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RevOps as a Service: Lead Status

How to Feel Invincible with RevOps

If you grew up in the 80’s or 90’s, there’s a good chance you played Mario Brothers on Nintendo at some point.  For many kids, their favorite part of the game was finding a star (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, here you go). 

A star made you invincible, and it felt like nothing could go wrong.  It meant that any shortcomings in your level of play (e.g. being bad at timing jumps over the countless number of mushrooms) would be taken care of.  

In an unsure economy, businesses can often find it difficult to have this same feeling of invincibility.  This is especially true when it comes to RevOps, the concept of maximizing revenue potential in a repeatable way.  

This is because very few businesses have a team of RevOps professionals guiding their GTM motions and analyzing their models.  Oftentimes, a random sales or marketing employee will be tasked with revenue operations-type responsibilities, usually with subpar results.  The fact that some businesses may use “revenue” in someone’s job title may or may not be indicative of their RevOps knowledge. 

Like Mario finding a star, a business can have that same feeling of invincibility when they turn their revenue operations over to a company which specializes in offering RevOps as a service.  Instead of hiring a full-time, in-house RevOps team, a business can outsource their revenue operations to experts who will review and revamp their processes.

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Areas/Topics Assessed

Here are some examples of the areas a RevOps as a service company may look at while mapping out your strategies and process:

Let’s take a look at the last one, lead status, and see how it might be tackled by a team of RevOps pros.

Lead Status

What is it?  Why is it Important?

Lead status shows the “stage” of current marketing or sales cycle a lead is in and helps to drive what actions should be taken.  It is beneficial as it helps to confirm that no leads fall through cracks, ensures there is less friction in the handoff between departments, and aligns teams to prioritize and plan next action steps.

lead status stages

Stage Definitions

Clear and agreed upon lead status definitions for each stage are important because they help to eliminate confusion and premature movement from one stage to the next.  When a business uses RevOps as a service, they can be assured that a lead’s movement is handled in a timely and effective manner.

  • Nurture:  Inbound leads that marketing is actively nurturing to hand off to sales; these mostly include leads which have filled MOFU (middle of the funnel) or TOFU (top of the funnel) forms
  • Recycle:  Leads that may have told you they’re no longer interested in moving forward; good fit, but not ready to buy
  • New/Not Contacted:  Leads you have not yet reached out to; includes leads which are passed from marketing after nurturing them and those which filled BOFU (bottom of the funnel) form also 
  • In Progress/Sequence:  Leads you are actively working in a sequence/cadence or reaching out to them through a series of emails and/or calls
  • Connected/Replied:  Leads you’ve been able to make contact with but are not yet opportunities; this lead may be waiting on a booked meeting or working to establish a budget
  • Attempted to Contact/No Reply:  Leads you have tried to reach out to via a sequence/cadence, but did not connect with; opportunity to send back to marketing team for nurture campaign
  • Open Deal:  Leads that have expressed interest in buying and booked a meeting; have a deal associated
  • Unqualified:  Leads that will never be a fit for your product/service

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When Does it Occur?

Lead status occurs on the left side of the funnel.

lead status on funnel

Pre-Requisites

For most companies offering RevOps as a service, they will require that customer lifecycle stages, sales technical setup, and the marketing to sales handoff process be completed before the lead status process is configured and built.

Guidelines

To maximize how lead status is used in HubSpot, a team of RevOps experts will typically have a set of guidelines which will inform their decision-making.  Here a some examples with descriptions:

  • Contact Ownership:  Review current process and set clear guidelines for marketing and sales ownership
  • Categorize your Sales and Marketing Content:    Categorize your current and future content on basis of TOFU, MOFU, BOFU for understanding contact’s buyer journey and using those inside lead status filters
  • Understand Sales and Marketing Activities: Review your current sales and marketing activities and align those with defined lead status
  • List Filters: Communicate importance of filters used and why those exist, customize the filters as per partner requirements
  • Universal Usage: Every contact in HubSpot should have a lead status except lifecycle stage subscribers, lifecycle stage contacts, and beyond that (e.g. LTV)

Bottom line:  data integrity and consistency = success.

Roadmap

yoda roadmap meme

When it comes to correctly building the process for lead status, a team of RevOps experts will typically work in phases.

Phase 1 will often include agreeing on defined lead status (names, order, definition, ownership), acknowledgment of triggers, and customization of triggers.  Acknowledging triggers communicates the why and the what of the defined triggers and customization adds changes as per the requirements. 

Phase 2 gets into the actual processes including building lists, building workflows, adding suppression lists inside workflows to avoid duplicates, resetting lead status for existing ones, turning on workflows to correct update lead status, and build reporting.

Phase 3 wraps up with rolling out the process to the team and constant monitoring to make sure workflows are working.

What Will Success Look Like?

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When lead status is done right, you can expect that all contacts will have clear ownership (marketing or sales), that there is a clear process to recycle and unqualify leads, there is organization around the pre-deal “funnel” for the sales team, and all contacts are segmented correctly based on lists and workflows.

Reporting Examples

before lead status

after lead status

RevPartners is at Your (RevOps) Service

It can be difficult for a business to feel confident in their RevOps plan.  For a true “Mario just found a star” feeling of RevOps invincibility, consider using RevPartners as your RevOps as service partner.

Here’s a great example of the “RP Difference” in action…

Recent Problem Encountered by Partner

No defined process between HubSpot and Salesforce resulting in messy data and inaccurate reporting for BDR (business development representative) and AE (account executive) teams.  Unqualified contacts were causing major confusion.

Our Solution

One of our strategists built an integration between HubSpot and Salesforce using native two way selective sync and an inclusion list to only send contacts to Salesforce that had been qualified by BDR in HubSpot. 

What’s the Bottom Line?

Clarity was created for the sales team on lead status in both HubSpot and Salesforce.  

Warning:  you may begin involuntarily dancing like this upon turning over your RevOps operations to RevPartners.

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Want to learn if you're doing RevOps well?

Check out our 5 stage revenue maturity model

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RevPartners is at Your Service

Does your revenue engine need built, fine-tuned, or supercharged?

To learn more about how to continuously improve operational efficiency and identify the gaps in your customer experiences, see what RevPartners can do for you!