Marketing Hit Every Number and Revenue Still Tanked

I agree that MQLs are BS. I don't know if I can curse on this podcast.

>> You can curse. Here, allow me. MQLs are [censored]. We'll start it off.

>> Yes. MQLs are [censored]. It's a BS term. A lot of our clients don't really understand MQLs, SQLs, and all those kind of SaaS language because they just don't get it.

>> I got 274 MQLs last month.

>> Okay.

So Stacy, in typical GTM Uncensored form, I'm going to drop you into a scenario and I want your take. Bigfoot Metrics just closed their quarter 20% under forecast despite marketing hitting every number on their dashboard. MQLs, my favorite term in the world, went up. Webinar attendance up. Content downloads up. All great. The CFO asks the only question that really matters: which of these turned into revenue? Unfortunately, no one has a straight answer. The CRO blames pipeline quality. The CMO points at the MQL chart. Every tool in the stack has this big green thing. We're doing amazing. You spent 17-ish years in rooms just like this watching marketing get blamed for a number that nobody actually owned. When the CFO asks and nobody has the real answer, whose fault is it and where do you go?

>> That's it for GTM Uncensored. Can't wait. I've never been in that scenario before. Love that. Awesome. Well, first I would say it's everybody's fault. That's what I would go with. I spent my whole ramp-up advisory career defending CMOs because I believe they're the red-headed stepchild that everyone blames everything for and I don't believe that's true. So where I would start with that is I also agree that MQLs are BS. I don't know if I could curse on this podcast.

>> You can curse. Here, allow me. MQLs are [censored]. We'll start it off.

>> Yes. MQLs are [censored]. It's a BS term. A lot of our clients don't really understand MQLs, SQLs, and all those kind of SaaS language because they just don't get it. We're all rising tides. The boat rises together. So I would say we're a big proponent on attribution modeling, and so what you didn't elaborate in that scenario was, great, MQLs are up, great, webinars are up, great, content is up, but what are all the channels that the CMO is doing? Those are three-ish. I'm sure they're doing ten, probably plus, depending on the size of the business. And we need to see which ones are doing well, which ones are not doing well. And when I say well, I want to know which ones are not only opening pipeline but which ones are actually bringing back revenue into the company. And that's when I believe CMOs can defend their position in the company and be considered a really valuable asset, which I believe they are. I just don't think everyone sees them as that.

>> I love that you said that they're valuable, but people don't see them as that. And I agree with you. I think when I look at the companies that I've worked for full time, the engagements that Dale and I have had, the CMOs are inherently valuable when they are, in my opinion, tied to a revenue number. When they very much believe that marketing's job is to drive revenue, and when they're not the CMO that's like—and I had this in one of our last engagements—but I got 274 MQLs last month.

>> Okay.

>> But I do think because of that and because of that historical pattern of MQL this and MQL that and not being assigned a number and not owning pipeline, they have become kind of this red-headed stepchild of, well, what does marketing actually do? And let me reword that. Not what does marketing do, but how do we quantify the result of what marketing does? And that's hard. So I agree with you spot on.

>> Yeah, so attribution modeling is the big thing that we go in and help CMOs with. And to be frank, attribution modeling is hard. It's not like an easy linear thing. It's going up, down, left, right, sideways, swirls, whatever. But what I find people don't do to defend the marketing budget—because the CMO needs to, in my opinion, be friends with the CFO. And I often think the CFO looks equal to the CRO but often looks down on the CMO. And all the marketing folks are coming in and saying, I need more money, I need a sponsorship, I need a tentpole event, we need to buy this tool, we need more content creators, etc. And what they're not telling is the story rooted in data and analytics. So our blog content is up, but we didn't close enough deals with our blog content because we can see our conversion metrics all the way through with our attribution modeling. However, if we doubled or tripled, in my opinion using AI, the content, maybe then that goose egg of zero—the blog content's up but it brought in no deals—that can go to we just brought in twenty deals. And then I would say to you, CRO, I just brought you twenty deals. What happened over there? Did you close any of them? And if you didn't, why? And we also have a theory called the conveyor belt methodology, which I find that CMOs give, like you said, the MQLs on the other side of the house, but no one ever gives them the feedback like, were they qualified? What actually happened to it? Why did the deal stall? And they're telling that to the CFO, they're telling that to the CRO, they're telling that to the board. But that is really interesting data that the CMO and the marketing team also needs because they need to write messaging, social, campaigns, content, newsletters, etc. back to potential customers to combat those objections in the sales funnel way down the line, much more early on. And so I believe marketing is a huge asset for companies, and that's why I'm going to hang my hat on helping CMOs because if all of this works in unison—and that's why I said it's an everyone problem—this is where I see in our work the revenue tenfold.

>> And attribution is really hard, and what you were just saying is really interesting because it's not even if you get feedback, it's actually unproductive feedback. It's just like, that MQL sucked. And it's like, okay, but what does that mean, right? And so I like your perspective on making sure that there's a tie-in. I actually think attribution—I don't think we're ever going to solve attribution because do you take your first touchpoint, your last touchpoint, your middle touchpoint? Like, even though the blog didn't necessarily convert leads into the funnel, someone may have read that blog post and then the salesperson called and then they went to an event and then they decided, oh, I want to have a conversation with a client. Like, who gets attribution on that, right? Because it started with the blog content, and you'll never figure out that they actually read the blog content because it's not like they're saying, I read this great blog content piece. And so I always say to people, well, great, if you don't think marketing is doing anything or contributing to revenue, let's just stop spending on it and see what happens because we know if we stop spending—

>> Dale.

>> If we stop spending on it, you will see like an inverse reaction happening because then you end up with a sales team that's trying to do awareness, brand, and selling. And we have clients that have very little on the marketing spend and there's so much downward pressure on the sales team, but like that will just take so much longer. So, enough of that piece. I totally agree. Attribution is super hard. I think it needs to be, are we hitting the number? Are we not hitting the number as a go-to-market team? And then we look at how do you adjust some of the variables? But if you're hitting your number, everyone should get credit on it. And if you're not hitting your number, everyone should not be getting credit and figure out what the problem is. So let's switch it up a little bit. I loved your perspective on it. Adam always has bad takes on the first question, but he'll make up for it later on in the session. Um, so you mentioned recently on a podcast: ask five people inside a company what brand that is and you'll get six different answers. In your framework, brand debt is not just a branding problem, it's a revenue problem. Where does this show up on the P&L?

>> The sunken revenue, I would say. We have clients where, let's call it the CRO or the president or a board member is out there saying one messaging, your sellers are often saying a totally different messaging, marketing's pushing out content and saying different messaging, and then your customer success team is out there telling them what you do or don't do and it's totally different. So where I think it shows up is the missed revenue. And in that example that Adam gave at the top of this conversation, I don't think it's just an MQL problem, a webinar problem, a content problem. I mean, I believe it all starts with messaging. And I think even in my own business, when I really started focusing on the marketing, on the messaging, on the go-to-market strategy, and really we say we help CMOs, but we do so much more than that. We do GTMs, we do revenue operations. People now have been coming back to me on LinkedIn, on Substack, on DMs and saying, oh, you help CMOs. I have someone I can connect you to. And so we didn't shift what we actually do.

do as a company from a deliverable standpoint, but we just really like niched. And I think that's the problem that brands have. They think they're something to everyone. And I think the more clear and concise you get with the messaging, it helps. And where does it show up? I think it shows up in the revenue lines.

Wait a minute. Clear and concise on the messaging. So you mean a value proposition shouldn't be a three and a half minute, seven paragraph dissertation on what my company does that ultimately says I do everything for everyone?

Correct. Because I was at a company, Daily Mail, that came from the UK to the US in my corporate career. And basically when we came to the US, we're like, we do everything to everyone. And all the clients were confused. And when we kind of hung our hat on this niche on pop culture, gossip, a little bit salacious, a little New York Posty, we started getting advertising from all of Proctor and Gamble.

Oh my god. That I see every day pop up like in my Apple News, like that Daily Mail, like the Daily Mail?

That Daily Mail. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was the third US start and I say it's the third start that stuck. And so we changed our messaging and we changed it. It wasn't the ICP that ever changed. It was who we were that changed.

Yeah. I love it. I love it. So Interbrand research. I think it was March of 2026 you said that Interbrand research on brand value is what gets the CFO's attention, not the CMO's attention. But if that's the number that moves the budget, why are teams still leading with MQLs?

Because they don't know what else to do.

How do we shift that though? Because I feel like I know we have and we're not listening. We know enough about marketing to be dangerous, but we're not CMOs by any stretch. And I feel like this change about shifting from MQL. I feel like this is a conversation that's been going on for years, which is why I get so frustrated every time we sit down and do an audit or talk to a CMO and they want to tell us how great their MQLs are. I'm like, are you living in 2005? Like I don't understand.

Yeah, so we work with what I would call legacy industries. So we work. I moved away from true SaaS because of what you and TL have been talking about. All they care about is MQLs, all they care about is SQLs. I'm not saying there's no importance, but to me those are top line vanity metrics and I think they're problematic because they're the ones that aren't moving the needle in the revenue and in order to do go to market strategy, we need marketing and sales to agree. And so if we're just going to talk all day about page views and clicks and opens and MQLs, I didn't actually do anything for you. I didn't actually help your business at all. So my clients actually don't necessarily believe in MQLs because I've debunked this philosophy with them. I'm more like, what channels for marketing are performing well? And I call it apples, oranges, and bananas because a sponsorship that's a TOFU top of funnel awareness play is different than a form fill book a demo on my website that's going to be more further down the funnel. And so my clients actually don't really talk about MQLs because I teach them that it's a problematic metric. And a lot of them say, well, we're one team. And that's because they have us ingrained in their head and saying let's stop this finger pointing. When I was in corporate it was very like church and state, sales and marketing totally separate, didn't talk to each other. You couldn't even go to that side of the office and speak to them. They had to email it to you. You had to email the answer back to them. It's just the wrong way of doing business and I think people love to hang their hat on metrics, but I believe those are complete vanity metrics and they don't move the needle at all because you're not what I call the iceberg method. You're only looking at the surface level metric. You're not actually looking at the 17 problems under the surface that is getting you to miss your revenue goal.

It needs to be clear across the entire go-to-market strategy and what we're all getting measured on, which at the end of the day should be revenue. Like, are we hitting our revenue numbers? Are we not hitting our revenue numbers? Yes, we need leads. They can come from a variety of places. Marketing, sales, partners, like they can come from anywhere, but we just need to make sure we're all on that same trajectory.

A lot of these marketers and sellers don't like each other. So when we first come into our engagements, they don't actually talk to each other. They're not friends. They look at each other as frenemies, the CMO and the CRO. So there is a lot of a fundamental problem. Like that is the problem.

Yes. That is the problem. And so when I start these engagements, the Zoom chat with the sales team and the Zoom chat with the marketing team, and my goal is what Dale said, to increase revenue for the company, but I need you all to sit at the table together. And one of the ways we start engagements is a shared vernacular of verbiage and acronyms because your definition of an MQL, marketing's definition and sales' definitions and the board's definition are totally different. And so you're actually reporting on three metrics for one term.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think we see that all the time. I think and that goes beyond just MQLs. I think even whether it's NRR or GRR or even as simple as what is a lead will vary super widely. I think it goes back to those foundations that you have to put in place of, you know, what are we talking about and is everyone speaking the same language? And that's becoming even more critically important as we're doing a lot of AI infrastructure and AI builds. You know, what the hell is an opportunity? Because I promise you, if I ask a client right now, if I ask their eight different sales reps what's an opportunity, I'm going to get 10 different answers and if I ask what a qualified opportunity is, I'll probably get 12 different answers.

And there's eight people.

And the CEO, the CRO, and the CFO will all have their own answers as well.

Correct. Exactly. And to me, that's the problem. That is like the fundamental problem beyond, oh, our MQLs are up. We actually don't share the same data dictionary and language and that is one of the things that sounds so rudimentary, but we put into new client engagements is like, we're going to sit here and we're going to define what this is and there's a little argument and we're going to go back and forth on it. But I create for them a data dictionary and I was like, this is what an opportunity is. This is what a qualified lead is and here's how you go find it in your system too because everyone knows, you guys know probably, the reports are pulled differently with different fields and we're using different metrics and we're actually confusing the board if you really think about it.

So let's go back a little bit of attribution and talk a little bit about something you mentioned again in a conversation that the industry keeps describing the same scene. Like the CMO says that the campaigns drove millions of pipeline, the CFO says the revenue hasn't moved, the CRO says half the deals are still open. Everyone's got a number and none of them match. Like we've talked about that. You're not going to fix this on a dashboard unless you get like a single dashboard that we can all agree on, which is probably an active god, probably not in your clients because I think you get a good place of like, this is how we're going to do it. But what's broken? The measurement or the relationship?

Both. Both is broken. I feel like the relationships between the executives are often broken. I think that's why we really get hired at the end of the day. A lot of our clients come to us and say, this is my famous one, is like, we've tried everything and we have no idea how to do it. And I think they've tried everything with the talent and the metrics that they know and understand. But as consultants and I am constantly educating myself on GTM because it's constantly changing, especially with the AI landscape. It's like, what does that actually mean? What is your measurement? What was your measurement for success? What are the definitions? How did you go about putting in SOPs? How did you actually tactically implement it? And when you break down and start asking what I call a lot of these why questions, they didn't actually really do it. They haphazardly half-assed it and they've probably spent some of my clients spent years haphazardly doing this. And I was like, well, maybe you should have hired us two years ago because I could have saved you a lot of sleepless nights, pain, grief, and you know, pills that you're popping because you have a migraine all the time from your job.

Pills popping, jeez. I mean, I could tell you some stories.

I've been in and talked to executives because the HR team has had me come in and say, we have noticed our employees are using more of their health insurance and their health is getting really bad. And we need you to come in and talk to them about how to sustain being a high achiever. And I come in and you know, do a whole other spiel about how to maintain being a high achiever and not burn yourself out.

I had an issue, I guess it was about five years ago.

# Transcript

Ago, so it was before Revenue Reimagined. And I thought I don't even know if I told you the story. I'll never forget, but when we're talking about health, I was sitting in an office at an offsite for a company that I worked for. Big glass office, right? And it happened to be the VP of marketing, funny enough, we'll say slightly slurring her speech. And she goes to get up and leave to use the restroom and walks right smack into the plate glass door. Not once, not twice, but three times prior to figuring out that there is a plate glass door. They opened up her beverage vessel and smelled it. And let's just say it was not water or coffee. She was drinking some type of brown liquor. And I half joke, and it's not funny because it's obviously a very serious problem, but it goes to the stress that people are under day to day building out these go-to-market functions.

It's interesting that someone brought you in looking at their health insurance data. I would question the legality of that, but far be it from me to question the self-insured. Probably not a thing you should be doing. But the stress is real. And when you look at what campaign's driving and whether revenue's moving and what attribution is and what the definitions are and all of these things, you have to have alignment or else you're going to continue to see what we are seeing now, which is companies that on LinkedIn are like, "We got acquired by this massive company and it's such a great exit and it's amazing and it's wonderful." And people don't realize how interconnected the space is. You find out that this massive acquisition is like peanuts and pennies and you walked away with less than I make in a year. Like, this is not a massive acquisition. It looks good on paper. You got acquired, but let's not kid ourselves here. This was your only exit path, your only off-ramp. They're buying you for some IP that you have and nothing else because you didn't have the basic foundations to have a repeatable and scalable company.

**Speaker 2:** Yep, we see that all the time with Outbound. Yeah, I agree.

**Speaker 1:** We see that a lot. Yeah, and it's craziness. Here's something I keep seeing with sales teams I work with. Generic sequences don't work anymore. We've all gotten so good at turning up the noise that even your own buyers are ignoring you. The problem isn't your reps. It's that your sequences are static and your signals are somewhere else entirely. That's why our clients use Nooks. And the thing that's stuck with me is that their sequences actually stay fresh because the signals update them automatically. Right buyer, right moment with no manual babysitting. If your outbound feels like it's shooting into a void, go check them out at nooks.ai/bridgethegap.

How do you coach a CMO to have this conversation with their CRO, or maybe it's reverse? Where does the conversation need to start? Does it start with the CMO saying, "Hey, you know, we're not going to measure on MQLs. I know this is wrong and this is what I believe we need to measure on from a revenue function," or does it truly lie with the CRO top down to be like, "All right, timeout, y'all. Like, this is what matters"?

**Speaker 2:** Yeah, I'm always going to say both, but we typically get brought in by the CMO these days just because we're focusing on the marketing ops piece of revenue operations. So we get brought in by the CMO and we did a deal with a client that's been in business for 22 years. They ended up selling to a Fortune 100 client. The CMO was like, "We had another what's called GTM consultant," and I'm being very nice with what I'm saying. The sales team doesn't talk to the marketing team. The CRO won't talk to me anymore. The president, who's also the CEO, hates me because I can't tell him any answers to the questions he emails me and barrages me with all the time. We've done it this way for four years and it's so bad that the teams aren't speaking to each other.

So my first layer of defense—and I see this all the time—is the CMO just unleashing. I call myself sometimes a business therapist. To me it's like, "I want to keep my job. These are real people. I have kids in high school. I have kids in college. I have a mortgage. I have real bills to pay. I want to keep my job and I love what I do, but no one is helping me here."

So it started with the CMO and creating an attribution model and explaining to the marketing team how this looks way beyond the MQLs and those BS metrics like page views, opens, clicks. And then from there, I went and spoke with the CRO and said, "Hey, we put in all these reports for marketing, but we need to know where it goes with the handoff. We need to know where the leads go, what are some of the SLAs, how are you picking this up? We'd like to implement this model—what I call true revenue operations all the way through to the sales ops side of the house. Would you let us do this?"

And eventually she said yes because she saw what we had built for marketing and she saw we had elevated the CMO in those board meetings and leadership meetings. She didn't come in floundering. She actually had good stuff to say with data and metrics and graphs that we can pull right out of their marketing automation system. And then we implemented all the way through to the CRO. So we had full funnel attribution with all the activities and how much revenue we're bringing in. And that's when this president CEO got interested and he got excited.

The challenge we had with that client is they only did first touch attribution and that's what they hung their whole business off of, and they were about to be sold. So that's where my challenge lied because there's external factors that I can't control. They ended up getting sold. We did the due diligence. That whole process lasted two plus years. They sold, the CEO was happy, he walked away with a great multiple, much higher than he would have. But we had to baby step it. That was a two year process and then the parent company took over and changed everything. But we did our job.

**Speaker 1:** I think that's a big conversation that no one has to have. Like, this takes time. And I'm sure you get into these conversations all the time where when they hire someone like us or you, they just think it's like the magic button. "Hey, you've been CRO and blah blah blah, or you've been the CMO and XYZ. Like, we should just get leads flowing in or we should just have revenue and pipeline all over the place." And they don't realize that this is an evolution. We built out a methodology to kind of explain that to them.

**Speaker 2:** Love that.

**Speaker 1:** What we hear from a lot of our clients at the end of an engagement is, "Wow, we didn't realize it was going to take that long to do XYZ." So we kind of say, "A lot of things that you're doing need to be stabilized before we build anything, and then we'll put it into a foundational element, and then you can get to a repeatable stage." But everyone wants repeatability, and they don't have the fundamentals, the foundation. Like, you don't have good content getting written for example in marketing. There's no strategy around your social media. Everything's going through the motions. But I want to switch it up a little bit and go into AI now. We haven't talked a lot about AI here.

There's a concept that AI didn't break marketing. It just stopped letting it hide. And you say something that we say all the time: AI is going to expose you. So if you have bad marketing, content, whatever it is, that's going to get amplified. But now we're flipping on the other side where buyers are doing a lot of AI research prior to filling out a form, for example. So if we put those two together, what's going to end up happening when you have buyers using AI to do research on companies and the sellers setting up AI to sit on the companies? Like, we know that buyers already have made the decision, but how can we get in front of this as a go-to-market team or organization to make sure you're progressing that sale?

**Speaker 2:** Yeah, so many things. I mean, AEO is the new SEO. So answer engine optimization versus search engine optimization. I feel like all websites and content needs to be optimized for AEO. And to be frank, it's evolving, so I don't think anyone has the answers, but there are tricks that you can do to get yourself in front of these LLMs and engines.

I do think there's a gap because it's exactly what you said. We are seeing for that client that sold, about a year before everyone was talking about this, they were coming up on ChatGPT and Gemini were recommending their company. And the reason I think it was recommending their company is because they were around for 22 years. In the beginning, all they did was search engine optimization to the point that their domain authority went up. They had hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of blogs. They had different websites coming back to them and doing a whole backlink strategy. So I think there's a whole game to that which takes time, takes money, and people don't realize.

The other thing I would say is there are two sides to AI. So it's like one, it's discoverability. How do you find your company? How do you get top of mind if I'm searching?

# Transcript

You know, RevOps? How does our name come to like the top of what that search is? But then I think the other side goes back to the foundations, and I have an episode that's about to drop about data lakes and structured and unstructured data, which gets you back to the foundations. If you are sitting on a pile of garbage data, and AI is going to amplify and expose garbage data. So if we don't go back to the foundations of infrastructure, SOPs, strategy, etc., I say AI can turbocharge a company, but if it's garbage, we're literally turbocharging a pile of poop at the end of the day. But if it's good data and we can structure it and put it in a data lake and make it usable to create triggers and automations and bots and agents—and like, whole other podcast conversation—that is where you can really increase revenue because you're increasing efficiency, operations, ease, etc.

So I think there's a lot of different sides to AI, but just from a marketing perspective, if you want to go out and write content or edit, that has been made so much easier. You don't necessarily need to hire a team. You can have tools, but if you don't have a strategy of which channels are working and which channels are worth your time and effort, you are literally what my mentors in sales used to tell me—like throwing spaghetti at the wall. It's like which string of spaghetti is going to stick.

So I think there's two sides to the AI conversation, probably more. There's internal efficiencies, data structures, and then there's how do you get discovered? And I think there is a huge gap between finding us on Copilot, Gemini, my friend Claudie in ChatGPT, and then going on my website and having just like an FAQ section. That's like a big thing that used to be popular, was popular, and now is popular again because answer engine optimization looks for FAQ sections. YouTube, Reddit—like there's all these niche strategies that you need to implement to make AI discoverability useful for your company, and I don't think a lot of people even understand the complexity of what that looks like.

>> We could do a whole episode on that. I don't think 98% of people understand the complexity, and I think people are still optimizing for pure Google and don't understand how to think outside the box.

>> We love thinking outside the box because a lot of our companies are mid-market companies, and so they don't have the money that Fortune 500, Fortune 100 clients have. So we love to come to them with creative solutions, and it's experiments. Marketing is experimentation, but I am a firm believer you have to have a measurement along the way and metric for success and stop moving the damn goal posts because all my clients constantly are moving the goal posts and like, how do we compare to this one and that one? And I was like, you have no metrics against yourself. Stop worrying about your competitor over there. Let's set some goals, benchmarks, and metrics for ourselves, and then we can start looking at the other people. But unless we're rooting it in ourselves, it's like if you have a problem, you want to blame everyone else, but you don't want to focus on how you can fix yourself. It's the same thing for a company.

>> We never have baselines on ourselves. Like we talk about this all the time. When they're asking like, we want more top of funnel, we want more revenue, we want to pick a metric—it's like, okay, great. Why do you want that? And so they'll go through like, well, this is what we committed to the board. It's not rooted in like bottoms-up conversations. It's rooted in like top-down. And so they don't have a true value around it. That's why I believe a lot of people don't actually achieve it. They don't have like a systemized process from going from the bottom-up model to hitting the number. So they're never going to hit it. It's like I want to fly to Japan. It's like, okay, but I have no coordinates to get there. So it doesn't really matter. And so the other part that you were talking about was if you don't have that perspective, then you're never going to end up getting to a place of success. And so having random numbers and not having a baseline—because how can we tell if we're successful or not if we have no baseline? It's always moving. And that's super tricky in the consulting space.

>> Yeah, and they're looking at like Forrester and McKinsey and like all these big guys that are putting out all these studies. And I'm like, you guys have no metrics of what you should do. So they're telling you all these industry standards, but you have no sense of where you even play in the sandbox and who our competitors are. I mean, we have some clients that like I'm asking, can you tell me your ICP? Because they're running all these marketing and spending and using all their marketing budget and they're like, what do you mean? What's the ICP? And then, you know, same thing that Adam said before, eight sellers and twelve different answers. It's the same thing with marketing. It's like five people on the marketing team, fifteen answers as to who your ICP is. Well, that's a problem because you're actually spending money with Google and paid advertising and Meta and LinkedIn and all these other places. And how are you measuring success if you're not even targeting and segmenting your data and campaigns to the right people?

>> All day, every day. Let's shift gears. We are going to go to the Monday morning move. So this is a practical takeaway that our listeners can take away this week. You have a couple of jobs here, Stacy. Number one, Dale's favorite part is to rate my takeaway one through ten. I want to be as close to a ten as possible. Dale wants you to rate it as close to a one as possible because he just wants to give me crap forever. And then you are going to tell me what you would add, change, or push back on.

>> Okay, let's do it.

>> All right, here we go. If you are the CEO or the CRO, pull your last ten closed lost deals and read the actual notes, not the stage history. Count how many died because the buyer never understood what you sell. Not price, not timing, just confusion. Then go to your CMO and ask them to explain in one sentence what the buyer actually thought they were buying. If the sentences don't match more than half of the time, you don't have a sales or marketing problem. What you have is a story that stopped traveling with the business, and pipeline coverage ain't going to fix that until someone owns rebuilding the narrative that you tell your customers.

>> I like that. I like that. I'd give that an eight. I think that's pretty damn good, I will say.

>> Wow. I appreciate you. What would you add, change, or push back on? Because it's not perfect. We're like we talked a little bit about value prop, but how can we make this stronger for the listeners?

>> Well, I mean I was a seller and I ran teams in Manhattan and I would say my biggest fear—just me being a good human, and not all sellers are good humans. I'm going to be honest here. Was what we're selling, can we actually deliver? Because Stacy Sussman is going to leave this company someday and go to another company and call on my General Mills buyer and hope that they will buy with me at another company. So I always felt like not only can you understand what we're buying—like what is it?—and going back to like I was listening to some of your old episodes, like what are the terms? What do they actually put on the paper? What was in the proposal versus what you're actually delivering? But it's also like what can you deliver on it? Because I was in sales and I saw a lot of BS being spewed, guys, and we couldn't actually deliver on a lot of those programs. And so my bigger concern is not only how is the messaging traveling, which I think is super important because buyers are so much smarter now. I'm going to say, you have six or eight sales stages right now. I'm probably at stage halfway there because I've already read your demos and watched your YouTube videos and read your Substack. So like I don't need the first part. I need to be like, do I have a problem with my business? Does your tool solve this problem? And I want your sales engineer on the phone with me and I want you to walk me through where in your software this solves my problem and how this makes it better. So yes, I believe that's a messaging problem, but I also believe can you actually deliver on what you're selling? Because there's a lot of BS companies out there, especially in the age of AI, and they can't really do what they say they want to do. Or I've talked to a lot of VC and PE firms, they call them wrapper companies, where they're just layering them on top of LLMs, and there's actually nothing there when you start looking under the hood. It's not proprietary, and anyone could do this business.

>> A pretty skin.

>> Exactly. And I'm super into AI and building agents and bots, and that is a whole other wave of where this is going to evolve, and I think our consulting work is also going to evolve, and that's something I think about all the time.

>> Yeah, love that. Love that.

>> I love that.

>> All right, Dylan, take us home, sir.

>> I can't believe you got an eight. This is like this is getting too... I'm going to...

Got a seven, I think. I think six. I don't know. But we have to start changing some of these Monday morning moves.

They're my Monday morning moves. You cannot change them.

[laughter]

That was good.

At the end of every session, we do something called uncensored questions. It's a bit more of a rapid fire type scenario so you can answer some questions a little quicker. So let's just start off. You told a story about a company that's paid a brand name consulting firm seven figures for a deck that changed nothing. What do you think that deck cost the business in delay? Like, what's the opportunity cost?

I don't even know. I feel like if you go out in the market with bad messaging, and I've been at corporations where we had this at Daily Mail—like we went out there for probably six to eight months of bad messaging. And luckily we had a mothership over in London that had tons of pounds like Scrooge McDuck over there, so we kept the lights on and we kept going. But I think some can end up going out of business because they don't have the messaging right. And especially with how AI is changing things, if your messaging is wrong but your tech is great, and then someone else comes into the market as a new player or an old player that's changing what they're doing because they have better infrastructure, you can be like dead in the water and your run rate that was maybe eighteen to twenty-four months could be nine. And now you got to tell your employees you can't pay them anymore because the lights are gone off.

It's a problem. Stacy, you tell CMOs to lead with revenue language instead of MQLs. You've been in this game a long time. Have you watched a CMO get fired or demoted because of that?

Yes. [laughter] Yes, sadly. I think some companies don't want to change really fundamentally, and I've seen it. Companies like to blame someone. There's always going to be a scapegoat. We didn't make the numbers. The board says we need to cut efficiencies. Exactly what Dale said. It's like, all right, let's cut the CMO 'cause that's the most expensive head count on the marketing P&L line, and let's have some more junior people run the tactics and let's just assume that we'll hire more sellers and we'll get more revenue into the company. And it's not going to work, but you can sort of die trying.

Let's get a little swizzle here. So Omnicom just finished swallowing IPG, cut over four thousand jobs, and folded DDB, FCB, MullenLowe and other agencies. They folded them all together. Is a holding company model finally admitting it's broken, or is this just what it takes to survive right now?

A lot of friends on the agency side—my background's in media and advertising from my publishing days—they are ruthlessly firing people. The model I think is fundamentally broken, but I don't think these companies are willing to admit it because restructuring parent holding companies and tons of subsidiaries underneath—not only head client roster, office-based geography. That is a whole five-year project. And I don't think people are willing, like I said, time, right? If they really admitted this model is broken, let's bring in consultants that actually could think creatively and change this, the question to me would be, do they have enough money to hold all of the entities while they restructured like the larger picture? And do they want to do that? Or is the goal just to form a bigger conglomerate and then get sold by someone bigger? It's like I always say, what's the exit strategy? 'Cause you're playing for different games depending on what the exit strategy is. I think the model is broken though.

I agree. Stacy, third-party cookies are gone from Chrome. Was multi-touch attribution already fiction before they disappeared, or did losing them just make it obvious?

Probably losing them just made it obvious. I would say owned and operated was always something I was so obsessed with just 'cause I worked in publishing and media. And so that whole programmatic game is so broken. But there's new stuff that's happening out there. But I think owning your own data and owning your own subscribers is huge. Why I started a Substack.

Awesome. Stacy, so you've gone through the GTM call with us. We're going to give you a super easy question at the end. What's your dream vacation destination?

Japan. I love sushi and I am dying to go to Japan.

So you said it. How do I get to Japan? Dale, please tell me what clients do I need to get to get me to Japan?

Right, I'm with you. Japan's on our list as well. What clients? The right ones, the ones that want to make change, the ones that are willing to understand that they hired you. And I say this for us as well for a reason. It is not smart to hire folks like us and then not take any advice and just look at like you're wasting an awful lot of money. And knock on wood, we've gotten to the point that you we just won't take it at that point. Like I don't want to be in a situation where I'm taking your money and you're not implementing anything and you're going to come back and tell me everything's. It's just not good business. Stacy, where could people find out more about you and your company as we close it out other than go find you on LinkedIn? Shameless plug time.

Yes. I'm on LinkedIn, Stacy Sussman. I have a Substack, Stacy Sussman too. I have a podcast, C-Suite Strategies. We're about to enter our third year. We do not record as much as you guys. God bless you guys. We're a [laughter] monthly thing. So Substack, LinkedIn, podcast C-Suite Strategies, and I do a little more personal stuff on Instagram, the_suss.

Nice. Stacy, thanks for joining GTM Uncensored.

Thank you.

Thank you guys for having me.