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?