Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

“Nearly 63 percent of small-business marketers say they can’t track the return on investment of their marketing programs and point to poor feedback from sales regarding the status of leads as a prime culprit, according to a new study by the Sales Lead Management Association,” reports Christopher Hosford, senior reporter BtoB magazine.

The study also notes that marketers are also to blame with 56 percent of respondents stating they do not qualify their leads before sending them to sales; And you wonder why sales doesn’t trust marketing’s judgment?

We have always purported that determining who is real and where they are in the buying process is essential in determining whether or not a prospect is ready for interaction from your sales team. Our recent webinar hosted by Andrew Gaffney, Editor of the DemandGen report, “Real Revenue Gains with Marketing Automation” showed how this plays out in the real world with real companies:

• 2-4x higher Lead Conversion Rates for companies using lead scoring

• 181% higher average close rates from the use of Marketing Automation systems

• Bid-Win ratios 150% higher for organizations that deliver real-time lead alerts to sales

• Sales teams with database filtering tools reported 200% higher average revenue growth in 2008

Automation has helped B2B and B2C companies alike automatically qualify potential leads by scoring each individual prospect based on their engagement with your company, demographic profile and timing. With multiple scoring techniques to choose from, marketing/sales teams can fully understand how each prospect moved to the front of the line. Custom scores based on virtually any single or compound criteria also proved valuable in identifying unique buying behaviors.

And while Marketing Automation vendors , including eTrigue, continue to promote the importance of aligned marketing and sales teams. According to the study, “too many of these types of organizations operate within isolated silos and have not found a way to align the objectives of sales and marketing.”

Please visit the following link to read Hosford’s article:

Study: Small companies can’t track campaign ROI, fail to qualify leads

An interesting article by Andrew Gaffney of the DemandGen Report “New ROI Study Shows Firms with Ops Teams, Metrics Outgrowing Competitors” highlighted a new study by the Lenskold Group / MarketSphere that showed that firms with Marketing Ops are outpacing their competitors 52% to 46%.

“We consistently see that the high performing marketing organizations tend to have advantages in marketing operations, strengths in generating insights, and ROI discipline,” says report author Jim Lenskold, president of Manasquan, NJ-based consultancy the Lenskold Group. “The economic pressures are increasing the demand for measurements and ROI, and should motivate marketers to improve their capabilities. It is a critical time to understand and manage marketing effectiveness. And as marketers experience the opportunity to improve marketing effectiveness with better insight, we would expect those practices to hold steady and continue on beyond the economic recovery.”

This is a trend we have seen for some time. Firms are measuring both their marketing programs and marketing organizations more than ever before. The ROI of marketing spend and the volume of sales-qualified-leads delivered to sales are now common measures for compensating marketing executives.

Measurement is just one aspect of the general shift marketing organizations are making as they begin to own the upper portion of the sales funnel. “A more operational approach to the marketing function makes organizations more accountable and more efficient.” According to Mark Lewis, Director of Marketing at Fujitsu Computer Products. “Just as Sales organizations have added Ops support to better understand and manage the sales cycle, marketing organizations need to measure their performance as well.”

And while Marketing departments are becoming more analytical, don’t expect the science of marketing to render the art of marketing obsolete. As Dan Pink describes in his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, the right side of the brain skills such as creativity, empathy, contextual, and big picture thinking are going to become increasingly important as we outsource and automate marketing.

Is your marketing organization measuring its way to success?