If you’re on a marketing team or running one and not thinking about the company’s revenue goals, it’s time to start thinking about the company’s revenue goals. Welcome to TradePending TV.

Marketing’s job at any dealership is to help the company sell more. Period. That’s it. Everything that the marketing department does should be in support of that goal.

That means that marketing needs to know the business’s revenue goals, and then needs a plan to help them achieve it.

It really means that you’re tying marketing’s goals to the sales team’s goals to the overall revenue goals. How should you go about doing that?

Step 1 – figure out what kind of information you’re tracking today that reflects marketing touches or influence on your sold vehicles. This usually takes the form of “lead source” in your CRM

Step 1A – if you’ve got none of that today, work with your CRM company and your vendors to start tracking that information.

Step 2 – Look at that data quarter by quarter and for the last year to get a baseline of what % of revenue that marketing has been contributing in the past. 

Is marketing influencing 50% of new sales? 80%? 90%? The number itself doesn’t matter too much, what matters is what you do with it. 

Side note: There’s a whole big can of worms we can open here regarding what gets credit. The first touch, the last touch, a blend, a weighted average?

If you’re just starting out with this, pick the one that makes the most sense for you and is simplest to measure, and start there. The “last touch” someone had with marketing is an easy place to start.

So what do you do with that % number of marketing influence?

Step 3 is to evaluate which lead sources are performing the best or worst, and then figure out how you can double down on what’s working and determine what you need to change or drop from the underperformers.

Step 4 – set some new goals to determine if you can increase marketing’s contribution to your revenue targets based upon this new intel that you’ve got. 

Your final step is to report back up the monthly and quarterly influence, clearly communicating that your numbers are tied directly to the dealership’s revenue goals.