How we use Salesforce

Lead Creation

Leads are single individuals that have not been qualified yet, and therefore are not associated with an account or opportunity. Leads can be created in Salesforce in a few different ways:

• Inbound Marketing Lead - automatically created via Hubspot when a user takes an action on our website
• SDR Created - SDR either manually creates a new lead or uploads a list
• Other Offline Sources - list uploaded from marketing event, webinar, etc.

Lead Source

Every Lead should have a value in the Lead Source field. The Lead Source value is set automatically for inbound leads based on the origination of the lead. For other sources (like referrals), this value should be set by the SDR when creating the Lead.

Lead Source values include:

• Inbound - any inbound lead generated from a Contact Form, Demo Request, Trial Request, Sourcegraph.com Account Setup, Install, etc.
• Referral - any lead that was referred by a partner, investor, customer, employee, etc.
• SDR Created - any lead created by an SDR
• Event - lead attended an event, webinar, or similar; note that events are considered Inbound for handling under the assumption that they’ve opted to contact us at an event, rather than us reaching out to them and in this case, associated opportunities will be sourced to Inbound
• Feedback Form - NPS Form Submissions
• Other

First Touchpoint

First Touchpoint is a slightly more granular version of Lead Source and is set automatically in Hubspot. First Touchpoint fields hold info about the first marketing interaction a prospect has taken. It is used to reflect an individual’s first interaction with either Sourcegraph’s gated (i.e., email submission required) marketing content or initial sign-up for the free product offering. While we also use cookies to track user behavior prior to email submission, First Touchpoint only reflects the original source of contact info collection by marketing.

The only time these fields should be blank is when a lead or contact has not had any interactions with marketing content (e.g., an SDR uses LeadIQ to import leads from a target account into SFDC for outreach, etc.). We leave First Touchpoint blank for these leads to account for any future marketing site interactions taken after initial sales outreach. Please note that we no longer actively report on First Touchpoint.

See below for an overview of our current First Touchpoint types:

Lead Status

Lead Status indicates the stage of a lead in the workflow process.

Lead Status values include:

• New
• Working - SDR is actively engaging new lead
• Nurture - lead has potential, but is not ready to be converted
• Self-Service - lead is best served by our self-service offering
• Unqualified - lead is unqualified for our services, used for job candidates, students, etc.
• Bad-Data
• Converted - auto-set upon conversion of lead
• Replied - lead responded from an Outreach sequence
• Unresponsive - lead has not responded to an Outreach sequence

Lead Assignment

New Inbound leads are round-robined automatically to SDRs.

New Lead Workflow

SDR monitors new inbound Leads using a Lead View in Salesforce. SDR will also receive email/slack notification upon new high-priority lead (demo request, contact form, etc.)

SDR scrubs the Lead to confirm / enrich contact info fields - Name, Company, Title, Email Address, Phone Number, etc.

SDR dedupes the lead to look for recent activity, open/recently closed opportunities, etc. to determine eligibility to work based on the Rules of Engagement

• If eligible to work, SDR should update Lead Status to “Working” and begin outreach
• NOTE: we target <5 mins from new Lead Creation to First Touch during working hours, with a firm SLA of 24 hours for updating the Lead Status of any New Lead

Outbound Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Workflow

If an Outbound Lead meets the “Target Opportunity Profile” criteria, we use the following process for converting the lead and getting an AE connected with the prospect:

• If not already completed, the SDR completes the “Qual Interview”. See video tutorial
• SDR uses the “Assign AE” button to automatically assign the correct AE to the Lead. This process handles checking for existing Account ownership and round robin assignment.
• SDR schedules meeting with the Lead and the assigned AE.
• SDR creates the Opportunity in Salesforce by converting the lead to an Account/Contact/Opportunity (Note: be sure to convert into existing Account if one exists vs. creating a new). Salesforce will automatically assign the Account, Contact, and Opportunity based on the assigned AE.
• At this point, the Opportunity will be in Stage 1 - Interest
• SDR schedules meeting with the Contact and the receiving AE.
• SDR logs all pertinent information - call/email notes, research on contact/company, and any additional context that is helpful for the AE to be prepared for the initial call / understand the justification for creating an Opportunity SDR joins this initial call to make the AE intro and listen to the call for feedback

Inbound Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Workflow

If a Lead meets the “Target Opportunity Profile” criteria, we use the following process for converting the lead and getting an AE connected with the prospect:

• If not already completed, the SDR completes the “Qual Interview”. See video tutorial
• SDR uses the “Assign AE” button to automatically assign the correct AE to the Lead. This process handles checking for existing Account ownership and round robin assignment.
• SDR schedules meeting with the Lead and the assigned AE.
• SDR creates the Opportunity in Salesforce by converting the lead to an Account/Contact/Opportunity (Note: be sure to convert into existing Account if one exists vs. creating a new). Salesforce will automatically assign the Account, Contact, and Opportunity based on the assigned AE.
• At this point, the Opportunity will be in Stage 1 - Interest
• SDR logs all pertinent information - call/email notes, research on contact/company, and any additional context that is helpful for the AE to be prepared for the initial call / understand the justification for creating an Opportunity SDR joins this initial call to make the AE intro and listen to the call for feedback

Rules of Engagement (ROE)

• If it’s not in Salesforce it doesn’t exist - make sure all activity is in Salesforce
• You can only prospect into accounts in your name (if you want to add an unassigned account to your list, just ping me)
• For Inbound Leads: If lead comes in for an account that has an open opportunity, the SDR should connect with the AE to determine whether the SDR should work (entirely new contact/business unit/etc.) or convert to the AE (related to the existing opp)
• If an SDR has touch (any email, call, etc.) within the past 30 days on an account/lead/contact for a new Inbound Lead, that lead should be routed to that SDR to work
• For Assigning Opps: All Opportunities being converted from Inbound Leads will be round-robined unless:
• AE/SDR pair has touch within the past 30 days on the account
• AE has a closed opp within the past 90 days on the account

NOTE: just being a target account / owned by an AE does not mean you automatically get an inbound lead, you have to be working the account

New Business Meetings

An important metric for tracking Sales performance is “New Business Meetings” or NBMs. The target for NBMs is 7 a month for a ramped AE.

New Business Meetings are considered to be the initial meeting for a new business opportunity – these can be net new customers or expansions on existing customers, but there can only be 1 NBM for a given sales opportunity. That means that every opportunity at Stage 1 or beyond counts as a New Business Meeting for tracking purposes in Salesforce.

This also means that if a meeting is held, but no Opportunity is created, it doesn’t count as a new NBM. For reporting and tracking purposes, the date of the NBM is not the date the actual meeting took place, but the date when an opportunty reached (or was created in) stage 1 or beyond.

Qualified Pipeline

Any opportunity in Salesforce that reaches stage 2 or beyond is considered to be a Qualified Opportunity. Our pipeline metrics and reporting only consider Qualified Opportunities – opportunities in Stage 0 or 1 do not count in our pipeline metrics. The Entered Qualification Flag filter should be used for filtering Salesforce reports for qualified opportunities as some qualified opportunities will skip Stage 2 and accordingly lack a date within the Entered Qualification Date field.

The date an opportunity becomes qualified is the date it moves into Stage 2 or beyond – this date, and not the create date of the opportunity, is the date that is used for cycle time and other pipeline analysis.

We only consider qualification for New Business opportunities as organic expansions will qualify and close on the same day (so a 0 day time to close), throwing off reporting on statistics related to average days to close for all expansions.

Opportunity Taxonomy (How to Name Your Opportunities)

Associating contacts to opportunities

All of the contacts important to an opportunity should be linked. This should include the technical decision-maker, the economic decision-maker (if they are different) and the original member who introduced Sourcegraph to the organization.

This ensures that all deal-related communication is visible within the deal timeline for teammates to quickly get context surrounding the deal. This also allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing channels and sales touchpoints that our team has with an organization. How we reached the person(s) who introduced Sourcegraph to their organization is one of the most important factors in evaluating the success of marketing activities.

When a deal is won

1. On ‘New Business’, make sure you have added products to the Opportunity following the linked demo: Add Products Demo
2. Move the deal to ‘Closed Won’.
3. If you have added Products using Step 1, the Contract End Date will be set for you. If not, mark the ‘End of contract’ field with the last day of the contract. Salesforce will automatically create a renewal deal based on this date.
4. Ensure the appropriate ‘deal won reason’ fields reflect the main factors that contributed to the opportunity being won.

When a deal is lost

1. Update the ‘Closed Lost Dropdown’ property to reflect the reason. If the reason doesn’t exist in the dropdown, you can talk to #ask-sales-ops about adding one.
2. Expand upon the reason in the longform ‘Closed Lost Reason’ field.

Opportunity Source

Opportunities in Salesforce can be created either manually from scratch or from converting a lead. In the latter case, Opportunity Source is then populated in Salesforce based upon the following workflow:

1. An AE navigates to a lead in Salesforce and selects “convert”
2. They will then be asked to assign this lead to an account (which can be newly created or selected from pre-existing accounts)
3. This lead will then be automatically converted into a contact
4. The newly created opportunity will populate Opportunity Source to match the converted lead’s Lead Source with one important exception:
   1. If within 60 or fewer days prior to creation of the converted lead any pre-existing contact on the account selected to carry the new opportunity had a Lead Source reflecting outbound efforts (i.e., AE created or SDR created), the Opportunity Source will revert to taking that Lead Source in place of the source of the converted lead. This is to reflect a scenario that we frequently encounter where an SDR or AE will outbound prospect into a specific individual within a company, have no follow-up correspondence with that particular lead, but then receive an inbound inquiry (typically through completion of a marketing form or product sign-up) from a separate individual at the same company that heard about Sourcegraph from the lead originally contacted. Without this rule in Salesforce, we would materially undercount the impact of our outbound prospecting efforts while overstating the influence of marketing content on pipeline generation.
   2. Even with the above, we still retain data on the converted lead and where it was originally sourced - see the “Lead Source” field within an opportunities report.

Note that we are in the process of transitioning to a weighted campaign attribution report for evaluating the various sources of qualified pipeline. This report will ensure that any campaigns attached to contacts on an opportunity prior to the opportunity creation date receive attribution, enabling us to evaluate our best sources of pipeline generation. More details to follow.

Recording outbound activity

TBD

Determining where campaign members originate

We utilize UTM parameters on external links to Sourcegraph web properties to determine where campaign members originate from. This process works by temporarily stamping the lead with associated UTM parameters, passing these UTM parameters to the campaign membership, then clearing the UTM parameters from the lead record. If a campaign membership does not have any values for UTM fields, this means that they either found us organically or through the use of a link without UTM parameters included.

HubSpot to Salesforce sync

All HubSpot contacts are synced to Salesforce, usually within 15 minutes. The complete settings are in HubSpot, but the most important of the synced fields are:

• Basic contact info (name, email)
• Their lead source based on First Page Seen
• Most ZoomInfo enriched fields
• MQL date and checkbox
• NPS survey results attached to the contact

Contacts are synced as Leads in Salesforce, and become Opportunity/Account/Contact if the Lead is an MQL (based on MQL_checkbox = TRUE/YES)

Salesforce to HubSpot sync

Any update on the lead/contact in Salesforce will sync back to HubSpot (name, email, MQL checkbox, etc…). Companies and opportunities will not be synced back; Salesforce is the source of truth for these objects.

What HubSpot still does

• Everything marketing (email campaigns, workflows, lead capture/forms, including NPS, MQL, and PQL scores)
• Links to customers from RFCs, GitHub issues, etc. are still accessible. This will eventually be deprecated

Leads to Accounts/Contacts/Opportunities

• All leads are put into an automated round robin process when they are converted in order to identify the AE owner
  • There are separate queues for Inbound 500+ employee Leads, Inbound <500 Employee Leads, and unassigned Outbound Leads. All Queues are Region-specific.
  • To be eligible for the round robin, a rep must first pass the demo certification
• If a round-robin lead is assigned to an AE while they are on Parental Leave, the AE on leave will be designated as the Account Owner, and the covering AE will be assigned to the opportunity. The covering AE will be designated by the manager. Additional guidance regarding split/coverage during parental leave can be found here.
• Round robin spots are used when a meeting with a lead is scheduled, the outcome of the meeting does not matter
• Consultants should not count in the round robin, and the SDR team should not convert consultant leads into the round robin queue
  • If a consultant does slip through, the scenario will be assessed on a one-off basis by Sales Ops and Sales Management

Forecast Generation

Company Forecast and related records are generated automatically at 6pm Pacific every week.

AE/SDR Teams

Outbound SDRs are paired with AEs.

SDRs are automatically assigned as the SDR on any account when an AE is on the account.

If an account becomes unassigned for any reason, the SDR can stay on the account until another AE owns the account. Any leads / meetings sourced by the SDR for an unowned account will enter the Round Robin, the same as a new inbound lead.

If an account is transferred to another AE who has a different SDR pair A notification will be sent to both SDRs involved All existing leads on the account will be transferred to the new SDR The previous SDR has 14 days to generate a new SAO on any transferred lead, after 14 days any SAO generated will belong to the new SDR. If an SAO is generated after the lead transfer, but before 14 days has passed, the previous SDR who generated that lead must notify #Sales-Ops, who will verify that the SAO will belong to the previous SDR instead of the new SDR on the account.

Note that notifications will only be generated when an SDR is being removed from an account - a new greenfield account being picked up by an AE/SDR pair or a transfer between AEs with the same SDR will not generate a notification to the SDR.