Is SFA for widgets only?

I was working with a client in the transportation industry (think freight, shipping, etc.) last week and we were brainstorming on how best to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns targeted at existing customers (what high tech folks might call installed base marketing). All of the sudden it hit me.

Most SFA applications are built for a widget-oriented market.

In B2B marketing, we're so used to talking about finding new leads and converting them to opportunities, that we forget that there are millions of businesses out there that have a specific set of accounts that they're trying to grow over time.

For instance, let's say you're selling printing services. You might have one-off projects that you bid on (which could equate to a specific opportunity in the traditional sense). However, you also have a set of accounts that use you for their on-going printing needs. So you run a campaign to your active and inactive accounts in an effort to reactivate them or get them to send their print jobs to you more frequently.

There's no new lead to create, no opportunity to be converted. Just an increase in overall account billings in a given timeframe.

Bridging the gap between marketing and sales data

If your bookings data is stored in your SFA/CRM this might not be too difficult to measure. We’re talking about joining four objects (campaigns, contacts, accounts, and bookings) but it’s doable. If not you might need some kind of on-demand external business intelligence tools now being offered by companies such as LucidEra to help you make the connection between marketing responses and actual sales data.

But what do you do if your financial data isn't stored in the CRM application where your marketing campaign responders are housed? How do you know which campaigns are truly driving repeat business and increased share of wallet and which ones are just costing you money?

How to measure marketing’s impact in a services world

First, you’ll need to split your activities into new business lead generation, and existing-customer focused campaigns. In the case of new business lead gen, once you “win” the business (let’s say the client gets a specific rate for your printing based upon anticipated volume), then you can estimate the total annuity for the lifetime of that customer, thus enabling you to calculate a marketing ROI for that campaign.

In the case of customer-focused activities, it’s a little trickier. One way to measure the impact of customer marketing activities is to track marketing influence on overall sales. For instance, if you’re running a big promotion in Q3, set up a dashboard which shows responses over time, and bookings over time – side by side. Depending upon your sales cycle, you might find that three months after you launch a campaign you see a spike in bookings. It’s not an exact science but if you’re tracking this data over time, you should get an idea of what’s working and what’s not.

Have any ideas about how you’re tracking marketing campaign effectiveness in a services or annuity-based world? I’d love to hear them!