The One Day Sales and Marketing Operations Tune Up

Yesterday’s blog walked through the Twenty Questions that all VPs of Sales and VPs of Marketing should be able to answer on a Monday about last week’s performance. High velocity lead generation models require significant operational focus. If you can’t answer these questions, what do you do? Below is a one day agenda for an offsite that by the end of the day, your team should have a good idea of the operational soft spots that exist in your organization. Follow the agenda, get the correct people who have access to the data and combine them with the people responsible for driving the various metrics and you can have an extremely productive one day data review. Your head might hurt at the end of the day, but your operations will improve over time which means more revenue for the company.

Here is your Marketing “Getaway “Agenda.

Time	Topic	Who	Description
0800	Sales and Buying Cycle Overview	Front Line Sales Manager	Map out the steps a customer goes through when buying. During the course of the day, see how measurements map to this process.
0830	Traffic Study	Webmaster or marketer	Look at all the site statistics by source and goal conversion. Identify traffic makeup and compare against averages. Note goal conversion rates and compare against averages. Record expected leads to sales based on goal conversion rates.
0900	Social Media	Social Media marketer	Look at social media statistics paying particular attention to match up the statistics against site traffic. Include YouTube stats, community stats and third party community sites. Do Facebook followers for example, translate into traffic for you?
0930	Paid Programs	Marketing Programs	Check out PPC spending, cost per clicks, traffic by sites. Investigate other paid programs especially PPL, webinar. Record cost per name, cost per lead, opportunity conversion rates. Look for click farms, leads that don’t convert and other sources of poor spending.
1000	Referring Sites	PR/Marketing	Document the top referring sites. Determine which sites can be influenced through program spending, focused attention and other means.
1030	Site Health	Webmaster	Review site health statistics for the week. Pay attention to 404 errors, SEO moz rankings, keyword rankings.
1100	Calendar	Marketing	Review the weekly marketing calendar to validate how it will generate traffic over the coming weeks based on the traffic study from the morning. Pay attention to proposed nurturing campaigns, product launches and other industry events.
1200	Lunch
1201	Lead Scoring	Marketing Admin	Understand lead scoring methods. Check for sales agreement and agreement with the sales cycle. Determine how many leads went to sales last week.
1300	Nurturing	Marketing Ops	Understand the nurturing process. Measure the database size and the last four weeks of emails sent to calculate turnover rate. Validate click through rates by comparing traffic amounts.
1400	Leads to Sales	Sales Ops	Note total leads delivered to sales last week, territory assignments and the ability of sales reps to find the leads. If marketing says 1,000 leads went to sales, can the sales manager find all 1,000 leads assigned to the right reps?
1500	Sales Follow Up	Sales Ops	Determine the status of all leads sent to sales last week. Note opportunity create rate, bad data rate. Record calls and emails by rep. Compare against averages. What is the capacity of the sales team each week to make phone calls?
1600	End of Day	All	Summarize next steps, determine how to repeat this process monthly, then weekly in shorter and shorter periods of time.