RevTalks 2014The first REVTalks 2014: The Revenue Marketing Summit took place earlier this month, a new event devoted to the increasing responsibilities of marketing deep into the sales funnel.

Marketing has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. The rise of the Internet has driven not just a movement of budgets from offline channels towards online, but has led to the creation of an entirely new culture of metrics-led responsibility.

The simple idea that the effectiveness of marketing initiatives and campaigns can be measured has inexorably spread both up and down the sales funnel. Upstream we now we see the results of logo redesigns and re-branding campaigns being measured – things that in the past were considered invisible to anything except interpretation by focus group.

But it is downstream that the biggest changes have been seen. As new metrics have been developed, it has become obvious that marketing and sales need to be in a much closer relationship. The old model, in which marketing’s role was to simply deliver new leads into the “black box” of sales, no longer applies. The efficiency of sales agents in converting leads from different sources is now up for analysis, while at the same time, how well each type of lead the marketing department delivers converts into sales is also apparent.

The need for “joined-up” marketing/sales metrics is clear, and with it comes the increasing drive towards job titles such as Chief Revenue Officer, in which responsibility for both departments is combined. And with this movement towards an expanded role for marketing all the way down the sales funnel comes a new discipline: revenue marketing.

The Pedowitz Group is perhaps the leading revenue marketing agency in the USA. Earlier this month it organized here in San Francisco a one-day event, REVTalks 2014: The Revenue Marketing Summit. Aimed at marketing professionals grappling with how to drive change in theior own organizations and how best to take more control deep into the sales funnel, the event brought together over 30 presenters from companies such as PR Newswire, TechTarget, Cisco, LinkedIn and Ellie Mae.

Structured into short, 15-minute, TED-style talks, the sessions ran through the whole day and gave a broad range of insights into the challenges facing revenue marketers. Taken together they delivered something that is sorely needed today: a motivational blueprint that marketers could take back to their own companies and use to persuade colleagues on-board with the changes necessary.

If the idea of redefining your company’s sales funnel scares you, or if your sales team is reluctant to facilate tracking of qualified leads through to revenue and ROI metrics, then this was the event for you. And of course, in a world in which content marketing has led to better-informed customers than ever, expectations on sales people are increased too – customers expect them to be aware of which white papers the client has downloaded, or which videos have been watched. Revenue marketing methodology can deliver increased sales intelligence and higher conversion rates – and that means higher commissions too.

Revenue marketing is the future of marketing. REVTalks delivered relavent, useful content in an innovative format. We understand that The Pedowitz Group is already planning next year’s event. It deserves to be supported.
Content from REVTalks can be viewed here.