What’s the real driver of increased marketing budgets over recent years? It isn’t brochures. It’s the rise of MarTech and the need for specialized talent to manage it. Marketing’s shift from brand to revenue in inevitable.
The Gartner 2016–2017 CMO Spend Survey found that 75% of marketing leaders now own or share P&L responsibility. Meanwhile, a 2016 HubSpot survey shows 57% of sales reps say buyers rely less on salespeople during the buying process.
Marketing is now the keeper of critical data and insights that propel growth. Revenue discussions are no longer just for the CEO, COO, and sales leaders—marketing now has a strategic seat at the table.
>> Related: Three Things Revenue Marketers Do Differently <<
Yet even with the MarTech explosion and availability of data, the average B2B marketer still spends hours every week aggregating data, wrestling with Excel, and struggling to unpack some pretty important insights, like:
- Length of time leads spent in various funnel stages
- Campaign performance in aggregate, comparing campaigns to others
- Comparing plan vs. actuals””what assumptions were accurate and which were off
- How to forecast the impact on revenue based on historical performance and how to adjust accordingly
Most organizations have a way to track leads and ops or engagement within accounts. It’s not the lack of data””it’s the ability to do meaningful things with it.
Despite advanced technologies and growing responsibilities, many teams still struggle to connect data to revenue or forecast marketing’s impact.
The CMO Survey, sponsored by Duke, Deloitte, and the AMA, found that marketers use barely a third of available data for decision-making. The second biggest barrier is the lack of people who can bridge marketing analytics and practice.
While analysts and business ops talent are important, the real need is for the entire marketing team to focus on contributing to revenue.
How do you get there? Here’s a simple breakdown:
- Marketing and sales alignment to define a shared understanding of revenue goals
- A marketing plan that makes sense and tracks back from revenue goals
- An efficient way to track marketing’s performance throughout the quarter
- The agility to adjust if you’re not meeting your goals
- Understanding key metrics to track and what to report to different audiences
- Team ownership: providing every member of your team with a way to measure their activities’ impact on engagement and revenue
Sharing ownership of part of the P&L means aligning with sales and setting realistic goals based on revenue, deal size, and conversion rates. Once revenue goals are agreed upon, build a marketing plan that sets lead and opportunity targets your team can realistically achieve with available resources.
It’s easy to skip goal setting and funnel modeling, but linking lead and opportunity targets (or ABM targets) to revenue is key for a marketing team that consistently drives pipeline and growth.
Otherwise, aren’t we just committing random acts of marketing?
Header image via Giphy
