In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin introduces the show’s focus on practical, up‑to‑date revenue strategies and acknowledges the sponsors Rev Genius and Demandbase. The core discussion walks listeners through the sales funnel, emphasizing how marketing should warm prospects at the top, the stark reality that lead‑to‑close conversion rates are often below 1%, and why prioritizing high‑quality leads is far more efficient than chasing volume. Jared stresses the critical importance of speed‑to‑lead—responding to interested prospects quickly to avoid losing deals—and highlights the role of sales enablement in the later stages, ensuring reps have the right collateral, talking points, and positioning. He concludes that even modest improvements in conversion percentages can translate into significant revenue gains, especially when average contract values are high, urging teams to optimize the entire funnel rather than simply feeding it more leads.
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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
So this visual should be quite familiar to all of you. Of course, the naming convention of the different sales stages is going to differ across your organizations, but the points I wanted to cover here should really resonate regardless. So we're starting at the top of the funnel, right? This is where marketing is really doing this hard work of warming up the conversation because Let's face it, most quality leads don't just fall in our laps, right? There's this job of raising awareness. And again, perhaps through things like thought leadership and adding value and really teeing up sales for a conversation that is value-add. And so we do know prospecting is a necessary evil, right? So here you've got marketing contributing to the conversation. You also have sales contributing to the conversation. But again, marketing's goal really is to tee sales up and ideally by adding that value so that conversation starter becomes a less challenging feat. So then you start thinking about leads, right? And to me, the leads is when someone's raised their hand, they've showed intent, they're interested in a specific product or service. For anyone who's measured the data, you know that we have to sift through a lot of leads to get to a closed one sale, right? I was just having some conversations Forrester, talking about industry benchmarks, and really across a number of industries, we're looking at a sub-1% lead-to-close won conversion rate. So again, you're doing a lot of work to get to that sale, but not all leads are created equal. So when the focus is on lead quality, you actually start to need less of them to hit your targets. So for example, if you had the choice between 1,000 leads that convert at 1% or 100 leads that convert at 10%, which would you prefer? So of course, both of these scenarios yield 10 sales, but obviously the preference is to have less conversations, more quality conversations. So generating those higher quality leads is really going to help reduce the amount of work the teams have to do to get to sale. So it's critical that you know and prioritize your highest quality lead sources. So once we have a sale, a lead in the door, we really have to be quick about how we reach out to them, right? So how quickly you do that is going to have a direct impact on whether the deal is won. And I can't tell you, I'm sure you will all experience the same. In my personally vetting vendors over the years, I've had folks that won't get back to me for weeks or even at all. And this is after I've done the hard work of saying, I have budget, I'm trying to buy in 2 to 3 months, right? I've done the BANT criteria for them and still crickets on the other end, which is just an entirely frustrating conversation for the prospect going through this whole process. So that speed to lead is really critical and you don't wanna leave that bad taste in the mouth of the prospect. And then when we're looking at the bottom half of the funnel, this is really where sales enablement support is key. So this is a critical partnership between all parties to really bring that sale home. And I'm talking about making sure that they have the right collateral, talking points, positioning, all that stuff that's going to be really important to make that deal into a sale. So I realize that what I covered here is probably common sense for all of you, right? So the thing is, again, we say this a lot in this presentation. I spent a lot of time in my career emphasizing that what we do with leads Once they're in the door is just important, if not more important, as how many leads we generate. So the more we can optimize the customer experience down funnel, which happens in partnership, the greater the impact your organizations will feel to the bottom line. So I'll just point out specifically, small improvements to conversion rates, a fraction of a percent, even a whole percent if you can, right? That's gonna result in some significant impact to revenue. Especially when you have higher average contract values. Either way, contract values large or small or anywhere in between, it's really important that we focus on making the most of what we have rather than playing that dangerous game of just shoving more and more leads into a funnel that may have conversion challenges down the line.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenuetoday.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
