<span style="font-weight: 400;">Marketers need to stop using leads for their goals.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Previously, leads were an acceptable way of measuring the performance of your marketing.</span>

...When cloud-based applications weren’t the norm.
<span style="font-weight: 400;">...When the average marketing manager probably gave little attention to the CRM.
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">...When the word ‘eyeballs’ was a measure seriously spoken about and the concept of attribution was alien to anyone outside of film and copyright.</span>

It was a time when sales and marketing teams sat in silos, divided by language, goals systems and processes.

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The problem with leads is that it doesn’t show on a balance sheet.</span>

<span style="font-size: 17px; font-color: #45474d; font-family: proxima_nova_alt_rgbold;">A ‘lead’ doesn’t generate real value.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">To simply focus on leads means you’re misguided. Unaligned with what your business is trying to achieve.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">It means that you can often get stuck. Unable to see the wood for the trees.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Your marketing team can be stacking up mountains of leads, but your bottom line remains flat.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Sales can find themselves inundated with poor quality, irrelevant deals that take up all of their time but never had a chance of closing.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">In fact, I’d go as far as saying that misaligned sales and marketing teams are the biggest problem faced in the customer acquisition function today.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">To quantify that problem, I’d like to draw your attention to a study by the <a href="http://www.aberdeenservices.com/">Aberdeen Group.</a></span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">They found that teams with self described ‘good alignment’ grew their annual revenues by 20%.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Their out-of-sync counterparts?</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Their revenues </span><b>declined</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> by an average of 4%. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s no surprise that </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">80% of CEOs</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> don’t trust marketers. </span>
<p style="text-align: left;"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-2517" src="https://www.ruleranalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/your-lead-generation-is-dead-www.ruleranalytics.com_.png" alt="your lead generation is dead - www.ruleranalytics.com" width="751" height="534" /></p>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">They fail to accept proper commercial responsibility, even though the tools they need to do so <a href="https://www.ruleranalytics.com/features/">exist and are readily available.</a></span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Instead, they focus on fluff.</span>

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<p style="text-align: left;"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-2516" src="https://www.ruleranalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/your-lead-generation-is-dead-www.ruleranalytics.com_.jpg" alt="your lead generation is dead - www.ruleranalytics.com" width="750" height="537" /></p>
Things that distract people from proper business goals.

<span style="font-weight: 400;">They’ll try and dazzle executives with the promise of ‘the next big thing’ like marketing automation and messaging bots, or even worse, reports on how many people have liked or shared their posts on social media.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">What they should be doing is making efforts to prove their commercial impact. Focussing on generating more customer demand in a <a href="https://www.ruleranalytics.com/case-studies/optionis/">quantifiable and measurable way.</a></span>

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<span style="font-size: 24px; font-color: #45474d; font-family: proxima_nova_alt_rgbold;">You Must Reassess Your Goals</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">You must understand, I’m not saying the practise of generating leads is wrong, dead, dying or going anytime soon.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">What I am saying is;</span>

<span style="font-size: 17px; font-color: #45474d; font-family: proxima_nova_alt_rgbold;">if you’re using leads to measure the performance of your marketing, then you need to reevaluate your strategy.
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">The ultimate goal for any marketer, salesperson and business is to generate more revenue. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">So the way to make sure that every marketer, sales person and executive is aligned, the goal we must all strive for is simple.</span>

<b>Revenue.</b>

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<span style="font-size: 24px; font-color: #45474d; font-family: proxima_nova_alt_rgbold;">What is Revenue Marketing?</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://www.ruleranalytics.com/blog/ppc/you-probably-arent-measuring-your-ppc-campaigns-properly/">Revenue marketing</a> is a system that focusses on the entire customer journey, from discovery to each repeat purchase.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">It influences people to continue their path to revenue. From becoming a lead, moving to a sales opportunity and finally becoming a paying customer.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The key to the evolution of revenue marketing is the rise in cloud-based CRM and marketing tools that can share data with each other.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">If you know the impact of your actions through the entirety of the customer’s lifetime, you can accurately link it back to the initial investment.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="http://www.ruleranalytics.com">Marketing attribution systems</a> can pass data like the lead source, campaign, keyword and referrer alongside the lead’s name and contact information.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">This information, paired with the customers revenue data, means you can now easily segment and view the exact revenue generated by your marketing efforts.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">By focussing on the entire funnel, not just lead generation, sophisticated marketing teams are now making leaps and strides towards becoming one of the most indispensable functions.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">No longer is marketing seen as a luxury, and one of the first functions in line for layoffs when times get hard, but a department that provides a tangible impact on the company's growth.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">As these teams understand exactly how marketing activities correlate with revenue outcomes, planning is much simpler. Activities can be planned based setting a goal and working backwards to get a measure of what is needed to achieve them.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Revenue marketing is inclusive of all marketing methods and tactics. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The core premise is simple, figure out how you can use data and analytics to understand the impact of all of your sales and marketing activity on revenue.</span>

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<span style="font-size: 24px; font-color: #45474d; font-family: proxima_nova_alt_rgbold;">How To Become a Revenue Marketing Organisation</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Becoming a revenue focussed marketing team is easier than you think.</span>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">All you need is a marketing attribution tool and CRM that integrate with each other.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Once this connection is formed, it’s simple to see the amount of revenue you actualise throughout the customer’s lifetime.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Marketers have been focussed on leads for so long because that’s all they were able see. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">But now, there is no excuse. It’s time to optimise your marketing based on what really matters to your business. </span>

REVENUE.

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