Why automation is the future of lead management (and RevOps) – Search Engine Land

Your revenue operations team can reliably get inbound leads into the hands of your sales representatives in roughly two minutes, executing every step of your lead management process along the way.

Delays in your revenue processes, especially in lead follow-up, decimate funnels. Slow lead processing makes it 7x less likely youll ever qualify your leads. Most RevOps pros understand this, but lead management is a deceptively complex set of processes, oftentimes built on the back of a house of cards.

Note: If you havent heard of Jobs to be done, check it out, its worth a read.

Oftentimes these jobs are done asynchronously using a myriad of third-party tools, which despite everyones best intentions, leads to challenges with the reliability and speed of lead processing. These challenges are especially difficult for those on the front lines to troubleshoot.

Problems with orchestrating processes across multiple tools arent limited to lead management, either: If you work in RevOps, youve certainly earned some battle scars when trying to make the litany of software tools across your go-to-market org play nice.

On the one hand, the proliferation of SaaS means teams across the organization can find best-in-class solutions for their use cases. On the other hand, there are unintended consequences when adopting them, and dealing with that normally falls on the shoulders of ops. Likely, youll spend countless hours dealing with the various quirks of these tools, collectively increasing your technical debt more and more as time goes on.

Meanwhile, only the most well-resourced teams can allocate engineering resources to build homegrown solutions that resolve these issues. But nobody gets off easy. This approach has its own challenges. You must also account for the overhead homegrown has in terms of ongoing maintenance and adapting to changes as your go-to-market strategy evolves.

The reality is most of us heavily rely on purpose-built tools and native integrations from our SaaS vendors of choice. No matter how much your team has invested in technology, we still must deal with its inherent limitations. Maybe youre spending too much time on manual processes (such as list imports), answering an onslaught of messages from teammates regarding data discrepancies, fighting endlessly to squash out duplicates, or filing too many vendor tickets trying to understand whats happening inside the black box.

The bottom line is these gaps turn into roadblocks that cost your company serious money. The pain is even more apparent in a challenging economy, where tight budgets mean youre expected to justify ROI while your budgets get frozen, if not cut. Heres the harsh truth, 58% of business professionals say less than half of their applications have netted a positive ROI. Meanwhile, 66% of marketing teams dont believe they have the skills to use their existing technology effectively.

Ouch. Let that sink in. Do you have any idea how much money were spending on software here, folks?

Chin up. Dont worry. Theres hope! The fact is, this is all POSITIVE. Theres SO much room for improvement here if you work in RevOps. Its a great opportunity you can solve.

Everybody loves the RevOps hero.

Considering how hard it is to manage the revenue stack, its no accident leaders are radically rethinking their approach to better support their companys revenue strategy. Instead of taking a tools first approach and designing around limitations, smart teams opt for a process-driven approach, choosing open, API-first systems to fit into their stack.

Process-first thinking isnt new: weve always wanted to do things this way. Weve just lacked the resources and tools to deliver.

But friends, the times, they are a-changin! The lines between engineering and operations are blurring as practitioners are becoming increasingly technical. Theyre learning to leverage APIs to connect systems, write SQL to query data warehouses, and use JavaScript to instrument tooling. Building technical skills open the door for operations pros to be truly process-driven by integrating, orchestrating, and automating processes across your go-to-market organization, such as lead management. And how are they putting these technical skills into practice?

By learning to leverage General Automation Platforms (GAP) like the Tray Platform. These automation platforms close the resource gap for semi-technical ops professionals, empowering them to build multi-step, automated processes called workflows. These workflows focus on the job to be done first, not the technology vendor that does it.

Throughout this series of posts, well introduce a workflow framework that makes sure the lifeblood of your sales pipeline is in good, strike that, GREAT health.

Using a lead management framework built on the Tray Platform provides your team with control and visibility into every possible aspect of your lead funnel. You can quite literally measure your funnels reliability and speed at every step. Meanwhile, you will prepare yourself for a future in which Citizen Automators (thats you) build processes tailor-made to your organizations needs, without ever having to worry again about whether your software tools do that or wait for engineering support.

At the center of this framework is a workflow we call the Lead processing pipeline. The pipeline is responsible for orchestrating each of the essential lead management jobs to be done. From intake to creation to enrichment and beyond, you can use this process for any lead, no matter the source.

Before getting too deep into the framework, we wanted to introduce our process-driven approach and explain why we believe this approach is a smart choice that unlocks new possibilities for RevOps teams.

We host a series of deep dives into each of the workflows supporting the framework on the Tray.io blog if youre interested. We delve into the nitty-gritty details, so youll have a practical guide to building your very own lead management process on the Tray Platform. You can also get your hands dirty by requesting a trial of the Tray Platform here.

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Why automation is the future of lead management (and RevOps) - Search Engine Land