I’ve worked with many sales-driven organizations where the marketing department is the red-headed stepchild. After all, it’s sales that drives the revenue, right?
Marketing just eats through budgets and promotes the brand (whatever that means). Meanwhile sales is doing all of the heavy lifting.
The fundamental flaw in this scenario is that there is no connection between marketing activities and sales. Without a closed-loop marketing strategy (ability to track customer interactions that lead to a sale) that’s geared to produce measurable sales results, it’s easy for marketing departments to feel left-out and underappreciated.
Despite all of the great campaigns you devise and execute, the bottom line-oriented c-suite and sales department may not recognize all of the value that marketing brings to the table.
What if it was possible to tie these marketing activities directly to sales results? For the CEO or marketing director perspective, we’ve distilled all marketing activities down into 3 quantitative metrics, and all of which tied directly to sales and revenue generation:
Traffic → Leads → Sales
Without getting into campaign details, analytics, and other minutia with the C-Suite–sales will never have a reason to question marketing if you can show them that all of your marketing efforts delivered a specific number of website visits, lead conversions, and most importantly sales revenue. Welcome to the family.
Here’s how it works:
Drive Traffic – Traffic is simply the total number of unique visitors to your website in a month.This is an easily trackable statistic and traffic can be directly sourced from and attributed to specific marketing activities.
Activities include: production of website content and blogs, social media referrals, traffic from inbound links that resulted from PR efforts, email marketing referrals, paid and organic search traffic.
Convert Leads – Leads represent the total number of people who provide their their name and contact information – again, easily trackable. Lead conversion can include phone calls, live chats, emails, form submissions, downloads, signups, blog subscriptions, and more.
Activities include: website optimization, creation of landing pages, forms, downloadable content and other special offers.
Close Sales – You can measure sales in terms of new customers or total revenue. As long as you have the ability to track customers through the sales process through closed loop marketing, you’ll be able to directly attribute sales back to the source.
Activities include: qualifying leads, transferring sales qualified leads (SQL) to the sales team, nurturing marketing qualified leads (MQL) through email marketing.
If you don’t have a trackable closed-loop system in place, we hope this helps get you started. Our agency helps businesses implement lead generation campaigns and make bottom line sense out of marketing activities. If we can help, please don’t hesitate to look us up.
