Just what you want to hear, right? After spending all this time, money and effort to evaluate and implement a bunch of tools, it’s entirely possible that they’re actually complicating your ability to generate revenue more than they’re helping. That’s because more often than not, the tools meant to help you generate more revenue are in many ways just generating more data points. They can still be incredibly helpful – the problem, however, is really that as more data points are created, more guesswork is needed to make sense of it all.
Begin at the Beginning
Here’s an example. Certain tools out there can tell you when someone from a particular business is on your website. That’s great to know, because now you have an idea of what kinds of companies might be looking for the content you’re creating. What you don’t know is who that person is, or even where they’re at in their customer journey. Is it John in the marketing department or is it Sarah from finance? Is it someone who is going to buy from you tomorrow or is it someone who is planning for the next fiscal year? You get some great information, but at the same time, you’re left with more transactional data points that tell you very little about what’s really happening.
More Questions than Answers
Other tools can give you more insight as to which landing pages or content are driving the most activity. Let’s say you have a blog post that gets read several thousand times per month. What does that tell you? Is it safe to assume that everyone who reads that blog post goes on to buy from your company? Or, could the converse be true that everyone who reads that particular blog never ends up buying anything. What if in actuality, half the people who read that post end up buying something and half don’t. Wouldn’t it be nice to know which half was generating revenue before you retarget them all with ad spend?
Companies are often left to their own devices when deciding which kinds of activity are important and which aren’t. If someone is on the website for more than 5 minutes, protocol at your company may be to get a sales person on the phone to see if they can figure out who it was. Or, if someone asks for more information by downloading something from the website, you may connect them to sales immediately. More often than not, prospective clients will choose to disengage for a multitude of reasons including (but not limited to) the creepiness factor, and these practices are hurting the business more than they’re helping.
Speaking of disengaging activity, some tools champion the idea of multiplying the amount of activity your outbound sales team can generate. Or maybe they can secure you more leads and demos in a single month than you’ve ever had before. While all of that is really good and incredibly important, it does very little to optimize the outcome. You still have to guess which activities are most important, qualify leads by hand, and hope that by the time they’re ready to buy something that they’re signaling that intention incredibly loudly. Wouldn’t it be great if prospective clients just say, “Ok, I’m ready to buy now. Please have someone reach out to me.”
The Qualification Quandry
Now that we’re looking at the problem surrounding qualification, there is the issue of, “What if I’m wrong?” What if I spend all this time, money and effort on a tool that tells me someone is an incredibly good lead and they’re not? What happens if in focusing on this lead, we’ve actually missed out on opportunities where we could have generated revenue? Traditionally speaking, we’re focusing on getting more and more leads to show up at the top of the funnel as a means of getting more quality opportunities at the bottom of the funnel. It’s a numbers game, but it’s likely not the most efficient or cost-effective game to play.
Take a minute to review the tools in your tech stack and try to remember the value proposition you bought into when implementing them. Then ask yourself, “Am I really getting the full value for what I intended this tool for?” If the answer is yes, awesome. You’re one of the lucky few who can bask in the glow of victory. If the answer is no, what is it you were hoping to get that you’re not, and what’s holding you back from getting that value. If the answer to that is actionable insight on what to do next with the information you’re capturing, a quick chat with the Click360 team might just be in order.