When it comes to your marketing analytics capabilities, what kind of grade would you give your team? Are you getting by with work that is “good enough “? Or are you really using marketing analysis to the full of its potential?
Most B2B marketing teams have some analytics capabilities in place, but those capabilities vary widely. In our experience, what the “best” teams are doing is significantly different than what the “good” or “better” teams are doing. Here’s how it breaks down:
Good…
These teams keep an eye on the performance of their marketing programs and are able to demonstrate that they are effective at targeting prospects and generating leads and prospects that can continue the sales process.
But are those leads actually helping the business?
Better…
These teams are able to follow leads and prospects through the full sales cycle. Going far beyond leads and opportunities, these teams are able to show how much revenue their marketing programs are actually generating.
But where can that process be improved?
Best…
These teams aren’t content at simply proving their worth and tying marketing efforts to revenue—they’re also tying results to profits to understand the true bottom-line benefits of their efforts.
And they’re constantly on the lookout for optimizations. They want to understand which deals were won—and which were lost—and why. That helps them better understand what can be improved in the marketing and sales process. Maybe they can educate prospects earlier on in the sales cycle. Or maybe they can improve their targeting criteria so they’re reaching better prospects. They’re never content to rest on their laurels; they’re always looking for things that they could do better.
Moving from Good to Best
So where is your team right now?
If you have yet gotten to the “good” level, by all means, work on improving your analytics for tracking leads. If you’re at the “good” stage, it’s time to kick things up a notch and start tying marketing leads to revenue.
But whatever stage you’re currently in, don’t lose sight of the fact that the “best” state should be your ultimate goal.
If you’re not there yet, don’t make excuses. It’s easy to convince yourself that you can’t do this sort of optimization unless you have fancy (read, “expensive”) marketing automation tools. The truth is, while those tools can certainly help, you probably already have the data and technology you need.
If you’re not sure where to start, these resources can help:
- Strategies and Tactics for Boosting Your Close Rates—This express guide explores twenty approaches that leading organizations have used to improve the number of sales opportunities they win. It explains how to analyze your wins and losses to improve your targeting and replicate what is working well.
- How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel—Approaching your funnel systematically can make it much easier to spot the places where small tweaks can have a big impact on overall sales and margins. These small improvements are easy to make and they can compound as leads flow through the funnel, resulting in fairly dramatic improvements over time.
- Masterful Marketing Operations—Take a master class from successful marketing ops teams. This webinar goes through some of the history and lessons learned by great B2B marketing ops teams and explains how to put successful approaches into practice at your organization.
Strategies and Tactics for Boosting Your Close Rates
Most B2B companies would like to improve their close rates. On nearly every sales and marketing research study ever conducted, something to the effect of "improve our win rates" shows up as a top priority or objective. But what are they really doing to make it happen?
How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel
With so many different variables involved, improving sales performance across the board and at-scale can seem like a daunting task. But with a different perspective on your sales funnel, you can generate huge improvements much more easily and with far less risk.
Masterful Marketing Operations
Marketing Ops is still evolving and there are no long-standing rules for how everything should work. But there's a lot to learn from teams with a track record of success. In this on-demand webinar, we explore the traits and mindsets of successful Marketing Ops groups.
