Brooke Hattie · Sep 23, 2024 · Case Studies
About this engagement
Our client's sales reps qualified prospects for a product by submitting a long form in Salesforce, which their research and RevOps teams then worked from.
They brought in Lean Layer's fractional RevOps team to fix that process, which was slowing the sales cycle and causing friction between sales, research and RevOps.
Our partnership enabled the following results:
The Challenge
Sales reps were responsible for a lengthy form that qualified a prospect's eligibility for a product, a task better suited to the research team. The process had duplicative fields and inefficient workflows, and reps spent up to an hour on each submission, which slowed the sales cycle.
Communication between sales, research and RevOps ran through Slack and email. That often led to miscommunication, and nobody could see the status of a request.
The Solution
We audited the existing Salesforce setup to find the redundant fields and the time-consuming steps, then rebuilt the process around what each team needed from it.
At a high level, here is what changed:
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| A research assessment form with duplicative fields | → | A Sales Request with the fields consolidated |
| Up to an hour per submission | → | About 5 minutes per submission |
| Status chased in Slack and email | → | A status bar in Salesforce every team can see |
| Same-day due dates | → | Rules that prevent them, so requests are planned realistically |
| Sales recommending research vendors | → | The research team recommending them |
And now, here is how we got there.
An audit and stakeholder interviews
We began with an audit of the existing Salesforce system, looking for inefficient workflows, repetitive fields and unnecessary steps in the research assessment process. We then interviewed stakeholders across the sales, research, RevOps and media strategy teams. Each team had different concerns, so capturing all of them meant the final process would work for everyone.
A simpler Sales Request
We renamed the research assessment object to Sales Request, which made it easier for sales, research and RevOps to coordinate and track requests. We consolidated the duplicative fields and removed the unnecessary steps, so a submission takes a sales rep minutes instead of an hour.
A status every team can see
A status bar on each request lets every team track its progress, so nothing sits in a black box and people can follow up when they need to. New rules prevent same-day due dates.
The right team for each job
Recommending research vendors moved from the sales team to the research team, so the recommendations come from the subject-matter experts. That removed a source of friction between the two teams.
Rollout
We built the new process in a sandbox, deployed it to production and ran office hours to walk the team through the changes and answer questions, with stakeholder feedback built in throughout.
The Results
A submission that took up to an hour now takes about 5 minutes, which saves the sales team more than 93 hours a month. Requests are tracked in Salesforce instead of across Slack and email, so every team can see where things stand.
Vendor recommendations now come from the research team, so the right expertise is applied at the right time, and sales reps spend that time on higher-value work, which contributes to faster deal cycles.
Request a free consultation to see how we can help you give more time back to your sales reps to spend on closing, not admin.