More Related Content Similar to How marketers can earn respect at the revenue table (20) How marketers can earn respect at the revenue table2. INTRODUCTION
How would a 10% increase in your
marketing budget affect the
profitability of your company?
If you can’t answer that question, budget
meetings probably aren’t your favorite
part of the job. When you walk into your
CEO’s office, maybe you bring activity
reports, industry awards, examples of
jobs well done…but does she care
enough to increase — or even maintain
— your budget?
The truth is, your CEO might not care
about how many emails you sent last
week. In her mind, if marketing isn’t
driving revenue, it’s a cost center — pure
and simple. But it doesn’t have to be that
way.
Today’s CMOs have technology on
their side.
The right marketing automation
platform, combined with smart
organizational and process alignment,
makes it possible to connect the dots
between that promotional email you
sent last month, that webinar you hosted
last year, and the revenue your CEO sees
this week or can expect to see next
quarter. Enterprises increasingly look to
marketing to drive top‐line growth,
which is great for building credibility. But
to meet the demands of what’s being
called margin marketing (driving top line
growth and keeping the bottom line
constant) marketing organizations must
transform the way they have historically
operated — streamlining processes and
people, and designing each program and
tactic so that it can be measured relative
to its effect on the bottom line.
In addition, marketers must be acutely
aware of the types of metrics they are
tracking. To earn respect at the revenue
table, a CMO must walk into the
boardroom on a regular basis with a
simple spreadsheet that answers the
questions her CEO and board care about
most.
LEAD‐TO‐REVENUE MANAGEMENT:
OWNING THE SALES AND
MARKETING CONNECTION
Forrester Research defines lead‐to‐
revenue management (L2RM) as the
practices, processes, and technologies
deployed to acquire, retain, and enrich
customer relationships. Enterprise
companies have embraced L2RM
frameworks because they help
marketers:
• Contribute more to the sales
pipeline
• Achieve higher levels of process
maturity
• Measure results holistically
• Collaborate better with their sales
colleagues
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3. Before you roll out your marketing automation platform, we recommend you implement
key L2RM methodologies. To understand how it works, let’s start with how the marketing
world has evolved in the past few years.
L2RM Philosophy, in a Nutshell
The internet has changed the way people buy things, whether we’re making purchases
for ourselves or for our companies. These days, most of us like to check in with our
networks and do significant online research before we walk into a store or talk to a sales
person.
So if your marketing department is driving online conversations about your company —
the information available about your products and services — you better believe that
marketing is directly affecting revenue.
L2RM methodologies seek to quantify that effect and continually improve it.
L2RM Funnel Taxonomy and Definitions
Funnel Stage Name SFDC
Status
Owner Definition
Demand Generation Suspect NA Mktg A marketing target about whom
very little is known
Nurturing Prospect Open Mktg A respondent to a marketing
campaign with a known
name and valid email address
Nurturing / Qualification Lead
(MQL)
Sales Ready Mktg A prospect who meets the
minimum fit criteria and has
displayed enough interest to be
handed over to sales
Qualification Sales
Accepted
Lead (SAL)
Working Inside
Sales or
Sales
Dev.
An MQL that has been accepted
by sales (or inside
sales team) for further
qualification to determine
pipeline readiness
Qualification Sales
Qualified
Lead (SQL)
Qualified Sales An SAL that has progressed to an
opportunity and is
now committed to pipeline
Revenue Closed
Won
Closed Won Sales An opportunity that has resulted
in revenue
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4. L2RM’s Secret Sauce:
Create a Common Language
The secret to making L2RM work is to
think through the stages of the sales
funnel and articulate clear definitions of
each milestone a buyer passes through
on the way to a sale. For example:
• What do prospects, marketing‐
qualified leads, sales‐accepted
leads, and sales‐qualified leads
look and behave like?
• How can you translate that
information into programmatic
characteristics that you can
identify in an automated way?
Where Traditional Metrics Go
Horribly Wrong
The sales and marketing connection may
seem obvious to you, as a marketing
professional. In fact, you may think
you’re collecting reams of metrics that
prove it beyond a doubt. But time after
time, these numbers aren’t taken
seriously by your CEO. Where are you
going wrong? Of course, you have
reasons for collecting the metrics you do.
They may even help you make good
marketing decisions. The problem is that
they don’t map directly to revenue, so
they don’t matter to your CEO, CFO, or
board members — and they certainly
don’t help to prove your revenue
contribution. We’re talking about metrics
like:
Vanity Metrics
It feels good to know that a million
people on Facebook “like” your
company, or that you have 38,000
Twitter followers. Those numbers
impress people, but they don’t do the
work of measuring business outcomes or
improving marketing performance and
profitability.
Activity Metrics
You may be busy recording webinars,
writing blog posts, or running campaigns.
But if you take that busy schedule into
the boardroom, they’re still going to see
you as a cost center — unless you can
connect your activities to actual revenue.
Cost Metrics
Cost metrics are the worst, because they
actually frame marketing as a cost
center. When you tell your CFO that
you’ve improved cost per lead by
=N=100, he’s going to ask you to improve
it by =N=120 next quarter so that he can
hire more salespeople. As you can see,
those traditional marketing metrics are
doing you very few favors. So how do you
get the good metrics — the ones your
CEO will sit up and listen to? In three
words: alignment with sales. Luckily,
your new marketing automation
platform can help you both align to sales,
and measure metrics that matter.
©2015 Quorium Solutions. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved.
5. How do you get the good metrics
— the ones your CEO will sit up and
listen to —, Alignment with sales
The Key to Credible Metrics:
Sales and Marketing Alignment
You know marketing plays a critical role
when it comes to revenue, and by now,
your sales counterparts may understand
the same. To get the real goods — to
accurately measure the impact
marketing has on revenue — you have
to partner with the sales team. There’s
no way around it, so before you roll out a
new marketing automation solution, sit
down with your sales team and make
sure you’re all on the same page.
Aligning sales and marketing may be a
relatively simple process if your company
is already fairly agile and well integrated.
But if your company is a large enterprise
and comes with many entrenched
mindsets and processes, you may have to
initiate a comprehensive change
management process. Whatever route
you take, make sure you cover these
basic points:
Strategy Alignment
Define sales and marketing strategies at
the corporate and divisional levels. If
your sales team is looking to expand into
new markets, for example, make sure
your marketing efforts are focused on
helping them succeed. In this way, you
set up common goals, so you are being
measured on the same outcomes.
Cross‐Functional Alignment
Most enterprises have several marketing
teams, each focused on a different,
aspect of the business: products, sales,
corporate brand. But to measure the
effect of all the marketing efforts that
move customers through the sales funnel
to the revenue stage, you must
streamline these marketing teams and
bring your entire organization together in
a comprehensive way.
Sales Funnel Language and
Process Alignment
How do you define your revenue cycle?
What qualifies as a lead or opportunity?
Good metrics are about everyone
speaking the same language and using
the same methods to achieve well‐
defined goals. Bring your marketing and
sales departments together to create and
document a common language, so that
people at all levels of the organization
can measure results accurately and act
on them appropriately.
Metrics That Matter to
Your C‐Suite
Different companies prioritize different
revenue milestones. If you’re in growth
mode, you’re going to be focused on the
number of leads, your lead‐to‐
opportunity ratio, and net new wins. A
more mature business, on the other
hand, may be more focused on the
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6. customer lifecycle — nurturing existing
customers, diving deeper into their
business, or upgrading them to the next
level of service.
The first step in identifying your key
revenue metrics is to define the stages of
your revenue cycle, as you’ve done in the
alignment stage. With that model in
place, you can begin to explore the key
types of metrics that matter to your C‐
suite:
Flow (Lead Generation)
How many people are entering each
stage of your cycle in a given period? Are
those trending up or down?
Metrics: How many new prospects did
we create last month? How many
marketing qualified leads did we pass on
last week? How many opportunities can
sales expect to have next quarter?
Balance (Lead Counts)
How many people are in each pipeline
stage? How many accounts? How does
that vary by lead type? Are the balances
going up or down over time?
Metrics: How many active prospects do I
have? How many opportunities is sales
working on right now?
Conversion
What is the conversion ratio from stage
to stage? Which types of leads have the
best conversion rate?
Metrics: How many leads generated from
pay‐per‐click ads covert? How many
leads generated from purchased lists
convert? How do those two numbers
compare?
Velocity
What is the average revenue cycle time?
How does it break down by stage?
Metrics: Are healthcare industry leads
converting faster than financial services?
How long does an SMB purchase take,
compared to enterprise?
Pipeline to Investment
What return are you seeing on your
marketing investments?
Metrics: Which programs bring in quality
leads that eventually convert to dollars
for your team? How much revenue
results from individual programs, and
how much did you spend to generate
that revenue?
Opportunity Influencers
How are all of your marketing programs
working together to bring in sales?
Metrics: What programs influence sales
in the mid‐funnel stage? What types of
influencers are interacting with programs
at the mid‐ and bottom‐funnel stages?
Keep it Simple: Identify Your Top 5
Understanding the conversion rates and
velocities of each stage in your revenue
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7. ©2015 Quorium Solutions. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved.
cycle helps you understand — and
communicate — your revenue cycle
economics. Looking at how your
marketing programs influence sales helps
you defend your current planning cycle.
This information is invaluable when it
comes time to set and defend the
marketing budget. At Qrimart, we set the
demand generation budget by working
backwards from how many customers we
want to close in future months. When
you walk into the boardroom, don’t
arrive with a stack of reports. To make
your case cleanly and effectively, focus
on the five metrics your CEO, CFO, and
board care about most. Know why they
are important, be able to defend them,
and most importantly, make sure you’re
looking at the same numbers as your
CEO.
CONNECTING THE DOTS:
PROGRAM MEASUREMENT
We’ve covered how to identify the
metrics that matter to your C‐suite, but
how can you connect individual
marketing programs to revenue? Here
are some of the questions marketers
must answer along the way:
• What should I measure? Last
month’s trade show may deliver
results next month or next year.
How do I decide where to invest
my budget today?
• Which touch? Converting a cold
lead into a sale takes at least seven
touches, according to industry rule
of thumb. How do I allocate
revenue to any specific touch?
• Which influencer? The average
buying committee for a complex
purchase can involve over 20
different people, and different
marketing programs affect each
individual differently. How do I
know which program had the most
impact?
• How do I account for other
variables? The economy, the
weather, whether or not the sales
rep had his coffee that morning —
many factors outside of our
control can affect the sale. If
revenues increase because the
economy is on the mend, can I
claim my programs delivered
better ROI?
Dream Big, Start Small:
Taking a Phased Approach
Fortunately, marketing maturity isn’t an
all‐or‐nothing game. You can start by
simply taking your current marketing
efforts and experimenting with various
ways to improve and measure their
success rates.
Each sequential method on the following
list gives you a more accurate view into
your customer value data — but this
additional insight comes with a corollary
rise in investment and complexity. As you
go through the alignment process and
progress along the marketing maturity
curve, you can try increasingly complex
approaches.
8.
Method 1:
Single Attribution
After a sale is made, assign all the credit in
your marketing automation solution to the
first or last program that touched a sale.
This usually means allocating the deal to
the email, webinar, or website visit that
caused the first person (or the key person)
from the target company to enter your
sales funnel.
Example: If you held a webinar that
generated a lead that closed a deal one
year later, give full credit to the initial
webinar.
Method 2:
Single Attribution with Revenue
Cycle Projections
Adding revenue cycle projections to single
attribution gives you deeper insight into
the long‐term impact of your programs.
Example: Instead of waiting to see the
actual results of the webinar, look at its
impact at the top of the revenue cycle and
then estimate its long‐term impact, based
on historical webinar conversion metrics.
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9. Method 3:
Multiple Touch Attribution
Measuring the contribution of multiple
touches toward closing a sale in your
marketing automation tool gives you
valuable insight into the effectiveness of
your mid‐funnel programs — not just the
programs that affect the top or the
bottom. This is our recommended
approach, as you can see the results of all
your marketing programs as a whole.
This can be achieved through running
program attribution reports in your
marketing automation tool.
Example: Assume a =N=100,000 deal
recently closed. Three people on the
customer side were involved in the deal:
Person A attended a trade show and a
webinar.
Person B attended only the trade show.
Person C saw a direct mail piece and
clicked to the company website.
In this scenario, you might give =N=50K
credit to the trade show, =N=25K to the
webinar, and =N=25K to the direct mail
piece.
Method 4:
Test and Control Groups
You can measure the true impact of a
particular marketing program by testing
its effectiveness against a control group.
Of course, this means you must plan your
programs to be testable from the get‐go.
Example: To measure the impact of a
brand advertising campaign, split your
market into two equal geographic parts,
and spend twice as much on one group
as on the other. Then compare the
behaviors of those two market segments.
Did you experience more growth in direct
and branded search from the area where
you spent more? Assuming all other
influences were the same, you can credit
any difference to your brand advertising
spend.
Method 5:
Full Market Mix Modeling
Market Mix Modeling (MMM) uses
statistical techniques, such as regression,
to show how sales outcomes depend on
various marketing touches and other
non‐marketing factors. As you might
expect, MMM requires a lot of data and
sophisticated analytical skills. Only 3% of
B2B marketers currently use this model
to measure marketing ROI. Example:
Company X has an MMM equation
showing that, without marketing, they
would have made =N=125M in sales. Of
the =N=40M in revenue generated by
marketing:
• Search advertising gets credit for
=N=15M
• Display advertising gets credit for
=N=10M
• Trade shows get credit for
=N=15M
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10. ©2015 Quorium Solutions. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved.
KEY LESSONS:
TAKE YOUR SEAT WITH
CONFIDENCE
As you continuously evolve and adapt
your marketing measurement system
over time, it will only improve.
Remember these key points, and take
your seat at the revenue table with full
confidence in the value of your work:
• Find a rock‐solid marketing
automation partner. Your software
vendor should have the experience
and knowledge to help you
implement L2RM in your
organization and build the
business case internally.
• Establish goals and ROI estimates
up‐front. Pick your five most
important metrics and use them to
your advantage.
• Design programs to be
measurable. Set goals and run
scenarios for all marketing
programs — prior to spending
money.
• Focus on “improving ROI” rather
than just “proving ROI.” Apply the
insights you gained from prior
measurements to your current
cycle of planning.
11. About Qrimart.com
Qrimart provides leading marketing software for companies of all sizes to build and
sustain engaging customer relationships. Spanning today’s digital, social, mobile and
offline channels, Qrimart’s customer engagement platform powers a set of breakthrough
applications to help marketers tackle all aspects of digital marketing from the planning
and orchestration of marketing activities to the delivery of personalized interactions that
can be optimized in real‐time. Qrimart’s applications are known for their ease‐of‐use,
and are complemented by the users and third‐party solutions users who share and learn
from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern
marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results. Headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria,
Qrimart serves as a strategic marketing partner to large enterprises and fast‐growing
small companies across a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit
www.Qrimart.com.
The materials on this website are provided for general informational and educational
purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. They are not offered as and do not
constitute legal advice or legal opinions. You should not act or rely on any information
contained in this website without first seeking the advice of an attorney
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