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Book the right meetings faster with one-click scheduling
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Engage website visitors with automated Journeys and live chat
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Qualify, route, and schedule prospects directly from your web form
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Route records in Salesforce based on a Trigger
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Route and schedule prospects from bizdev to sales to implementation
Most of you know the Drift story. They built a chat solution specifically for B2B revenue teams—and named it conversational intelligence. They evangelized this category name with the kind of mastery that impresses many founders like me.
They advocated that the B2B buying process is broken. Prospects who are ready to buy should not have to wait 24 hours for someone to contact them.
On this trend, they reached $70M+ in ARR and eventually exited to what some say is close to $1 Billion. My jaw dropped when David Cancel sold it to Vista Equity. Because, somehow, I thought he’d continue to grow the company much further. In my mind, the potential was so much greater.
Since that exit, many of their customers have exited to competitive solutions.
What happened?
As a channel, chat on its own is effective for prospects who might have questions on the website, who are hesitating before clicking to start a trial, or who have an urgency. But the buying process is a lot more complicated.
And revenue teams.. well, if you’ve ever worked in one that’s larger than 20 you know it ain’t easy to navigate decisions.
Many chats remained unanswered, and lots of conversations were missed—either because of erroneous setups or because SDRs didn’t always find it valuable to spend time with people not ready to book a meeting. Companies would spend months creating complex playbooks only to find little ROI from the contract signed.
My cofounder, Nicolas, says it a bit more bluntly: “Marketing is pissed off because sales didn’t follow up with the leads they sent; Sales is pissed off because marketing keeps sending them shit leads.”
Everyone has their own little piece of the puzzle, which means nobody has time to focus on the big picture—so buyers end up with a shitty experience. The problem is that as soon as your competitor figures out how to provide a better buying journey, you lose.
The reality is that our company website (no matter how much attention we pay to it) is just one channel out of the many. And chat is one tool out of the many. In the meantime, here I was with my co-founder, optimizing for conversion around other parts of the funnel:
In parallel, in our space, LeanData was optimizing for demand conversion, too, via webinar leads and other lists. Across all these solutions (us included), RevOps teams would have to re-create qualification rules, territories, teams, and segments to ensure that:
About 4 years ago, it started to click: demand conversion should all be done under one platform.
Boards are restricting new investments for outbound or marketing spend. By now, we all feel the pressure from efficient growth (especially in Saas). That’s why everyone is taking a hard look at conversion—we all want to convert better from the same spend.
In this short book, together with top revenue leaders in the space, we will cover some playbooks to convert better, some metrics to cover, and why it might be a good idea to put all the use cases under one umbrella: the Demand Conversion Platform.
And, in the process, let’s have a little bit of fun too, because life is too short to be boring.
— Alina Vandenberghe, Co-founder and Co-CEO
Every lead is a potential win, and your sales funnel should reflect that. The leap from marketing efforts to sales success shouldn’t be a leap at all—it should be a seamless journey.
Maybe that sounds like a pipe dream (pun intended).
That’s why we designed our Demand Conversion Framework to guide your leads through that journey, redefining how B2B companies engage with potential customers from the first interaction to the final signature.
In this guide, we will revisit how marketing, sales, and customer success collaborate and measure success, turning overlooked moments into engagement milestones
on the way to becoming happy customers who stay and grow with you. We cover some initial ideas to convert better, some metrics to consider, and why it might be a good idea to put all the use cases under one umbrella: the Demand Conversion Platform.
Based on countless conversations with our customers, partners, and some of the best minds in GTM, this guide is designed to help you walk into the age of demand conversion with confidence.
Demand conversion is the strategic process of transforming initial interest into actionable sales opportunities, ensuring no lead is left behind and every prospect journey progresses towards a successful close. It’s the bridge that connects marketing efforts to sales success, turning potential interest (MQLs) into engaged opportunities, ready for the sales team to close.
What makes demand conversion truly revolutionary is how it optimizes the sales funnel, effectively converting MQLs into SQLs. Demand conversion leverages both marketing insights and sales acumen to nurture leads at precisely the right moment, enhancing the likelihood of a sale. It fills what we call the Demand Conversion Gap.
The end result of demand conversion? A more efficient sales process, better buyer experiences, and increased chances of successfully closing deals.
Considering your Demand Conversion Score
The Demand Conversion Score (DCS) is a composite index that ranges from 1 to 20, reflecting the health of your demand conversion process. A higher score indicates a more efficient pipeline with minimal leakage, where leads are swiftly and effectively transformed into sales opportunities and, eventually, customers.
You can calculate your DCS with the following formula:
This formula factors in both the conversion of leads to qualified opportunities and the conversion of those opportunities to actual sales.
You can use our rubric to measure your DCS success:
DCS: How you’re doing
1 to 5: You’re in trouble—time to bring things back to the drawing board.
5 to 10: You’re at benchmark level, but there’s room for improvement.
10+: Your demand conversion is strong.
When you improve the process of converting initial interest into actionable sales opportunities, every aspect of your business benefits.
Higher demand conversion:
The benefits of strong demand conversion extend far beyond closing the initial sale, fostering long-term customer relationships and increasing customer lifetime value.
Yay, another list from marketers—but stick with us on this one. The last thing anybody wants is more random acts of marketing. Instead, this list of principles establishes what demand conversion means, before we dig into what it looks like in practice.
It’s not all about you. “The seller will hit their number—but the buyer will have a more elegant experience, too” says Tom Rowe, Chili Piper’s SVP of Sales. “Demand conversion is about giving every buyer the most efficient path available to them, showing them that they’re VIPs.”
The little piece of the GTM motion where folks go from marketing lead to opportunity is an underserved piece of the puzzle. In other words: you could drive 1,000 MQLs every month and still have a demand conversion score that leaves you wanting more.
Shift your focus to converting the high-quality leads you already have — maturing the middle of the funnel, not just pouring all your energy into the top of the funnel.
“I think we drive more demand than we know how to convert. We have very mature means of driving leads and very mature means of closing deals, but what about the middle? What if we went from 2% conversion to 5% conversion? What would happen?”
— Mark Kosoglow
Effective and efficient demand conversion is about understanding the full scope of your business metrics, beyond just pipeline and MQLs. When everyone understands the data and uses it to guide their actions, you’re not just hoping for better results—you’re planning for them.
“A lot of people are being fired because they can’t see the big picture for their immediate goals; they can’t make their numbers. But if you can speak the right language and see the big picture, you’re a lot closer to winning.”
— Alina Vandenberghe
It’s easy to point fingers. Maybe marketing didn’t fully qualify the lead. Maybe sales let too many leads linger on the back burner. But here’s the truth: we’re all on the same team.
Instead of the blame game, take a unified approach where everyone is accountable for conversion goals and works towards shared, clear benchmarks. Start by defining your processes and metrics together. When both teams have a say in setting the standards, they’re more likely to buy into the goals and join forces to achieve them.
The demand conversion challenge isn’t something you can just slap a bandaid on and call it good. Start by examining everything—your marketing measurement, handoff process, lead scoring, MQLs—anything that impacts demand conversion. You’ll likely need to redefine some of these elements to get them just right.
Once you’ve got a clear picture, only then can you deploy the right mix of tools and integrations to streamline and enhance the demand conversion process, from lead capture to close. Then commit to ongoing testing of your conversion paths to increase efficiency and effectiveness over time.
“We’re in a game of efficiency and growth, and the only way you can do both is by paying attention to every touchpoint in your funnel. That’s a non-existent role, so the alternative is using systems to help you connect the dots.”
— Alina Vandenberghe
Sure, speed-to-lead still significantly boosts conversion rates. But don’t limit yourself to this linear thinking. The real measure of success is when sales qualifies the meeting, not just when the meeting is set.
That’s why at Chili Piper, our main metrics is QHM: Qualified Held Meetings.
Start by creating a seamless process for transitioning leads from marketing to sales. Ensure there’s no friction in handoff. Explore innovative ways to engage with your leads before they convert to a meeting. Prepare prospects for sales to swoop in and work their magic.
Yes, revenue teams can use automation to guarantee immediate responses, helping to manage lead routing and overcoming challenges like time zone differences. But we humans are great at building relationships and showing empathy—things that automation can't replicate.
Use technology to handle what it does best—like fast, consistent responses—while allowing your team to focus on what they do best—building relationships and closing deals.
You can’t generate, capture, or convert much demand without a brand. As you work to increase demand conversion, keep laying the groundwork for your brand — you’ll need it to improve anything in demand, including conversion.
“When your brand is strong, you can be an average demand gen motion and see success. But if you have a weak brand and strong demand gen motion, you might still be struggling.”
— Jon Miller
ABM focuses on the quality of accounts rather than the quantity of prospects, and involves identifying high-value accounts and targeting key decision-makers within those businesses. Proper ABM means marketing and sales teams join forces to create personalized buying experiences for a select group of high-value accounts.
This aligns well with our Demand Conversion Principles. And, like Demand Conversion, ABM delivers big on its promise:
No, this guide isn’t about ABM. But by focusing on high-value accounts and delivering personalized experiences, businesses can drive higher conversion rates and stop wasting marketing budget. ABM can play a major role in that.
Ok—now that we’ve set the table, let’s jump into the fun stuff – seeing Demand Conversion in action.
Okay, we know what demand conversion is: but what does it look like—and how does it translate into a VIP-level buying experience?
To answer that question, let’s first take a little detour and explore this idea of delivering a great buyer experience. Being buyer-first means aligning the sales process with how buyers want to buy, and putting the buyer's needs at the center of your sales process. And that’s exactly what our 2024 B2B Buyer First Best Practices Report we recently published with Navattic was all about. It’s a great read with a lot of data and actionable insights, but the main takeaway is that companies that prioritize being buyer-first focus on making it easy for buyers to connect with sales, try out their products, and find their pricing and packaging information.
5 ways to be buyer-first and deliver that VIP experience:
“The next wave is to orchestrate, holistically, across buyer types and funnel stage. Whether they came to the website, chatted with a particular question, re-engaged at a certain point, were retargeted with demo ad—the goal is the same. Accelerate speed. Reduce friction.”
— Nicolas Vandenberghe
To get your revenue-oriented brain juices flowing, here are some tactical ideas mapped to different stages of the buyer’s journey, designed to bridge the gap between each stage and drive demand conversion.
“The magic formula for top-of-funnel success is a personalized, relevant, and timely message.”
— Brandon Redlinger
At this early stage, demand conversion focuses on capturing initial interest, turning anonymous visitors into identifiable leads through personalized responses and engaging content. More sophisticated GTM teams are taking it one step further and leveraging AI to make outbound motions more effective. AI enables reps to send more personalized messages by analyzing and surfacing industry, segments, intent and engagement data. Now, reps can craft tailored messages, predict the best times to reach out, and prioritize high-potential leads.
Use segmentation to send tailored emails that address specific pain points and interests of different prospect groups. Automate follow-up emails to consistently engage with and remind prospects of your value proposition.
Create valuable content such as guides, masterclasses, and podcasts to showcase your value from the start. Invest in your social following. Build a great newsletter. Host live or on-demand webinars on relevant industry topics to capture even more leads. Whatever the tactic, keep value front and center for your audience.
Use chatbots to qualify leads on your website and route them to a live SDR for more personalized interaction. Then, the SDR can seamlessly transition the warm lead to an AE, moving prospects further down the funnel.
The problems with many current chat solutions are they’re over-engineered with too many extra bells and whistles (which you end up having to pay an arm and a leg for) and designed to pounce on visitors and pop up on video chat, or they’re too lightweight and won’t get the job done.
Embed booking links in your emails and on your website to allow prospects to easily schedule meetings with your sales team. “Never let a visitor leave without giving them an opportunity to book a meeting with you,” says Tom Rowe.
Set up easy actions like one-click booking and a nurture program that guides folks in the right direction.
Automatically reassign an opportunity to a different SDR or team if you don’t see engagement within 24 hours. Keep your SDRs’ dockets full while optimizing for their time and getting back to leads fast.
You don’t have to give all of your leads the same treatment by funneling them through a static sales process. Instead, distribute qualified leads to the right AE or SDR depending on the ABM landing page, LinkedIn Conversation Ad, or webinar that they’re coming in from.
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Here, the focus is on nurturing leads by providing valuable information and personalized interactions to move them closer to making a purchase decision.
Convert directly from events, whether virtual or in-person—why make prospects who are ready to talk now wait for a follow-up? Allow for booking at in-person events with simple forms or QR codes, and use virtual event attendance to drive qualified sales calls faster.
Respond quickly to demo requests—or give leads a calendar in the request itself—to capture interest while it's hot and move prospects towards a buying decision. Use automation workflows to route these high-intent handraisers to the right SDR or AE for follow-up within minutes, instead of hours or days.
Use lead scoring and routing tools to ensure that leads are distributed to the right SDRs and AEs based on predefined criteria. Implement guidelines to have SDRs follow up with leads within a set timeframe, maintaining that buyer’s momentum. Pull out the white glove treatment for high-intent and existing target accounts. For example: if you get a website visitor from a target account, you can route that engagement to the AE who owns the account.
A key to a good routing solution is it must be flexible and easy to change processes as you scale. Having a solution built for speed of experimentation and deployment will make your ops team more effective and happy (we like happy ops people).
Have your SDRs and AEs create a personal page to share a booking link with your prospects and customers—designed to showcase your brand and their needs more than a straightforward booking link.
Reduce no-shows in the first place with automated (yet personalized) reminders leading up to the meeting. For those who still seem to be slipping away, optimize your reps’ time by automatically following up with options to rebook or watch a self-serve demo.
There’s no reason to give leads coming from channel partners, marketplaces, or review sites like G2 the same MQL treatment that you give everyone. Reflect their intent—and where they’re coming from—from the very first interaction.
During the purchase stage, demand conversion aims to convert trials and inquiries into actual sales.
Automatically route trial users to sales for personalized follow-up, aimed at converting them to paid customers. If necessary, offer incentives or special promotions to encourage trial users to upgrade to paid plans.
Use product usage data to identify Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) and prioritize them for sales engagement. Use a routing tool to route and assign a PQL to your sales team automatically, ensuring no one falls through the cracks. Equip sales with insights about how PQLs useare using the product to tailor their pitches and address specific needs.
In the loyalty stage, the focus is on retaining and expanding customer relationships through proactive engagement and attentive customer support.
Use in-app pop-ups to promote relevant features or upgrades to existing users, driving cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Trigger offers based on specific user behaviors or milestones within the product.
Once a lead is marked closed-won, facilitate a seamless handoff from sales to your customer success or onboarding teams to maintain that positive customer experience.
Proactively schedule regular check-ins with customers to address any issues, gather feedback, and discuss new opportunities. Conduct value reviews to showcase the ROI of your product and discuss ways to further enhance the customer’s experience.
As we said before, what’s good for the buyer is good for the seller. There’s a reason that’s our #1 Demand Conversion Principle. A lot of these use cases across the demand conversion journey are focused on creating a frictionless buying experience because how you sell today is as important as what you sell. In other words, creating a white-glove, VIP experience can be a competitive advantage.
But a lot of times, organizations think this creates more work and hassle for their team. It shouldn’t. In fact, if you have the right tools and setup, it can also be a white-glove experience for your team. Here’s what we mean – your ops team spends countless hours setting up your lead routing and distribution in one system, only to have to repeat that again when you add a new tool. But by integrating all your solutions with one unified platform, no more duplication of effort and no more inconsistency.
“Every go-to-market team is under pressure to do more with less. Before, you could spend money and have low efficiencies, but now that’s no longer acceptable. You can’t afford any leakages in your processes now, because then you won’t meet your goals.”
— Nicolas Vandenberghe
Boosting your Demand Conversion Score (DCS) involves your metrics, people, and tools.
We recommend that order: metrics are meaningless unless they’re tracking the most impactful areas, and there’s no need to jump straight to shiny new tools until your team is set up for success.
You need to monitor the right data points to ensure that you are on the right track.
“It’s time to revisit how marketing and sales collaborate and measure, turning overlooked moments into milestones of engagement on the way to becoming customers.”
— Brandon Redlinger
There are volume metrics, and then there are conversion metrics. Here’s our short list of metrics that we think are important. However, we’re always learning and open to feedback, so if you see holes in this model or would love to offer a different perspective, please email brandon@chilipiper.com so we can start a conversation.
Volume metrics measure the quantity of a certain stage in the funnel and will always be a number.
On the volume front, we drew inspiration from Jacco van der Kooij’s Revenue Architecture.
Now, you probably wouldn’t be surprised if we told you we have some meaty benchmark data on inbound conversion rates. We analyzed 2,948,575 form submissions, 2,042,453 qualified form submissions, and 1,307,505 booked meetings and put our findings in our 2024 Benchmark Report on Demo Form Conversion Rates. For more insights, inspiration and best practices, subscribe to The Sauce.
In traditional models, leadsAccounts that are “Engaged” are often defined as MQLs (marketing deems them more likely to convert). In some other companies, Handraisers are synonymous with MQLs.
Not all interactions with an account should be deemed equal. More interactions don’t necessarily mean more pipeline. In general, teams accept pipeline created as a much better way to measure marketing success than the success of marketing instead of MQLs.
According to RevOps leader Brendan Tolleson, a qualified lead is someone who has shown intent, has a problem that your solution can solve, and has the budget to do something about it. It’s much more involved than a webinar registration or even an aggregate lead score. Marketing and sales need to get on the same page with their definition of qualified.
But even with a better definition for “qualified,”—leaders still need to align on accountability. Charlie Liang, Head of Marketing at Finch, says there was a shift in the nature of his relationship with the Head of Revenue when he requested to tie his variable compensation to half new business ARR growth and half pipeline.
“He realized, wait, we have the same goals,” Charlie says. “I’m not just focused on inbound pipeline; we’re focused on the whole.”
Part of looking at your processes involves reevaluating your hand raiser qualification process.
As Jay Gaines suggests, not all hand raisers are created equal. For example, if someone with the right title at the right company that fits your ICP fills out a contact or ‘book a demo’ form — of course, hand them off to a sales rep right away. But don’t invest the same amount of effort into every handraiser. “Handraisers should be evaluated based on engagement patterns, the level and recency of their interactions at an account level, versus a lead level,” says Jay.
Helen Baptist agrees, adding that technologies now allow companies to gain deeper insights into the interests, journeys, and size of a buying committee—to both qualify buyers and improve their experience. “Look at the attributes that are important to your ICP or ICV, understand your customer profile,” says Helen. “Let’s first address, are we aligned on who we’re going after and how we’re going after them? Use the data you have to make sure you’re able to prescribe a solution based on what you have in your back pocket.”
Automating your qualification
Many B2B companies are still handing their hottest leads (inbound demo requests) to junior reps to qualify and run discovery calls on. Not only does this slow down the selling process, it tends to create a crappy experience for the buyer.
This most likely isn’t the first time your buyer is making a software purchase. They’re booking a demo because they’re ready to see a demo, not to have their time wasted getting ‘BANTed’.
Once you’ve aligned on what ‘qualified’ looks like in your org, you should be able to cover this criteria in a form. If your qualification criteria is more complex than a few form fields, you should probably revisit them as it will be hard for your internal teams to remember and stick with (and will lead to friction and tension between your teams).
Rather than having to ask your prospects to fill out several new form fields to self-qualify, there are data tools that can help you fill in the blanks. For example, if you only want to pass companies with over 50 employees directly to your AEs, you can use a tool like Zoominfo form complete to capture company size data on your demo form and use that to qualify your inbound leads.
Setting qualification criteria isn’t a once-and-done activity. Regularly review and refine your criteria to ensure that only the most qualified leads are passed to reps, the right amount of leads are being passed, and youryou’re conversion rates don’t drop. Lead scoring can and does play an important role in qualification, so factor in important data, like firmographic, technographic, 3rd party intent and 1st party engagement data to gauge their interest and readiness to talk to sales.
Some of the common pushback on automating the lead qualification process is from sales leaders who have hired great reps as inbound SDRs. What would this team do if their role was automated?
Rather than having them gatekeep AE’s calendars and act as admin support, this is an opportunity to redeploy them to spend their time on tasks that are hard to scale or can’t get done by AI. Creative tasks like hyper-personalized outbound and supporting ABM programs are great places to start.
Most companies can’t or don’t invest in expensive attribution tools; as a result it’s harder to attribute pipeline in one bucket over another. Especially since multiple sources can contribute to an opportunity being created.
In fact, if you mention “attribution” in a crowded room of marketers, and you’ll get looks like you just dropped the F bomb.
Because even the simple act of asking hand raisers how they found you via self-reported attribution, it is not a very reliable method either. Oftentimes we can’t recall what lead us to make an inquiry.
Another reality revenue teams face today is that more research is done in ways that are not trackable by your attribution software. For example, buyers are highly influenced by peers, communities, networks 3rd-party sites, and sources we probably aren’t even aware of. that will never show up on an attribution report.
To simplify, companies choose to focus on either first-touch (the first trackable point of interaction a lead had with your company) or last-touch attribution (the most recent trackable point of interaction before the lead requested a meeting).
There is no perfect attribution model, but you should still have a model that you can defend and that will help you make more informed decisions about where to spend time and resources.
For PLG companies, aka companies that focus on product funnels for self-service, the metrics might look a tad different:
Post sales, we have different ways to look at volume metrics—and the marketing team might or might not be involved in the optimization of these metrics
From a volume of “Accounts” perspective, we can consider:
From a revenue perspective, these turn into:
Conversion metrics are ratios that compare two different quantities that have different units and are displayed as a percent.
Most companies struggle to measure the volume of accounts in different stages so conversions are even trickier to achieve. (But they are a lot easier to calculate when you have a platform that caters to optimizing all the touch points in the funnel.)
On the conversion front, we have been following the following metrics (and their calculations):
Addressing the demand conversion gap isn’t a quick fix; it requires a deeper look at how you think about the funnel in the first place. Some companies have already adopted a more innovative approach to stages, metrics, and connecting the dots.
For example:
Movable Ink started measuring pipeline generated as their main KPI. “Since we started measuring pipeline as our main KPI, it’s been fascinating because we realized that we didn’t need to generate as many opportunities,” said Justin Keller, VP of Growth. “They were piping at a higher value than we thought, which gave us some relief. We didn’t need to grind as hard.”
Lori Richardson of Score More Sales introduced a metric called Helpful Conversations (HC) to encourage reps to build relationships, emphasizing the quality of interactions over quantity.
And Brian Yam, Head of Marketing and Growth at Paragon, wants to connect marketing efforts to the bigger picture. “From Day One, I said I wanted to own pipeline,” says Brian. “It’s hard for me to define the value of marketing if I’m stuck at the MQL level; if I can’t contribute to anything that’s close to revenue.”
Brian suggests closing the gap between the metrics: OKRs for marketing usually revolve around leads, while sales is responsible for revenue. In his words: “Start by aligning on the definition of what is qualified pipeline.”
It’s time to put an end to the finger-pointing between marketing and sales. The blame game only creates friction and stalls progress. Instead, foster a culture where both teams collaborate, share insights, and work towards common goals.
“One of the biggest problems with the demand conversion process is if you're not aligned on who you're selling to and what a best fit looks like, sales is never going to pick up leads that you pass over fast enough..”
— Kacie Jenkins
We need to speak the same language—not just between sales and marketing, but also with our revenue, post-sales and finance leaders. Marketers need to see the bigger picture and learn sales to understand how their efforts impact ROI, and sales teams need to appreciate marketing's nuances.
A couple of examples:
Brendan Tolleson (RevPartners) focuses on how much marketing influences pipeline. They use content created by their marketing team at different points of demand conversion to generate the right traffic with the right persona. If form submissions aren’t converting to stage-one opportunities with sales, this sends a signal to marketing that content isn’t resonating or they’re targeting the wrong audience. This closed feedback loop allows marketing to adjust and refine their strategies, to attract the right prospects for sales to convert.
Joseph Lee, SVP Marketing at Paradigm, describes the lead generation machine they built in tandem with the BDR team, with effective lead scoring and two MQL pipelines. They also established clear SLAs on speed to lead, nurturing every prospect according to best practices.
“Our secret sauce is that we like each other and we are students of the game,” says Joseph. “It requires humility and the willingness to learn.”
That humility translates into shared wins for his team. At his previous company, they saw a 60% conversion rate for hand raisers and 25% for anything that led to first meetings. To focus their efforts on the most qualified prospects, Joseph built fast tracks for strategic enterprise accounts and incentives for high-value contacts attending events.
Their biggest demand conversion challenge? Attribution, especially in ABM, since marketing doesn’t get credit for the work of reps chasing down multimillion-dollar LTV accounts. Working towards shared metrics and goals, however, makes sure that both teams get kudos for their contributions to demand conversion.
This ties in with the discussion of qualification above. Chili Piper advisor Kaylee Edmondson recommends a solid strategy for getting started on this front: give your sales and marketing leaders homework. Ask simple questions like “What does an MQL mean for us?” and “What signals intent?”
“Usually almost nothing matches until the SQL stage. It’s a good place to start the conversation because it highlights critical gaps without resorting to finger-pointing. Do some homework, get in a room, and swap notes.”
This initial conversation will help set the stage—especially when you bring in MOps or RevOps—no matter what your motion looks like.
From there, Kaylee recommends a weekly pipeline review with your VP Sales, VP Marketing, and RevOps leader all together in the same room: “It’s a great way to add qualitative insights to your quantitative data.”
“How do you maximize the probability that interest in your product converts into meetings? What do you put in place to make sure interest generated by marketing turns into pipeline?” asks Nicholas Vandenberghe.
That’s as much a tech stack question as it is a process question.
Yes, we recommend starting with your processes and your people. But having the right tools and systems makes all the difference in demand conversion. They streamline your processes, cut down on friction, and ensure every lead gets the attention it deserves.
One CMO we spoke with shared that they had to start over from scratch, after a high-volume lead gen strategy that just wasn’t leading to conversions. She pivoted her team toward making the website a true marketing engine—and an easy experience for customers. They simplified their systems for routing and responding to leads, made handoff more straightforward, and introduced better measures for every stage of the conversion funnel.
The result? A more positive impression of the company from their buyers, which meant this CMO’s team hit their numbers every following quarter and delivered all pipeline for both inbound and outbound. (Remember what we said about brand?)
“In the past ten years, forward-thinking organizations have been trying to fix this problem with point solutions deployed at various part of the funnel: lead distribution for outbound and territories, chat on the website, handoff tools between teams. Some of the tools solve partially for the problem but make it extremely hard to understand the full picture—or to be nimble in experimentation across systems. It’s time for a single view into demand conversion.”
— Brandon Redlinger
The right tools will help you put the right processes, owned by both marketing and sales, into action. For example:
Investing in these tools means your team can work more efficiently and effectively, leading to better results and higher conversion rates.
To navigate the dynamic landscape of demand conversion, we've put together a market map that outlines key players in the industry, categorized by area of focus.
These tools are designed to mature and refine the middle of your funnel, including categories like:
On either end of these tools are your Top of Funnel tools (paid ads, lead enrichment, intent data) and your systems action for sales and marketing (CRM, sales engagement, marketing automation).
We know: it’s a lot, and it can be overwhelming. Some of these platforms help you accomplish better demand conversion on multiple fronts. Consolidating your stack translates into consistent data and reporting, with no need to double up on workflows, avoiding the risk of broken integrations—and taking another step toward sales and marketing alignment.
Eight years ago, Nicolas and Alina recognized the gap between buyers and sellers and built a form router and scheduler, becoming a category leader and household name in B2B.
Chili Piper in 2016 with three goals in mind:
(“I worked for a CIO who had done a $100M failed implementation of a CRM and I knew teams needed new tools,” says Alina.)
(“I knew it was broken because I was often a buyer in these large contracts” says Alina.)
(“I was a miserable employee, working with a lot of red tape and inefficiencies,” says Alina. “I am hopeful that businesses can do a lot better for their people so they can do their best work without feeling burnt out.”)
Over the years, Chili Piper added more products and functionality to qualify leads and get buyers in front of the right sales reps, fast. Now, we’ve closed the gap even more with our latest release, making all our solutions unified in one platform. Oh, and did we mention it’s the only solution out there that integrates your demand conversion system that’s easy to set up, easy to create experiments, and scales with you as you grow?
Demand conversion is all about bringing together the right people, processes, and technologies into a unified system that addresses the challenging parts of your sales funnel. It’s now easier than ever to transform the space between an MQL and an active sales deal into a goldmine of opportunity, ripe for redefinition.
With Chili Piper’s platform, this gap becomes a space where qualified prospects are nurtured, not neglected.
We believe demand conversion is the key to unlocking your company’s full growth potential.
Ready to get started? Get a demo of our Demand Conversion Platform today!
Lead Contributors
Tara Robertson, Head of Demand Gen
Tom Rowe, SVP Sales
Joey Williams, Director Sales Development
Nicolas Vandenberghe, Co-CEO & co-Founder
Brendan Tolleson, CEO
Brian Yam, Head of Marketing
Charlie Liang, Head of Marketing
Helen Baptist, Chief Strategy and Market Officer
Jay Gaines, CMO
Joe Lee, VP of Growth
Jon Miller, Entrepreneur
Justin Keller, VP of Growth
Kaylee Edmondson, Soloprenuer
Lori Richardson, B2B Sales and Revenue Growth Trainer
Mark Kosoglow, GTM Leader
Alex Bauer, Co-founder
Alon Waks, Executive Advisor
Amber Bogie, Sr. Director Growth Marketing
Amrita Mathur, VP of Marketing
Amy Volas, Founder/CEO
Andrea Kayal, CRO
Andy Mowat, VP GTM Ops
Brandon Young, CMO
Brendon Cassidy, Co-founder/Co-CEO
Cliff Simon, CRO
Dan Stratton, Sr. Partner
David Fallarme, VP of marketing
Emmanuelle Skala, GTM and CS Leader
Eric Wittlake, Sr. Director of Strategic Marketing Initiatives
Heidi Bullock, CMO
Helen Baptist, Chief Strategy and Market Officer
James Fletcher, Founder
Jane Serra, VP of Marketing
Jared Fuller, Co-founder & CEO
Jen Igartua, CEO
Jill Rowley, Strategy & Evangelism
John Barrows, CEO
John Fernandez, SVP marketing
Jordan Henderson, Director of RevOps
Josh Braun, Founder
Kacie Jenkins, SVP of Marketing
Laura Erdem, Sales Manager
Liam Moroney, Co-founder
Mada Seghete, Co-founder & Managing Director
Matt Heinz, Founder and President
Matt Mullin, VP of Demand Gen
Megan Heuer, Principal
Michael Maximoff, Founder
Natalie Marcotullio, Head of Growth and Operations
Ray Rike, Founder/CEO
Richard Harris, Founder
Rob Jones, Creative Lead
Sam Levan, Co-founder/CEO
Scott Leese, CEO and Founder
Tim Davidson, Founder
Tracy Eiler, CMO
Trinity Nguyen, UserGems
Tyler Lessard, CMO
Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist
Most of you know the Drift story. They built a chat solution specifically for B2B revenue teams—and named it conversational intelligence. They evangelized this category name with the kind of mastery that impresses many founders like me.
They advocated that the B2B buying process is broken. Prospects who are ready to buy should not have to wait 24 hours for someone to contact them.
On this trend, they reached $70M+ in ARR and eventually exited to what some say is close to $1 Billion. My jaw dropped when David Cancel sold it to Vista Equity. Because, somehow, I thought he’d continue to grow the company much further. In my mind, the potential was so much greater.
Since that exit, many of their customers have exited to competitive solutions.
What happened?
As a channel, chat on its own is effective for prospects who might have questions on the website, who are hesitating before clicking to start a trial, or who have an urgency. But the buying process is a lot more complicated.
And revenue teams.. well, if you’ve ever worked in one that’s larger than 20 you know it ain’t easy to navigate decisions.
Many chats remained unanswered, and lots of conversations were missed—either because of erroneous setups or because SDRs didn’t always find it valuable to spend time with people not ready to book a meeting. Companies would spend months creating complex playbooks only to find little ROI from the contract signed.
My cofounder, Nicolas, says it a bit more bluntly: “Marketing is pissed off because sales didn’t follow up with the leads they sent; Sales is pissed off because marketing keeps sending them shit leads.”
Everyone has their own little piece of the puzzle, which means nobody has time to focus on the big picture—so buyers end up with a shitty experience. The problem is that as soon as your competitor figures out how to provide a better buying journey, you lose.
The reality is that our company website (no matter how much attention we pay to it) is just one channel out of the many. And chat is one tool out of the many. In the meantime, here I was with my co-founder, optimizing for conversion around other parts of the funnel:
In parallel, in our space, LeanData was optimizing for demand conversion, too, via webinar leads and other lists. Across all these solutions (us included), RevOps teams would have to re-create qualification rules, territories, teams, and segments to ensure that:
About 4 years ago, it started to click: demand conversion should all be done under one platform.
Boards are restricting new investments for outbound or marketing spend. By now, we all feel the pressure from efficient growth (especially in Saas). That’s why everyone is taking a hard look at conversion—we all want to convert better from the same spend.
In this short book, together with top revenue leaders in the space, we will cover some playbooks to convert better, some metrics to cover, and why it might be a good idea to put all the use cases under one umbrella: the Demand Conversion Platform.
And, in the process, let’s have a little bit of fun too, because life is too short to be boring.
— Alina Vandenberghe, Co-founder and Co-CEO
Every lead is a potential win, and your sales funnel should reflect that. The leap from marketing efforts to sales success shouldn’t be a leap at all—it should be a seamless journey.
Maybe that sounds like a pipe dream (pun intended).
That’s why we designed our Demand Conversion Framework to guide your leads through that journey, redefining how B2B companies engage with potential customers from the first interaction to the final signature.
In this guide, we will revisit how marketing, sales, and customer success collaborate and measure success, turning overlooked moments into engagement milestones
on the way to becoming happy customers who stay and grow with you. We cover some initial ideas to convert better, some metrics to consider, and why it might be a good idea to put all the use cases under one umbrella: the Demand Conversion Platform.
Based on countless conversations with our customers, partners, and some of the best minds in GTM, this guide is designed to help you walk into the age of demand conversion with confidence.
Demand conversion is the strategic process of transforming initial interest into actionable sales opportunities, ensuring no lead is left behind and every prospect journey progresses towards a successful close. It’s the bridge that connects marketing efforts to sales success, turning potential interest (MQLs) into engaged opportunities, ready for the sales team to close.
What makes demand conversion truly revolutionary is how it optimizes the sales funnel, effectively converting MQLs into SQLs. Demand conversion leverages both marketing insights and sales acumen to nurture leads at precisely the right moment, enhancing the likelihood of a sale. It fills what we call the Demand Conversion Gap.
The end result of demand conversion? A more efficient sales process, better buyer experiences, and increased chances of successfully closing deals.
Considering your Demand Conversion Score
The Demand Conversion Score (DCS) is a composite index that ranges from 1 to 20, reflecting the health of your demand conversion process. A higher score indicates a more efficient pipeline with minimal leakage, where leads are swiftly and effectively transformed into sales opportunities and, eventually, customers.
You can calculate your DCS with the following formula:
This formula factors in both the conversion of leads to qualified opportunities and the conversion of those opportunities to actual sales.
You can use our rubric to measure your DCS success:
DCS: How you’re doing
1 to 5: You’re in trouble—time to bring things back to the drawing board.
5 to 10: You’re at benchmark level, but there’s room for improvement.
10+: Your demand conversion is strong.
When you improve the process of converting initial interest into actionable sales opportunities, every aspect of your business benefits.
Higher demand conversion:
The benefits of strong demand conversion extend far beyond closing the initial sale, fostering long-term customer relationships and increasing customer lifetime value.
Yay, another list from marketers—but stick with us on this one. The last thing anybody wants is more random acts of marketing. Instead, this list of principles establishes what demand conversion means, before we dig into what it looks like in practice.
It’s not all about you. “The seller will hit their number—but the buyer will have a more elegant experience, too” says Tom Rowe, Chili Piper’s SVP of Sales. “Demand conversion is about giving every buyer the most efficient path available to them, showing them that they’re VIPs.”
The little piece of the GTM motion where folks go from marketing lead to opportunity is an underserved piece of the puzzle. In other words: you could drive 1,000 MQLs every month and still have a demand conversion score that leaves you wanting more.
Shift your focus to converting the high-quality leads you already have — maturing the middle of the funnel, not just pouring all your energy into the top of the funnel.
“I think we drive more demand than we know how to convert. We have very mature means of driving leads and very mature means of closing deals, but what about the middle? What if we went from 2% conversion to 5% conversion? What would happen?”
— Mark Kosoglow
Effective and efficient demand conversion is about understanding the full scope of your business metrics, beyond just pipeline and MQLs. When everyone understands the data and uses it to guide their actions, you’re not just hoping for better results—you’re planning for them.
“A lot of people are being fired because they can’t see the big picture for their immediate goals; they can’t make their numbers. But if you can speak the right language and see the big picture, you’re a lot closer to winning.”
— Alina Vandenberghe
It’s easy to point fingers. Maybe marketing didn’t fully qualify the lead. Maybe sales let too many leads linger on the back burner. But here’s the truth: we’re all on the same team.
Instead of the blame game, take a unified approach where everyone is accountable for conversion goals and works towards shared, clear benchmarks. Start by defining your processes and metrics together. When both teams have a say in setting the standards, they’re more likely to buy into the goals and join forces to achieve them.
The demand conversion challenge isn’t something you can just slap a bandaid on and call it good. Start by examining everything—your marketing measurement, handoff process, lead scoring, MQLs—anything that impacts demand conversion. You’ll likely need to redefine some of these elements to get them just right.
Once you’ve got a clear picture, only then can you deploy the right mix of tools and integrations to streamline and enhance the demand conversion process, from lead capture to close. Then commit to ongoing testing of your conversion paths to increase efficiency and effectiveness over time.
“We’re in a game of efficiency and growth, and the only way you can do both is by paying attention to every touchpoint in your funnel. That’s a non-existent role, so the alternative is using systems to help you connect the dots.”
— Alina Vandenberghe
Sure, speed-to-lead still significantly boosts conversion rates. But don’t limit yourself to this linear thinking. The real measure of success is when sales qualifies the meeting, not just when the meeting is set.
That’s why at Chili Piper, our main metrics is QHM: Qualified Held Meetings.
Start by creating a seamless process for transitioning leads from marketing to sales. Ensure there’s no friction in handoff. Explore innovative ways to engage with your leads before they convert to a meeting. Prepare prospects for sales to swoop in and work their magic.
Yes, revenue teams can use automation to guarantee immediate responses, helping to manage lead routing and overcoming challenges like time zone differences. But we humans are great at building relationships and showing empathy—things that automation can't replicate.
Use technology to handle what it does best—like fast, consistent responses—while allowing your team to focus on what they do best—building relationships and closing deals.
You can’t generate, capture, or convert much demand without a brand. As you work to increase demand conversion, keep laying the groundwork for your brand — you’ll need it to improve anything in demand, including conversion.
“When your brand is strong, you can be an average demand gen motion and see success. But if you have a weak brand and strong demand gen motion, you might still be struggling.”
— Jon Miller
ABM focuses on the quality of accounts rather than the quantity of prospects, and involves identifying high-value accounts and targeting key decision-makers within those businesses. Proper ABM means marketing and sales teams join forces to create personalized buying experiences for a select group of high-value accounts.
This aligns well with our Demand Conversion Principles. And, like Demand Conversion, ABM delivers big on its promise:
No, this guide isn’t about ABM. But by focusing on high-value accounts and delivering personalized experiences, businesses can drive higher conversion rates and stop wasting marketing budget. ABM can play a major role in that.
Ok—now that we’ve set the table, let’s jump into the fun stuff – seeing Demand Conversion in action.
Okay, we know what demand conversion is: but what does it look like—and how does it translate into a VIP-level buying experience?
To answer that question, let’s first take a little detour and explore this idea of delivering a great buyer experience. Being buyer-first means aligning the sales process with how buyers want to buy, and putting the buyer's needs at the center of your sales process. And that’s exactly what our 2024 B2B Buyer First Best Practices Report we recently published with Navattic was all about. It’s a great read with a lot of data and actionable insights, but the main takeaway is that companies that prioritize being buyer-first focus on making it easy for buyers to connect with sales, try out their products, and find their pricing and packaging information.
5 ways to be buyer-first and deliver that VIP experience:
“The next wave is to orchestrate, holistically, across buyer types and funnel stage. Whether they came to the website, chatted with a particular question, re-engaged at a certain point, were retargeted with demo ad—the goal is the same. Accelerate speed. Reduce friction.”
— Nicolas Vandenberghe
To get your revenue-oriented brain juices flowing, here are some tactical ideas mapped to different stages of the buyer’s journey, designed to bridge the gap between each stage and drive demand conversion.
“The magic formula for top-of-funnel success is a personalized, relevant, and timely message.”
— Brandon Redlinger
At this early stage, demand conversion focuses on capturing initial interest, turning anonymous visitors into identifiable leads through personalized responses and engaging content. More sophisticated GTM teams are taking it one step further and leveraging AI to make outbound motions more effective. AI enables reps to send more personalized messages by analyzing and surfacing industry, segments, intent and engagement data. Now, reps can craft tailored messages, predict the best times to reach out, and prioritize high-potential leads.
Use segmentation to send tailored emails that address specific pain points and interests of different prospect groups. Automate follow-up emails to consistently engage with and remind prospects of your value proposition.
Create valuable content such as guides, masterclasses, and podcasts to showcase your value from the start. Invest in your social following. Build a great newsletter. Host live or on-demand webinars on relevant industry topics to capture even more leads. Whatever the tactic, keep value front and center for your audience.
Use chatbots to qualify leads on your website and route them to a live SDR for more personalized interaction. Then, the SDR can seamlessly transition the warm lead to an AE, moving prospects further down the funnel.
The problems with many current chat solutions are they’re over-engineered with too many extra bells and whistles (which you end up having to pay an arm and a leg for) and designed to pounce on visitors and pop up on video chat, or they’re too lightweight and won’t get the job done.
Embed booking links in your emails and on your website to allow prospects to easily schedule meetings with your sales team. “Never let a visitor leave without giving them an opportunity to book a meeting with you,” says Tom Rowe.
Set up easy actions like one-click booking and a nurture program that guides folks in the right direction.
Automatically reassign an opportunity to a different SDR or team if you don’t see engagement within 24 hours. Keep your SDRs’ dockets full while optimizing for their time and getting back to leads fast.
You don’t have to give all of your leads the same treatment by funneling them through a static sales process. Instead, distribute qualified leads to the right AE or SDR depending on the ABM landing page, LinkedIn Conversation Ad, or webinar that they’re coming in from.
Here, the focus is on nurturing leads by providing valuable information and personalized interactions to move them closer to making a purchase decision.
Convert directly from events, whether virtual or in-person—why make prospects who are ready to talk now wait for a follow-up? Allow for booking at in-person events with simple forms or QR codes, and use virtual event attendance to drive qualified sales calls faster.
Respond quickly to demo requests—or give leads a calendar in the request itself—to capture interest while it's hot and move prospects towards a buying decision. Use automation workflows to route these high-intent handraisers to the right SDR or AE for follow-up within minutes, instead of hours or days.
Use lead scoring and routing tools to ensure that leads are distributed to the right SDRs and AEs based on predefined criteria. Implement guidelines to have SDRs follow up with leads within a set timeframe, maintaining that buyer’s momentum. Pull out the white glove treatment for high-intent and existing target accounts. For example: if you get a website visitor from a target account, you can route that engagement to the AE who owns the account.
A key to a good routing solution is it must be flexible and easy to change processes as you scale. Having a solution built for speed of experimentation and deployment will make your ops team more effective and happy (we like happy ops people).
Have your SDRs and AEs create a personal page to share a booking link with your prospects and customers—designed to showcase your brand and their needs more than a straightforward booking link.
Reduce no-shows in the first place with automated (yet personalized) reminders leading up to the meeting. For those who still seem to be slipping away, optimize your reps’ time by automatically following up with options to rebook or watch a self-serve demo.
There’s no reason to give leads coming from channel partners, marketplaces, or review sites like G2 the same MQL treatment that you give everyone. Reflect their intent—and where they’re coming from—from the very first interaction.
During the purchase stage, demand conversion aims to convert trials and inquiries into actual sales.
Automatically route trial users to sales for personalized follow-up, aimed at converting them to paid customers. If necessary, offer incentives or special promotions to encourage trial users to upgrade to paid plans.
Use product usage data to identify Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) and prioritize them for sales engagement. Use a routing tool to route and assign a PQL to your sales team automatically, ensuring no one falls through the cracks. Equip sales with insights about how PQLs useare using the product to tailor their pitches and address specific needs.
In the loyalty stage, the focus is on retaining and expanding customer relationships through proactive engagement and attentive customer support.
Use in-app pop-ups to promote relevant features or upgrades to existing users, driving cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Trigger offers based on specific user behaviors or milestones within the product.
Once a lead is marked closed-won, facilitate a seamless handoff from sales to your customer success or onboarding teams to maintain that positive customer experience.
Proactively schedule regular check-ins with customers to address any issues, gather feedback, and discuss new opportunities. Conduct value reviews to showcase the ROI of your product and discuss ways to further enhance the customer’s experience.
As we said before, what’s good for the buyer is good for the seller. There’s a reason that’s our #1 Demand Conversion Principle. A lot of these use cases across the demand conversion journey are focused on creating a frictionless buying experience because how you sell today is as important as what you sell. In other words, creating a white-glove, VIP experience can be a competitive advantage.
But a lot of times, organizations think this creates more work and hassle for their team. It shouldn’t. In fact, if you have the right tools and setup, it can also be a white-glove experience for your team. Here’s what we mean – your ops team spends countless hours setting up your lead routing and distribution in one system, only to have to repeat that again when you add a new tool. But by integrating all your solutions with one unified platform, no more duplication of effort and no more inconsistency.
“Every go-to-market team is under pressure to do more with less. Before, you could spend money and have low efficiencies, but now that’s no longer acceptable. You can’t afford any leakages in your processes now, because then you won’t meet your goals.”
— Nicolas Vandenberghe
Boosting your Demand Conversion Score (DCS) involves your metrics, people, and tools.
We recommend that order: metrics are meaningless unless they’re tracking the most impactful areas, and there’s no need to jump straight to shiny new tools until your team is set up for success.
You need to monitor the right data points to ensure that you are on the right track.
“It’s time to revisit how marketing and sales collaborate and measure, turning overlooked moments into milestones of engagement on the way to becoming customers.”
— Brandon Redlinger
There are volume metrics, and then there are conversion metrics. Here’s our short list of metrics that we think are important. However, we’re always learning and open to feedback, so if you see holes in this model or would love to offer a different perspective, please email brandon@chilipiper.com so we can start a conversation.
Volume metrics measure the quantity of a certain stage in the funnel and will always be a number.
On the volume front, we drew inspiration from Jacco van der Kooij’s Revenue Architecture.
Now, you probably wouldn’t be surprised if we told you we have some meaty benchmark data on inbound conversion rates. We analyzed 2,948,575 form submissions, 2,042,453 qualified form submissions, and 1,307,505 booked meetings and put our findings in our 2024 Benchmark Report on Demo Form Conversion Rates. For more insights, inspiration and best practices, subscribe to The Sauce.
In traditional models, leadsAccounts that are “Engaged” are often defined as MQLs (marketing deems them more likely to convert). In some other companies, Handraisers are synonymous with MQLs.
Not all interactions with an account should be deemed equal. More interactions don’t necessarily mean more pipeline. In general, teams accept pipeline created as a much better way to measure marketing success than the success of marketing instead of MQLs.
According to RevOps leader Brendan Tolleson, a qualified lead is someone who has shown intent, has a problem that your solution can solve, and has the budget to do something about it. It’s much more involved than a webinar registration or even an aggregate lead score. Marketing and sales need to get on the same page with their definition of qualified.
But even with a better definition for “qualified,”—leaders still need to align on accountability. Charlie Liang, Head of Marketing at Finch, says there was a shift in the nature of his relationship with the Head of Revenue when he requested to tie his variable compensation to half new business ARR growth and half pipeline.
“He realized, wait, we have the same goals,” Charlie says. “I’m not just focused on inbound pipeline; we’re focused on the whole.”
Part of looking at your processes involves reevaluating your hand raiser qualification process.
As Jay Gaines suggests, not all hand raisers are created equal. For example, if someone with the right title at the right company that fits your ICP fills out a contact or ‘book a demo’ form — of course, hand them off to a sales rep right away. But don’t invest the same amount of effort into every handraiser. “Handraisers should be evaluated based on engagement patterns, the level and recency of their interactions at an account level, versus a lead level,” says Jay.
Helen Baptist agrees, adding that technologies now allow companies to gain deeper insights into the interests, journeys, and size of a buying committee—to both qualify buyers and improve their experience. “Look at the attributes that are important to your ICP or ICV, understand your customer profile,” says Helen. “Let’s first address, are we aligned on who we’re going after and how we’re going after them? Use the data you have to make sure you’re able to prescribe a solution based on what you have in your back pocket.”
Automating your qualification
Many B2B companies are still handing their hottest leads (inbound demo requests) to junior reps to qualify and run discovery calls on. Not only does this slow down the selling process, it tends to create a crappy experience for the buyer.
This most likely isn’t the first time your buyer is making a software purchase. They’re booking a demo because they’re ready to see a demo, not to have their time wasted getting ‘BANTed’.
Once you’ve aligned on what ‘qualified’ looks like in your org, you should be able to cover this criteria in a form. If your qualification criteria is more complex than a few form fields, you should probably revisit them as it will be hard for your internal teams to remember and stick with (and will lead to friction and tension between your teams).
Rather than having to ask your prospects to fill out several new form fields to self-qualify, there are data tools that can help you fill in the blanks. For example, if you only want to pass companies with over 50 employees directly to your AEs, you can use a tool like Zoominfo form complete to capture company size data on your demo form and use that to qualify your inbound leads.
Setting qualification criteria isn’t a once-and-done activity. Regularly review and refine your criteria to ensure that only the most qualified leads are passed to reps, the right amount of leads are being passed, and youryou’re conversion rates don’t drop. Lead scoring can and does play an important role in qualification, so factor in important data, like firmographic, technographic, 3rd party intent and 1st party engagement data to gauge their interest and readiness to talk to sales.
Some of the common pushback on automating the lead qualification process is from sales leaders who have hired great reps as inbound SDRs. What would this team do if their role was automated?
Rather than having them gatekeep AE’s calendars and act as admin support, this is an opportunity to redeploy them to spend their time on tasks that are hard to scale or can’t get done by AI. Creative tasks like hyper-personalized outbound and supporting ABM programs are great places to start.
Most companies can’t or don’t invest in expensive attribution tools; as a result it’s harder to attribute pipeline in one bucket over another. Especially since multiple sources can contribute to an opportunity being created.
In fact, if you mention “attribution” in a crowded room of marketers, and you’ll get looks like you just dropped the F bomb.
Because even the simple act of asking hand raisers how they found you via self-reported attribution, it is not a very reliable method either. Oftentimes we can’t recall what lead us to make an inquiry.
Another reality revenue teams face today is that more research is done in ways that are not trackable by your attribution software. For example, buyers are highly influenced by peers, communities, networks 3rd-party sites, and sources we probably aren’t even aware of. that will never show up on an attribution report.
To simplify, companies choose to focus on either first-touch (the first trackable point of interaction a lead had with your company) or last-touch attribution (the most recent trackable point of interaction before the lead requested a meeting).
There is no perfect attribution model, but you should still have a model that you can defend and that will help you make more informed decisions about where to spend time and resources.
For PLG companies, aka companies that focus on product funnels for self-service, the metrics might look a tad different:
Post sales, we have different ways to look at volume metrics—and the marketing team might or might not be involved in the optimization of these metrics
From a volume of “Accounts” perspective, we can consider:
From a revenue perspective, these turn into:
Conversion metrics are ratios that compare two different quantities that have different units and are displayed as a percent.
Most companies struggle to measure the volume of accounts in different stages so conversions are even trickier to achieve. (But they are a lot easier to calculate when you have a platform that caters to optimizing all the touch points in the funnel.)
On the conversion front, we have been following the following metrics (and their calculations):
Addressing the demand conversion gap isn’t a quick fix; it requires a deeper look at how you think about the funnel in the first place. Some companies have already adopted a more innovative approach to stages, metrics, and connecting the dots.
For example:
Movable Ink started measuring pipeline generated as their main KPI. “Since we started measuring pipeline as our main KPI, it’s been fascinating because we realized that we didn’t need to generate as many opportunities,” said Justin Keller, VP of Growth. “They were piping at a higher value than we thought, which gave us some relief. We didn’t need to grind as hard.”
Lori Richardson of Score More Sales introduced a metric called Helpful Conversations (HC) to encourage reps to build relationships, emphasizing the quality of interactions over quantity.
And Brian Yam, Head of Marketing and Growth at Paragon, wants to connect marketing efforts to the bigger picture. “From Day One, I said I wanted to own pipeline,” says Brian. “It’s hard for me to define the value of marketing if I’m stuck at the MQL level; if I can’t contribute to anything that’s close to revenue.”
Brian suggests closing the gap between the metrics: OKRs for marketing usually revolve around leads, while sales is responsible for revenue. In his words: “Start by aligning on the definition of what is qualified pipeline.”
It’s time to put an end to the finger-pointing between marketing and sales. The blame game only creates friction and stalls progress. Instead, foster a culture where both teams collaborate, share insights, and work towards common goals.
“One of the biggest problems with the demand conversion process is if you're not aligned on who you're selling to and what a best fit looks like, sales is never going to pick up leads that you pass over fast enough..”
— Kacie Jenkins
We need to speak the same language—not just between sales and marketing, but also with our revenue, post-sales and finance leaders. Marketers need to see the bigger picture and learn sales to understand how their efforts impact ROI, and sales teams need to appreciate marketing's nuances.
A couple of examples:
Brendan Tolleson (RevPartners) focuses on how much marketing influences pipeline. They use content created by their marketing team at different points of demand conversion to generate the right traffic with the right persona. If form submissions aren’t converting to stage-one opportunities with sales, this sends a signal to marketing that content isn’t resonating or they’re targeting the wrong audience. This closed feedback loop allows marketing to adjust and refine their strategies, to attract the right prospects for sales to convert.
Joseph Lee, SVP Marketing at Paradigm, describes the lead generation machine they built in tandem with the BDR team, with effective lead scoring and two MQL pipelines. They also established clear SLAs on speed to lead, nurturing every prospect according to best practices.
“Our secret sauce is that we like each other and we are students of the game,” says Joseph. “It requires humility and the willingness to learn.”
That humility translates into shared wins for his team. At his previous company, they saw a 60% conversion rate for hand raisers and 25% for anything that led to first meetings. To focus their efforts on the most qualified prospects, Joseph built fast tracks for strategic enterprise accounts and incentives for high-value contacts attending events.
Their biggest demand conversion challenge? Attribution, especially in ABM, since marketing doesn’t get credit for the work of reps chasing down multimillion-dollar LTV accounts. Working towards shared metrics and goals, however, makes sure that both teams get kudos for their contributions to demand conversion.
This ties in with the discussion of qualification above. Chili Piper advisor Kaylee Edmondson recommends a solid strategy for getting started on this front: give your sales and marketing leaders homework. Ask simple questions like “What does an MQL mean for us?” and “What signals intent?”
“Usually almost nothing matches until the SQL stage. It’s a good place to start the conversation because it highlights critical gaps without resorting to finger-pointing. Do some homework, get in a room, and swap notes.”
This initial conversation will help set the stage—especially when you bring in MOps or RevOps—no matter what your motion looks like.
From there, Kaylee recommends a weekly pipeline review with your VP Sales, VP Marketing, and RevOps leader all together in the same room: “It’s a great way to add qualitative insights to your quantitative data.”
“How do you maximize the probability that interest in your product converts into meetings? What do you put in place to make sure interest generated by marketing turns into pipeline?” asks Nicholas Vandenberghe.
That’s as much a tech stack question as it is a process question.
Yes, we recommend starting with your processes and your people. But having the right tools and systems makes all the difference in demand conversion. They streamline your processes, cut down on friction, and ensure every lead gets the attention it deserves.
One CMO we spoke with shared that they had to start over from scratch, after a high-volume lead gen strategy that just wasn’t leading to conversions. She pivoted her team toward making the website a true marketing engine—and an easy experience for customers. They simplified their systems for routing and responding to leads, made handoff more straightforward, and introduced better measures for every stage of the conversion funnel.
The result? A more positive impression of the company from their buyers, which meant this CMO’s team hit their numbers every following quarter and delivered all pipeline for both inbound and outbound. (Remember what we said about brand?)
“In the past ten years, forward-thinking organizations have been trying to fix this problem with point solutions deployed at various part of the funnel: lead distribution for outbound and territories, chat on the website, handoff tools between teams. Some of the tools solve partially for the problem but make it extremely hard to understand the full picture—or to be nimble in experimentation across systems. It’s time for a single view into demand conversion.”
— Brandon Redlinger
The right tools will help you put the right processes, owned by both marketing and sales, into action. For example:
Investing in these tools means your team can work more efficiently and effectively, leading to better results and higher conversion rates.
To navigate the dynamic landscape of demand conversion, we've put together a market map that outlines key players in the industry, categorized by area of focus.
These tools are designed to mature and refine the middle of your funnel, including categories like:
On either end of these tools are your Top of Funnel tools (paid ads, lead enrichment, intent data) and your systems action for sales and marketing (CRM, sales engagement, marketing automation).
We know: it’s a lot, and it can be overwhelming. Some of these platforms help you accomplish better demand conversion on multiple fronts. Consolidating your stack translates into consistent data and reporting, with no need to double up on workflows, avoiding the risk of broken integrations—and taking another step toward sales and marketing alignment.
Eight years ago, Nicolas and Alina recognized the gap between buyers and sellers and built a form router and scheduler, becoming a category leader and household name in B2B.
Chili Piper in 2016 with three goals in mind:
(“I worked for a CIO who had done a $100M failed implementation of a CRM and I knew teams needed new tools,” says Alina.)
(“I knew it was broken because I was often a buyer in these large contracts” says Alina.)
(“I was a miserable employee, working with a lot of red tape and inefficiencies,” says Alina. “I am hopeful that businesses can do a lot better for their people so they can do their best work without feeling burnt out.”)
Over the years, Chili Piper added more products and functionality to qualify leads and get buyers in front of the right sales reps, fast. Now, we’ve closed the gap even more with our latest release, making all our solutions unified in one platform. Oh, and did we mention it’s the only solution out there that integrates your demand conversion system that’s easy to set up, easy to create experiments, and scales with you as you grow?
Demand conversion is all about bringing together the right people, processes, and technologies into a unified system that addresses the challenging parts of your sales funnel. It’s now easier than ever to transform the space between an MQL and an active sales deal into a goldmine of opportunity, ripe for redefinition.
With Chili Piper’s platform, this gap becomes a space where qualified prospects are nurtured, not neglected.
We believe demand conversion is the key to unlocking your company’s full growth potential.
Ready to get started? Get a demo of our Demand Conversion Platform today!
Lead Contributors
Tara Robertson, Head of Demand Gen
Tom Rowe, SVP Sales
Joey Williams, Director Sales Development
Nicolas Vandenberghe, Co-CEO & co-Founder
Brendan Tolleson, CEO
Brian Yam, Head of Marketing
Charlie Liang, Head of Marketing
Helen Baptist, Chief Strategy and Market Officer
Jay Gaines, CMO
Joe Lee, VP of Growth
Jon Miller, Entrepreneur
Justin Keller, VP of Growth
Kaylee Edmondson, Soloprenuer
Lori Richardson, B2B Sales and Revenue Growth Trainer
Mark Kosoglow, GTM Leader
Alex Bauer, Co-founder
Alon Waks, Executive Advisor
Amber Bogie, Sr. Director Growth Marketing
Amrita Mathur, VP of Marketing
Amy Volas, Founder/CEO
Andrea Kayal, CRO
Andy Mowat, VP GTM Ops
Brandon Young, CMO
Brendon Cassidy, Co-founder/Co-CEO
Cliff Simon, CRO
Dan Stratton, Sr. Partner
David Fallarme, VP of marketing
Emmanuelle Skala, GTM and CS Leader
Eric Wittlake, Sr. Director of Strategic Marketing Initiatives
Heidi Bullock, CMO
Helen Baptist, Chief Strategy and Market Officer
James Fletcher, Founder
Jane Serra, VP of Marketing
Jared Fuller, Co-founder & CEO
Jen Igartua, CEO
Jill Rowley, Strategy & Evangelism
John Barrows, CEO
John Fernandez, SVP marketing
Jordan Henderson, Director of RevOps
Josh Braun, Founder
Kacie Jenkins, SVP of Marketing
Laura Erdem, Sales Manager
Liam Moroney, Co-founder
Mada Seghete, Co-founder & Managing Director
Matt Heinz, Founder and President
Matt Mullin, VP of Demand Gen
Megan Heuer, Principal
Michael Maximoff, Founder
Natalie Marcotullio, Head of Growth and Operations
Ray Rike, Founder/CEO
Richard Harris, Founder
Rob Jones, Creative Lead
Sam Levan, Co-founder/CEO
Scott Leese, CEO and Founder
Tim Davidson, Founder
Tracy Eiler, CMO
Trinity Nguyen, UserGems
Tyler Lessard, CMO
Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist
Ready to start converting more demand?
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