In the land of over-used acronyms, here are a few worth investing in
ICP
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a critical definition to discuss with your sales leadership and executive team. Something I commonly see within start-up environments is the desire to continue to focus on an extremely wide breadth of customers in order to avoid limiting the Target Addressable Market (TAM) too early on. While this makes perfect sense from an investor perspective and is not wrong, avoiding defining a near and long-term roadmap for your ICP can make it challenging to build immediate revenue momentum and increase efficiency across your go-to-market teams. If you’ve read the book, “Crossing the Chasm,” I’m referencing the bowling pin analogy here. At its simplest: ICP is a combination of Firmographic and Demographic attributes that you can enrich on leads and accounts to help align and prioritize your go-to-market efforts. This definition can and should evolve over time as the business grows. My recommendations:
Leverage insights from where you’ve done well in the past.
Think about where you need to go next. Killing it in a particular vertical and need to diversify? Need to go up market to close larger, more complex deals?
Think about not just the account profile, but what buyer profiles you're aligning to. Note: it's often multiple, especially in larger deals.
Once your ICP is defined, you’re able to leverage these descriptions for business logic like lead scoring and to set Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) thresholds to prioritize your sales teams’ time. Which brings me to the next topic, Service Level Agreements.
SLAs
Service Level Agreements are agreements between sales and marketing regarding specific hand off points within the funnel. Most B2B organizations have three key hand-off points within their sales funnel before a customer is successfully onboarded.
Hand-off from Marketing to Sales Development Representative (SDR)
Hand-off from SDR to Account Executive (AE)
Hand-off from AE to Customer Success Manager (CSM)
You can have the fastest runners in the relay, but they will trip if they’re not working in unison. This isn’t a trickle down effect; establishing SLAs is a two way street. It’s a great way to set the expectation with your Inside Sales leadership regarding what’s a good definition of a “sales ready” lead worthy of pursuit by the SDR organization. On the flip side, we also need to make sure that if a lead comes through that fits the defined criteria, the Sales Development Reps will follow up in a consistent and timely manner. There’s a ton of research that’s been done on diminishing likelihood of conversion to a business opportunity with every hour that passes. That’s right, every hour– forget about days! Recent data has shown that your chances of connecting are up to 21x higher within 30 minutes, and consumers today expect follow-up within 10 minutes of submitting a request. It’s critical to agree with your sales leadership team what the expectations are for your sales team to adhere to when it comes to lead follow up– potentially even with specific expectations for different types of leads– to help them increase their chances of converting those leads into business opportunities. #timeismoney!
KPIs
Key Performance Indicators is a term that is pretty commonly known and used, but what I’m specifically referring to here is having a unified view across the organization into funnel definitions and metrics to measure over time. Defining which key points within the funnel each team will hold themselves accountable to, and then actually sharing those metrics out in a transparent way is a great way to build trust and credibility with your counterparts. It doesn’t always have to be sunshine and rainbows in order to share these numbers out– it’s important to highlight any potential roadblocks you’re facing as they arise along with the ways you’re considering addressing these challenges so that everyone is on the same page with regards to where each team is focused on investing time and resources from month to month.
There you have it– three, three-letter acronyms to help you establish a tighter alignment with your sales org. Can you count how many other acronyms I got to pepper in here, though😉?
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