Full Circle Insights’ CEO, Bonnie Crater Offers Her Views on How to Select the Right Martech solutions for Better, Integrated Marketing and Sales Campaign Optimization
Generating new sales opportunities is a tough business challenge. And, most marketing and sales teams rely on Martech tools to beat the blues. A recent study revealed that 91% of all marketers consider Account-Based Marketing as a necessity to integrate marketing and sales departments. Yet, despite the integration of the two departments, proving the relationship between marketing and sales generation remains a challenge. In 2018, marketers are better driven to close the gap between data and insights to elevate marketing and sales performance for higher revenue generation. That’s where Full Circle Insights helps to connect leads to accounts in your CRM with it’s smart, self-customizable matching technology.
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Bonnie Crater, CEO, Full Circle Insights, believes this is because the current technology tools marketers are using are leaving gaping holes in their data. With marketers struggling to choose the right martech platform for their business, they’re missing out on how easy it can be to prove marketing ROI and increase lead generation.
We spoke to Bonnie to better understand the most contemporary tactics used by CMOs, to build their lead-generation campaigns in 2018, using the right martech tools. Here are her tips for selecting the right martech tools to prove ROI.
The State of Lead Generation in 2018
Are Marketers More Focused on Lead Acquisitions over Lead Generation Campaigns?
We continue to expect marketing to grow their focus on data.
While the demand generation function continues to evolve, we feel that dividing the function into lead generation and lead acquisition is splitting hairs and defocuses from the overall objective to generate high-quality demand for offerings that result in new sales.
When CMOs work with colleagues to achieve the company’s revenue targets, they must be able to collaborate with sales leadership to identify goals and determine the average deal size, lead volume, and velocity needed to meet the objectives.
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Demand generation information from historical data provides signals to help marketers understand sales velocity and collaborate effectively with sales to achieve objectives via lead generation. Using historical data, CMOs need to have the capability to determine the Conversion Rates based on past performance and identify what they need to do (For example, how many leads to generate, optimal sales cycle, etc.) to meet their objectives.
The Biggest Challenges to Choosing the Right Martech Stack in 2018
The top challenge is that too few marketing leaders are considering the importance of aligning their data with that used by the sales team. To operate as data-driven organizations, marketing and sales need a common source of data truth. But too often, marketing chooses martech solutions that aren’t compatible with the de facto revenue reporting system top companies use — Salesforce or other CRMs.
So, when marketing presents its data to the C-Suite, there’s a credibility gap because it doesn’t match up with the system everyone else uses. To solve this problem, marketing needs to choose martech solutions that are integrated with their CRM platform so that everyone is using the same data source — and marketing also gets a seat at the strategy table.
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The Growing Importance of Customer Data Platforms in Unifying Marketing and Sales Technologies
Marketing and sales need a single source of data truth, and companies are already using their CRMs as a CDP. Cooperation between marketing and sales teams is more important than ever. Since prospects tend to show up on sales’ radar later in the buying process, marketing must shoulder greater responsibility for nurturing leads further down the sales funnel. That’s why we advocate using Salesforce or another CRM as a core part of the martech solutions stack.
Marketing data from virtually any source can be integrated with the CRM platform and used to create a unified view of customers, which is the key function of a CDP.
Plan Your Data Management Strategies
The Role of Automation Technologies and Vendor Platforms in Integrating with Top-End Data Management Platforms
Marketers should acknowledge that we’re in the middle of a sea change, a transition to a new way of producing what I call the “Insights Economy”. Data is the raw material we’re refining into insights, and the quality of our work depends directly on the quality of the data we use to create insights. That’s why it’s so important to have a single source of data truth.
Our recommendation is for marketers to look for martech solutions that are built natively on the platform used by many companies as their sales management and revenue tracking tool: the CRM platform.
Adoption of Data Science and AI/Machine Learning in The MarTech Stack
Data science and machine learning are tremendously exciting, but we must keep in mind that a solid data set is a prerequisite to fulfill their promise. The old saying “garbage in, garbage out” still applies because AI, as sophisticated as it is, is a computer program.
So, to capitalize on new technologies in marketing, CMOs must ensure that they get the most complete and accurate data on marketing campaign performance. The AI technology I’m watching closely is Einstein from Salesforce, which provides predictions and recommendations based on unified data.
