You busy this February 23, at 1 pm ET? I hope you can spare a few and join me for my first (and hopefully not only) appearance on WRMR – Revenue Marketer Radio.
What is WRMR?
Debbie Qaqish Host Revenue Marketer Radio
It’s the call letters for a virtual radio station. Actually, it an online radio show sponsored by friends of mine at the Pedowitz Group – one of the up and coming demand generation agencies that help marketers build lead generation and nurturing programs that convert a larger number of prospects to opportunities and turn more qualified leads into sales pipeline.
I’ve know Jeff Pedowitz for about as long as I’ve been active in the lead management automation field. We met when he ran professional services at Eloqua. His business partner, Debbie Qagish, I’ve come to know since and found her to be one of the most dynamic and outspoken advocates for professionally generating and managing demand as a core marketing function. Together they have built a fast-growing, thriving business and live in the world of demand management daily.
Debbie invited me to join her for a little tête-à-tête on how I came to be a Revenue Marketer. Or at least how I found myself on the journey to become one.
And it is a journey. A long one.
According to Debbie, the journey to Revenue Marketing nirvana begins by recognizing that marketing activity – outreach to prospective clients with educational and informational offers coupled with good inbound visibility and relevant content delivery — helps to speed the sales process along. Just like with any problem, recognizing that you have one is the first stage.
The second part of the journey she calls Lead Generation where marketers begin to devise programs — and use some type of technology, typically an email service provider or ESP system — to help generate leads and deliver them to sales. Qualified leads, not just those fished out of a bowl at a tradeshow. In the Lead Generation stage, marketers measure progress in terms like open rates, click through rates, and registrations – simple activities that correlate loosely to buyer interest.
It’s a big jump from Lead Generation to the next phase: Demand Generation.
Marketers in the Demand Generation phase graduate to higher levels of automation and campaign sophistication. They use marketing automation tools integrated together with a CRM system. (This also implies some rigorous use of the CRM system by sales and sales management for the purpose of managing accounts and tracking pipeline progress. — More on this if you come listen to the show.) They learn to measure marketing impact in terms like Marketing Qualified Leads, lead-to-acceptance rates, and pipeline value generated. In this stage, the marketer can begin to demonstrate a direct impact on revenue without getting laughed out of the room by sales.
The ultimate stage defines the whole process – Revenue Marketing. In this phase marketing programs, processes and results earn the RPS seal of approval, where RPS stands for Repeatable, Predictable, and Sustainable. (Sounds a lot like the words my buddy Sean Geehan uses in his B2B Executive Handbook. But I digress.)
On Thursday, I’ll share some of my hard-won insights into what it takes to get started on the journey to becoming a revenue marketer at a large, multi-billion dollar enterprise with a highly-recognizable brand and a long history of sales management best practices. I plan to share a bit about my role in industry marketing and how this led to the start of my revenue marketing journey. How my team and I adopted marketing technology to drive revenue. And what makes Revenue Marketing at a large, global, diverse enterprise — with many long-standing sales traditions — different than RM at smaller, younger firms.
The goal of our talk show segment is to help pave the way on your road to becoming an elite Revenue Marketer and to make your journey smoother — with less bumps and potholes. If you can’t make this date and time, don’t worry, BlogTalkRadio records the session for you to access on demand. Check it out when you can. Or you can download them from iTunes.
(Full disclosure: This post is not an ad for the Pedowitz Group. I am appearing on the show as a favor to Debbie and to boost my personal brand on this topic. I receive no compensation. Although she did buy me a drink a couple of times…)
