Marketers’ perception of themselves and their jobs must change if companies are to be successful beyond just getting by. Marketing must be the front end of the sales process. Simply bringing in raw/open leads and handing them off to the sales team is not enough.
I cringe when I hear of a marketing program that looks very cool but clearly hasn’t delivered much in the way of qualified leads or conversion. A cookie-cutter approach to marketing programs lacks creativity and is a disservice to the company paying for it.
My challenge as an advocate for changing the “we do it this way” approach is that formulaic approaches aren’t totally ineffective, but their results pale in comparison to what is possible. For a marketer whose main job is to maintain a company’s revenue and status, this may be enough. For a marketer tasked with ramping a company in a significant way – $5 million to $40 million, $100 million to $200 million or $500 million to $1 billion, focusing on incoming leads only will never be enough.
Marketing programs must focus on qualified leads and converting them to opportunities with projected revenue attached. If marketers did this consistently, I guarantee you would see fewer webinars and less newsletters – or at least they would be more interesting. A webinar isn’t a bad idea, but it needs to have more behind it than “we do monthly webinars.” If these are not publicized to the right audience and no partners are involved, this becomes a time-intensive database marketing program. If you are going to do it, think it through and do it right, otherwise don’t do it.
The often-stated assumption that marketing is a numbers game and you need to bring in a lot of open/raw leads because of the small percentage that converts is said by someone who doesn’t know focus marketing efforts. Marketing becomes the front of the sales process when it focuses on finding and developing leads that are most likely to close. Marketing’s new end goal is not leads; it is opportunities.
In recent months, I’ve written a lot about the need to measure marketing’s efforts. Marketers sometimes don’t want to talk about how much their programs cost, possibly because they don’t want to draw attention to the high price tag. This is a mistake. I can guarantee if you aren’t talking about how much your programs cost and calculating what revenue or project revenue is related to it, there is someone else in your organization, probably at the C-level, who is looking at the high marketing spend and wondering what value it is delivering.
Marketers need to be ahead of this and become the loudest advocates for measuring every campaign and program. Beyond the number of raw/open leads and the conversion to qualified leads, campaign measurement should include:
1) Number of leads converted to opportunities
2) Projected revenue from those opportunities
3) Cost per opportunities
4) Cost per sales
Marketing to your existing database must also be measured in marketing’s efforts/touches that assisted in converting these leads to opportunities. Reclaiming leads that were not on an immediate path to nurture and sell are sometimes forgotten. Without a doubt, there are millions of unclaimed sales sitting in CRM systems right now.
Brand efforts, which in this case include public relations, should be created for what they delivered:
1) touches that have contributed to SEO and SEM
2) positive positioning with investors and prospects
3) touches that help convert opportunities to signed deals – reputation and perception matters
With the change in marketing’s focus from leads to likely opportunities, it will become more scrutinized than ever before. At the same time, marketing is becoming more important than ever to business.
Fork In The Road 