Why is revenue marketing so important?

The definition of revenue marketing, is the process of developing repeatable prospecting programs in order to increase the rate of customer acquisition and improve sales.

It’s also a critical approach that needs to be adopted sooner rather than later if you’re going to successfully navigate your organization through the long-term implications of the pandemic.

The revenue marketing era is about mapping the full lifecycle and optimizing every single touchpoint, no matter where it’s coming from. You cannot become customer-centric across the entire lifecycle unless you have acquisition, engagement, closing and data all under one roof.

As referenced in Ledger Bennett’s blog ‘The Changing Face of Revenue Responsibility’ – the rise of digital technology, stretching growth targets and fierce competition means revenue responsibility between teams has shifted away from being solely a sales responsibility to a collective endeavor between sales, marketing and customer success.

Here are our top 5 tips to help you win the revenue marketing era:

1. Understand the value revenue marketing brings to all parties involved

  • Sales Team – Sales know which prospects are sales-ready and have the necessary context and supporting content they need to close sales.
  • Marketing Team – Marketing learns which campaigns, channels and messages deliver revenue in addition to clicks or leads, so they can optimize for success.
  • Customer success – Revenue marketing approach ensures customers always receive the most relevant and high value communication. This impacts on retention rates and ultimately revenue generation.
  • Prospects – New business prospects receive a consistent digital buying experience at every stage of their journey, from awareness right through to on-boarding.
  • Brand value – Continuous improvement of every single touchpoint a customer or potential customer comes into contact with is an opportunity to reinforce a positive brand image at every stage of the buyer journey.

2. Digitize your user journey

Even pre-pandemic, the user journey outlined above was moving away from human centric actions to digital user journeys. The pandemic has rapidly accelerated this journey so it’s critical you map out each and every touchpoint and identify opportunities for effective digitization. This will help enable predictability, scalability and repetition.

Predictable: The aim should be for a CMO or a CRO to produce a report showing marketing’s revenue contribution over the past month, quarter, or year, and a forecast for the upcoming period.

Scalable: Campaigns, reporting, content development, and attribution are all done similarly across any vertical, business unit and/or product group.

Repeatable: Processes for success are documented so that any new hire could quickly understand the process and begin contributing to the revenue machine.

3. Go beyond marketing and sales alignment

As referenced in one of our recent blog posts on marketing revenue accountability, functioning optimally for many will entail leaving behind the very notion of sales and marketing as siloed activity-centers that need to be aligned. As much as this notion of Sales and Marketing Alignment has been pushed, accept it as demand era thinking that at best creates a scenario yielding little more than efficient, contextualized MQL hand-offs, and marketing still left haggling for revenue attribution.

Data, technology and buyer demand for personalized digital and self-serve experiences drive home this point: Marketing needs to function further down-funnel with Sales moving further up-funnel on the path from Attention > Interest > MQL > SQO > Closed Won.

4. Plan and execute collateral and campaigns at every stage of the funnel

Process – defining your process around demand management (lead scoring; lead management; user journey led content). From there develop and execute campaigns that are repeatable and scalable and secure processes around data governance and privacy.

Technology – review your tech stack and how it relates to your revenue marketing architecture. Identify any gaps in your tech stack, research vendors and prepare for technology rollout.

Customers – Digitizing the whole user journey to include customers has to be a collective effort. With the trend for business models to move towards a focus on Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), understanding critical customer engagement points, taking an always-on approach to customer knowledge management and creating collateral tailored to customer pain points (as opposed to the traditional focus on prospect pain points) will be critical to optimizing user revenue management (URM) and overarching revenue success.

5. Analyze and improve

It goes without saying, but regular analysis and iterative planning across the whole user journey is the only way to reliably scale revenue impact. Critical to this is the development of revenue led KPIs that are the North Star for all revenue generating teams. Analysis and improvement should be based on success against these key metrics.

Ledger Bennett are ushering in the new era of progressive marketing revenue accountability through the right-sized deployment of optimal people, technology and digital agency solutions to ensure our client partners continuously win in the revenue era. Push to Start.