Many companies use a marketing automation tool as a stack consolidator, employing it for all e-mail marketing, content publication, landing page creation and similar actions. It reduces manual labor, reveals buyer behavior and automates lead qualification – and that makes it indispensable.

The shortfall is it can’t truly measure end-to-end marketing performance. This means most marketing teams using these tools to judge success or failure of campaigns can't truly assess their full impact. Unlike Showpad, a late-stage analytical sales platform, they only track the start of the customer lifecycle. That means marketing is blind to whether its campaigns not only attract customers at the top of the funnel, but close them at the bottom.

In essence, marketing automation is great for meticulously tracking touches like e-mail opens, page visits, content downloads, or call to action clicks. It’s fantastic for helping marketers figure out when a prospect is valuable and automatically routing that lead to the right sales person. But it fails as leads advance through the later stages; those that require a one-on-one meeting or personalized sales approaches.

Need to track through the final outcome

Ironically, sales reps still use marketing content in those late-stage pitches. Marketers just stop tracking it. Marketing automation systems don’t show how often content is used or whether certain content used in meetings correlates to deals closed. That means most content marketers don’t have a complete view of how much impact the material they produce has on new business.

Of course, the analytics that marketing automation systems track are an important piece of the puzzle. But when sales reps use marketing content to help close a deal, that’s the real indication of late-stage content ROI. So why can’t we analyze it to create better content, and close more deals? When a sales rep pulls out an infographic, technical spec, feature explanation or blog post that speaks to a customer’s problem, I’m willing to bet marketing has no idea of that use.

One of the reasons is it’s hard to digitally track in-person conversations. You can record the discussion, transcribe it and add notes into a CRM. But there’s no record of content being used unless the sales rep remembers to input it into the CRM. Very few do that.  

Showpad helps; but mindset change is needed

Showpad can automatically track bottom-of-funnel analytics concerning content used in sales meetings, but tools are only part of the solution. Needed is a mindset change about how marketers judge the full value of their campaign’s content. It’s not just about what goes in at the top of the funnel; it’s knowing what, how, and why content moves through the funnel that justifies the effort spent to create it.

Download case study here

Impact doesn’t stop when marketers throw a lead over the fence to sales. It means we need to measure the lead’s final outcome better. Read a case study to learn exactly how it’s done.