Shrink Your Marketing Sales Funnel
Reduce The Time From ‘Inquiry’ to ‘Customer’ With Insight From Marketo
Only 50% of the leads you see are likely ready to buy. The remaining 50% enter your marketing sales funnel and find themselves on the sometimes lengthy route towards becoming a sale.
Posts on Modern B2B Marketing Blog help you effectively manage your marketing sales funnel, ensuring sales leads spend the minimum amount of time necessary transforming from an ‘inquiry’ to a ‘customer.’ Shrink your marketing funnel, and close more sales leads, with the posts below.
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How To Sell Your Marketing Budget To Your CFO
I recently received this email from a colleague who runs marketing for a security software company:
I’m getting some pushback from my CFO on the size of my proposed total marketing budget as % of forecasted revenue… Do you have any sources with basic credibility with this info that I can cite?
Selling your marketing budget to other executives is a common problem faced by B2B marketers, and looking at marketing spend as a percent of revenue (i.e. the Marketing Budget Ratio) is the most common way to set and justify marketing spend. It is an easy approach, and as "Mac" McIntosh points out, it is certainly better than just taking last year's budget and subjectively adding or cutting based on what you think worked.
Earn a Seat at the Revenue Table – Part II
In Earn a Seat at the Revenue Table – Part 1, I asked how can marketers take more control over the revenue process, build the respect of their organizational peers, and earn a seat at the revenue table.
The key is to act more like Sales (at least when it comes to driving revenue). Sales and revenue just seem to go together. Some people even use the words as synonyms (e.g. "last quarter's sales grew 10%"). Sales does not suffer from the same credibility problems as marketing, and despite their sometimes lavish expense accounts, nobody thinks of Sales as the group that just wines and dines clients. Assuming they deliver on their plans, Sales is the group with the most respect and power in the organization.
By taking the following actions from the Sales playbook, Marketing can become as closely tied to revenue as Sales.
Earn a Seat at the Revenue Table – Part I
Who is in charge of revenue at your company?
In most B2B companies, the Sales Department owns the revenue pipeline. Marketing may play a supporting role by supplying leads (that probably get ignored). But in these companies, Sales controls the revenue process and is accountable for top-line growth. As a result, Sales holds the most political power of any function.
In contrast, Marketing too often gets left out of the revenue process. I’ve seen companies where sales holds a weekly revenue call, and nobody from marketing is on the call. The executive leaders of these companies think of Marketing as a necessary but distasteful cost center, not a strategic asset that drives growth. As one marketer lamented in a recent CMO Council report, “My group is perceived by upper management as the people who do color brochures.”
Growth Champions
Strategy+Business had a great article in their summer issue by Edward Landry, Andrew Tipping, and Jay Kumar from the consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton.
The authors argue that marketers can no longer be measured by brand management, creativity, or promotional expertise – instead, they argue that "In an era of unlimited opportunities but constrained resources, the only marketing metric that matters is growth."
The authors categorize marketing departments into six basic categories
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