Closing the loop

Aligning marketing with sales – or doing more with less

Intro

There has never been more pressure on budgets. For marketing, there has never been more
questioning about what marketing is bringing to an organization. How much are the strategic
marketing plan and tactical mix of activities contributing to top line revenue? What sales and
general management want to know most is how effectively marketing is helping to create
demand.
The challenges that we often see are
disconnect between marketing and sales
lack of measurement of marketing effectiveness (impact on sales results)
lack of a process to increase efficiency of marketing campaigns.
There’s a huge opportunity to better align marketing with sales in business to business
companies. Marketing executives feel more and more responsible for maximizing the revenue of
their company, while minimizing the
cost. It’s about doing more with less, but Strategic Objectives
in a smart way. Sales Objectives

Situational Marketing
Open loop with sales Analysis Planning

When it comes to the generation of leads

and creation of opportunities, the
handover between marketing and sales
is a critical process. In many
organizations, it is not very well defined, Sales Campaign
(PL,FC,$) Execution
and is often the reason of frustration in
both the marketing and the sales
department. Marketing complains that
sales don’t follow up leads timely. Sales Lead
Management
complain that quality of leads is weak.
But we also often see problems in the
marketing planning process, with a lack
of situational analysis as input to the marketing planning process. This then results in marketing
plans that are not fully aligned with sales pipeline needs.
The biggest impact of these problems is that sales pipeline in the beginning of the quarter is not
appropriate. It’s not big enough to support sales targets, or quality of it is not appropriate.

If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it

Marketing is an investment, not a cost. So why wouldn’t one want to measure the return on it?
Marketing was seen as an art for a very long time, not a science, and hence couldn’t be
measured.
To close the loop with sales, the right metrics need to be put in place to monitor the whole lead
generation process and track conversion of leads into opportunities and finally into won
business. Some of these metrics will be marketing specific, and used solely by marketing to
optimize campaigns. Other focus on sales, and measure the marketing impact on sales pipeline.
The challenge is to define the right set of metrics to monitor the whole process, and to agree on
a limited set of Key Performance Indicators to be watched closely by sales and marketing
management.

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Learning

The only way to make marketing more effective and increase the efficiency is to measure. One
needs to define metrics that are focused on the effectiveness of campaigns, and use these
results in the marketing planning process to optimize the campaign mix. This will allow the
marketing function to increase the impact of campaigns, based on concrete measures, rather
than on gut feel of which type of campaigns work best in which segment.

How to close the loop

The methodology addressing these challenges consists of a 4 step approach:

MEASURE
ALIGN
OPTIMIZE
PREDICT

The first step, MEASURE, defines a set of metrics throughout the whole marketing planning,
campaign execution, lead management and pipeline creation cycle. It also defines which KPIs
will be used to monitor and track above and in the funnel activity, to optimize the impact of
marketing on sales.

The second step, ALIGN, enables a marketing and sales organization to close the loop based on
an agreed set of processes and metrics. It includes the definition of processes and workflow
between marketing and sales, including lead grading, lead management and lead-to-opportunity
conversion. But also in the marketing planning process, before the marketing program mix is
decided, this step will align the marketing mix with sales pipeline needs, starting from
situational analysis. It will take pipeline needs into account, but also look at pipeline conversion
ratios to set lead targets and align the tactical plan with sales needs.

The third step, OPTIMIZE, will improve the effectiveness of campaigns by using metrics that
track pipeline impact of marketing programs, the conversion of leads into opportunities and
closed business, and takes into account the cost of closed business on a per campaign basis. It
is this step that will allow a marketing organization to do more with less, by working smarter,
optimizing programs by segment, product line, region or even sales unit.

The last step, PREDICT, allows to predict whether marketing is going to be able to generate the
proper pipeline, based on historical lead conversion rates, but also whether sales is going to
have a revenue issue during a particular quarter based on historical conversion of pipeline into
closed business.

Start now!

It is clear that introducing metrics and the right set of processes are essential to close the loop
between marketing and sales. While IT systems are important to help automate this, the lack of
it is not an excuse for not starting to measure and close the loop between marketing and sales.
For more information, please contact Edwin Willems at edwin@willems.com or
+32 479 85 17 30.

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