As marketing performance management (MPM) evolves, I anticipate that marketing and lead generation dashboards will likely be a hot topic.
What’s a lead generation dashboard look like? I’ve included a recent dashboard that we created for a CEO. It is designed it to show their marketing ROI metrics for all of their lead generation modalities (fictional data).
Why was this dashboard created? Our client’s CEO asked one critical question, “What’s our marketing team’s contribution to sales revenue?” This simple question required them to tie their marketing and lead generation results directly to each new sales new generated.
Still, dashboards won’t be the ‘end all and be all’ solution for marketers. They can’t fix an underperforming marketing, sales or lead generation team.
Since marketing and sales are iterative, dashboards are best used to help you understand your baseline ROI metrics and spot trends. They should not be used as a command and control system.
If you seek to create something like this yourself, be prepared to spend a majority of your dashboard development efforts on collaborating with your sales team to understand their sales process and ensuring data point accuracy before looking at the technology needed.
Many CRM providers, database gurus and a few agencies have preset forms to create dashboards. I’ve found that most of them don’t work well for most companies that have a complex sale.
The first step is to develop a collaborative culture that is committed to closing-the-loop on marketing investments. Your efforts must go beyond the marketing department or your plan simply won’t work. It really needs to come from the bottom up, starting with your customers’ buying process and your sales process.
Brian Carroll is the CEO of InTouch Inc. InTouch is a 50-person company focused on delivering effective lead generation solutions for “the complex sale.”
Brian authors the very interesting B2B Lead Generation Blog which focuses on B2B lead generation, sales leads, and marketing for the complex sale.
