B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners is a podcast for marketers who want evidence, not opinion. Marketing Scientist and host, Dale W. Harrison sits down with B2B marketing strategists to challenge the assumptions B2B marketing keeps repeating without checking — from lead scoring and demand generation to brand building and attribution — replacing conventional wisdom with research, real benchmark data, and hard-won practitioner experience. Each episode takes one persistent industry belief, tests it against the evidence, and leaves you with a sharper, more honest way of thinking about the problem.
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Data Does Not Equal Information - and AI Is Not The Solution | B2B Effectiveness - Episode 9
Episode 9
Thursday, September 10, 2026 • Duration 50:46
For roughly five hundred years, bloodletting with leeches was standard medical treatment — and even decades after doctors realised it was probably killing people, they kept doing it, because patients demanded it. That's Dale W. Harrison's analogy for the intent data industry today: happy customers and glowing reviews that prove nothing about whether the product actually works.
This week, Diego Sosa joins Dale in Liam Moroney's usual seat for a deep, methodical breakdown of the idea the show keeps returning to: data is not information. Diego and Dale walk through why ten ebook downloads don't mean ten times the certainty, the name-tags-at-a-networking-event analogy for how information actually works, and why nobody in the intent data industry has ever produced a single graph proving their product does what it claims.
Timestamps
0:00 Cold open: data is not information
0:26 Welcome back, with a new guest in Liam's seat
0:34 Meet Diego Sosa
1:08 The core question: why do we think more data is the answer?
2:07 What “information” actually means
6:59 The ebook download example, and why more never means better
8:18 Why marketers keep falling for this anyway
14:22 Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, and rebranding touch points as signals
16:06 The classic failure: intent data
20:59 A real correlation graph, built from actual sales data
21:27 The name tags analogy: how much information is really in the data
26:46 The iceberg: what you don't see still matters
27:20 Dark social, and why the two buckets end up identical
36:48 Working backwards from success doesn't work, and the measles analogy
38:44 The real closed-won vs. closed-lost numbers on LinkedIn engagement
42:07 The billboard story: proving impact without a click
44:35 The Google ads scam agencies run on branded search
46:17 Diego's first data analytics job, and asking the question before the data
48:36 Intervention vs. no intervention: the umbrella and headache examples
49:06 “They're lying to you”: why intent data doesn't exist
Key Topics Discussed
- Why data is not information, and why more data usually isn't more information
- The ebook download example: why the information curve flattens long before the points curve does
- The name tags analogy: how prior knowledge determines how much a data point can tell you
- Why no intent data vendor has ever produced a real correlation graph
- Working backwards from closed-won accounts doesn't work, illustrated with a measles analogy
- The real numbers: closed-lost deals were more likely to visit the LinkedIn company page than closed-won deals
- The billboard story, and the branded-search scam some agencies run on Google Ads accounts
- Why you have to ask the question before you look at the data
Notable Quotes
“Data is not information. Data is a bucket. It's the bucket that information comes in.” — Dale W. Harrison
“What you see is not all there is, and you don't know how much there isn't.” — Diego Sosa
“They're lying to you. It's a straight lie when they tell you they're selling you intent data, because intent data does not exist.” — Dale W. Harrison
Resources & Mentions
- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
- Bombora and 6sense (intent data providers)
- Forrester, Gartner, and BCG B2B benchmark data
Next Episode
Back next week with a new episode of B2B Effectiveness.
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Rising/Falling Markets: Category Growth and Share of Search | Episodes 8 - B2B Effectiveness
Episode 8
Thursday, September 3, 2026 • Duration 01:00:04
For years, LastPass dominated the password manager category. Then it suffered a string of serious data breaches, trust collapsed, and competitors like Bitwarden absorbed the fallout. Bitwarden's marketing team could be forgiven for thinking their campaigns did that. Almost none of it was marketing.
In Episode 8, Liam Moroney brings real branded-search data to back up an argument Dale W. Harrison has been building for weeks: marketing very rarely grows a business — the category does. Using a live three-slide case study of the password manager category (plus a second, more mature category for contrast), Liam and Dale walk through how to actually read share of branded search, why market share barely moves except after one of two specific shocks, and why AI is now eating entire software categories the same way email once ate the fax machine.
Timestamps
0:00 Cold open: marketing doesn't grow the business, markets do
0:15 Welcome back (Dale's in the UK this week)
1:04 Setting up today's topic: rising and falling markets
2:22 Why 99.99% of growth comes from riding the category, not beating competitors
3:54 The disruption myth, and why tech clings to it
5:04 Disruption happens in engineering, not marketing
6:22 Bitcoin, NFTs, and fads that look like marketing genius
7:57 Welcome to the life of a fax machine salesman, circa 2005
9:20 Marketing automation platforms as a case study
11:06 Categories that self-disrupt through over-promising
12:37 Why intent data and de-anonymization providers are collapsing
15:16 How AI is uniquely positioned to eat interactive demo software
A Better Lead-Scoring System Can Create Better Targeting | Episode 7 - B2B Effectiveness
Episode 7
Thursday, August 27, 2026 • Duration 01:06:34
Dale W. Harrison likes to run a poll: imagine a company about to sign a $5 million annual contract, renewed every year for five years. Who's on the buying committee? Most people guess the CFO, maybe the CEO. Then he reveals the deal: it's Google's contract for toilet paper in the employee restrooms. Nobody's CFO is in that meeting.
In Episode 7, Liam Moroney and Dale W. Harrison flip the usual playbook: can better lead scoring actually define better targeting, instead of the other way around? Dale walks through why lookalike lists built from your closed-won accounts alone are structurally guaranteed to fail, why “buying groups” are an 80-year-old idea being resold as something new, and why the real de-anonymization numbers are nowhere near what most targeting strategy assumes.
Timestamps
0:00 Cold open: massively overshooting who will buy
0:20 Welcome back, and teasing about the solo episode
1:42 Can better lead scoring define better targeting?
5:20 The feedback loop model, explained
10:56 Buying committees, and the summer intern who did the real work
15:21 The 90% de-anonymization era, and what changed
23:31 What Meta's lookalike algorithm actually does
25:07 The vowels-in-the-name story, revisited
29:12 The stock-picking sales pitch analogy
31:25 Glengarry Glen Ross, and the problem with intent
32:47 The $5 million toilet paper deal
35:38 Buying groups: a 1965 Harvard Business Review idea, not a new one
39:48 Why buying committees are confidential, and the HR risk of naming names
The Next-Gen MQL | Episode 6 - B2B Effectiveness
Episode 6
Thursday, August 20, 2026 • Duration 01:00:11
Take every account your company has ever closed-won, upload the list to an ad platform, and ask it to find more companies that look just like them. Here's the uncomfortable part: every one of those accounts almost certainly has vowels in its name too. That's the opening argument in this solo episode, where Dale W. Harrison lays out why most B2B lookalike modelling, lead scoring, and “intent data” never actually worked — and introduces the framework The Insight Collective is calling the NextGen MQL.
With co-host Liam Moroney away this week, Dale walks through the real original sin of lead scoring (mistaking a pattern for a signal), why “data is not information,” and a three-part model — category expansion, buyer-seller fit, and firmographic customer lifetime value — that scores leads on probability and expectation value instead of invented point totals.
Timestamps
0:00 Cold open: marketing is a slot machine, not a vending machine
0:14 Welcome to a solo episode
1:15 Why the MQL still matters
1:45 The flat tyre analogy, again
2:04 The real question: what's worth a sales investment
6:47 The ABM buying-committee fantasy
9:09 The vowels-in-the-name story
9:52 Lead scoring's original sin: subjective, made-up numbers
13:24 Where HubSpot's scoring framework gets it half right
17:15 In an ideal world, what should an MQL mean?
18:20 Buyer fit vs. seller fit
20:58 Customer value fit
26:14 The blood test analogy: data isn't information
"The ICP" is Not Necessarily Your ICP | Episode 5 - B2B Effectiveness
Episode 5
Thursday, August 13, 2026 • Duration 01:00:51
Run the numbers on almost any B2B company's accounts, and a strange pattern shows up: the top 10% of your top 20% highest-revenue accounts tend to be your absolute lowest-profit accounts. They cost a fortune to land, a fortune to service, and know they can make unreasonable demands you can't refuse.
In Episode 5, Liam Moroney and Dale W. Harrison take on Ideal Customer Profile — why most B2B “dream account” lists are built on a B2C-shaped mistake, why buyer-seller fit has to work in both directions, and why you can't just hire your way into a new market. Dale also lays out the layered framework the series has been building toward: broad ICP fit, in-market fit, consideration set eligibility, conditional win probability, and CLTV.
Timestamps
0:00 Cold open: your best accounts might be your worst
0:18 Welcome back
0:35 Setting up today's topic: ICP
1:19 The marketing guru who couldn't define ICP
2:12 What ICP means in B2C vs. B2B
3:37 Your “dream accounts” list, and the Swedish supermodel problem
5:24 Why B2B buyers prefer buying from other large companies
5:56 HubSpot vs. Salesforce, and the Fortune 1000 problem
12:35 Defining buyer-seller fit
13:20 Why sales teams develop lopsided skills (“leg day, arm day”)
16:22 The rep who could only sell to banks
17:12 The distributor rep who only sold refrigerators
19:53 Can you just hire your way into a new market?
The 95-5 rule is one of B2B marketing's favourite soundbites: at any given moment, only 5% of your market is in-market to buy. It gets cited as settled fact in board meetings and budget arguments — and in most fast-growing B2B tech categories, it's wrong by a factor of five or more.
In Episode 4, Dale W. Harrison and Liam Moroney unpack where the 95-5 rule actually comes from, the hidden assumption almost nobody repeating it seems to know about, and why growing or shrinking markets break it completely. Dale also takes aim at the famous Binet and Field 50-50 brand/performance split, explains why roughly 70% of billion-dollar tech companies never ran a single brand ad, and walks through exactly when brand marketing does and doesn't earn its keep.
Timestamps
0:00 Cold open: most tech companies grow because the category grows
0:13 Welcome back
0:50 Setting up today's topic: the 95-5 rule
2:29 What actually is a “category”?
4:10 The jobs-to-be-done model
5:06 What the 95-5 rule actually says
6:23 Andrew Ehrenberg's NBD model of purchase frequency
7:39 The hidden assumption: stationary markets only
14:50 The iPod launch: 100% first-time buyers
17:39 The CRM market: doubling in size, and what that implies
24:21 Speaking of math: walking through the numbers
27:06 The Binet and Field research, and its selection bias problem
30:46 70% of billion-dollar tech companies never ran a brand ad
Your Lead Scoring is Completely Broken! | Episode 3 - B2B Effectiveness
Episode 3
Thursday, July 30, 2026 • Duration 50:15
Imagine a medical test that tells a patient they have cancer, but is wrong 19 times out of 20. No regulator would ever allow it near a hospital. Yet for roughly twenty years, that's been about the accuracy of the average B2B lead scoring system — long-running Gartner benchmark data puts MQL acceptance rates by sales at around 5–6%.
In Episode 3, Dale W. Harrison and Liam Moroney dig into why every proposed fix for the MQL — MQAs, AI-qualified leads, more signals, better points — keeps the exact same broken scoring math in place. Dale explains why data is not information, why patterns that show up equally in your wins and your losses tell you nothing, and why any real qualification system has to measurably beat a coin flip — something most lead scoring never actually does.
Timestamps
0:00 Cold open: the failed system, guaranteed
0:30 Welcome back
0:52 Why this topic is personal for Dale
3:31 The Gartner benchmark: 5-6% MQL acceptance rate
4:39 The false positive problem, explained
5:24 The cancer test analogy
12:20 Data is not information
17:53 Liam pushes back: doesn't more signal data help?
21:49 The false negative problem
23:06 Measuring both false positives and false negatives
24:14 SQOs, and the click monkeys who ruin every model
27:03 Dark social: invisible engagement
32:48 The Harry Potter sorting hat problem
33:44 Thinking in bets, revisited
35:35 MEDDIC, BANT, and why checklists don't help
What Would a New MQL Have to Look Like? | Episode 2 - B2B Effectiveness
Episode 2
Thursday, July 23, 2026 • Duration 01:01:14
A B2B SaaS company once found that accounts on Amazon FBA generated ten to twenty times more lifetime value than accounts on Etsy or eBay — even though the sales effort to close either one was statistically identical. If your lead qualification can't tell the difference between those two prospects, what exactly is it qualifying them for?
In Episode 2, Liam Moroney and Dale W. Harrison move from last episode's argument — the MQL is a structural necessity, not a fad — into the harder practical question: what would a good MQL actually need to know? Dale lays out five distinct things a useful qualification should answer (broad ICP fit, in-market fit, consideration set eligibility, conditional win probability, and lifetime value fit), explains why checklist frameworks like MEDDIC don't solve the problem, and makes the case for thinking in bets instead of chasing false certainty.
Timestamps
0:00 Cold open: what a good MQL should tell you
0:24 Welcome back (and a smart home tangent)
0:58 Recap: last week's argument that the MQL isn't dead
2:04 Why marketing can never know for certain
4:33 Thinking in Bets: the book behind the mental model
16:18 Why the MQL gets so politically corrupted internally
18:49 The poker analogy: raise, fold, or walk away
21:03 Why hand raisers are a better bet, not a sure one
26:28 Thinking in bets, applied to poker itself
31:31 Broad ICP fit vs. in-market fit
31:52 The fantasy of intent data, and the 95-5 rule
32:29 Why MEDDIC-style checklists don't solve this
34:55 Hand raisers, revisited
41:56 HubSpot vs. Salesforce: the Fortune 1000 problem
The MQL is NOT Dead! | Episode 1 - B2B Effectiveness
Episode 1
Thursday, July 16, 2026 • Duration 01:04:14
“The MQL is dead” has been a B2B marketing clickbait headline for a decade. This episode makes the contrarian, evidence-based case that it never actually died — it just never worked the way we scored it.
Liam Moroney sits down with data-driven marketing strategist Dale W. Harrison to unpack why the entire industry conflated engagement data with intent data, the infamous story of a RevOps team who proved their lead scoring model performed no better than a random number generator, and why more data almost never means more information. They close with a reframe: MQL scoring isn't about certainty — it's about improving your odds.
Timestamps
0:00 Cold open: “The sales team needs leads”
0:36 Welcome back after a year off
1:04 Is the MQL dead, or just pining for the fjords?
3:55 A brief history of the MQL, from Glengarry Glen Ross to SiriusDecisions
6:55 The Zoho CRM random-number-generator story
8:12 The “original sin”: engagement data isn't intent data
9:38 The ebook-download absurdity
13:09 What Gartner's benchmark data actually shows
16:10 Why sales just wants better odds, not certainty
17:18 The lead-nurturing “goose” and the ice-cream-stand fallacy
24:16 HubSpot vs. Salesforce: why market share changes everything
27:57 The ABM challenge: should marketing target accounts, not leads?
34:08 Data isn't information: the roulette-wheel test
38:55 Why hand-raisers aren't the golden ticket
39:35 Brand vs. performance marketing and the “consideration set”
16:14 Liam's data: a tale of three slides (the password manager category)
17:32 Bitwarden vs. LastPass: the branded search view
19:17 What “share of branded search” actually measures
20:50 Why campaign changes show up in the data almost instantly
22:59 The LastPass data breach, and what it cost them
25:11 Defining “category”: Tide detergent vs. Tide Pods on TikTok
31:36 Dale's own hypergrowth story: 100x growth, same market share order
32:50 The collective view: how the category grew even as LastPass fell
39:09 A mature category case study: content management platforms
41:03 What an accelerating category decline looks like
43:40 Rolodexes, CRMs, and where declining categories' customers go
47:23 Optimizely's rebrand, and repositioning into an adjacent category
47:47 Why categories almost never fully vanish
57:50 The tool behind today's data, and where to learn more
Key Topics Discussed
- Why 99.99% of business growth comes from riding a category, not beating competitors
- The disruption myth: why tech assumes a great product creates its own momentum
- Fads vs. real category shifts: Bitcoin, NFTs, and fax machines
- Why AI is uniquely positioned to eat categories like interactive demo software
- How to actually read share of branded search as a proxy for market share
- The LastPass/Bitwarden case study: a real market-share transfer, and why it wasn't about marketing skill
- Why market share is remarkably sticky, and the two things that actually move it
- What a declining category looks like from the inside, using a mature CMP category example
Notable Quotes
“Marketers live in this fantasy world where they think it's their marketing that's growing the business.” — Dale W. Harrison
“You're not growing the category. This is another one of these silly myths that people love to blather on about.” — Dale W. Harrison
“It is these category-level and market-level dynamics that are really driving things — the fish are jumping out of the water into the boat by themselves.” — Dale W. Harrison
Resources & Mentions
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research
- Bitwarden, LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane, and NordPass branded search data
- Optimizely, AEM, Contentful, and Sitecore (content management platform category)
The show is taking a short break for the Fourth of July and the following week while Dale's still travelling in Europe — back with a new episode on the 18th.
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Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.
45:18 Reverse-engineering targeting from your own closed-won and closed-lost data
51:09 How to verify it's actually working: MQL-to-SQL rate
52:10 The slot machine analogy
54:21 Home runs vs. the Tour de France: buyer-seller fit in sports
56:47 The roulette wheel: data is not information
59:35 Seventh-grade math, and why the models aren't complicated
1:02:17 Teaser: rising and falling markets, and categories being eaten by AI
Key Topics Discussed
- Why lead scoring data should define targeting, not just measure it after the fact
- How lookalike-list algorithms actually work, and why they keep pointing at your losses too
- Why “buying groups” are an 80-year-old idea, not a new market shift
- Why buying committees are treated as confidential, and what happens if you name one publicly
- The real de-anonymization numbers: ~65% at the account level, 5–7% for named individuals
- Working backwards from your own closed-won and closed-lost history instead of guessing
- How to verify a scoring improvement is real: tracking MQL-to-SQL acceptance rate
- Why data is not information, illustrated with a roulette wheel
Notable Quotes
“The perfect lookalike list would be for us to go out and find more prospects that also have vowels in their name.” — Dale W. Harrison
“Data is not information. Data is the bucket that information comes in.” — Dale W. Harrison
“If you have two slot machines, and one pays off one out of a hundred pulls, and one pays off one out of fifty pulls, which one do you want to put your money in?” — Dale W. Harrison
Resources & Mentions
- Gartner B2B sales funnel benchmark data
- Harvard Business Review, 1965 article on buying committees
- 6sense and Bombora (intent data providers)
- Ocean.io (lookalike list provider)
Next Episode
Next week, Dale and Liam get into rising and falling markets — why a category being quietly “eaten alive” can mean there's no one left in-market at all, no matter how good your targeting is.
Subscribe & Follow
Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.
29:29 Why in-market fit is nearly impossible to detect
32:59 Marketing is poker, not chess
39:47 The 95-5 rule, and when it breaks
41:17 The three-part NextGen MQL model
46:25 Vector modelling and buyer-seller fit
50:35 Firmographic CLTV
52:33 Expectation value scoring
55:55 Glass box vs. black box models
58:11 Where to learn more
Key Topics Discussed
- Why the MQL is a structural necessity, not a fad, in any business with a separate sales function
- The vowels-in-the-name story: why a pattern in your closed-won accounts can be meaningless
- Lead scoring's original sin: treating engagement data as if it were intent
- Why “data is not information,” illustrated with a blood test analogy
- Buyer fit, seller fit, and why sales teams are better suited to some accounts than others
- Customer value fit: scoring for lifetime value, not just the next closed-won deal
- Why marketing is poker, not chess — thinking in bets instead of certainties
- The 95-5 rule, and why it breaks down in fast-growing categories
- The three-part NextGen MQL model: category expansion, buyer-seller fit, and firmographic CLTV
- Expectation value scoring: replacing invented point totals with real probability and value
- Why a “glass box” model beats a black-box AI score every time
Notable Quotes
“The most reliable predictor of what you'll find if you look at closed-won accounts is that every one of these accounts has vowels in their name.” — Dale W. Harrison
“Data is not information. Data is the bucket that information comes in.” — Dale W. Harrison
“You're playing poker. Decisions have to be made with incomplete information, hidden variables, and luck. A good decision can lose, and a bad decision can win.” — Dale W. Harrison
Resources & Mentions
- Gartner B2B sales funnel benchmark data
- Forrester and BCG B2B benchmark data
- HubSpot lead scoring framework
- 6sense and Bombora (intent data providers)
- The Insight Collective's NextGen MQL framework
Where to Learn More
If you'd like a copy of the presentation deck, want early access to the NextGen MQL, or have any questions, reach out to Dale W. Harrison directly — by email or by DM on LinkedIn.
Subscribe & Follow
Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.
26:19 The sober reality, and how to be more optimistic about it
33:29 Brand marketing's slow payoff vs. today's performance needs
40:37 Consideration set eligibility and conditional win probability
41:34 The Apollo moon suit story
44:14 Highest CLTV expectation value
51:08 Market orientation, and grounding leadership in reality
55:22 How static is an ICP, really?
57:14 Why relative market share barely changes over time
Key Topics Discussed
- Why B2C-style ICP thinking breaks down in B2B
- The “dream accounts” problem: wanting a buyer isn't the same as being wanted back
- Why the Fortune 1000 almost never buys from the smaller player, no matter the product
- Buyer-seller fit: why sales teams get good at selling to some accounts and bad at others
- Why hiring experienced enterprise sellers rarely fixes a buyer-seller fit problem on its own
- The Apollo moon suit story: when the best product and the best seller are two different companies
- The five-layer framework: ICP fit, in-market fit, consideration set eligibility, conditional win probability, and CLTV
- Why relative market share is remarkably stable, even in fast-growing categories
Notable Quotes
“Your dream accounts are the accounts you're dreaming of selling to, but it's not necessarily the accounts that are interested in buying from you.” — Dale W. Harrison
“For most sales teams, it's like every day is leg day, or every day is arm day at the gym. And you end up with some pretty distorted-looking physiques as a result.” — Dale W. Harrison
“It has to be a buyer who is likely to buy from someone who looks like you, and it has to be a buyer that your sales organisation has a reasonably good chance of selling to.” — Dale W. Harrison
Resources & Mentions
- Gartner and Boston Consulting Group B2B benchmark data
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research
- HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, and Pipedrive market share data
Next Episode
Next week, Dale goes solo to get into the messy technical details of what building this kind of scoring system actually looks like in practice.
Subscribe & Follow
Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.
32:18 Supermarket brands that have never advertised
36:00 “You don't need to bait the hook if the fish are jumping in the boat”
41:23 Home exterminators: brand marketing done right
42:19 DUI attorneys: the most precisely targeted marketing on earth
44:34 The physics analogy: F = ma, and gravity on the Moon vs. Earth
55:05 Wrapping up
Key Topics Discussed
- What actually defines a “category,” and why so many marketers get it wrong
- Where the 95-5 rule comes from: Andrew Ehrenberg's NBD model of purchase frequency
- The hidden assumption behind the rule: it only holds in stationary markets
- Why growing markets can push the in-market rate from 5% to 25% or more
- The selection bias hiding inside the famous Binet and Field brand/performance split
- Why 60–80% of supermarket brands have never run a single ad
- Exterminators vs. DUI attorneys: when brand marketing actually earns its keep
- Why the 95-5 rule is a baseline, not a universal law — and what that means for lead scoring
Notable Quotes
“You don't need to bait the hook if the fish are jumping out of the water directly into the boat.” — Dale W. Harrison
“Gravity on Earth is completely different than gravity on the Moon, which is completely different than gravity on Jupiter. That doesn't mean physics doesn't exist.” — Dale W. Harrison
“They want to expose themselves to potential buyers as close to the moment they get arrested as possible, so that they'll hopefully be remembered when they get to jail.” — Dale W. Harrison
Resources & Mentions
- Andrew Ehrenberg's NBD model of purchase frequency
- Les Binet and Peter Field's brand/performance research
- CRM market growth data (Salesforce)
Next Episode
Dale and Liam are opening up the floor: if there's a topic related to MQLs, lead scoring, or getting leads into the hands of sales that you'd like covered, drop it in the comments — it'll show up in a future episode.
Subscribe & Follow
Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.
40:11 Why identical products can have wildly different close rates
44:24 Liam's camera store story
47:03 Teaser: how growing markets break the 95-5 rule
Key Topics Discussed
- Why every proposed MQL replacement keeps the same broken points-based math
- The cancer test analogy: why a 5% accuracy rate would never pass regulatory approval
- Why data is not information, and why more signals make the problem worse, not better
- Why a pattern has to differ between closed-won and closed-lost to mean anything
- Measuring false negatives as well as false positives, and the “click monkey” problem
- Dark social: why the best buyers sometimes show zero digital engagement
- Why MEDDIC and BANT don't solve the qualification problem on their own
- The buyer is scoring the vendor too — and most of their signals are invisible to you
- Why identical products can have wildly different close rates depending on who's selling them
Notable Quotes
“No matter how you choose your signals, how you weight the signals, or how you gather up the signals, the moment you start adding up your data points, you have a fundamentally failed system.” — Dale W. Harrison
“Data is not information. Data is the bucket that information came in.” — Dale W. Harrison
“Just because there's something that characterises all of the closed-won deals doesn't mean that same thing doesn't also characterise all the closed-lost deals.” — Dale W. Harrison
Resources & Mentions
- Gartner B2B sales funnel benchmark data
- MEDDIC and BANT sales qualification frameworks
- Mark Ritson (marketing commentator and academic)
Next Episode
In Episode 4, Dale and Liam take a detour that turns out to matter more than it sounds: how rising and falling markets break the well-known 95-5 rule — not by a little, but massively.
Subscribe & Follow
Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.
49:07 The five things a useful qualification needs to know
1:00:27 Why tweaking HubSpot's scoring system won't fix it
1:00:47 Teaser: Episode 3, why your lead scoring is broken
Key Topics Discussed
- Why a good MQL is a bet, not a certainty
- The five things a useful qualification needs to answer: broad ICP fit, in-market fit, consideration set eligibility, conditional win probability, and lifetime value fit
- Why checklist frameworks like MEDDIC don't solve the qualification problem
- The procurement bid-padding story: why every box can be ticked and the deal still isn't real
- Why hand raisers are a better bet than cold outbound, but still not a sure thing
- The HubSpot vs. Salesforce Fortune 1000 example, and why market fit matters
- The Amazon FBA vs. Etsy lifetime value story
- Thinking in bets: why a good decision can still lose, and a bad decision can still win
Notable Quotes
“A good MQL should tell you what's the likelihood of taking this name and putting it into a sales process and getting a good return on that investment.” — Dale W. Harrison
“A good decision can still lose, and a bad decision can still win.” — Dale W. Harrison
“Just because you're a hand raiser doesn't mean there is a single iota of actual buying intent there.” — Dale W. Harrison
Resources & Mentions
- Thinking in Bets (book)
- MEDDIC sales qualification framework
- Gartner B2B sales funnel benchmark data
- HubSpot and Salesforce market share data
Next Episode
In Episode 3, Dale and Liam dig into why your lead scoring is broken — the specific things that are guaranteed not to work, and what a better approach actually looks like.
Subscribe & Follow
Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.
- Why the “MQL is dead” narrative misses the actual structural need it serves
- A brief history of the MQL, from the SiriusDecisions demand waterfall to today
- The Zoho CRM story: when a random number generator scored leads as well as a real model
- The “original sin” of lead scoring: treating engagement data as if it were intent data
- Why more data doesn't automatically mean more information
- What Gartner's long-term B2B sales funnel benchmarks actually show
- The HubSpot vs. Salesforce market-share example, and why “buyer-seller fit” matters
- Why Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs) repeat the same scoring flaw at a bigger scale
- Brand vs. performance marketing, and getting into the buyer's “consideration set”
- “Thinking in bets”: reframing lead scoring as a probability game, not a certainty machine
Notable Quotes
“The problem is in the queue. What are we doing to qualify the lead?” — Dale W. Harrison
“Data is a bucket — an empty bucket that may or may not contain some amount of information.” — Dale W. Harrison
“Just because you have a flat tyre doesn't mean it's time to haul the car to the junkyard. You just fix the tyre.” — Dale W. Harrison
Resources & Mentions
- Glengarry Glen Ross (film)
- SiriusDecisions demand waterfall model
- Forrester Research
- Gartner B2B sales funnel benchmark data
- HubSpot and Salesforce market share data
- Zoho CRM RevOps lead-scoring anecdote
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (mental availability research)
Next Episode
In Episode 2, Dale and Liam dig into which factors can realistically move the odds of a lead converting — and which ones the data simply can't tell us, no matter how much of it we collect.
Subscribe & Follow
Catch every episode of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners on your favourite podcast platform, and subscribe here on YouTube for future episodes.
