A simple Google search for the terms “marketing measurement” or “marketing campaign success” yields a slew of results touting advice about the most effective ways to measure marketing campaign success. Incredibly, absent from the results is any mention of tracking the short- and long-term service revenues that result from customer wins.
For a service-oriented business, it’s inadequate to stop your marketing campaign success measurement at ‘number of leads’ or ‘number of leads that convert to customers.’ You need to know the final result of each marketing campaign: the amount of service revenue that actually resulted from all your efforts, broken down by specific campaigns.
Why the disconnect between service revenue and marketing campaign measurement? Because until recently, organizations had no automated or intuitive means of connecting the two realms. Yes, CRM systems allow deal closings to track back to marketing campaigns, but the critical next step of continuous follow-through, particularly in the area of service delivery, falls off the CRM tracking radar. Instead, service delivery and the ongoing tracking of its profits are generally managed in a separate project management system called Project Service Management, or PSM.
Next-Generation PSM Closes the Campaign Success-Tracking Gap
Next-generation project systems live within the CRM system – or integrate tightly with it – so organizations can connect all marketing data and, eventually, service project data, to obtain a complete picture of marketing campaign success. When the project system tracks all the way back to your original marketing campaign, you can understand the full picture.
Take, for example, two campaigns that an organization measures with traditional CRM and marketing tools. If they both yield approximately 100 leads and close rates of 10%, it seems that both marketing campaigns were successful. When they tie PSM data into the results, however, the organization discovers that the customers from Campaign 1 accounted for 12-month service revenue of $2 million, while the customers from Campaign 2 only accounted for $500,000 in service revenue. You now know that the campaigns were not equally successful.
This is the type of real-world results analysis that today’s sophisticated and integrated PSM systems can deliver.
Next-generation PSM can take the analysis even deeper than the simplified example above. Let’s assume the same two marketing campaigns were tied to very different service level agreements and/or service offerings. Once again, with integrated project-marketing campaign data, you can compare not just the service revenue earned but also the profitability of those revenues. Using the above example, let’s say that Campaign 1 incurred $1.8 million in expenses while Campaign 2 only incurred $200,000 in expenses. Despite Campaign 1 yielding four times the revenue of Campaign 2, the margins were so low that Campaign 1 didn’t provide more profit than Campaign 2. Further analysis of the project system proves that Campaign 2 was a greater success in both profits and long-term resource management because it required fewer resources, which led to less drain on management and fewer resources to manage in the long run.
These two quick analyses, both yielding very different findings regarding campaign success, are only possible when you manage your entire lifecycle through a unified PSM-CRM system. From that unified system, you can run campaigns, secure leads, quote work, forecast opportunities, manage and track service delivery, and nurture relationships. Next-gen PSM systems also provide analytics and reporting tools with intuitive UIs to pinpoint success levels at all stages of the cycle and to calculate ROI for every activity your team undertakes.
To learn more about gaining deeper marketing success insights, visit our website or contact us today to talk to one of our PSM-CRM experts.
