Where does it come from?
How To Overcome the Issue of Leaky Lead Lifecycle Management
Discover the common LLM issues, factors impacting LLM, and how to overcome the issues to close the opportunity cost gap.
Lead lifecycle management (LLM) is critical to RevOps. Poor LLM leads to revenue losses. And most companies face LLM issues. Christine Crandell, president, New Business Strategies, discusses the common LLM issues, the factors impacting LLM, and how to overcome these issues to improve sales and marketing efforts’ effectiveness and revenues.
Lead lifecycle management is a critical part of revenue operations (RevOps) to help organizations improve their revenue generation processes. Lead lifecycle management is the first touch point for RevOps teams to analyze when revenue is impacted. It is a subset of revenue operations.
Lead lifecycle management is tracking and nurturing potential customers, known as leads, through each stage of the sales funnel, from initial contact to close. The goal is to convert as many leads as possible into paying customers. RevOps, on the other hand, is a cross-functional approach to optimizing revenue generation that integrates teams, processes, and technology to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a company’s revenue operations.
Without lead lifecycle management (LLM), there is no RevOps. It provides the data and insights to inform revenue generation. Organizations can quickly identify where to optimize their lead nurturing and conversion strategies by tracking lead behavior and engagement throughout the sales funnel. In other words, the quality of an organization’s LLM has a direct impact on revenue as well as RevOps.
See More: Orchestration: The Next Step for RevOps
Every organization complains about lead quality and focuses on incrementally increasing conversion.
Rajesh Bahttad, head of RevOps Strategy and Solutions for RevSure.ai, lays out the revenue impact of a one percent increase in funnel performance. “Let’s say your target market ASPs are $50K and $15K, and your conversion rates are MQL to SQL of 30 percent, SQL to SAL of 70 percent, and SAL to Win of 30 percent,” shares Bahttad. “A one percent increase in conversion at each funnel stage would increase annual revenue by nearly $1 million.”
What should be talked about is the opportunity cost of poor LLM.
A recent study, “Understanding Lead Lifecycle Management ProcessesOpens a new window ,” sponsored by Tray.io, quantified that impact — almost 40% of study respondents report annual revenue loss between 10-25% of revenue due to LLM operational issues. Said another way, for a $100 million company, LLM issues cost them between $10 and 25 million in missed annual revenue, regardless of industry.
Lead Lifecycle Management Issues
A recent study, “Understanding Lead Lifecycle Management ProcessesOpens a new window ,” sponsored by Tray.io, quantified that impact — almost 40% of study respondents report annual revenue loss between 10-25% of revenue due to LLM operational issues. Said another way, for a $100 million company, LLM issues cost them between $10 and 25 million in missed annual revenue, regardless of industry.
Ryan Barba
Senior Director of Client Experience, VCA Animal Hospitals
- Widely and repeatedly socialize a well-articulated RevOps vision that gives each team member a clear understanding of the real meaning their work has.
- Widely share detailed customer journey maps that show aligned business process flows to help employees understand who does what, when, and why.
- Implement accountability to reinforce commitment across all levels of the organization.
- Transparently share metrics to help team members understand cause and effect.
- Have a milestone-based plan and encourage team members to share suggestions, ideas, and feedback.
- Widely and repeatedly socialize a well-articulated RevOps vision that gives each team member a clear understanding of the real meaning their work has.
- Widely share detailed customer journey maps that show aligned business process flows to help employees understand who does what, when, and why.
- Implement accountability to reinforce commitment across all levels of the organization.
- Transparently share metrics to help team members understand cause and effect.
- Have a milestone-based plan and encourage team members to share suggestions, ideas, and feedback.
1. Executive champion.
2. Solve a handful of key use cases.
3. Do the right thing for the customer.
Customer Experience Guidelines
The culprit is an inability to move leads through the funnel efficiently. In fact, 88% of respondents reported issues with their LLM processes, which show up as slow response rates, higher sales and marketing costs, and lost leads.
The most common operational issues cited include the following:
Time-consuming, manual, and repetitive processes
Lack of integration capabilities across the tech stack
Complicated tech stack comprised of siloed SaaS apps
Difficulty in scaling leads
A surprise in the study’s findings is that despite massive investments in martech, Ops, and cloud infrastructure, virtually all study respondents state that their automation and integration tools missed the mark in improving lead lifecycle management.
Current tools and applications are too complex for business users; they need deep resilience, governance, and compliance capabilities, and out-of-the-box integrations with marketing automation platforms lack scalability and customizability.
Organizations need help with workflow gaps between applications and data stores. Study respondents that opted for in-house development did not show better results. Of companies that built their own integrations and automated workflows, 57% struggled with complex tech stacks, and over 53% invested significant resources and time to develop and maintain integrations and automation. Gluing together siloed SaaS applications and disparate data structures is hard and slows down lead management.
Marketers and Ops want to increase speed, almost 30% want greater flexibility, and 18% want higher lead reliability. These are in addition to RevOps’ need to collect insights on various buyer journeys, intent signals, and deeper insights into prospects’ challenges and pain points.
Data Quality
This brings up the pesky issue of data quality
Poor data quality is a widespread issue significantly impacting lead lifecycle management, especially in B2B industries. According to a study by Experian, nearly 60% of all B2B data becomes outdated within a year. In addition, a report by Dun & Bradstreet found that, on average, almost 25% of an organization’s customer data needs to be more accurate.
Poor data shows up as incorrect contact information, incomplete lead information, and duplicate leads, to name a few, leading to ineffective engagement, which contributes to lost sales opportunities and decreases sales productivity. A study by the Data & Marketing Association found that organizations prioritizing data quality see a 20% increase in marketing ROI and a 15% increase in sales productivity. B2B organizations must prioritize data quality and implement processes to ensure that their data is accurate and complete.
See More: 4 Steps To Maximize Won/Lost Program ROI
Where to From Here?
How organizations manage prospect and customer engagement needs a rethink. Adding more applications is not the answer. The industry has tried that with its 10,000-plus applications; the problem remains.
What is emerging is an intelligent layer between application functionality and data that enable organizations to codify their journey and persona workflows across applications and data sources. This offers a more holistic and responsive approach to buyer engagement, lead, and revenue management.
Whether it is called revenue orchestration, new low-code automation, or next-generation iPaaS, the intelligent layer can understand and respond to each buyer’s behavior and intent signals rather than attempting to fit all buyers into predefined sales channels. This approach prioritizes building value-based relationships instead of just focusing on closing transactions. It also intelligently enables cross-functional alignment, information sharing, and collaboration (aka tearing down silos).
Even better, this new intelligent layer can help with the data quality issue. Tray.io, for example, addresses data quality issues through transparency of process and order of operations.
Transparency of process refers to knowing exactly when/where data is being used in a process. Most importantly, it enables users to make changes when data quality issues are detected. By providing visibility into exactly how processes unfold, step by step, the intelligent layer overcomes the “black box” syndrome of popular market-facing applications.
Order of operations is the ability to control when and where data is written to and read from, creating an enterprise-wide source of truth. According to Niels Fogt, director of automation solutions at Tray.io, “customers have recognized the approach of native integrations provided by martech solutions puts them “behind the process,” thus having to design around the constraints of this approach. Using Tray puts them “in front of the process,” giving them explicit control over how and when data moves.”
LLM, RevOps, and deep contextual customer lifecycle insights are the three legs of the customer-led growth stool. By integrating lead lifecycle management, RevOps, and martech stack into an intelligence workflow layer, organizations can not only improve the effectiveness of their sales and marketing efforts but also close the opportunity cost gap of leaky lead lifecycle management.