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Today’s marketer faces many of challenges from shrinking budgets to saturated markets to difficulties aligning with sales teams. But there’s perhaps no more important challenge to solve than tying marketing investments to revenue generation. Revenue is what your CMO, your CFO, and your sales team care about. All your favorite acronyms like MQL, SQL, and CPC amount to vanity metrics when you can’t show them the money.
But tying marketing efforts to revenue is much easier said than done, especially when customers leave the digital experience and call a buisness. With advancements in technology, the customer journey has become a great deal more complex. According to Google, consumers use an average of 5.5 different touch points before they fill out a lead form or call a business. To make matters more complicated, today’s marketing and sales teams use an array of different software tools to track the customer journey, and it can be difficult to integrate them effectively to share data.
To solve this all-too-common issue and tie marketing campaigns to revenue, teams are investing in revenue execution platforms. In this post, we’ll cover what revenue execution platforms are and how they solve today’s top marketing challenges. We’ll also do a deep dive into some of the most powerful features that deliver results. Keep reading to learn more!
Revenue Execution Platforms are software solutions that connect the entire customer buying journey. They work by bridging the data gap between the marketing team that engages customers and the sales teams that close the deals, creating a cohesive view of the revenue journey.
Being a marketer in today’s fast-paced environment is no easy feat. In this section, we’ll break down the top marketing challenges and how revenue execution platforms can help solve them.
Marketers are encountering significant challenges due to tightening budgets, which have become increasingly common in today's economic climate. With financial pressures mounting, marketing departments are forced to do more with less, requiring creative strategies to maximize impact while minimizing costs. Marketers need to make every dollar count and implement the right attribution to prove their impact.
How to solve it: Revenue execution platforms give marketers granular attribution about how many phone leads and conversions their campaigns drive. This allows them to track their full ROI and make smarter optimization decisions to stretch their budgets further.
Today’s complex customer journeys can make it challenging to tie initial marketing touchpoints to revenue. As budgets tighten, marketers will need to prove their impact on the bottom line if they want ad dollars for their programs.
How to solve it: Revenue execution platforms connect the entire revenue journey, allowing marketers to see not just which campaigns are driving calls, but how many of those calls convert to customers. This allows marketers to prove their full impact on revenue so they can defend their spend and make a strong case for more budget.
With the rise of omnichannel shopping experiences, consumers have come to expect seamless, personalized interactions at every stage of their journey. However, as customer expectations rise, so too does the pressure on businesses to deliver exceptional experiences consistently. In an increasingly competitive market where consumers have numerous options at their fingertips, brands may only have one chance to win a customer's loyalty. As a result, businesses must prioritize understanding their customers' needs, preferences, and pain points.
How to solve it: Revenue execution platforms connect the entire buyer journey, allowing revenue teams to deliver a unified, personalized experience. For example, you can give a customer ad creative that aligns with their past interactions, route them to a contact center agent who specializes in their desired service, and answer the call with a personalized greeting.
Misalignment between marketing and sales teams can significantly impact revenue generation for businesses. Marketing may generate leads that aren’t properly qualified or aligned with sales priorities, while sales teams may struggle to convert leads into customers due to inadequate support or understanding of marketing messaging. These communication issues often stem from the teams not having a shared view of the customer journey or a common set of metrics they can align around.
How to solve it: Revenue execution platforms enable alignment and collaboration between marketing and sales. They create a unified view of the customer journey and a “common language” of data that these teams usually lack.
Now that we’ve defined what revenue execution platforms are and the challenges they solve, let’s take a deep dive into how they work. In this section, we’ll break down some of the key capabilities marketers can tap into to drive results.
As we touched on above, many organizations are cutting back on their marketing budgets. In order to defend your spend and secure funding for your campaigns, you need to present an ironclad case that shows your impact on revenue. The issue is that many teams aren’t tracking their full ROI — while they’re tracking the online conversions they bring in, they’re missing out on the revenue they drive from phone leads. If you fail to account for phone leads, you could be significantly underreporting the revenue you drive.
Revenue execution platforms solve this critical blind spot in the customer journey by giving marketers attribution for the calls their campaigns drive. Not only do revenue execution platforms track that calls occurred, but they also use AI to identify if those calls were leads and if they converted to revenue. Marketers can then stream this call conversion data directly to martech platforms like Google Ads. This integration allows them to accurately target high-value customers with the most effective campaigns, ads, and keywords to increase conversion rates, reduce wasted spend, and drive more revenue from every ad dollar they spend.
When marketing is unable to attribute conversions that happen on the phone to paid media spend, they also have no visibility into the revenue they drive. In many industries, this can account for 50% or more of the revenue that marketing drives, so many under-attribute their revenue by millions of dollars.
Revenue execution platforms solve this issue by enabling marketers to track the entire buyer journey. Marketers can see each consumer’s digital journey, pinpoint which ad or webpage drove them to call, capture what they said on the call, and track if they converted to a customer. This allows them to understand how their advertising programs are contributing to their ultimate goal of driving revenue. It also allows them to identify inefficiencies in the path to purchase — such as improper call routing — which they can correct to increase conversion rates.
In addition, revenue execution platforms seamlessly integrate with CRMs like Salesforce. The tool automatically updates customer records with insights from their phone conversations, such as products discussed and purchases made and this is where you can match revenue to conversions. This helps marketers better tie their efforts to customer acquisition and revenue generation.
As a marketer, you may feel that phone call routing isn’t relevant to your role. However, ensuring that the phone leads you drive are routed to the most capable sales agent is paramount to maximizing conversion rates and driving revenue. When a potential customer picks up the phone to inquire about a product or service, they expect a seamless and personalized experience that addresses their specific needs and concerns.
This is where revenue execution platforms come in. By using data from the caller's digital journey before the call, the tool can automatically route callers to the sales agent best equipped to handle their inquiries. It can also give the agent relevant information about the caller’s digtial journey via a screen pop so they can answer with a personalized greeting. This not only enhances the customer experience by providing timely and relevant assistance, but also increases the likelihood of conversion by ensuring that every interaction is handled with expertise and care.
As a marketer, the customer experience falls under your jurisdiction, and revenue execution platforms give you the powerful features you need to take of the buyer journey. When you tap into these features, you can delight customers with personalization and earn their lasting loyalty.
Driving phone leads from your campaigns is only half the battle — your marketing ROI also depends on sales agents converting those calls to revenue. Traditionally, many marketing teams don’t have visibility into what happens to the phone leads they drive, especially when they go to multiple business locations. They don’t know if it was converted to a sale, or even answered. This can lead to inefficiencies, as you may be sending calls to understaffed locations or during off hours.
With a revenue execution solution like Invoca, you can view real-time and historical reports on calls to every location. With complete visibility into call volumes, caller intent, and call outcomes across individual locations, you can adjust staffing and procedures, and even optimize digital marketing to drive more calls to the right locations at the right times.
You can also track and reduce missed calls by using data to inform staffing or by forwarding unanswered calls to available staff, other locations, or contact centers. You can even have missed call notifications automatically sent to employees on Slack for quick follow-ups on high-value missed calls.
Taking this kind of collaborative approach with your sales agents will ensure that your phone leads are handled correctly and converted to revenue at the highest possible rate.
Want to learn more about how revenue execution platforms help marketing teams deliver results? Check out these resources:
Get The Forrester Wave: Real-Time Revenue Execution Platforms, Q2 2024 report here to learn more about the value you can expect from a real-time revenue execution platform.
