Closing the loop on Marketers’ Holy Grail
Here is what Mark Killens had to say on my last blog post on functionality coverage in CRM products for Marketing Automation: “CRM systems and marketing are very important sales enablement resources. They both must include tools to manage and report on how marketing is helping and enabling sales and how to keep track of the customer after a sale closes”. Please find the post, the comment and my response here.
I perceive Mark’s comment as referring to one of the long standing challenges for Marketers – how do you attribute the end Sales revenues to the original Marketing efforts? This ability to tie the eventual revenues back to the campaigns, thereby closing the loop, has largely been either impossible or a difficult task to accomplish for Marketers - thus making it a Holy Grail.
One of the reasons for this is that the leaders in the Enterprise Marketing area today evolved differently. For instance, the enterprise vendors typically started with database / eMail marketing (capitalizing on the contact / account data already available in the sales automation system) - the ‘execution’ area - and gradually integrated (and integrating) backwards into Marketing Resource Management (MRM) area. And there were point solutions aimed at fulfilling the needs of MRM area – the ‘planning’ area - which integrated forwards into eMail Marketing. This resulted in organizations large enough with needs in both planning and execution areas investing in more than one application for Marketing needs. And the result is the familiar story of issues with tying these multiple systems together.
And just tying the systems together – or, for that matter, having just one integrated solution –has not been sufficient to address this either. You have the classic attribution problem. You can run eMail campaigns, have prospects/contacts respond to them and capture them as leads in the system. But, what if a prospect just talks to one of your sales guys who just decides to ‘pocket’ the lead and just creates an opportunity without tying it back to your email campaign?
The good news is that vendors are making progress in addressing issues like these. For instance, in version Siebel Marketing 8.1, Oracle introduced Inferred Responses functionality, which in a sense addresses the above attribution problem. While that certainly does not address all the issues, that indeed is a step towards closing the loop – Marketers’ Holy Grail.
Comments
Most times it is always a combination of marketing messages received via various mediums that creates the final impetus to buy. In that event tying a sale to just one marketing activity (email or banner ad etc.) may not be entirely correct.
Instead perhaps understanding what sort of an enabler or "influencer" a particular message from a medium has been would perhaps need to be attributed.
Posted by: preetish | March 16, 2010 5:48 AM