How to Unlock Marketing Analytics Across Your Sales Funnel

We’ve been told time and time again that marketing data analytics are essential for effective content marketing. While most acknowledge its importance, many are still struggling to make effective use of their data.

“Spending on marketing analytics—quantitative data about customer behavior and marketplace activities—is expected to leap from 4.6 percent to almost 22 percent of marketing budgets in the next three years, representing a 376 percent increase. At the same time, marketers say barely a third of available data are used to drive decision making in their companies.”  

Today we’re exploring the current state of – and challenges associated with – marketing analytics utilization and how it relates to the sales funnel. We’ll also be reviewing top strategies you can employ for effective analytics throughout your sales and marketing process.

The Availability of Data is Growing

Digital content, websites, email campaigns, and other online customer touch-points are generating data at a greater velocity, volume, and variety than ever before. However, data is an enabler of insights, not an answer in itself. Gathering large volumes of data about buyers is fine, but that data must then be utilized to compel audiences and adjust strategies.

The main data challenges shared by businesses are ensuring data quality, creating actionable insights from data, and managing data from a variety of sources.

So, how can we unlock the power of marketing analytics across our sales funnel?

Sales and Marketing Alignment

A key phrase has emerged over the past few years. Sales and marketing alignment is among the best organizational strategies you can employ for improved sales funnel performance, more effective digital content creation, and greater utilization of marketing analytics.

When sales and marketing alignment is weak, the result is poor data sharing. Common problems include: sales presentations that aren’t in sync with marketing messages and difficulty measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns.

Alternatively, when sales and marketing teams are properly aligned they enjoy:

• 3% better quota attainment
• 20% higher annual growth
• 75% higher follow-up on marketing qualified leads

Shared data between both teams is the best enabler of sales and marketing alignment. Additionally, when the two teams are aligned, they improve their ability to collaborate and enhance the quality of data.

A Complete Sales Stack

The sales stack is a hot issue. The sales support industry has been growing exponentially in recent years as dozens of point solutions strive to solve a variety of business challenges. Unfortunately, these point solutions aren’t working and many businesses are experiencing a phenomenon known as “tool exhaustion” that’s preventing sales success.

The right sales stack mix includes a sales analytics software component that facilitates closed loop marketing and pushes all sales presentations and meeting data to the marketing team and the CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Without a complete sales stack, aligning analytics to your sales funnel would be impossible.

Effective CRM Implementation

It’s one thing to have a CRM system; it’s another to have measurable business success from a CRM. While many organizations use and appreciate its benefits, their objectives are often misaligned from what a CRM can realistically deliver, leading to adoption challenges that erode ROI and cause friction in the sales process.

The problem is not the CRM, it’s how the CRM is implemented and used. In order to maximize effectiveness, you need to automate the entire process of updating and extracting data. Updating a CRM with anecdotal insights and focusing on limited metrics, like conversions and visits, creates time consuming, limited, and retrospective insights.

Data is exactly the reason why CRM-user adoption numbers are crashing below 50 percent. With so much data creation, the inputs and outputs have to be contextually relevant and entirely automated. Otherwise, they cease being a tool for enablement and become an administrative detour that wastes time.

For your CRM to be effective, your sales & marketing analytics software must update the CRM in real time and provide your sales teams with all relevant information about their current buyer.

How to make the most of your data

The first steps towards unlocking marketing analytics across your sales funnel are to invest in sales and marketing alignment initiatives, move towards a holistic sales stack, and rethink your CRM strategy.

If you need help managing the volume, velocity, and variety of data, and need a tool that helps coordinate your digital sales and marketing communications, then request a demo of Klyck.io and let us show you how simple data utilization in sales can be.  

For more information, check out www.klyck.io/resources