Revisiting the Speed to Lead concept
If you’re new to this newsletter then welcome! Thank you to the 1,400 revenue operations professionals who continue to subscribe to this newsletter. You’re the reason I continue to write each and every week on a Go To Market related topic. When I have a template to share paid subscribers will get access. I don’t have all the answers in revenue operations. That’s impossible because RevOps can be uniquely situated for each unique situation. But what I hope you can take away a few guiding principles or tactical snippets which you can use in your day to day. Before jumping into the newsletter, let’s hear from our sponsors that keep most of this newsletter free to readers.This weeks Newsletter is brought to you by Growblocks where you can manage your full revenue engine from traffic to churn. We allow you to apply data-driven and scientific methods to grow revenue predictably and efficiently. Watch a 5 min demo of how it works here or listen in to our podcast here.
Salesforce is powerful and robust. But it wasn’t built to help sales teams identify the next steps to take and guide them on who they need to build relationships with in order to win deals. Prolifiq helps Revenue & Sales Operations professionals solve this gap through strategic account planning and sales intelligence technology.
Improving sales performance with disjointed tech and data is like fist-fighting a bear. Get immediate access to insights for full revenue management and control, with RevBI from BoostUp. Watch a demo.
Let’s pull out an oldie-but-goodie in the RevOps world: SPEED TO LEAD! What is it? Why does it matter? And how can you orient your processes and infrastructure to best in class?
Speed to lead is the concept and execution of how much time it takes to respond to a lead. You can clock yourself doing it with a test lead. Visit your website, click on the get a demo button, and fill in a test lead that will get past your non-qualification filters (more on that down below). From the moment you submit a lead you should have had a stopwatch on your phone to measure the time it takes for a notification to route to the appropriate sales rep and for that sales rep to make a phone call.
If it’s under five minutes, you’re world class!
If it’s under fifteen minutes, that’s still Grade A.
If you’re under an hour, you’re not bad.
If you take a day to respond… you have a lot of work to do.
Generic lead routing flow
Here’s how the flow of events typically plays out:
Prospect visits your website
Prospect clicks on the Demo button
Prospect fills out a form
[Optional] Record pings an API to enrich the lead with firmographic and demographic information from a third party data provider
[Optional] Lead record bounces around a decision tree logical flow that determines if the lead should be disqualified
[Optional] If disqualified, the lead is set to rejected (or a variation of it within your marketing automation platform/customer relationship management tool)
If they have a scheduling solution integrated into the form the prospect will have the ability to schedule a demo with the appropriate rep
[Optional] Round robin the lead among a group of peers
[Optional] Assigned directly to the account owner
A notification is sent to the sales rep in a multi-channel format (Slack, email, CRM notification)
Rep opens up the dialer and calls
The call is recorded in CRM
The activity time difference from the lead creation time is the speed to lead
[Optional] If the lead first goes through your Marketing Automation Platform then the create date/time will be slightly different from your CRM time. This is due to batch sync interval times between your systems. If this is the case, create a custom field in your CRM and sync over the MAP Created Date/Time.
Your flow might differ from this but I’m confident I have 90% of it right. Reply to me if your flow is different! Love to hear about different configurations.
Batch Sync Intervals can f*#&! up your speed to lead journey
Sometimes speed to lead can’t get off the ground if your systems aren’t interacting well with each other. For example, if you have a separate marketing automation platform from your CRM then the two need to sync seamlessly. Look out for the following:
Salesforce validation rules or custom code preventing syncs
Duplicate records
Mismatched field types
Mismatched field values
These issues prevent records from creating or updating. You can’t even measure speed to lead if these leads don’t even get into your CRM.
Lead routing
I previously walked through a Salesforce-centric flow based lead routing engine. There is a lot of good in acquiring third party lead routing solutions. Firstly, they greatly enhance the administrative UX. Flows can be cumbersome to work through. But with a third party tool, their UI and workflow actions iterate much faster than what Salesforce can offer. Imagine instead of using a blank canvas you are using a paint-by-numbers system. A third party tool is painting by numbers.
Here are some requirements to consider with a lead routing system:
Ability to handle multiple if/then conditions across CRM objects
Ability to account for personal time off with the team
Ability to account for initial missed SLAs and route to another team member
Ability to integrate with other tools to intake information to better enhance lead routing logic
Ability to integrate with other tools to enhance the notification and alert portion of the lead routing process
If you have other requirements you consider drop me a reply!
First contact
More choices isn't always better. Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper released a study back in 2000 showing a table with 24 jams. Shoppers who stopped to sample the jams received a coupon. The next day they showcased only 6 jams with the same offer. There were more people interested in sampling on the second day. This effect has been confirmed multiple times in other studies. Despite having more choices, buyers may ultimately want a more curated list of choices.
In another study by X, internet searchers tended to select the first option.
Why am I bringing this up? Because, when a lead comes inbound and your business logic allows it to get routed. You better jump all over that lead. This is why speed to lead matter. You want to be the FIRST to make contact. Before they build a solution themselves. Before they talk to your competition.
Get in front of the contact immediately.
So what should be your target?
The smaller the segment you target, the faster you should jump all over the lead. Five minutes or less is aggressive but when it comes to Go To Market, why shouldn't you be aggressive. As a revenue operator I slwouod lay out a plan to improve your speed to lead.
Say for example:
First quarter: cut it by 50%
Second quarter: cut it by 50%
Keep on going
Doing this is going to require enablement, management and ops buy-in. What you should find is a dramatic return on investment. If you developed a chart where the X axis is the amount of time (in five minute increments) and the Y axis is the connection rate (the % of leads who answer the call) you should see an negative exponential drop. Meaning, the best opportunity for reaching the lead and therefore the best opportunity to book a meeting is in those earlier five minute increments.
I often tell sales leaders that the lead is DEAD or spoiled vegetables the longer you wait.
Revisit my other articles on lead management
Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:1/ If you’re looking to further develop your Revenue Operations knowledge sign up for my courses in partnership with the RevOps Co-Op.
→ Unleashing ROI course. A ten-week virtual, live instruction RevOps course designed to level up your RevOps Impact (R.O.I.). Lessons from my career scaling from $10M to $100M+. Join 50+ alumni. https://www.revopscoop.com/courses/unleashing-roi
→ Sales Ops Masterclass. A six lecture virtual, live instruction SalesOps course designed to take your sales operations skills to the next level. https://www.revopscoop.com/courses/sales-operations-masterclass
→ CS Ops Masterclass. A five lecture virtual, live instruction CS Ops course designed to take your CS operations skills to the next level. https://www.revopscoop.com/courses/cxops-masterclass
2/ Promote your Revenue focused startup to a newsletter with over 900 tenacious revenue leaders. My eventual goal is to shift this to a completely free newsletter for my readers through sponsored ads. Reply to this email if you’re interested in receiving a media kit to learn more.