The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million

by Mark Roberge

The teams were not as aligned as we had hoped. The Sales team preferred active free trials. However, the way the SLA was structured, the marketing team was better off focusing on product collateral downloads. As precise as our approach to the Marketing SLA was, it did not account for the fact that different prospect actions reflected different stages of the buyer journey. The process needed to be refined. To account for the different qualification levels of leads, we focused less on the raw number of leads generated and more on the implied dollar value of leads generated. Here is how we engineered each lead's implied dollar value: For each buyer state, we calculated the average rate at which these leads converted to customers. For each segment, we calculated the average purchase price for each customer generated from these classes of leads. We then multiplied the conversion rate by the average purchase price. This simple arithmetic exercise yielded the dollar value of each lead in that Buyer Persona/Buyer Journey segment.