Sales and revenue miracles need optimized marketing technology and clear strategy, process and marketing assets. If your company adopted marketing technology, but leads remain insufficient and the talented marketing team says they are doing their best, it may be a strong sign your company is missing key steps necessary to deliver the improvements. First in a series.
Marketing automation has been the power behind radical sales revenue improvements, but can also create a dicey situation when the software is adopted without the the plans, processes and activity assets to deliver against planned marketing calendars.
This creates what I call The Marketing Hamster Wheel, one of six signs that marketing isn’t optimized.
Sales people do a great job at selling the incredible benefits and potential revenue and marketing increasing produced by users of the technology. Data from the SiriusDecisions waterfall model indicates that best in class business to business marketers using marketing automation measured a 77% reduction in marketing expenses to generate the same number of closed won deals with 5 times more inquiries converting into closed won deals.
Here’s an example showing gains top to bottom when marketing programs are optimized:
Once marketing technology is purchased, these gains don’t happen because you bought software. There are a few more steps left to revenue transformation, and many organizations — especially small to midsize companies — don’t realize this. This often leaves the individual or team tasked with producing that incredible marketing transformation running the proverbial hamster wheel.
Get Lift estimates that getting MAPs up and running requires a minimum start up cost that’s 3 times the first year software license fee – and likely much more.
Have a look at the list and see if your company completed all these marketing automation infrastructure steps. If not, that’s likely the reason programs are keeping you running in place.
- Research: Budget, time and allocated internal or external expertise to investigate map the processes needed for the head to toe lead to revenue cycle and how that will function in your marketing automation and CRM platforms. Also critical are complete buyer persona research, buyer cycle and content mapping.
- Programming: Build out of scalable programming assets for all the different tactics in your marketing mix, built by qualified experts (not newly minted trainees).
- Content: Emails, Webinars, White papers, ebooks, events mapped to the buyer journey, written, with programming assets – emails, landing pages, etc set up and ready to deploy.
The struggles will continue until these steps are taken. Happily, once addressed, the transformation begins quickly and marketing can finally get off the hamster wheel.
Need help diagnosing what ails your marketing? Contact Get Lift for a complimentary consultation and customized ROI calculation to get a sense of your potential improvements.