Page 132 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

shift toward a buyer-centric world. We both wanted to scale a big company. We
knew it was critical to achieve Sales and Marketing alignment, rather than find
ourselves mired in dysfunction.

Reverting to the quant-oriented lens through which we viewed the world, Mike
and I set out to establish a service level agreement, or “SLA,” between our two
teams. SLAs are commonly established in the world of IT in order to quantify
the acceptable availability of a system (e.g., 99.999 percent uptime per month).
Our mission with the Sales and Marketing SLA was to establish similarly
quantified agreements between the two teams.

“Use the Sales and Marketing SLA to replace the subjective and qualitative
aspects of the Sales/Marketing relationship with well-defined targets and
quantified goals.”

The Marketing Service Level Agreement (SLA)

The first step in establishing the Marketing SLA was to define when a lead
would be qualified to be passed to the Sales team. This topic was covered
thoroughly in Chapter 11. The decision to pass a lead to Sales is best derived
from the Buyer Matrix. It depends on the type of company the lead represents
and the level of engagement the lead has had with your Sales and Marketing
teams thus far.

Referring back to our Buyer Matrix in Chapter 11, we established that leads with
a “Mid-Market” buyer persona would be passed to Sales when they reached the
“Solution Research” buying journey stage. To add more context to our example,
let's assume that a typical Mid-Market lead represents a company with 1,000–
10,000 employees. Let's also assume that for a Mid-Market lead to reach the
“Solution Research” stage, the lead needs to have downloaded information about
our product or requested a demonstration. If Marketing delivers a lead that meets
these criteria, the lead “does not suck.” Sales should engage with it. If Sales
continues to resist these types of leads, then either Sales needs additional
training on how to engage these leads or the Marketing SLA needs to be revised
to better define what makes a lead worthy of Sales' attention.

With a clear lead quality definition in place, the quantity of leads expected each
month needed to be established as well. Mike and I studied the optimal lead flow
a bit. For the purpose of this example, let's assume that the optimal number of