Why do Marketing and Sales departments need to collaborate? Sure, it’s nice, but beyond people getting on better together, how can it really impact the numbers, the outcomes for the business?

We’ve just spent a month at Redgate improving the collaboration between the two departments and we can see the direct and measurable impact on new opportunity generation. Here’s what we did and what happened. NB: None of this is rocket science, these all seem like really obvious things to do. But it’s quite rare to see such a direct impact on the numbers, so I wanted to share “What we actually did” as it may be useful to others – it can be easy to miss some of the basics.

What is Collaboration?

To start with the obvious, it’s nothing to do with whether you “get on” or not, whether you’re friends. We have great relationships between the marketing and sales departments, we get on incredibly well, and we talk all the time. But that’s not collaboration.

I feel there are three levels of what could be called “collaboration”:

1. Sitting in a (virtual) room telling each other things – what your plans are, what the latest results are, your ideas for the future.
2. Sitting in a (virtual) room listening to each other. A step up from above, actively finding out what others are working on, trying to understand their goals, and how you might fit in.
3. Sitting in a (virtual) room looking at the same numbers, working on a common goal

The first two are fine, and communication is great. But the third is what I consider true collaboration – what is our shared goal? What are the (shared) numbers showing? What can we do to fix this, together?

And it’s the third of these that we kicked off at the start of 2021, and has shown direct impact on the outcomes we care about.

What Did We Do?

Redgate has a good problem (and has had that problem for a while) – too many “leads”. We get around 500 leads a day (a lead being “Someone who expresses an interest in one of our offerings, and gives us some of their details”). Great, what’s the problem? The problem is that salespeople’s time is invaluable and scarce. If we asked Sales to follow up on all 500 leads every day, they would waste an incredible amount of time chasing low quality leads, tyre-kickers, people who will never buy from us and so on.

This is a standard problem in marketing/sales and the solution is some sort of qualification process. There are various models out there (the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall being one of the more common frameworks), but we have a pretty simple process – use Marketo to score leads on two perpendicular scales – engagement, and firmographics, then only pass the good Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs – the Glenngarry leads!) through to Sales. It’s generally around 10% of the total, or 50 a day. Then keep the rest back to be nurtured from within Marketo until they’re ready for prime time.

So far, so easy. But of course the point is that it isn’t easy. When you move from theory into practice, here are some of the problems you hit:

1. What you think is an MQL, is not was Sales think is an MQL
2. Worse – different sales folk in different offices have different views on what should or should count
3. Different salespeople are happy with, and capable of taking on leads at different “stages” – from very early “Can I have a chat with someone?” enquiries to late stage “Can I get a quote please?” orders
4. Even if you agree on criteria, what cadence should a salesperson follow with different types of leads? Three calls? A call, an email, then a call? When should they give up? How do you know if the process is being followed?
5. How much extra work should sales people do to add context and info for a lead? Marketo/Marketing provides some data (industry, job title, company info, web usage etc), but not as much as everyone would like
6. If you agree on lead qualification, how do you get the right leads to the right people in a timely manner?
7. How do you learn and adjust qualification over time? If you find leads of type X are gold and leads of type Y never seem to go anywhere, how do you change the qualification process quickly? How do you get that feedback back in to marketing from an enormous and global Sales team?

Most of this is operational – needing marketing operations and sales operations teams to work together alongside the rest of their colleagues. And there’s a lot to figure out here. But these are the things we did in January to try and tackle some of these problems. Not everything went smoothly, but enough went well to achieve noticeable differences in the numbers. And everything here was a joint project between various people in Marketing and Sales at different levels.

• Reporting. We started by putting together some basic reports of MQLs and Opportunity numbers. We focused on “Consistent, simple but imprecise” over “Complicated but accurate”. And we spent time running these through with Marketing and Sales leadership, to see if we had a common agreement that we were looking at the right things.
• Definitions. Next, we realised there were a lot of different definitions out there – what was an “Inbound lead”? What was a “Good download”? What should we do with “renewal referrals”? So we spent a lot of time talking these through – in 95% of cases, we were all aligned to start with, so we spent time on the 5%. As an example – what should we do if a customer has asked a renewal rep to add a license on to an order? Is that a sales person upsell, or just a customer enquiry that came through a circuitous route? (We decided on the latter btw)
• Lead Types. We spent a lot of time simplifying the types of leads we’re interested in. From analysis of 2020 data we realised that the vast majority of leads came from a small set of sources – inbound emails/phone calls, web orders, downloads & free trials, events/webinars, reaching out to current customers, and prospecting out to new customers. There were then about 10 additional sources, most of which generated less than 1% of leads each – we simplified the model to the few that really matter.
• Lead Flow. Armed with an understanding of different lead types, who should get what? And how quickly? We spent a lot of time with operational teams working out the processes then implementing manual processes (we’ll automate later…) to make sure all the leads found the right home (I like to think of this as “No lead left unturned”)
• Follow up. Is every lead being followed up? With the right cadence? Again, some great work from our SalesOps team, and Sales Leadership making sure this was happening.
• The Feedback Loop. We now track which leads are converting and which are too early stage or low value. We’ve already made one round of changes to the qualification process, and expect many many more as we learn over the coming months.

What Impact Did it Have?

This is what matters. If you did all of the above, you can give yourself a pat on the back, but it only matters if it made a difference to the numbers. So did it?

Yes it did. I can’t post all of the charts here, but in summary:

• January opportunity generation (before we’d actually made any changes) was more or less the same year-on-year. A bit disappointing, but we are in the middle of a pandemic.
• So far, February opportunity generation has been between 20% and 30% up year-on-year, after we made the changes described above.

Could this just be luck/the market? It could be, but poring through the data for “What actually happened here?” it clearly shows that the new opportunities are coming from the right leads being placed in the hands of the right sales people with the right information at the right time. Sales people feel like they’re getting decent leads from Marketing. Marketing people feel that all their leads are being “maximised”. And most importantly customers are getting the service they expect – help from Redgate when needed, and left alone when that’s what they want.

I’ve been watching the figures every day like a hawk, to wait for things to go wrong, but the increase is very consistent.

Looking back over January, this effort would have failed if it hadn’t been for us taking a collaborative approach. As mentioned at the start, these things aren’t rocket science. So why didn’t we do it all years ago? Well, a number of reasons (having the right people in place for example), but primarily, that taking the more forensic, tougher and collaborative approach was necessary to proceed. We could have tried doing these things in isolation, but it would never have landed as well as it did.