Nathan Yerian
One of the biggest challenges that businesses face is aligning their sales and marketing efforts. Tons of money gets poured into marketing to generate sales opportunities. At some point these opportunities are turned over to the sales department, but what happens then?
This is usually where the trail goes cold, and the disconnect starts between the marketing and sales departments.
-
Were those sales opportunities quality leads?
-
Were the leads followed up on?
-
What was the outcome?
-
Which marketing activity generated the most leads?
-
Which marketing activity generated the most sales?
Without closed loop marketing, these questions go unanswered and no strategic improvements can be made to the system. Closed loop marketing is the process of tracking your marketing activities, prospect activity, lead generation successes, and closed sales in terms of the origination point. In other words, it allows you to see exactly what marketing activities are generating the highest quality opportunities that are actually turning into closed sales.
Connecting your sales activities back to the marketing root through closed loop marketing allows you to systematically increase not only the amount of sales you close, but also the amount and quantity of opportunities you generate.
Here are three ways closed loop marketing will enable you to close more sales.
1. Deliver leads to sales people in real time
According to a Harvard Business Review study, sales people who attempted to contact a sales lead within the first hour were 7 times more likely to qualify the lead by reaching the decision maker. Surprisingly, the study also found that the average response time for lead follow up was 42 hours, and 23% of companies never even responded.
Connecting your marketing department's lead generating activities with your sales teams CRM (customer relationship management) software allows your sales team to receive leads in real time. If your sales people respond in real time, they have the advantage of reaching the decision maker at their peak point of interest, after all, they just submitting themselves into your system.
Quick response also gives the impression that your company is on top of its game and truly values customer relationship. This first impression can go along way toward closing the deal.
2. Allow sales people to focus on the hottest prospects
Obviously someone who filled out your "Request A Quote" landing page is probably a hotter prospect than someone who downloaded a whitepaper. But what happens when you have 20 people download the whitepaper? How would you determine which lead to call first?
Closed loop marketing allows critical data from the marketing process to trickle down to the sales person in the form of a lead grade. What marketing activity generated this lead, which and how many pages were viewed on your site, and has the lead taken advantage of any other offers? A sales person armed with the knowledge of a prospect's interest level and what the prospect is intersted in is far more likely to close a sale.
An example could look like this:
A business owner in Houston is in the process of opening a new office. She goes in search of a local commercial office furniture dealer. She types "Houston office cubicles". Based on the search results she selects a website to visit. After navigating to the cubicle page, she also views office desks, video conference tables, and break room furniture. She then fills out a lead conversion form to schedule a showroom tour.
A standard marketing/sales system without closed loop marketing only delivers information that a woman named "Kelly White" filled out the form and is interested in looking at some type of office furniture. Although this is a hot lead, there is no way to tell. It is impossible for a sales person to put more priority on this lead than the one that came in before it that is only interested in buying a chair?
Had the office furniture company employed use of a closed loop system the sales person would have recieved information like the keyword that brought the prospect to the site ("Houston office cubicles"), what pages were viewed, how long the lead spent on the website, and what form was filled out. They could also be notified if the lead returned to the site, prompting a follow-up call.
This data allows a sales person to appropriately judge the value of each lead, and invest their time accordingly. How much more could a sales person sell if they always used their time to work on their hottest prospects?
3. Consistent marketing improvement
An isolated marketing department creates and executes campaigns and measures their success in impressions, reach, website visits, and possibly sales leads. These are good metrics, but they don't give the marketing department the ability to see which specific activities or campaigns actually resulted in a sale.
In a closed loop system, when leads result in a sale, or are lost, this info is channeled back to the marketing dept for analysis and adjustment. With this data coming back to the marketing department and "closing the loop" it allows reallocation of marketing funds toward the most fruitful campaigns/activities.
The constant improvement of maximizing the highest potential lead opportunities gives the sales team an ever improving stream of sales leads. Better quality leads equals more sales.
Conclusion
Stop the age old problem of the disconnect between the marketing and sales departments. Connecting your marketing and sales teams will enable you to maximize your marketing activities and increase your sales. Honestly, what more could you ask for?
