Building The Architecture To Track Your Marketing And Sales Funnel Conversion Data:
Robert Smith
July 31, 2023
During my time in the RevOps space I’ve learned that one of the main goals of an operations resource is to bridge the gap between all departments. This type of project can take many shapes, but one I’ve worked on for several clients is tracking the full marketing and sales funnel.
A consistent problem I’ve seen is that the data required to track these figures is stored in different systems, managed by different teams, or the fields to track the information haven’t been created.
This project is critical because knowing these figures allows you and your team to understand if they are on track to meet revenue goals, if account assignments make sense, if you need to expand the accounts in your TAM and more.
Here is a high-level list of the steps I recommend:
- Define your funnel stages.
- Build a funnel status picklist and a date field for each stage.
- Define your business processes that indicate an account should move to the next stage in the funnel.
- Translate those processes into automation that manages the picklist field, populates the date fields, and tracks the history of both.
- Leverage the data produced by the picklist field and the date fields to understand conversion from stage to stage and average time in each stage.
Before building fields and automation, it’s necessary to define your own funnel stages. This will be specific to your business and your marketing and sales motion. For this guide we will be working with an account-based sales model and use the stages defined below:
Marketing Accepted Account – Accounts to whom your marketing team is sending communication, these would be accounts falling into an acceptable range of your ICP.
Marketing Qualified Account – Accounts that have met an internal definition of “qualified” by your marketing team, this would be indicative of positive interaction with marketing content.
Sales Accepted Account – Accounts that have been assigned to the territory list of a SDR or AE and are now receiving direct communication from your business development teams.
Sales Qualified Account – Accounts that have been vetted by your sales team, most likely there is some kind of open opportunity or deal associated with the account and they have entered a buying cycle with your business.
After creating stage definitions for your marketing and sales funnel you will create fields to store the data.
I’d advise you to build a picklist to store your funnel stages as well as date fields for each stage on your company or account layout. In this example we would have one picklist and four date fields.
You should create automation that populates the date fields as the picklist is changed. The picklist should be changed using automation as well. If you’re starting fresh, it is an option to manually set a certain number of accounts as “Marketing Accepted”.
Next you should define a trigger to move an account to “Marketing Qualified”. This will be based on actions that are tracked in the marketing side of HubSpot or Pardot or another marketing ops system. An example would be a prospect downloading a case study or hitting a marketing score based on a combination of actions. Once your criteria are hit, there should be automation to update your account picklist and stamp a date in your “Marketing Qualified” date field.
The next stage in our funnel is “Sales Accepted Account”. The definition of becoming a Sales Accepted account is dependent on your business, but it could happen in several different ways. This could be a combination of a marketing score and/or an intent score. This could be from an inbound request asking for a meeting or it could be from assigning an account to an AE’s or SDR’s territory list. It could also be a combination of all the above. Again, once you know your process you should define the automation that triggers an update to your account picklist and populates a date in your “Sales Accepted Account” date tracking field.
Lastly, you need to track when an account becomes a “Sales Qualified Account”. The easiest way to do this is to leverage the creation of an opportunity or deal representing net new business on a “Sales Accepted Account”. If a new deal or opportunity record is created it will be straightforward to build the automation that updates your account picklist and then stamps a date in your “Sales Qualified Account” date field.
With this architecture in place, you will begin to collect the data that reveals your conversion rates and average time in each status. If you choose a specific time frame you can easily understand how many “Marketing Accepted Accounts” move through all the stages of your funnel. With the date fields in place, you will have a better understanding of how long this process takes and where accounts may get stuck or where they accelerate.
If you connect this data to opportunity or deal stage conversion rates you will have a complete view of your marketing/sales funnel. From there you’ll be able to take conversion numbers and “time in stage” data and create a simple model in Excel, Google Sheets, or another system. This model will allow you to build a reverse funnel and plug in numbers to test out how many accounts you’ll need in your funnel in order to hit your goals.
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One Response
This is exactly how it needs to be done! Thanks for breaking it down