As the consumers’ habits have changed, the marketing environment has fallen in line as well. What we witness today can be described as the beginning of a new marketing era, one that is focused on value and personalizing the buying experience for each consumer. This leads to more complex strategies, data driven campaign designs and increased paid advertising efforts. It also means that, if you want to continue to play this game, you need to upgrade your tools. Sales applications, multifunctional platforms and of course, a bigger budget is required.

As the investment in technology and digital marketing increases, the need to demonstrate the ROI becomes crucial. Since there are so many options, channels, and opportunities, as a marketer, you need to prove that you have taken the best course of action and maximized the sales potential through the marketing efforts you have put in. Tracking lead generation results, as well as sales and overall gain can sometimes be difficult, unless you understand that the sales team in your company are vital for demonstrating ROI.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

To make the sales team understand their role in proving marketing ROI, you are going to need a perfect alignment of marketing and sales teams that will prove very useful in sharing information in real time and track efforts efficiently. Build a marketing platform dedicated to managing and automation of lead generation campaigns. Get a CRM software that can monitor and measure the sales activities and integrate those two softwares. It may seem tedious, but it will make your work easier, and it is worth it.

Next, you have to ensure that both the marketing and the sales team contribute to this platform and use the software as they are supposed to. The marketing team is responsible for sharing lead intelligence, such as the activity of each lead’s website, the download history, the campaign engagement and the social media interaction. They also have to share lead alerts, meaning relevant notifications, email messages, and trigger actions. The sales team has to share the history of each lead (what actions were taken and how those concluded), updates on the lead status and the amount of closed deals.

In the end, the result will be that you will have access to valuable data and in-depth knowledge regarding the efficiency of your marketing efforts. You will know exactly what works, what doesn’t and, most important, how you can improve and upgrade the processes.

You will need a lot of patience and a significant budget if you want your marketing and sales teams to fall in line. Besides the cost and effort of implementing the process, there is also the well-known grudge between the marketing and the sales team. But, in the end, after they understand that communication is vital to the success of both of their efforts, you will have two highly-functional departments that will communicate efficiently and ensure a reliable assessment of the marketing ROI.

About Johnny Huntington

Johnny has 20+ years in the advertising & communications industries under his belt. A 1st graduate in art history & commercial design and hailing from the United Kingdom, he moved into online communications early on, and now lives and works out of Dubai.

A lateral thinking innovative online communications specialist with experience of commercial research for multi-platform service projects, including design for all user interaction and delivery. He has delivered projects for Unilever, Barclays, Kraft, Hallmark, NTT Do Co Mo, Vodafone, HSBC, General Electric and many more…

TEL: +971 (0)52 290 2164