Return on investment is one of the most potent marketing metrics used by SaaS marketers. Yet, most marketers struggle with proving or measuring the ROI of their marketing efforts.
A new survey reveals that 84% of marketers felt pressured to justify their marketing spend or budget increase. And 61% of marketing heads miss out on considering ROI when making critical business decisions because they aren’t confident of their data.
Some of the challenges marketers face when realizing and proving ROI are attributing leads to revenue, gathering the right and reliable data, and lack of technology resources and expertise. Further, the sales and marketing aren’t aligned on what successful ROI looks like.
That’s where revenue marketing helps.
Yes, this phrase has been trending in the B2B SaaS domain and chances are you’ve already stumbled upon a battery of posts related to it.
Yet, you are wondering what it is all about and how you can leverage it to boost your business's bottom line.
Hence, we’ve got this comprehensive and straightforward guide that will persuade you to go beyond the traditional journey and lay a clear path to turn marketing from a cost center to a profit center.
So, let’s get started.
What Is Revenue Marketing?
Revenue marketing is a best practice framework used by sales and marketing departments to deliver marketing revenue growth at a predictable return on marketing investment (ROMI). When a marketing department connects marketing expenses, an input, to revenue generation, an output, it is capable of transitioning from a cost center to a profit center.
Thus, revenue marketing is a strategy where the sales and marketing teams work together to attribute their campaigns to attaining the business’s revenue goals and engaging leads even after the sales team has taken over them. Unlike other campaigns that center around increasing brand visibility in search engines, revenue marketing solely focuses on increasing revenue.
In other disciplines, such as sales or finance, standard frameworks exist, but there is still no equivalent in digital marketing. Ironically, as marketing has become more data-driven, marketers struggle to develop revenue attribution models necessary to understand the link between marketing expenses and revenue generation.
Revenue marketing, the fourth generation of performance marketing, contributes to marketing revenue growth and is at the forefront of digital transformation. It should be no surprise that the most valuable companies in the world also have the highest revenue growth rates. Therefore, the pursuit of revenue marketing capabilities is a core capability for any digital-first business today.
Thus, in revenue marketing, the marketing team would consider the revenue goal first, instead of the business goal.
Here’s how revenue marketing goals differ from business goals.
But revenue marketing is not limited to new customer acquisition. The framework can be leveraged to increase customer retention rates and drive up-sell and cross-sell revenue.
The term revenue marketing is often used interchangeably with growth marketing. Both include similar strategies and tactics. However, growth marketing often focuses on the absolute growth of multiple KPIs and is often disconnected from revenue and marketing ROI.
What Does Revenue Marketing Aim to Achieve?
In revenue marketing, the sales and marketing teams join hands to maximize their ROI. Here are a few goals revenue marketing aims to achieve.
- Align the sales and marketing teams towards one common goal - revenue generation
- Create a constant feedback loop between sales and marketing data, while breaking silos between these teams
- Sales-qualified leads generation and channeling them into the sales funnel
- Scaling only those strategies that will be successful in a predictable manner
- Customer-driven marketing that ensures a seamless prospect/buyer journey through the sales funnel
- Creating measurable outcomes on pipeline activity and revenue for the marketing team
- Enabling the marketing team long after the leads are passed to the sales
Benefits of Revenue Marketing
Here are a few key benefits of revenue marketing
- Leverages Data to Boost ROI
One of the most significant benefits of implementing revenue marketing is that it uses data to determine what’s working or not and make critical decisions.
For instance, if a marketing channel feels expensive, it’s a sign that the team needs to look beyond the vanity metrics and track actionable metrics that directly impact revenue. Thus, the marketing team knows which campaigns or channels deliver marketing revenue, not just clicks or leads.
This report offers insights into how a campaign is performing on Google Ads Insights.
The impressions, clicks, and revenue data on this dashboard are enough to assess if this campaign is performing as per the business goals. Thus, revenue marketing ensures that reliable data drives your business decisions.
- Brings the Sales and Marketing Teams Together
The sales and marketing teams often work in silos and getting them to work as ‘one team’ can be challenging. This is especially true in the case of go-to-market teams like in B2B SaaS companies.
Each of these teams has unique yet intertwined roles. Plus, they define success differently. This can lead to a clash on everything from how key metrics like MQLs are defined to who gets credit for the revenue generated.
Revenue marketing allows the marketing team to identify the channels and strategies that will fetch the most revenue. Also, the sales team understands which prospects are SQLs or sales-qualified leads. Thus, it aligns the teams on the same page with a focus on the customer and revenue.
- Makes It about the Customer, Always
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Revenue comes from satisfied and loyal customers. So, when the entire organization is aligned to a common goal of earning marketing revenue, the entire focus is on the customer’s pain points, needs, and interests.
Teams will look for answers to questions like -
- What does the customer expect from this product?
- What feature can I introduce to make it more likely for them to make a purchase decision?
- What would make them buy less or switch to the competition?
- Does my product solve customer problems or address their needs?
Thus, revenue marketing encourages teams to prioritize cultivating long-term customer relationships.
- Builds a Buy-In for Marketing Efforts
CMOs often squeeze the last drops from their marketing budgets and get asked to do more with less. Hence, they can no longer ignore their direct role in revenue generation.
Revenue marketing allows marketers to prove their ROI. Not just this, by leveraging marketing automation tools and revenue marketing platforms they can forecast their impact on revenue. Thus, they can calculate what every dollar of investment in marketing will mean to the company's revenue.
All this is music to the ears of the CFO and CEO who for years have been frustrated by the inability of marketing teams to prove a return on substantial investments.
The Significance of Revenue Marketing
Buying software has changed. Prospects complete 60% of the buying process before talking to sales. It takes 21 touchpoints for a prospect to reach its buyer, organizations must move from sales-led growth to marketing-led growth.
Traditionally, the marketing team was responsible for acquiring and nurturing leads and passing warm leads to the sales team. And because these teams have been working in silos, data isn’t exchanged between them.
In today’s inbound approach in B2B SaaS marketing, strategies need to be hyper-personalized.
Plus, a Gartner study shares that, when considering a purchase, B2B buyers spend only 17% of their time talking to vendors. This means brands have a small window of opportunity to convert prospects.
Source: A Gartner Study on B2B buyers
Thus, marketing and sales teams should support each other in offering a seamless buying journey to customers through the sales cycle.
Finally, marketing revenue growth drives company valuations. CEOs and boards expect marketing departments to drive revenue growth. Therefore, this pressure to perform and deliver on revenue and revenue growth rates drives frequent turnover at the CMO level and across marketing departments. This constant turnover makes it difficult to sustain any momentum around building a Revenue Marketing Framework.
That’s where revenue marketing helps.
It creates a data cycle between the sales and marketing teams. It lets the sales team know what marketing activities generate the best leads. On the other hand, it lets marketers know which campaigns drive the highest ROI.
Without a doubt, revenue marketing is a must for B2B SaaS businesses where they have better access to data and well-aligned strategies.
How Has Revenue Marketing Evolved?
There are 4 distinct phases of marketing’s transformation from a cost center to a profit center.
1. Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing comprises tactics used before the internet came into being. Tactics like print, direct mail, telephone, and others are prevalent in today’s age, but they aren’t as effective as revenue marketing.
It is maligned for lacking a data-driven approach. So, these tactics may help with lead generation or nurturing but the sales team doesn’t have customer information. Hence, few leads are converted.
However, a few traditional marketing programs, such as trade shows, sales cold calling, direct mail, and door-to-door sales calls use a common funnel conversion (number of calls or pieces of mail delivered) to form the foundation for a successful revenue marketing framework.
How Revenue Marketing Scores?
Revenue marketing allows marketers to track every campaign and channel. Thus, they can optimize their marketing efforts while closely tying them to revenue.
2. Lead Generation
Websites and search engines led to the birth of lead generation. Marketing departments, using mostly search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and paid search, focused on filling the funnel with a high quantity of leads. Quantity prevailed over quality.
For instance, targeting low-tier countries for a campaign involves low acquisition costs but would generate poor-quality leads. These leads neither fit the buyer persona nor are apt for the sales team to convert.
Marketers had little to no ability to forecast marketing revenue based on lead generation and few accurate models for determining return on marketing investment. Marketing teams were not accountable to revenue and focused almost purely on activity. Estimates suggest that 33% of marketers are in this phase today.
Lead nurturing is a challenge here because there’s a lack of coordination between the sales and marketing teams. The marketing team feels that the sales team isn’t working hard enough on converting leads and sales believes that the leads sent to them aren’t high-quality.
How Revenue Marketing Scores?
In the revenue marketing model, marketing and sales work together to identify the ICP (ideal customer persona) and craft tailored messaging to target the right audience. Marketers work towards nurturing leads till they are sales qualified and then hand them over to the sales, enabling them to effectively convert them.
3. Demand Generation
Demand generation focuses on top-of-the-funnel marketing tactics that educate prospects on why a specific product or service is apt for them (even if they aren’t looking for a solution). This stage needs a lot of planning as it a marketer needs to -
- Define the buyer persona as per the buying stage
- Create a robust inbound marketing strategy to generate demand
- Forecast the spending and revenue generated
At this stage, there still exists a rift between the sales and marketing teams.
How Revenue Marketing Scores?
Revenue marketing tracks every customer at every stage such that marketers can map the entire customer journey. They can predict the challenges that may prevent a business from achieving its sales goals.
4. Revenue Marketing
Marketing teams are responsible for delivering a marketing revenue target within a set return on marketing investment. With numerous marketing channels and increased responsibility across the entire customer lifecycle (customer upsell, cross-sell) the complexity of running a marketing department grew exponentially making revenue marketing elusive for most businesses.
Only a minority of marketers have reached this stage and use smart task management capabilities to optimize the marketing mix. This stage takes a business’s marketing to the next level as marketing automation, inbound content, and outbound nurtures allow them to build predictable, scalable, and repeatable strategies.
- Predictable because the teams know precisely what revenue they can expect
- Scalable because automation can help them improve efficiency and eliminate manual tasks
- Repeatable because the processes are documented, allowing teams to replicate them with minimal training
How Revenue Marketing Differs from Marketing ROI
Since revenue marketing is all about revenue, many wrongly believe it to be similar to marketing return on investment. Though these terms are inextricably related, they aren’t similar.
As mentioned above, revenue marketing is the process of leveraging channels to build campaigns that directly impact customer acquisition and sales. Thus, revenue marketing links marketing strategies to revenue goals.
Marketing ROI, on the other hand, is a key metric that measures the efficiency of the investments made and the impact of marketing initiatives on revenue and profit growth. In fact, it is one of the KPIs for revenue marketing. So, the tighter your revenue marketing strategy the better your marketing ROI.
Here’s how you calculate it -
Marketing ROI = (Sales Growth - Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost
Take, for instance, when investing in email marketing tactics, you will want to track metrics like open rate, click-through rate, conversions, number of unsubscribes, and more to tell you if your tactics are working.
However, it’s only when you look at the closed deals and revenue that you can determine the success of your campaign.
Both revenue marketing and ROI are important to determine if your efforts are proving to be revenue drivers. That way, you only pursue profitable campaigns and investments.
Role of the Marketing Team in Revenue Generation
The present decade is quite challenging for B2B marketers as pressure builds on them to operate as the lifeblood of their business. Budgets are rising and marketing tools are growing to be more potent than ever before. Thus, B2B marketing teams that are yet to transition from cost centers to revenue generators have few excuses not to do so.
In fact, a McKinsey study shares that 83% of CEOs expect marketing teams to be major revenue drivers.
Source: Marketing’s moment is now
No wonder, an increasing number of CMOs are adopting an unprecedentedly revenue-oriented posture. They are planning and implementing robust top-of-the-funnel strategies that are focused on bottom-of-the-funnel outcomes.
Before the boom in digital marketing, assessing the impact of marketing on revenue was tough. However, in this digital era, everything can be measured. The tools marketers now have at their disposal coupled with the traditional tracking methods have brought more transparency into their contribution to the bottom line than before.
Despite this digitization, CMOs and technical marketers often find themselves submerged in a sea of spreadsheets, manually merging disparate datasets. Most tools fail to quickly and confidently answer the top questions in their mind -
- Where are we going?
- How far have we come?
- How will we get there?
Hence, to answer these questions and communicate marketing performance to the company’s stakeholders, marketing teams need a one-stop, power-packed intuitive platform that will highlight the fastest path to achieving their revenue goals.
Revlitix, our AI-powered revenue marketing platform, combine go-to-market data from various platforms and prioritizes moves based on their revenue-driving potential. It automates the process of turning data into insights and insights into actions. Thus, it empowers technical marketers to build a fully optimized and up-to-the-minute market navigation plan that they can be confident of.
Role of the C-Suite in Revenue Generation
For it to be successful, revenue marketing requires the whole organization (including the c-suite) to support revenue-focused efforts. A Forrester research reveals that aligned organizations grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable.
Here’s how every member of the C-suite can support the marketing team to drive revenue.
1. CEO - Chief Executive Officer
CEOs set the overall company vision and goals and align the team towards them. They encourage teams to support each other in achieving these goals.
Here’s how they can directly influence marketing teams to achieve revenue goals.
- Adopt the GOST framework
Identify a business goal followed by clear objectives that lead to goal achievement. Once these are identified, it’s time to think about the ‘How?’
Hence, the next step is to determine the strategy and tactics within the process.
Leveraging GOST will help CEOs set clear goals for the entire company and keep the rest of the C-suite on the same track.
- Encourage a Culture of Transparency and Accountability
The data on the key sales and marketing metrics should be available to the entire team. This includes C-level executives and strategic planners. They should see how the company is performing on the sales cycle time, profitability per product line or level, close rates, CAC, and more.
Based on this data and new findings, the CEO should work with the teams to readjust the company strategy.
- Establish a Culture of Cross-Functional Collaboration
Collaboration begins at the top. If the leadership communicates openly, collaborates, and works together, the internal and external stakeholders will follow suit.
2. CRO - Chief Revenue Officer
The role of the chief revenue officer is to align all teams across the organization toward a common revenue goal. Here’s how they can support the marketing team as they work towards boosting revenue.
- Help Marketing Make Informed Decisions
With a clear understanding of the business scenario and the products that are the firm’s top revenue drivers, the CRO can help the team make robust strategies for the year.
- Establish a Strong Line of Communication
The CRO oversees and creates alignment between all teams. Further, they connect different revenue-related functions, namely product development, customer success, pricing, marketing, sales, and revenue operations teams.
They also create transparent revenue reports that show how marketing and sales efforts impact sales.
Hence, they can create an active line of communication between these functions to maximize profitability.
- Build a Tech Stack for the Team
The CRO must ensure that the team is equipped with the right resources and technology strategy to win deals and achieve revenue goals. They don the CIO hat to build strategies for the implementation and deployment of a complete sales and marketing stack.
3. CSO - Chief Sales Officer
The CSO knows the sales funnel and works closely with the marketing team to nurture leads at all stages of the funnel. They manage the organization’s sales strategy, ensuring that it’s implemented as planned.
A lot of the CSO’s focus is on closing deals and checking in on the sales team to boost market penetration. They have a clear vision of the company’s sales strategy and refine them based on market trends and customer behavior.
4. CMO - Chief Marketing Officer
The CMO is responsible for spotting the areas that give the company a competitive advantage. They work on strategies to transform the marketing team into a revenue generator.
- They ensure efficient channel optimization with few wasted cycles
- They keep track of channel-specific metrics to assess company performance in terms of sales and marketing goals and revenue
- They help the team stay within the budget and invest in areas that focus on that target audience and fetch maximum revenue
Here’s a summary of how each member of the C-suite can support the marketing team to drive revenue.
How to Build a Revenue Marketing Organization?
The very best revenue marketers combine artificial intelligence, software, marketing playbooks, and smart task management. This combination allows marketers to execute successfully against their goals, execute against the needs of sales, and do so with less effort and costs.
The playbook for building a predictable and scalable revenue marketing framework includes:
The Revenue Marketing Framework
1. Connect Siloed Data Sources
With an increase in marketing tools comes an increase in the complexity of centralizing marketing data. Siloed data is a silent killer in your firm’s revenue engine because it leads to data inefficiencies. Marketers are forced to use incorrect data to drive decisions, leading to missed business opportunities, unfavorable customer experiences, ineffective revenue forecasts, reduced employee productivity, and increased compliance risks.
One of the biggest issues is poor tech stack integration which makes it difficult to read data and manage reports.
In order to shift to a revenue marketing mindset it is imperative that all the data is connected to a single source of truth with easy access. So, all your data should be on one platform. Organizations should invest in tools that -
- handle quick transfers of information and cross-references across departments
- easily integrate with existing systems, averting the need for undergoing a complex overhaul of the data-driven technology.
2. Alignment of Sales and Marketing Goals and Activities
With confidence in the tasks that need to be addressed, marketers can focus on "revenue leakage" by optimizing the funnel with sales. This will help them identify areas of opportunity where small improvements can make big differences.
Optimization is one of the most important steps in this framework. Revenue marketers succeed by finding the next area that needs 1% improvement. This can be system optimization, process optimization, people optimization, website optimization, or campaign-specific optimization.
3. AI-Powered KPI Monitoring
Marketing data is complex and changing every day. Today, marketers have to track thousands of KPIs and millions of potential combinations to analyze each day. These KPIs form the basis of a firm’s business intelligence efforts. But tracking all of them at once and knowing which programs to act on or what to ignore is impossible at the scale that most marketing departments, even small teams operate.
Hence, they need AI-Powered KPI monitoring to derive insights that can help them reach their marketing revenue targets. AI can quickly cut through the massive volume of data that contributes to day-to-day business operations, allowing them to make decisions in real-time.
4. Marketing Performance KPI Alerts
This early warning system provides marketers with specific alerts on potential issues that will impact future revenue production. Taking it a step further, these alerts provide marketers with a daily stream of the next-best actions to optimize marketing performance and marketing revenue generation.
Tracking KPIs shouldn’t need logging in to dozens of platforms for an update. Revlitix, our revenue marketing platform, lets you automate KPI alerts so that you can make adjustments when they matter most. The platform sends alerts based on positive and negative KPI signals and marketing anomalies, allowing you to spend time taking action instead of staring at a report.
5. Smart Task Management (Actions)
Smart task management solves the disconnect between marketing activities and results by leveraging data to determine the next best action. If task management tools are not connected to performance data, marketing teams will work in the wrong areas and end up becoming inefficient and unproductive. This also enables marketing leaders to develop a culture of performance marketing management.
Devising a Foolproof Revenue Marketing Strategy
1. Understanding Your Customer
This stage forms the foundation of a strong revenue marketing strategy. Customers will pay if their pain points are being addressed through a product or service. Hence, when you design a campaign start with creating a detailed buyer persona, mapping out their needs at different stages in the buying process.
When it comes to B2B SaaS, the buying cycle has three stages -
- Awareness - being aware of a problem and telling them that there’s a possible solution to it
- Consideration - weighing options and finding the best solution to the problem
- Decision - purchasing the solution (product or service)
To guide customers through these stages thorough audience research is critical. Are they social media users? What’s their position in the organization? What makes your existing customers stick with you? What target audience is your competitor looking to reach?
Google Analytics Audiences report can give you interesting audience insights into audience behavior. It tells you how they engage with your website and whether they are leaving after viewing only a single page. It also shows information about demographics, interests, conversion probability, and more.
Next, track customer pain points, motivation, and goals. What makes them choose your or a specific product? What features drive them to use a product? What’s their ultimate goal? Tracking social sentiment and engaging in social listening can help you know more about them.
Finally, determine how your product can help them. Each feature you introduce should be problem solvers.
All this information will help you spot relevant patterns and buying behavior. Organize them into segments and assign them to a specific type.
For instance, for a SaaS product that targets social scheduling, the following profile will be a good fit -
Your audience research should bring out the top features and attributes of an ideal customer.
An accurate buyer persona will help in -
- Building a sound SaaS pricing strategy because you’ll know how your product can be linked to customer pain points
- Creating accurately targeted content for social
- Optimizing your landing page
- Sharing the most relevant content for each stage in the buying process
The process of creating a buyer persona will also help in mapping out your customer journey - a roadmap outlining their journey from being a lead to providing lifetime value. This map will show the touch points customers use to get in touch with your brand and review the processes from the customers’ viewpoint. All this will empower you to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
2. Establishing a Revenue Goal
Your revenue goals should be clearly defined and understood by the team executing the strategy. A common goal will keep all the teams aligned on the company’s direction, thus encouraging them to play their role.
Say, a marketing team generates $200,000 revenue per quarter through online marketing efforts like email and content. They are aiming to double their revenue by investing in other channels like social media and video.
So, their goal is - To double marketing revenue in Q3 by investing in additional channels.
Though this may sound like a challenging goal, it isn’t SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound).
Instead, this would sound like a SMART goal -
This goal is specific and measurable and clearly states the time.
Besides, when setting a revenue goal, consider the following -
- Look at past data - What’s your existing customer base? How long is the sales funnel? What’s the churn rate? Having access to such data will help you set a realistic goal that gets buy-in from all the teams.
- Set monthly/ quarterly targets (not annual) - The average annual churn in the SaaS domain is 32-50%. This clearly shows that not every customer may choose to stay with a service for a year.
Hence, by setting monthly or quarterly targets or monthly recurring revenue (MRR) targets you will have factored in the churn rate. Besides, the numbers will not overwhelm your team. And, it gives you an opportunity to review/reset your goals rather than waiting for a year to pass.
- Consider your team’s capacity - Consider your team’s capabilities when setting goals. A team achieving an MRR $100,000 cannot be expected to achieve $500,000 within a quarter.
Further, have a clear recruitment plan so that you have the right talent for achieving the marketing revenue goals.
- Break targets as per teams and revenue-driven activities - If your company’s major revenue-driving campaigns include outbound marketing and identifying sales-ready leads, your goals should be divided and assigned to each and the team responsible for them.
Setting goals is critical to motivating the revenue team and assessing where the company is headed. It goes a long way in maximizing efficiency and avoiding stressful hurried decisions.
3. Aligning Sales and Marketing Teams
The Revenue Marketing Report 2022 reveals that nearly 60% of sales and marketing professionals don't feel well-aligned, compared to 46% in 2021. This means that the two teams aren’t on the same page when it comes to goals, KPIs, the ICP, and the customer journey.
Assess whether your teams are aligned by asking these questions.
- Are the sales and marketing teams aware of the revenue goal? Are they working towards it?
If they aren’t aware, host a series of workshops to communicate the goals and get them on a common track.
- What KPIs are they tracking? Are they aligned with their and the other team’s KPIs?
This may be a good time to get the teams together to set clear KPIs. Discuss how each team can help the other keep up with these KPIs.
- What’s each team’s understanding of the ICP and plan of action?
This will help both teams agree on their roles and responsibilities and ensure a positive customer experience. Besides, create a service level agreement (SLA) to define responsibilities.
- How openly do the teams communicate?
Develop a communication plan or invest in tools like a CRM platform to encourage teams to interact with each other and share information.
- How easily does data flow between the teams?
Develop the necessary processes and invest in the right tools to break data siloes and build a continuous feedback loop.
4. Leveraging Technology to Track and Drive Revenue
Optimize your MarTech stack with integrated marketing automation, sales software, revenue marketing platform, and CRM to unearth real-time revenue insights into the type of customers showing interest or purchasing your products and track the revenue your sales and marketing campaigns are generating.
The primary aim is to make sure that your teams get a complete picture of each prospect. Hence, the data should be shared and integrated between platforms.
For instance, your sales team will require a complete profile of prospects and details on how they interact with the brand or which product feature interests them.
Similarly, the marketing team will benefit from a power-packed platform that simplifies technical tasks like crunching multiple dashboards to determine the campaign ROI.
Marketing performance data is scattered across systems; hence, it’s tough and time-consuming to assemble all that data and derive insights from it.
That’s where Revlitix can help. Revlitix sits on top of your tech stack to pull all the data and present insights on a clean UI and multi-channel dashboards. With little effort, technical marketers can gain access to areas that need immediate attention. Further, the platform effortlessly connects data to task management, thus improving operational efficiency.
Technology is central to effectively analyzing data. It can help you improve your marketing efforts and effectively get your most profitable customers together. This will avoid the waste of time and resources involved in pursuing prospects that aren’t a good fit for your product.
5. Optimizing Marketing Strategies to Boost Revenue
Track and measure the performance of your marketing campaigns to see what’s working and what’s not. For this, you need to track the top revenue marketing KPIs.
- Revenue metrics
These are the metrics that measure the performance and effectiveness of your sales and marketing strategies. These are also referred to as the big-picture revenue metrics as they directly relate to revenue.
This includes -
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Cost per funnel (It measures the effectiveness of the buying process. A shorter funnel is less expensive.)
- Customer lifetime value (LTV)
- Conversion rates
- Revenue forecasting
It estimates the revenue your firm will generate over a given time (quarterly or annually). This metric is critical to assess where you are headed at the current pace for expected revenue after a year or a quarter.
- Marketing ROI
It is a metric that attributes revenue and profit growth to sales and marketing efforts. It refers to the profit and revenue growth from all of your different marketing channels like email marketing, social marketing, guest posting, and more.
The revenue marketing strategy you build and implement should align all teams, sales, marketing, customer success, technology, and strategy to create exceptional experiences for customers. We have summed up the areas your revenue marketing strategy should address in this graphic.
How to Determine if Your Business Is Ready for Revenue Marketing?
The questions below will help you determine if your business is ready to implement revenue marketing.
- Does your firm sell SaaS or digital services?
In a SaaS business model, the buying decision is self-directed. This means customers research a lot before making a purchase decision. However, this doesn’t mean they need no support. Offering them holistic and contextual support through their journey will push them lower in the funnel.
Sales and marketing teams should build a customer support system with suitable collaterals, marketing channels, and emails, thus guiding customers through their journey.
In a SaaS business model, revenue marketing can help the sales team identify sales-ready prospects and the marketing team know which channels and campaigns drive revenue. It ensures your customers get the information they need, speeding up the decision-making process and shortening the sales funnel.
Thus, if you are a SaaS or a firm selling online services, revenue marketing is for you.
- How much do you spend on software?
A 2022 Gartner report reveals that companies across all industries on average spend 9.5% of their revenue on marketing. To determine the portion of the revenue you should spend on software, review your growth plans and your marketing priorities.
If your sales or marketing VP is batting for an increase or reallocation of budget around revenue marketing initiatives, you are ready for revenue marketing.
- Have you hired around revenue marketing?
Is your company adding permanent team resources around revenue marketing ( VP revenue marketing, content developers, strategic campaign managers, creative marketers, data analysts, demand gen specialists, and technical marketers)? If yes, you are laying the foundation for revenue marketing success.
By building a robust revenue team your business is creating a revenue marketing center of excellence for the key skills and functions involved.
Beware of These Revenue Marketing Pitfalls
There are several reasons why your revenue marketing efforts may not pay off. It is critical to be aware of these pitfalls because the more prepared you are the more success you’ll experience when building a predictable revenue model.
- Lack of collaboration between marketing and sales departments
Revenue marketing is tied to a common goal; hence your sales and marketing teams are required to work in complete synchronization. They need to agree on one revenue goal and ICP, build shared programs, develop engagement strategies, and target high-quality accounts. Only this can ensure the success of your revenue marketing efforts.
Most businesses fall short of effective collaboration between teams. This hurts their revenue marketing outcomes.
- Resistance to change
When implementing a revenue marketing strategy, the ability of teams to adopt and adapt to change can be a challenge. Changes involved when executing a revenue strategy impact everyone in the organization - from the C-suite to sales and marketing.
If teams aren’t open to changes in the way they interact with customers, use technology, or go to market, the revenue marketing strategies won’t work.
- Legacy tools and processes
The MarTech era has been on for almost a decade. And with every tool we’ve deployed, we’ve built several processes to support their applications. This means the present generation of managers and teams have inherited a sea of tools and processes that may not be relevant and are draining resources instead of adding value.
The next leg of the journey with revenue marketing requires teams to unlearn and dissociate with these legacy systems and take a fresh approach that’s purpose-built to achieve revenue goals.
Before We Conclude: A Few Rules to Bear in Mind
- Be accountable for revenue metrics
It’s easy to get carried away with vanity metrics like shares, comments, likes, followers, open rates, views, traffic, time on site, and others. Your team should be accountable for the revenue metrics we discussed earlier in this post.
- Follow a data-driven approach
Data should be the foundation of all your business decisions. Leverage a flexible technology stack that can crunch volumes of data in minutes and present you with accurate insights. This will help your team make data-driven informed decisions that drive revenue.
- Be hyper-focused on your ICP
Make sure your sales and marketing teams are aligned on your ideal customer profile at every stage of the customer journey. This will help them focus on programs that drive the most revenue.
Get Started with Revenue Marketing!
Revenue marketing strategies are specifically designed to re-align a business’s marketing structure and convert it into a revenue generator. It goes beyond lead generation or demand generation to link marketing campaigns with reliable and recurring revenue.
By aligning your teams to the strategies shared in this post, you will take a step closer to securing recurring revenue and profit growth. If you want to up your marketing game and grow revenue, build a robust revenue marketing strategy today using this information.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- What is revenue marketing strategy?
In a revenue marketing strategy businesses use various channels to build customer-specific campaigns that boost customer acquisition, sales, and revenue. It links marketing plans to revenue goals.
Further, it aims to align sales and marketing teams by creating a continuous feedback loop, enabling a free flow of information across the organization.
- What is the goal of revenue marketing?
Revenue marketing is a holistic goal-oriented approach that aims at predictably driving revenue growth. Proper implementation of a revenue marketing strategy will ensure alignment between marketing plans and the sales processes. Both teams will focus on a common goal - generating revenue.
- How does marketing impact revenue?
The marketing team analyzes customer behavior and product preferences to determine customer-centric strategies and campaigns and channels that deliver revenue. Based on the insights they receive through data analysis they develop targeted promotions that address key pain points. Thus, they impact sales and a company’s revenue.
- What does a revenue marketer do?
A revenue marketer is responsible for identifying and leveraging revenue opportunities or revenue drivers. Here’s a summary of their role in the organization -
- They leverage people, processes, and technology to maximize revenue
- They build and align teams so that they work together towards a common goal
- They predict the ROI of campaigns so that the company doesn’t waste resources
- They build a strong revenue marketing team with the required skillsets
- They create campaigns that go beyond lead and demand generation and link them to revenue
