π΅π»ββοΈ Lead Handoff
How to refine your lead handoff process and develop marketing and sales playbooks aligned with the level of intent.
During the recent conversation with a Sales Development Rep who was added to the ABM program, she complained about the lead handoff process. I decided to dig deeper and understand whatβs broken. Here is what she said:
"I log in to Salesforce and see a bunch of contacts with a random score. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with these contacts."
There are 2 problems:
a) This handoff process stimulates further silos between sales and marketing.
Marketing just transfers MQLs or engaged accounts to sales and celebrates the win. While sales has no idea why these contacts were added, whatβs their buyer journey stage and level of intent.
This is the problem that weβve covered in the Account Blindness post.
b) There is no playbook to nurture and activate engaged accounts according to their level of intent.
Not every sign up, click or engagement means buying intent. Sales either waste time trying to pitch non-sales-ready prospects or just put them in automated sequence and forget.
The consequences are simple:
Missed revenue targets while generating tons of MQLs or engaged accounts
Lack of trust between marketing and sales
Today weβre going to cover:
How to develop marketing and sales playbooks aligned with the level of intent
How to make sure that information is tracked, stored and shared across GTM teams properly
How to set up account review and development meetings
Let's dive in.
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How to develop marketing and sales playbooks aligned with the level of intent
First rule:
Stop tracking downloads and event sign ups as buying intent and transferring them to sales. Instead, match the next step/CTA with the buyer's intent level. Here is how.
Second rule:
Understand the buyer journey of your ICP accounts (check our guide on B2B buyer journey).
When you map out different scenarios, ask yourself:Β Β
What does the buyer actually want next?
Below are a few examples.
ππππππππππ ππππππ (demand for content).
ππ€π΅πͺπ°π―: A buyer downloads a piece of content, or registers for a webinar
ππ―π΅π¦π―π΅:Β Β Learning more about a specific topic
Next steps aligned with the intent:
Connect before the webinar to ask what they expect or want to learn
Follow up after the webinar asking for their feedback, and offering more resources on the topic
Offer them newsletter sign-up upon content delivery instead of automatically signing them up
Progressive profiling: collecting more info about needs, goals, and priorities.
ππππππ ππππππ
ππ€π΅πͺπ°π―: Book a demo call
ππ―π΅π¦π―π΅: Get a demo and evaluate the fit
Pre-requisites:
Give a detailed product overview
Explain pricing and your ICP (who is this product for).
Make sure buyers pre-qualify themselves.
Next steps aligned with the intent:
Set up automated lead routing and opportunity to book a call right in the calendar of a sales rep that is in charge of that territory or account tier
ππππππππ
ππ€π΅πͺπ°π―: Visit high-intent pages; hit engagement threshold.
ππ―π΅π¦π―π΅:Β Β Considering a vendor or evaluating solutions (but not yet ready to book a call)
Next steps aligned with the intent:
Provide a personalized buying experience for tier 1 and tier 2 accounts and start engaging with them (account-based marketing).
Here are a few ideas:
Run an account research and understand how your product fits company needs
Analyze their profiles and define their KPIs, goals, needs, and jobs to be done
Match your product value with the potential needs or challenges of each buyer
Define channels where you can connect and engage with the buying committee.
Distribute that content to target accounts through ads, personal messages, tagging.
Involve target buyers in any content collaboration activity to get acquainted and build a relationship.
Ad an account to the relevant retargeting group with niche case studies and customer stories from peers
Send fully personalized direct mail swag including ideas on how the identified account & buyer challenges can be solved, or goals achieved.
Suggest 1-1 debriefings
Create personalized content hubs
Key takeaways:
Don't assume that every click or engagement means the buying intent.
Understand where your buyer is in their journey and provide the next step aligned with their current needs, not your wishes.
There is one more caveat:
To make these playbooks working, you need to regularly track and source this data. Donβt assume your SDRs will do it on their own (almost never happens).
Here is what I'm going to cover next.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but donβt do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you donβt know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales canβt get even a reply.
You clearly see that you're already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We'll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.
How to track, source and store data about interactions with target accounts
The more marketing and sales programs you run, the more interactions with the target accounts you have. And the higher are the chances that you deal with account blindness, because the data is owned by multiple people.
Here is how we solve it.
1. Define the key sources of intent and engagement data.
Don't be obsessed with multiple sources. Select 5-7 most important sources and software that provides it.
2. Define a responsible person for tracking intent data.
Avoid joint tracking. Make sure you have one person who is in charge of:
Tracking the data
Qualifying insights
Sourcing the data with collected insights to the right team members
3. Define tracking frequency.
Not all intent triggers were created equal.
High intent (company spent 10 mins on Book a Demo page) should be tracked daily while search intent could be tracked on a weekly basis. Timely follow-ups are crucial.
4. Make sure that sales email accounts and calendars are connected to CRM.
5. Ask sales and marketing to capture and immediately add all offline interactions.
6. Ask one person to clean the data, remove duplicates and make sure that all accounts are up-to-date.
But here is a caveat.
If you have a CRM or RevOps manager, make sure that this business unit is not oeprating in silos. Involve them into marketing & sales sync meetings where this person can raise critical issues about information accuracy.
Which leads us to the last part.
How to set up account review and development meetings
The only reason we work on account intelligence is making sure that our GTM team has a timely and accurate information about target accounts to personalize marketing message, content and do timely outreach.
The easies way to maintain it is by scheduling weekly sync meetings.
The agenda is really simple.
Review:
Target account engagement, updates, and insights collected
Next actions per account
What accounts should be removed from the program
What accounts should be added to the program
Is there any information missed
Obviously, whenever you add a new source of engagement or intent data, you need to update everybody what does this data mean and how to leverage it.
Most companies don't have good playbooks and just start retargeting and adding accounts to outbound cadence. But this is another story β¦ π¬
Listen to Full-Funnel Live - ABM expansion
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In the episode of Fullfunnel Live we'll review ABM expansion and answer community questions:
How to structure an expansion ABM program - the key steps
Expansion playbook example
How to align expansion with other ABM and demand gen programs
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