Four Steps to Move from Traditional Marketing to Revenue Marketing
What has changed so much about B2B marketing in the last few years that we’re now using a term like revenue marketing? In a nutshell: accountability. Ask yourself these two questions: Do you currently have any kind of revenue accountability? And if you don’t have revenue accountability today, will you be held accountable in the next 12 months?
B2B marketers are in a period of extreme transformation. Roughly 85 percent of B2B marketers are feeling intense pressure to add direct revenue accountability to their job description. The imperative for marketing to directly connect to revenue is coming at the marketer from every part of the organization:
- Today’s CEO is asking, “How can marketing today help us achieve growth and competitive advantage?”
- Today’s CFO is asking, “What revenue impact is marketing making and what’s the ROI?”
- Today’s COO is asking, “How can marketing help increase operational efficiency and effectiveness in the marketing and sales process?”
- Today’s VP of sales is asking, “How can marketing help us find substantially more sales-ready leads and get them through the sales funnel more quickly?”
This demand to show credible financial results lands squarely on the plate of today’s CMO, who is now charged with leading transformation and change in order to meet the requirements of the organization. In this pressure-cooker environment, the CMO can view the situation as either the sky is falling (disaster) or there is a silver lining to this cloud (opportunity).
Let’s take the silver-lining approach because, for most B2B marketers, this environment of transformation represents one of the best periods for career and contribution potential in the history of the field.
What Is Revenue Marketing?
Revenue marketing is the combination of strategies, processes, people, technologies, customer focus and results that does the following:
- Drops sales-ready leads into the top of the funnel
- Accelerates sales opportunities through the sales pipeline
- Measures marketing based on the repeatable, predictable, and scalable contribution to pipeline and revenue
- Improves the ROI of the sales and marketing continuum
The Model
The Revenue Marketing Journey™ (RMJ) is a simple model that The Pedowitz Group created to help marketers understand this new landscape, to identify where they are today and where they need to be. The model presents four distinct stages to achieving revenue marketing status: traditional, lead generation marketing, demand generation and revenue marketing, the final stage. Marketers in the revenue marketing stage directly connect to revenue in a repeatable, predictable and scalable manner. They have become an economic engine for the organization.
Since its introduction in early 2011, the RMJ has been tested with thousands of marketers and has proven to be an easy way to set a course for any marketing organization to more concretely connect with revenue. Let’s review each stage of the journey.
Traditional Marketing—The “Make It Pretty” Department
Characterized by the Four P’s—product, promotion, placement and price—traditional marketing is what is still being taught in school and what most marketers experience every day. For many B2B marketing organizations at this stage, marketing has little political clout, doesn’t have a seat at the revenue table and is seen as the “make it pretty” department. Senior executives in this organization don’t realize the revenue impact that marketing could make on the company.
Traditional marketers are focused on creating and implementing marketing strategies and tactics without good insight into the impact of those initiatives. They typically report on a host of activity-based metrics, such as number of ads and impressions. For many companies, this is largely a blind spend, represents a huge budget and provides metrics that key executives don’t care about.
What we’re talking about is moving beyond these traditional marketing activities to include a more relevant and effective way of marketing, one that eventually earns marketing a seat at the revenue table. The next three phases include defining characteristics and specific metrics because understanding what you are measuring gives you better insight into what your business is really all about.
To learn more about the other three stages in the Revenue Marketing Journey, read the full article by Debbie Qaqish.
