The right answer is everyone – From the CEO down, but the lion’s share of the responsibility falls on the sales organization.
In most B2B companies today, sales still carries significant quotas, but marketing is becoming responsible for an ever-increasing amount of revenue. In the latest survey, 52% of mid-market and enterprise marketers said they are under ‘a lot of pressure’ to deliver pipeline and revenue. This increases to 56% when we look just at enterprise marketers. Consideredcontent.com
Is it time for marketers to take responsibility for more of the pipeline, and ownership of the revenue targets and be held to the same rigorous measurements as sales. Measurements of “likes and shares” are not relevant, revenue is relevant.
Sales is easier to measure – in an over simplification – here’s your quota go make it. Marketing on the other hand has had softer measurements, although I see them putting more rigor to their KPI’s:
- What’s the revenue goal?
- How many new customers will it take to meet it?
- What kind of customers?
- What’s the typical ratio of sales-qualified leads to get to that number of clients?
- And how many marketing-qualified leads need to convert?
- Plus the agreed to criteria between marketing and sales as to a MQL
Statistically though, sales continually is held more accountable for the revenue which may be evidenced by average tenures in B2B Tech companies:
- VP Sales – 19 months
- VP Marketing – 40 months
- CEO’S – 64 months
If truly everyone is responsible for revenue – everyone should pull together and make it happen – but all too often these two departments work in silos and point fingers.
This could go a long way to getting sales and marketing closer to their revenue target. And ultimately, it will allow marketing to fully take its place at the table of business decision making.
For more information or clarification on this and other sales facets call Jim Hale, 303-697-6416 or email jim@mprovesales.com www.mprovesales.com
