In the days of yore – meaning prior to 2020 – it was an accepted best practice to do pipeline goal splits between marketing, sales, and channel. It was usually a split with more onus on sales and about 30% on marketing and channel would waver based on if the deal was channel-in or channel-out.
The most painful part of my opening paragraph is that I cannot in confidence continue to use the word “was” since so many companies still measure this way – and it’s flat-out wrong.
When we re-emerged with a whole new buyer cycle post the most treacherous times of COVID-19, we also re-emerged with the need to adjust how we do marketing and sales. Yet, at the same time, still so many companies apply that model and wonder why their numbers do not add up to the closed-won deals that they need. Starting with a split like that changes how you consider your go-to-market investment and that investment is a losing gamble.
For one, marketing, even if business development reps (BDRs) sit in that organization, something I recommend for better marketing/sales interlock, they cannot CREATE pipeline. We also know that the buyer journey is such that lead source (where a lot of outcomes are tracked back to in the CRM) has been simplified to an investment indicator not a deal outcome. But it doesn’t mean that lead source is why the buyer purchased – it could be, but measuring pipeline by a split with teams and lead source as truth vs. multi-touch attribution simply tells me you don’t know how marketing fuels, or should fuel, your business.
The thing is, in reality, if a marketing team or its programs are not engaging the customer throughout their entire life cycle then it is not doing the right programs. At W2 Communications we believe in a model that we call the “Butterfly” that puts the onus on marketing to not only attract names and convert them to leads, but also prepare and enable sales, help create mechanisms for customer optimization and stickiness for long-term-value (LTV) and reduced customer acquisition costs (CAC) if they need to be replaced, and ultimately turn those customers into brand advocates based on their companies’ allowed policies.
This concept is not ours alone, but I created this model several years ago while an in-house Chief Marketing Officer and it’s now a fundamental component of how we manage our marketing services – demand gen, account-based experience (ABX), pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), creative design, and both organic and paid social. It’s also what our content strategy, research, and strategic communications teams use to help build their strategies and also advise clients on how to use their outputs to advance their revenue generating activities (RGA).
I want to be clear that I am in no way saying that marketing is not responsible for feeding qualified leads to sales for ultimate closed-won conversion. That is our job. But measuring that based on a pipeline split versus a reverse analysis of what we can even glean of the buyer journey from lead inception to customer acquisition based on a joint closed-won win is a better way of determining where to invest your marketing resources, how to best enable your channel and even price for their margins, and structure your sales engine.
I wouldn’t be a good former fulltime CMO / current fractional CXO if I didn’t say that these finite rules also cripple sales in some ways; they benefit from the shared outcome as well. And they need to be incentivized properly in order to also prospect for themselves on top of whatever book of business they bring with them, and grow those opportunities as well. Baseline operations are a good guideline to help sales leadership do this. This also keeps your pipelines from getting fluffy and inflated – and gives you a real incentive number for sales to be paid on closed won deals versus pipeline until the ink is dry.
At W2 Communications, we continue to thrive and grow, and one of the ways we have done that has been by expanding and up-leveling our marketing services based on the items I mentioned above to fractional CMO / CXO strategy work that spans from marketing to sales to revenue operations – based on decades of experience learning these lessons the hard ways and finding wins in spite of them.
If you want to chat more about this you’re welcome to book time on my calendar for a chat, debate, or discussion of how our services might help you. But, most importantly, please consider the points above as you build and expand your go-to-market, especially in early to late-stage startups, because it will amplify your growth to put the right measurements in the right places.