“Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong.”- Suhail Doshi
Every October, B2B product and marketing teams typically begin to shift their focus to helping the sales teams close out the year strong, and develop 2019 budgets.
One of the things that’s not typically done well by B2B product and marketing teams is a deep-dive into the success and ROI of marketing initiatives from the past 12 months.
Modern B2B marketers must be able to measure the percentage of Marketing Generated Opportunities (MGO) and Marketing Influenced Opportunities (MIO) that end-up in the sales pipeline. These measurements have become more difficult to manage, primarily due to the disconnect between an organization’s CRM (sales operations led), and it’s marketing automation system (marketing led).
While marketing teams and their agencies talk about buyer journeys, they too often chase open rates, click-through rates, form conversions, and the number of “leads” they generated for the sales organization. It’s too common that marketing and sales operations haven’t built a marketing funnel and revenue attribution model that tracks MGO and MIO.
So what’s special about Q4 and MIO and MGO?
First, it takes time to build attribution models and embed them into the CRM system. It’s more effective to build and test in Q4 and be in a position to deploy in January.
Second, defining MGO and MIO can be complex, so its important to start the discussions as soon as possible. Sales leaders should have a voice in this process, so you have buy-in on the models and approach you want to deploy.
Third, making the case for next year’s marketing budgets are fare easier if you have data to support which initiatives are driving contributions to the sales pipeline.
Fourth, product teams have a vested interest in the success of marketing efforts. If marketing ROI for certain product initiatives is below expectations, product teams often are the best resources to help diagnose and prioritize improvements.
Finally, sales cycles don’t start and end according to the calendar year. For many B2B organizations, Q4 marketing efforts don’t begin to pay off until Q1or later anyway.
So, make sure that your marketers and product teams don’t lose the Q4 opportunity to build for success in 2019.