You Basically Insure Your Entire Life – Why Not Insure Your Marketing Campaigns?

In your personal life, you probably have a wide range of insurance policies on the things that matter most. Many of us insure our cars, health, home, life, and may even be lucky enough to have a secret stash of savings for those “just in case” life moments. Insurance is meant to protect our most valuable assets and can provide peace of mind and security.

So here are my open questions to corporate marketers who spend A LOT of budget and money on marketing campaigns:

  • When you’ve put time, money and effort into driving campaigns to generate, nurture and qualify leads, don’t you feel like you need some protection on your campaign assets?
  • What if you could buy an insurance policy to make sure your peers in sales generate measured ROI off of your marketing spend?
  • What if that policy was less than 1% of your total campaign spend? Or less than one 30-second spot on prime television?

The ideal insurance policy to protect your marketing campaign investments should have three basic lines of coverage. It should:

    1. Insure that sales teams receive your leads.

      Lead distribution continues to be an issue in our recent conversations with marketing leaders. Leads get lost in dashboards, spreadsheets, emails, or even within the marketing automation platform itself.

      Keep in mind that 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales (MarketingSherpa). I don’t have the data, but my educated guess is that about half of these die simply because they get lost in the system based on what we see out there.

      TIP: Distribute leads directly into the seller workflow by adding them to their predictive dialing list – right on the homepage of their CRM.

 

    1. Insure that sales uses the content that you invested heavily in and you know works.

      Think about how terrible the experience is for a prospect that makes it half way through your perfectly curated marketing campaign that was custom tailored to their buyer persona, only to have a sales person call them to ask some silly question such as “What’s keeping them up at night?”

      It would be a lot better if the sales person had prescriptive intelligence telling them “this prospect is interested in X, you should share Z.”

      TIP: Customer Journey Mapping should apply not only to lead generation efforts but also to the stages of the sales process. Sales reps should serve the ‘next logical offer’ based on marketing insights and best fit offer.

 

    1. Insure that you track analytics against pipeline performance.

      Imagine how much better you could appropriate your marketing budget if you could specifically pinpoint stages of your campaign that are leading to opportunities and closed deals. Having direct visibility into which pieces of content are specifically advancing deals and which are not will help you identify the content you need to build in the future. With this type of data, planning for and gaining approval of your marketing budgets would be much easier. It won’t be a silver bullet that gets your budget requests approved overnight, but it will save you several weekends during the dreaded holiday season and fiscal year end crunch.

      TIP: Use data aggregation services to link campaign performance to pipeline performance. Easy to access dashboards for you and your campaign managers will allow you to determine where to stop, start, and continue spending. And using these dashboards in your meetings with sales and leadership quantifies why you are spending where.

 

Technology is readily available to put real data behind the seemingly never-ending debate – “Is our lead quality lacking?” (says sales) or “Is sales just not following up?” (says marketing).

We’ve built a solid campaign insurance policy in the form of sales enablement technology. Stringer for Salesforce prescribes the next logical selling motion directly to a seller, removing the “who, what, when” guesswork and allowing reps to get straight to the art of selling.

Our marketing director and my friend Jean Shin wrote a great blog a while back and this quote stands out in my mind – “Leads may be prime and interested when you initially gathered them, but they are perishable and decay at a rapid rate despite a comprehensive CRM that houses them.” A great reminder to me that investments should be made in ensuring successful handoff, prioritization, and sales workflow to make sure marketing campaigns come to fruition.

What are your campaign “insurance policies?” Would love to hear more of what your team is doing and discuss how our team can help.