Imagine...
How great would it be if everyone in sales and marketing shared helpful feedback about the prospects coming in and out of their pipeline on a daily basis?
If, instead of lobbing leads over an invisible fence, marketing followed up with sales at the end of the day, and sales gave them valuable data to make better decisions.
What a dream, eh?
Now raise your hand if this is more familiar…
When it comes to sharing feedback about lead quality, conversations like these are pretty common—and the burden of proof inevitably falls on marketing.
What happens next? Someone (probably in lead gen) is assigned the unsavory task of finding some sort of “quality metric”, and before you know it, you’ve rolled out marketing automation tools, implemented lead scoring systems, and started grading prospects based on As, Bs, and Cs all the way through Zs.
But it doesn’t solve the main issue.
That’s because the issue isn’t necessarily lead quality.
The issue is communication between sales and marketing.
More often than not, these arguments occur too late in the game when they should have been addressed earlier on. Plus, feedback between divisions should be a lot more specific, measurable, timely, and transparent to everyone involved.
Enter Slack.
At Vendasta, Slack is our central nervous system for internal communication.
Our CRM might be our brain—our single source of truth—but Slack is the system of rapidly firing conversations that keeps us moving.
What if you could use Slack to collect rapid daily feedback from sales and iterate on it quickly instead of hearing about gripes through the gripevine? Here’s how.
Step 1: Go to geekbot.io
Our team started using Geekbot for stand-ups about a year ago, but it took us six months to realize its full potential in terms of sales alignment.
The best thing about this bot is that it’s super needy. It’ll bug anyone in Slack about anything you want it to until it gets an answer, which is perfect for busy people.
Click Add to Slack and sign up for a free trial.
There are tons of other bots out there that do the same thing I’m about to show you (potentially for free) but Geekbot is by far the most user-friendly I’ve found.
Step 2: Create a custom report
Click Create New Report and choose Custom Report.
Note: The report options in Geekbot are just templates with preloaded questions, so it doesn’t really matter which one you select.
Name your report and set up a channel where you want your salespeople’s responses to go. I created a new channel called #lead-feedback.
Click on Questions and add the questions you want to ask your sales team.
Protip: keep it simple.
For example, think net promoter score (NPS).
NPS whittles customer satisfaction down to a single question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company’s product or service to a friend or a colleague?” That score is then used as a proxy for gauging overall satisfaction.
Do the same thing here.
I use two questions: 1) On a scale of 1 – 10, how good were the leads that marketing sent you today? 1 = Terrible, 10 = Amazing. 2) Any specific feedback?
Next, click Participants and add all of the people you want to get feedback from on a regular basis. In Vendasta’s case, we add all of our sales development reps (SDRs) because they’re the ones qualifying the leads we send them.
Lastly, go to the Schedule tab and choose how often you want to survey your reps.
I run it every day Monday to Friday at 3:30pm. The only reason we don’t wait till 5pm is because we have some reps who go home at 4pm.
Step 3: Tell the team
Once you’ve cleared this with the sales managers (which shouldn’t be hard, given that you’re about to unearth some great feedback), all that’s left to do is to tell the team.
Step 4: Let Geekbot do its thing
When the clock strikes whatever time you told it to strike, Geekbot will direct message your questions to everyone on its list.
If they don’t answer? It’ll message again. And again.
Shortly after, the responses will start rolling into your broadcast channel. Add anyone you think should see these responses, including your marketing team and sales managers.
Tip: the C-suite loves checking these out, too. Add your CRO, CMO, CEO, etc.
This is when things get interesting.
The natural interactions that start happening over time are pretty great—everything between marketing interns catching leads that slipped through the QA cracks to reps marking duplicates to managers adjusting our ad strategy on the spot.
My personal favorite is when the CRO drops a message in the channel calling out a downward trend…at least he’s following along 🙂
Step 5: Track yo’ self
If you’re not comfortable working with Geekbot’s APIs, tracking is somewhat manual—but hey, at least it’s possible.
Login to Geekbot, navigate to your report, and click Download CSV on the right-hand side.
Select your dates, gather your file, and get thee to Google Sheets.
In Sheets, you can upload your CSV and then combine the results into weekly averages that you can track over time. It also helps to have a record of the full-text responses, which I break out weekly by tab.
As soon as you start tracking your results, I suggest using it in a couple of ways.
First, bring the data forward at every relevant meeting that marketing and sales have together. For example, we have a weekly huddle, and we always lead with a data update.
Second, create a separate Slack channel for in-depth discussions with sales and marketing leadership about lead quality. A channel with fifty people in it can get noisy, and sometimes it’s better to have private convos. Also, it’s nice to keep your Geekbot broadcast channel dedicated solely to the daily responses.
Let’s wrap this up
While Slack is no substitute for marketing automation tools, CRMs, lead scoring, and the rest of that fancy (read: expensive) stuff, I can tell you first-hand that having daily communication with our SDRs has been a huge win.
How? With some simple automation, it has reduced the amount of time it takes us hounding reps about spreadsheets and surveys and notes about lead quality while increasing transparency, accountability, and communication across the board.
That’s something we can all get onboard with.
P.S. This post isn’t really a hack per se but more so something I’ve found helpful in the past. I was hesitant to even use the h-word, but “Slack hack” makes a pretty sweet headline, so I’m sticking to it.
