Do Sales value the leads you generate for them? Do you track those leads through the sales cycle so you can determine how much revenue a particular campaign generated?

Do you qualify leads that you generate and only send Sales the ones that are “sales ready”? Do you run nurturing campaigns for leads that are not “sales ready”?

Do you have a partner channel and if so do you track leads through this channel? Can you report to your board how much revenue your marketing budget generated?

 

These are all questions that can be answered if you close the loop between the marketing and sales processes within your organisation.

Implementing a process such as the one illustrated below not only allows you to perform an in-depth analysis of the success of your campaigns but also to feed this analysis into the planning of the next campaign. It also feeds the marketing database with a rich source of historic information that can be used to run highly targeted campaigns.

Nurturing campaigns can also be devised to warm-up potential prospects before they are passed to sales so every lead they receive is a hot "sales-ready" lead.

Key benefits

• Analysis of previous campaigns can be used within the Campaign planning process to maximise success and avoid previous failures.
  
• Historic information allows precise campaign targeting.
  
• Leads are qualified and scored before passing to Sales to maximise their time spent selling.
  
• Leads that are not yet sales ready can be fed into nurturing campaigns.
  
• Leads are tracked by Marketing through the sales cycle to see if the leads they generated were of the correct type and quality.
  
• Campaigns can be analysed by the number and quality of leads they generated, the number of leads passed to sales, the sales cycle length, the number won and lost.
  
• Can provide ROI measurement of marketing budget and help in forecasting marketing expenditure based on sales targets.

How can we help?

To many businesses achieving a closed-loop process for marketing and sales is a complex proposition.  We can overcome this complexity by advising on best practice, helping you fill in the gaps in the administration of this process and by offering a tailored service encompassing the provision and hosting of a marketing database and ongoing data services to maintain it. Alternatively we can work with your IT department to help build the relevant infrastructure in-house.