Welcome back to Stacking Growth Snacks, I'm Saf Kneul and I'm here with Sydney Waterfall. Sydney, how are you? I'm doing great. You're wearing your marketing hat today.
I am. I figured it was fitting for our conversation today. I love it. Do you have a, do you have a demand hat and like a data hat and a?
I need, I need a marketing off or a brave offset and maybe a seal sat now, you know, just get all everything in there. Amazing. All right. So we've talked about snacks with you before but I'm going to hit you with these questions again just to see if your tastes have changed in the time that has passed since I last talked to you.
Sydney, what was your favorite childhood snack? So I said for benefits, which still stands, but my second one is gummy bears. You can tell like more of the salary kind of or like the gummy type of sweets versus like other ones. Yeah.
No, I like that. If I asked you to sing the gummy bears theme song, on demand, could you do it? Oh my gosh, I don't think so. You said gummy bears and all of a sudden it was playing in my head.
So I guess just me. Can you sing it? Yeah. Gummy bears bouncing here and there are other words, but that's the gummy bears.
I love it. Today we are talking about the inbound buying experience and funnel conversion. So Sydney, what is the inbound buying experience and how do you optimize it? So simply it's from when a user visits your homepage to your declared intent flow on your website all the way through that flow, form fill routing assignment sales close one.
So that's really what we're going to be focused on talking about here. There's other buying experience optimizations that you can make in your go to market motion, specifically for demand and what marketers and demand marketers optimize for. We're going to be focused on the declared intent coming from the website. So I will kind of break this down into a couple steps.
This is how I think about it, how we look at optimizing it and we'll kind of go from there. So step one is you need to understand and document your current state. This is super helpful when you're new to an organization. This is like one of the first things that I do to really understand what's going on.
And it also forces you to understand the systems, lack of workflows over too many workflows. All of that kind of stuff. The pro tip here is to keep auditing this probably every one to two quarters because some stuff can get changed. You might not know that it gets changed or areas of optimization that other teams are doing, but constantly being obsessed with this funnel and funnel conversion will help you get more out of all of your marketing and also sales efforts.
So step one, understand the current flow. So this includes understanding the objects in your marketing automation system, your website, CSS and your CRM. So you've got the people object which is going to be leads or contacts depending on what you use internally, accounts, opportunities or deals, again, depending on your CRM and then potentially how you use campaign members or other, maybe your company uses a custom object or something like that. So step one really helps you understand and go through that full process.
As if you were a user, I would highly recommend that you kind of treat this as a secret shopping exercise on yourself. Also, if you've been in the organization for a while, maybe you're a little biased, maybe have someone else go through at least the form conversion and see what their experience is knowing that they might have a different experience or have different less blinders on them, you might have internally. Step two is going to be understanding your current baselines and your current data for this process. So what does that mean?
So I just kind of outline the steps. So we're going to understand, okay, from the homepage, where is that high-intensity CTA? Is the declared intensity TAs great? How much traffic are we getting on there?
Okay, from the traffic that comes on there in a given time period, how many are filling out the form and converting on the form, right? From that form, Bill, how many of those are going to get qualified or passed and routed and assigned to your sales team, depending on your qualification criteria? And then from there, you know, they send sales handoff, how quickly is the meeting getting booked, how quickly is sales outreaching to them, how quickly is the meeting happening, and then through further states of your funnel, meaning opportunity creation and your opportunity stages, all the way to close one. So you want to have all of the data understanding each of those kind of funnel conversion points, because then you'll know where to diagnose what your baseline is.
And then if you implement something to improve it, which I'm sure we will talk about soon, you will understand if you've actually improved it or not. So thinking of improvement, what are some of those core KPIs that you want to be measuring specifically? All right, I'll go through some of the core KPIs to understand how to optimize your funnel. There's going to be quite a lot.
It might seem too much, but I think if you break it down by these conversions, you'll be really able to diagnose what area of the funnel you need to focus on and then create initiatives that are hyper focused on just fixing that versus a broad initiative. It's like, let's just increase our win rate. It's like, where do we even start? So okay, core reporting KPIs.
So first off, it's going to be your volume of declared intent conversions. So this is just raw number of conversions that you're getting. So most likely foreign bills, chat fills, whatever those conversion points are on the website. You're going to want to monitor that like monthly and quarterly, and you're going to want to look back for all of these if you can, at least two to like eight months, if you could get a whole year's worth of data, that's great, but depends on what you're working with.
The second one is going to be volume of qualified declared intent conversions, third volume and dollar amount of the qualified pipeline associated to those form pills and conversions, the fourth volume and again, dollars of closed one. So those are like the four high level KPIs that you want to measure. Then underneath that, I'm going to go into like 10 different sub KPIs that you should be looking at. So number one is meeting requested to meeting booked.
So if they're filling out, for example, a book, a demo form, they're really requesting a meeting and how many of those actually get booked or a K a scheduled second one meetings booked to meetings attended. We got to make sure these people attend these meetings. You're going to have some drop off, but you hopefully shouldn't have a lot of drop off after they've scheduled the meeting. Then you're going to look at the ratio between declared intent conversions and those qualified meetings booked.
So what is that percentage? That's the conversion rate. And you can monitor that. I would recommend monitoring conversion rates like on a monthly basis, weekly and daily.
It just fluctuates so much and you might get a little too reactive. The next one is going to be the qualified meetings to high intent revenue opportunity. So this is a little bit longer of a conversion to measure, but it's important because there's a lot of sub steps underneath here and you want to measure the whole portion there. And if you don't know high intent revenue opportunity is a revenue opportunity that converts at greater than 25% with a historical win rate.
Next one, you're going to look at hero high intent revenue opportunity, maybe your qualified opportunity to close one percentage. I'm going to go through the last couple. I told you that there's a lot. You declared intent conversion to hero conversion and then declared intent conversion to close one.
So that's really your full funnel, your overall pipeline velocity and underneath the pipeline velocity that inputs to those velocities, which is going to be win rate average ACV opportunities, a number of qualified opportunities and your sales cycle. Like those are all inputs to your pipeline of velocity metric, but it's you need to understand those because you need to understand, oh, if pipeline velocity is up, why? Because sales cycle went down. That's why or something like that.
So step three is going to be breaking this down into phases and optimization categories. So each phase, we've got four different phases actually that we break this out in. Phase one is going to be conversion and qualification. Phase two is book and schedule meeting.
Phase three is going to be your initial first meeting with sales and next steps. Sometimes that's a demo. Sometimes it's not depending on your sales flow and buying cycle. And then phase four is going to be essentially your opportunity creation to close one.
So those are the four phases that you want to essentially deep dive and audit. I highly recommend breaking those up in phases because you're going to have different action plans and different things to solve each of what you find in those phases. In each phases, you're going to want to look at three different categories. And this is what you want to be focused on.
Number one, people. What people are doing what in each of these phases? And do you have the right people doing the right thing? Is there things that people are doing that we could automate and make easier, right?
So that's an example. And you want to ask that question in each of these phases. Category two is going to be process. Process is my favorite.
I'm a process, operation scale. What is happening in the actual systems? Normally, there's multiple systems that the buyer is using, internally use, you are using what is happening on the back end in the systems that is making all of this work or maybe not work so well. And then at category three, which everybody loves to debate is technology.
If you want to refil some feathers, this is the category to do it in. No, I'm just kidding. What technology is being used? How is it being used?
And at what point of the journey? So process is different than technology. You can build a process that involves technology, involves no technology or involves multiple technologies, but look at them separately. Yeah.
All right. So in the next session, we're going to really dig into each of those bases and steps. So I'm really looking forward to that. This has been excellent information so far.
So thank you, Sydney. And we'll see you on the next one. Yeah. Yeah.
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