A traditional sales campaign typically involves a sales force following up on new leads from website inquiries, calls for more information, lists of purchased leads, and referrals. Your sales force (or maybe it’s you) makes calls to new leads, completes the “dog and pony show,” and then continues to follow up to convert that lead into a sale. Usually, this effort is easily measurable. Either you see results or you don’t. The process is in black and white.
In marketing, measurable objectives can seem a bit more gray. But they don’t have to be. Every time you implement a new marketing strategy, you need to affirm that it is truly measurable. Otherwise, how else will you know if your time and money were well spent? Ultimately, the key here is to combine your sales and marketing efforts for maximum ROI. When you put these two together, measuring the bottom line actually becomes a lot easier.
Measuring marketing efforts can be a scary thought. Just as sales people have quotas, your marketing team needs a measure of accountability, because every dollar you spend building awareness (and ultimately sales) for your business should generate a return on that investment. Sometimes marketers are labeled as an expense because they are known to spend, spend, spend. In truth, your marketers are responsible for generating the leads that are delivered to the sellers.
There are ways to change this misconception. The first step is to create sales and marketing programs and initiatives that complement each other. Let’s take a look at some ways to do this and how you can make this work for you:
1. Brand Awareness – Marketers are continually developing a brand or identity for a business and while this may not result in direct sales, these ongoing efforts are critical to producing long-term sales. Strong, consistent brand messages create an image that matters most to your customers so that when it comes time to buy, they think of you and not your competitor. If you were to ignore your brand and not create a strong identity, your sales would suffer in the long run.
2. Measure brand activity: While it’s important to create and maintain a strong brand identity, in today’s economic climate, that’s simply not enough. You must create a way to effectively measure the impact of your brand. With the advent of online marketing and advertising, we can now more easily measure this type of brand. Now you can add call tracking or click tracking to your online ad campaigns and assess how impactful your efforts are and which are not. Don’t assume your brand is being recognized. Use it in ways that can be measured and calculated with ROI.
3. Marketing is the lead generation arm of sales – As mentioned above, the sales force typically follows up on leads, regardless of how they are generated. But how are they generated? Some can be purchased while others can result from referrals. Still, a good chunk of it typically comes from your advertising, public relations, direct mail, and website activity that goes into a company’s marketing mix. One way to measure these efforts is to create tracking codes, distinct links, or custom URLs (PURLs) for each marketing piece to quantify how many leads a particular campaign can generate. Add language to a direct mail piece like “Mention this postcard to receive a free widget.” Or create a promo code which is when a customer requests more information from your inquiry form on your website. These tactics will allow you to really determine where your leads are coming from.
Marketing and sales are not separate and distinct functions. They must work in sync to be effective and powerful. You may need to be a little more creative in how you measure ROI, but it’s just as easy to measure your marketing efforts as it is to be accountable for your sales tactics. If you continue to view sales and marketing as a package rather than individual entities, your overall efforts will also become easier to measure.