You know your marketing has a hand in closing a high percentage of sales opportunities. However, influence can be a hard thing to prove. To convince the rest of your organization that your marketing efforts are helping win deals, you need data to back it up. This means going beyond tracking just lead generation metrics in order to gain a clear picture of the customer journey. To do so, requires the ability to track every marketing interaction with every contact. This level of tracking may sound difficult, but it is more achievable than you may think.
Capture Every Marketing Touchpoint
The first step in understanding marketing influence is tracking every touchpoint. This means knowing when a prospect has visited your website, seen you at a trade show, clicked on your display ad, etc. Every touch counts. Achieving such complete tracking requires a few different tools and intense attention to detail.
First, you will need a marketing automation tool that can track activities such as email blasts, content downloads, demo requests, and website visits. Advanced automation can also capture details on how visitors got to your site (i.e., paid search, organic, direct, etc.). Marketing automation is excellent for capturing online conversions, but for complete tracking, you will also need call tracking software. This enables you to track offline conversions from both your online and offline marketing campaigns. Finally, tracking marketing touches also relies on some manual effort from your sales team. This is for touches such as customer events and trade shows. While these are marketing events, it is ultimately up to your sales reps to account for and record every prospect they talk to.
Enroll Prospects in Salesforce Campaigns
Once you have the ability to track every marketing touch, the next step is to record each touch in a common location. The overwhelmingly popular way to do this is with Salesforce campaigns. By adding leads and contacts to Salesforce campaigns, you can track each touchpoint in a way that can be directly associated with accounts and opportunities. This process becomes considerably easier with automated campaign association. The more touchpoints that can automatically enroll prospects in Salesforce campaigns, the easier your life will be. However, some manual campaign enrollment will always be necessary. You will still have to rely on your sales reps to enroll prospects in campaigns for events that you have no ability to track. Once you start universally adding members to Salesforce campaigns for each interaction, your marketing influence starts to come into focus.
Turn All of This Data into Quantified Results
So where do you go from here? Now that you are tracking all of your marketing touchpoints, you need to turn all of this hard data into digestable numbers you can take to the board. The simplest way to do this is to take all of the opportunities that have been influenced by marketing and divide by the total number of opportunities. This gives you a great ratio of marketing influence that is easy to comprehend. You can further analyze this number by looking at how much of your open pipeline has been influenced by marketing and how many of your won deals have been influenced. Drill even further down into the data by looking into the types and even the specific marketing campaigns you are running. Putting this lense on your marketing efforts can help you acquire some powerful insight into which campaigns are truly pushing deals past the goal line.
Understanding the impact marketing is having on sales opportunities is crucial to your standing within your company. By tracking and recording every single touchpoint that results from your marketing, you have the ability to truly quantify your influence on sales opportunities.
