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Measuring your B2B Customer Journey

Posted on Jun 13, 2020 | 15 min

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About Leore

Leore Spira is the Head of Sales & Marketing Operations at Syte.ai

Leore is an integral part of the Sales & Marketing Operations at Syte.ai, a visual AI for Retail that has experienced rapid growth in recent years. It has been said that their visual AI tech company is building a “bridge between physics, machine learning, and style”. They generate 4 billion visual searches, powered by 42 million devices, and support 2 billion shoppers.

Revenue Operations Must Understand the B2B Customer Journey

• Leore’s position as Head of Sales and Marketing Operations is a new role for Syte. She was hired to understand their revenue growth, pipeline, and how to increase productivity and revenue.
• Many startups don’t understand how essential it is for sales and marketing operations, or revenue operations, to understand the pipeline and how the departments work together to improve the business.
• Revenue Operations is not hired just to build strategies and processes, but also to understand the customer’s journey, how to capture and collect the data to understand the sales cycle, and what should be improved at every milestone in that journey.
• How does Rev Ops find where the gaps are in data? And how do you connect attributions throughout the B2B customer journey? Leore recommends managing a process in one platform rather than various external tools and spreadsheets. Collect all the data in one place. Build the process and strategies that create the customer journey and connect the departments inside one platform.
• To align the Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success departments, start with the top of the funnel with marketing. Help marketing generate more leads to bring in more business and then move it forward to the sales department to help them with prospecting. Understand the milestones in between and how we either bring new customers to the pipeline or support expansions and other business opportunities. And then help the customer success department understand the customer to better support them. Create an onboarding plan with the kick-off meetings, and make sure that the customer journey is smooth.
• There can be difficulty defining B2B buyers and your real buyer personas. You may think you understand the customer journey and the buying process, but once you look deeper at the data it helps determine the right buyer persona. Revenue Operations leaders can take the data and analyze the pipeline.
• By using the lead progression and understanding the conversion rates and the funnel of our customer journey, we can learn, not just the buyer persona, but also about their interests and specific needs. We can even understand use cases and be more focused in bringing new business and the right business in a short and smooth process, instead of spending a lot of time with cold-calling and prospecting.

Friction Points in the Sales Pipeline

• We discuss the typical friction points for tech companies – the handover from SQL to SAL, Sales Qualified Leads over to Sales Accepted Leads. How do you strike the balance between the need to deeper qualify leads versus the need to keep the rhythm and the momentum quick from a buyer perspective since people want a convenient buyer experience?
• Leore recommends striking this balance by understanding the qualification criteria and understanding the persona and the use case pains. This deep understanding will prevent delays between the stages. You will be able to have much higher conversion rates and success in closing deals.

Learning from Closed-Lost Opportunities

• Closed-lost opportunities can contain a lot of good information. It can tell you for example, whether it was a matter of product fit, or whether it was the timing or other reasons. As a Sales Operations Manager, it’s essential to evangelize the need to practice good data hygiene on closed-lost opportunities.
• Many times AEs will not convert a lead to an opportunity because they aren’t 100% sure it will become closed-won. The benefits of collecting good data on closed-lost opportunities are what you can learn from them. We can capture a lot of data.
• To learn from closed-lost opportunities, ask the SDR, BDR, and AE to provide some information to understand where the deal went wrong, and how we can maybe bring the same company and convert it to a closed-won. Or use this use case to learn about other opportunities.
• The closed-lost analysis allows the company to understand and learn more about its product and how to improve, and how to work with the R&D team. Then we can increase not just the revenue growth, but also the productivity of the whole company, the whole team. Not only the teams that are related to the customer journey, but also other teams that developed the product. It helps the company create a revenue machine.
• Closed-lost is just a stage in the bigger journey, and it’s absolutely not final. It’s an opportunity to learn to revise, to improve and to come back again, maybe with the same account, and do a better job next time around.

Understanding the Sales Cycle

• To prioritize milestones in the customer’s journey, it starts with customer journey mapping – analyzing the funnel and conversion rate. To do that, start by marking the important touchpoints that your customer experienced during this journey, with each department in the workflow and pipeline.
• Leore recommends sitting with every stakeholder at the company, with every manager, and together deciding what would help us understand the sales cycle. The most important thing is to understand the cost per stage and how much we spend during the customer’s journey, and how much we spend every time we meet the customer and every resource we invest during the process.

The Role of Revenue Operations

• Leore sees revenue operations as an essential function at a company. At every startup, if they want to grow and succeed, they must hire such a function, because revenue operations sees the full picture, the full customer journey. Not concentrating on one step of the funnel allows marketing, sales, customer success, support, finance, etc., to think from a higher level, to look into the macro, not the micro.
• This macro-perspective allows Revenue Operations not just to forecast, but also to understand the pipeline and understand productivity as a team and as a company. This is how you build a successful revenue machine and bring the company to success and hypergrowth.

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