Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

The Sales and Marketing Chasm

It appears that every Marketing and Sales product vendor has a panacea for the chasm between marketing and sales. They don't.  So let's get an agreement on the forms the chasm takes, and list the areas of improvement that can bridge the gap.

Lead Generation is fundamental to marketing performance

The purpose of the marketing demand generation group(s) is to:

• Generate many new high quality leads
• Nurturing the in-house database to drive more opportunities out of it sooner
• Increase the velocity of opportunities in the funnel
• Maintain the loyalty of the installed base

To accomplish these we leverage a mix of awareness, assets, and programs through a variety of media: web, events, webinars, partners, in house database emails to opt-ins. We need to balance awareness and brand building against lead generation. We need to create training materials and sales collateral for multiple channels. The output from marketing from a Sales perspective, and by which they measure marketing, is:

1. Marketing Qualified Leads
2. Assets (collateral, Website)
3. Lead nurturing programs
4. Brand equity (awareness, attributes, loyalty, perceived quality)
5. Channel training (competitive info, product info, target market info)
6. Partner relationships

Whilst the relative priority of these things may vary from firm to firm, most sales folks would put leads at the top of the list. The 2009 CSO report indicates that Sales generate 52% of their own leads ( a significant increase in the past few years) and that marketing contributes just 24% (a significant decrease).  If you want to align marketing and sales, first and foremost measure your marketing team on that number. If you are producing lots of high quality leads for Sales, many of your other weaknesses can be overlooked. If you are failing to produce leads, or nurture leads into opportunities, the chasm from a sales perspective is that marketing does not understand what Sales needs - warm qualified leads.

Marketing has a finite budget to spend on these 6 areas. It behooves the VP of marketing to win agreement with the Sales peers on the relative importance of these marketing deliverables in the coming year. Sales and marketing alignment starts at the top. But this is only half of the bridge over the chasm.

What does Sales need to deliver to Marketing?

Marketing wants:

1. Follow up to all marketing qualified leads
2. A feedback mechanism that gives a measure on where the best and worst leads are coming from
3. Support and attendance at prospect events and training
4. Persistence with regard to prospects who are not quite ready to buy
5. Adherence to process
6. Clean and complete contact and account data in the CRM
7. Behavior that aligns with the brand
8. Accurate forecasts

As with the marketing list, the first one is very important. Lead generation can consume a large portion of the marketing budget, and the idea that Sales ignores 80% of these leads drives marketing crazy. This problem is resolved with a rock solid lead management process, an agreement of what a Marketing Qualified Lead is, and a process in the CRM/SFA to track timely sales followup to new marketing qualified leads (typically <2 business days). It also requires that Sales management step up and hold their team accountable for lead follow-ups.

Sales is arguably the most accountable organization in a company. Where else are up to half of the team turned over every year if they don't meet their goals? Marketing in B2B companies has probably been the least accountable, with the exception that the VP of marketing gets ejected after 22 months. My point is this. Don't expect what you don't inspect. Sales is very accountable because we have put systems in place to measure everything they do as it relates to closing business. Following up on marketing leads, quality and completeness of the data in CRM, accurate forecasting are important Sales metrics too and need more scrutiny from Sales management.

On the marketing side, Marketing Automation provides the measurability tools required to measure net new leads, lead quality, asset quality and usage, and efficacy of lead nurturing. So start measuring them, and holding marketing accountable for their deliverables to Sales. The facts will crush the finger pointers.
 

Measuring The Influence of Marketing - ROMI

I am delighted to see the B2B industry move towards greater accountability and metrics for Marketing. But the use of marketing automation systems, email platforms, web analytics, and online advertising is flooding marketers with lots of raw data.  I suspect that many marketing folks who didn't have to worry so much about ROMI in the past are struggling to organize the mountain of data in a way that helps them make better decisions, and demonstrates their positive influence on the business results.

Over the coming weeks I want to focus on one marketing KPI (Key performance Indicator) in each post, and elucidate the benefits of it. I want to start with a KPI that shows total responses in the period.

What is Total Marketing Responses Per Period?

A few months ago Megan Heuer from Sirius Decisions gave an excellent presentation on Marketing KPIs, and in it she said "Never confuse activity with results." 

So whilst you may send lots of emails, and host webinars, and attend trade shows, counting the responses to these programs is a good measure of the results! Marketing is tasked with creating demand (lead generation is just a portion of this). An effective measure of demand, in addition to actually linking opportunities back to marketing, is to measure the program responses you are getting. With a marketing intelligence business intelligence database such as the one included with Market2Lead's enterprise edition, one can segment out all responses by contact type. In this way you can tell at a glance how much of your efforts are going to net new lead generation, versus lead nurturing, vs installed base loyalty marketing.

How do you measure it?

What constitutes a response? Is a website visit a response? Is a card swipe at  a trade show a response?  If I register for a webinar, and subsequently attend the webinar is that one response or two? Is downloading a case study which doesn't require an registration a response? The important point here is that you decide these things at the outset, and stick to the definitions, because you want to see the month to month trends. Here are my recommendations:

• A website visit is a single response independent of how many pages were viewed
• Registering for a webinar and subsequent attendance represents two responses
• Downloading "free" assets from your website are not additional responses beyond the website visit
• Downloading premium assets that require registration are each a response
• Every registration is a response, but not every response requires registration
• Card swipes at a trade show because people want to put their name in for a free iPod raffle is not worthy of a response
• Responses from anonymous visits to your website, are real responses.
• Importing a list of contacts who have had no inbound interaction with your company, does not constitute responses.
• Unsubscribes and profile updates are not responses
• Email opens are not responses, but email click throughs are responses
• Telemarketing "connects" are responses
• Incoming calls to telemarketing, and contact us form submissions, are responses
• Syndicated content downloads are responses
• Comments added to a company affiliated blog are responses
• Re-tweets of your twitter content are responses

Don't forget to tag all your contacts with a contact type (prospect, customer, analyst, media, competitor, ex-customer etc) so you can slice and dice the data and figure out who you are really marketing to!  I am interested to hear your responses!

-Kevin