It is Time for Marketing to Fully Embrace Analytics

More and more marketing efforts are applying metrics to gauge their success or failure.  This trend is not stopping and metrics will become a critical requirement in ensuring marketing has a seat at the key decision maker's table.

Forrester recently published a paper on Lead to Revenue Management for Tech Marketing that takes a look into making revenue the focal point of marketing activities.  In my opinion, this has been too long in coming.  Many marketing efforts are content to focus on merely getting leads; regardless of the quality.  This type of measurement usually leads to a lead quantity game.  Sales organization typically despise these types of activities as they have little time to track down poor quality leads.  The Forrester paper mentions that marketing should be more responsible for nurturing leads as well.  This would definitely keep marketing organizations focused on attaining quality leads.  By having marketing teams focus on revenue as opposed to merely lead gathering their strategies and approaches to marketing efforts should become more outcome driven.  However, tying marketing to close to sales is not without its own issues.

These issues include marketing focusing on more short term goals and not thinking about the lifetime value of a customer.  All too often sale teams are focused on their quarterly numbers and it is marketing who represents the long term view of the market and customer.  It is critical that marketing not lose that view.  In addition, measuring revenue against marketing activities can be difficult.  This is an issue that the Forrester report doesn't cover that much.  Tying revenue to marketing activities is difficult in that marketing efforts often move potential customers through different stages of the sales cycle and this process takes time.

  Depending on how long the sales cycle is can determine how marketing efforts to revenue should be measured.  But for organizations that don't have the sales process from lead to conversion completely mapped out measuring marketing to revenue is almost impossible.  Marketo has written a number white papers which address this issue of marketing to revenue and time.  I recommend this one as a good read before starting a measurement program.

Ultimately, measuring the impact to sales of marketing efforts can help with forecasts.  Predictive models can help sales, manufacturing and even CMOs work together to help drive the business.  The time for marketing efforts to be better to tied to sales is now.  The fun really begins in choosing a model that takes into account both the time of sale funnel and the methods of nurturing customers through the process.  It may be a long journey to get to a predictive marketing model but it is a journey we should start now.

What are your thoughts?