What is your guilty pleasure snack? Honestly, I love cheese, so... Just like, really good cheese or like, melty cheese is like, out of sea cheese. This is gonna sound so bizarre.
I'm gonna get this clip back and be like, this girl's obsessed with cheese. I feel like it's more of a problem for anyone who's not a little bit. Like a healthy obsession with cheese is right for this world, I think. Welcome back to Stacking Growth Snacks.
I'm Steph Crenola and I'm here with Sydney Waterfall and we are talking about the inbound buying experience and funnel conversion. So we've gone through what the inbound buying experience looks like. We've gone through how to optimize it and KPIs. We've gone through phase one and two of the process.
So today we are going to hit phases three and four in detail. So Sydney, can you walk us through... Let's start with phase three. Yeah, let's jump into it.
So phase three is essentially the initial meeting and like kind of that next step. Phase four is going to be once a deal or opportunity is created and all the way to close one. So phase three, we kind of broken down into two steps, which is an initial meeting. So that's right after that first meeting gets booked, right?
Who is having that meeting? Where is it routing? What is the goal of that meeting? Normally it is the initial discovery meeting, give some information, maybe a small demo about whatever product you're selling.
But it's a critical step in the sales process because it sets the stage for like it's like the first impression, right? Maybe second impression. First impression might be your website. But your second impression is going to be like, you're finally raising your hand and talking to sales.
What does that look like? The biggest like watch out for this phase is to try to get all of the discovery down ahead of this call. This is very specific to your internal sales structure and sales process. So during phase three, then four, marketing is not the leader.
You are the supporter, but you want to understand what's going on so that you can optimize things. And then that way, if you see a conversion rate drop or something like that, you know what is happening, what is sales doing, and what is the expected flow so that you can kind of understand, like this conversion rate is dropping. Maybe that means that our first meeting flow change and why did that change and then you can work with sales to figure that out. The more productive that discovery meeting can be, the more helpful it is to the prospect, not internal teams, usually the better outcome you're going to have.
And, you know, I'm not a sales coach, but this is just what I've seen work well. There's plenty of sales all stars out there. Now, one thing I'll say about phase three, which is the initial meeting and next steps phase four is going to be your deal or opportunity creation, depending on your sales cycle, your ACV, your sales flow. Some companies do create deals and opportunities like right when that first meeting gets booked.
So it really just depends on your organization, but we broke it out in these two steps, so you can kind of think about it in two different ways. So for some companies, if you do create the opportunity very early in the sales process, these are going to be really close to each other. For other companies, usually that have high receive or longer sales cycle, these are going to be structured out, right? You're going to have a meeting set.
Then after that meeting, then once you've identified if it's a qualified buyer and they have urgency to buy, then create the opportunity. So it just depends. I just wanted to put that disclaimer out. So for people, normally this is going to be the team member that booked the meeting.
If you're doing it manually or the technology that did it, this could also be your SDR could be taking this meeting or BDR or your sales rep trying to figure out who's doing what right in this handoff. Sometimes in the discovery meeting, you also bring in other people depending on your technology and your buying cycle and how technical the product it is. Sometimes you can use a sales engineer subject matter expert. So kind of just look at all of that when you think about people, but the key here is to deliver value as quickly as possible and answer their questions as quickly as possible.
Normally they want to have, they've got product questions. They've got very specific use case they're coming into and they all want to know pricing. So even if you don't have a pricing page, typically you're giving them like a pricing ballpark, like, okay, it's going to be in this ballpark to even understand if they should keep continuing the conversation. So all that's going to be in people.
And then under process, you want to understand like how the meeting should be conducted and what are those follow up steps. So what is being discussed about the company and the solution? How long is that meeting? Is it too long?
Is it not long enough? Who do you often find attending that first meeting from a prospect point of view? Why? Why not?
What are common questions that are being asked in the meeting? Is there a structure for sales or is it really dependent on the sales rep themselves? And then what are the next steps look like? So typically for every sales funnel stage, you're going to have entry criteria and exit criteria.
Okay, so we've had this first meeting. What is the exit criteria for sales? So if they are qualified, what things need to be true to move them to the next funnel stage? What things would disqualify them and need to be true to get them out of the funnel and make sure that's well documented, most of time it's not.
But this will help you in the process category. And then technologies are during this phase, you're going to technology staff that you're going to look at is like conversation, intelligence, sales analytics tools, call recording tools, and outreach tools as well are going to be the topics and the categories that you look into. So these tools like record and report on prospect and customer conversations, they aggregate insights. So if you have some of these look into these, how you're using these, how you could you be using them better if you're not identifying manual ways or maybe a technology could help in the space.
Awesome. You want to bring it home with Facebook? All right, phase four. This is in your opportunity or deals are created all the way to close one.
So this is really when sales is selling and converting the deal. So this phase includes all sales activities and subsequent meetings, any resources, enablement, things that are needed to move a deal forward to close one, close loss or close nurture. This is sales territory. They are the expert here.
They've been testing different ways to make the impact and increase win rates and everything like that. Marketing and campaign can kind of support as needed. But as a marketer, it is really crucial to understand what sales processes are and where key points in the funnel, again, so that you can understand if a conversion rate is increasing or decreasing why. Oh, maybe sales is converting stage two to stage three much higher because they've done X, Y, or Z to improve that process.
Marketing can also support in these phases by targeting additional people in the buying committee, things like that, working with the sales team to try to help them to increase win rates. People in process is pretty straightforward. It's the sales team. It's AEs.
It's subject matter experts, sales solutions, technical engineers, depending on how technical your product is or other relevant enablement roles within the sales organization. Those are going to be the people who's doing what it is not necessarily your job to say who should be doing what in this phase, but just understand the dynamics of this phase. Sales leadership and sales managers have much probably more experience in marketers in that specific phase. But again, it's really important to understand and partner with them.
Because if you partner with them, you'll get more insights on what's going on. You're going to hear, ah, this stage and our buying process. We keep running into this objection. Awesome.
Let's figure out a way that marketing can help with content or web content or enablement or anything that can help the sales team convert. And then phase four is technology. So your number one technology, and this is going to be your CRM. And it should be honestly your source of truth from phase two to phase four.
Once that person fills out that form and they get into your CRM, everything should be source of truth in your CRM. Even if you're using outside other technologies, sales team will be logging notes, contacts, meetings, activities, potentially creating like account plans. If it's like a larger deal, things like that. Typically, you want to be able to see and access those things in your CRM.
And just like in phase three, the conversational intelligence and sales analytics tools also play here. So sales outreach platforms are going to be utilized typically for communicating, meeting recordings, nurtures, follow up tasks, all of that kind of stuff. So that's the really the technology that's going to be most useful here. And in this phase, the technology is going to be optimizing things for the sales team.
What are they doing manually that we can accelerate on? Is there anything that would be more valuable for them to do account or contact research, things like that? So there's a ton of AI tools on the market these days. There's a ton of other intelligence tools.
So that's really the technology piece in phase four. This has been a really great breakdown. There's been a lot of good detailed information in this session and the last two as well. If you could distill all of this into one little crumb of wisdom or advice, just a little piece that people can take away.
What would that be? I'm going to break this into steps because I'm a process person, which I mentioned in the next episode. So you need to understand your lead to close KPIs for this funnel. And you need to monitor those and you need to share those with your sales team and everybody in this process.
So these KPIs are going to inform where you optimize and how you optimize the funnel conversions to meetings requested meetings, requested to meetings booked meetings, meetings attended meetings held to your hero qualified opportunities qualified your opportunities to close one and then your conversion rates underneath those and then the pipeline velocity. The reason that we audit this immediately when we work with a customer is because there's often so much low hanging fruit that while you're getting your marketing campaigns up and you're trying to launch demand creation strategies, which take time. There's often easy things that you can do to immediately increase revenue that quarter. And so let's start there with capturing the demand, converting the demand using this process and all the steps that we just laid out.
Start there first, get that done. Now you feel confident that your funnel is a well-oiled machine, at least for this go to market motion. And now you can go do fun marketing activities. Awesome.
So thank you so much. Where can people find a follow and connect with you? I'm on LinkedIn for usual for every market out there. No, it's the channel I'm most active on.
You can also find me supporting or find labs or find labs content always. And LinkedIn under Sydney waterfall. Awesome. Thank you so much, Sydney.
Thank you, everyone for watching and listening and we'll see you all next time.