Mark Walker, Co-founder and CEO at Revved Up, dives into the enduring challenges of B2B lead nurturing. He explores why many companies still rely on outdated tactics despite the availability of new tools and data. He shares insights on the power of brand-building, customer alignment, and elevating sales conversations. His perspective underscores the importance of bridging the gap between strategy and execution for sustainable growth.
“Lead nurture gets overlooked because everyone’s focused on stuffing the top of the funnel. They chase more leads while ignoring the middle: moving leads through the funnel more effectively. You are sitting on a gold mine in your lead nurture that you are not touching.” – Mark Walker
This episode examines the impact of uniting sales and marketing on growth strategy. Mark’s experiences guide listeners toward a holistic revenue approach, helping them see how seamless collaboration fuels pipeline health and accelerates business outcomes. By uncovering real-world insights on aligning both disciplines, executives can equip their teams with a roadmap for long-term success.
Follow Host Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn
Follow Mark Walker on LinkedIn
[Transcript]
[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, I guarantee that we’re going to have a conversation that will change your perspective—your point of view—on many different things. We’re gonna be talking with Mark Walker, and Mark is not only the co-founder and CEO of Revved Up, but Mark, you have been a four-time CRO in charge of revenue operations. You’re a startup, you’re a founder, you’re a CEO. In the company that you have right now, you do a lot of consulting with other Chief Revenue Officers and CEOs about their revenue operations. So, with your background in B2B and now working with several different companies, you have a comprehensive perspective on best practices.
[00:00:53] Steve MacDonald: Particularly in the area of our topic today, which is why B2B lead nurturing hasn’t changed in the last 10 years. We have new sources of data we’ve never had before, right? We have new technologies we’ve never had before. We have best practices we’ve never had before, but we tend to lean back and default to the way that we’re used to doing things.
[00:01:16] Steve MacDonald: A big part of that is breaking through the status quo. Before we dive into it, I wanted to give you a chance to expand more on your background before we get started.
[00:01:27] Mark Walker: Alright, thanks, Steve. I appreciate the warm introduction and great to be on the podcast.
[00:01:31] Mark Walker: Yeah, as you said, my background is—over the last 10 years, I’ve been a Chief Revenue Officer, so helping drive overall revenue for businesses, which means running and aligning sales and marketing, as well as CS, account management, and revenue operations to drive those businesses forward. Before that, I had always been involved in commercial teams, and perhaps somewhat unusually, I had crossed over the divide between sales and marketing many times.
[00:02:02] Mark Walker: So my background has always been a near-equal balance between sometimes taking quite operational marketing roles, sometimes quite operational sales roles, before becoming a Chief Revenue Officer. So it’s given me a unique perspective between those, which can often be quite siloed disciplines.
[00:02:18] Mark Walker: I think almost evenly, 50/50, between the sales and marketing mindset, which has given me quite a unique advantage in a lot of the roles that I’ve taken on. And as you mentioned, more recently, I’m now a founder and CEO of a VC-backed tech startup, which is a whole new learning curve that I’m enjoying.
[00:02:36] Mark Walker: Before that, getting off the ground, I was consulting and advising several different startups and growth technology businesses.
[00:02:44] Steve MacDonald: From that description, it sounds like we should have you back on, ’cause we have an ongoing series on why B2B CMOs and why B2B CROs fail so quickly.
[00:02:54] Steve MacDonald: We had the two shortest tenures in the C-suite, but I think we’re gonna unpack a little bit of that—some of the reasons behind that—today. Let me just have you dive right in. The topic was why B2B lead nurturing hasn’t changed in the past decade. Why is that the case?
[00:03:09] Mark Walker: Yeah. We were discussing the changes in the landscape for go-to-market and technology revenue a few weeks ago.
[00:03:16] Mark Walker: I just happened to mention this idea that, 12 years ago, I was Head of Growth at Eventbrite, and more recently, the last three months or so, I’ve been diving quite deep into what hasn’t changed with different revenue leaders. And one of the things that has become very evident is that the way people lead nurture has not changed in the 12 years since I was leading growth at Eventbrite, which is just crazy, right? We’ve had so many advances. The whole playbook around go-to-market seems to have been ripped up and rewritten, what feels like—every fortnight at this point. And yet, lead nurturing is exactly the same as it was 12 years ago.
[00:03:57] Mark Walker: So the question is, why? Why is this area of go-to-market being completely untouched? And I’ve got my hypotheses. One reason that lead nurture has simply not been worked on to any great extent is that people are pretty obsessed with filling the top of the funnel more and more, right?
[00:04:19] Mark Walker: They look at, “Hey, we need more opportunities.” So they work at the funnel and they go, “Okay, if we need more opportunities, we need more SQLs, we need more MQLs. Therefore, we need more leads.” And then they skip the bit in between, which is, why don’t we get those leads to MQL more efficiently and effectively? And why don’t we get more of those MQLs to turn into SQLs, which is a story we’ll dive into in a minute.
[00:04:45] Mark Walker: They skip right to the top and go, “We just need more leads. Spend more money. We need to go to our trade shows. We need to spend more on LinkedIn. We need to spend more on PPC.” So I think one is that default mindset of “We need more leads to drive growth.” Okay, more is more. And that means they skip what feels like a relatively easy win with lead nurturing for those reasons.
[00:05:08] Mark Walker: A second piece is that, until recently, there has not been any new technology within Lead Nurture. So, your marketing automation platforms—HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua—the big four—have been around for over 10 years, sometimes 15 or 20 years. There’s been no new players in the space, right?
[00:05:32] Mark Walker: Almost no innovation within marketing automation. There has been a lack of innovation and technology to drive new thinking and capabilities in that area. Then, I think the third one is—it’s just impossible to get away from—sales and marketing misalignment means that often, people are not focused on improving their lead nurturing. They’re running around with their heads on fire, trying to generate more leads or sometimes playing more political games, which is maybe a subject we can touch on a little bit further in the podcast.
[00:06:06] Steve MacDonald: I’d love to, and I wanna get into that MQL, SQL conversation. Before that, though, you mentioned that we spend the vast majority of the time trying to go after new prospects, get new MQLs, new SQLs.
[00:06:20] Steve MacDonald: But just in the last couple of years, Forrester came out with a big report, and they said in the world of B2B, 73% of revenue—73%, three-quarters of revenue—comes from existing customers. So I just want to ask you a question about being a revenue operations leader. That doesn’t mean, “Oh, revenue operations is just about new logo development.”
[00:06:42] Steve MacDonald: That means increase our revenue, right? And the more enlightened companies have Chief Revenue Officers who oversee revenue operations. So, marketing, sales, and customer support, customer experience—all live under that umbrella. So the structures are maybe tending towards that.
[00:07:00] Steve MacDonald: They’re not that way in most companies, but why are companies so focused on new logo development and not as much on mining the massive opportunity we have with our existing customer base?
[00:07:12] Mark Walker: Yeah, great question. I’ve been on the board of other fast-growth VC-backed businesses as a CRO, and I can tell you, it is primarily driven from the top, right?
[00:07:23] Mark Walker: It is driven by a board that rarely asks the question of how much revenue we are moving from our existing base, right? They want to know, “What is our future pipeline?” That’s the question that you, as a CRO, get beaten over the head with: Where’s our future pipeline? Where’s our new logo? That is the predominant occupation or interest of boards at the moment. It doesn’t mean they don’t care about things like churn and net retention, but they care more about new logo growth, right? Because that, they see, is the engine of the business. If you flatline on new logo growth and rely entirely on existing business—your install base—then I think, to be fair, rightly, if you go too far in that direction, the company will eventually stall. There is only so much you can extract from your existing customer base.
[00:08:21] Mark Walker: Actually, there’s a great guy in the SaaS space called Jason Lemkin, who I admire greatly. He’s spoken a lot about the last 12 months. Too many SaaS CRO leaders have gone in the opposite direction, squeezing every penny out of their existing customer base to the detriment of existing client relationships. So we may be overcorrecting to that route at this point.
[00:08:42] Mark Walker: But I think traditionally, Steve, you’re entirely right—we’ve just ignored our existing customers. They just don’t matter when there is an enormous amount of value and revenue to be driven from those existing customers. And of course, the expense of trying to replace any churned
[00:09:00] Mark Walker: customers with net new customers—it’s like you are treading in quicksand, right? You don’t want to build a business on a leaky bucket.
[00:09:08] Steve MacDonald: I love how you positioned it, like within the board meeting setting, right? Which is, from leadership at the highest level on down. If you come into a board meeting, right?
[00:09:18] Steve MacDonald: And we’re not talking about this quarter’s quota and what next quarter’s looking like, everybody’s like itchy. They’re like, “What are we doing here?” If you come in and you start talking about, “Here’s our customer expansion program,” and from a marketing perspective, “Here’s how we’re building the brand”—’cause today’s brand is tomorrow’s demand, which everybody knows, right?
[00:09:34] Steve MacDonald: These are like excellent things that we should be talking about at the board level. But you’re gonna get shot. That’s one way to have a failed board meeting—at least, you have to know your customer and their needs. And that’s what they want.
[00:09:49] Steve MacDonald: But to your point, they want us to be leaders in our businesses. They are advising us to execute. All these areas have to be focused on. But I wanna come back to this focus. Let’s go back to developing the new logo. Let’s return to the MQL and SQL conversation and what you wanted to discuss there.
[00:10:15] Mark Walker: Yeah. There’s a fundamental disconnect in how businesses treat lead nurturing, and it often stems from a misalignment between sales and marketing, as well as how they value a lead. Okay. Typically, marketing is driven towards a target that is primarily MQL-based, right?
[00:10:39] Mark Walker: The way that they define an MQL is very frequently based on a numeric behavioral metric. By that, I mean: How many times did they open the email? Did they read this white paper? Did they go and visit the pricing page? So it’s a behaviorally driven mechanism. Now, the problem with that is it doesn’t consider whether the lead is a good fit for the business from an ICP perspective—an Ideal Customer Profile perspective.
[00:11:09] Mark Walker: So, historically—and I do think marketing teams are starting to change this—but if we talk historically, many marketing teams would race as fast as they could to generate as many MQLs as possible. Volume was the game. And then they’d throw you over the fence to sales, and sales would go, “What is this?
[00:11:30] Mark Walker: I can’t sell to these. They’re not within our ICP.” And so, I won’t be able to give the exact quote, but someone I spoke to a couple of weeks ago said, almost inevitably, that the sales team would rather go and run their own cold outbound because they know they’re reaching customers they can sell to.
[00:11:51] Mark Walker: Then, spend time on inbound MQLs because they don’t believe in the quality of them. Now, on the sales side of things, it can also be tough because they expect an MQL to be ready to buy. And that is not what an MQL is, right? Sometimes you get these overly privileged sales teams who reject anything that doesn’t practically have their checkbook ready to sign a contract and give you the cash.
[00:12:24] Mark Walker: So, sales, sometimes, is unfair with their expectations around what can be delivered to them. And marketing, sometimes, can be misaligned in terms of what sales need to get from them. And so, this disconnect between MQLs and SQLs is at the heart of why lead nurture programs often don’t receive the love they need—or the attention and budget they need—because there is a foundational level of misalignment.
[00:12:52] Steve MacDonald: I’d love to hear your definition of a Sales Qualified Lead, and then the role that you see marketing playing in creating Sales Qualified Leads. I, like a year ago, did a meme—I hired a cartoonist—and it was a CMO at his desk, and he was looking at a big stack of all the MQLs and throwing them over the wall.
[00:13:16] Steve MacDonald: A year ago, did that. It got an excellent play on LinkedIn. But—so, what is your definition of an SQL? And then what is marketing’s role in helping create the SQL?
[00:13:29] Mark Walker: Sure. My definition of SQL is, of course, not as important as each company’s definition, which can vary.
[00:13:35] Mark Walker: But to give you a broad-brush view of what I would class as an SQL—it is a matrixed view of a lead. In other words, an SQL should be, in some way, ready to buy within a reasonable period. So, there’s a level of: Are they engaged? Are they looking to have a conversation with us about a challenge they have that we can help solve?
[00:13:59] Mark Walker: And they have to be. So that’s the engagement piece of the matrix. But they also have to be a fit with our Ideal Customer Profile, right? So, if you’re an organization that only sells to—I’ll give you a real-life example with a marketing leader I worked with—the organization had decided to only sell to D2C and e-commerce brands, okay?
[00:14:23] Mark Walker: But we got a ton of inbound interest from agencies. And this marketing leader lobbied every quarter for us to loosen the definition, so that we could include agencies, because it would massively increase the MQLs. But—we couldn’t sell to them. So, in that case, no matter how engaged the agency was on the one vector, they were not within our ICP. And therefore, they wouldn’t have been SQL, right? Immediately disqualified.
[00:14:59] Mark Walker: A prevalent framework that many people use to help with base-level SQL qualification is BANT, right? You’ve probably heard of it on podcasts before. BANT stands for: Budget—is there money, is there a pot of money to solve for this problem? Are you speaking to someone with some level of influence or power within the organization? Need—have they indicated that there is a pressing problem right now? And Timing—do they want to try and solve it within X period?
[00:15:29] Mark Walker: Now, you can’t get all of those without having an actual conversation, but you can have plenty of proxy measures within your systems to tell you: This is probably a BANT-qualified lead. And that’s where I would talk about SQL.
[00:15:40] Steve MacDonald: I love that. We should change the definition from SQL to a BANT-qualified lead. That makes it very simple. So here’s the thing that I think is interesting—
[00:15:50] Steve MacDonald: You brought up there the very definition of an ICP. Misalignment between sales and marketing in the definition of what an ICP is—that’s one major issue. There
[00:16:00] Steve MacDonald: is an underlying, major issue below that I would love to get your opinion on. And I’ve had the good fortune to talk to over 160 different B2B C-suite executives on this podcast, and I run this by them all the time.
[00:16:13] Steve MacDonald: And so I’d love to get your point of view on it, because they don’t have your perspective. But my perspective is that we have a very high degree of familiarity with our ICP, but we don’t have a deep understanding of it, and many layers go into that.
[00:16:35] Steve MacDonald: But we tend to talk to our ICP and learn from our ICP within the bandwidth of what we can do for them. Their challenges and their pain points are out here. Talking to them here is a vendor. Talking to them out here is like being a partner, a consultant, or a peer. And that’s the value-added selling. That’s the Gartner, trusted advisor, sales methodology. What’s your opinion on this idea of whether we have a deep familiarity, or do we really, genuinely have a deep understanding of our ICP?
[00:17:10] Mark Walker: Yeah, I think from what I’ve observed working with many organizations, your observation is valid on the whole. Since we have familiarity, I would describe it this way: most good sales and marketing organizations can tell you their definition of an ICP.
[00:17:29] Mark Walker: Not everyone, sadly, but most at least will be able to say, “Okay, our ICP is this type of industry, this size of headcount.” Maybe they can talk a little bit about, “These are the types of common challenges that they have. They operate in these geographies,” and so on. So, it is a firmographic understanding of their ICP, which is familiar. You can identify them. Do you deeply, truly understand them? Correct—most do not.
[00:18:00] Mark Walker: Because we don’t spend enough time speaking to and listening directly to those prospects and those customers. We don’t walk in their shoes. We can’t develop the level of empathy necessary to understand their challenges and context truly.
[00:18:17] Mark Walker: Truly great salespeople are exceptional because they have an incredible way. Sometimes it’s purely natural, sometimes it is built through a process to get under the skin of a prospect and empathetically through curiosity, understand what it is that person cares about. And to your point, sometimes what they care about isn’t the surface stuff right? They know how to peel back the layers of the onion and actually find sometimes quite personal motivations for why they would want to get this deal done. That would never be uncovered by your top level firmographic ICP characteristics.
[00:18:58] Steve MacDonald: Fascinating—like, small world kind of stuff. An extension of what we’re talking about here—another CMO said this really well. The context behind it, though, is that McKinsey did a study about two years ago that looked at both B2C and B2B companies that were highly profitable, highest return on shareholder value. And the number one differentiator across all 400 of those companies was CX—Customer Experience, right?
[00:19:25] Steve MacDonald: And so this B2B CMO, he said, “Here’s the way I think about this, Steve.” He said, “That’s a competitive advantage we haven’t had before.” We’ve relied on product, service, and price as the bastions of competitive advantage, right? He said, “But I can create a competitive advantage around CX. And the way I do that is by knowing my customers better than my competition.
[00:19:49] Steve MacDonald: I’ll create a better customer experience, which is the number one competitive advantage today.” So here’s my question to you: How much do we need to refocus our efforts as a company—sales, marketing, customer success—on really understanding that customer, not here?
[00:20:11] Mark Walker: I really believe all the great, storied businesses—during their most successful phases—were obsessed with the customer.
[00:20:19] Mark Walker: My favorite example of this is Amazon and Jeff Bezos. All of his executive meetings and board meetings—they would have an empty chair, and that was the customer’s chair. It was a physical reinforcement that the customer is always sat around the highest-level executive decisions. And I just love that—just how customer-obsessed they were. And look how well they’ve done.
[00:20:42] Mark Walker: Now, there are always antithetical examples as well, but I genuinely believe—and I think this is even more so in the world of AI and the tech innovations that are sweeping through the market.
[00:20:58] Mark Walker: If you can genuinely understand your customers better than your competition—maybe even sometimes better than they know themselves—you will be at a significant competitive advantage. Yet, it’s not easy, right? And that’s partly why there’s a competitive advantage. It’s pretty easy to write down a bunch of firmographic information and say, “This is our ideal customer profile (ICP).” To truly understand what drives and motivates someone, to understand their context, requires a significant amount of effort.
[00:21:30] Steve MacDonald: And you know, if we don’t make that extra effort, here’s what our competitors are doing—they have sales teams that are talking to the peers we’re trying to sell to, too, right?
[00:21:39] Steve MacDonald: And within a sales environment, there is a tremendous amount that we can learn—but that’s still an environment where there’s a shield up. That prospect’s being sold to. This isn’t an opportunity to divulge the more significant pain points, issues, and challenges.
[00:21:57] Steve MacDonald: Most of the time, now, this will drive you crazy as a four-time B2B CRO—I think it was Gong that had a study of thousands and thousands of sales calls. The sales reps talked two-thirds to three-quarters of the time. For instance, you would never design and drive a deep customer learning program through an existing business process that was set up to do something entirely different.
[00:22:20] Steve MacDonald: Same thing for customer success. They’re putting out fires, they’re answering questions, and they’re trying to cross-sell and up-sell, right?
[00:22:29] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, that’s their mantra, right? The data is fantastic—but how do we have these open conversations that aren’t skewed towards a traditional business process that every single one of our competitors is already doing?
[00:22:44] Steve MacDonald: They’re doing the same thing, right? They’re learning the same stuff that we are through those processes. So I guess my ultimate question is: on a scale of 1 to 10, how important is it that we get out of our traditional methods, and that we find new ways to learn deeply about the very customers that we’re trying to create—the prospects that we’re trying to reach out to?
[00:23:12] Steve MacDonald: One—it’s not important at all, let’s just keep doing what we’re doing. Ten—we really gotta do something different. Where do we fall there, and why?
[00:23:20] Mark Walker: So I’d love to give you a straightforward answer. But—so let me give you something that’s not too nuanced, right? I’m going to bucket it very broadly into two stages of business, okay?
[00:23:34] Mark Walker: If you are an earlier-stage startup—and I’m talking a few million in revenue, maybe up to 10, 20 million, Series A, early Series B—that type of size, your entire focus should be 10 out of 10—being completely customer-obsessed, right? Do things that don’t scale. Break the rule books.
[00:24:00] Mark Walker: Think through everything from a first-principles perspective. Because if you are taking off-the-shelf processes, frameworks, best practices that have been handed down to you from other businesses that have already made it, and you’re listening to them on podcasts like this, or from books that you’ve read, that is available to all of your competitors.
[00:24:19] Mark Walker: And if you are executing the same playbook in the same way, do you know what you’re going to end up with? Roughly the same results. The regression to the mean, right? Do you know what happens to average companies in VC-backed businesses? They go bust, right?
[00:24:34] Mark Walker: So you have to break the mold. So it should be 10 out of 10—that important. Now, that doesn’t necessarily scale—and this is me being a little bit cynical—so you might have listeners who completely disagree with me. But there has to come a point when having the whole business just do whatever they can to be customer-obsessed starts to break down a little bit.
[00:25:00] Mark Walker: You do have to put in playbooks and processes. There’s always room for innovation, but you start to have to coalesce around some kind of consistency and repeatability. And some of that will come at the expense of maybe being exceptionally customer-oriented in every situation.
[00:25:17] Mark Walker: Sales is the best example of this, right? If you just have a nice chat with your customers on every sales call and take the conversation wherever it wants to go, regardless of whether or not they will buy from you, you might learn a lot. But you’re going to build a costly sales team that doesn’t close many deals and you’re going to become relatively inefficient.
[00:25:39] Mark Walker: So I think it goes from a 10 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10, right? But at no point should it drop below 6 or 7 out of 10—because that’s when you’ve gone too far the other way. You’re obsessed with process. You’re obsessed with, honestly, bureaucracy and efficiency for the sake of efficiency. And a competitor who is much more customer-obsessed will come and eat your lunch.
[00:26:03] Steve MacDonald: What you’re saying here is—you brought this up yourself—Amazon is probably the role model for customer-obsessed, right? And no company says, “We’re not customer-obsessed. We’re not customer-focused.” Everybody is, right?
[00:26:14] Steve MacDonald: It’s really about where you put your actions behind your words. And they’re one of the world’s largest companies. But I had the privilege of interviewing an executive at Amazon on the podcast, and that still holds today. That might be a virtual chair at a virtual meeting, right?
[00:26:30] Steve MacDonald: But they are still 100% customer-obsessed. So to your point—even as big as you get—don’t let it get below an 8, right? Understanding your customer—they’re complex, and they’re constantly changing. The minute you take your eye off the ball, your competitors aren’t.
[00:26:48] Steve MacDonald: I have one last question to ask you—and a brief answer, because we’ve covered a lot of territory here today. If there was one thing you wanted people to take away—the executives, the C-suite execs that are watching today—what would you want them to take away from this podcast?
[00:27:10] Mark Walker: Oh, that’s a great question. Okay, brief answer. I’ll give two takeaways. One is: Please ensure, at a foundational level, that you have good sales and marketing alignment. They agree on shared targets and shared definitions. If marketing succeeds, that genuinely means sales grow—and vice versa. I still see too many organizations fundamentally hobbled by misalignment at the KPI and metric levels.
[00:27:37] Mark Walker: And then the second piece is, of course, where we started the conversation: You are sitting—I guarantee—on a goldmine in your lead nurture that you are not touching. You are not unlocking it. It’s free cash sitting there, staring you in the face, and it’s being ignored. So, go and have a look at your lead nurture programs.
[00:28:00] Mark Walker: You might think it’s super tactical. It might not have been touched for quarters or even years. Go and have a look and think: How much money is sitting in there where we are simply not doing a very good job of nurturing these leads today that could be clients tomorrow?
[00:28:17] Steve MacDonald: I love it. So here’s one thing that I know is going to happen—people are going to have questions, or they’re going to want to reach out and talk to you more. Would it be okay if I shared a link to your LinkedIn profile so people can reach out to you?
[00:28:31] Mark Walker: Please do. Yes—I would love to hear from folks. Anyone who wants to speak about revenue alignment or, in this particular case, improving your lead nurture programs—I’d be happy to talk. And in a very consultative way, too.
[00:28:42] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Mark, thank you. Thank you so much. The mission behind this podcast is to bring diverse perspectives from C-suite executives around the world. How do we create growth? How do we create long-term, sustainable growth?
[00:28:57] Steve MacDonald: There’s not one way to do it. So, thank you for contributing to that conversation today. I appreciate it.
[00:29:02] Mark Walker: Thanks so much, Steve. Appreciate you having me on.