Dr. CHAKRAPANI GOPAL
Today as B2B marketers are immersed into all directions the role of marketing are multifaceted. The modernization and deployment of new technology, and new customer behaviour needs a special mention. The expectation from the CXOs is to pay immediate attention to customer needs and deliverables are the key to success stories.
As a cost center, marketers at this stage report general, activity-based metrics, such as number of ads and impressions. For many organizations, this is largely a unperceptive spend, represents a expensive budget, and provides metrics that key executives don’t care about.
The responsibilities of Revenue Marketer are:
ĂĽ Focus on revenue impact
ĂĽ Runs the numbers
ĂĽ Integrates with sales
ĂĽ Fully leverages technology
ĂĽ Earns a seat at the executive table by showing concrete revenue
ĂĽ Creates a new Revenue Marketing team, with new skills
There are four distinct stages of Revenue Marketing Transformation —
ĂĽ Traditional
ĂĽ Lead Generation
ĂĽ ĂĽ Revenue Marketing.
The journey helps us to identify where we are today, and also provides insight into where our organization can be.
Stage 1: Traditional Marketing
Traditional Marketing is the four Ps of marketing. Millions of marketing organizations operate in the Traditional Marketing stage. Marketing is purely a cost center at the traditional stage which involves in product marketing, marketing communications and branding. Metrics include budgets to actual spend and impressions.
Stage 2: Lead Generation
Lead Generation marketers provide leads to sales, though there isn’t an contract between them as to what constitutes a qualified lead. They typically invest in organic search, paid search, advertising, leads list purchases, and a siloed email system.
Key Metrics include: emails sent, open rate, click through rate, form submissions and per lead cost.
Stage 3: Demand Generation
Organizations in Demand Generation have invested in a marketing automation system and have integrated it with CRM. Demand Generation is the stage that begins providing tangible revenue contribution from marketing. Marketing and sales begin to work together and are united by a single view of the customer. It is a single funnel to pull high quality leads into the top of the funnel, and pull opportunities through the funnel faster. Marketing is now taking responsibility for contribution to pipeline and closed business. Fewer than 10,000 organizations have reached this phase. This is the stage CXOs pay attention
Key metrics include: Number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) sent to sales, number of days to close, percent conversion to opportunity, percent contribution to pipeline, and percent conversion to close
Stage 4: Revenue Marketing
Revenue Marketing increases sales-ready leads at the top of the funnel. This accelerates opportunities through the sales pipeline. This is a optimized stage, revenue generated and attributed to marketing is now repeatable, predictable, and scalable, allowing marketing to both report on and forecast revenue. The Head of Revenue Marketing is able to create a forecast that aligns tightly with sales to ensure the revenue goal is reached. Only about 500 marketing organizations are in the Revenue Marketing stage.
Further there are three stages to propel Revenue Marketing –
Work with the team to assess where you are on the sales process – where you are currently? where you need to be? how will you get there? what happens when nothing is done? What constitutes a qualified lead? what kind of questions are customers asking? what can marketing do to help you connect with customers? and create a plan and vision
Begin the revenue marketing dialog with executives – provide proof points and data to build a business case to support your plan, factoring in return on investment and revenue impact, socialize this plan with your executive team, and find an executive advocate.
CFO is always a best choice at the stage
Socialize the plan with sales – provide proof points and data to show what this translates into from a revenue perspective. At this stage sales terms are used – more revenue, meeting and exceeding quota, higher average deal size, faster sales cycles, etc.
What it takes to be successful revenue marketers lies in clear vision, intentionality, commitment and courage.
To conclude, revenue marketing is simply marketing done from a different perspective. The ultimate goal is to create repeatable and measurable campaigns that drive new customers and increase sales revenue marketing’s key differentiator is its emphasis on measuring return on investment. It prioritizes strategies, tactics, and tools that bring tangible results to the organization. It measures everything it can, and tries to find a way to attribute those metrics to sales at the end of the cycle.
References:
Three Steps forward your Revenue Marketing journey B2B Marketing
Revenue Marketing Journey Pedowitz Group
The Rise of the Revenue Marketer, Marketo September 2011
