I’m sure that every marketing director, chief marketing officer, head of marketing department every once in a while ask themselves questions like “Am I paying enough my marketers” or “Am I paying too much?” and even “What if I pay more?”.
And these questions always are followed by even more important one – “How can I motivate marketers to do more?” Of course, there are many non-monetary ways to motivate your marketer or marketing team to do more, to do better, to reach new levels etc. Today I won’t be listing them and leave it for another post later this year.
Today I would like to share with you an exclusive method I used for my marketing team to work harder, more creative, more effective and gain more leads, more potential customers, better potential customers.
For every company, and especially, for the B2B industry, the more leads marketing generates, the better our company results in general. For the B2B market, it is always difficult to support a certain amount of new leads per month, and there are some periods with less potential customers, and there are some periods which exceed your expectations.
And of course, as a CMO you want this number to be predictable and controlled. You want to get at least 20, 30 or 50, or even more leads per month depending on your business and your sales team who proceed to work with leads generated by your marketing team.
To keep this figure predictable I tried to come up with some marketing motivation for my marketing team which could guarantee the minimum number of leads we needed to keep up with the general sales plan.
Of course, first, we needed a certain number of leads with certain conversion rate per month. The more the better, of course, and here you can face some problems as well, that’s why you need to be quite careful with just number of leads. If you do not set additional rules, your marketing team can generate hundreds or thousands leads, 99% of which will be worthless.
That is why I set another variable to this marketing motivation method – lead quality.
Every B2B company has a sales plan for a year consisting of sales forecasts from current customers and an additional plan for new customers. This additional plan is divided into 2 parts – one part for the active sales department and another part for the marketing department.
Based on that I prepared a simple formula for my marketing team, using which my marketing team was highly motivated to generate not just a lot of leads, but a lot of quality leads:
Mm = Qpc*Npc*Cpc*S
where:
Mm – marketing motivation
Qpc = PSpc/ASpc*100%
- Qpc – lead quality index
- PSpc – new leads sales plan previous quarter
- ASpc – actual new leads sales previous quarter
Npc = Ppc/Apc*100%
- Npc – the number of leads per month index
- Ppc – leads plan per month
- Apc – the actual number of leads per month
Cpc = PMpc/AMpc*100%
- Cpc – customer acquisition cost index
- PMpc – customer acquisition cost plan
- AMpc – actual customer acquisition cost
S = 1/2 of your marketer’s regular monthly salary
Of course, there should be certain rules and limitations used to guarantee this formula properly works. In my case, I set the following limitation for my marketing team which is to be followed strictly otherwise there is sense to pay extra your marketer.
My marketing motivation limitation was that with Npc<70% or Cpc<70% the motivation bonus wasn’t calculated at all. So it always had to be over 70% and my marketer knew it, and my marketers set their goals to exceed it.
All numbers I used to set the plan were based on previous years data. As a result, using this marketing motivation formula in 6 months my marketing team started to generate more quality leads and the sales plan was exceeded by 56%.
Always keep in mind – motivation is everything in marketing. If there is no motivation, there is no marketing, and eventually, there are no sales…
PS: alongside with that formula I used other non-monetary marketing motivation tools to drive my team. I will share them with you later this year.
And while you’re thinking about your marketing team motivation take some time to watch these amazing marketing inspiration movies described in Best Marketing Movies To Inspire Your Team article.
