Why Integrate Web Analytics with Your CRM?

Information Management Special Reports, December 18, 2007

Mikel Chertudi

According to the Direct Marketer’s Association, North American B2B companies spend $77 billion annually on marketing programs and campaigns with no real idea of how it affects sales. This statistic underscores the love/hate relationship that frequently exists between marketing and sales organizations. Sales teams complain that marketing doesn’t generate enough leads to get the sales cycle moving or that marketing’s activities aren’t meeting their intended goals. Marketing complains that if the sales team were producing more sales, then marketing would have more budget to do the marketing activities that would produce more meaningful leads.

There’s an overriding question that marketers and sales organizations should ask themselves, though. Are leads really the end game? What about the number of meaningful sales opportunities per month? The number of net new customers gained? Or a campaign’s overall return on investment?   

When used properly, Web analytics can create marketing nirvana for online marketers because they can know the exact answers to all of the above questions. Marketers can easily understand what’s working and what isn’t. In so doing, they can better allocate marketing budget toward those activities that are most effective at achieving their key performance indictors and eliminate those that aren’t producing.

A simple, recent example at Omniture illustrates how lead generation vs. conversions from leads-to-sales made a big difference in our marketing and demand generation efforts. The company recently promoted a free Web seminar and downloadable guide on “Eight Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation.” So which one, the guide or Web seminar, performed the best in terms of creating sales conversion? The freely downloadable guide converted 42 percent more leads than the Web seminar. At the outset, you would think the company would have emphasized and promoted the guide over the Web seminar; however, you would have guessed wrong. It turns out that even though the Web seminar generated fewer leads, it was 155 percent better at converting those leads to sales-ready opportunities and had an 80 percent better close ratio from sales opportunity to closed deal.

Armed with this information, the company was able to modify its campaign promotion to emphasize the Web seminar. Gaining this kind of information was made possible by integrating the company’s Web analytics data with its customer relationship management (CRM) system.      

Integrating Web analytics with CRM system should come as no surprise as an important step to tying the entire lead generation and sales process together. The three main reasons for integrating Web analytics with CRM are:

1. Better marketing investment prioritization (both time and money ROI)
2. Measure marketing’s contribution to the sales pipeline, and
3. Enable sales intelligence for improved selling context.

Businesses and their marketing organizations that promote products or services with complex sales cycles often lack visibility beyond generating the initial sales leads from their Web sites, trade shows or other offline initiatives. For example, once Web leads are generated, they move into the black hole of the sales force automation (SFA)/CRM system with almost no ability to tie results such as closed deal quantities and sales values back to the marketing campaign costs, thus leaving fully measured ROI (or return on marketing) unan­swered. To provide concrete answers to these ROI and other related questions, marketers should endeavor to integrate their Web analytics/campaign management solutions together with their SFA/CRM applications. 

In lieu of this type of integration, most marketers are con­fined to measuring premature and often mislead­ing campaign metrics, such as total lead quanti­ties and their associated cost per lead metrics as a basis for performance. Once marketers are enabled to measure metrics beyond initial lead conversion, such as qualified leads (i.e., after having been through a qualification process), closed deals and sales values, all at a campaign or tracking code level, marketers can prioritize which marketing investments, such as advertising placements (which keywords, banner ad placements, email, etc.), site promotions (Web seminars, white papers, product tours, etc.), are yielding results deeper in the sales cycle relative to their counterparts.

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