The Marketing Operations Strategist - How to make your Sales team up to 21x more effective with follow-up 🤑

Hey! 👋

Quick question: is now a good time for me to send this email? Do you like it when I send this on Sunday mornings, or would you rather I send it during the work week? 🤔 Please reply and let me know! 📥

Check out these stats from Chili Piper:

• 78% of B2B customers purchase from the vendor that responds first

• Responding within the first minute increases lead conversions by 391%

• Responding within five minutes is 21x more effective than responding after 30 minutes

• After five minutes, the odds of qualifying a lead drop by 80%

You can increase your company’s revenue just by increasing your speed of outreach to leads.

Unfortunately, most companies are not paying enough attention to this — the average B2B business lead follow-up is….42 hours. 😢

BUT this is good news for you! Because this means that there is A LOT of money to be had here, if you improve your speed to lead just a little.

Let’s dive into how you can get some of that sweet, sweet revenue.

1. Measure your speed-to-lead and set up a way to continue to monitor it.

Speed-to-lead is the time it takes your business to follow up with an inbound lead. We want to get this metric down as low as we can. The first step is to measure this: you can do this by setting up a timestamp field for your form submission, setting up timestamps for each stage change, and then setting up a calculated field for Salesforce. You can also use a tool like Bizible to do this, or you can create a Tableau dashboard. Your tools may vary, but the holistic solution remains the same — record what time a lead comes in, what time it is followed up with by sales, and then record the difference between these times. The key here is to measure it and continue to monitor it — don’t set it and forget it. If you set up a dashboard or report to monitor this metric, you can see slow-downs and diagnose/fix them early. An even hotter tip is to split reports by GEO, industry, etc to be able to more easily target where an issue may be.

2. Standardize your fields.

If your field values are all over the place, it’ll cause sync errors and confusion amongst marketers and salespeople. Look at all of the most important fields for critical processes like lead routing and standardize them as much as possible across systems. A great example of this is choosing one format for the Country field.

3. Enrich intelligently.

If you have too many fields on your web forms, it can decrease your conversion rate. So, how do you collect the information you need? I prioritize collecting important fields on the form (think: the same ones we just standardized above), and leave the rest for enrichment. When we enrich, we want to be conservative, though…don’t enrich every possible field just because you can. The enrichment of too many fields can be very heavy for systems to manage, taking up API call space etc. Too much enrichment can also cause Sales to distrust data, which increases the chance that they will spend way too much time manually checking the accuracy of the enrichment data. Also, make sure you are enriching in the right spot (which is typically right before you need the information) — I’ve seen companies hoard all enrichment in Salesforce, which can cause system overload and can prevent marketing from being able to utilize the information for top-of-funnel targeting.

4. Ensure that Sales has a playbook for each campaign.

A lot of companies miss this — Marketing assumes that Sales understands how to follow up with every lead, while Sales is confused because the Salesforce Campaign has no details on what was actually sent to the lead. To fix this: 1) pull together a counsel of Marketers and Salespeople and meet once per month to review playbooks (including effectiveness), 2) make sure that the creation of a Sales follow-up playbook is part of every new campaign build 3) make sure Campaign data in Salesforce is consistently filled in (Sales typically loves a link to the landing page and a quick description with context on how the campaign came about, what the lead learned, which product/features were covered, etc)

5. Audit your website experience.

Is your website personalized for each type of customer? You can often use tools like Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, and your MAP to push data into a data layer and then show personalized content on the website. You also want to make sure it’s easy for folks to find your forms/chatbot and to inquire about speaking with someone. Some experiments I’ve run have been testing chatbots and phone numbers instead of forms — the results vary depending upon company and customer type, but it’s worth running these A/B tests to see if you are truly optimizing your main advertising asset, which is your website! You could also test a tool like Chili Piper. Also, be smart about routing…if you’re getting too many customer support inquiries through your Sales form, that likely means that your customer support experience is not simple or fast enough. You can’t prevent every anxious customer from submitting the wrong form, but I’ve found, in my experiments, that if you adjust your CS experience you can often curb this behavior.

6. Continue to hone your lead pass mechanisms.

Do you use lead scoring to prioritize lead follow-up? Start off with something simple and then build upon it as necessary…and don’t forget to continue to monitor conversion rate, to gauge effectiveness. Too many companies set up an ultra-complex lead scoring model and then regret it when the original architect of it leaves. Ultimately, you want to make sure that your Marketing leads are converting at a relatively high rate, so Sales is incentivized to follow up.

7. Cleanse your database regularly.

Simply put, get rid of junk and keep it out of your systems as much as you can. This will help make automation and Sales follow-up that much more efficient, as neither mechanism will have to filter out tons of junk records. If you’re not sure where to start, analyze the leads that Sales is declining for any common themes. Bonus points if you have a data cleansing program/strategy!

8. Set up effective routing rules.

For lead routing, ensure that you aren’t routing trash leads to Sales. This means looking at leads that failed to convert and speaking directly with Sales, to identify the top “trash” personas — and then, setting up automation to exclude these trash leads from being routed to Sales. A great example: if you can’t sell to students, you could adjust your routing rules to avoid routing anyone with that job title.

9. Set up automatic monitoring for issues so you can nip them in the bud.

Set up smart lists, dynamic lists, or whatever automation you can use in your systems to capture inaccurate data coming in — so you can catch it early. If you’ve standardized a field and an unexpected value comes into your marketing automation platform, set up a rule so your marketing automation platform will alert you or your system admin — so they can look into the issue (likely a broken integration or bad list import) quickly and resolve it before it becomes a larger, systemic problem.

10. Consider buying a tool like Conversica to auto-follow up with leads that are not in your target persona, but who could ultimately be qualified.

Tools like Conversica (SDR bots) can send a qualification follow-up email to your leads, helping you determine if they are worthwhile for a human to speak with or not. Sometimes, data can be deceiving and what looks like a personal email address could actually be a CTO at a target company! Note: these tools do require implementation and considerable maintenance (training the algorithm), so don’t purchase these on a whim — do a 6 month proof of concept to see if it’s a worthwhile investment for you.

Recommended book of the week:

Learning resource of the week:

Helpful AI tool of the week 🤖

Would you believe that Canva AI made the image above, and that is not a real cat? This technology is still in its infancy, but it’s pretty cool to experiment with. Check out more here and see if it can help you with your content creation needs.

What I’m up to/what I’m studying

This week, I’ve honestly been spending a lot of time doing spring cleaning/organization. 😆 I’m thinking about pulling together an experiment on the newest data providers, to show you how I approach a bake off and how they compare….would you like to see that? Let me know!

Dear Sara ✍️

New to marketing operations? On a team of one at your company? Shy/introverted? Wish you could ask a question to an experienced marketing operations professional, without them knowing who you are? Here’s your chance! Submit an anonymous question to me here and I’ll answer a new question in every issue.

Here’s my answer to a question from last week:

First off, to set the stage — interviewing is like dating. Everything can be very circumstantial and out of your control, so make sure you aren’t thinking that you are going to craft the perfect, flawless response that will dazzle every potential employer.

That being said, I think it’s okay to say that the company culture was not a fit for you — my favorite way to explain my desire for work/life balance is by saying “I’m a hard worker, but I’m not a machine — if I work constantly, I will eventually get tired and won’t perform to the best of my abilities. I want to perform to the best of my abilities, and to be in environments that support that kind of high performance level.”

Mature employers will understand the importance of avoiding burnout, especially for star players. If an employer is turned off by this response, I would seriously hesitate working for them (or know what I was getting into upfront, and negotiate for as much compensation as possible. If you can get more compensation, you can put that money to work by hiring a house cleaner, grocery shopper, etc to save you time and to ensure you have bandwidth for self-care.

What else do you want to hear about from me?

I have a bunch of content lined up, but I want to hear from you — did you enjoy this issue? Is there anything specific you’d like to hear my take on? Please do reply to this email with any and all feedback! 😄 If you enjoyed this issue, please refer your friends by forwarding this email/sending them here!

Til next time,

❤️ Sara