Marketing Magazine’s industry advisory board chairman and Deakin University senior lecturer Michael Valos recently asked two good questions for an opinion piece he is researching. Here are my answers:
Q1 What is the best way to measure marketing performance?
ANSWER: If you are operating in a B2B environment, you will need an integrated front-end business technology platform supported by engaged people and aligned processes. This means a CRM married with a marketing automation tool, an enterprise-grade website content management solution and a sophisticated, business-driven analytics application. Ideally, your CRM is also fully integrated with your ERP system, enabling you to understand what’s happening with your recurring revenue. Without these tools, plus the right people and the processes, you cannot effectively measure your contribution to the business in these terms:
- Marketing-sourced pipeline revenue
- Marketing-sourced closed-won revenue
- Marketing-influenced pipeline revenue
- Marketing-influenced closed-won revenue
- Marketing-influenced recurring revenue
- Net promoter score
- Customer effort score
Q2 What are the major challenges that hinder this
- Poor leadership
- A failure to give more than lip service to the reality that the customer experience is the decisive differentiator and is, in reality, the new marketing
- Limited vision
- Ineffectual change management
- Business failing to engage with IT as a genuine partner
- Traditional sales & marketing misalignment
- Siloed organisational structures
- A conventional approach to analytics, resulting in reports without actionable insights
