There is a disconnect between marketing and sales departments. I have seen this over and over again. Marketing has a hard time knowing when their efforts have attracted sales leads, and marketing results do not always get back to the appropriate sales hands. This means lost opportunities…and lost revenue.
As Sales and Marketing Director for VisiStat, I am very familiar with this common – and repairable – issue. I spend much of my days counseling clients on how they can not only get their two departments connected, but also improve the return on their efforts like never before.
I love my job. There is nothing more satisfying than when I see the light bulb go on when people "get it" and see a clear picture of their sales and marketing efforts. Good, real-time market tracking allows for more efficiency, better budgeting and more ROI. Who would have thought that all that information was available and waiting to be harvested so easily! Like anything else that is successful, you just need the right tools.
A great case study of this very issue comes from one of our corporate clients, Tuvox. In their situation, through our reporting system, we were able to provide hard evidence that their marketing efforts were resulting in hot sales leads. They had not been able to gain the same valuable information through another big name service they had used.
Tuvox's marketing needs were especially interesting, because they needed to track very targeted one-to-one marketing. It was critical for them to know when an email link was used and which recipient acted on it. More specifically, they needed to pinpoint what emails resulted in a click to a custom landing page, how long that visitor stayed, and exactly what they viewed. Tall order? Not with the right tools!
For example, one of their email campaigns was targeted to relevant company CEOs. Each CEO was set up with his or her own landing page, and the email linked to that page. When one of these pages was visited, an Alert was sent back to Tuvox.
In one of their first cases, the VisiStat report they ran showed how a CEO had forwarded his email to 33 people spanning 14 different geographic locations and two countries, and that CEO's landing page had been seen a total of 46 times. Tuvox's Marketing Director told me it was a fantastic feeling to be able to deliver such a hot lead to his sales department.
What had eluded them before was now absolutely clear. By analyzing the behavior of their audience, through click path reports and isolating the data of their campaign landing pages, they were able to track how an email was passed around inside a target company. We then showed them how to take advantage of our marketing and ad-specific campaign report tool, AdCaM®, and combine it with real-time email Activity Alerts™ to get precisely the up to the minute information they needed. This information greatly increased their follow-up results.
Tuvox was successfully able to bridge the gap between their marketing and sales departments with their use of special landing pages and VisiStat reporting tools, such as Alerts, click path analysis and AdCaM®.
I love their story, and Tuvox is only one of many cases where successfully connecting sales and marketing is seeing incredible results. Choosing the right tools and gaining indispensable insight, such as actually seeing the exact responses of your potential customers in real-time, will make a tremendous difference… and provide golden results.
