B2B Marketing Accountability: 5 ways to demonstrate the B2B marketing efforts are paying off

Your boss wants to see proof that money and resources invested in the company business-to-business marketing activities are really paying off. You start to sweat.

Relax. It 's surprisingly easy to show that B2B marketing is contributing to your company's bottom line. Here's how.

Show the relationship between marketing and revenue

Start looking for sales and revenue that can be linked to marketing. Just compare the list of new customers or invoices to companies or prospects in the marketing database and search for matches. You do not have to find every sale that led out of your marketing activities. Sometimes all it takes is a big sale to justify a campaign.

If sales are not yet closed, count the number of qualified leads and use the expected conversion rate and average size of sale to quickly determine the sales potential of these contacts. Or look at the projected sales in the company's CRM system and compare them with the database of prospects, inquiries or qualified leads.

You can also send "Did you buy?" inquiries and qualified leads to investigators, using their answers to demonstrate that the prospects being targeted by marketers are buying from you or competition. Ask if they have bought, and if so, by whom. Ask why and how much they spent. If the sample is large enough, you can also use the answers you receive to estimate the number of sales and the amount of revenue that are represented by all the investigations, and leads you have generated.

Show how you saved the company

Just think a little 'and probably find a list of what you have done to save your company money or time. For example:

- Saves printing and mailing, after cleaning the mailing list or sending the company newsletter by e-mail.

- Savings by offering electronic versions of literature.

- The money saved by eliminating non-productive and marketing activities

- Time and money saved by automating the acquisition of Web forms and eliminating some manual data entry.

Show other ways your marketing is more effective

This can range from showing how many more prospects you reach with your marketing messages to indicate the improvements that have been made in terms of cost per impression, cost per inquiry, cost per participant or cost per qualified lead.

List all the marketing projects to complete marketing team

Marketing often do not think their productivity when justifying the money the company invests in marketing. Unfortunately, people quickly forget what happened last month or last quarter. Or simply have no idea what is involved in the creation of a mailing or designing a new website.

Stressing the number of marketing projects completed, and all the work phases, can be a real eye-opener to others who are completely unaware.

Always be ready to make your case

I recommend that you block a couple of hours to create your own business-to-business marketing responsibilities back every month, so you'll always have up-to-date results at your fingertips. If you're short on time, temperature or use an intern to do it for you.

Results may vary, but consider this ...

A marketer I know has recently reported that its management awareness of their company and products between the perspectives of the target is more than doubling the cost per qualified leads supplied from marketing to sales fell by almost 40 per cent, 58 per percent of sales opportunities in the pipeline were first found percent of marketing, sales and 48 closed and 62 percent of revenue over the past 12 months has come from marketing-generated leads.

The result? He received a bigger marketing budget and senior management is no longer contribute to the success of marketing a doubt .......