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In the past, when companies looked at their sales cycle, they usually did so through a funnel model. The term "sales funnel" has been around for years, as it neatly depicts how you bring prospects into the fold on one end and then work with them until you have leads, who will eventually become customers.
However, lately, a number of companies have decided this model doesn’t work quite as well as they’d like. It’s called a sales cycle, after all, which is why closed loop marketing is becoming so popular.
Closed Loop Marketing
This is more than just another buzzword for the marketing industry. Many companies now swear by it. Closed loop marketing simple refers to the fact that sales teams and marketers can combine forces, leveraging the analytics collected by the latter to produce better results.
One of the reasons this type of marketing approach is so important is because when these two teams aren’t communicating with one another, only bad things happen. When they work together, though, both sides improve.
With closed loop marketing, sales teams are instructed to speak with the marketing team, usually to give feedback about the prospects they’re receiving. If the prospects aren’t properly vetted by the marketing team, they could be wasting the sales team’s time. Likewise, the marketers need to give as much information as possible to the sales team regarding important characteristics about the prospective customers they’ve found or leads will never convert.
This way, too, the sales team doesn’t look at each prospect as being of the same caliber. The marketing team can tell them which prospects are ready to be closed and which will need a little more effort.
Marketers Love the Closed Loop
In the past, a company’s marketing team has had a pretty difficult job for a couple of reasons. First, marketing is always tough work. Even with all the technology available today and the insane amount of data it can provide, marketing is still no walk in the park. This is especially true if you’re trying to break into a market or introduce a new product.
Secondly, marketers tend to take a lot of blame for poor sales. Their job is to find prospective customers and then hand them over to the sales team to close. However, if the sales team isn’t successful, they can always blame the marketers.
A closed loop makes it easier for marketers to do their jobs because they get useful information from the sales team that isn’t just part of the blame game. On top of that, marketers actually get to play a bigger role in ensuring their hard work pays off. Like we mentioned above, they’re not just handing over large groups of prospects at once. They can now differentiate them, making the sales team’s job easier and, eventually, leading to more sales.
Closed loop marketing process #MSdynMKTG #conv15 pic.twitter.com/rPvxobzpgt
— Mark Smith (@nzCRMguy) March 18, 2015
The Importance of Software in Closed Loop Marketing
Perhaps one of the main reasons closed loop marketing took so long to catch on is that it requires software to be most effective. For small companies, sales and marketing teams may actually be able to meet, but this is hardly efficient.
With CRM and marketing software, though, both teams can share analytics and reports, leave public or send private messages, combine efforts on marketing emails, social media campaigns and so much more.
Closed loop marketing is the future of gaining customers. The best part about it is that most companies are already set up to begin benefiting from this new concept. As long as you have the right software, it will simply take a shift in thinking to take your current resources and leverage them for better results than ever before.
