You know you need to track your marketing efforts, but you don't know what to do aside from installing some basic analytics software on your site. Marketing, sales, and ROI are all intimately tied together. Ultimately, you need a simple way to communicate with all of your departments and measure where the money is being made.

Identify Your Revenue Attribution Model

Businesses that track revenue attribution usually do it via the single or multi-touch approach. In other words, when you're tracking where the money is made in your company, you're tracking what is actually responsible for the sale.

With a single touch approach, you might set up a Google adwords campaign, get a few leads, have your sales team keep in touch with them for 6 months, and then finally close the sale. The attribution for the sale is awarded to the Google ad.

With a multi-touch approach, using the same example, the credit would be given either to the sales rep who closed the deal, or split among the marketing team (i.e. the ones writing the Google ad) and the sales team.

Decide how you want to track and award attribution. It will make a huge impact on how to spend (allocate) marketing dollars.

Get The Sales and Marketing Team on The Same Page

Companies, like Yodle.com, often suggest that businesses work to "marry" the sales and marketing teams. Why? Because they're essentially on the same team - working at different points in the sales process. Often times, the sales team and marketing department are kept separate. There's often this feeling of "us vs. them" - not healthy.

Sales people don't usually care about the latest Google update. Marketing people don't actually take to customers. If you want the sales team to get excited about marketing, then show them the result of your company's marketing efforts. Ditto with the marketing team. Align revenue appropriation with both departments' goals, with one incentivizing the other.

This shouldn't be a once-a-year thing. rather, you should work toward reorganizing your company's structure so that both the sales and marketing departments are housed under the same department. You should also hold regular meetings where each side of the same department can come together to better understand how one impacts the other.

Track ROI

A lot of businesses track ROI, but many of them don't base revenue allocation on it. This is a bit ridiculous, because the main goal of any business is to maximize profits. So, it only makes sense to allocate funds to areas that are proven to bring in the most money, while siphoning off, or shutting down, projects that aren't economically feasible.

In some cases, it does make sense to allocate funds to an unprofitable project. This is usually when you're doing research and development, or testing a new marketing campaign, or making tweaks to an existing one. However, if all you're doing is blindly throwing money at every initiative - stop. Take a look at your revenue attribution, and then revamp your marketing and sales initiatives.

Author Bio
John Childs is a veteran in marketing. He enjoys blogging about effective techniques to create and maintain great marketing plans.