Step 1: Choose One Customer to Analyze

I recommend that you select one customer success story. Don't boil the ocean. Work with the sales team to identify a customer who presented multiple challenges, perhaps did some stopping and starting in his or her process, but also is reflective of a typical deal. Chop out the anomalies of bluebirds who swooped into the CRM and closed within 10 days. They just won't provide you an accurate picture of your typical buyer. In preparation for your customer analysis, you'll need the following:

1. Marketing automation history
2. CRM history
3. The sales professional(s) who worked the account to help fill in any missing information

The sales professional is critical because, let's face it, not every sales interaction will have been properly placed into the CRM. You'll need the sales professional(s) involved in this deal to show emails, phone-call summaries, notes, and so on for any interaction that isn't clear in the CRM.

Using a spreadsheet, plot your buyer's journey across rows and, in the next row below, fill in the details of your typical sales process across the spreadsheet. I recommend that the buyer's journey and sales process be in rows 1 and 2 so your sales professionals get a clear understanding of the chronological timeline you're trying to capture. When we've done this exercise internally, our buyer's journey in columns 1, 2, and 3 are named “Why,” “How,” and “Who,” early, middle, and late stages of the journey. Sales professionals can plot their sales process (i.e., first call, discovery, consensus-building call, demo, proposal, legal review) within this three-column sequence.

Begin plotting sales interactions first; voicemails, phone calls, emails—nothing is too small. Highlight the dates of these interactions. Plot these interactions from first touchpoint all the way until the close, so include discovery calls, demos, proposals, and so on. Next, plot the consumed insights and dates over the same timeline. Highlight marketing assets in a different color if you need to visually distinguish everything. Note the assets by type, dates between assets consumed, dates between assets consumed in proximity to a sales interaction. You should be left with a road map of everything that sales and marketing did to influence this won customer.

Step 2: Isolate a Single Observation

From this exercise, you may have a few observations. First, the sales professionals will have their mouths open, realizing that their buyer had been on your website reviewing various insights without informing the sales team. Hopefully, there is a nugget of gold to extract. This could be the proximity of content consumption 24 hours before or after a major sales interaction. Perhaps this buyer consumed a variety of asset types, but the headline and topic of these insights were basically the same. You now have a template to scale this process.

Step 3: Scale by Mapping Larger Pools of Clients

Now that you have the template for implementing this analysis, you'll want to map all your top customers. Depending on volume, you may start with recent transactions. However you choose to dissect this information, you need a sample size that is large enough to give you the comfort that the results will represent your entire client base.

Step 4: Regression Analysis to Isolate Trends

Now the fun begins. You will begin plotting client after client, giving you further knowledge about how your buyer is conducting his or her due diligence. As you begin analyzing the entire buyer story, segment consumption patterns into the three buyer's journey stages: why, how, who. You'll want to understand what's happening in great detail when a buyer is first discovering his or her problem (the why), then the patterns that are helping him or her progress.

Here are examples of trends you'll want to discover:

• How many insights, on average, is a buyer consuming? Is that similar for all buyer personas or size of customer?
• Within a buyer's total consumption, how much (as a percentage or number of assets) is consumed before the first sales interaction? Can you make a case for CEB's statistic that 57 percent of the buying journey is happening without sales?
• What is the percentage of consumption a buyer does when interacting in later stages with your sales executives? During the how and who stages, how much are digital insights still influencing a buyer?
• At the asset-type level, are specific asset types dramatically outperforming others to create new leads? Are sales executives nurturing their accounts?
• Are specific asset types being consumed in high volume during a specific buyer's journey stage that you didn't anticipate?

You can slice and dice this data all day long. Remember, your main goal is to understand:

1. Volumes needed for future production.
2. Velocity needed to get assets into the market quicker.
3. Probability that an asset will convert.

Each of these three main metrics will be the focal point of your incremental improvements. As an example, when we ran this analysis among a portion of our client base, the following trends caught our eye:

• Our buyer is consuming 7.4 assets before buying.
• Forty-three percent of that consumption happens before our first sales conversation.
• Seventy-five percent of that consumption happens before our sales executives discuss our solution during a discovery call.
• Infographic-based blogs had five times the opportunity for greater production development. If you analyzed our production time against remaining production resources and cross-analyzed against an infographic's ROI, we can accelerate our production by five times before we hit a capacity issue.

Step 5: Arm Your Sales Team with This Information to Improve Sales Conversations

Imagine the power this information has in your sales team's hands. Your professionals know what insights should best be shared, to which buyers, and at what stages of that buyer's journey. They'll be able to better qualify a buyer if he or she is not consuming insights that meet the average consumption patterns of previous buyers. This content consumption minimum has been highly valuable for our sales team. If a buyer is not actively engaged in our insights, a red flag goes up and we ask ourselves, “How interested is this buyer in our solution?” This saves countless hours to ensure our sales team isn't spinning its wheels.

The communication of these trends needs to extend beyond your Insights Committee. This data will enable your entire team to see a system that allows for better spear fishing.

6. Create a Prescriptive Process to Making Incremental Improvements

This year, I decided I would write down my current weight on January 1 and then I gave myself a goal for December 31. But as an extra step, I also then framed the goal and placed it on my work desk. Remember that my lagging indicator for the Jamie Shanks Weight-Loss Challenge is my weight on December 31. If I don't hit that goal, I can't do anything about it on New Year's Eve. I need to be looking at my current indicators: What is my weight today; if I lost X pounds per month or quarter, could I hit my goal?

It's time to dust off your initial production capacity results from Chapter 14 and begin to develop a plan for testing ways to slightly improve volumes, velocity, and probability in each campaign, in each month. Here are examples of ways you can think about making incremental improvements. Remember, don't just click your fingers and decide on smallish ways to improve. These improvements, done month over month, have to align to the goals set out for meeting sales quotas.

Volume:

• What can we do next month to double our blog volume?
• Can we shift resources to improve volumes on high performing assets? Can we outsource a contractor to accelerate things?
• Can we ask each Insights Committee member to tell two blog stories (rather than one this month), so we can double our blog output?
• As we build the “8 steps to XYZ ebook,” can we also carve out the eight headlines to make eight, 60-second video blogs for next month?

Velocity

• What can we do next month to shorten our production time on webinars by 33 percent?
• Can we ask our panelist if we can just be the moderator, and he or she the subject matter expert? Can they then supply the presentation deck? Can we use the promotional package and schedule from last month's webinar and get these panelists promoting the event quickly?
• Can we leverage the email copy from our top performing webinar and recycle its style for this upcoming webinar?

Probability

• What can we do to convert 50 percent more leads next month without dramatically changing our production volume, as the team is overcommitted on a few projects?
• Can we invite two panelists from Company ABC to be part of next month's webinar? Last time, the webinar drove 500 registrants and 20 new leads come from it.
• Can we get the sales team sharing the “XYZ infographic” heavily, as it's been the highest-converting asset in the last six months? That infographic created 10 leads just from our corporate account; we should get 50 new leads from our 100 sales professionals.
• Can we repurpose the ebook “The ROI of XYZ” and add quotes from the top 20 industry experts. If we get them socially sharing this ebook, it will drive at least 50 more leads.

Your team is experimenting, but experimenting with more and more information to become more scientific. It doesn't take long for your marketing efforts to become predictable. Whenever you can make your marketing efforts predictable, you can scale them. Work that predictable scale with your sales team to plot a course for meeting and exceeding their sales quota.