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Recession-Proof Marketing with Next-Gen Funnel and Pipeline Visibility

How to build certainty and predictability into your demand-generation funnel
Marketing Teams are Caught in a Game They Can't Win. It's Time to Turn the Tables
revenue operations Hero Image

For B2B marketing leaders, even the best-laid, most thoughtful strategies are vulnerable to unforeseen pressures and events beyond our control.
In 2023, any existing marketing plan is being challenged by rapid technological change, global crises, and economic uncertainty. This means marketing planning can't just be a once-per-year effort, and marketers must rethink the strategies and tools of the trade. The question is, can you adapt?

The answer depends on your ability to see what's happening in your pipeline and understand what it means for downstream revenue generation. The good news? That is now possible in a way it never was before...

Modern Marketers Have a Tough Job

In the wake of multiple global-scale disruptions over the last few years and a contracting economy, CMOs face an array of demands that make adapting quickly and successfully a necessity, yet extremely challenging.
Do more with less
As the economy slows and belts tighten, marketing teams are expected to front-load the funnel with opportunities, often on reduced budgets. Expensive channels may now be at risk of cuts, and the mix of activities used at top-of-funnel may need alteration too.
But as your marketing mix changes, your need to test and validate grows. On paid channels, this can be a tricky balance to strike, and on slower-burn organic channels, you need to know where to spend reduced resources effectively.
Be accountable for revenue
Marketing teams have traditionally been accountable for generating leads. But in recent years, companies have increasingly expected marketing to show a direct impact on revenue. This leaves many CMOs wondering how they can demonstrate proof with a limited budget and a lack of tools designed for this purpose.
And with a $198 average cost per lead for B2B SaaS businesses, your room for maneuver is limited.
Track shifting ICPs
Ideal customer profiles can morph across dimensions such as company size, vertical, buyer persona, title, region, and more. In fact, conversions, velocities, and win rates can change even within a quarter, especially in turbulent economic conditions.
Many companies have poorly defined ICPs to begin with, and they lack the capability to accurately track change indicators.
Reach enterprise
Securing an enterprise customer at the right time can make an entire fiscal year. But guess what? Every other marketing team in your space is thinking the same thing.
Getting in front of buying committees costs time and money, and it requires a level of attention and care you might struggle to spare if budget or resources is a concern. Plus, as marketing methods become more sophisticated, your ICP becomes more discerning. Tired creative gets found out and ignored far more easily.

Kicked While You're Down?

On top of the above demands, various external factors are making the job of marketers even more difficult...

That's a lot on your plate. It's easy as a CMO to feel spread thin, or even unsure how to succeed. Let's look at some ways to handle the load effectively.

Effective Marketing in 2023

You've probably already noticed how the issues we've outlined threaten your strategy for the year. And with 61% of CMOs reporting they lack the in-house capabilities to deliver their strategy, even with 25% of budget spent on tech solutions, you're not alone
There are three main pillars that CMOs will need to lean on to navigate these challenges, and they're all connected. It all starts with planning.
1
Planning
It's a well-established pattern: strategic planning for B2B businesses happens in October, with enough time to refine and implement for the new year.
It's like playing chess a few moves ahead. This made sense when the rules of the game were dependable. But these days, they're always changing, and checkmate requires keen observation of what's happening off as well as on the board.
Your forward planning is now contingent on events. Economic uncertainty, legislative changes, reduced budgets, and disruptive events like wars and climate disasters could all amount to that punch in the face we spoke about in the introduction.
How to fix it

Your planning needs to happen more frequently. Consider more agile approaches to your marketing activity, including sprints, simple research projects, and experiments. The more you learn, the more confidence you'll gain in planning next quarter's activity, and the sooner benchmarks will emerge for performance, spending, and revenue.
You need to think on your feet because the very idea of forward planning when you're responsible for revenue growth has a significant obstacle...

2
Predictability
There will always be uncertainty in marketing, but shifting market and legal dynamics compound this problem. And planning ahead is made even harder thanks to a lack of predictability across your funnel.
What gets fed into your funnel can stall, drop out, or succeed - but many marketers can't say why a particular result occurred in the past, let alone predict the future results of their activities.
It's never been more important to develop a predictable pipeline that shores up and boosts revenue. But with an armful of spreadsheets and poor lead-tracking, you don't have what you need to get there.
How to fix it

Put simply, you can't solve this problem on your own. No matter how well you know the market, how good you are with numbers, and how well you can communicate as a team across spreadsheets, projects, and handover points, you need Al to help you make durable predictions.
Today's technology can help marketing leaders quickly join the dots between data points, tracing an accurate pattern you can rely on for effective decision-making.

3
Budget
That data can also be crucial in the tense budget talks CMOs across the US are now facing. Unfortunately, many are going into those conversations without the planning cadence and predictability needed to defend existing budgets or push for investment.
Just as the need for upfront spending on marketing activities increases, so too does the cost of these activities. Yet there is caution surrounding spend. This can create a maddening cycle that spins out quickly if you don't get a handle on it.
How to fix it

Your best friend for winning budget negotiations is data: show proof of lifted revenue with strategies tested for dependable results.
Think about your typical cost of acquisition. Think about your customer journey. What are the most expensive channels you use? And what evidence do you already have about how leads from each source convert?

Draw up a list of known unknowns about acquiring and converting leads to revenue and make a core part of your strategy finding out how you can convert them to knowns. If that sounds like a challenge, you're right...

The Pipeline Intelligence Gap (The Elephant in the Boardroom)

Let's say you have a power surge at home, and it flips a circuit breaker. When you go down to the basement to flip the breakers, you know any one of them could be the cause of the outage. The problem is, down there you have no insights. And right now, you don't even have a flashlight. So what's the right course of action?
Most CMOs believe large-scale changes are needed. A recent survey from Gartner on the state of marketing found 71% agreeing that they need to reevaluate their role and the components of their marketing machine - to achieve their long-term vision.
You have to prove the dollar value of your campaigns, but available analytics tools don't give the necessary insights. It's like standing there in the dark trying to play electrician. A marketing team set up to attract and engage an audience is different from one set up to meet a revenue target, and this can affect the kinds of activities your team performs.

Why Marketers Need Better Tools

Most revenue operations and intelligence solutions slice up the funnel, with specialized uses for different areas of growth activity. It's like a big data salami, with marketing and sales getting separate slices. It seems like every spot is covered by a different tool. What this does, however, is complicate coordination and attribution.
CMOs and marketing teams don't have the visibility they need to show the efficacy of their top-of-the-funnel activities in driving revenue. They get their slices of revenue info at the data deli and never really get to see the ingredients.
They don't have a way to make accurate projections. Al-powered predictive analytics can now potentially help solve this problem, but most such systems don't cover the full funnel (and many companies are still trying to get by with muddled spreadsheets).
Now more than ever, you need to see what makes a successful lead: what happens to them across the pipeline, how they respond to messaging and engagement points, their source and background, and the cost of acquiring them.
They don't have a way to make accurate projections. Al-powered predictive analytics can now potentially help solve this problem, but most such systems don't cover the full funnel (and many companies are still trying to get by with muddled spreadsheets).

4 Steps to Better Marketing Data

With planning, predictability, and budget accounted for and shored up in your new strategy, you need to take a careful look at how you measure impact.
Underneath everything we've discussed are four key steps you can take now to ensure your marketing is as impactful and efficient as it can be.
You can't win a spelling bee without your ABCs. Similarly, you need to start with the fundamentals.
1
Implement lead - tracking best practices
It's an obvious point, but we'll say it nice and clear for those at the back: your data must be as clean as possible.
Input new leads into your marketing automation platform by source, channel, and campaign. Take care that there are no issues with incorrect fields or any ambiguities on how your leads are organised. Then ensure there's a 1:1 sync with your company's CRM.
You'd be amazed at how many successful and well-established businesses get this wrong. Getting serious about lead-tracking is the first step toward solving your strategic problems.
Those handovers down the funnel? Make sure you can accurately track what happens next. Correct your lead-tracking now, and you could save yourself serious effort down the line.
2
Create a feedback loop with sales
You've got to keep communication flowing with sales.
The way a typical sales and marketing function is set up can make this difficult, but despite the specific needs of each team, increasing revenue should be the north-star metric uniting the whole operation.
Keep asking....
  • Why? Why did a lead close? What's the reason for dropping out at a particular stage? Look at specific cases and see where the snag points were.
  • What did they say? Even small details can help you and your team understand how top-of-funnel work affects prospects. From messaging to channel selection, reports from the frontline will give you the insights you need to pivot effectively.
Above all, keep looking at the figures together. The ASP (Average Sales Price) now governs your activity more than before, but it's also firmly in the sales team's wheelhouse. See what conclusions you can reach from digging into ASP, sales velocity, and anything tied to revenue that Sales has an influence over. And to work more effectively, you'll need to break an unwritten rule marketers have been following for too long.
3
Stop slicing up your funnel
You can't afford to wash your hands of leads at those traditional handover points anymore. Your new targets and conditions demand a full-funnel approach.
That doesn't mean you don't let sales do what they do best. Instead, you need to keep an eye on what's happening and know how to respond when a negative pattern develops.
The LinkedIn State of Sales 2022 Report for the US and Canada highlights "No organization-wide, unified view of data" and "Siloed Data" amongst the 5 biggest data challenges sellers face.
The need for a unified, coherent funnel is clear. A sliced funnel has been enabled by both a rigid attitude to ownership between sales and marketing and specialist tools handling various parts of the whole.
You need to look at options that fuse the funnel back together, both between teams and across systems.
Not only will this help you demonstrate your impact on revenue, but it will also help your team pivot much more effectively when you spot a red flag downstream, helping you match your strategy to the market.
4
Find the metrics that matter
The MQL was the marketer's goal for many years; get prospects there and you'd succeeded. As long as leads kept flowing through the pipe, marketing could be said to be performing just as intended.
But with a revenue purpose, SAL and MQL numbers aren't the full story. You need more indicative metrics and leading indicators of revenue contribution.
The problem is how to find these. Thankfully, Al now makes this much easier.
Using predictive analytics from advanced Al tools will help you scour the whole funnel for true performance indicators, giving you the insights you need to test and validate assumptions.
Solving this aspect of the planning and analysis processes should help you prove marketing revenue contribution, as well as feed your team the insights they need to reach the right people in more creative ways.
Pretty soon, planning, predictability, and budget are in lockstep, making bankable revenue growth a core part of your strategizing.
Finding the Opportunity in the Challenge
With so much shifting in technology, legislation, and business practices, marketers have their work cut out for them.
But those with the right insights, processes, and leading-edge tools have an opportunity to stand out and drive change rather than being swept up in it.

Finding the Opportunity in the Challenge

With so much shifting in technology, legislation, and business practices, marketers have their work cut out for them.
But those with the right insights, processes, and leading edge tools have an opportunity to stand out and drive change rather than being swept up in it.

About RevSure

Drive confident and profitable growth with RevSure
In a recession, your sales cycle will naturally grow longer. This is especially true the more your company is trying to reach enterprise customers. Dealing with senior stakeholders and a more complex evaluation process slows sales, making it harder to track the results of your campaigns.
Improved performance, predictable outcomes
Through Sales Pipeline Readiness, RevSure shines a light on those murky mid-pipe stages, offering you:
  • Confident pipeline generation
  • Improved conversion rates
  • Optimized campaign performance
B2B Marketing made whole
We know what's been holding marketing teams back. And we're confident that our platform could help you and your business scale the trickiest obstacles you face in 2023.
From planning to analysis, Sales Pipeline Readiness creates dependability and predictability when you need it most.
An unpredictable pipeline leads to unpredictable revenue generation. Sales Pipeline Readiness is the missing link in driving predictable & profitable revenue growth, and Pipeline health needs to be on every revenue leader, CEO, and Board's agenda
Deepinder Singh Dhingra
Founder & CEO, RevSure.Al

Testimonials

"Understanding the impact of our marketing programs and spending using RevSure's detailed analytics is a game-changer as we take a data-driven approach on all things from board meeting presentations down to executing the marketing day-to-day."
Ryan Shopp - Chief Marketing Officer
 “With RevSure, marketers can confidently understand what will happen in the future and plan accordingly. RevSure provides insights that help you take actionable steps to improve your campaign effectiveness and overall marketing ROI - it’s one of the very few tools I use every single day.”
Tom Wentworth—CMO, Recorded Future
“B2B revenue productivity is at an all-time low. The best way to improve it is by digging deep into the blockers in your funnel and pipeline. Finally having stage-by-stage conversion, in one comprehensive view, is super powerful and actionable — it’s a level of insight I never thought we could achieve.”
Tom Murtaugh - VP, GTM Operations
"RevSure's full funnel analytics and AI recommendation engine gives our team the insights they need to accelerate pipeline & close business."
Shreha jain - Director of Marketing Operations
"RevSure not only simplified our analytics but transformed how we view and optimize our marketing funnel. The clarity and accessibility of the data empowers our team to make informed decisions much faster than before."
ZANE HALSTEAD - Head of Marketing Operations
"Just the breadth of information that RevSure presents around the whole funnel is excellent. While most companies look at just the pipeline or marketing data, RevSure bridges that gap by connecting the entire funnel. That's the core differentiator because I haven't seen any other platform offer this level of capability."
Mark Sladden - Revenue Operations Leader

No more random acts of marketing.

Pipeline & Revenue Predictions, Attribution and Funnel Intelligence in one place.

No more random acts of marketing.

Pipeline & Revenue Predictions, Attribution and Funnel Intelligence in one place.
Getting to the finish line

7 Best Practices of Demand Generation Effectiveness

Effective demand gen programs involve a vast set of tactical and strategic components. This includes the orchestration of impactful campaigns, the creation of engaging content, the delivery of clear and compelling messages, and the reinforcement of your unique value proposition across multiple touchpoints.

But today, it’s not just about clear messaging and robust campaigns. Speed and impact play a bigger role than ever. Marketers are increasingly being measured by their contribution to organizational revenue goals. This increased alignment to revenue means that there’s a bigger emphasis on impact beyond acquiring new leads.

To make your demand gen strategy work best, you must find the right balance between getting immediate results and having projected outcomes you can feel confident about—and it ultimately boils down to having high-quality data. That’s where accurately forecasting how much business your marketing efforts will generate and the revenue you will bring in becomes a critical variable for success.

It begins with setting achievable goals, pinpointing which levers are making the greatest impact in your path forward, making informed investments that will maximize the ROI of your programmatic efforts, and ultimately improving your overall pipeline generation machine to achieve predictable revenue growth, backed by data.

Creating a solid demand gen strategy includes seven best practices that we will break down in this guide.

Key Takeaways

1.

95% of marketers surveyed feel that having the ability to predict pipeline outcomes is important to the overall success of marketing programs.

3.

50% of those who can fully predict
pipeline contributions saw a significant increase in revenue last
year, compared to just 16% of those who cannot fully predict pipeline contributions.

5.

There is a general lack of confidence in marketers’ ability to convert throughout the entirety of the marketing funnel.

2.

Three-quarters (75%) of all marketerssurveyed report that they spendtoo much time in “fire drill mode”answering questions from leadershipregarding revenue projections andpipeline forecasts.

4.

Over two-thirds (68%) of marketers don’t know where there is funnel leakage and conversion bottlenecks.

1.

Only 29% of marketers surveyed say they can fully predict pipeline
contributions and outcomes. In light of this, many said they plan to prioritize how to gain better insight into the pipeline in the year ahead.

Best practice #1

Set Achievable Goals

When pressured to “deliver more leads,” marketing leaders can fall into the trap of goal-setting that’s not based on data in an attempt to close pipeline gaps.

The pitfall of this approach is that it fuels unrealistic expectations, sets growth teams up for failure, and creates mistrust between sales and marketing teams. So where to begin instead?

Get narrow on your target segments

One of the most important pillars of a successful growth strategy is focus. This doesn’t mean your tactical approach should be slim in scope, but it does mean that who you target should be specific and strategic.

This will enable you to effectively test your messaging and have a greater impact on pipeline generation, especially if you’re aligned with the sales team on their late-stage opportunities.

Define your metrics for success and tie goals to organizational objectives

Alignment to your organizational goals means that you must work hand-in-hand with your sales operations and revenue operations leaders to set goals that roll up into overarching organizational Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). This alignment with other revenue teams ensures you work together toward the same objectives and don’t reinvent the wheel.

Which of the following attribution
models do you currently use?

Gain a firm grasp on pipeline predictability

Making accurate predictions on lead generation is easier said than done. With data hygiene crises on most revenue teams, it’s hard to get a grip on pipeline health. However, it’s not impossible. Mapping your GTM motion and leveraging AI to analyze the journey can help you uncover conversion and leakage insights that can help you improve the overall lead journey and your goal attainment.

Best practice #2

Use a Holistic Approach to Attribution

What is Attribution Marketing?

Marketing attribution is correctly assigning credit for the impact of all marketing campaigns on pipeline and revenue. Proper attribution is a critical way to measure the results of marketing programs. It helps you prioritize your budget and see where to place budget bets. Most importantly, marketing attribution helps organizations plan for the future with predictable outcomes.

Today, marketing attribution is complex and confusing. While digital marketing has made it possible to track and measure most activities, attribution data is generally siloed, preventing a true view across the full funnel. And because marketing and sales outcomes are tracked in separate systems, organizations can’t assess buyer journeys or see how the earliest touchpoints affect pipeline and revenue. It’s a frustrating situation.

Marketers can choose from several attribution models: single-touch attribution models, which assign credit to one touchpoint (usually first or last touch), and multi-touch attribution models, which give credit to various touchpoints along the lead journey.

“The purpose of attribution is budget prioritization and to know what’s impacting and what’s not.In the world of a tight budget, marketing measurement has never been more important.”

Bonnie CraterCEO
Full Circle Insights

42%

of marketers use multi-touch attribution models today.

Unfortunately, these attribution models are subjective. They often drive tension across marketing and sales teams who want to earn credit for pipeline generation, and they’re simply not a straightforward way to truly understand what’s working and what’s not.

How to achieve Full Funnel Attribution?

Only 31% of marketers say they can measure ROI accurately using multi-touch attribution. Traditional attribution models don’t provide insight into the “deep funnel”, don’t account for incomplete data, and—because they rely on historical data—don’t enable forward-looking predictions. Legacy marketing attribution approaches can be ambiguous and cause tension between marketing and sales teams.

But today, there’s a better way to approach attribution. Marketing intelligence technology has paved the way for AI-powered full-funnel attribution, allowing marketing teams to gain access to a full-funnel view of which levers are driving success.

Marketers are able to map the go-to-market motion from lead to opportunity and ultimately to revenue by leveraging the technology to:

☑ Pin-point your highest converting channels

☑ Surface common conversion paths to determine what works best

☑ Evaluate touchpoints based on engagement and effectiveness

☑ Provide recommendations on your best path forward through ‘next best action’

By facilitating a forward-thinking and predictive approach to attribution, deep funnel attribution links to specific funnel tactics for real-time strategic insights.

This approach equips marketing teams with the information they need to make informed decisions on a daily basis. It helps identify the most effective strategies at each stage of the lead journey, optimizing resource allocation and ensuring that every action aligns with forecasted goals.

Marketers must move beyond first- or last-touch attribution. Gain full-funnel insight by understanding how dark funnel data informs deep funnel behavior and conversions

Full-Funnel Attribution Shows What’s Working

Full-funnel attribution goes beyond the fundamental question of assigning credit into the nuances of real impact. It sheds light on the highest-impact tactics across campaigns, channels, and activities.

This approach offers insights into the likelihood of converting leads to Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Its granularity empowers marketing leaders with the knowledge needed to optimize their efforts and drive greater success throughout the entire sales funnel.

Full-Funnel Attribution Recommends Next Best Steps

By analyzing many data points, both on-and off-line, deep funnel attribution can also recommend the "Next Best Action" for sales rep follow-up, lead nurturing, and conversion, offering detailed next steps to help marketing leaders determine how to tweak and adapt marketing efforts based on what’s working.

The rise of full-funnel attribution, powered by AI, provides marketing teams with a complete view of the sales funnel and valuable insights into what's driving success.

Historically, creating an attribution model has been daunting and complex, but new marketing intelligence technologies are simplifying this process with great success. Now, marketing leaders can concentrate on refining strategies and execution with actionable insights on not only where to attribute success, but also what to do next, and where to invest.

How BigID Democratizes Data and Optimizes Campaign Strategy with RevSure

BigID is a leader in data security, privacy, compliance, and governance; enabling organizations to proactively protect and get more value from their data in a single platform.

As a high-growth technology company in a competitive market, BigID’s marketing team moves quickly and wants to move even faster. But data siloed in separate systems and lack of campaign visibility across the whole team was preventing each member from driving their own programs to optimize strategy. The company wanted to ramp up its analytics capabilities to drive results more effectively.

"There are multiple people on our demand gen team who go into RevSure every day and can easily point and click and get what they need. That makes them more agile, and makes us more responsive and able to optimize our campaign strategies, which in turn drives growth across the entire business.”

Sarah Hospelhorn, BigID CMO

RevSure allows BigID’s marketing team to move as rapidly as it needs to.

Now BigID has:

  • Full-funnel visibility to analyze results, plan strategy, and see what worked and what didn't quickly and easily
  • Ad channel system integration for a single source for metrics, accurate spending, and consistent campaign names
  • Data insight by different channels down to the campaign level for a more informed strategy and micro optimization and sales improve its processes
Best practice #3

Maximize Campaign ROI

Now that we’ve explained full-funnel attribution and the role AI plays, it’s time to drill into the nuts and bolts: determining what’s working, what’s not, and how to make budget calls that don’t leave you sweating on pipeline calls.

Many marketers report lacking confidence in the ability to convert leads, especially as leads move further into the funnel. According to the RevSure State of Pipeline Generation Report, only 37% of marketers report being extremely confident about converting MOFU leads and one in ten marketers feel not at all confident about converting BOFU leads.

It boils down to the fact that predictable pipeline contributions and outcomes are stymied by a lack of solid analytics. There are three steps you can take to remedy this:

     1. Make sense of data

     2. Optimize campaign effectiveness

     3. Improve marketing spend efficiency

Following these three steps will empower you to predict campaign outcomes so that you can maximize marketing ROI.

Step 1: Make Sense of your Data

Most marketers today spend hours analyzing spreadsheets with countless tabs, moving from sheet to sheet, trying to tell a story with the data. Unfortunately, many organizations have a data hygiene crisis. Inconsistent data from the CRM, account-based management platforms, and other revenue analytics tools make it hard to paint an accurate picture.

This means most marketing teams have a skewed, incomplete perspective on which marketing programs are driving the most impact, what channels are providing the most value, and which leads actually have a high likelihood of closing. In fact, 48% of marketers report that they are measuring campaign success solely based on Return On Investment (ROI) or Customer Acquisition Cost, illuminating how other contributing data points are often disregarded.

Here’s where AI can play a critical role in helping you make more informed decisions.

How Marketers Use AI to Make Sense of Data

Activate Funnel Management

Instead of using guesswork to predict what’s contributing to conversions, marketers can use AI to gain visibility into their marketing mix and attribution, empowering you to maximize ROI throughout the customer journey. This helps you understand what levers can be pulled to ensure an opportunity moves through the journey, optimizing close rates.

Understand Lead Propensity

AI allows marketers to determine how likely their leads are to buy. As an advanced alternative to lead scoring, AI-scored lead propensity offers the ability to measure the likelihood of leads contributing to the pipeline.

Increase Funnel Speed

AI allows marketers to understand where bottlenecks are from marketing to sales, and offers guidance on where to improve the process around the buying journey.

Aggregate Data

AI enhancements of attribution and data cataloging allow marketers to gain a holistic view of data and strategically dissect which sources create leads with the highest propensity to purchase or with larger average deal sizes.

How SnapLogic Replaced Siloed Spreadsheets With Full Funnel Insights

SnapLogic is the leader in AI-led generative integration. The SnapLogic platform accelerates digital transformation across the enterprise and empowers faster and easier integration.

Before implementing RevSure’s full-funnel attribution solution, SnapLogic’s marketing team knew where it was spending money and what the return was. However, it lacked the ability to analyze the ROI of their GTM strategy on a granular level and couldn’t determine what percentage of spend was driving pipeline. In addition, each revenue owner had a separate data analysis spreadsheet, which led to conflicting reporting, conclusions, and action plans.

“With RevSure’s AI-based pipeline acceleration platform, we know how things are moving across the funnel, what’s moving forward, what’s moving back, what’s staying stagnant.”

AJ Patel, Senior Director of Finance, SnapLogic

With RevSure, SnapLogic has gained unprecedented insight into its revenue motion, including:

Now SnapLogic has gained unprecedented insight into its revenue motion, including:

  • Full funnel insights across every stage of the marketing and sales funnel
  • Visibility into lead behavior and which leads are moving through the funnel and which are not
  • Visibility into projected time-to-value on investments and when ROI can be expected to impact pipeline, backed by data.
  • Enhanced team performance with data-driven strategy changes that helped marketing improve its mix of programs, and sales improve its processes

Step 2: Optimize Campaign Effectiveness

Every company’s marketing mix execution plan varies the amount of time, budget, personalization, and automation required for success. The best strategies employ the right mix of tactics and spend to reach and convert target audiences.

Here are five tactics you can implement to improve your marketing strategy and optimize campaign effectiveness.

How Marketers Use AI to Make Sense of Data

1. Be where your buyers are

It’s critical to assess where your buyers go to conduct their research and improve their domain knowledge. For example, a B2B manufacturing buyer may not be active on Instagram or Threads, so investing in this channel will yield low ROI.

2. Run a competitive analysis

Another factor to consider is the competitive landscape and the current and emerging trends in your industry. You can conduct a SWOT analysis to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to your competitors and their demand gen strategy. Today’s SEO tools can provide granular insight into keywords, and ads that your competitors are bidding on.

Ask these Questions:

What marketing & sales activation channels am I using today?

☑ Which channels are owned vs paid?

☑ What is my budget allocation across paid channels?

☑ Which channels do my target buyers actually engage with?

☑ How do I measure success on each channel?

☑ Which business-level metrics and KPIs can I optimize?

☑ Can I connect each channel to revenue or other business-level metrics?

Use a Holistic Approach to Attribution

3. Define your segments and tailor your messaging

Align channels to your target segments, as different types of personas take different engagement strategies. Messaging tweaks, timing, outreach style, and marketing tactics vary for each segment that you target.

4. Choose your channels

Based on your lead generation goals, you can determine which channels to begin with. If you’re starting from scratch, a good place to start is to understand which free channels are frequented most by your buyers, and use the content distribution matrix to map out your greatest areas of opportunity. Then, you can make investments into these channels with the creation of relevant, educational content.

5. Monitor and measure performance

Finally, after you define your action plan and set it in motion, you need to create a framework to monitor and measure performance. The types of metrics you track and assign value to will determine the effectiveness of your reporting mechanism. Avoid the trap of using only traffic and engagement metrics as a core measurement of success. It takes an integrated approach to all metric types—from traffic to engagement, to conversion to business impact—to paint a holistic picture and move the needle on revenue goal attainment.

42%

of those surveyed reported that email marketing is making the most impact for marketers, but social media, content marketing, and organic search are close behind.

What channels have the greatest impact on pipeline generation?

Get a Holistic View of All Marketing Metrics

Marketing reports provide you with a limited benchmark for how things are working.

With a reporting mechanism in place, you can look at a report and get a partial glimpse into if you’re succeeding, where you’re falling short, where improvements need to be made, and which channels are working and which are not.

But at most companies, it’s a daunting task to capture, measure, and synthesize all of these data points. Today’s AI-powered attribution solutions let you aggregate data, simplify reporting, and gain granular insights. AI can help you analyze performance and arm your revenue teams with confidence.

Step 3: Improve Marketing Spend Efficiency

The last step is to determine where your marketing spend is actually contributing to revenue.

One third of marketers report budget allocation as a top challenge for achieving pipeline generation success. When marketers don’t have access to the right data, allocating marketing dollars is a guessing game.

Step 3: Improve Marketing Spend Efficiency

The last step is to determine where your marketing spend is actually contributing to revenue.

One third of marketers report budget allocation as a top challenge for achieving pipeline generation success. When marketers don’t have access to the right data, allocating marketing dollars is a guessing game.

Being able to predict and forecast pipeline enables you to make data-driven decisions that inform how well you spend your marketing dollars. The quality and timing of these recommendations are critical to impact pipeline in the short and long term.

With RevSure’s Pipeline Projections, you can extract, transform, and unify data from every major sales and marketing platform for accurate learnings on your pipeline health that you can use to shift investments into the channels, campaigns, or ads that are working well.

Leveraging AI, RevSure assigns a pipeline conversion likelihood and a potential opportunity value to every lead. This assigned value is unique to your GTM motion, factoring in attributes such as lead, account, and opportunity journey data. By tracking conversions at every stage of the lead journey, you’re able to focus on the right efforts on a stage-by-stage level.

When you become proactive on generating and covering your sales pipeline for both current and future quarters, you enhance your ability to predict outcomes, identify potential issues early, and access valuable insights that can help you increase revenue faster.

Best practice #4

Accelerate Pipeline Efficiency

Once you’ve started to improve campaign ROI and marketing spend, it’s time to improve how those leads convert into qualified sales opportunities. This step is critical to drive revenue, but arguably the hardest of them all.

The handoff of a lead between marketing and sales often faces a lot of challenges. As hard as it can be to admit, what makes a qualified lead for you might not be perceived as a qualified opportunity by sales. Here’s where defined marketing lead criteria and a rigorous de-qualification process are key to driving the trust needed for sales to follow up on your hard-earned leads.

Here are three ways to accelerate pipeline efficiency:

     1. Diagnose pipeline health

     2. Close funnel leaks

     3. Improve sales velocity

Step 1: Diagnose Pipeline Health

Having insight into conversions beyond the funnel and into the pipeline is critical. Tracking stage-by-stage conversions can help you better understand where opportunities are getting stuck in the funnel and drive predictability, speed, effectiveness and alignment.

A healthy sales pipeline means that there are enough leads and opportunities in each stage to ensure consistent revenue growth. Analyzing pipeline health helps teams identify areas that require improvement, such as increasing lead generation, improving sales conversion rates, or shortening the sales cycle.

By managing the pipeline health effectively, sales and marketing teams can increase revenue, improve forecasting accuracy, and ultimately achieve business growth.

Wondering if you are going to miss your targets?

Real-time projections help you monitor your pipeline and bookings, including where you are tracking against your targets.

Step 2: Close Funnel Leaks

Now that you have analyzed pipeline health and know where leads fall out of the consideration funnel, it’s critical to take a surgical approach to closing these leaks.

Begin by analyzing why prospects leave the funnel. If most leave at an early stage, you may be targeting the wrong Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Mid-stage losses can be attributed to lack of information or mismatch with prospect needs. Late-stage losses can be due to competition or missed opportunities to reinforce your value proposition. You must also determine whether it’s a lack of follow up or other action by the sales team.

One tool to prevent lead loss is content that showcases the ROI of your solution, aligns to unique buyer motivations, provides social proof, and validates your offering. A nurture campaign of stage-appropriate content such as white papers and case studies can keep buyers informed and engaged.

Here are three types of gap-closing content:

An ROI Calculator

It’s critical to assess where your buyers go to conduct their research and improve their domain knowledge. For example, a B2B manufacturing buyer may not be active on Instagram or Threads, so investing in this channel will yield low ROI.

Competitive comparison one-pagers

Another factor to consider is the competitive landscape and the current and emerging trends in your industry. You can conduct a SWOT analysis to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to your competitors and their demand gen strategy. Today’s SEO tools can provide granular insight into keywords, and ads that your competitors are bidding on.

Third-party reviews

There’s no better way to prove your value than through the words of your customers. Make investments in third-party review sites like G2, Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius, and Capterra. If done right, these sites can also serve as lead-generation sources.

Step 3: Improve Sales Velocity

Moving deals through the pipeline faster requires ruthless prioritization and lead scoring. It means you need to be sourcing higher-quality leads—even if that means having fewer leads altogether.

There are two common ways to capture and nurture high-quality opportunities to drive sales velocity.

1. Remove prospects with the lowest likelihood of progressing

Sometimes, we get stuck on the notion that we must cultivate every prospect in our pipeline. By cutting the dead weight, you can focus efforts on the opportunities that have the strongest outlook. Pipeline intelligence can help sort through which opportunities to pursue with greater accuracy and speed.

2. Define step-by-step actions for high-quality prospects

Once you have identified the best opportunities in your pipeline, pursue them with a clear action plan. Scaling this manually can be a challenge. Pipeline intelligence capabilities that set your next-best action enable you to take proactive steps to keep prospects engaged.

Best practice #5

Improve Win Rates with Predictive Intelligence

Predictive intelligence uses AI to provide a forward-looking projection into prospect behavior, helping you identify high-performing opportunities to generate pipeline.

With RevSure’s predictive intelligence capabilities, you can hone in on win rates and improve your overall performance. AI-powered solutions provide intelligence that can help you design a powerful action plan with confidence. Additionally, you can gain insights into the current state of your pipeline and the key factors influencing win rates. Monitoring pipeline health and aligning it with predefined targets becomes a straightforward task, allowing for proactive adjustments.

Predictive intelligence equips teams with the knowledge needed to enhance pipeline quality and identify areas of potential leakage. It provides insights into which segments have the highest probability of conversion and offers actionable guidance on transforming leads into opportunities and driving successful conversions.

Perhaps most importantly, reporting becomes a much simpler lift, eliminating guesswork and enabling your entire marketing organization to make data-driven decisions confidently.

“We need to keep looking at the pipeline goal as a shared responsibility of sales and marketing, with sourcing splits being directional, not absolute.”

Carilu Dietrich
CMO Marketing Advisor, Ex-Atlassian
Best practice #6

Choose the Right Full-Funnel Attribution Solution

It’s essential to adopt a full-funnel attribution solution that empowers you to understand your data, analyze marketing performance at different journey stages, and boost both conversions and pipeline.

While there are a variety of vendors on the market today, it’s critical to find the best fit for the needs of your marketing team. Here are a few tips to consider.

1. Identify a solution that analyzes performance from both marketing and sales funnels

It's crucial to find a platform that will actively bridge the gap between marketing and sales funnels. This platform should offer comprehensive insights into the lead-to-prospect journey, enabling you to make informed decisions for your entire revenue motion.

2. Make sure AI modeling is designed for inconsistent data

Let’s face it—most marketing teams don’t have the cleanest data. The good news is, there are ways to diagnose your pipeline health even with incomplete data inputs. When choosing a partner, seek out AI modeling that can handle incomplete data inputs effectively. This will help keep your reporting reliable, even when dealing with varying or irregular data sources.

3. Choose a platform that goes live in weeks, not months

In a world where market conditions can change rapidly, the ability to get your platform up and running within weeks allows your business to respond swiftly to emerging trends and shifting business demands. Shorter deployment timelines often translate to cost savings. With fewer resources allocated to getting timely, accurate analytics, you can focus on making strategic decisions that will impact pipeline this quarter and next.

4. Choose a pipeline intelligence offering that complements your ABM platform

Traditional ABM platforms have a wealth of insights and reporting capabilities for accounts, intent and engagement. However, platforms that offer more sophisticated pipeline intelligence capabilities include pipeline predictions on how those accounts will convert and how much pipeline they will generate. In using these two solutions together, companies can build more accurate forecasts around where larger deals from target accounts will come, which helps with sales bandwidth and resource planning as well as marketing allocations.

Best practice #7

Align Sales and Marketing Attribution

Sales and marketing alignment plays a pivotal role in enhancing communication, facilitating collaboration, and streamlining processes to drive revenue.

Establishing shared goals and a common attribution model between marketing and sales is paramount to growing existing accounts and securing new business. Aligning teams ensures these critical functions are working in tandem, concentrating on identical objectives and strategies. This synchronization leads to a more efficient approach to lead generation, nurturing, and conversion.

Robust attribution and reporting mechanisms empower sales teams with the confidence to pursue leads generated by marketing. By relying on data-driven insights and metrics that genuinely reflect marketing effectiveness, sales can maximize their efforts.

To achieve this, it’s imperative to move away from vanity metrics towards shared goals. Vanity metrics such as views or impressions are often showcased in marketing reports and can be misleading. While they may appear favorable, they fail to provide an accurate gauge of marketing’s actual impact on business outcomes. This misalignment can hinder progress and decision-making.

Another alignment lever to use are shared goals, which prepare the sales team to seize opportunities promptly, especially when high-intent leads emerge.

This readiness fosters a seamless lead handoff and enhances the likelihood of successful conversions.

When your sales and marketing teams can capture every touchpoint and see exactly what is generating pipeline, you can surface insights that are instrumental in crafting a go-to-market (GTM) strategy that is both predictable and scalable.

Adopt these best practices for demand generation and never miss a revenue target again.

Drive Revenue Growth WithRevSure

RevSure gives sales and marketing teams unparalleled AI-driven insights into pipeline health.

RevSure’s full-funnel attribution solution empowers businesses to drive qualified opportunities with predictive insights from the entire revenue funnel to optimize marketing and sales investments and ensure you never miss pipeline targets again.

RevSure takes the guesswork out of your marketing strategy, giving you data-driven insight into your overall funnel health so you can know how to improve your marketing efforts and drive revenue growth.

  • Quantify marketing contribution at every stage of the funnel and quickly pivot from under-performing programs, double down on those that are performing well, and accurately understand the impact of investments on revenue.
  • Confidently commit to pipeline generation and coverage targets with a forward-looking view of your pipeline based on your company’s unique GTM motion.
  • Ditch manual calculations and average calculations, allowing AI to show you which leads to prioritize, what campaigns to scale, or where funnel leakage is preventing conversions, with granular insight into each stage of the marketing and sales funnel.

No more random acts of marketing.

Pipeline & Revenue Predictions, Attribution and Funnel Intelligence in one place.