Marketing a profit centre - Is that possible?

Revenue marketing is something that CEOs have begged for and marketers dreamed about for years, but the inability to track customers all the way from media through to purchase meant that it has often been nothing but a pipedream.  This is becoming more and more achievable with the web tracking and automation tools available to marketers.

Today however, I want to talk about the philosophy rather than the tools.

Revenue marketing is a mindset.  A determination.   It is the same quality that is present is the eyes of sales people.  The need to make their number.  Revenue marketers have a number and they constantly drive to achieve it.

Revenue marketing does not happen overnight – It is a process that takes time.  In our case it took eighteen months before we started to see real results.  We started with the customer’s journey.  How will you reach them, create awareness, engage them and ultimately prompt action?

We had to build every part of the funnel.  Build, measure, optimize.   Often we had to create new components to the engine based on our customer’s journey.  Those components took time.  We had to implement an inbound call centre and click-to-chat.  Just the onboarding of the call centre and then the optimisation to convert inbound calls to sales opportunities took several months.

And all the way through we measured and optimized.

We kept everyone honest.  We set targets for every step of our sales funnel and held ourselves accountable through monthly review meetings.  However, as we were optimising the various elements of the engine, we realised that we could achieve so much more.  We have re-set our targets twice just this year.

Have a look at our current funnel below.  Please keep in mind that every business is different and you should find your appropriate achievement levels.

If revenue marketing is something that you have been thinking about, I can recommend a book written by Debbie Qaqish entitled “Rise of the Revenue marketer” that explores what is needed to make marketers accountable for a real sales funnel and accountable for revenue.

If you have enjoyed this blog, have a look at: No silver bullet for Marketing,  Marketing transformation: Where do I start, oh where do I start?, Content, content – We need content!