Data-First Marketing

Foreword

“Where are the hot leads!?” The vice president of sales yelled at me on a regular basis. “These leads stink! Our people can't sell.”

I'd respond with something clever like “You've got good leads! Your people just stink at closing!”

In the late 1990s and very early 2000s, I served as the vice president of marketing of several different publicly traded technology companies. The tension at the companies I worked for was common at most organizations and it stemmed from the sales process involving a handoff. Marketing generated the leads and then handed them over to the sales team, who owned them until close.

Back then, I now realize, the marketing and sales departments at the companies I was with weren't aligned because we didn't share common goals based on easy to understand data. Marketing had metrics like how many people subscribed to our email newsletter, how many business cards we collected in the fishbowl at the tradeshow booth, and how many press clips talked about our company. Sales was measured on how much new business they closed and how many existing customers they kept.

Like a marriage on the rocks, we were speaking different languages. We weren't communicating. And it was negatively affecting the business.

In the two decades since my tension-filled encounters with the sales VP, the amount of data available to marketers has exploded. We're able to measure every click in our campaigns and every like in social media. We can see exactly what people do when they ...