Rise of the Revenue Marketer by Debbie Qaqish
Debbie is the chief strategy officer of The Pedowitz Group, and is a nationally recognized expert, innovator and speaker on revenue marketing with more than 30 years of sales and marketing experience applying strategy, technology and process to help B2B companies drive revenue growth.
The Host’s Perspective:
In the book, the author describes a before and after analogy that has come about because of the growing adoption marketing software and their improving ability to measure marketing’s contribution to the sales pipeline and revenues.
For the longest time, marketers were bowling with a curtain in front of the bowling pins. They rolled the ball down the aisle and could hear that some pins were knocked down, but they couldn’t tell how many, which pins, or if they were getting a strike or not.
Today, marketing uses digital insight, which is comparable to removing the curtain. Now marketers roll the ball down the aisle and can actually see what pins are going down and what the interaction is between the pins.
Did we knock a few down? Get a strike? Do we adjust our approach?” With marketing automation, marketers now have the visibility they need. With so much more visibility into marketing’s contribution to sales and revenues, that has led to revenue marketing.
Revenue marketing is the strategy that is transforming marketing from a cost center to a revenue center. The author explains that companies are in one of four phases of the revenue marketing journey. Think about which one you’re currently in:
Traditional, which is the “make it pretty” department I mentioned earlier, where there is no lead generation and no alignment with sales.
Lead Generation, which is generating leads and sending every last lead over the wall to sales without any follow up or analysis to learn if the leads are any good or even become closed sales.
Demand Generation, which has marketing generating leads and measuring the contribution to the sales pipeline and revenue, but only by looking back – it’s not predictive.
The Revenue Marketing stage includes everything in the demand generation stage with one major difference: the revenue generated and attributed to marketing is now delivered in a machine that is repeatable, predictable, and scalable.
So, a revenue marketer can walk into a senior management team meeting with two different reports. The first report shows the revenue contribution from marketing over the past month, quarter, or year. The second, and more powerful, is the Marketing Forecast Report that forecasts revenue impact from marketing for the upcoming period. That will get you a seat at the management table.
For a marketer, being able to do that makes them an extremely valued member of the company whose job function the company simply cannot survive or grow without.
As a marketer with aspirations of a long-lasting and richly rewarded career, would you like that?
Listen to the Interview:
Show Notes
Rise of the Revenue Marketer by Debbie Qaqish
Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World by Steven Woods
Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative by Scott Eblin
The Three Value Conversations: How to Create, Elevate, and Capture Customer Value at Every Stage of the Long-Lead Sale by Erik Peterson, Tim Riesterer, Conrad Smith and Cheryl Geoffrion
The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader: How to Succeed by Building Customer and Company Value by Thomas Barta and Patrick Barwise (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
About Debbie Qaqish (Pedowitzgroup.com)
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