Operational Implementation is Crucial for Revenue-Generation Marketing

In my most recent blog on revenue-generation marketing, we talked about the alignment of sales and marketing. It is a crucial link for a number of reasons, not the least of which is ensuring that sales and marketing are working toward the same ultimate goal.

In that particular instance, I spoke about:

1. The responsibility of marketing to provide qualified leads to sales
2. The need for service level agreements (SLA) dictating process for how those leads are handled
3. Including a timeline for SLAs that illustrate how those leads will be pushed through the process

As we continue the revenue-generation marketing journey here at Cisco, operational implementation was the next step. Today, I want to share with you some of the best practices we’ve discovered during that implementation.

Set a Goal

There is that pesky goal again! But it is so important; it simply has to be included every time we look at any implementation. Just as it was important for sales and marketing to agree to a goal, or a number, to track, it is equally important for your organization to agree to an operational goal when implementing revenue-generation marketing into your tools. As your marketing leads move through your internal tools, everyone has to be tracking to a common end goal. In our case, we picked one main key success indicator to track. In short, we gave ourselves one “number” that everyone in sales, marketing and operations are all working to achieve, so our implementation was driven by being able to work toward one goal as a team.

Keep Your Goal Simple

If you look at any given tool dashboard, there may be 30 to 40 metrics you can view at any one time. However, it’s important to have everyone focusing on driving the one success indicator you really care about. In our case, we settled on making sales qualified leads (SQL) the one number that we are all working toward. Now there are definitely “parts” of these metrics that are important to different folks within your company, but you have to have everyone rowing in the same direction and agreeing to strive for that one simple goal.

Set Key Success Indicators for Individuals

Whatever goal you settle on, I highly recommend making the “parts” of that success granular. Individuals on your team need to know that their contributions are affecting the bottom line. Don’t think for a moment that we don’t track multiple metrics for the various teams, even though overall we are all working toward that one SQL goal.

Reporting

Now that you have everyone involved and they each have a stake in the game, you have to keep everyone engaged by telling them just how they’re doing. There must be a steady cadence of reporting in order to make sure involvement and responsibility remain high. We actually hold a weekly readout call and provide an infographic that illustrates the latest progress made in our ongoing revenue-generation marketing journey. Senior leadership participates in that call and it is not just a readout, with no action taken. In each call we assign action items to keep us on pace for the goal we originally set.

What do you think of these four best practices on implementing revenue-generation marketing into your operation? I would love to hear your perspectives in the comments section or via twitter @sherriliebo.

On a related note, since Partner Summit is quickly approaching, I wanted to point out that I will be holding an executive chat as part of Virtual Partner Summit (VPS) on March 26. The information to add my session can be found under the VPS Dialogs tab. Just link through to “Listen to chats with our executives” and you’ll be able to add my session, and others, to your calendar. My chat will be focused on revenue-generation marketing, so for those of you that have been following this blog series, please register for VPS. I look forward to interacting with you in that session, so bring your questions!