Two things are certain.
1. Driving all leads directly into the SFA or contact management solution is a losing proposition – for both marketing and sales.
2. Marketing resources will be cut unless ROI can be validated and continuously optimized.
B2B companies with sizeable marketing investments recognize the need to improve marketing effectiveness as well as the limitations of marketing modules that have been “tacked on” to CRM applications. As you evaluate marketing effectiveness, if the answer is NO to any of these twelve questions, it’s probably time to complement your CRM application with a best-of-breed solution built from the ground up to optimize B2B lead generation and fill the pipeline – not just forecast it.
Campaign set-up and execution
1. Are marketing efforts closely aligned with the sales cultivation process?
2. Can personalized and metric-rich landing pages be set-up without the help of IT resources?
3. Are supporting vendors, including outsourced telemarketing resources, held accountable through a centralized real-time solution?
4. Is personalization technology fully leveraged to optimize response and lead capture rates?
Tracking
5. Is a unified solution that reports real-time on all marketing channels shared with sales management?
6. Can marketing easily determine which lead generation channels and specific sources are driving the best quality leads – early in a campaign?
7. Are web visits directly correlated to marketing efforts and appended to a unified contact history profile?
8. Does marketing have real-time insight into the follow-up productivity of high quality leads?
Refinement & ROI Reporting
9. Is marketing ROI reporting in the CRM application 100% accurate?
10. Does real-time “projected ROI” (based on lead quality) factor into early refinement of the marketing channel strategy?
11. Is lead quality systematically captured and improved – based on specific sales qualification criteria?
12. Are search engine advertising, list and offer strategies systematically improved based on the quality of leads captured?
Before you evaluate potential best-of-breed solutions, identify the additional savings and revenue generated from solving each of these and other points that support your business objectives. The sum of additional revenue generated will identify the optimal solutions – not brand names or promises to modify an application that is not specifically designed to optimize marketing effectiveness.
Jeff Kostermans is CEO of LeadGenesys, the leading web-based solution designed specifically to optimize B2B marketing and sales effectiveness. A prolific writer on the topic of B2B marketing and sales, Mr. Kostermans consults Fortune 2000 companies on how to get the most ROI out of their investment in marketing and sales. Download free tips papers at: www.leadgenesys.com
