RevOps, or Revenue Operations, has always considered lead lifecycle management. Unfortunately, MQLs (marketing qualified leads) or ideal customer profiles aren’t things that sales and marketing always agree on. What further complicates the lead lifecycle is the different methodologies that marketing or sales managers implement with differing visions.
Of course, there are systems that help with lead management, regardless of whether you use funnel stages, flywheel, or a bowtie. Let’s understand why such systems have been repeatedly successful and how they help avoid automation pitfalls.
Start with a blank slate while designing lead stages in RevOps. Gone are the days of planning with real or perceived system limitations in mind. So, where and how do you start?
First, you talk to your marketing team and understand what they think of the lead stages and the definition they attribute to the different stages. Sales managers are next on the list, followed by talking to stakeholders and understanding their expectations.
Now, don’t be surprised if all these agendas are very different from each other. For example, marketing and sales will have different priorities. The marketing team's eyes would be on whether sales are acting on their leads. In contrast, the sales team will only worry about whether their definition of sales-qualified leads or SQLs is being met. It is precisely at this junction that you will have to make sure that upper management, salespeople, and marketers all agree on the same definition of lead.
You can do that by beginning with a practical workflow plan. Such a plan will question what different departments want to incorporate into the lead stages model. Several questions can be asked at each stage to smooth out the differences.
If done correctly, the best part of this process is that the lead stages won’t even look like a bowtie or a funnel.
Imagine that you are the customer. How would you want your customer journey to look like? Finding the answer to such a question is critical before designing the lead stages and updating CRMs like HubSpot. After all, comprehensively understanding how a customer engages with you can only help you map out their journey.
You can break down the primary questions into different parts and ask some of these to your team and yourself:
While it may seem like a long process, defining go-to-market methodologies helps gather concurrent information. Remember this: a sales manager will have their own ideas on their team's lead qualification method. This sales manager will define the buyer journey using terminology different from the marketing team's.
Such behavior leads us to the fact that marketers, pre-sellers, and stage sellers are hardly ever aligned in how they want to score the lead in its lifecycle stages. For example, tracking at the account and person levels is standard for lifecycle processing, while pre-sellers do so with the help of status updates and object creations. The lifecycle stages and status updates of a prospect should complement one another. While lifecycle stages offer an objective view of the customer's journey, status updates provide a more intuitive, descriptive representation of the relationship, reflecting the current progress and interaction.
On the other hand, stage sellers using sales qualification methodologies like MEDDIC and BANT can track progress through these methodologies. Marketers can track their information through their marketing automation systems despite the language they use vastly differing from what is used in their CRMs.
When a new marketing or sales manager joins a company, they almost always use their own new lead stages methodologies. So, how do we tackle this major drawback? You can bypass this by separating how you track your lead lifecycle stages and how you define them.
Historical data also has a role to play in your GTM methodologies in asking questions like:
Let’s take another instance. Your sales team prefers the MEDDIC sales qualifying framework. As a result, is there any change to your opportunity stages, or does it lead to the sales team giving you information at different stages? Keep in mind that changing stages are not really descriptive, as managers actually want their teams to be creative and thoughtful with customer write-ups. Through conditional page layouts, CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce often assist in presenting some fields due to prompts being completed.
The process of defining lifecycle stages starts when all the other requirements have been met. As a rule of thumb, using Forrester and Winning By Design terminology for B2B is recommended for this process.
For companies with long and linear sales cycles starting from marketing to pre-sales to sales, the following stage definitions are widely accepted:
When new leads are found without records in the system, this is the stage used to define them.
This is the stage where the leads and accounts that can never be a good fit are put.
For people who have matching records in the system, this is where they are put into.
For all those people who don’t meet the ideal customer profile.
This lead has met all the requirements set by the marketing team and is now supposed to be met by the sales team.
The sales team has now verified this lead and is working to set up a meeting.
As is obvious from the stage name, a meeting has been set with the sales team.
When sales believe that the lead is not moving towards being sales qualified or if pre-sales judges it too early for the lead to meet, this is the stage where that lead is housed.
Following the meeting, the sales team marked the lead as sales-qualified.
- the lead has moved beyond ‘Best Case’ and ‘Pipeline.’The company has now committed to the lead opportunity
The company will start delivering the product line items as contracts have been signed by the parties involved.
This is the unfortunate stage where product line items have been stopped or canceled.
While the account remains active, the seller has determined that the person is no longer with the buying company.
The lifecycle stages should be expanded to account for customer retention and expansion complexities, such as renewals and upgrades. This means introducing additional stages, such as 'Renewal Cycle' and 'Upgrade Opportunity,' to ensure account managers and sales teams can identify and flag these critical touchpoints.
The account-level flags for renewals and upgrades can cascade at the individual level, highlighting specific persons of interest within the account. This allows for targeted, personalized engagement and nurturing to maximize the likelihood of success.
It is vital to understand that different companies will have different definitions for each unique stage level of their business. Yet, making these definitions too specific can lead to confusion and overcomplication, making the system more error-prone.
Establishing an intricate and finely tuned lead scoring and assignment system is commendable, but it must be done closely with your sales team. Ensure they review and approve the model before implementation, apart from getting their feedback at various intervals (30, 60, and 90 days), leading to more optimization.
If you have defined and established your stages on the individual level, the next phase of the journey is to move them to the account level. You can do so by getting satisfactory answers to some of the following questions:
You should only start configuring your systems once all the process updates and lead stage definitions have been mapped out properly. However, correcting the lead stage definitions can sometimes be challenging, even after following the proper procedures. This can be due to various factors and can easily be solved by getting help from RevOps experts who understand your company's needs.