John Stone

About John Stone

CEO at Revenue Architects - Sales, Marketing and Digital Business

Entries by John Stone

Achieving Marketing-Sales Alignment with the Closed-Loop Marketing Architecture

Closing the Loop – Aligning Marketing and Sales

Traditionally, marketing teams generate leads, while sales teams close deals. With the web and the shift of the customer buying process and business-to-customer interactions, the lines between marketing and sales are blurred. Companies today know that they need to adapt, but how?

Growth-focused companies often wrestle with aligning marketing and sales to maximize revenue growth. A key goal is establishing a “service level agreement” between marketing and sales teams that defines both the required quantity and the characteristics of the ‘MQL” or Marketing Qualified Lead”. But there is more to it then that. Marketing and sales teams today, must work together to orchestrate the customer experience end-to-end and generate leads, nurture opportunities in the pipeline and ultimately convert sales. And, they need to track this end-to-end so they can attribute revenue to marketing programs and campaigns and see what is working and not working.

A useful framework to manage this end-to-end process is the “Closed Loop Marketing Architecture”.

February 17, 2017 /0 Comments/by John Stone

B2B Marketing and Sales, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Revenue Growth

Let’s Talk About Email – Why and How to Use Email Marketing

With the rise of social media, many “traditional” online marketing tools have fallen out of the spotlight in the glamorous new world of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Marketers scramble to discuss the latest marketing campaigns that can be implemented with social media. However, email marketing is one of the marketing tools that should be […]

February 5, 2017 /0 Comments/by John Stone

Measurement and Analytics, Revenue Growth, Sales Excellence

AMA Boston: Actionable Marketing Metrics Recap

I recently had the pleasure of attending the American Marketing Association Boston event Actionable Marketing Metrics: Tools and Methodologies on Tuesday, 24 January, 2017.

The two guest speakers, Thor Johnson, CEO of Bedrock Data, and Kristen Hambelton, CMO of ServiceChannel, gave outstanding presentations. They raised interesting points on how businesses should approach defining metrics in both marketing and sales.

Here are a few main takeaways that are particularly pertinent to B2B businesses (though, of course, they do apply to B2C companies as well):

January 27, 2017 /0 Comments/by John Stone

Revenue Architecture, Revenue Growth, Revenue Marketing

Why You Need Fewer Leads…But More Marketing Qualified Leads

Why Marketing Qualified Leads? Although many marketers focus on increasing the number of leads, quite often marketers should be in fact aiming to have fewer leads. The key is that this smaller number of leads are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), who are genuine sales prospects, instead of people who are curious but have no intent to […]

January 18, 2017 /0 Comments/by John Stone

B2B Marketing and Sales, Measurement and Analytics, Revenue Architecture, Revenue Growth, Revenue Marketing, Revenue Systems, Technology & Websites

Revenue Systems: Your Platform for Sustainable Revenue Performance

We define Revenue Systems as the foundation for sustainable revenue execution. Revenue Systems include brand, people, process, and technology that enable marketing and sales. These core capabilities help attract, capture, deepen and expand relationships. Assuming the right strategies are in place, your revenue system provides the platform you need to execute marketing and sales programs and achieve marketing and sales performance metrics.

November 12, 2016 /0 Comments/by John Stone

B2B Marketing and Sales, Revenue Growth, Revenue Systems, Sales Enablement, Sales Excellence

Good Selling Checklist: Activities and Competencies

There is a continuum of different B2B business models – from luminary consultants to commodity products – and each model needs to have a distinct structure for marketing and sales. Before we assess sales team readiness, we begin by ensuring that the right revenue architecture (the product and process of marketing and sales) is in place and aligned with the target business architecture.

For businesses with a complex, solution sale or consulting sale, there are sales effectiveness attributes that we look for. Below, we’ve outlined competencies, activities, and attributes for good selling. Sales executives, client managers and account reps that sell complex products, business solutions or consultative services should possess the following:

October 28, 2016 /0 Comments/by John Stone

B2B Marketing and Sales, Closed-loop Marketing, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Revenue Growth, Revenue Programs, Sales Excellence

10 Questions for Your B2B Sales Campaign

Designing and launching a B2B sales campaign is a continuous activity for B2B sales and marketing teams. To illustrate this, we developed a Closed-Loop Marketing Architecture that describes the continuous campaign process. Data insights help determine the new customer messaging and personalized interactions resulting in better sales conversions. The process tightly aligns marketing and sales teams to orchestrate buyer engagement at each […]

August 24, 2016 /0 Comments/by John Stone

B2B Marketing and Sales, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation, Revenue Architecture, Revenue Growth, Revenue Marketing, Revenue Programs, Sales Enablement

How to Set up a Lead Nurture Program

You have implemented marketing automation and you are generating some inbound leads. Great! You have uploaded a database of contacts and these represent even more potential ‘leads’ (in the system). Now you need to manage all these leads. How do you convert them into subscribers and real sales leads? Of course, only a handful of leads are likely to become MQLs […]

June 24, 2016 /0 Comments/by John Stone

Account-Based Marketing, B2B Marketing and Sales, Closed-loop Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Measurement and Analytics, Revenue Architecture, Revenue Growth, Revenue Systems

Choosing Sales and Marketing Metrics

When choosing sales and marketing metrics, start with your revenue funnel.

Your revenue funnel dictates which metrics are best to use and a range of factors including size and scale, complexity, volumes, revenue per client, account-based vs. lead based focus will suggest different ways to measure your revenue impact.

Your Revenue Architecture – and revenue funnel – should dictate the metrics you use.

Marketers often seek to understand ‘campaign attribution’ to prioritize investments – yet, in complex multi-stage, multi-touch customer journeys, the impact of any one campaign or touch is difficult to define precisely. Should you attribute to the first campaign touch….to the last touch? The truth is that multiple influences and touches combine to contribute to the sale. As an example, if you are using an account-based marketing approach, you will focus more on account-level metrics like account awareness and penetration instead of just lead volume.

April 19, 2016 /0 Comments/by John Stone

Buyer Engagement, Investment Management

MFEA 2016: Data-Driven Revenue Programs

This presentation and discussion took place at the MFEA conference in March of 2016. The focus of the discussion was on the use of data in advisor engagement programs and how to integrate a closed-loop marketing architecture.

April 2, 2016 by John Stone