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 house team of RevOps professionals guiding their GTM motions and analyzing their models. Oftentimes, random sales reps or marketing team members will be tasked with revenue operations as a service-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 through a revenue operations as a service model, ensuring better coordination between sales and customer success teams.
Areas/Topics Assessed
Here are some examples of the areas a Revenue Operations as a Service company may look at while mapping out your marketing strategy and processes:
- Net revenue retention
- Data integration
- Marketing to sales handoff
- Sales stages
- Lead scoring
- Customer lifecycle stages
- Lead status
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 sales pipeline position of a lead within the current marketing or sales cycle and helps to drive what actions should be taken by team members to move them forward. It is beneficial as it helps to confirm that no leads fall through cracks, ensures there is less friction in the handoff between sales and customer success teams, and aligns team members to prioritize and plan next action steps.
Stage Definitions
Clear and agreed upon lead status definitions for each stage of the customer journey 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 leads are a crucial part of the marketing strategy as they have engaged with lead status options like 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. Customer success teams may get involved if these leads require personalized follow-up, like scheduling 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, booked a meeting, and are actively engaged in the sales pipeline, with a deal associated.
- Unqualified: Leads that will never be a fit for your product/service
When Does it Occur?
Lead status occurs on the left side of the sales pipeline, where team members work together to track and update each lead's movement through the funnel.
Pre-Requisites
For most companies offering Revenue Operations 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 options are 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 sales and customer success ownership, ensuring no confusion about lead ownership or follow-up responsibilities.
- 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 them with defined lead status options, so team members have clear visibility on where each lead stands.
- 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 option assigned, except lifecycle stage subscribers, lifecycle stage contacts, and beyond that (e.g., LTV), ensuring alignment across sales and customer success teams.
Bottom line: data integrity and consistency = success.
Roadmap
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 options for existing ones, turning on workflows to automatically update lead status, and building custom reporting on leads moving through the funnel
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?
When lead status options are done right, you can expect that all contacts will have clear ownership (marketing or sales and customer success), that there are clear sales processes to recycle and unqualify leads, there is organization around the pre-deal sales pipeline for the sales team, and all contacts are segmented correctly based on lists and workflows.
Reporting Examples
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.
