Ideas are easy, but execution is everything. That’s why 6sense prioritizes its internal commitment to operations — after all, well-defined processes help us leverage data to inform our decisions.
Since we use the same data and insights we offer our customers, we wanted to share with you how our Operations team builds processes and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to drive revenue efficiency.
Understanding What ‘Good’ Looks Like
The first step to ensuring consistent success means analyzing your organization’s successful deal history, conversion rates, and velocity.
By studying these metrics, we gain valuable insights into the patterns and factors that contribute to successful outcomes. Armed with this knowledge, we can replicate and enforce these patterns across our organization.
Communicating Expectations and SLAs
The next step is communicating these expectations and SLAs to the relevant teams. Whether it’s the inside sales team, the enablement team, or others, clear communication is key.
We ensure that the entire revenue team understands their responsibilities and the specific actions required to meet our revenue goals. This alignment fosters collaboration and keeps everyone working together towards a common objective.
Inspecting and Enforcing SLAs
Regularly reviewing and assessing our processes and SLAs is important for maintaining a predictable pipeline stream. Periodic inspection uncovers gaps or areas for improvement and helps us close the loop and ensure that our teams are adhering to the defined SLAs.
This eliminates ambiguity, clarifies responsibilities, and enables marketing and sales to work seamlessly as a well-oiled machine.
Example: 6sense Qualified Accounts
One specific process that has been highly successful for us at 6sense is what we do when an account becomes a 6sense Qualified Account, or 6QA. A 6QA is an account that our AI-driven platform has determined is highly interested in our solution and in-market. This is based on a combination of intent data and engagement signals measured by our predictive analytics.
The moment a highly qualified account becomes in-market is critical, and we have a well-documented process to ensure a flawless execution. When an account becomes a 6QA, our Business Development Representatives act immediately. They leverage sales intelligence to understand the account’s research keywords, historical content consumption, and campaigns, which enables them to conduct personalized outreach.
Our SLA for this process is a tight one. We expect the first activity from a BDR to happen within 20 minutes of the account qualifying. Additionally, our reps are trained to engage with multiple personas within the account, as we have observed that our win rate doubles when we have multiple contacts involved.
Only when there is sufficient interest and outreach from the prospect do our Account Executives take over and drive the deal forward.
Conclusion
Sticking closely to strategically determined processes and SLAs is crucial for driving operational efficiency — and ultimately driving revenue. Create a culture of operational excellence by unifying the whole revenue team under a single concept of what “good” looks like, communicating expectations, and regularly looking for opportunities to improve.
