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Closed Loop Marketing - How Marketing Can Get Along with Sales

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Closed Loop Marketing can be a powerful tool to help sales and marketing get along.  But it starts as a process.  First, marketing captures leads, and then should probably categorize and grade leads before sharing them with sales.  Likewise for the final part of the process, sales should provide feedback to marketing about how the lead follow-up turned out.

In a perfect world, both Sales and Marketing are getting the information they needs to refine their activities and drive profits for the company. To get the gist of Closed Loop Marketing in a Web 2.0 world, let's imagine a number of prerequisites to a well-functioning process are already in place.

For starters, assume your business has perfected its inbound marketing. When your best prospects are looking online for products or services that you sell, they are finding your company in search engines, blogs and social media, and they are entering into your marketing funnel. Moreover, you've perfected your calls to action, offers and landing pages so that you convert a high percentage of these prospects into leads.

Marketing Data to Enable Closed Loop Marketing

Let's think about what pieces of marketing data you should want to track:

  • Which campaign, program, keywords, and website brought the lead to your website
  • What offers or landing pages the lead completed
  • Some demographic information about the lead (size of company, title, etc.)
  • The number of visits the lead made to your website and all the pages viewed, before and after becoming a lead
  • Updates anytime the lead has returned to your website and viewed more pages or filled out another form

Sales Data to Enable Closed Loop Marketing

Now, let's think about what pieces of sales data you should want to track:

  • Where along the sales cycle the lead is currently
  • How far along in the sales process the lead ended up - including if it resulted in a closed deal and a new customer
  • Time elapsed between different stages of the sales process
  • The value of any closed deals - total revenue
  • Conclusion - Closed Loop Marketing

    All of this information should seamlessly flow between your Marketing system and your CRM/Salesforce system, so that everyone has a complete view of what is going on in the Sales and Marketing Funnel.

    With the right reports, process and closed loop marketing, both sales and marketing can work together to figure out what processes are working best, and how the company as a whole can get more customers at a faster pace and a cheaper cost.

    Is your company using closed loop marketing?  What have you found to be  the key success factors?

    Posted by Mike Volpe on Wed, May 14, 2008 @ 09:06 AM

    COMMENTS

    This is a very interesting concept. We've been compiling email addresses for a furniture company, based on what people are interested in, but we're stumbling on what to do with it. We're a little hesitant to pass them along to an actual salesperson, but want to get it out of the hands of the marketing department so we can start a line of communication with these people. I'm interested to hear what other companies are doing once they get their list of categorized leads.

    posted on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 2:41 PM by Andy Weigel


    Really enjoyed it, I wanted to click out and
    you kept pulling me back in! Many thanks
    and keep up the great work!

    posted on Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 11:57 AM by Franchise Whale


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