You’re a B2B marketer in a company that either doesn’t understand or value marketing. See prior blog post for the 5 signs that marketing’s undervalued in your organization. One of the best ways to turn things around is to start internally advertising your marketing wins.
Now you may wonder why you should proactively educate your executives or sales people on marketing’s value. Executives who understand your department’s contribution are more likely to support your efforts, are more likely to continue funding marketing initiatives. We all know that marketing budgets get scrutinized in downturns. Laura Ramos from Forrester Research recently conducted a study on the economic impact on B2B budgets. 42% of survey participants expect marketing budgets to decrease in 2009. Only 25% of participants will actually see their marketing budgets increase. If you want to be part of that 25%, then you need to start internally selling your team’s successes!
Here are three practical tactics to increase marketing visibility internally.
1) Include key executives on emails generated by lead registration forms.
I used to include executives on the emails generated when someone successfully completed a website form. The emails included the registrant’s contact info, title, company, and size of the opportunity. I used to drive as many marketing campaigns as possible to these forms because I wanted the executives to feel inundated by the registration emails, I wanted them to see firsthand the quality of leads generated. These very executives would often come to my defense when the sales teams complained about lack of leads, or abundance of poor quality leads. Now you might get asked by an executive to remove them from the email distribution list. If they’re asking you to take them off the list, it only means that you’re flooding their Inbox with leads. Don’t worry, you’ve made your point.
2) Always communicate marketing campaign metrics internally
You ran a successful marketing campaign. It’s time to start selling your success. Get in the habit of collecting marketing metrics and communicating them to critical internal constituents. When a campaign first completes, send out a summary email with total leads generated & total size of business available from those leads. I’d also include the company names of some of the larger leads generated just to reinforce the quality of the campaign. As more time passes, send follow on emails with total qualified leads generated and total sales opportunities created.
3) Celebrate sales wins with marketing campaign context
It’s always great when the sales team closes new business. Make it a point to find out whether the sale originated from a marketing program, and if it did, be sure to market this fact internally to key executives. Closely linking these sales wins to campaigns only reinforces your overall marketing ROI.
