The Audit That Can Save Your Marketing

Are you bringing in leads but not seeing sales?

Does your marketing team speak one language and your sales team speak another?

Do you know which marketing channels are driving revenue and which are not?

Are your customer acquisition costs through the roof?

If you answered yes to any (or all) of these questions, it might be time for a marketing audit.

Let me paint a picture here, one you've probably seen before.

There is this very smart marketing team that is tasked with generating leads for sales. They are writing content, leveraging lead gen channels, and handing off leads to the SDR/BDR team.

Yet, sales aren't seeing the results from those leads. Close rates on leads generated from Marketing is an anemic 0.2%.?So, although well-intended, the marketing effort isn't translating into revenue. As a result, tensions rise between the two teams, and misalignment occurs.?

What's happening?

Sales perspective: marketing isn't doing its job.

Marketing perspective: sales isn't doing its job.?

The reality??

Neither team has the answers - yet. The truth is, you can guess, assume, complain, and still see no progress toward improvement. Or, you can dig in and understand your current situation and make decisions for improvement based on data and facts.??

The above scenario is far from unique.?It's quite typical of a tactical and siloed approach to customer acquisition. Marketers, it's time to adopt a strategic buyer-centric approach to customer acquisition. It will drastically improve results, having a positive impact on your revenue numbers.?

Now the big question is - how do we do this?

Start with your current situation.?

• Where are you today??
• Where do you need to be?
• Where is the process broken??

The best way to answer these questions is to run a situational audit. This is not an easy task; it takes time and commitment, but it's worth it.

Once you have your situational audit in place, you can decide where the best place to start is.?

It's like renovating your house; sure, you might want to rip up that ugly flooring and paint those dated walls, but if your bathroom pipes are broken, you are going to want to fix those first.

The audit will help you see which areas need your attention first. Which will show the quickest results and which need to be fixed for long-term success? Where are you draining your marketing dollars, and where can you move that money to see revenue??

The Customer Acquisition Situational Audit?

Every good customer acquisition strategy starts with an honest, in-depth marketing assessment. The assessment should consider perspectives from marketing and sales and others involved in the acquisition process and operations. The more involved the parties are in the process, the easier it is to align needs, goals, expectations and priorities.?

Let's get started.

Desired Outcome

What is the goal of this audit? Where do you want to be at the end of it?

Here's a generic example:

Goal: Align, operationalize and optimize people, processes, content, and technology to focus on your buyers and their purchase path throughout their buying journey.

Specific results:??

• Increase MQL → SQL conversion rate by 10%
• Increase Marketing Contributed Pipeline and Revenue by 20%
• Increase ARPC?

I think you get what I'm saying here. Start your process by setting the goal and desired outcome to help you build the map on how you will get there.

The Ultimate Process

What is the ultimate process (aka the map) to achieve your desired outcome?

'The Ultimate Process' is the holistic approach that ensures the customer acquisition strategy starts with the buyer in mind and is at the core of everything marketing and sales does. At a more granular level, The Ultimate Process includes the following attributes:

• Buyer-Centric: Coordinating all marketing and sales activities to align with the buyer and their buying process. Including creating content, programs and systems that align with all stages of the buyer's journey. Being buyer-centric means stopping all the one-off campaigns centred on a specific piece of content or an event.
• Revenue-Oriented: This is shifting marketing's focus from driving top-of-funnel lead volume to actively delivering revenue. This happens when marketing takes on a strategic and outcome-oriented approach to identifying, qualifying and converting buyers in a repeatable, predictable, and programmatic fashion.
• Integrated and Orchestrated: All marketing and sales activities must be unified and operationalized. This means working together to develop a sequence of engagement and nurturing the buyer and creating a series of closely managed and optimized steps, ultimately leading to revenue.?

When you neglect to take this holistic approach, a gap develops between marketing and sales. As a result, all activities become isolated, and in the end, your buyers' experience is less than excellent, resulting in low revenue numbers.

Insights Needed

What information do you need to achieve your desired outcome?

• Customers: Who are your buyers, what are the segments, what are the use cases, how is product performance? What marketing efforts are working best, what aren't? Which market segments represent the most growth and profit? Which are unprofitable? Are there any customer needs or problems going unaddressed??
• Competitors: How are their brands positioned? What are their products, services, and pricing? How do they communicate? What customer segments are they pursuing, and how are they doing it?
• Capabilities: What can you deliver with your current product capabilities? How does it match up to the customer's needs? Are there any market opportunities that haven't been capitalized on?
• Industry trends: To understand the product and market segments you intend on penetrating, you need to understand the industry overall and where the growth opportunities lie. What parts are growing? To paraphrase the great Wayne Gretzky, "it's about getting to where the opportunity will be as opposed to where it is right now." I'm kidding, of course. Gretzky wasn't talking about marketing in his original quote when he said, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." But if he were a marketer and not a hockey player, he'd surely say to look forward to where the success will be.
• Touchpoints: How are you performing at all buyer touchpoints throughout the organization? Is it seamless across the organization? If not, it will affect your business outcomes. For example, think about your website, content, events, speaking engagements, webinars, emails, sales calls, customer success calls, etc.
• Measurements: What is currently measured, and why? Are you collecting the correct data vs. convenient data? It would help if you used these metrics, so marketing dollars move towards the most profitable (and promising) customer segments and marketing channels and away from those that aren't.

Kicking Off the Audit

Here are some questions to get you started evaluating your current marketing effectiveness and your journey to marketing hero status.

Marketing Talent & Technology

From the copywriter to the CMO, every marketer's job is to connect actions to outcomes. The question is, do your marketers feel they have the skills necessary to impact the bottom line?

Where are the gaps in your marketing team?

1. What are the roles and responsibilities of the existing marketing team?
2. How are gaps in capabilities affecting performance?
3. Do team members understand the metrics used to evaluate their performance?
4. What are the core components of your existing marketing technology stack?
5. Does the marketing team clearly understand the features, functionality and value of the existing marketing technology solutions??
6. Is the marketing team immersed in the technologies that drive your company's success?
7. Are the existing technologies being fully utilized by the marketing team?
8. Are the technologies you have tightly integrated with each other?
9. Are gaps in technology affecting performance? For example, is the lack of a marketing automation solution hindering the lead-to-sale conversion rate?

Buyer Analysis

Buyer personas are a crucial component of successful customer acquisition strategies, particularly for the sales and marketing teams. After all, the marketing team needs to know to whom they are marketing, and the sales team needs to know to whom they are selling.

Who are your buyers?

Do you know:

1. Demographics/backgrounds?
2. Goals/challenges?
3. Common objections??
4. What are the first steps taken in the buying process?
5. What are the next steps after the buying process begins??
6. What were the events that started the purchase process?
7. Who are the key players in the buying process, what are their personas, their involvement along the purchase path, and their unique content consumption patterns?
8. Do you know what product features they find most valuable? What are their top 3?
9. What are the top 3 marketing channels you're finding this buyer in currently?
10. What value proposition do they care about most? Least?

This is just a quick look into the buyers. I'm keeping it a macro view for this post, but when you do your situational audit, you do need to do a much deeper dive into your buyers' path to guarantee alignment of content and dialogue at all stages of the buyer's journey. How to do that is a topic for another post.?

Marketing Assessment

Raise your hand if you would like more visitors to your website, more leads for your sales team, and more customers to fuel growth. I'm guessing your hand is up. Now, raise your hand if you get cold calls when you're about to sit down for dinner with your family. Or get emails with irrelevant offers in your inbox. Or see pop-up ads when you're trying to read an article online. I'm guessing your hand is up again. Are you marketing the way your customers actually want to shop and buy???

Are you marketing in a way that will grow your business? Dive in and ask yourself and your team these questions to see if you are:

Website Traffic, Source Traffic, Conversion Rate:

1. How much traffic has your website seen in the past six months? Are you satisfied with this traffic volume? Do you want to grow it??
2. What have you been doing to increase awareness of your business? Is it working?
3. How many views does your website's homepage get?
4. What is your best-performing page? Why do you think it's performed so well/not so well??
5. Is your website optimized for search engines? Are your web page titles and meta descriptions unique and complete?
6. How much money do you spend on paid advertising to drive website traffic? What platforms do you usually use for paid advertising??
7. What social media accounts do you have? What's the purpose of each account?
8. Do you have a blog? If yes, how often do you post to your blog? What's the most popular content topic? If not, why?
9. Do you include contextualized Calls To Action (CTA) throughout your website, particularly on your highest trafficked pages?
10. Do you include contextualized CTAs in blog articles, or do they have dead ends?
11. Do you follow up with leads using marketing automation?
12. Do you have automated nurturing email messages that are relevant to the recipient based on the offer downloaded?
13. Have you developed relevant messages and offers to help qualify a prospect?
14. What is the conversion rate from lead to customer??
15. Is there a point where the percentage between two stages in the funnel drastically drops off?

Review Past Campaigns

1. What were your best-performing campaigns??
2. What were your worst-performing campaigns??
3. Were there any campaigns last year where you deviated from your status quo? How did that go for you??
4. What were your "highest hope" campaigns? These are campaigns that had high expectations and consumed a significant amount of time/budget. How did they perform for you?
5. How do you measure campaign success (leads generated, page views, etc.)?

Content Marketing

1. Is your content mostly product-centric??
2. Is it created in reaction to perceived gaps?
3. Does your content support key personas/industries?
4. Does your content align with the buyer journey stages and personas?
5. Which assets do you currently have that are underutilized?
6. Is your content centralized in one place to help manage it and ensure everyone is using only marketing-approved content?
7. Is your content organized for easy discoverability by your buyers?
8. Have you mapped your content distribution plans to buyer personas and stages?

Sales & Marketing Alignment

Achieving actual sales and marketing alignment is about more than holding the occasional 'smarketing' meeting and going for monthly drinks. All the meetings, status reports and team-building exercises are for naught if sales and marketing don't have a strategic playbook for delivering predictable, measurable results. Both groups need to work together to connect with the buyer, provide a cohesive buying experience, and be measured by a singular metric, revenue.

If marketing cannot close the loop and connect leads to revenue, then it's a clear indicator that sales and marketing are misaligned.?

I'm a huge fan of tying marketing teams' KPIs directly to revenue targets. That way, marketing and sales are working towards the same goals, aligning the two teams.

How aligned are your sales and marketing teams?

1. Our sales and marketing focused on the same metrics? If not, what is marketing focused on???
2. Is there an agreed-upon definition of your ideal customer profile???
3. Is there a clear and mutually agreed-upon definition for buying stages, for example, a qualified lead, marketing qualified lead (MQL), sales qualified lead (SQL), sales accepted lead (SAL), opportunity, or any other criteria you have in your sales process?
4. Is there a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in place between sales and marketing? For example, how many qualified leads will be passed on to sales? How will sales handle those leads, and in what time frame??
5. Is there an agreed-upon lead routing process?
6. Have both teams agreed on how to score leads?
7. Our sales and marketing systems connected?

Reporting Requirements

Remember earlier when we said that customer acquisition strategies have to start with clear goals? Tracking progress toward these goals requires selecting smart marketing metrics. Building metrics into your strategies empowers both your marketing and sales teams by giving them the ability to measure the impact of all investments. Data gives you the confidence to identify which parts of marketing efforts deliver the optimal return on investment (ROI), including the performance of channels and specific campaigns.?

What are you measuring, and is it the right thing?

Lead Management Performance

1. Overall Lead volume: What is the overall lead velocity rate? Is the volume of qualified leads increasing month over month?
2. Lead volume by Channel: Which channels are producing the most leads?
3. Lead volume by Campaign: Which campaigns are producing the most leads?
4. Opportunities by Channel: Which channels are creating the most opportunities?
5. Opportunities by Campaign: Which campaigns are creating the most opportunities?
6. Closed Won Opportunities by Channel: Which channels are creating the most sales and revenue?
7. Closed won Opportunities by Campaign: Which campaigns are creating the most sales and revenue?
8. Number of Open Leads: Is sales attending to all incoming Leads? If not, how many are being missed?
9. Lead response time: When is sales attending to the leads??

Funnel Performance

1. Buyers by lead stage: How many buyers are in each lead stage?
2. Conversion rates by lead stage: How many buyers are moving through the funnel?
3. Velocity by lead stage: How fast are buyers moving through the funnel?
4. Growth rate by lead stage: How full is each stage throughout the funnel?
5. Nurture database size: How many buyers are being nurtured at any given time?

Revenue Performance

1. Pipeline value by lead stage: What is the weighted pipeline by stage?
2. Revenue by program: Which marketing programs are driving revenue?
3. Revenue growth rate by program: Which marketing programs are influencing revenue?
4. Win rate by program: Which marketing programs are influencing closed-won business?

After You've Answered the Questions

Once you've completed your marketing audit, you should have a better understanding of what's working, what's not working, where the gaps are and what you need to do to achieve your objectives.?

As Anthony Robbins says, it's not what you know. It's what you DO with what you know. Knowledge without action is merely interesting, but knowledge is pure gold when using it for productive purposes.??

Take a look at your analysis; what can you do right now to improve your customer acquisition? Are there quick wins? What is most critical for success in the future??

Map those answers to your Desired Outcome. Now craft a smart customer acquisition strategy, together with the other go-to-market teams, and deliver a higher return on your investment.

Customer acquisition can be complex, but it's inherently easier to use your strategy as a driver of business when you start with a good understanding of where you are, where you need to get to, and how you will get there as a unified team.?

The question for you isn't: Are you going to market the best way possible??

The real question is, Are you ready? Who's all in??

Be the hand raiser, be the agent of change.??