Revenue Performance Management: Webtrends Tackles Data Overload
There are times when knowing a lot about one thing can make answering a simple question difficult.
Take Webtrends, for instance. A top provider of social and mobile analytics, Webtrends is an expert at helping organizations leverage and measure campaigns across blogs, Facebook, Twitter…the list goes on and on.
But for Myllisa Patterson, Senior Marketing Optimization Analyst at Webtrends, all that expertise drilling deep down into analytics created an internal struggle. “We had a build it first and ask questions later mentality,” Myllisa said.
The problem was that company had all kinds of homegrown applications, various explanations for a myriad of different data points, not to mention an overly customized Salesforce CRM solution. “Questions like ‘How many leads did we generate?’ were really difficult to answer, and we would end up with several reports and all kinds of explanations,” Myllisa said. That inability to quickly call up data to demonstrate marketing impact on closed deals created tensions between sales and marketing.
Webtrends’ first mandate was to simplify the process for collecting leads, converting them to opportunities so that they could get a better understanding of the data. So the company engaged Eloqua to serve as the marketing automation solution that would sit between lead engagement and CRM. But that partnership revealed deeper issues that needed to be addressed.
“When we really dug into the issues, it wasn’t that the reporting that was so terrible,” Myllisa said. “It was agreeing on what a lead is. Eloqua was really instrumental with us getting in line with sales.”
Through intensive meetings with sales, Webtrends marketing team ironed out common definitions for what qualified as a sales-ready lead. That level of agreement between sales and marketing led to a fundamental shift towards Revenue Performance Management. “We hold ourselves accountable by taking ownership of a certain percentage pipe. Now I know how many marketing leads I need to generate to reach that number and we apply that model to all our campaigns we run,” Myllisa said.
For Myllisa, RPM not only led to faster access to understandable data, but it introduced a new means for driving predictable results, a more robust lead management system, and opened up the lines of communication between marketing and sales.
“We have a common goal. We are contributing to that goal and helping them meet that number,” she said. “It’s empowering as a marketer to know that this is what success looks like. And at the end of the day, that’s pretty much the gist of it.”
