Welcome to Step 07. Want to jump back to our full 11 step Business Growth process?

The importance of the Revenue team SLA

To explain: we see sales and marketing as the 'Revenue team' as they're all there to grow your business...

1. 69% of high performing companies rank highly the communication of company-wide goals
2. But, only 7% of typical companies employees know what to do to achieve goals

Track Value not Quantity!

Asking marketing to generate X leads for sales if fine, but, not all leads are equal. Wouldn’t it be better to know the value of a lead and even the value of different types of leads such as leads from a content download, enquiry, or demo request.

By implementing the right technology, it’s easy to track the value of different types of leads by having a clear picture of:

1. Average conversion from lead to opportunity
2. Average conversion from opportunity to closed sale
3. Average value of a sale

The result of this approach is a clearly defined SLA such as

“Every month, marketing will deliver £100k in lead value to sales, and sales will contact every Marketing Qualified Lead within 24 hours of receiving it.”

Implementing a Judicial branch to review leads that sales rejects

It’s important to take an agile approach so we take a ‘Judicial brand’ approach to regular review rejected leads, find out why, and look at ways to improve as a team.

Marketing velocity

If your SLA requires your marketing team to produce more qualified leads than they’ve typically been producing, we’ll audit the way you’re using your marketing production process and look for ways to reallocate resources.

We’ll assess the assets your marketing team currently produces (blogs, infographics, meet-ups, tradeshows, etc.). For each, we’ll define how many of those items you produce in a typical year, how many leads one item typically produces, and how many hours one item takes to produce. That gives us a ‘Lead per hour’ value and a clear picture of the best place to focus resource and strategy.

Sales velocity

It’s also important to consider the amount of leads that sales can handle so marketing performance is aligned to sales capacity. We’ll identify:

1. How many sales opportunities can a salesperson handle in a given time period?
2. How much does a typical sale close for?
3. What percentage of sales opportunities actually close into new business?
4. How long does it take your sales team to turn opportunities into customers?

Maintaining alignment with Revenue team meetings

We take a collaborative approach to business growth and will recommend Revenue team meetings. These are creative meetings where all ideas are welcome. These meetings are the engines that drive revenue and success based on:

1. A time when the Revenue team (sales and marketing) come together to help each other succeed
2. Meetings held monthly (for quick updates) and quarterly (for strategy)
3. Identify problems, brainstorm solutions, make assignments
4. Rotate who attends
5. 6 people max

Expectations of the people that attend

• Nothing to add = Remove from meetings
• Can’t get a word in = Encourage them to speak
• Happy just to watch = Encourage them to speak or Remove
• Don’t like what’s said = Remove from meetings
• Don’t need to discuss anything = Remove from meetings

Future optimisation of the SLA can include

1. What if SLA requires more leads than marketing can deliver = Focus on best performing assets
2. What if marketing produces more leads than sales can handle = Increase lead standards
3. What if sales rejects marketing leads = Judicial branch to review
4. What if marketing leads are a poor fit = Improve messaging and content
5. Is there a steady flow of leads throughout the month from marketing to sales
6. Speed at which sales contact leads
7. Optimise the approach based on facts

Once your SLA is in place, we follow the agile approach of 1) theory, 2) action, 3) outcome, 4) learn...

Next, Step 8. The power of content to grow your business...