Study: 24% of B2B Marketers View Sales Influence as Their Top Metric

Are you able to prove which campaigns and keywords influence each sale? A new study from BtoB and Eloqua shows that 24% of B2B marketers view influence on sales as the most important success metric (second only to measuring overall marketing ROI). This clearly demonstrates that more marketers are directly focused on how their efforts enable sales. It also speaks to marketers’ need for CRM tools such as Salesforce.com that can offer insight into which channels, campaigns and even keywords directly influence sales.

Salesforce.com, for instance, empowers marketers to automatically show which campaigns influenced opportunities and closed revenue. For example, if you specify a Campaign Influence Time Frame (CITF) of 30 days and one of your prospects joins a campaign on September 1, the campaign can be considered to have influenced any opportunity that is created and associated with the prospect for the month of September (companies with long sales cycles often much wider date ranges). Salesforce.com also enables marketers to establish rules to configure additional criteria that campaigns must meet in order to be associated with an opportunity automatically. The end result is that marketers know which of their campaigns actually influence opportunities and sales.

This is one reason why so many people are interested in adding call metrics to the mix. Imagine this common scenario: a prospect sees your business’ number on a Google AdWords ad and, instead of clicking on the add, she simply picks up her phone and calls your business. The result of her phone call might be thousands of dollars worth of closed revenue, but without call tracking, it would be impossible to know that the sale had been influenced by the AdWords ad without asking the intrusive question, “so how did you find us, anyway?”

With CRM-based call tracking, you can solve this problem easily by provisioning a unique phone number for any online or offline ad that enables you to automatically view a prospect’s campaign referral source to your CRM. When the phone rings, your CRM automatically logs the call and attributes it to a marketing channel. This lead can then be tracked all the way through the CRM until it is closed. It’s then finally possible, and actually easy, to track which efforts influence all opportunities and closed deals.