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Month: April 2023

My Campaign Failed. How Do I Turn This Around?

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Hi Joe,

My campaign fell flat, and I’m struggling to figure out why.

We based this email around a great asset: a whitepaper with advice and analysis that seemed valuable to our audience.

Everything went according to plan. Our team was all on the same page about the content, and we sent it out right on schedule. So far, so good.

Our numbers—email opens, CTA clicks, whitepaper downloads—are all roughly on-target, but they haven’t added up to any new leads or conversions.

What am I missing here? How can I understand why this campaign failed? How can I prevent this from happening again?

Thanks,

Disappointed in Dallas.

pink seperator line

Hi, Disappointed, I understand how you feel.

A few months back, we launched a campaign targeting a new market for the first time. Everything seemed to come together—images, content, our offer to the audience—and I really thought we were onto something.

The response? Crickets.

It was a tough pill to swallow, but in every “failure” there’s an opportunity to learn.

We tested, tweaked, and tried again—we figured out what messages struck a chord with our audience, and now we’re making real headway in the market. You can’t undo past missteps, but you can take the lessons forward and do better. So let’s start now.

 

Which metrics equal success?

First of all, it’s good that you know what metrics equal success for this campaign. Success is relative to your goals, after all.

That said, numbers like clicks and opens don’t tell you much in a silo.

As a starting point: compare your metrics, and your results, to the campaigns you’ve run in the past.

Think about what’s changed between your more successful campaigns and this one.

Your team was all on the same page about content, but was it the right message for the right audience? Did it miss the mark as far as cultural sensitivities go? Was it personalized enough?

 

Ask the tough questions

There are many potential factors at play here.

  • Sending the email out on schedule is good news for your processes, but did you choose the right time and day of the week?
  • Was email really the most effective channel for the people you wanted to reach?
  • Did any small errors or placeholder names sneak into the final text?

Size up the content and the numbers with past campaigns, which will help you crack the case.

A/B testing

Then, you move from diagnosing problems to making improvements. Every part of your email is fair game for A/B testing, be it the subject line, content, time and date, imagery, or CTA.

Test alternatives constantly, and you’ll build up a strong understanding of what really resonates with your audience.

One of our best-ever campaign responses came from targeting execs with an email right after the Masters Tournament on a Sunday evening.

Why?

We had a distinct segment (execs—the kind who’re into golf), we had a good idea of what was on their minds (checking emails before the week ahead), and we caught them at the right time.

You get to know what makes your audience tick from testing campaigns continuously, and that refines your experiments from shots in the dark into calculated risks.

 

QA testing

The other kind of testing you want to do is QA.

Get an extra pair of eyes or two on every campaign, checking your content for mistakes and cultural issues lost in translation.

Sure, it’s no one’s favorite job, but it’s the backbone of quality.

Any measure that side-steps “Hello [Name]” misfires is one to bring on board.

And even before then, getting feedback on your campaign ideas from around the company can help you gauge whether your approach is sound at the root.

 

Refine your process

With all the parts involved in getting a campaign off the ground, the process is everything.

Think of the steps you took that worked well in the past, whether sending a certain number of reminders for an event or staggering the timelines for approvals and translations in a particular period.

Use those tried-and-true processes as a foundation for your campaigns, and keep layering on top of new ideas and tweaks from your testing.

You might stumble and get frustrated, but don’t worry — you’ll find out what works along the way.

Just remember: “failure” gives you a chance to do better. If you need any help, contact us

You’ve got this,
Joe.

How to Hire the Right MOPs Leader

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TLDR: Is your company looking for a new MOPs leader? Learn the fatal flaws to avoid when designing a MOPs leadership role and the qualities to prioritize instead.

One of the growing pains of Marketing Operations is that many organizations are hiring in the dark. Hiring teams with a hazy understanding of MOPs as a discipline struggle to design roles with realistic skill requirements that candidates find fulfilling.

And nowhere is this disconnect more blatant or consequential than with leadership positions in the space.

If your hiring manager or CMO is searching for a MOPs leader, this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you.

We’ll help you articulate the fatal flaws to avoid when hiring a MOPs leader, and the qualities and experience your organization should instead prioritize.

By having this conversation, you can advocate for a strong vision of what it means to lead a MOPs team, help your hiring team to identify credible candidates, and position yourself to grow into a leadership role.

 

The split problem

Many job descriptions for senior management positions in Marketing Operations tell stories of confusion.

Companies look for candidates that must have:

  • current platform certifications
  • a wealth of data science experience
  • the ability to manage day-to-day campaign tactics, and
  • suitable knowledge to own the tech stack.

So along with having the technical experience from more junior roles, these desired candidates have had time to strategically lead the same functions they performed.

 

This is both unviable and uncompetitive

Your CMO may recognize the value of stellar technical skills and reportability, and budget to offer candidates high salaries. Still, the price too often means doing three different jobs in one.

For candidates ready to set strategic direction, roles with heavy platform administration and hands-on tactical work do not represent meaningful career progression.

If your hiring team’s idea of a MOPs VP or Director resembles an “upgraded” platform admin role, encourage them to reflect on other leadership positions in the company. Do any other senior roles have a comparable share of tactical responsibilities?

Probably not, because a 50/50 split between tactical and strategic projects is simply ill-fitting for a leadership position. In a marketplace where the demand for high-level MOPs skills outstrips the supply, it’s unrealistic to attract and retain good candidates with roles that don’t play to their strengths or career goals.

 

Advice for your hiring team:

Focus your MOPs leader role on setting the strategy, and leave the tickets and data pipelines to team members who’re still learning the tools of the trade.

If forced to flip-flop between two very different sets of competencies, your unicorn candidate will become a master of none.

 

From ‘management’ to ‘leadership’

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation in many businesses. To stay resilient and competitive, companies raced against the clock to hire candidates with the digital prowess to optimize their technology and data. The urgency for MOPs skills increased in kind. Companies bumped up middle management marketing operations roles to leadership status and pitched them to candidates with around 5-10 years of experience.

Just as the tactical and strategic split in these roles is ill-fitting for prime leadership, it also does not work for those still learning about management.

Your CMO will relate to this: The transition from “manager” to “leader” encompasses more than just a change in job title. This concept holds true for individuals in MOPs as well.

Becoming a MOPs leader is a development from knowing all the corners of Marketo to understanding what drives revenue and growth in your business, setting a vision for the department’s operations and priorities with the future direction of marketing and technology. Candidates with 5-10 years of experience are, broadly speaking, still nurturing that skill set.

 

Advice for your hiring team:

Giving a leadership position with high expectations (and a steep learning curve) to someone still learning what it takes to be a leader sets them up for failure.

You have two viable alternatives:

1. Downgrade the role appropriately. Give your new manager the time and space to develop their leadership skills.
2. Hire someone who’s truly ready to lead.

 

The right MOPs leader

Your Hiring Manager and CMO may need help identifying what leadership really means in MOPs. This is where you come in.

You know that MOPs is all about efficiency. Rather than putting out fires, a leader should demonstrate proactivity to set processes up for success and prepare to mitigate risks. They also need a strong grasp of how marketing operations as a function is evolving — enough to see through the spin of vendors and get to the real value of each tool.

From your experience at the crossroads of the company, you’ll know that MOPs demands exceptional communication skills, and nowhere more so than at the leadership level. Your MOPs VP or Director will lead the team that orchestrates data, so they’ll need to interpret insights, share feedback, and sell decisions at levels from C-Suite down to Business Development reps.

In a role that’s focused specifically on setting direction for the team rather than manning the same tools, these are the traits you want to advocate for as a MOPs leader:

  • a passionate student, as MOPs is constantly changing
  • someone who learns through adaptation rather than prescribed beliefs about how the industry works, and
  • is prepared to take new developments and apply them to current and future plans.

By having this talk with your CMO and Hiring Manager, you can set your MOPs function up to succeed with the right talent in the appropriate roles, and position yourself as someone who understands what it takes to lead.

Follow Revenue Pulse on LinkedIn for daily updates about improving communication with MOPs leadership.

I’m Starting a Job as an SDR. What Tech Should I Know About?

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Hey Joe,

I’m about to start a new role as a sales development rep – and if all goes well, there’s a good chance I can move into an account executive position down the road.

What specific tools in my company’s tech stack will be most relevant to me as I embark on this journey?

I want the whole picture now, so I can prepare myself and start off on the right foot.

Thanks,

Revitalized Renata

Pink seperator line

Hi Renata, thank you for the question, and congratulations on your new role as an SDR!

Gaining a holistic view of the tech at your disposal is essential in sales and will certainly set you up for success over the long term.

So how can we identify and prioritize the tools that are most relevant to you?

 

The 4 sales tech pillars

I like to break down the Sales tech stack into 4 major pillars. Let’s get into them:

1. CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

This is one of the more obvious, but important, aspects of your company’s tech stack.

Whether it’s Salesforce, HubSpot, or anything else, chances are your company will have a dedicated CRM.

Ideally, your CRM will contain information on leads, contacts, and sales opportunities informed by activity, contract history, and so on.

A well-managed and comprehensive CRM is a must-have for effective Sales and Marketing reporting.

 

2. Sales Engagement Platform

Next is to figure out what Sales Engagement Platform your company uses. A few examples include Salesloft and Outreach.

These tools allow you to be as efficient and effective as possible, particularly when it comes to setting up your outreach cadence.

As an SDR, you will also be using this tool often for prospecting, forecasting, reporting, and so on.

 

3. Sales Intel Platform

This tool will be highly relevant to your role as an SDR.

The sales intel platform could be something like LinkedIn Sales Navigator or ZoomInfo.

This tool provides valuable information on leads and opportunities so you can pursue relevant prospects and build relationships.

 

4. Contact Information Platform

The fourth and final pillar of the Sales tech stack is a contact information platform like ZoomInfo.

This will provide phone numbers, emails, and LinkedIn profiles of clients, prospects, and other important contacts.

 

Many tools have overlap

It’s important to understand that many of these platforms will have overlapping use cases and functionalities.

For example, ZoomInfo offers certain modules that provide “intent” information on contacts, classifying them as potential prospects or sales opportunities based on their search history, activity, and so on.

Then, you might have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which can provide similar benefits, such as alerting you when a growing company has just raised funding or had a change in leadership.

In short: Not only do you need to identify the tools that are relevant to your role, but you also need to understand how they can work together optimally. Read our post ‘How Do I Evaluate New Pieces of Technology‘ for more information.

 

Your role in all of this

As an SDR, you exist at the top of the sales funnel. You’ll fill the pipeline with leads and get the conversation going, which means you’ll likely be using your company’s sales engagement and sales intel platforms more than anyone else.

Conversely, as an account executive, you will be spending most of your time in the CRM as you strive to develop relationships and ultimately close deals.

But these rules aren’t set in stone!

Many account executives, especially ones who do their own prospecting, may be utilizing your sales engagement and intel platforms as well. This is where it depends on your company’s structure, size, and interpretation of the account executive’s responsibilities. Read our post ‘How Can Sales Succeed With Limited Resources?‘ for more on this.

The important part is to work with leadership to make sure the responsibilities of your role are clearly defined.

Then you can start putting relevant pieces of the tech stack together to fulfill those responsibilities and reach your goals.

You’ve got this,
Joe.

Why Investing in Marketing Operations Reduces Risk

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TLDR: Wondering how to prevent your budget from being cut? Learn how to make a strong case to your marketing leaders, speaking the language of risk reduction.

Marketing Operations teams are facing pressure to do more with less:

📈 more platforms to own
📈 more processes to optimize, and
📈 more revenue and productivity to generate.

All with stagnant or reduced budgets available as we enter a more cautious spending environment. Funds are spread thin, expectations are high, and you’re wondering how to prevent your budget from being cut or even how to gain additional investment to create growth and efficiency.

Periods of recession amplify the importance of two related skills in business:

1. Understanding what drives your leaders’ financial and strategic decisions.
2. Using that insight to speak up and make your case from a position of outcome orientation.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll explore these ideas in more depth so you can make a convincing argument for your Marketing leaders to preserve or increase your budget.

 

The risk mindset

When it’s time to make a spending decision, two considerations come top of mind for your executives: ROI and risk mitigation. During an economic downturn, leaders naturally veer towards the latter—making only the necessary investments to avoid losing a competitive edge.

Risk reduction is one approach to this, where leaders strategize to reduce the business’ vulnerability to risk or decrease the severity of its consequences. You can empathize with this easily, seeing as the implementation of controls is a significant priority in Marketing Ops and RevOps.

Examples of the initiatives you regularly work on that contribute towards risk reduction include:

✅ optimization of user roles and permissions in Marketing and Sales apps
✅ market and competitive intelligence research
✅ evaluation of the Marketing and Sales tech stacks
✅ identifying areas for skill development, and
✅ safeguarding data privacy compliance and security.

With tighter budgets, it’s harder for these projects to achieve what your leaders intend

Wherever economic hardship looks to compromise financial investment in your work, the argument for keeping or increasing your budget looks like this: we have an opportunity to maintain or gain market share by pursuing a certain course of action—if we don’t, we’ll lose ground instead.

Consider the particular disposition of your leaders and organizational culture to decide which side of that equation to emphasize. In a recessionary environment where new business is particularly challenging to sign, highlighting the threat of lost competitive advantage over the prospect of benefits gained will likely resonate stronger.

Because underinvestment in Marketing Operations exposes your business to a wealth of risks:

⚠️ security vulnerabilities
⚠️ financial and reputational damage
⚠️ customer churn without replacement
⚠️ staff churn and burnout
⚠️ technical debt, and
⚠️ obsolescence.

Many of these risks can coincide in response to, say, a data breach arising from security weaknesses or a violation of data privacy laws from a lack of compliance knowledge.

The consequences of these things occurring will cost your business significantly more than had your leaders initially made the relevant investments to help your team get these risks under control.

‘Lean and mean’ as a strategy only works when cuts are properly controlled and calculated, nourishing the initiatives that help you contribute to revenue growth, efficiency, and harm reduction. Of course, your leaders at C- and VP level can only know and respect your needs if you speak up effectively.

 

“Assert to leadership why
your budget is necessary.”

 

Understand the impact each aspect of your work delivers (the creation of positives and the prevention of negatives), the resources you need to perform to a high standard, and the risks incurred should those resources diminish. With this insight, you can assert to leadership why keeping or increasing your budget for particular initiatives is necessary for the business to grow or avert loss.

 

Tough love

Speaking up to get your desired results is part of doing your job well. Facing recession, your leaders need tough love from Marketing Operations to help maintain and grow market share.

Making the case to keep or increase your budget, highlighting the risks incurred by disinvestment, can steer your business away from crippling damage and help your team gain the necessary resources to accomplish what it needs in the challenging year ahead.

Get in touch for more guidance on risk mitigation in Marketing Operations.

What Essential Skills Do I Need When Starting in Sales Ops?

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Hi Joe,

I’ve been considering a career in Sales Ops for a while now, and I think I’m finally ready to pursue this idea more seriously.

As someone new to the world of Sales Ops, where should I focus my attention, and what skills should I develop to set myself up for success?

Thanks,
Courageous Carl

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Hey Carl, welcome to the world of Sales Ops!

I’m happy to outline some key findings I’ve picked up over the years that will help you succeed in your new role.

Let’s get right into it.

 

The science behind selling

I like to think of Sales Ops as the “science” behind selling.

It’s a discipline that carefully combines strategy, technology, operations, and performance to help your sales team become more efficient and effective throughout the sales process.

In Sales Ops, you’ll likely be asking (and answering) questions such as:

  • Are your company’s sales tools and platforms being utilized effectively?
  • Are you capturing relevant leads at the right time? Are the goals of your Sales team clearly defined?
  • Are your tools and processes set up to facilitate these goals?

 
With a clearer picture of what Sales Ops entails, here’s what you should keep in mind as you dive into this world more deeply.

 

Play to your strengths

People come into their Sales Ops role in many different ways and from different professional backgrounds.

Their unique experiences and perspectives will likely dictate how they contribute to the success of the overall Sales Ops function — especially in the beginning.

For example, someone may be a successful salesperson with a deeply ingrained knowledge of a certain product and industry.

Once they join Sales Ops, they can combine their existing strategic knowledge of the industry with the technical aspects of operations to further optimize sales for their company.

 

Know your industry

Let’s say the previous example doesn’t really apply to you. Maybe you previously worked as an Operations Analyst, for example, and you already know a lot about sales technology and reporting – but you lack knowledge and experience when it comes to the strategic side of sales.

In this case, it’s imperative that you learn everything you can about the industry you’re in and the people you’re selling to. Gaining a holistic view of your industry will give you:

  • insight into the psyche of your buyer
  • credibility in your conversations with salespeople
  • ability to pivot/predict changes in the industry, and
  • better adaptability.

 

Understand your salespeople

While we’re not quite talking about Sales Enablement (you can read about the difference between Sales Ops and Sales Enablement here), it is still important for Sales Ops to understand the pains and needs of the salespeople they’re working with.

Part of your job is to reduce friction within the sales process so your salespeople can work more efficiently – doing this requires a deep and thorough understanding of their needs and how you can best address them.

 

Keep updated with tech

It’s important to keep an eye on the latest updates and innovations when it comes to Sales Ops tools and platforms. For instance, how AI is transforming the space.

But be cautious. While new tech is always being developed, not every tool is necessarily right for you.

When new software is released, it’s crucial to understand its use cases and evaluate whether or not it’s actually relevant to your overall sales strategy.

Buying up every new tool that comes out puts you at risk of tech bloat and tech debt – so make sure it’s a right fit before you invest.

 

Stay attentive and curious

I’ll leave you with this: Stay as attentive and curious as possible throughout your career in Sales Ops.

This means taking initiative when you notice opportunities or inefficiencies in the sales process and always striving to find new ways to improve and innovate.

Sales Ops and MOPs require constant optimization and those who view this space as a puzzle they’re continuously solving tend to be the most successful in the long run.

You’ve got this,
Joe.

How Misaligned MOPs and Sales Ops Stifle Business Growth

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TLDR: Marketing Operations and Sales Operations work better together. People in both teams have a similar mix of skills, work towards compatible goals, and have knowledge that mutually enriches each others’ work. For a successful RevOps function, leadership should express this clearly through culture and processes. Set out accountabilities, clarify access to systems MOPs and SOPs needs, and make spaces for teams to share feedback and insights.

 

Marketing Operations and Sales Operations share many common goals and competencies. Both define processes to:

  • capture meaningful engagement data
  • measure the impact of Marketing and Sales activities, and
  • surface actionable micro and macro insights to help marketing and sales understand their performance and progress towards goals.

 
In a perfect world: Marketing Ops and Sales Ops are tied closely together. And they have a clear understanding of each team’s responsibilities and contributions.

In the real world: Issues will arise that hinder the productivity and revenue intake of your business—poor data hygiene, inter-team friction, and fragmented customer experiences.

Sound familiar? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn to explain to leadership why MOPs and Sales Ops alignment matters—and how to bring both teams together. This conversation will help leadership spend their time and money wisely and create team harmony.

 

How alignment breaks down

Often, the day-to-day projects of MOPs and SOPs teams don’t directly intersect, even as they both frequently use the CRM.

This lack of visibility can encourage a misconception that SOPs teams exclusively manage the CRM and have authority over all actions in the system. For comparison, while MOPs uses a CRM for things like attribution, lead lifecycles, and reporting, SOPs people typically don’t need to access a marketing automation platform.

In environments where SOPs and MOPs are siloed away from each other, the inevitable result is territorialism. Suppose Sales and Marketing leaders haven’t created a culture where SOPs and MOPs know each others’ accountabilities and haven’t incentivized regular communication. In that case, people become protective over “their” tools and systems and reluctant to share information.

In other words: Culture makes or breaks your Sales-Marketing alignment.

When SOPs and MOPs are at odds over who owns what in the CRM, both teams get things done slower and at a greater risk of creating problems with data hygiene.

With bad or outdated data, Sales and Marketing teams waste time acting on dead ends. If discrepancies build between the data in your CRM and marketing automation platform, Sales and Marketing leaders lose a single source of truth to support their decisions.

Sales and Marketing efforts become splintered as fractures emerge between Marketing content and comms versus Sales outreach. Lead gen falters without effective targeting, which causes your ROI to diminish.

The consequences are sweeping—paralysis, hostility, and stagnant growth. Fortunately, there’s a lot your leaders can do to correct course.

 

Uniting MOPs and SOPs

There are two initiatives your leadership should pursue:

1. Aligning MOPs and SOPs on goals, and
2. Encouraging them to work closer together.

First, leadership should punctuate just how much Marketing ops and Sales ops have in common. Both teams:

  • capture accurate lifecycle data
  • design effective lead-scoring models
  • create reports that surface key insights for Sales and Marketing
  • define processes to measure the impact of Sales and Marketing activities
  • protect systems from data loss due to technical limitations/errors
  • facilitate Sales and Marketing to review and share feedback on each others’ processes
  • set Sales and Marketing funnel goals in the CRM, and
  • enable cohesive customer experiences between Sales and Marketing efforts.

 
For each goal, leadership should establish which components MOPs and SOPs own. Responsibility Assignment Matrices are helpful structures to define and communicate who is responsible, accountable, informed, and controlled for each goal.

To make this work, your CRO should meet with SOPs, MOPs, and their leaders to identify the smaller processes that contribute towards achieving each goal.

For example: what’s the division of labor and impact on the lead lifecycle before and after the handover of MQLs? Use these accountabilities as a basis for joint ownership of the CRM, getting MOPs and SOPs to agree on features, dashboards, and processes that each leads.

The value of sharing information

Beyond assigning responsibilities, leadership should impart the value of sharing information on a regular basis.

Just as access to the CRM helps MOPs, MOPs people can share insights and reports from their marketing automation platform that SOPs might otherwise lack.

This deepens how SOPs people understand the customer journey and enriches the strategies and tactics they can recommend to sales.

Encouraging MOPs and SOPs to meet quarterly (at minimum) to share their opportunities and challenges—things that worked, things that didn’t, ongoing goals—also helps both teams be visible, accountable, and collaborative with each other.

 

Natural collaborators

MOPs and SOPs are natural collaborators—people in both teams have a similar mix of skills, work towards compatible goals, and have access to information that mutually enriches each others’ work.

For a successful RevOps function, your CRO should express this clearly through your culture and processes.

Set out accountabilities, clarify access to systems MOPs and SOPs needs, and make spaces for teams to share feedback and insights. The closer you align MOPs and SOPs, the more productive and profitable your business can be.

Get in touch for more guidance on making your RevOps team a success.

How Can Sales Succeed With Limited Resources?

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Hi Joe,

I’ve just been put in charge of the Sales team at a relatively small company. So far, things have been great – but there are definitely some limitations.

Compared to the last company I was with, we don’t have nearly as many resources for the Sales team to use.

We’re hitting a plateau right now, and I’m unsure how to break through it. Any advice on how Sales can work more efficiently and effectively with what we have?

Thanks,
Efficient Emma

pink line

Hi Emma, thank you for the question – I’ve been in your shoes before.

Helping your company grow past a plateau, especially with very limited resources, is a serious challenge.

Here’s some advice I think will go a very long way in helping you get through this.

 

Understand your tools

I can’t emphasize this one enough.

If your company has a dedicated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform that is integrated with a marketing automation platform like Hubspot, it’s crucial that you know how it operates and how you can get the most out of it.

These are essential tools that will guide your sales process, allowing you to track and define the different stages of leads as they progress from lead to contact to opportunity closed and so on.

After that, see if your company has any other tools like Outreach or Salesloft that will optimize outreach campaigns and communication. You can learn more about the 4 pillars of a Sales tech stack here.

 

Sync with marketing

Alignment between sales and marketing is key. Especially when resources are low, every dollar must be used as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Keep direct lines of communication open with your marketing team, so sales can stay up to date with relevant campaigns, inbound and outbound programs, and other materials that marketing has put in place. These are materials sales can leverage, including:

  • whitepapers
  • product comparisons
  • product demos
  • case studies, and
  • customer success stories.

Ideally, marketing sees what happens before prospects get to sales, so make sure to leverage any intel you can get to increase your understanding of clients – which brings us to our next point.

 

Personalize communication

Having limited resources doesn’t mean you can’t personalize your emails, phone calls, or any other communication channel. In fact, it’s even more reason to ensure every reach-out is as effective as possible.

Doing this will require using tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator to get detailed insights into the pain points of possible leads, which will help you tailor your messaging and create effective, targeted communication points that can increase conversion rates.

If you don’t have access to software that can help with this, or you’re at a stage where you simply can’t afford to invest in a data enhancement tool, then I encourage you to do as much manual research on your leads as possible. Depending on your business, even 2 to 3 hours of extra research on a single lead is worth it if it means closing on a sale.

Once you’ve collected enough data on leads, you can work with marketing to create an ideal customer profile (ICP), as well as key personas that will aid communication strategies going forward.

 

Automation is your friend

If your team is hitting a plateau, one way to accelerate productivity is to automate anything you can. Find yourself entering the same pitch, message, CTA, or value offer more than once? Make it into a template!

And if you’re working closely with marketing, you should have a good understanding of what each persona in your ICP needs to hear at different stages. This will allow you to create templates with reusable content for every scenario, so you can spend more time personalizing your message.

You’ll find yourself sending higher-quality messages to more prospects this way.

 

Stay patient

If a certain approach or sales strategy isn’t working right away, it’s okay to persevere and see it through for a longer time.

I’ve seen far too many sales teams give up on a strategy after a single week if the email open rates weren’t ideal, only to realize later that their strategy needed more time and a larger sample size to produce meaningful feedback that can guide future decisions.

Of course, it’s good to persevere – but do so within reason. If you’ve been following the same sales strategy for months without success, it’s time to experiment with new approaches.

And when you’re trying something new, KPIs and deadlines are your friends. Adding specific numbers to benchmark against (such as reaching a minimum of 1,000 prospects in 3 months, for example) will make the process easier to control, measure, and replicate.

Follow the points above, and your sales team will certainly be getting more out of the limited resources that you currently have.

If you still need more help to push past this plateau, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

You’ve got this,

Joe

What Your Leadership Should Know About SLAs

Posted on by admin

TLDR: Internal SLAs in RevOps define your policies and contingency plans regarding the lead lifecycle. Logical, well-understood SLAs allow you to monitor the impact of your lifecycle structure and activities, and make it easier to improve processes and resolve issues. But SLAs only work when people are incentivized to follow them. Seek feedback from people in your RevOps team when developing processes, and gamify the fulfillment of SLAs to encourage participation.

 

Service level agreements (SLAs) define a business’s deliverables and services to customers and prospects. They also serve an important purpose between internal teams. SLAs lay out your policies regarding the lead lifecycle—the actions Sales, Marketing, and RevOps should take in response to customer activities and the contingency plans in case things don’t happen as expected.

Service level agreements standardize your timelines to respond to customers and prospects at each stage of the lifecycle. Establishing and optimizing these processes is essential to move prospects along their buying journeys and prevent leads from going cold.

In other words: the quality of your SLA processes can make or break your revenue function. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn to explain the impact of SLAs to your RevOps leader. You’ll help them to grasp why processes succeed or fail and encourage the implementation of strategies and initiatives with SLAs that lead to a healthy RevOps team.

 

The impact of SLAs

SLAs encourage clarity of policymaking in your business. They help people in your RevOps team to understand your default processes and corrective measures. Crucially, they give people a reference point to improve processes and resolve issues based on realistic expectations.

For each stage of the lifecycle, your team has measures to engage prospects within certain conditions. For example, if someone fills in a contact form, Sales might receive an alert minutes later alerting them to respond within 2 hours.

But if the Sales rep responsible for a particular account is away, what’s the handover process? If there’s no handover, why not? How do you escalate the situation? Given the data-crunching and people involved in responding to an inquiry, is the 2-hour turnaround time for a responsible feasible?

Effective SLAs allow your RevOps team to:

  • monitor the impact of their lifecycle structure and activities
  • rectify flawed processes, and
  • double down on what works.

For example, if your conversion rate from sign-ups to MQLs is below a certain threshold within a particular timeframe, an SLA to insert a new nurture campaign to the relevant subset of prospects can galvanize engagement. Likewise, if you’re experiencing an exceptionally high rate of closed lost opportunities, an SLA to investigate your processes can help to identify why sales aren’t flowing (are SDRs opening opportunities prematurely? Are Sales reps not following up in time?)

Crucially, SLAs can increase the pace at which the most promising leads progress through the lifecycle.

Let’s say your sign-up page receives 1k sign-ups per day. By inserting an SLA for RevOps to review all sign-ups and measure each prospect’s fit for the business, Sales can easily identify which sign-ups to prioritize in their outreach. This responsiveness shortens your time to revenue and prevents the most compatible leads from going cold.

 

Implementing SLAs

For all the clarity and improvement opportunities that SLAs offer RevOps, they only work when people are incentivized to follow the processes—otherwise, they risk falling apart. With ineffective or absent SLAs, your RevOps team will struggle to monitor behavior and make tweaks that boost ROI. Therefore, your CRO needs to consider how to educate and encourage people to stick by them.

Firstly, involving people in your RevOps team with the development of processes will help to encourage adoption. Your CRO should consult internally when conducting a process audit, inviting people from MOPs, Sales Ops, and Customer Success to share their perspectives on what works and what doesn’t. The more your CRO engages the team, the greater insight they’ll gain about SLAs to add, improve, or eliminate, and having team feedback guide these processes will make evident the value of following them.

For devising SLAs that involve multiple departments, get people together from each team to raise issues and strategize approaches. Your CMO, for instance, might analyze the results from your NPS surveys and report back. If client satisfaction is revealed to be low, then your Customer Success team can take the lead with approaching customers to mitigate and resolve any problems while your Product team stays in the loop.

For SLAs pertaining to processes that involve just one team (e.g. web conversions in Marketing), cross-departmental counsel can be useful to focus group any proposed SLA, but only the team following and impacted by the process needs to be involved.

Once an SLA is implemented, gamification helps motivate people to fulfill the process’ objectives. Establishing weekly or monthly targets and celebrating the wins of your team reinforces the value of following SLAs and usually comes at no significant cost—considering the uplift of processes that work, the ROI of rewarding people for meeting or exceeding their SLA fulfilment targets makes sense.

 

The bottom line

SLAs in RevOps spell out how your revenue function works and why. This helps your team to coalesce around logical, cohesive processes and makes it easier to measure, refine, and improve them.

Vitally, they support your team to take timely actions that progress your leads through the lifecycle and keep the dollars coming in.

Get in touch for any guidance you need with SLAs.

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