Once you have the math figured out for your SLA, you'll need to spend some time thinking through the logistics of delivering on it. There are strategies you can use to improve the way both teams deliver on their promises. Let's start with marketing deliverables, your SLA is going to require that marketing delivers a certain number of leads or a certain amount of lead value every month. It's great to know exactly what marketing has to deliver within a given month, but if you don't pay attention to pacing, you can run into serious trouble, here's Mark again. >> Yes, so when it came to measuring marketing that became at scale, that became a pretty precise engine to run, right? Because you could imagine a chart where it's like okay, Mr Marketer, you're supposed to generate $100,000 of lead value for the mid-market team this month. Okay, so every day we can draw a straight line that goes from 0 to $100,000 of value spent over 30 days. Now You can't have marketing run this super campaign in week one, get 200,000 and go to sleep for three weeks. I just don't have the sales people to call those leads and you're going to waste a bunch of them. Similarly you can have marketing go to sleep for the first three weeks of the month and then run a super campaign at the end, I got reps sitting around for three weeks doing nothing. So, when you have five salespeople, six salespeople, not as big a deal, but when are you going to start to scale where are you going to start to grow? You've got to have a much more precise engine to hug that line really closely and make sure that the lead capacity you're sending to your sales team matches the sales capacity you have to receive it. >> As Mark said this matters more once you start to grow, but it's an important thing to keep in mind regardless of what your current sizes, implementing an SLA is a recipe for growth. So you need to be looking forward and preventing problems before they start. As marketing gets better at delivering the right number of leads every month, they'll need to also get better at delivering those leads at a sensible cadence. And keep in mind too that the shape of that line might need to change from time to time. It could be that there are industry events or seasonal factors that make it so sales is really busy in certain months and less busy in other months. If it's a predictable ebb and flow, marketing can shoot to turn down the lead generation during the busy months, and turn it up during the slower months to help things out. A straight line is the best place to start, but always feel free to adjust if you think there's a better way to achieve your goals. For sales, the SLA requires contacting leads within a certain amount of time, determining this timeframe is one of the most delicate parts of designing the terms of an SLA. Marketing deliverables are calculated using math, you look at how much revenue you need in a month to meet your company's goals. And you figure out exactly how many leads you need to hit that goal, but how quickly should sales contact those leads? The correct answer is as quickly as possible, and even though that isn't specific enough to go into an SLA, that should always be the goal your teams have in mind, why? Because the faster you contact your leads, particularly those hand raisers, the more likely they are to close. Here's Josh Harcus, founder of Hüify and author of a closing culture. >> In fact give you some real hardcore data on this, most companies call MQL or leads, it's kind of with overall study states within 42 hours of them becoming a lead. Studies show if you call them within 5 minutes versus waiting 24 hours, you increase the chances of closing them 1000 times, not 1000%, 1000 times. So just that move alone knowing that all of your competition is most likely calling leads within 42 hours, that's really the reason of why sales and marketing alignment matters. We saw that firsthand, our company really rallied behind and we practiced what we preached, in one year we six extra our revenue. And it was because even down to customer success, we were completely aligned every lead needs to be called within five minutes. It doesn't matter if the entire sales team is busy, out to a conference, whatever someone needs to get on the phone with the lead. And so we would even have customer success, people jumping on the phone and saying, hey, I just want to make sure I called you. It seems like you had some questions, I might be able to answer some of them, maybe not. I know a few people who can definitely answer these questions but go ahead lay on me and people overwhelming positive response. They were like, wow, thank you so much, like yeah, I do have some questions. >> That's amazing, and it's worth noting that Hüify was a seven person company when they implemented this rule. So it isn't as though a large team is required to hit that goal of contacting leads within five minutes. And if there's a potential to six extra year revenue, it's probably worth the effort, that's why the timeframe for contacting leads is the most delicate part of the SLA. On the one hand, faster is always better, on the other hand, you have to have a high level of dedication to be able to pull off a Hüify style, five minute follow up. So work with your sales team to figure out what the fastest reasonable timeframe is and then look for ways to shorten it as time goes on. And there are lots of ways that you might speed up your response time, if you're a small company like Hüify, it might require getting people outside of sales involved like Hüify did. If you're a bigger company, you might want to make some organizational changes. Here's Laura Poggi, vice president of marketing North America and global marketing infrastructure at PeopleDoc, explaining how they reorganized their teams to improve their response time. Another thing that we did recently which has yielded great results so far is we've actually decided to move our inside sales team or business development team into the marketing organization for better alignment. So that does a couple things that allows us to work way more closely with the inside sales team. And we were working with them pretty closely before but to actually take a look at the messaging because oftentimes that team, it may be the first touch or a real human interaction that a prospect has with our organization. So you really need that to be a strong interaction and a great interaction and how do we make sure that we're really staying true to who we are, and to the messaging that we want people to hear, and really helping people find the information that they need. So that's been great and ever since we've done that, we've increased the number of qualified meetings that the team has generated by 60%. >> Impressive, so put some serious thought into how you can contact people faster, but there's another question you need to consider as well. What happens if your sales team can't get ahold of someone? When should they try again? How many times should they try before giving up the? The answers to these questions depend on the sorts of people you're selling to. For us here at HubSpot, Marco Lagi did a ton of analysis and found that the optimal calling pattern for our sales teams was different, depending on whether they were calling enterprises, mid market companies or small businesses. If you have the ability to perform that sort of analysis, do it and see what you find, but if not, don't worry, Mark has some advice just for you. >> It takes a lot of effort to do your own analysis and it takes a lot of volume to do your own analysis, right? So in the beginning, if you're a newer company or you just haven't gone through the analysis yet, look at some of the market research and come up with some subjective guesses, as to what these things are. Come up with some guesses as to what the ideal call patterns are, come up with some guesses around the lead value even though you haven't studied it yet. Put in the infrastructure and then start measuring it right ,and at least it'll give you that metrics cadence that you can speak to. And a quarter from now, six months from now you'll start to have some historic data to compare it against, and say we really undervalue this lead or you know what it turns out that we're actually under calling these types of lead segment. And so I would start with the market research and some qualitative subjective sort of guesses on this stuff to put the infrastructure in place. And if you've got the ops bandwidth and you've got the volume then check against that and bring it to your and your data over time. >> So if you don't have enough data or if you don't have the ability to perform an in depth analysis, don't worry, remember even having a very basic SLA in place will set you apart from the competition. The best thing you can do is start with your best guess and iterate towards something more sophisticated. So start with an SLA that requires marketing to deliver a certain number of leads each month and require sales to contact those leads within a specific timeframe. Once you get that in place, start getting more sophisticated in the kinds of leads marketing sends to sales and start looking for ways to optimize the timeframe and cadence of your sales outreach. And from there, you'll be able to iterate your way towards an SLA, that completely revolutionizes the way your company performs. [MUSIC]
