Thao Ngo and Emily Ward explain why marketers can't track spending and how tying marketing spend to the CRM fixes it. Clean CRM data reveals which programs work for which sales teams, letting you shift budget toward higher-converting activities and lower cost-per-sale.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
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We zoom back out into our concept of ROI marketing. In order to contribute to this funnel, how do we get there? And it's the investment part, the I of the ROI, that's often overlooked. Why? Marketers are on top of a ton of data, especially on the execution side. But when it comes to the business of marketing, that part is more challenging. and difficult to track. A lot of marketers don't really enter the field so they can scrutinize their budget. And it's a mystery. Sometimes it's hard to measure accurately. I remember looking at the monthly budget reports that I would get from finance, and I say reports, and it was completely confusing because finance reported according to their GL codes, which were meaningless for marketers. None of those reports helped me drive any marketing decisions that I needed to make. Also, the I is forgotten because maybe it's scary. Do you even want to know the truth? Can you handle it? You have programs you believe in. Are you ready to learn if they aren't worth the squeeze? But armed with that kind of ROI knowledge, it will inform your decisions. Now, I think we've all been in this situation where every year we have sales reps that that come to us and say, you know, these trade shows, we absolutely positively have to sponsor them. And with the right software, you can easily look up the ROI of any marketing program and you'd share that data back with them. And it becomes a data-driven conversation, not anyone's subjective feelings. And you're able to have this data because your marketing investment is tied directly into your CRM. And that leads us the critical importance of CRM discipline and hygiene, which near and dear to all of our hearts.
Near and dear to our hearts, but certainly not the sexiest part of the job, that's for sure. But yeah, absolutely a necessary one. So if it's not in the CRM— and I literally just came out of a meeting discussing this— then we as an organization have no way of proving that anything really happened, right? Without tracking, without attribution, we're unable to show success and the source of that success, which makes it extremely difficult to make the case for more budget, more activities, right? So I've had the privilege of working at a handful of organizations with very significant budgets, but no marketer I know has ever had an unlimited budget. So if you're out there, very lucky, but most of us working with limited budgets, right? So we always need to pick and choose where to spend our time and money. And marketing will invest all day long if we can actually see ROI. It's a no-brainer for us. It's a no-brainer for the organization. And where there is ROI, we'll certainly partner with the appropriate parties to make the case for more funding. On the flip side of that, back to priorities, it will be extremely difficult to get the time of day from marketing if there are no results or positive return. This is why it's so important that we have a source of truth for what's happening to the leads that we're generating. So this brings us to the next point, which is using this data to really identify areas of optimization. And so this is the fuel for data-driven decision-making so that we know where we wanna spend our time and resources as a business. We focus on the things that work, we optimize or phase out the things that don't. And it's pretty much as simple as that. So once I was able to instill this type of discipline at one of my former organizations, we really began to make drastic and intentional changes to the marketing mix. So the organization had previously relied heavily on one source of leads to fuel their pipeline, where conversion rates were in a steady decline and demonstrating ROI was becoming more and more challenging. So by being able to track the data at a more granular level, we were able to diversify our marketing mix shifting our investments to higher converting activities, and ultimately reducing our cost per sale, all things the organization loves. So another interesting point that Tao and I discussed was how different sales teams and players can really shine when it comes to specific activities. And so I'll let Tao chime in here with some of the examples that she shared with me.
Yeah, so looking at the data again, we're actually able to see the core competencies of each of the sales teams. So one of the companies I was at, the sales teams were organized according to the target industries that they were focused on. So for example, our sales team looking at the tech sector were crazy good at driving registration to our field events. And then we have the sales team that were focused on the CBG industry and they were much better at driving webinar registrations or leveraging content such as survey reports. So what we had is different sales teams had different ROI-driven marketing programs tailored for them. Still on the data train here as well, when we looked at trade show booth demo data, we saw that our senior account executives weren't necessarily great at taking shifts at the trade show booths. So I actually got an idea from a fellow marketing leader, so shout out to Kay, That said, just swap out, swap out the sales reps for BDRs to work the booth. And it was a great idea because the BDRs were hungrier. They were used to trying to get that first meeting. And they welcomed the face time versus hitting the phones or email. So, this is a win-win for really everybody when we were able to go back and look at the data together and make those kinds of decisions. So, it's not subjective at all. And then if we look at running marketing like a business, what does that mean? So being data-driven is important. Similarly to how a CEO would run their business, like other executives at the table, you need to be able to understand the financials of your business. This is key. So I remember moving up the ranks, I didn't get exposure to the marketing budget. It was just this black hole and you just asked for approval. approval anytime you want to spend anything. And marketing would just have to wait, often too late after the books on the quarter were already closed, whether or not you were over or under and by how much. And it really is a terrible position to be in, this waiting game to find out from finance if you were good or not. And even if you were tracking your budget diligently, if there was any discrepancy between your numbers and finance's numbers, their numbers always trumped yours.
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