poweredbycaffeine

☕️

Sales Leaders Only

I've been talking to a ton of CROs and VPs, and they truly have no idea why or how their S/BDRs are focusing their efforts beyond seeing the activity numbers. The main reason is a lack of tracking by channel, which makes it impossible to replicate with new reps or even other existing teams.

How are you currently measuring your top of funnel success? Is it a report in your CRM (massive risk for human error)? Are your AEs asking where the prospect first found you?

🔥 Revenue

👍 Sales Process

👨‍🌾 SDR

14 comments

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RandyLahey

Politicker

Account Executive

I'm no sales leader, but I will still comment.
Where I am, we rely on manual inputs to track each inbound-sourced deal, think Web ad, LinkedIn, etc.
Our SDRs need to manually select this in SFDC, and it is rarely accurate. As a matter of principle I always ask my prospects where they initiated their request.
That habit isn't shared across other AEs though.
In a previous gig, we had a killer sales ops head who had configured TOFU reports on HubSpot so that this source capturing was effectively automated. Gave us as a sales org a much clearer activity of what was going on.

Phillip_J_Fry

Opinionated

Director of Revenue

We track it in our CRM, where reps are SUPPOSED TO mark the mode of outreach, but it's about as accurate as you'd imagine.

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

☕️

Do you think Deal Source is more valuable/more reliable?

Revenue_Rambo

Politicker

Director, Revenue Enablement

Just becomes a Chicken/Egg argument.

What was the trigger? Post on LinkedIn that brought them to website? SDR stalking because they downloaded a whitepaper (To which marketing will claim it was the whitepaper and not the SDR)?

Ultimately you need to cross reference data points. Campaigns vs Collateral vs Outreach vs Time

Revenue_Rambo

Politicker

Director, Revenue Enablement

We had lead attribution (though as you pointed out it was constantly not filled out or incorrect). To help combat this we started having the AEs ask how they heard of us during the qualification call and this was expected to be logged into a CRM field.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

I love how this solution is the same thing I was doing/having my team do 10 years ago..

Not foolproof by any means, but if the AEs are coachable and thorough then it can be really solid.

Revenue_Rambo

Politicker

Director, Revenue Enablement

Yeah we had a CRO that just wanted to replay the same shit they did 15 years ago no matter how out dated it was.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

That's often annoying, but sometimes the simplest method is the best. Especially when you hit a wall and don't have a more high tech solution available.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

Yes and no. You also have to grow and adapt with the times. See RTO mandates and how unsuccessful they are LOL

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

Oh yea, that's a GLARING example of where it won't work.

But sometimes people like to use tech for the sake of it.

MRK47

Tycoon

Head of Growth

Agree with this...we used SF and made the 'source / how you heard about us' field a forced one that must be completed before an opp can be saved. Human error is inevitable so better to offer a drop down pick list rather than a free form text field. We also had a discovery checklist document that included those questions which must be completed and saved to the account record in SF - helps with random checks/balances as well as ensuring full info sharing as part of handoff process to Customer Success but it's not reportable so couldn't populate a SF dashboard/report.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

Dropdown is key. Free form is awful, and makes reporting hard.

We're implementing HubSpot now, and I was surprised that Closed Lost reasons was that by default. Just changed it to a drop down and made it a necessary condition to move the deal to that stage.

medhardwaredr

Politicker

Director of Sales NA

We are very regimented and structured in our Salesforce efforts. From stages to leads to contacts blah blah, we track everything for each opportunity including lead source and whether it was inbound/outbound. It’s only as good as the input from the rep for white space however we are channel heavy so leads hit constantly via deal registration or pricing concessions requests.
Force the channel to register their deals, make them input the oppy, contact and company in exchange for a discount (most industries are 5%). Works great
Once you have an opportunity follow it along each stage, and measure closed won/losses. If the stages are set well you can see at what stage you are losing deals and winning them and address it and replicate

ChumpChange

Politicker

Channel Manager

We utilize marketing enrichment tech stack coupled with some nifty SF automations that maps everything to a specific category (channel/partner, marketing campaign, inbound or outbound) that our entire sales team utilizes. We ran into the same issues that many other commented on which is having the human operator manually update it. Now it's all baked into the workflow and so far it's been running fantastic. We even added a failsafe where we allow the sales teams to manually change it if needed which is rare.