A New Breed: The Revenue Marketer

We reviewed Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics and found it lived up to its title with 70 pages of detailed advice on how to most effectively gather and measure key marketing metrics.

Within the Guide, a new profile emerged: the Revenue Marketerâ„¢. Marketo describes them as marketers who, “begin to operate and sound more like sales.” Trademarked by The Pedowitz Group, The Revenue Marketerâ„¢ “…knows how their key metrics stack up against their targets, and what they plan to do to improve their results.”

If you don’t classify yourself as a one of these new breed marketers, you’re not alone. 44% of marketers have no idea what profits a 10% increase in their marketing budget would generate (Lenskold Group’s 2010 B2B Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study)

However, we should.

As the Definitive Guide tells us (and as most of us suspected already), to gain more credibility and respect (translation: budget and resources) within our organizations, marketing needs to measure the things that will guide decisions that improve profitability. We need to start speaking the CEO and CFO’s language.

To do so, we first need to understand and develop goals around:

• How many sales we anticipate our marketing program(s) will generate
• How much revenue each sale produces
• What the gross margin percentage is
  

Next we need to design our programs so that we can effectively measure results. With clearly understood goals and well-defined ROI estimates at the outset, we can then track and connect measurements to our pipelines, revenue, and profits. We also can make adjustments to programs with actionable data to improve results, and therefore improve credibility.

To get started, we recommend you download our Marketing Audit Pack. This group of templates includes our Marketing Plan Audit Template, Marketing ROI Template, Sales & Marketing Scorecard and S.W.O.T. Analysis Template, and will help you:

Make well-informed adjustments to your marketing strategy

Understand the true performance of your marketing plan vs. the estimate

Report your status on a weekly basis to raise awareness about your sales and marketing results

Calculate the ROI on your marketing plan

Think about it. Prospects are taking more time to gather information from the wealth of content online, content that marketers produce. This means we are presiding over a much larger share of the revenue cycle than ever before. If you aren’t yet measuring your ROI, it’s time to start. The Revenue Marketerâ„¢ is here to stay.