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 your marketing software platform, or emailing them to the entire team.
This highly public update not only tracks your progress toward goals, but it can also help your team meet their goals. Marketers and salespeople are less likely to fall behind if they know that the rest of the team will see their numbers every day. And if people do fall behind, they’re more motivated to fix problems on their own.
The Marketing Dashboard
This Marketing Dashboard, also known as the Daily Leads Waterfall Graph, is a simple but very effective way to visualize your marketing team’s progress toward its Service-level Agreement (SLA) goals. The graph compares your actual daily lead flow against the target rate that you need to hit your monthly goals.
Enter your results every day to plot your progress against the SLA goal. The resulting chart can show you where to focus your marketing team’s attention.
- If Leads Are Low: If actual leads are below the goal, your marketing team must do additional work to deliver on its SLA promises. That might mean developing new content,increasing social media engagement, or spending additional money on PPC or other channels.
- If Leads Are On Track: If actual leads are running above the goal, your marketing team has some breathing room and can look ahead to the next month or next quarter. For example, you could start working on next month’s campaigns, or hold back a few pieces of content for next month’s promotions.
Sales Dashboards
Sales dashboards generally measure follow-up timing and contact attempts. Have your sales manager dig into CRM data to create charts that illustrate whether the sales team is delivering on its SLA goals. Two key dashboards are:
- New leads that were not called within XYZ hours, as specified in the SLA
- All leads that weren’t called at least XYZ times within XYZ days
These daily reports will show when specific teams or individual sales reps are falling behind on their goals. That early warning gives sales managers the chance to jump in, diagnose the problem, and provide some coaching that will help the team or the individual get back on track.
Monthly Reports
Dashboards provide a daily update of the most important metrics for your team.
But you should also create a monthly sales and marketing report that gives a detailed look at your sales and marketing strategies and results.
This monthly report should be shared with the entire company. It creates transparency about sales and marketing activities – but also highlights how your efforts are impacting the entire business. The monthly report should feature charts that quantify the work that sales and marketing does each day.
Marketing Monthly Report
The marketing team’s report should illustrate the impact of its recent activities including:
- Visits, Leads, and Customers by Source: Show how your different marketing channels have helped you attract visits, leads, and customers. Compare the contributions of organic search, paid initiatives, email marketing, referrals and social media, and evaluate which ones provide the most return on investment. Such insights will help you prioritize efforts in the future.
- Performance of Marketing Assets: Next, look at how your marketing assets–web pages, landing pages, and calls-to-action–are performing. These are the assets your various marketing channels use in order to be successful. In fact, they are the substance of what your sources use to generate more traffic, leads and customers. In order to evaluate how these assets are performing on a monthly basis, review the conversion rates of your landing page and calls-to-action.
- Speed from Conversion Event to Sales Follow-up: If you are a B2B marketer, you should also be aware of how long it takes for a sales person to follow up with a lead. That will give you an idea of how you can speed up the “demo worked” process by creating more high-quality leads and/or ensuring that your sales team is contacting the leads fast enough.
Sales and Monthly Reporting
The sales team’s monthly report should feature charts that show what’s being done with the leads that marketing is generating.
Sales Waterfall Chart
The most important chart look at is a visualization of actual sales results vs. quota. The chart should show the percentage of the goal that was reached and if there was a gap between the quotas and the monthly goal.
Total Sales Cycle
It’s also important to keep track of how long it takes your sales organization to convert the leads that marketing generated into customers. Monitoring this view will give you a sense of your sales cycle and if you are ever below or above average.
Whenever you do nonstandard marketing initiatives, keep a close eye on this chart because it will give you insights into the performance of your efforts from a sales perspective. This view is also tremendously helpful when you slice it across different target personas. You probably are targeting customers with different needs and preferences, you might notice that their sales cycle is drastically different.
