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The Disconnect in “Data-Driven” Marketing

Marketing as a field is increasingly being touted as “data-driven.” Still, all too often, the data is relegated to a quarterly performance slide, and marketing is driven by:

• What sales says they want (usually for more emails to be sent out to create “leads”)
• What the CEO says they want (usually something that generates “excitement” and “buzz”)
• What seemed to work in the past
• What seems flashy, cool, or new
• What will produce quick, impressive results 

How Clients Typically Track Marketing

When discussing marketing reporting, I tend to come across two types of clients: those who track everything (and I mean everything) externally in a spreadsheet, and those who have an attractive dashboard and only look at the charts. 

But this isn’t a clickbait article where I’m now going to tell you that everything you’ve ever done to measure and drive your marketing is wrong. 

I believe that all of the elements listed above should have an impact on your marketing strategy, but in the proper context and proportion. And the only way to integrate all these disparate elements is by using your data effectively to drive results.

While each of the above influences plays a role in shaping marketing strategy, one in particular has an outsized impact: the alignment between sales and marketing. Get that right, and the rest becomes easier to measure, adapt, and improve.

Why Sales and Marketing Need Alignment

CEO directives, past successes, and trend-driven ideas will always have a seat at the table, but without a strong bridge between sales insights and marketing execution, they’re just noise.

In the first scenario, before undertaking any marketing efforts, you need to collaborate with sales to define and agree on your goal. Here’s the reality: if your product is so transactional that you can hand over sales leads who are ready to sign a contract, then you don’t need a sales team. That isn’t a partnership, that’s an assembly line. 

Marketing’s job is to educate the masses, enabling the ideal prospects to self-identify as someone who could benefit from your solution. And their job is then to create opportunities for sales to have meaningful one-to-one conversations with those prospects.

So when sales says they want “more leads,” what they want is more meaningful conversations. And when they say they want “more emails sent out,” what they want is more opportunities to chat with leads and content to use in their conversations. 

What Should Marketing Measure?

How does marketing support what sales wants? By understanding what content and which tactics lead to meaningful conversations. The most common response from marketing is to send some emails with various types of messaging and content, and then measure the response to those emails. An advanced team would also try to link opportunity creation to its efforts. But I would argue that neither email open and click rates nor opportunity creation rates measure the achievement of this goal. 

If the data you’re looking at doesn’t tell you what to do next, then it’s not useful data. For example, you should keep an eye on email send and response metrics. Because if all of a sudden your emails are bouncing, or being marked as spam, you need that data to tell you what to do. (Pause email sends, check your sender score, etc.) But seeing that your email response rate is about the same for every email doesn’t tell you what to change, continue, or stop. 

Better Ways to Use Your CRM Data

Instead, consider using date stamps and “time to” reports to determine how many meetings were created from email recipients within a specified time frame from the email send date. 

Segment your audience so that all prospects don’t receive all communications. This provides a natural control group to evaluate messaging and tactics. If you already have a well-developed customer journey, great! You already have those segments in place.

Create a field for sales to tag what they discussed in their meetings. If you must create an unstructured data field for this, also include a structured one to facilitate trend analysis.

Map content topics to your funnel so that you understand the effectiveness and time lag for each topic based on where someone is in their journey.

Put your data into a spreadsheet and play with it. Do sales topic tags match up to the content being sent in an email? Why or why not? Does this change based on the time lag between the email and the sales meeting? Do prospects who meet with sales convert more quickly? In greater numbers?

Are prospects who have more meetings more likely to purchase? Do they buy more (at a higher price, with more extended contracts, etc.)? Are many meetings scheduled closer together more effective than a longer sales cycle?

Closing Thought

Once you have sufficient data to understand which trends drive your specific sales cycle, you can take steps to conduct marketing activities with messaging and timing tailored to capitalize on these trends.

Nail this process and you’ll not only generate more meaningful sales conversations, you’ll also be able to handle CEO requests, trend-chasing ideas, and quick-win opportunities with confidence, because your decisions are grounded in data that works.

If you’re ready to get more out of your data and build a marketing strategy that supports sales, let’s connect.