Sales Handoff and the Net Quality Score

One of the most controversial and challenging areas of any revenue engine is the hand-off process from marketing to sales. It is this transition that bears the brunt of all the inter-organizational process differences, motivation differences, and politics. This makes it a vital area to focus on in building the benchmarks and dashboards that will help optimize overall performance.

The nurturing and discovery of qualified leads, while vitally important, is of limited value unless the hand-off to sales is efficient and optimized. As this aspect of the process involves a significant behavioral element in the managing of sales team engagement with the lead flow process, it can be the source of many easily remedied revenue engine challenges.

The first aspect of understanding this element of the process is to understand the volume and quality of leads flowing to each territory. Volume is, of course, a simple metric to dashboard, and volume differences by territory can be quickly identified.

Quality, however, is often a more important indicator of eventual success. While MQLs may be defined as any lead that falls into a fit and engagement profile that defines it as an A1, A2, or B1, this does not mean that all MQLs are equal. Understanding the quality of leads passed to each territory is vital in ascertaining whether any revenue challenges being seen are a result of poor team performance or poor lead quality.

Most useful in this is a metric called the Net Quality Score that indicates the overall balance of high and low quality leads being sent to each rep or territory. To calculate the Net Quality Score, first split leads into high (eg A1s), medium (eg A2s), and low (eg B1s and B2s) categories. The Net Quality score is the number of high quality leads minus the number of low quality leads, divided by the total number of leads. Scores can range from -100% to +100%, and higher scores indicate a higher average lead quality.

This quality score can quickly pinpoint issues, for example in the following dashboard, it can be seen that while the Central region is receiving a large number of leads, they are generally of very low quality. This may result in sales team effectiveness that is much lower than expected without being the fault of the sales team in terms of performance.



What Happens After the Handoff?

With this understanding of which territories, product lines, and salespeople are provided with leads, and of what average quality, the next step is to provide insight into the outcome of those leads. Done properly, the disposition of leads by a sales team after they attempt to connect with them should not only trigger a marketing process to correctly handle the leads, but also provide clear insights into the whether any fine tuning of the qualification process may be required. If the leads were unreachable, lacked interest, were not the right role, or only had early stage interest, this insight allows marketing to see whether there are potential quality issues with their leads.

Likewise, if certain sales reps are doing a poor job in following up with the leads they are given, this will also show up in the analytics of lead disposition when a MQL to SQO conversion ratio is calculated for each sales person. In the following lead disposition chart, for example, you can see that Bob, Andy and Jane received a large number of leads, but failed to convert many of them to opportunities, instead marking them as unable to connect. Worth noting, however, is that the net number of opportunities created remains on par with the team as the poor conversion rate was masked by the high volume of leads.

This may be an indication of a performance or training challenge with these sales reps, or it could be that the volume of leads was so high that they were unable to truly dedicate sufficient effort to each lead.



Looking at a Difficult Problem

How are you analyzing and optimizing your handoff process from marketing to sales? Just delivering leads is not enough, if you're not able to ensure quantity, quality, and follow-up, you may be leaving money on the table.

The Sales Team as a Content Testing Crucible

It's been a while since we've talked much about the topic of sales enablement, so I wanted to loop back to some interesting peripheral points. Marketing teams generally work hard to provide not just content and messaging that is available online, but also content and messaging that can be used directly by sales teams as they guide buyers through the buying process.

This usage pattern is very powerful, in that it allows the sales team to use their intuition, insights, and judgments in deciding what content to provide to what buyer at what moment in time. This human judgment can often provide more insight than digital body language alone, and if looked at carefully can provide the marketing team with a good understanding of what content is most valuable.

This direct use of content by the sales team provides a valuable content testing crucible for understanding both which messages are being used and which are effective in guiding buyers. For example, in the following chart, you can see that the Product Spec Sheet is not being discovered by the sales team, while the ROI calculator is being discovered by sales, but is not being used. The Video Testimonials content is being used frequently, but is not connecting with the buying audience, while the Technical Specifications, while used less, are well received by the audience they are sent to.




This ability to assess content from a sales usage standpoint, as well as from a market reception standpoint enables marketing efforts to be directed at only the most highly leveraged investments.

Cash Flow Statement as a Metaphor: Sources and Uses of Leads

Earlier, we introduced the financial metaphors for balance sheet and income statement when looking at B2B marketing analysis. Following on the same financial metaphor, a “cash flow” statement can show valuable insights into the sources and uses of leads, allowing you to dashboard the lead flow within your organization in order to understand which territories, product lines, or business segments are seeing more lead flow than others, and whether the leads are being successfully converted into opportunities.

Understanding which sales teams are seeing the best sourcing of leads gives a good sense of whether there is any imbalance in the lead flows. For example, in the following data, you can see that although the West is generally getting more leads, they are of significantly lower quality. Similarly, while there are lots of leads for Widget B being generated, there is a significant imbalance in lead flow to reps in the East.





With this understanding of which territories, product lines, and salespeople are provided with leads, the next step is to provide insight into the outcome of those leads once they have been handed off to sales. Done properly, the disposition of leads by a sales team after they attempt to connect with them should not only trigger a marketing process to correctly handle the leads, but also provide clear insights into the quality of the leads. If the leads were unreachable, lacked interest, were not the right role, or only had early stage interest, this insight allows marketing to see whether there are potential quality issues with their leads.

Likewise, if certain sales reps are doing a poor job in following up with the leads they are given, this will also show up in the analytics of lead disposition. In the following lead disposition chart, for example, you can see that both Bob Clark and Jane Chen received a large number of leads, but failed to convert many of them to opportunities, instead resorting to voicemails or calling back in 90 days. This may be an indication of a performance or training challenge with these two sales reps.



The more visibility we introduce to our processes for building interest, qualifying leads, handing them to sales, and having sales connect in order to grow a revenue opportunity, the better we are able to improve those processes. The cash flow statement, as a metaphor, provides a great way to look at which sales teams are getting good sources of leads, and what the uses of those leads are. The ability to optimize this lead flow or guide the sales team's response lets us optimize revenue quickly and effectively.

Sales and Marketing Alignment: Operational Challenges Might be a Good Sign

I often get asked how one measures success in aligning marketing and sales. Alignment is a fairly fuzzy concept, so it’s hard to find a definitive metric to look at in order to determine alignment. However, there are some very interesting signs of great progress that I have seen a number of times that are worth highlighting. One of those signs is when the different operational styles of marketing and sales become an observed problem. That is actually a symptom of growing alignment between sales and marketing.

What does that mean?

Sales and marketing are very different organizations with very different natural ways of operating. Marketing, even in forward-leaning organizations that have invested heavily in lead nurturing, is often organized around campaigns or events. Sales, being very much a people discipline, is organized around sales people’s time.

This operational style become very apparent when your sales and marketing teams become very closely aligned around the sales lead handoff process. In this process, leads from marketing are handed to sales for follow-up, and sales calls in to those leads to engage with them and work towards an opportunity. However, the natural propensity of marketing to run campaigns or events, which generate a point-in-time spike in leads, begins to conflict with the sales team’s ability to follow-up on those leads, which is governed by the number of sales people on the team, and the number of hours in a day.

It is usually very difficult to make instantaneous adjustments in the number of sales people available to call hot leads, and the number of hours in a day is even more difficult to adjust. This leaves a challenging disconnect. As we’ve addressed earlier, the ability to connect with leads successfully is very dependent on the speed with which you follow up, so this disconnect has significant implications on sales success.

If a marketing campaign generates a spike of marketing qualified leads on a Monday, for example, and those leads are passed to sales, there will likely be an overwhelming number of leads for that Monday. The calls will spill over into Tuesday, and Wednesday, where the sales team will face declining success rates due to the elapsed time, and by Thursday, the sales team will be out of leads.

A far better solution would be to “throttle” marketing campaigns so that a more steady stream of leads flows to sales. Not all campaigns can be throttled, but many can. If there is to be an outbound email marketing campaign that generates leads, it is better to split it into 5 equal sections and spread it over 5 days than it is to send it all at once. Not only will the sales team not be overwhelmed with leads on one day, but the increase in successful connections they make will keep them busier with the same number of leads as in the original scenario.

When marketing and sales begin to get more closely aligned, the operational differences between the two groups become more apparent. Many of the challenges your teams will face in shifting their operations to be better in synch are actually signs of a growing level of alignment.

Evaluating Marketing Automation/CRM Integration

In a recent post, we talked about the three key elements in the Marketing Automation/CRM integration stack; data, activity, and process. This gives a good sense of the key elements that need to be integrated in order to have a seamless flow of the business process between marketing and sales. The next challenge in evaluating an integration between your marketing automation and CRM systems is understanding how to approach the integration. Depending on what systems you are using, and how complex your requirements are, this can end up in one of 4 buckets, each of which has its own unique characteristics.

The way to think about this is a 2X2 matrix. The first dimension is whether your Marketing Automation software is natively “aware” of the CRM system you are working with or not. The second dimension is whether your business processes for the integration are standard, or customized.

Native Support of Chosen CRM System

There is much confusion in the industry on this point, as the claim to “be able to integrate with” a particular CRM system leaves much to be clarified. There are, to significantly simplify, two main approaches to an integration. In one method, the marketing automation system itself is natively aware of the API calls of the CRM provider, and can update data, make notes of web activity, or create leads as appropriate.

The second method, however, is a more passive approach. Instead of taking care of the calls directly and natively, the information is provided through an API, and is available for integration as needed, but a third party integration tool would likely be required. This approach definitely allows integration, but requires a more technical investment on behalf of the organization looking to perform the integration.


Standard or Custom Business Process

When examining the business processes for the integration, many businesses will discover that they have unique requirements that are outside of the standard and typical business flows. Unique sources of data for segmentation, lead scoring criteria that come from your CRM system, novel lead handoff or claw-back processes with sales, or data requirements based on analysis needs can all drive custom integration processes.

Depending on your approach to integration – native support or non-native support – these custom process requirements can be handled in different ways.


Integration Scenarios, and Questions to Ask

Each integration scenario leads to different integration considerations. Each allows integration, and each can lead to a very successful and viable integration, but the difference are important to be aware of.

Standard Business Process, Native CRM System

This is the best available option, as it combines standard business processes with a known, and natively supported CRM platform. This should be a very quick process, and ideally will incorporate best practices and experience into the standard integration processes that are enabled. If this is the situation you find yourself in, ask questions around the marketing automation provider’s experience with that CRM platform:
- How many integrated clients do you have on that specific CRM system?
- Are you that CRM vendor’s recommended provider of marketing automation?
- If custom business process requirements arise down the road, is there the flexibility to customize?

Custom Business Process, Native CRM System

Either on initial engagement, or after the initial processes begin to show their success, there is often a need to expand the depth of the integration between CRM and Marketing Automation. As your lead scoring, handoff, and nurturing process grows in maturity, you will need to expand how the two platforms coordinate. As you are dealing with a CRM system that is natively understood by your marketing automation provider, the flexibility of your marketing automation provider is what will govern your success here. Ask questions both around the flexibility of individual calls into the CRM system, and the ability to customize the workflow that governs when those calls are used:
- What entities within the CRM system are accessible; contacts, accounts, tasks, activities, custom objects, etc?
- Can any updates (ie creating a task), be fully customized to control exactly what is written?
- Can a workflow process be created to give you as a marketer complete control of the update process?

- Do you have full decision/branching control in that workflow process


Standard Business Process, Non-Native CRM System

If the CRM system you are using is not natively supported by the marketing automation provider you are considering, integration will be possible, but there will be a significant amount more work to be contemplated. Essentially in this case, both your CRM provider and your marketing automation platform will expose an API, and you will need to use either custom code or an integration platform to build the integration.

If this is the situation you are looking at, a few key questions to ask your marketing automation software provider:
- How robust and deep is their API? Does it cover all of the key functions you will need to replicate a standard integration with your CRM system?
- How much experience do they have with integrations outside of their most familiar CRM system? (If they only have experience integrating with one CRM system, you will likely find that the flexibility to integrate with other CRM systems is not present)
- Will there be an experienced best practice team to help you with the business process aspects of the integration?
- Is there a deep partner ecosystem with experience in building integrations that you can rely on if needed?


Non-Standard Business Process, Non-Native CRM System

This is the most interesting and challenging of all the integration options. With both a non-standard CRM system, and a custom business process, your integration project will likely be more challenging than the previous options. It is important in this situation to accurately assess your integration plan in order to avoid surprises as you move forward.

Some important questions to ask of your marketing automation provider:
- Does their API cover all key areas of interest? Has there been a community of partners and developers working with the API for at least a year in order to ensure that the necessary depth and robustness is present?
- Is there a workflow engine within the marketing automation platform that can work seamlessly with the API in order to allow marketers to configure unique business processes which are then easily integrated?
- Is there a community of clients and partners who have built integrations with a wide variety of systems – data warehouses, business intelligence, purchasing, CRM, etc – whose experience you can draw from


Integration Between Marketing Automation and CRM

The integration between a marketing automation platform and a CRM system is the technological underpinning of the alignment between sales and marketing. As such, it is a key area to understand and investigate in thinking about a marketing automation investment. Whereas many things are possible in looking at integration between two systems, understanding the scenario you are in and what that means for integration can make your marketing automation journey significantly smoother.

Loose Coupling and Analysis of the Marketing Process

When analyzing the flow of leads through your marketing organization, and into your sales organization, how you design the stages in the process has a significant impact on both how you are going to be able to analyze it, and how you are going to be able to optimize it in the future. Without the ability to both analyze and optimize a process, you will find that errors begin to creep into the process due to the lack of visibility, and your ability to adapt the process as your business changes or grows is minimal.

The best approach, when you have a hand-off between one team and another, is one that is “loosely coupled”. Your marketing team, for example, may pass marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to your sales team. However, what the sales team accepts should not be termed the same thing – MQLs – as this does not allow the system to account for, and measure, a drop-off in the acceptance rate. Instead, these leads that are accepted by sales should be termed differently – in this case Sales Accepted Leads – SALs.

Even in a system where your current design parameters state that 100% of MQLs should be acted on by sales, you should still name and handle them separately. The reason for this is two-fold. For one, no system involving people can ever operate at 100% accuracy. Some of your lead will slip through the cracks due to bad data, absent employees, or inattentiveness. Without having both MQLs and SALs to measure, and thus a SAL/MQL acceptance rate, it is not possible to measure how close to 100% your system is operating at.

The second reason to avoid the tight coupling that is implied by having the same name in subsquest process stages is that most marketing organizations will change their processes over time. Perhaps your current design specification is a 100% acceptance rate of MQLs within the sales team. This may change in a quarter’s time if you decide to open up the funnel a little bit, and pass more leads to your sales team, while allowing them to selectively choose. You may reduce the design parameter to 60%. Without the “loose coupling” that having unique naming provides, it will require a full change of your marketing funnel process just to shift this one parameter. Instead, build in the flexibility up front by having the pre, and post-handoff leads named separately.

The example of MQLs being passed to sales is an obvious one, but this becomes a more interesting challenge when the names are not as obvious. For example, if you have an inside team focused on lead generation. They would take a lead at some level of quality, place a call, confirm interest, perhaps budget and authority, and deem the lead ready for the field sales team. If this team is part of the marketing organization (in some organizations, this team is part of sales), then you might wish to call the output of this team’s work an MQL. However, the question is, what is the input to this team?

Obviously, you will be scoring the leads prior to handing them to this team, so you might call them “Qualified Inquiries” to differentiate them from the raw inquiries you see on your website. The Qualified Inquiries that are then picked up by the inside team might be called “Qualified Inquiries Accepted” in order to allow you to manage the handoff between your marketing campaigns team and the inside team and allow that handoff ratio to be adjusted as needed.

The loose coupling provided by having unique names for each relevant stage of the buying process allows you to both analyze the operation of your process and also make adjustments as needed. Some upfront planning to define sufficient handoff points to allow the right amount of adjustment later can save you significant future rework.

Relationships Salespeople's Biggest Competitor

Truly great sales skills are both rare, and genuinely valuable in the overall revenue creation process. The art of understanding the people, politics, and pains within an organization, and positioning your offering in such a way to navigate through to a closed deal is difficult and needed. In almost any situation, as you try to navigate the buying process, your competitors will be working to disrupt your progress and further their own.

This is definitely a threat, but many sales people seem to overlook an even bigger competitor to their efforts. Google.

Quite simply, the reason that you, as a B2B salesperson, are invited to meet with prospects is because you carry the promise of unique and valuable information. Whether it is insights into their business, unique perspectives of industry trends, anecdotes of what others in the industry are doing, or access to negotiation options on pricing, service, or terms. Only by providing that valuable insight do you earn the right to their time and consideration.

However, more and more, executives and mid-level decision-makers are becoming less willing to grant that time to salespeople. The reason is not economics, as this trend was here in good times and in bad. The reason is not even solutions that are competitive to yours, as this trend is affecting everyone. The reason is access to information. If a prospect can get information on your capabilities, understand the market’s opinion of your fit in circumstances close to theirs, and form an understanding of the effort and costs involved in making and investment, then the information you provide is not a unique value.

This makes Google your largest competitor for prospects’ attention. If you can’t add more value than Google (or Bing) in your sales call, then you should not go.

The major search engines do a great job of providing access to generally available information, opinions, and perspectives. To provide value, as a sales person, the level of information you provide needs to improve beyond this. To add value above and beyond the search engines, top salespeople need to provide unique perspectives on the prospect’s own situation, inside access to pricing, service, or terms, and intelligent commentary on which industry trends may be relevant to the prospect.

The early stages of buyer education are best done, in today’s environment, by the marketing team, using marketing automation and lead nurturing. This change in the roles of marketing and sales may be uncomfortable, but it is needed in today’s changing buying environment. The insights that might have been gained in the initial discovery conversation is best understood by observing the buyers’ digital body language.

Sales, as an art, will continue to be a key element of delivering revenue to a business. However, as access to information continues to increase for prospects, good B2B salespeople must continue to increase their ability to provide unique information and perspectives.

Sales/Marketing Integration - The Technology Stack

Integration between Marketing Automation systems and CRM systems allows a very powerful and valuable flow of data, and business alignment, between marketing and sales. It forms the technology and data basis for a new relationship between your marketing team and your sales team. This is a very powerful concept, and worth digging into in some depth as there are a lot of questions worth asking as you evaluate potential solutions.

First, and most critical, is a look at what actually needs to be integrated between marketing and sales.

I think of it as a three-layer system, in order to keep things simple. This is obviously a somewhat simplified view, but it allows some clarity into the discussion of the integration.

Data:
The first layer is the data. Your marketing team and your sales team are communicating with the same audience in many cases. The data should be synchronized between sales and marketing in order to ensure that when a field is updated, both systems know about it. You will want to make sure that you can synchronize all key data; contacts, accounts, purchase history, etc. Any data that is meaningful for segmentation whether it is directly accessed (like contact data) or relational data (like purchase history).

Unless you have a very simple structure, you will want to allow flexibility in both what data passes between marketing and sales, and what data is tracked on each individual. The data model will share many common elements (name, address, title, etc), but most marketing and sales organizations begin to quickly evolve their data model with elements that are unique to their business. Marketing may store information on prospects’ campaign history, event attendance, meal selection, and communication preferences, while sales may store information on whether certain contract, budget, and commitment milestones had been met. Requiring both marketing and sales to use the same data model is a recipe for significant frustration.

You will also want good control on which data is moved to sales. Generally marketing deals with a broader universe of suspects than you want to pass to sales. If your CRM system becomes filled with this lower quality data, your sales team will become frustrated with invalid and poorly qualified entries. It’s worth keeping a “wheat and chaff” model whereby only the good quality data is passed to sales and the lower quality data is kept, and cleansed, in the marketing database.

In order to do this, and in order to manage a marketing database that sees data from many sources, it is also necessary to have good control over the priority of data that is flowing into your marketing database. If, for example, you have the same contact in multiple data systems, all of which are synchronized with your marketing database, you need to be able to select which of those sources will be treated as a priority in updating your data.

Activity:
The second layer of an integration between marketing automation and CRM is the marketing activity and the prospect’s response. This is critical to an understanding of the individual’s digital body language, and is key to allowing your sales team to understand the individual, the company, and their overall territory.

It’s key in integrating activity to have a very flexible model for configuring what shows up where. The main goal of providing the activity information is to provide for sales enablement, which involves ensuring successful sales adoption. Being able to show prospect activity in a rich, interactive, visual manner is as critical for sales rep adoption as the data itself is.

Similarly, being able to configure what data is presented, and how it shows up is key for sales adoption. In some environments, prospect activity can be presented in an activity history record within the CRM system, whereas in other environments it may be more successful to send real-time email notifications, and in other environments, a weekly report is found to be more effective. The key to this level of the stack is configurability in order to maximize sales adoption.

Process:
The third, and final layer of the integration stack is the process layer. This layer is where the lifecycle of a lead is defined. When a lead is qualified, how is it presented to sales? Is it presented through a task, through a lead record, or through a more customized way? Similarly, if a lead is not followed up on, or is not turned into a live opportunity, what happens next? Is a lead that is not followed up on clawed back and re-distributed? If a follow-up attempt only resulted in a voicemail being left, is the lead automatically nurtured for a period of time before prompting sales with another follow-up attempt?

This process layer is where there is a great opportunity to differentiate your business. By optimizing how leads are passed to sales, in a way that makes sense for your business, you can drive noticeable improvements in your revenue. However, to do this, it’s crucial to be able to have your technology match your exact business process. If it makes sense to create structured follow-up tasks for sales so you can manage and monitor follow-up times, you will need to be able to automatically create and allocate tasks. If you need to focus on clawing back leads after they go quiet in order to plug leaks in your revenue funnel, you’ll need to be able to pull in opportunity history data in order to ensure that your marketing is aware of the sales process stage that individual lead is in.


Sales Alignment and the Technology Stack

Aligning sales and marketing in a new relationship is a challenging task that relies on many changes in people’s daily lives, and your overall business processes. In order to be successful with this new form of alignment, you will need your marketing automation system and your CRM system carefully aligned. This relies on alignment and flexibility at all levels, from data, to activity, to process. If you build your sales and marketing processes on a technology and data foundation with sufficient ability to map to your business processes, it will allow you to learn and grow over time and continually enhance the alignment between your sales and marketing teams.

Fit, Engagement, and MQLs: Mapping the Lead Handoff to Sales

Marketing organizations looking to only hand qualified leads over to their sales teams are faced with an interesting analysis challenge. Whereas it might seem to be a simple task to look at implicit data on a prospect and understand their engagement, or look at explicit data on a prospect and understand their fit, the reality is that this is often a relatively difficult task.

The first task is to look at the raw data in order to define a score between, say 0 and 100 points. This is not as simple as more activity leading to a higher score; some areas of activity may in fact be worth more score than others, and time needs to be taken into account in order to ensure that scores do not grow indefinitely over time. The machinations of this scoring algorithm, however should be kept separate from the sales organization.

For a sales organization to be comfortable building a process, they need a stable definition to be applied to the leads that are sent their way. This is where the fit/engagement matrix is highly useful. A value for the lead’s “fit”, in other words their title, industry, and size, can be mapped to a standard definition of A, B, C, D, where A is a high fit, and D is a low fit. Similarly for a lead’s “engagement”, or their activity on the website, a standard definition of 1,2,3,4 can be applied, again with 1 representing high engagement and 4 representing a low engagement.

The sales team can then understand leads as A1s, C3s, or B4s. The underlying scoring definition of what earns a lead points, how those points are adjusted over time, and which range of points maps to the each rank, does not need to be visible to the sales team at large. A core group of key individuals within sales and marketing can debate the definitions and make necessary adjustments each quarter.

With a clear definition of what makes each lead rank, the discussion can then progress to which leads should be passed from marketing to sales, and to which sales team if there are multiple teams involved. A1 leads will obviously be passed directly to sales, likely to a field sales force, but a mapping is needed for where each other lead rank goes. Some may be passed to an inside sales team, some may be passed to a partner channel, and some may be held back to be further nurtured. The set of leads that are passed to sales from marketing are deemed marketing qualified leads (MQLs). This higher level definition is useful in looking at a higher level view of your marketing analysis.

There are two key questions that these efforts in lead scoring allow you to tackle in analyzing your marketing programs:

Does our scoring accurately correlate to a higher propensity to purchase?
- A lead scoring algorithm should be continually revisited in order to ensure that a higher score actually correlates with a higher propensity to purchase, based on both fit and engagement.

Which leads are worth sending over to sales based on the sales team’s ability to engage them in relevant conversations?
- Adjustments in your marketing, sales, and channel mix can mean that you may
wish to send more leads or less leads to sales. This adjustment comes into play
as you adjust which leads, A1, B2, C3, etc, are sent to sales as Marketing
Qualified Leads (MQLs)


In order to better enable analysis of what is working and what is not, it’s a good idea to keep the lead score and lead rank tracked. As these are values that change with time the best way to do this is to stamp the values at the point in time that the lead is passed to sales. This value pair can then be analyzed against later in order to understand whether the score and rank at that moment in time accurately indicated an intent to purchase.

Setting up a lead scoring and lead handoff process in a way that allows you to both analyze and adjust it as you learn and your business grows, sets you up for long term success.

Influencing Sales Behaviour - Tips for Marketers

(excuse the image as a metaphor for influencing sales behaviour... but anyone in B2B marketing who has tried to guide what sales does will understand)


Being able to accurately understand and score leads is only as valuable as the likelihood that your sales team picks up those leads and begins to work with them. If you cannot change behavior in sales, then your lead scoring efforts are of limited value. However, if you are able to influence sales, the effect on your overall revenue creation can be tremendous as effort is focused only on leads that are nearly ready to convert.

Influencing, and ultimately changing, the behavior of a sales team, however, is a challenging undertaking. Sales behavior can be difficult to change, and it may seem as though there are limited tools at a marketing team’s disposal to help guide this behavior. However, there are a few techniques that can be used to guide behavior and ensure success.

Firstly, and most importantly, is buy-in. Both sales management, and the sales team, should be engaged in order to get their buy-in as early in the process as possible. Without this buy-in, it is extraordinarily difficult to enact the needed changes in behavior.

Sales Management

For sales management, there needs to be a common view on the fact that buyers’ buying processes have fundamentally changed, and that success in today’s environment depends on a shift towards understanding where buyers are in their buying process and aligning sales resources with only those buyers who are ready to buy. If this philosophical agreement can be reached, then marketing is in a good position to offer a much clearer view into buyer behaviors.

The next step with sales management is to reach alignment on metrics. In an ideal B2B marketing process, there should be common agreement on the definition of a marketing qualified lead (MQL), and that those leads will be worked on by sales. However, if the sales team is managed (and compensated) by metrics on activity, such as a number of calls per day, they will not respond well to a lower number of more highly qualified leads.

Sales Team

Getting the sales team’s buy-in, as discussed in last week’s video on lead scoring best practices is a matter of having them understand and agree with why a lead is scored a certain way. Both dimensions of lead scoring should have agreement from sales; the explicit criteria (“who” a lead is) and the implicit criteria (“how interested” a lead is). If sales is engaged early on, they can provide critical input into which of your content assets truly indicate an interested prospect. This forms the basis of your structure for how to score a lead’s activity.

Once a lead scoring structure has been defined, a clear marketing focus on sales enablement can show sales more detail on their leads, accounts, and territories than they have historically seen, and give them insight into the underlying digital body language of their prospects upon which the lead scoring is based.

These sales enablement techniques allow you to build credibility with the sales team. By showing the sales team incremental aspects of the value that your marketing team can provide, you can gain their trust, buy-in, and enthusiasm for leads that have been qualified based on their buying activities.

Carrots and Sticks

With the definition of a marketing qualified lead created, and the need for alignment between marketing and sales agreed to by the management of both functions, you can then build a process that facilitates sales, while still encouraging adoption of the overall system. First, with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in place between your marketing and sales teams, you can define an agreement on how long sales should have to follow up with a qualified lead. If they do not, marketing is allowed to “claw back” the lead in order to nurture them, or pass them to another sales person.

If you manage this sales hand off carefully, the growing acceptance within sales of the fact that marketing qualified leads are better to work with can act as fuel for sales motivation to adopt the process. With claw-backs in place, having a lead pulled back and perhaps passed to a channel partner or another rep can be a strong motivation to act quickly. Likewise, for sales people who are performing well and are quickly following up with their leads, an increased flow of these leads can keep their enthusiasm high for continued quick follow-up.

Top-Of-Mind Presence

Like any initiative, keeping your efforts top of mind with your sales team is helpful for success. Prospect activity can be communicated in real time to your sales team with email alerts each time prospects do anything interesting on your website. Similarly, each of your successes with sales engaging with qualified leads can be marketed internally. This can build upon those successes and lead to a much broader awareness in your sales team that qualified leads are critical to their success.

Influencing Sales Behavior

Gaining traction with a sales organization is difficult for any initiative. For deeper sales and marketing alignment, however, your marketing organization must engage with the sales organization in order to facilitate a change in behavior. However, by focusing up front on buy-in from both management and the sales professionals, and at the same time delivering value at each step, this alignment can be achieved.

Relationship Sales and Today's New Buyer

For years, the prevailing thinking in sales has been oriented around relationship sales. The idea was that by being a friendly person, a good listener, and a decent golfer, you could gain the opportunity to build trust with potential buyers. In initial conversations, sales would ask a lot of questions, learn about the prospect’s business, delve deep into areas of pain or business challenge, and finally wrap things up with a solution that was oriented to curing these pains and solving these challenges.

However in today’s world, there is often not an opportunity to have that conversation in the first place. Unless you have information of value to offer first, the chance of a prospective buyer wanting to spend an hour with you to describe their business while you ask questions is plummeting . The access to information, which was once mainly managed by sales, is now open to all. This has forever changed the dynamics of relationship selling, as the early conversations, upon which the “trusted advisor” relationship were built, are now being diligently avoided by most prospective buyers.

Now, that trust is built by educating prospective buyers early in their buying process, providing information of value to them, and establishing the credibility of knowing enough about the space to be able to solve their problems. Rather than relying on large sales teams with good golf skills, this now relies on marketing and sales teams who are able to work together closely to understand prospective buyers and educate them on topics of interest to them so they remain engaged throughout a lengthy buying cycle.

So where does that leave the discipline of Sales?

The discipline of sales is changing fundamentally, as there is a shift away from the upfront concepts of relationship building social functions and the discovery call. Sales is shifting towards being a discipline that builds trusted relationships based on providing real business value based on prospective buyers true needs and discovery based on guiding, and observing, buyers own education processes.

For those in the Atlanta area, I’m excited to be joining Rick Page, author of Hope is Not a Strategy, and Debbie Qaqish, Principal Partner at the Pedowitz Group in a luncheon and panel discussion on these exact topics. The event is on Friday, September 25th, and more information is available here:

http://success.eloqua.com/?elqPURLPage=2557

For those unable to attend this event in Atlanta, I will definitely share the ideas, thoughts, and discussions that come out of the event with the audience here.

Sales Enablement: A Key Goal of B2B Marketers

As B2B marketers, many of us have mainly focused on lead flow to sales as our key driver. Lead flow is definitely an important and vital part of good B2B marketing and sales alignment, but it is not the only area that should be focused on. Marketing can also bring insights, process, and relationship-building tools to the sales teams they serve, and by doing so, give their sales teams a better ability to understand, manage, and close deals with their prospects.


In a new eBook - "Beyond Lead Flow - Enabling Sales Through Marketing Automation" - 5 main areas that marketing can enable sales are discussed.


The 5 main areas where marketing can enable sales are:

1. Understanding Individual Prospects - their areas of interest, level of engagement, and hot buttons



2. Understanding Accounts - who the key players, who are your internal champions, and who still needs to be engaged in order to move a deal forward



3. Understanding Territories - which accounts are actively engaged in buying processes with your company within each salesperson's territory



4. Building Relationships - providing your sales team with a strong relationship with prospects through personalized marketing to their prospects



5. Maintaining Top-of-Mind Presence - assisting sales with any sales calling campaigns by actively maintaining top-of-mind presence of your brand with prospects

The Sales Enablement eBook is free, with no registration required. However, if you enjoy the content, my only ask is that you share it with others:

Share this eBook on Twitter.

What is B2B Marketing?

What exactly defines Business to Business (B2B) Marketing?

It’s an interesting question, as marketing is a discipline that is common across both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) organizations. However, beneath the surface, there are significant differences in how B2B and B2C marketing is done in today’s environment. It’s worth exploring what B2B marketing entails.

Let’s look at a few of the areas that differentiate a B2B buying process:

Information Exchange

In B2B marketing, you are often dealing with a buying organization that requires a significant amount of information during their buying process. Unlike in many consumer marketing situations where the need for clothes, food, or cleaning products may be well understood, in B2B marketing, that may not be the case at all. Early stage education on industry transition, technology changes, or regulatory changes can be needed in order to best understand why your solution’s category even exists in the first place.

This need to exchange information continues throughout the buying process. Buyers, when convinced that a potential solution exists to their business challenge, will then need to know which solutions to evaluate, what criteria to evaluate them on, and what evidence exists that one solution is better than the others. B2B marketers need to understand where in this education process their largest marketing challenge exists in order to better educate the buyer.

Social media becomes a critical part of this information exchange in a B2B environment as social media forms a great medium through which to educate, converse with, and build relationships with prospective buyers who may be interested at a point in the future. Over time, a great social media strategy in a B2B organization will improve market perceptions of your organization in ways that other brand investments never could.


Multiple Buyers

In B2B marketing, the most common situation is one in which multiple buyers are involved. Each buyer may take a different role in the buying process, whether it’s a technical evaluator, decision maker, or economic buyer. Each of these buyers needs to be educated at each stage of the buying cycle to ensure that they facilitate moving things forward. This leads to a need in B2B marketing for a significant amount of content. Each buyer in the buying committee, at each stage of their buying process, has specific educational needs. Mapping marketing content to the buying cycle is key in ensuring you have the right assets available for each of the buyers involved.

Whereas in B2C marketing, there may be a husband and wife both involved in a buying decision, the unique roles that are played by B2B buyers allow very clear differentiation of buyer roles. By carefully monitoring buyers’ digital body language, B2B marketers can identify buyer roles based solely on their actions. This allows messaging to be catered precisely to the unique needs and interests of each buyer role.


Sales Involvement

The complexity of most B2B transactions means that there is usually involvement of a sales team prior to a deal being finalized. This may be an inside sales team, a field sales team, or a channel partner’s sales team, but the direct involvement leads to another unique aspect of B2B marketing. One of marketing’s main roles in a B2B organization is to provide sales with a steady flow of qualified leads. Given the length of the buying process, this is a challenging undertaking. First, the marketing organization needs to understand the digital body language of buyers in order to see indications of who is ready to buy, both on their main web properties, and also as seen being referred in through the social media “periphery”.

With this insight, B2B marketers can then establish a lead scoring system that identifies and ranks prospective buyers. Those that are ready for sales involvement can be passed on to sales, those who are not yet ready can continue to be nurtured until they do show the signs of being ready. This active management of the top of the marketing funnel leads to unique challenges for B2B marketers, as there is a need for rich thought leadership content of interest to prospects at the top of the marketing funnel in order to effectively nurture leads until they are ready to consider a purchase.

Marketing needs to work on not only a steady flow of qualified leads to sales, but also needs to provide the insights needed to sell better through sales enablement techniques. Sales enablement involves providing insights into which prospects are actively interested, who within an account is a key influencer, and which accounts within a territory should be focused on.

Length of Buying Cycle and Challenges for Marketing Analysis

The length of the B2B buying cycle also causes significant challenges for marketing analysis. Given that buying cycles can last months or quarters, if not years, the analysis that can be performed on marketing’s effectiveness is very different. B2B marketers must take a top-down approach to marketing analysis that looks at an overall lead funnel, where each prospect is within it, and what changes in the lead funnel have been made within the last period of time.

When looking at individual campaigns, each campaign can be analyzed, or even A/B tested against results, but often should only be analyzed against tactical results such as the creation of marketing qualified leads or inquiries of a certain level of qualification. Analyzing individual campaigns contribution to revenue can only be done in B2B marketing with the acknowledgement that many campaigns will have contributed to one revenue event, and that the resulting revenue must be attributed across the contributing campaigns.

Concluding Thoughts on B2B Marketing

As today’s buyers continue to evolve, and gain more of their education online, through social media, or through any other form of online information exchange, the role of the marketer continues to evolve. Whereas the classic role of marketing (as described by Peter Drucker), to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits them and sells itself, has not changed, the techniques for doing that in a B2B scenario are different from those used in a B2C scenario.

Lead Scoring Best Practices

I sat down with various folks on the Eloqua Customer Success team to hear their experiences on what it took to build out a highly successful lead scoring system. Jocelyn Brown (@jocebrown), Chad Horenfeldt (@chadhorenfeldt), and Adrian Chang (@adrianchang) are the folks who help clients with implementing lead scoring at organizations of various sizes and within a variety of industries, so they have the experience to know what it takes to achieve success. Here is their take:




Some key takeaways:
- get buy-in from sales management in order to best align goals
- use a matrix of A-D for fit and 1-4 for engagement
- define what will happen with each lead, based on that matrix, from lead nurturing to sales hand-off
- define an SLA with sales on how long is allowed for follow-up
- don't be shy about lead clawback if too much time passes
- sales cherry-picking leads is a sign of mis-alignment between marketing and sales
- lead scoring is one of the most valuable things a B2B marketing organization can do

I hope you enjoy the video, I always learn a lot chatting with people like Jocelyn, Adrian, and Chad, as they deal with organizations who are wrestling with these challenges on a daily basis.

Lead Scoring: Eight Critical Questions to Consider

Much of the conversation around how best to set up lead scoring tends to focus around the aspects of the buyer's digital body language that are most interesting. What whitepaper, excerpt, or download they last looked at, and what this means in terms of their propensity to purchase.

These are all great discussions to have, but there are eight critical questions that need to be contemplated and discussed in order to build a lead scoring algorithm that will truly work in a business environment:

1) What are Your Outputs?: are you using lead scoring to determine who to hand off to sales? what message to communicate to them? who to nurture further? which accounts to get deeper visibility into? all of the above? Understanding your lead scoring outputs first is key in understanding how you want to approach the scoring of leads.

2) How does Time affect your Scores?: it's necessary to think through how the relevance of your prospect actions, and hence their lead score, degrades over time. An action 6, 12, or 18 months ago will likely not have the same relevance as the same action last week. For scoring interest level, this time factor is crucial, whereas for scoring on buyer role, this may not change as rapidly over time.

3) What Dimensions are Critical?: In lead scoring, it is important to clearly define what the question is that you are asking, and to build your scoring algorithm to match that question. If multiple lead scoring dimensions are merged into one, you will likely run into a challenge. Two of the most commonly used scoring dimensions are who the prospect is (explicit data like title, industry, and revenues) and how interested the prospect is (implicit data like web interest, search, and downloads).

4) How do you Cap and Bucket Scores so they are manageable?: When building a lead scoring algorithm, there are often a few buckets of data that come into play. For example in scoring the lead explicitly (who they are), you may look at title, industry, and revenues to determine whether the individual is highly qualified. To do this, it is often best to cap the scores available for each individual bucket. For example, if you are looking at the title to find an executive responsible for content strategy, you may give 10 points for "VP", "Content", "Digital", "Media" or "Production". However, would you want to give 50 points for a "VP of Digital Content and Media Production". Likely not, so this is where caps are needed. 10 points for any of the key terms, up to a maximum of 20.

5) Are your Scores Loosely Mapped to the Ranks that Determine Follow-Up?: If you are going to teach sales to follow up with leads that are defined as "A leads", you need to build in the flexibility to slightly adjust the bar on what makes a lead an "A lead" over time, without retraining sales. The best way to do this is to have both a lead score (a number such as 0-100) and a lead rank (a letter or grade such as A, B, C). Mapping the lead score to the lead rank allows you to adjust your criteria while sales does not change their process.

6) Do you Allow Sales to Cherry-Pick More Leads?: In many environments, especially when lead scoring has been implemented and only good leads are passed to sales, the sales team will feel as though they need more leads. They will ask for the lead funnel to be opened up to them so that they can "Cherry Pick" leads that they deem to be good. Allowing sales to cherry pick has opportunities as well as significant risks, however, and should be discussed carefully upfront.

7) If Sales Does Not Act, do you Claw Back the Lead?: In an ideal world, sales follows up with all leads. However, this is not the reality that most organizations live in, so a process is needed for automatically clawing back the sales lead into marketing if it has not been followed up on in a short time period. Once the lead has been clawed back, it can be re-allocated to another sales person, re-entered into a nurture program, or passed to a partner channel.

8) Have You Provided Sales with Disposition and Nurture Options?: If leads are not being followed up on by sales, it is difficult to adjust your processes unless you know why. Providing sales with options for lead disposition, including automated nurture programs that will continue to educate the lead until it is again ready for sales, can provide both great insight into reasons for lead rejection and foundation for better nurturing of leads.


By thinking through these eight critical factors up front, your lead scoring process will avoid a number of challenges on its road to adoption and success, and will succeed in driving revenue for your organization.

Lead Scoring - Providing Disposition Options

Handing scored and qualified leads to sales in order for them to follow up is an inexact science. Continual optimization of the process is necessary in order to understand what aspects of a buyer’s digital body language are key to understanding buyer’s intentions. One of the best sources of this information is the sales team themselves. However, as any marketer knows, getting information out of a sales team can be challenging. On a topic such as the quality of an individual sales lead, it may in fact seem almost impossible.

Recently, we talked about the need to implement a claw-back system for scored leads that are passed to sales and show no sales activity. This approach is useful, but is a black and white system. Either a lead is good and is worked by sales, or it is not good and is ignored and quickly clawed back. There is no opportunity for middle ground, and no opportunity for feedback from sales.

If, instead, the sales team is presented with disposition options for the lead that feed directly into appropriate lead nurture campaigns, the best of both worlds is achieved. By having an option to pass a lead back to marketing, with a specific disposition that guides what will happen next, the sales person is able to maintain ownership of the lead. However, by carefully constructing the set of disposition options, marketing can learn much more about why the leads were not accepted by sales than they ever would have by asking sales to fill out a feedback form.

For example:
- If a lead is deemed by sales to be slightly too early in their buying process, they might enter the lead into a “Late Stage Buyer Nurturing” lead nurture program that provides case studies and ROI analysis to guide a prospect towards buying

- If a lead is deemed by sales to be too junior to make a buying decision, they might enter the lead into a “Convince Your Executive Team” nurture program that provided key information to make an internal business case for your solution

- If a lead is deemed by sales to be more interested in an alternate product (Product B), they might enter the lead into a “Product B Nurturing” program

These are only a few examples, each organization will have different options. The technique of providing these “lead disposition” options to sales in order to provide sales with a “middle ground” option, while at the same time providing rich insights to your marketing team as to why a lead is being rejected is extremely valuable.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.

Cherry Picking of Leads: B2B Marketing to Sales Handoff

Should we allow sales to cherry pick leads that, based on lead scoring, we have deemed not to be ready for sales?

Steve Kellogg at Astadia raised the question very aptly in his Endless Lead Loop post, and it's a question we all face as we wrestle with the business process of lead scoring and handing leads from marketing to sales. Let me start by saying that there is no right answer here, and businesses that have consciously decided to allow cherry picking are not necessarily doing anything wrong.

However, I would make a strong argument for "No."

The better we get at lead scoring, the more factors we are able to consider. We look at multiple dimensions of lead scoring to split the "who" from the "how interested", we look at multiple components of a score and allow each component to only contribute a maximum amount, and we take time into account by degrading lead scores over time. Over time, as we work with sales, we are able to build a fairly accurate picture of what matters to them in a lead.

However, there will always come a time when sales is not getting, in their view, enough volume of leads, and they will ask to open up the funnel so they can "cherry pick" the leads that they deem good. Sounds harmless, as some might turn into opportunities, and those that don't can continue to be nurtured.

It is, unfortunately, not a harmless activity. If we are connecting sales with buyers who are too early in their buying process to be ready to talk to sales, we run a very real risk of alienating those buyers and pushing them away. Despite our good intentions, this cherry picking activity can have significant negative consequences, as prospective buyers who might be good opportunities later can disconnect from an otherwise promising education process early in their buying cycle.

Better than allowing cherry picking, is to keep with the same scoring methodology, but open the funnel slightly. If an A-Lead is passed to sales, and 80-100 points is deemed to be an A-Lead, then keep the same process in place, but open the funnel up so that a A-Lead is now from 60-100 points. By doing this, we prevent sales from negatively impacting early-stage prospective buyers, but still allow them more leads in the funnel.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.

5 steps to a more honest view of buyer interests

I was talking with Stefan Tornquist the other day while we got ready for a video webcast with On24 (see the webcast here). We spent some time discussing one of the results from an interesting survey that MarketingSherpa did on buyer transparency.



Sherpa had asked the question "How often do you provide accurate information during registration?" of 2,700 technology buyers, in the context of events such as webinars and virtual events. The results were very interesting.

Data such as name and email were generally provided in an accurate manner, with around 70% of respondants always providing accurate information and another 20% sometimes providing it. However, beyond that, the prospects' likelihood of submitting accurate information plummetted. For Job Title, only 53% said they always submitted it accurately, and for company size it dropped further to only 40%. Although information such as readiness to buy, or main area of interest, was not studied in this survey, most marketers would intuitively suspect that it would be significantly less accurate than even Job Title and Company Size.



This challenge underscores the importance of observing what prospective buyers do, rather than just what they say, in understanding them as a buyer.

1. Map your buyer's buying process and understand how each buyer progresses from education through to vendor discovery, validation, and purchase.
2. Understand your marketing assets, and map each of your marketing assets into the "buyer's toolkit" so you can understand where each is applicable in the buying process.
3. Define areas of your website that also map into this buyer's toolkit, allowing you to understand how web activity best maps to buying stage and area of interest.
4. Add in search activity to give you an even more refined view of buyer interest and intent. Understanding what questions each prospective buyer is asking gives you a much more accurate view of their stage in the buying process.
5. Present the information on each prospect's true area of interest, or stage in the buying process to your Sales team in the environment that they are most comfortable in - their CRM system.

There is no way to guarantee that your insights into buyers' roles, interests, and industries are accurate. However, if you look at their digital body language to see what they do, and what they show interest in, and use that information to augment what they fill out on web forms, you will have a clearer picture of their interests than through web forms alone.

Lead Scoring - Thinking of Outputs First

I was on a webinar with Todd Davison of BullDog solutions the other day, and he had a great way of showing the outputs of lead scoring that I wanted to share as it gives a great conceptual model for how to think about lead scoring and what to do with the scored leads.

Todd used a 2x2 matrix to talk about lead scoring from the perspective of outputs. What you want to do with the leads once you have understood who they are.

For the leads that had a good ability to purchase (the "who"), AND a strong intent to purchase (the "how interested"), that's easy, those are sales ready. However, it's the other three corners of the 2x2 that get interesting.

Prospects with a good ability to purchase (the right "who"), but no displayed interest, should be nurtured. These are the execs who are in the right industry and could purchase, but are not showing interest yet.

For those with the right intent to purchase (the "how interested"), these are the keen interns; great interest, but not able to execute a purchase. These can be very valuable guides to an account, and can help you qualify and account and explore for other potential buyers with more decision-making abilities.

In the lower left corner, the individuals with neither a current interest, nor a current ability to purchase, are longer term candidates. Over time, with nurturing and thought leadership content, you can either build their interest enough to move them up the 2x2, or learn more about their role enough to qualify them to move to the right on the matrix.

Lead scoring is all about deciding on the next course of action with that lead, and by defining that output first, it clarifies some of the thinking about how you might want to score your leads.

The webinar with Todd is here (registration required) if you're interested, and it digs into a lot of topics related to scoring leads, nurturing, and understanding digital body language:
http://www.bulldogsolutions.com/bulldogma/frmRegistration.aspx?aid=60&bdls=18499


This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.

Golf, Putting, Sales Reps, and Growing Revenue

My golf game needs improvement, I can admit that. However the one thing I have noticed is that every time I do manage to get the ball into the cup, it’s when I’m using my putter. The obvious conclusion then is that I should spend all of my effort working on my putting game in order to improve at golf, because that’s what gets the ball into the cup.

Well, no. That’s obviously a flawed conclusion.

It’s odd then that so many CEOs associate growing revenue with hiring sales reps. Yes, it is the sales rep who gets the deal done, but that is at the end of a long process that involves building awareness, establishing thought leadership, nurturing leads throughout a long buying process, scoring leads based on interest, and routing those leads to the right sales rep.

Investing in more sales reps is like working on your putting game. Certainly important, but only part of the picture. We all know that being able to start with a good drive, play the fairway well, and stay out of (or get out of) sand traps is an equally important part of the game. We know it, in golf, because we can clearly see how these move the ball towards the green.

In B2B marketing, however, it is not quite as obvious.

We all understand that buyers progress through their own buying cycle, and in doing so are guided by the information that we as marketers provide for them. However, unless we have mapped that buying cycle, and used an understanding of the buyers’ digital body language to determine who is at what stage of the buying process, it becomes hard to see where in the buying process we need to apply effort in order to improve our overall ability to grow revenue.

Terracotta did a great job of mapping their buying process (see their case study here), and by doing so, were able to understand which of their buyers were at which stage of the process. Doing this, in any B2B buying cycle allows us to see where our strengths are and where our weaknesses are. With this insight, we can then see where we would be best to focus our efforts.

Our ability to grow revenue is based on many factors, of which the number of sales reps is just one. Understanding our buyers’ overall buying process gives us the insight we need in order to understand where we need to invest for maximum results, much like watching our entire golf game allows us to understand whether to work on our putting, our drive, or our short game.