Customer Journey Analytics Frameworks

A few weeks ago, I was on a project status review call with a marketing leader who runs demand generation for one of our customers. During the call he said that he was asked an interesting question by the sales leader at the company and he wanted to discuss how to go about answering it. Been working with the company for over a year, I know the sales leader personally, who is one of those few leaders who truly understand nuances of sales/marketing data and leverage analytics to drive performance. Knowing this sales leader well, I had a feeling that something interesting was coming up and boy was I right!

He told me that the sales leader had asked him a very interesting question -

For all the deals that they had closed in that quarter, how and at which points in the deal cycle did marketing influence them?  

If you are in marketing, I am sure many of you have been asked such questions by the sales leaders you have been working with.

For this customer, we had just built a new “Pipeline Influence” dashboard and added the metrics to track pipeline by “Marketing Sourced and Influenced”. We had implemented attribution methodology as well to enable us to track marketing’s influence on the pipeline. We were in pretty good shape as far as the marketing analytics roadmap for this customer was concerned. I did not take a moment to brag about the fact that we had all the details to answer such questions but turned out that he wanted go deep and understand

How and when during each deal, marketing enabled the AEs to move the deals through the funnel towards closing.

I realized that this discussion between the 2 leaders was not just about who is taking the credit for a deal but it involved going above and beyond to truly understand how best to leverage marketing resources when it comes to closing deals.

To answer these questions, we needed the ability to do “Deal Dissection” in pursuit of understanding how sales and marketing teams were partnering during the deal cycles. To this day, I think this is the true description of “sales and marketing alignment”, the term that has been abused beyond words.   

After a few follow-up discussions, we drafted what the ultimate solution would like. The result is our “Customer Journey” framework and we are super excited to share about this with everyone. This is the best part of being at marqeu and having the opportunity to partner with some of the smartest data-driven marketers. Every day our customers are asking such thought-provoking questions that push the boundaries of our knowledge so as to deliver on our commitments.

In our customer journey framework, we enabled sales and marketing teams to do sorts of “MRI of each deal” on the fly.

• We have the ability to look at 1 deal or combination of deals right from the very first marketing touch across each persona to the last touch for the deal closure.
• We also have the ability to look at general trends (clusters) across marketing tactics that work for each sales segment, the industry of customers, for new business vs cross/up-sell etc. along with the insights into what decision makers vs practitioners engage with and in what phase during the deal cycle. These insights drive efficiency in execution as marketing has the key insights to fine tune the programs down to each account, industry, product line or geography.
• The insights from the customer journey framework are not only relevant from the sales perspective but they drive building the marketing playbooks especially for ABM programs. Such playbooks are powered by an organization's internal data rather than by generalizations from the so called "best practices" that are most of the time irrelevant to how an organization operates and and executes on the go-to market strategy.

The best part of the customer journey framework project is not the dashboard that was delivered to enable teams to access such deep-rooted intelligence on the fly but the approach with which we went about delivering on it. We started with the key business questions that this sales leader had asked. We then reviewed what we could answer with the capabilities we had put in place, had follow-up discussions to understand further what was being asked for, how it would be used and then we went about building the solution with the set of tools we already had in the organization. Most of the modern marketing teams use some kind of analytics tools and we have seen that conversations always revolve around what fancy tools each company has in their so-called tech stacks, new tools that they can get etc. The conversation most of the times is not about what business questions are being asked, the solution approaches that are relevant to those questions and the organization. We think these kinds of conversations set apart the high performing organizations.

We are always on the lookout for inputs and examples from the marketing and sales communities to keep adding value for our customers. We would welcome the inputs from other leaders and practitioners around what kind of questions are being asked by sales and marketing teams at your organizations and how you go about answering them.