Case study: Workflow & Process Redesign
Company: Equifax
Project length: 2 years
Delivery method: In-house
Introducing lead processes for Equifax
Problem
Equifax identified that their growing marketing team was delivering more campaigns but had no way to understand results after a prospect had converted. There were four different ways a prospect was being directed to contact the team: An online form, direct to the salesperson, through an email inbox, or through a switchboard phone number.
Through historic processes, every enquiry created was sent to the sales team as a lead regardless of its origin or request. This meant sales were dealing with customer service enquiries, one off requests with minimal value, alongside white paper downloads and business queries. The sales teams worked these leads in chronological order but as campaigns started to increase, so did volume. This was resulting in a reduction in output, disbelief in the value of marketing activity and prospects waiting 4-5 days for a response.
The first step to finding the most suitable solution(s) was to clearly define the problems that were being experienced. This meant the marketing team had to build relationships with the sales teams and understand any internal and external frustrations in order to prioritise and introduce changes. The first phase was to introduce the first ever process map (image 1) - understanding where and how leads were delivered into the business. This, alongside feedback from sales, marketing and prospects, identified a number of problems:
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Prospects were choosing competitors due to slow response times.
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Marketing leads were seen as low value and did not meet sales’ expectations.
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There was no way for sales to identify or distinguish a lead versus query.
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Sales teams did not receive commission for leads generated by marketing.
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There was no process in place to direct prospects’ enquiries to the right place.
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All leads were treated equally despite potential value or urgency.
Solution
It was agreed across sales and marketing that all identified problems needed to be addressed, however it was not clear which priority or order to take. To find an agreed route the teams mapped the ideal lead process state utilising existing and new technology that was on the business roadmap (image 3).
Working backwards the next 3 iterations of this process became clear alongside the understanding that this would be a multi-year programme. Highest priorities would be;
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Marketing leads were seen as low value and did not meet sales’ expectations.
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There was no process in place to direct prospects’ enquiries to the right place.
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Sales teams did not receive commission for leads generated by marketing.
The first priority was:
Marketing leads are seen as low value and did not meet sales’ expectations.
To solve this leadership and operations teams from sales and marketing worked together alongside the sales teams receiving the most enquiries to define a lead. Once this definition was defined it was agreed there would need to be a way for marketing to filter enquiries that did not match.
Resource restraints meant this was going to be near impossible in-house so the marketing team enlisted the support of a telephony agency as an interim solution.
The second priority was:
There was no process in place to direct prospects’ enquiries to the right place.
The first 6 months of working with the telephony agency were spent building out a process to match the initial MVP workflow (image 2). The longest part of this setup was defining clear qualification questions and adapting them to a telephony channel, call handler training and knowledge alignment.
Once there was an agreement across all teams of how we wanted to push a prospect through to sales we spent time adapting and building technology processes to match. This resulted in the introduction of a lead process that included prospect pre=qualification and hand off to sales. The MVP simplified the process to allow for speed with all leads going to one sales team whilst process niggles were ironed out. Upon success, processes were adapted based on industry or value to match them with tailored sales people. This solution meant removing all external phone numbers and email addresses from collateral and instead ensuring that prospects were directed to one specified route that would trigger their entry into this new process.
Automation was added to identify individuals and redirect them to customer service, individual account requests were flagged to account managers and spam was caught.
The third priority was:
Sales teams did not receive commission for leads generated by marketing.
Arguably one of the most difficult problems to address - marketing leads were not valuable but equally sales people were not incentivised to deal with them. It was a chicken and egg situation that, fortunately, due to proactive leadership engagement meant the business came to an agreed incentive plan. This solution would later be expanded to have a dedicated internal headcount for all marketing leads.
Remaining priorities:
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Prospects were choosing competitors due to slow response times.
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There was no way for sales to identify or distinguish a lead versus query.
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All leads were treated equally despite potential value or urgency.
The first 3 priorities reduced the need to address the next two priorities relating to response times and lead identification. The remaining one, however: All leads were treated equally despite potential value or urgency, became the focus for the next 12 months. The marketing team once again engaged multiple sales teams alongside the expanded inside sales team to understand how urgency or value was defined. It was agreed that introducing a lead score would allow the team to see the match % to relevant personas alongside engagement. By introducing this there was also the hope that marketing would be able to share prospects showing intent before they requested a call back, enabling sales to proactively reach out.
Results
All of these changes increased conversions of leads throughout the funnel, from initial marketing qualified lead (MQL) through to sales qualified leads (SQL).
Total lead conversion (MQL to a deal)
The conversion from initially adding a lead to the sales pipeline to the prospect signing a contract increased dramatically year on year.
Previous to 2022 the MQL stage did not exist. Instead all enquiries were classed as a lead and sent to sales. The lack of data or information meant sales were unable to qualify the lead so, based on fear of missing revenue, everything was added.
This meant there was a large number of sales accepted leads (SALs) in 2021 with an extremely low conversion. By introducing an MQL stage, and only sending qualified leads, SALs reduced by over 300% but conversions increased exponentially.
Once the definition of an MQL was created, we retrospectively added it to previous years to provide a comparison.
Sales conversion (SAL to a deal)
From the introduction of an MQL we know that SALs reduced, something which sounds counterintuitive to the purpose of the redesign, however, year on year conversions of SALs increased ten fold.
Reducing SALs meant sales were able to focus their efforts on value and not volume.
Sales conversion (SQL to a deal)
Increasing almost 85%, conversions of sales qualified leads proved that the redesign was impacting the full funnel and there was a total benefit to the business. These SQLs accounted for tens of millions of potential revenue versus the previous year's hundreds of thousands.
For those eagle-eyed readers, you'll spot that conversion reduced in 2021 versus 2020 which is down to volume increase. In 2020, there were fewer than 100 SQLs on the system which meant sales had more time to focus on each enquiry - there was also 3x as many BDRs in the team. In 2021 volume increased, team sizes reduced and the issues of not having a process in place became clear.
This multi-year redesign project now means prospects are being contacted within 24 hours and sales were able to understand prioritisation and potential of leads. This increased revenue opportunities by 50x year on year (from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions) and increased actual revenue by 300% with a projection to increase 50% each year thereafter.
Disclaimers:
This case study is based on experiences as part of a previous in-house role.
Total project time: 2 years.
This work was conducted alongside a full marketing audit & review and includes workflow process and redesign for leads alongside future tech stack and capability alignment.