When Should Marketers Pay Attention To Data From Other Departments?

What we call the marketing department today is often made up of several different functions, even if you’re working within a small to medium-sized business.

There may be certain people or projects you could designate as the “demand gen” side, for example, where the aim is to get customers interested in your products and services.

Other areas might be more focused on brand marketing to simply keep your company’s name top of mind among customers and prospects. Still others could be spending time on “customer marketing,” where you work with your biggest fans to elicit case studies and testimonials.

All of these marketing functions have been transformed by digital tools like a CRM that allow marketers to collect, manage and derive insight from data and improve their overall results. It has not only required marketers to level up their skills, but to get as good with analyzing campaigns and tactics as the creativity they put into them.

If all this wasn’t enough to keep marketers occupied though, they also need to make sure they avoid one of the most common pitfalls: becoming an island unto themselves. When marketing teams get too myopically focused on their own activities and challenges, they risk overlooking issues in other areas of the business that could have an impact on their work over the long term.

The good thing about a CRM is that it was designed to be used by the entire organization so that everyone can benefit from the collective effort to use data more strategically. Sometimes, however, age-old silos that have existed between one department and another manage to stay firmly in place.

Although every business function might use the same CRM, the kinds of data they collect, manage and analyze will obviously look a little different. It may not always be clear how it relates to the kinds of things marketers care about.

The easiest way to get everyone on the same page? Think about revenue.

Ultimately, business growth is tied to bringing money in through the door, and while metrics may vary across departments, it should all ladder back to that. Asking yourself ‘How might this relate to revenue — and to what we’re doing?’ is one of the smartest questions you could ask.

As for when you should be asking it, these are some of the key tipping points:

1. Leads are coming in, but going nowhere

In some organizations there is a formal process whereby a potential customer sourced through a marketing campaign is called a marketing-qualified lead (MQL), which then needs to be assessed by sales before it becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL).

Even if your firm is small and doesn’t have those terms in place, marketing teams should always be monitoring the lead-to-conversion ratio based on sales CRM data. There’s no point in generating a lot of leads if reps don’t trust them enough to pick up the phone or reach out to them in some way.

2. Engagement is high, but sentiment is low

You may have developed a campaign with a goal of getting a lot of people in your target market to “like” a social post, to share it or to click through back to your website. Depending on how you promote those posts, it might have worked, but don’t get too comfortable just yet.

Marketers need to be just as vigilant about looking at CRM data from the customer service team. Remember that social media has become just as critical a channel for them as it is for marketing.

If a large volume of complaints are coming in the door, the engagement metrics you’re seeing aren’t leading to the desired outcome. You may be making a promise that in some way isn’t being delivered. Whatever the cause, find out, because this ultimately affects the health of your brand.

3. Deals are closing, but the pace is slow

Selling takes time, but reps should be able to take a lead, pursue it and get a win while still meeting their quarterly quota.

When that doesn’t happen, you may have to look more closely at the sales data in CRM to better understand the typical buying cycle and how it’s evolving based on market needs. This might change when you run a campaign based on the kind of journey you want to set up for a customer or prospect, and how you arm the rep with lower-funnel content that gets a deal closed faster.

4. Customers come, but even more customers go

Churn is the biggest enemy of progress in a company. The customer service data in your CRM will prove it.

Agents may be answering customer’s questions or addressing their complaints, but customers might still choose not to renew a contract or sign up to the latest version of a product.

Marketers should be using this data to determine whether they need to create new discounts, bundles or promotions. Maybe it’s time to look at a cross-sell or upsell strategy. Maybe there are other ways you can support customers after the sale as a marketing team that makes them feel appreciated in order to earn their loyalty.

5. Your content is compelling, but no longer current

A lot of the stories marketers tell is about the pain points of problems their target customers have and how the company’s products or services can help overcome them. In some cases, though, those pain points were first captured when the company was just getting going.

Reps are fantastic conduits for details about what customers are talking about today. Their feedback (even if they’re saying “No”) should help marketing teams to update content. This can include everything from the value proposition on their product pages and the themes of blog posts and eBooks to the ads that get run.

Hopefully if you’ve been using CRM for a while as a marketer, you already see it as a source of customer gold. The trick is to keep sifting through it based on what other departments have discovered — there may be even more golden opportunities than you realized.