VIDEO: Lead Generation Strategies: Tracking Leads

Aligning the efforts of your sales team and Marketing team will effectively increase revenue by targeting more sales accepted leads and moving them through the Sales funnel faster. So how do you align your sales department and marketing department to operate as one entity? At TechnologyAdvice, we like to call this alignment of sales and marketing, Smarketing. That’s why we’ve included this in our Smarketing video series. Right now marketing teams are having trouble tracking which campaigns are most effective in bringing in the right leads.

Marketers will watch a lead for weeks only to find it drop off their radar when handed off to the sales team. To prevent this drop off, Sales and Marketing need to add a return flights to their leads. To do this you will need to establish a bi-directional integration between the data systems that marketing uses and sales work from. CRM’s and Marketing Automation platforms communicate through an API. Some software, like Marketo and Salesforce, come with a compatible API out of the box.

When you have both your marketing system and sales systems integrated with each other, both teams have end-to-end visibility into lead information and status. Sales reps can see where leads originated, how they were qualified, and how long they have been active. Marketers can track close rates and other conversion metrics. Here are a few ways system integration can maximize the impact of cooperation between sales and marketing. First, Closed-loop reporting allows you to track a lead from brand awareness to deal close.

This gives you a complete picture of how your marketing efforts impact revenue. Second is a shared pipeline. The Marketing pipeline and Sales pipeline have always been separate. Combining them into one continuous process will help each team visualize lead progress and better understand their common goals. The last is Lead Assignment. Lead assignment rules can be set up through your software. The software will automatically assign leads to specific sales reps based on certain criteria.

This helps streamline the sales cycle, and makes monitoring progress easier for individual leads. It also allows you to check the status of a high priority lead through a single point of contact in sales. This is helpful for larger companies with multi-site sales teams. Now that both Sales and Marketing shares a pipeline, build an Attribution Model. This will allow you to map the buyer journey and identify your touchpoints that contributed to a conversion.

Utilizing your newly closed loop between sales and marketing and tracking data with your attribution model, you can now focus on the sources and tactics that produce high-quality leads. Marketers can now utilize metrics that measure Lead-to-customer ratios, Average cost per lead, Average Lead Value, and Lead-to-close cycle time. CMOs can now deliver Return on Investment statistics to their CFOs, and in turn calculate how effective their marketing efforts are in the company. Making you a Smarter Marketer, by combining Sales and Marketing.