Summary
Building synergy within sales and marketing relationships: An end-to-end cycle to build a mutually beneficial relationship for driving an enhanced customer experience. A re-defined process was able to help us witness joint success in meeting internal goals.
Challenge
UiPath faced challenges to capture demand, channelize enquiries, establish processes to qualify the leads & track the opportunities for closures. Initially, the approach was essential and needed to evolve. The primary source of lead generation was limited to ‘contact us' sales forms on the website or whitepaper downloads, and inbound leads were aggregated in Hubspot and routed to sales slack channels. Sales representatives were supposed to pick up the leads and act on the same. The challenges were:High-quality pipeline for powering field sales teams to monetise the opportunity, Lack of efficient process flow to capture and qualify leads from marketing campaigns across channels, Need for mutually agreed response time between Marketing & Sales on acceptance and conversion of qualified leads to opportunity, Tracking SQLs (Sales Qualified leads) progress in the funnel and conversions to revenue for tracking marketing investment effectiveness, Providing adequate pipe coverage
Objective
We focused on both qualitative and quantitative objectives to gain a thorough understanding. Below are the objectives we focused on. Objectives: ● A consistent flow of opportunities in the pipeline ● Increase sales lead flow and faster turnaround time ● Differentiate between existing opportunities and incremental impact ● Position marketing, to drive revenue and enhance customer experience ● Solidify the relationship with the sales team and develop broader organizational predictability ● Track on-time execution and published outcomes/learnings at the end of each quarter
Strategy
UiPath has evolved from being a small startup in Romania to a public company. The company has grown tremendously in the past few years and is generating traction across various industries and geographical locations; companies have started automating their processes irrespective of the business size. However, with this hypergrowth came challenges to capture demand, channelize the enquiries, establish processes to qualify the leads, and track the opportunities for closures. Now, to overcome these challenges effectively and efficiently we recognized the: Need for Demand Management: The surge in demand for Automation needed to be captured, assessed, qualified, progressed, and converted to revenue in an efficient & effective manner. Change of Engagement Model between Sales & Marketing: Both the teams were operating individually and this initiative focused on the significance of the joint approach that brought a significant change. Identification of Stakeholders in the Demand Creation process : It was unclear who the various stakeholders were and their roles in the process, which were now set up as : ● Internal Customer: Sales ● Collaborators: Pre-Sales, Customer Success, Sales Enablement, Tech Support, Professional Services ● Facilitators: Procurement, Finance, IT & Admin ● Gate Keepers: Legal Development of Joint Demand Planning process: A structured quarterly planning process was initiated 6 weeks before a new quarter, reviewing rolling 4 RQ (rolling quarter) pipe, reviewing new launches/campaigns inflow, aligned areas of demand gap with investment, and rolled out tactics. Creation of Structured Lead Tracking mechanism: Once the lead was captured, the trackable process for assignment, nurture, qualification, and hand-off to sales was designed.
Data
Data and results are shared in results section.
Solution
As a process, five lead stages were created before the opportunity level – 1. New –Leads moved from Hubspot to SFDC needed LDR / Sales follow-up 2. Working –leads accepted to work on it but hasn't reached a conclusion. 3. Qualified – Leads are qualified and handed over to sales for opportunity creation. 4. Disqualified – Non-Sales leads 5. Recycle – Leads that had no current interest for purchase and kept for nurture. SLA (Service Level Agreement) with Sales team: T1 leads assignment to LDRs with an SLA of 48 hrs. Qualified on BANT criterion before sending out as SQL. Since this was a completely new category, clear budgets and buying authority as well as the time to close can be hard to assess super accurately. It was agreed that once UiPath sales accepted the formal meeting, the qualified lead will be accepted as an opportunity by sales in SFDC. Metrics: Clear metrics were defined to measure the marketing tactic effectiveness & lead progression - Number of new contacts generated in an account, Leads follow-up in the queue by LDRs, Marketing tactic effectiveness Cost per lead from various campaigns ● Conversion of marketing-led opportunities to won/booked revenue Cadence and Feedback – In order to continuously evolve and make the processes work better, weekly cadence was set: Cadence with marketing managers and sales operations – Review tactic effectiveness and Lead discipline, Biweekly cadence with Sales for conversation and closures Systems: Technology was a big enabler to drive the entire lead management process and brought a closer alignment with sales. SFDC had transformed lead allocation and management, reduced manual interventions. 1. Automated lead routing and prioritization to LDR. 2. Lead progression to sales for opportunity conversion. 3. Enabled better and predictive sales forecasting. 4. Pipeline report and coverage
Results
Quantitative : There were various learnings that came across and we saw positive results in just 3 quarters. ● Lead Consistency (Velocity) ➔ Regular Campaign planning & execution rhythm provided a consistent flow of opportunities in the pipeline aligned to sales requirements ➔ Sales Lead flow increased by 2.5x time, from 2K leads to 20K+ Suspect enquiries, 5K+ MQLs. ➔ SQL to opportunity ratio stood at 75%. - Best in the world ➔ Lead Prioritization helped address the hand-raisers within 48 hrs by LDR team members with a faster turnaround time ● SAL (Sales Accepted Lead) Volume ➔ This optimized the traffic flow of 5K+ Inquiries to 2.5K MQLs to 500+ incremental SALs ➔ This meant 20 SAL/rep/month, which is 1SAL per day at an account level. ● SAL Value ➔ We were not able to differentiate between existing opportunities and incremental impact and hence we shifted to track new opportunities and the influenced pipeline, as well as tracked closure values separately. ➔ Achieved 500+ NN Opps, 600+ influenced opps, closures – 80 new deals – 1M US$ Revenue impact. ➔ At the funnel level, if we must summarize our conversions from MQL to SAL reached at 18% and SAL to closures at 11%. Qualitative: These results not just helped us solidify our relationship with sales and helped in positioning marketing, drive revenue, and enhanced customer experience. In addition, mutual support of goals & prioritization of areas of effort and budget investment were attained. We were able to jointly develop quarterly demand creation plans and share the broader organization predictably. We also tracked on-time execution & published outcomes/learnings at the end of each quarter. We saw joint success and sharing of credit and mutual appreciation was seen through the sales team recommending marketing team members for corporate excellence awards internally.
