Overview

There’s no doubt about it: speed is key when it comes to getting your marketing leads over to your sales team. A quicker response time results in a better experience for the prospect, which ultimately can lead to more revenue for your business. The thought process is simple enough, yet I believe many of us fall short in understanding how long it takes for a lead to end up in the hands of our respective sales teams, let alone what is happening to that lead before being assigned out.

Today is the day we take the step into having the knowledge and full confidence that our processes work; they’re easy to understand and well-documented to provide our organizations with the visibility they want and need. Let’s begin.

What is a lead flow audit?

Simply put, a lead flow audit is a project you take on to understand what happens to a record upon creation in your systems. Oftentimes, teams will undertake this kind of effort to improve their sales response time on leads, identify recurring sync errors in their systems, or just try to improve visibility into the order of operations to identify missing components.

This will usually involve your marketing automation platform (MAP), your customer relationship management (CRM), and any other systems in your MarTech stack that touches your lead process. You may not know all of the systems that includes at first, and that’s okay. You’ll have the opportunity to document the others as you go through the rest of this process.

Why should companies do a lead flow audit?

As mentioned above, there are a multitude of benefits to doing a lead flow audit. What I believe it eventually boils down to is ensuring your lead flow is, what we like to say here at Etumos, “S.C.R.I.M.” The flow should be:

• SCALABLE and work as the volume increases over time
• CLEAR and easy to follow for first-time users all the way to seasoned veterans
• ROBUST and satisfy the requirements for all teams relying upon these leads
• INTELLIGENT and is built to avoid unexpected and unnoticed downstream errors
• MODULAR and allow for updates down the road that don’t break anything else in the process

When should a company do a lead flow audit?

Proactivity is the name of the game here. You shouldn’t sit back and wait until you start hearing complaints from your sales team about leads not showing up in their queues. Start right now. Take an afternoon and run a couple test leads through your system and see what happens. More likely than not, it will be a very shocking and eye-opening experience once you discover all of the old processes still touching your leads.

How should a company conduct a lead flow audit?

Step 1: Create a test record with the knowledge you already have

Do you already know that your MAP creates records via forms on your website? Or maybe your sales team creates records in your CRM that sync down to your MAP? Great! Fill out the form as if you were an actual prospect or create the record like your sales reps. Make sure to create a testing worksheet and write down the email address you use for each scenario and keep that handy, as you’ll reference that when sifting through the various systems.

Step 2: Document your current lead flow

Document everything you see happening to the respective records. For me, I’m big on visualizing my processes, so a tool like Miro or LucidChart works best for me. Below is an example of a basic flowchart I would use if I were auditing a client’s lead flow for an “inbound” record that is created in the MAP.

P.S. Reach out to us if you want a copy of the above.

The key is to be as specific as possible. “What do you mean by that, Kyle?” Say less, I got you. Here’s what I mean:

• Identify which system is making the data change. I like to do this by color coding, but a simple label is sufficient.
• Link to the specific workflow/automation that is triggering the data change. Should you need to make any changes to that process in the future, you’ll have a quick reference to it in your document.
• Include a timestamp of when the change occurred. This is where activity logs come in handy. This will ultimately help you determine your speed to lead time and how much of an improvement you can make.
• Create a different flowchart for each entry point. Remember how I said a lead could be created via a form or manually by a sales rep? These can trigger different processes or have different timing, so be mindful of that.

Step 3: Validate your findings with the business

I like to think us MOPs folks are some of the best problem solvers out there, but sometimes we just don’t have the full picture of everything. This is where confirming with your business partners can be helpful in putting the rest of the pieces together. You may come to find out that leads are created via another mechanism that you’re unaware of. For example, your CRM admin team may have created a process in the past that automatically creates a record in your CRM when someone signs up for your company’s partner portal. Once you identify that and find examples of those records, add the scenario to your documentation.

Step 4: Identify Dependencies, Inefficiencies & Problems

This is arguably the most important step in the whole process and where you’ll start to see the puzzle come together. The good thing about processes is that they work together and rely on each other. The bad thing about processes, though, is that they work together and rely on each other. What I mean by that is there is ample opportunity for efficiency, but when one process is broken, it’s likely that another process that’s relying upon that one is broken, as well.

Within the same process map above, identify the fields that are being updated and what pieces of data that process relies upon. You should also identify where you’re seeing inefficiencies in the timing of the process, as well as issues that arise from the test record (namely, sync errors). Naturally, you’ll start to gather an idea of an optimal order of operations, how much time is needed for each step, and which pieces of data are needed where.

One common example I find is assigning the proper mailability restrictions to a record based on their country location. Obviously, having clean and accurate country information is vital to determining what level of consent is required in order to email a prospect. However, companies may not standardize country information until after your mailability compliance process fires, which can result in an inaccurate application of mailability restrictions. Therefore, we need to make sure we standardize the country data before running our email compliance process.

Step 5: Make the Adjustments

Now that you have discovered all of the possible entry points and identified the optimal flow of each process, it’s time to re-architect the processes to match that best case scenario. Be sure to do a lot of testing before fully activating your updates.

Step 6: Document!

What good is your updated lead flow if nobody else knows about it? Still good, but you get the point. Wherever your team hosts documentation, include a section about this project with a brief summary on the context of it, a process map (if you created one), and full details on each step in the process.

This is also a great opportunity to showcase the positive impact your audit had on the lead flow process. Faster speed to lead processing time? Indicate how much faster! Eliminated the hundreds of sync errors you were receiving with your previous process? That’s a huge win. 100% accuracy on lead routing after only hovering around 85%? Now we are talking. This is what your leadership team wants to see, and the more you have documented ready to share out, the more visibility your work gets.

Who should be involved in a lead flow audit at your company?

This process will likely involve most, if not all, of your RevOps stakeholders (Marketing Ops, Sales Ops & Customer Success) as well as your sales counterparts. Marketing Ops will have the knowledge on the path through the marketing automation platform, Sales Ops will know what happens to them when they hit your CRM, and Sales & Customer Success can provide the extra context as to what actions they take on the records within the CRM. It’s a group effort, and may take some time trying to coordinate schedules, but it sure will be worth it.

Conclusion

While there’s many ways you can go about conducting a lead flow audit, I have found this process works for me and the teams that I have worked with. I often find this exercise to be an enjoyable one as you get to flex your problem-solving and discovery muscles, while ultimately being able to make a significant and tangible impact on your business.

Are you thinking about taking on a lead flow audit for your organization? We would love to partner with you and share even more tips and tricks on how to optimize this process for your business.