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  • Rising/Falling Markets: Category Growth and Share of Search | Episodes 8 - B2B Effectiveness
    2026/09/03

    For years, LastPass dominated the password manager category. Then it suffered a string of serious data breaches, trust collapsed, and competitors like Bitwarden absorbed the fallout. Bitwarden's marketing team could be forgiven for thinking their campaigns did that. Almost none of it was marketing.

    In Episode 8, Liam Moroney brings real branded-search data to back up an argument Dale W. Harrison has been building for weeks: marketing very rarely grows a business — the category does. Using a live three-slide case study of the password manager category (plus a second, more mature category for contrast), Liam and Dale walk through how to actually read share of branded search, why market share barely moves except after one of two specific shocks, and why AI is now eating entire software categories the same way email once ate the fax machine.

    Timestamps

    0:00 Cold open: marketing doesn't grow the business, markets do

    0:15 Welcome back (Dale's in the UK this week)

    1:04 Setting up today's topic: rising and falling markets

    2:22 Why 99.99% of growth comes from riding the category, not beating competitors

    3:54 The disruption myth, and why tech clings to it

    5:04 Disruption happens in engineering, not marketing

    6:22 Bitcoin, NFTs, and fads that look like marketing genius

    7:57 Welcome to the life of a fax machine salesman, circa 2005

    9:20 Marketing automation platforms as a case study

    11:06 Categories that self-disrupt through over-promising

    12:37 Why intent data and de-anonymization providers are collapsing

    15:16 How AI is uniquely positioned to eat interactive demo software

    16:14 Liam's data: a tale of three slides (the password manager category)

    17:32 Bitwarden vs. LastPass: the branded search view

    19:17 What “share of branded search” actually measures

    20:50 Why campaign changes show up in the data almost instantly

    22:59 The LastPass data breach, and what it cost them

    25:11 Defining “category”: Tide detergent vs. Tide Pods on TikTok

    31:36 Dale's own hypergrowth story: 100x growth, same market share order

    32:50 The collective view: how the category grew even as LastPass fell

    39:09 A mature category case study: content management platforms

    41:03 What an accelerating category decline looks like

    43:40 Rolodexes, CRMs, and where declining categories' customers go

    47:23 Optimizely's rebrand, and repositioning into an adjacent category

    47:47 Why categories almost never fully vanish

    57:50 The tool behind today's data, and where to learn more

    Key Topics Discussed

    - Why 99.99% of business growth comes from riding a category, not beating competitors

    - The disruption myth: why tech assumes a great product creates its own momentum

    - Fads vs. real category shifts: Bitcoin, NFTs, and fax machines

    - Why AI is uniquely positioned to eat categories like interactive demo software

    - How to actually read share of branded search as a proxy for market share

    - The LastPass/Bitwarden case study: a real market-share transfer, and why it wasn't about marketing skill

    - Why market share is remarkably sticky, and the two things that actually move it

    - What a declining category looks like from the inside, using a mature CMP category example

    Notable Quotes

    “Marketers live in this fantasy world where they think it's their marketing that's growing the business.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “You're not growing the category. This is another one of these silly myths that people love to blather on about.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “It is these category-level and market-level dynamics that are really driving things — the fish are jumping out of the water into the boat by themselves.” — Dale W. Harrison

    Resources & Mentions

    - Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research

    - Bitwarden, LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane, and NordPass branded search data

    - Optimizely, AEM, Contentful, and Sitecore (content management platform category)

    - Kantar market research

    - Liam Moroney's category-tracking tool (Storybook)

    Next Episode

    The show is taking a short break for the Fourth of July and the following week while Dale's still travelling in Europe — back with a new episode on the 18th.

    Subscribe & Follow

    Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.

    #B2BMarketing #BrandMarketing #MarketingStrategy #MarketingAnalytics

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    1 時間
  • A Better Lead-Scoring System Can Create Better Targeting | Episode 7 - B2B Effectiveness
    2026/08/27

    Dale W. Harrison likes to run a poll: imagine a company about to sign a $5 million annual contract, renewed every year for five years. Who's on the buying committee? Most people guess the CFO, maybe the CEO. Then he reveals the deal: it's Google's contract for toilet paper in the employee restrooms. Nobody's CFO is in that meeting.

    In Episode 7, Liam Moroney and Dale W. Harrison flip the usual playbook: can better lead scoring actually define better targeting, instead of the other way around? Dale walks through why lookalike lists built from your closed-won accounts alone are structurally guaranteed to fail, why “buying groups” are an 80-year-old idea being resold as something new, and why the real de-anonymization numbers are nowhere near what most targeting strategy assumes.

    Timestamps

    0:00 Cold open: massively overshooting who will buy

    0:20 Welcome back, and teasing about the solo episode

    1:42 Can better lead scoring define better targeting?

    5:20 The feedback loop model, explained

    10:56 Buying committees, and the summer intern who did the real work

    15:21 The 90% de-anonymization era, and what changed

    23:31 What Meta's lookalike algorithm actually does

    25:07 The vowels-in-the-name story, revisited

    29:12 The stock-picking sales pitch analogy

    31:25 Glengarry Glen Ross, and the problem with intent

    32:47 The $5 million toilet paper deal

    35:38 Buying groups: a 1965 Harvard Business Review idea, not a new one

    39:48 Why buying committees are confidential, and the HR risk of naming names

    41:21 The real de-anonymization numbers

    45:18 Reverse-engineering targeting from your own closed-won and closed-lost data

    51:09 How to verify it's actually working: MQL-to-SQL rate

    52:10 The slot machine analogy

    54:21 Home runs vs. the Tour de France: buyer-seller fit in sports

    56:47 The roulette wheel: data is not information

    59:35 Seventh-grade math, and why the models aren't complicated

    1:02:17 Teaser: rising and falling markets, and categories being eaten by AI

    Key Topics Discussed

    - Why lead scoring data should define targeting, not just measure it after the fact

    - How lookalike-list algorithms actually work, and why they keep pointing at your losses too

    - Why “buying groups” are an 80-year-old idea, not a new market shift

    - Why buying committees are treated as confidential, and what happens if you name one publicly

    - The real de-anonymization numbers: ~65% at the account level, 5–7% for named individuals

    - Working backwards from your own closed-won and closed-lost history instead of guessing

    - How to verify a scoring improvement is real: tracking MQL-to-SQL acceptance rate

    - Why data is not information, illustrated with a roulette wheel

    Notable Quotes

    “The perfect lookalike list would be for us to go out and find more prospects that also have vowels in their name.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “Data is not information. Data is the bucket that information comes in.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “If you have two slot machines, and one pays off one out of a hundred pulls, and one pays off one out of fifty pulls, which one do you want to put your money in?” — Dale W. Harrison

    Resources & Mentions

    - Gartner B2B sales funnel benchmark data

    - Harvard Business Review, 1965 article on buying committees

    - 6sense and Bombora (intent data providers)

    - Ocean.io (lookalike list provider)

    Next Episode

    Next week, Dale and Liam get into rising and falling markets — why a category being quietly “eaten alive” can mean there's no one left in-market at all, no matter how good your targeting is.

    Subscribe & Follow

    Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.

    #B2BMarketing #DemandGeneration #LeadScoring #ABM #MarketingAnalytics

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    1 時間 7 分
  • The Next-Gen MQL | Episode 6 - B2B Effectiveness
    2026/08/20

    Take every account your company has ever closed-won, upload the list to an ad platform, and ask it to find more companies that look just like them. Here's the uncomfortable part: every one of those accounts almost certainly has vowels in its name too. That's the opening argument in this solo episode, where Dale W. Harrison lays out why most B2B lookalike modelling, lead scoring, and “intent data” never actually worked — and introduces the framework The Insight Collective is calling the NextGen MQL.

    With co-host Liam Moroney away this week, Dale walks through the real original sin of lead scoring (mistaking a pattern for a signal), why “data is not information,” and a three-part model — category expansion, buyer-seller fit, and firmographic customer lifetime value — that scores leads on probability and expectation value instead of invented point totals.

    Timestamps

    0:00 Cold open: marketing is a slot machine, not a vending machine

    0:14 Welcome to a solo episode

    1:15 Why the MQL still matters

    1:45 The flat tyre analogy, again

    2:04 The real question: what's worth a sales investment

    6:47 The ABM buying-committee fantasy

    9:09 The vowels-in-the-name story

    9:52 Lead scoring's original sin: subjective, made-up numbers

    13:24 Where HubSpot's scoring framework gets it half right

    17:15 In an ideal world, what should an MQL mean?

    18:20 Buyer fit vs. seller fit

    20:58 Customer value fit

    26:14 The blood test analogy: data isn't information

    27:12 What can we actually know: broad ICP fit

    29:29 Why in-market fit is nearly impossible to detect

    32:59 Marketing is poker, not chess

    39:47 The 95-5 rule, and when it breaks

    41:17 The three-part NextGen MQL model

    46:25 Vector modelling and buyer-seller fit

    50:35 Firmographic CLTV

    52:33 Expectation value scoring

    55:55 Glass box vs. black box models

    58:11 Where to learn more

    Key Topics Discussed

    - Why the MQL is a structural necessity, not a fad, in any business with a separate sales function

    - The vowels-in-the-name story: why a pattern in your closed-won accounts can be meaningless

    - Lead scoring's original sin: treating engagement data as if it were intent

    - Why “data is not information,” illustrated with a blood test analogy

    - Buyer fit, seller fit, and why sales teams are better suited to some accounts than others

    - Customer value fit: scoring for lifetime value, not just the next closed-won deal

    - Why marketing is poker, not chess — thinking in bets instead of certainties

    - The 95-5 rule, and why it breaks down in fast-growing categories

    - The three-part NextGen MQL model: category expansion, buyer-seller fit, and firmographic CLTV

    - Expectation value scoring: replacing invented point totals with real probability and value

    - Why a “glass box” model beats a black-box AI score every time

    Notable Quotes

    “The most reliable predictor of what you'll find if you look at closed-won accounts is that every one of these accounts has vowels in their name.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “Data is not information. Data is the bucket that information comes in.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “You're playing poker. Decisions have to be made with incomplete information, hidden variables, and luck. A good decision can lose, and a bad decision can win.” — Dale W. Harrison

    Resources & Mentions

    - Gartner B2B sales funnel benchmark data

    - Forrester and BCG B2B benchmark data

    - HubSpot lead scoring framework

    - 6sense and Bombora (intent data providers)

    - The Insight Collective's NextGen MQL framework

    Where to Learn More

    If you'd like a copy of the presentation deck, want early access to the NextGen MQL, or have any questions, reach out to Dale W. Harrison directly — by email or by DM on LinkedIn.

    Subscribe & Follow

    Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.

    #B2BMarketing #DemandGeneration #LeadScoring #MQL #MarketingAnalytics #ABM

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    1 時間
  • "The ICP" is Not Necessarily Your ICP | Episode 5 - B2B Effectiveness
    2026/08/13

    Run the numbers on almost any B2B company's accounts, and a strange pattern shows up: the top 10% of your top 20% highest-revenue accounts tend to be your absolute lowest-profit accounts. They cost a fortune to land, a fortune to service, and know they can make unreasonable demands you can't refuse.

    In Episode 5, Liam Moroney and Dale W. Harrison take on Ideal Customer Profile — why most B2B “dream account” lists are built on a B2C-shaped mistake, why buyer-seller fit has to work in both directions, and why you can't just hire your way into a new market. Dale also lays out the layered framework the series has been building toward: broad ICP fit, in-market fit, consideration set eligibility, conditional win probability, and CLTV.

    Timestamps

    0:00 Cold open: your best accounts might be your worst

    0:18 Welcome back

    0:35 Setting up today's topic: ICP

    1:19 The marketing guru who couldn't define ICP

    2:12 What ICP means in B2C vs. B2B

    3:37 Your “dream accounts” list, and the Swedish supermodel problem

    5:24 Why B2B buyers prefer buying from other large companies

    5:56 HubSpot vs. Salesforce, and the Fortune 1000 problem

    12:35 Defining buyer-seller fit

    13:20 Why sales teams develop lopsided skills (“leg day, arm day”)

    16:22 The rep who could only sell to banks

    17:12 The distributor rep who only sold refrigerators

    19:53 Can you just hire your way into a new market?

    21:22 The Salesforce 15-person team story

    26:19 The sober reality, and how to be more optimistic about it

    33:29 Brand marketing's slow payoff vs. today's performance needs

    40:37 Consideration set eligibility and conditional win probability

    41:34 The Apollo moon suit story

    44:14 Highest CLTV expectation value

    51:08 Market orientation, and grounding leadership in reality

    55:22 How static is an ICP, really?

    57:14 Why relative market share barely changes over time

    Key Topics Discussed

    - Why B2C-style ICP thinking breaks down in B2B

    - The “dream accounts” problem: wanting a buyer isn't the same as being wanted back

    - Why the Fortune 1000 almost never buys from the smaller player, no matter the product

    - Buyer-seller fit: why sales teams get good at selling to some accounts and bad at others

    - Why hiring experienced enterprise sellers rarely fixes a buyer-seller fit problem on its own

    - The Apollo moon suit story: when the best product and the best seller are two different companies

    - The five-layer framework: ICP fit, in-market fit, consideration set eligibility, conditional win probability, and CLTV

    - Why relative market share is remarkably stable, even in fast-growing categories

    Notable Quotes

    “Your dream accounts are the accounts you're dreaming of selling to, but it's not necessarily the accounts that are interested in buying from you.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “For most sales teams, it's like every day is leg day, or every day is arm day at the gym. And you end up with some pretty distorted-looking physiques as a result.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “It has to be a buyer who is likely to buy from someone who looks like you, and it has to be a buyer that your sales organisation has a reasonably good chance of selling to.” — Dale W. Harrison

    Resources & Mentions

    - Gartner and Boston Consulting Group B2B benchmark data

    - Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research

    - HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, and Pipedrive market share data

    Next Episode

    Next week, Dale goes solo to get into the messy technical details of what building this kind of scoring system actually looks like in practice.

    Subscribe & Follow

    Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.

    #B2BMarketing #DemandGeneration #ICP #MarketingStrategy #MarketingAnalytics

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    1 時間 1 分
  • Rising Markets Break the 95:5 Rule | Episode 4 - B2B Effectiveness
    2026/08/06

    The 95-5 rule is one of B2B marketing's favourite soundbites: at any given moment, only 5% of your market is in-market to buy. It gets cited as settled fact in board meetings and budget arguments — and in most fast-growing B2B tech categories, it's wrong by a factor of five or more.

    In Episode 4, Dale W. Harrison and Liam Moroney unpack where the 95-5 rule actually comes from, the hidden assumption almost nobody repeating it seems to know about, and why growing or shrinking markets break it completely. Dale also takes aim at the famous Binet and Field 50-50 brand/performance split, explains why roughly 70% of billion-dollar tech companies never ran a single brand ad, and walks through exactly when brand marketing does and doesn't earn its keep.

    Timestamps

    0:00 Cold open: most tech companies grow because the category grows

    0:13 Welcome back

    0:50 Setting up today's topic: the 95-5 rule

    2:29 What actually is a “category”?

    4:10 The jobs-to-be-done model

    5:06 What the 95-5 rule actually says

    6:23 Andrew Ehrenberg's NBD model of purchase frequency

    7:39 The hidden assumption: stationary markets only

    14:50 The iPod launch: 100% first-time buyers

    17:39 The CRM market: doubling in size, and what that implies

    20:55 Liam's brand-tracking data: declining search volume

    24:21 Speaking of math: walking through the numbers

    27:06 The Binet and Field research, and its selection bias problem

    30:46 70% of billion-dollar tech companies never ran a brand ad

    32:18 Supermarket brands that have never advertised

    36:00 “You don't need to bait the hook if the fish are jumping in the boat”

    41:23 Home exterminators: brand marketing done right

    42:19 DUI attorneys: the most precisely targeted marketing on earth

    44:34 The physics analogy: F = ma, and gravity on the Moon vs. Earth

    55:05 Wrapping up

    Key Topics Discussed

    - What actually defines a “category,” and why so many marketers get it wrong

    - Where the 95-5 rule comes from: Andrew Ehrenberg's NBD model of purchase frequency

    - The hidden assumption behind the rule: it only holds in stationary markets

    - Why growing markets can push the in-market rate from 5% to 25% or more

    - The selection bias hiding inside the famous Binet and Field brand/performance split

    - Why 60–80% of supermarket brands have never run a single ad

    - Exterminators vs. DUI attorneys: when brand marketing actually earns its keep

    - Why the 95-5 rule is a baseline, not a universal law — and what that means for lead scoring

    Notable Quotes

    “You don't need to bait the hook if the fish are jumping out of the water directly into the boat.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “Gravity on Earth is completely different than gravity on the Moon, which is completely different than gravity on Jupiter. That doesn't mean physics doesn't exist.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “They want to expose themselves to potential buyers as close to the moment they get arrested as possible, so that they'll hopefully be remembered when they get to jail.” — Dale W. Harrison

    Resources & Mentions

    - Andrew Ehrenberg's NBD model of purchase frequency

    - Les Binet and Peter Field's brand/performance research

    - CRM market growth data (Salesforce)

    Next Episode

    Dale and Liam are opening up the floor: if there's a topic related to MQLs, lead scoring, or getting leads into the hands of sales that you'd like covered, drop it in the comments — it'll show up in a future episode.

    Subscribe & Follow

    Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.

    #B2BMarketing #DemandGeneration #BrandMarketing #MarketingStrategy #MarketingAnalytics

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    57 分
  • Your Lead Scoring is Completely Broken! | Episode 3 - B2B Effectiveness
    2026/07/30

    Imagine a medical test that tells a patient they have cancer, but is wrong 19 times out of 20. No regulator would ever allow it near a hospital. Yet for roughly twenty years, that's been about the accuracy of the average B2B lead scoring system — long-running Gartner benchmark data puts MQL acceptance rates by sales at around 5–6%.

    In Episode 3, Dale W. Harrison and Liam Moroney dig into why every proposed fix for the MQL — MQAs, AI-qualified leads, more signals, better points — keeps the exact same broken scoring math in place. Dale explains why data is not information, why patterns that show up equally in your wins and your losses tell you nothing, and why any real qualification system has to measurably beat a coin flip — something most lead scoring never actually does.

    Timestamps

    0:00 Cold open: the failed system, guaranteed

    0:30 Welcome back

    0:52 Why this topic is personal for Dale

    3:31 The Gartner benchmark: 5-6% MQL acceptance rate

    4:39 The false positive problem, explained

    5:24 The cancer test analogy

    12:20 Data is not information

    17:53 Liam pushes back: doesn't more signal data help?

    21:49 The false negative problem

    23:06 Measuring both false positives and false negatives

    24:14 SQOs, and the click monkeys who ruin every model

    27:03 Dark social: invisible engagement

    32:48 The Harry Potter sorting hat problem

    33:44 Thinking in bets, revisited

    35:35 MEDDIC, BANT, and why checklists don't help

    35:51 The buyer is scoring you too

    37:47 The parallel universe you can't see

    40:11 Why identical products can have wildly different close rates

    44:24 Liam's camera store story

    47:03 Teaser: how growing markets break the 95-5 rule

    Key Topics Discussed

    - Why every proposed MQL replacement keeps the same broken points-based math

    - The cancer test analogy: why a 5% accuracy rate would never pass regulatory approval

    - Why data is not information, and why more signals make the problem worse, not better

    - Why a pattern has to differ between closed-won and closed-lost to mean anything

    - Measuring false negatives as well as false positives, and the “click monkey” problem

    - Dark social: why the best buyers sometimes show zero digital engagement

    - Why MEDDIC and BANT don't solve the qualification problem on their own

    - The buyer is scoring the vendor too — and most of their signals are invisible to you

    - Why identical products can have wildly different close rates depending on who's selling them

    Notable Quotes

    “No matter how you choose your signals, how you weight the signals, or how you gather up the signals, the moment you start adding up your data points, you have a fundamentally failed system.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “Data is not information. Data is the bucket that information came in.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “Just because there's something that characterises all of the closed-won deals doesn't mean that same thing doesn't also characterise all the closed-lost deals.” — Dale W. Harrison

    Resources & Mentions

    - Gartner B2B sales funnel benchmark data

    - MEDDIC and BANT sales qualification frameworks

    - Mark Ritson (marketing commentator and academic)

    Next Episode

    In Episode 4, Dale and Liam take a detour that turns out to matter more than it sounds: how rising and falling markets break the well-known 95-5 rule — not by a little, but massively.

    Subscribe & Follow

    Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.

    #B2BMarketing #DemandGeneration #LeadScoring #MQL #MarketingAnalytics

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    50 分
  • What Would a New MQL Have to Look Like? | Episode 2 - B2B Effectiveness
    2026/07/23

    A B2B SaaS company once found that accounts on Amazon FBA generated ten to twenty times more lifetime value than accounts on Etsy or eBay — even though the sales effort to close either one was statistically identical. If your lead qualification can't tell the difference between those two prospects, what exactly is it qualifying them for?

    In Episode 2, Liam Moroney and Dale W. Harrison move from last episode's argument — the MQL is a structural necessity, not a fad — into the harder practical question: what would a good MQL actually need to know? Dale lays out five distinct things a useful qualification should answer (broad ICP fit, in-market fit, consideration set eligibility, conditional win probability, and lifetime value fit), explains why checklist frameworks like MEDDIC don't solve the problem, and makes the case for thinking in bets instead of chasing false certainty.

    Timestamps

    0:00 Cold open: what a good MQL should tell you

    0:24 Welcome back (and a smart home tangent)

    0:58 Recap: last week's argument that the MQL isn't dead

    2:04 Why marketing can never know for certain

    4:33 Thinking in Bets: the book behind the mental model

    16:18 Why the MQL gets so politically corrupted internally

    18:49 The poker analogy: raise, fold, or walk away

    21:03 Why hand raisers are a better bet, not a sure one

    26:28 Thinking in bets, applied to poker itself

    31:31 Broad ICP fit vs. in-market fit

    31:52 The fantasy of intent data, and the 95-5 rule

    32:29 Why MEDDIC-style checklists don't solve this

    34:55 Hand raisers, revisited

    41:56 HubSpot vs. Salesforce: the Fortune 1000 problem

    43:15 Conditional win probability

    46:13 Lifetime value fit

    47:01 The Amazon FBA vs. Etsy story

    49:07 The five things a useful qualification needs to know

    1:00:27 Why tweaking HubSpot's scoring system won't fix it

    1:00:47 Teaser: Episode 3, why your lead scoring is broken

    Key Topics Discussed

    - Why a good MQL is a bet, not a certainty

    - The five things a useful qualification needs to answer: broad ICP fit, in-market fit, consideration set eligibility, conditional win probability, and lifetime value fit

    - Why checklist frameworks like MEDDIC don't solve the qualification problem

    - The procurement bid-padding story: why every box can be ticked and the deal still isn't real

    - Why hand raisers are a better bet than cold outbound, but still not a sure thing

    - The HubSpot vs. Salesforce Fortune 1000 example, and why market fit matters

    - The Amazon FBA vs. Etsy lifetime value story

    - Thinking in bets: why a good decision can still lose, and a bad decision can still win

    Notable Quotes

    “A good MQL should tell you what's the likelihood of taking this name and putting it into a sales process and getting a good return on that investment.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “A good decision can still lose, and a bad decision can still win.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “Just because you're a hand raiser doesn't mean there is a single iota of actual buying intent there.” — Dale W. Harrison

    Resources & Mentions

    - Thinking in Bets (book)

    - MEDDIC sales qualification framework

    - Gartner B2B sales funnel benchmark data

    - HubSpot and Salesforce market share data

    Next Episode

    In Episode 3, Dale and Liam dig into why your lead scoring is broken — the specific things that are guaranteed not to work, and what a better approach actually looks like.

    Subscribe & Follow

    Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.

    #B2BMarketing #DemandGeneration #LeadScoring #MQL #MarketingAnalytics

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    1 時間 1 分
  • The MQL is NOT Dead! | Episode 1 - B2B Effectiveness
    2026/07/16

    “The MQL is dead” has been a B2B marketing clickbait headline for a decade. This episode makes the contrarian, evidence-based case that it never actually died — it just never worked the way we scored it.

    Liam Moroney sits down with data-driven marketing strategist Dale W. Harrison to unpack why the entire industry conflated engagement data with intent data, the infamous story of a RevOps team who proved their lead scoring model performed no better than a random number generator, and why more data almost never means more information. They close with a reframe: MQL scoring isn't about certainty — it's about improving your odds.

    Timestamps

    0:00 Cold open: “The sales team needs leads”

    0:36 Welcome back after a year off

    1:04 Is the MQL dead, or just pining for the fjords?

    3:55 A brief history of the MQL, from Glengarry Glen Ross to SiriusDecisions

    6:55 The Zoho CRM random-number-generator story

    8:12 The “original sin”: engagement data isn't intent data

    9:38 The ebook-download absurdity

    13:09 What Gartner's benchmark data actually shows

    16:10 Why sales just wants better odds, not certainty

    17:18 The lead-nurturing “goose” and the ice-cream-stand fallacy

    24:16 HubSpot vs. Salesforce: why market share changes everything

    27:57 The ABM challenge: should marketing target accounts, not leads?

    34:08 Data isn't information: the roulette-wheel test

    38:55 Why hand-raisers aren't the golden ticket

    39:35 Brand vs. performance marketing and the “consideration set”

    47:38 Thinking in bets: the poker-hand analogy

    56:31 Wrapping up part one

    58:04 So… is the MQL dead? (No.)

    58:56 What's coming in Episode 2

    1:03:05 Sign off

    Key Topics Discussed

    - Why the “MQL is dead” narrative misses the actual structural need it serves

    - A brief history of the MQL, from the SiriusDecisions demand waterfall to today

    - The Zoho CRM story: when a random number generator scored leads as well as a real model

    - The “original sin” of lead scoring: treating engagement data as if it were intent data

    - Why more data doesn't automatically mean more information

    - What Gartner's long-term B2B sales funnel benchmarks actually show

    - The HubSpot vs. Salesforce market-share example, and why “buyer-seller fit” matters

    - Why Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs) repeat the same scoring flaw at a bigger scale

    - Brand vs. performance marketing, and getting into the buyer's “consideration set”

    - “Thinking in bets”: reframing lead scoring as a probability game, not a certainty machine

    Notable Quotes

    “The problem is in the queue. What are we doing to qualify the lead?” — Dale W. Harrison

    “Data is a bucket — an empty bucket that may or may not contain some amount of information.” — Dale W. Harrison

    “Just because you have a flat tyre doesn't mean it's time to haul the car to the junkyard. You just fix the tyre.” — Dale W. Harrison

    Resources & Mentions

    - Glengarry Glen Ross (film)

    - SiriusDecisions demand waterfall model

    - Forrester Research

    - Gartner B2B sales funnel benchmark data

    - HubSpot and Salesforce market share data

    - Zoho CRM RevOps lead-scoring anecdote

    - Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (mental availability research)

    Next Episode

    In Episode 2, Dale and Liam dig into which factors can realistically move the odds of a lead converting — and which ones the data simply can't tell us, no matter how much of it we collect.

    Subscribe & Follow

    Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.

    #B2BMarketing #DemandGeneration #RevOps #MQL #MarketingAnalytics #LeadScoring

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