FOREWORD

From Kate Adams, VP Marketing, Drift

B2B marketing is broken. We’ve lost our way by optimizing our strategies around acronyms instead of people – and that has to change.

As the person in charge of demand generation at Drift, I spend a lot of time talking about the power of conversational marketing and how we’re aligning our actions around what we really believe – that there’s no more B2B or B2C – there’s just marketing and selling to real people like you and me. And it’s not just a new approach. We’re writing a whole new playbook for modern marketing.But even pioneers sometimes get caught in a rut, and I realized that as we were talking about a different way of doing things, we were still using the same old MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) and MQA (Marketing Qualified Account) approach to measure our own performance.It was time to make a change. A big change. So to ensure that we were walking the walk, we overhauled our whole marketing funnel to be people-centric. We skipped the acronyms and are instead focusing on the individuals who do the actual buying. This approach changes the whole context of the conversation. It elevates it and makes it more authentic and more effective.And because we know that words matter, we’ve changed the terms we use to define the stages of our funnel.We’re no longer talking about MQLs; we’re talking about Interested People. And from there, our process is all about conversations – Scheduled Conversations and Held Conversations. That’s what turns our Interested People into Future Customers, and – ultimately – customers.And you know what? It’s working.Here at Drift, we’re all about the conversation. And conversations are held with people – not accounts, not companies – people. We’ve changed the way we think about demand generation so that we can focus on those conversations. We hope that other marketers will join us and ditch the outdated MQL in favor of conversations. That’s where the connection is made. That’s where the relationship starts.KATE ADAMS
VP of Marketing, Drift

FOREWORD

B2B buying has become a much more fragmented experience, with each member of the buying team owning only a small piece of the transaction. In this new world, each member of the buying committee needs to be engaged at different times and with different approaches and value messages, all in the hopes of building consensus across a very diverse set of functions, needs, and readiness. You need to rethink the idea that an individual MQL is an indicator of where an account is in the buying journey.