Prospecting Platforms: Part Two

Last week I wrote about how to chose a lead gen & prospecting platform. Really it’s a basic framework to any evaluation project. But once you’ve decide on any change, how do you go about making sure the people in your organization get the best value out of that decision?

We had a solution before, but we didn’t really get a good value out of it. When looking at the numbers, it seemed terrible. If you read my last newsletter you know I did stakeholder interviews, if you haven’t - check it out. These interviews showed that a lot of the people in our organization did not use it properly. Instead of using the CRM integration, a bunch of people exported contacts to excel before importing to our CRM which made us underestimate the value we extracted from the platform. But these interviews also showed that there were a lot of other broken processes.

This is how I made sure our new lead gen & prospecting platform got utilized from the get go. Or at least how I tried to get my team off to a good start, the real result will have to show itself over the coming months

Start with something basic

Too much change in a short period of time is often not a good experience, so we opted to not make too detailed and too static processes. But we started documenting the processes and the reasoning behind them, along with process maps to get a better visual of points of frictions. When looking back at the notes from the stakeholder interviews we realized that a lot of people expressed lack of knowledge and training in how to best utilize the tool. From the Ops side, we hadn’t really provided sales with any guides or best-practices, or even any process descriptions. When launching the new tool, we decided to make sure that these resources should always be quickly accessible easily understandable. We also decided to make sure that every person using the platform should get proper onboarding.

Use the integration when importing contacts

One thing we learned during the interviews was that many reps did not use the integration to import contacts to our CRM and instead did it it manually. With a couple of follow up questions we could easily determine how much time could be saved on mandating the use if the integration instead of doing it manually. When setting up the new platform, we made sure we could manage these permissions to only allow importing contacts through the integration.

Having all contacts imported made it possible for us to faithfully estimate the ROI from the prospecting platform. Before, we couldn’t do it in a reliable way.

Manage users and their permissions

We understood that each rep had a lot of permissions. Having all permissions allowed each rep to find their own processes, this didn’t create efficient work. Before launching the new platform to our team we made sure to map out what functions would be allowed to use the platform and in what capacity. This helped us align user permissions to the different users work streams. We decided to this in order to avoid different processes to be created by each individual.

This is what we started with, we will keep track of the progress and development of the KPIs to make changes as needed going forward.

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Cheers

Erik