Marketers Owning the Pipeline and Achieving ROI

Potential clients have so many touchpoints, marketing must evolve their strategies to provide their prospects with the solutions they need to convert to paying clients. For pipeline marketing to see success, sales and marketing needs to be aligned. This ensures the prospect, sales, and marketing are on the same page through the buyer’s journey.

Many companies are realizing the value of marketing and sales coming together as their revenue goals tie into pulling out qualified marketing leads and converting them to customers. Marketers that care for the performance of the company are involved in the sales processes, understanding the sales pipeline, and the steps needed to gain more in sales.

This doesn’t mean that marketing should take over sales. Rather, it means that marketing should take ownership and responsibility for the leads they generate and send through the sales pipeline. It helps marketing understand the sales processes and the steps needed to take to help them drive better results on their side of the pipeline.

Marketing teams who do want to take ownership of the sales pipeline should have a strategy to maximize their involvement in the sales process. Some of the important strategies that marketers should consider include:

Connect Viable Leads With Revenue Goals

It all starts with the alignment of goals between the company and marketing. Marketing should be able to know the details of company targets to achieve revenue goal with questions like:

• How many closed deals does sales need to achieve that revenue goal?
• How many opportunities does the sales team need to reach the closed-deals goal?
• How many leads does marketing need to create those opportunities?
• How much traffic does the site need to attain that number of leads?
• What kind of marketing content is needed to drive that traffic to the site?

Manage Customer Expectations

An important aspect of getting the customer through the end of your pipeline is the customer itself. B2B buyers have expectations when they begin the buyer’s journey. Missing the mark in knowing who they are, what they want, how they want it, and when they want it could upset customers. They could be lost making it not possible to hand them off to sales to close them.

Enable Sales and Marketing to Succeed

Marketers should know the personas of closable leads and get them on board the customer journey. With this knowledge, marketing is setting up sales to succeed, which is what your ultimate goal is.

Listen to Sales Calls

One of the best ways to know a good customer persona is to listen to sales calls. You can then understand where in the pipeline your strategy isn’t working or where you lack content. Listening makes it easier for sales to give the right answers for leads to become customers.

Bring Sales into Marketing Strategy

Collaboration should not be a one-way street. Sales should also be interested in marketing to get a picture of what they are going through and what their perspectives are. The partnership means that both need to understand goals and implementations to drive revenue.

Pipeline marketing is more than just generating leads to make a sale. It enables marketers to take a more active role in the lead generation efforts to create revenue for the company. The goal is to connect both marketing and sales to make decisions based on a common goal.

Marketers have to  be fully aware of the impact they have on the pipeline. Taking ownership of it means that your team is taking a step toward achieving your revenue targets as a team player with the sales team. The marketing pipeline induces this cooperative environment, and those that are aligned report an average increase of 32% in annual revenue growth. Take ownership of the pipeline and tackle revenue results.

Demand marketers are faced with shifting internal objectives that can be challenging to navigate, particularly while transitioning leads to their sales team. DemandScience’s lead follow-up system leverages our optimized 10-step lead development sequence to drive high-quality meetings for your sales organization so your marketers can take ownership of the pipeline.