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Today’s marketers are under mounting pressure to prove how their marketing efforts impact revenue and business growth. Early-funnel metrics like click-through rates, ad engagement, and lead volume don’t hold water with CFOs and CEOs who are now laser-focused on the bottom line. It’s no longer sufficient for marketers to hand leads off to sales, wipe their hands on their pants, and call it a day. Instead, they’re pushing themselves to look further into the funnel to see how they’re influencing the entire buying journey from the first click to the final sale.
Connecting the end-to-end buying journey and tying marketing campaigns to revenue is easier said than done, however — especially in today’s omnichannel journey, where customers engage with businesses through multiple touchpoints before finally making a purchase. The trail gets especially hard to follow when consumers pick up the phone to call a business.
In our recent webinar, “Going Beyond Lead Generation: The Path to Revenue-Focused Marketing,” Invoca CMO Peter Isaacson spoke with leading marketers to learn how they navigate these challenges. He interviewed Noah Brooks, Manager of Digital Engagement and Analytics at University Hospitals, and Melissa Reilly, Assistant Vice President of Digital Marketing at U.S. Bank/Elavon.
Their illuminating conversation was full of actionable tips you and your marketing team can use to implement a revenue-focused marketing strategy. In this post, we’ll cover the top takeaways from the webinar.
In many organizations, there is distrust or friction between marketing and sales teams. When revenue goals aren’t met they may point fingers at one another. The marketing team says sales is fumbling the hot leads it sent them, while sales claims those leads weren’t so hot to begin with. To avoid these kinds of issues, you need to put effort into building a partnership and establishing trust with your sales team.
There are many ways to build stronger bonds — Reilly shared her experience in the webinar: “Before I joined the company, the sales and marketing teams weren’t talking to each other. I took the initiative and invited the sales team to dinner so we could build a connection. Making the first move and setting up those conversations really helped our collaboration down the road.”
Historically, many marketing teams have emphasized driving a large volume of leads. But this strategy is flawed for several reasons, the main one being that if volume is your only focus, you could be wasting the sales team’s resources by overwhelming them with low-quality leads that don’t convert. Though it sounds like an obvious fix in theory, in practice it can be difficult, as many marketing teams don’t have visibility into how well their leads convert — especially when those leads come in over the phone.
“Media buying is getting more expensive,” said Brooks. “So as marketers trying to control a budget, we’re starting to prioritize quality over quantity. I could flip a couple of switches today to increase our phone calls and website visitors a lot, but it’s not going to be high-quality traffic. The best teams are optimizing for the right kind of traffic — they target people who are ultimately going to convert revenue.”
As I touched on earlier, it can be difficult to connect the full buying journey, especially when customers exit the online experience to make a phone call. This disconnect can make it difficult for marketers to understand how many of their leads are actually converting to revenue.
That’s where revenue execution platforms like Invoca come in. They tie the entire digital-to-call journey together so marketing teams can track and optimize how leads convert to customers. This allows them to drive higher quality leads and ensure those leads are properly nurtured to conversions by sales and contact center teams.
“Invoca solved issues I’d been having for decades,” said Reilly. “For 20 years, we struggled with tracking the value of the phone leads our campaigns drove. Now, we finally get full closed-loop attribution and it's amazing. It’s been so helpful for the marketing team to see how well phone leads are converting and it’s helped us work more closely with sales. Our teams can log into the platform and see the same view of the customer journey, which allows us to make smarter decisions to improve it and drive more revenue.”
A common issue that marketing and sales teams face is that their success is defined by completely different metrics. Marketing teams may be focusing on cost per lead, cost per click, engagement rate, and lead volume, while sales teams are looking at deal progression and close rates. These metrics don’t always line up — for example, the marketing team may hit its quota of leads, however, these may be low-quality leads the sales team is unable to convert. These kinds of discrepancies and misunderstandings can cause friction between the teams.
The best way to eliminate friction between your marketing and sales teams is to align around a shared metric: revenue growth. This is the metric that matters most to your business, and revenue execution platforms like Invoca can give you complete visibility into how your marketing leads ultimately convert to customers in your contact center.
“A lot of marketing and contact center teams have separate KPIs. So when ours is an appointment rate and theirs is the speed to answer the phone or how long the call takes, you're not going to be on the same page,” said Brooks. “I think it's really important to understand where they're coming from, what's important to them, what's important to me, and how do we find a common ground of what we’re tracking. It’s important to take a collaborative approach and say, ‘How do we get better at this together?’ Rather than saying, ‘Hey, you guys need to do this.’”
Want to get more insights about revenue-focused marketing from Peter, Melissa, and Noah? Watch the full webinar on demand here.
