Driving more discovery calls (📈 MTN #15)

In this edition

• 📊 HubSpot sales benchmarks
• 💡 Increasing discovery call volume
• 📈 Ways you might be “leaking” revenue

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📊 Featured Benchmark Data (from Benchmark Groups)

HubSpot sales benchmarks for all companies

Median HubSpot CRM & Sales performance for all companies (June 2023):

• Emails logged: 383
• Meetings: 69
• Calls: 118
• Deals created: 31
• Deals created amount: $235.3k
• Avg time to close: 70d, 10h
• Deals closed won: 8
• Deals closed won amount: $68.5k

Join this group to view more metrics, and how your company stacks up. See if you’re ahead or behind the curve, and where you can improve.

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💡 Trends & Insights (from Reports & Surveys)

Increasing your volume of discovery meetings

Budgets are tightening, and companies are trying to do more with less. So if you want to increase the number of discovery or demo calls you’re booking, where do you start? That’s the topic we explored in our latest article.

It’s not a quick fix. And for many companies, it’s hard to know where to start because there are so many factors that impact it. Broadly speaking, you can focus on two areas: 1) drive more people to your site, or 2) increase the number of conversions from your site. 

But under each of those two options, it gets vastly more complicated.

Driving more people to your site? Will you try and create new demand, or capture existing demand? Is your targeting or messaging right, or do you need to refine it? What channels should you focus on? Paid or organic? Inbound or outbound?

Increasing conversions from existing traffic to your site? Are you answering the questions and objections visitors have? Is your site easy to navigate? Is the messaging clear and compelling? Is it easy to book a call?

Obviously, there’s a lot that factors into increasing calls. But to help us get an idea of what other companies are doing, we ran a survey and compiled the insights into our latest article.

Here are some of the takeaways:

• The top 3 ways companies are generating discovery calls are Inbound marketing (70.59%), Outbound marketing (64.71%), and Referrals (54.90%)
• About 10% to 30% of leads turn into discovery calls for most companies. For a tad over 20% of survey respondents, this percentage surpasses 30%.
• About one-third of companies said their Discovery call to Closed Won conversion rate was 10-20%, and another third was 20-30%
• The vast majority of companies (65%) reach out to potential customers for a discovery call weekly, while almost 20% do it daily

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📈 Drive Predictable Performance (from Metrics & Chill)

7 ways you might be “leaking” revenue

All businesses think about increasing revenue, but not nearly as many are working to identify the ways they’re “leaking” it.

I recently asked Sean Burke (COO of Prometric) on the podcast, to talk about ways this happens without companies realizing it.

Sean has noticed more companies move from a “growth at all costs” mindset to a “run efficient revenue teams” mindset, where the goal is to capture every ounce of revenue they possibly can. And part of that means identifying areas where you’re leaking revenue. 

In the interview, he shared 7 areas where this occurs:

1. The deal itself.

Sean says, “in a lot of B2B sales, the way that you present your solution or the way that you sell, can automatically, right out of the gate, change the value of that deal.”

For example, you could approach sales with two broad strategies: build, or bust.

“Build strategy”: sell something (one tool or product), and build up the account over time, by slowly trying to get them to adopt more products or services.

“Bust strategy”: sell your entire “suite” of tools or services (the entire white space in the account) from Day 1, by packaging it as a comprehensive solution to permanently solve the customer’s problem.

So just in the way you bring your product to market, you can be making – or losing – hundreds of thousands in revenue. 

2. “Conversion dollar amount” from booking to revenue.

Here’s, you’re losing revenue in the gap between what you sell, and what you actually get paid for.

Say you sell a million-dollar deal, and the average time to implement is 6 months. The question is, how much of that million dollars actually turns into billable revenue within a certain time frame?

Sean finds that companies very rarely document, measure and address this.

3. How your compensation plan ties bookings to actual revenue.

You may be paying people commissions for revenue you never ultimately collect. Say you sell a $100k deal. The AE gets a 10% commission and walks away happily on to the next deal. But if you dig into the data, you might find that that deal only generated $60k of actual revenue by the time it was complete. 

4. Billing issues related to the complexity of the deal structure.

Not all deals you sell line up neatly into your billing system. In some companies, the more complex the deal, the more it almost “breaks” their billing system. Sean has found that it’s not uncommon for companies to have to manually bill a complex deal. And whenever that happens, there’s an opportunity for it to be set up wrong, and to lose revenue you should’ve had.

5. Relying on a usage-based pricing formula (e.g. selling API calls), based on client forecasts.

If you rely on usage-based pricing where your customer forecasts their use, you’ll find it’s often far higher than what they’ll actually end up using. This will naturally lead you to predict revenue that never actually comes in. Another problem is that in those cases, the pricing doesn’t scale for lower or higher use, but you’re stuck with it. Sean says that often, this may be the first time a Client purchases something like this, so their projected forecasting is even more wrong because they have no historical data of what they’ll end up needing.

6. Lacking data on Client “white space”: how much you have available to still sell to your existing accounts.

Your company should know how much value you could still add to your existing accounts, and the opportunity to sell them on additional products or solutions in order to bring them more value.

7. Customer churn. This one is obvious and much more tracked, but remains a huge source of revenue leakage.

If you want to hear all the insights Sean shared, and how you can apply these lessons to your company, give the interview a listen.

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Drive predictable growth

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