Stop Letting Sales Get All the Credit!

Sick of the sales team getting a trophy while the marketing team fights for budget? It’s no fun. I’ve been there too.

Many of our clients ask: “How do I demonstrate the value of marketing to my sales-driven CEO?” This is especially tricky for business-to-business (B2B) companies with products that are high-consideration and have a long sales cycle. Here’s how you should approach the issue…

Track by Company, Not Individual

Stop looking at how your marketing programs interact with just the small percentage of known visitors or leads from a particular customer or prospect. Most companies can only identify about 5 percent of their site’s traffic as registered users. So marketing only gets credit for activity with these known leads (registered visitors). But, most B2B companies will have many stakeholders involved in the decision-making process.

So, identify which company these anonymous visitors are likely from and combine them together to get an aggregate view of a company’s total activity and engagement. For example, early in the buying process, you could have analysts and then marketing people engaging with content about specific use cases and case studies. Then you might have IT folks reviewing white papers. At the end of the process, finance or C-level executives could review your company’s profile. See the example tracking spikes in engagement scores for each role in a prospective customer.

Marketing interacts and nurtures all the different influencers and stakeholders over weeks or months and across many different channels and campaigns. Identifying and tracking all the people associated with a particular prospect company will allow you to show all of the marketing activity and touchpoints in advance of a salesperson even engaging a prospect. The right agency partner and tools such as Demandbase can help you identify visitors through advanced reverse-IP lookup and other means.

Sales usually engages with fewer stakeholders later in the funnel, but they’re tracking every touchpoint with the prospect so when the sale is closed, they can puff out their chest and say, “It’s all about me, baby!”

These “company-level engagement scores” even the playing field between sales and marketing and will shine a bright light on all the fantastic work you’re doing. The scores will also tell your sales team where to focus their efforts – so you can not only get some credit, but maybe even a trophy ;)

This column was originally published on July 23, 2012.