keep that edge?
- 17:34What are the things you think are gonna be the short term, near term challenges
- 17:38to continue to deliver this kind of revenue value for the organization?
- 17:42Lauren Daley: For our company it's getting marketers to
- 17:45understand how to now activate.
- 17:48So I think Jeremy and I have done a great job of.
- 17:52Helping them understand that this shift is important and they should care.
- 17:56And now they're asking us, okay, well how do I do this?
- 17:58How do I incorporate all this data, these buyer signals into my targeting efforts?
- 18:03How do I, as Jeremy said progress them down our funnel into Pipeline.
- 18:09And so that's a big area that Jeremy and I are going to be
- 18:12focused on in the next 12 months.
- 18:14And then we were also talking earlier about.
- 18:17The vendor landscape and how Jeremy and I really had to piece this
- 18:21together with our tech stack.
- 18:23And we luckily have some really talented technical people on our team that we've
- 18:29partnered with to make this happen.
- 18:31But I'm excited to.
- 18:32See more vendor partnerships coming to fruition.
- 18:36So I know like Demandbase and Lean Data have a partnership and I feel that's
- 18:41gonna really help propel this forward and allow us to activate more effectively.
- 18:47Yeah,
- 18:47Jeremy Schwartz: absolutely.
- 18:48The other thing is some new metrics that we focus on, and I've already
- 18:51talked about campaign to opp.
- 18:52The other two metrics that we really are working on from a marketing perspective
- 18:56is we're teaching marketers to focus on targeting the complete buying group.
- 19:00Instead of just individual personas, we want the majority of representation
- 19:05of the personas we need for a particular product or solution.
- 19:08The other one is buying group coverage.
- 19:10If we look at our total opportunity universe, only about in the last quarter,
- 19:15only about 12% of our opportunities were.
- 19:17With buying groups.
- 19:19So we are setting goals of increasing that coverage.
- 19:21We want to go to 15%, we wanna go to 20%.
- 19:24Remember all those metrics I talked about are up.
- 19:26Mm. So given that if we can increase the coverage, what happens to our bottom line?
- 19:30Mm-hmm.
- 19:30If we're generating a lot of what we call incremental Pipeline, we can do
- 19:35a lot better if we go increasing that coverage of opps with buying groups.
- 19:40So those three metrics together are really what we're focused on over
- 19:42the next 12 months and teaching marketers how to really focus on
- 19:45those metrics within their campaigns.
- 19:48Matt Heinz: Love it.
- 19:48Lauren Daley.
- 19:49Jeremy Schwartz, Palo Alto Networks.
- 19:51Congratulations again on the award.
- 19:53Thank you for being here.
- 19:54Lauren Daley: Thank you.
- 19:54Jeremy Schwartz: Thanks so much.