Mid-Funnel Sales Effectiveness | Learning from Revenue Leaders

In the early 2010s, Fortune Magazine would compile an “Executive Dream Team” each year. The idea behind these lists was “if you could have anyone you wanted on your executive team at your company, who would it be?” This is the exact approach we took when compiling our panelists for our webinar yesterday titled “Unlocking Mid-Funnel Velocity: A Roundtable with Revenue Leaders.” We tapped experts from across the revenue spectrum, including:

• Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at TripActions
• James Springhetti, RVP of Sales at Seismic
• Colleen Bashar, SVP of Solution Sales at Guidewire 
  

During the session, our CEO, Thad Eby, focused the discussion around mid-funnel velocity, the activities and content needed to achieve that, creative ways to build relationships, and how, as a holistic revenue function, teams can be more effective. 

Below, we’ve compiled some of our favorite nuggets from the discussion:

Key Takeaways

Sales and marketing alignment is only becoming more important. 

This is pretty much a no-brainer at this point, and each of our panelists agreed; it’s critical to have a cohesive revenue team. Meagen, as a CMO, said trust and deep partnership between marketing and sales are imperative for successful sales cycles and mid-funnel conversion.  

When the partnership exists between marketing, sales, and pre-sales, you feel this blissful “a-ha” moment, and everything executes so perfectly...that’s the kind of partnership we’re trying to create. If that partnership isn’t there, there’s a breakdown in execution at some point, that can ultimately hurt conversion. 

Ensure your pre-sales team has access to the prospect.

The most important thing for pre-sales teams in the middle of the sales funnel? According to Colleen, it’s access to the prospect. If they’re able to have quality discussions on business imperatives, long-term strategic goals, and challenges the prospect is facing, that just elevates the level of support they’re able to give not only their sales team but to the prospect. 

Always be sure to run a quality sales discovery. 

“Deals are won and lost in discovery.” It’s an old adage and everyone on the panel agreed that discovery in the sales cycle is something that never ends. To James, if you think of discovery as just one meeting or a moment in time, you’ll be missing a lot of opportunities to add value to the conversations you’re having with prospects.

So, what happens if you run a poor discovery? James says it’s all about humility. Recognize you messed up, humanize it, and own up to it. From a tactical perspective, it’s your best bet. To move forward, it’s important to have that strong partnership with marketing to uncover and bring to light the value-based messaging you can leverage, even though you may have missed doing that in your discussions with the prospect. 

Relationships drive middle of funnel conversion. 

For these revenue leaders, remote selling is a new venture. When you can’t “break bread” and meet face-to-face, how do you build your buyer-vendor relationship? 

Now more than ever, we need to find “surprise and delight” moments in creative ways. For Meagen’s team, it’s been sending picnic baskets to customers to remind them to get out and enjoy the sun even if they can’t travel. For Colleen’s, it was a survival kit with branded t-shirts both the prospect and her team wore on the last day of a week-long, intensive POC. 

In this remote world, we need to find ways to edge out our competition by engaging and interacting with our prospects. As James said, “buyers need to feel like you’re easy and fun to work with.”

Watch the Recording & Join for More!

For more insights and discussion around each of these topics, check out the recording now!

Want to learn about Ombud best practices or how to effectively manage change within your organizations? Join us for our next installments of the Ombud SCALE 2020 Webinar Series on October 15th and 22nd.