StoryMetrix

Most CMOs and VP of Sales spend their time and focus on messaging, sales skills training, closing deals, branding, and lead generation. But due to the operational demands in the B2B sales process, most companies easily waste 20% of their revenue in the multiple systems and people hand offs that prospects encounter as they go from raw traffic, to website visitor, to prospect, to lead, to opportunity, to close.

The waste or leakage comes from breaks in the process introduced by the various administrators of the systems. For example:

• a single click of a CRM administrator’s mouse can send leads to the wrong rep
• a webmaster can unknowingly kill key pages that while they appear obscure to them, are key lead generators
• a sales rep the company and for whatever reason their leads are not reassigned
• a poorly trained sales rep has too a high a bar for creating opportunities and while they have a high close rate, their overall low efficiency goes undetected

The operational processes that have to work flawlessly from traffic click to closed deal are many, are complex, and are  not integrated.

Let’s do some numbers to illustrate the problem.

A site with 10,000 visitors, 10% site to lead conversion, 5% lead to opportunity conversion by the sales team, and a 25% opportunity to close ratio has an overall conversion rate of .0125% (10% x 5% x 25%) . To get 20% more revenue, the traditional approach is to drive more leads through the system.  Not enough focus, however, is usually placed on improving the efficiency of the system. All that has to happen to get 20% more revenue, is to increase that overall conversion rate to .015%.  Unless you are tirelessly measuring your operations, you can generally find this waste or leakage of prospects in your systems.

Leakage examples include:

• Site visitors that never make it to the marketing system due to web site content errors or form errors
• Marketing systems that don’t pass all the prospects to the CRM system through workflow errors
• CRM systems that don’t pass leads to the right territories due to inaccurate lead routing rules
• Reps that can’t find their leads in the CRM system due to the data model or difficult data views
• Reps that don’t follow the correct sorting process tossing aside too many leads that should be worked due to training and monitoring issues
• Reps that don’t follow the correct opportunity management process letting opportunities atrophy

404 Errors, poorly defined lead scoring rules, routing errors, impossible to use data views all keep prospects from getting to sales reps.

Each of these areas is rich enough to discuss in a separate blog posting over the coming weeks. But don’t wait, here are some simple reports you can run to find leakage and increase your B2B revenue today by reducing waste:

1. Ask your webmaster how many 404 errors are your site. 404 errors indicate web pages prospects are looking for or are linked to, but are missing. Fix this, get more leads, reduce leakage.
2. Ask your webmaster to walk you through the highest bounce rate pages. Segment out the heavy bounce rate pages like PPC landing pages, job pages, About US pages.  For the rest, find the top traffic pages and figure out how to fix the bounce.
3. Use Google Analytics to see the number of goal conversions on the site. Does this match the leads that show up in the CRM system? If not, do you know why? The presence of site goal conversions should indicate someone completed a form on your site. If you can’t find the leads in your CRM system or explain why some evidence of the form completion is not there,  something is wrong.
4. Run a report in your CRM system showing lead ownership over a 30 day period. Did they make it to the correct reps? Overly complex routing rules can put leads in the wrong territories, or worse assign them to managers to sort out where they quickly atrophy.  How about that sales rep who left the company last month? Who gets their leads?
5. Run a report in your CRM system showing the number of open leads by sales rep over 7 days old. One of the best ways to crush revenue is not follow up on leads. If there are overdue leads, what process is not being monitored to detect this?
6. Run a report in the CRM system showing rep disposition of leads. Are all the reps generally creating opportunities at the same rates over a 120 day period?  Dramatic differences in opportunity creation highlight a training need to stop the leakage of opportunities.

This is a rich topic – more to come. But first, do items 1-6 and see if you can increase overall conversion rates from .013% to .015%.