Will Riley | Address Front-of-the-Funnel Demand Generation to Begin Improving Rev Ops - 013

May 4, 2021

Will Riley works with chief revenue officers of the clients of FitzMartin, and he’s talking about demand generation, which for many companies represents an early-stage misalignment. 

This conversation is part of our continuing discussion around revenue operations and why it’s such a big focus right now. Rev ops is a function that consolidates, organizes, and improves communication between three teams that are typically siloed: marketing, sales, and customer success. 

Why Rev Ops, and why now?

• These three teams – sales, marketing, and customer success – have never had so much data and people haven’t learned yet how to talk and share that information. 
• If you add innovation to those three segments, all four of those segments impact revenue, so it’s surprising that we’ve allowed them to be siloed. Rev Ops encourages us to align them, focus them, and coordinate these complicated pieces. 
• The operational cost savings for businesses in that 100-employee range is about $420,000 EBITA if they implement this properly. That results in a lift of 16 percent just by teaching departments to talk to each other. 
• Audits help find the trouble spots in an organization and create a set of tasks for each area that helps them find the places where they can improve. 
• Organizations can’t achieve closed-loop attribution until they fix the front of the funnel which is demand generation. 

Demand Generation:

• B2B companies often operate with misalignment, and there’s a revenue cost to that situation. 
• Demand generation involves the early-stage of the process before anybody even contemplates buying your service or product, to the point where they are considering a purchase. 
• Most often, people have a traffic problem; they aren’t getting enough traffic to their site to create conversion. You should always see a traffic increase. Measure that by creating a benchmark and measuring over a quarter to see what you achieve. 
• It’s not just volume; it’s getting the right people to your website. Good revenue operations involve identifying ways to be more efficient and effective.
• Rev Ops can help marketers focus on lead quality instead of lead volume. It can help your team identify what to keep and what to get rid of. 
• Some important numbers:
• • Data shows you have five minutes to contact your leads 
  • 78 percent of customers buy from the first responder
  • Sales conversions decrease 391 percent after one minute
  • Longer than five minutes is an 80 percent decrease in lead qualification
  • 55 percent of companies take more than five days to respond to leads
• This means the marketing handoff becomes very important.
• Begin the Rev Ops process with an audit to understand where you are, including an audit of your website traffic, content strategy, conversion rates, and consumer engagement.

Episode resources:

• To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page. 
• You can also connect with Will Riley on LinkedIn. 
• Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives of rapidly growing businesses; and executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull. FitzMartin is a sales-first company that is driven by those things, and we want to pursue those things, and we know that you do, too.