Why Most Pipeline Problems Start Long Before Pipeline

Full transcript

Neil Anderson 0:18
All right, welcome everybody. My name's Neil Anderson, and I'm today's host for the Outcome Marketing LinkedIn Live. I'm joined by my fellow Outcome Marketing practitioner, Michael Elliott of Denver, Colorado. We'll get a proper introduction for Michael in a minute, but I want to welcome everybody who's taken time out of their day to join us as we present some of our continuing series on best practices based on Outcome Marketing philosophies and principles. Outcome Marketing is a methodology and marketplace for B2B companies, primarily SaaS and tech services companies, a million to a hundred million in revenue. We have a methodology, we have a marketplace, and we have AI tools to accelerate and improve the quality of the outcomes from the marketing that we all do. So we're gonna talk today about pipeline, sort of, and pipeline problems that might not actually be pipeline problems. It's not always what it seems. So let me start by asking Michael if you would just say a couple of words about yourself and introduce yourself to the audience today.

Michael Elliott 1:41
Absolutely, and thank you, Neil. So, Michael Elliott. I've had — I hate to say — decades within marketing, both for large enterprises like Dell and NetApp, and more recently doing a lot of work for small to medium-sized businesses. My experience has really evolved from managing and building product marketing organizations into running marketing for organizations. And through those decades, I have learned a lot. I've made mistakes, and I'm hoping to share some of my key learnings and what I've seen from the perspective of building pipeline and why I see pipeline problems that could have been reduced by three simple common mistakes. But we'll get into that, Neil.

Neil Anderson 2:42
Sounds good, Michael, and thank you so much. I think those mistakes result in gray hair. I wouldn't know a lot about that, but I can see in the monitor that there's two guys with gray hair on this call, so hopefully we've got some decades of experience to share with our audience today. So let's talk about some of those mistakes. I've heard you say often that it's not so much a pipeline problem — it's a precision problem. Can you explain what you mean by a precision problem?

Michael Elliott 3:21
So from my perspective, it really comes down to three things. The first one is you're positioning your products or solutions instead of positioning business outcomes. So your website, your thought leadership, your content is all around your product or your solutions. It's not about meeting the clients' and the prospects' business challenges. It's not relating to them. So that's the first mistake that occurs.

Michael Elliott 3:55
The second is around your ICP, your ideal client profile. A lot of times ICP is just a given document — you walk in as a marketer and you're handed "here's who we market to." But there's never a check to say, well, is this the right market? Are we truly attacking where we can win with these solutions? We've looked at it from a product perspective, but not from a solutions perspective.

Michael Elliott 4:30
And then the third mistake, and I see this a lot, is generic messaging. Once you truly understand who your ICP is, you have to go down to the persona level. So if it's manufacturing that you're trying to reach, are you creating messaging for an overall manufacturing industry, or are you starting to look at the personas within that buying committee and the individuals within that buying committee — whether it's head of manufacturing, whether it's CIO, whether it's CFO? They're all part of that buying committee, but they require unique and differentiated messaging to enact a conversation with them. Otherwise, with the overabundance of emails and content hitting them, you're never going to break through.

Neil Anderson 5:28
Roger that. So let me dig into this ICP thing a little bit. You mentioned a couple of things. One is that it stays static, and I've seen that happen. I've seen work where we've developed detailed ICPs and the CEO puts it on his credenza in a printed out PowerPoint slide, and three months later, five months later, six months later, it's still sitting in the exact same place. I want you to talk to me about that. But I also want to talk about this details issue. It's not enough to say our ICP is companies in North America that are 50 million in revenue in the industrial manufacturing area. That is not an ICP, if I understand it correctly. So if you could just unpack that a little bit, what do you do differently when you generate ICPs to keep them from being static and get them to the right level of detail?

Michael Elliott 6:40
A couple points to unpack there. First of all, you're right. A lot of times that ICP just sits, but it's never transferred down. One, it's not continuously evolved and updated. It's never looking at some of the ancillary markets within that main ICP. But it's also never translated down from marketing into sales. And that's a unique relationship that has to exist. So what marketing might be saying from an ICP perspective isn't what inside sales and outside sales are having a conversation around. That's a big mistake that occurs that really impacts your pipeline.

Michael Elliott 7:30
Secondly, ICP is built around some perceived assumptions, but it's not built on signals. It's not looking at how the market is evolving. And in the age of AI, marketing is constantly evolving. So it's not looking at those signals and indicators that say we have a solution that's now meeting this new market that's evolving, or a segment within a certain industry where we have the right solution. It's really not evolving with market conditions. That's where an ICP has to be dynamic, constantly evolving. It's not like a daily thing, but you have to continuously look at it and check it against what your solution actually provides.

Neil Anderson 8:23
Got it. So let me remind folks listening in, go ahead and use the chat if you have specific questions. We had one come up already, and I'd like to ask that question: what's the difference between ICP and personas?

Michael Elliott 8:40
So from my perspective, your ideal client profile is this broad view of who you're targeting. But you really need to get down to that individual — that's the persona side, that individual person, individual titles — so you understand what the messaging needs to look like for that person, what the business challenges are as they see it. Because a CIO or CTO is going to have different business challenges than the head of manufacturing versus a customer success leader. So that's what we have to get to from a persona level.

Neil Anderson 9:22
The way I like to think of it is I usually think of the ICP as the company and the personas as the individual people. But even in the ICP, as you mentioned, the ideal client profile, you do need to at least touch on the archetypes of your personas. And then when you do your persona work, you can go into much more detail on the specific titles, the roles, their function, their responsibilities, their fears, their dreams, their aspirations — all those different things that help you when you're selling.

Michael Elliott 9:59
And that's an important thing you just said there. What are their fears? What are their dreams? That has to be part of what we build because it's this social messaging that has to be a part of it to break through.

Neil Anderson 10:14
Couldn't agree more. So let's talk a little bit about this precision thing you keep bringing up. You say it could be a precision problem versus a pipeline problem. There's still a big focus that I see from clients all about "we want more leads, more leads, more leads," whereas I'd rather hear them say, "I actually want fewer leads, but I want better leads." What's your take on the precision issue, Michael?

Michael Elliott 10:48
I talk to CEOs of smaller companies and that's exactly what they say. "I need more leads." And my answer back is, more leads does not equate to more revenue. What you need is the quality opportunities that are going to convert. And you do that by — we talk about precision. What are those right-fit accounts? Because when you find those right-fit accounts, that leads to faster cycles, that leads to higher win rates, that leads to larger deals.

Michael Elliott 11:30
I often hear from marketers, "I just need more MQLs because they'll convert." I can create as many MQLs as you want, but I really focus on sales-accepted leads. And for me, sales-accepted leads means these are opportunities in our wheelhouse that sales can have a valid and relevant consultative conversation around with a prospect that leads to a win.

Neil Anderson 11:59
Yeah, for sure. So it gets into the vanity metric stuff — MQLs, SALs, SQLs, and what's really important. I know that Angus Robertson, my cohort in crime and my co-founder of Outcome Marketing, he and I used to mud wrestle a bit around the SAL/SQL issue. But at the end of the day, whatever you call it, until sales owns the lead, it's not really going to get the attention that it deserves. Once sales actually understands the profile of the lead and says, "I think I can sell this in this situation to this company, to this person, to this buying committee" — once they own it, then they get into the sales cycle motions that have proven to be effective at that company.

Michael Elliott 12:55
Yeah, and volume fills dashboards without a doubt. But precision really builds pipelines.

Neil Anderson 13:01
Yep, I'd agree. So what do you think about the connection between if you get the ICP right and you get the personas right, how does that then drive content, messaging, thought leadership? What's the impact downstream?

Michael Elliott 13:22
From my perspective, the impact is if you get your ICP right, you get your messaging right, you know who you're targeting — the impact is, one, it's going to drive a relook at your website. It's going to enable you to create the right thought leadership that's going to resonate with that ICP as a whole, but also with those personas. Then it's going to allow your inbound marketing and your outbound marketing to be that much more effective and increase your win rates overall. You're driving the right messaging at the right time to the right audience.

Neil Anderson 14:09
Okay. It wouldn't be a conversation if we didn't include the dreaded AI word at some point. So I do want to ask you where AI fits in this conversation.

Michael Elliott 14:27
Two parts. One, from an AI perspective, we used to think in terms of "how do we get more SEO?" AI has really changed that. People are not searching on keywords. They're searching on a sentence or a paragraph. So we need to start writing and creating content that answers what people and what our target audience is truly searching for. That's one side of it.

Michael Elliott 15:15
The other side is AI — whether you use AI Studio, Claude Code, or one of the others — they can help you start to really dial in who my ICP is, what that messaging looks like. But they can also take you in a completely wrong direction if you're not answering the right questions, if you're not putting in the right input. So AI can be a positive for you, but it can also lead you very far astray. That's an important component as we think about and utilize AI.

Michael Elliott 16:00
Most companies, whether SMB or large enterprises, are playing with it, trying to understand it, adopting it. But until executive leadership says this is important and critical for us, we need to make sure our people know how to use it and how to benefit from it. Because AI left alone will take you in a completely unknown direction. And that's where you have to have a human in the loop as a part of that process to be the checkpoint.

Neil Anderson 16:35
So it'll take you in the wrong direction, but it'll do it faster.

Michael Elliott 16:39
Yeah, this is true.

Neil Anderson 16:41
So I know we're going to wind this up in a bit, Michael, but I don't want to do that without giving you the opportunity to talk a little bit about the AI tool that you've created. I've experimented with it just a wee bit. I'd like you to describe what Persona Forge the app actually does in the conversation we're having today.

Michael Elliott 17:09
So I started this as kind of a thought experiment to help me in my own practice. How can we look at a company and build out an ICP using tools around that? I went in and, using AI Studio — which is Google's version, you could use Claude Code — I built a system that lets you say: who is the company, what is our product or solutions, who do we believe to be our target market, who do we believe are good clients for us, who are bad clients for us, plus a few other aspects.

Michael Elliott 17:55
It does an interview process, and the output is a matrix of who your ideal client profiles are, plus some ancillary industries that you should consider. It ranks all of those. And within that it says, here are some secondary industries or sub-industries that really seem to resonate well with the solution you can provide. That was my first step. It really helped me have a more meaningful, intelligent conversation with my clients.

Michael Elliott 18:50
The second part I added is now that we know the ICP and we know the personas within that — who's that buying committee — I built in the capability to say, what is the messaging? It creates three emails with a call to action for each of those personas within each ICP. It started as: I wanted to learn AI, I wanted to understand it. It really evolved. When I created this content and showed it to my clients, the light started to come on. They'd say, "We were always in this industry, but now I can see where I can expand and have relevance in this other industry. And you provide all the messaging I need to start that process." It's been a fun experiment that really turned into a solution most marketers and small businesses can use.

Neil Anderson 19:39
Got it. The thing I thought was cool when I was testing it — I put in real information from a real client in the industrial manufacturing space, put in the details, and the tool came back with results around that core business they're in, but also created some white-space opportunities we hadn't really thought about. It had the data to back up why those white-space recommendations were being made, which was pretty cool. So if you could, two more questions. One: how can people find you and find the app if they want to get more information?

Michael Elliott 20:34
You can go to personaforge.app. But probably the easier path is, schedule time, have a conversation with me. Or just LinkedIn message me. I love having conversations with other practitioners and with the SMB marketplace to understand what their business challenges are, because I learn from that. I'm a former professor of marketing back in a prior life, so I love the teaching aspect. That's why I enjoy the consulting. I probably give away too much for free, but I love to see businesses, I love to see that light come on, and for them to start to understand what's next for them. That's what I get out of it.

Neil Anderson 21:25
Got it. Then I just want to ask you, is there anything on your mind that you want to share with the audience before we wrap it up?

Michael Elliott 21:40
Yeah, just some final thoughts. With AI, everything in go-to-market has gotten easier and harder at the same time. Your go-to-market strategy really needs to evolve and reflect: who am I targeting? What is that ICP? And getting down to the persona level. It's the one-ten-hundred rule — get that right and the rest of the system works. Get that wrong and you're creating and spending extra dollars that are wasted. That's my closing thought.

Neil Anderson 22:30
I want to thank you, Michael, very much for joining us today and sharing your wisdom. And I want to thank the audience for their time and attention. We'll be doing these LinkedIn Lives with our network of forty-some Outcome Marketing practitioners and their clients to talk about the challenges and the solutions we've provided for them. Hope everybody has a good rest of their day. Michael, thank you very much for joining us, and we'll see everybody on the next go.

Michael Elliott 23:04
Thank you, Neil. Always a pleasure.

Neil Anderson 23:07
Thanks.