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Closing the Loop Between Marketing and Sales

This podcast summarizes a session I recently conducted at the first annual  Inbound Marketing Summit September 8th in Cambridge, MA.  The event was sponsored by Hubspot, the providers of the industry’s leading inbound marketing system and WebsiteGrader.com.  There were about 300 people in attendance and through the use of social media the event reached nearly 100,000 people. 

I conducted a session called “Closed Loop Marketing.”  A link to the presentation slides are available here.

The keynote speakers were David Meerman Scott and Seth Godin both well known authors, bloggers and speakers.  They didn’t disappoint with their clever insights into contemporary marketing. 

Here is one of my “take aways” from each keynoter:

Scott: “you can’t measure everything…what is the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?…of the receptionist?…the guys cutting the grass in front of the building?”  His point is that the way we measure contemporary marketing is not the same as it used to be.

Godin: “when you look at a cow, it’s pretty boring, but if you color it purple people notice it.”  His point is that marketing has to stand out.  It needs to be different and attention-grabbing to cut through all the bad marketing which clutters our brain every day. 

My session covererd the four pillars of closing the loop between marketing and sales:

1) Key Relationships: marketers must know each of the executive stakeholders and their measurement criteria and be aligned with them to effectively measure results (see Scott’s point above).

2) Strategies: know behavior of your target market, design proper messaging, listen to online communities, allocate resources wisely, think “small” (long tail strategies)

3) Best Practices: “eat lunch with stakeholders,” know your competition and industry thought leaders, propagate your content, test, measure, revise (TMR), don’t be afraid to experiment.

4) Measurement Strategies: measure leads, sales, “buzz,” brand, cost-per (fill in the blank).  Use tools to measure ranging from manual calculations, free or inexpensive tools, to elaborate and costly tools based on your budget and marketing programs.

In this session I placed a lot of emphasis on rolling out marketing programs that are well aligned with key stakeholders and that your measurement strategies agree with your key stakeholder’s goals and criteria.

The full presentation videos for all the sessions from IMS08 will be available on the Inbound Marketing Summit Website in the near future.  I also recommend you check out the full Flickr slideshow on the Inbound Marketing Summit at  www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ims08/.

How do you close the loop between marketing and sales in your business?