May 6, 2025 • 20 mins
In this special episode of Sales Pipeline Radio from the Forrester B2B Summit 2025 marketplace floor, Matt spoke with Lauren Daley, Director, Marketing Operations, and Jeremy Schwartz, Sr. Manager, Global Lead Management & Strategy at Palo Alto Networks.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Matt Heinz (00:15):
All right.
Welcome back to the, uh, marketplacefloor here at B2B summit from Forrester.
Very excited to be doing a series of SalesPipeline Radio interviews and episodes
from a series of Forrester analysts,attendees go to market leaders, and
with us here from Palo Alto Networks.
Very excited to have Lauren Daleyand Jeremy Schwartz, the Director of
(00:35):
marketing operations and senior managerof Global Lead Management and Strategy.
Respectively.
Thank you guys for being here.
Jeremy Schwartz (00:41):
Thanks for having us.
Lauren Daley (00:41):
Thank you.
Matt Heinz (00:42):
Yeah, this is exciting.
This is exciting for us to dothis formally here on the floor.
Excited to integrate with differentpeople and just get a lot of
conversations, especially for thoseof you that are award winners here.
So congratulations on your B2B ROI award.
Super excited to see yourteam present that tomorrow and
talk about what they're doing.
Talk a little bit about the programsthat got you on stage tomorrow.
What are the things that you'reworking on, you're so excited about?
Lauren Daley (01:05):
We have been on an 18 month journey to shift from an MQL
focused funnel to buying groups andthinking about how we collect all
the buying group signals together.
Package them up, andsend them over to sales.
Jeremy Schwartz (01:21):
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that you know, thistransformation, I call it a
seismic shift in marketing.
I'm gonna date myself and say thatI was around when pixel tracking was
invented and I thought that was awesome.
And then ABM was invented, and thatwas an awesome way to track accounts.
But now when we think about the buyinggroup and being able to focus on
buying centers within large accounts,that's really transformational.
Matt Heinz (01:41):
Yeah.
The game key's changing, right?
I mean, what worked before doesn'twork today, or I guess maybe what we
thought worked before doesn't worktoday, where we sort of like you
got an individual that we're singlethreading at a large deal and just
hoping that that white paper download.
Is actually gonna turn into something.
We're not really working inthat kind of a world anymore.
How have you guys adjusted to thenew roles of the game and what are
some things that you can point tothat have helped you be successful?
Jeremy Schwartz (02:04):
Yeah, I mean, we think about it this way.
Marketers are hyper-focusedon MQLs and what is an MQL?
It's a guy who filled out a form, maybetwo forms, and that person is usually.
The lowest man on the totem pole,he's usually the researcher.
His boss got a job from hisboss who said, do this research.
And the guy goes out and does it,and that guy becomes an MQL and
we send that guy to sales and wethink that's gonna make a deal.
(02:27):
But that person usuallydoes not have BANT.
That person is the researcher.
So if we start to think about that,maybe he shared an ebook or a solution
brief or a white paper with hisboss and his boss downloaded that.
Well, he's not gonna score up toMQL and in an MQL centric world,
you're ignoring that person in abuying group centric world, you
can think about that as a signal.
(02:48):
Should we send that person to sales?
Now, should we surroundthem with marketing tactics?
But if we start to think that way, and wethink beyond the MQL, because no single
person buys Palo Alto software, right?
Matt Heinz (03:00):
Yeah, and I think that the buying committee and the buying
group, I thought they did a greatjob in the keynote earlier today.
Not just talking about thatinternal group, but talking
about the ecosystem that exists.
'cause there's the people insidethe company that care about that,
that might benefit directly.
But then there's the whole ecosystem ofanalysts, of influencers and other people
that indirectly are going to influencewhether that deal gets done or not.
Lauren Daley (03:20):
Yeah, so we've been talking a lot about known and unknown
visitors and making sure that we'resurrounding everybody and taking those
unknown visitors and identifying theaccounts that are in market and how
do you convert those unknown visitorsinto known visitors, and that's.
Yeah, a shift, a mindset shift that ishappening within our marketing org today
(03:45):
because many of our campaign managersare hyper-focused on known visitors.
Did they fill out my form and did Iget credit for that form fill in MQL?
Jeremy Schwartz (03:54):
Yeah I'll expand on that.
When you think about a typical MQL,and let's use the most valuable
MQL someone request a demo.
So wow.
A demo that's gonna auto MQL everytime and it's gonna go to sales and the
seller's like, wow, that's terrific.
But if you look at that person andyou say, well, he's a networking admin
and there's no other people from thataccount that are interacting with us,
and there's no signal on our website,what does that demo request mean?
(04:16):
Versus that same person where youmight see three or four people.
Returning visitors to the website,unknowns never submit a form
looking at the same product line.
You see these people engagingwith us or people who might
fill out a form and not MQL.
If you start to look at that fullsignal, that guy who's looking at
the demo becomes much more valuablebecause you see a buying group forming.
(04:37):
So being able to discern thatis the first and foremost.
But knowing that.
It's not critical toconvert those unknowns.
It's critical to focus on those unknowns.
It's critical that we areable to be in front of them.
Someone who sees our ad. Is great'cause they're getting a brand touch.
Someone who clicks on the ad even better.
'cause that increases our signal.
(04:58):
And I almost call that compoundinginterest on our marketing signals.
And then finally, if someone submitsa form, that's really fantastic.
But every one of thosepieces is important.
The guy who sees our ad but doesn'tclick on it could be a decision maker.
And that brand touch could bewhat makes him move over the top.
Matt Heinz (05:14):
And some of those
signals are false signals, right?
Someone could attend your lastthree webinars, not because they're
qualified, but because they're bored.
Right, or someone could be interestedin a topic for themselves, but
not be representative of thepriorities of the organization.
Whether it's not a priority or there'snot budget there, how do you separate
at an individual level as well asat the group level, the signals
(05:36):
that matter in a collective way?
Lauren Daley (05:40):
Great question.
And that's where we started tothink about a buying group score.
And we've used Forrester,Gartner as, you know, a,
Jeremy Schwartz (05:49):
sounding board
Lauren Daley (05:50):
Yeah.
Or a structure to thinkabout different cohorts.
Almost like the magic quadrantand looking at the intent as well
as the completeness to start separatingout the groups of people and see if
somebody has very low intent and lowcompleteness of that buying group.
Let's just let brand take care of them.
(06:11):
There's not a lot of point inspending marketing dollars there.
Whereas if we see a buying group formingand there's high intent, low engagement,
that's where our teams can go inand try to drive up that engagement.
If we see that the completenessis there, that's where we can
pass that off to field marketing.
So we're starting to think about buyinggroup scores and really look at intent,
(06:31):
completeness, propensity to convert intoan opportunity and what's the engagement?
Engagement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jeremy Schwartz (06:37):
And, and the difference, this is the other
problem with the MQL world.
The MQL world is focused on ascoring model that is passive.
Someone has to do something.
I come in, I download awhite paper, I get 20 points.
If I don't do anythingelse I never move forward.
Our new scoring model is usingsignal that's active all the
(06:57):
time, and so by looking at.
Fit.
Looking at intent, looking at engagement,and looking at completeness and combining
those in these different cohorts thatLauren mentioned, we're able to activate
accounts and then the people within thoseaccounts, and it's always on the move.
Every day we're looking at theseaccounts and moving people into
different programs based on thesignal, and so I come back to that.
(07:20):
Idea of compoundinginterest on the signal.
If we are putting ads in front of accountsthat are showing signal and people are
engaging with 'em, that signal go up.
Mm-hmm.
And so it's, again, it'sthis rinse and repeat cycle.
And if we focus on that entirebuying group and we look at
people who are engaging and don'tnecessarily wait for them to score
up, we're getting ahead of them.
We're giving people to the sellers.
(07:42):
We're putting people into marketingcampaigns where it makes sense.
We're not trying to surround everybody.
We're surrounding those folksand those accounts that are
showing that high signal.
Matt Heinz (07:52):
We are here live at the Forrester B2B Summit Marketplace
with Lauren Daley and Jeremy Schwartzfrom Palo Alto Networks, winners
of the B2B ROI award for 2025.
Lauren, you mentioned a wordthat gives heart palpitations to
marketers everywhere, and that iscredit, so we're talking about.
Not just single motion programs, right?
This isn't an email campaignthat generated Pipeline.
(08:14):
This isn't a event activation thatgenerates Pipeline to do this well.
You have a lot ofdifferent people involved.
Assigning credit becomes, I think,a kind of an impossible task.
You've got this body of work and it'sa team effort to do all of this, but
how do you figure out, like, how do youthink about attribution at Palo Alto?
Lauren Daley (08:34):
So we're thinking about it from multi-touch perspective.
And we're really looking at where arewe influencing ahead of opportunity
creation and then after, and that'swhat we call bookings influence.
And that's where the buying group issuper important to the bookings influence.
'cause that's where when we canbuild out the buying group, we notice
that they move into our forecastedPipeline at a much higher rate.
(08:57):
But also extending that buyinggroup on those opportunities is
where we're seeing the deal sizegrow, the win rates increase.
And so that's the bookings influenceand that's the Jeremy and I
talk about this all the time.
Our team used to do a lot offuzzy matching for attribution.
And this is direct attribution.
Yeah.
That sales understands and youcan explain it in 30 seconds to a
(09:19):
sales rep and they're gonna get it.
Jeremy Schwartz (09:21):
And it's not only the attribution and believe it.
Yes.
And that's true.
So sellers hate fuzzy match.
They don't believe it.
Hey, we did some marketing activityand that meant something to the
deal, even if it never got to it.
When we do this.
Expansion of buying groups, not onlydoes it create direct influence where
we can say this person was added tothis opportunity, but it provides more
importantly, the context to a seller.
(09:43):
When we can tell a seller that animportant persona took an action and
we weren't waiting for them to MQL,that there's an open opportunity and we
see that a VP of cloud infrastructuredownloaded a total cost of ownership
ebook, and we can send that to a sellerand attach it to his opportunity.
They love it.
I had an anecdotal statement that Itell all the time, A BDR attached of
(10:06):
this story, the VP to an opportunity.
The seller said, thank you.
I know that guy.
I have a meeting with him next week.
Now I know what to talk to him about.
And his opportunity's beenstalled for three months.
Yeah.
And guess what?
That opportunity moved forward.
'cause he had the context,
Matt Heinz (10:19):
I love the word influence.
You have the bookings influence, notfull credit, not like this is what's
gonna get all credit for the deal.
But to know that this is a team sport.
And some of that is around how you treatthe data, some of that around the language
you use around different campaigns.
Some of that is just culture, right?
Like what are some of the key elements ofhaving a culture that can embrace the fact
(10:40):
that this might be a little messy, but ifwe can treat it and manage some of the
messy, but also know that it's gonna be abody of work, we're gonna be much better
at creating Pipeline in a complex market.
Yeah.
Lauren Daley (10:51):
Yeah.
And at our company sales already getsthis concept, they're already doing it.
Right?
All of our sales repssell to a buying group.
It's just the nature of our business.
And so it's really been about gettingmarketers to shift their mindset.
And a lot of it comes backto how you target them.
And honestly, we do still have MQLtargets, and Jeremy and I have been
(11:15):
campaigning for that to move awayfrom MQL targets into more of the
opportunity creation with a buying groupand getting marketers to think about
those outcomes from their campaigns.
And Jeremy, do you wanna expand on yourcampaign to opportunity conversion?
Jeremy Schwartz (11:32):
Yeah, absolutely.
I've been talking to marketersabout changing the way they think.
And you know, when we think aboutmarketers today, it's, I generate
MQLs and I get opportunities.
So MQL to opp is usually the mostimportant metric that marketers focus on.
But if you really think about that, well,if I generate a thousand interactions
and they converted a generous 10%, that'sa hundred MQLs and a generous 10% to
(11:52):
opportunity that's 10 opportunities.
But what about the other 900 people?
So maybe some of those people actuallybelong in those 10 opportunities We've
seen when buying groups are present, thatdeal sizes increase by 2, 3, 4 times.
So take some of those people andput 'em in the existing opps.
Maybe there's a bunch of people.
Who, none of them, MQL, butthere's a buying group in there.
(12:14):
We can pull those over.
So instead of operating on a hundredpeople and getting 10 opportunities,
you cannot be operating on 2, 3,400 of those people on the accounts
and generating 15 or 20 opps.
And those are bigger opps.
So by focusing on campaign to opportunityinstead of MQL to opportunity,
you're able to start having marketersthink about it in a different way.
(12:35):
I'm almost having to disguise someof these conversations because
you don't wanna scare marketers.
Yeah.
I actually, when I said I wasdoing a presentation and I said,
well start to think beyond theMQL and the person I was doing the
presentation with said, don't say that.
That'll scare the team.
So I said, okay, we won't say that.
We'll say.
How do you make more thingshappen with your interactions?
(12:55):
Well, if you focus on buying groupsignals, you'll drive more MQLs.
And they were like,okay, I like that idea.
So we're actually like almostdisguising it in a way.
It's silly, but that's how you changethe culture because if you try to
move it too fast, people get scared.
Yeah.
That's something we have seen.
Matt Heinz (13:09):
Yeah, that's really great.
The status quo is powerful.
The status quo is powerful when you'retrying to sell your status quo is powerful
when you're trying to change inside.
And I think MQL is such an, I mean, we'reliterally sitting at the conference.
That years ago when it was SiriusDecisionsSummit, they invented that acronym.
I mean, I'm old enough.
I remember when the waterfall coverscame out and the idea of an SQL and
an MQL was, it was transformative.
(13:31):
And here we are sometimes saying,well, it's a vanity metric.
Well, only if you let it.
Yes.
Like I don't think the MQL's thebe all, end all of what marketing
does, but I think it has value inthe context of like finding the right
person at the right company thatmight be leaning in a little bit.
That doesn't mean they're salesready, it doesn't mean they're
gonna close next quarter.
But I think if you have theright definition and put that
in context, it's still useful.
(13:51):
But again, we're getting backto everyone on the same page.
With that definition, everyoneable to think about that together.
Just a few more minutes with our team hereat Palo Alto, I wanna ask the question
around the data behind all of this,and I believe fundamentally, that data
is becoming one of the most importantthings for B2B marketers to manage.
How do you attempt to corral thedata across all the different
(14:15):
platforms, across all the differentfunctions to tell and activate on a
complete picture of your customers?
Lauren Daley (14:22):
Well we have a great tech stack at Palo Alto Networks, so we use
Demandbase, TechTarget what others?
Jeremy G2, G2.
Jeremy Schwartz (14:32):
Our own website.
Yeah.
So we use first, second,third party signal.
Sure.
And that really helps us tohone in on what's happening.
Around an account, not just in onearea, you know we use Demandbase.
Doesn't matter what your platformis, your intent platform that shows
you that third party intent signal.
We use TechTarget, we use G2 for thatsecond party, and then our own data
(14:52):
and those unknown website visitors.
It's critical data that helpsus to understand the buying
group, our new scoring model.
Is really designed to capture all this.
So we've worked to create this model sothat we can look at an account and say,
well, we have five primary product lines.
What is the buying group score inthis account for each of those?
And through that, we use that foractivation in different platforms.
(15:15):
So we'll use that foractivation in Marketo.
We use that for activation in Demandbase.
We'll use that for webpersonalization, for chat
personalization media personalization.
And it really goes far.
In understanding where thepeople are in their journey.
So activating the account and thenactivating the people based on
where they are in their journeyis really fundamentally important.
(15:35):
I think one of the other things thatwe've done is we've created some really
amazing dashboards and that's allowedus to measure the success and we really
focus on a couple of areas there.
One is we do a lot of comparisonbetween opportunities with no buying
group with one or less contacts.
And you might be surprised,but there's a lot.
Of opportunities that havezero contacts on them.
Mm-hmm.
And then we look at theones that have two or more.
(15:56):
And you know, we look at things likeprogression from omitted into Pipeline
progression to future stage deal size,and closed won in almost every case in
almost every segment for almost everyproduct at all of those numbers are up.
Yeah.
So that, given.
Yes.
You know, when we start to showthat to leadership, they get it.
Yeah.
And that's the datathat we try to compile.
(16:17):
Now our scoring model is pulling allthese pieces of data together and, you
know, gosh, I wish we had a CDP Lauren.
We've been struggling for that,but you can do it without it.
We've pieced it together in ourcloud platform with a custom app
and we bring that signal in andwe come up with this cohort score.
And I think that's been a real win forus because at first when we were thinking
about these four individual signals.
(16:38):
It was confusing and we reallywanted to make it easy for marketers.
Hey, I want to activate on people who havehigh signal and everything, or I wanna
activate on people who have high intent.
And doing that has allowed marketersto really start to understand how
to move people down funnel to reallyfocus on full funnel marketing.
If you drive in thousands of leadsand content syndication, you can't
possibly retarget them, right?
(16:59):
But if you look at the accounts thatare represented there and you say,
well, 20% of them or 10% of them arein market, I'm using generous numbers.
And you surround those,you can afford that.
You know, Lauren says it a lot.
It's free.
You don't need more money to do this.
It's about optimizing yourspend, especially in the
middle and lower funnel areas.
Matt Heinz (17:19):
Last question, I think I want to let you guys go for you, Lauren,
big achievement of all the differentprograms to be on stage tomorrow.
So congratulations on that.
But I'm curious, as you think about thenext 12 plus months, what are the things
that are gonna help you keep that edge?
What are the things you think are gonnabe the short term, near term challenges
to continue to deliver this kind ofrevenue value for the organization?
Lauren Daley (17:42):
For our company it's getting marketers to
understand how to now activate.
So I think Jeremy and Ihave done a great job of.
Helping them understand that this shiftis important and they should care.
And now they're asking us,okay, well how do I do this?
How do I incorporate all this data, thesebuyer signals into my targeting efforts?
(18:03):
How do I, as Jeremy said progressthem down our funnel into Pipeline.
And so that's a big area thatJeremy and I are going to be
focused on in the next 12 months.
And then we were alsotalking earlier about.
The vendor landscape and how Jeremyand I really had to piece this
together with our tech stack.
And we luckily have some really talentedtechnical people on our team that we've
(18:29):
partnered with to make this happen.
But I'm excited to.
See more vendor partnershipscoming to fruition.
So I know like Demandbase and Lean Datahave a partnership and I feel that's
gonna really help propel this forward andallow us to activate more effectively.
Yeah,
Jeremy Schwartz (18:47):
absolutely.
The other thing is some new metricsthat we focus on, and I've already
talked about campaign to opp.
The other two metrics that we really areworking on from a marketing perspective
is we're teaching marketers to focuson targeting the complete buying group.
Instead of just individual personas,we want the majority of representation
of the personas we need for aparticular product or solution.
(19:08):
The other one is buying group coverage.
If we look at our total opportunityuniverse, only about in the last quarter,
only about 12% of our opportunities were.
With buying groups.
So we are setting goals ofincreasing that coverage.
We want to go to 15%, we wanna go to 20%.
Remember all those metricsI talked about are up.
Mm. So given that if we can increase thecoverage, what happens to our bottom line?
(19:30):
Mm-hmm.
If we're generating a lot of what wecall incremental Pipeline, we can do
a lot better if we go increasing thatcoverage of opps with buying groups.
So those three metrics together arereally what we're focused on over
the next 12 months and teachingmarketers how to really focus on
those metrics within their campaigns.
Matt Heinz (19:48):
Love it.
Lauren Daley.
Jeremy Schwartz, Palo Alto Networks.
Congratulations again on the award.
Thank you for being here.
Lauren Daley (19:54):
Thank you.
Jeremy Schwartz (19:54):
Thanks so much.
All right.
Welcome back to the, uh, marketplacefloor here at B2B summit from Forrester.
Very excited to be doing a series of SalesPipeline Radio interviews and episodes
from a series of Forrester analysts,attendees go to market leaders, and
with us here from Palo Alto Networks.
Very excited to have Lauren Daleyand Jeremy Schwartz, the Director of
(00:35):
marketing operations and senior managerof Global Lead Management and Strategy.
Respectively.
Thank you guys for being here.
Jeremy Schwartz (00:41):
Thanks for having us.
Lauren Daley (00:41):
Thank you.
Matt Heinz (00:42):
Yeah, this is exciting.
This is exciting for us to dothis formally here on the floor.
Excited to integrate with differentpeople and just get a lot of
conversations, especially for thoseof you that are award winners here.
So congratulations on your B2B ROI award.
Super excited to see yourteam present that tomorrow and
talk about what they're doing.
Talk a little bit about the programsthat got you on stage tomorrow.
What are the things that you'reworking on, you're so excited about?
Lauren Daley (01:05):
We have been on an 18 month journey to shift from an MQL
focused funnel to buying groups andthinking about how we collect all
the buying group signals together.
Package them up, andsend them over to sales.
Jeremy Schwartz (01:21):
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that you know, thistransformation, I call it a
seismic shift in marketing.
I'm gonna date myself and say thatI was around when pixel tracking was
invented and I thought that was awesome.
And then ABM was invented, and thatwas an awesome way to track accounts.
But now when we think about the buyinggroup and being able to focus on
buying centers within large accounts,that's really transformational.
Matt Heinz (01:41):
Yeah.
The game key's changing, right?
I mean, what worked before doesn'twork today, or I guess maybe what we
thought worked before doesn't worktoday, where we sort of like you
got an individual that we're singlethreading at a large deal and just
hoping that that white paper download.
Is actually gonna turn into something.
We're not really working inthat kind of a world anymore.
How have you guys adjusted to thenew roles of the game and what are
some things that you can point tothat have helped you be successful?
Jeremy Schwartz (02:04):
Yeah, I mean, we think about it this way.
Marketers are hyper-focusedon MQLs and what is an MQL?
It's a guy who filled out a form, maybetwo forms, and that person is usually.
The lowest man on the totem pole,he's usually the researcher.
His boss got a job from hisboss who said, do this research.
And the guy goes out and does it,and that guy becomes an MQL and
we send that guy to sales and wethink that's gonna make a deal.
(02:27):
But that person usuallydoes not have BANT.
That person is the researcher.
So if we start to think about that,maybe he shared an ebook or a solution
brief or a white paper with hisboss and his boss downloaded that.
Well, he's not gonna score up toMQL and in an MQL centric world,
you're ignoring that person in abuying group centric world, you
can think about that as a signal.
(02:48):
Should we send that person to sales?
Now, should we surroundthem with marketing tactics?
But if we start to think that way, and wethink beyond the MQL, because no single
person buys Palo Alto software, right?
Matt Heinz (03:00):
Yeah, and I think that the buying committee and the buying
group, I thought they did a greatjob in the keynote earlier today.
Not just talking about thatinternal group, but talking
about the ecosystem that exists.
'cause there's the people insidethe company that care about that,
that might benefit directly.
But then there's the whole ecosystem ofanalysts, of influencers and other people
that indirectly are going to influencewhether that deal gets done or not.
Lauren Daley (03:20):
Yeah, so we've been talking a lot about known and unknown
visitors and making sure that we'resurrounding everybody and taking those
unknown visitors and identifying theaccounts that are in market and how
do you convert those unknown visitorsinto known visitors, and that's.
Yeah, a shift, a mindset shift that ishappening within our marketing org today
(03:45):
because many of our campaign managersare hyper-focused on known visitors.
Did they fill out my form and did Iget credit for that form fill in MQL?
Jeremy Schwartz (03:54):
Yeah I'll expand on that.
When you think about a typical MQL,and let's use the most valuable
MQL someone request a demo.
So wow.
A demo that's gonna auto MQL everytime and it's gonna go to sales and the
seller's like, wow, that's terrific.
But if you look at that person andyou say, well, he's a networking admin
and there's no other people from thataccount that are interacting with us,
and there's no signal on our website,what does that demo request mean?
(04:16):
Versus that same person where youmight see three or four people.
Returning visitors to the website,unknowns never submit a form
looking at the same product line.
You see these people engagingwith us or people who might
fill out a form and not MQL.
If you start to look at that fullsignal, that guy who's looking at
the demo becomes much more valuablebecause you see a buying group forming.
(04:37):
So being able to discern thatis the first and foremost.
But knowing that.
It's not critical toconvert those unknowns.
It's critical to focus on those unknowns.
It's critical that we areable to be in front of them.
Someone who sees our ad. Is great'cause they're getting a brand touch.
Someone who clicks on the ad even better.
'cause that increases our signal.
(04:58):
And I almost call that compoundinginterest on our marketing signals.
And then finally, if someone submitsa form, that's really fantastic.
But every one of thosepieces is important.
The guy who sees our ad but doesn'tclick on it could be a decision maker.
And that brand touch could bewhat makes him move over the top.
Matt Heinz (05:14):
And some of those
signals are false signals, right?
Someone could attend your lastthree webinars, not because they're
qualified, but because they're bored.
Right, or someone could be interestedin a topic for themselves, but
not be representative of thepriorities of the organization.
Whether it's not a priority or there'snot budget there, how do you separate
at an individual level as well asat the group level, the signals
(05:36):
that matter in a collective way?
Lauren Daley (05:40):
Great question.
And that's where we started tothink about a buying group score.
And we've used Forrester,Gartner as, you know, a,
Jeremy Schwartz (05:49):
sounding board
Lauren Daley (05:50):
Yeah.
Or a structure to thinkabout different cohorts.
Almost like the magic quadrantand looking at the intent as well
as the completeness to start separatingout the groups of people and see if
somebody has very low intent and lowcompleteness of that buying group.
Let's just let brand take care of them.
(06:11):
There's not a lot of point inspending marketing dollars there.
Whereas if we see a buying group formingand there's high intent, low engagement,
that's where our teams can go inand try to drive up that engagement.
If we see that the completenessis there, that's where we can
pass that off to field marketing.
So we're starting to think about buyinggroup scores and really look at intent,
(06:31):
completeness, propensity to convert intoan opportunity and what's the engagement?
Engagement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jeremy Schwartz (06:37):
And, and the difference, this is the other
problem with the MQL world.
The MQL world is focused on ascoring model that is passive.
Someone has to do something.
I come in, I download awhite paper, I get 20 points.
If I don't do anythingelse I never move forward.
Our new scoring model is usingsignal that's active all the
(06:57):
time, and so by looking at.
Fit.
Looking at intent, looking at engagement,and looking at completeness and combining
those in these different cohorts thatLauren mentioned, we're able to activate
accounts and then the people within thoseaccounts, and it's always on the move.
Every day we're looking at theseaccounts and moving people into
different programs based on thesignal, and so I come back to that.
(07:20):
Idea of compoundinginterest on the signal.
If we are putting ads in front of accountsthat are showing signal and people are
engaging with 'em, that signal go up.
Mm-hmm.
And so it's, again, it'sthis rinse and repeat cycle.
And if we focus on that entirebuying group and we look at
people who are engaging and don'tnecessarily wait for them to score
up, we're getting ahead of them.
We're giving people to the sellers.
(07:42):
We're putting people into marketingcampaigns where it makes sense.
We're not trying to surround everybody.
We're surrounding those folksand those accounts that are
showing that high signal.
Matt Heinz (07:52):
We are here live at the Forrester B2B Summit Marketplace
with Lauren Daley and Jeremy Schwartzfrom Palo Alto Networks, winners
of the B2B ROI award for 2025.
Lauren, you mentioned a wordthat gives heart palpitations to
marketers everywhere, and that iscredit, so we're talking about.
Not just single motion programs, right?
This isn't an email campaignthat generated Pipeline.
(08:14):
This isn't a event activation thatgenerates Pipeline to do this well.
You have a lot ofdifferent people involved.
Assigning credit becomes, I think,a kind of an impossible task.
You've got this body of work and it'sa team effort to do all of this, but
how do you figure out, like, how do youthink about attribution at Palo Alto?
Lauren Daley (08:34):
So we're thinking about it from multi-touch perspective.
And we're really looking at where arewe influencing ahead of opportunity
creation and then after, and that'swhat we call bookings influence.
And that's where the buying group issuper important to the bookings influence.
'cause that's where when we canbuild out the buying group, we notice
that they move into our forecastedPipeline at a much higher rate.
(08:57):
But also extending that buyinggroup on those opportunities is
where we're seeing the deal sizegrow, the win rates increase.
And so that's the bookings influenceand that's the Jeremy and I
talk about this all the time.
Our team used to do a lot offuzzy matching for attribution.
And this is direct attribution.
Yeah.
That sales understands and youcan explain it in 30 seconds to a
(09:19):
sales rep and they're gonna get it.
Jeremy Schwartz (09:21):
And it's not only the attribution and believe it.
Yes.
And that's true.
So sellers hate fuzzy match.
They don't believe it.
Hey, we did some marketing activityand that meant something to the
deal, even if it never got to it.
When we do this.
Expansion of buying groups, not onlydoes it create direct influence where
we can say this person was added tothis opportunity, but it provides more
importantly, the context to a seller.
(09:43):
When we can tell a seller that animportant persona took an action and
we weren't waiting for them to MQL,that there's an open opportunity and we
see that a VP of cloud infrastructuredownloaded a total cost of ownership
ebook, and we can send that to a sellerand attach it to his opportunity.
They love it.
I had an anecdotal statement that Itell all the time, A BDR attached of
(10:06):
this story, the VP to an opportunity.
The seller said, thank you.
I know that guy.
I have a meeting with him next week.
Now I know what to talk to him about.
And his opportunity's beenstalled for three months.
Yeah.
And guess what?
That opportunity moved forward.
'cause he had the context,
Matt Heinz (10:19):
I love the word influence.
You have the bookings influence, notfull credit, not like this is what's
gonna get all credit for the deal.
But to know that this is a team sport.
And some of that is around how you treatthe data, some of that around the language
you use around different campaigns.
Some of that is just culture, right?
Like what are some of the key elements ofhaving a culture that can embrace the fact
(10:40):
that this might be a little messy, but ifwe can treat it and manage some of the
messy, but also know that it's gonna be abody of work, we're gonna be much better
at creating Pipeline in a complex market.
Yeah.
Lauren Daley (10:51):
Yeah.
And at our company sales already getsthis concept, they're already doing it.
Right?
All of our sales repssell to a buying group.
It's just the nature of our business.
And so it's really been about gettingmarketers to shift their mindset.
And a lot of it comes backto how you target them.
And honestly, we do still have MQLtargets, and Jeremy and I have been
(11:15):
campaigning for that to move awayfrom MQL targets into more of the
opportunity creation with a buying groupand getting marketers to think about
those outcomes from their campaigns.
And Jeremy, do you wanna expand on yourcampaign to opportunity conversion?
Jeremy Schwartz (11:32):
Yeah, absolutely.
I've been talking to marketersabout changing the way they think.
And you know, when we think aboutmarketers today, it's, I generate
MQLs and I get opportunities.
So MQL to opp is usually the mostimportant metric that marketers focus on.
But if you really think about that, well,if I generate a thousand interactions
and they converted a generous 10%, that'sa hundred MQLs and a generous 10% to
(11:52):
opportunity that's 10 opportunities.
But what about the other 900 people?
So maybe some of those people actuallybelong in those 10 opportunities We've
seen when buying groups are present, thatdeal sizes increase by 2, 3, 4 times.
So take some of those people andput 'em in the existing opps.
Maybe there's a bunch of people.
Who, none of them, MQL, butthere's a buying group in there.
(12:14):
We can pull those over.
So instead of operating on a hundredpeople and getting 10 opportunities,
you cannot be operating on 2, 3,400 of those people on the accounts
and generating 15 or 20 opps.
And those are bigger opps.
So by focusing on campaign to opportunityinstead of MQL to opportunity,
you're able to start having marketersthink about it in a different way.
(12:35):
I'm almost having to disguise someof these conversations because
you don't wanna scare marketers.
Yeah.
I actually, when I said I wasdoing a presentation and I said,
well start to think beyond theMQL and the person I was doing the
presentation with said, don't say that.
That'll scare the team.
So I said, okay, we won't say that.
We'll say.
How do you make more thingshappen with your interactions?
(12:55):
Well, if you focus on buying groupsignals, you'll drive more MQLs.
And they were like,okay, I like that idea.
So we're actually like almostdisguising it in a way.
It's silly, but that's how you changethe culture because if you try to
move it too fast, people get scared.
Yeah.
That's something we have seen.
Matt Heinz (13:09):
Yeah, that's really great.
The status quo is powerful.
The status quo is powerful when you'retrying to sell your status quo is powerful
when you're trying to change inside.
And I think MQL is such an, I mean, we'reliterally sitting at the conference.
That years ago when it was SiriusDecisionsSummit, they invented that acronym.
I mean, I'm old enough.
I remember when the waterfall coverscame out and the idea of an SQL and
an MQL was, it was transformative.
(13:31):
And here we are sometimes saying,well, it's a vanity metric.
Well, only if you let it.
Yes.
Like I don't think the MQL's thebe all, end all of what marketing
does, but I think it has value inthe context of like finding the right
person at the right company thatmight be leaning in a little bit.
That doesn't mean they're salesready, it doesn't mean they're
gonna close next quarter.
But I think if you have theright definition and put that
in context, it's still useful.
(13:51):
But again, we're getting backto everyone on the same page.
With that definition, everyoneable to think about that together.
Just a few more minutes with our team hereat Palo Alto, I wanna ask the question
around the data behind all of this,and I believe fundamentally, that data
is becoming one of the most importantthings for B2B marketers to manage.
How do you attempt to corral thedata across all the different
(14:15):
platforms, across all the differentfunctions to tell and activate on a
complete picture of your customers?
Lauren Daley (14:22):
Well we have a great tech stack at Palo Alto Networks, so we use
Demandbase, TechTarget what others?
Jeremy G2, G2.
Jeremy Schwartz (14:32):
Our own website.
Yeah.
So we use first, second,third party signal.
Sure.
And that really helps us tohone in on what's happening.
Around an account, not just in onearea, you know we use Demandbase.
Doesn't matter what your platformis, your intent platform that shows
you that third party intent signal.
We use TechTarget, we use G2 for thatsecond party, and then our own data
(14:52):
and those unknown website visitors.
It's critical data that helpsus to understand the buying
group, our new scoring model.
Is really designed to capture all this.
So we've worked to create this model sothat we can look at an account and say,
well, we have five primary product lines.
What is the buying group score inthis account for each of those?
And through that, we use that foractivation in different platforms.
(15:15):
So we'll use that foractivation in Marketo.
We use that for activation in Demandbase.
We'll use that for webpersonalization, for chat
personalization media personalization.
And it really goes far.
In understanding where thepeople are in their journey.
So activating the account and thenactivating the people based on
where they are in their journeyis really fundamentally important.
(15:35):
I think one of the other things thatwe've done is we've created some really
amazing dashboards and that's allowedus to measure the success and we really
focus on a couple of areas there.
One is we do a lot of comparisonbetween opportunities with no buying
group with one or less contacts.
And you might be surprised,but there's a lot.
Of opportunities that havezero contacts on them.
Mm-hmm.
And then we look at theones that have two or more.
(15:56):
And you know, we look at things likeprogression from omitted into Pipeline
progression to future stage deal size,and closed won in almost every case in
almost every segment for almost everyproduct at all of those numbers are up.
Yeah.
So that, given.
Yes.
You know, when we start to showthat to leadership, they get it.
Yeah.
And that's the datathat we try to compile.
(16:17):
Now our scoring model is pulling allthese pieces of data together and, you
know, gosh, I wish we had a CDP Lauren.
We've been struggling for that,but you can do it without it.
We've pieced it together in ourcloud platform with a custom app
and we bring that signal in andwe come up with this cohort score.
And I think that's been a real win forus because at first when we were thinking
about these four individual signals.
(16:38):
It was confusing and we reallywanted to make it easy for marketers.
Hey, I want to activate on people who havehigh signal and everything, or I wanna
activate on people who have high intent.
And doing that has allowed marketersto really start to understand how
to move people down funnel to reallyfocus on full funnel marketing.
If you drive in thousands of leadsand content syndication, you can't
possibly retarget them, right?
(16:59):
But if you look at the accounts thatare represented there and you say,
well, 20% of them or 10% of them arein market, I'm using generous numbers.
And you surround those,you can afford that.
You know, Lauren says it a lot.
It's free.
You don't need more money to do this.
It's about optimizing yourspend, especially in the
middle and lower funnel areas.
Matt Heinz (17:19):
Last question, I think I want to let you guys go for you, Lauren,
big achievement of all the differentprograms to be on stage tomorrow.
So congratulations on that.
But I'm curious, as you think about thenext 12 plus months, what are the things
that are gonna help you keep that edge?
What are the things you think are gonnabe the short term, near term challenges
to continue to deliver this kind ofrevenue value for the organization?
Lauren Daley (17:42):
For our company it's getting marketers to
understand how to now activate.
So I think Jeremy and Ihave done a great job of.
Helping them understand that this shiftis important and they should care.
And now they're asking us,okay, well how do I do this?
How do I incorporate all this data, thesebuyer signals into my targeting efforts?
(18:03):
How do I, as Jeremy said progressthem down our funnel into Pipeline.
And so that's a big area thatJeremy and I are going to be
focused on in the next 12 months.
And then we were alsotalking earlier about.
The vendor landscape and how Jeremyand I really had to piece this
together with our tech stack.
And we luckily have some really talentedtechnical people on our team that we've
(18:29):
partnered with to make this happen.
But I'm excited to.
See more vendor partnershipscoming to fruition.
So I know like Demandbase and Lean Datahave a partnership and I feel that's
gonna really help propel this forward andallow us to activate more effectively.
Yeah,
Jeremy Schwartz (18:47):
absolutely.
The other thing is some new metricsthat we focus on, and I've already
talked about campaign to opp.
The other two metrics that we really areworking on from a marketing perspective
is we're teaching marketers to focuson targeting the complete buying group.
Instead of just individual personas,we want the majority of representation
of the personas we need for aparticular product or solution.
(19:08):
The other one is buying group coverage.
If we look at our total opportunityuniverse, only about in the last quarter,
only about 12% of our opportunities were.
With buying groups.
So we are setting goals ofincreasing that coverage.
We want to go to 15%, we wanna go to 20%.
Remember all those metricsI talked about are up.
Mm. So given that if we can increase thecoverage, what happens to our bottom line?
(19:30):
Mm-hmm.
If we're generating a lot of what wecall incremental Pipeline, we can do
a lot better if we go increasing thatcoverage of opps with buying groups.
So those three metrics together arereally what we're focused on over
the next 12 months and teachingmarketers how to really focus on
those metrics within their campaigns.
Matt Heinz (19:48):
Love it.
Lauren Daley.
Jeremy Schwartz, Palo Alto Networks.
Congratulations again on the award.
Thank you for being here.
Lauren Daley (19:54):
Thank you.
Jeremy Schwartz (19:54):
Thanks so much.
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