You Need To Align Your Lead Management with OKRs with Lorena Morales

The alignment of lead management with OKRs provides organizations with a strategic framework for effectively managing leads and achieving their business objectives.

By setting clear objectives and measurable key results, teams can focus on revenue generation and work collaboratively towards common goals.

In this session with Lorena Morales, Global Director of Digital Marketing and Revenue Operations at JLL, you will learn how:

• Aligning lead management with OKRs drives effective lead management practices and maximizes the chances of achieving desired outcomes.
• Alignment promotes focus, collaboration, and accountability among teams and individuals involved in lead management.
• Setting relevant metrics and tracking allows for agility and adaptability, as OKRs are typically reviewed and adjusted on a quarterly basis, enabling teams to respond to changing market conditions and customer needs.

[Transcript] You Need To Align Your Lead Management with OKRs

Although transcriptions are generally very accurate, just a friendly reminder that they could sometimes be incomplete or contain errors due to unclear audio or transcription inaccuracies.

Joe Aicher

Hey, welcome back to our final session. I’m excited to get this one going; I’ll bring on Lorena Morales. Hi! How are you today?

Lorena Morales

Hello everyone, very happy to be here and very honored, as always. When Armando reached out, I was like, I have to say yes to this one.

Joe Aicher

Definitely, well, we’re excited to have you. I will jump out, Lorena. Feel free to go through your hot take for the day, and we’ll talk in a few minutes once you wrap up.

Lorena Morales

Thank you, Joe. So yeah, hi, everyone. We are going to talk about two topics that are super close to my heart these days because I am fully involved in the launch of a framework called OKRs, and I’m also in charge of lead management at JLL. 

So, first of all, who am I? I am the current Global Director of Digital Marketing and Revenue Operations. Besides the fancy title, what it means is that I am in charge of making sure that every single marketing activity is tied to revenue.

I’ve been there for two years at a company called JLL or Jones Lang LaSalle. It’s a real estate company with 110,000 employees. So, pretty big, and running operations is a fairly new function. So it’s fun days for me; it’s a roller coaster, it’s never been seen before in the company, so that’s kind of energizing to me.

What’s an interesting fact about me? I have never eaten a burrito, and I don’t expect to be eating one anytime soon because I think it goes against Mexican culture. That’s a fun fact about me, but let’s jump right in.

So what exactly are OKRs? First of all, it’s a goal-setting framework, that is, it stands for, or the letters mean objectives and key results, and the main idea here is that you have your goals which are both, they are ambitious, but they are dead achievable, and then you have the key results who are the things that are gonna keep track of your success towards those goals.

The other important thing here to mention is that, and I’m sorry if I’m going too fast because this is a 10-minute presentation, but generally speaking OKRs have a hierarchical structure. So as I said, it has high-level objectives that have to cascade down to departmental or team objectives, and eventually, it’s going to hit individual objectives. 

Why do we do this? I feel that, at least at JLL, we brought it over because it ensures that everyone is working towards the same goals, and as I said, they are meant to be ambitious, yes, and achievable, but they are usually said with a combination of top-down guidance and bottom-up input to foster that ownership and that engagement.

On the other hand, what is lead management, and why am I going to marry these two concepts? Lead management is simply the process of doing four things; capture, track, nurture, and convert leads into customers. 

It’s all the activities and strategies that organizations employ to manage their leads effectively, and it also involves several stages, including lead generation, lead qualification, lead nurturing, and ultimately lead conversion, which is when a customer becomes our customer. Once the leads are qualified, lead nurturing strategies are implemented to build relationships. 

Which, I think, and from my previous job, I realized that building relationships is a metric that should be accountable for every single marketing team and sales team in order to bring revenue. I said to my previous team that without relationships, you really don’t have anything because, towards the end, I don’t believe in B2C or B2B anymore. I believe in H2H, human to human, and those human-to-human interactions are going to provide valuable information at the end and guide customers through the entire buyer’s journey.

So what are some benefits of aligning these two things that I just talked to you about? The first one, by aligning both frameworks, which are very customer-centric as well, we are focusing on revenue generation. This focus is a general mindset toward revenue, toward how do I generate revenue, and how do I achieve the desired business outcome?

While OKRs provide a clear direction for lead management efforts ensuring that the strategies are activities and that those activities are tied directly to overall organization goals.

The second thing is it improves collaboration and alignment. When lead management is aligned to OKRs, the teams and individuals across the organization work towards a common objective.  

This is super important because generally, people keep asking me, and I talked about this very recently in an interview, ‘How do I make sure that my teams are aligned?’ Especially the revenue-facing teams and the answer is never simple, right? 

It’s never an easy way to get there, but these types of frameworks, which again are not easy to apply because they have to come from leadership all the way to individuals or ICs (individual contributors), you can get there, effectively get there. 

The third thing is, ‘What does it do with visibility and accountability?’ I feel like OKRs provide a framework for measuring progress and success. By aligning lead management with OKRs, it simply becomes easier to track key metrics and assess the effectiveness of lead generation and conversion efforts.

The fourth and last one is that it typically gets better agility and adaptability. Why? Because this is a framework, at least the OKRs, is a framework that is set up partly on a quarterly basis, and this allows organizations to adapt fast to their lead management strategies based on whether the market is changing, the customer needs something else, I am expanding to other territories, or as I am doing something new in the business. 

It can also be adapting to internal priorities that change all the time, especially for the SaaS world and especially for high-growth companies and ultimately, this flexibility what it does it enables teams to be more agile and in responding to opportunities and challenges, ensuring that lead management is always and it always stays aligned with the most current objectives.

So those are the four main benefits that we see in lead management. 

We talk about these four, and then lastly, I want to tell you that there are some key considerations for aligning these two things. 

I’m going to talk about two of them. First of all, relevant metrics. This is important because when setting up OKRs for lead management, you have to identify key metrics that indicate progress and success. Without this, you can’t move forward. These metrics should be aligned with the stages of the lead management process that I already mentioned before and should provide actionable insights for optimizing lead generation, qualification, nurturing, and conversion. 

The most important thing that I want you to know here is that choosing the right metrics helps in tracking performance and making data-driven decisions. Every organization should be aiming to be a data-driven decision organization because, without data, you don’t have a real story. You don’t have how the customers are moving through the entire funnel, which by the way, is not a funnel anymore, it is a bow-tie. I believe in the bow-tie system, but for better definitions, it was a funnel indeed. 

On the last slide, it’s my main takeaway here. The main takeaway I want to read verbatim is, “Aligning lead management with OKRs drives effective lead management practices and increases the chances of achieving success.” 

As I said in the beginning, OKRs and lead management are two forces coming together to fight inefficiencies. So when you combine both, you have a master formula to really generate more revenue and to really get to the desired outcomes. 

So this is a fast presentation just to kind of get you started. To at least pick your curiosity on like, “What the hell is an OKR & how do I implement it in my organization?” and, “How does this marriage with lead management?” because lead management can be really hairy, it’s a problem that I’ve seen in organizations that tends to be very different from one to the other.

For example, the lead qualification process; sometimes it’s automated, sometimes it happens with a human, sometimes it’s both, and in both frameworks, you need to have goals.

So that’s the presentation; if you have more questions about OKRs and Lead management, it’s something that I am working on every single day. Trying to bring a good model to JLL. Here is my LinkedIn; I’m always very happy to connect with literally everyone, so just feel free to add me and see you there. 

Joe Aicher

Awesome, thank you, Lorena; I appreciate that. Love the presentation. 

I think making sure that everybody’s got something they’re accountable to, even on that on that marketing team lead generation, it’s just immensely powerful like you said. You’re building relationships with clients, you’re selling human to human, you’re not just dealing with numbers, but you got to be able to track it. 

You got to be able to know where you can make improvements or find you know the fix. I think we all took away something great from that; as you said, feel free to connect on LinkedIn. 

Thank you so much for joining. Appreciate the presentation and best of luck for the rest of the summer. 

Lorena Morales

Thank you, Joe.