This is cross-posting of my article for AdWeek
Finding a performance marketing partner is the modern shortcut
Sales and marketing teams both serve critical functions for their organizations, and in a perfect world, they’d work together to maximize results. As CMOs and other executives push for higher revenue accountability from their teams, aligning these integral stakeholders is now more important than ever.
Unfortunately, sales and marketing often feel disconnected. Despite their aims being similar—and their efforts relying on each other’s support—they often operate independently without access to each other’s insights.
Performance marketing > digital transformation
Of course there are solutions to the disconnect between marketing and sales. But they often come in the form of major initiatives with names like “digital transformation” or “digital maturity” that carry 8-figure investment requirements and timelines measured in years.
If that’s not possible for your organization, there are shortcuts that allow you to derive much of the same benefit. One of these shortcuts is enabling close cooperation between performance marketers and sales.
Connecting marketing and sales
Because of the struggle in forging a clear connection between marketing and sales, it can be difficult to understand how marketing investment impacted revenue. A simple CSV report can deliver significant impact.
When a deal is closed, the sales team needs to track which leads became closed-won business, called a disposition report. Obviously lead-to-sale performance is a critical sales metric, but it can also deliver significant value to the marketing organization.
The sales org can share disposition reports with their marketing team, so they can go find more leads likely to become customers. Marketing benefits from the transparency and is able to provide higher-quality leads consistently. This results in more closed deals and higher revenue, which are significant wins for the sales team.
All that’s required is the sharing of a report that the sales team is already using, delivered via email. Bridging the gap between marketing and sales can be easy.
Unfortunately, going about this process the old-fashioned way—by fixing relationships between marketing and sales and aligning all stakeholders—is a time-consuming effort that often fails.
Finding a performance marketing partner is the modern shortcut. The gist of the problem is simple: salespeople need qualified leads, and marketing teams need clarity on the success of their lead generation efforts. If sales can take leads, process them, and report on which leads did and didn’t convert via a disposition report, performance marketing makes it possible to find more of the same through closed-loop optimization.
Performance marketing partners are built to deliver this closed-loop optimization, and they’ll bring an optimized model to generate results and insights. Because the model is pre-built, it’s low effort, and because organizations only pay for the performance itself, it’s low risk.
Taking this shortcut also effectively eliminates the need to immediately bring the organization to full digital maturity and align internal teams. While these goals are still important in the long term, thanks to performance marketing, they’re not a prerequisite to reaching sales and marketing goals.
At the end of the day, for very little risk, marketing and sales teams can work together to generate higher-quality leads – meaning, everyone (especially the business) wins.