Note: This post was originally published in 2018 but has been updated for relevancy and new information on the topic.
In parts 1 and 2 of the sales and marketing alignment series, we talked about mapping the buyer’s journey to the funnel and defining lead stages and statuses. For the third and final part of the series, we’ll be discussing SLAs (service level agreements).
Having clear and measurable SLAs is necessary to ensure sales and marketing teams drive the same actions. On a recent episode of Marketing Ops Confessions, Maria Velasquez, Director of Demand Gen at Feroot shared the importance of SLAs and how to drive alignment with effective SLAs.
Let’s dive into SLA frameworks and how to get started building an SLA report today.
When developing or iterating on sales SLAs consider organizing by lead stage to determine the goal, engagement focus, and follow-up timing. For example, hand-raisers (who are much closer to revenue) require much faster follow-up than MQLs who may be interested in content but not necessarily as ready for a sales conversation. While follow-up time can vary based on the lead stage, the name of the game is moving quickly. Faster follow-up yields higher conversion rates. The goal and type of content delivered will also depend on the lead stage.
Here’s what we suggest from working with hundreds of marketing and sales teams.
But wait, there’s more! Don’t stop at sales SLAs.
Marketing SLAs are often overlooked but are a critical piece in the alignment puzzle.
Having both sales and marketing SLAs in place ensures accountability on both sides.
Important components to track from a marketing perspective include:
Here’s another example of how to think about your sales and marketing service-level agreements.
Now that we’ve discussed the importance of SLAs and frameworks to help you get started, here is a step-by-step guide to building an SLA in Salesforce today.
While other CRM will soon be documented (such as HubSpot), the focus of this "how to" is really on setting up Salesforce and building Sales SLA reports to measure the consistency of your SDR team's follow up.
To create the SLA Report, you'll need to have the right information available at the Lead level. The overall idea is to create a “Time to Touch” field on the Lead object. Whenever that field's value is 0, the lead was never touched. This means that your reps never got to reaching out to that lead (or that it wasn't tracked). Whenever the field value is greater than 0, the lead was touched and the field value will is the time difference between the lead creation date and the date of the first touch. We’ll be considering activity completion dates to achieve this. Activities can either be Calls, Emails or Meetings (but you can easily customize this list). This tutorial leverages Rollup Helper, which is a free app on the AppExchange marketplace and a great way to get started without building custom computations or ETL.
Install Rollup Helper from the AppExchange
Create the following custom fields at the Lead Level:
Create a custom filter with the following criteria: Name = Sales Touches
There you have it, you can now start measuring your average, min/max time to contact leads based on channels, reps... This is the first step to being able to identify the biggest areas of improvement for your SDR team.
We’re all feeling it, volume isn’t what it used to be. These circumstances can create a lot of temptation to open up the funnel and care less about quality. If you are still looking at volume based goals for your team it almost feels like you have to, but is it worth it? Learn how to get your team to focus on quality even when quantity is going down.
Read StoryIt’s tough out there, and while we can’t change outside factors, what we can do is align sales and marketing around shared goals to work more efficiently.
Read StoryWe've found there's a goldmine of potential revenue waiting to be unlocked within your current funnel. No extra headcount, no extra spend.
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