Revenue marketing is the combined set of strategies, processes, people, technologies, content and result measurements across marketing and sales. A well-maintained combination of these components accomplishes four things:
- Drops sales-ready leads into the top of the purchase funnel;
- Accelerates sales opportunities through the funnel;
- Measures marketing based on its contribution to pipeline and revenue; and ultimately
- Transforms marketing from a cost center to a revenue center.
In my monthly blog post series I will chronicle the major tasks fundamental to transforming your marketing organization to one that influences revenue in a predictable, scalable way.
The Increasing Importance of Customer Experience Requires Us to Transform Marketing
Jerry Gregoire, chief information officer at Dell said: “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” Is the customer experience at your firm sufficient to motivate a marketing transformation? Consider these examples of customer experience driving change:
- Vinyl shifted to CDs, then to iPods and now to Spotify, Pandora and Songza. The product is the same — music — but the customer experience is much different and driving the change.
- Blockbuster and Hollywood Video are replaced by Netflix, iTunes, HBO Now, and Amazon Prime. Again, same product, but different customer experiences.
- Are you hailing a yellow cab, or scheduling an Uber or Lyft? I’ll wager you have tried the latter two and had a different experience than with a traditional taxi.
- Have your tried using an Amazon Dash button at home to order laundry detergent?
- Have you pre-ordered and prepaid for your Starbucks beverage so you can breeze in, skip the line and be sipping in seconds?
- And how about those iPads at every table in some airport restaurants replacing the wait staff? The food is the same (sadly), but the customer experience is certainly different.
The internet has changed the way people buy and how they want to engage with us. The buyer’s journey has changed and if we adapt marketing faster than our competitors we can gain market share. But responding to pressures from prospects isn’t the only impetus to transform marketing.
Sales Wants Effective Marketing Engagement Within Their Funnel
There are various conflicting statistics about how much of the buying journey is over before the buyer wants to engage with a sales department, though many statistics do suggest the answer is in excess of 50 percent. One thing that is certain is that buyers are increasingly engaging with companies through marketing’s digital channels, particularly when they are in the awareness, research, consideration and evaluation stages of making a purchase. These digital channels include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google and your website.
Sales teams know that they can benefit from knowing exactly how and when a prospect engaged. What content did they view? What advertisement did they respond to? Furthermore, if a prospect is not ready for sales engagement, the representatives want to be able to advise the marketing department how to nurture that individual. Perhaps they want the marketing team to engage with several large strategic accounts and help the sales team reach prospects on a deeper and broader scale (Account Based Marketing). This is not a new concept, but we now have technologies and marketing channels that make these activities more measurable and cost effective.
Marketing Teams Want to Know Their Efforts Make a Difference
Marketers know that the buyer behavior is shifting. They know there are new channels and new marketing technologies to help them. Marketers want to transform from lead and demand generations to the modern marketing approach of engaging prospects and customers. They know that more CEOs are insisting that marketing departments demonstrate a strong ROI. Most marketing management I meet understand that the silos of old marketing structures will not work in a world where prospects interact through several channels for a single business transaction.
First Steps on the Revenue Marketing Journey
The destination is a revenue marketing organization that delivers repeatable, predictable and scalable results, generating a significant impact on the pipeline and revenue. Key milestones along the way include:
- Choosing the channels with which to engage prospects and customers
- Deploying a revenue marketing architecture that will scale
- Adopting the best processes, especially around lead management and program development
- Choosing and enforcing the right KPIs
- Overhauling the content factory
- Organizing for success
In the next post we will discuss organizing for success in revenue marketing and designing an excellent marketing center.
For more insights, download TPG’s new white paper: Introduction to the Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence.