Taft Love, founder of Iceberg RevOps and former sales development leader at PandaDoc and SmartRecruiters, breaks down the concept of the invisible funnel and why company-level metrics matter. He discusses contact density, timing over perfect messaging, CRM measurement gaps, and the rising complexity of sales tech stacks.
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insights INSIGHT
The Invisible Funnel Hides True Outbound Value
Sales metrics focused on people/activity hide the company-level funnel that actually determines deal value and strategy.
Taft calls this the "invisible funnel" and shows two reps with identical activity metrics producing vastly different company-level outcomes.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Measure Account Level Outreach Not Just Activities
Track outreach at the account level not just contact/activity level so you know how many companies you started prospecting and your contact density per account.
Use account rollups to measure contacts reached, meetings set, and opportunities created per company to prioritize high-value targets.
question_answer ANECDOTE
SmartRecruiters Hack Revealed Scalability Limits
Taft built a hacky rollup solution at SmartRecruiters to surface account-level metrics by bubbling activity into the account record.
It broke at scale because rollup apps scanned millions of records and made data stale for days.
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In the latest episode of "The Enterprise Sales Development Podcast," we had the pleasure of interviewing Taft Love, founder of Icerber DevOps and expert in the field of sales development. Taft explained that while many sales teams primarily focus on the traditional sales funnel, there is an equally important "invisible funnel" that consists of activities that don't necessarily lead to immediate conversions but are crucial for long-term success. He also discussed essential KPIs in sales, and the role of technology in sales development. Overall, the episode offers actionable advice and strategic considerations for sales professionals looking to optimize their sales development efforts.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
The “invisible funnel”
The real KPI´s to focus on sales
Tech in sales development
QUOTES
“How many companies did my outbound team start prospecting this month? And if you don't know your way around sort of the architecture of Salesforce, you might think like there's gotta be a field for that, but I promise you there's not.” - Taft Love [11:43]
“You got to do two things to get outbound, right? You have to have decent timing and not screw up. And if you do those two things, you're probably going to be okay.” - Taft Love [18:19]
“I think we've seen this proliferation of tools and simultaneously as the buying group has changed in companies and the way people buy fundamentally has changed, so have the strategies of selling to companies and the world is changing so fast that it's created this proliferation of tools.” - Taft Love [28:03]
TIMESTAMPS
[0:00] - Meet Taft Love
[5:26] - Taft beginnings as an SDR
[8:24] - Taft on “the invincible funnel”
[14:33] - Taft on his sales strategy with SmartRecruiters
[19:47] - Taft experience in a “dual” role
[25:25] - Taf on Iceberg RevOps
[27:23] - Are we at peak tech in the sales development?
[31:51] - Connect with Taft
CONNECT
Taft Love's LinkedIn
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Enterprise Sales Development (CIENCE) 