B2B Conversations Now

Jon Miller of Marketo made an excellent point in Paul Dunay’s podcast Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus. Jon said “Sales is very measurable in terms of outcomes (results), but it’s very hard to measure the activities of sales. Marketing is the other way around. It is really easy to measure all the marketing activities, but it is hard to measure the outcomes.”

In that single quote lies the dilemma for B2B Marketers trying to generate sales ready leads for their organization. It struck me as one of those perfect comments that goes to the heart of what EchoQuote solves. Here is his statement visually:

This is where Marketers get off the track and end up sabotaging their own efforts. Since a sales oriented organization is always measuring results in terms of sales, Marketing mistakenly tries to “map back” from sales results to marketing activities as shown here:

This approach is sabotaging the B2B Marketer’s efforts in several ways.

First, most sales people will not want to admit that marketing “found” any of their deals; it diminishes their value to the organization. Take it from an IT sales person with 15 years of selling experience, we single handedly generate every deal, at least in our own mind! This is where some of the misalignment between sales and marketing originates.

Second, and more obvious, B2B Marketers are shortchanging their efforts by tying their results to the sales pipeline. Slicing up the pipeline pie implies that marketing always generates less than what is shown in the sales forecast. If the eMarketer is lucky he may get credit for 25%.

So, what is the B2B Marketer left with to quanitfy her value to the organization? She must create measurement in some other fashion, usually in the form of lead count, lead rank, analytics and page clicks, etc. All of these traditional measurement methods are coming under greater scrutiny because they don’t map to the real goal: revenue.

To solve this problem, B2B Marketers need to find a way to capture the real, top-line contribution to the organization. What I mean by that is that Marketers need to look at the actual products and services an organization sells and tie their results to the potential lead value generated based on the price of those items. If an organization sells widgets for $100,000 and marketing has generated leads for 5000 widgets then the marketing forecast/funnel is $500,000,000. Taking that and mapping it into our original chart we have:

When I present this to marketing people during our EchoQuote demo, their first reaction is often “we can’t do that, not all of those deals in the marketing funnel are going to generate revenue”. My answer is twofold; marketing is not responsible for closing the deals just helping locate them and second, all the deals in the sales funnel are not going to close either, believe me. Quit being afraid to post a big, potential number, the VP of Sales does.

If you are an eMarketer engaged in B2B marketing activities see if you can come up with a way to map your lead generation activities to sales oriented numbers like revenue potential. Think in terms of a marketing funnel the same way the sales team thinks in terms of a sales funnel. You will gain a lot of traction inside your organization.

Tags: B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, Lead Generation //