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

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...

Data Privacy and compliance changes

Adding to the burden for marketing team resources is an ongoing change to privacy and data handling regulations, which in the US varies from state to state. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) has now passed along with similar legislation in Virginia. Other states are following suit later this year, so you will need to be aware of how this affects your contacting and handling leads, and much more.

Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 aims to update how you track and monitor your site visitors, accounting for the complex and ambiguous ways people interact with your business before purchase. Your team will require training on this new system and time to work it into your reporting structures.

Lengthening sales cycles

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Modern Marketers Have a Tough Job

Kicked While You're Down?

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

The Pipeline Intelligence Gap (The Elephant in the Boardroom)

Why Marketers Need Better Tools

4 Steps to Better Marketing Data

Finding the Opportunity in the Challenge

About RevSure

Testimonials

No more random acts of marketing.