As the implementation and effectiveness of inbound marketing has grown, larger enterprises have begun to realize the value inbound marketing can bring to their specific department, division, or even their entire company.
If you are a C-Level or management level executive seeking to increase your sales revenue or effectively master the complex sale with inbound marketing, consider the following factors in your selection process:
Technology - Strategy and consulting firm Gartner predicts that CMO's will be spending more on IT than CIO's by 2017. You'll want your enterprise inbound marketing agency to have worked with a number of content management, data integration and marketing automation technologies like Sitefinity, Pervasive, and HubSpot. With larger organizations, we typically find a number of systems pieced together. Departmental priorities change, decision makers come and go and what's left is a technical patchwork quilt. It's important to understand the functionality of your current technologies so that we a build an inbound solution that extracts all the necessary data from your existing technical architecture.
Process - Yes, we understand technology. We usually begin our conversations with our enterprise clients around their business processes, though. Does the Director of Sales actually talk to the CMO? Who owns the marketing budget? No, honestly, who owns the marketing budget? Who has a dotted line reporting relationship to the CFO? Really, so your CFO owns your marketing budget? Which sales division is the most successful and why? Are they an efficient division? How do you define 'efficient'? How much did your last $100K sale cost you and how long did it take? Where did the lead from that sale originate? What does your typical sales lifecycle look like? How do you track warm referrals from partners? What type of input does your Chief Customer Officer have on your sales process?
Metrics and ROI - At LyntonWeb, we dig Big Data. We know that closed-loop marketing is the only way to prove your ROI. We also understand the enterprise level platforms that need to be in place to provide ROI data. We realize, too, that larger organizations can be siloed and may have a hard time proving marketing ROI even for their own internal marketing efforts. From your corporate single sign-on to the time a sale is closed - our intent is to provide a single point of truth for your data (which will likely come from several different sources).
So that's a start. Some initial considerations. We'll need to have a number of conversations. So let's talk. Are you at Inbound 2012? Stop by our booth, let's plan a dinner together.
Photo: The Rocketeer