3 Ways to Boost Demand Gen Efforts by Leveraging Sales Data
As a marketer, you work hard to get your company on the map by launching killer brand campaigns and innovative lead gen programs. You track visits, clicks, bounces, and conversions. Unfortunately, it’s a struggle to quickly and easily prove that what you’re doing is working.
Yes, you may have a hunch that things are going well. You may get an occasional call from a sales rep thanking you for the great leads last week. Or, you get rave reviews about the fun new t-shirts marketing designed. But, wouldn’t it be great if you could finally have the data to back up your hunch and prove value beyond just the random hallway high five? What if you could show a direct connection between marketing activities and sales results this quarter?
When it comes to generating demand, marketers aspire to confidently launch an effective marketing program and deliver value by contributing significant pipeline. To earn the respect of your executive team and the budget you desire, you must offer a sound investment strategy supported by accurate data. Once the plans are launched, you must quickly prove results, value, and ultimately, impact to the bottom line.
Today, Spiro is paving the way to do all of this in a way that’s seamless and aligned with sales. With a proactive relationship management platform like Spiro, marketers can more easily and confidently predict and show contribution to pipeline and revenue.
“Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets planning.” – Thomas Edison
Here are 3 ways you can use Spiro today to boost your confidence and guide effective marketing decisions:
1) Turn sales-driven data into marketing insights
When you integrate marketing campaigns into Spiro, you can track a lead through its journey from marketing qualified lead (MQL) to closed-won opportunity. With real-time analytics and reporting, you can track results based on any number of key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand how your campaigns are performing and how quickly marketing leads progress through the sales funnel.
Spiro makes it easy to measure marketing ROI by linking campaigns and lead sources to sales pipeline and closed/won opps. By evaluating the source of your largest deals or your fastest-moving opportunities, you can identify the highest-performing marketing sources and invest more in those areas.
2) Gain actionable guidance to keep the lead funnel flowing
Once you understand the typical conversion rates for marketing-sourced leads, you can take a bottoms-up approach to your demand generation goal setting. Knowing you have a certain conversion rate from an MQL to a sales-accepted lead (SAL) allows you to target the ideal number of marketing leads you need to generate for a particular campaign or activity. Spiro provides the data and trends to help you with this type of goal setting with reports on all campaigns.
Another way to keep the funnel moving is by viewing forecast reports in Spiro to identify areas where marketing needs to step in and fill any gaps that may prevent sales from reaching their pipeline goals based on sales cycle tendencies. Spiro allows you to look at the data by territory, by time frame, or by rep. Understanding in advance that one area is weak, marketing can call in the troops to boost efforts and ultimately deliver the right number of leads to keep the pipeline healthy on all levels.
“Always plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.” – Richard Cushing
3) Activate sales conversations with real-time tracking and alerts
Having the right set of reports can certainly help guide decisions pertaining to campaign investments and lead funnels. However, knowing which tactics are most effective is just the beginning. The key to building a high-performing demand generation machine is moving from insight to action via sales and marketing collaboration.
With Spiro, marketing can enable the sales team to strike while the iron’s hot. When Spiro is integrated with Slack or another internal communication tool, it can alert sales reps in real-time when a prospect or contact engages with marketing content. Whether they visit a web page, click on an email, or request a demo, the sales rep is notified and can engage the lead in a meaningful conversation appropriate to the stage the prospective buyer is in. The reps have ready visibility on that contact’s record in Spiro showing what actions the contact took and can then use those insights to ask the right questions.
Fine-tune your demand generation efforts with Spiro
The Spiro platform turns data into insights, activity into predictability, and reports into stories. When marketing connects to Spiro it becomes much easier to identify which programs are working, which are not, and most importantly, why. Ultimately, marketing teams can implement more effective marketing campaigns to deliver higher quality leads to sales. Once those leads are actively engaged, sales can take more informed action and achieve greater results.
