Episode #19: A Scalable Solution to B2B Funnel Tracking - Charlie Saunders

Fix my funnel

Every B2B company has a funnel tracking process. And quite often, that process is seriously limited or broken.

Leads get lost, data is inaccurate, and businesses struggle to produce insights and accurate reporting.

I've seen this first hand, and so has this week's guest - Charlie Saunders. We've both spent years as consultants fixing broken funnels.

In this episode, we talk about the many reasons funnel tracking goes wrong and dive deep into the architecture of the scalable solution Charlie's team has developed.

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Charlie and his team advocate for using a custom object to track the lifecycle, as opposed to the more typical method of using lead or contact status fields.

This is a method I’ve used and endorse as well, as I think it’s the only way to accurately capture the multi-dimensional nature of how people buy.

People very rarely buy in a straight line in B2B; they move backwards, go in circles, and engage with multiple marketing efforts along the way. A single status field is hopelessly inadequate to support that.

Charlie and I talk through the many ways companies have tried to address this inadequacy - date stamps, a lifecycle campaign, BI - but ultimately all of them are band-aids that won’t work in certain scenarios.

A custom object solves the vast majority of problems in an elegant way.

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Thanks to Our Sponsor

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About Today's Guest

Charlie Saunders is co-founder and the Chief Revenue & Operations Officer at CS2, where he builds Revenue Growth Architecture for growth-stage B2B tech companies that powers efficient and predictable revenue growth.

Take-Aways

• Funnel is important for three reasons: Charlie gives three main reasons why funnel tracking is important. Your architecture needs to support all three.

  • Insights - delivering a view into the health of the go-to-market engine, including all the reports a GTM team expects.

  • Process - bringing order and structure to the revenue process, from marketing to sales to customer success.

  • Buyer experience - if we don’t have a view of our funnel, it’s very difficult to tell what’s broken, and we can’t optimize the buyer’s experience to remove friction.

• CRM needs to match BI

  • Many teams export their CRM data to a BI tool and then rely on data transformations to overcome limitations in their CRM tracking.

  • However, if your data doesn’t exist “natively” in the CRM, users have no independent way to validate and verify what they see in BI.

  • This can create trust and adoption issues.

  • For this reason, Charlie believes that your funnel data should exist natively in the source system as much as possible.

• When to deploy scalable infrastructure

  • It’s never easy to know when to roll out a more scalable infrastructure.

  • If you do it too early, you may add unnecessary complexity to your systems and waste time on infrastructure projects when you should be focusing on other things.

  • But if you do it too late, you’ll feel the pain of technical debt for longer and lose years of data by delaying the switch.

  • Overall, Charlie believes companies tend to wait too long.

Key Topics

• [00:00] - Introduction

• [01:35] - Why funnel tracking matters

• [05:05] - How funnel metrics and attribution interact

• [08:21] - Key funnel metrics

• [10:18] - Accuracy vs. perfection in funnel tracking

• [14:06] - Why we can’t rely just on a Lead Status field

• [19:03] - Using a Salesforce custom object for funnel tracking

• [20:23] - Explanation of using a lifecycle campaign to bridge leads and contacts

• [21:01] - Should everyone start with a custom object?

• [26:55] - Why a custom object doesn’t need to be that intensive to implement

• [29:34] - Custom object impact on sales process and UX

• [33:25] - Tipping point = the initiation of the sales process

• [34:58] - Multiple tipping point types

• [36:14] - Different stages in the pre-pipeline section of the funnel

• [39:28] - Build vs. buy when considering a custom object solution

• [40:38] - You need a strong foundation for any funnel tracking to work

• [42:56] - Deeper discussion on attribution

• [45:47] - Significance of the tipping point touch

Resources

• CS2 - B2B Marketing and Revenue Operations - Charlie’s agency.

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