A traditional sales campaign typically involves a sales force following up with new leads from website inquiries, calls for more information, purchased leads lists, and referrals. Your sales force (or maybe you) make calls to new leads, complete the “dog and pony show,” and then follow up to turn that lead into a sale. In general, this effort is easily measurable. Either you see results or you don’t. The process is black and white.
In marketing, measurable goals can seem a bit grayer. But they don’t have to be. Every time you implement a new marketing strategy, you need to claim 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 return on investment. When you put these two together, measuring the bottom line actually becomes much easier.
Measuring marketing efforts can be a scary thought. Just as the sales staff has quotas, the marketing team needs a measure of responsibility, because every dollar you spend creating 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 generating long-term sales. Consistent and strong brand messages create an image that matters most to your customers, so when it comes time to buy, they think of you and not your competitor. If you ignored your brand and didn’t 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 the current 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 measure this type of brand more easily. Now you can add call tracking or click tracking to your online ad campaigns and assess how much of an impact your efforts are making and which aren’t. Don’t assume your brand is being recognized. Use it in ways that can be measured and calculated with an ROI.
3. Marketing is the lead generation arm of sales: As mentioned above, the sales force generally 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 usually 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 for a free widget.” Or create a promotional code that 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 you can measure your marketing efforts just as easily as being 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 be easier to measure.