One of the most common issues we see from companies that have adopted the B2B Revenue Waterfall as part of a revenue process transformation (RPT) is sales failing to pick up and progress stage-zero (qualified) opportunities. Even the most well-intentioned and thorough RPT teams can’t force sales to address the valuable signal- and buying-group-based opportunities passed to them. Marketing may get frustrated and question the effectiveness of the transformation effort because they aren’t seeing positive results from their work. Big changes like an RPT require patience, determination, and a commitment to the long game — in this case, revenue growth.
To address this challenge, marketing leaders must ensure that team members stay the course by developing incremental metrics that tie to things under their control so that they understand the endgame. But marketing will also need to work with sales leadership to get them to understand the value of the stage-zero opportunity and how to leverage it to drive positive revenue impact. This means sales leaders must get involved and adhere to a level of governance over these early-stage opportunities where it is likely that very little or even no governance existed before.
Stage-zero opportunities are critical because they represent momentum in the B2B Revenue Waterfall. It is the activation of the handoff from marketing to sales. Marketing will identify opportunities with signals, enrich the account data, and add buying group members to the account and opportunity, then a revenue development representative will book a meeting for the next sales expert in the process. Sales receives these meetings-booked opportunities and further develops the opportunity to determine its viability before ultimately closing the deal. Sales knows its role in the traditional sales process, but its role in a transformed revenue process may be murkier. If your organization has stuck stage-zero opportunities, one or more of these is the likely breakpoint:
Agreement. In a revenue process transformation, marketing and sales agreement is more critical than the alignment that marketing and sales typically attempt at the campaign or program level. RPT requires marketing and sales leadership to agree that there is a need to transform and agree on the implementation strategy and on definitions at each step in the process. Leaders need to roll this down to their direct reports and hold their teams accountable. Looking at situations where the sales team may be falling back to their old ways and not leveraging the power of the transformation is a key focal point. Revenue process transformation is implemented in a bottom-up manner but will never be successful if there is not a top-down agreement on how the transformation will drive revenue growth.
Understanding. Every team member involved in the transformation must understand why it is pivotal to the future of the business. They must understand what is forcing change, the business approach to addressing it, and their role in it. Even when team members know what is expected of them, they may work in parallel with or even outside the new framework without understanding the negative downstream impact. This type of behavior is a sign that more enablement is needed. These employees need to understand both the positive and negative impacts of not actively engaging in the transformation.
Enablement. Governance via the use of strong sales-level agreements, opportunity stage management, sales process, and measurement using the B2B Revenue Waterfall will be very important in this transformation. Enablement is the tool to reduce friction in the governance process. A formal onboarding program is required as a part of transformation planning. If taught in piecemeal fashion, team members will quickly suffer from change fatigue and bad behaviors will develop because each piecemeal change can result in workarounds that are difficult to break once created. The enablement plan must include an overview of the entire workflow process, an understanding of why it’s important to the business, lessons on each individual step they will be responsible for, details on how they will be measured, and an opportunity for regular interactions with their leaders to ensure that they are successful.
Sales’ acceptance of, and willingness to address, the new buying-group-centric stage-zero opportunities passed to them from marketing will ultimately define the success of a revenue process transformation. No function wants to be the team that limits growth.
