I’ve spent a great deal of time of late looking into the issue of measuring marketing effectiveness, specifically looking at the return of investment for marketing expenditures. Marketing is often accused, and sometimes guilty of its inability to measure and map to bottom line effectiveness. In this post I thought I’d share with you my findings on ways and means to measure marketing returns, and discuss the critical importance of the sales & marketing relationship in this effort.
Lead generation is the bread and butter of the marketing department and typically the area of most significant investment area. If marketing folk are to gain respect from the business – specifically their sales colleagues – and build an effective business case for
The role of the marketing team is to generate interest in the company’s product through a range of tactics including online advertising, print advertising, tradeshow participation, seminars, webinars and search engine optimization or pay per click (PPC) advertising, as well as investments in PR and analyst relations. The objective here is to turn high quality leads over to the sales organization, which if all goes well, ultimately generate sales opportunities and revenue. The key here in measure ROI is to focus on quality, not quantity. The number of leads returned from a campaign or event is not a reliable metric. What marketing teams must measure is the conversion ratio of those leads as they move through the sales funnel. How many leads result in a meaningful conversation with the sales person? How many of those transform into opportunity? How many make it to the proposal stage? And finally, what revenue is driven from these investments?
I cannot understate how important the the marketing/sales partnership is in successful marketing ROI measurement. A united sales and marketing organization and joint ownership and responsibility for these metrics is absolutely fundamental to a successful lead management and measurement process.
At every stage there must be a well defined, closed loop process. There must be well understood criteria for lead acceptance (ideally agreed business rules set out jointly by marketing and sales), and there must be joint management and ownership over metrics produced. Marketing can feed the funnel, but if sales is not communicating constantly the results of the campaign efforts the whole system fails. There must also be a system in place that provides for an accurate, empirical measurement of these investments. Software tools such as Eloqua, married with a CRM system such as Siebel or salesforce.com provide marketing and sales professionals with the ability to measure and report consistently on lead generation performance and ROI.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Friday, May 9, 2008
Managing (and if lucky) controlling your circle of influence
I’m a great believer in six degrees of separation. It amazes me that you can be sitting on an airplane somewhere far from home, strike up a conversation (well, I would but that’s just me) and find that there’s some connection point between you and what you had believed to be a perfect stranger.
The six degree of separation rule absolutely applies in the world of marketing.
Just think for a minute about the sphere of influencers a marketer touches in their daily job. There are your customers, of course. There’s also your own employees and executive – who if you’re lucky, see their role as one of a thought leader for company. Then there’s media, industry analysts, financial analysts, authors, bloggers, the list goes on. Each of these individuals or groups forms a spoke on the circle of influence, and in the middle sits the marketer.
In my job as a marketer, it was my and my team’s responsibility to establish a positive and open communication with each of these influencer groups. But these relationships do not exist in parallel – or I should say – should not exist in parallel. A truly optimized circle of influence is an interconnected circle of influence – where each of the influence groups is connected to the other.
This connectivity between the circle should not be left to chance. Rather the marketer should directly facilitate connection points between the spokes of the wheel acting as the relationship broker. Here are some practical ways to connect your circle:
1. Connect customer to customer – cultivate reference accounts (both private and external) who will speak to prospects or allow their stories to be told. Encourage the formation of local user groups and grassroots networking events allowing customers to connect to each other. Establish social media type vehicles on your own site allowing customers to connect to each other virtually.
2. Connect industry analysts to customers – if you want to place “up and to the right” make sure the analysts covering your company are taking to customers. Facilitate private conversations (some customers are reluctant to talk on the record), bring analysts to keynote customer events such as user conferences, and seek out opportunities for your customers to speak at analyst conferences. Customer evidence gives analysts confidence you have executed on your strategy.
3. Connect media to industry analyst – when a reporter is doing a feature or news story, they need to generate a thoughtful article with depth and dimension. In addition to providing customer references for the journalist to speak to, consider supplying the reporter with an analyst contact for third party opinion or research on the technology or market. Analysts and their firms are interested in thought leadership exposure.
These are just a small handful of ways you can facilitate your circle of influence. This process, managed in an ongoing way can translate into better exposure and ‘buzz’ for your company and its products in your core market.
Cheers!
The six degree of separation rule absolutely applies in the world of marketing.
Just think for a minute about the sphere of influencers a marketer touches in their daily job. There are your customers, of course. There’s also your own employees and executive – who if you’re lucky, see their role as one of a thought leader for company. Then there’s media, industry analysts, financial analysts, authors, bloggers, the list goes on. Each of these individuals or groups forms a spoke on the circle of influence, and in the middle sits the marketer.
In my job as a marketer, it was my and my team’s responsibility to establish a positive and open communication with each of these influencer groups. But these relationships do not exist in parallel – or I should say – should not exist in parallel. A truly optimized circle of influence is an interconnected circle of influence – where each of the influence groups is connected to the other.
This connectivity between the circle should not be left to chance. Rather the marketer should directly facilitate connection points between the spokes of the wheel acting as the relationship broker. Here are some practical ways to connect your circle:
1. Connect customer to customer – cultivate reference accounts (both private and external) who will speak to prospects or allow their stories to be told. Encourage the formation of local user groups and grassroots networking events allowing customers to connect to each other. Establish social media type vehicles on your own site allowing customers to connect to each other virtually.
2. Connect industry analysts to customers – if you want to place “up and to the right” make sure the analysts covering your company are taking to customers. Facilitate private conversations (some customers are reluctant to talk on the record), bring analysts to keynote customer events such as user conferences, and seek out opportunities for your customers to speak at analyst conferences. Customer evidence gives analysts confidence you have executed on your strategy.
3. Connect media to industry analyst – when a reporter is doing a feature or news story, they need to generate a thoughtful article with depth and dimension. In addition to providing customer references for the journalist to speak to, consider supplying the reporter with an analyst contact for third party opinion or research on the technology or market. Analysts and their firms are interested in thought leadership exposure.
These are just a small handful of ways you can facilitate your circle of influence. This process, managed in an ongoing way can translate into better exposure and ‘buzz’ for your company and its products in your core market.
Cheers!
Welcome to Marketingfluence
Welcome to our inaugural blog, which I hope will serve as a interesting conversation pivot point on marketing topics. As a long time marketer in the high tech sector, I have found myself on many occasion searching the Web for topics of relevance to marketers, and particularly practical advice from one marketer to another. I hope to fill the gap with this blog, where I'll post in future on a variety of marketing topics ranging from lead generation and closed loop measurement, to managing the circle of influence that surrounds a company, to planning and executing an effective analyst relations strategy.
Tune back, tune in soon.
Cheers,
Ellyn
Tune back, tune in soon.
Cheers,
Ellyn
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