Category: Tough Talks

TLDR: Is your CRM heaving with old records? Time to clean up your data. Learn how to advocate for good data hygiene to your Sales leaders.

Why data quality is crucial: Sales teams struggle to succeed without clean, well-organized data. To work efficiently and make the right decisions, people at every level and in every function of your sales team need easy access to accurate, relevant information.

Data challenges in Sales Ops: For Sales Operations, good data hygiene can be challenging to maintain. Sales Ops handles information from different avenues which are often difficult to standardize. Think contact forms, data enrichment tools, research from Sales reps. As a result, CRMs bloat with duplicate and incomplete records that only become less viable as time goes on — and this bloat costs in many ways.

What’s in this article for you? If your CRM is heaving with records or your reporting doesn’t match the reality of your team’s performance, it’s time to clean up your data. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn:

➡️ The impacts of poor data hygiene

➡️ The need for continuous effort to keep data clean

➡️ How to inform your team of best practices that will keep your data clean and your sales team on track

➡️ Do you use Marketo + Salesforce? Explore our Data Hygiene Management offering

 

Why data hygiene matters

Companies waste 12% of revenue on inaccurate data. And bad data encroaches on everything your sales team does.

👉 Leads to inaccurate analyses of opportunities in the pipeline.

👉 Results in sales reps making muted progress on deals, chasing prospects that are past their relevance to your business.

👉 Creates a lack of clarity on the accounts, industries, and regions you should be targeting and how to target them.

👉 Causes technical debt, smaller pipelines, leads being routed to the wrong places, and hours burned cleaning up and correcting messy databases.

Why do these problems arise? A lack of clean, consistent practices around how your organization handles data. Often, this is due to business culture. Your sales leaders might, for example, oppose deleting data. They’ve paid for the methods to acquire this information that could, at some point, yield business.

 

It pays to part with data (sometimes)

Records that have been sitting cold in your CRM for years with no signs of engagement cost more than they’re worth.

Insights expire, industries evolve, and peoples’ interests and roles change.

After a few years of inactivity, you’re more likely to reengage a prospect inbound, in response to a different product or service line, than what you’ve previously been sending them.

And at that point, as far as their potential as a customer goes, they’re an entirely new prospect whose old data is no longer relevant.

 

“Your organization should understand that data hygiene = time and money well spent.”

 

Your organization should understand that data hygiene = time and money well spent.

Before renewing your CRM instance, see what your capacity costs annually.

Scope out the data that you don’t need, such as:

👉 duplicates

👉 outdated and irrelevant information, and

👉 metrics that your reps don’t use.

Then, present leadership with the savings you can make by getting rid of old records.

 

An ongoing process

Remember: This isn’t a one-time clear-out.

You have to keep working on it regularly to make sure it stays in good shape.

To increase revenue, sales reps need access to accurate information that will allow them to focus on the most viable leads. Leadership can help by making data hygiene a part of the culture and practices of your business.

Data should enter your system according to standardized methods of collection and categorization, following a central repository of business definitions that your sales and RevOps teams universally agree upon.

You also want to standardize the fields across channels that people can use to enter information—discrepancies between, say, United States vs. USA vs. US will bloat your database and compromise the accuracy of your reporting.

Sales Ops can take the lead with regularly auditing the CRM and other databases for data quality. Things like:

✅ merging duplicates

✅ flagging records with missing data, and

✅ removing data that are no longer correct or relevant.

Chat with your CRO and Head of Sales about the conditions that make data meaningful for the team:

• Do we use it in reporting?
• Do our Sales reps use it in their work?
• Does it concern prospects who are reasonably engaged given the norms of our industry?
• Does collecting and storing it drive our desired outcomes?

If the answer is ‘no,’ chances are you can safely delete a record.

To increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your data cleanups, encourage leadership to invest in a data preparation tool to automate parts of the audit.

 

Helping Sales win

In Sales, data hygiene and quality will make or break your capacity to strike deals and achieve growth.

Follow these steps and your pipeline will likely prosper:

➡️ Adopt clear and consistent practices for collecting and categorizing data.

➡️ Complete regular audits to streamline your databases to only include accurate and relevant information.

Visit our data hygiene management offering for more guidance on maintaining good data hygiene practices.

TLDR: Lead routing tech distributes incoming leads to sales representatives. It’s important to choose the right lead routing system to maximize revenue potential. Evaluate your business needs, consider manual assignments for certain scenarios, and justify the cost based on conversion rates.

What is lead routing? Whenever a lead comes in, your sales team needs to decide who will work on it. Lead routing is the process of distributing incoming lead records among your sales reps. It allows Sales to automate the flow of leads based on various methodologies, assigning records based on factors like their region, industry, seniority, and prior relationships with reps. Done right, routing keeps leads moving fast and towards the people best equipped to convert them.

 

“A process that delivers leads slowly, to the wrong reps, will restrict your revenue potential.”

 

The benefit of third-party lead routing: CRMs and marketing automation platforms tend to have built-in lead-routing functions, but using them isn’t the only approach your sales team can take. Third-party solutions offer more advanced features that may justify the cost depending on your needs, while businesses in some scenarios can opt to handle lead assignments manually.

What’s in this article for you? The decision falls with your sales leaders, and it’s an important one to consider—a process that delivers leads slowly, to the wrong reps, will restrict your revenue potential. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how to

➡️ Evaluate the market of lead routing tools

➡️ Focus on the features and performance factors that matter

➡️ Advise your sales leaders on the lead routing system best suited for your business

 

Route planning

As with any potential tool acquisition, you want to consider a new lead routing system through this lens: Is your business in the right state — with the right needs — to justify the costs?

In some scenarios, Sales can manage without an automated lead routing mechanism. You’re likely suited to a less sophisticated setup (for instance, where one senior sales person identifies and assigns leads by hand) if your business:

👉 Works with few inbound leads

👉 Serves a niche sector

👉 Has a small sales team

👉 Tends to receive warm leads

That said, if you’re experiencing issues like slow follow-ups or low conversion rates, it suggests that your current routing processes aren’t working. Listen to your reps:

• Are they getting leads suited to their regional or industry expertise?
• Are incoming leads from companies that are already in your database going to the people familiar with those accounts?
• Are they able to strike while the iron’s hot?

If the answer to any of these is ‘no,’ it’s time to rethink how you’re routing leads.

And if your business has a large sales team serving global markets in various industries, you stand to benefit from the efficiency and granularity of a dedicated third-party tool.

 

Making the case

Annually, you’re looking at between $20k-100k for a lead routing tool.

If your Head of Sales is reluctant to allocate the budget, gather data on your conversion rates and customer responsiveness. If you can estimate any revenue lost to broken lead routing, frame the tool as an investment to recuperate and exceed the value of that lost business.

As you explore tools on the market, assess each option with these factors top of mind:

👉 How thoroughly does the tool allow you to build routes and orchestrate processes?

👉 How smoothly does it integrate with your CRM and marketing automation platform?

👉 What’s the learning curve?

👉 Can it identify incoming leads who work at a company that already exists in your database?

👉 How can this help to improve SLA fulfilment?

 

“Lead routing tools tend to be simple to integrate with a CRM.”

 

Lead routing tools tend to be simple to integrate with a CRM. The only significant overhead to anticipate is for Sales to decide, document, and build routes in the system. Once you’re up and running, keep track of the following metrics:

✅ SLA completion rate

✅ Revenue intake and forecasts per quarter

✅ MQL to SQL

✅ SQL to opportunity

✅ Customer/prospect response rates

After several months of reporting, you’ll be able to surface the ROI of a lead routing tool to your Sales leaders: fast, efficient workflows that play to the strengths of your reps and set them up to succeed.

Get in touch for more guidance on Sales Operations processes and tools.

TLDR: Attribution assigns credit to marketing tactics that generate revenue to calculate the ROI of marketing efforts. It’s not as simple as spending more on what works. Finding the balance of spending and assessing the tipping point for each channel is crucial. The complex buyer’s journey requires sophisticated attribution models, and marketers must determine the impact of each touchpoint.

“I heard there’s this tech that can get us better ROI like magic!”

The misconception about marketing automation: Among the many misconceptions about marketing automation, one of the worst is the belief that automation does our job for us, like the wave of a wand.

How to discuss attribution with your boss: Discussing attribution with your CMO or CFO isn’t a talk you should dread. It’s a talk you can use to your advantage. That’s because attribution isn’t only the process by which your organization assigns credit for MQLs and sales—it’s also concrete evidence of your precise value to your organization as a marketer.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you dispel the magic assumptions and ‘set it and forget it’ mentality to explain what’s really going on behind the scenes. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Explain your attribution maturity in a way that emphasizes your expertise

➡️ Earn the recognition you deserve

➡️ Make an argument for increasing budgets down the line

 

Explaining attribution data decisions

The challenge you’re facing is clear: you need to communicate the function and value of attribution modeling without effacing the importance of how you analyze and react to the data you have available.

For starters. what is attribution? Attribution assigns credit to how much revenue a specific marketing tactic produces, letting you calculate the ROI on each and every dollar you spend.

Attribution arms you with the data you need to optimize your programs and spend over time—and to clearly report your results in a way that lets your organization buy into your vision.

 

“Attribution isn’t as simple as spending more on what’s working and less on what isn’t!”

 

But attribution isn’t as simple as spending more on what’s working and less on what isn’t!

Having the data at your fingertips is only part of the battle. Finding the balance of your spending and assessing your company’s tipping point for any given channel is both an art and a science.

👉 Let’s walk through an example:

Let’s say you’re spending $100K on a channel with 5 to 1 ROI. If you instead allocate $200K, you should make a million!

But not so fast: ROI isn’t constant and every channel can have diminishing returns, where a certain amount of spend changes 5 to 1 ROI into 4 to 1, or less.

If your 5 to 1 ROI only holds true to $150K before dropping to 4 to 1, you have a choice on your hands. 4 to 1 could still be your best bet — but that’s a decision that automation can’t make for you.

It’s your expertise that allows you to find the tipping point and determine your next course of action accordingly.

 

The complex buyer’s journey

That example covers the ROI balancing act, but attribution itself is rarely so simple or cut and dry.

While it’s great to attribute a sale to a particular tactic, customers can have hundreds of interactions with a brand before deciding to buy.

Sure, when the time came to pull the trigger, they may have visited your website, but they could’ve been persuaded by an excellent white paper you offered last quarter — which came to their attention thanks to a CRM email — which they signed up for thanks to a social lead gen ad over a year ago.

That’s why attribution platforms offer increasingly complex models, accounting for Member Statuses in many campaigns at different points in the buyer’s journey.

 

“It takes multiple programs across multiple channels to make a deal happen.”

 

It takes multiple programs across multiple channels to make a deal happen.

Complex attribution modeling can reveal the marketing history of every touchpoint but it’s up to you to determine the impact of each status and channel on the final deal itself.

That determination is a sign of your Attribution Maturity.

 

Know thy company

If attribution provides the data, attribution maturity is your outlook on that data.

Attribution platforms provide high-end data-rich attribution but that’s only as valuable as how you parse and leverage that data. And if all we’re using it for is explanation and description, we’ve definitely got some maturing to do.

Fortunately, many of these platforms scale with you as your attribution outlook matures.

Do you want to track a program for everyone who registers for a webinar, or one to track only those who actually attend? Your specific needs and interests can be fine-tuned to arm you with the data that’s most pertinent to your future goals.

So how do you know what programs to implement? You need to know your own company.

 

“Different attribution models answer different questions—so what questions are you asking?”

 

Different attribution models answer different questions—so what questions are you asking?

👉 Wondering which campaigns are sparking initial interest? You’ll want a First Touch attribution model.

👉 How about which campaigns are taking leads from awareness to opportunity? A W-Shaped model can scratch that itch.

👉 Or maybe you’d like an overall holistic approach, to give the CMO a full update on all stages of the lifecycle? Then Full Path is the way to go.

Remember: Whatever questions you are asking, attribution modeling gives you the ability to target accordingly. From there, it’s a matter of time, testing, and analysis to arrive at the answers your company needs.

 

Be the one with the plan

No matter how you’re targeting your attribution, you need a Data Utilization Plan to go from description to determination.

Create a plan based on your team’s needs

✅ Timelines

✅ Key data points

✅ What you’re measuring

✅ Why you’re measuring

Remember: These sorts of plans take time. Build in benchmarks from month to month and year to year to measure where you plan to be and the spend you’re going to make to get there.

And if your higher-ups bristle at the long-game, simply explain that they will never truly know the value of any spend without attribution – and without a savvy marketer such as yourself handling their modeling, along the way.

Hopefully, this helped you get out of your own head and out of the weeds when it comes to communicating attribution to those who need to know.

When it comes to making the most of your modeling or progressing on the Attribution Maturity Curve, Revenue Pulse’s experts are here for ideas, guidance, and support.

P.S. Want more advice like that? Follow us on LinkedIn to never miss an update.

TLDR: Whether you’re in a MOPs team or consulting in the space, learn methods of managing processes, projects, and expectations to strengthen the consultant-client relationship.

Why is a good relationship important? A strong relationship with a consultancy can help MOPs teams to optimize day-to-day processes and tasks, address issues that have built up over the years, and unearth opportunities to improve the strategic contributions that MOPs makes to the business.

The secret to a good relationship: For consultants and clients to enjoy a successful working dynamic, however, both sides must empathize with the needs of the other and be considerate and transparent around scope and project expectations.

What’s in this article for you? If your MOPs team is beginning to work with consultants to deliver projects, or you’re a consultant in the MOPs space looking to build successful client relationships, this Tough Talks Made Easy will help you:

➡️ Communicate your needs within the partnership

➡️ Better understand those on the other side

➡️ Understand effective methods of managing processes, projects, and expectations to strengthen the relationship

 

Active listening

When MOPs teams and consultants begin to collaborate, there’s a groove to find between the established ways of doing things internally and new recommendations that consultancies bring to the table.

 

“Reciprocity and active listening are perhaps the most important qualities.”

 

At this early stage, reciprocity and active listening are perhaps the most important qualities to get the relationship off to a strong start.

As a client

Before contacting an agency or consultancy, your marketing ops team should adopt a specific mindset for success.

👉 Have clear objectives for the partnership

👉 Be prepared to communicate with the consultancy effectively

👉 Be open to incorporating external expertise, even if it means adjusting established work approaches

As a consultant

If you’re consulting with a MOPs team, responsiveness is essential.

Spotting early opportunities to optimize your client’s workflows and tech stack can quickly prove value and create rapport, but your vision should respect your client’s priorities.

Your recommendations and suggestions need buy-in from the decision-makers and day-to-day contacts in the team—and you’re most likely to get that if you show awareness of what your client needs and how more significant changes will impact them.

Big takeaway

Whether you’re on the client or consultant side, approach these early discussions respectfully.

Take on board your consultant’s rationale for certain changes or what motivates your client’s organizational choices and methods — regardless of how early decisions go, if the other party feels understood and appreciated, you’re creating a solid basis of trust.

 

Expectations vs. reality

As your projects continue, transparency and open lines of communication are like oxygen to the relationship.

As a client

For a marketing ops team, sessions with the consultant are a proactive way to surface your needs and communicate expectations around expected deliverables and timelines.

If your MOPs team lacks experience working with consultancies, they might not understand that consultants have other relationships to manage with unique deliverables and timelines. What might seem like a fair request in-house can be unviable for consultants to fulfill.

For that reason, encourage your team to consider the demands your partners are under and prepare to be flexible. Some urgent turnarounds just aren’t possible for your consultant. Others can be done but require adapting project scope.

As a consultant

Meetings with clients help you keep up with requirements and requests.

A common pitfall for consultants is to view the content of a project in isolation and underestimate the amount of time it’ll take to complete.

Avoid building up client expectations beyond what’s realistic by clarifying the factors that contribute to delays like scope creep, vacations, multiple rounds of reviews in testing and gathering consensus from multiple stakeholders in the discovery phase.

As a consultant, you want to reflect on all these dependencies and share them proactively with clients when setting a turnaround date.

 

“The train can go off the track without a regular communication channel to set the course.”

 

Path to success

Both parties should know that the train can go off the track without a regular communication channel to set the course.

Whether you’re client-side or consulting, encourage systems of working that put you on the same page.

👉 Suggest task management software (be it a dedicated tool or a spreadsheet) to assign tasks and monitor progress, and establish weekly status calls to discuss the status of day-to-day projects, longer-term plans, and any issues or roadblocks impeding progress.

 

Reciprocity

The consultant-client relationship is one of mutual participation.

It requires openness and respect from both parties towards the other’s expertise, needs and demands.

Transparent communication around timelines and deliverables and an enthusiastic approach toward your shared purpose are the foundational components of a rewarding relationship that gets results.

For any project guidance, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

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TLDR: Demand for skilled MOPs people far outstrips the supply. To attract and retain the best talent, your recruitment process should focus on the candidate experience and the employee experience.

The struggle to attract talent: Demand for skilled Marketing Operations professionals has long outpaced the supply. The current job market is especially driven by talent. Top MOPs candidates have the bargaining power to take or stay in roles with the most attractive company cultures and compensation packages, and for as long as that’s the case, companies that hire without regard for the candidate experience will struggle to attract and retain the best talent.

What’s in this article for you? If multi-stage interview processes and a lack of long-term thinking for each hire sounds like your organization’s approach to recruitment, it’s time for a Tough Talk.

We’ll help you discuss what effective MOPs recruitment looks like with your CMO and Hiring Manager, so your team can get great candidates onside and nurture them for long-term success.

 

The candidate experience

Far too often, companies in the MOPs space operate with the assumption that the logistics of recruitment should work in their favor. Really, the process is a two-way street.

In each interaction, candidates are scoping out whether your organization is the right place for them to work, and considering the scarcity of MOPs skills, the people with real potential to excel in your roles hold all of the cards.

 

Encourage hiring teams to view their recruitment practices through the candidate’s eyes.

 

👉 Does a demanding job description position your company as a rewarding workplace?

👉 Is a string of multiple interviews with disparate stakeholders (e.g. Sales, Marketing, IT, Leadership) the most considerate use of a candidate’s time?

👉 Is it respectful to require candidates to perform free labor or attend a full-day interview while working a full-time job?

The candidate experience is not just about extending decency. Practices like these fail at selling your company as an inviting and stimulating place to be, which has real business consequences.

If you can’t attract talent, your company faces spending serious dollars on a recruitment agency. And even then, you run the risk of hiring subpar candidates.

Bottom line: The lost productivity and cost involved in fixing the mistakes of an ill-fitting hire will completely dwarf the size of investments your company should have made into

• Well-researched role requirements.
• Building a culture that your talent people advocate for.
• A recruitment process that puts the candidate’s needs first.
• An attractive compensation package.

 

To keep people, hire with a purpose

MOPs roles are often multidisciplinary by design, but many of the industry’s job descriptions read like laundry lists of scattershot and highly advanced competencies.

Just like how the right tools for your business are the ones that effectively support your goals, leadership needs to plan and design new roles around the specific needs of the MOPs team.

Before writing the job description

Before your hiring team sits down to write any section of a job description, tell them all about the skill gaps and upcoming projects in the MOPs team.

This is the basis of an intentional hire. Your hiring team can identify the experience that’s truly important for candidates to bring versus skills that transfer or can be taught.

As an example: Many roles seek experience with a particular marketing automation platform. But experience using one platform is highly transferable to another. Unless particular expertise is crucial to the position, keeping the role platform agnostic will attract a broader range of competent candidates who can learn new skills in the role.

This is essential for employee retention.

Rather than looking for a candidate who fits your requirements 100%, prioritize candidates who are 80% there.

Your hiring team can think of it this way: A 100% fit candidate has already been there and done that. Are they going to be satisfied in a job that doesn’t represent meaningful progression? You might offer them a higher salary than their current position, but there’s no telling if that’ll incentivize them to stay long-term.

 

“Your 80% fit, however, can truly gain something from taking the job.”

 

Your 80% fit, however, can truly gain something from taking the job. That makes them a better investment. A candidate who can say your company gave them a chance to develop their skills has motivation. That’s motivation to give their best effort, stay on the team and advocate for your brand to their network.

TL;DR: The perfect fit has room to grow.

 

Your recruitment brand

Desirable places to work all have this in common: They create environments where people want to stay.

To attract and retain the best marketing ops talent, leadership should focus the recruitment process on two things:

• The candidate experience, then
• the employee experience.

Treating your candidates and employees with empathy — practices based on candidate needs, a rewarding culture and compensation, hiring to invest in people — is how you create a workplace that people advocate for.

For any guidance you need with building a MOPs team, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Agencies help MOPs teams take on ambitious projects and meet goals, but do you know what it takes to work successfully with an agency?

How can marketers benefit from agencies? Agencies and consultancies are valuable sources of guidance and hands-on support, helping marketing teams to clear through tasks with greater efficiency and execute more ambitious projects that may otherwise be out of reach.

What homework should you do before approaching an agency? Organizations with all sorts of technical and resource needs can benefit from a strong agency partnership, but it’s best to establish clear priorities and learn how to manage the relationship before deciding to approach one.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll teach you how to work with an agency amidst various situational demands and how to communicate optimally with your partners. By the end, you’ll know how to:

➡️ See greater results from your current agency relationship

➡️ Set your expectations and communicate them to the agency

➡️ Get the most out of working with an agency

 

Determine your priorities

There’s a tendency for some organizations to hesitate when it comes to agencies, fearing the risk of being locked into a contract or pouring money into a resource they don’t use.

If the decision-makers in your marketing team have been reluctant to work with an agency for similar reasons, make this point: If your marketing ops team has more work than bandwidth, an agency is a direct solution to help you meet your goals. The investment makes sense if you know what you want to achieve.

 

“Before approaching an agency
to take on projects, establish your most pressing needs.”

 

Before approaching an agency to take on projects, leadership and MOPs must establish the most pressing needs for the team. These priorities will determine the kinds of service providers you need to look for and how you can best use them.

 

Here are a few scenarios:

Comfortable budget but short on time? Hiring an agency to take on more practical tasks frees up your team for higher-level strategic work. And if a project is particularly time-sensitive, the extra assistance makes it possible to reach your target turnaround time within an agreed scope.

Access to budget but not to headcount? Hiring an agency is a great option in this case. It gives your team the ability to achieve targets and successfully execute tasks while safeguarding their existing but limited bandwidth.

Lower budget with time to spare? Consider using an agency’s experts for advice on complex projects to maximize your time. Think of projects like implementing a new marketing automation platform or attribution. Consultants can interpret and communicate the impact of the changes you’re looking to make and guide you through the steps to take for long-term success.

Short on both? If you’re in a crunch for time and budget, your leadership team needs to establish top priorities for marketing ops and share them proactively with your agency so they’re best equipped to meet your needs within scope.

Read our post ‘Marketing Operations: In-House, Agency or Hybrid‘ for other models.

 

Realistic expectations

To build a partnership based on trust and transparency, both parties must uphold their roles and responsibilities.

Clients are right to have certain expectations of an agency:

✅ Getting work done on time to a high standard

✅ Managing internal stakeholders

✅ Pivoting when necessary to match the changing needs of your business.

But clients should also prepare to support the agency to deliver. That means being open and honest about your goals for the working relationship.

Whatever performance expectations Marketing has, team members using the agency must offer relevant information about your business, campaigns, and priorities proactively.

 

Best practices for projects:

👉 Share resources and access permissions in a timely and forthcoming manner.

👉 Be courteous in all communications and timelines you establish.

👉 Offer support and feedback to help the agency perform more effectively.

Your marketing team might approach an agency with great ambitions. But for all the help an agency can provide, they aren’t magic.

 

“Your partners are
human beings
with multiple priorities to balance…”

 

Your partners are human beings with multiple priorities to balance and many projects in MOPs involve working through a long series of steps and processes. For example, getting attribution off the ground in a matter of weeks isn’t a viable scope to present to an agency.

To keep expectations realistic, your team should acknowledge that progress takes time. Clearly communicate what you want to achieve, sharing relevant KPIs and metrics with your agency as you approach each milestone, but do so with the understanding you’ll get results gradually.

 

The bottom line

An agency’s expertise and support help to make your MOPs function successful.

Deciding to work with one is a sign that you’re delegating effectively to complete important projects to a high standard.

Collaborate with your leadership and marketing teams to identify clear goals, share them proactively with your agency, and mutually establish a realistic scope for delivery. These are the ingredients of a partnership that gets results.

Whatever your organization needs, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Adopting a new tool has a range of logistical and financial consequences. MOPs and RevOps leaders should interrogate each potential addition to your tech stack by evaluating the ease of implementation, the experience of your team, the ease of integration with your current or planned tech stack, the potential financial costs beyond the purchase price, and how the tool responds to real business needs and strategic aims.

The motivation for adopting new tools: When new leaders join companies or people move internally to different teams, they take with them the technologies and practices they’re used to. New marketing leaders are often keen to implement tools they’ve had positive experiences with in the past and can be prone to thinking that having more tools makes it easier to surface ROI—more ways to analyze data, more ways to present it, more functions and features to optimize how you work.

The consequence of new tools: In practice, however, this isn’t quite the case. Adopting a new tool has a range of logistical and financial consequences for your business that require thoughtful planning to navigate.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you explain to your CMO or CRO the problems that can arise from adopting a new tool too soon. We’ll also outline the important things your organization needs to consider before deciding to adopt new technology.

 

New tool consequences

Marketing operations people are frequently asked to take ownership of managing new tools, and so they have first-hand experience of the reality that more tools = more responsibilities.

Adding a new tool to someone’s workload has productivity consequences for what that person can feasibly deliver, especially if they need training to effectively use the tool in question.

If the department leadership is looking at a new core piece of tech—a marketing automation platform, a CRM, a content management system—it’s likely to demand a revamp of your whole MOPs infrastructure.

 

“Before adopting a new tool, you need to understand
if it’s worth it and why.”

 

Without qualified talent on board, you might need to hire someone new to lead on that piece of tech — and the hiring process costs time and money. So before adopting a new tool, you need to understand if it’s worth it and why.

Poorly-conceived additions to your stack will leak revenue, for example:

👉 Wasted subscription fees for unused tools.
👉 Unforeseen disruptions to your team’s workflow and productivity through accommodating new processes.
👉 Suboptimal implementations or maintenance that cause damage downstream.
👉 Integrations that don’t work properly, corrupted data, bloated storage.

 

The questions to ask

 

If you have a robust tech stack

If your tech stack is already robust, your first step should be to evaluate what isn’t working.

Is a new piece of software the best way to address your needs? Encourage your CMO or CRO to explore the solutions existing in your company stack — you might already have the license to a tool that fulfills a similar purpose to a good standard, and you’ll avoid the redundant expense on an overlapping solution.

If leadership’s considering a tool that can change the essential infrastructure of your MOPs/RevOps function (a MAP, a CMS, a CRM), it’s crucial to know what strategic ambitions it supports.

➡️ Are you scaling down to cut costs or simply overhead?
➡️ Are you scaling up because your CMO/CRO has a growth plan and needs the particular capabilities of more advanced tools to achieve it?
➡️ Have they planned for the corresponding investment in the MOPs team (e.g. whether that’s greater headcount, higher training budgets, or a redistribution of role responsibilities) to facilitate a more complex platform?

 

If the new tool will play a supporting role in your stack

When evaluating a tool that plays more of a supporting role in your stack, you’ll want to assess how well it integrates with your existing infrastructure.

➡️ What depth of expertise will the tool require?
➡️ How long is the implementation period? Will it require more resources on a temporary or permanent basis?
➡️ Is it best-in-class at providing the functionalities you’re looking for?
➡️ Does it have good momentum in the marketplace?

Getting to the bottom of these points is essential to come up with a realistic assessment of a tool’s total cost of ownership.

 

Questions to ask beyond those above

➡️ Is the total cost of ownership (TCO) worth paying?
➡️ Do the capabilities of the tool respond to the goals your CMO/CRO wants to achieve?
➡️ Can you reasonably estimate that its features can drive revenue and productivity in ways that justify the time, money, and work?

 

“The impact of adopting a new tool
is often poorly understood.”

 

The impact of adopting a new tool is far-reaching and often poorly understood. Remember that strategy defines your outcomes and tools help you achieve them. Read our article Connect the Dots Between Strategy and Technology for more.

Your MOPs and RevOps leaders should interrogate each potential addition to your tech stack by evaluating the:

👉 ease of implementation
👉 experience of your team
👉 ease of integration with your current or planned tech stack
👉 potential financial costs beyond the purchase price, and
👉 tool’s ability to respond to real business needs and strategic aims.

Approach each tech decisions with this degree of intentionality, and you’ll maximize the ROI you gain from your stack.

Get in touch for more guidance on assessing and implementing new technologies.

TLDR: Lead scoring can help Sales focus only on the most valuable or receptive prospects, but the project stands or falls based on the quality of Sales-Marketing collaboration.

What is lead scoring? Lead scoring is the process of evaluating the interest of a prospect and their readiness to engage with the sales process.

The problem lead scoring solves: Lead scoring helps Sales and Marketing concentrate efforts on leads that have demonstrated a higher level of interest or engagement with your brand, increasing the chances of closing deals and generating revenue.

What’s in it for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll cover how to explain the value and reality of lead scoring to Sales – what it is and is not, what it offers and requires. You can incentivize Sales to work together with Marketing with realistic expectations on a project that’s vital for both teams to grow the business.

 

Methods and data points

Companies can score leads in a variety of ways. You can ascribe numeric values, letter rankings, or descriptive terms like “warm” and “cold.” However you choose to score leads, there are several key data points that should factor into the analysis:

👉 Demographics (relevant individual characteristics, e.g. job title)
👉 Firmographics (organization profile, e.g. industry, vertical, size, location, annual revenue)
👉 Behavior (how the lead engages with your brand, e.g. visiting the webpage, interacting on social, requesting a demo)
👉 BANT qualification (the lead’s budget, authority, need, and timeline)
👉 Completeness of the data you have for each lead

There’s no objectively superior method of scoring leads and accrediting weight to different data types. Instead, your Sales team needs to work with Marketing to define the scoring methodology and establish what a “qualified” lead looks like.

An accurate view of lead quality helps Sales to focus on engaging only with the most receptive and valuable prospects. Neither team can make a complete assessment of this without ideas, data, and feedback from the other.

 

Qualify or nurture

Naturally, some leads will show a higher likelihood to buy than others. The task for Marketing and Sales is to determine how to identify and treat leads that fall into one of two groups:

1️ shows an optimal level of interest for Sales to act, or
2️ requires further nurturing by Marketing.

For this process to yield results, Sales needs to agree with Marketing on the benchmark for qualification.

Sales might expect the leads they receive from Marketing to be ready to sign, but there’s only so much your Marketing team can do in advance. As long as Marketing can unearth opportunities with a high likelihood of closure, it’s on Sales to identify where in the process to step in and how to approach each lead.

On the other hand, Sales shouldn’t encourage Marketing to pass leads over who show just enough of a pulse to open an email or click a link. Qualifying leads this way undermines the evaluative power of Marketing’s nurture process. Sales might get a couple of lucky bites, but it won’t translate to sustainable success.

 

Building lead profiles

Marketing’s nurture programs build insightful lead profiles through rich data collection, which allows Sales to approach the highest quality leads in the most engaging ways, showing awareness of their interests and the situational context. Without that basis, Sales risks burning effort on premature leads and failing to hit targets.

The point to make is that lead scoring best allows Sales to identify and win business from the highest value leads when two things are in place:

✅ clearly defined and realistic models for scoring and qualification, and
✅ time for Marketing to nurture developed engagement data from their campaigns.

 

Fuel your growth machine

To get started with lead scoring, Sales needs a good grasp of their past successes. Your reps should dig into historical data about past deals and lead journeys until they can answer these key questions:

👉 What makes a person qualified enough?
👉 What behaviors and traits did closed-won leads show?

 

The quality of collaboration

From there, lead scoring stands or falls based on the quality of your collaboration. Sales and Marketing should participate in healthy, ongoing discussions until you agree on a scoring methodology and handover process that both teams can comfortably deliver.

With that agreement in place, you stand the highest chance of seeing the benefits of lead scoring—the ability for Sales to prioritize quality leads, better insight for Marketing into the most valuable lead characteristics, and increased alignment and revenue that both halves of your growth machine can enjoy.

Want more guidance on lead scoring? Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Is your Sales Ops team feeling the strain of manual processes? Learn to discuss with leadership what you should automate, why, and how to prepare for automation.

Why organizations don’t automate: Sales ops teams rely on manual processes for various reasons. Automation might not be a priority in small or scaling businesses where teams are still developing their tech stacks and systems. Teams in larger organizations might use legacy systems customized to the business’s specific needs and aren’t designed to scale. In either case, there tends to be a shortage of people who understand the tools and mechanisms to accelerate work.

The problem with manual processes: Business that don’t prioritize automation can suffer issues from manual processes that compromise revenue, including:

❌ Inaccuracies
❌ Inefficiencies
❌ Limited forecast and analytical potential

And while companies might be mature in their commercial offerings and field of expertise, a lack of alignment prevents teams around the business (e.g. Sales and Technology, Sales and Operations, Sales Ops and Marketing Ops) from coming together to discuss and address these issues.

What’s in this article for you? If your business is feeling the strain of manual processes — and your teams aren’t talking about it — this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you. We’ll help you have a strategic discussion about automation with your CRO and COO, covering what to automate in Sales Ops and why, and how to examine your processes and communication channels so your business can reap the benefits.

 

Benefits of automation

Your CRO and COO want to understand how automation can translate into increased revenue. To that end, there are a few important benefits that automating your lead and opportunity management can create:

✅ Efficiency: Automating the likes of lead capture and routing will simplify and reduce the overhead of your operations, freeing up your sales and sales ops teams to focus on higher-impact initiatives.

✅ Accuracy: Automation reduces the risk of costly errors that can occur. For example, manually creating contracts and quotes or entering data into your CRM.

✅ Data enrichment: Automation tools can enrich your lead data with publicly available information and activity metrics, helping Sales to better segment leads and prioritize the best matches to the business.

✅ Forecasting: Tools with forecasting capabilities can also lead to more accurate predictions (e.g. how Sales is performing vs. quotas) and more comprehensive analyses of various metrics. For instance, understanding how Sales is set to perform against quotas, how seasonality impacts lead behavior, or which channels to optimize your spending on, will fuel greater strategic decision-making that makes it easier to captivate leads and win business.

 

“Become more productive, predictive and responsive
to customer needs.”

 

 
Automation can help your Sales Ops function become more productive, predictive, and responsive to customer needs and preferences. In theory, these improvements should translate into growth, but there are several logistical and financial complexities with implementing automation.

Prepare to discuss the following points with leadership to show you’ve thought through what it takes to make automation successful:

👉 Recruitment and training: Implementing any technology entails having the knowledge and skills to use it. You’ll want at least one dedicated person or team to manage your workflows, with the know-how to maintain processes in good order and fix things. This might require a headcount budget, agency support, or upskilling people in your business who can progress into this role.

👉 Change management: What existing tools and integrations could be impacted by our implementation of automation? Given the available time that our team members have, what other projects and initiatives are we willing to put on hold in order to prioritize this?

👉 Data quality: Between tools, you might have disparate methods of categorizing the same data points. To make integrations between tools work correctly, and for your reporting to be accurate, you’ll need IT to help with data normalization as you implement and connect tools.

👉 Awareness: How will leadership educate people on the benefits and risks of automation? If Sales isn’t aware of how new processes and tools can improve their workflow, or if people aren’t encouraged to embrace the changes in how you do things, you risk wasting the investment of time and money.

 

Implementing automation

To address these challenges, your CRO and COO play important roles in the process of implementing automation:

🎯 Direction: Your CRO and COO can position themselves as sources of guidance and authority on data initiatives, offering mentorship and incentives to encourage a greater understanding and adoption of new processes and tools. Being able to answer questions and assure people of the logic behind what they’re doing will be crucial to the ongoing success of automation.

🎯 Communication: Your leaders should encourage communication between Sales, Marketing, Operations, and IT to encourage collaboration and alignment as automation impacts the business. This will be crucial to ensure that your uptake of automation in Sales Ops compliments the tools, processes, and workflows in other departments.

🎯 Resources and development: Leadership can allocate the budget for software purchases, training, hiring, and agency support towards the initiative. This can involve working with Sales Enablement to come up with a training plan, and devising a plan for hiring and skill development to ensure that automated processes are well understood and integrated into the team.

🎯 Measurement: Based on what your CRO and COO want to achieve with automation, they can establish success metrics for the initiative—KPIs and other points of reporting for Sales Ops to track in order to gauge the success of automation. Monthly or quarterly meetings between Sales Ops and leadership, discussing these data points and talking about how to further optimize things, can aid the ongoing success of the project.

 

“Automation is equally about
making changes to your communication structure.”

 

Implementing automation is equally about making changes to your communication structure as it is about adopting new tools and processes.

If you can explain clearly to your CRO and COO the kinds of preparation that are required to realize the benefits of automation, your leaders can use their time to guide and align stakeholders around the business and incentivize people to adopt new ways of doing business to achieve a strategic vision.

Treating the interpersonal elements of change management with care puts you in a good place to enjoy the strengthened efficiency, accuracy, forecasting potential, and growth that automation offers.

Get in touch for more guidance on change management and automation in Sales Ops.

TLDR: Is your CRM heaving with old records? Time to clean up your data. Learn how to advocate for good data hygiene to your Sales leaders.

The problem with data hygiene in sales ops: Sales ops teams struggle to succeed without clean, well-organized data. To work efficiently and make the right decisions, people at every level and in every function of your sales team need easy access to accurate, relevant information.

Why data hygiene is hard to maintain: Sales Ops handles troves of information from different avenues, which are often difficult to standardize including contact forms, data enrichment tools and research from sales reps.

The cost of poor data hygiene: Sales and revenue leaders can be reluctant to part with data, even when a prospect’s interest and engagement have long cooled. As a result, CRMs bloat with duplicate and incomplete records that only become less viable as time goes on—and this bloat costs in many ways.

What’s in this article for you: If your CRM’s heaving with records and difficult to segment, or your reporting doesn’t match the reality of your team’s performance, it’s time to clean up your data. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how to:

➡️ Illustrate the impacts of poor data hygiene with your CRO/COO

➡️ Raise awareness of practices that will keep your data clean and your Sales team on track

➡️ Save money for your organization

 

Why data hygiene matters

Bad data encroaches on everything your Sales team does.

❌ Leads to inaccurate analyses of opportunities in the pipeline.

❌ Slows progress on deals as Sales reps chase prospects who are no longer relevant to your business.

❌ Creates a lack of clarity on the accounts, industries, and regions you should target and how to target them.

❌ Results in technical debt, smaller pipelines, leads being routed to the wrong places, and hours burned cleaning up and correcting messy databases.

 

Why do these problems arise?

A lack of clean, consistent practices around how your organization handles data. Often, this is due to business culture. For example, your sales leaders might oppose deleting data because they’ve paid for the methods to acquire this information that could yield business at some point.

 

“It pays to know when
to part ways with your data.”

 

But it pays to know when to part ways with your data. Records that have been sitting cold in your CRM for years, with no signs of engagement, cost more than they’re worth.

Insights expire, industries evolve, and peoples’ interests and roles change.

After a few years of inactivity, you’re more likely to reengage a prospect inbound, in response to a different product or service line, than what you’ve previously been sending them. And at that point, as far as their potential as a customer goes, they’re an entirely new prospect whose old data is no longer relevant.

Your head of sales, CRO, and COO should all understand that data hygiene = time and money well spent.

 

Before renewing your CRM instance, follow these steps:

👉 See what your capacity costs annually.

👉 Scope out the data that you don’t need, such as duplicates, outdated and irrelevant information, and metrics that your reps don’t use.

👉 Then, present leadership with the savings you can make by getting rid of old records.

Important: This isn’t a one-time clear-out. Data hygiene has a systemic impact on the productivity of your Sales team and requires a continuous, purposeful effort to maintain. To increase revenue, Sales reps need easy access to accurate information that will allow them to focus on the most viable leads. Leadership can help Sales to achieve this by enshrining data hygiene into the culture and practices of your business.

 

Data standardization

Data should enter your system according to standardized methods of collection and categorization, following a central repository of business definitions that your sales and RevOps teams universally agree upon.

You also want to standardize the fields across channels people can use to enter information. Discrepancies between, say, United States vs. USA vs. US will bloat your database and compromise the accuracy of your reporting.

Sales Ops can take the lead with regularly auditing the CRM and other databases for data quality. Things like merging duplicates, flagging records with missing data, and removing data that are no longer correct or relevant.

Chat with your CRO and Head of Sales about the conditions that make data meaningful for the team:

• Do we use it in reporting?
• Do our Sales reps use it in their work?
• Does it concern prospects who are reasonably engaged given the norms of our industry?
• Does collecting and storing it drive our desired outcomes?

If the answer is ‘no,’ chances are you can safely delete a record. To increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your data cleanups, encourage leadership to invest in a data preparation tool to automate parts of the audit.

 

Helping Sales win

In Sales, data hygiene and quality will make or break your capacity to strike deals and achieve growth.

Adopt clear and consistent practices for collecting and categorizing data, with regular audits to streamline your databases to only include accurate and relevant information, and it’s likely your pipeline will prosper.

Get in touch for more guidance on maintaining good data hygiene practices.