RevOps 101

How RevOps Can Help Sales Book More Meetings with Gap-First Thinking

We know marketing teams are incredible – they create demand, define our brand, tell stories of our successes, and work hard to get us great leads. So, why don’t we have more meetings?

‘Just send us qualified leads–it’s not that hard!’. As a salesperson, this can feel like a simple enough request.

The truth is, there’s a lot happening behind the scenes between awareness and a customer booking a meeting: upwards of 20 tools, and almost as many processes and workflows.

The good news is that there are so many places to create efficiency and work on the conversion from marketing qualified lead to booked meeting.

The RevOps sales meeting gap refers to disconnects in communication, processes, or strategy between Revenue Operations (RevOps) and Sales teams, which can hinder revenue growth. By implementing gap-first thinking, teams can better identify these misalignments and take proactive steps to optimize performance. To address these gaps, it’s crucial to focus on aligning teams, understanding the full customer journey, and ensuring shared goals. This can be done by attending meetings to observe dynamics, analyzing key reports and data, and fostering cross-functional collaboration. By addressing gaps early, RevOps can help improve the lead-to-meeting process, reducing friction and increasing conversion rates.

So, where do we start?

Spotting Gaps in the Sales Process with RevOps

Spotting gaps isn’t very difficult. And lucky for us, our intuition is going to point us in the right direction. But once you’ve exhausted those “quick wins” or obvious gaps, you’ll have to go back in for more.

✱ Here’s what to think about:

There are lots of different kinds of gaps. We like to break them down into a few key categories:

Customer Experience Gaps — these are typically the biggest bang for your buck. These are gaps that your customer feels, often causing the biggest drop in conversion. Buyers are not easy to please.

Scale Gaps — these are going to increase carry capacity as your team grows. Fixing these gaps are what let us hire more reps and bring in more leads without seeing lead leakage or huge conversion drops.

Internal Efficiency Gaps — often these can be red herrings; proceed with caution. It’s easy to see gaps in how we do things from a process standpoint and focus on efficiency. Efficiency is great, it can also increase carry capacity which helps increase revenue. But it’s not always true. Many times streamlining a process that wasn’t keeping you from scaling might save each rep a few minutes, but most of us are not running 1000 person sales teams, and that time savings won’t do much for us.

✱ Here are some ideas for gap-spotting activities:

1. Secret Shop the Team & Competitors

2. Customer Journey Mapping with Internal Stakeholders

3. GTM Rep Rides (from lead capture to meeting booked)

4. Data Analysis (by key cohorts)

5. Customer Interviews

I promise you these things are worth doing. You’ll design a better, more impactful process if you immerse yourself in the experience. Don’t just go buy a few routing and sequencing tools – you will not maximize them if you don’t design a great experience for your customers AROUND your tech.

How RevOps Improves the Customer Experience from Awareness to First Meeting

The key to RevOps is fast and effective follow-up. Getting back to a customer quickly can be a competitive advantage. B2B companies are still struggling to get back to inquiries quickly. And all our research shows that the faster we do, the more likely we are to get to a meaningful meeting.

37%

Of B2B companies in an HBR study responded to leads within 1 hour.

Following up within an hour makes you 7x more likely to convert to a meaningful conversation. And 60x more likely to convert than those that waited 24 hours.
Average time it takes B2B sales teams is 42 hours to respond. Taking 4.3 days of back and forth communication before first meeting.

So, identify sales ready leads fast, get them to the right person, and outbound quickly with personalized messaging.

The RevOps Playbook for Leading and Booking Meetings

This RevOps playbook can be streamlined to convert leads into meetings at scale. Keep improving your process to maximize conversions, driving more meetings and increased revenue.Do the work above to make sure you know where your gaps are. Once you do, you’ll know how to design the workflow. Your lead to meeting booked process can truly be a machine. Keep managing it, tweak it, make it better and better until you maximize your conversion rate. More meetings, more revenue.

Lead capture & tagging (lead source, campaign creation)
MQL definition
- Lead Scoring
- Hand-raisers vs Engaged
Lead Handoff
- Lead Assignment
- Lead Status management and dispositioning
- Lead status & reasons
Outbound Sequencing
- SLA
- Sequence Design

Tech Stack for RevOps-Driven Sales Efficiency

For a smooth RevOps process, the technology stack must support all the stages of the customer journey. These tools help streamline data, automate workflows, and ensure that sales teams work efficiently:

Marketing Automation Tool

Lead Assignment Tool

Meeting Booking Tool

Data Appending

Sequencing Tool

An example:

Marketo

Salesforce

Outreach

LinkedIn Navigator

LeanData

ZoomInfo

ChiliPiper

Key Metrics for RevOps and Benchmarks That Matters

Tracking the right metrics is crucial in RevOps. The key metrics to track in the lead-to-meeting process include:

Key conversion rates
- Lead to MQL
- MQL to Meeting Booked
Key velocity metrics
- (For hand raisers) time to first outreach
- Time to meeting booked
- Time to meeting held
Key volume metrics
- Number of MQLs per period
- Number of meetings held per period

By monitoring these RevOps metrics, you can quickly spot inefficiencies in the process and take action to improve performance.

✱ Notes:

The key to a great lead to meeting process is an increase of leads not resulting in a drop in conversion rate. It’s imperative to keep those two monitored.
Increasing internal velocity is how we most impact revenue in this part of the funnel

For a deeper dive into building a unified go-to-market approach, explore our RevOps Strategy Guide

Check the Superhuman Use Case, an innovative email client, worked with Go Nimbly to optimize their RevOps process.

Have questions or want to learn more about how to spot gaps and improve your lead to meeting process?Get in touch with us!