Connect Marketing with Revenue by Instrumenting your Funnel

Leading Marketing Transformation with Technology

The stakes for marketing teams continue to rise. More C-level leaders expect marketing to use technology to tie dollars spent, and the resulting leads, to revenue. It is imperative that marketing leadership can deliver that connection to revenue by utilizing technology to effectively track buyer engagement and establish their digital relationship with marketing.

Although most marketing organizations have their hands full, they must lead the charge and take responsibility for architecting a system that tracks and attributes all touch points on a buyer’s journey.  The best group to lead this is Marketing Operations.  If this role or group is not in place, it should be established and empowered to align teams and overcome the inevitable obstacles.

The Role of Marketing Operations in Marketing Transformation

A key function of the team charged with tracking buyers through the funnel is to serve as the change management agent. They drive transformation not just in marketing, but across the entire organization.  Change is hard, and organizations often resist change even more than individuals.  For organizations to support and embrace change, they need to understand the benefits.

Establishing the benefits of change requires alignment around the goals and outcomes.  A cross-team working group helps build alliances and keeps everyone connected.  It also creates stakeholders.  The team should include representatives from all groups that touch leads through their funnel journey. This includes agencies, marketing, web team, IT, telemarketing/inside sales and sales.

Being able to see every touch point through the funnel, marketing can identify which programs and activities generate leads that convert at the highest rates. Once complete, marketing can deliver sales the leads the group wants and the sales team can focus on selling.

The Process of Marketing Transformation: Instrumenting your Funnel – Connect Marketing with Revenue

Rather than attempting to boil the ocean, prioritize.  Begin with a focus on major conversion points and align teams to communicate at these conversion points.  Start with the connection from the website to marketing systems to ensure the lead source is attributed correctly.  Work with sales and sales ops to ensure that the lead is tracked through the funnel, and that its attributes stay connected. This should happen even when lead is handed off from marketing to sales and moved to another system, as well as when the lead is converted to an opportunity.

Instrumenting the funnel to retain lead attribution through conversion points makes it possible to access rich data. This will  reveal what is and is not working, and will ultimately track marketing to revenue.