Why your marketing budget isn’t generating pipeline

It is easy to spend your marketing budget. The difficult part is understanding its impact on pipeline and revenue. Having a clear strategy, with flexible goals and tactics is critical for truly understanding what moves the needle.

What? Flexible goals? Yes. In today’s business world, there are many factors beyond your control, so you need to be able to bend and flex and move with the market and your customer’s needs. If you are not reviewing your goals quarterly, or you have the same goals year-in year-out that never get achieved, you need to review them now.

It is pointless increasing spend if your pipeline is still pretty dry. First, understand what’s not working so you can make the right changes. Let’s unpack the top 3 reasons why your marketing budget and activities are not generating pipeline:

1. Your Customer Journey Is Not Clear

Once you map your customer journey to your CRM software (like HubSpot or Salesforce) and the leads are passing through, you will be able to see leaks in your marketing funnel. You cannot fix the problem if you do not know where the problem is.

You need documented systems and processes and clarity across all teams. This could be done in Confluence, or even in a simple Word doc. Ensure you have answers to the following questions:

• How are the leads qualified? Do you have a clearly defined MQL and SQL?
• What data points are collected from your leads at each stage?
• What comms plan is in place for leads? For customers? For after-sales?
• Are you leveraging lead scoring?

Marketing also needs to be directly aligned and in-step with the Sales team for effective lead handover and management. I have sadly seen many instances of leads being passed to Sales, and then not being followed up correctly or promptly.

The customer journey touches everyone in the business – marketing, sales, support, IT, product, so everyone needs to understand the journey and where they fit in serving your target customer so they can play their part.

2. Your Marketing Budget Needs Alignment to Strategy

While many businesses have a “rough” marketing budget, it is often not mapped to the strategic goals. You need to understand exactly where your budget is going, from multiple angles.

Always have a breakdown of how much budget goes to each stage of the marketing funnel, not just marketing tactics. If your leads have a longer buying cycle, then you may need to invest more in nurturing them faster along their journey. If you are short on leads, then you may need to invest in top of funnel activities. If you have been in business for more than 5 years, your biggest opportunity could be in connecting with your existing customers.

As well as the funnel, you need to decide what percentage of your spend is allocated to areas like:

• Strategy
• Tactics
• Tools
• Human Resources

Your marketing budget needs to be generating and supporting pipeline, and it’s critical you understand exactly how that happens.

3. Your Reporting Doesn’t Give A Clear Picture

Reporting is not just about vanity numbers. Real reporting should inform marketing leadership to make better decisions, and should reveal where your marketing budget is failing to deliver pipeline.

Do you have visibility over the top metrics that matter?

• Cost Per Lead (CPL)
• Cost Per Sale/ Acquisition (CPS)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate (LCR)
• Marketing Influenced Revenue (MIR) for B2B

With the tools available today, marketers can provide clear reporting showing the impact on the pipeline. I use 2 different types of reporting:

• Static Reporting – where you take a freeze-frame of the numbers at the end of a certain date, sometimes weekly, usually monthly. This type of reporting should tie directly to your strategy.
• Rolling Reporting – produced in tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot or Salesforce and can help you see what your data looks like over a certain period (3, 6, 12 months) up to the current date. This type of data is great for modifying campaigns in action.

Reporting is never static. To ensure the marketing reporting and attribution are accurate, the reporting functionality needs to be regularly reviewed – at least annually.

Once you have confirmed your customer journey map is correct, your budget is correctly allocated, and your reporting gives you the key data to make informed decisions, you should have clear insights into why your marketing budget isn’t generating pipeline. You can then tweak your tactics and watch for improvements.

There are no fast fixes, but with increased visibility and commitment to get it on the right path, a healthy pipeline is within reach.