Under Marketing’s Influence
With marketing now involved in more tasks from cold to close than ever before, it's time to re-examine the potential span of its influence, and in turn how this influence should be pursued and reported up to the higher levels of the organization.
It’s often easy for marketing leaders to become so fixated on having to generate a tangible “lead” with everything they sponsor in order to justify its cost, but this ignores critical areas of influence that must be sponsored, actively driven and measured. The four types of influence include:
Sourced. The generation of an opportunity that can be tracked back to a marketing-sponsored program.
Recycled. Leads that should be recycled back into marketing for additional nurturing/management until they exhibit certain characteristics or behaviors, thus reducing lead waste.
Touched. A hybrid of programs and support designed to help others source and migrate opportunities.
Facilitated. The targeting of and messaging to the sources that are internal or external to an organization that play an advisory (but not final decisionmaking) role at key junctures in a buying cycle.
By changing the paradigm on which we evaluate marketing’s influence, we widen its charter and provide additional opportunities for it to make a difference.
