Campaign Planning for Sales and Marketing Teams
Coming up with a campaign idea is quite easy but planning and executing it… ohhh well you might know that answer - that usually takes a lot of time, patience and coordination.
You want to deliver successful campaigns to meet your business objectives? Then please, keep reading…
Best is to start with the right ingredients that are crucial for the planning and execution of your campaign. Campaigns are 35% more likely to be successful if you stick to the following ingredients. List of campaign ingredients:
The Goal - WHAT - What do you try to achieve? What are the Milestones?
Roles - Ownership / Responsibilities - Who Owns the project VS who contributes to it?
$$$- Budget
The How - How are you going to achieve your campaign goals?
Project Management (Accountability) - Manage the process - Hold people accountable
Tracking - Measure the success of your campaign
Now it’s time to dig deeper in each of these areas to get you step by step closer to a successful campaign management plan.
The What - Your Campaign Goal
Are you leading a team? You work across different departments on campaigns? Or are you simply running campaigns on your own?
No matter what, always try to be respectful of your and other people's time. There is nothing else that can save you more time than a well thought through goal. The consequence of not having a goal is that you and your team will end up nowhere.
Even worse, imagine your Manager asks you how successful your campaign was? What would you answer if you don’t have a clear goal that you can track towards? So let’s first think of the types of campaign goals that you can set:
Brand Awareness (x amount of people should see my ad)
More Leads (x amount of leads from campaign x)
More Sales Meetings (x amount meetings for sales from campaign x)
More Pipeline (x amount of pipeline for sales)
More Revenue (x amount of closed pipeline)
Etc.
The most common goal is pipeline / revenue and the closest to that are sales meetings. So the more meetings you can get for sales, the more pipeline you will be able to generate over time.
So how high do you set your campaign meeting goal if that's the first time you are doing it and you don’t have any experience? The answer is - calculate it.
The fastest way is by going back to your data, checking how many people you have contacted over the last 3 months - let’s say those were around 2000 - and how many meetings you have got - let’s say around 200. This data will give you a glimpse on how high your goal has to be considering the type of campaign you drive. It is also ok to just come up with a goal that you think is achievable e.g. 20 sales meetings from the campaign. Important is that you have a goal as your north star and that you can track your team's efforts against it.
The amazing thing about the tracking is that you can always go back to that data and use it when planning new campaigns.
Roles - Ownership / Responsibilities
If you are like us then you might not only have one campaign or project but several over time and sometimes across multiple departments (Marketing, Sales, Product, etc.). See picture below:
The more people that are involved the harder it actually is to get anything done. Our data shows that campaigns with 1-3 people involved are 3x faster and 40% more likely to be successful than campaigns with 3-8 or even more people involved.
What can we learn from that? First, don’t have too many people involved in your campaigns and always make sure to give clear ownership to everyone - no matter how many people are involved.
Who is the lead of the project? This is the person that makes sure to:
Set the goals and clear expectations
Give responsibilities to other team mates, manages them and holds them accountable
Time Management - Manages weekly check ins and that team mates meet their deadlines
Track the progress of the campaign
Reports the results of the campaign back to the leadership team
Include all people that are crucial for the campaigns success and that are contributing to the campaign.
$$$- Budget
Unfortunately - almost nothing in life is free - at least when it comes to marketing and sales campaigns. So let’s have a look at the potential costs that you have for a given campaign. There are smaller campaigns that don’t have a lot of costs included such as outbound campaigns:
Email Tools
Costs for prospecting
And please don’t forget your time ;)
But there are also campaigns where marketing and sales collaborate, or product collaboration - which can come with a lot more costs. Let’s have a look at the example of trade shows which are soon coming back - what are the costs for such a show?
Booth
Batches (entry to the show for your team)
Catering (sometimes needed)
Travel costs (hotel, flights, etc.)
Digital marketing
Outbound Sales (prospecting, tooling, etc.)
Parties
etc.
Keep track of your costs so that nothing can surprise you - not even a manager who wants to know if you are still on budget.
The How
How and where do you start now to get to your goal of x sales meetings? That’s probably the toughest question for most companies and teams to answer. We now know the What - our goals, the responsible people and the budget. But do we also know how to achieve our goals? Is it impossible?
I can tell you - It’s not! The good thing is that most things have already been done before. Similar to a Playbook in football or any other sport. There are proven processes that can help you win! There are Playbooks out there for almost everything in business - especially for campaigns.
How to get more Leads/Meetings through Trade-Shows
How to get more revenue with marketing and sales campaigns
How to get quickly Marketing Qualified Leads
How to predictable generate leads through content marketing
How to …
Do you have access to them? Yes you have. Email gerald.zankl@kickscale.com and get your free playbooks that set you up for success. Here are just a few of them:
The cool thing about Playbooks is that you can and should always create them yourself. Playbooks are the best practices of your business that you want everyone to follow so that they can succeed as well. How does a typical playbook look like? It is a summary of procedures / tasks & actions that have proven successful for your business?
How do you start if you don’t have any best practices? Test Test Test - You should always be creating and tracking your own Playbooks and share the successful ones with the rest of the team.
So what do you do if you have your first playbooks? It is important to make your Playbooks actionable - they should be a standard operating procedure that all team members can follow.
How are we doing it?
We write successful processes down - yes, we really take our time to write down every little detail around the methods so that we can easily share them with other people and they can follow them. Believe me, it is worth the time. You have a bigger time commitment at the beginning when creating the playbooks but it will pay of later on - your team will become stellar!
What does this look like? Let’s take a look at the example of an outbound email campaign. Such a campaign has several steps in its process: Kick-off Meeting, Prospecting, Creating Templates, Email Automation and Tracking - and each comes with a set of sub tasks.
Each of those steps has its difficulties. But you can write the best practices down and add them as descriptions. See for example below the best practice on how to write cold email templates:
You can build your whole Playbook this way and share it with your entire team to ensure that everyone is following the same successful process. The next step is even more important because it shows how you can make all of that know-how applicable.
Project Management (Accountability)
Do you have your first Playbook ready? Or did you take one of ours that has proven to be successful?
Well, now it’s time to apply the Playbook and to assign the tasks to your team. Every procedure and task needs to be assigned to a person who is responsible for getting that done.
This is even more important the more people you have on your project. You ultimately want to know about the status and progress of your campaigns so that you can report that back to the leadership. Here is an example of that - This is for our brand campaign which was a collaboration of the brand and digital marketing team: (Note: by opening the button under tasks, you get a well defined set of sub tasks and descriptions that guide every person through the process.
Tracking and Reporting
What do you try to achieve? What are the Milestones?
The usual question that the leadership comes with is - How can you deliver more pipeline? You will need to track all your campaigns accurately in order to answer that question.
Always remember, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Always make sure to have a goal assigned to each of your campaigns. We usually go with sales meetings and pipeline created. This is especially important if you have outbound email campaigns, trade shows, and other sales campaigns.
You ultimately want to answer the following questions with your tracking:
Campaign Analytics:
What was the outcome of each campaign?
What were the most successful campaigns?
Which campaigns should we re-do? And which one’s should we avoid doing?
Team Analytics:
Who contributed the most to your campaign's outcome?
Who needs improvement and what can they improve?
Trend Analytics:
How many campaigns do you usually need to generate x amounts of sales meetings and x amounts of pipeline?
Is there a trend between sales meetings and pipeline generated?
You can easily answer all these questions if you track it down in your campaigns.
Let’s have a look at an example of the trend analytics below: Green shows the number of meetings and red the number of opportunities. - we can see that the # of sales meetings is definitely related to the # of pipeline generated.
And how do you get more sales meetings? - through more campaigns and for that you will need to know which of your campaigns and team mates are performing best.
Start tracking today to improve your future decision making! Automate your campaign planning and tracking with our platform - Signup for a FREE TRIAL!