Last week at the Eloqua Experience conference, I was shocked at the stats confronting businesses.
- Two-thirds of CMOs believe marketing ROI will be their top effectiveness measurement by 2015.
- Effective use of sales intelligence increases revenue productivity per sales rep by 17%.
- 90% of the data in the world today was created in the last two years.
All of us are bombarded with data: sales, marketing, finance, operations, and more. Yet divisions about that “one version” often occur between and even within departments.
How can you measure ROI if sales and marketing disagree on what qualifies as a lead and where that lead came from? How can the use of sales intelligence increase if your CRM and marketing automation systems are not integrated and streamlined with the digital body language of the customer? How accurate can all your data be if team members are allowed to massage the numbers and deliver altered reports? Even Stanford Business School researchers noted, “Managers are inevitably less likely to disclose bad news than good news.”
In this world of business intelligence and uncertain economic times, having “One View of the Truth” and a culture of transparency is paramount to the success of a company. No more hiding behind the data. No more fudging the numbers. No more.
How do you create this transparent culture?
- Be willing to accept the bad news along with the good.
- Use technology that provides complete and up-to-date data.
- Make data widely available to everyone in the company.
Creating this cultural shift is not easy, but it’s vital to the life of businesses. Having all your data in one place will enable CMOs to accurately generate positive ROI, help sales effectively capture that needed sales intelligence, and make sure all that new data you’re generating is real-time and reliable.
See how others have approached and achieved a transparent culture. Download A Culture of Transparency: Do You Have What It Takes?