By Steve Woods, Eloqua CTO & Bluewolf Guest Blogger

The idea that marketing is virtually impossible to measure is nearly as old as the discipline itself.  Since its earliest days, people have talked of the concept of “closing the loop” and being able to see what effect each effort is having on driving revenue.  It wasn’t surprising then, that as we started talking about the discipline of Revenue Performance Management last year, we were met with a bit of skepticism.  Why now, when it’s been talked about for so long?  What makes it possible, and why was that not possible previously?

Those are fair questions, and the right ones to be asking.  There’s never been much doubt that if you could understand the effect of each dollar of sales and marketing investment on revenue it would be beneficial.  The only question was how?  Each attempt to understand marketing’s effect on revenue in longer buying processes was confounded by the fact that there were almost always multiple touchpoints with multiple buyers in a process.  Each system would understand one type of touchpoint, but not the others, and be left with a picture that was impossible to complete.

As we talked with, and learned from, the early customers who were building out the analytics, processes, and insights that we began to call Revenue Performance Management, we realized that this was being enabled by a much broader trend in the market.  The tools that marketers were using to connect with buyers, engage them, interact with them, and understand them, had all gradually progressed to the cloud.  Events were being managed in SaaS tools like Cvent, webinars were running in web-native platforms like ReadyTalk and On24, data was being sourced through online crowdsourced platforms like ZoomInfo and Jigsaw, PowerPoint presentation were being shared on Slideshare, technical questions were being answered on social communities like Jive and Lithium - the list was virtually endless.

As we looked at this trend – all the ways that buyers sought and found information being in the cloud, we realized that a new possibility had emerged.  Each of these touchpoints in the buying process could be understood from one common viewpoint.  By using Cloud Connectors to bring this buyer data into one system, and create a single view of buyer behavior across all interactions, it became possible to develop one view of the truth in terms of how revenue was generated.  From this one view of the truth, it became possible to see where investments could be made, where they should be reduced, and how best to maximize revenue growth.

Revenue Performance Management is possible, at long last, because of the fact that the majority of marketers’ and sales professionals’ systems have now migrated to the cloud.  With that migration, it becomes possible to understand buyers across all their touchpoints in the buying process, and with that, understand how to maximize demand generation and revenue growth.  It will be an exciting year ahead as this long-awaited goal of marketers everywhere moves into the realm of the possible.

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