Making the Case for a Data-driven Strategy: Grant Access and Unlock Results

Planning is an opportunity to learn, improve and make impactful decisions for your business moving forward. It’s also an opportunity to gain consensus from your key stakeholders around a strategy for the coming year. And when you bring together a diverse team with varying perspectives and goals, the one thing that unites them all – and is difficult to refute – is data. Increased revenue, in particular. Because that’s the end game, right?

When it’s time to plan, or optimize a current strategy, agencies and B2B marketers are challenged to dig deeper into available data and extend their reach across the entire buying process. You can begin to accomplish this through a number of methods:

• Gain access to CRM information
• Evaluate marketing automation results
• Define segmented contact lists
• Close the loop with the sales funnel
• Gain insights about converted leads and related revenues

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Sales

Many marketing departments have gotten to a place where they are effectively measuring marketing activity. But the reality is we tend to lose sight of that activity somewhere in the handoff from marketing to sales. With marketing affecting a much larger portion of the sales funnel, it’s time to connect the data points to the sales process and assign an actual business value to marketing programs.

“Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions enjoyed 36 percent higher customer retention rates and achieved 38 percent higher sales win rates.”
Joint Study Findings
MarketingProfs & Math Marketing

Look Under the Hood

You may be pushed by your agency or team to provide information that is typically not shared or is not easy to access. For example, revenue history and sources, growth goals, how you generate sales, how you’re scoring and evaluating leads, or how much you’re willing to invest to convert a prospect. Start asking for access to your sales tools so you can see some numbers.

It will not happen overnight, but the effort is worth it. With the right access and shared goals across departments, you can begin to provide your company metrics like cost per lead, cost per conversion, expected investment and expected revenue. With that critical data, marketing’s value and influence across the entire company increases. And it also sets a foundation for accountability on all sides.

So let’s change the conversation, bridge the gaps and grant access. Use the information you have to drive the development of a solution-based, data-driven strategy and plan that directly addresses business challenges and can help your organization grow.