How (and why) bespoke Sales actions creates issues for MOps

Revenue Operations process design would be much easier if it weren’t for Sales Reps. 

We would prefer that Sales follow a methodical and step-by-step documentation process in the CRM, but years of experience and (let’s be honest) frustration has led me to this conclusion… 

Process only works in and as much as it enables sellers to sell, and many of the CRM restrictions that we as Revenue Operators have placed into CRM systems, while they have had positive effects for reporting and forecast accuracy (my teams had 90+% accuracy - a metric I am very proud of), they can tend to have a negative effect on the one thing that we need most from sellers.

This metric is:  Engaged selling time. 

“Engaged selling time” is the percentage of a salesperson’s workday that is, after dealing with internal politics and administrative requirements (which “logging activity in the CRM” is part of), they have to spend engaging with and influencing buyers. 

In other words, the time they are actually doing their job:  finding and generating revenue for the business (and meeting their quota).

In Revenue Operations – especially when it comes to designing CRM workflows, we are acutely aware of the necessary tension between generating reliable intelligence on revenue team performance and enabling sellers with margin to interact with customers.  

As a result, where tradeoffs are necessary, the tendency today for CRM administrators to err on the side of fewer restrictions on Sales, at least until the quoting process, where controls around discounting and product mixes are required.  However, when it comes to the lead-to-opportunity process, the CRM tends to be fairly flexible. 

This presents a challenge for Marketing Operations, who are thinking in a methodical Sales stage model such as the one below.  In this model, a BDR would “accept” a lead in the CRM, send a qualified lead to a rep as an “SQL,” who would then accept the opportunity (SAO), and qualify the opportunity and create a quote (SQO) that would be signed by the customer to move the opportunity to Won.  In an ideal world, all of these stages would be methodically followed and our lifecycle workflows largely follow that expectation. 

However, the flexibility that sellers have in today’s modern CRMs create some challenges, and we need to both confirm that these challenges exist and also strategize on how to solve them. 

Let’s talk about a few of the most common of these actions, which I will talk about as “bespoke sales actions.”  These are actions that are reasonable for sellers to engage in, but skip stages in our ideal marketing process. 

First, The “I know this person!” MQL scenario.  

We tend to see this scenario after we upload a list of badge scans from a recent tradeshow into our Marketing Automation tools to be qualified as MQLs.  The leads tend to be viewed by direct sellers more often than most (although there are orgs out there that don’t have BDRs).  Hunter-oriented sellers, and especially Enterprise reps with large quotas and long sales cycles tend to hate working the lead object in Salesforce, especially for a known person.  Therefore, their inclination is to get that lead moved over to their account records sooner rather than later.  

If they expect that a deal can arise from the activity that brought them the lead, they may just instinctively convert the lead directly from MQL to their account database, and may or may not create an opportunity record depending on how far out (or likely) an immediate deal is to being booked.  This scenario presents a few challenges for us in tracking the lifecycle.

1. The lead status will always change as a result of lead conversion, but what does this new person status “mean?” 
2. An opportunity being created can in some cases be up to three steps ahead of MQL in our lifecycle tracking models. 

Second, The “bluebird opportunity” scenario

Here’s a reality of daily life as an enterprise (but applies to other) sales rep: When a large opportunity (as your organization defines “large”) gets created in the CRM, alarm bells go off all around the organization alerting everybody in the Sales leadership chain and members of the C-Suite about its existence.  

Talk about pressure!

This is all on top of the pressure to bring in the business for quota achievement.  

I don’t endorse this behavior, but I understand it after having worked with many enterprise sellers.  They want to be absolutely sure that if a big deal is getting entered into the CRM that it has a really (and I mean, really really) good chance of being won.  Being on the losing end of a big deal isn’t something that is good for ones’ career, if you know what I mean. 

Therefore, they will work the deal offline until they get some form of commitment from the buyer, which is typically a request for a quote.  This quote will go through the CRM’s Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) process, and typically require that an opportunity gets created in a specific stage for reporting/governance reasons. This “create the opportunity in the ‘Quote’ stage” action can also be encouraged in a number of organizations.  This step will skip the early-stage opportunity lifecycle stage and possibly a few lead stages in the process of creating the opportunity.  

This feels like herding cats for us in Marketing Operations. 

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These are a few examples of how flexibility in CRM processes can (and often does!) create operational headaches for we operators who want to create reliable operational reporting to help marketers and revenue teams manage their business.  Many of us create workarounds and more than a few hacks in our lifecycle workflows to account for these and other unpredictabilities that come with relying on administrative actions from sales reps in CRMs for our reporting. 

I will be writing more on this topic.  There is more to come.

As a shameless plug:  This is an issue that I have faced over 17+ years as a Revenue Operations professional supporting sales and marketing teams, and have solutioned to account for these bespoke actions in the lifecycle programs I build for my clients.  If you are attending the Adobe Summit from March 18-20, 2025, I will be talking about this solution framework at the Skill Exchange on the final day of Adobe Summit, and if solving these issues resonates with you, I would encourage you to attend and sign up for my session.