Understanding The Lead Flow Process
Written by Josh Hines • August 28, 2024 • 5 Minute Read
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Before moving into hypergrowth, first, you'll want to automate as much of your process as possible to reduce human error and ensure that your teams are working on complex problems, not manual processes that keep them busy but unproductive.
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Automating Your Lead Management Process
One of the most overlooked items in a SaaS organization is its lead management process. I've had a lot of conversations these days where CROs, CMOs, Directors, and other marketing roles think this process is unnecessary and are moving away from the buying cycle and focusing only on MQLs and SQLs, I don't think this will play out well.
Lagging vs Leading Indicators
- Lagging Indicators: Backward-looking metric used to evaluate the impact that has already occurred
- Leading Indicators: Forward-looking metric used to manage activities that lead to future impact
Without a lagging indicator, you won't know where you're headed. Without a leading indicator, you won't know where you are.John Doerr -- Measure What Matters
Yes, leading indicators are what end up determining the success of your program, and documenting them well will ensure you're moving the needle, but when you do away with the lagging indicators, how are you able to understand the data in your system and clearly understand what marketing programs are running effectively?
When Larger Budgets Don't Drive Results
It's for this exact reason that marketing budgets are becoming larger but the amount of pipeline has remained stagnant. Most marketing programs are all about doing as much as possible, and as long as the pipeline is coming in, the marketing department is successful, right?
When you want to move into hypergrowth and reach $100M ARR, having a large marketing budget which leads to high costs for acquiring customers, isn't what allows you to reach your goal effectively.
If you measured and understood the data in your system, you would realize that there is often an ideal customer path and if you promote this path effectively with email and paid ads, ensured prospects followed it, you could reduce your marketing budget and costs to acquire customers, significantly.
What's more nerve-racking, is most times when working with an organization, this framework doesn't even exist, which is often why the marketing department is constantly pumping out more and more content but again not seeing the needle moving.
The Buyer's Journey
I am a firm believer in measuring every aspect possible throughout the marketing and sales lifecycle.
Most marketers are moving away from this framework because they're measuring these indicators manually, which is very time-consuming, so it makes sense why most would reduce their metrics to only MQL and SQL.
But when setting up your marketing campaigns, it's not difficult to capture all these indicators with a little finesse.
How To Measure Your Conversions
Most CRMs come with a Javascript snippet that you place on your website that allows you to track every visitor activity once a cookie has been in place.
To activate that cookie, you'll need to gate content on your website that makes prospects fill out their contact information to access. These days, you only need to ask for their first, last, and validated business email because you can get all their other contact information using ClearBit, ZoomInfo, Winmo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or other data sources to enrich the lead.
When building out forms, I create a campaign in the CRM for every piece of content on your website, I don't group anything into buckets. I also setup up the campaigns in the CRM to host UTM variables so that when you promote content online, you can understand which channels are driving engagement. You can pull these UTM variables into your form on the website when it's submitted.
If you are working with an editable website framework, I would even suggest you place sessions for the UTM variables so that if the prospect engages with other content, the same attribution is added to that form as well.
Doing this allows you to understand how a single boosted post or email can drive multiple engagements on your website. Otherwise, the initial form will have the variables but then subset submissions during the same visit will be blank. The reality is the initial post or email should be what is attributed to all these engagements within a single session.
What Your Forms Should Look Like
When creating your forms, the following inputs should be present:
- Three visible fields for first name, last name, and validated business email; set up your validation to exclude emails using @gmail, @hotmail, or other popular public email domains, most CRMs will have this functionality built in
- Three hidden fields for UTM variables source, medium, and campaign
How I Use UTM Variables
Everyone seems to have their way of using UTM variables, I tend to use them differently than how Google suggests because they developed them to solely be used to measure Google Ad Campaigns, not marketing campaigns in general.
When I use UTM variables, I use them to:
- Source Variable: The Source Variable hosts the data about who is sending the content; marketing, sales, bdr, and tech platforms in your system such as ESP, or chatbot. This allows you to attribute who
- Medium Variable: The Medium Variable hosts the data about where you shared the content; Google Adwords, social media platform, public relations platform, or partner platform. This allows you to attribute where
- Campaign Variable: The Campaign Variable hosts the data about which marketing campaign you're currently promoting. Some content can overlap in multiple campaigns, understanding which one you're working on helps you to measure the success of the campaign, not just the content. This allows you to attribute the what
Using the UTM Variables in this way allows you to measure the who, where, and what so when you are looking in your CRM at each campaign you can segment it out in different situations to understand its impact.
Mimicking Related Processes
This is a similar approach to how affiliate marketing is done, when someone clicks a link, a 30-day cookie is placed on the website for the visitor with the influencer trackable ID.
This approach helps you understand how each piece of content drives conversions, opportunities, and customers. Having all this data in your CRM allows you to look backward and understand what content your typical customers engaged with that influenced them into taking a meeting with your sales team and becoming a customer.
Bringing It Altogether
Now that you set up proper attribution, you can automate the lead flow process following the stages of the buyer's journey, Potential Suspect, Engaged Lead, High Intent, MQL, SQL, Opportunity, Customer, and Advocate.
This is another aspect of marketing that seems to be getting some tension as of late. Most people are again forgoing suspects and leads and only looking at MQLs and SQLs, but every true salesperson can attest that if you stop measuring each stage, you'll start to realize where you're messing up because it's a numbers game; call 100, get a hold of 30, find interest with 10, engage with 5, sell 2.
Why is marketing starting to ignore the top of the funnel? Most likely, because they don't have a clear ideal customer profile and the current audience in the marketing funnel is all over the place, so they only focus on those who show actual intent and raise their hands requesting a demo, trial, or other gated content.
This goes back to the idea I shared above that marketing these days is just a game of doing more, more content, more webinars, more, more, more and we'll even see this exacerbated with the introduction of AI where you can create content in a matter of seconds.
More is not the answer.
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Managing Potential Suspects
The first step of the lead process is Potential Suspects. At this stage, the Contact is in your database, sourced from a list or database, but hasn't engaged with any of your content, development team, or sales executives.
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