The bigger the company, the bigger the disconnect.
The purpose of the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is “to align and optimize the entire customer experience with the aim of increasing revenue”, according to VentureBeat. The CRO needs to optimize the alignment of each line-of-business and the unification of their company goals to effectively implement revenue operations. Within this customer experience, opportunities for maximizing revenue are found. You just need to know where to find them.
Within this customer experience, opportunities for maximizing revenue are found. You just need to know where to find them.
The Challenge
Each line of business team is responsible for their own KPIs and departmental bonuses, with budgets aligned with this reality. Departmental aims sometimes come before the good of the company.
An example of this is when Marketing teams talk about the number of MQL leads they created during the quarter from specific campaigns, and how many of them were Sales Qualified. But, how many of these SQLs made it into the Opportunity pipeline? What was the cost, and source, of the leads that become real opportunities?
An Effective Response
Reverse engineering the pipeline results to their attributed sources is, an excellent method of ensuring the most efficient business results are at the forefront of the funnel optimization process.
Drill-Deeper
It’s not enough to look at the high-level lead sources that led to success; you need to set up the sub-campaign themes in your lead capture workflow. This allows you to drill down to the messaging and segmentation that drives the most qualified leads to convert, resulting in a greater volume of qualified opportunities.
Carry the Unique Buyer Fingerprint Forward
Information gathered by the sales team, or collected from the buyer, must be mapped through the fields across your CRM to the very end. No detail is without value. The buyer’s time is sacred and should never be wasted with mundane questions they have already answered through their form submissions.
I recently spoke with Hubspot’s, Dan Tyre. He re-emphasized the importance of personalization throughout the buyer’s journey, saying that any digital touchpoint should give the experience that it is speaking solely to the buyer. This is true throughout the buyer journey, not just in the initial stages of attracting traffic.
Are you on Track for Real Revenue Growth?
Consider these sales process KPIs that matter to the CRO:
- length of the sales cycle
- percent of wins
- dollars per win
- net margin in each revenue dollar
Differentiate Your Company
Those KPIs are 100% valid, but to differentiate yourself as a company you need to also measure your latency time between every step in the Sales Process.
- Increasing response rates from 27% to 92% causes a 314% lift in results; all you have to do is respond immediately and persistently to leads, according to Ken Crogue, in Business2Community.
- Faster deal-proposal creation and sending is equally important during every stage in the Sales Funnel. At DealHub we reduce our customers’ buyer response time by up to 78%. CEO, Eyal Elbahary, says this is “largely due to the fact that all the heavy lifting for each salesperson is pre-configured.” Making it quick and convenient to respond to buyers.
Make Smarter Technology Selections
A couple of years ago, it was normal to have many different sales technologies managing various stages of the Sales Process. Now, there is a new class of ‘Sales Engagement Platform’ on the market, allowing you to unify your sales tech with a continuous and responsive platform and giving you a complete view of buyer engagement at every stage in the deal proposal process.
All for the Greater Good
A solid Chief Revenue Officer is adept at looking at the net business outcomes and all of the channels that contribute to success – New Business, Expansion, Renewals – and the respective roles of Marketing, Sales, Account Managers, and Customer Success in driving Revenue growth.
The CRO has our greater good at heart – they want us to work together and create a responsive and transparent workflow. Salesforce recently said, “hiring a great CRO is critical to maximizing revenue across all areas of your business.”
At DealHub we are excited to match a new breed of role (CRO) with our new breed of Sales Engagement Platform (SEP), bringing together both the challenge and the solution. We give you much more than a unified Deal Acceleration Platform. We give you a new lens to understand your measured deal progress within in your wider CRM. Sales teams present a superior and measurable experience to the buyer. DealHub’s SEP measures the impact of the buyer experience and utilizes a Platform approach to provide revenue optimization and insight into revenue growth. CROs have a crystal clear vision of revenue opportunities, and opportunities lost, through the entire marketing and sales process.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
