The Marketing Profitability Path: Mapping Your Journey (Part 1 of 4)

As much as marketing has advanced its scientific approach to measuring and managing effectiveness, it is still much like a cross-country truck route that runs on a combination of superhighways and unpaved terrain.

The roadblocks and endless detours on the path to profitability are not the result of subtle errors in the execution of sophisticated techniques—they are mostly the result of not getting the fundamentals right.

In managing the customer journey, both Marketing and Sales are structured, motivated and measured in such a way that allows significant profits to be “leaking” along the way. Bringing together the customer perspective, alignment of the goals and metrics across customer touchpoints, and insight into optimizing profitability can guide strategies that can more effectively plug those leaks.

Core Problems

Let's start by reviewing some of the core problems inhibiting marketers' abilities to effectively manage profitability; we'll then run through several checkpoints for each to let you assess how your company is currently performing:

• Traditional marketing metrics and measurements are not designed to accurately capture ROI.
  
  
• The relationship between Marketing and Sales is disconnected.
  
  
• The sales cycle is not aligned with the buyers' perspective.
  
  
• The typical marketing and sales model built on feeding high volumes into the sales funnel to generate small conversion percentages misses opportunities.
  
  
• Key profitability drivers are not fully understood.

This four-part series of articles integrates key concepts from Hugh Macfarlane's recently published book, The Leaky Funnel: Earn more customers by aligning Sales & Marketing to the way businesses buy (Bookman Publishing, 2004), and Jim Lenskold's book, Marketing ROI: The Path to Campaign, Customer and Corporate Profitability (McGraw-Hill, 2003). Our objective is to outline our approach to improving your marketing ROI through better management of the integrated marketing and sales cycle.

Read the Full Article

Jim Lenskold and Hugh Macfarlane Jim Lenskold is President of Lenskold Group and author of Marketing ROI, The Path to Campaign, Customer and Corporate Profitability (McGraw Hill, 2003). The Lenskold Group (www.lenskold.com) offers consulting services in the area of strategic marketing, marketing ROI, customer relationships, customer profitability and market analytics. Jim can be reached at jim@lenskold.com or 973-598-1911.

Hugh Macfarlane is CEO and founder of the demand generation consultancy MathMarketing (www.mathmarketing.com). He is also author of The Leaky Funnel: Earn more customers by aligning Sales and Marketing to the way businesses buy (Bookman, 2003). Hugh can be contacted via hmacfarlane@mathmarketing.com or +61 3 9690 7600. In the US, contact Hugh via Lenskold Group.