Start off by making sure you have a clear understanding of the vision and business goals of your company. Make sure there are no discrepancies between how you envision the company goals, versus how the rest of management does.

The best way to do that is the good old SMART goals method i.e setting clear goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timebound. As this is not a general business strategy post, I will not go into much detail on this point, yet I will mention that smart goals are a great method yet should be used carefully. You do not want to enter a state of mind that locks you down to only attempting achievable things. Combine smart goals with stretch goals and always remember the latter. A company that does not shoot for the stars, doesn’t stand a chance of getting there (If the subject of combining practical goals with stretch goals interests you, I strongly recommend reading Charles Duhigg’s bestseller “Smarter faster better“, specifically the chapter about GE and how legendary CEO Jack Welch paired the two back in the 80s).

Let’s take an example of a SaaS company’s smart goal to “grow the number of core customers who buy a yearly subscription by 10% within the next year”. If the company has 10,000 core customers with a yearly subscription, this would mean they would need to add 1,000 new yearly subscribers within a time frame of 12 months (in order to simplify the example I’m not taking into consideration natural churn rates).

Now let’s dive in and figure out how to turn business goals such as the above to marketing actions.

If you identify your problem in converting visitors to leads, i.e. you have enough visitors on your website, yet they don’t progress down the funnel, evaluate the following:

• Is your traffic random or relevant? This ties back to the top of the funnel. Who are your efforts targeting?
• Are you taking action to convert the visitors or are you relaying on chance or strong intent that your prospects may not have at this stage of the funnel?

Possible methods to cure this problem:

• Revisit your top of the funnel and make sure you are attracting the right visitors
• Use content offers, landing pages, forms, calls to actions and gated content to convert the visitors

In the SaaS company example, it would be a good idea to invite visitors to download an eBook or other content offer in exchange for filling out a form and providing their email thus turning them into a lead.

If you have plenty of leads, yet your conversion rates are low, the bottom of the funnel needs attending. There could be numerous reasons for this to happen:

• Your targeting isn’t focused enough and therefore you are capturing irrelevant leads
• Your sales team is pitching to them when they are not yet ready to buy
• Your sales team is pitching to them at the right timing with respect to their readiness to buy, however, they are not yet ready to buy from you – they don’t trust you yet

If when speaking with your leads your sales team’s feedback is that the leads are irrelevant, revisit the top and middle of the funnel (stop it, sales aren’t your enemy, collaborate with them and make love not war).

Otherwise, if sales are struggling with readiness issues, the secret lies in lead nurturing. The bottom of the funnel is the stage to nurture your leads, gain their trust, and only approach them once you identify that they are ready to buy, and from you.

Possible methods:

• Email workflows – stay in touch with your leads and keep adding value and educating them. Send them relevant content and build their trust. Do this using triggered automated actions based on a lead’s behavior. Most email marketing platforms provide this function (mailchimp, aweber etc)
• Lead scoring – rank your leads in accordance with their current engagement with your company and relevancy to your company. Possible criteria: job position, company size, number of forms the lead filled out, number of emails they opened, number of CTAs they clicked on, the nature of the content they read on your website (a strong indication of their level of readiness) and so on.

In the SaaS example, a good way to push a prospect down the buyer’s journey would be to send the CTO and automatic email with an eBook right after she fills out a form requesting the content. Then, proceeding to sending a series of emails inviting her to read educative blog posts. Then further on, depending on her engagement and lead score, to send her an email inviting her to a free evaluation call with one of the company experts. Using lead scoring and evaluating her engagement, sales would be able to pitch to her in correlation with her relevancy to the company, state of readiness and intent. This could save lots of time that the company may currently be wasting as a result of sales reaching out to irrelevant leads.