Camela Thompson, Head of Marketing at the RevOps Co-op, offers a different perspective on bad quarters and how to seize an opportunity to make a difference.
A lousy quarter is difficult. Bad quarters (plural) can bring out the worst in leadership. While these leaders can choose how they react, it's a cutthroat world, particularly in the United States.
According to The Bridge Group, the average tenure for CROs and CMOs in B2B SaaS is 8-10 quarters. The VP of Customer Success has an even shorter tenure. These department heads know that if things don't go well, their heads are on the chopping block, even if the market is bad.
Even though it's well known that blaming other departments or the product or the market for a failed goal is taboo, it's inevitable when people get desperate. Too often, RevOps is thrown in the middle of these arguments as leaders look for data to bolster their opinion that it is not their fault.
So, what can revenue operations do when the company goals aren't met? A lot if you know where to look.
When things are rolling along with targets being hit and bonuses being paid out, it's easy to cling to the adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." When a company hits a bad quarter – or a string of bad quarters – everyone becomes more open to exploring possible changes.
And this IS a good thing.
Humans are funny because they like doing what's comfortable and sticking with the status quo. As soon as you start to miss goals, the inspection of the process and internal training begins.
Before we get into areas to research by department, I'd like to take a moment to give revenue operations a pep talk:
You know the data better than anyone! Don't assume that the people around you see the same things. It's also important to not only look for patterns and anomalies but also to understand what could be causing the change and research it before you raise it. A jump start on the diagnosis is a great way to build a business case that every executive can get behind.
There's a laundry list of things that can go wrong in marketing, and most revolve around an inability (or lack of skill sets needed) to tie marketing efforts to revenue.
The biggest opportunity to impact marketing is to analyze how campaign data is integrated with your CRM. Many marketers don't view the CRM as a means to communicate with sales what they care about most—the CTA the prospect performed! The prospect's action is closely tied to conversions (next to fit).
Did they request a demo?
Fill out a form to download something?
Marketing rightfully cares about what the person clicked before performing the CTA. They spend a lot of their budget on ads to drive people to perform the CTA. And they get a ton of pressure from the CEO and CFO to defend that spend!
What's best for marketing conflicts with what's best for sales (this pattern repeats itself too often in B2B). It's up to you to figure out how to structure campaign and campaign member data to cater to sales' needs without losing visibility into what marketing needs to justify.
I've done this by capturing CTA information at the campaign level and UTM data on the campaign member using custom fields. This gives a running history of UTM data (instead of writing it to a field repeatedly overwritten on the Lead and Contact object) that can be grouped in campaign member reports.
The other way to help marketing is by understanding the data review cadence they do or do not have and assisting non-data-inclined marketers with reports and (more importantly) insights. It's common for marketers to try different tactics. It's challenging to pivot quickly and figure out how to tie reports together (Did I mention no marketing platforms have the same data schema? SUPER frustrating!)
Paying attention to how money spent converts into bookings will help your marketing team make better decisions and build a better budget plan for the following year.
Sales managers know their forecast information inside and out. Otherwise, they don't have a job! CEOs and boards hate to be surprised by a different final number than what was promised a week before quarter close.
Although analyzing forecast accuracy can yield significant benefits, opportunities lurk in data your sales management team rarely has time to review.
Researching opportunity health and time to close by segment are good places to start. Sales management often misquotes time in stage and conversion rates by stage. Analyzing them by won, lost, and open and then looking at different customer types can reveal useful patterns.
Another area that is ripe for analysis is the ideal customer profile. This definition impacts every part of the go-to-market team. It defines who marketing targets, who sales sells to (and how), and which customers are the highest priority.
Most organizations I've worked for have defined their ideal customer profile by analyzing existing customer data and finding patterns in firmographic and technographic data. This is a great start! However, it's critical to consider how much it costs your company to maintain that customer type.
The formula to analyze whether a customer profile is a fit should be:
Or Lifetime Value divided by Customer Acquisition Cost plus Cost of Goods Sold.
Understanding how much your organization needs to stretch itself to accommodate demanding customers who aren't quite a fit can expose a bad fit that seemed like a great fit to sales. If a customer asks for customizations (development) and extra support, it can quickly cut into the money they paid upfront.
If sales has a lot of initial success with a profile but they churn at a high rate, it can be difficult to convince the marketing sales teams not to sell into that profile. Creating a North Star Metric (to quote Ryan Milligan) tied to customer retention and understanding which levers to pull in compensation plans can curb the wrong behavior.
Despite the emphasis on NRR and expansion business in today's market, customer success is often neglected. They rarely get the same level of support as the sales team or are forced to divide dedicated support resource time between operations and their "day job."
Team hand-offs are always a great place to look for efficiency gains. Is sales giving customer success the information they need to onboard a customer quickly and effectively? Is sales setting the right expectations for what your product can and can't do? Are they losing engagement at the point of contract? What's the time to value?
Analyzing the onboarding process can also uncover many opportunities for operationalizing the process and creating repeatability.
Finally, helping customer success find ways to prove the return on investment for their customers by exploring the metrics that may be positively impacted after implementation and working with the customer to develop benchmarks and measure trends can help your entire company attract more customers and retain existing customers by creating a stronger argument for their finance team.
Remember that the leadership team is feeling more stress than they let on. They're defending their teams and looking for reasons that will convince the CEO and board to keep them employed.
It's natural for them to be defensive, so you must frequently communicate your intent to help their organization. You are not on a search and reveal mission. Your goal isn't to get anyone fired. Your goal is to help them turn this poor time in company history into a win.
Do your research before raising the project. Calculate the potential opportunity cost and benefits. Then, the project can be sold to the department head who has the problem by posing it as an opportunity for them to look like a winner.
And don't worry about credit. The executive team will remember that you turned over every rock to find a way to increase profitability and keep you in mind as they move on to new companies.
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