6 Marketing Automation New Year's Resolutions - #2

Marketing Automation New Year's Resolution #2:
ALIGN TO ONE VIEW OF THE TRUTH

There are 4 steps to this:

Step 1: Fully Integrate Marketing Automation to CRM
Sales enablement tools are a crucial component of marketing automation. It is marketing's gift to sales in helping them identify not only a pecking order of who to call first, second, third but also to provide key insight into online behaviors that will drive a much more relevant conversation. Getting Lead, Company and Contact data in full 2-way sync between CRM and Eloqua is what keeps the trust and value of these sales enablement tools in place for salespeople. It's what establishes one view of the truth.

Step 2: Set up a Full Lead Funnel Stage Evaluation Process

If you haven't yet fully adopted the Sirius Decisions Funnel model, you should. It opens up some extremely insightful reporting capabilities.

SUSPECT | INQUIRY | MQL | SAL | SQL | CLOSED WON

• How many leads are at each stage of your funnel?
• Is this number growing or shrinking?
• How long have they been at each stage?
• What is the conversion rate to the next stage of the funnel?
• What is is costing you to get these conversions at each stage?

Step 3: Align All Reporting to Support the Goal of the CEO
Tracking your marketing effectiveness at the level described above helps provide tangible metrics to the CEO as proof that their goal is being adopted by both sales and marketing, supported, measured and (hopefully) reached.

Step 4: Evaluate the Overall Health of the Data
As you evaluate the metrics above you will begin to spot weaknesses in effectiveness. Certain target groups might be performing better than others for instance. Conversions from Inquiry to MQL may be lower than expected. It's time to take a hard look at the completeness of your data.

You'll never get out of the Batch and Blast era of marketing without focusing on your data. This is typically a huge problem for most companies. Legacy databases, 3rd party list rentals, no data acquisition standards -- the result: incomplete and unreliable data. It's time to evoke a full data standardization process.

Updated 5-8-12
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See all 6 Marketing Automation New Year's Resolutions:

Resolution #1 - Establish Corporate Alignment
Resolution #2 - Establish One View of the Truth
Resolution #3 - Establish Data Standardization
Resolution #4 - Fill in the Content Gaps
Resolution #5 - Tighten the Plumbing
Resolution #6 - Harvest the Unknown Visitor

Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

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