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Knowing how to set goals and what metrics to track can be tricky for today’s progressive marketer. In the kick-off episode to season 2 of the highly successful podcast Smash The Funnel, we sit down with Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift, to talk about conversational marketing and chatbots. We also discuss how to know what numbers marketers should be shooting for, how to set them, how to track them and how to think differently about what goals and KPIs are most important today.

Now that you’ve set your goals, how do you measure revenue-related metrics? In this conversation with Angela O’Dowd, Director of Partner Marketing at HubSpot, we dig into how to sift through the massive amount of data to focus on those key revenue-related metrics that provide the true measure of how your marketing is performing. Dashboards, reports and analytics are great, but if you can’t uncover the insights, your company won’t grow.

Dashboards, reports and analytics aren’t enough anymore. Today, you need to be able to uncover the insights that you can act on. Mike Donnelly, CEO at Seventh Sense, helps us navigate the challenges associated with uncovering those insights and then turning insights into an action plan that improves your results – the marketing and sales results required to drive revenue growth. Mike has several highly insightful comments around changing your execution based on these insights. It’s a don’t-miss episode.

Analysis paralysis is common among marketers. With so much data and so little time, what should marketers be working on first to drive results? Gabe Wahhab is president and one of the co-founders at the software company MAXG, the first AI-powered insight and recommendation engine for marketers. Gabe will share with listeners how to use artificial intelligence to skip the dashboard and go right to insights and recommendations, how to prioritize those to drive the best results and how to be more efficient in your day-to-day execution. If you want to know what the future of marketing looks like, you’ll want to listen to this episode.

Getting results from sales and marketing execution isn’t only about data, analytics and software. In fact, it’s more about process, methodology and systems than ever before. We sit down with Rashmi Vittal, CMO at Conversica, to talk about the importance of process in revenue growth. We cover a wide variety of topics, including the critical nature of sales and marketing alignment, helping sales by building process and how to make sales more efficient.

Garbage in, garbage out. You simply can’t execute effective marketing or highly efficient sales efforts with bad data. Right now, your data is degrading. People are moving up, people are leaving their jobs and new people are stepping in. Are you talking to the right people? Dion Cornett, CEO at ReachForce, shares with us the challenges associated with keeping your data accurate and cleaning up your current database, and explains how bad data can sink even the most created campaigns.

We wanted to make an extra effort to bring on more practitioners to the show – people who are actually doing the work. Mitch Rose has over 30 years in sales and marketing and is now SVP of Strategic Partnerships at Billtrust, a software company that provides billing solutions. Mitch candidly discusses the challenges associated with tracking ROI on sales and marketing. He also shares how Billtrust worked through some of their marketing and sales challenges, like alignment, sales operations and sales process upgrades, and explains the SLAs they put in place. It’s a great example of progressive sales and marketing execution in practice.

With 50% of companies habitually missing their sales targets, the world does need a better way to drive revenue. The first episode of Smash The Funnel – The Podcast introduces listeners to Eric Keiles, the entrepreneur-in-residence at Square 2 and co-author of Smash The Funnel – The Book. Eric will share why we need a new revenue methodology and why the buyer journey is so chaotic today. He’ll also help you understand why you’re not hitting your revenue goals every month.

If you’re not actively trying to disrupt target prospects who don’t know you, you’re only executing a partial marketing effort. Join Sangram Vajre, co-founder at Terminus, to learn how you can operationalize outreach to targeted prospects who are not looking for you and leverage marketing tactics, analytics and software to drive new prospects into your revenue cycle.

People are looking for businesses like yours right now, and they’re looking on the web. Join me and Franco Valentino, CEO of Narrative SEO, as we discuss the massive changes going on with search and Google. If your prospects can’t find you in search, your business is invisible. And with the changes related to how search works, this is a can’t-miss episode for everyone.

As we know, the buyer journey is chaotic and more complex than ever before. This episode features Matt Heinz, CEO of Heinz Marketing, talking about the differences between people who are reactive in the Awareness Stage and those proactively looking for education in the Education Stage. Matt gives insight into what prospects are thinking while educating themselves, how to create marketing to deliver education and what successful educational marketing campaigns look like.

This episode features Sonja Jacob, content strategy team leader at Drift, the leading conversational marketing software company that provides chat tools to businesses. This episode shows you how to use new software tools to construct a buyer journey that is designed to get prospects information and engage with them quickly, accelerating sales cycles and increasing close rates. This is a must-listen episode for anyone in marketing or sales.

This episode features Tyler Lessard, VP of marketing at Vidyard. The Evaluation Stage is one of the most important stages, and how you differentiate your company here can make or break sales. With most people preferring to watch rather than read, video is an increasingly critical tactic for sales, marketing and customer service. Learn how to add this to your tactical plan to drive better results.

Your prospect is emotionally ready to buy, but you’re not done. You can still lose the deal. How your prospects rationalize their decisions is key, and you need to make it easy for them to get answers to every detailed-oriented question that comes up during this stage in their buyer journey. That’s why we’ve invited Kyle Racki, CEO at Proposify, to share his secrets on how to present your recommendations to clients, answer their final questions, and keep them feeling safe with you and your team.

In this episode, we’re delighted to have Matt Sunshine, managing partner at LeadG2 and executive vice president of The Center for Sales Strategy. Some people consider this the most important stage, that key time when prospects sign the paperwork and you get to celebrate your new customer. But if you don’t handle this stage properly, you can still blow it. Matt shares his strategies to make this stage a nonissue, increasing your close rates dramatically.

This episode includes a conversation with Jeanne Bliss, president of CustomerBliss and author of Would You Do That to Your Mother?: The ‘Make Mom Proud’ Standard for How to Treat Your Customers. If you don’t consider servicing customers as a revenue driver, you’d be wrong. With today’s transparent business culture, your customers are talking about you, posting reviews and sharing their experiences. If you’re not working hard to deliver a remarkable service experience, you’re shooting your revenue growth plans in the foot. Learn how to drive revenue growth through high-quality and remarkable service experiences.

Our mission in season 1 of Smash The Funnel – The Podcast is to teach all of our listeners about the new buyer journey. We want you to understand how to apply tactics and metrics to that journey, and how to incorporate technology as well. In this final episode, we’re talking with Pete Caputa, CEO at Databox, about how to build dashboards for using metric and analytics at each stage of the new buyer journey. We discuss moving from tactical data review to stage data review, and we highlight the interesting insights that come with this switch. You’ll never think about data in the same way after joining us for this conversation with Pete.