Content:
- The why?
- Inspiration for data to collect.
- Call Recordings.
- Feedback loops and follow-through.
The why?
B2B Startups who are in the early stages of their CRM journey can benefit from a sales process that has a focus on gathering specific feedback for their product. On top of this, you can add this information to a feedback loop so that Product, Customer Success, and Marketing can get those valuable insights. Since my background is B2B SaaS these ideas are most suitable for these types of companies.
Inspiration for data to collect:
Strong use case collection:
This one is a given, and something most sales processes collect during the discovery/qualification phase. However, my 2 cent is that it's important to design it in terms of product management feedback. Startups can generally move faster when it comes to product development, their prioritization of which features to implement next is crucial, and sales can help highlight what use cases and features prospects are the most excited about.
Here are some ideas for data you can collect for use case info:
- The problem you are solving/use case
- Features they are looking for (ideally a picklist)
- Integrations needed (if applicable)
- Requirements (such as security/admin controls etc)
If you have done any documentation on ICP and what problems your product solves for various roles or departments, you can also link this together based on the titles of the prospects you have engaged with during the buying journey.
Closed Won/Lost Process
From my experience, a closed won/lost process often looks like this:
- Required Closed won reason (Free text)
- Required Closed lost reason (Free text)
Sales Reps are not measured on providing insightful feedback (albeit it is in their long-term best interest). Therefore you can sometimes find these reasons being something like this: "The contract was signed" or "didn't want to buy". With this in mind, it's up to RevOps to make this process actionable, easy to understand, and quick for sales reps to fill out. Think about categorizing your closed won/lost reasons so that it can be made into a picklist, such as pricing, features, and competition. You can then on top of this create conditional dependencies, for instance, if a close lost reason is "competition", then the next option can list your top 10 competitors.
Of course, the market is evolving, and it's difficult to think of every won/lost reason, therefore always have an "other" reason and make sure to review these regularly to make sure to update your process to capture these instances.
Capturing more insightful data into closed won/lost reason can help to understand why deals are being lost, and if it's an external or internal problem. If an internal problem such as missing features, a plan can be put in place to potentially develop these features, or teach sales to avoid these specific use cases in the future.
Designing a closed won/lost process is in my opinion not a one-size-fits-all and should be customized specifically to the company.
With a robust closed won/lost process, you can generate detailed reports and dashboards that reveal why deals are won or lost, offering valuable insights to the entire company.
Call Recordings
A quick mention of call recordings. With recording tools adding AI capabilities to their functionalities, searching and asking for specific data across all your prospect and customer calls is now easier than ever. Which can be useful for anyone looking for prospect feedback on specific topics. Tools such as fathom or TL;DV have this capability when calls are being recorded and transcribed.
Feedback loop and follow through
Now that we have collected all this useful data, it's important to create a feedback loop so that the insights gets shared across the company department such as product, marketing CS, etc.
Since the CRM is collecting all the data, the easiest will be to create a dashboard, let's say with closed won/lost information, and create a relevant report that shows why deals are closed won, and lost. This should be especially interesting for marketing and product.
You can also create some automation so that the specific feedback can be exported from your CRM into a product management tool such as Productboard.
To avoid meeting overload, schedule yourself once a month/quarter to create a video going over the various data points and highlight trends of why deals are closed won/lost. You could highlight specific features that contributes to closed won deals, or competitors to look out for in your closed lost deals. You can also compare this data to previous periods.
Share the video with product and marketing, and ask for their feedback. if the feedback needs to be discussed, you can arrange a call to over the data points and arrange for actions that can be taken based on the data.
This process will look something like this:
If you read this far, thank you!
Do you have other ideas for data that is good to be collected during the buying journey?
If you need fractional RevOps, happy to connect to see if I can help you out with your RevOps initiatives.
Comments