Bridging the Marketing Language Gap With Revenue Marketing

The misalignment between marketing, sales, and customer success teams has created a growing barrier to how marketers and executives can differentiate the return on their marketing investment. According to Statista, the global marketing technology market is worth $345 billion. Despite this and the endless human resources that have been invested in making marketing more data-driven, marketers still face outdated tools and data warehouses that prevent them from doing so. clearly present the impact of their efforts on the company’s performance.

In fact, the struggle to quantify marketing initiatives is so pervasive that, according to our research, 85% of executives still cannot unambiguously tie marketing activities to turnover. Why? Lack of a common language throughout the organization. This is why marketing teams have a hard time quantifying their contributions – the revenue-focused language the rest of the organization focuses on is foreign to them.

Unfortunately, with no common language across revenue groups, marketing metrics and models are disconnected from the rest of the business, leaving the value of marketing still unclear to those who do. revenue when it comes to marketing. It’s about identifying the factors that create or hinder income. This language barrier exists in all departments which have resulted in a lack of marketing credibility. Here is a more detailed explanation of what the reliability gap is and how to close it.

What is a marketing credibility gap and why does it exist?

Marketing used to focus on lead and account-based metrics, while the rest of the business operated on revenue-focused metrics and language. For example, marketers have long focused on acquiring marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Metrics like MQLs generated and MQL conversion rates are confusing for the rest of the business because they don’t clearly represent how marketing contributes to profitability, especially unlike sales teams. Customers can talk about the exact figures of revenue growth they have produced.

Due to the focus on a lead or lead-based metrics, marketers cannot reliably communicate a direct cause-and-effect relationship between marketing activities and business results. in the language appropriate to their peers. Because their model is separate from the rest of the business, marketers often have to customize their own analytics, forcing them to rely on all the one-way dashboards and reports they can receive instead of modern analytical tools.

According to our research, 74% of B2B marketers still rely heavily on outdated spreadsheets to try to generate revenue stakeholder alignment for their initiatives. But collating data into spreadsheets from large-scale marketing tools is a nightmare, so marketers often spend hours preparing data manually, all just to get a picture. an incomplete picture of their efforts.

The “instant” nature of marketing systems and spreadsheets also makes it difficult to extract trending information over time. Without a unified, multi-dimensional view of the entire customer journey, marketers cannot get the big picture. The solution is very clear:

As marketing and sales teams increasingly rely on data, they need to establish common success metrics to create systems that can give them the big picture. Here’s how to set up a unified RevOps strategy.

How to Build a Bridge (and Cross It) with Revenue Marketing

Revenue marketing is a new approach designed to close the marketing reputation gap by focusing key marketing metrics on revenue and linking marketing strategy to revenue performance. This approach bridges the gap between marketing models and other systems in the organization. This is especially important because to achieve a truly unified view of the customer journey, marketing and sales teams need to agree on revenue metrics to work together to define and create better quality opportunities for sales teams. By adopting a revenue marketing approach, marketers can build alignment and transparency in all revenue-facing teams. This can help marketers not only break down data silos and establish cause-and-effect relationships between their initiatives and revenue outcomes, but also uncover relevant data trends. to make meaningful and predictive forecasts from their marketing and sales information, and determine the impact of marketing initiatives across the entire customer journey.

Revenue marketing is an essential first step toward true RevOps

Revenue marketing is the solution to the current connectionless approach to revenue operations. This eliminates much of the time and money previously spent customizing marketing systems to determine how marketing is impacting revenue and allowing those resources to be reallocated for growth.
Revenue marketing is the foundation that businesses need to build to get a unified view of the entire funnel, from initial engagement to past closing. This ultimately facilitates business processes such as determining where CRM data accurately represents reality. When implemented, revenue marketing enables more advanced data science for marketing analytics by feeding data models that connect the cause and effect of marketing initiatives to their results. revenue results. This allows marketers to apply predictive analytics to project business outcomes and helps the entire company establish a unified understanding of the most effective paths to growth.

How to close the gap for good

With revenue marketing, marketers can move from being lead-focused to opportunity-focused and connect their actions to revenue by establishing a common revenue language and strategies. success metric that every income-contact workgroup can line up with. It’s time for marketers to confidently explain how their efforts contribute to business value.

Here are three best practices that organizations can follow to permanently close the marketing reputation gap:

1. Move from lead-centric revenue initiatives to opportunity-centric revenue initiatives. While leads are still important, marketers need to shift their focus from individuals to groups of leads and individuals as a buying group to better understand what’s going on in the organization. office. Continuing to rely on lead-centric metrics will prevent marketers and the rest of the business from getting a complete and accurate picture of how marketing is/is not contributing. generate revenue.
2. Establish clear and common tax language. Leverage opportunity-focused metrics to establish a common revenue language across all parts of the organization. Working with sales, finance, and customer success teams to establish common success measures will create a more coordinated and effective organization. It will also allow marketers to highlight where their marketing is generating revenue for the business, thereby justifying future marketing investments.
3. Break your silos. Many organizations claim that they practice revenue operations but do not take steps to break down their operating silos. Failure to consider the entire demand driver will cause the organization to focus on only one part of the problem (often making the sales process more efficient) and will lead to a one-sided solution. Organizations need to choose an approach that will break down silos to get a unified view of the entire customer journey.

By taking these steps and reducing the marketing language gap, marketers can demonstrate how their efforts and investments translate into revenue.