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Sales and Marketing Alignment: The Secret to Pipeline Velocity and Revenue Growth
The landscape of B2B marketing is changing at a rapid pace. Traditional methods and legacy playbooks are being questioned as leaders face immense pressure to drive pipeline, generate revenue, and prove marketing’s exact contribution to business outcomes. In a compelling episode of the Business of Marketing podcast, host A. Lee Judge sits down with Andrei Zinkevich, co-founder of FullFunnel.io, to unpack the core issues facing modern marketing organizations, from internal misalignment and broken KPIs to the challenges of attribution and the role of AI. Here are the essential takeaways from their insightful discussion.
The Legacy Problem: Why B2B Marketing Misalignment Exists
Andrei Zinkevich launches the conversation by outlining a persistent issue: marketing is often relegated to a cost center or “arts and crafts” department, rarely associated with pipeline or revenue. This misperception stems from the old enterprise world, where marketing focused on brand and awareness, rather than business impact.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and marketing has worked hard to win back a seat at the table, primarily through proving predictability. This shift led to the “demand waterfall” era, with marketing activities becoming highly measurable and attributable, culminating in the rise of MQLs, SQLs, and a lead-centric focus.
However, as Andrei notes, this focus produced silos within marketing and sales organizations. Each marketing function, be it content, field marketing, PR, or paid media, ended up with its own set of KPIs, often disconnected from actual revenue impact. The goal became checking off personal or departmental metrics, not driving unified outcomes.
One of the most telling anecdotes reflects this problem: a sales rep, desperate to meet an event KPI, asks a speaker to simply visit the booth so he could “report” an attendee. The metric was fulfilled, but it did nothing for business value.
Towards True Alignment: The Case for the Revenue Team
A. Lee Judge introduces a critical concept: moving away from the marketing-vs-sales mindset and embracing the “revenue team.” He emphasizes that holistic business growth comes from joint KPIs and shared objectives, metrics that genuinely report on the whole team moving forward.
Andrei supports this by recommending a focus on revenue reporting and pipeline velocity. Pipeline velocity, calculated through the number of open qualified opportunities, win rate, average contract value, and sales cycle length, offers a clear, actionable trajectory for aligning marketing and sales efforts. Measuring this monthly provides an accurate forecast and highlights areas for joint improvement, not just individual achievement.
This approach recognizes business realities: generating more leads doesn’t inherently result in growth if those leads are low-quality, if win rates are declining, or if sales cycles keep expanding. Only by focusing on shared metrics that affect revenue can organizations course-correct in meaningful ways.
Practical Steps to Improving Pipeline Velocity
What can individual marketing and sales teams do to accelerate deals through the funnel? Both Andrei and Lee stress the importance of identifying accounts most likely to convert in the coming quarter. This reorients territory planning and account selection, moving beyond a product-centric ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) for awareness and demand generation, into a more collaborative approach for account-based revenue programs.
Key criteria Andrei suggests for account selection include:
Revenue potential of the account
Existing relationships with buying committee members
Demonstrated awareness or engagement with your brand
Evidence of a product need or challenge your solution can address
With these defined together, marketing and sales can select the accounts that truly merit one-to-one personalization and focused effort, thus accelerating sales cycles and maximizing ROI.
Rethinking Attribution: From Click-to-Close to Blended Insights
Attribution continues to be a thorny topic, particularly as buying journeys become longer and more convoluted. Andrei acknowledges that no system can provide a perfectly accurate picture of how a buyer found or engaged with your brand.
Instead, he advocates a blended approach, starting with self-attribution (“How did you hear about us?”) and supplementing it with digital analytics and customer interviews. While systems like HockeyStack or TrimData can connect activity across channels, manual analysis and direct customer feedback often paint a clearer picture of influential touchpoints.
A CFO, for instance, may ask, “Who should get credit for this deal?” when there are dozens of touchpoints involving marketing content, SDR outreach, trade show conversations, and digital engagement over many months. To bridge the gap, Andrei and Lee suggest running a “CFO quiz”. Sharing the full buyer journey and facilitating an open conversation on how credit should be shared, while moving toward simple, collective measurement systems like “all-bound” revenue.
Ultimately, the most important questions become: Are we hitting our total revenue and pipeline velocity targets? And are we running quality, not just quantity, plays?
The Role of AI in Enterprise B2B Marketing
No modern marketing conversation is complete without addressing artificial intelligence. While AI is often hyped as a force for replacement, Andrei’s interviews with enterprise CMOs reveal that, for now, AI’s most real value lies in augmenting, not replacing, seasoned professionals.
Content creation, specifically, structuring interviews and case studies for more meaningful insights, remains the most common use. Teams are also leveraging AI for content optimization (such as SEO and localization), sales processes (like research and enrichment), and to an extent, workflow enhancements.
However, skepticism persists due to lack of trust in output, data privacy concerns, and unreliable automation. “No one has replaced 90% of their team with AI agents,” Andrei points out. For most mature organizations, AI adoption is cautious and supplemental. A sentiment echoed by Lee’s own presentations and discussions with leading AI experts.
Change Management: A Survival Guide for B2B CMOs
The episode concludes with a stark reality: B2B marketing remains in a precarious position. Despite demands for marketing to “generate revenue,” organizations often invest far more heavily in sales resources. The solution isn’t for marketing to promise more predictable, short-term results or for leaders to wait out the pressure. Those paths are recipes for eventual failure and misplaced blame.
Instead, Andrei asserts, change management is non-negotiable. Marketing must drive cross-functional transformation away from silos and short-term thinking toward integrated revenue teams with joint ownership of pipeline and revenue outcomes.
This change is possible, as showcased by organizations that have successfully made the shift. From endless attribution debates to meaningful, joint execution. For B2B CMOs serious about survival, the agenda must include realignment of KPIs, a holistic view of the revenue process, smart application of AI, and steadfast communication with finance and executive teams.
Continuing the Conversation
For leaders seeking to put these concepts into action, both Andrei and Lee recommend connecting on LinkedIn, joining in on upcoming webinars like “How to Survive as a B2B CMO,” and following the content released by FullFunnel.io and Content Monster. The path forward requires transparency, collaboration, and constant adaptation. But the rewards are worth it: a marketing function that finally owns its rightful place in driving enterprise revenue.
Thanks for listening to The Business of Marketing podcast.
Feel free to contact the hosts and ask additional questions, we would love to answer them on the show.

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Full Transcript
Andrei Zinkevich [00:00:00]:
The problem is that marketing is in a bad position because marketing used to be predictable. But the truth is that while companies expect marketing to generate revenue, right? If marketing alone was able to generate enterprise pipeline, why then marketing teams are 10, 20 times smaller than the sales teams. Maybe that’s the answer to a question.
A. Lee Judge [00:00:28]:
Welcome again to the business of marketing. I’m a Lee Judge. You know, I released a book earlier this year about the relationship between sales and marketing. The book is titled Cash, which is an acronym for the four areas that I see sales and marketing struggle the most. That’s communication, alignment, systems, and honesty. And throughout the book I mentioned the touchy subject of the funnel. And while some debate that it doesn’t exist, I clearly lay out that the funnel is just simply a visualization of how we interact with customers throughout their journey. Today’s guest is very vocal about the funnel.
A. Lee Judge [00:01:04]:
In fact, he’s a co founder of a company called Full Funnel or full funnel IO. His content on LinkedIn resonated with me because of his clear ideas and views on optimizing complex and long sales cycles for B2B companies. An area that I too am very passionate about. So he is here today to share his expertise with you. Welcome to the podcast. Andrei Zinkevich. Hi Andrei.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:01:29]:
Hey, thanks a lot for inviting me and happy to chat about all the areas that you have defined. I think the four quadrants that you have mentioned, they make perfect sense and they are kind of the keys either to successful alignment and shared GTM execution or to misalignment as well.
A. Lee Judge [00:01:50]:
Yeah, I’ve been watching your content and you know, it’s, it’s great when you see someone who posts. My favorite place is LinkedIn and I see a lot of content from you there and you go, wow, they get it. Or we really align on what we’re talking about. And so since our subjects are so close, I wanted to have this conversation. So we’ll dig right into it. And one of my first questions is that, you know, one of my key areas of consulting is alignment. And you recently commented on misalignment inside marketing as in marketing versus marketing misalignment, when we’re using content to chase traffic and demand gen to chase MQLs and looking for lead handoff instead of looking for revenue. So in your view, how can marketing and sales leaders address this work so that marketing better aligns to the buyer journey and the pipeline?
Andrei Zinkevich [00:02:41]:
I think we need to kind of take a step back and look at how we got into this problem, to be honest. And if I’LL just reverse engineer to kind of 20 years ago we’ll see that what was happening is that obviously 20 years ago we didn’t have this big tech scene, right? And marketing was usually all about corporates, big enterprise organizations. And if you’ll open any book, right, you’ll always see the examples from Coca Cola, Pepsi, et cetera, right? Or some well known B2B enterprise organizations like IBM, etc. Now the problem was that marketing lost a seat among the board members. And the reason why, because marketing became treated as a cost center, as arts and crafts department if you will, sales order takers, whatever you’ll call it. But you’ll never hear pipeline or revenue in that definition. So to make or to gain back the strategic seed and to make marketing predictable, we needed to invent the new formula to present, let’s say marketing impact on revenue. Hence we entered the demand waterfall era.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:04:08]:
And then all Martech software was optimizing their messaging towards it. Think about Marketo, HubSpot, etc. It was all about life cycle lead stages, MKL, SQL, etc. And then our marketing became predictable. Hey, move the leads between the lead stages, right? Move the leads between this life cycle definitions, get my budget, generate more MQLs. And here we have done our job. So from that perspective, we started basically as marketers. We started fulfilling the expectations of CFOs and executives, making sure that marketing is predictable and you can clearly calculate ROI of every marketing activity and it’s easy to attribute.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:05:02]:
Then technology obviously motivated us to buy, to report on it. And at the same time we started to facilitate the silos, we started to facilitate the handoff problem, saying okay, we generated this MQL or whatever, we generated 16,000 MQLs per year and we don’t care what happens next, our job is done. So maybe we didn’t want it, but we facilitated that playbook and that became a default playbook for many organizations. From that perspective, bigger B2B enterprise organizations and later, unfortunately even startups inherited this broken playbook and to make everything predictable, they started to facilitate internal marketing misalignment, which you mentioned right in the beginning, initially it was okay, marketing just generates MQLs and passes to sales and then it’s sales job to close this and but now what was happening, we had big marketing departments and then we had field marketing team, we had content team or more precisely in bigger organizations, communication team, right? And then we had whatever PR team we had, paid media team that could be dependent on the company, that there are campaign managers, etc.
A. Lee Judge [00:06:27]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:06:27]:
There are multiple definitions. And the problem is that to make every function predictably efficient, we started to invent the KPIs for these departments, right? Hence, like you said, okay, content team traffic or maybe positions in search engines, then field marketing, MQL. So paid media, MQLs.
A. Lee Judge [00:06:56]:
Right?
Andrei Zinkevich [00:06:58]:
And basically, if you look holistically at it, every team started to pursue own goals and KPIs without thinking how does that impact the revenue creation? So literally. And even SDRs in that setup, they were not chasing the pipeline and revenue, they were chasing the beatings. I have heard maybe the most hilarious anecdote that I witnessed a couple of years ago when there was one of the sales reps and I was a speaker and so he catched me and he said, hey, can you go to our booth, you know, and see our software? I’m saying, okay, sorry, I’m not really interested, but please, please, please. I’m like, look, I’m not interested. And ultimately he was desperately saying, look, I just need to report that I attracted a person. It’s my KPI, please help me. I was like, okay, but it’s hilarious, right? So the only person in that scenario, in that entire system who was in charge of actual revenue were account executives. All other teams, they were chasing completely different goals, right? Hence here is the problem that we all deal today we join the organization with completely broken setup and maybe in some smaller teams, at least inside marketing teams.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:08:22]:
If the team is small, there is not that obvious market misalignment, right? Still, let’s say if the team is limited to 5, market or CMO can easily ahead of marketing can easily manage this. But in bigger organizations that’s still a huge problem. And without fixing it, you can’t even mention marketing and sales misalignment marketers and sales leaders.
A. Lee Judge [00:08:48]:
If you want to close more deals and drive real revenue growth, you need cash. And I don’t mean money. I’m talking about my new book, the four keys to better Sales, Smarter marketing and a supercharged Revenue Machine. It gives you a proven framework to improve the four areas that impact revenue. The communication, alignment systems and honesty. You need a stronger sales and marketing engine and this book will show you how to build it. Get your copy now@aleadjudge.com cash. Now back to the content.
A. Lee Judge [00:09:23]:
Well, you know, it’s funny you mentioned that the trade show anecdote because part of what I speak about a lot is, and it’s also often misinterpreted when I say honesty. But the honesty part Is are the KPIs you’re working towards just for you or are they for the company? And like the guy at the trade show, he wanted to solve his own KPI. And I think that comes from the culture of the company that allows individual people or teams to work so hard at their own KPIs without the culture of we’re on the same team, we all have overarching KPI to drive business. Not just to check a box and say, you got so many MQLs, you had so many phone calls, you had so many meetings, you know, you had so many visitors to a booth that those KPIs individually don’t drive business. So when we talk about joint KPIs, and I always talk about having a revenue team to, to give an idea that there’s just one team, you know, I like using revenue team because it helps us shift towards away from marketing versus sales. So when you report on a revenue team, what are some of the KPIs we can look at that are holistic, as you mentioned earlier, that report on the whole team moving forward.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:10:41]:
So we typically break it down into two categories. There is a revenue report that also tracks the sales pipeline velocity and why I believe it’s important for every team to look at these metrics. Because in nutshell, the sales pipeline velocity is a formula that calculates the number of, of open sales opportunities, right? I mean qualified sales opportunities multiplied by your average contract value and also your win rate, right? And divided by your sales cycle length. And this simple formula, if you measure it on a monthly basis or quarter basis, depending on your preferences, I prefer the monthly basis because then it gives you an accurate trajectory and forecast where you are likely to be with these metrics at the end of the year. What I hate is just making forecasts out of thin air, right? While this metric, basically it’s what we have today and starting from this point, it motivates us to look at what should we improve. All companies, they again, because of what I shared before, right? This obsession with leads and predictable market. And everybody thinks that the only way to grow the business is to increase number of leads. But if you again, if you generate, let’s say only tier 3 accounts, accounts with the lowest revenue potential, or your pin rate is constantly declining, or your sales cycle length is constantly expanding, right? Then you are doing the wrong things and then you are optimizing for the wrong things.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:12:25]:
So the point is that when you look at this holistically, you understand, okay, what other activities should we take to improve each of these metrics because all of them impact the total revenue that you will generate on an annual basis.
A. Lee Judge [00:12:39]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:12:39]:
That’s the key. So this is the report with actual revenue generated which you can break down into kind of existing customers, new logos, expansion, revenue, etc. Based on your preferences. Right. If it makes sense. Or you can just track the total revenue. So up to every company. We prefer to break it down because then you can also compare our actually listing into expansion.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:13:05]:
Or we do it as, let’s say, a random act of expansion.
A. Lee Judge [00:13:10]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:13:10]:
Because sometimes expansion programs could be described that way, to be honest. So that’s the key.
A. Lee Judge [00:13:18]:
I like something you mentioned about funnel Velocity. One of my favorite metrics is funnel velocity because with that you can assign the entire revenue team, marketing and sales, to say, look, we want these deals to move forward faster. Now given you can’t force a customer to change their timeline, but you can influence them by letting marketing help nurture and sales follow up. The team effort can as a result bring deals through the pipeline faster if they’re working in a cohesive way. So funnel velocity, what can these individual teams do to contribute to the funnel velocity?
Andrei Zinkevich [00:13:59]:
I think aside from what you have mentioned, nurturing, et cetera, the key question that comes out of, let’s say the goal we want to accelerate, let’s say our sales cycle length, is how can we select the accounts that are likely to be converted into sales opportunities in the next quarter? And this changes completely the way how you do territory planning or you select accounts for your account based, let’s say account based revenue programs.
A. Lee Judge [00:14:32]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:14:33]:
Whatever you’ll call it. And then instead of kind of targeting the product icp, which you can still still do, but you put that let’s say product ICP into your awareness demand generation layers. You start define, defining together the characteristics of accounts that are likely to be converted.
A. Lee Judge [00:14:53]:
Right?
Andrei Zinkevich [00:14:53]:
And then we usually look at four quadrants of, let’s say metrics of four categories, the revenue potential. Because sometimes it’s not like we mentioned, right? It might still be, take your one enterprise deal that equals, let’s say 15 smaller deals, right? Then it doesn’t. Sometimes companies say, hey, but we just generated. Like I remember when we shared one case study about the ABM program that generated in two quarters almost 3 millions in revenue. But the initial statement was that we generated five enterprise deals. And people were like, but these are just five enterprise deals. Yes, but look, on this metric, you don’t look at revenue, right? That’s the key. So here is what I’m Saying revenue potential is the first one.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:15:43]:
Then do we have any relationship with the buying committee group of these accounts? Because if we don’t then we need to establish it and it will extend our sales cycle. Does this specific account aware of our product? And this shouldn’t be like gut based definition. You need together as market and sales one group defining the engagement threshold. What specific behavior account should demonstrate to be called as account that is aware of us.
A. Lee Judge [00:16:15]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:16:15]:
And likely is there any product need evidence? I don’t like to call it the buying intent because for me the buying intent is when I ask you to send me an invoice. So saying that I’m ready to purchase.
A. Lee Judge [00:16:27]:
Right?
Andrei Zinkevich [00:16:27]:
That’s the buying intent. The rest is product need evidence. Are there any signals or information that tells us that this account has the challenge that we might help them to solve?
A. Lee Judge [00:16:39]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:16:39]:
And they are likely to be in market at least in the upcoming future. So that’s the key. And when you apply this obviously favorite company, this criteria would be custom, but there are no right or wrong answers. The right way here is sitting down together and defining answers to these questions. And when you define these answers to the questions, you start selecting accounts that are more likely to convert in these opportunities. And from this perspective, I often hear question from sales peers, okay, which accounts deserve one to one personalization?
A. Lee Judge [00:17:16]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:17:16]:
And that’s the answer to question. Then you’ll have a set of accounts where you actually need to spend time.
A. Lee Judge [00:17:22]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:17:22]:
While the rest could be in your, let’s say more typical outbound campaigns or demand gen layer. So that’s probably one, I won’t say the easiest tactics, but one of the essential principles to accelerate pipeline value. Again, it’s not a silver bullet per se, but it’s an approach that helps you to accelerate the sales cycle length because you focus on accounts that are likely to be converted into sales opportunities.
A. Lee Judge [00:17:53]:
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A. Lee Judge [00:18:36]:
No need for expensive production crews, long production plans, or complex setups. Want to see how it works. Visit content monster.com today to learn more. I want to pivot a bit and talk about something that is always a thorn in the side of marketers, especially when we’re trying to prove our value, and that’s attribution. And as you mentioned earlier, we’ve kind of put ourselves in this, this corner because we spent so many years claiming that we could show attribution. I myself used to give a talk called click to close, which, you know, that’s impossible now to track someone from click to close. But that’s what we built and now we’re trying to unravel what we’ve put ourselves into. So when we have attribution is not only a pain to analytics, but it also, I think that now we need to lean more into blended attribution and more customer reported attribution.
A. Lee Judge [00:19:35]:
So what are your thoughts on how companies should address attribution today in today’s structure? And then how do we explain that to the financial parts of our company?
Andrei Zinkevich [00:19:47]:
Yeah, so the truth is that no system will give you an accurate overview of the buyer journey and what influenced this. And that’s the only reason why we need to have this blended attribution. Like you said with the custom replacement ports.
A. Lee Judge [00:20:08]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:20:08]:
By blended attribution, I mean self attribution, the easiest one, right? Which is like, how did you hear about us? Everybody knows about this, but everybody takes it for granted thinking this is the silver bullet. Again, we often hear anecdotes from, even from our customers when they say, for example, when people submit this form and they just put Google right, and then it doesn’t give you a lot of information, but it’s also good. In our case, for example, we know that’s. I might be wrong, but when we did it at the beginning of the year around like close to 90% people were mentioning LinkedIn as a primary channel. How did they hear about our company? FullFinal IO, which gives you at least an understanding what is the primary channel that they think when they think about us they refer to.
A. Lee Judge [00:20:59]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:21:00]:
But what’s interesting, again, if you’re saying, okay, only LinkedIn and companies, they used to make wrong decisions here, right? Okay, only LinkedIn works. Let’s code all the rest. But the truth is that you need to add to the blended attribution to other layers of reports. One is ideally you need to have end to end analytics, something like hockey stack or trim data, where you can connect all the channels and all digital activities and then you have a holistic overview of all these digital traces. But that costs money. If you can’t do this again, then the second way would be just manually analyzing the data. That’s unfortunately that’s the problem of majority of companies. The data that the system is in multiple systems, marketing Systems, Sales System, CRM etc.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:21:48]:
And trying to connect the dots and seeing what was happening. Also looking at Google Analytics, etc.
A. Lee Judge [00:21:53]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:21:54]:
And lastly the customer is interview. So that could be a part of the discovery process. It’s an ideal scenario, but not often sales reps would be willing to do this. So that could be a part of the onboarding call, right, where client success manager could talk and ask a little bit about the buyer journey. And then you can ask like what may be the main touch points that you can recall of interacting with us. In our case we often hear people sharing, like I said LinkedIn in the beginning, but they can set. Okay, we have attended some of your live podcast episodes. So we are reading your newsletter and obviously they didn’t mention it in the beginning, right? But now you can start seeing what also influences their decision.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:22:38]:
So if you look at all this, if you combine all of this into blended system, then you will have close to real buyer journey and see the old touch points at now the interesting part, right, you’ll see that it’s long, there are many touch points, many interactions across multiple channels. And now the question is which channel or what activity should get the credit? Is it marketing source or sales source? And like to make it more complex, let’s say one SDR was engaging with the buying committee member of on, let’s say buying committee members on LinkedIn. And then these people were engaging with marketing content. And let’s say six months later they met account executive at the trade show, they chatted, but then they started ghosting let’s say the sales team. And in three months let’s say they did a brand search on Google, went to the website and submitted the form. So what activity and finally who should get the credit for this deal, right? For this opportunity. So I know a lot of marketers, they try to shake hands and fists and say hey, so my CFO, my CEO doesn’t get it, etc. But again we discussed a couple of minutes ago why they don’t get it.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:24:05]:
So the only point to change it is when we’ll start collect the data and present this to especially to CFOs.
A. Lee Judge [00:24:14]:
Right?
Andrei Zinkevich [00:24:15]:
And then what kind of invented a funny exercise called CFO quiz, you print the real buyer journey. I just described the simplified one.
A. Lee Judge [00:24:25]:
Right?
Andrei Zinkevich [00:24:25]:
But the more Complex is the product and the more complex is the buyer journey, the more touch points you’ll have. And then you literally come up with these questions, right? Who should get the credit, what channels, what activities, etc. And have this open discussion with CFO because until they will see the actual example and the actual data, you won’t be able to change their opinion. And then from this perspective, you need to come up to two solutions, right? That first of all, there should be all bound revenue. And by all bound revenue it means that still you, I mean it’s not possible to magically change the incentives and the compensation systems at companies, but at least the bare minimum, what you can do by all bound revenue, it means that all this revenue, this pipeline, was influenced by default by marketing. So marketing contributes to it because they are working with sales on it. And then the compensation, or let’s say credit is going to the sales rep to whom the account was initially assigned to. As simple as that, right? So that’s the key.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:25:31]:
And then everybody is interested in closing their own accounts. So that’s the point. But ultimately the entire metric that proves the efficiency of this is the revenue and the sales pipeline velocity. Are we hitting this target? So no. Right, that’s the key. But also from this perspective, it motivates everybody. Instead of chasing the numbers, right? Start looking at the quality approaches, okay. How we’re going to select the accounts like we have discussed, right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:26:02]:
How we are going to approach them, etc. And then ultimately in terms of setting it up, I think most CFO, at least from my experience, most CFOs, they prefer simplicity. So for everybody, probably the easiest attribution channel would be all bound or ABM or revenue team, whatever you’ll call it doesn’t really matter, right? That’s, that’s the key. So then you report on total revenue and sales pipeline velocity. And ultimately there should be the second layer of reports which are more, let’s say marketing based. For every program that you are running, you need to define leading and lagging indicators. Lagging indicators are really easy to track and most companies at least tracking them.
A. Lee Judge [00:26:47]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:26:47]:
Again, number of discovery calls booked, sales opportunities, revenue generated. These are the results of our activities. And then leading indicators, they would be always individual. For every company, sorry, for every program that you are running for thought leadership program, there would be one set of leading indicators. For webinars or field events would be another set. But the key is that you connect the dots.
A. Lee Judge [00:27:14]:
Well, I want to, you know, go back a bit to all bound because even when we talk about these indicators when we have this vision. I think as we mentioned earlier, where we were, we’ve put ourselves in a bad situation. I think one of the fixes to that is to take this all bound approach. I love the term all bound because it makes you think more about having that one team, that one revenue team. You know, we’ve often used the analogy comparing it to sports teams. Like when a sports team wins, it’s the team that wins. It isn’t, oh well, defense won and offense lost. It’s no, the team won.
A. Lee Judge [00:27:49]:
And so when we think about revenue in this way, it’s a revenue team that wins. And so we have to have the measurements that, that work for a revenue team. And then when the CFO asks, you know, how was this deal brought in? It was by the revenue team because they were both required to bring the deal in. In my book, I give a story that I call the Bluebird where a salesperson said, hey, this deal just fell out the sky and we just found it today and I closed it today. And then the marketer says, well, no, we saw them in Marketo two years ago and they’ve been to three webinars, they’ve opened our emails, they’ve responded to white papers, they weren’t new today. You, you just heard about them today. And not to discredit the salesperson’s skill in closing the deal, but the honest part of it was it took the entire team like very few, if any deals close without both marketing and sales touching that opportunity. So it’s, it’s, it’s the all bound.
A. Lee Judge [00:28:51]:
It took all the, the, the parts to bring that deal in. So one thing that we can’t ignore here, Andrei, is in any conversation is AI. It’s like something we wish almost at this point. It’s ubiquitous, we could almost avoid, but it touches every part of our industry, every part of our job. And so we can’t really have a conversation about this without talking about AI and how it’s impacting it. And so I know in this case you’ve had some interesting conversations in your B2B marketing community and outside of content creation, what are some use cases you can share where AI has become valuable in the areas of enterprise sales and marketing.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:29:34]:
So we indeed are working currently on the new state, the state of full funnel B2B marketing report and we are talking to enterprise B2B CMOs and partially like you said, AI is here and we want to, to discover where they are in their AI journey, what are some best practices and what are the challenges? So as you mentioned, most of them are using it for content creation. But the good thing is that I think the difference is also that we are talking to seasoned professionals and people, they never say okay, we just ask ChatGPT, you know, hey, create me this article. So a lot of them are mentioning extracting for example custom interviews and creating more structured, more meaningful case studies. So that accelerates time to value. But the associated challenge is that A couple of CMOs mentioned that it takes a lot of to review the content because again as you know AI can hallucinate, can provide fake examples or you interpret the data incorrectly. So there is answer actually that led to one interesting takeaway. I would, I mean like so far we hosted maybe close to 30, 35 interviews and quite often I have heard that lack of trust to AI is the major problem. So people simply don’t trust the output because of this incorrect data.
A. Lee Judge [00:31:12]:
Right.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:31:13]:
So this is the issue with the content creation. Some interesting kind of use cases that companies were mentioning is that they put for example the existing content and ask to optimize it. So finding some specific keywords to do the geo optimization or basically optimizing it for new LLM recommendations, etc. Just a few mentioned workflow, processes optimization and let’s say at least half of people mentioned that they use AI in let’s say sales related processes. So it’s either account enrichment or account research or craft and personalized emails based on the account research, etcetera, etcetera. So nobody ever mentioned, you know, complex automation systems.
A. Lee Judge [00:32:09]:
Why?
Andrei Zinkevich [00:32:09]:
Because again data privacy, procurement processes, lack of trust, etc. Then a few teams mentioned that the complex let’s say automation systems, they usually crack really fast, they are not working as cool as some people present these examples on LinkedIn, on YouTube, etc. And lastly, nobody ever mentioned that they have substituted the marketing and sales team as AI agents. So this nonsense that sometimes I’ve seen on LinkedIn and yeah, what’s, it’s, it’s really ridiculous. I, there are some people who I actually admire the way how they built their startups but now when I see they say okay, replace 90% of my team with the AI agents and like.
A. Lee Judge [00:33:04]:
You don’t believe it.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:33:06]:
Yeah, I don’t, I don’t even want to comment it.
A. Lee Judge [00:33:09]:
Yeah, well you know it’s, it’s funny because I’m presenting a content marketing world in a few weeks and I’m talking about AI workflows and I write out will tell them that agents aren’t there yet. Because we don’t have that kind of trust in most cases. And at the same time, I recently spoke with Christopher Penn, who’s one of my go to guys on AI, and he was talking about, you know, where we’re headed in terms of bringing AI inside our companies or onto our hardware devices versus in the cloud. And I think as we get closer to that, when it becomes more common to have controlled and secure AI, then we might see more use of AI in sales and marketing practices where we can trust the data is contained and secure. But until then, I agree with you that the agent isn’t quite there yet. And I don’t quite buy the hype, at least today in September 2025, that it’s going to replace a lot of sales and marketing jobs effectively because it’s just not there yet. We don’t, we don’t trust it quite that much yet. Plus there’s skill sets and experience that the human has.
A. Lee Judge [00:34:22]:
So we’re a little bit out from that. So while we wrap up today, Andrei, this episode will happen to be released about the same time as a webinar that you have coming up called how to survive as a B2B CMO. So please tell us about that and how we can connect with you to keep learning from you.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:34:42]:
Yeah, absolutely. So the goal behind this webinar is again, like I mentioned these interviews with CMOs and you touched one specific issue with attribution and more specifically proven marketing impact on pipeline creation and revenue. But that’s only one, like let’s say only one problem that’s modern B2B CMOs are facing. So there are a few others and I think all of them are intertwined. So the pressure to deliver leads and pipeline and basically demonstrate short term roi, ignoring the long term programs that are actually required to be able to deliver the short term results, then the misalignment, internal marketing, misalignments external with sales and other teams, incentives and KPIs and pressure to deploy AI to accelerate the processes without actually having the processes.
A. Lee Judge [00:35:45]:
Right?
Andrei Zinkevich [00:35:45]:
The problem with data scattered across multiple systems. So lots of these things are indeed in place. But the problem is that marketing is in a bad position because of the issue that we have have discussed, right? Marketing used to be predictable, but the truth is that while companies expect marketing to generate revenue, right? If marketing, I always give that example, if marketing alone was able to generate enterprise pipeline, why then marketing teams are 10, 20 times smaller than the sales teams. Maybe that’s the answer to a question. Question. The goal of marketing is to create the requisites to create the opportunity and revenue right together with sales to enable sales to actually be able to engage these buyers and generate revenue. But to be able to do this right, we need to fix these things. And there are kind of two camps, two completely different camps that claim how to solve it.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:36:48]:
One says that it’s just enough to say hey my CEO, my leadership doesn’t get marketing and then, you know, shake fees and try to make the revolution in the company. But that never works, right? And there is another camp is just okay, so I will try to hit this short term target this quarter and next quarter it will be better, there will be less pressure and I will will be able to work on the long term. But that’s not true. And everybody knows that it’s not true. And that in this scenario the rules of the game are against us and we are sitting on Titanic. So it’s just a matter of time when the targets will be missed and marketing will be blamed for this inevitably, which often causes the career to see a more so in this scenario, I believe the only way to survive is to initiate change management. Without this, it’s absolutely not possible. And this webinar is all about this.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:37:47]:
We invited also one of our customers who successfully did it at enterprise organization. So I believe if that’s possible to do an enterprise world, then for smaller companies it’s way easier, right? Considering that you are dealing with fewer people. So that’s the goal. We want to present the entire framework, what we have seen, how to successfully move from complete silos and all the endless debates about attribution, etc. To these cross functional revenue teams that work together on pipeline and revenue generation.
A. Lee Judge [00:38:27]:
Awesome. And then about the company Full Funnel.
Andrei Zinkevich [00:38:31]:
So like you mentioned, our website is in our title FullFunnel IO is where you can find us. And you mentioned a couple of times LinkedIn. So this is our primary channel where you can find myself or my co founder Vladimir Blagojevich.
A. Lee Judge [00:38:48]:
Great. That’s where I found you. And both you guys put out great content for the company. So Andrei, thanks again for joining me today. It’s been a great conversation and thanks for the listeners. If you’re listening to the podcast and also want to see Andrei and I video, the podcast and others are available in in the podcast section of content monster.com catch you next time.
Announcer [00:39:12]:
Thank you for listening to the Business of Marketing Podcast, a show brought to you by Content Monster.com, the producer of B2B digital marketing content Show Notes can be found on content monster.com as well as aleejudge.com.