The secret to achieving success in any walk of life begins with defining success: you need to understand what success looks like, and measure your progress against that goal. Too often, we forget to keep the goal in mind, and we measure success based on how far we’ve come, or some other metric which we choose for no other reason than that it’s easy to measure.
Unfortunately, we see this all the time in sales and marketing organizations. If an organization’s goal is to maximize revenue and profit, then the sales team’s goal is to sell to more revenue and profit maximizing customers. The marketing team’s goal should be no different!!! However, because marketing is often seen as an enabler to sales (driving interest, providing leads, etc), marketing success is often measured from a point before true success is achieved. It may be easier to measure marketing by their ability to provide sales with sales ready leads, but is this what is best for the organization?
Great marketing divisions are very data driven. They build complex lead scores based on many factors, including measures of prospect responsiveness, level of interest, and readiness to buy. They continue to nurture those leads until they hit a specific level of interest and then hand them to the sales team.
But are these leads ones which will enable the sales team to maximize revenue and profit? Are the leads they’re nurturing and handing off likely to be customers who will:
- generate good revenue,
- remain customers a long period of time, and
- close with minimal effort?
Unfortunately, marketing is often several steps away from the sales outcome, which makes measuring success really difficult. As a result, marketing often focuses on a prospect’s level of excitement which is very different from the odds that a particular prospect will become a valuable customer.
The secret is to measure marketing success with the end in mind – a sales centric approach. Sales are trinary: you either win a deal, lose a deal, or a prospect pushes a decision into the future. With the right analytics tools (shameless plug for our SalesAlign Suite), it’s easy to tell how likely a particular lead is to close based on previous sales history. Once you understand how likely any particular lead is to close, marketing can generate and nurture leads that will be of high value to a sale force. Our whitepaper, “Winning through Smart Lead Scoring & Routing” (available for download at: http://incentalign.com/whitepaper/) discusses the benefits and challenges of this approach.
Measuring from the goal, not start, means that marketing and sales can be on the same page driving towards the same goals with the same ROI metrics. When building the next generation sales organizations, we should take some advice that grandma could have told us – never put the cart before the horse.
Best,
Greg