Evaluate Personas
Along the same lines of auditing prospect quality, take a look at your personas. More likely than not, each persona will require different outreach tactics, nurture sequences, follow-up strategies. Similarly, different personas will have differing timelines to close.Â
Pair qualitative insights with segmented metric performance to further inform your audit. Do some personas reflect prospects that will sign-up for free trials but never convert? Does a select audience fail to respond to your content marketing? Pair such data with the most important question of all, why is this the case? It could be that your sales methods or product fail to address important priorities, or perhaps it’s that the audience is a poor fit. Candid conversations with your sales team (and competitive analysis) could provide crucial context.
Explore which approaches work best for each of your personas and make a plan for your sales and marketing teams to implement these varying strategies effectively.
Not all prospects will be your ideal customers. You may be hesitant to start weeding leads out before moving them down the sales funnel, but you’ll ultimately save your team tons of time and energy, as well as improve your overall win ratio.
Identify Knowledge Gaps In Your Resources and Sales Team
If a large number of prospects that are handed over to your sales team ultimately say no for the same reason, you have a gap in your acquisition content. Your top of funnel marketing content should qualify good-fit prospects by educating them around your product or services. This doesn’t just mean highlighting the best parts of your offering — it also means highlighting the reasons you may not be a good fit for someone.
Similarly, if your sales team is often unsure of the answers to prospect questions, you need to enhance team education. Explore how you can provide additional training to increase your team’s product knowledge as well as provide resources that can help them during sales conversations.Â
Keep in mind, this step of the auditing process especially pertains to channel sales, as partners won’t be focused on familiarizing themselves exclusively with your products. Make sure you’re making the most of their limited bandwidth with a carefully curated onboarding process. Tools like Allbound help you track training engagement and subsequent quiz results as they relate to lower-funnel activities like deal registrations and generated revenue. Sales data in hand, audit and refine your partner training methods so you promote the most effective and eliminate the worse.Â
Collect Qualitative Feedback
While the numbers don’t lie, they also don’t tell the entire story. Collecting feedback from your team and customers can help you understand the reasoning behind different sales metrics. One effective strategy is using a call recording tool, like Gong.io to listen back to conversations and create a feedback loop with your direct and indirect sales teams.
You should also conduct closed-lost interviews to explore why prospects said no and where they ended up going instead. Similarly, you can connect with closed-won clients to explore what made them say yes, what their expectations were, and any opportunities for improvement throughout the process.