Beyond the Dashboard - A Yirla Podcast

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Your dashboard shows the what. We dig into the why. Beyond the Dashboard is where B2B demand gen professionals get real about what's working, what's not, and how they structure their teams to actually own pipeline. Each episode features candid conversations with growth leaders who've seen campaigns soar and flop—and aren't afraid to share both. Expect concrete examples, creative strategies, and the kind of insights you can actually use on Monday.

Valerie Tarangelo - MQLs Are a Participation Trophy

Valerie Tarangelo has spent over a decade building the operational backbone that most B2B SaaS companies skip on their way to scale. She's done it at Publicis Sapient, GumGum, and now Interact Software, where she owns the entire marketing to pipeline funnel end to end. This episode gets into the unglamorous stuff that actually moves the needle including data fragmentation, audience segmentation, creative fatigue, competitive intelligence, and why the MQL framework is doing more harm than good. In this episode: 00:04 — Scott introduces the show and Valerie's background 01:44 — The through line across Valerie's career: every company has the same fundamental tension between ambition and infrastructure 03:11 — Ready, fire, aim: what it looks like when a team is running campaigns without knowing what success looks like 04:27 — How to make changes without shutting everything down — and why 90 days of observation isn't as crazy as it sounds 05:57 — Where the ops side ends and the strategy side begins — and how technical credentials give you credibility with your own team 09:25 — The real cost of stitching together five dashboards every Monday morning: it's not the time, it's that the data's already stale by the time the report is done 11:44 — How confident should teams actually be that their pipeline data and ad performance data are telling the same story? (Spoiler: way less than they are) 13:53 — Why marketing is almost always overconfident and sales is almost always underconfident — and what to do about it 15:00 — The MQL is dead. How Valerie redefined the lead lifecycle at Interact to align marketing and sales around the same thing 16:31 — Creative fatigue: how do you know when a campaign has hit the wall, and what do you actually do about it? 18:57 — What good audience segmentation looks like versus what most teams think it looks like 21:01 — How granular is too granular — and when broad targeting is just burning money on the wrong people 22:39 — How much attention should demand gen teams actually pay to competitors in paid channels? Valerie's honest answer 24:28 — The magic wand question: what would AI actually have to do to be genuinely useful to a demand gen team? 27:04 — Why every tool that promises to unify everything underestimates how messy your existing environment actually is 31:52 — What's considered best practice in demand gen right now that Valerie thinks is broken 33:28 — Where the CMO should report and why it matters for revenue alignment 33:59 — If you could fix one thing about how demand gen teams are measured, what would it be? 36:18 — Micro wins for long sales cycles: how to evaluate a campaign before it's had time to close anything 37:56 — Why tracking unique contacts per account is a better signal than leads generated 39:07 — Where to find Valerie ---------------------------------------- Connect with Valerie: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/valeriekuller [http://linkedin.com/in/valeriekuller] Connect with Scott: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/scottschnaars [http://linkedin.com/in/scottschnaars] Yirla: yirla.com [http://yirla.com]

2 de jun de 2026 - 39 min