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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’s so many places to create efficiency and work on the conversion from marketing qualified lead to booked meeting.

So, where do we start?

Let’s Spot Some Gaps

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.

The Promise of a Seamless Customer Experience From Awareness to First Meeting

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 Lead to Meeting Booked Playbook

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.

  1. Lead capture & tagging (lead source, campaign creation)

  2. MQL definition
    • Lead Scoring
    • Hand-raisers vs Engaged

  3. Lead Handoff
    • Lead Assignment
    • Lead Status management and dispositioning
    • Lead status & reasons

  4. Outbound Sequencing
    • SLA
    • Sequence Design

Typical Tech Stack

  • Marketing Automation Tool

  • CRM

  • Lead Assignment Tool

  • Meeting Booking Tool

  • Data Appending

  • Sequencing Tool
 
An example:
Marketo
Salesforce
Outreach
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Navigator
LeanData
ZoomInfo
chili_piper
ChiliPiper

Metrics That Matter, Benchmarks That Matter

  • Key conversion rates
    • Lead to MQL
    • MQL to Meeting Booked
  • Key velocity metrics
    • (For handraisers) 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

✱ 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

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