B2B Effectiveness

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

20:55 Liam's brand-tracking data: declining search volume

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

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.

#B2BMarketing #DemandGeneration #BrandMarketing #MarketingStrategy #MarketingAnalytics

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

35:51 The buyer is scoring you too

37:47 The parallel universe you can't see

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.

#B2BMarketing #DemandGeneration #LeadScoring #MQL #MarketingAnalytics

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

43:15 Conditional win probability

46:13 Lifetime value fit

47:01 The Amazon FBA vs. Etsy story

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.

#B2BMarketing #DemandGeneration #LeadScoring #MQL #MarketingAnalytics

“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”

47:38 Thinking in bets: the poker-hand analogy

56:31 Wrapping up part one

58:04 So… is the MQL dead? (No.)

58:56 What's coming in Episode 2

1:03:05 Sign off

Key Topics Discussed

- 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.

#B2BMarketing #DemandGeneration #RevOps #MQL #MarketingAnalytics #LeadScoring