RevOps Co-op Weekly #15 - lead stage vs. lead status, so what's the diff?
Adjust your pocket protectors and get your calculator ready, my fellow ops nerds, because we are about to dive deep into the realm of lead sales and marketing cycle indicators.
RevOps Co-op provides resources, content and community for those who ❤️ revenue operations. This weekly newsletter features collected tweets, posts and thoughts on a variety of RevOps topics. We also have a private Slack community with > 900 RevOps pro’s from companies like Slack, Lyft, Clari, Miro and more - click here to join.
🚨 Slack AMA Alert 🚨
Mark you calendars! 📆
The topic: Hey marketing, you're not there JUST to attract leads
When: Thursday, 01/21 @ 11am PST / 2pm EST
Where: RevOps Co-op Slack, #03_general channel (not a member yet? click here to join)
Guests: Angela Earl, VP of Marketing @ RFPIO and James McArthur, Director of Revenue Planning and Operations at Leaflink
Lead Stage vs. Lead Status
Adjust your pocket protectors and get your calculator ready, my fellow ops nerdlings, because we are about to dive deep into the realm of lead sales and marketing cycle indicators.
What's the Difference Between Lead Status and Lead Stage?
The differences are nuanced, but there are differences.
Lead Stage Defined
Lead stage indicates where a person is in the buyer journey. Tracking begins once a name is acquired by Marketing and follows the person as they enter, exit, and re-enter the buyer journey.
Companies often choose to implement demand generation waterfall stages that follow SiriusDecision's original model. Examples of lead stages may be:
MAL (Marketing Acquired Lead): name acquired (enrichment/prospecting/list purchase) but has not interacted with the brand to the point of becoming an MQL
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): a person has done an activity that meets marketing's definition of a qualified lead
SAL (Sales Accepted Lead): person fits basic requirements to be contacted by sales
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): a person has been qualified by sales for further contact
TSM (Tele-Sales Meeting): a person has agreed to a meeting set by an inside sales organization
SAO (Sales Accepted Opportunity): an opportunity has been identified
LSO (Late Stage Opportunity): an opportunity has progressed beyond the probability of x%
Customer: an opportunity has closed won
SRL (Sales Recycled Lead): a sales recycled lead, which occurs after an opportunity is lost
MRL (Marketing Recycled Lead): a lead is recycled by marketing before generating an opportunity
Churned Customer - a customer who canceled all services
Disqualified - opted out, not a person, no longer with a company
This journey is not usually linear. People may move from one phase, drop back to MRL, and then climb their way back up MQL and beyond again. Your system must be constructed with this in mind!
Lead Status Defined
Lead status is used by the salesperson who is in the process of working with the prospect. These statuses are intended to help the sales team stay organized. Typically, the status immediately after "Prospect" is set by either marketing automation or sales. Later statuses are automated by Salesforce flows and are based on related object activity (an opportunity is created, closed, or lost). Examples of lead statuses may be:
Prospect: a person in the database who has not interacted with anyone
Open - Not Contacted: an MQL that needs to be acted on by sales
Working: sales is attempting to contact, qualify, and create an opportunity
Meeting Set: sales has set a qualifying meeting
Opportunity Created: sales created an opportunity
Customer: an opportunity was closed-won
Opportunity Lost: an opportunity was closed-lost
Not a Target: the person does not fit the profile of someone who would buy the product at this time (to be revisited if new product lines/features added)
Disqualified: the person no longer is with a company or isn't who they claimed to be when they filled out a form
Nurture: the person is a potential target but not ready to buy at this time
Inactive Customer: account churned
These statuses are also not always linear. Again, be certain that your final process indicator when an upsell is lost doesn't confuse the sales team (do you choose Opportunity Lost or Customer -- what are the assumptions the sales team will make for each?)
The two indicators overlap quite a bit. Statuses will drive stages and visa versa. However, the statuses are a combination of segmentation and process, whereas the stages strictly measure where the person is in the buyer journey.
Does This Make Sense for B2B?
::record screech… everybody at the party stops what they're doing::
I'll keep it brief, I promise.
B2B sales target accounts and specific people who work at those accounts. The person at the purchasing account who manages the product is most likely the primary contact on the opportunity, so it makes sense to help sales track where the people they are working with are in the process.
However, buyer committees complicate things significantly. While a champion may be 100% on board, the CFO may pull the budget out from under their feet. An account has a holistic buyer journey that matters more than any individual's engagement alone.
Sarah Sheehan, Senior Manager and Principal Business Architect at Electronic Arts (EA):
“[O]nce you start converting leads, you run into having a lot of failed opportunities, potentially creating duplicate prospects, accounts, and contacts if the conversion process isn't set up properly. For outbound reps, utilizing account-based routing makes more sense than lead-based routing. You want to understand the intent, technographic, and true firmographic aspects of your accounts, not just the people or the leads that reach out to you."
“Utilizing account-based prospecting and customer management in sales allows you to set up campaigns to target accounts that show deanonymized web activity for people at that company which could indicate an openness to buy when you integrate with sophisticated intent systems. It allows you to segment customers that you have and target upsell or cross-sell opportunities before their renewal cycles. The tech debt risk is a lot higher though, and it can really affect your system performance as well as drive up your CRM costs to build in the automation you want to run a smooth marketing demand funnel and sales opportunity conversion processes.”
B2B organizations should measure stage progression and engagement from multiple angles. It's essential to find the right company and interact with the right people. A single demand waterfall following the primary contact simply won't cut it.
You can read my longer argument for expanding on the traditional demand generation waterfall along with how to do it here.
Does This Make Sense for B2C?
Your stages and statuses will differ depending on the product cost, selling method (eCommerce, direct, reseller, etc.), and sale complexity.
If you have a lower price point product that's either direct to consumer website sales or sell your wares on a third-party eCommerce platform, you may use a customer data platform to track buyer journeys and focus solely on stage. If you're selling luxury sprinter vans that are highly customized for each consumer, you may focus more on sales execution and status over a holistic journey.
What you implement depends on how closely you need to track your return on marketing investment, what people in your company need to keep track of their process, and what the company needs in terms of topline metrics.
How Do You Implement Lead Stage and Lead Status?
Always default to a single system to manage a process when it's possible. Your marketing automation platform should have visibility into the full range of fields and activities needed to update the stage, so it's a natural place to manage the process.
Because the two indicators are interconnected, people must land on their data definitions for both metrics before implementation. If people want to change definitions or add picklist values, it's imperative that they understand downstream or upstream impacts and that the logic for the other field is updated appropriately.
Because humans error and are not divine, make sure to automate as much as possible with the lead status field. Lead processes in Salesforce are pretty slick, but salespeople hate what they call "data entry," even if it's intended to help them do their job.
Lead stage and status are a decent start, but several other indicators can make marketing, sales, and customer success more efficient. These additional indicators may even inform lead stage and lead status once they are tried and tested. For example, ICP score and engagement score may be used to gate MQLs (this should only be done if you are absolutely confident in your logic and execution!). More on that later.....
Read the full blog post on this topic at the RevOps Co-op blog 👉🏻 Lead stage vs. lead status
🐦 This week in #RevOps Twitter
Little motivation to get your week started ✨
Some things worth considering from RevOps Co-op member Jeff Ignacio 🤝
This has absolutely nothing to do with business or RevOps but it made me laugh 😂
📚 Your curated #RevOps reading list
10 predictions for revenue operations in 2021, from SaaSsales.io
With the continued rise of Revenue Operations, what can we expect for 2021? RevOps Co-op member Rosalyn Santa Elena lays out 10 predictions, some of our favorites include:
Understanding the revenue engine
Optimizing the customer experience
GTM enabler and differentiator
Data driven value
When I grow up I want to be in RevOps
The engine behind your business - the three key components for successful revenue operations, from LeadIQ
Revenue Operations (RevOps) has become one of the most popular topics in the business-to-business (B2B) realm. RevOps are the engine of any business; they are the underlying power behind your revenue teams and the glue keeping Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success efficiently aligned. In short, they are the key to your
company's growth and success.
According to research done by SiriusDecision, companies that align all go-to-market functions outperform those that don't, resulting in 15% more profits and 19% faster growth. Furthermore, companies with aligned teams close 38% more deals and post 208% more marketing revenue, according to HubSpot reports.
LeadIQ's Ryan O'Hara and Rishi Mathur sat down with Rosalyn Santa Elena, Head of Revenue Operations at Clari. With over 20 years of experience with operations, Rosalyn discusses the three fundamental aspects of RevOps: metrics, technology, and strategy. This executive brief takes a deep dive into each section to showcase the importance of implementing a RevOps department and successfully doing so.
A case for making ‘revenue’ an action verb, from Forbes
Most marketers agree that the most important growth metric at their organization is revenue. But not all marketers feel prepared to impact revenue today. For years, we've been thinking about revenue as a byproduct or an effect, rather than an action.
As B2B buyers conduct more independent research than ever before, the marketing funnel has evolved in tandem. Marketers today have a much more integrated and complex — and less linear — job than handing MQLs over to sales. They are involved in nearly the entire customer journey and often have many touchpoints with a prospect before sales is ever involved.
Because of this more dominant role in the customer journey, marketers can't stay in a silo. Companies can no longer run the relay race starting with marketing handing off to sales and ultimately transitioning customers to customer success after everyone signs on the dotted line. Driving revenue in this new era fundamentally requires a stronger synergy between marketing, sales and customer success.
Businesses today need to orient all goals and benchmarking around revenue impact and ensure they have the right team and technology in place to ensure organizational alignment and prevent silos.
Funl is an operating system for your GTM team that provides end-to-end, full funnel analytics and insights that keep marketing, sales and customer success teams aligned and working seamlessly together to drive more revenue growth for your business.