Investing in marketing & sales integration can be one of the most important decisions your company can make. 

That sounds rather boring, but think about it this way: What if you were trying to lose weight but you didn't own a scale? Or if you wanted to be able to run longer but didn’t know how long you could run right now? It’d be difficult, to say the least. Yet many businesses are flying blind when it comes to how the spend money on their sales & marketing efforts.  

With a new year upon us, taking some time to invest in how you monitor and measure your activities can be vital if you want to continue to improve. It may also show you some things that can be scaled back, or some things that are wildly successful that you didn't even know about. Here’s some ways to invest in analytics and some strategies you can implement after that: 

Focus on Sales & Marketing Technology Integration

The sales team has their CRM. Marketing has their email program. And social media program. And landing page program. And some other stuff. Integrating all of these together can be a boon, not only to productivity, but to your business intelligence. Knowing whether people who open emails also visit your website is important, but if you’re having to compile everything on a spreadsheet, you’re probably missing that information, or at the very least not getting it in a timely manner.

HubSpot is obviously a great solution for pulling all of your marketing activities into one system. Integrating it with a CRM can be even better. You can not only see if your marketing activities are generating sales, but you can also share information with your sales team in real-time. 

Maybe someone on your sales team is about to make a call to a lead. They’ve spoken once before and it’s about 50/50 whether they’ll become a customer or not. Knowing whether they’ve visited your website several times since you last spoke is important in that instance. Seeing that they’ve downloaded several ebooks since then can help you see what they’re researching and what they might want to know more about. 

Determine Your Marketing ROI

As companies look to become more sophisticated, one of the things they often look to do is to be more efficient in their marketing. Some of those big, traditional spends get evaluated, and higher-ups often want clear ROI numbers. 

Few people realize that it’s now possible to gain “closed-loop analytics” from marketing and sales. In other words, leads generated from marketing efforts can be tracked all the way through the research phase until they become sales opportunities, and then further tracked to becoming a customer. This enables marketers to not only track which campaigns produce the most leads, but which leads become most profitable. 

This is the Holy Grail of marketing analytics and can be used to justify a lot of those activities that you knew were working, but couldn’t quite attach a dollar figure to. The good news is that while this provides sophisticated business intelligence, it isn’t particularly complicated to set up. HubSpot provides this level of connection out of the box with Salesforce, and many others providers offer solutions that connect it with other CRMs.  

Invest in your Brand with Content

If your company has put in place quality software and analytics systems, then it may be time to start producing content that pulls people in and guides prospects through the sales process. Developing quality content that educates people on what your company does, why someone may need them, and how to evaluate providers can be especially helpful, and all of these touches help define your brand. Plus with the right technology in place, you can see exactly how effective any of these efforts can be. 

Rather than simply telling someone that you are well-qualified, using content to explain things can be much more effective. Using content to sell also allows your company to frame the problem as one that you’re best suited to solve. Plus, the content keeps people engaged with your company, and helps connect your company to the problem they’re trying to solve. 

As your company develops new services or products, it can be important to educate new and/or existing customers about the advantages of it. Using a content offer can not only help them more clearly understand the benefits, but it can also save your salespeople time and set them up to have a more educated discussion on what’s being offered. Also, combining it with a landing page will generate leads for your company, which can be nurtured until they are sales-ready. 

Wrap-up

As you’re looking to make your marketing better, don’t overlook more effective tracking. This opens the door to a whole lot of new marketing tactics, and let’s you justify them in the best way possible - with data to back up your operations. Connecting different systems can help to generate better analytics, and also allow different departments to get a clearer idea of what’s most effective in helping a company grow. That type of valuable information can make a big difference to the bottom line of your organization.