How's it going, everyone?
I'm Zand.
Today
we're talking all about lead generation.
We'll discuss identifying
a North Star metric.
How to build a solid measurement
framework. And how to increase your ROI.
Then I'll give you three tips
to help you optimize your early
gen strategy.
Let's hop right in.
Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce.
An inside
look at how we run our sales
service and marketing businesses
with helpful how to tips
you can apply to your own business.
If you haven't seen our episode
on how sales and marketing unite
behind pipeline to drive growth.
Check it out here.
Pipeline is the glue that holds sales
and marketing together,
so it's super important
that the programs we create
as marketers
are optimized to drive
the kind of pipeline
that turns into revenue growth.
First, let's discuss
what lead generation is.
Lead generation can be defined
as the process of generating
consumer interest
for a service or a product
with the end goal
of turning that interest into revenue.
Every business is dependent
on inbound demand, either
through organic or paid channels.
This can be somebody
downloading a piece of content,
signing up for a free trial,
or creating an account
for any kind of premium product.
However, not all leads are created equal
to run an efficiently gen program.
It's not just about the quantity
of leads,
but ensuring quality
through control of who you're targeting
when you're targeting them
in their journey,
where you're targeting them
and then aligning the right message.
Let's put this into perspective.
Sales teams are getting leaner
and marketing budgets
are tightening as companies
prepare for this uncertainty ahead.
On top of all of this
competition is growing.
It's getting more expensive
to acquire new customers.
The days
when revenue growth was a game of lead
volume are long gone.
Now more than ever,
it's critical for marketers
to optimize their strategies,
to focus on quality,
to maximize the return
for every dollar they spend.
If this is an area in your business
that keeps you up at night, don't worry.
Here at Salesforce,
we have three tips
that you can use
as a starting point to help you
optimize your lead gen strategy.
Tip number one
Understand and build
a measurement framework
around your North Star metric.
Every business has a point
in their customer journey
where a person reaches their aha moment
and figures out
how your product
is going to help make their lives
and their businesses
more successful or more efficient.
This could be in product behaviors
and interactions
or identification through your sales team
or any combination of these.
Think Facebook's metric
of seven friends in ten days
or Slack's metric of 2000 messages
within a team of three users.
Or the traditional SAS model
around opportunity stages.
These moments are what we'd call
North Star metrics.
A North Star metric
can simply be defined as a metric
that is a key
indicator of business
growth and can be tied to increases
in product engagement
and therefore eventually revenue.
It's a metric that's backed by data
and that the entire or can rally behind.
For us at Salesforce,
the North Star metric is
when an opportunity
has reached stage two.
This means that a perspective customer
has been qualified
by our sales development org
and then verified
and accepted by our sales
lead at this step.
The sales team will estimate
the potential revenue
value of the opportunity,
allowing us to start
to also begin to track an ROI.
After you've identified
what your business is.
North Star Metric is.
This is when
and from where
you can start
to build out your measurement framework.
This metric is going to be
how you measure
success and based
optimizations around
for your acquisition programs
and your activities.
The types of questions
you'll be asking yourself
and your team is
How is the volume trending?
What sources are bringing
in these types of users and at what scale
for your paid channel specifically?
What is the cost efficiency
of generating
these engaged users
from each of the tactics
and campaigns that you're running?
This is also where you can start
to find the proxy metrics
that may be leading
indicators of this KPI,
particularly as you track them
further up your sales funnel.
For example, at Salesforce,
we don't care as much about overall
traffic trends,
but more so traffic
trends from our highest quality
sources of leads.
If traffic is dropping from a top quality
lead source,
we need to react quick
because we know what the expected
downstream effect is.
Tip number two
Not all leads are created equal.
A common misconception
is that a lead is a lead.
In reality,
not all of these are the same.
On the one end of the spectrum.
Some leads can be less
costly, have huge scale
but low quality in terms of
they're looking for the products
or services you offer
and therefore their likelihood
to convert is low.
On the other end of the spectrum,
there are leads
that may be a lot more expensive,
but higher quality and ready to buy.
Of course,
then there's everyone in between.
What actually causes the spectrum?
There are a lot of factors at play.
Things like targeting, accuracy,
who a person actually is versus
who the ad partner thinks they are,
how close these individuals
are to your target persona,
as well as how far along
they are on their buying journey.
Is this their first interaction
or had they done research beforehand?
How open are they
to learning about your product?
Did you interrupt them
by pulling them out of their social feed
or from an article they were reading?
Or were they already in
active research mode?
The various channels targeting options
and content you pair together to acquire
these leads can produce hundreds
or even thousands of iterations of who
you're acquiring.
Ideally, you want to understand
which of these combinations
produce, what quality of leads
and at what cost.
An example of this variation
could look like this on LinkedIn.
You target a sales manager
within the financial services industry
using a customer story
from a banking customer.
And they've interacted with your business
once in the past.
They might be more expensive,
but they're highly likely to convert
if you target a similar
looking sales manager
through an ad network
with no prior engagement
on a banking news article with an e-book.
They're likely to convert
significantly lower,
so the cost you're willing to pay
for them
needs to align
to the relative decrease in quality.
Once you understand
the quality of leads
across your acquisition sources
and campaigns,
you can
then begin to figure out
which sources are scalable.
Ideally,
you want to spend the most time
where there is the most potential
for business impact.
Also important
is where you don't spend time
keeping yourself
your team and supporting functions.
Working on the highest leveraged
areas of your program
will ensure
you're driving the most efficient results
across the wider org.
Tip number
three test learn iterate scale.
Whether you're a one person team
or a large enterprise,
there's always going to be room
for improving the efficiency
of your operation.
Prioritize tasks
like you, prioritize spend.
If you can only run one or two,
which are the ones that are going to have
the biggest potential impact?
If and when you find success,
that's
when you can take the potential scale
you've outlined
and maximize
it due to market competition.
Ad Fatigue.
Ad Platform.
User Degradation.
Performance will always decline
back to the baseline.
It's inevitable for all companies.
So take advantage of the windows
you have and plan
to repeat this process often.
For our team at Salesforce,
we take our highest traffic paid forms
and we run variant
testing on them at all times.
Some of the most basic changes
you'd think
would have minimal impact
have driven significant returns.
We ran a simple test
changing the layout of the 6
to 8 fields in our form
from one column to two,
shortening the vertical length
of the form.
This increased form submission
on desktop computers by 10%
applied to all paid forms.
The scale portion of this process
now makes a meaningful impact
on the entire operation.
Again,
not all tests need to be big overhauls.
What matters most is
that when you do find wins,
they are impactful enough
to have a material impact
on your business.
That's three
tips on how you can
optimize your Legion strategy
to drive more revenue for your business.
I hope you enjoyed this episode
of Salesforce on Salesforce.
Be sure to check out the resources
in the description below
and check out our other episodes
in the series. We'll see you next time.