Andy Mindlin continues his series of presentations with a discussion of how to create marketing goals that support sales objectives and creating metrics for measuring ROI. His approach of identifying steps that bog down the sales process and ideas for marketing tactics that break the bottlenecks are sure to get your marketing plan on the path to success.
Today we're going to talk about defining marketing goals in a must measure world, and then deciding what tactics are best in your specific situation. We talked, in a prior talk in the series, about how important it is to measure our ROI in today's economic environment. The question is, if I've got to measure and report everything, what do I do about it? My suggestion is that you start with the end in mind. Make sure that you're supporting the financial goals of your company or your division. It sounds really simple, but when you slice it a little bit further, you want to be sure that you're dovetailing the marketing efforts with the sales objectives dollars, time frames, quarters, half years, years and specifically, the jobs or target markets that your division or company is going after. We're not talking about blindly supporting sales in whatever they ask you to do. The key for marketing is to be spurring the process of generating orders and speeding prospects through the selling cycle.
So, if that's what we're trying to do, to speed people through the buying process and speed the selling process of the company, it's critical to understand what the selling process is. And most companies just don't think of the selling process as a process similar to, say, the manufacturing process, where we understand that raw materials come in, are taken through a series of steps, and out come finished goods. With the selling process, it's the same, but it's not as well understood.
So, what I encourage you to do is diagram a recent successful sale using your own knowledge of the situation or by interviewing some of your salespeople. List the steps from beginning to end. What happened from when a prospect became aware of you, or you of them, all the way to their becoming a customer of your company's product.
Then, once you've got the steps listed, it's just like analyzing a manufacturing process. If you want to get more throughput, then you've got to find the bottlenecks and expand them. Find out where the process bogs down. Your colleagues, particularly in sales, will be happy to help you understand where the process bogs down. That's where you've got to create marketing tools or marketing programs to break the bottleneck. Those are the tactics that we need to spur more leads to get through the funnel and turn into sales.
I don't know what the process is at your company, so what I've done here is I've just created a generic list of steps to generate a sale. One, two, three, four, five. From awareness, to understanding, to considering us, to trying us, to purchasing our product. Please understand that this is just a generic substitute for what makes sense in your company.
But, once you've identified what the steps are, you'll think, "If that was the bottleneck, what will I do?" Do we have an awareness problem? Well, if so, then we need to be working on things like online advertising, as long as it's distinctive. AdWords programs, SEO, Email bulletins, PR, Videos posted on your site, on the latest industry sites. We're doing general awareness building if the problem that we need to solve is to get more leads into the funnel.
Now, you may find in analyzing your sales process that we have plenty of leads coming in, but people don't seem to grasp what we do. Well, if that's the situation, then you generate ideas with your team for what we can do as marketing people to help prospects understand who we are and what we do and why they should choose us instead of the other guys even faster.
If people understand it and you can verify that with your surveys of prospects as they're moving through your process but they just are not willing to consider you as a change to their current situation, or they're not having you in their consideration set versus other alternatives, then there are other alternatives. We've listed them here. You can consider them as marketing tactics or marketing programs to spur people to consider your company.
For the same reason, if we were looking at trial, and said "Well, people understand us, and they want to use us, but they're not getting the product into their hands," then you've got to come up with a low or no cost way for people to try the product. Guarantees really aren't the ticket here. You've got to make it easy for people to say yes.
The point is, whatever the bottleneck is, whatever step that is, generate ideas to deal with that problem. Then, once you've identified programs that you want to pursue, you've got to make sure that you've got metrics for each of these. Listed here are some of the suggested metrics for each one of these programs.
The thing that I'd like to touch on real quickly, without reading through all of these, is in the upper right hand box, where it mentions the number of qualified leads delivered to sales. That's really key. We can talk about each of these, but that's a real important key to success to talk about. It's really not useful to salespeople to deliver them leads. Names and phone numbers are really not actionable for them.
You want to focus on qualified leads. That's going to require you, if you haven't already, to define probably with your sales partners what criteria make someone a qualified lead. I usually say, what are the four or five characteristics that a lead has to have to make a salesperson want to follow up on that lead immediately? I could guess what they are for your company, but it's best that you write that down and negotiate that with your internal customers in sales.
Focus on delivering qualified leads. Because it's so difficult to tie actions that you'll take in the beginning of the marketing or sales process to the end point, which is dollar sales delivered, it's really important that you have metrics on how many people are moving from each step to each subsequent step of the selling process, so you get a handle on ROI.
The thing that I try to focus on is how many qualified leads I have to generate in order to deliver a sale out the end of the pipeline. When you know that, then you can start to focus on what kind of ROI you're getting on your marketing programs, because you know how many qualified leads you've delivered. Then it's just math to determine how many of those, over time, are going to turn into sales for your company.
So, we said we were going to talk about defining marketing goals in a must measure world and deciding what tactics are best in your situation. What I'd recommend you do, based on the points that we've shared quickly today, are one, clarify the financial objectives of your organization and make sure that you're dovetailing with those. Then, second, diagram the process of generating new orders. What are the steps that our company has to take to turn names and phone numbers into purchase orders? Then, find the bottleneck in that process, just like looking at a manufacturing line. Where's the bottleneck? Where's the logjam? And then, with your team, generate ideas to break that logjam. When you've generated the ideas that you wanted to test, then you want to test several things.
Don't do things globally and with a huge budget. Now is not the economic environment for that. You want to be testing a lot of things and see what moves the needle. And make sure that you're setting quantifiable goals and have a way to measure results for each test. Of course, tie it to ROI, because that's the way our executives that we report to are managed.
Then, you want to make sure you're reporting results so that everybody knows what's happening. The things that work, you continue; the things that don't, you stop. And then you repeat the process. I often keep a list of business building ideas to attack the different logjams we encounter in projects. When things don't work, that's fine. We just go back to the list. And when somebody has an idea, we're just constantly building that list of business building ideas and deploying them when we find that it's appropriate.
That's what we've got for today as far as defining marketing goals and deciding what tactics are best in your situation. Thank you very much for your attention.
