Read this article to understand the value of conveying Closed Won Stories to your team.
Ever since the world turned upside down in 2020, activities in the sales pipeline have never been more uncertain. What used to take 8 touches to schedule an appointment now takes 13. Connect rates have tanked while no shows have spiked. Regardless of how much your business has been affected, it’s good to know what it takes to win a deal. What if you increased the number of meaningful touches on your pipeline by 20%? What if that was all it took it to push those deals across the finish line?
These are the questions you can answer by tracking your closed won journeys. Everyone knows how tough working in sales is, so let’s celebrate everyone’s contributions and recognize the sheer grind it takes to close a deal. In this blog post, I’ll share how you can track your closed won journeys by measuring all the relevant marketing and sales activities that go into it.
The Formula of Activity
To measure the number of total touches on a lead, add the number of marketing campaigns deployed and engaged with to the number of times you contacted them.
For example, 5 marketing campaigns + 2 one-on-one emails + 1 call = 8 touches.
Then, bump the number of touches against your marketing qualified leads (MQLs), Meetings Booked, and sales qualified leads (SQLs). This will give you an idea of how many touches it takes to move someone from one lifecycle stage to the next. This is how you walk the line of “not enough” and “too much”.
For example, if you know the number of total touches before a lead was converted into an MQL but the date the lead was converted into a sales accepted lead (SAL) is unknown/nonexistent, then you have the number of touches per MQL. This can be valuable to know because say you have 8 touches against your MQLs—it’s likely you’re not doing enough follow-up or nurture to these leads. You may want to extend your marketing automation nurture efforts and add four more touches to get those who will convert to keep moving down the pipeline.
Getting the Full Story
To take another step further and get deeper insight into your data, you can break down the marketing funnel into three parts—the top, middle, and bottom—and track specific data points within each part. While you don’t need every single data point, it will certainly help you tell the full story. Here are the data pieces I track on any HubSpot or Salesforce dashboard:
Top Funnel Tracking
- Lead Source of Original Contact: Where did we acquire this person’s info? Note that in most B2B outreach, the original contact is often not the key contact for the opportunity.
- Number of marketing campaigns engaged: The number of campaigns you engaged with this lead.
- Date Converted MQL: When a person engages through a predetermined intent barrier (such as downloading a content piece) and they fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). Or hit high intent pages like Demo Requests 3+ times but doesn’t convert on the form.
- First Engagement Date: When did you first have a human connection with them via phone, email, social media?
- First Engagement Owner: This should be your BDR or SDR and is the person who is responsible for further engaging the lead after their first engagement.
- Date Converted SAL / First Meeting Date: When the SDR schedules the meeting or call for the sales rep. This is when Deal Age typically starts.
Middle Funnel Tracking
- Meeting Campaign Source: The name of the campaign engaged with just before the first connection, whether that’s a content download, LinkedIn touch, sales sequence, or demo request.
- Number of Touches to Meeting Booked: adds all the marketing engagement to the number of sales touches
- Pro Tip // start tracking this now for all your contacts in the First Meeting Booked stage – what’s your average? If you’re currently taking 14 touches before the initial meeting is booked, but the current average touches on your SDRS targets is 10, then it’s time to collaborate with marketing to help the SDRS with their coverage, without sacrificing value in their nurture.
- Date Converted SQL: Likely the date of the qualified first meeting if the sales rep believes the lead is likely to move forward.
- Decision Marker: Second, third, or even fourth persons identified as members of the buying team.
- Identified Pain Points // Solution Alignment: Why did the lead agree to move forward with us?
- Pro Tip // collecting this from the reps will inform marketing what to do “more” of. If we win business because people struggle peeling Bananas, then our marketing team should host a whole content series on how we help companies peel their Bananas. Without this, the marketing team is siloed and planning campaigns about Apples and Oranges, rather doubling down on Banana webinars, ebooks and blogs. That’s how we hit our meeting and revenue goals.
- Closing Rep Owner: The sales rep responsible for “driving the bus” now.
- Is there a dream duo? “This” SDR and “This” Rep are 2x more likely to close deals from “This” industry.
- Days in stage: The number of days a lead spends as an MQL, SAL, and SQL.
- When deals exceed the average time in stage, should we have automation deploy some relevant marketing nurture to help us stay relevant and top of mind?
Bottom Funnel Tracking
- Total Campaign Engagement: Across all members of the buying team, how many marketing campaigns did they interact with before closing?
- Total Number of Page Views / Sessions: Across all members of the buying team, how times did they come back to our website?
- Total Number of Sales Activities to Close: How many calls, emails, social touches, tasks were completed by the sales team before closing? This is typically double what leadership thinks it is.
- Number of Times Contacted How many times did you outbound them? What is the number of logged calls and emails?
- Number of Meetings: How many scheduled meetings did it take for your reps to close this deal?
- Deal Age: The number of days between when the deal was first created and when it closed.
- Revenue / Discounts: How much the deal was worth, including any discounts that may have been created to help close the deal.
This may seem like a lot of data points, so many that it may lead to analysis paralysis, but the properties mentioned above will help you unlock invaluable insight. Plus, if you do it right, you only do it once. Keep in mind a lot of these fields are standard HubSpot or Salesforce properties. You just need to visually lay them out on a dashboard to generate the average.
So what kind of actions can these data points drive? Here’s an example: if you know the average number of days that a closed won deal will sit in specific stages, such as MQLs, SALs, or SQLs, you can run additional marketing nurture campaigns for any deals that are sitting in one stage for too long. If the average number of days that a closed won deal will stay in the SQL stage is 12 and you have a deal that’s sitting there for 15 days, try hitting them with additional campaigns to help keep them moving.
On the other hand, if you have a deal that is moving faster than usual (and you know what “usual” means because of your data), marketing can stay out of the sales team’s way and let them do their own thing. Or my personal favorite – if we’re in the last 45 days of the quarter with low pipeline coverage with our current win rates, we know now we can run THIS campaign to THIS industry and THIS title drives some quick pipeline wins, we can make a hard push before end of quarter.
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