We've been doing a lot of research over the last year into a critical part of the buying process that seems to get very little attention in the design and execution of demand generation: sales and marketing efforts. Anyone who has ever been involved in attracting or acquiring new customers knows that buyer intent is an important ingredient in the customer acquisition recipe.

Intent varies by person, by market and/or by what you're selling. There are any number of factors that are going to impact when and where intent occurs, but somewhere along the buyer’s journey, buyer intent hits a critical point. Intent, initially, does not necessarily relate directly to buying from any particular vendor. Buyer intent refers to the decision that some level of action needs to take place. If you think about the last major purchase or even decision that you made, you can quickly and easily identify that point that separates pre-intent actions from post-intent ones.

My daughter is entering her senior year in high school. I have to admit that there are times where I stop and think how I wish I were in high school today. Now, I don’t have this wish for the common reasons you may be thinking.

You see, when I was in high school it wasn’t cool to obsess about things like data. But today, data is about the coolest thing in the world (well, except for maybe AI). Everyone is talking about data. Big data. Little data. Metadata.

Today, it seems, marketing and sales advisors pronounce their coolness by claiming to be data-driven. Everywhere I look, I see people claiming to be data-driven, but when I look at how they manage process and make decisions, it’s no different than how they did things a decade ago.

Sure, they may throw some numbers or vanity metrics at you, but the way they do it reminds me of how I used to describe statistics. Today, data is like a lamp post to a drunk - it’s used more for support than illumination.

Make no mistake. If you want to successfully grow a business today, you’d better be data-driven. I’m fond of Netscape founder Jim Barksdale’s philosophy: If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.

So, the first step to be data-driven is to understand what being data-driven means.

The first confusion is that there’s a difference between being goals- or metric-driven and being data-driven. There is probably no clearer illustration of the difference than using my favorite example: baseball.

A new research report from SiriusDecisions presents a pretty damning view on the state of sales today. The 2018 Global Chief Sales Officer Study surveyed the heads of sales from 250 companies covering a broad array of business, from small business through large multinational businesses.

Here are some of the key findings:

• Fewer than 50% of sales reps are hitting quota
• At 70% of companies, fewer than 70% of sales reps are hitting quota
• Marketing is contributing less than (a paltry) 25% to revenue
• Sales cycles are getting longer for 64% of companies, with 27% seeing an increase of more than 30% in just the last year.
• For the typical company, sales reps spend just 27% of their time on direct activities involved in selling to customer or prospects. Higher-growth companies reported their reps spent 53% more time selling (though I'd point out that’s still only? 41% of their time spent actually selling).

I’ve got to tell you, I had to read the report twice before I believed what I was seeing. The last five years have seen greater investments in customer acquisition and sales than ever before, yet these numbers indicate that nothing has improved.

Of course, I really shouldn’t have been surprised to see these numbers as I’ve got front row seats to this whole thing. While I caution people to be wary in reading too much in surveys, this report is another piece in a growing plethora of evidence that shows that selling organizations have still not made the necessary adjustments in their approaches to sustain and succeed.

A couple of weeks ago, I introduced a chronic problem plaguing the growth efforts of companies, large and small alike. Lead Activation Syndrome occurs when the successful results of lead generation efforts aren’t translating to greater velocity of quality sales, opportunity creation, or new customer acquisition.

Companies can still drive growth--often at a very high rate--but the costs of such efforts grow at a faster rate than growth. As a result, the systems and people supporting growth must run at a faster, often non-sustainable, pace.

The cause of this problem is typically weak, or nonexistent, middles. The attention paid to lead generation and inbound marketing has greatly strengthened the top of the funnel, but little to no attention is paid to constructing a strong middle.

Last week, I was going through some older files when I came across a standard presentation deck from six years ago. Two things struck me as I reviewed that deck. The first was just how much of what we were talking about five years ago still applies today.

The second was the amount of time we spent in that presentation on the need to develop a formal lead generation process for businesses desiring growth. While the strategies shared are still applicable, what I found interesting was that, just five years ago, we spent a considerable amount of high-value sales time getting business executives to understand the importance of simply generating leads.

Certainly, there are companies that haven’t adjusted, but even those companies acknowledge the importance and value in designing top-of-funnel strategies to drive higher lead volume. (They’re just still working through their list of excuses.) Today, we rarely spend time talking about the importance of lead generation.

Instead we find, with increasing frequency, that companies committed to serious growth are suffering from a very different problem. They’ve generated the leads, and continue to generate them. Often, they’re generating more leads then they can handle.

Yesterday, Drift announced the latest enhancement to their conversational marketing platform, called Leadbot 2.0. Leadbot 2.0 increases the power available to marketers and salespeople utilizing chat while also drastically improving the user interface and ease in building out strong chat experiences.

This news, combined with the leaps HubSpot has made with their soon-to-be-released update to their chat product, Messenger (I’ve had beta access to the product for the last month), means that the momentum behind Chat and Conversational Marketing isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.

And for good reason. I’ve always believed that the mantra of the modern demand generation executive is “Solve for the customer!” Done properly, chat is a powerful tool to empower both the seller and the buyer, enabling them to have meaningful conversations in the most effective and efficient way possible. I’ve made no secret that I don’t believe Chat means the end of other demand generation tactics, but the compelling use cases for Chat continues to increase every day.

However, Chat is by no means an easy or “quick fix” solution. It’s not as simple as throwing some code onto your site, assigning sales reps to manage it, and then waiting for the people to ask you if you will let them buy your product/service. Make no mistake, there are far more bad chat experiences than there are good ones.

Implementing chat requires a commitment of time, money, and a solid effort to develop the strategies, plumbing, and training to make it work. There’s no question it’s a great opportunity to create leverage and lower costs, if - IF - you do it right.

Make the number! It’s probably the three words that dominate the thinking of salespeople and executives everywhere. I’ll admit that over my career I’ve literally had dreams--and nightmares--where making the number was the central theme. (Of course, whenever this happened, I knew it was probably time to take a week off).

Sales quotas (or revenue quotas) are a foundational element of the sales. For most, the only question to ask about quotas is “Where should the target revenue or new customer acquisition quota be set?” Questioning the need, appropriateness, or effectiveness of even setting quotas is sacrilegious in business circles.

But the time has come for those leading businesses into the future to admit that quotas aren’t working. Recent research from CSO shows that barely 50% of salespeople are meeting quota, a trend that has been steadily deteriorating. Anecdotally, many senior sales executives responsible for setting quotas adjust to this reality by setting artificially high quotas and putting more pressure on salespeople.

Earlier this week, I presented a webinar where I revealed some research that we just completed, along with ways to implement strategies that can double your pipeline in 90 days. In this session, I shared that the nature of sales continues to undergo rapid change. If selling is going to remain a viable strategy, leaders must rethink their fundamental assumptions about sales, how they allocate talent and resources towards the sales process, and how they assess and compensate performance.

At the beginning of this year, I determined it was time to take a lead in designing the sales model of the future. As a part of our 2018 sales plan, I eliminated the sales quota as a key metric for our VP Sales. Here's why.

 A good rule of thumb for a blog post is to always lead with an introduction. So, while this may not be the kind of introduction you were expecting, I’m Fiona, Imagine’s new Director of Content. I’m thrilled to be here! Since I’ll be sharing my thoughts on content from time to time, here’s a little of background: I’m a writer and editor with extensive experience developing content and marketing strategies for Fortune 500 companies. On that note, let’s kick off my first bog post by talking about what makes content great!

We’re all barraged with content every day. If you’re like me, you have twenty browser tabs open because you truly intend to read all those articles and blog posts. You know, the ones that promise to make you a giant in your field. The problem is, there’s just so much noise.

There’s content constantly coming in from every direction—via email, social media, and the interwebz. 

This means you have to have some mental filtering system in place. Your time is limited and precious, so you need to know that you’re not wasting it by reading a piece that over-promises and under-delivers. You can only choose content that you reasonably believe will make your life better.

Which brings us to the question….

How do you make someone read your content?

As we all probably already know, engaging content results in reads and shares. It builds a relationship. It offers the reader something of value, which creates trust and increases your credibility. All of this moves a potential customer further down the path to purchase – moving them from indifference to emotional engagement.

So how does this mysterious and magical process happen? Every piece of content is different, but you can’t go wrong if you incorporate the following five elements:

If any of these objectives are a high priority for you, read this post (if not, feel free to skip it):

• Create predictability in your customer acquisition process
• Shorten the ramp-up time for new salespeople to be successful
• Transform marketing momentum into sales momentum
• Shorten the sales cycle
• Improve your ability to forecast

While strong strategy, insight and execution are certainly crucial to achieving these objectives, what is all too often overlooked are two especially important operational structures that are 100% necessary for consistent success:

• A clearly defined funnel structure
• A clearly defined sales pipeline structure

You may be thinking, “Doug, you’re crazy. I haven’t overlooked a pipeline, it’s central to our CRM!” And while the vast majority of companies that I see do have stated deal/opportunity stages that define their pipeline; more than 90% of them aren’t worth the paper (or bytes) they’re written on. Not only do they fail to create any real value or insight, they are central to the problems that sales and demand generation organizations are working so hard to overcome.

This post will walk you through the key elements of designing an effective sales pipeline structure, as well as enabling you to diagnose some of the fundamental flaws that likely exist in your existing process.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to prospecting effectiveness. One school focuses on quality and maximizing the yield of the process. "Let no good lead go unconverted" is their philosophy.

The other approach focuses on volume, thinking "What we lack in effectiveness we can make up in volume." As a result, they hire more reps, make more calls and send more emails, continuously ramping up velocity to hit their targets.

Unfortunately, both camps are wrong, and, well, they're kinda right.

Your connect rate (the rate of attempts a salesperson or sales development rep makes to “connect” with their intended target) is the most important metric to use when assessing the effectiveness of the customer acquisition process.

The connect rate focuses on the biggest bottleneck in the sales process, capacity. The limiting factor for salespeople is time, and if your connect rate is too low, it means too much time is wasted. Be careful though, because if it’s too high it may also mean that too much time is being spent here, as too much effort (and time) may be spent in an attempt to reach a lead that could be better spent elsewhere.

In the end, the use of connect rate should solve for maximizing the output of right-fit leads entering the next phase, based upon the limited-resource capacity you have, which is selling time. Note that this output is represented by a hard number, not a percentage. I’d rather have a connect rate of 17% that generates 125 right-fit leads than a 38% connect rate that yields 67.

Identifying your optimal connect rate range (balancing quantity with quality) should be of the utmost strategic imperatives for your sales leadership team. Once this range is determined you can turn your attention to testing ways to enhance it.

To get your started, here are the 7 most common areas that we’ve identified in our work that lead to material improvements in connect rates and right-lead throughput.