We’ve built our business around helping our clients transition their marketing organizations through the different stages of the journey to Revenue Marketing™. There are four distinct stages of Revenue Marketing Transformation™ — Traditional, Lead Generation, Demand Generation, and Revenue Marketing. The journey helps you identify where you are today, and also provides insight into where your organization can be.

As you read through each stage below, consider how moving through this journey can help you provide Sales with better qualified leads, your head of sales with help managing the top of the funnel, and your C-suite with new ways to create revenue.

Traditional marketing is characterized by the 4 Ps – Product, Promotion, Placement and Price. Millions of marketing organizations operate in the Traditional Marketing Stage. Marketing is a pure cost center at this stage, and focuses on branding, product marketing, marketing communications and public relations. Metrics include budget to actual spend and impressions.

Lead Generation marketers are responsible for providing leads to sales, though there isn’t an agreement between them as to what constitutes a qualified lead. They typically invest in organic and paid search, advertising, list purchases, and a siloed email system. Metrics include emails sent, open rate, click through rate, form submits and cost per lead.

Demand Generation is the first stage that begins providing tangible revenue contribution from marketing. This stage relies on alignment of the sales and marketing teams to pull high quality leads into the top of the funnel, and pull opportunities through the funnel faster. Fewer than 10,000 organizations have reached this phase.

Organizations in Demand Generation have invested in a marketing automation (MA) system and have integrated it with CRM. Key metrics include: Number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) sent to sales, percent conversion to opportunity, percent conversion to close, percent contribution to pipeline and number of days to close.

Revenue Marketing increases sales-ready leads at the top of the funnel, then accelerates opportunities through the sales pipeline. In this stage, revenue generated and attributed to marketing is now repeatable, predictable, and scalable, allowing marketing to both report on and forecast revenue. The VP of Revenue Marketing is able to create a forecast that aligns tightly with sales to ensure the revenue goal is reached. Only about 500 marketing organizations are in the Revenue Marketing stage.