Heather Bakire on LinkedIn: 3 signs it may be time to stop using the Lead object in Salesforce: 1️⃣… | 19 comments (2024)

How to be more inclusive during meetings:1. Introduce everyone and briefly mention the value they bring to the table.2. Don't interrupt. Ever.3. Use reflective listening. "It sounds like you're concerned about X. Is that right?"4. If you notice someone hasn't given any input, ask them what they think. 5. Be kind.In my current role and in past roles, I'm often the only woman "in the room" (the virtual meeting room).Most groups make me feel included and respected, but I've had a few bad experiences as well.Whenever I'm in a meeting, I try my best to make sure everyone's voice is heard.This is one of the best ways to build a better culture within your company. And it's free 😊

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Raise your hand if you’ve ever been laid off 🙋♀️One of the nice (?) things about all the recent layoffs is some of the stigma is going away.Especially in SaaS, it’s becoming more rare to find someone who has never been impacted by layoffs.Empathy is growing ❤️Another result of the recent rounds of layoffs is revops teams are having to do more with less.In some cases, GTM teams are having to go without revops at all.If that sounds familiar and you’d like to use a fractional resource that can scale up or down as needed, let me know.My team is ready to step in and hit the ground running to get your revops where it needs to be.Because let’s face it, every single company needs revops to grow.And for those of you who have been laid off, my heart goes out to you. I’ve been there too.

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GTM alignment checklist:1. Is everyone looking at the same dashboards?(Or dashboards that say the same thing on different platforms)2. Are GTM leaders meeting regularly to discuss processes?(One-off campaign meetings and emergency meetings don’t count)3. Does your revops team liaise between all GTM teams?(Not just sales)4. Is your account-based motion truly ABX?(Marketing should not be doing ABM in a vacuum)5. Have you invested sufficiently in CX?(The customer is at the heart of go-to-market and needs to be resourced accordingly)If you can say a resounding YES to all of these, hats off to you!If you can’t, let me know where you’re struggling and I’m happy to help.Ops folks, what would you add to this list?

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There are two main ways to handle churned customers in your CRM:Option 1 - add a Churned Customer Lifecycle stageThis option is best for orgs that don't typically have many customers who churn and become a customer again later.Pros: Simple reporting and quick visibility into who's an active customer and who isn't.Cons: If you have lots of customers who leave and then come back, their Customer Lifecycle date stamp will be replaced and you'll lose visibility into their journey.In that case, consider...Option 2 - add a separate Customer Status fieldPros: This will maintain the integrity of your Lifecycle date stamps but still allow you to see who's an active customer and who's a former customer.Cons: Since Lifecycle will stay as Customer, reporting is a bit more complex and all teams need to be aligned. For example, if marketing wants to do a customer marketing campaign, they need to use Customer Status for lists rather than Lifecycle.How do you handle tracking churned customers in your instance?

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Why Nurture is not a Lead Status - here we go.I know I'll probably take some heat for this because using Nurture as a Lead Status is super common.But I don't think it's a best practice. Here's why:1. Lead Status should show where a contact is within your sales process. Nurturing is typically handled by marketing.2. Nurture doesn't immediately signal whether the contact has been qualified or not. In my experience, reps move contacts to Nurture during different parts of the sales process (some even use it as a catch-all).3. It's much more straightforward to build reports based on Disqualified contacts rather than contacts in Nurture.Am I saying you should not nurture contacts who have been through the sales process?Of course not - I'm still a marketer at heart and love a good nurture 😊 Here's what to do instead of using Nurture as a Lead Status:1. Create a Disqualification Reason field. Depending on your business, some or all of the Disqualification Reasons should lead to nurturing.2. Trigger nurtures based off of this field.3. Lead Status should remain as Disqualified while nurturing. If a contact re-enters the sales process at any point, Lead Status will be updated accordingly.Okay, hit me with your feedback!

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SO many companies get this wrong. ❌ What's the difference between Lifecycle and Lead Status?Lifecycle Stage should mark where your contacts are in the customer journey.Lead Status should mark where your contacts are in relationship to sales outreach.I've worked with lots of companies that tangle all this together.There's no way to easily see where contacts are in the journey, let alone create accurate reports.Make sure your Lifecycle Stages and Lead Statuses have 0 overlap.Common mistakes:- Disqualified is not a Lifecycle Stage- Nurture is not a Lead Status (or at least shouldn't be)- MQL, SQL, [Insert Acronym Here] is not a Lead StatusAnything missing from this diagram? What would you add or subtract?

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Examples of processes you SHOULDN'T automate:1. Your marketing campaigns (if they're not working)2. Your sales outreach (if it's not working)3. Your customer service pipeline (if it's not working)The common denominator? Don't automate something that's not working.Spend some time measuring efficacy before you automate something that needs to be improved.Throwing more resources at a broken process (whether it's adding more heads or automating) isn't going to fix it.For each process:1. Evaluate2. Optimize3. Automate

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