| Your boss wants to see evidence that the
money and resources invested in the company's business-to-business marketing activities
are really paying off. You start to sweat.
Relax. It is surprisingly easy to prove that B2B marketing
is contributing to your company's bottom line. Here's how.
Show the relationship between your marketing and your
revenue
Start by looking for sales and revenue that can be linked
to marketing activities. Simply compare lists of new customers or invoices to companies or
prospects in your marketing database and look for matches. You don't have to find every
sale that resulted from your marketing activities. Sometimes all it takes is one big sale
to justify a campaign.
If sales haven't closed yet, count the number of qualified
leads and use estimated conversion rates and average sales size to quickly determine the
sales potential of those leads. Or look at the forecasted sales in the company's CRM
system and compare them to the database of prospects, inquiries or qualified leads.
You can also send "Did you buy?" surveys to
inquirers and qualified leads, using their answers to show that the prospects being
targeted by your marketing are buying from you or the competition. Ask if they bought, and
if so, from whom. Ask why and how much they spent. If your sample size is large enough,
you can also use the answers you receive to estimate the number of sales and the amount of
revenue that are represented by all the inquiries and leads you've generated.
Show how much you saved the company
Just give it some thought and you'll probably come up with
a list of things you've done to save your company money or time. For example:
- Printing and postage savings after cleaning the mailing list
or delivering the company newsletter by e-mail.
- Savings accomplished by offering electronic versions of
literature.
- The money you saved by eliminating non-productive marketing
activities
- Time and money saved by automating the capture of Web forms
and eliminating some manual data entry.
Show other ways your marketing is more effective
This can range from showing how many more prospects you
reached with your marketing messages to indicating the improvements that have been made in
cost per impression, cost per inquiry, cost per attendee or cost per qualified lead.
List all the marketing projects your marketing team
completed
Marketers often don't think about their own productivity
when justifying the money the company invests in marketing. Unfortunately, people quickly
forget what happened last month or last quarter. Or they simply have no idea what's
involved in creating a mailing or designing a new Web site.
Pointing out the number of marketing projects completed,
and all the work steps involved, can be a real eye-opener to others who are completely
unaware.
Always be ready to make your case
I recommend that you block out a couple of hours to create
your business-to-business marketing accountability reports every month so you'll always
have up-to-date results at your fingertips. If you're pressed for time, use an intern or
temp to do it for you.
Your results may vary, but consider this ...
A marketer I know recently reported to her management that
awareness of their company and products among target prospects more than doubled, the cost
per qualified lead delivered to sales by marketing dropped by nearly 40 percent, 58
percent of the opportunities in the sales pipeline were found first by marketing, and 48
percent of the sales closed and 62 percent of the revenue during the past 12 months came
from marketing-generated leads.
The result? She received a bigger marketing budget and
senior management executives no longer doubt marketing's contribution to the company's
success. |
