Fixing the Pipeline Problem: How Marketing Can Unlock Growth

In this upcoming episode, we’ll explore how marketing teams are taking a more active role in fixing pipeline issues, not just by generating more leads, but by improving the quality, timing and relevance of what enters the funnel. We’ll speak with B2B leaders across demand gen, product marketing, and RevOps about the strategies they’re using to close the gap between effort and revenue. The final conversation will be shaped by guest insights and current challenges, but we expect to dig into themes like these:

• Diagnosing the real pipeline problem
  Is the issue volume, fit, velocity or something else? We’ll look at how marketing and sales teams are working together to pinpoint where pipeline is breaking down — and what to measure beyond MQLs.

• Refining ICP and targeting smarter
  Strong pipeline starts with clarity on who you're for. We’ll explore how teams are revisiting their Ideal Customer Profile and using richer data to avoid wasting spend and sales time on low-fit leads.

• Creating content that drives movement
  Not all content builds pipeline. We’ll discuss how marketers are creating assets that speak to real buying triggers — helping prospects move from curiosity to conversation, especially in longer B2B cycles.

• Activating the right channels at the right time
  Whether it's paid, outbound, field or partner-led, timing and relevance matter. We’ll cover how teams are mapping channel activity more tightly to pipeline stages and buying signals.

• Working the funnel together
  The best pipeline strategies today are shared efforts. We’ll dig into how marketing is aligning more deeply with sales, operations, and product to influence pipeline all the way through to closed-won.

Guests

• Bill Glenn, Senior Vice President Marketing at Esper

• Camilla Heidenreich Bommen, Chief Commercial Officer at SuperOffice

Transcript

speaker-0 (00:00)

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing Futures. Today we are tackling a challenge that almost every marketing and revenue leader is dealing with right now, which is the pipeline problem. Despite more tools, more channels, and more content than ever, many organizations are still struggling to generate pipeline that actually converts. And the question is, why?

Is it a revenue problem? Is it a volume issue? Targeting speed or something deeper in how marketing and sales work together? So in this episode, we'll explore how marketing can unlock growth with sales by diagnosing where pipeline breaks down, refining the ICP, creating content that actually moves deals forward and aligning channels and teams more effectively.

But before we dive in, I'd love for each of our guests to introduce themselves and share a bit about their focus and their role. So maybe Camila, would you like to start?

speaker-1 (01:02)

Perfect, thank you. My name is Camilla Heidneres-Bomen and I work in Superoffice, which is an international CRM company with the headquarter in Norway. I used to be the managing director of the Norwegian part of Superoffice, which is the subsidiary selling and delivering in that market.

And now I'm in the group management trying to enable the sales and consulting teams to succeed. Hopefully with some experience from my time in the field and trenches. So as a part of the CCO role that I hold now, my most important collaboration is with

our CMO, the marketing responsible and trying to get past that sort of old truth of sales and marketing not being best friends. So we've done some things to fix that. So that's my angle today.

speaker-0 (01:53)

That's great, please share those experiences. Bill, welcome. Welcome to B2B Marketing Futures.

speaker-2 (02:00)

Thanks, Joaquin. Great to be here. Great to see you, Camilla. I'm Bill Glenn. I'm the SVP of marketing at a company called Esper. That's E-S-P-E-R dot I-O. We're a privately held, fast growing company that does mobile device management. And specifically, we work with companies like restaurants, retail, manufacturing, and even some healthcare to think intentionally about...

how we help them manage their hardware devices. Usually it's dedicated devices specific to their industry. And we are the software that powers all of those dedicated devices from payments, point of sale, menu boards. At airports, we help with any of the information boards that you might see as you're walking through the airport. So kind of a fun business that nobody has really heard of or were behind the scenes. But it's been great to be able to partner with

an ecosystem of companies that helps to deliver both hardware and software to create dedicated device experiences for our end customers.

speaker-0 (02:59)

Well, great introductions. Thank you. Thank you both. Let's start with the foundation. When we talk about pipeline problems, many teams default to thinking they just need more leads. But in reality, the issue is way more nuanced. So I'd love to start with this. How do you diagnose where pipeline is actually breaking down in your organization? Is it volume fit? I don't know. You tell me.

speaker-1 (03:24)

All

of the above. No, but it's a good question. A couple of years back, we saw that we needed to renew our sales methodology. And in doing that, we did some analysis to figure out exactly what you're saying. What's challenge here? Is it the size of the pipeline or is it what we do with the leads? Is it the wrong kind of leads coming in? And the answer was actually a little bit of all of them.

So it became extremely important for us to be more strict on the ISTP. I know we'll return to that. But also then for sales to be able to disqualify what's actually not the right kind of leads. That was really, really important and the basis of how we retrained our people.

because I'm a salesperson myself. I know the pain of not having enough leads in the funnel and how easy it is to just have something even though there are some videos. It's better than nothing, but it's not. So that's at least part of the problem. And then I have some more, but let's hear Bill's input first.

speaker-2 (04:28)

Sure, thanks Camilla. So first of all, I echo everything you said, especially around the, it's a little of everything. And what I've found is that when I've come into new companies that I've started at, you have to start with the data. And everybody says that, right? It's like, look at the data and it'll just tell you. But I think like Camilla said, it's not until you actually kind of do the root cause analysis and ask why five times over for every question, where you actually start to get into like the real reason things are happening.

And so you can start with just your basic funnel information and understand what your conversion rates look like. But then even at each stage of the funnel, there's those five why questions that you would say, even if you have a, for example, a great conversion rate between one stage to another, that actually might mean that you're not being discerning enough on the leads that are being passed. And so there is that like marketing and sales alignment that needs to take place of understanding.

not just what is the service level agreement of like, what is a qualified lead to be able to hand to sales, but on the flip side, like what is sales actually willing to say no to, to make sure that they're not spending time trying to warm up something that's not ready to be truly worked, not really in market, if you will. So I think like there's the push pull of the why that you have to dig into. And normally it's not a full black and white answer. There's a, there's definitely some gray in each one of those and

I think maybe the big takeaway for folks who are looking at pipeline is like, you have to be okay with some gray. It's never gonna be fully black and white. And so you get to what's good enough to be able to make that root cause analysis and then kind of take it from there of like where you're gonna start to put your resources to fix some of the issues that you found.

speaker-1 (06:09)

Completely agree. And also I think based, you also mentioned it in your intro Joaquin that we as a salespeople, it's very easy to look to marketing and just expect more leads, right? we actually sat down and discussed, okay, so how will we split this responsibility of a big enough healthy pipeline, meaning four times coverage of budget? How do we split this between us?

and we landed on actually splitting it. 50 % of it should be marketing sourced and 50 % should be sales sourced. And we actually then measure on those two different parts of the funnel. We call it the dual funnel. So in combination, it should be what we need to reach target as a team. But we are also now holding each sort of function responsible. And then we could do...

some reverse engineering saying, okay, if sales are responsible for four times coverage of half the budget, what does that mean in outreach, in meetings, in sort of also the leading KPIs, right? So we're not just measuring the size of the pipeline, it's often too late.

speaker-0 (07:15)

Yeah, something interesting that you mentioned, Bill, about the five whys and analyzing and starting with data, I agree with you, sounds super obvious. But I remember someone telling me, you need to look at things that you don't see with data. for example, if you are analyzing an insurance company and all the information you get from customers, probably most of the...

data you will be there will be people complaining about their policies but you need to be able to look at the things that are not there things that probably if you have 20 % of people complaining you have 80 % of people happy about your products and no one is saying yes I love this insurance company because it's working well with me but so I think that idea of using the five whys in analyzing conversion rates and analyzing everything

in marketing and sales, I think is so important.

speaker-2 (08:11)

Yeah, if I can just like kind of layer onto that and kind of tie back to what Camilla said, the thing that's most interesting in the five whys and exactly what you said Joaquin about like, you you don't know what it's going to be per se, or you don't know where that's going to take you. One example I've seen at many companies that I've come into is the marketing leader is

you know, comes in with their traditional playbook and, if they've been in the industry for a while, they're like, hey, this has worked at other companies. I can just apply that similar playbook here. And one of the things I learned really like later in my career, and I wish I had learned earlier, was maybe the first thing that a marketing leader should do is actually understand what the sales compensation plan is. Because that to me is the biggest unlock in the wise.

For example, like you could sit there and say, hey, we just launched these three great products, new products. Why isn't the sales team selling them? Because they're better than some of the old products. Well, if the sales team is actually compensated on expanding more of the existing customer base versus net new, that might work because they could say, okay, well, these are the new products, so I'm gonna apply it. But if the end of the day, your sales team is more like they get a higher compensation for net new business.

they might actually wanna just sell what they already know how to sell because that's easier or they already have that sales pitch down or they know that product intimately. And so unless you figure out the ways to be incentivizing for that change management or those new products that you're trying to put in place, you might not get the result that you want. kind of start with some of it is like that internal analysis of like what's not going well with marketing, but some of it is just like, are the externalities that you don't even realize that...

like from human behavior perspective, you have to get your head around before you can really understand how you're gonna truly create that change management that you want to meet the company goals.

speaker-1 (09:59)

But also the alignment when it comes to compensation between sales and marketing. Because I remember this is way back when, but I remember when marketing was measured on website visitors and sales was measured on ARR created, right? Or landed. And marketing was so happy. They reached all their targets and sales were furious because we didn't get any leads, right? So.

The one of the things that we did now is that we measure marketing and sales on both pipeline and ARR. So we actually have the same goals. What's successful marketing is success for sales, cetera.

speaker-0 (10:38)

100%. And let's build on something you had earlier, Camila, about the ICP and targeting because a lot of the pipeline issues start there. And as companies evolve, move up market, shift strategy, the definition of a good account changes, right? So how are you thinking about evolving your ICP today?

what signals and data are actually helping you identify high-fit accounts versus just active ones and actually how are you disqualifying them, Camila you mentioned earlier as well

speaker-1 (11:15)

Yeah.

Yeah. So, so on the ICP side, which, which is often, so we have two ways of disqualifying. One is on the basis of the ICP, which is size. The main one for us is size so that we don't spend too much time with too small.

speaker-0 (11:32)

Size, sorry, number of employees.

speaker-1 (11:35)

Number of employees, number of users.

speaker-2 (11:37)

Okay.

speaker-1 (11:37)

Because number of employees is often an indication of how many users they will have over time, right? So if it's too small a company, then they're sort of disqualified because we can't ask them how many, if we were in the sales process, how many users would you buy? So then we use number of employees. And this of course for us, geography is another part of the ICP that we're actually

Because we're sales led, we're not product led. We sort of we do relationship based sales. So it's important that we're in the markets where the customers are. So that's another thing that we look at, of course. And then we have some not disqualifying parts of the RCP, but some verticals we're really strong on. So those are then upping the priority.

And that's sort of how we disqualify on the ICP side of things.

speaker-0 (12:27)

Then you have like a monthly meeting or something to align with marketing on how they are targeting, on how like, hey, these leads actually are not looking good or these are looking really good. We should focus more on them. Tell me about that process and iterating on that ICP.

speaker-1 (12:46)

So

say it's a marketing generated lead, right? Coming in as an MQL. then we, sales is expected to pick up the phone and actually when it's an MQL, call the customer or talk to them within 15 minutes. Because then we've sort of massaged them in our marketing automation solution, right? And then when they're ready, we should get in touch fast. And then if it's then,

sales qualified, it becomes an opportunity and the sales process is started. So the demand to actually call it sales qualified is that the customer is ready to engage in the sales process with us. And of course, those conversion numbers and that feedback, that's done monthly in scorecard meetings between us in commercial and marketing and each market management.

to get the feedback that it's actually not qualified at all. So our conversion rates are low because it's non-ICP leads. That could be a feedback, right? They're too small. We need to do something in the way we target in our use of channels, in our approach, because we're getting the wrong kind of leads. So that's how we then try to improve. And of course we have a lot of insights also on the marketing upside.

where we fine tune what we get when it comes to leads.

speaker-0 (14:09)

Interesting. what about you, Bill? How are you thinking about your ICP? Is it evolving?

speaker-2 (14:16)

Yeah,

I love this topic. We're actually going through this process right now, so it's very timely. And I have a little bit of a different mindset and always have around pipeline coverage. And I feel like it's marketing's goal or mission to be able to reduce the amount of pipeline coverage that we need because we actually are fully targeted on the right type of accounts, the right types of buyers.

And so the more that you can get dialed in on your ICP, and we're using a lot of data right now, and we're also kind of what's old is new again, is we're going back and actually doing human to human interviews of the customers that actually are what we think are best fit customers and the ones that have stayed with us the longest and have expanded. And that is giving us even more insight into one, just like even basic questions like, why did you pick us from the initial purchase?

But more so, why did you stay with us? Because that answer to that question is more important sometimes than the why did you pick us originally? Because oftentimes, we were just picked in a bake-off with other solution providers. the buyer really, as much as they had tried to do their own education, it's not until they actually get in and start using our product and understand what works and what doesn't that gives us more insight into these are the actual types of humans and types of users, not just the buyers.

that we want and we sort of work back then on what's the profile of the company, what's the profile of the user. We're using our own data, but we're also doing, you know, real in real time customer interviews. And then we're trying to leverage AI wherever we can to try to like massage that into like, what does that profile look like? And then to your point, Joaquin, like we, we're not there yet for the company that I'm at, but I've done this in other companies, which is it's not just about like what you learn.

It's the most important thing is how you package that up for the rest of the organization and how you communicate very clearly and very like in a tight fashion. Like these are our best profile companies and these are our best profile types of buyers, economic buyer, and then also the user. And we have to be really crisp and as detailed as possible about that and try to even feed the sales team. Like here are the types of discerning questions you need to ask.

to decide whether or not this is an ICP. So it goes beyond just what's the size of the company or what's the industry that they're in, which are all like great starting points. But you have to take it another couple layers deeper of like, what's your use case and how do you expect to use this product? And what's the business pain that you're feeling most acutely? And we need our sellers to actually be more discerning there of like, if the pain that they're trying to solve, any mobile device management company could solve.

we probably shouldn't either be in that account or we should just let it go and like move on and not waste our time because we don't want to get into a race to the bottom for like what's the lowest device price and make it a conversation about price. We actually want to solve the pain, the like the hardest challenges for companies that are trying to expand and think about like global device management and thinking about how they can manage in a centralized location, a global fleet of devices.

because those are the companies that are going to land and expand with us. And if we know their hardest problems up front, and if we think we can solve them in a unique way compared to our competitors, then we're like, that's the account you want to spend your time on. So at the end of the day, what I'm trying to do is to say, let's actually have less pipeline that is more on target and be okay with the fact that we need to drive a higher conversion rate. And so that way we don't have to think about being on that hamster wheel of how many MQLs you create on the marketing side.

We actually want to create fewer MQLs that are more on target that have that higher conversion rate and let the sales team focus on closing like five to 10 deals a year as opposed to like 20 to 100 to try to hit their number.

speaker-0 (18:08)

Yeah, one thing that I think is very challenging is taking all the information that you found on refining your ICP, interviewing customers, etc. and then connecting that to being proactive with that data and because you can...

One option of course is creating content that speaks to your customers needs, right? But then you depend on someone else's algorithm to put that content in front of someone else, for example with SEO or with GEO. But how can you be proactive and take that data into an account list?

that you know that these accounts are so good by definition, structurally, culturally and then you can advertise to them you can do manual outreach for example at ADATSAC we focus on identifying what we call the deep fit accounts not just companies that look right on paper but the ones that show real structural, cultural and technical alignment and then we can detect like

the signals, like for example, how a company talks about the employee benefits in the job descriptions, where they showcase real customer stories versus generic messaging, or when they talk about sustainability, for example, are they truly embedding sustainability in operations or they are just doing green washing, things like that, that are very hard with traditional thermographic.

If you want to target these things with geography or sector, it's really hard to do it but now with AI you can surface these things at scale and then when you align on targeting at that level everything downstream improves conversion rates, sales conversations and ultimately the pipeline quality in my opinion

speaker-2 (20:02)

Yeah, I think the biggest challenge that we have. So first of all, I agree with everything you're saying, but I think the biggest challenge we have is when at this company and other companies I've worked at, when you fundamentally shift the size of the company you want to go after. So for example, like if we have historically a more small and medium sized business profile, and then we say to our sales team, we actually want you to hunt more up market. And we know that even when we tap into our channel partner networks to understand where these companies are in their

life cycle around mobile device management. And they could potentially get us introduced faster than us trying to do a traditional marketing to sales waterfall. Those enterprise accounts typically take longer to generate the opportunity to work through the opportunity and then to close to Camilla's point about sales methodology. And so in that way, I think the biggest challenge is how do you get sales to commit to that new ICP?

If they're like, well, that's great that we're building more quality pipeline. But if that means those deals aren't gonna close for 12 to 18 months and I'm not gonna get paid this year, their natural tendency is like, I still need to have some of these things that close in the short term. I think there's this like, what's on paper is good, but the reality of like, hey, they still want to make money now. So how do you help them with like more of a

It's a hard shift, but it's a shift that we know will take time to go to enterprise. So how do we feed them still with the best next fit for these slightly smaller companies that they can get closed up and down in quarter or at most two quarters out? So this is where I get into the gray area of like, it's not all black and white. And I'd love to say like, you no longer get to market or sell to a company that is less than 5,000 employees. Well, the fact of the matter is you still get companies that come inbound.

that are like right in the buying cycle and they're ready to buy, you wouldn't, I don't think most marketers or seller sales leaders would say, well, just ignore that. And we'll just focus on the large enterprise. So you have to find, you have to kind of strike that balance of like, as long as they're trending towards focusing more on the ICP that is the future fit. And it's kind of like that 80-20 rule of like, yeah, you can still work 20 % of your time on these other ones if you believe that they are right enough fit and you can get them closed fast.

but we just don't want them to over-index their time on the things that historically didn't close. And so our training is more about here's the messages, here's the qualifying questions you need to ask. And then we're asking our sales leaders to help them be more discerning and say no faster to the things that historically have not closed. Because we basically keep it in the frame of this is all to benefit you as a salesperson because you actually can make more money.

And you can help the company more by focusing on the right target accounts and not wasting your time on deals that go for weeks, months, or years that never ultimately close, or we know are gonna most likely close as lost business because we're just not the right solution for that particular company.

speaker-1 (23:03)

I mentioned that we do two disqualifications or qualifications. One is more the pure ICP and the other one is more related to what you're talking about, Bill. We call them red flags and we have defined them throughout the sales process. So are we able to understand your pain? Are we actually in a position to help you? Will your business goals help you reach them?

Are we talking to the right people? Are we talking to the people who can actually sign the contract? Are you willing to give us the data so that we can create an impact case or business case? Those kind of more quality, not quantitative, but qualitative that we're working on throughout the sales process. And those we address, but if we're not able to meet them.

then it's better for us to disengage. So that's also what we try to train our people on. And this is change management on a high level, both for the sales managers and for the salespeople to let go of these deals. But this is also where we've sat down and agreed that this is what a deal that doesn't lead to anything look like. So let's...

Let's admit that to ourselves and stop spending time on it. So the initial ICP qualification, if it's a very small company, that's immediate. That's don't spend time on it. If it's more towards what you mentioned, Bill, they could grow. They could become an ICP customer. We're not in enterprise. We're small medium. So it means the very small that we don't work on, right? Because they're also often not the most professional buyers.

So we spend a lot of time on them. But then it's the most difficult part is the qualitative part throughout the sales process. And that's also difficult to your question, Joachim, to try to recognize those customers by data signals or intent signals. What do they look like? That's also something that our AI team is trying to look at, To figure out.

What is the common denominator of the great leads or the great companies to work with?

speaker-0 (25:07)

once you know who you are targeting, the next challenge is what do you say to them? So a lot of content generates engagement, but actually not everything helps you to progress these deals. So I'm curious, what types of content have you seen generally moving opportunities forward?

speaker-2 (25:28)

Yeah, if I can maybe start by tying it back to the ICP question, this is why it was so important for us to interview our existing customers, because we wanted to get a better understanding of like, how do they gain the information? As we all know, like most of the sales research or the buying process research is done before a buyer engages with a seller. I think it's now up to like almost 80 % of that buyer's journey takes place before they engage with sales. And so what...

what we did in our interview process was to understand like, what are the types of questions that you were asking? And at that time it was probably more like, how did you Google, know, how did you use Google to like find the companies that you shortlisted? And now we actually want to get it into that AI for like basic language of basic questions of Q and A so that we can put those questions on our website and we can get the AEO or GEO effect of that, of like making sure that we're showing up in those, or those LLM driven searches.

And what that's doing for us is allowing us to understand what are the basic questions that the buyer has, and then how do we write content, whether it's our blog posts, whether it's our social media, whether it's how we get our sellers to ask the right questions on discovery calls. So that could be our SDR team, that could be our account managers with existing customers. It's like the data is all there. So like go tap into the data to be like,

these are the top questions that are being asked in our category. So do we have good answers for that? One, that the LLMs will pick up, but two, if you're a human engaging in a sales conversation, we want to impress the buyer so much with our, we are the thought leader in our space, or you're working with somebody that isn't here to just sell you a software package. They actually want to engage in the hard problem that you have. And if that person doesn't know the answer, our trained response is we,

We want them to say, we don't know, but we bet somebody in our company has the answer to that. So give us some time to research it and let us get back to you. And if we can answer one or two human related back and forth questions, oftentimes that's the difference in getting shortlisted or not. It goes beyond what we found in LLM to these people care about our business and they're willing to take the time to understand our pain and help us to solve real problems.

speaker-0 (27:40)

100%. There is a very good book I recommend. They ask you answer by Marcus Sheridan. He has been in this podcast, by the way, you can search for his episode. And it's all about the questions that your customers are asking you. And people usually during the research process, they ask the same questions to themselves and with their teams. Like, what is the best in class?

CRM for example for this kind of company like what are the competitors, what's the cost, like basic questions that many times we forget to write in our websites and definitely LLMs are peaking because people are asking those kind of things to CRMs. Well thank you so much Camila and Bill for this conversation. If there is one takeaway, if it's

I think is if there are pipeline problems definitely are not solved at surface level I think they usually sit deeper in how we define our audience how in our audience how we engage with them and how our teams work together to move the deals forward if you enjoyed this episode make sure you follow B2B Marketing Futures for more conversations with dealers

shaping the future of B2B growth and as always if you are rethinking of how your organization approaches pipeline we'd love to continue the conversation thank you for listening and we'll see you in the next episode