Without a doubt, the past few months have been a challenging health, social, and fiscal period for many. Millions have filed for unemployment, businesses had grinded to a halt, and many have been isolated at home. Yesterday my family decided to eat out first the time in over 3 months to support a local restaurant and to have some semblance of normalcy. We sat outside, the dinner was excellent, but for almost an hour, we were the only guests at this large restaurant before a couple came to have dinner. Even though the waitress was wearing a mask, it was easy to see, she was relieved to see another table became occupied. This sobering moment inspired me to write this.
The economy will pick up, and there are early indicators showing that it is starting to recover. People are requesting directions on Apple maps has increased. Open Table restaurant bookings are increasing. Hotel occupancy rates have almost doubled from the March lows, and passengers passing through TSA checkpoints is rising. Things are recovering, but it will undoubtedly take a long time.
What is certain is that businesses have tremendous pressure to stay in business, capture demand, grow share, or increase their stock price, or all the above. In this landscape of unprecedented challenges and more limited resources, most marketers will have enormous pressure to prove that advertising is driving business and optimize budgets.
So how do you prepare to grow again?
- Create a consistent message to be delivered across all sales & marketing channels. You can’t have your salesperson, your website, or your advertising say different things.
- Optimize marketing spend, so you can efficiently deliver your message to new customers
- Maximize growth & ROI by ensuring marketing and sales are aligned through holistic analytics. “According to Aberdeen Group, companies that optimize the marketing/sales relationship grow 32% faster, while companies who fail to nurture that relationship see their business decline.”[1]
For #1, it often comes down to a company’s leadership to align and ensure the appropriate stakeholders execute. For #2, below are lead funnel data points and metrics you should be monitoring in your executive dashboard.
- For a B2B company you must be able to report on: Cost, Impressions, Leads, Qualified Leads, Opportunities, Customer, Revenue
- For B2C companies, you should be looking at Cost, Impressions, Site Visits, Product Views, Add To Carts, Purchases, Sales Revenue, New vs. Old Customer.
The metrics you should have for the above data points are Cost Per, CVR (conversion rate from the previous step), and % change from the prior equal period.
Of course, there are more dashboards, KPIs, and reports required
for different stakeholders in an organization; however, the Executive Dashboard
is the first one I would build and align on internally. Then every other report/dashboard
can be made to support and connect to the executive view.
#3 is related to #2 as you need alignment from both sales and
marketing on the metrics and KPIs. It is
also imperative that both organizations are using and referencing the same
report to base their decisions. Many
organizations have different reports in circulation with the same metrics, e.g.,
# of leads or website revenue, that often provide conflicting information for
many reasons (e.g., data sets, measurement or tracking methodology, human
error, etc.). Each report in
circulation usually has a unique purpose and should be kept, however for a
marketing and sales team to maximize business growth and optimize marketing
spend; they must first align on the Source of Truth for marketing/sales performance
data. Having a Source of Truth requires
marketing analytics experts that can navigate both an organization and the
analytics landscape to provide a holistic analytics infrastructure and approach
that accurately attributes marketing to sales and can help an organization forecast
sales and optimized future budgets.
Is your company prepared to grow again?
[1] https://www.aberdeen.com/cmo-essentials/i-achieved-the-holy-grail-of-sales-and-marketing-alignmentor-so-i-thought/