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 sales generated $200,000 in revenue. That’s important information!
A properly implemented closed-loop reporting system will be able to tell you which lead source drives the most revenue. In order to implement this type of lead-to-sale tracking, you need:
- Marketing Software: Marketing software that helps you with lead generation and management.
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software): A CRM system that helps you track and measure sales activities.
Having these two systems is a great start, but they alone won’t get you the information you need to make smart decisions regarding your marketing spend.
2 Steps to Creating a Closed-Loop Marketing System
1. Integrate Your Systems
Your marketing and sales systems must be integrated to share data on every lead from creation to opportunity stage to close, so you can build reports that show the close rate and new customers from the leads generated by marketing.
Features you should look for in a closed-loop marketing system include:
- Automatic, two-way synchronization between the marketing platform and your CRM.
- De-duplication of leads by matching on email address and tracking information, so as leads come back to your website you are updating existing lead records, not creating duplicate leads.
- The ability to pull information from the CRM into the marketing platform, allowing you to segment your leads by data the sales team has added to the lead or contact records.
2. Share Information
Next, begin sharing information between the two platforms that will help the sales and marketing teams improve their performance.
What should marketing share with sales?
- Complete Lead Intelligence: Complete lead intelligence, including the history of each lead’s activity on your website: campaign engagement, download history, and social media presence. Appending these details to each lead record helps sales reps plan their follow-up strategies and find hooks to start that first conversation.
- Lead Alerts: Lead alerts such as an email message or other notification when a particularly hot lead visits your website again, responds to an important campaign, or takes another trigger action, such as requesting to speak with a salesperson.
What should sales share with marketing?
- Contact Touches: Records of email and call attempts and connects.
- Lead Status Updates: Updates on lead status, such as open, in progress, qualified and
unqualified. - Revenue Numbers: Data on closed deals and the revenue associated with each contract, to calculate marketing effectiveness and ROI.
These types of insights are available when you properly integrate your sales tracking and marketing systems. With this closed-loop data, you can track how each customer progressed through your marketing funnel and see which marketing programs are delivering the best bang for your buck.
