Frank Donny is founder and CEO of Marseli, a marketing and sales analytics and performance software company. Frank is responsible for the firm’s capabilities, software vision and services. Frank’s remarkable 25-year career of driving marketing and sales operations divisions within Fortune 500 and start-up organizations is highlighted by his passion for business development and empowering others to succeed.
Although it seems as though everyone is talking about big data and the need to overcome the challenges of managing data, the key is to not focus on all of the data, just the right data. Start with focusing on the top 5-6 key performance indicators that you need to run your business and embed the collection and reporting of the data directly into your work stream. For marketing and sales leaders, your work stream is your CRM system. Embedded analytics can deliver intuitive performance reports right where you need them—within your CRM system. Having real-time access to simple and easy to use performance reports can play a significant role in guiding you to greater marketing success.
Embedded analytics can make marketing more efficient by providing timely new insights with previously unknown information about how your leads perform once they enter the sales pipeline as opportunities. Previously, this information has only been available to marketers at the end of the process, when marketing sourced opportunities were removed from the cycle as either a completed or failed sell. There are numerous advantages that result from having access to this information, delivered by tools that are easy to use and provide insights into relevant business events as they happen. Having analytics right in your work stream eliminates the “real view mirror” assessment of your marketing.
Increased Pipeline Integrity
Integrated performance reporting increases the integrity of your sales pipeline, and will help you deliver the right leads to your sales team. Although your marketing automation software provides marketing analytics that allow you to manage the outbound marketing efforts that generate leads to feed your pipeline, embedded analytics can help you focus your marketing efforts to deliver the most viable leads that become profitable opportunities. These analytics can provide critical information on volume and velocity trending from your pipeline at each stage in the sales cycle. This will deliver insight on the trends in your pipeline and more accurately identify upward or downward forecasts.
For example, you may have a marketing campaign that is delivering a substantial amount of qualified leads to sales that become opportunities in your pipeline. You may know that opportunities from this source typically underperform opportunities from other marketing efforts, embedded analytics can help you determine why and make the necessary adjustments to your marketing and sales efforts.
Greater Marketing ROI
One of the most important marketing analytics is your sales process stage-to-stage conversion. With conversion analytics you can quickly and easily determine which marketing campaigns and touch points work best in each stage of your sales cycle. Identifying this information can improve your marketing return on investment by identifying where you should expand, decrease and curtail your marketing expenditures.
Perhaps you have a costly and time consuming lead nurturing campaign that has been maintained because it appears to eventually deliver a high number of qualified opportunities into your sales pipeline. However, with embedded analytics you may see that the percentage of opportunities that move from the proposal stage to the negotiation stage is disproportionately low. With the proper stage-to-stage analytics you may determine that alternative marketing messaging can increase your conversion rates. Of perhaps you may determine that the ROI for this particular channel is lacking and be able to strategically dedicate these marketing resources to other higher converting channels.
Improved Overall Sales Performance
With the right marketing analytics you can have greater insight on the performance of your sales teams and sales people and identify potential challenges with opportunity retention and management. Embedded analytics can provide real-time information that can help marketing and sales managers identify where coaching or additional tools are needed to improve opportunity performance. These performance analytics can uncover adverse behaviors and help sales managers make corrective actions to increase the close ratios on opportunities generated by marketing, which will improve your overall performance report.
Existing marketing analytics do not provide real-time insight that can help identify which sales reps are losing marketing sourced opportunities and at the exact phase in the sales cycle where they seem to be falling short. However, sales process analytics could easily identify that sales rep Jim Smith only has a 25% conversion rate from proposal to contract with opportunities sourced from a certain marketing channel. Embedded analytics could also help determine that the marketing sourced opportunities are making it to the negotiation phase then stalling. This key information can identify that sales rep A needs more assistance with negotiations to close more of these opportunities.
Quality marketing analytics should provide an in-depth view of both your leading and lagging performance indicators and provide you with both the “what is wrong” and “how to fix it” analyses. Embedded analytics can provide conversion analytics from the top of your pipeline and the bottom of your pipeline, and provide new insights to your performance opportunities and actualization.
Embedded analytics that work within your CRM system to provide an in-depth view of your pipeline can bridge the gap that is frequently found between sales and marketing teams, by making the information universally accessible. Embedded marketing analytics can enable sales and marketing teams to work in conjunction and achieve greater success in pipeline management and revenue generation.