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5 Tips to Measuring B2B Marketing Initiatives

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The business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing roles are continuously evolving because of social selling, marketing automation, mobile devices, and more. According to Biznology, today’s sales process takes about 22% longer than 5 years ago. So, how does your business measure the effectiveness of sales and marketing campaigns?  Below is a brief list of tips to successfully measure your B2B marketing initiatives:

Know Your Sales Pipeline Calculations

We get calls all the time from businesses that want to increase their sales and revenue.  Unfortunately, not all businesses take the time to access their sales pipeline and calculate what it will take to achieve their goals and objectives.

  • How many prospects do you need to call to book a meeting?
  • How many meetings turn into a quote?
  • What’s your quote-to-close ratio?

Knowing this information will give you a sense of your potential budget needed to create the incremental volume necessary while also determining whether or not your goals are realistic. You will also have visibility into phases in the sales pipeline that are under performing.

Capture Progress of the Sales Pipeline

It’s no secret that sales reps hate manually entering data. In fact, 23% of salespeople cite manual data entry as the biggest challenge using their existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system (HubSpot, 2017). Capturing the progress of the sales pipeline in your CRM allows you to measure the impact of each sale or prospective customer’s actions. This will improve the sales forecast or closing ratio. The incentive for your business and the sales reps is to help focus on which actions will generate high revenue and sales. Use marketing automation to work on your sales reps behalf.

Access the Impact Marketing is Having on the Sales Funnel

So, you just want more sales but do you respect the sales funnel? The sales funnel is the buying process that companies lead customers through when purchasing products or services.  The goal of your marketing is to have prospects enter the sales process to solve your customer’s problem. Access the impact your marketing is having on moving prospects through the funnel. Your business won’t increase its sales until more prospects move through your sales process.  

Create a Measurement Plan for B2B Sales & Marketing Campaigns

A measurement plan is a document that translates your business objectives into metrics that can measure your website’s offline sales. It provides a framework to customize the configuration of your digital analytics and sales funnel. It is a vital part of your digital marketing strategy and will guide you to set realistic expectations. If you can’t get to raw numbers to calculate the metrics, can you really measure it?

Report Only on B2B KPIs That Matter

There are so  many reports, dashboards, and analyses , but whichget to the point of your marketing and sales campaigns? Narrow down the metrics to your key performance indicators (KPIs) so that you’re not looking at every metric associated with your business to business (B2B) marketing and sales initiatives – only the ones that matter.

Check out Pipedrive (CRM) to improve your sales & marketing campaign tracking. Already measuring sales and marketing?  Let us know your thoughts and add to the list of tips.

DaBrian Marketing Partners with Pipedrive to Deliver Integrated Sales and Marketing Solution

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DaBrian Marketing Group added Pipedrive to its suite of client solutions. The strategic move will help area businesses improve their lead nurturing processes and accelerate sales cycles by fully integrating their marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. DaBrian will provide configuration, integrations, support and consulting to better align sales & marketing efforts for clients and allow them to extract the most value from Pipedrive.

Automatically Update Contacts

DaBrian Marketing Group’s marketing automation solution fully integrates with Pipedrive, allowing businesses to instantly sync contact information across both platforms. Any customers or leads added to or updated by sales and support teams are instantly connected with marketing efforts, and vice versa – eliminating the need for manual import/export. The automation removes human error from the data entry process and saves time. After an initial set-up by DaBrian Marketing Group, Pipedrive’s continuous integration does all the work to keep marketing, sales and support information aligned. This ensures consistency in data between systems and enhances database segmentation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and many other contact handling functions.

Push Marketing Insights to Sales Team

Businesses can now use Pipedrive to connect leads directly to the campaigns that generated them, allowing managers to focus their teams’ sales efforts and providing context to those sales conversations. DaBrian’s marketing automation platform will identify the most effective marketing channels and the most active prospects, directing the sales team where to increase efforts. Integrating marketing information with Pipedrive also allows members of the sales team to more effectively target prospects and personalize their messages. Better understanding the sources, preferred channels and interactions of prospects with marketing efforts arms sales forces with the insights they need to close more deals.

Simple CRM that Drives Profits

Pipedrive was developed by salespeople, for salespeople. In addition to integrating information between marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management systems, Pipedrive helps simplify and organize the sales process. Users can be up and running in less than 3 minutes and it’s easy to add or remove team members. Salespeople are notified about key prospect activities to ensure timely follow-up. And the solution comes with native mobile applications to increase convenience and productivity. An attractive user interface and graphic pipeline representations further increase usability and effectiveness. The CRM starts at $10 per user, per month for subscription.

About DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC

Founded in 2008, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is a full-service digital marketing agency that provides original strategic digital marketing solutions for businesses. DaBrian Marketing Group’s digital marketing services include email marketing, digital branding, search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, web hosting, web design, web analytics, social media marketing, and more. Company headquarters is centrally located at 500 Penn Street, Suite 201, Reading, Pennsylvania 19602. For more information about DaBrian Marketing Group, visit dabrianmarketing.com or call 610.743.5602.

About Pipedrive

Founded in 2010 by seasoned sales pros, Pipedrive is a sales CRM solution designed to help salespeople rather than control them. It is built on a proven selling framework that gives visibility into the pipeline and drives actions that push deals to close consistently. Pipedrive is serving more than 60,000 customers worldwide with corporate offices in New York and Estonia. Pipedrive ranks no. 14 on the Inc. 5000 list as one of America’s fastest growing private software companies. For more information, go to www.pipedrive.com.

What Is a CRM and Where to Get Started

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CRM may be an acronym you’ve heard floating around before – but what is it? CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, basically it’s how you can keep track of data on past, present, and potential future customers and log interactions with them whether it’s through, emails, phone calls, mailings and so on.

Why would you want to have that information? With information like that you can manage how to regain former customers, retain customers, and gain new ones. You’re probably starting to see that a CRM is an integral tool for sales and marketing for businesses and in fact it is.

You could start a CRM system by collecting and entering customer and potential customer information into something like an excel sheet but that can become tedious work that wouldn’t be very helpful in the long run. Fortunately, there are a ton of CRM systems out there that can help.

Track Conversions

There are a few helpful things to keep in mind when picking out a CRM:

Is It Automated?

As in does it integrate with any platforms you are already using such as your email and social media? This is useful because it will save you or your employees time from having to manually enter every bit of customer information on your own.

Is It Mobile?

Can you access your customer relation information on the fly? This is helpful when you meet a new prospective customer and want to get them in the system right away or access all the information about a customer out in the field without having to log into your computer.

Is It Usable?

A major factor to consider: is the program easy to use for you and your employees? A big reason for businesses leaving their CRM to the way side is not knowing how it functions.

However, searching through all of the CRM options out there can be overwhelming in of itself. I’ve picked a few of some of the best ones out there to get you started.

SalesforceIQ CRM

One of Salesforce IQ’s features is the automatic collection of customer data such as emails, calendar events, and smartphone calls so you can spend more time focusing on the client and less time on data entry. You can also share information with other employees in order to collaborate when communicating with customers. It also creates reports to keep you on track and focused on the most promising sales. It’s mobile so you can work from anywhere and streamline your workflow.

Prosperworks

If you use G Suite then Prosperworks might be the best option for you. It was made for G Suite and seamlessly integrates with G Suite’s apps such as Google Sheets, Docs, Slides, Calendar, Inbox and Gmail and automatically syncs collected information from these apps. It will also remind you when you are not following your schedule to follow up with customers or potential customers. And whenever you update your Google contact information, it will roll over to your CRM.

Hubspot CRM

Hubspot has a great dashboard to gain visibility into what’s going on in your CRM to keep everything organized. You can also swiftly sort customers by a number of filters to keep track of what’s happening. Hubspot also syncs information across several platforms for email, social media, and phone calls. One of the best things about this platform is that it’s free!

Do you use a CRM platform? If so – which one? What are some of the benefits and pitfalls you’ve experienced with a CRM platform? Let us know in the comments.