What role did luck play a role in your career?

If I look at my career, 50% was luck and the other 50% was hard work.

I was lucky to have joined some great companies with nurturing work cultures and amazing colleagues. I was also very lucky to have multiple very good mentors who gave me the opportunities I would not have had access to otherwise. And when I started my consulting practice in 2001, I was lucky to have a network of past colleagues, who became early clients.

But I also worked hard to make the most of these opportunities, that came my way. I have always been very focused on making my clients or managers successful. As a result, all my clients came from referral business – not a single cold call.  During the journey, I met some clients who pushed me, and I am very thankful for them because I grew significantly from those experiences.  While working with some clients, I was able to expand my practice into areas such as ROI Models to help their customers justify solutions, Monthly Win-loss Analysis, Sales Play books, lead-to-deal flow optimization and competitive analysis and deliver significant value to them and many others.

But one practice I would like to share with everyone in this post is the practice of owning your day/week that I have intensely followed. I attribute a lot of my success to it.  At the beginning of each quarter, I plan for what I want to accomplish for the quarter and for the first month. Then every Sunday I review my monthly plan and then make a list of deliverables for Monday and for the week – not action items, but what I am going to deliver or accomplish. And they need to fit into my monthly goals.  Then every day of the week I start my morning with what I am going to accomplish that day.  This keeps me intensely focused during the day.  I spend a few minutes at the end of the day to see what I accomplished, where I am on my weekly plan and any adjustments I need to make to my pace.  I also reflect on, if anything needs to change in my weekly, monthly, or quarterly plan based on any new developments.  My goal always is to finish everything on my list by mid-day Friday, so I have some buffer built into it.   This practice has become foundational for me and not only allows me to deliver what I promised, but more importantly, continue to grow personally.  Reason is my personal growth goals are a part of my quarterly plan.

What worked for you?  Please share with others by replying to this post.  We all learn from each other.

The age old question - is that marketing or sales that primarily generates our pipeline?

 

It takes a village. Attribution for leads is an age-old problem.  But I have a proven solution.

When I became the CMO of one of my previous companies, I immediately knew I had a problem. The marketing team used last touch attribution for sales leads i.e., the lead source in the CRM system was attributed to whoever touched the lead last. This led to lots of conflict between sales and marketing.  The sales cycles for the product were long – so invariably every lead was touched by one of more nurture marketing campaigns, even when sales (or SDRs) had brought the lead in and kept it engaged.  So, on the surface it appeared that over 85% of the leads were brought by marketing.  However, when I spoke to the SDR team, they scoffed at the volume (and quality) of leads send to them by marketing.  I knew I needed to solve the problem immediately, to not only get marketing and sales to start working together, but more important, understand the real ROI of demand generation investments.

The solution was simple.  We created multiple lead attribution fields.  The Lead Source field was used to capture which team (and program) brought the lead into the company such as Google Ad Words, trade show events, webinars, outbound calling from SDR team etc.  This gave us visibility into what top-of-the-funnel programs were working. These programs tend to be expensive and conversion rates tend to be low.  But some programs typically do better than others.  So even a slight change in marketing mix here can yield huge returns.  Then we a created last-non-marketing-touch field to understand which SDR and sales campaigns were the leads responding to. We also left in last-marketing-touch fields to understand which marketing nurture programs the lead was responding to?  By adding date fields alongside these attributions, we were able to capture the timing of that touch.  These fields non only helped us get clarity into whether marketing or sales was being more effective for certain segments/regions/verticals, but more important, it gave us a better understanding of the customer journey, as well as the ROI of various sales and marketing programs.  With this data, we were able to map how customers moves through the process and the investments we need to make in the website, content, and programs to make those interactions more engaging for the customers, as well as more productive for us.

It does take a village to make demand generation programs work well.  The right tracking is critical not only for getting the right collaboration between sales and marketing, but more important, delivers the insights you need to improve the effectiveness of your precious marketing spend.

Please let the readers know how you solved this age old problem by adding your comment below.

Win-Loss Analysis - Revisited

 

In the last few weeks, I have spoken to at least three ex-colleagues who wanted some insights into the win-loss analysis work I have done in the past for clients.  They were all looking to significantly enhance the win-loss analysis program within their product marketing organizations.  Here is the summary of thoughts I shared with them.

1. Win-loss and competitive analysis are two sides of the same coin.  The programs feed into each other to help you give your sales reps the information edge they need to compete and win.
2. Win-loss analysis contains two components – qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, and you need both. 
• Analysis from your CRM system can give you good quantitative insights into your sales performance against major competitors in the last quarter(s) by segment and region, why you win and lose against them, as well as quarter over quarter trends.  Of course, the quality of analysis depends on the quality of data being entered by your sales reps in the CRM system.  Your Sales Ops should help you continuously improve the quality of data within the CRM system.
• If there was an RFP associated with that opportunity, gets your hands on the RFP response. Also get your hands on the proposal submitted by your sales rep, as well as any notes about the opportunity within the CRM system.
• You need to complement the quantitative analysis and RFP/CRM notes with interviews – with your sales reps, pre-sales engineers, partners, and your customers (both won and lost) to get a 360-degree perspective about that opportunity.  The more interviews you can do, the richer your understanding will be about why you won or lost that deal. Key is to keep those interviews open ended (except for a few scripted questions at the beginning to validate the information within the CRM system).  This will give you deeper insights into what were the triggers that led to the customer looking for a new solution, what was the perception of your company before the sales cycle started, how it changed over the course of the sales cycle, what was done well in the sales cycle, what could be done better and why did they choose your solution over your competition (or vice-versa if you lost the deal).  You will be surprised with what you can learn from these interviews, including what marketing messages are working and what are not.

Key is to get to this information quickly – do not wait till the end of the quarter to start the interview process.  Within a week of winning or losing a deal, you should be scheduling calls with your sales, pre-sales, partner, and customer to get the whole picture.  Sometimes it helps to get an independent consultant to do this for you - they can look at the data more objectively and there is more open sharing of information during the interviews - both internal and external.

I had written multiple blog posts on this topic last summer.  Here is the link to the first post in the series.

Please share your win-loss program war stories  - especially what worked well and what changes you need to make to get the program back on track (where you were not happy with initial results), so other readers can learn from them.