Our company values are one of the many reasons I fell in love with Lessonly. The most important value (IMHO) is share before you are ready which I hope to accomplish with this and subsequent posts.

The marketing team has learned a lot over the past couple of months by testing, rebuilding and creating processes in order to effectively scale growth. This activity coupled with advice from some of the best in the business has helped us focus. Thanks especially to Judd Marcello, Mike Volpe, Brad Gillespie, Nick Christman, Tim Kopp and Andy Raskin for your guidance on all things process and strategy.

I thought I would share what I’ve learned in my first 30 days regarding two important aspects of software marketing: the inbound funnel and go-to-market framework.

A couple of disclosures before we start.

  1. We are lucky to have OpenView and High Alpha as investors. OpenView’s Expansion Team helped us rebuild our Inbound Funnel metrics and definitions. Thanks to Ashley Minogue and Kyle Poyar for your help.
  2. The team at Lessonly is amazing. Special thanks to Mitch Causey, Matt Caudill, Kyle Roach, Riley Rapp, and Rosie Newman for the insight.

Inbound Funnel Definitions

We realized pretty early on that an overhaul of our funnel definitions, lead scoring and nurture campaigns were needed in order to fully execute our plan. They are plenty of resources out there but we already had the best resource just a phone call away. We asked Ashley Minogue and the team from OpenView to help us dive into our historical data and build out a proper inbound funnel.

This is where we landed:

  • Users – total net new users visiting our digital properties. Net new users are always a better signifier of growth than total traffic.
  • Total Leads – All inbound leads created during a specific time period.
  • MQL – All leads with a Pardot lead score greater than 269. The lead score is automatically calculated by Salesforce and the threshold is based on a quartile analysis of our database. The top leads These leads will be manually reviewed by the inbound SDRs.
  • SAL – Any inbound lead that has a lead status of “Accepted” through a manual review from an SDR. These leads will be actively pursued by the SDR.
  • SQL – Inbound-sourced opportunities that have been created during this time period. The primary trigger for an opportunity to be created is when a prospect agrees to a demo.
  • Closed-Won – closed business. Dollah bills y’all.

Click to copy a Google Sheet for managing all inbound funnel metrics in one place. Thanks to Mitch Causey who is the mastermind behind the numbers. Just go to FILE > MAKE A COPY to access the sheet.

We will be testing and adjusting our definitions over the course of the quarter. I’d love to know what you have found to work. By the way, this project is also working towards another… even more important goal… shared vocabulary between marketing and sales.

Nurture Campaigns

This was a much simpler change. We worked with Max to rewrite all the nurture track emails to come directly from him… our CEO. He monitors the email and responds to anyone that may have questions or comments. The emails are straight forward, without frills and most of all… deliver value.

The feedback has been amazing. We’ve received ideas from our best salespeople… our customers. What more could you ask for?