In this series, we will walk you through the necessary steps for building an effective and revenue-generating marketing plan. You need to make sure you:

1. Reverse engineer your goals. Have a clear understanding of your targets before you hop into executing your tactics.
2. Take a deep dive into your pipeline and review what is closing next quarters. Additionally, review the historical percentage of the pipeline that has been pushed to future quarters.
3. Understand the stages’ velocity.
4. Identify the needed pipeline coverage target.
5. Align your marketing programs and campaigns with your revenue goals and budget.
6. Monitor performance. It’ll help to have transparency on how your programs perform and fix things that don’t work as soon as possible.

Let’s look at each step closely.

To head off this dreaded question marketers must pivot to understanding and speaking more sales-based metrics. Preventing it is wonderful but what happens if you have this problem now?

In this article, we are going to offer a cheat sheet to try and help the marketer with short-term bluebirds. Before we do, we will explore how our clients have tackled the issue. We will start with how to see the need for bluebirds forming, where to find bluebirds, and preventing the need for bluebird revenue.

REVERSE ENGINEER YOUR GOALS

Let’s dive into the first step, reverse engineering your goals. What’s the reverse engineering of marketing goals about? In this post we define it as the process of deconstructing and analyzing the desired outcomes or objectives of a marketing team, revenue in our case, and working backward to determine the steps and strategies needed to achieve the desired revenue outcomes. 

Here are six things to get you started:

1. Begin with your revenue goal and divide by your average selling price to determine how many deals your company needs to win.

2. Calculate your conversion rates between each sales and marketing stage. As an example, if your company had 3 stages MQL-Demo-Won and the conversion rate between each stage is 20%. We want to get 20 Won Deals, therefore we need 20*5 = 100 Demo, and number of MQLs is going to be 100*5 = 500.

3. Now calculate how long it takes MQLs to become Demos and Demos to become Won Deals.

4. With these metrics you can assemble your marketing strategy. Answer questions such as:
   • In order to win deals in Q4, when do you need to produce the MQLs?
   • Which campaigns, programs, and channels can produce these MQLs?

5. Compare the available budget and bandwidth to the needed production. Use these constraints to align the marketing team around a plan of action.

6. Review outputs and outcomes weekly to ensure your calculated conversion rates are on track and adjust as needed.

COMBINE  EVERYTHING TOGETHER

Failure to focus on your revenue goals in the planning process may result in failing to reach your goals. Let’s look at steps that can be taken in the way of aligning your campaigns with revenue targets and funds available.

1. Examine your pipeline and identify what is already there. Based on what you see, how many deals do you need to add to your pipeline to reach your goals?
   
   
2. Understand all the marketing programs you’re currently running. Once you organize your scheduled marketing activities in a clear view, look at it in terms of pipeline. Answer the question: what will be added to the pipeline based on those plans? Keep in mind that you need to examine your entire marketing calendar, and what we mean by this is you need to consider all the programs that just finished running, are running, or will be running in the future, and will affect the pipeline for this quarter. Another important thing to keep in mind is to monitor your marketing activities often to make sure that everything’s performing as expected. If it doesn’t, you need to adjust them as soon as possible. Do you always have real-time data handy?
   
   
3. Now, when you know how much you already have in your pipeline combined with predicted value that is going to be delivered by your planned (current) marketing campaigns and programs, you can see the gap between where you are today versus where you need to be from a revenue perspective. This can help you identify how much you still need to add to your pipeline to hit your goal. It’s important to understand the gap as soon as possible so you can have enough time to add new programs and campaigns to your calendar to close this gap.
   
   
4. Figure out the available budget. Do you still have an unassigned budget? Great! It will give you the advantage of adding new marketing activities that will help you to close the gap. However, when you add those items to your calendar, remember about velocity, that it’s not going to be the same for different types of tactics. But what if you don’t have an available budget left? The answer is hiding inside of your pipeline again. Look at your current pipeline and find the items that can be reactivated.

Following these steps will help you to ensure that you are on track to achieve your revenue goals. What you need to keep in mind is that things may not always go as planned. For different reasons, your campaigns may not always perform as you expected. You need to monitor their performance closely, so let’s go over some useful tips on how to do this in the most efficient way.