Revenue Operations evolved from Sales Operations and Marketing Operations for one simple reason, alignment.

Traditionally, sales and marketing are in constant conflict. Marketing generates leads that don’t close. They blame sales for not following up. Sales blames marketing for poor lead quality. RevOps was meant to fix this issue but it still persists.

There’s always so much to do, where should RevOps even start? We answered this question with the Revenue Efficiency Pyramid. We outlined how to set the foundation for RevOps and how to build on it. In this article we want to go deeper and outline how to do this in Marketing Operations, starting with the first two layers of the Pyramid.

Whether you’re just now evolving from Founder-Led Sales to building your first sales and marketing team or have had a robust marketing engine for years, here are the elements you’ll want to consider to get your Marketing Engine running at maximum efficiency.

Fundamentals

The fundamentals are the base of the pyramid. They’re the very basic things you need in place to have a functioning marketing engine.

IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE AND PERSONAS

To be successful in marketing, selling, and growing customers you need to know who to target. Your “Ideal Customer Profile” indicates the type of company you want to go after. The “Persona” describes who within those companies you want to reach. These profiles should include what that company or person’s common pain points are, how your product helps them, and how they decide to buy. Understanding these things will help you figure out how to speak to them and what to say. It will give you guidance on how to price your products. Finally, it sets the foundation for operations right down to the contacts you add to your sales and marketing tools and how you segment them.

As early as you can, write up a document that profiles these things and share it with all of the members of your Revenue Teams. I’d recommend sharing it with the teams next to them too so that Product, Delivery, and others are all aligned as well.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY

With your Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Personas in mind, the next step in the foundation is to map out the Customer Journey. There is a lot of content on the internet that can help you so we won’t go deep into it here.

To oversimplify it, you’ll want to map out how your brand makes an initial impression with potential customers, from your social media posts to ads, events, and even cold outbound prospecting. Then, at some point, most of them will visit your website and may ultimately request a meeting with your sales team if your sales team doesn’t reach them first. They will then continue to be influenced by marketing as the sales team engages them and even after, whether they become a customer or choose not to buy.

By mapping this process out in detail you can start to think of the metrics you’ll want to measure along this journey and the tech stack your team will need in order to deliver it.

PROCESS

Now that you have the Customer Journey mapped, what is the process to deliver it? At what point in time does a Marketing Lead get passed to the sales team? When does it enter the sales pipeline? What are the qualification criteria and what is required for it to move through each stage in the sales funnel?

Answering these questions is critical to assess whether or not marketing is working. All too often, organizations measure Marketing Qualified Leads and fall off from there. Those leads enter the sales pipeline without any rhyme or reason and salespeople fail to follow up. This creates conflict between sales and marketing because there’s no defined process. Getting this right is critical to achieving alignment.

Activation

The next layer is Activation. In our experience, most companies fall into this category. This is where we are starting to build out a set of marketing functions, but without any bells and whistles.

THE TECH STACK

As we’ve mentioned before, the core of your Revenue Tech Stack is your sales CRM. All marketing leads flow into it so it needs to be set up correctly when leads start coming in. The next piece of the foundation is the Marketing Automation tool you integrate with that CRM.

There are so many other Marketing platforms. It can get overwhelming.

Before you let yourself get anxious about what you need, step back and look at those things that are the most fundamental. Before you buy a product to help connect your events team with your lead routing tool, make sure you have a CRM and Marketing Automation Platform. Think of integrating Salesforce with Pardot, Hubspot, or Marketo before adding other systems and make sure they are set up right.

Getting those things figured out will help you decide what to add to it. If you want some help with your Marketing Technology plans, Union Square is available to answer any questions.

LEAD RESPONSE TIME

Now, let’s imagine we have the perfect marketing engine feeding our sales team with high-intent leads. The best way to ruin this is to follow up too slowly. Studies show that responding to leads in under five minutes, instead of waiting a mere 30 minutes, increases lead conversion by 21X!

Once someone reaches out to you they are testing you to see what it would be like to be your customer. They are not looking to see if your product works for them. They have already looked at your product and at least one other competitor. Congratulations, you are one of the finalists. Now it is time to shine!

Studies show that the company that responds the quickest and best wins most of the time. Focus on responding quickly and put your best foot forward. Aim for 1 minute and never become slower than 5 minutes here.

MARKETING CALENDAR

Your Marketing team should have a calendar where they track upcoming campaigns and events. That’s useful, but now you want to organize the rest of the team around that. We suggest a standing meeting that you co-own with your Marketing leader.

You will likely need people to reach out to during those campaigns, this is where you discuss who will chase that. You’ll want to prep the BDR team ahead of time and task them with follow-up. Here is where you organize that too. Lastly, you will want to make sure enablement is ready, content is ready, training is scheduled, etc.

There is a lot to do with every campaign. Having a meeting with the leaders of the Revenue team where tasks are assigned and steps are staged will make sure everyone is pulling on the same oar and misalignment does not creep in.

MARKETING ATTRIBUTION

Finally, we will touch on Marketing Attribution. Everyone has a different opinion on attribution and the only thing we all seem to agree on is that it’s not an exact science. Should it be First Touch or Last Touch? What about Multi-Touch? What about asking customers on web forms and in sales calls “How did you hear about us?”

Whatever you decide, make sure you’re consistent and that you’re measuring through to Closed Won deals, not just MQLs. The goal of operations is to measure what’s working and what’s not and then work to optimize it. You can’t do that if you’re measuring the wrong goal. Too many organizations work hard to generate a lot of MQLs that never close.

SUMMARY

There are some things that you can get quick leverage out of

• Define your Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Personas
• Map out the Customer Journey they expect from your brand
• Outline the Process you need to execute to deliver that Journey
• Get the Marketing Automation right before adding additional tools
• Follow up on new Leads faster than you think is humanly possible
• Organize the sales and marketing team around a Content Calendar
• Track marketing performance to Closed Won Revenue, not just MQLs

*We’ll dive deeper into the rest of the Pyramid in another article soon.