Gaining trustworthy data with alignment and metric tracking

As a Marketing Operations consultant, Julien works with companies to optimise their processes through data. As he explained: 

“I look at the effects of different campaigns, analysing clicks and form submissions and understand how much of that ends up as an opportunity or meeting booked. That way, we can optimise channels and campaigns and know what is worth investing in.”

Yet, when tracking this data, Julien often sees a misalignment of the key data definitions between marketing and sales.

When Julien started working with this client, the MQLs were disorganised and measured differently across different dashboards and forecasts.

Different flows in Salesforce had overwritten the data and definitions behind these MQLs.

As a result, all the information and data in these fields was unreliable, and the business was building its strategies and forecasts on inaccurate information.

Stakeholders could not measure the impact of a specific campaign and the revenue or leads generated. 

When creating and building the campaign, whilst planning the content, the visuals, and the targeting is important, you also have to understand what results you want to track and how you will track them. 

If you’re not doing this, you are not prepared to launch the campaign, as you won’t be able to measure and understand its impact.

Metrics-wise, for Julien, leads are, of course, important. If you have a form linked to your content, it’s essential to understand how to track the impact of that content in your sales funnel. Julien explained: 

“A lot of behaviour happens online, so tracking which piece of content brought a lead to a landing page and UTM tracking is key.”

“You also need to be able to track the whole journey across different touchpoints. No single action will result in a sale, and many marketers only have one piece of that picture, but tracking the entire online journey is important.”

“Everything happening online is nice to know so you can figure out how to optimise your landing pages. But these can often become vanity metrics. Whilst you might generate lots of leads from a nice landing page, messaging and CTAs if you generate 1,000 leads and none become revenue makers, it’s useless. So whilst this is interesting to optimise, it’s not the most important metric.”

Instead, analyse how many of the leads you have generated are receiving the proper grading and are qualified to speak to sales. That’s why this definition alignment is essential. 

Following a conversation with an SDR or BDR, a lead will go down three paths: either they’re going to be disqualified, be put back in the nurture cycle campaign or be qualified and put in front of an Account Executive and move on with the negotiation. 

Then, through the sales funnel and looking at the conversion from MQL to SAL to SQL to the opportunity created, marketing can understand the impact of its actions on the pipeline generated through these campaigns.

The other angle is understanding how much marketing has influenced the contact inside the opportunity. 

When sales cycles are long and the product is complex, you can’t measure your marketing performance solely by acquisition. You must also consider your impact on open deals and how the materials you create have helped your sales team close their deals.

If you’re not having this vision, you’re losing a big part of your role and the impact.