Category: Tough Talks

TLDR: An agency-side project manager (PM) bridges the gaps between your organization and agency partners throughout a project. A PM ensures you’re on track to deliver the project on time, within budget and scope. During a project, an agency PM will help your organization plan deliverables and timelines, follow coherent processes, communicate effectively between teams, troubleshoot issues, and monitor and mitigate risks to the things you want to achieve.

Which projects benefit from project management? Projects like marketing automation platform (MAP) implementations and migrations are often heavy to plan and coordinate. Migrations and implementations involve bringing many different stakeholders together throughout the project to share updates, deliverables, and decisions against agreed timelines and scope—a particularly complex task in larger organizations.

How PMs help: It’s easy to underestimate the demands of aligning communications and actions between various accountable stakeholders in an agency-client relationship. As a result, organizations may decide not to involve an agency’s PM to steer the progress of a project. This decision adds a high level of risk for big projects like migration or implementation.

 

“Having an agency-side PM is essential to keep your internal teams and agency partners on the same page.”

 

Do you need an agency PM? Even if your organization has an internal PM assigned to the project, having an agency-side PM is essential to keep your internal teams and agency partners on the same page.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you navigate the intricate space of project management, particularly in the context of complicated projects. You’ll learn how:

➡️ To effectively communicate the value of agency-side project management to key stakeholders and decision-makers across departments.

➡️ PMs drive collaboration, alignment and risk mitigation.

➡️ PMs bridge the gap between your organization and the agency, ensuring timely input, decisions, and updates to prevent project delays.

 

The PM’s value 

At a high level, PMs ensure that your team and the agency are working towards the same goals to deliver a project on time and within the budget and scope.

PMs accomplish this by:

👉 Planning and setting up meetings between teams.

👉 Coordinating the delivery of action items.

👉 Raising awareness of risks and causes for delay.

👉 Pushing stakeholders to make timely decisions to keep the project moving as planned.

 

“Stakeholder alignment is the key area where PMs make a constructive impact.”

 

Stakeholder alignment is the key area where PMs make a constructive impact.

Migrations and implementations involve many different tasks and decisions. These projects also involve various teams in your organization — such as Marketing, Sales, IT, and Digital — each has responsibilities and decision-making power.

PMs track when input and decisions need to be received and connect these teams to provide timely and relevant updates. Without an agency-side PM to play this role, deliverables, and decisions can slip under the radar and delay project completion.

 

How PMs work

Involving a PM right from the beginning of a project maximizes your ability to succeed.

During the initial kickoff session, PMs create the spine of a project by constructing a plan for deliverables, responsibilities, and timelines. A clear understanding of these pieces is essential for stakeholders to deliver and communicate as needed to progress the project.

 

“PMs bridge the gaps between your organization and the agency throughout the project.”

 

PMs bridge the gaps between your organization and the agency throughout the project:

Agency-side PM responsibilities include:

• Ensuring that the agency has captured all the relevant discoveries.
• Establishing who from your organization is required to participate.
• Following up with stakeholders to ensure that input and decisions follow the agreed timelines.
• Helping to identify, mitigate, and monitor delivery risks.

Through mediation, agency PMs help you achieve success.

Stakeholders from your workplace can go to the agency PM to discuss and address feedback on the project’s progression.

Should a colleague raise concerns about the project or develop new requirements, PMs work with agency teams to find solutions.

An agency-side PM will ask questions like:

• Is your organization’s request in scope?
• How can we make this work?
• What impact will any changes have?
• How can we address any risks?

Having a PM to ask these questions lets teams get organized, make improvements on the move, and solve potential issues as they arise.

 

Alleviating project management challenges

PMs experience some persistent challenges when project managing MAP migrations and implementations.

Timelines are often compromised when organizations lack the resources to participate and provide input as planned or juggle competing projects (e.g. a web launch) that are likely to interfere with the process.

 

“PMs proactively work to anticipate and minimize risks to project delivery.”

 

Unclear ownership of tasks and scope creep born from underestimating complexity can also cause disruption and delay. In these scenarios, PMs proactively work to anticipate and minimize risks to project delivery.

For example, an agency PM can help your organization involve the most relevant stakeholders and sensibly delegate tasks and responsibilities. PMs can also factor competing projects into the initial plan and continuously monitor the risk of interference.

Tips for working with an agency PM:

👉 Scope creep: Avoid strain from scope creep by taking time before the project begins to review the steps involved and decide where your organization needs the most support from the agency.

👉 Project delivery: Define clear goals and priorities to help the PM organize stakeholders and deliver the most pressing items and achievements.

👉 Identify stakeholders early: Identify the people within your organization who need to be involved and establish ownership and accountabilities for the project.

 

Steering projects to success

MAP migrations and implementations are complex undertakings, and the agency PM plays an indispensable role in guiding them to success.

From the start to the end of a project, agency PMs contribute effective planning, process management, risk mitigation, troubleshooting, and alignment between your teams and the agency to deliver results on time, within scope, and within budget.

For any further guidance with MAP migrations and implementations, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: In the rapidly changing martech landscape, choose tools aligned with your business goals, set realistic learning milestones, measure and adapt your progress, and prioritize purposeful learning over speed.

The barriers to martech Martech moves fast. As more and more tools enter the space every year, it’s increasingly a priority and a challenge to spot the best ones to adopt. Access is another barrier to navigate. Many tools are too expensive for individual learners to experiment with, and when businesses have limited licenses to distribute, your ability to learn a new tool comes down to resourcing.

Complicated learning journey: Even when you’ve settled on a new piece of tech to learn, it can be tricky to structure your learning into realistic, achievable goals, with many features to explore, high expectations from management, and competing projects to juggle. MOPs people have a hunger for knowledge and a keen understanding of martech, but the above factors often complicate the learning journey.

What’s in this article for you? If you’re having trouble with learning tools purposefully, this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you. We’ll help you sit down with your boss and come up with a development plan for learning that focuses on the right tools to make an impact. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Understand your business’s specific needs and tools that align with those needs

➡️ Prioritize your organization’s existing tech stack

➡️ Set realistic learning goals and break them into achievable milestones

➡️ Measure and share your progress with leadership, adapting your goals as the martech landscape evolves

 

Choosing tools

The martech boom has given businesses new and evolving options to solve problems and create efficiencies.

Your boss or team might be excited by particular pieces of tech taking the industry by storm, but the best tools to learn are always the ones that address your business goals.

Therefore, you’re looking to answer two questions:

👉 What does the business need

👉 What is the most effective tool to meet those needs?

First, chat with leadership to understand your goals:

• What does the business want to achieve with marketing operations?
• What problems or opportunities exist with the MOPs team?
• What functions can you perform in your role to contribute to big-picture performance outcomes, like increased revenue, productivity, efficiency, or lower costs?

 

“Once you know the intended outcomes of adopting a new tool, start surveying your existing tech stack.”

 

Once you know the intended outcomes of adopting a new tool, start surveying your existing tech stack.

It’ll save time and money to adopt a piece of tech your company already uses over onboarding a new tool, even if it means purchasing an additional license.

If you find a tool internally that could fit the bill, chat with your colleagues who use it.

• Does it perform the particular function or get the results your team needs?
• Does it have the potential to do so?

If you’re unsure, vet this tool against other solutions on the market.

Get a sense of pricing, reviews, demand and discussion in MOPs spaces (forums, channels, job postings). Once you’ve narrowed down 3-4 top contenders, suggest trialling each of them and measuring the results to investigate how each tool impacts performance. Present the relevant data to leadership, whether it’s ROI or productivity gains, and you’ll have made a strong case for your tool of choice.

 

Setting learning goals

Now you’ve got the right tool for the job, how should you learn it?

Your boss has likely given you specific KPIs to meet. These indicators might include:

✅ Contributions to revenue

✅ Efficiency you’ll make from performing certain functions

✅ Generate a certain number of MQLs from the campaigns you build

✅ Increase conversion rates by using a data enrichment tool to deepen your lead scoring

Leadership may want fast results, but rushing through your learning to meet these goals quickly is an easy way for things to break, particularly if a tool has particularly complex features to master. Realistically, it’ll take months to learn the capabilities you need, gather performance data, and illustrate the business impact of your activities with the tool.

A point your CMO and CRO would agree with: if it’s a choice between doing things fast and doing them correctly, choose the latter every time.

 

Here’s a game plan that works:

Break down any big-picture achievements and complex projects into attainable, gradually paced milestones.

Many commonplace tools and platforms have different certification levels to obtain.

Even if you’re not taking a certification exam, the curriculum provides a framework for learning a tool, from foundational to advanced levels. There’s a logical progression to this structure that will help you identify specific features to learn and understand how long it’ll take to learn them.

Exam curricula and other official learning resources are endorsed by the tool creators themselves, so they’re compelling pieces of evidence to back up your learning goals.

 

How to articulate this to leadership:

“Based on the official resources, I’ll be able to do X in three months; let’s set Y as a goal for six months’ time. When I’ve sufficiently learned these functions and allowed several months for reporting, I’ll show you how my work has contributed to Z outcome. From there, we can see what ongoing goals make sense.”

 

Purpose makes an impact

Learning is continuous in an evolving space like MOPs, and martech in particular demands a constant finger on the pulse.

Measure and share the impact of your learnings with leadership as they progress, listen to emerging issues in the team, and keep an eye on developments in the martech space.

Doing this will help you set fresh and relevant goals to pursue by using tech impactfully—because when it comes to getting results, purpose wins over speed.

Need a hand with martech? Contact us

TLDR: Data collection and reporting are a key part of decision making in RevOps, but do you have the right frameworks to help your team get that right? Help your RevOps team align on the right metrics and KPIs, as well as the considerations you should make to choose the right reporting tools for your business.

Set your baseline: Gathering and reporting on performance is a key part of any marketing operations team. In fact, not having a baseline of reporting and analytics tools for MOPs and sales ops is like trying to fly a plane into Chicago without functioning instruments at night. You may land somewhere in the region, but you definitely won’t make it to O’Hare. Meanwhile, with the right reporting practices in place, you’re much more likely to reach your target.

The silo problem: Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges for RevOps teams that are bringing sales and marketing capabilities together under the same roof is finding alignment around what data to report on and why. For so long, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success have operated in silos that are almost at odds with each other—and that just doesn’t make sense when both teams are focused on the shared goal of growing revenue. While working together to find the right reporting tools will be a big part of finding that alignment, there are a number of conversations that need to happen before that point.

What’s in this article for you? To help you guide your RevOps team through those conversations, this Tough Talks Made Easy takes a look at the value of reporting and having the right tools in place. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Align your RevOps team on the right metrics and KPIs

➡️ Choose the right reporting tools for your business.

 

Figure out what you want to report on

The first step is going to be getting alignment on what your team’s key performance indicators (KPIs) are.

These are metrics that should

👉 a) ladder up to your overarching business drivers

👉 b) align your Sales and Marketing teams to pursue the same results, and

👉 c) facilitate the collection of actionable data that prompts decision making.

Make sure that this starts out as a collaborative conversation between Sales and Marketing, and involves Customer Success when it also makes sense.

So often, these two (or three) sides of the RevOps coin fall into an nonconstructive blame game when things aren’t performing as they should. Bring all teams to the table and have a mediator that can connect the dots between their goals and define what “good” looks like, collectively.

 

“When we’re talking about RevOps KPIs, conversion should be at the heart of that conversation.”

 

When we’re talking about RevOps KPIs, conversion should be at the heart of that conversation.

At the end of the day, quality is more important than quantity.

It doesn’t matter if you have 1,000 qualified leads if none of them become customers.

Another important goal for the team should be around increasing customer satisfaction, as returning customers are another key source of revenue.

 

Choose the right reporting tool

When it comes to reporting tools, there are as many options out there as there are constellations in the sky.

Knowing that, and the fact that your business is unique in its needs and structure, it wouldn’t be useful for me to give you a specific set of tools to adopt.

Instead, as you work with your team to figure out which tools make the most sense for you, here are some things to consider:

• What role will that reporting tool play in your tech stack? Think about the data you need to help you make effective decisions, and what tool can help you collect and report on that data in a way that’s actionable.
• What technology do you already have? When I help a customer build on their tech stack, the first thing I want to do is understand the native systems that are already creating data (e.g. a marketing automation tool, a CRM system, Google Analytics). The reporting tools you choose should be able to integrate with these systems and pull (or push) data as needed.
• What output are you looking for? Whether you need detailed reports for your boss, or a simplified presentation to take to your executives, you should consider tooling that provides the outputs you need without adding unnecessary work to your plate.

Once you talk through these considerations with your team, you’ll have the right key criteria to identify and evaluate the reporting tool that makes the most sense for your business.

 

The takeaway

 

“Reporting on performance is a key component of MOPs or revenue operations.”

 

I’ll say it again, reporting on performance is a key component of MOPs or revenue operations.

Going back to the plane metaphor: today, we have so many teams missing their target destinations because they don’t have the right tools to direct them or tell them where they are in the first place.

With the right insights in place, marketing and sales teams can continue to improve their efforts and meet their ultimate goal—delivering the best possible product and experience to their customers.

Need more help finding the right reporting technologies for your team? Get in touch.

TLDR: The need for marketing ops to surface dollar values, improve processes, and validate ideas makes data science a natural ally. When MOPs and data science teams work together, revenue and lead generation become easier to predict, benchmark, and grow.

The importance of data literacy: Marketing is now a data-driven discipline, where a top priority is to understand what generates revenue and drives growth. Data literacy is crucial for MOPs to handle data, structure their systems, and answer decisive business questions.

The problem for most MOPs teams: Unfortunately, teams often lack the skills and resources to manipulate and turn data into an asset that generates value. Data scientists are the ideal collaborators for MOPs to validate ideas and improve processes, but they’re hot commodities in every workplace.

How to get the collaboration green light: When budgets are tight, it’s easy for C-Suite to overlook marketing when approving spending for data science projects. So, if you want the green light on a collaborative project with data science, show your CFO and CIO that the ROI makes sense.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll guide you through the conversation you’ll need to have with your CFO. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Make data-driven decisions.

➡️ Collaborate effectively with data science teams.

➡️ Justify data-driven investments to leadership.

 

How data science enriches marketing

One of the most persistent challenges marketing teams face is proving their success.

If you’re in a low-margin business in particular or otherwise facing cost strains, there’s extra pressure from your CFO to show your contributions to the bottom line.

Marketing as a space also has many ‘common sense’ generalizations of best practices floating around, but the likes of “never send an email on a Friday” don’t hold water for your business without evidence.

Without the data or the know-how to interpret it correctly, your team is validating decisions and measuring success in the dark.

The need for MOPs to surface dollar values and make good judgment calls makes Data Science a natural ally.

MOPs collects lots of data from campaigns, which Data Science can turn into detailed customer profiles and identify purchasing behaviors.

 

“Data science connects and maps the entirety of your business’ data to spot patterns and understand how to optimize processes.”

 

Data science connects and maps the entirety of your business’ data to spot patterns and understand how to optimize processes. Where Marketing generates leads, Data Scientists automate changes to the lead journey to trigger positive engagement behaviors.

When MOPs and Data Science work together, revenue and lead generation become easier to predict, benchmark, and grow.

 

Collaborating with purpose

Data science teams work their magic using emergent technologies, like machine learning and artificial intelligence, which are expensive for companies to deploy.

This means collaborative time with Data Science and new tools requires a budget for development, which involves your CFO and CIO.

Considering the costs, your C-Suite is looking to allocate data science resources only to teams that can justify the investment with impactful results.

You can make a few points to leadership in response.

👉 By modeling the business end to end, Data Science can see what brings in the most revenue, and as one of the most commercially-minded teams, Marketing should be at the top of the list. The more you invest in making campaigns compelling in response to audience data, the more likely the business will win deals.

In other words, investing in Marketing boosts the whole organization.

👉 The insights that Data Science provides can create a strong audience for a product/service and attract more customer segments to it.

👉 Collaborating with data science can help find solutions to streamline operations through automation and cutting processes to achieve better outcomes.

Bottom line: Whatever your proposal, frame it to C-Suite with intended results and impact in mind. 

After all, you’re not running experiments for their own sake — you’re working with Data Science to help Marketing make or save more money than you spend, investing less per lead generated than you bring in. That’s the language your CFO and CIO speak.

 

Set appropriate expectations

Leadership can be adverse to risk or expect quick results, which means your CFO or CIO might be hesitant to play the long game.

A dose of reality: if you’re trying something new, you need time to ride it out, make sense of findings, and realize the benefits.

Suggest running campaign experiments with small subsets of your audience first, as a proof of concept, to make the idea more palatable to a hesitant CFO. 

On the whole, explain the analysis and modeling you want to do, the included limitations, and what you’re trying to achieve with revenue when testing certain actions.

 

“If you can estimate the ROI at 1.5-2x what you spend, you’re likely to get the green light.”

 

Focus on how the results can benefit the business, and if you can estimate the ROI at roughly 1.5-2x what you spend, you’re likely to get the green light.

 

Investing in success

MOPs and Data Science together can be a force of nature, making the wealth of data that Marketing collects actionable and steering better strategic decisions.

Come to any conversation with leadership with a clear plan of action and a confident sense of how collaboration with Data Science can boost the bottom line.

Need some help with data? Drop us a line to chat

TLDR: As subscription business models become commonplace, customer retention is something you maintain by making proactive investments in CX. To keep customer confidence high, your RevOps team should consistently collect customer feedback, discuss it cross-functionally, and strategize how best to solve customer pain points.

Typical sales and marketing strategies Businesses often prioritize generating as much revenue as possible, as fast as they can. This encourages Sales and Marketing to pursue quick wins and short-term goals. Measuring Sales against quarterly quotas, for instance, drives Sales and Marketing to focus more on leads from which they can quickly close deals.

 

“To sustain revenue long-term, you want to be equally dedicated to client retention.”

 

The logic to this short-term thinking: To keep costs low and be as profitable as soon as possible, pursue business you can easily win. But to sustain revenue long-term and maximize the ROI of each client engagement, you want to be equally dedicated to client retention.

What’s in this article for you? In the age of subscription business models, customer churn has never been a greater existential threat. Retention’s something you maintain by making proactive investments in Customer Success and quality customer experiences. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you explain what good CX looks like and the value it provides to your business.

➡️ Prioritize customer retention

➡️ Optimize CX at touchpoints

➡️ Use cross-functional feedback

➡️ Invest in long-term CX

➡️ Embrace RevOps for CX

 

Enhancing customer experience

CX is all about how your business engages with customers at each point of interaction.

Every instance where Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success interact with a customer is an opportunity to build goodwill and keep people interested in your brand, from campaign ads and content to the sales process to customer service and relationship management.

Businesses typically fall short with CX when customers have already signed a deal.

👉 For self-service products where users sign up independently, invest in an accessible UX with support channels and documentation to address more complex use cases. Make it as easy as possible for people to use your service, and they’ll probably continue to do so.

👉 For managed products and services, where clients have specific needs to address, Customer Success reps play a vital role in encouraging retention by regularly checking in with clients, listening to their goals and challenges, and helping them use your products and services to achieve their aims.

 

“Quality customer support will encourage them to stay.”

 

Even if a customer isn’t using your product for all its intended features, quality customer support will encourage them to stay. Where Marketing gets peoples’ attention and Sales gets them to sign, Customer Success is why people remain loyal to a business.

 

Strategies for effective CX

You want to discover and resolve any issues before customers lose confidence.

✅ Collect customer feedback through NPS surveys or simple Q&As integrated into products. It’s important to understand where you’re succeeding and what improvements to prioritize in your roadmap.

✅ Monitor social media channels Siloed communication limits how quickly you can solicit and react to feedback. Work with Marketing to gain visibility into social channels and use the data to improve products/services and respond to customers.

✅ Budget time for collecting feedback Give your RevOps team time to collect and integrate feedback from every channel and discuss it regularly as a team. Include BDRs and Product teams for a full scope conversation. Strategize together on how to address the issues clients have. Whether that means tweaking customer support or creating content to clarify certain processes and technical capabilities of your product.

 

Turn criticism into trust

Ultimately, your customer retention, business reputation and ROI from each customer engagement are threatened less by complaints than by failure to engage with criticism.

Each of your channels and customer touchpoints should be conceived as an opportunity to collect feedback.

 

“It’s more costly to rebuild your reputation than to deal with issues at the root.”

 

As long as business memberships to sites like TrustPilot cost tens of thousands of dollars each, it’s more costly to rebuild your reputation than to deal with issues at the root.

Listen to what your customers and prospects are saying at the first possible opportunity and here on after.

You’ll find out from their feedback where you need to make investments, and can rehabilitate potentially-damaging issues into demonstrations of care that inspire greater trust in your business.

 

The value of CX

The beauty of RevOps is its capacity to focus on CX in a proactive, planned manner.

Take every opportunity to collect customer feedback, discuss it cross-functionally, and strategize how best to solve customer pain points. Make CX a dedicated, long-term investment, and you’ll enjoy greater customer satisfaction, retention, and ROI.

For any guidance you need in RevOps, get in touch.

TLDR: Stakeholder maps help new hires understand organizational roles. The map shows who affects or is affected by their work, and highlights the importance of forging relationships with key individuals who regularly impact the new hire’s tasks.

Onboarding challenges in MOPs: The first weeks in a job involve learning new information, building relationships, and adapting to new processes. Newcomers naturally want to show the positive impact they can make. But, in a fast-paced discipline like MOPs, it’s easy to get overwhelmed without some help.

What are stakeholder maps? Stakeholder maps are great for onboarding new team members. These maps help newcomers identify their most important working relationships, learn the responsibilities of different people, and understand how they’ll interact when collaborating on projects.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how to explain stakeholder maps to newcomers in your MOPs team. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Understand and use stakeholder maps.

➡️ Manage relationships in MOPs.

➡️ Efficiently onboard and integrate new hires into the organization.

 

Stakeholder 101

MOPs professionals are often spread across many different responsibilities, interacting with teams around the organization.

Stakeholder maps visualize all the relevant stakeholders and categorize them based on their influence over and interest in each project.

Project stakeholders will fall under one of four quadrants of interest and influence. Here’s how your new colleague can interpret them:

• Low interest, low influence: Keep a minimal level of contact throughout a project.
• High interest, low influence: Inform with status updates as your work progresses. The project outcome impacts these people significantly, even if they don’t exert a great deal of influence over its direction.
• Low interest, high influence: Anticipate and meet their needs as you work together.
• High interest, high influence: Collaborate and communicate closely. Understand how their responsibilities impact the project and what they need to keep on track.

Through this framing, stakeholder maps spell out the dependencies and accountabilities for each project.

Insight that helps newcomers learn what the people around them need and how each stakeholder’s deliverables contribute to projects.

 

“It’s especially difficult for new hires to interpret the influencers, decision-makers, and advocates.”

 

In large organizations it’s especially difficult for new hires to interpret the influencers, decision-makers, and advocates. A stakeholder map trims down the org chart and onboarding docs to the key people with whom to build trust and rapport.

In a nutshell, it’s a practical guide to relationship management and the interaction of responsibilities on each project.

 

Navigating the map

As new hires in MOPs start working on projects, they’ll need to know:

👉 who to approach with queries

👉 who can approve decisions to keep projects moving, and

👉who can offer support and information.

When these things are unclear, miscommunications arise and tasks fall short of deadlines, bloating the project scope.

 

“The value of a stakeholder map is to clarify who does what on a day to day basis.”

 

The value of a stakeholder map is to clarify:

👉 who does what on a day to day basis

👉 who owns which responsibilities around the business, and

👉 which stakeholders people can expect to coordinate and collaborate with in various scenarios and across projects.

By making this information accessible, stakeholder maps encourage people around the company to communicate fluidly and mitigate risks to project success.

For new hires in particular, having a resource to handily digest this information will help them quickly settle in and start making an impact.

Your new colleague wants to know the most important people to meet and processes to learn first. Encourage them to focus on the key people they’ll be working with on a regular basis, whose interests are closely tied to their tasks and whose responsibilities and decisions significantly influence their workload.

Once new hires know their immediate surroundings, you can gradually build out and discuss more tertiary people and processes, but the most impactful and interested people on the map are the most helpful to prioritize.

 

Confident on-boarding

When you’re new to a role or workplace, it can be daunting to make sense of all the new processes and relationships.

Stakeholder maps are a great source of guidance for any new MOPs hire.

Maps help them navigate through the nuances and structures of your organization and build strong relationships around the workplace with the people most relevant to their work.

By using stakeholder maps, your new colleague can settle in with confidence and start contributing to success.

Get in touch for more guidance with onboarding new hires or project managing for success.

TLDR: Sales and MOPs sit a few degrees of separation away from each other, but MOPs’ deliverables have a vital impact on Sales’ ability to pursue leads and close deals. That’s why it’s vital for both teams to understand clearly what each team needs from the other to work together well.

The Sales vs. Marketing showdown: The relationship between Sales and Marketing gets a lot of attention in the business world. It’s understandable why companies place such importance on resolving the historical tensions between these two critical parts of their revenue machine. However, the discussions often overlook a pivotal factor that can significantly impact how effectively Sales and Marketing collaborate.

Where does MOPs fit in? Marketing Operations doesn’t get the spotlight in the Sales-Marketing partnership. MOPs might be on the sidelines, but what their work seriously affects Sales’ ability to chase leads and seal the deal. So, Sales can have quite a say in what MOPs focuses on and how busy they get.

Success starts here: That means it’s in the best interest of both Sales and MOPs to understand clearly what each team needs from the other to work together effectively. If you don’t frequently interact with Sales in your role, it’s especially important that your marketing leaders grasp how Sales and MOPs impact one another and can encourage Sales to understand the practicalities of how MOPs works to support them.

What’s in this article for you? This Tough Talks Made Easy will give you the guidance you need to sit down with your boss and have that conversation. Key points include:

➡️ Setting realistic expectations

➡️ Initiating communication that sticks

➡️ Maintaining the relationship

 

Bridging the gap

In many organizations, MOPs is perceived as part and parcel of the Marketing team. As a result, Sales might not wholly understand how MOPs as a function differs to more generalist Marketing roles with its focus on tools, platforms, and systems, or the extent to which their demands cascade onto your workload.

Essentially, MOPs glues Sales and Marketing together.

Sales expects to receive correctly qualified leads from Marketing in a timely manner, so they can strike while the iron’s hot and close deals.

Behind the scenes, MOPs creates all of the technical infrastructure to make that possible:

👉 Setting up campaign programs

👉 Alerts to Sales

👉 Data delivery systems

👉 Capturing all the relevant information about how a lead has previously engaged with the business

To execute this effectively with fewer miscommunications around deliverables and expectations, marketing leadership should bring MOPs into any conversations with Sales about lead qualification criteria and process adjustments.

Sales will want any changes in direction to be implemented as soon as possible. At this stage, whoever represents MOPs in that conversation needs to provide a healthy dose of realism.

 

Setting realistic expectations

Sometimes, Sales sets the bar for lead qualification no lower than bluebird opportunities which take minimal effort to close. And despite the urgency on Sales’ end for quick adjustments, MOPs will often need to balance their requests with tasks like platform operations, executing campaigns, and reporting.

Real alignment between Sales and Marketing occurs when both teams discuss the realities of their work and agree on outcomes that are actually possible.

Depending on the size of your organization and the practicalities of how teams come together to make decisions, encourage leadership to share MOPs’ processes, deliverables, and updates, or invite someone from MOPs to partake in these discussions.

Sales should understand what MOPs can and can’t do, and the practicalities and trade-offs of fulfilling requests.

• What time and resources does MOPs need to set up auto-notifications for MQL delivery? If it’s a priority to complete this request, what other projects need to sit on the backburner?

By having a transparent dialogue around priorities and bandwidth, MOPs and Sales can devise a plan of action with clear and realistic deliverables: X number of leads delivered in Y time frame, based on Z qualification status.

 

Maintenance time

“No news is good news” is a common state of affairs in MOPs.

It tends to go unacknowledged when all your processes and data flows are running smoothly, but all hell breaks loose when something goes awry.

MOPs is left scrambling to make fixes on top of all other task in situations like:

👉 Qualified leads aren’t reaching Sales on time

👉 Campaigns aren’t visible or don’t have the correct people attached

👉 The lead’s engagement data is incomplete or inaccurate

👉 Leads are being sent without meeting the agreed qualification criteria,

There are a few points of discussion you can bring to your boss to help ensure everything is in good order for Sales.

The reality of looking after processes like lead scoring models and lifecycles is such that, after monitoring them heavily for the initial weeks and months with no signs of trouble, it seems safe to leave them alone and turn your attention to other responsibilities.

Ideally you’re able to reevaluate and test processes on a regular basis to proactively detect and prevent errors.

To keep on top of this, leadership should prioritize hours for maintenance in your schedule if you’re short on the time to look after elements of the system that impact Sales—lead lifecycles and scoring, campaign and lead data.

For each campaign, suggest a dedicated sync with Marketing to clarify the finer points—target audience, how to access and update it, how to add the correct prospects—so all the information’s in the right place.

 

Connecting the dots

There might not be a direct line between Sales and MOPs in your workplace, but the work of both teams has a profound impact on the other.

Making space to communicate what MOPs can realistically deliver, and carving out the time to perfect the processes that power Sales’ success, are two key initiatives you can advocate for to support Sales effectively and contribute to the achievement of revenue and productivity.

For additional guidance on bringing teams together, contact us.

TLDR: The industries you sell to are changing all the time—are your methods of managing Sales performance keeping up? Learn how to help your Sales leaders win business and incentivize the team.

Sales is a numbers game: The main objective of a Sales function is creating revenue. And it’s easy for sales leaders and Sales Operations to quantify and break down into quarterly performance targets. From this, Sales teams are heavily measured against “tried and true” activity metrics that, in theory, generate revenue—calls made, emails sent, demos scheduled.

Adapting to shifting landscapes: But meeting these benchmarks doesn’t guarantee results. Many industries are evolving continuously, where the issues that people care about and their preferred spaces and methods of communication are in flux. As a result, leaders need to be on top of the internal and external dynamics of their spaces—what’s happening in the field and with the team—because the “proven” performance metrics and engaging conversations of the day could expire in a month.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you have conversations to rejuvenate your Sales function. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Encourage your Sales leaders to think laterally about performance management

➡️ Go beyond stagnant metrics and make space to build industry awareness, boost team morale

➡️ Make meaningful customer connections

 

Adapting to the space

Gone are the days of sales being purely transactional.

Consumers today are:

• wise to the sales cycle
• plugged into online communities and emerging trends in their industries, and
• have high expectations not only of the products and services that vendors offer but of the relationships they can build with potential business partners.

For sales leaders, this means it isn’t productive to fill out the days of your reps by having them place dozens of calls and send hundreds of emails each week at the expense of more strategic work.

“Tried and true” sales practices are the bare minimum to captivate new business and are sometimes insufficient.

👉 Instead, encourage your sales leaders to think creatively about the practices that generate impact.

👉 Allocate time for the team to get in touch with communities, understand the challenges of potential clients, and get up to speed with the zeitgeist and direction of your marketplace.

👉 Examine how people in the space get their information, the outreach methods you’re using, and how your Sales team positions themselves to solve people’s problems and address their needs.

 

“Encourage your sales team to meet people in the market.”

 

Encourage your sales team to meet people in the market. By doing this, their outreach is more in tune with the issues prospects care about, and the better grasp leadership will have of the measures of performance management that are actually relevant and effective.

 

Talking to the team

Sales professionals are motivated by compensation and rewards, and incentive structures are a delicate aspect of performance management.

Talented salespeople leave companies when leaders change their commission structure without first consulting with them or explaining the rationale behind changes that impact how they earn.

When leaders don’t promote dialogue around targets and incentives, it’s easy for Sales to become frustrated.

Encourage leadership to talk to people in the team and get their perspectives.

👉 Are our incentives working for you?

👉 Are the KPIs we’re setting realistic and relevant to the dynamics of our market?

👉 Appealing to people’s interests and showing respect for their expertise will help create performance targets that people are inspired to meet.

In practice, your SDRs are the people most in tune with today’s market dynamics, customer needs, industry standards, and emerging products and services in the space.

 

“Without SDR insights, leaders will struggle to come up with fresh and relevant strategies.”

 

Without SDR insights, leaders will struggle to come up with fresh and relevant strategies. Therefore, it’s a priority to create an open and transparent structure for communication, where people at each rung of the ladder roll up into others and have their voices heard and represented at C/Head/VP level.

 

This includes Sales Operations.

Sales Ops has the data to provide valuable consultation when revenue is stagnant.

Where are conversion rates falling in our lead flow?

Are the metrics we’re using and benchmarks we’ve set the sales team allowing us to get a sophisticated grasp of how we’re doing and why?

Contextualize your current performance by drawing comparisons to the conversion rates and Sales’ tactics used in stronger-performing periods.

What are we doing differently?

What’s different in the space?

Perhaps you’re seeing a significant drop off at the proposal stage, or you’re signing business that you end up losing. Maybe you’re tracking certain metrics that don’t meaningfully convey how your Sales reps contribute to revenue. Whatever the data reveals, your insights help Sales leaders tweak their strategies and approach to managing the team’s performance.

 

The bottom line

Sales isn’t a “set it and forget it” sort of field, and this also applies to performance management.

✅ Encourage your sales leaders to stay on the pulse of industry dynamics

✅ Invite team perspectives on KPIs and incentives

✅ Celebrate using time creatively, freeing people to make meaningful customer connections and learn about developments in their space.

This approach to business development is far richer than a strict adherence to activity metrics, and it’s likely to get results—a Sales team in high morale, incentivized to hit targets, generating a healthy pipeline.

Get in touch for any guidance you need in Sales Operations.

TLDR: Is your CRM heaving with old records? Time to clean up your data. Learn how to advocate for good data hygiene to your Sales leaders.

Why data quality is crucial: Sales teams struggle to succeed without clean, well-organized data. To work efficiently and make the right decisions, people at every level and in every function of your sales team need easy access to accurate, relevant information.

Data challenges in Sales Ops: For Sales Operations, good data hygiene can be challenging to maintain. Sales Ops handles information from different avenues which are often difficult to standardize. Think contact forms, data enrichment tools, research from Sales reps. As a result, CRMs bloat with duplicate and incomplete records that only become less viable as time goes on — and this bloat costs in many ways.

What’s in this article for you? If your CRM is heaving with records or your reporting doesn’t match the reality of your team’s performance, it’s time to clean up your data. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn:

➡️ The impacts of poor data hygiene

➡️ The need for continuous effort to keep data clean

➡️ How to inform your team of best practices that will keep your data clean and your sales team on track

➡️ Do you use Marketo + Salesforce? Explore our Data Hygiene Management offering

 

Why data hygiene matters

Companies waste 12% of revenue on inaccurate data. And bad data encroaches on everything your sales team does.

👉 Leads to inaccurate analyses of opportunities in the pipeline.

👉 Results in sales reps making muted progress on deals, chasing prospects that are past their relevance to your business.

👉 Creates a lack of clarity on the accounts, industries, and regions you should be targeting and how to target them.

👉 Causes technical debt, smaller pipelines, leads being routed to the wrong places, and hours burned cleaning up and correcting messy databases.

Why do these problems arise? A lack of clean, consistent practices around how your organization handles data. Often, this is due to business culture. Your sales leaders might, for example, oppose deleting data. They’ve paid for the methods to acquire this information that could, at some point, yield business.

 

It pays to part with data (sometimes)

Records that have been sitting cold in your CRM for years with no signs of engagement cost more than they’re worth.

Insights expire, industries evolve, and peoples’ interests and roles change.

After a few years of inactivity, you’re more likely to reengage a prospect inbound, in response to a different product or service line, than what you’ve previously been sending them.

And at that point, as far as their potential as a customer goes, they’re an entirely new prospect whose old data is no longer relevant.

 

“Your organization should understand that data hygiene = time and money well spent.”

 

Your organization should understand that data hygiene = time and money well spent.

Before renewing your CRM instance, see what your capacity costs annually.

Scope out the data that you don’t need, such as:

👉 duplicates

👉 outdated and irrelevant information, and

👉 metrics that your reps don’t use.

Then, present leadership with the savings you can make by getting rid of old records.

 

An ongoing process

Remember: This isn’t a one-time clear-out.

You have to keep working on it regularly to make sure it stays in good shape.

To increase revenue, sales reps need access to accurate information that will allow them to focus on the most viable leads. Leadership can help by making data hygiene a part of the culture and practices of your business.

Data should enter your system according to standardized methods of collection and categorization, following a central repository of business definitions that your sales and RevOps teams universally agree upon.

You also want to standardize the fields across channels that people can use to enter information—discrepancies between, say, United States vs. USA vs. US will bloat your database and compromise the accuracy of your reporting.

Sales Ops can take the lead with regularly auditing the CRM and other databases for data quality. Things like:

✅ merging duplicates

✅ flagging records with missing data, and

✅ removing data that are no longer correct or relevant.

Chat with your CRO and Head of Sales about the conditions that make data meaningful for the team:

• Do we use it in reporting?
• Do our Sales reps use it in their work?
• Does it concern prospects who are reasonably engaged given the norms of our industry?
• Does collecting and storing it drive our desired outcomes?

If the answer is ‘no,’ chances are you can safely delete a record.

To increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your data cleanups, encourage leadership to invest in a data preparation tool to automate parts of the audit.

 

Helping Sales win

In Sales, data hygiene and quality will make or break your capacity to strike deals and achieve growth.

Follow these steps and your pipeline will likely prosper:

➡️ Adopt clear and consistent practices for collecting and categorizing data.

➡️ Complete regular audits to streamline your databases to only include accurate and relevant information.

Visit our data hygiene management offering for more guidance on maintaining good data hygiene practices.

TLDR: Lead routing tech distributes incoming leads to sales representatives. It’s important to choose the right lead routing system to maximize revenue potential. Evaluate your business needs, consider manual assignments for certain scenarios, and justify the cost based on conversion rates.

What is lead routing? Whenever a lead comes in, your sales team needs to decide who will work on it. Lead routing is the process of distributing incoming lead records among your sales reps. It allows Sales to automate the flow of leads based on various methodologies, assigning records based on factors like their region, industry, seniority, and prior relationships with reps. Done right, routing keeps leads moving fast and towards the people best equipped to convert them.

 

“A process that delivers leads slowly, to the wrong reps, will restrict your revenue potential.”

 

The benefit of third-party lead routing: CRMs and marketing automation platforms tend to have built-in lead-routing functions, but using them isn’t the only approach your sales team can take. Third-party solutions offer more advanced features that may justify the cost depending on your needs, while businesses in some scenarios can opt to handle lead assignments manually.

What’s in this article for you? The decision falls with your sales leaders, and it’s an important one to consider—a process that delivers leads slowly, to the wrong reps, will restrict your revenue potential. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how to

➡️ Evaluate the market of lead routing tools

➡️ Focus on the features and performance factors that matter

➡️ Advise your sales leaders on the lead routing system best suited for your business

 

Route planning

As with any potential tool acquisition, you want to consider a new lead routing system through this lens: Is your business in the right state — with the right needs — to justify the costs?

In some scenarios, Sales can manage without an automated lead routing mechanism. You’re likely suited to a less sophisticated setup (for instance, where one senior sales person identifies and assigns leads by hand) if your business:

👉 Works with few inbound leads

👉 Serves a niche sector

👉 Has a small sales team

👉 Tends to receive warm leads

That said, if you’re experiencing issues like slow follow-ups or low conversion rates, it suggests that your current routing processes aren’t working. Listen to your reps:

• Are they getting leads suited to their regional or industry expertise?
• Are incoming leads from companies that are already in your database going to the people familiar with those accounts?
• Are they able to strike while the iron’s hot?

If the answer to any of these is ‘no,’ it’s time to rethink how you’re routing leads.

And if your business has a large sales team serving global markets in various industries, you stand to benefit from the efficiency and granularity of a dedicated third-party tool.

 

Making the case

Annually, you’re looking at between $20k-100k for a lead routing tool.

If your Head of Sales is reluctant to allocate the budget, gather data on your conversion rates and customer responsiveness. If you can estimate any revenue lost to broken lead routing, frame the tool as an investment to recuperate and exceed the value of that lost business.

As you explore tools on the market, assess each option with these factors top of mind:

👉 How thoroughly does the tool allow you to build routes and orchestrate processes?

👉 How smoothly does it integrate with your CRM and marketing automation platform?

👉 What’s the learning curve?

👉 Can it identify incoming leads who work at a company that already exists in your database?

👉 How can this help to improve SLA fulfilment?

 

“Lead routing tools tend to be simple to integrate with a CRM.”

 

Lead routing tools tend to be simple to integrate with a CRM. The only significant overhead to anticipate is for Sales to decide, document, and build routes in the system. Once you’re up and running, keep track of the following metrics:

✅ SLA completion rate

✅ Revenue intake and forecasts per quarter

✅ MQL to SQL

✅ SQL to opportunity

✅ Customer/prospect response rates

After several months of reporting, you’ll be able to surface the ROI of a lead routing tool to your Sales leaders: fast, efficient workflows that play to the strengths of your reps and set them up to succeed.

Get in touch for more guidance on Sales Operations processes and tools.