Category: Tough Talks

TLDR: Attribution assigns credit to marketing tactics that generate revenue to calculate the ROI of marketing efforts. It’s not as simple as spending more on what works. Finding the balance of spending and assessing the tipping point for each channel is crucial. The complex buyer’s journey requires sophisticated attribution models, and marketers must determine the impact of each touchpoint.

“I heard there’s this tech that can get us better ROI like magic!”

The misconception about marketing automation: Among the many misconceptions about marketing automation, one of the worst is the belief that automation does our job for us, like the wave of a wand.

How to discuss attribution with your boss: Discussing attribution with your CMO or CFO isn’t a talk you should dread. It’s a talk you can use to your advantage. That’s because attribution isn’t only the process by which your organization assigns credit for MQLs and sales—it’s also concrete evidence of your precise value to your organization as a marketer.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you dispel the magic assumptions and ‘set it and forget it’ mentality to explain what’s really going on behind the scenes. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Explain your attribution maturity in a way that emphasizes your expertise

➡️ Earn the recognition you deserve

➡️ Make an argument for increasing budgets down the line

 

Explaining attribution data decisions

The challenge you’re facing is clear: you need to communicate the function and value of attribution modeling without effacing the importance of how you analyze and react to the data you have available.

For starters. what is attribution? Attribution assigns credit to how much revenue a specific marketing tactic produces, letting you calculate the ROI on each and every dollar you spend.

Attribution arms you with the data you need to optimize your programs and spend over time—and to clearly report your results in a way that lets your organization buy into your vision.

 

“Attribution isn’t as simple as spending more on what’s working and less on what isn’t!”

 

But attribution isn’t as simple as spending more on what’s working and less on what isn’t!

Having the data at your fingertips is only part of the battle. Finding the balance of your spending and assessing your company’s tipping point for any given channel is both an art and a science.

👉 Let’s walk through an example:

Let’s say you’re spending $100K on a channel with 5 to 1 ROI. If you instead allocate $200K, you should make a million!

But not so fast: ROI isn’t constant and every channel can have diminishing returns, where a certain amount of spend changes 5 to 1 ROI into 4 to 1, or less.

If your 5 to 1 ROI only holds true to $150K before dropping to 4 to 1, you have a choice on your hands. 4 to 1 could still be your best bet — but that’s a decision that automation can’t make for you.

It’s your expertise that allows you to find the tipping point and determine your next course of action accordingly.

 

The complex buyer’s journey

That example covers the ROI balancing act, but attribution itself is rarely so simple or cut and dry.

While it’s great to attribute a sale to a particular tactic, customers can have hundreds of interactions with a brand before deciding to buy.

Sure, when the time came to pull the trigger, they may have visited your website, but they could’ve been persuaded by an excellent white paper you offered last quarter — which came to their attention thanks to a CRM email — which they signed up for thanks to a social lead gen ad over a year ago.

That’s why attribution platforms offer increasingly complex models, accounting for Member Statuses in many campaigns at different points in the buyer’s journey.

 

“It takes multiple programs across multiple channels to make a deal happen.”

 

It takes multiple programs across multiple channels to make a deal happen.

Complex attribution modeling can reveal the marketing history of every touchpoint but it’s up to you to determine the impact of each status and channel on the final deal itself.

That determination is a sign of your Attribution Maturity.

 

Know thy company

If attribution provides the data, attribution maturity is your outlook on that data.

Attribution platforms provide high-end data-rich attribution but that’s only as valuable as how you parse and leverage that data. And if all we’re using it for is explanation and description, we’ve definitely got some maturing to do.

Fortunately, many of these platforms scale with you as your attribution outlook matures.

Do you want to track a program for everyone who registers for a webinar, or one to track only those who actually attend? Your specific needs and interests can be fine-tuned to arm you with the data that’s most pertinent to your future goals.

So how do you know what programs to implement? You need to know your own company.

 

“Different attribution models answer different questions—so what questions are you asking?”

 

Different attribution models answer different questions—so what questions are you asking?

👉 Wondering which campaigns are sparking initial interest? You’ll want a First Touch attribution model.

👉 How about which campaigns are taking leads from awareness to opportunity? A W-Shaped model can scratch that itch.

👉 Or maybe you’d like an overall holistic approach, to give the CMO a full update on all stages of the lifecycle? Then Full Path is the way to go.

Remember: Whatever questions you are asking, attribution modeling gives you the ability to target accordingly. From there, it’s a matter of time, testing, and analysis to arrive at the answers your company needs.

 

Be the one with the plan

No matter how you’re targeting your attribution, you need a Data Utilization Plan to go from description to determination.

Create a plan based on your team’s needs

✅ Timelines

✅ Key data points

✅ What you’re measuring

✅ Why you’re measuring

Remember: These sorts of plans take time. Build in benchmarks from month to month and year to year to measure where you plan to be and the spend you’re going to make to get there.

And if your higher-ups bristle at the long-game, simply explain that they will never truly know the value of any spend without attribution – and without a savvy marketer such as yourself handling their modeling, along the way.

Hopefully, this helped you get out of your own head and out of the weeds when it comes to communicating attribution to those who need to know.

When it comes to making the most of your modeling or progressing on the Attribution Maturity Curve, Revenue Pulse’s experts are here for ideas, guidance, and support.

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TLDR: Whether you’re in a MOPs team or consulting in the space, learn methods of managing processes, projects, and expectations to strengthen the consultant-client relationship.

Why is a good relationship important? A strong relationship with a consultancy can help MOPs teams to optimize day-to-day processes and tasks, address issues that have built up over the years, and unearth opportunities to improve the strategic contributions that MOPs makes to the business.

The secret to a good relationship: For consultants and clients to enjoy a successful working dynamic, however, both sides must empathize with the needs of the other and be considerate and transparent around scope and project expectations.

What’s in this article for you? If your MOPs team is beginning to work with consultants to deliver projects, or you’re a consultant in the MOPs space looking to build successful client relationships, this Tough Talks Made Easy will help you:

➡️ Communicate your needs within the partnership

➡️ Better understand those on the other side

➡️ Understand effective methods of managing processes, projects, and expectations to strengthen the relationship

 

Active listening

When MOPs teams and consultants begin to collaborate, there’s a groove to find between the established ways of doing things internally and new recommendations that consultancies bring to the table.

 

“Reciprocity and active listening are perhaps the most important qualities.”

 

At this early stage, reciprocity and active listening are perhaps the most important qualities to get the relationship off to a strong start.

As a client

Before contacting an agency or consultancy, your marketing ops team should adopt a specific mindset for success.

👉 Have clear objectives for the partnership

👉 Be prepared to communicate with the consultancy effectively

👉 Be open to incorporating external expertise, even if it means adjusting established work approaches

As a consultant

If you’re consulting with a MOPs team, responsiveness is essential.

Spotting early opportunities to optimize your client’s workflows and tech stack can quickly prove value and create rapport, but your vision should respect your client’s priorities.

Your recommendations and suggestions need buy-in from the decision-makers and day-to-day contacts in the team—and you’re most likely to get that if you show awareness of what your client needs and how more significant changes will impact them.

Big takeaway

Whether you’re on the client or consultant side, approach these early discussions respectfully.

Take on board your consultant’s rationale for certain changes or what motivates your client’s organizational choices and methods — regardless of how early decisions go, if the other party feels understood and appreciated, you’re creating a solid basis of trust.

 

Expectations vs. reality

As your projects continue, transparency and open lines of communication are like oxygen to the relationship.

As a client

For a marketing ops team, sessions with the consultant are a proactive way to surface your needs and communicate expectations around expected deliverables and timelines.

If your MOPs team lacks experience working with consultancies, they might not understand that consultants have other relationships to manage with unique deliverables and timelines. What might seem like a fair request in-house can be unviable for consultants to fulfill.

For that reason, encourage your team to consider the demands your partners are under and prepare to be flexible. Some urgent turnarounds just aren’t possible for your consultant. Others can be done but require adapting project scope.

As a consultant

Meetings with clients help you keep up with requirements and requests.

A common pitfall for consultants is to view the content of a project in isolation and underestimate the amount of time it’ll take to complete.

Avoid building up client expectations beyond what’s realistic by clarifying the factors that contribute to delays like scope creep, vacations, multiple rounds of reviews in testing and gathering consensus from multiple stakeholders in the discovery phase.

As a consultant, you want to reflect on all these dependencies and share them proactively with clients when setting a turnaround date.

 

“The train can go off the track without a regular communication channel to set the course.”

 

Path to success

Both parties should know that the train can go off the track without a regular communication channel to set the course.

Whether you’re client-side or consulting, encourage systems of working that put you on the same page.

👉 Suggest task management software (be it a dedicated tool or a spreadsheet) to assign tasks and monitor progress, and establish weekly status calls to discuss the status of day-to-day projects, longer-term plans, and any issues or roadblocks impeding progress.

 

Reciprocity

The consultant-client relationship is one of mutual participation.

It requires openness and respect from both parties towards the other’s expertise, needs and demands.

Transparent communication around timelines and deliverables and an enthusiastic approach toward your shared purpose are the foundational components of a rewarding relationship that gets results.

For any project guidance, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

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TLDR: Demand for skilled MOPs people far outstrips the supply. To attract and retain the best talent, your recruitment process should focus on the candidate experience and the employee experience.

The struggle to attract talent: Demand for skilled Marketing Operations professionals has long outpaced the supply. The current job market is especially driven by talent. Top MOPs candidates have the bargaining power to take or stay in roles with the most attractive company cultures and compensation packages, and for as long as that’s the case, companies that hire without regard for the candidate experience will struggle to attract and retain the best talent.

What’s in this article for you? If multi-stage interview processes and a lack of long-term thinking for each hire sounds like your organization’s approach to recruitment, it’s time for a Tough Talk.

We’ll help you discuss what effective MOPs recruitment looks like with your CMO and Hiring Manager, so your team can get great candidates onside and nurture them for long-term success.

 

The candidate experience

Far too often, companies in the MOPs space operate with the assumption that the logistics of recruitment should work in their favor. Really, the process is a two-way street.

In each interaction, candidates are scoping out whether your organization is the right place for them to work, and considering the scarcity of MOPs skills, the people with real potential to excel in your roles hold all of the cards.

 

Encourage hiring teams to view their recruitment practices through the candidate’s eyes.

 

👉 Does a demanding job description position your company as a rewarding workplace?

👉 Is a string of multiple interviews with disparate stakeholders (e.g. Sales, Marketing, IT, Leadership) the most considerate use of a candidate’s time?

👉 Is it respectful to require candidates to perform free labor or attend a full-day interview while working a full-time job?

The candidate experience is not just about extending decency. Practices like these fail at selling your company as an inviting and stimulating place to be, which has real business consequences.

If you can’t attract talent, your company faces spending serious dollars on a recruitment agency. And even then, you run the risk of hiring subpar candidates.

Bottom line: The lost productivity and cost involved in fixing the mistakes of an ill-fitting hire will completely dwarf the size of investments your company should have made into

• Well-researched role requirements.
• Building a culture that your talent people advocate for.
• A recruitment process that puts the candidate’s needs first.
• An attractive compensation package.

 

To keep people, hire with a purpose

MOPs roles are often multidisciplinary by design, but many of the industry’s job descriptions read like laundry lists of scattershot and highly advanced competencies.

Just like how the right tools for your business are the ones that effectively support your goals, leadership needs to plan and design new roles around the specific needs of the MOPs team.

Before writing the job description

Before your hiring team sits down to write any section of a job description, tell them all about the skill gaps and upcoming projects in the MOPs team.

This is the basis of an intentional hire. Your hiring team can identify the experience that’s truly important for candidates to bring versus skills that transfer or can be taught.

As an example: Many roles seek experience with a particular marketing automation platform. But experience using one platform is highly transferable to another. Unless particular expertise is crucial to the position, keeping the role platform agnostic will attract a broader range of competent candidates who can learn new skills in the role.

This is essential for employee retention.

Rather than looking for a candidate who fits your requirements 100%, prioritize candidates who are 80% there.

Your hiring team can think of it this way: A 100% fit candidate has already been there and done that. Are they going to be satisfied in a job that doesn’t represent meaningful progression? You might offer them a higher salary than their current position, but there’s no telling if that’ll incentivize them to stay long-term.

 

“Your 80% fit, however, can truly gain something from taking the job.”

 

Your 80% fit, however, can truly gain something from taking the job. That makes them a better investment. A candidate who can say your company gave them a chance to develop their skills has motivation. That’s motivation to give their best effort, stay on the team and advocate for your brand to their network.

TL;DR: The perfect fit has room to grow.

 

Your recruitment brand

Desirable places to work all have this in common: They create environments where people want to stay.

To attract and retain the best marketing ops talent, leadership should focus the recruitment process on two things:

• The candidate experience, then
• the employee experience.

Treating your candidates and employees with empathy — practices based on candidate needs, a rewarding culture and compensation, hiring to invest in people — is how you create a workplace that people advocate for.

For any guidance you need with building a MOPs team, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Agencies help MOPs teams take on ambitious projects and meet goals, but do you know what it takes to work successfully with an agency?

How can marketers benefit from agencies? Agencies and consultancies are valuable sources of guidance and hands-on support, helping marketing teams to clear through tasks with greater efficiency and execute more ambitious projects that may otherwise be out of reach.

What homework should you do before approaching an agency? Organizations with all sorts of technical and resource needs can benefit from a strong agency partnership, but it’s best to establish clear priorities and learn how to manage the relationship before deciding to approach one.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll teach you how to work with an agency amidst various situational demands and how to communicate optimally with your partners. By the end, you’ll know how to:

➡️ See greater results from your current agency relationship

➡️ Set your expectations and communicate them to the agency

➡️ Get the most out of working with an agency

 

Determine your priorities

There’s a tendency for some organizations to hesitate when it comes to agencies, fearing the risk of being locked into a contract or pouring money into a resource they don’t use.

If the decision-makers in your marketing team have been reluctant to work with an agency for similar reasons, make this point: If your marketing ops team has more work than bandwidth, an agency is a direct solution to help you meet your goals. The investment makes sense if you know what you want to achieve.

 

“Before approaching an agency
to take on projects, establish your most pressing needs.”

 

Before approaching an agency to take on projects, leadership and MOPs must establish the most pressing needs for the team. These priorities will determine the kinds of service providers you need to look for and how you can best use them.

 

Here are a few scenarios:

Comfortable budget but short on time? Hiring an agency to take on more practical tasks frees up your team for higher-level strategic work. And if a project is particularly time-sensitive, the extra assistance makes it possible to reach your target turnaround time within an agreed scope.

Access to budget but not to headcount? Hiring an agency is a great option in this case. It gives your team the ability to achieve targets and successfully execute tasks while safeguarding their existing but limited bandwidth.

Lower budget with time to spare? Consider using an agency’s experts for advice on complex projects to maximize your time. Think of projects like implementing a new marketing automation platform or attribution. Consultants can interpret and communicate the impact of the changes you’re looking to make and guide you through the steps to take for long-term success.

Short on both? If you’re in a crunch for time and budget, your leadership team needs to establish top priorities for marketing ops and share them proactively with your agency so they’re best equipped to meet your needs within scope.

Read our post ‘Marketing Operations: In-House, Agency or Hybrid‘ for other models.

 

Realistic expectations

To build a partnership based on trust and transparency, both parties must uphold their roles and responsibilities.

Clients are right to have certain expectations of an agency:

✅ Getting work done on time to a high standard

✅ Managing internal stakeholders

✅ Pivoting when necessary to match the changing needs of your business.

But clients should also prepare to support the agency to deliver. That means being open and honest about your goals for the working relationship.

Whatever performance expectations Marketing has, team members using the agency must offer relevant information about your business, campaigns, and priorities proactively.

 

Best practices for projects:

👉 Share resources and access permissions in a timely and forthcoming manner.

👉 Be courteous in all communications and timelines you establish.

👉 Offer support and feedback to help the agency perform more effectively.

Your marketing team might approach an agency with great ambitions. But for all the help an agency can provide, they aren’t magic.

 

“Your partners are
human beings
with multiple priorities to balance…”

 

Your partners are human beings with multiple priorities to balance and many projects in MOPs involve working through a long series of steps and processes. For example, getting attribution off the ground in a matter of weeks isn’t a viable scope to present to an agency.

To keep expectations realistic, your team should acknowledge that progress takes time. Clearly communicate what you want to achieve, sharing relevant KPIs and metrics with your agency as you approach each milestone, but do so with the understanding you’ll get results gradually.

 

The bottom line

An agency’s expertise and support help to make your MOPs function successful.

Deciding to work with one is a sign that you’re delegating effectively to complete important projects to a high standard.

Collaborate with your leadership and marketing teams to identify clear goals, share them proactively with your agency, and mutually establish a realistic scope for delivery. These are the ingredients of a partnership that gets results.

Whatever your organization needs, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Adopting a new tool has a range of logistical and financial consequences. MOPs and RevOps leaders should interrogate each potential addition to your tech stack by evaluating the ease of implementation, the experience of your team, the ease of integration with your current or planned tech stack, the potential financial costs beyond the purchase price, and how the tool responds to real business needs and strategic aims.

The motivation for adopting new tools: When new leaders join companies or people move internally to different teams, they take with them the technologies and practices they’re used to. New marketing leaders are often keen to implement tools they’ve had positive experiences with in the past and can be prone to thinking that having more tools makes it easier to surface ROI—more ways to analyze data, more ways to present it, more functions and features to optimize how you work.

The consequence of new tools: In practice, however, this isn’t quite the case. Adopting a new tool has a range of logistical and financial consequences for your business that require thoughtful planning to navigate.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you explain to your CMO or CRO the problems that can arise from adopting a new tool too soon. We’ll also outline the important things your organization needs to consider before deciding to adopt new technology.

 

New tool consequences

Marketing operations people are frequently asked to take ownership of managing new tools, and so they have first-hand experience of the reality that more tools = more responsibilities.

Adding a new tool to someone’s workload has productivity consequences for what that person can feasibly deliver, especially if they need training to effectively use the tool in question.

If the department leadership is looking at a new core piece of tech—a marketing automation platform, a CRM, a content management system—it’s likely to demand a revamp of your whole MOPs infrastructure.

 

“Before adopting a new tool, you need to understand
if it’s worth it and why.”

 

Without qualified talent on board, you might need to hire someone new to lead on that piece of tech — and the hiring process costs time and money. So before adopting a new tool, you need to understand if it’s worth it and why.

Poorly-conceived additions to your stack will leak revenue, for example:

👉 Wasted subscription fees for unused tools.
👉 Unforeseen disruptions to your team’s workflow and productivity through accommodating new processes.
👉 Suboptimal implementations or maintenance that cause damage downstream.
👉 Integrations that don’t work properly, corrupted data, bloated storage.

 

The questions to ask

 

If you have a robust tech stack

If your tech stack is already robust, your first step should be to evaluate what isn’t working.

Is a new piece of software the best way to address your needs? Encourage your CMO or CRO to explore the solutions existing in your company stack — you might already have the license to a tool that fulfills a similar purpose to a good standard, and you’ll avoid the redundant expense on an overlapping solution.

If leadership’s considering a tool that can change the essential infrastructure of your MOPs/RevOps function (a MAP, a CMS, a CRM), it’s crucial to know what strategic ambitions it supports.

➡️ Are you scaling down to cut costs or simply overhead?
➡️ Are you scaling up because your CMO/CRO has a growth plan and needs the particular capabilities of more advanced tools to achieve it?
➡️ Have they planned for the corresponding investment in the MOPs team (e.g. whether that’s greater headcount, higher training budgets, or a redistribution of role responsibilities) to facilitate a more complex platform?

 

If the new tool will play a supporting role in your stack

When evaluating a tool that plays more of a supporting role in your stack, you’ll want to assess how well it integrates with your existing infrastructure.

➡️ What depth of expertise will the tool require?
➡️ How long is the implementation period? Will it require more resources on a temporary or permanent basis?
➡️ Is it best-in-class at providing the functionalities you’re looking for?
➡️ Does it have good momentum in the marketplace?

Getting to the bottom of these points is essential to come up with a realistic assessment of a tool’s total cost of ownership.

 

Questions to ask beyond those above

➡️ Is the total cost of ownership (TCO) worth paying?
➡️ Do the capabilities of the tool respond to the goals your CMO/CRO wants to achieve?
➡️ Can you reasonably estimate that its features can drive revenue and productivity in ways that justify the time, money, and work?

 

“The impact of adopting a new tool
is often poorly understood.”

 

The impact of adopting a new tool is far-reaching and often poorly understood. Remember that strategy defines your outcomes and tools help you achieve them. Read our article Connect the Dots Between Strategy and Technology for more.

Your MOPs and RevOps leaders should interrogate each potential addition to your tech stack by evaluating the:

👉 ease of implementation
👉 experience of your team
👉 ease of integration with your current or planned tech stack
👉 potential financial costs beyond the purchase price, and
👉 tool’s ability to respond to real business needs and strategic aims.

Approach each tech decisions with this degree of intentionality, and you’ll maximize the ROI you gain from your stack.

Get in touch for more guidance on assessing and implementing new technologies.

TLDR: Lead scoring can help Sales focus only on the most valuable or receptive prospects, but the project stands or falls based on the quality of Sales-Marketing collaboration.

What is lead scoring? Lead scoring is the process of evaluating the interest of a prospect and their readiness to engage with the sales process.

The problem lead scoring solves: Lead scoring helps Sales and Marketing concentrate efforts on leads that have demonstrated a higher level of interest or engagement with your brand, increasing the chances of closing deals and generating revenue.

What’s in it for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll cover how to explain the value and reality of lead scoring to Sales – what it is and is not, what it offers and requires. You can incentivize Sales to work together with Marketing with realistic expectations on a project that’s vital for both teams to grow the business.

 

Methods and data points

Companies can score leads in a variety of ways. You can ascribe numeric values, letter rankings, or descriptive terms like “warm” and “cold.” However you choose to score leads, there are several key data points that should factor into the analysis:

👉 Demographics (relevant individual characteristics, e.g. job title)
👉 Firmographics (organization profile, e.g. industry, vertical, size, location, annual revenue)
👉 Behavior (how the lead engages with your brand, e.g. visiting the webpage, interacting on social, requesting a demo)
👉 BANT qualification (the lead’s budget, authority, need, and timeline)
👉 Completeness of the data you have for each lead

There’s no objectively superior method of scoring leads and accrediting weight to different data types. Instead, your Sales team needs to work with Marketing to define the scoring methodology and establish what a “qualified” lead looks like.

An accurate view of lead quality helps Sales to focus on engaging only with the most receptive and valuable prospects. Neither team can make a complete assessment of this without ideas, data, and feedback from the other.

 

Qualify or nurture

Naturally, some leads will show a higher likelihood to buy than others. The task for Marketing and Sales is to determine how to identify and treat leads that fall into one of two groups:

1️ shows an optimal level of interest for Sales to act, or
2️ requires further nurturing by Marketing.

For this process to yield results, Sales needs to agree with Marketing on the benchmark for qualification.

Sales might expect the leads they receive from Marketing to be ready to sign, but there’s only so much your Marketing team can do in advance. As long as Marketing can unearth opportunities with a high likelihood of closure, it’s on Sales to identify where in the process to step in and how to approach each lead.

On the other hand, Sales shouldn’t encourage Marketing to pass leads over who show just enough of a pulse to open an email or click a link. Qualifying leads this way undermines the evaluative power of Marketing’s nurture process. Sales might get a couple of lucky bites, but it won’t translate to sustainable success.

 

Building lead profiles

Marketing’s nurture programs build insightful lead profiles through rich data collection, which allows Sales to approach the highest quality leads in the most engaging ways, showing awareness of their interests and the situational context. Without that basis, Sales risks burning effort on premature leads and failing to hit targets.

The point to make is that lead scoring best allows Sales to identify and win business from the highest value leads when two things are in place:

✅ clearly defined and realistic models for scoring and qualification, and
✅ time for Marketing to nurture developed engagement data from their campaigns.

 

Fuel your growth machine

To get started with lead scoring, Sales needs a good grasp of their past successes. Your reps should dig into historical data about past deals and lead journeys until they can answer these key questions:

👉 What makes a person qualified enough?
👉 What behaviors and traits did closed-won leads show?

 

The quality of collaboration

From there, lead scoring stands or falls based on the quality of your collaboration. Sales and Marketing should participate in healthy, ongoing discussions until you agree on a scoring methodology and handover process that both teams can comfortably deliver.

With that agreement in place, you stand the highest chance of seeing the benefits of lead scoring—the ability for Sales to prioritize quality leads, better insight for Marketing into the most valuable lead characteristics, and increased alignment and revenue that both halves of your growth machine can enjoy.

Want more guidance on lead scoring? Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Is your Sales Ops team feeling the strain of manual processes? Learn to discuss with leadership what you should automate, why, and how to prepare for automation.

Why organizations don’t automate: Sales ops teams rely on manual processes for various reasons. Automation might not be a priority in small or scaling businesses where teams are still developing their tech stacks and systems. Teams in larger organizations might use legacy systems customized to the business’s specific needs and aren’t designed to scale. In either case, there tends to be a shortage of people who understand the tools and mechanisms to accelerate work.

The problem with manual processes: Business that don’t prioritize automation can suffer issues from manual processes that compromise revenue, including:

❌ Inaccuracies
❌ Inefficiencies
❌ Limited forecast and analytical potential

And while companies might be mature in their commercial offerings and field of expertise, a lack of alignment prevents teams around the business (e.g. Sales and Technology, Sales and Operations, Sales Ops and Marketing Ops) from coming together to discuss and address these issues.

What’s in this article for you? If your business is feeling the strain of manual processes — and your teams aren’t talking about it — this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you. We’ll help you have a strategic discussion about automation with your CRO and COO, covering what to automate in Sales Ops and why, and how to examine your processes and communication channels so your business can reap the benefits.

 

Benefits of automation

Your CRO and COO want to understand how automation can translate into increased revenue. To that end, there are a few important benefits that automating your lead and opportunity management can create:

✅ Efficiency: Automating the likes of lead capture and routing will simplify and reduce the overhead of your operations, freeing up your sales and sales ops teams to focus on higher-impact initiatives.

✅ Accuracy: Automation reduces the risk of costly errors that can occur. For example, manually creating contracts and quotes or entering data into your CRM.

✅ Data enrichment: Automation tools can enrich your lead data with publicly available information and activity metrics, helping Sales to better segment leads and prioritize the best matches to the business.

✅ Forecasting: Tools with forecasting capabilities can also lead to more accurate predictions (e.g. how Sales is performing vs. quotas) and more comprehensive analyses of various metrics. For instance, understanding how Sales is set to perform against quotas, how seasonality impacts lead behavior, or which channels to optimize your spending on, will fuel greater strategic decision-making that makes it easier to captivate leads and win business.

 

“Become more productive, predictive and responsive
to customer needs.”

 

 
Automation can help your Sales Ops function become more productive, predictive, and responsive to customer needs and preferences. In theory, these improvements should translate into growth, but there are several logistical and financial complexities with implementing automation.

Prepare to discuss the following points with leadership to show you’ve thought through what it takes to make automation successful:

👉 Recruitment and training: Implementing any technology entails having the knowledge and skills to use it. You’ll want at least one dedicated person or team to manage your workflows, with the know-how to maintain processes in good order and fix things. This might require a headcount budget, agency support, or upskilling people in your business who can progress into this role.

👉 Change management: What existing tools and integrations could be impacted by our implementation of automation? Given the available time that our team members have, what other projects and initiatives are we willing to put on hold in order to prioritize this?

👉 Data quality: Between tools, you might have disparate methods of categorizing the same data points. To make integrations between tools work correctly, and for your reporting to be accurate, you’ll need IT to help with data normalization as you implement and connect tools.

👉 Awareness: How will leadership educate people on the benefits and risks of automation? If Sales isn’t aware of how new processes and tools can improve their workflow, or if people aren’t encouraged to embrace the changes in how you do things, you risk wasting the investment of time and money.

 

Implementing automation

To address these challenges, your CRO and COO play important roles in the process of implementing automation:

🎯 Direction: Your CRO and COO can position themselves as sources of guidance and authority on data initiatives, offering mentorship and incentives to encourage a greater understanding and adoption of new processes and tools. Being able to answer questions and assure people of the logic behind what they’re doing will be crucial to the ongoing success of automation.

🎯 Communication: Your leaders should encourage communication between Sales, Marketing, Operations, and IT to encourage collaboration and alignment as automation impacts the business. This will be crucial to ensure that your uptake of automation in Sales Ops compliments the tools, processes, and workflows in other departments.

🎯 Resources and development: Leadership can allocate the budget for software purchases, training, hiring, and agency support towards the initiative. This can involve working with Sales Enablement to come up with a training plan, and devising a plan for hiring and skill development to ensure that automated processes are well understood and integrated into the team.

🎯 Measurement: Based on what your CRO and COO want to achieve with automation, they can establish success metrics for the initiative—KPIs and other points of reporting for Sales Ops to track in order to gauge the success of automation. Monthly or quarterly meetings between Sales Ops and leadership, discussing these data points and talking about how to further optimize things, can aid the ongoing success of the project.

 

“Automation is equally about
making changes to your communication structure.”

 

Implementing automation is equally about making changes to your communication structure as it is about adopting new tools and processes.

If you can explain clearly to your CRO and COO the kinds of preparation that are required to realize the benefits of automation, your leaders can use their time to guide and align stakeholders around the business and incentivize people to adopt new ways of doing business to achieve a strategic vision.

Treating the interpersonal elements of change management with care puts you in a good place to enjoy the strengthened efficiency, accuracy, forecasting potential, and growth that automation offers.

Get in touch for more guidance on change management and automation in Sales Ops.

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.

The problem with data hygiene in sales ops: Sales ops 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.

Why data hygiene is hard to maintain: Sales Ops handles troves of information from different avenues, which are often difficult to standardize including contact forms, data enrichment tools and research from sales reps.

The cost of poor data hygiene: Sales and revenue leaders can be reluctant to part with data, even when a prospect’s interest and engagement have long cooled. 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’s heaving with records and difficult to segment, 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 how to:

➡️ Illustrate the impacts of poor data hygiene with your CRO/COO

➡️ Raise awareness of practices that will keep your data clean and your Sales team on track

➡️ Save money for your organization

 

Why data hygiene matters

Bad data encroaches on everything your Sales team does.

❌ Leads to inaccurate analyses of opportunities in the pipeline.

❌ Slows progress on deals as Sales reps chase prospects who are no longer relevant to your business.

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

❌ Results in 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. For example, your sales leaders might oppose deleting data because they’ve paid for the methods to acquire this information that could yield business at some point.

 

“It pays to know when
to part ways with your data.”

 

But it pays to know when to part ways with your data. 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 head of sales, CRO, and COO should all understand that data hygiene = time and money well spent.

 

Before renewing your CRM instance, follow these steps:

👉 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.

Important: This isn’t a one-time clear-out. Data hygiene has a systemic impact on the productivity of your Sales team and requires a continuous, purposeful effort to maintain. To increase revenue, Sales reps need easy access to accurate information that will allow them to focus on the most viable leads. Leadership can help Sales to achieve this by enshrining data hygiene into the culture and practices of your business.

 

Data standardization

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 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.

Adopt clear and consistent practices for collecting and categorizing data, with regular audits to streamline your databases to only include accurate and relevant information, and it’s likely your pipeline will prosper.

Get in touch for more guidance on maintaining good data hygiene practices.

TLDR: Marketo helps you save time, increase efficiency, and grow revenue. Communicate these outcomes and the value of your CEO’s investment in Marketo (and your team) will be undeniable.

You’re great at your job. 🔥

Why? Because you work hard to demonstrate the value that marketing operations brings to your organization.

The problem: Now you’re on the hook to explain the value of Marketo to your CEO.

What do you do next? Read this Tough Talks Made Easy. We’re going to arm you with everything you need to maximize your minutes with the C-suite. Ditch the buzzwords and focus your approach on the language C-Suite speaks on a daily basis: outcomes.

 

Focus on outcomes

Your CEO needs to worry about the bottom line without being bogged down by minutiae.

When we talk about speaking in outcomes, we don’t mean:

❌ increased clicks
❌ better open rates, or
❌ the things that only excite marketers. (Sorry).

Your CEO is interested in outcomes with positive impacts on pipeline.

✅ improved lead conversion by stage
✅ the ability to enable your existing sales force and help them achieve quota, and
✅ any other outcomes that lead directly to increased revenue.

The value of Marketo speaks for itself. But, it’s up to you to communicate its many uses into outcome-focused conclusions.

 

Outcome 1: The value of marketing automation

Marketing automation lets you streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks to save time, increase efficiency, and grow revenue more quickly. (Pretty good outcomes!)

Marketing automation takes every aspect of your existing campaign management and marketing programs and allows you to run them ‘lights out.’ With automation, you’ll get real-time data on what’s working and what isn’t, and a comprehensive scoring system to strategize new leads as you get them.

Your CEO needs to know what Marketo can do. Marketo is to marketing what Salesforce is to sales.

Here are a few features of Marketo

👉 boosts pipeline while providing insight into the customer journey
👉 allows for more targeted, relevant communication as relationships progress, and
👉 delivers insights to drive account and prospect intelligence to sales.

 

Outcome 2: Enhances doesn’t replace talent

Marketing automation isn’t about making humans obsolete. It’s about giving your talent the data and feedback they need in real-time to flex their marketing muscles in the right direction and do what they do best.

Marketo isn’t some set-it-and-forget-it approach—far from it.

 

“Marketing automation is
only as effective
as those who implement it.”

 

Marketing automation is only as effective as the marketers who implement it. Campaigns are at their best when the creativity of your talent is able to thrive.

Marketo provides digital experiences that weren’t possible before, but to be successful marketing ops need the right support, funding, and data to make it all work.

 

Outcome 3: Actionable data

Marketo isn’t about creating a deluge of information—it’s about telling you precisely which strategies are working and which aren’t, so you can react accordingly.

The insights delivered by Marketo are focused on efficiency, scalability, and ROI.

 

“Marketo tells you

which strategies work and

which do not.”

 

Without marketing automation, you simply aren’t measuring these things effectively—if you’re measuring them at all.

With Marketo, everything is tracked and displayed. It provides a comprehensive analysis that allows you to compare every facet against others—and keep constant track of how much everything costs.

 

Outcome 4: Enhanced relationships

Marketing automation has been exploding for a reason. Companies like Fujitsu and the Portland Trail Blazers have made big investments in Marketo and the teams that run them.

Buyers have the ability to google every option, consider every purchase, and compare every choice in spending.

In order to make a sale, relationships need to be fostered, nurtured and brought to fruition. This requires personal, targeted communications that don’t push for sales until the customer already feels confident in their decision to buy.

That’s where lead scoring identifies the best incoming leads for your sales team.

 

Outcome 5: Sales and marketing sync

Every CEO wants their sales and marketing teams on the same page.

The real-time, first-hand insight into customer behavior and lead ranking mean your sales team will receive a comprehensive list of the ‘hottest’ leads the moment they come in.

 

“Marketing will do

the same thing upstream

that sales is doing downstream.”

 

And once they’ve received the lead, they won’t only be armed with what they need to react immediately, they’ll also know how to react in a relevant way.

Your sales team will receive the same deep, actionable insights regarding which content has the most immediate, positive impact on conversion rates and closed sales. And they’ll receive instant notifications when it’s time to leap into action.

That means your marketing team will be doing the same thing upstream that your sales team is doing downstream. This is a harmonious tandem that spells success and it’s the type of outcome that CEOs’ dreams are made of.

 

The big takeaway

Marketo helps you save time, increase efficiency, and grow revenue by:

🎯 providing your talent’s with actionable data
🎯 deepening and nurturing relationships with your leads
🎯 enabling your marketing and sales teams to align with a shared strategy, and
🎯 working for the same goals with the information sales and marketing need to succeed.

Communicate these outcomes, and the value of your CEO’s investment in Marketo—and your team—will be undeniable.

And remember: if we can help prepare you in any way, let us know. That’s what we’re here for.

TLDR: Are manual CPQ processes eating up your time? Learn how to discuss the benefits and tradeoffs of CPQ solutions with your leadership team.

What is CPQ? Configure, price, quote (CPQ) solutions allow Sales teams to automate the production of quotes and contracts.

The problem with current CPQ processes: Manually creating quotes results in time spent correcting mistakes, bloated approval processes, and delayed starts to projects that can leave negative impressions on customers.

How CPQ solutions help: CPQ solutions can improve the speed, accuracy, and scalability of quote and contract creation. Before adding another tool to your stack, you’ll want to establish whether or not the investment makes sense.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you have a purposeful discussion with your CRO and COO about CPQ solutions. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Position the benefits

➡️ Voice important strategic and logistical considerations

➡️ Impact ROI

➡️ Get the support you need to evaluate and implement a potential new solution

 

CPQ ins and outs

Your C-level execs want to know how investing in a CPQ solution will contribute towards the organization’s goals and needs.

Start by identifying where your CPQ processes are straining and what your leaders want to achieve. Then frame your arguments around the impact a CPQ solution can create to meet their priorities.

👉 Productivity: How many hours per week do your Salespeople spend on quotes? Automation can free up this time and allow Sales to focus on higher-impact initiatives. Do your teams struggle to produce contracts in a timely manner or end up spending way too much time on the approval process? You can issue contracts and get them over to QA, Legal and your customers quicker, and begin working with customers sooner.

👉 Accuracy: Do errors or ambiguities cause approval delays and extend contract execution time? CPQ solutions can ensure consistent pricing and service terms, including standardization and controls for customizations such as discounts and tiers.

👉 Scalability: Does leadership aim to grow the RevOps, Sales or Retention teams? The more people involved, the more complicated pricing and approvals can become. CPQ software enables efficiencies for scaling teams by reducing error-prone manual processes. CPQ solutions offer multi-currency support, which is beneficial for organizations working internationally.

 

CPQ solutions can help refine pricing models.

 

👉 Insights: Tracking recurring revenue streams and establishing a trailing twelve months can highlight key insights to help make intelligent pricing decisions and better understand your client base. Dynamic pricing capabilities can also suggest effective price points for your services based on customer behavior and market conditions to enable better forecasting.

👉 CX: Automating renewals reduces friction during the contracting process. By streamlining work with your organization, CPQs can help improve customer relationships and have a downstream effect on churn reduction.

Your bottom line: How might the above factors translate into costs saved, revenue gained, and losses avoided?

 

Make your case for CPQ

These are all salient points to get your CRO and COO interested in a CPQ platform, but as with any tool adoption, there are trade-offs and planning elements to assess. Before you approach leadership, think through and prepare to discuss the following factors:

✅ Appeal to your customer journey: At what points in the customer journey can you integrate a CPQ solution to close contracts more effectively, boost customer satisfaction, and improve retention? How will using this tool achieve the aims of your organizational strategy?

✅ Immediate and future needs: What does leadership want a CPQ solution to address in the short- and long-term? For the investment to pay off, people need to know that using the tool will make their lives easier. Does the tool have the potential to continue meeting your organization’s evolving needs?

✅ Alignment with existing tools and processes: Any CPQ tool should fit smoothly with your tech stack and business processes—if it doesn’t, teams may resist adopting the tool. CPQ processes often impact teams in charge of renewals in addition to Finance, Legal and Procurement. Getting the perspectives of key stakeholders can help you to identify whether a new piece of tech can complement your current finance, payment, and audit processes and align with the needs of your business.

✅ Highly integrated vs. siloed products: What is the projected future state of your tech stack? You might opt for a CPQ solution that seamlessly integrates with a core piece of technology (e.g. your CRM), but what happens if you remove or change that piece? Alternatively, the autonomy of a siloed product may be more suitable than the high performance offered by a solution that integrates more deeply with your tech stack.

✅ Power vs. lift: A more sophisticated solution will likely have a heavier lift, demanding more time and expertise to implement and manage, but will result in a more comprehensive solution. Consider who will be in charge of setting up and managing the solution? You may need to recruit a contractor or bring on a new hire to get the job done. Consider if your needs justify the cost of a more powerful, intensive tool over a lighter solution that is easier to implement.

 

“Leadership can help people
see CPQ as an investment.”

Raising these points will help your leaders gain a clearer sense of the total cost of implementing a CPQ solution and whether the ROI justifies the lift.

If your CRO and COO want you to explore this further, there are various ways they can offer guidance to support the process of evaluation and implementation:

💰 Parameters: What does the minimum viable solution look like—the capabilities and traits that have to be present to support your goals and needs? What is the maximum budget your leadership is willing to allocate—will this cover the purchase price and any hiring and training needs?

🎯 Choice factors: Based on C-Suite’s top-level goals (e.g. increase revenue by 10%), what performance factors make sense to prioritize? For example, can you best achieve these with a solution that’s optimal for speeding up quote creation, freeing people from admin, or deepening analytics?

🌱 Roadmap for growth: Where does a CPQ solution fit within the planned growth of teams within the organization? Will a new CPQ tool impact the requirements of the personnel within your team?

📈 Impact measurement: Which analytics and reporting points are crucial for understanding how the solution meets your organization’s KPIs, such as enabling growth, saving time, and cutting costs?

🧭 Alignment and direction: Your CRO and COO can be huge allies with this endeavor, using their pull to capture thoughts and encourage buy-in from people and teams involved and impacted. Crucially, this involves managing expectations since, for the first few months, the benefits of using the solution may not yet be apparent.

As you establish a baseline, leadership can help people see the tool as an investment that reveals its value over time and showing how riding out the bumps of implementation and onboarding is worthwhile. This understanding is key to internal adoption, which is how you fully realize the long-term benefits.

As you begin using the tool, leaders can stress its long-term value as an investment and inspire employees with their vision during difficult stages of implementation and onboarding. Leadership’s enthusiasm plays a vital role in achieving internal adoption, which is necessary to gain long-term benefits.

 

The bottom line

As you explore the pricing and specs of options on the market, you might find a piece of tech that responds perfectly to your needs, or you might decide that adopting a new tool isn’t the right move.

In any case, voicing the opportunities and realities of taking on a CPQ solution will help leaders make a decision that best meets the needs of the business.

Get in touch for more strategic Sales Ops guidance.