Have you ever wondered how Coke became so synonymous with cola, Hoover with vacuuming, or Google with searching the internet?

“Emotional connectivity,” says former Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide CEO Kevin Roberts. “You want loyalty beyond reason and loyalty beyond recession.”

Emotional connectivity that becomes brand loyalty is what a true customer brand experience is all about. For every business seeking to thrive and create a lasting impact, emotional connectivity needs to be a mission-critical constant in their branding equation. Nowadays, customers no longer spend their money as a result of what they see and hear about brands; rather, they value brand and customer experience. Advertisers and brand managers are shifting their focus from creating simple brand messages towards building a lasting brand-customer relationship. Customers now equate brands with experiences, and they are willing to pay premium prices for excellent customer service and an outstanding retail experience. A single negative experience or unresolved issue is enough to make a client give up on a brand. Worse: a negative experience can easily become a negative review, and this can spread quicker than a wink online, thanks to social media and online review sites.

It’s vital for companies to connect with their customers on a deeper and more satisfying level – through positive customer experience. Here are five ways brands can create worthwhile and memorable customer experiences:

Make the brand stand out – in a good way

To customers, the uniqueness of a brand is what makes it stand out. The easiest way to do this is to create a memorable brand name. For instance, affixing the lowercase ‘i’ to its product offerings – like the iPhone, iMac, and iPad – has made each item a very recognizable Apple product.

Of course, Apple did not stop at brand recollection value; that alone would hardly make a customer use and keep using a new product or service. What makes the brand experience a meaningful one is when people use a product or service – and enjoy every minute of it.

In a fast-changing digital environment where each subsequent product tends to get more and more complicated, Apple went back to basics; the company decided to simplify everything. Apple built its brand by focusing not only on the features of each product but also on sleek and simple aesthetics – attributes that seemed like an afterthought to competitors. The strategy clearly worked; Apple has created a satisfactory customer experience that has morphed into a huge loyal brand following.

Adapt to the changing times

Staying current is a must for every brand that wants to endure over time. In the fast-paced Internet Age, doing so can be challenging, as evidenced by the many brands that have crashed and burned over the last few decades, like social media platform Friendster and mega-bookstore Borders. It seems like any brand that fails to stay relevant is signing its own death warrant.

Many businesses are finding ways to adapt to the changing times through social media, which has become an avenue for consistent, direct, and meaningful customer interaction. It provides tremendous insight into customer needs, wants, behavior, and engagement.

These days, having a website and a mobile app is pretty much non-negotiable, too. They provide information to consumers and help them not only to make informed purchasing decisions but also to resolve issues that could have a significant impact on how they perceive a brand.

Connect with customers on a personal level

A personal touch can go a long way in strengthening a business’s branding. Gone are the days when one size fits all; customers now favor brands that offer and provide them with tailored experiences. ‘Tailoring’ can be as easy as having the customer’s name in an email newsletter. A ‘Dear Joe’, as opposed to a ‘Dear valued customer’, can be interpreted as solid customer engagement. Personalized email messages, in fact, increase their click-through rates by an average of 14%, according to a 2015 report by the Aberdeen Group. Conversion rates also increase by 10%. Furthermore, research by Experian has revealed that personalized emails increase transaction rate by up to six times.

Brands’ efforts to personalize their connection with their customers clear demonstrate gratitude and appreciation for their clients’ continuing patronage – and the gratitude and appreciation are reciprocal.

Be transparent

Brand transparency has become a way of humanizing the business and showcasing a company’s positive corporate values. According to a study by Label Insight, brand transparency is the best way to build consumer trust, with more than half of the respondents saying that they would be loyal to a company if it showed itself to be fully transparent. An excellent example of such a marketing campaign is McDonald’s Canada’s ‘Our Food, Your Questions’ campaign. Trying to dispel misinformation and urban myths surrounding its food and ingredients, the fast food giant saw an opportunity to educate its consumers and still stand behind its products. The campaign has garnered over 42,000 questions since its launch in 2014. Even though it is widely known that McDonald’s is not the best choice when it comes to healthy eating, the campaign has satisfied its customers’ need to know everything about a product – no skeletons in the closet.

Consistency is key

Finally, the key to creating a brand that resonates with customers is consistency. This means keeping the brand in sync with its strategies so that every product and/or service always points back to the brand—distinctly and directly. Coca-Cola is considered to be one of the most widely recognized brands in the world. Although it continues to evolve, its classic script and font can be identified anywhere in the world, even when displayed in different languages. Consistent branding eliminates confusion and shapes how people perceive the business.

Consistency is also important when it comes to messaging; it should always be in keeping with a brand’s mission and values.

For instance, clothing company Patagonia has always been clear about its mission to inspire social change and protect the environment by advocating sustainability. It launched a Fair Trade campaign that led people to be more mindful of how their clothes were being manufactured, thereby leading to a stronger demand for products coming from Fair Trade Certified factories that pay higher wages to workers.

Ultimately, bridging the gap between brand and customers boils down to creating memorable customer experiences. Sure, the brand message is still important, but customers become more invested in a company when it walks its talk and prioritizes customer well-being and satisfaction above all else. An outstanding customer experience is by far the best way to encourage the type of brand loyalty that transcends both reason and recession.

Most people today know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to having a successful on-line business. What they may not know is exactly how to use it in their marketing plan. Incorporating strategically chosen keywords, with valuable content, can dramatically increase your world-wide-web presence, and ultimately, your bottom line. Even more important, knowing how your customers find you is invaluable information.

But this is just the first layer, of many, to creating a consistent revenue stream. Implementing a data driven marketing plan, to create repeat business, is necessary for growth and longevity. Once complete, you must re-evaluate your data and re-engineer your plan, to attract new customers and retain your existing business. With time, you can create a recycling funnel system that will continually produce revenues. This is known as data driven marketing.

First, what is SEO?

We know what SEO stands for, but what does it really mean in the marketing world? When building, or updating, the website for your business, using SEO and keywords is critical to being discovered organically online. You can certainly pay for placement, but this is an expensive option and must be on-going to maintain good ranking. It also does not guarantee top placement. Organic leads are what you want to strive for, as these people found you through a search engine or other free avenue.

When search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, crawl your site, they want to find words that are relevant to what people are searching for most. Big corporations know the importance of key word searches. Consider this: when you enter “the best laundry detergent for sensitive skin,” you will find all blogs on the first page, however when you use keywords such as “laundry detergent” and “detergent for sensitive skin” you start to see more name brand companies in the search results.

Quality content is a must

You want people to go to your website and stay there long enough to see what you do and offer. The average person spends only 15 seconds on a web page and less than one minute on a site before moving on. With quality content, you can engage your users and ultimately convert them from a customer into a client. Think about it like a retail store. Customers walk in and out all day long, but clients are those who purchase things and come back repeatedly.

Optimizing your content

There is no way to guarantee that you will rank number one on the major search engines with the number of services available to boost your placement, but your goal should be to land in the top 30. If you are searching for your own website on pages 10 or 15, you need to tweak your content and get it working better for you. Be sure you have a title and description that contains keywords for each page of your website. Also, add text to your images via alt text. Pictures on a website are great, but search engines cannot screen photos. Add your website name or a short blurb about what you do to your image files.

Pay attention to technology trends

In recent surveys, 64% of respondents felt that having a data driven marketing strategy was the key to on-line business success. Everyday technology improves and new services are available. Knowing what is out there and how it could benefit you can be critical to your on-line business. If you are not changing with technology, you will find yourself with less internet customers and a weak bottom line. Stay on top of how Google ranks sites and use their Analytics tools. This will guide you to a more successful website.

Test your Website

Many websites provide great tools that allow you to see how your website is performing. They track, for you, what words are being searched, where your traffic is coming from, how long people stay on a page, etc. Again, Google Analytics is a great tool to know how to use, as well.

Know What Your Competition is Doing

Competition is good for business. It forces you to be on your game and be more creative. But you don‘t have to do it blindly. Knowing what keywords are used to drive traffic to your competitors site can be invaluable marketing information for your business. Websites such as www.seositetools.com can be a great tool to use in your data driven marketing strategy.

Website Optimization and Marketing Strategies

There are a plethora of avenues for collecting data. How you use it will determine your business success. As stated by Kate Cooper, CEO of Bloom Worldwide, digital marketing has tracking capabilities that generates data, whereas traditional marketing mediums such as direct mail and print couldn’t be tracked accurately. The main challenge is choosing the most important data to analyze. You can easily get overwhelmed with all the information available.

As discussed above, researching your competition is a good place to start when creating a website that captures customers and keeps them engaged. By using the keywords that bring customers to your website you can determine what may or may not be beneficial to your marketing strategy. Also, make sure that you are optimizing all aspects of your site; add alt text to images; use at least two headers on each page or with each post, if you have a blog; and use external links. Don’t forget to keep on testing, as well. Strategies and plans need to have a fluid component. Business moves fast online, and so does the way search engines rank. When your competitors change the construction of their web presence, it will affect you. It’s important to avoid working with a reactive approach. Stay proactive and do your own research to determine the best way to stay at the top. Additionally, make sure that the rest of your company is in prime condition. As the saying goes, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. A balanced company is a successful one.

Alt Text

Using alt text is a simple way to increase your SEO ranking. Images do not get ranked, text does. Incorporate short, descriptive language and keywords into your alt text. If you are selling hand-woven baskets, then you should add this tag to your images. This will not only help your site ranking, but will also help when people are searching for images, as the alt text is what is picked up in searches, not the actual image itself.

Headers

Using headers is an easy and often neglected way to increased site rankings in search engines. Web crawlers first look for header 1 and header 2 on websites, and will go on to search lesser headers, 3, 4, and so on. Neglecting to add the initial headers will substantially hurt your SEO and ranks. Never leave off headers.

External links

You would think that linking to another site to yours would hurt your ranks. Why would you want to bring attention to another website? But having at least two external links boosts your SEO. Make sure that you link to meaningful articles, but not your competition, and that you link through keywords. If your company sells skylights in Maine and Vermont, link to a website that perhaps discusses the top five ways skylights benefit homes in the northeast. If you can google the topic to find the article, linking to the article through the keywords you used to search for it will help your website.

Test and Retest

Think of testing your marketing plan the way you would any other theories: with the scientific method. First, start with the data you have collected. Then ask a question about the information you have assembled. Determine your hypothesis or theory about this data and test it with an experiment. Next, analyze your results and formulate a conclusion. Finally, use this information in your fluid marketing plan. Take these steps often to ensure that your strategy keeps you at the forefront of the market.

Balance Within Your Company

Be sure that you have not only marketing goals, but company-wide goals. It’s one thing to have a solid marketing plan, but if the rest of your company is a disaster, you will ultimately fail anyways. Don’t spend money on marketing until you have all other sectors of your business in order, from your company finances to your POS systems.

Set SMART and RACE objectives

To win in business you need to run a SMART RACE. Yes, it’s true that success is a marathon, but not a sprint. You can’t take off fast and maintain success with a plan. Consider your marketing strategy more of a marathon; moving forward at a steady pace to gain success over time. Using the SMART RACE acronyms will help get you there.

SMART

The acronym SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Specific: Have a specific goal and audience in mind.

Measurable: Make sure that your strategy includes measurable data. Can you track where your audience is coming from? How you gained your customers? What your rate of conversions are and returning users?

Achievable: Making a billion dollars your first year is not an achievable goal for any business, nor is gaining a million new followers to your blog. Make sure that your plans are achievable ones and that your growth plan includes recruitment and retention. It’s great to get a client, but if you can’t keep them then what is the point?

Realistic: Can you accomplish your goals set forth in your marketing strategy? Are the time-lines you set to hit your goals even capable of being reach in the current economy? Make sure that your marketing strategy is a realistic one.

Timely: Timing is everything. You don’t want to miss the boat nor do you want to be ahead of your time in business. Make sure that your plans include data from the current economy. Do not use outdated research when planning for future growth. Yes, you can use old data to formulate new plans, but make sure you test your theories before putting them into action.

RACE

RACE stands for: Reach, Action, Convert, and Engage

Reach: There are many ways to reach your customers. The Seven Touches marketing principle suggestions that in order to gain a new customer you must get their attention, through various techniques, at least seven times. This may include: social media posts, emails, and even offline contact, such as print media and person-to-person. You can increase traffic to your website by creating multiple avenues, such as ads and social media. You can also utilize other websites to help promote your business, whether it be smaller blogs or larger discount pages.  Using different paid, owned and earned media can help you grow and thrive.

Action: Action comes in many forms. It can range from user interaction to a call to action. Either way, the idea is to interact with your prospective audience and give them the steps to becoming your customer. Phrases such as “limited time offer,” “this week only,” and “join our mailing list and get 25% of now” are great examples. They all tells prospective consumers that if they act now, they can get a great deal or that they can get something they may not be able to get once a certain amount of time passes. Utilizing various forms of media to convey this message will meet your seven touches strategy and direct them to do a specific task.

Convert: Reaching your prospective customers is one thing, but converting them to actually make a sale is entirely different. If you have 100,000 visitors to your site weekly, but are only selling 10 items, your conversation rate is horrible! Be sure to include realistic conversion goals into your marketing strategy and develop ways to increase them over time.

Engage: You reached your target audience, encouraged them to take timely action, and make the sale. Now you need to ensure that they keep coming back. Engaging your customers will ensure that you have a revenue stream for life. Provide “value-added” services, by letting them know about new products, and encouraging them to take advantage of future promotions. The best marketing strategies include maintaining your current clientele. It is easier to sell to a customer who already knows your product than to get someone onboard who you have never interacted with; remember the seven touches.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will a successful marketing strategy to grow your business. Do your research, create a website that will increase your SEO rankings, test what you implemented, and use the data collected to rejuvenate your marketing strategy, use SMART RACE techniques, and work all sectors of your company collectively to maximize your success.

Sales DNA? Is this the absolute that dictates your sales career path?

Some people may claim to have it, but anybody who’s been in sales for a substantial amount of time knows that to prosper in sales, you must be humble and always willing to learn. All industries benefit from someone skilled in sales.

People from various backgrounds and educational attainment enter the world of sales. How far they make it is more reliant on the amount of work they put in than anything else. Drive, ambition, and persistence are all non-negotiable traits for someone who wants to succeed selling.

Having great success in other industries doesn’t automatically translate to success in sales. This is the reason why most people who enter sales start at the bottom. Whether going out in the field to get sales (and experience) or answering and making phone calls to prospects. Of course, bottom is a relative term. A lot of successful sales professionals choose to stay at the bottom because it’s what they find most rewarding, among other things.

A career in sales does not have to be linear, though. In this post, we will tackle the different sales career paths you can take, based on your skills and many other factors.

Let’s dig in.

Full-time and commission-based salesperson

If you’re looking to start a career in sales, chances are, the first profession you’ll be looking at is one as a field salesperson or inside sales. It may be a high-pressure job, but a lot of people are entering this profession to get the set of valuable skills and personality traits that make a salesperson successful.

Once you can sell like a pro, there’s little barrier in entering any industry.

Compensation might not always be good when you’re starting out. In fact, for most industries, the best case scenario is having a very small base salary upon which you build a sustainable income through commissions. You will have to rely on your own skill to supplement this small base salary. If you’re not growing your skills and aptitude, you’re just wasting time and losing out.

Is a commission-based job right for you? The first thing you have to ask yourself is why you’re interested in a sales position. Are you ready to be a knowledge sponge?

The great thing about sales is, in a way, when you reach a level of competence, you control the amount of money you make.

This is the reason why a lot of people—even those who have already spent a lot of time in the sales industry—reach a level where they can be hired in higher positions but still choose to be in the frontlines of field or inside sales. When you’re good, your paycheck will reflect this.

To be a successful salesperson, you have to have at least some of the traits from this list:

• motivated
• self-disciplined
• confident
• positive
• inquisitive
• want to perform
• hungry for knowledge
• never satisfied

While this may seem like a list of buzzwords, there is no doubt that being a self-starter with a high EQ is the trait of a great salesperson. Sales professionals who receive the highest commissions are those who always seek to better themselves as people and professionals.

When you’re a sales professional, it’s not enough to just show up. You need work hard. Although some movies may show you that being sales is for the cut-throat, fast-talking braggadocios, you’ll be surprised that those who succeed in sales are the most personable and patient pros.

If you’re not willing to improve yourself and think that you’ve already hit your professional ceiling, this profession may not be right for you. You are less likely to succeed. Humility goes a long way in sales.

Of course, another non-negotiable skill is having stellar communication skills. This is essential. But being good in communication doesn’t mean knowing what to say and being good at delivering long pitches. Contrary to what most believe, being a good communicator—whether in sales or elsewhere—requires you to be a great listener. You know what questions to ask and you’re not above spending your time listening to the woes and opinions of your customer.

Do you think you can fit the bill?

Entry-level jobs: inside sales professional, outside sales professional

Marketing professional

Some salespeople will squirm at the thought of grouping sales and marketing together. The truth is that they overlap more than you think. These days, with a lot of sales done “inside”, more and more sales professionals are doing their selling online.

Undoubtedly, sales and marketing go hand in hand. Sales pros perform marketing tasks and vice versa.

Could a career in marketing mean a career in sales?

Of course! Never have the two been as homogeneous as they are today.

Marketing is done online, so is sales. Having the pulse for good selling is definitely essential to being a great marketer. With the rise of inbound marketing, you should be able to sell yourself without selling yourself. Does that make sense to you?

If you’ve been dabbling in marketing—social media, content marketing, even telemarketing—you’ll know that the battery of skills needed to be a good marketer is almost the same in sales. The only difference, the only stark difference, is having to reach as many people as possible as opposed to sales where, at any point, your attention is directed at one target and the goal is to close that sale.

To enter the marketing world, you have to understand that marketing has moved online. It’s no longer that one-way street where you call your customer or blast a big ad in their faces, hoping that your campaign will leave a good impression and generate sales. If you’re a sales professional entering marketing, you need to equipped with the desire to bring value to your customer—much like how you nurture your prospects. Running a marketing campaign is nurturing thousands or even millions of prospects at a time.

People are bombarded by content every day. You need to be able to rise above the noise and successfully compete for the attention of your prospects.

If you’ve been in sales and want to enter marketing, remember that you’ve always been a marketer. You just have to tailor-fit your skills to the bigger plane and the new goals that you have to achieve.

Entry-level jobs: marketing associate, marketing account executive, social media manager, marketer

Business owner

For those who want to be in sales but have the itch for entrepreneurship, owning a business might be the best sales career path. Keep in mind, though, that when owning a business, it’s not all about sales. You need to care about the whole picture. From marketing to selling to product development. Of course, depending on your business model and the success of it, having a business of your own also puts you in the situation where you can hire employees to help you execute

Here are some business models you might want to consider:

Franchising

If you’re passionate about selling but would rather find a product that already has taken off or already has a proven business model, franchising might be a good fit. There are scores of business-types to choose from. There are franchising opportunities for every industry, mostly in the B2C field.

Distribution

If you’re good with dealing with manufacturers and want to sell their goods through your own sales model, distribution could be the path for you. You can either form a business that sells a certain line of products from a sole manufacturer, meaning you will act as the middle man (or in this case, middle business) between the manufacturer and the customers.

You can either sell the products to other companies that work closer to the end-consumers or you can market and sell to the end-consumers themselves.

Consulting

Consulting, in a nutshell, is selling your skills and opinion through forming a business and a brand around yourself. Consulting will not only make you flex your sales and marketing chops, it will also help you develop a long list of skills that is required to run a successful consultancy. You need the flexibility of time and understanding. Constant challenges are part of the game. You need to be able to cope with doing things that you’ve never done before. Like all businesses, offering your skills through a consultancy needs much more than desire in order to succeed.

Sales/Business/Marketing Manager

Having the opportunity to manage people and money without absorbing all the risk is pretty much what management is about. From being a sales manager and upwards of the corporate ladder had to begin with managing a team or a business on a smaller scale. Regional managers, sales VPs, and even CEOs are all managerial positions in different tiers.

Most people who make it to the top ranks are from sales backgrounds. It’s not surprising since a lot of these positions concern themselves with revenue and hitting sales quotas.
In management, your pay is commensurate to your performance. But, getting hired or promoted to a managerial position requires a mixture of experience, track record, relationship with the company, and many other factors. The pay can be good—and for many companies, holding a managerial position often gives you the opportunity to own stock.

Why be a salesperson?

The obvious answer to this is that a competent salesperson has a very big chance to outearn even top tier management. Great salespeople are showered with rewards because they are a great asset to any company. They hold relationships to many A-list clients, they’ve mastered the product and the process to the point that losing them will cost a company up to years in income.

The television series Mad Men portrays the bustling world of advertising in the 1960’s when it first rose to prominence as its own driving force. Over the last ten years, a similar seismic shift in marketing has taken place. For decades, many corporations had their own marketing departments, often relegated to the end of the supply chain and then responsible for moving products designed by engineers and executives who were often out of touch with the market.

Marketing Operations (MO) is a next-level concept engaged in the actual process of creating, manufacturing and promoting products. A marketing operations department is likely to be a wild blend of creative left-brain thinkers and buttoned up right-brain statistic ninjas, all working in harmony towards a common goal.

1.  Various Roles of Marketing Operations

As a department, Marketing Operations is involved with much more than just ‘marketing’. At Estée Lauder, for example, marketing operations start with creative teams conceptualizing new beauty products in anticipation of both demands and trends. From the initial concept, Estée Lauder’s MO team then oversees materials sourcing—such as finding fair trade ingredients or new non-allergenic materials—as well as product testing, brand naming, and design. The team also gauges demand by polling retailers and sets projected inventory and delivery dates. From there, each project is handed off to manufacturing, accounting, and various other departments until it arrives in warehouses for shipping. Meanwhile, the MO plans product launches and brand promotions.

At some companies, MO plays a bigger role at the end of the production process—but nearly every  department is involved at some stage of the company’s brand process. Other roles include strategic planning, lead management, process improvement, budget management, stakeholder analysis, quality testing, and data management. MO thus has a much broader sweep, taking care of the ‘business of marketing’ and not just the creative aspects.

2.  Factors Driving the Creation of Marketing Ops

The term ‘marketing operations’ was originally coined by analyst firm IDC in early 2005 but only entered the mainstream corporate lexicon around 2011. Several factors contributed to the rise of MO as an integrated unit in company culture. Savvy corporations began consulting the marketing department before introducing new ideas to get important insights on demographic trends, competitive pressures, and customer feedback.

What was once considered a revolutionary idea—including the marketing team from the beginning—created a loop that improves and informs company branding from concept to delivery. Now, with ever-increasing pressure on companies to provide transparency and guarantees, MO departments have also moved into designing company workflows, providing training, and establishing company standards.

At Thomson Reuters, the most widely used news distribution network in the world, the Marketing Ops team was intensely involved in crafting the company’s branding mission. The marketing team at Thomson Reuters is responsible for clarifying its values to clients and employees in the realms of journalism and intellectual property rights, as well as the finance and legal industries to which it provides proprietary software.

3.  The Real Purpose of Marketing Operations

The word ‘operations’ in the title is just as important as ‘marketing’. Marketing Operations evolved as a way to help companies be more transparent, efficient, competitive, profitable, and accountable. Early adopters of this over-arching role include Cisco Systems, Symantec, and Adobe. Today, hundreds of companies across multiple industries draw their employees and recruits from backgrounds in branding, finance, technology, accounting, and sales.

The defining purpose of Marketing Ops is to create alignment and order within a company. MO teams are often responsible for creating work systems and workflows through every business unit, as well as overseeing deadlines and cooperation. In essence, although the MO team is often involved in tactical analysis and deployment, its main mission is that of strategy. A strong Marketing Operations department becomes the hub of the company, where people, processes, metrics and goals are brought into alignment.

4.  Oversight of Long-Term Goals

One of the key roles of Marketing Operations is to help define the company’s long-term goals and then provide the oversight necessary to keep a company on course. This involves everything from making sure the company is following through on marketing strategy, to ensuring a strong return on investments. As with traditional marketing teams, this means a continual focus on key performance indicators(KPI’s). MO may also be in charge of those KPI’s related to budgets, distribution, data flow, and procurement. Another key role is ensuring that the company stays ‘on brand’ at all times.

The word ‘branding’ used to mean what colors represent the company’s product, and what values are included in a (frequently vague) mission statement. Today, branding is a complicated and powerful field that affects the very essence of a company’s identity. Some MO departments will review everything from the company’s mission statement to its year-end investor portfolios to ensure that a company’s overall brand remains intact.

5.  Planning for Market Penetration

Of course, despite its many responsibilities, Marketing Operations is still about marketing. While overseeing a multitude of tasks, MO will also have a flourishing creative department working on print collateral, media campaigns and event planning. The integrated nature of Marketing Operations allows it to assimilate information and feedback from multiple company modules that were once in their own silos. MO can see which products sell faster than others or have seasonal fluctuations, enabling the team to anticipate demand for inventory. Coordination with accounting helps MO analyze which products are most profitable, and why. Data from warehousing and distribution can identify bottlenecks. MO can then work backward from an anticipated launch date to include more time for possible delivery glitches.

6.  Responding to Changing Market Trends and Requirements

Marketing Operations is also the catcher for the company’s tech awareness team. MO keeps abreast of improvements and competition in CRM, data analysis, and marketing and then translates that knowledge into actionable improvements.

Agility is key when it comes to staying ahead of the competition in 21st-century marketing. Online commerce means most companies are selling globally 24/7, which requires highly responsive customer service teams, real-time traffic and revenue reporting, an understanding of advertising exchange algorithms, and the ability to spot fresh opportunities.

As an example, Estée Lauder’s trend-setting MO Department gave one of its more mature brands, Bobby Brown, a digital makeover in 2013 by launching a YouTube channel called ‘I Love Makeup’ targeted at millennials. As Forbes reported at the time: “As the first brand to take such a step, it will be watched closely by everyone.”

7.  Identifying New Markets

The marriage of data and strategic planning make it easier for a company to identify and evaluate a variety of new opportunities like exports, franchising, additional product lines, and mobile advertising. However, the growing impact of digital marketing also has complications: every country has different legal and political concerns regarding data privacy, and it’s MO’s job to sort that out.

8.  Optimizing Marketing Channels

MO allows a company to exercise both versatility and specificity in its choice of marketing channels. A department can put different people or teams in charge of direct selling, wholesaling, digital marketing, print media, mobile advertising and so on. This allows each team to drill down into what works (or doesn’t) in each channel, while still functioning as part of a cohesive department that collates and analyzes data from all channels.

9.  A Typical Month in Marketing Operations

While the scope of the department’s role can be quite involved, individual responsibilities are generally clearly defined. The ultimate responsibility is supporting other teams or individuals. A data analyst would likely lend support to the sales team and working the CRM, then move on to A/B testing and analysis of email campaigns and finally, refine data and feed it into current ROI reporting.

At least twice a week, data teams might meet with their creative counterparts to get their input and answer questions. Data teams can share which types of franchise leads respond most favorably, and ask creative teams for tailored messaging to those demographics — or Creative may ask Data to assess various mobile advertising exchanges and pick the best ones for geo-targeting and fill speed.

Twice a month, both teams might meet with a larger strategic planning group that reports directly to decision makers. These meetings may focus on preparing year-end reports, assessing new markets, or creating workflow templates and training materials across the company.

10. The Future of Marketing Operations

According to a 2009 Lenskold Group study, companies with a marketing operations department are twice as likely (11% vs. 5%) to enjoy more “effective and efficient” marketing and are more likely to outgrow their competitors. In a survey conducted by the CMO Council and software company Alterian, 60% of respondents said the transformation of marketing operations is an essential area of focus, regardless of company size. In the Lenskold study, 59% of respondents reported having a dedicated Marketing Operations person or team.

For those seeking a career in marketing, MO may be a very smart choice—new hires are likely to get intensive experience in the discipline of their choice, while still being exposed to, and working with, teammates in other disciplines.

For companies small and large, Marketing Operations provides the integration and insight necessary to compete in a world of rapidly accelerating data and intelligence.

There are several processes that make (or break) a business. Perhaps the most important of these is the process that goes into your marketing and sales pipeline. This is where your leads turn into customers, where your mainly revenue comes from.

Your marketing and sales pipeline refers to the stages that your sales rep goes through to convert a lead into a customer. It is separate from the sales funnel such that the pipeline sums up all the customer sales funnels. It is a visualization of where things really are, in terms of sales, and what’s being done at each stage.

It is typically made up of the following stages:

• Lead generation
• Lead nurturing
• Lead qualification as marketing-qualified or sales-qualified
• Deal closing
• Post-sale

In a way, your sales pipeline represents the health of your sales life cycles.
Are you dealing with a clogged system, wherein the average sales cycle takes too long?
Do you lose a lot of leads as they go through the pipeline?
At which stages of your pipeline do the process stall?

A thorough examination of your sales pipeline can reveal areas in your sales and marketing that need to improve. Thus, it is important to regularly draft pipeline reports that show deal quantity and value per stage. This is data that’s crucial if you want to better pipeline management.

Sales Pipeline VS. Sales Funnel

Your sales funnel captures your buyer’s journey. It represents the actions they take that move them from awareness to making a purchase.

The funnel has helped determine steps that you need to take to improve your content marketing, follow-ups and such, at its different stages. Knowing where your prospects are, you can provide them with the information and push they need to move them further down the funnel and eventually towards buying from you.

The sales pipeline, on the other hand, maps the actions taken by sales reps. It is the sales cycle from the rep’s point of view. To them, it is not about moving from awareness to conversion. To them, it is about getting the leads, qualifying them and eventually closing the deal.

The overlap lies in the leads. Are the actions at each stage of the pipeline effective enough to move majority of the leads down the sales funnel and through the pipeline?

Market research company Forrester found that 99% of leads never gets converted as customers. If you observe this in your sales pipeline, then it’s time to take a closer look and tweak where necessary.

Why Focus on Pipeline Marketing

Until recently, when the power of CRM and data put a lot of guesswork on the wayside, lead generation was the metric that determined your sales pipeline’s success. If you have a lot a leads, then you can potentially close a lot of deals.

We know that this is actually not true. There are several stages within your pipeline that need attention too as these might be the weak links that cause lead leakage. We should no longer focus on quantity – quality is more important.

Pipeline marketing connects sales and marketing to information. It considers all out-reach channels and marketing campaigns. Solid data becomes the basis of decisions and goals.

Pipeline marketing employs strategies that you may already be familiar with. Inbound marketing, content marketing, lead nurturing and growth hacking – all these factor into the individual sales funnels of your lead. In the same way, they are used at the different stages of the sales pipeline.

What Does a Healthy Sales Pipeline Look Like?

There are 4 key metrics that determine a healthy pipeline:

• Number of deals in the pipelines.
• Average size of deals.
• Average percentage of closed deals.
• Average time for closing deals.

Assess these metrics against your current production capacity, competitor metrics and goals. See if there are stages where movement’s stalled. Examine this against select sales funnels to see if there are common hindrances in moving clients down the funnel and through the pipeline. Are they information lacking – data, reports, guidelines and what-not that can help in the decision-making? Are you failing to follow-up at certain points of the funnel?

Your sales pipeline can work as a guide to improving your marketing and sales operations. It is a way to trim the fat and shape up. Take the time to draft your sales pipeline report and see where you can go from there.