A few weeks ago, I was on a project status review call with a marketing leader who runs demand generation for one of our customers, a SaaS company. During the call he said that he was asked an interesting question by the sales leader at the company and he wanted to discuss how to go about answering that question. Been working with the company for over a year, I know the sales leader personally who is one of those few leaders who truly understand nuances of sales/marketing data and leverage analytics to drive performance on a daily basis. Knowing this sales leader well, I had a feeling that something interesting was coming up and boy was I right!
He told me that the sales leader had asked him a very interesting question –
“For all the deals that they had closed in that quarter, how and at which points in the deal cycle did marketing influence them”?
If you are in marketing, I am sure many of you have been asked such questions by the sales leaders you have been working with. Some of you might have the capabilities in place to answer such questions to some extent but hold your thoughts as it is about to get interesting.
For this customer, we had just built a new “Pipeline Influence” dashboard as part of the marketing BI infrastructure that we had been building. We had also added the metrics to track pipeline by “Marketing Sourced and Influenced” based on marketing engagements from the accounts before or after opportunity creation. We had implemented attribution methodology as well to enable us to track marketing’s influence on the pipeline.
We were in pretty good shape as far as the marketing analytics roadmap for this customer was concerned and I did not take a moment to brag about the fact that we already have all the details to answer such questions from the sales leader. To this, the marketing leader said that just tracking at a high level how many opportunities and pipeline were influenced by marketing tactics/channels was not enough and that the sales leader wanted to understand
“How and when during each deal, marketing enabled the AEs to move the deals through the funnel towards closing”?
When I heard these words, I asked the marketing leader to repeat them for me because they sounded super melodious and immediately had my analytics juices flowing. I realized that this discussion between the 2 leaders was not just about who is taking the credit for a deal but it involved going above and beyond to truly understand how best to leverage marketing when it comes to closing deals, especially the strategic ones.
To answer these questions, we needed the ability to do “Deal Dissection” in pursuit of understanding how sales and marketing teams were partnering during the deal cycles. To this day, I think this is the true description of “sales and marketing alignment”, the term that has been abused beyond words.
After having a few follow-up discussions with the customer and reviewing the capabilities we had in place, I drafted what the ultimate solution would like that would enable sales and marketing leaders to track these details. The result is our “Customer Journey” framework and I am super excited to share about this with everyone. This is the best part of being at marqeu and having the opportunity to partner with some of the smartest data-driven marketers. Every day our customers are asking such thought-provoking questions that push the boundaries of our knowledge so as to deliver on our commitments. It is this never-ending quest that helps us continuously add value for our customers by leveraging data and analytics.
In our customer journey framework, we enabled sales and marketing teams to do sorts of “MRI of each deal” on the fly.
We have the ability to look at 1 deal or combination of deals right from the very first marketing touch across each persona to the last touch for the deal closure.
We also provide the visibility to look at general trends (clusters) of marketing tactics that work for each sales segment, the industry of customers, for new business vs cross/up-sell etc. along with the insights into what decision makers vs practitioners engage with and in what phase of the deal cycle. All these insights are like gold mine when it comes to leveraging data for personalized and contextual experience for customers. It also drives efficiency in marketing execution and a higher ROI as marketing has the key insights to fine tune the programs down to each account, industry, product line or geography.
The insights from the customer journey framework and the associated dashboards are not only relevant from the sales perspective but they drive building the marketing playbooks especially for ABM programs.
With the right marketing analytics strategy, organizations can empower the teams with these critical insights so that they each team member is able to make data-driven decisions around marketing optimization and actively contribute towards driving the data-driven culture within the organization.
The best part of the customer journey framework project is not the dashboard that was delivered to enable teams to access such deep-rooted intelligence on the fly but the approach with which we went about delivering on it. We started with the key (and extremely relevant) business questions that this sales leader asked. We then reviewed what we could answer with the capabilities we had put in place based on earlier asks, had follow-up discussions to understand further what was being asked for, how it would be used and then we went about building the solution with the set of tools we already had in the organization. Most of the modern marketing teams use some kind of analytics tools and we have seen that conversations always revolve around what fancy tools each company has in their so-called tech stacks, new tools that they can get but the conversation most of the times is not about what business questions are being asked, the solution approaches that are relevant to those questions and the organization. We think these kinds of conversations set apart the high performing organizations.
We are always on the lookout for inputs and examples from the marketing and sales communities to keep adding value for our customers. We would welcome the inputs from other leaders and practitioners around what kind of questions are being asked by sales and marketing teams at your organizations and how you go about answering them.