The secret of successfully developing a jointly managed demand generation engine
After years of experimentation and plenty of flops, marketers are getting more conscious of the importance of linking sales with marketing automation to effectively impact revenue growth and their organisation’s bottom line. However, in the future it’s not going to be sales alone that need to make an effort to harvest profits for their business. “To be successful, it needs to be done jointly. It is about creating alignment and transparency between sales and marketing,” says Mitchell Mackey, Head of Marketing at Ansell.
Marketing automation has risen to prominence in recent years as it aids marketers with driving revenue and improving operational efficiency. The tool is about automating the routine and repeatable tasks associated with lead management, scoring and nurturing. Through this mechanism marketers are better equipped to gauge how they are faring in terms of brand awareness, sentiment and service. “In sales cycles of months or years, it is vital to have a sophisticated marketing automation tool in place that enables you to communicate in the context of your end users issues and concerns,” explains Mackey.
However, getting the platform and technology right is only half the battle for modern marketers and sales professionals. Traditionally there has been poor communication between the two worlds which has left them in misalignment. “Once you get the platform right, you can take away some of that friction. We need to get to a point where sales understand the quality of the leads marketers are generating and in turn we need to recognise that sales cannot be the only one held accountable for generating revenue,” notes Mackey. Navigating the barriers between the two professions is tough, but not an impossible challenge. He says marketing efforts are “a little bit hard to define” and that “in the future marketers need to be held just as accountable for generating revenue as the sales guys”.
In order to be successful, leaders on both sides must work together to develop a jointly managed and owned demand generation engine. “The customer life cycle has to be the common design point for aligning marketing and sales. Both parts need to participate in the mapping of the buyer journey and agree on their contributions to delivering the information that customers’ need to move confidently forward into and down the sales funnel,” explains Mackey.
The importance of going beyond agreeing on the definition of lead stages to include an understanding of how and when leads will be scored, nurtured, handed across to sales, followed up, tracked and converted should not be underestimated.
“Marketing automation is a journey and you are not going to get to the finish line in 90 days, it may take a year or so before you get your process maturity up to speed,” he says.
Mitchell Mackey will be presenting “Unlocking marketing automation best practices in the Australian landscape” at the ADMA B2B Marketing Seminar in Melbourne the on the 28th of February. For more information about the event and to register please click here.