Analytics are useless if they’re not actually, you know, analyzed.

“Who visited your website yesterday? Who read your blog?”

“We … don’t know.”

“Do you have analytics?”

“I guess so. Maybe Google analytics?”

“Okay, but who paid attention to those numbers this week?”

“Um. Uh –”

Why pay attention to the numbers?

Monitoring user behavior lets you manage your pipeline. Your analytics will show trends in how users interact with your website and marketing content. See a high (>50%) bounce rate? It’s time to re-examine the messaging on your homepage. Are visitors not spending a lot of time on your website? Your content may not be resonating with them. Your analytics must allow for new insights to be identified — use them to improve your website and marketing materials _ you’ll build a stronger pipeline.

How often should you look at your numbers? We send two types of reports to our clients to gain a better understanding into how they are performing:

1. Daily reports: Let your marketing and sales team see who visited the website yesterday. Which prospects read the latest blog post? Which leads downloaded the latest white paper? Daily reports empower marketing and sales to respond promptly and appropriately to prospects and leads.
2. Weekly reports: See overall activity on your website: bounce rates, total visitors, traffic from search, time spent on your site, and more. Identify trends in user activity by examining how activity changes week-to-week. See a traffic spike during summer months? Give marketing and sales the data needed to capitalize on that trend to take advantage … before your competitors do.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

And you can’t measure what you don’t monitor. Maybe the biggest benefit of Sales & Marketing Management (S&MM) toolkit is that it pays attention for you, responds for you, tugs at your sleeve when you should pick up the phone to close a sale. Analytics actually made useful 24/7/365.

Who should be using modern marketing automation? “Anyone selling anything” is a smartass answer, but more seriously, S&MM is a collection of tools especially for high-ticket sales. Complex sales. Considered purchases where you need multiple touch points to close the deal, where a “buyer’s journey” goes from suspect > prospect > lead > hot lead > buyer > repeat customer > brand recommender.

Do you offer B2B intangible services or complex products or investments that require trust-building before commitment? Monitoring user behavior lets you manage your pipeline.

You can analyze the ROI of every marketing tactic when you follow each step of the buyer’s journey, recording prospect actions in your CRM.  You can double down on the ads/emails/search terms/freemiums that work best, and reallocate spending away from unproductive efforts, messages or market segments. Cha-ching.

Turbocharge sales while subtracting sales grunt work. Clients who fully engage with practical analytics often grow sales – by turning “B” salespeople into all-stars. Since better analytics usually reveal the miserable ROI of cold calling, OG dinosaur tactics give way to warm calling and incoming calls. Cha-ching again.

Sounds exciting. But – which MA platform? Good question. Should you deploy Marketo or HubSpot or SharpSpring or Pardot or InfusionSoft or ActOn or Eloqua … or any of a dozen others? It can be confusing, especially because all those feature sets seem similar and yet some platforms will cost you ten times as much as others. For realz.