3 Ways Marketing Impacts the Bottom Line

Posted by: Lisa Cramer | Posted on: March 22nd, 2011 | 0 Comments

We are often asked by marketers how they can get the budget they need to drive leads they need to meet company objectives.  CEOs often ask us how to get more from their marketing group.  There’s an adjustment needed in marketing that is starting to take hold and it comes from the change in the buying process. Below are the 3 ways marketing can impact the bottom line.

1.    Drive Revenue

a.    Marketing can have a direct impact on revenue if they spend the time and effort to implement a lead management process that drives better qualified leads to sales. This means that marketing needs to start accumulating data (digital behavior) about the prospect and driving interaction with the prospect. This gives marketers the ability to pass sales teams leads that have shown some level of interest in the products or services they offer.

b.    Marketing must also take on the responsibility to nurture leads that are not quite ready to buy.  Instead of passing over inquiries and suspects straight from a website for sales teams to ignore or waste time with, marketers can keep those prospects  engaged and the company’s name top of mind so that when they are ready to buy, they think of your company first.

2.    Reduce Sales Costs

a.    Maximizing sales resources or more specifically maximizing revenue per sales rep and revenue per employee are two important metrics for any company.  Marketing can directly help drive these numbers by helping sales people focus their efforts on prospects that are more likely to buy rather than spending their time calling inquiries and suspects that are either not qualified or are not ready to talk to a salesperson.  In today’s internet-driven society, most prospects gain some amount of information online without the “help” of a salesperson.   With this digital behavior now available, marketers must take the responsibility of tracking those insights and interpreting them as best as possible.  This digital behavior, coupled with additional data about the prospect, will help sales reps maximize their time, and therefore, reduce wasted costs.

b.    Additionally, sales teams will now have added intelligence available about the prospect when they make their outbound calls. This should make for a “warmer” call, helping engage the prospect initially.

3.    Maximize Marketing Budgets

a.    It’s often difficult for marketers to get the budget they believe they need because they can’t quantify the return on their     marketing dollars. Marketing needs to start gaining visibility into additional metrics that go beyond traditional opens and clicks. They need to start tracking the number of qualified leads passed to sales and where those leads flow through the funnel into opportunities and sales.  Marketers are often unable to gain that visibility through lack of systems and processes.  This should be an essential element in any lead management process and now is enabled through marketing automation and CRM systems.