From increasing competition to unpredictable markets, revenue operations leaders face new hurdles seemingly every day.
Those rapidly evolving challenges are only exacerbated by a long-standing problem among sales and marketing teams: misalignment.
Limited automation means many RevOps tasks are still done manually. Inaccurate data means leads aren’t routed properly to sales. And disjointed platforms are painful to integrate and manage. It all increases friction between sales and marketing — two teams who, now more than ever, need to work in lockstep.
In a survey from LinkedIn and Forrester Consulting, 90% of sales and marketing professionals agreed their teams are misaligned across culture, strategy, process, and content — even though 90% also agree that alignment is better for the customer.
Luckily for today’s RevOps leaders, the path to sustainable sales and marketing alignment is clearer than ever. What’s it take? A strong foundation of go-to-market intelligence, cutting-edge automation tools, and the data management backbone to bring it all together.
Challenge #1: Poor CRM adoption
RevOps teams hear it often: complaints that their CRM system doesn’t provide the necessary data for a sale, or is full of messy, incomplete, and inactionable data.
Sorting through tools and datasets that don’t get the job done is a big part of why sellers are seeing more time consumed by administrative overhead. In fact, research from Salesforce shows that sales reps now spend about 28% of their week actually selling — down from 34% in 2018.
Low CRM adoption because of poor data quality management ultimately costs operations teams valuable seller trust. Giving your sales team their time back by solving data hygiene problems will increase their trust in your CRM.
Solution: Automate data management to keep CRM and marketing automation systems clean
Cleaning and updating your data with matching, normalization, and deduplication solutions is an essential step that helps RevOps leaders maintain a trustworthy CRM.
Fixing problems with existing data is one piece of the puzzle — you also need to ensure that your CRM or MAT has enough data to begin with. Automated enrichment from third-party data sources can fill any gaps in your system, helping reps avoid tedious manual prospecting on LinkedIn or other public-facing tools.
When sellers can simply work from the reliable data in their CRM, they can reverse the trend of increasing overhead and get back to what they do best — selling.
Challenge #2: Turning MQLs into SQLs
It’s a common complaint for sales teams: They can’t act on leads from marketing — like form fills or event lists — because they simply don’t have enough reliable information. Without an enrichment process that automatically augments form fills with data points like phone numbers and email addresses, and a routing process to efficiently assign those leads to sales using account attributes like industry or employee size, conversion rates suffer.
The cost? Slower lead response times that ultimately eat into your bottom line. Any marketing budget, as well as the valuable time spent on acquiring those leads, could be wasted.
Solution: Create automated workflows to enrich incoming leads
Enriching incoming leads with comprehensive referential data can turn MQLs into SQLs quickly — and help sales reps win.
RevOps teams can customize the level of automation that suits the needs of their business or the duration of their campaigns, sometimes running enrichment on demand and other times executing enrichment on a predetermined schedule. Either way, tedious manual work is eliminated — and sales and marketing efforts are better connected.
From there, it’s a matter of forwarding SQL appended with plenty of data for sales reps to start selling.
“There’s no question ZoomInfo has significantly impacted our revenue. We’ve been able to 5x our growth in terms of both MQLs and SQLs. And with 5x the deals in the pipeline, we’ve seen at least 5x the revenue opportunities.”
– Robert Kulewicz, Chief Growth Officer, MarketSpark
Challenge #3: Automating account-based selling motions
According to Gartner, today’s buying committees can be as large as 11 decision-makers — sometimes increasing to as many as 20 different contacts.
New data acquisition is historically a manual, time-consuming process and not all sales reps know what the best-fit accounts are — especially newer reps. Too often, that means time is wasted on manual data-gathering that may not even be targeting the best accounts.
And when sales teams struggle to acquire the necessary contact data to sell to large buying committees, they’re often stuck with a single-threaded selling approach. When the right decision-makers aren’t being targeted with a comprehensive sales approach, your deal loss rate increases and revenue suffers.
Solution: Automate account-based selling workflows at scale
Help your sales team nail their messaging and reach pivotal decision-makers at your best-fit accounts using a sophisticated data intelligence platform that delivers dynamic, real-time data where you need it.
With an automated selling workflow, new accounts that fit your ICP criteria are not only assigned to the right sales rep but are also populated with enriched buying committee contact data directly into your CRM or MAT. With all the appropriate contact data on hand, sales reps can approach accounts proactively. The chances of closing a deal increase when they build relationships with all stakeholders involved in the buying process.
Account-based marketing (ABM) gets much more personalized too, providing sales with the necessary aircover for a smoother conversation. Advanced signals like ZoomInfo’s intent data can quickly identify your target companies that are researching high-value topics at an above-average rate, and then automatically move them into a specialized campaign of your choosing or signal your team to craft a customized outreach strategy. Company news alerts can be used in a similar fashion to help sales and marketing teams send relevant messages about solutions that can help.
“With the data intelligence we get from ZoomInfo, we’ve been able to create a successful account-based marketing structure to ensure every prospect receives a 1:1 experience and only sees content that is most relevant to them at the moment.”
– Ileana Gheorma, Global Marketing Director of Demand Generation and Analytics, The Hackett Group
Challenge #4: Increasing Speed to Lead
When it comes to lead follow-up, speed is the name of the game. But too often, RevOps teams lack the rule-based automation necessary to tackle complex routing needs quickly and accurately.
Disjointed lead-routing point solutions often require hours of manual research and data entry, which not only wastes time, but can result in costly poor-quality data. And without a comprehensive automation solution, leads quickly go cold — research has shown that the chance of qualifying the lead can decrease by as much as 400% after just 10 minutes.
Solution: Automate your routing assignments with rule-based workflows
Route leads faster with flexible automation tools that eliminate the need for manual assignment and set up complex logic with a simple, no-code platform.
An integrated routing system that automatically cleans and enriches leads and manages which sales rep gets what leads in real time is a game-changer. Add efficiency to lead routing and follow-up efforts with workflows that seamlessly coordinate lead hand-offs so you never lose a prospect.
The time between a form fill and a phone call from the right sales rep on your sales team is significantly reduced — think down to seconds rather than minutes — and the right record in the hands of the right sales rep leads to increased conversion rates.
“What we’ve engineered here is something that is much more sophisticated than a traditional lead routing structure. Typically, organizations don’t work this way, and we certainly would not have been able to create this without the ZoomInfo API integration.”
– Chuck Swenberg, SVP of Strategy, Red Sift
Challenge #5: Uncovering account and contact data that fits your ICP at scale
Identifying and selling to the right contacts within your target account list is a challenge — and it becomes much more challenging when your target account list is underdeveloped.
Additionally, relying on manual processes for ICP insights results in slow, ineffective processes that distract from the real work of selling.
Solution: Automatically uncover account and contact data with a unified platform at scale
Automate the process of building a list of companies that fit your ICP criteria. Then hand it off to your sales and marketing teams to sell to and run campaigns against. Establish a workflow that lets you automatically search ICP data in bulk and at scale.
With automation, your team can instantly uncover new account and company data that’s been built against your ICP — enabling much faster time to value for your data.
From there, contextualize customer contact data with key additional buyer insights — intent data being one example — for a more tailored sales process.
By using an automated platform based on complete, high-quality data, your sales and marketing resources are quickly targeted at your highest-fit accounts, resulting in higher buy-in.
Align your teams with unified data management
Adopting a unified RevOps platform that offers full-funnel data accuracy and alignment across CRM and MAT solutions allows teams to easily segment campaigns and perform equitable, timely lead distribution.
Teams can count on higher MQL-to-SQL conversion rates, and critical tasks like data-driven territory planning become effortless.
Strengthening the performance of your GTM efforts requires a sophisticated solution that aligns everyone around data they trust. Visit zoominfo.com/operations to learn more.