Things have changed in marketing and sales. With the rise of integration between marketing automation and CRM systems has come a rise in priority alignment (or, as is probably more likely, each has influenced the other). In fact, Bizible's 2016 State of Pipeline Marketing report tells us that "a majority of marketers selected “total revenue” as the primary metric used to measure success." Bizible believes "marketers should be measured and incentivized on the same metrics as their sales teams." Making the switch to measuring success through revenue is a great start.
Today, we want to review exactly how you can use InsightSquared reports to understand marketing contribution to your pipeline, a practice which will keep your teams and objectives connected and aligned. Without further ado, here are our picks for the best reports to give you the strongest insight and keep you on track with your goals.
Matt Solomon, New Breed's sales operations specialist, tells us that "having demand generation reports visible in a platform like InsightSquared forces the marketing and sales team to open up communications around lead generation efforts, marketing qualified lead acceptance and revenue generated from marketing efforts."
Here are our favorites:
Your main priority is to understand how marketing efforts are driving revenue. Understanding the influence of your different campaigns on closed/won business can help you prove the effectiveness of each of your tactics. If you're running an email campaign, for example, and want to know its value, the campaign influence report, if set up correctly, can give you that information.
This report is useful when you want to delineate which opportunities were generated and closed by particular sources. If sales reps create leads just like marketing does, this report should provide clarity as to how much marketing contributes to the pipeline, as its name indicates. It might also be used to measure existing business vs. net new if you have no other way to indicate that measure for your opportunities.
By our estimate, the lead funnel report is the most important demand gen report in the group. "It gives you direct insight into the full conversion funnel, from the moment a lead comes into the system through the moment that lead converts to a customer," says Solomon. It's important to keep in mind that this report only looks at net new deals.
What does this report do for your marketing efforts? It helps you understand where you could improve your process. You might find, for instance, that you're not generating enough leads to meet your desired revenue, or that you're managing opportunities poorly, or that your MQLs aren't converting when they should be, and you need to update your lead scoring criteria. Whatever you find, you can use that information to improve your process and, over time, to improve marketing contribution to revenue as a result.
That's why this report should be reviewed by your executive teams to inform the strategic efforts of your marketing and sales teams. For example, if you know you're not succeeding in lead gen, you may need a new website or more top of the funnel, search optimized content. If you notice a bad lead to MQL conversion rate, you might change your messaging to focus on personas more acutely. If you notice a poor MQL-to-SQL conversion rate, you could review MQL criteria with your sales team.
"When you break it down, looking at a lead count report really gives you insight into cohort-based funnels," Solomon says. "You can understand, month-to-month, the leads in the different stages and compare that to the goal lead generation values."
This report can show you how often you're engaging with your leads, revealing cadence, activity count, etc. New Breed often reviews this report by employee, which requires us to filter out marketing integration users so as not to inflate certain aspects of the report.
If you want to understand the length of each of your funnel cycles split by lifecycle stage, a marketing cycle report is a must. We at New Breed begin the sales process with SQLs, so we measure the time between lead creation and SQL acceptance to understand that cycle.
Remember the good ol' days? When CPC and impressions were your major measures of success and you didn't need to prove contribution? Those days are gone.
But we've got good news! These days are better. Executives want to understand how marketing is driving revenue, just like they always have. But now marketing teams have the reports to prove those contributions. Finally.
Many of today's marketers, though, still hold onto MQL count as a measure of success. You can go beyond that by discovering net new business sourced from marketing channels (direct traffic, referral, etc.). These reports will help you convince the executive team your budget is on point, and/or help you prove that your team is chock full of high performers, busy generating revenue.
Who could ask for more?