How to Improve Your Closed-Loop Reporting

The purpose of closed-loop reporting is to align your sales team and marketing team together, but you might be wondering: How do I set this up? How do I improve on our current system?

In a closed-loop situation, the marketing team reports all qualified leads they have generated to sales, while the sales team reports back to marketing on the outcome. By working together to constantly improve this process, the company as a whole can understand where they should focus their resources in order to reduce their sales cycle.

Connecting Your CRM and Marketing Software

Closing the loop connects your customer relationship software and marketing analytics in order to improve your company’s ROI. The CRM system will integrate the activities of your various teams while the marketing software will document data enabling improvements in optimization and results.

The progression of a closed-loop marketing situation is as follows:

1. A visitor arrives on your website.
2. A visitor browses around your website, viewing your pages and offers.
3. A visitor converts into a lead by downloading your content or filling out a form.
4. The lead is nurtured down the sales funnel
5. The lead then becomes a customer or client

The problem with closed-loop reporting is that it’s not a simple task. A broken loop is very easy to encounter and remains detrimental to your company’s ROI. Closed-loop reporting will allow your company to focus on the most dominant conversions further yielding an increase in results. The following are helpful ways to fix a broken loop within your company:

Set Tracking Codes and URLs

A tracking code must be in place on all pages and subdomains or your loop will be broken. The tracking code will not only connect your content to a specific campaign, but it will also allow for you to analyze what is being clicked on and how your visitors originally discovered your page. Data must back-up every marketing endeavor in order to analyze results and understand your company’s most prominent strategy.

Tracking codes are equally important for URLs associated with advertisements, emails, and marketing events. When creating a tracking code for each individual aspect of your marketing strategy, you are also tracking the corresponding results. This is vital when allocating which marketing efforts should be highly invested in, and where to consider a little revamping. Your ROI will directly correlate with the success of each individual marketing effort, ranging from an email campaign to blog articles shared on social media.  

Nurture All of Your Leads

Just because a particular lead is not moving towards the end of the buyer’s journey, don’t count them out just yet. Setting up lead nurturing according to their life cycle stage will be beneficial in the long run. An email campaign will keep these leads updated and informed so they will remain in touch with your company. Using each lead’s behaviors and interactions within your company will determine what information to provide to shorten the buying journey, and further capitalize on your inbound marketing efforts overall.  

Partner with the Sales Team

A closed loop requires marketing and sales to be on the same level. While the marketing team tracks each lead, the sales team must coincide with closing the right leads and at the right time. When the sales team is informed on your marketing strategies and lead nurturing, it is a much smoother process of converting leads into customers.