How can Marketing compete with Meeting Bookers? (Reporting/KPIs)

[bunners007]

Hi community! 

I have a couple of clients where Marketing is competing internally against meeting bookers. Marketing has #leads as a KPI, but meeting bookers are filling up the CRM with lists of "leads" (we're really talking about contacts with a lead lifecycle stage that is then used for prospecting/cold calls).

The problem is that as the database builds up, it's more and more difficult for Marketing to convert new leads, since the contacts are already in the CRM. We could change lifecycle of "meeting booker leads" to blank or subsribers, but still we will have the problem that ads are not really generating lots of new contacts anymore, etc.

Have you run into a similar problem? Have you come up with a good solution? Looking forward to hearing about it.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @bunners007,

Great question. This is a broad topic which could be discussed in a lot of detail, depending on the sales processes, marketing budgets and overall go-to-market of those clients.

In general, I think this is a good problem to have – not for marketing, of course, but for the company. If there are too many qualified leads that things seem a bit unbalanced in favor of SQLs generated by sales, that's perfect. I don't think it makes sense to try and shift any of those inbound contacts towards marketing. They're supposed to talk to sales eventually, why make them jump through additional hoops?

For marketing that can mean multiple things. First of all, if marketing has issues generating contacts, they'll have to be very honest with themselves and critically evalutate the channels they're currently focusing on. Inbound marketing can have many forms. Google and LinkedIn Ads are not always the best tool in the kit. This might involve some experimenting. With some companies, you might want to explore community building, with other account-based-marketing – it really depends on the customer.

If conversion rates aren't as high as sales, that also doesn't have to be a bad thing. Things might change and overall requests to sales might go down. Marketing should prepare for that by designing marketing touchpoints based on helpful content and education.

Additionally, consider allocating some marketing resources towards sales enablement, for example success stories and references. These will usually not generate contacts directly but can positively influence close rates in sales. This is a topic which sales cannot cover but that will contribute to the bottomline.

Generally, I'd try to think of it more as a "together" and less of an "against".

Hope this helps!

[BukunmiOdetayo · Accepted solution]

Hi @bunners007 , 

I actually have not run into a similar problem before, but this problem is not unfathomable. I'll ask some questions to begin. Are the meeting bookers in the sales team or do they still have to pass their qualified leads across to another team? Definitely, lead conversion is an important KPI for the marketing team and is always present for performance tracking on the marketing dashboard. I really think changing the lead status property for leads generated by the meeting bookers does not and cannot solve any problem, since the leads are still in the CRM. 

Another question I will ask is how do the meeting bookers generate their own leads? The marketing team has always been but not necessarily saddled with the sole responsibility of generating leads and qualifying them for the sales team. So, if the marketing is not in the same team as the meeting bookers, then a possible solution might be that both the meeting bookers and the marketing team define the sources of their leads. After doing that, you can add reports to your existing dashboard or create a new dashboard and add these reports. That way, the marketing will be able to track their KPI. I attached a snapshot of the sample. 

For the part of the ads not generating new contacts anymore, I think the marketing team has to review their assets, ads, and campaign strategies. Perhaps, since most of the leads encountered by the marketing team have been reached out to by the meeting bookers, chances are that the leads have already laid their hands on what marketing offers. Marketing then must expand its reach and seek to develop new tactics to convert new leads. It's not possible that the meeting bookers have taken everything. Consider changing locations, channels, tools among other properties of your target audience.

Creating more dynamic assets that can be used as lead captures can help the marketing, and they should not forget to define the sources of the new leads they will be generating for them to be able to analyze their KPI. There will definitely be some improvements and something to point at by the marketing that way.

Let me know if this helps.

All the best,

Bukunmi

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @bunners007,

Great question. This is a broad topic which could be discussed in a lot of detail, depending on the sales processes, marketing budgets and overall go-to-market of those clients.

In general, I think this is a good problem to have – not for marketing, of course, but for the company. If there are too many qualified leads that things seem a bit unbalanced in favor of SQLs generated by sales, that's perfect. I don't think it makes sense to try and shift any of those inbound contacts towards marketing. They're supposed to talk to sales eventually, why make them jump through additional hoops?

For marketing that can mean multiple things. First of all, if marketing has issues generating contacts, they'll have to be very honest with themselves and critically evalutate the channels they're currently focusing on. Inbound marketing can have many forms. Google and LinkedIn Ads are not always the best tool in the kit. This might involve some experimenting. With some companies, you might want to explore community building, with other account-based-marketing – it really depends on the customer.

If conversion rates aren't as high as sales, that also doesn't have to be a bad thing. Things might change and overall requests to sales might go down. Marketing should prepare for that by designing marketing touchpoints based on helpful content and education.

Additionally, consider allocating some marketing resources towards sales enablement, for example success stories and references. These will usually not generate contacts directly but can positively influence close rates in sales. This is a topic which sales cannot cover but that will contribute to the bottomline.

Generally, I'd try to think of it more as a "together" and less of an "against".

Hope this helps!

[bunners007]

Thanks for your input. I appreciate your thinking, but let me give more insights: 

-I would encourage companies to have their meeting bookers using HubSpot,  for instance in order to get a lot of valuable, structured data out of all those cold emails and calls, for better coaching, reporting, etc.

-But let me be more specific on how the problem might look:

1.Meeting bookers feed HubSpot with say 1000 contacts from 1000 companies, that they plan to call within the next year, maybe encompassing most of the potential clients for a niche solution.

2.For the marketer, there isn't much room left to generate contacts or companies from online sourcesl. Since they're mostly there already, there's simply not much left to convert. Also ad statictics suddenly looks bad, as they don't end up creating as many new contacts. 

3.The marketer can work hard to influence the current CRM database, but when also measured on generated leads it becomes a problem. 

So one can argue that the KPI is then simply not working for a marketer. Problem is that you don't always get to change those KPIs. I'm just wondering since I occasionally run into places where marketers compete against hunters, how other people are solving it, and what you think about it.  🙂

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @bunners007,

If you're generating a lot of meetings booked, that's amazing. When the total addressable market is so small that sales takes up all of it, the focus of marketing should shift, for example towards sales enablement, brand awareness and long-term plays like content marketing and SEO. It would have to be discussed then if marketing should still be goaled on SQLs.

If it's harder for the marketing to generate new SQLs but not impossible, then it's a matter of exploring new marketing tactics.

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@bunners007 wrote:

So one can argue that the KPI is then simply not working for a marketer. Problem is that you don't always get to change those KPIs.

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You're right, this is a tough one. However, with research and data visualization, you should be able to make this argument. It might need education and also change management.

Best regards!