Many companies leave the numbers up to the sales team. Hot leads, warm leads, cold leads, lead conversion rates, quotas, etc.
But what about the marketing team?
Leaving any sort of numeric measurement entirely to the sales team is where many businesses go wrong. Marketers need a number to strive for, too!
Marketing team goals usually end up being more general, such as generating larger email lists or increasing website visits and leads. But without creating measurable, time-bound goals (that are also attainable) there is no way to know whether the marketing team is truly reaching its full potential.
Unifying your sales and marketing departments into one aligned Smarketing team will give your company an advantage. That way you can set business goals and then divide them into sales and marketing-specific objectives.
Marketing Numbers
Start by setting an overall business plan, say having one new client a month or increasing revenue X amount by the end of the year. Then work backward to find out how many sales that would require, then how many sales, website visits, etc.
For example, for a revenue increase of $500,000 you might need 10 new clients within the next year, that would mean 500 new leads and 20,000 website visitors. Marketing needs to find a way to get those web visits.
Use that process to determine the number of Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) your company will need to reach its goals. That way the marketing team can take those MQLs and nurture them into SQLs making it easy for the sales team to close a deal.
These can also be linked to specific campaigns, such as a series of emails your team is sending out about a new products or service you are offering. Add numbers to that, too. “We will send out _____ emails with the hope of gaining ______ new clients.”
Another way to add a number to marketing services is to determine where your team would like to be ranked in certain searches. Such as saying that by the end of a specific time period your company would like to be ranked first for those who search a keyword that is hot in your industry.
That will determine exactly what your Smarketing team will be striving for.
Learn From Those Numbers
No campaign is going to be perfect the first time you try it. That’s why measurable goals are so important, so a company can tell when they are succeeding and when they are not.
When you are not reaching your goals it is time to meet with the entire Smarketing team to decide whether the goal was unreachable, or what needs to be changed to attain that in the next month or year.
Specifically the marketing department needs to be constantly learning what can and should be improved in order to help the sales side get high-quality leads so that they can make the sales the company depends on.
Takeaway
Sales and marketing teams are not known for working well together, but by unifying them into a Smarketing team they can work together to achieve overarching company goals. With that, give marketing teams specific numbers to strive for so they can measure their successes the way the sales team does.
This article was originally published by SyneCore
Author: Laura Sievert
Published: March 14, 2014
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