How do I create an SLA when I don’t know conversion rates?

[JonPayne]

Not all of us have access to a complete data set to be able to calculate our conversion rates to set an SLA between marketing and sales. Join the discussion to get advice on how to create your SLA based on industry estimates.

*To learn more about this, check out the Holding Your Teams Accountable With an SLA lesson via HubSpot Academy. 

[JonPayne]

Hey @joepod700  - Not to replace @Ajax1000's excellent answer but to build upon it...

We several clients, we've recommended they report on Annual Value or Lifetime Value of a customer. Then you could measure campaigns by the number of new customers won, the increase in Annual Value of existing customers and agree an SLA on that basis. Get both marketing and sales to agree goals for both metrics. Often transformational 👍

[Ajax1000]

Hey Joe, 

With a rapid transaction rate on the sales side, that's occurring without much friction currently, I understand your objective to be increased marketing velocity & accountability as a result of the SLA?

As a thought - do you have the systems in place to tag and categorize current customers based on behaviours and preferences? 

You could define the segmented audiences based on expected behaviours and demographics and create those audiences using existing customers. With those ICPs defined, you could establish new campaigns with audience-specific content & offers. Tech permitting, you could develop dedicated landing pages for each campaign; scoring could then be defined for each campaign with dedicated content & funnels for each, aligned with behaviours for each ICP, enabling lead value to be defined. 

Easier said than done, of course 🙂 - but you could then report on the lead source, lead value by content & campaign, average deal value (new vs. existing), and pipeline velocity. VIPs could also be identified and placed on a secondary campaign for "high-spenders" or "frequent spenders" or the ultra-desired "blend of both". 

[schristm]

Yes!

[FKhadraoui]

...

[Huich3n]

great stuff!

[SDavis8]

I recommend the 50% rule.  I would look at the revenue you are aiming for and then use the 50% rule to reverse engineer the results.  For example, If I have 100 MQL's, sales will connect with 50 and close 25 at the average sales value of $1000 per sale.   You then can determine that it takes 100 MQL's to generate 25k in sales.  If your revenue goal was 100k then you would need to generate 400 MQL's.  The 50% rule is a good starting point when no previous data is available and allows you to move the % at each phase of the sales funnel as you require more data and analytics.  

[JonPayne]

Brilliant stuff, Shannon 😎 Sounds like you speak from experience... am I right?

[SDavis8]

A little😉!  

[DHeron]

How many people do you need at the company to have a SLA?

When is it needed?

[JonPayne]

We've helped small start ups of two people to create an SLA, @DHeron - a good SLA will enable the person (or team) responsible for marketing to agree with the person (or team) responsible for sales / revenue what a good opportunity looks like.  On the other side, the person or team responsible for sales commits to a rigourous follow up process, that aligns with the buyer journey.

For even small companies it can be transformative to the growth trajectory. If a company has a marketing and a sales function, then I'd heartily recommend sorting out an SLA as outlined in the lesson here.

[fcommunicatio]

Wonderful 

[EPitlick]

As a marketing agency, we have an additional hurtle to jump when setting up SLAs with sales. Multiplied by how many clients we're working with. Not impossible, but has it's own challenges. 

[JonPayne]

I find that many of the challenges my organisation faces with SLAs are shared by businesses in other sectors and often similar solutions present themselves... Care to share any of your challenges, and how you might overcome them @EPitlick? 🙂

[EPitlick]

During onboarding we have a sale enabelment call (something two or three) to define processes, align on goals and agree on how things are counted. It helps to get everyone on the same page from the start. And we review those KPIs on a monthly basis. It's hard when companies have high turnover in their sales organization and/or forget (as we all do) from time to time what we agreed upon. 

[JonPayne]

Hi @HeleneDion - that's how most people I know did it before they got both the HubSpot Marketing and Sales hubs. It's clunky but effective! If you're still finding it tricky to put together the SLA @CDibben created  this useful sales lead calculator  to help you turn the numbers you recorded previously into forecasts and an SLA for the future. 🙂

[HeleneDion]

Having a CRM that doesn't connect to your marketing platforms and automations makes it so tricky and time consuming to develop an SLA. We're finding ourselves tracking leads in excel and created our own attribution process. It's not ideal, but we make due with what we have. 

[MaggieTaylor]

What if your organization is having issues connecting their sources of truth together to find accurate data? It's something I find myself struggling with in the past. 

[JonPayne]

Oh @MaggieTaylor I FEEL YOUR PAIN 😭 - we work with lots of companies who have this problem. We normally end up taking information from the finance team and putting that into a spreadsheet to sort by recurring revenue and new revenue (it's great if you can get this data for 2-3 years), then importing at something like Google Analytics (if HubSpot isn't available or is newly in place) to see how website visitor numbers correlate with the finance numbers. Finally we'll grab what ever reports we can get from the CRM the sales team use... Even if that's just another spreadsheet. Each business is different, so there's no hard and fast method. If you want a chat about your issues send me a DM and maybe we can work something out together to get you started 👍

[LuisUlcueCampo]

Alright! Here we go. These are my questions:

If all of these are your rates what made the difference these 1st 6 months that increased your MQLs?

Is it possible to set or reate or SLA when you have just a business idea? or does it have to be on the go?

How can blogs be more attractive?

[JonPayne]

GREAT QUESTIONS @LuisUlcueCampo! 👏

Q1: If all of these are your rates what made the difference these 1st 6 months that increased your MQLs?

Noisy Little Monkey (the HubSpot partner for which I work) specialises in B2B and SaaS marketing and truth be told, the market is picking up as we are (hopefully) getting towards the end of the pandemic. 

Factors where we had some level of control include;  runnuing regular online events with content targeted at our key buyer persona (and sharing the recordings with transcript on our website), sponsoring a couple of excellent events, better retargeting with our display ads and continuing to blog and do social media with as much creativity and energy as we can muster 💯 It's a lot of work.  Let me ask the person in charge of our marketing... @CDibben - what have I missed?

Q2: Is it possible to set or reate or SLA when you have just a business idea? or does it have to be on the go?

It will be interesting to see what others say to this. I would say ABSOLUTELY! If you have a business plan (a bit more than an idea, I guess) you need to set yourself targets for revenue. If you have a revenue target, that's your sales target. You'll have a guess at sales close rates... (use the first set of numbers above, if you don't have any idea!) Now you need to think about what marketing activity will support that sales target and how many leads each activity might drive. Now you can set an SLA. Measure the results closely for the first few months and adjust accordingly! 😀

Q3: How can blogs be more attractive?

That's a big topic. Answering from the point of view of attracting more website visitors and turning them into leads I'd say help your prospects identify solutions to their problems and follow good SEO practice. To make them beautiful use wonderful imagery and video where you can. 

[CDibben]

@JonPayne @LuisUlcueCampo the most significant increase for our MQLs was the fact that we were running monthly online webinars through Zoom. We integrated Zoom to our HubSpot portal and registered everyone via a landing page on the nosiylittlemonkey.com site. This was not only a great way to increase the number of new contacts we were generating as a business but also a great way to capture that information and then nurture those leads through to MQL status via email marketing, display marketing, blog content etc etc 🙂