Segment Sales Engagement Activity

Jarrod Cohen

How do you track and measure sales engagement activity in your segment reporting? We're looking to reduce waste in our system, and today, we're currently tracking 6QAs engaged with sales on a monthly basis.

Basically, given the accounts that 6QA'd in the given month, what % were engaged with by sales? We're tracking up each month, but what does good look like?

50% of 6QAs engaged with by sales? 75%?

Surely, not all accounts that 6QA all can and should get sales engagement. What does it look like for your organization?

Brandon McBride

We're ramping up a pilot here and have a legacy process of sending 6QAs to one particular SDR team. So we utilize the 6QA, but not with any particular emphasis (yet). 6QA Analytics shows us working 51% right now.

Based off of that, I feel 50% is low. If the team is actively working those 6QAs, they should be able to hit higher. I think 100% is doable if you have Conversational Email.

Jarrod Cohen

We're interested in CE but it's not yet available for us Dynamics customers 🙃 I think it will be a game-changer for us. Are you using it?

Anyway, we've gone from about 16% sales engagement rate on 6QAs to 38% in about 5 months. I am shooting to be at 65-70% by year's end, which feels right to me. CE will help us get to 100% I would think.

Brandon McBride

I used it at my last company and it's part of my future plan for where I'm at now.

With that history, I think 70% is a solid goal to shoot for, with a mini-celebration at 50%.

Brandon McBride

@Jarrod Cohen Ami just posted their own percentages here. Looks like they're just shy of 70% of in-CRM accounts.

Ami Arad

Thanks for linking to my article, @Brandon McBride. As with all of these things, it could vary widely business to business, so while I'd say 50% or higher is solid is a decent generalization, there are a bunch of factors that could make it higher or lower for any one person's company.

The nice thing about that report is that you can filter for "Unworked" in the filter panel at the right, and then look at the exact accounts and go through some of them to understand why they aren't being worked. There are good reasons and bad reasons. As an example, we have a rep that is assigned "LEGO" as an account, and they happen to be a 6QA. Big fan of LEGO here, but not sure there's a strong business case for 6sense there. There aren't a lot of accounts assigned to our reps like that so I don't think it's a significant factor, but, mentally, I'd assume we're doing 1-2% better than the report says just knowing a chunk of accounts aren't really worth reps working.

Brandon McBride

@Ami Arad I think - and correct me if you feel I'm wrong here - that ensuring that we're working our 6QAs well is just as important as reaching as many 6QAs as possible.

We're hitting ~60% of our 6QAs through our normal processes, but there are still a lot of improvements that need to be made in those process to prioritize those 6QAs and personalize and multithread our outreach. We work in a finite market (local governments) so I'm also of the opinion that improving the quality of work to the 60% of in-CRM 6QAs will have more of an impact on our bottom line than reaching 80% of 6QAs without working on the quality of those efforts.

On a related note - for a little while, we had a "goal" noted in our 6QA report. The feature may have been in beta, but I don't see it anymore. I believe it was a reference to an ideal number, based on our Salesforce data, as to the number of contacts and sales activities optimal to producing an open opportunity. I'm hoping that will come back.

Ami Arad

If you're asking if quality is at least as important as quantity, of course! It's critical on multiple fronts as you mention:

• Frontline managers should be checking the quality of the content of BDR emails and/or calls.
• Frontline managers should be making sure BDRs are reaching out to multiple people.
• Frontline managers should be confirming that the outreach is persistent; that they're not logging an activity or two to "work" it but then giving up.

I'm using "frontline manager" intentionally because, while Marketing can randomly check in on some outreach to gauge quality, ultimately the frontline managers need to hold their teams accountable for it. It is already their job, literally. If you have a team of dozens or 100s of prospectors, it's impossible for Marketing to do the kind of quality control that is necessary; it should fall on the frontline managers who are also held accountable by their managers.

This will be part of a frontline sales manager training that's coming imminently! I will be sure to promote it on RevCity.