A traditional sales campaign typically involves a sales force following up on new leads from website inquiries, calls for more information, lists of purchased leads, and referrals. Your sales force (or maybe that’s you) makes calls to new leads, completes the “dog and pony show,” and then continues to follow up to turn that lead into a sale. Usually this effort can be easily measured. Either you see results or you don’t. The process is in black and white.

In marketing, measurable goals can seem a bit more gray. But they don’t have to be. Every time you implement a new marketing strategy, you must affirm that it is truly measurable. Otherwise, how else will you know if your time and money were well spent? Ultimately, the key here is to combine your sales and marketing efforts to get the maximum return on your investment. When you put these two together, measuring the end result becomes much easier.

Measuring marketing efforts can be a scary idea. Just as sales people have quotas, the marketing team needs a measure of accountability, because every dollar you spend on creating awareness (and ultimately sales) for your business should generate a return on that investment. Sometimes marketers are labeled expenses because they are known for spending, spending, and spending. In truth, your marketers are responsible for generating the leads that are delivered to closers.

There are ways to change this misconception. The first step is to create sales and marketing programs and initiatives that complement each other. Let’s take a look at some ways to do this and how you can make this work for you:

1. Brand Awareness – Marketers continually develop a brand or identity for a business, and while this may not lead to direct sales, these ongoing efforts are critical to generating long-term sales. Consistent and strong brand messages create an image that is most important to your customers, so when it comes time to buy, they think of you and not your competitor. If you ignored your brand and didn’t create a strong identity, your sales would suffer in the long run.

2. Measure brand activity: While it is important to create and maintain a strong brand identity, in today’s economic climate, that is simply not enough. You must create a way to effectively measure the impact of your brand. With the advent of online marketing and advertising, we can now measure this type of brand more easily. Now you can add call tracking or click tracking to your online ad campaigns and measure to what extent your efforts are having an impact and which are not. Don’t just assume that your brand is being recognized. Use it in ways that can be measured and calculated with an ROI.

3. Marketing is the sales arm of lead generation: As mentioned above, the sales force typically keeps track of leads, regardless of how they are generated. But how are they generated? Some can be purchased while others can result from referrals. Still, a good chunk of them usually come from your advertising, public relations, direct mail, and website activity that goes into a company’s marketing mix. One way to measure these efforts is to create tracking codes, separate links, or custom URLs (PURLs) for each piece of marketing to quantify how many leads a particular campaign can generate. Add language to a direct mail piece like, “Mention this postcard to receive a free widget.” Or create a promo code which is when a customer requests more information from your inquiry form on your website. These tactics will allow you to really determine where your potential customers are coming from.

Marketing and sales are not separate and distinct functions. They must work in sync to be effective and powerful. You may have to be a bit more creative in how you measure ROI, but it is possible to measure your marketing efforts just as easily as you are accountable for your sales tactics. If you continue to view sales and marketing as a package rather than individual entities, your overall efforts will also be easier to measure.