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all right hello everybody one second hi Antoine hi Monica hello helloo right one second to pull up the deck great awesome all right welcome everybody to this webinar uh today we'll be talking about optimizing leads and uh conversions with cognism and lean data so today I have Monica babakan with me and Antoine cornette U from lean data and cognism respectively and I am Christoper gan from cognism so thank you both for joining us today thanks for having me okay great all right so in this webinar what you will will learn uh we'll learn the cost of lead leakage uh lead routing best practices how to improve your speed to lead and Lead enrichment and we're going to be starting with the cost of lead leakage oh excuse me so Monica do you want to kick us off with this one yeah of course so uh I think first it's it's important to to cover you know what is lead leakage I know we we hear this term lead leakage Revenue leakage what does it actually mean right so I think lead when I think about lead leakage it's um you know just simply leads not being followed up with or maybe you have duplicate leads in your system um so that when a lead does come in you know if there's a dupe then it can result in inconsistent communication um or even a lack of prioritization when leads are coming in um maybe you you know your company doesn't have any sort of segmentation or personalization or a real strategy around how you're following up with leads um and so when all of that happens um I I think about lead leakage so what does that mean um it's a real cost to the business both from an internal and external perspective um so when you're thinking about the internal cost to your business um you can run into you know a lot of manual time and effort spent by your sales team trying to you know figure out which lead to follow up on if you're not merging duplicates correctly or trying to find the right data um if you're not enriching um you know your leads properly um and just overall like disjointed processes um that results in a lot of wasted time that your reps could be um using doing something else or more meaningful to the business um which you know of course ultimately um results in Lost revenue or you know decreased Roi on marketing efforts um but then from an external perspective as well you know you think about the buyer Journey um if if you're not following up on leads or if you have that disjointed process that I talk about um it can really damage your reput a right that's the first impression that a prospect or a buyer has when visiting your website and when trying to interact with your team and if that process isn't seamless that's you know that's um hugely DET detrimental uh to the reputation and just results in a poor buyer experience but um also gives your competitors a leg up so you always want to be thinking about the competitive Advantage as well um so a a lot of um kind of uh results that can can be detrimental to your business when it comes to lead leakage yeah certainly and that's challenges that anine and I face building um our initial Revenue operations function so Anan uh I know we have extensive experience both the good and bad lead leakage uh ends so why don't you speak a little bit about it yeah I can I can kind of sh our experience here at cognism because all all processes change quite law in the last kind of three three years uh when you know like three years ago we essentially didn't really have like a very structured process in terms of how we were going to Route uh leads and like what was the expected like followup so you know we experienced a lot of it and like it kind of showed in our our conversion rate and like we also you know faced a fair amount of like complaint for customer like poor followup and like not not the best customer experience and like we we've kind of decid to uh Implement L data like the goal was ultimat to to create a process where there was clear accountability on like who was meant to like follow up so like there was a clear owner like um okay the I I am responsible for following with that lead uh we set up clear slas uh so like you know our expectation that you will call within uh five minutes of receiving the lead if it like if that leads come within business hours like we set up like email alerts if like after after like a certain amount of time we didn't actually like action that that nql um and like also kind of like just create created a whole process so that all the sales reps had to do was actually like action following up with the lead and there was no like admin or like too much thinking to do uh on on that side so like pushing pushing those uh those leads directly into outage sequence or C of sequence or whatever like uh sequencing tool that you use so that again you you kind of make sure you stay on top of it and you know or just by doing like what what seems to be pretty simple like a conversion R went through the RO absolutely and that's something thing that we experienced firsthand so was great scene great so let's talk a little bit about lead routing best practices uh an do you want to start us off with this yeah um so I think with with that you kind of there's a few things that you need to kind of think about is like how do you few things where like how do you segment your go-to Market team uh is like probably the first thing you want to think about like you know are you do you have like Geographic segmentation do you have industry segmentation companys size segmentation uh and then like that will kind of tell you okay do like based on that do you have specific team that need to follow up with those leads um and then you also like if you have this sort of segmentation you need to think about how are you going to enrich those leads so that you are actually routing them to the right person so that the customer is followed up with effectively and there is like no dispute between reps on this Le should have gone to me no this Le should have gone to me um so like that's kind of where I would start and then there's like obvious ones which are like you know you want to make sure that the lead coming in is you want to check whether they're coming in on a customer account versus a prospect account or whether there's already a open opportunity or non-open opportunity those sort of things because they will essentially enter like a different journey and like the the level of followup needs to be different uh and probably more tailored if you're a customer or there's an open opportunity so yeah those those are the things that you kind of not need to think about absolutely absolutely and would you say that we implemented both those stages at the same time or do we do it in phases no we we we did it like in the first first instance from the get-go um that required some Salesforce infrastructure Bild like you know making sure that on the account level you know when there's an open up like so you can read that field like like kind of like very tactical items uh but yeah no we we implemented it straway great thank you Monica yeah um I think some of our our lead routing best practices are just some of the fundamentals when I think about you know how are we making sure that we're connecting the right leads to the right reps to me it's all about matching based on criteria like territory or maybe a product line or an industry vertical or just common characteristics so I think you um you really covered it well Anan like the the first step is defining your criteria and defining like how are your GTM teams segmented how are they structured um and I think this can often um be one of the hardest steps because we love to over complicate things and I think if you can try and take a step back and simplify your business that will then in turn simplify your lead routing process so um there was a time last year where you know we had just said M mented our our teams in a little bit of a way that was maybe over complicated so we took a step back at the end of the year really thought through like the why why are we doing it in this way and we made some adjustments and it has completely changed our our lead routing um process it has simplified our workflows it has simplified what we're expecting of of the rep so I think it's like the first step is really defining your criteria how are your GTM teams um structured and the why behind it why are you doing that is it going to result in a better customer experience and if it's not then it's worth kind of revisiting that that concept or that strategy um but for us we take into consideration things like geographical location or um company size lead Source um I think the segmentation then kind of um Falls next in line after after you have that criteria but then it's also about prioritizing those leads so um you know if you are not prioritizing leads and if you're following up with leads all of your leads in the same way um that's just not going to result in like the most e efficient process so um here at lean data we have a priority system um we call it our p1s and our p2s so all of our p1s are our hand raisers these are the the folks who are likely most ready to buy they're submitting a demo request page or a contact us form um they are you know asking for the time of our sales team um and so we we route those uh differently than our p2s which is um priority to um they have a 10-minute SLA so we have um a very tight window for reps to follow up that's the the concept of speed to lead of course um and then if um there is a missed SLA um we have lean data escalating um those leads to management and um sending an alert to the team so that we can ensure that Ely followup um so that's how we um manage our p1s and then our p2s we route based on um two things so one is lead score so really thinking about like that demographic data title Persona company um we try and um you know create our lead score based on our ICP but then also um you know we think about the lead score but then as well what are the activities and the types of Engagement that that lead is um doing so we we kind of marry the two the uh the score which is really like a fit score if you will um and then the intense score and once that lead then becomes qualified that's when we escalate those p2s to our team because we want to make sure that we are bubbling those up at the right time and not just giving um every single lead who is doing something on our website or looking at any piece of content to our team that's just not the right you know the right thing for us to do for our business um so it really is all about prioritizing segmenting and um and the the feedback loop right so constantly revisiting like is what we're doing working you know having a solid tracking and Reporting mechanism so that we can go back and make changes as needed that makes perfect sense and one thing you said that I really liked is about focusing on the um ideal customer experience so making sure that the experience of the the customer is going through um fits their their best need and generally if you do that the conversion rate will will follow for your business so it's a mutual win so sometimes a lead will have to go through an extra layer of qualification just to ensure like hey they need that extra conversation or sometimes they're just purely ready to speak directly to a sales rep so I think if you focus really on the customer experience uh it will help all aspects and that leads into another phrase you said which I really like which I learned from lean data speed to lead so how to improve speed to lead and if you want to start with this one Monica yeah absolutely I think you know speed to lead we we all know that it increases conversion rates it it Fosters that positive customer experience um but it really is important I I mentioned earlier having that competitive Advantage um if you are the first to respond um it it's more likely that you will have a more positive experience down the line when you know opening a deal when working that deal um but think when we think about speed to lead um it's obviously important that we're reaching out in a timely manner but we also want to balance that I think think with like um with other uh things that in the business so um making sure that we we follow up in a timely manner but that we're also personalizing and um reaching out in a way that makes the most sense and I think that's where lean data for for us has been really critical um you mentioned it earlier and Twan it's like well if a comes in at a customer account we of course would not want an SDR to follow up on that right we want to route that to the Matched account owner or maybe the account manager at that account or maybe there's a a lead coming in um from a particular industry and we want to treat that um that lead in a different way so I think it's it's a balance of the speed to lead but also having that context um and bubbling that context up to your rep so that um they have the right information and kind of building that into your lead process whether it is a tool like lean data or something else um so yeah I just think it's it's definitely a balance you want to have the right enrichment tools to to get that information to get that data to your team you want to have a solid system for actually going through all of the logic and the rules that make the most the most sense for your business because timely followup with the right information and the right message really is like the winner here absolutely uh anine um what is your experience with improving I yeah completely agree with Monica balancing like relevance versus speed is is also super important you know like there are tools like you know Lin data that integrate with ar so like in theory you could automatically route a lead to someone and then like send them an automated email sequence that would mean like you actually reach out to the lead in like minutes doesn't mean it's like going to be super relevant or that's necessarily what the customer wants uh so again yeah it's it's it's about finding that balance uh so I would say like yeah speed to is important but make sure you reach where you engage with like context and like it's also actually about like when you will actually speak to the customer rather than trying to reach to them so like again having tools like that enable like a prospect that's highly qualified to directly book time with like someone of the company uh like that that also kind of like Chang the game in terms of like providing a better customer experience and making sure you reach the customer when they want to be reached yeah that's a huge one actually it's it's like when do you present a calendar to a lead is it to everyone probably not because that might not mean that you're you're allowing the most qualified leads to book time on your your sales teams calendar so um having some sort of system or logic or tool that can go through all of the criteria and only present a calendar for example maybe if it's at a sales owned account or if it's an open opportunity or a customer um and then maybe don't don't present a calendar if it's a lead that needs a little bit more qualification from an inbound SDR or somebody somebody like that so yeah I think that's a big one is is the scheduling process is is um is very important yeah and I think both of you touched on a very important point there it's a balance between getting the speed right and getting um the text behind the reach out right right like you can reach out to a lead within a couple seconds with an automated email or a phone call with zero context behind it but if it's en enriched and presented with the right data so it's like oh I know it's a customer account right so it's like oh you must be calling for this reason like that's a much better customer experience than um just racing to the phone and being like hey um what is it I can help you with in my my opinion great all right lead enrichment so this is something that we've recently been working on at cognism um so Anan do you want to start with the experience and um how important it is to be enriching leads for routing yeah absolutely so I guess uh mon kind of just touched on that is like when do you want to show a calendar uh and at that point like and reaching leads is super important and it needs to be done in in a matter of seconds uh because you essentially as someone some form you need to be able to make a datadriven decision on like is that person qualified enough to Warrant automatically G access to an a calendar or maybe it goes to an SDR because it's non as qualifi or maybe it's like we deem that person to be a Spam or like like not not necessarily that needs to be further qualified and then they will actually not be presented a calendar so again it's it's about balancing the quality of the data like of the underlying data that you're enriching with as well as the speed of enrichment uh so getting both of those things right is critical to I guess yeah provide the best customer experience and the most optimal speed to lead makes sense from your lens Monica yeah I mean Le lead enrichment and just the overall concept of enrichment has been so important in our business um I think the the biggest thing is it has helped us Define our ICP in a really like targeted strategic way that then plays into our entire lead routing process um and helps us make decisions so I think data enrichment is just so critical and you know in targeting and segmentation and um the lead qualification process and um you know like I said the ICP process has just been so important for us because you know if you can analyze your existing customers using enrichment data and then play that back into your lead routing process to use the enrichment data that you get and then make decisions based off of you know what are our most successful customers doing what do they look like and then how can we treat our leads and route our leads in in the proper way is um is really critical so I think um being able to find the right data enrichment provider too is um is important you want to make sure you know you're you're able to instantly um enrich that data you're able to schedule enrichment jobs um so having that flexibility is um is really important for your business certainly um we've reached the of our slides here but I think that's a good thing because hopefully there there are some questions because this is such a um key topic I know that um every Improvement that we made in our lead routing and our speed to lead adding enrichment has added Millions to our top line so hopefully some of the audience has some questions so as Harry said if you have any questions please throw them in the chat because I think this is some critical experience to move from on this panel and we'll just give it a a minute while hopefully some questions pop up um just while we're waiting anything else uh Anon Monica from you on um speed to lead lead enrichment lead conversion um again Antoine I know this was a big part of our achievements from 2023 just raising the um mql to meeting attended rate with some very minor tweaks um including like directly routing to AES for example cutting out the marketing development rep where we felt appropriate because there was not a need for an extra level of qualification um do you want to speak on any of our personal experience with with um anything specific um yeah so I think the first one you you've touched on is make make it as hassle free for for the prospect as possible uh in the sense that you know if your ICP is uh your ideal person is like I don't know a VP of product and a VP of product that like the best type of account you you can dream of like comes inbound you probably don't want to make them go through different Hoops to actually speak to to see a demo of your product you want to get them straight away uh FASTT trck them so I'd say like that's that's probably the first uh operating principle that you should have uh getting the compensation plan as well in terms of like who's responsible for following up with uh with lead is like very important uh I'd say in the SDR world like making sure there's the right incentive and strike a good B between making it challenging but achievable uh that also went a long way for us and from your experience Monica yep oh I was just gonna ask a question I mean it sounds like you all made a lot of progress last last year um I'd be curious like what teams were involved what stakeholders who did you who did you like cross functionally collaborate with to to make it a success uh it I that might sounds cliche like pretty much everyone it was with uh is you know marketing was obviously involved uh ROP marketing OBS sales sales development uh it's because it it touches so many parts of your business like if you don't really have alignment or like yeah that that's that's not going to work yeah it was Finance as well because there were multiple aspects that went into it like it was um changing the infrastructure changing the process changing when we route to who changing the compensation between um to drive right Behavior to change the behavior at certain touch points and um so we had to get Buy in from all involved and it really really helped us a lot very cool yeah that alignment is so important it makes me think about the book uh busting silos by the two snowflake employees um such a such a good book on how to align sales and marketing um and just you know the the cross functional collaboration is so important but yeah for us I mean we're we're so tightly uh aligned with our marketing team I'm on the revops team um and I think a big part in driving that success is just the constant communication and like never assuming anyone knows anything so we meet weekly every Monday and then a few times every other week um for different project you know initiatives and everything but it's a constant feedback loop um I think you have to build in that feedback loop to provide input on lead quality how effective is our content what is working what isn't working um and then as well like for the for the sales reps like what is our Outreach strategy so we have a specific Outreach content committee and we're constantly analyzing the messaging that is going out to our leads and how we're how we're responding to them what is our open rate rate our click rate you know what are the the resources that um are really resonating with our our leads and how can we incorporate that um more into our lead strategy so constant feedback loop um communication is key we all know that but yeah the the alignment is very important yeah that's one of the fun things about being in rops is that you have to deal with most key stakeholders at a company and bring everyone together around problems and solutions as well exactly great we have a couple questions in the chat so we'll start with um Ben so Ben is asking how do we ensure the slas are met for lead followup and what tools do we do to do this do you want to kick it off um yeah so in terms of entering slas uh you know there's a bunch of like again I'm going to try and answer those that question very tactically there's like different tools that you can leverage uh Lin data as an outof the boox like kind of SLA function so that's something that can be that can be used uh you can also build some logic in Salesforce as to whether like an a lead has been action after the after they submitted like a form uh and then build like email alerts uh again using Salesforce uh I imagine hop spot would work similarly uh in terms of uh tools uh again well being at being at cognism uh of course that's that's the that's the tool we would be using great and from your side Monica yeah I mean we we use our own tool um lean data to ensure SLA so um I kind of touched on it earlier but that that priority system that we have our p1s versus our p2s really makes it um super cut and dry and straight to the point of how do we follow up with leads what are the slas it's a 10-minute SLA for p1s a 48 hour SLA for p2s um and then we we use our lean data um workflow our graph to um to listen for that activity you know is a sales rep following up yes or no if there's no follow up within that SLA time frame we bubble that up we escalate it to the manager um and then we have uh a reporting uh system in place it's in CES for it's a dashboard um really easy to monitor but um we've been doing that for for a while now and it's a really solid process but um I think you know if you if you can use tools like lean data or any sort of process to um to measure and understand you know why is this happening and how can we really diagnose the root cause of it um I think we'll we'll go along way and can I ask how did you arrive at those slas was it trial and error like what made those slas to write ones for P1 P2 yeah well you know our p1s it was it was pretty um easy to decide 10 minutes it's a a quick follow-up time um you know that was even before my time at lean data um the the 4 Hour one was definitely trial and error it was um it was shorter but um especially after we did some work on our lead scoring model and really narrowing in our like um our time or our um uh qualification process um we did realize that the 48 Hours made sense um so it yeah it was just again like the feedback loop and constantly reviewing um the process it's it's something that you don't just set and forget you have to you know be looking at it weekly discussing with your marketing team really poking holes in you know the the bottlenecks and who's doing really well who who needs a little bit of help when why so it's just that constant analysis that helped us get there and I think that's a really key question from Ben about how do you ensure that the slas are being met because without a tool like lean data Andor Salesforce I remember a few years five years back for cognism when we'd have our part out forms just come to a certain inbox and the MDR would respond actioned uh within x amount of time and that's how we measured SLA and if nobody responded we would all be like is this actions and that's how we track so Ben I understand the pain that that can cause if you're running a similar system so um using a system like lean data certainly helped relieve us of that problem yeah 100% I I was in a role a few years back I didn't have lean data and um all of our leads came in through slack and we asked everyone to just do like a thumbs up emoji if they had follow it up um so not the most efficient you know rep's forget to do that or um what have you but yeah it's been it's been really a game Cher ever since having lean data because all the communication is funneled through our sales engagement tool whether it's you know an Outreach or a sales loft or um HPS or anything like that and then all of our activity is tracked automatically and then lean data listens for that so it's it's a process that like doesn't take a lot of time on the revops team to manage it just kind of works in the background so it get you know selfishly gives me more time to to work on um other strategic projects absolutely exception reporting is a lot better than chasing down every single yes great um all right Harry has a question what experiments would you advise to run to optimize speed to lead or lead leakage and I think we could kick off with some of our experiments um yeah I think it's um I think we we've touched on a few of those experiment but I'll I'll go over them uh here uh again like having the direct like C showing the calar of like someone like really truly is like probably the most important things you can do in terms of improving your conversion rate uh again setting up like a very robust wellth thought out graph in L data and like pushing things into into Outreach or sales love to make sure like you're essentially asking your sales rep to just action task and like look at the customer and see what value we can add to them rather than like doing admin is a big one um then like other experiments we've run the last year like one of them was you know whether we would uh allow free emails uh so like you know someone with a Gmail account or like or whatnot to like submit forms so you know we it's like doing a lot of AB testing uh like for example for us we realized that like allowing free emails was actually not like a good thing because the conversion rate went so good and actually if we had a business email we couldn't enrich properly and we could give a better experience to that person great thank you um Monica from your end explain yeah I think it it it kind of goes back to what I was touching on earlier it's like well first think about what is it that you're trying to accomplish like what are your end goals um if you're if you're feeling the need to run experiments is there something that is not working in your process and like what exactly is that and just kind of go back to the drawing table a little bit and bring in folks from the right teams to to map that out and do that root cause diagnosis um and then just going back to your your criteria of like establishing the clear criteria for how leads should be handled and rethinking going back to the why you know I I I've been talking about this a lot on the on the on this webinar but going back to the why of why you're doing things things um is I think just can be can be very eye openening and can start to make you think about things in a different way it's like well if you keep asking why are we doing this why why does it matter why how does it impact the customer then maybe you can get to um the real reason around why you even want to improve the process in the first place and then I think from there you can run AB tests and really uh be specific around what it is you're trying to accomplish so I think that you know there is a a great example mentioned earlier of when to present a calendar versus not you know maybe you present calendars to everyone see how that goes or maybe you present calendars only for specific form fills that are being filled out you know maybe it's just for the demo request uh Pages or maybe you only present calendars for um certain product interest or after you've you know uh enrich your data and you have now um uh more information to make better decisions so I think it is all about that AB testing and giving yourself time to really and you know let it run through and um see if it's a success or not um and starting with a hypothesis I think when we we when we run experiments we we oftentimes don't start with a okay here's what I'm hoping to accomplish here's what success looks like um so defining all of that in the beginning and um then me meeting with your your teams your um different GTM functions to um review their process and see if it worked great um seems like we have no more questions um so I would like to thank everyone for joining this episode of the revops review um a big topic for us that has um moved our Top Line Millions with successful experiments so um this is something that um deserves time from the revops function uh and lean data and cognism are a great team with enrichment and routing so um Monica thank you Antoine thank you um it's been a pleasure thank you thank you