There’s a moment every B2B marketer knows
You’re sitting in a QBR. Sales leadership stands up + says they missed the revenue target by 18%. Then marketing leadership stands up + celebrates that they’ve had another strong quarter, achieving 134% of their MQL target
And nobody in that room says a damn word. Nobody questions how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just move on, accepting it as completely normal.
I sat in that room early in my career + it’s something I’ve never been able to forget
Reflecting on that moment years later revealed to me that we’ve been treating symptoms instead of diagnosing the disease
It’s like going to the doctor with chronic stomach pain. Every visit they tell you “take more pills,” but the pain doesn’t get better. At some point you stop trusting the doctor’s diagnosis because they never actually figured out what was wrong.
That’s been marketing for decades. Our CRM tells us numbers are down and our dashboards tells us to spend more, so we spend more, optimize more, do “more, more, more,” but the fundamental problem never gets solved.
Fast forward to this year as I’m at Loxo auditing our own funnel to figure out how we can keep scaling effectively + before I ask for more budget or default to the "more" bucket, I wanted to understand where our constraints are - to audit our own funnel the same way I've done for 100+ other b2b companies over the years.
So I started building the tool to help me do this. Plug in our core inputs, account for key variables in play, + diagnose what's going on so I could have a better view around how best to scale our GTM efforts here.
Then in a catch up conversation with a mentor of mine, Chris Daly, he said, "you do realize this is a product, right?" That if I stepped back from the Loxo inputs, this was something that would be invaluable to any marketing leader or GTM practitioner.
So I scratched + kept scratching, slowly building out answers to the questions I was having as I was looking to solve how to help scale revenue at Loxo.
And through the course of that I realized that we have attribution platforms that are great for data, but terrible at answering “so what?” That we have consultants charging $15-30k to do what I’m doing in a spreadsheet.
But we have nothing built to diagnose, to take our funnel + tell us where we stand relative to benchmarks
This tool is built for marketers who want to operate with conviction, to proactively affect their company’s bottom line, not constantly react to fire drills and pipeline drops
Hence the name of this new tool - Affect
In 5 minutes you can audit your core funnel and find out where you’re constrained
Affect was built for the marketers with backbones, who understand conviction is a choice + that being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing
So run your audit + if it feels true, you’ll know if you’re the type of marketer this is built for
You’re sitting in a QBR. Sales leadership stands up + says they missed the revenue target by 18%. Then marketing leadership stands up + celebrates that they’ve had another strong quarter, achieving 134% of their MQL target
And nobody in that room says a damn word. Nobody questions how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just move on, accepting it as completely normal.
I sat in that room early in my career + it’s something I’ve never been able to forget
Reflecting on that moment years later revealed to me that we’ve been treating symptoms instead of diagnosing the disease
It’s like going to the doctor with chronic stomach pain. Every visit they tell you “take more pills,” but the pain doesn’t get better. At some point you stop trusting the doctor’s diagnosis because they never actually figured out what was wrong.
That’s been marketing for decades. Our CRM tells us numbers are down and our dashboards tells us to spend more, so we spend more, optimize more, do “more, more, more,” but the fundamental problem never gets solved.
Fast forward to this year as I’m at Loxo auditing our own funnel to figure out how we can keep scaling effectively + before I ask for more budget or default to the "more" bucket, I wanted to understand where our constraints are - to audit our own funnel the same way I've done for 100+ other b2b companies over the years.
So I started building the tool to help me do this. Plug in our core inputs, account for key variables in play, + diagnose what's going on so I could have a better view around how best to scale our GTM efforts here.
Then in a catch up conversation with a mentor of mine, Chris Daly, he said, "you do realize this is a product, right?" That if I stepped back from the Loxo inputs, this was something that would be invaluable to any marketing leader or GTM practitioner.
So I scratched + kept scratching, slowly building out answers to the questions I was having as I was looking to solve how to help scale revenue at Loxo.
And through the course of that I realized that we have attribution platforms that are great for data, but terrible at answering “so what?” That we have consultants charging $15-30k to do what I’m doing in a spreadsheet.
But we have nothing built to diagnose, to take our funnel + tell us where we stand relative to benchmarks
This tool is built for marketers who want to operate with conviction, to proactively affect their company’s bottom line, not constantly react to fire drills and pipeline drops
Hence the name of this new tool - Affect
In 5 minutes you can audit your core funnel and find out where you’re constrained
Affect was built for the marketers with backbones, who understand conviction is a choice + that being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing
So run your audit + if it feels true, you’ll know if you’re the type of marketer this is built for