As marketing departments are increasingly being asked to commit and be held accountable for contribution to revenue, quantitative visibility and understanding into the performance of understand revenue with your funnels in salesforce marketing activity has become increasingly relevant. This is not only for the purpose of measuring whether that number has been met or exceeded, but more specifically for the purpose of giving marketers more power to achieve these goals. One important piece of this visibility is basic insight into every stage in our demand generation funnel so we can better understand not only what marketing activity is helping to mature and push along opportunities to close, but more importantly what is helping drive conversation with our sales teams and the creation of new opportunities.
This is where I would argue the most important marketing activity takes place: in the higher stages in our funnel prior to opportunity creation. This is where our prospects first engage with our material and then are either compelled to further educate themselves OR walk away and decide to take the investigation elsewhere. This is not only the marketing activity that drives things like new leads and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL’s) and prompts our sales team to engage with the lead or contact, but also the activity that is driving new opportunity creation.
Unfortunately, the visibility in Salesforce into those higher level funnel stages between lead creation and opportunity creation is very murky. And therefore, we are left with no true measurable understanding of what sort of programs are actually driving conversations between our sales people and our prospects. While Salesforce excels at offering visibility through the funnel from opportunity creation stage to close, the lack of visibility at the higher stages leave us with an incomplete means for analysis of our entire funnel and therefore makes it incredibly difficult to achieve even core funnel metrics such as volume, velocity, and conversion rates. And these metrics can offer us a wealth of insight into our B2B marketing and sales operations that can then drive confident decision making.
If you’re unclear as to the value of these metrics and what insight they can offer, please check out my colleague’s blog here: http://fullcirclecrm.com/why-funnel-metrics-are-essential-to-marketing-operations/.
