Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Kevin Suitor, VP Of Marketing, Exinda (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada

SM: If you were to look at the funnel from a holistic point of view, where you are bringing in leads from the top all the way down to where your fields sales or channel sales teams are closing deals, would you step me through how many steps you break the funnel into and how the metrics perform throughout that process?

KS: When I take a look at it, I am constantly tracking activity on the Web visit side because that is the first stage of the visit–lead–opportunity–customer funnel. I track that percentage on a weekly basis. I want to know how many visits we have, and I watch the visit-to-lead conversion rate. We track the visit-to-lead conversion rate, and it typically runs in the 2%–3.5% aggregate metric, which is pretty much what I would have seen in a direct mail campaign back in the 1980s and 1990s. The transitions are much the same as what we had with historical marketing methods. Then we look at the lead-to-opportunity conversion ratio, and there we aim for a 30%–40% conversion rate of leads to opportunities, and we also track this on a weekly basis. These conversion ratios are shared with the entire senior leadership team as part of the marketing activity report. Finally, we track the opportunity-to-customer conversion rate. These metrics are tracked weekly, rolled up quarterly, and benchmarked over 18 months. So, we see how we are trending on each of these conversion metrics over a period of 18 months.

SM: And what is the conversion rate at that stage, the opportunity-to-customer stage?

KS: Our current conversion rates are around 27%.

SM: Okay. You said this process has been in implementation for only a year and a half or two years, something like that?

KS: Yes, June 2010 was when I started on the formal marketing piece. The sales piece began in the middle of 2009. So, we have been building constantly on our foundations as we continue to add a long-term three-year plan to really turn sales activity around.

SM: Do you have any sense of what the conversion rates were before you put in this process?

KS: I don’t. My predecessors did not do this kind of formalized, metric-driven reporting.

SM: Okay, that makes sense.

KS: That is probably why they were my predecessors!

SM: Yes, of course! Are there any insights on the sales side of the process that are worth discussing that you are familiar with?

KS: On the sales side, we are capturing a lot of activity in Salesforce with regard to account and end-user mapping between our internal target list, which is developed by our sales executives, and channel partners. The channel partners to try to make sure that we understand exactly which partners to focus on by vertical. You know, you can’t really do horizontal marketing anymore, so it is important to understand for each partner which verticals and which customers within those verticals they target and capture this as a structured process within Salesforce.

SM: You need a distribution algorithm other than to match the channel partners with the right customers, correct?

KS: Well, right now it is really a brute force approach. With that you need to start with each of the field sales people sitting down with their partners and channel managers, understanding who those partners’ targets are and getting that mapped into Salesforce by updating customer records and making sure that you tie tightly those customer records to the partners who can best serve them. And you begin to run a sales and marketing program against customers that both the channel partner and Exinda want to target.

SM: Okay, fair enough.

KS: That is the program we began in the fourth quarter of 2010. I don’t have any hard and fast results on it as of yet, but it is an initiative whose fruits I expect to start to see by the middle of this year.

SM: Based on these changes in your sales process, what do you think your 2011 revenue target is going to be?

KS: We expect to grow the business between 80% and 100% this year.

SM: So, you are accelerating.

KS: We are accelerating our growth.

SM: Very good! I wish you all the best. I enjoyed listening to your transformational process; let’s keep in touch.

KS: Yes, thank you.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Kevin Suitor, VP Of Marketing, Exinda
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