With many of us hitting the road for holiday road trips, we’re reminded of those eternal truths passed down by word and deed over generations:
If you fail to plan, then plan to fail.
For B2B marketers, summer means that you’re far down the road in executing your annual marketing plan and starting to compare results to performance targets. What’s the best way to keep your plan headed in the right direction? If, like many marketers, you haven’t fully planned around KPIs, let’s take a step back to adjust in-route. Then, let’s apply our wisdom by turning to your teammates and to your data: continually adjusting your plans, and doing so using those specific, agreed-upon KPIs.
Here’s how.
Step 1: Build an integrated conversion funnel (mapping the journey).
First thing first: this process requires that you bring marketing and sales together if you have not already done so. Every B2B business establishes sales pipeline targets and you surely have marketing conversion goals. Just don’t overcomplicate it. The key is to build a continuous marketing-through-sales funnel with shared definitions and (measurable)conversion assumptions at each phase. If you’ve already gone through this exercise in your strategic planning, feel free to move to step three (with our admiration).
For each major conversion point:
- Agree on vocabulary and definitions (hint: for better results, you can find many commonly used conversion benchmarks online).
- Get representatives from sales and marketing in a room.
- Hammer out an end-to-end funnel.
- Set up conversion metrics that everyone agrees with.
Don’t let your sales and marketing team leave the room just yet. You’ll need to make sure that these targets actually make sense in the real world. For instance …
Target = Wicker basket manufacturers
