Reinventing Virtual Events

CHAPTER 20Marketing in a Sales Way/Selling in a Marketing Way

As marketing converges with customer service and sales, marketing today is more about helping and less about hyping.

— Joel Book

The $64‐million question is: how do you go from marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL) effectively? But we believe it's a trick question discussed in the first chapter. If you apply our work accurately, you'll eliminate the MQL, switching to an opportunity model or North Star key performance indicator (KPI) of “revenue.” On a pure event level, the new metric could even be “event registrations to opportunities.” Converting audiences to ultimately pay for software after an event is always an erratic puzzle. Usually, marketing teams see 1 in 1,000 people convert to paying customers.

From the marketing perspective, this problem stems from the saturation of crappy ads with ultra‐low click‐through rates (CTR). Clicks are dismal, descending toward .25% on banner ads. Your analytics dashboard is overflowing with fraud, spam, and bots, whether you'll admit it or not. In reality, most of what's perusing your content, site, apps, and ads is not even human!

From the lens of sales, there's a heavy debate that the role of sales development rep (SDR) should be sunsetted. Bad ...