Data is the Peacekeeper between Sales and Marketing
The struggle can be real between sales and marketing when it comes to seeing eye-to-eye. Priorities can be misaligned or maybe efforts go unrecognized. But one thing that almost no one can agree on is attributing revenue contribution. Whether you use a first, last or multi-touch attribution model, someone often ends up feeling neglected. Marketing feels like they did all the heavy lifting, while sales wants credit for sealing the deal. The truth is somewhere in the middle with everyone contributing to the same end goal but unclear about how they got there.
Sometimes all it takes is stronger measurement practices; a top goal for most marketing teams. Marketing pros are moving away from relying only on measuring activity and are focusing more and more on measuring impact so that they are able to report back to management about who is having an effect on what. How many qualified leads did we contribute? How many dollars in sales did that translate to? What’s the ROI on time and cost of investment? How many sales/marketing touches are needed to create an opportunity? However, these measurements might seem out of reach to teams who haven’t embraced analytics as a part of their daily process.
The depth and breadth of key marketing measurements are crucial to keeping the peace between sales and marketing. With better visibility to program performance, lead stage, conversion rates and pipeline contribution by team, a lead’s life cycle becomes more clear. But in order to get this insight, your process must be based on consistent, clean data. Often times this can be the most challenging part. The ability to pull data from different sources (Salesforce, marketing automation systems, social media platforms, etc.) and join it together to form a whole picture eludes many marketers. But it’s a must-have if you are going to look deep into performance and impact.
Once this data is gathered, cleaned and joined, marketing dashboards are the next step. With the use of smart dashboards, you can easily share Google AdWords influence, social media impact, website activity and more. Each of these touches is valuable in understanding how marketing and sales efforts work together to make a sale. Armed with this information, everyone will have clarity contribution and impact.
Sometimes all it takes is stronger measurement practices; a top goal for most marketing teams. Marketing pros are moving away from relying only on measuring activity and are focusing more and more on measuring impact so that they are able to report back to management about who is having an effect on what. How many qualified leads did we contribute? How many dollars in sales did that translate to? What’s the ROI on time and cost of investment? How many sales/marketing touches are needed to create an opportunity? However, these measurements might seem out of reach to teams who haven’t embraced analytics as a part of their daily process.
The depth and breadth of key marketing measurements are crucial to keeping the peace between sales and marketing. With better visibility to program performance, lead stage, conversion rates and pipeline contribution by team, a lead’s life cycle becomes more clear. But in order to get this insight, your process must be based on consistent, clean data. Often times this can be the most challenging part. The ability to pull data from different sources (Salesforce, marketing automation systems, social media platforms, etc.) and join it together to form a whole picture eludes many marketers. But it’s a must-have if you are going to look deep into performance and impact.
Once this data is gathered, cleaned and joined, marketing dashboards are the next step. With the use of smart dashboards, you can easily share Google AdWords influence, social media impact, website activity and more. Each of these touches is valuable in understanding how marketing and sales efforts work together to make a sale. Armed with this information, everyone will have clarity contribution and impact.