For many years, marketing has been constricted to being answerable to CFO’s as an expense head. It has been a function which usually does not drive results from a sales standpoint and has always been a matter of grouse for the Finance departments. It’s also often one of the reasons that we’ve seen fewer CMO’s take up the CEO role – the lack of tangible impact on business.
With the coming in of technology, marketing’s time to transform business is now. Gone are the days where marketing had the ability to only sprinkle magic dust onto the ethos and soul of a company – of course, this is an age-old benefit of marketers and it will continue to remain as a strong one, however, what’s exciting is that it isn’t the only benefit of marketers to companies now. Over the last couple of years, the responsibilities levied by the board to the marketing teams demand them to be more accountable.
This has led to an evolution of a new breed of marketers who are very savvy with sales and start their careers with a business orientation. In addition to that, the current marketer also has a sense of digital technology and an understanding of how to create a marketing process that seamlessly ties into the sales process.
One such example is a piece of work at a Global Digital Ecosystem Enabler where the marketing team identified $1M sales opportunities and closures simply by looking at some of the recurring patterns in the data and creating interesting frameworks for the sales team to tap the leads located through the patterns. The company in question due to its strong brand gets thousands of inquiries and it needs to understand which inquiries need prime focus and which inquiries can drive sales. Using a combination of Clearbit, Google Optimize, and Google Analytics, the marketing team was able to present rich data to the sales team. With Clearbit, they were able to identify the IP addresses of the leads that visited their website that helped them understand which companies are coming into their website. Is it Tesla that’s coming in? Is it Oracle? Is it Uber?
More time spent by the company and more downloads of whitepapers indicated that more people from the company are interested. 341 such companies were identified at this company in question, from 8000 odd leads. Those were the leads that the sales team focused on which ultimately led to closures. This kind of drip process for marketing and razor-sharp micro marketing process, using digital technologies that affect not just the digital world but also the physical world and the closures of sales, is making marketing both exciting and powerful.
Digileaf – Digital Marketing Agency