Winning Pipeline in Today’s Market

All right. It's good to be here. Good to see some familiar faces in the crowd as well. And those of you I haven't met yet – looking forward to meeting you at the networking reception. So, uh, as Kathleen mentioned, I'm Joe McNeil, CRO of Influ2, and we do contact-focused advertising. So we target named lists of individuals, we push the engagement back to the contact record, and then we measure the difference in conversion rates for the folks we're targeting versus those we're not. So the reason I'm telling you that is, I get the chance to work with a lot of sales and marketing leaders and look under the hood of their pipeline engine. So what I want to present is really what I'm seeing out there that's working and also what I'm seeing that's not working, right? I feel like a lot of pipeline discussions right now center around what not to do. So I'm hopeful to give you some ideas on what you can do as well.

So prior to Influ2, I led sales at Siteimprove, which was primarily an outbound-focused company. I think we went, we went from 8 to a 100 million, almost exclusively through outbound. Prior to that, I was with a company called ProtoLabs, and we went through an IPO primarily through inbound. So I've seen both sides of it. And I think, really, in today's market, you can't be successful with a single discipline focus like we had at Siteimprove or at ProtoLabs.