At Varicent, we’ve designed a program to help with this. It’s called the Silo Breaking Workshop. The goal is to increase alignment between marketing sales, improve conversion rates, and drive revenue. We’ve run it with dozens of companies, and now we’re sharing how you can do it with your team.
This is something you can do today, with the resources you already have, and will change your trajectory for 2020.
If you’ve read the Measurable Lead Model, you know the problem really starts with the term MQL – it has “Marketing” in its name and immediately changes the conversation to how we measure marketing’s contribution to revenue. To learn more about this, read the Measurable Lead Model, which we’ll reference throughout this post.
This language is important – with companies we work with, we’ve found that Marketing has a definition of what an MQL is, and Sales has a definition of who they sell to. In theory, those two things should line up exactly, but in most cases, they don’t.
Try it out with your own team: ask someone in Marketing what an MQL is. Ask someone in Sales. Ask a few folks who sit beside each other! You’re likely to get very different answers.
Improve nurture model
Recycle leads rather than drop them
Adopt a nurture model that addresses the reasons the buyer is not ready - yet
Adopt clear language that all employees understand including new team members. This single change will improve efficiency across sales, marketing, and success.
Only about 25-30% of MQLs were being worked by the sales team and it was unclear why.
A few theories were:
The Silo-Breaking Workshop helped the company identify:
A high-growth tech company, the sales team had doubled in size two years in a row. In that time, they organically built out multiple territories, new segmentation, new teams that handle renewals – you get the idea, but revenue growth hit a wall despite lead numbers increasing.
The Silo-Breaking Workshop helped the company identify:
A SaaS company had grown fast (70-90% YoY growth) on inbound leads and scaled up the sales development organization quickly into specialized inbound and outbound teams. However, the team viewed their leads as a linear funnel – they didn’t have a concept of recycling leads, which left the majority of Marketing efforts untouched.
The Silo-Breaking Workshop helped the company identify:
Your sales reps are closest to the buyer – and the people who have to work these leads. You need their perspective and buy-in. It’s tempting to keep sales reps working, but they’re the ones with the answers.
It’s important to have all these teams involved because they all have completely different perspectives on the funnel and your buyer, and each have a stake in executing this work after the workshop.
If you see this as a useful exercise, but don’t want to bring certain people or teams off of what they are working on to participate, you’re not going to achieve what you want out of the workshop. Everyone needs to be involved, have a voice, and hear each other out.
When it comes to running the workshop, the best option is to find a third party facilitator – like a board member, advisor, or outside consultant
The facilitator can ask questions without political consequence or motivation – but if your team members ask the same questions, it could feel like you’re poking the bear. Third-parties don't have in-depth knowledge about how your funnel works, so everyone has to explain it to them like it's brand new – and they’ll explain it in a way that’s different than if they're explaining it to a co-worker.
The workshop is interview driven. The goal is to ask time-based questions about your funnel, leaving all acronyms at the door, and document it as you go. Don’t be afraid to follow the random sidebars as that is where the good insights usually come from.
Time-based questions follow the structure of your funnel, but without a funnel model:
It’s important to set the stage properly for this workshop, and there are three main things you need to get across to the workshop participants:
Future state - this is about how it should work, not how it works today.
No blame - it doesn’t matter how we got here, it matters what we’re going to do about it.
Be open - be brutally honest about what’s working (and not working)
The point of this exercise is to answer questions like who we sell to, when we sell to them, how we sell to them, and why we sell to them in plain English – that means no acronyms.
To do that, we recommend using time-based questions. Here are some examples:
Using time-based questions will force you and your team to think differently about your funnel asking for definitions of things that already have meaning in your business (like MQL, SQL, etc.) When you ask, "What tells us someone's going to buy now,” opens up the discussion much more and lets you have meaningful conversations about what is happening in your deals.
Instead of asking:
Ask: