But Will it Work?   The Pressure for Marketers to Drive Pipeline Conversion

But Will it Work? The Pressure for Marketers to Drive Pipeline Conversion

It has become increasingly commonplace for marketers to rely on analytics to guide their department planning.With all of these  insights, the real value is in the probability determination of interpreting the data to make sound strategic decisions.

Said in another way - is what I’m hoping to achieve actually going to work?

In this post we’re going to look at how to determine the true value of your MQL’s before you do anything.

Marketers spend a lot of time and energy trying to get the right message inserted at the right point in a conversation to influence. They also spend even more time in crafting out the overall narrative that we’re all a part of every day.  This is important work because it impacts how we perceive the world.

However it has a major flaw -  it presupposes how you as a person are going to react.  That you’re at a particular level of needs awareness and are ready to advance to the next level in some way.  

So what does the marketer do knowing that the individual may or may not be ready for the gift they’re about to receive.  Simple: they rely on the law of large numbers and play the game accordingly by engaging bigger audiences. The result is some level of correlation between a large group of people and individuals who shake out at the end to become customers.

Everyday Put It Forward is in the middle of this conversation, believe me, we see it all by definition of the capabilities we bring starting with integration through to orchestration all the way up to predictive outcomes through machine learning.

We’ve been fortunate to engage with some of the brightest and well meaning people in marketing all over the world with our integration technology.  They’re passionate and committed to being market makers and generating demand.  However when we see their marketing stacks which on average these days is around at least 35-39 discrete applications from marketing automation to CRM to content to events and so forth - one thing stands out as interesting. They’re all the same - functionally.  The difference is in how the technology is applied as well as the operational maturity. I can also say there are a number of non-obvious correlations about a companies marketing stack and their ability to deliver value but that is for another discussion.

So what happens when we ask the question - but will it work?  Meaning will you get more or better MQL’s than before - and how do you know they will be better?.

When I ask this question the answers I usually get are “we have correlation established in our analytics platform” or “yes we know our customers” or “it’s self evident in our conversion attach rates”.  Which begs the following question - “So why if it works does an average of 97% of your engagements result in no or dead air?”

Now if I’m a marketer whose entire value proposition is boiled down to the number of MQL’s I generate and the quality of these leads, this number would scare the heck out of me. I’d know there was a major problem in spending all of this time and effort to identify my audience, craft a strong narrative and build high value content.

What if though, you could gauge the probability of what an individual was going to do at the next step of the conversation?

Suppose you could add to this by determining when they were going to take that step. This is the fundamental difference between analytics - did it work? and predictive propensity modelling through machine learning- but will it work? Yes that’s a meaty phrase but let’s take a closer look into this because it’s just likely the future of marketing one way or another.   Daily people ask us, what does Put It Forward do that’s so special and we reply with unlocking value from data or a variation thereof.

What we really mean though is that when data moves it’s representing an exchange of some kind and in that moment is where the highest value is.  After that the data sits at rest and it’s value decays quickly. This is precisely why analytics while interesting are helpful only in the past tense.

Every application in the marketers tech stack is meant to create data at rest - yet even greater value is achieved when the data is in motion.

What Put It Forward does is tell a marketer not only will it work but exactly who it’s going to work on and more importantly at what moment in time.  Then triggers the right sequence of events to respond like having an account exec call a person or customer support reaching out to keep them as a customer.  

Now everyone is from the kingdom of prove it to me when we tell them the following.  We will take your current audience and tell you not only who is going to become a customer but when.  Then we can tell you how to get the rest of them as your customer. This has resulted in 90% accuracy in determining who is going to convert in advance not just once but at every engagement step.  It’s also resulted in a 40X conversion rate consistently for those who decide to Put It Forward.

Sure you’re paying attention now and yes there’s more I’d like to show and share with you.   Please feel free to connect with me directly or fill in the fields below and press the button for us to connect with you.

Thank you and I look forward to learning more about your story.