On Funnel Reboot: what revenue operations is, and what I would add three years later

In early 2023, Glenn Schmelzle had me on Funnel Reboot for the third episode in his series on revenue operations. Plenty of people call it marketing ops instead, as he points out in the intro. It’s half an hour on the numbers actually worth watching inside a CRM, what a small B2B team should fix first, and how I ended up in automation after years on the sales side.

What we talked about

The two numbers I check first

Glenn asked which vital statistics I look at across accounts, and there are two I go to before anything else. The first email of a drip sequence, the one that follows a lead magnet download, should open somewhere around 50%. Forty to fifty is fine. Much below that and something is wrong, and it’s usually unglamorous: DNS settings, or so much HTML in the email that it lands in Promotions.

The second gets overlooked far more often. A contact form on your website should convert at roughly 2%. When it doesn’t, the cause is nearly always that you’re asking too much: too many questions, too much complexity, too much friction in front of someone who was ready to talk to you. I’ve doubled a client’s form conversion by cutting fields, and years ago tripled one. It makes me look good, and honestly it isn’t hard. It’s just easy to spot from the outside and easy to miss from the inside.

A pipeline can start at five stages

If you’re setting up a CRM and it’s asking you to define your stages, you don’t need a sophisticated answer. Five or so will do. If your business needs a call before anything can happen, the first is call booked. The second is a manual follow-up. Keep that one by hand, because you can tailor it to the conversation you just had, and a sale needs some level of personalness. Only then does an automated follow-up earn its place: a drip that might run seven times over three months, longer if what you sell is expensive, shorter if it isn’t.

That third stage is where small teams gain the most, because follow-up is precisely what the owner-operator-salesperson never gets to. They forget, it’s last on the list, and it’s the thing that converts.

Does it play well with others?

When a client asks me to evaluate a tool for their stack, the first thing I do is open the vendor’s homepage and look for the integrations link. If it doesn’t play well with others, I almost never recommend it. Fifteen years ago that was a fair limitation. Today there’s no excuse for any serious piece of software not to connect reasonably well to the rest of your stack: natively if possible, and through Zapier if not.

Treat your process like software versions

Windows 95 was one version of Windows and we’re on Windows 11 now. Your process deserves the same treatment: review it on whatever cadence suits you, make the tweaks, and accept that you’re on version two, then version three. Lead scoring is a good example of something that belongs in a later version rather than day one. Once you’re comfortable, knowing which leads deserve manual attention and which can sit in the drip is worth a lot.

Reporting fails backwards

Pulling reports is a genuinely different skill from building workflows, and clients struggle with it more than with anything else. But the real problem is usually that they’re looking backwards: trying to extract something today that nobody set up six months ago. If you want to know X, Y and Z half a year from now, the time to configure that is now. Otherwise you’re building reports by hand, which is nightmarish.

Glenn put the broader version of this better than I did: the answer to your business question will not be found in any one of your systems, but it will be found in all of them. That’s the whole argument for connecting them properly in the first place.

What I would add now

This was recorded in early 2023. Two things need updating.

On sizing the tools to the company. In the episode I put ActiveCampaign at companies of up to about twenty people and HubSpot at ten to five hundred. Today I’d put it differently. We work with companies of 10 to 100 people, whichever platform they run, because the work is the same: getting a small team to actually use its CRM.

On the analytics warning in the intro. Glenn opens by telling listeners to move to GA4. That was the 2023 deadline, and it’s long since passed.

Episode 133 is on Funnel Reboot. Thanks again to Glenn for having me.