Diagnosing the top of funnel
10 questions to get you on your merry way
What do you do when your inbound #SDR team is not converting at the rate or volume to reach target?
The first thing to investigate is to break down every step of the process leading up to the moment the SDRs begin working the leads. I suggest working backwards as a Revenue Operations team to find out. In this upcoming series we’ll break down 10 questions to help you diagnose your top of funnel.
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Here are the 10 questions.
What is your lead SLA? How much time does it take for the team to follow up with a lead after notification?
How does your team reach out? Do they call? Do they send a personalized email? Or is it an auto step? Do they connect on LinkedIn?
How is the team notified? Slack? Email? CRM notification?
Is the lead scored? What's the rating of the lead? Do you use the term "MQL" to indicate it's a sales-ready lead?
What factors go into your lead score? Behavioral component? Firmographic/persona component? Can you show the breakdown?
When was the last time the lead score and its components were regressed against actual conversion data? When was the last time the score was refreshed?
If you have too much lead volume the likely culprit may be too low of a lead score as opposed to too little sales capacity
Do you have a decay component in your lead score? Lead scores have a bad habit of astronomically high scores if you do not have decay or negative component scores. Tire kickers and ebook addicts especially
What sources and mediums do you source the leads from? What's the offer and the call to action?
Segment your assets and offers into intent bands of low, medium, and high. Anything outside high might be better served moving into a nurture track
Break problems down into smaller components first
Solving falling demand isn't as simple as "Do X, then Y will happen". Top of funnel is a “system”. Like any system, when something changes, breaking down the problem into smaller pieces might be more fruitful into your investigation. This approach is called dividing and conquering (duh!). Here’s why it works.
Manageability: Smaller tasks are easier to handle and manage. They make a large, complex problem seem less overwhelming.
Focus: You can focus on one aspect of the problem at a time, reducing the cognitive load and allowing for more thorough and detailed work on each part.
Parallel Work: Smaller components can often be worked on simultaneously by different team members, speeding up the overall process.
Progress Tracking: It’s easier to track progress and milestones with smaller tasks. This can boost motivation as each completed component shows tangible progress.
Problem Isolation: If an issue arises, it's easier to identify and fix within a smaller component rather than sifting through the entire large problem.
Flexibility and Adaptation: Smaller components can be adapted or modified without necessarily overhauling the entire project.
Resource Allocation: Resources (time, personnel, tools) can be allocated more efficiently to the areas that need them most.
Now the main issue with most revenue operations team is the time pressure placed on us to resolve things quickly. Our stakeholders are likely to tell us “I needed this answer yesterday”.
Well… maybe you should have asked me this well before today.
Stakeholders feel so important that their answers clearly violate how the 4th dimension works. We truly work with amazing people.
I jest! But never fear, let’s use the questions above to diagnose our top of funnel. Let’s get started.
1. What is your lead SLA? How much time does it take for the team to follow up with a lead after notification?
Speed and efficiency with which we respond to new leads can be the determining factor between winning a customer and losing them to a competitor. Our lead SLA sets a clear benchmark for our team, ensuring that every lead is promptly and appropriately addressed. Research shows that responding within five minutes of a lead is 21 times more effective than responding after 30 minutes, and responding within one minute can increase conversion rates by 391%. After five minutes, the chances of qualifying a lead drop by 80%. INSANE!
I keep thinking of someone who sends a text and expects an immediate reply.
Prospects are less intense obviously. If you don’t get to them quickly. They’ll forget about you.
So clock yourself.
Start your stopwatch
Submit a lead on your website contact us or demo form
Mark when it exits your marketing platform and enters your CRM. This is susceptible to interval syncs to CRM
Mark when it’s assigned to a sales rep in your CRM
Mark when the rep is notified (Slack?)
Mark when the rep takes action (call or email)
And now remember the benchmarks above
< 5 minutes (21x)
30 minutes (1x benchmark)
After 30 minutes… errrr you’re going below the 1x benchmark now
2. How does your team reach out? Do they call? Do they send a personalized email? Or is it an auto step? Do they connect on LinkedIn?
Many sales organizations have incorporated some sort of sales sequencing tool such as Outreach or SalesLoft. I have anecdotally seen this in sales teams with Sales Development Rep roles. The thesis was simple: automating sales steps would lead to wider account penetration.
I have since come to call these tools “spam cannons”.
What’s the cost of sending the next email? It’s close to nothing! In fact, it’s the marginal cost of electricity and that’s about it.
At our worst, we’ve armed young professionals with the promise that sales is easy. All you have to do is take a paint by numbers approach and you’re about to moneyball your way into the pipeline you need.
An older version of me would have proposed something like this:
SDRs should have no more than 150 active leads prospected at one time
SDRs need to clear their daily prospect list by end of day
Sequences might be written by someone who never talks to prospects (i.e. marketing, sales enablement, sales operations)
Sequences would use merge fields to bring in data from the CRM
With this approach you’ll definitely send a lot of emails. And get very little in return for it.
Call me old school but I still prefer the ultra personal approach. In fact, I remember when email was new. It felt so amazing to see digital correspondence. Nowadays I crave a handwritten note. Go figure.
Richard Purcell recently posted on LinkedIn a hyper personal approach to go after referrals/introductions.
Here’s his approach:
Here’s an example of an experiment that found warm intros into the hottest accounts by marrying relationship mapping with intent data at the account level.
A fast-growing SaaS startup sold to Data Scientists. It was a strong intent signal when a company recently hired (or planned to hire) software engineers.
1. They made a list of 20 of their “Besties”. Besties are people you can depend on to make an introduction and have deep networks of people who match your ICP.
2. Identified companies who matched their ICP and recently posted job descriptions for software engineers
3. Determined which of their Besties had strong ties to decision-makers at companies currently hiring Software Engineers
4. Sent a blurb to their Bestie asking for an intro
5. When they couldn’t get an intro, they sent an email referencing the contact’s work history with the Besties
Results:
- 50% positive reply rate from warm intros
- 2X higher conversion rate of outbound emails to meetings booked
- Higher Return On Effort (ROE) as research and prospecting time was reduced while results went way up
Personally I think only automated steps should focus on offering value instead of a call to action
Every other step should be manual and personalized, meaning your team could benefit from researching the prospect. There are tools out there that are building mass lists and bringing in social signals such as Common Room. Don’t go around just hitting the “go” button without reviewing and editing before hitting send.
If you are running sequences take a look at the following formula:
Number of manual steps / Overall number of steps
I don’t have a good benchmark for you but if that number is over 50% maybe you’re leaning too much on automation.
3. How is the team notified? Slack? Email? CRM notification?
I’m going to contradict myself a bit. You don’t have to reach back out within 5 minutes for every industry. But it doesn’t hurt to try to capture that 21x increased conversion magic. Reason being, your sellers (AEs or SDRs) may not be glued to their screens every minute of the day. When a lead comes in the team will be notified that a lead came through primarily through three methods:
Slack
Email
CRM
Raise your hand if you’re checking Slack and email every second of the day!
Personally my head explodes whenever I get an SMS text from someone saying “did you see my Slack?”
The most interesting Slack channel notification is the number bubble right next to the #inbound-leads channel. If I’m a sales rep and I see that pop off it tells me there’s a high intent inbound lead coming my way. I want sales reps to adopt the behavior of checking that channel three times a day (morning, midday, and evening).
If you’re in a lead rich environment (less common these days?) then I’d opt for a round robin approach to pick up the next rep up.
4. Is the lead scored? What's the rating of the lead? Do you use the term "MQL" to indicate it's a sales-ready lead?
A lead score is a numerical value assigned to each lead based on various attributes and behaviors that indicate their potential value to the business. This scoring system helps prioritize leads, allowing sales and marketing teams to focus their efforts on the most promising prospects.
Revenue Operations / Marketing Operations teams are determined to make their lead score useful. Creating one is both art and science. In my experience, it also goes stale really quickly.
Lead scoring typically involves evaluating factors such as:
1. Demographics: Information about the lead’s company size, industry, job title, etc.
2. Behavioral Data: Actions taken by the lead, such as website visits, content downloads, email opens, and event attendance.
3. Engagement Level: Frequency and type of interactions with the company, including social media engagement and responses to outreach. Dovetails with point #2.
4. Fit with Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): How well the lead matches the company’s target customer characteristics. Dovetails with point #1.
The scoring output can fall into two camps:
Numerical: score is outputted as a number
Temperature: lead comes out as cold, warm, or hot.
The hotter or higher the number it is the marketing team’s stamp of approval that this lead is certified and ready for the sales team to go after!
In my mind I like to use the image of the marketing team is a group of chefs at a restaurant. They put the dish out and ring the bell. The sales team is like the waiting staff waiting to pick up the dish to send it out to diners.
Every once in awhile someone orders a hot dish but the chefs put out undercooked food.
Every once in awhile someone comes in as a hot lead but the sales teams calls and it’s a cold lead.
Lead scoring really is a difficult thing to pull off. Also! I’m not sure I pulled that analogy off (ha! 😅 back to the lab)
Next week dive into lead scores and tackle questions 5 to 10.
Apologies for taking a week off! I was at the RevOps Co-Op’s RevOps AF event in San Diego. It was truly an amazing time! Try to make it out next year if you can.
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Like the ultra personal approach! Curious how can we find the bestie in the first place?