Adult supervision for sales & marketing…

Part 2 of the Coral guide to GTM execution

Previously we wrote about how climate startups can get traction in the enterprise including our approach to top of funnel sales strategies and tactics. Today we’re going to cover how your operations team can partner with and support your sales team to optimize top of funnel performance. 

I am definitely biased, but having a killer RevOps team is one of the most underrated functions within GTM orgs. Great RevOps teams are your wide-angle lens helping you run better, faster, cheaper. For climate companies this is vital because they tend to have longer feedback loops between POC and commercial scale, so getting the measurement and instrumentation right to be able to critically inspect the business is key. These metrics help you understand performance, make informed decisions, and effectively communicate progress to both internal and external stakeholders. 

If you can only do one thing, do this.

Forecasting starts at the top of the funnel, understanding lead volume, lead to opportunity conversion, and pipeline, which impacts everything from campaign performance to sales hiring to how worried leadership is about missing goals. Forecasting is also one of the most misunderstood skills, as it is subject to a deeply complex set of incentives from sales, marketing, leadership, and the board.

The single thing to get right here is getting your VP of Sales and VP of Marketing to agree on:

• What is your current pipeline?

• How has the pipeline number changed since last month?

• What numbers and how should these numbers be surfaced to leadership and the board?

If you have had to facilitate this conversation you know just how difficult it is to get your VP of Sales and VP of Marketing to agree. And if we’re being honest, nobody wants to have this conversation and the vast majority of folks incorrectly believe they can get around it by having two different versions of the metric. However, the only thing worse than this conversation is dealing with the consequences from not having it. Without this alignment, the Marketing and Sales teams will play a game of hot potato, passing the blame when revenue goals are missed, instead of partnering together to come up with a plan to get back on track. 

This is the step to get right. 

Key Metrics

Once you’ve documented and received sign-off from your VP of Sales and VP of Marketing on the previous section, you can start building out other metrics. To optimize the top of funnel sales process, the key metrics to focus on are:

• Lead Volume

  • Number of leads generated

  • Source of leads (webinars, cold emails, podcasts, etc). The marketing and sales teams will use a combination of content marketing, webinars, social media, cold emailing, and industry events to generate leads. To start, use a first touch attribution model and in a few quarters (or years or never) you can revisit a multi-touch attribution approach. 

• Lead Quality

  • Percentage of leads that fit the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

  • Lead scoring metrics based on company size, industry, engagement. Use your CRM (we recommend HubSpot) to automate lead scoring. This will help your sales leadership with lead routing and prioritization. 

• Conversion Rates

  • Lead to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) conversion rate

  • MQL to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) conversion rate

  • Create clear definitions of sales stages (eg. lead, MQL, SQL, opportunity) and the criteria for moving leads through the pipeline. This will be another area where your VP of Sales and VP of Marketing will disagree; depending on how MQL, SQL, and opportunity are defined the Marketing or Sales team will appear to have better performance.    

• Pipeline Velocity

  • Average time from lead generation to first meeting

  • In upcoming posts we’ll expand to average time between sales stages. To get started, get a whiteboard (or a big piece of paper if you’re feeling old school) and draw your business process flow from initial client inquiry to the final product delivery, detailing each step. This will help you visualize your operations. 

Key Metrics ✓ Dashboards ✓, What’s Next? 

Metrics can provide a clear picture of how well your marketing and sales strategies are working, but you need to take the next step and explain what the numbers mean for the business. Set up a weekly or biweekly meeting to review the metrics together with your marketing and sales leadership. Use the data to have a conversation to identify areas of improvement in the top of funnel process. Your value add here is helping these teams understand which strategies yield the best ROI to enable better allocation of resources. Again, everything about RevOps should tie back to helping the company operate better, faster, cheaper.  

Provide recommendations based on the data. Use the data to refine the ICP definition based on conversion rates paired with customer feedback. Track performance for lead generation at each channel so marketing can allocate spend to the most effective ones. Conduct A/B tests on email subject lines, landing pages, call to action statements. 

Stick with it.

The last piece of advice here is stick with it. Consistency is key. Align on metric definitions and choose a method for data analysis and stick with it. The goal is to create a reliable process for collecting, analyzing, and acting on data. Regularly review your approach, but avoid changing tactics too often. You’ll end up more lost than found comparing apples to oranges and expecting to get a clear answer. 

Wrapping Up

Next we’ll cover mid-funnel strategies for turning interest into action to advance prospects through the sales funnel.  Until then, give us feedback! We’d love to hear what you found resonant or helpful, what didn’t land, and please send us any questions that you’d like us to expand further. 

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