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Connected marketing

Many companies struggle to decide how much they should spend on marketing – and how to allocate that spend on everything from staff costs and overheads to marketing projects.

Our experience at Tudor Rose has shown that to get the balance right, it is crucial to connect the sales and marketing functions within the organisation. The sales cycle includes finding prospects, qualifying and developing them, providing solutions, closing sales and growing the customer base. The marketing cycle starts with ensuring corporate readiness, brand awareness and demand generation, followed by encouraging brand consideration and purchase intention, and ultimately nurturing customers to build satisfaction, advocacy, retention and development.

We are interested in helping our clients find the point where the marketing role crosses over with the sales role, and leveraging that knowledge to produce informed budget decisions. This point is different for every organisation, but having an awareness of the sales cycle and mapping against it to determine marketing objectives enables unique insights and more targeted expenditure for any business.

To give an example, typically the marketing department is responsible for managing corporate identity and generating brand awareness. Sales and marketing activity may start to cross over at the demand generation stage, perhaps in an activity such as an exhibition, where marketing organises the stand, while the sales team sells to visitors. The marketing department needs to be aware from a revenue point of view of what the sales team requires in order to achieve its targets, and what it must contribute to help the team achieve those goals. And the sales team can be more effective with the benefit of access to reliable marketing insights.

In addition to studying the sales and marketing cycles to find where they connect, we look closely at the numbers involved in bringing in new business. Let’s take the example of a sales team that expects to be able to convert one customer out of five requests for a proposal. In order to get a request for a proposal, they need to have five meetings, each of which requires around 10 qualified leads to set up. To get a qualified lead, they need to touch approximately 25 different companies.

Based on these figures and looking at the market potential, it is possible to work out what the total audience size needs to be to win new business (in the above example the average is one piece of business for each thousand touches), and also what percentage of the marketing budget should be allocated to each activity. For instance, if it takes a large number of sales calls to get a qualified lead, the business may opt to spend more on demand generation. If they are struggling to hold onto customers despite good conversion figures, they may decide to launch a customer loyalty programme.

Some of our clients find that the process of working through our connected marketing model reveals areas in which they need to increase or reassign their investment quite significantly to address issues that are hampering their growth. For others, it leads to less dramatic adjustments in the balance of spend, resulting in cost savings and more effective marketing and sales activity. In all cases, the knowledge that emerges from the process is empowering and has positive outcomes for business activity going forward.

Jon Ingleton is managing director of Tudor Rose. To receive articles like this directly to your inbox, please sign up for our newsletter