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Understanding the value of your marketing activities can be a real challenge. There’s nothing worse than spending money on marketing that doesn’t drive any sales! The good news is that a closed-loop reporting system can help you easily determine which lead sources (website, trade shows, cold calling, social media, etc.) bring in the best, most profitable customers. Closed-loop marketing tracks a lead from its inception all the way to a sale. Here’s an example: Let’s say you got 100 leads from a trade show, and 50 of them turned into customers that generated $100,000 in revenue. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Then, you got 25 leads from your website, and only 10 of them turned into a sale – but those 10 ...

Failing to monitor progress is a common mistake made by companies with poor alignment between sales and marketing – and it can be costly. If you’re not keeping an eye on your goals, you’re less likely to spot areas of concern until they spiral into big problems. At that point it may be too late to do anything about it. Manage your sales and marketing alignment with these two valuable tools: Daily Dashboards Detailed Monthly Reports of Sales and Marketing Activity Dashboards Sales and marketing dashboards turn data from your closed-loop reporting system into a daily snapshot of the team’s progress. Dashboards should be shared with the entire team by building them into your Customer Relationship Software (CRM) system, incorporating them into ...

Getting sales and marketing to work together can feel like a real challenge, but it’s worth the effort. One way to get them thinking like a team is to let those two groups actually get together and interact in person. Regular meetings between the two groups fosters communication and collaboration, and helps sales and marketing managers improve their tactics. You should hold two types of meetings: Weekly Sales and Marketing Meeting A Monthly Management Meeting Weekly Sales and Marketing Meeting Get the entire team together at least once a week to discuss recent results and upcoming activities. The size of your organization will determine the format of this weekly meeting. For a company with only a handful of sales and marketing ...

Making your Service-Level Agreement (SLA) convincing to your sales team is important to their productivity and overall performance. One way of making your SLA speak to the sales team is to base it in units a sales person is most familiar with – dollars. To calculate an SLA in dollars, take the percentage of the sales quota that marketing is responsible for each month – e.g., $200,000. Then, calculate the value of each Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to determine how many leads marketing must deliver to reach that total. Here is how to calculate the value of an MQL: Create a list of all the different campaigns or offers that have generated leads in your pipeline – such as white paper registrations, demo sign-ups ...

The importance of a Service-level Agreement (SLA) should never be overlooked. It is the SLA that formalizes the commitment sales and marketing teams make to meet shared goals for revenue growth. It’s a two-way process: The marketing team commits to delivering a certain quantity and quality of leads each month to help the sales team meet its quota. The sales team then commits to follow up on those leads in a timely manner, and to make a specific number of contact attempts before abandoning the lead. To set up the SLA for the marketing team, start by asking these questions:  How many quality leads does the sales team need to make quota? What percentage of those leads is originated by ...

The best way to reach your customers isn’t as obvious as it seems. Just because one marketing channel is bringing views to your website doesn’t mean that it’s creating customers. Knowing the difference between a winning and losing marketing channel can help you discover which sources are bringing in your most valuable customers. 2 Steps to Identifying Your Winning Marketing Channels 1. Trace each customer back to the source You’ll first want to trace each customer back to the source where they first visited your website. Their first visit could be through a paid search, organic search, social media, or email marketing. Knowing how they arrive at your site shows you how many channels you’re dealing with. It may also alert ...

Sales and marketing teams often have a very different picture of the sales funnel. They might disagree about the number of stages a lead passes through before becoming a customer – and they often use different terminology to describe those stages. To get the most out of your sales and marketing teams, they must have a unified picture of the funnel and standard definitions of each stage in the process. Without this, an alignment strategy isn’t possible. 3 Steps to Defining Sales Funnel Stages 1. Understanding Lead Quality Focus on the definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). This is the crucial hand-off point between marketing and sales, so it’s essential that the teams agree on the terminology. Every company’s ...

Even with Service-level Agreements (SLA) and regular meetings, your marketing team may not be doing enough to connect with your sales team. It’s important that your marketers look for additional ways to show the sales team how their efforts are helping achieve revenue goals. One way of doing this is by having your marketers think about the sales team as another customer base, and try to “market” the role of marketing to that internal audience. As with any marketing campaign, it helps to tailor your message to the audience’s persona. In the case of the typical salesperson, that’s someone who’s super busy, doesn’t want to be distracted, doesn’t want to read long reports, and needs to know how the information you’re sharing will ...