The ROI Roadmap: Decoding B2B Marketing Success Metrics

 

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers. If this is your first time, welcome. And if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. You’re about to hear a recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the accomplished marketing leaders of CMO Huddles, a community that’s always sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness. The leaders of this episode are Jamie Gier of Dexcare, six-time CMO Grant Johnson previously of Billtrust, and Julia Goebel of Komodo Health. Our discussion covers the all-important topic of marketing metrics, how to tell if your pipeline is healthy, and the challenges of lagging indicators, and the harder-to-measure parts of marketing that also contribute to overall success. Share this with that one colleague who is obsessed with developing the perfect metrics dashboard, one that shows the board and the C-suite that marketing’s strategic seat at the table is vital. And if you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. Alright, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to CMO Huddles Studio, the live-streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I’m your host Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. A few months back we convened a task force with seven veteran B2B CMOs to radically simplify marketing metrics, and help marketing leaders make the case for a range of metrics beyond pipeline and revenue. This is no small challenge given the different roles marketing plays depending on the business type, category maturity, company growth stage, C-suite understanding of marketing, and the financial backers. But we’re up for big challenges here at CMO Huddles, which is why we’re continuing to seek guidance on metrics that matter, not just what your investors are prescribing, but also the ones that help CMOs make better, more informed decisions. So with that, let’s bring on Jamie Gier, CMO of Dexcare, and a returning guest who previously appeared on the show to discuss the first 90 days for CMOs and B2B board management. Hello, Jamie, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Jamie: Good morning or afternoon to the audience. I am in Seattle.

Drew: Awesome. So let’s get into this. At Dexcare, I know you’re putting the foundation in place for tracking and reporting. What are the metrics that matter, metrics that your investors care about? And then, you know, what are the ones that matter, really, to you and how do you get there? So launch into it.

Jamie: I will launch into it. Let me provide some context because I think it’s important depending on your company, as you know, and your stage and your sales cycle, you’re probably going to use different types of metrics. So let me just give some context real quickly. Our company is in the healthcare technology space, we sell to large hospitals and health systems, we are enterprise technology, the SaaS play, our sales cycles can range anywhere from 12 to 18 months. And they’re comprised of a buying committee typically of six key buyers, across different departments, who are all motivated by different things. And so I set that stage because it’ll illuminate why we’re focused on certain metrics.

From that perspective, you’re having to do a lot of engagement work across an entire organization and multiple buyers. So our metrics that we look at is obviously things like pipeline contribution at the account level. But what’s also important is that we have to make sure that all influencers of that buying committee are engaged and bought in and persuaded to want to do business with us. And so we also look at: Do we have the right stakeholders engaged? How engaged are they and are they moving along through their journey as well? And so we do look at it from those two perspectives. I know in B2B marketing, it’s all about the account, the account, the account, which is true because you’re selling to an entity, but at the end of the day, you’re selling to people who make a decision for that organization. So pipeline contribution in terms of how many accounts we’re passing through, if there’s already an existing opportunity open, but we don’t have the right players engaged, then we have metrics set for rounding out the buyer committee and people who are now showing interest in that. So we call those qualifications or what we traditionally call leads at the person level, but not just filling the funnel.

I actually oversee the SDR team now, too, so we’re on the hook for actually opening up what we call stage two opportunities. So that’s another metric that we look at, but not only as to opportunities where they’ve already gone through a formal qualification but to even have more skin in the game we have metrics on how many of those actually progressed to a stage four. And so there’s a lot around conversion and velocity and progression that we measure. So those are the bigger metrics, Drew, that we focus on. But as marketers know, there’s a lot of other things that indicate whether you’re going to be successful in hitting those that are more efficiency metrics, whether that’s CPM, CPC, the performance of your campaigns, outcome metrics, like velocity and conversion rates. I think for us everything is around conversion rates and how fast and quickly we’re moving things.

As an organization, we’ve done some very sophisticated modeling that starts at the closed one and backs out in terms of how much pipeline do you have to have every month, every quarter. We’ve designed a model around how quickly do you need to move them through the pipeline and how much pipeline do you need both weighted and unweighted.

Drew: So alright, we’re gonna try to slice this and parse this down a little bit, in our remaining one-on-one time, several things. So in the back end of this, I’ll start at the end and we’ll work our way backwards. You talked about the model and what I’m imagining is, you’re saying that in order to reach your revenue targets, you have to close a certain amount of business. And based on past performance of if we have 10 stage four, we might close. Three of those might become revenue this quarter or next quarter so because of that you have sort of targets in terms of stages, right, is that sort of the model we’re talking about?

Jamie: That is absolutely correct. Because at the end of the day, Drew, we have to get to a degree of predictability, but for pipeline and revenue, and that’s where sales and marketing are hyper-aligned. And that allows us to forecast better, but to have an understanding of what that pipeline health has to look at, not just in the sales pipeline at these various stages, but at the very moment that they become engaged with us.

Drew: Okay, so this is where I get really sort of fussy, I feel like, if we look at stage two, stage four, there’s could be a year’s worth of activity. That happened, that’s gonna figure out whether or not they become stage two or stage four. And so I know all eyes of the business, I know the investors, I know the CEO, the CFO are looking at stage two, stage four, stage six opens, you know, that number, because that’s revenue, and you can sort of build a business on revenue. But that’s lagging, right? All this other stuff has to happen before you can get there. So help me understand from your standpoint, how you know that if we back up to this, you know, stage four, which you’re responsible for, that you’re going to get there? What are those metrics, those earlier standard metrics.

Jamie: This is where I’ve spent quite a bit of my time in the past six months at DexCare. When I came into this role a little over a year ago, the commercial organization had it pretty dialed in for stage two plus, because that’s where they focused. We didn’t have the infrastructure in place to really understand and have insights into what’s driving everyone to that stage two to begin with. So we’ve spent the past six months putting the infrastructure in place so that we can capture all of the required data to understand buyer behavior. To your point, Drew, what is leading them? What’s leading up to them becoming an opportunity in the first place and what are the right marketing motions?

We just spent six months designing that, so we had to bring in some additional technologies, we had to really improve our data flows, we had to have common language between marketing and sales on what is a lead or a qualification. What does that process need to look like? And we did a lot of work to be able to get that in place. So now that we have a unified funnel between marketing and sales, we can start capturing those insights in terms of what engagements actually matter, to persuade and influence somebody to want to do business with us and select us as a vendor of choice.

We didn’t have that in place. Fast forward to today, all of our campaign information is loaded into our platform. We use Salesforce, we did implement Demandbase so that we could have more of the account-level insights and persona-level insights across the buyer journey, you know, at the very earliest moments of them becoming familiar with us. So now we’re looking at how effective is our paid media? How effective is email? How effective are the events that we conduct? And by the way, everything in our business is about relationships and trust. So even our offline activities of those engagements and meetings are super important. So we’re having to capture that.

Right now we have insights and we can look at every single way that an account or person has engaged with us and start making some conclusions around did that progress them into a further and deeper relationship with us. But it started with having the foundation in place and having the data and the data accuracy so that we feel confident in what we’re looking at and the insights that we have.

Drew: Right. Okay. There are so many more questions I have for you. But we’ve got two other guests. So we’re going to come back and you’ll join us in the conversation because this is a great table setter. So thank you for that. Now, let’s bring on Grant Johnson, CMO at Billtrust and an industry expert who has graced our stage before to delve into the topic of implementing ABM and getting organizational buy-in. Hello, Grant. Great to see you again.

Grant: Hey, great to see you, Drew. Great to be here with this distinguished panel.

Drew: Oh my gosh. So where are you this fine day?

Grant: Well, I’m in now-sunny Southern California. Yes, we’ve had a major rainstorm, which means this afternoon, I’m gonna go play some tennis.

Drew: I love it. I love it. We got to get on the tennis court someday. I just have to get my self back to Southern California. Alright. Let’s talk about Billtrust marketing metrics, and how they’ve evolved since you’ve started there.

Grant: It’s been an interesting journey and it’s been a fun journey. Like a lot of my peers, the metrication of marketing is ongoing. You know, I arrived, we had something called the revenue engine, which is a very sophisticated Excel spreadsheet. And being owned by private equity and having ambitions to get to half a billion and beyond, we decided to instrument the entire sales and marketing operations. So we have a Power BI dashboard that basically has any metric you could want to track. You have to turn what are the most important things—we’ll talk about that later—it’s at your fingertips. 

So if you look at it, it’s kind of hard to read, it’s all Power BI dashboard, you can do any visualization dashboard. You see at the top right sales and marketing, the standard thing to see like MQLs, performance program, the type of campaigns we do, channel performance, this reseller channel, it’s like if it’s owned, or it’s paid, you know, it’s digital, or it’s content syndication, the ROI of everything, of course, and then we have pipeline stages, and then we have bookings because at the end of the day business is all that matters for us.

And what you see here, I can’t show the actual numbers, it’s proprietary. But we could see here, it’s just a snapshot, we actually tracked by each sales team, we have corporate, we have mid-market, we have enterprise, various verticals. And we have various contributors, you see team source, last touch. And so you know, there’s variations of how much is in our ICP and reasons why it’s not in our ideal customer profile, or it is. And this allows us to have very contextually rich, you know, meaningful conversations about the numbers with our commerce.

And just you know, as Jamie said, I own the pipeline. We have a meeting coming up after this call, actually, with the sales leadership and my marketing leadership just to review kind of where we are in February, what our goals are for Q1, and going forward to build the pipeline together. So the metrics help us have, you know, a very objective concrete dialog.

Drew: First of all, thank you for sharing the dashboard. And second of all, I am imagining that having this dashboard is a game-changer in that suddenly, you know, there’s a sense of control when maybe there isn’t as much control as they might want, but there’s a sense that we have a pipeline, this is how it’s progressing. These are where the things go, but—and it’s—you know, what you shared, of course, was the SQLs. How long did it take to build that sort of, if you will, that dashboard?

Grant: We have dedicated marketing analysts. And it took about two and a half months, there’s a whole logic behind it, working with Salesforce, getting clean data. But you allude to something else, having this control, if I go back to my one year, like Jamie, a little over a year here, you know, the PE and the board are asking questions. You know, it’s just moving from public company Billtrust to private equity ownership, you know, why is this number different? Tell me about this trend. You know, it’s been crickets the last two quarters because you know, we’ve got the numbers. They can go look at the numbers, we report every quarter to the board but also to give you an example, I got a Slack yesterday from the CFO, this is great. We all have to build relationships with our partners in the C-suite, CEO, CFO, CRO, and so on. And he says, “Hey, Grant, I’m looking at Q2 and Q3, how’s that look?” You know, he’s kind of looking ahead. He owns the consolidated reporting. I said, “Hey, I’m meeting with the head of sales tomorrow. You know, here’s where it was compared to last year. Yeah, we had a week off in January, because we did SQLs, therefore, it’s a little bit slower but you know, we’re talking about a week.” And so “Hey, great, thank you.” So that was a very short Slack conversation where it could have been, you know, we had to have a meeting on it in the past, right? Because the numbers tell the story. And you know, if you’re on target, short or ahead of target and where and why.

Drew: No doubt, every executive wants a predictable revenue flow. And you said, “One business was the only thing that mattered.” And I want to just—I want to pause on that. Because I suspect that’s not really true. I mean, I get it. But it’s so problematic, right? Because one business is not the only thing that matters, but you go into a deep recession or some other external factors. And you know, your budget gets cut or new entry or somebody discounts. There’s so many other factors involved here. And maybe you’re right, none of that matters, that’s all excuses. For the CEO, the only thing they care about is one business.

Grant: You know, that’s fair. We were on a CMO Huddle yesterday about demand capture that you hosted. We do a lot of stuff with demand capture, with sales stage progression, as Jamie was talking about, you know, looking by team, you know, by various cohorts, you know, how long in this stage? What are the reasons you lose from this stage to that stage? You certainly don’t want to get—we have five stages—you don’t get to stage four, and not win at least half those deals, right? So stage one to two, you lose a few. Hey, you didn’t spend all that time, whatever your sales cycle is. But I think all the components matter, the quality of communications, reaching your audience effectively, being relevant, having a variety of ways to engage. We all live 24/7, whether we’re online or out in the real world. And so you can’t just have one tactic. I think all that stuff adds up to getting you to the finish line. You’re right. Ultimately, you’re judged by, did we make the quarter whether you’re public or private, or not, did we meet or exceed expectations, but you’re right, I put a lot of energy as does my team and all the components tree of marketing, the analyst relations, public relations, social media, thought leadership, all these things add up to having your demand gen engine work, and work better or not so well.

Drew: Pardon me while I think about quarterly. Quarters tend to be lumpy. And obviously, that’s a problem. Customers don’t always perform exactly the way you’d want them to. So they say, “You know what, I’m not gonna make that decision this quarter.” And in fact, we know in the last 12-18 months, that’s been a lot of folks. Quarters are tough. So it just means filling the pipeline that much more. Let’s go back while we’re talking about pipeline. The issue I keep hitting with pipeline is that it’s a lagging indicator of all the other things that you’ve done. It’s not a leading indicator. It is a leading indicator of you might close business. For a marketer, how do you make a decision based on where pipeline is today? Because whatever you do today is going to have an impact on pipeline six months from now. So my question for you is, what are the things that you look at that will say to you predictively, you are going to hate your pipeline in Q3 or Q4? Here we are in Q1.

Grant: I go back to my wonderful analysts. And I can’t mention his name. But we actually built another model where we look at pipeline build and pipe that could get the decision to within a given quarter. So let’s say we’re gonna build over 100 million of pipeline this year. I can’t share the exact number, north of that, and a lot of it were going to be building especially with enterprise deals. Larger mid-market deals will be for next year. And so we have good historical, Billtrust has been in business for 20 years, I’ve got at least a couple good years of data. And we can see how much is going to happen. And then there are other things that I look at. We look at, you know, we need a 4x coverage at the beginning of the quarter. Now, that’ll go down as you close deals or some get pushed out. But that’s sort of our multiple. Everybody has different multiples, maybe by segment, and we look at pipeline quality health, and we’re in it together with sales. Hey, look, you don’t wait to the beginning quarter, then a quarter, then you clean the pipeline. It should be a rigor that happens all the time. So we have the best data that we could project. But there are other things that are leading indicators. And I love the way you’ve differentiated leading and lagging. Like, you know, we’re going to do an insight annual event, as we call our event. And if we blow out registration, that’s going to be a positive sign, right? You know, the number of case studies customers are willing to sign up for to, you know, I call it documenting success that are willing to testify that we’re a great partner. Our web vitality, we were all green in January. Now I expect that there’ll be a low December. What if we were red in January? That would have been, you know, a leading indicator. Hey, something they’re not coming to the website, they’re not converting to hand-raisers, why not? So I think you have to look at all these metrics together with your partners in sales, and you get a better sense of whether you can be more predictable. Still, you’re going to, there’s going to be variables where, you know, for some reason, you say some customer that you thought was going to buy didn’t buy this quarter and didn’t buy at all, or some deal got doubled in size because you’re able to sell more value. So there are things that you can do, but you want to have as much predictability based on all the metrics, measures, and discussions you have on an ongoing basis.

Drew: So you have leading indicators that will give you a sense that you’re gonna get to your lagging indicators down the road. Now, you did mention 4x coverage. And for folks that are listening that aren’t sure what you meant, I’m going to rephrase it and say you deliver four times the opportunities to sales and they’re expected to close one any given period of time. Is that basically the way that math works?

Grant: Yeah, that’s our average. I’ve had different averages with different companies.

Drew: Okay, so one in four. So you need them to have four opportunities at late-stage opportunities that they can work on to close any given time to make it work. Okay. Before we wrap up, I know you’ve spent a lot of time and I’ve seen you present ROI on a campaign level or something like that. Can you talk a little bit about that process? And what again, you know, every CFO and CEO loves the notion that you can walk in and say we spent X dollars, and we got a 6x return? Can you talk about how you look at this and the kinds of ROI that you can legitimately share?

Grant: Yeah, and I’ll keep it at a pretty high level. I would just say anecdotally that we’re being measured on magic number and CAC. And you know, all kinds of more sophisticated calculations include sales and marketing efficiency, but the simple way of looking at it is if I spend $1 on a program, I need to create some multiple on that program. It can be measured based on the ROI of the marketing program, the absolute measures the ROI of all marketing expense. So if you take my headcount, marketing technology, and marketing programs, I need to generate a positive return. I need to be a revenue contributor at the end of the day. So that’s got to be at least three to one. Again, I can’t tell you what it is, it’s about that but on a program basis, you know, the goal was at least 10 to one so if you think about it, that helps you decide what tactics. It’s got to be a combination of tactics because I have some things like a webinar that are 30 to 1. I get $30 for every dollar spent, but you can’t just do webinars seven days a week, right? And so it’s really the collection, try to measure ROI by, you know, certainly volume but also ROI, some leads to more expensive. ROI by channel, ROI overall, you know, that gets the help, because the CEO said to me, at some point last year, said, “Grant, you can prove ROI, we can get you more money,” so I proved ROI. He says, “Okay, good. We’re not ready to give you more money now. But while we are, it’s good that you’ve got your ducks in a row.”

Drew: You need to show ROI, you show ROI. And then that’s it. Alright. Well, anyway, we thank you for that Grant. We’re a little behind right now. So we’re gonna move on to Julia Goebel, who is the Head of Marketing for Komodo Health, who has previously joined us on this show to shed light on the intricacies of purpose-driven marketing. Hello, Julia, thank you for your patience. How are you and where are you today?

Julia: Hey, it’s great to be back. Thank you so much, Drew. Today I am in Phoenix, Arizona, although I’m usually at home in Chicago.

Drew: Got it. So you’ve heard a lot so far, and so maybe you can fill in a little bit on what you’ve heard versus what you’re doing?

Julia: Absolutely. So, you know, just for some background, I lead marketing at Komodo Health. We have an incredibly talented team focused on transforming the healthcare analytics landscape. We serve payers, providers, and life sciences companies trying to answer some of healthcare’s most challenging questions through enterprise software, machine learning, and AI to inform decision-making, close gaps in care, address disease burden. So healthcare is my favorite space. And I’ve had the opportunity to work in a variety of settings, in particular, with scaling companies.

Drew: Awesome, it’s wonderful. It feels very sort of purposeful and good, which is why you were on the show, purpose-driven marketing.

Julia: As I think about scaling companies, and how they vary, right, you know, each company is a little different, whether it’s a series A, post-Series E, where Komodo is today. When I join an organization, I like to understand current state of metrics, what is the company accustomed to seeing, what are metrics used to manage, which is different than metrics used to report out and up, you know, understand the current state is, of course, the baseline. We’re a data analytics company and so we’re very interested in all of the KPIs that matter, but when I think about the ones that matter most, regardless of organization, it’s marketing contribution to pipeline, marketing contribution to revenue. You know were focused at the end of the day on winning business, helping expand share, increase reach to our customers, deepen share of wallet. And so the number one metric I always begin with is how did marketing help deliver pipeline? How did marketing help deliver to closed-won revenue? And from there, really, the strategy is dropping the dye in the water and going backwards. So just like what Jamie described, just looking at closed-won, looking at what led to the outcomes going back down to the individual lead source, even the keyword, to understand what made a difference in that person taking action to engage. Whether it was through a digital engagement, perhaps an event, perhaps prompted to take the call from one of our sales executives, tracing back closed-won is one of the strategies as well as closed-lost and all the metrics along the way.

Drew: I love the forensics, I can just imagine doing it. But I’ve also seen the journey and it was like 137 different steps and marketing was 100 of them. And so it’s not as simple as saying, “Oh, they clicked, they started with a click on Google. So therefore, we’re going to spend all our money on Google,” right? It’s complicated.

Julia: It’s complicated. And you know what? The B2B buying journey has extended so that the time of the sales cycle is extending, the number of buyers in the buying committee is growing. Gartner has a chart that’s sort of notorious about the B2B buying journey. So good news, all of those activities and engagements are trackable, and marketing analytics have come a really long way. We’re able to see at high fidelity what led to engaging, participating, dropping in, or dropping out of the sales process. It’s not just what leads them to engage. And of course, we measure the MQL, and the SAL and SQL, all of those matter, but really start engaging and ensuring we’re focused on what’s occurring post stage one and into stage four, really that sort of incubation stage of the pipeline. There’s an inquiry, there’s enough to secure a meeting, perhaps identify intention. We use a stage called Value Alignment, an understanding and agreeing there is a value and a need here is where I view, not just do they fill out a form, it’s so much more later in the stage than it ever used to be. And so I look really mid-funnel, what we call stage four.

Drew: I want to go back to something that you said earlier about marketing contribution. And we’ve talked about this in Huddles so much and there’s a lot of controversy on that because, again, if we go to the 137 touch points, of course, a buyer journey and 100 of them were marketing, it’s impossible for me to imagine a sales close today that didn’t involve marketing at some point of time. So when you talk about marketing’s contribution, one, does anybody care, two, how do you prove it, and three, does it matter if it doesn’t close? I don’t know. Should we not be using the term marketing contribution? 

Julia: It’s a great question. You know, in the end, it doesn’t matter how we arrive at the win in terms of giving credit or praise. It’s about how did the team work together to get there. So whether it was marketing engagement along there, again, very long buying journey, or it was initiated through incredible prospecting by our sales talent. In any case, we can see all those touches along the way. And so there are times where I’ve found as a marketer in my experiences, you have to discern and say, no, no, no, this isn’t about credit. This is about ensuring we keep investing where it matters most. And as Grant said, you know, the relationship with my CFO is so important, and there is alignment around if we can show that this channel, these efforts lead to positive ROI, there is support to do more. And if we see that there are channels that are lagging naturally in the course of given campaigns, we’ll reduce what’s not working and invest more in what is, but the contribution usually needs to be discussed. And I have had great sales partners who agree and see where marketing can be air cover, a wingman or wingwoman to help ensure those deals that arrive are coming in at a better velocity than if not, you know, aided and assisted supported. And I’ve found great success in those conversations, where it’s not about who gets the credit, it’s about how do we do more of what’s right.

Drew: This is where these leading indicators have to help you make decisions. If somehow certain engagements or points in the way of marketing contributions aren’t leading to outcomes that you want? Then you can say, oh, I can change my mix a little bit. But also, what you’re really looking at is if they dropped off or if they closed. I guess it’s both what kept them progressing and where did the drop-off happen?

Julia: This is where some of the deal velocity metrics and the days to close, the time in stage, the, you know, is it more or less than the average you typically see for an opportunity this size, and of course, velocity varies, you know, whether you’re in a six-figure ARR organization, or five or seven, depending on the size of your deals, it will affect the duration, by company, but in general, you note how the average annual recurring revenue should be and so forth. I’m going to make up a number for $200,000 in annual revenue. Is this progressing in stage longer or shorter than usual? Why? You know, having KPIs that look at the many ways you can track velocity are important, because if something’s lagging, you can identify what measures do we have to move these stalled or paused opportunities. If they’re faster, what’s changing? What’s different? Let’s understand and ask the question why. And I think that’s the piece where I get very excited about the many metrics in between the larger ones we report on. There’s a lot underlying that can help us inform and make decisions. And you know, my partners in RevOps are vital to helping us.

Drew: Yeah, I mean, you really do need some dedicated, as Grant talked about, dedicated analytics folks. I love the notion of velocity, sort of today I was thinking about it because we’ve been working on this metrics report and it’s hard, because it’s hard to generalize on these things. But the notion of momentum, and talking about that, because marketing is all about momentum. And if we have momentum on the brand front, if we have momentum on the, you know, as you described it, velocity and the deal front, everybody’s happy, it’s all good. My last question for you is on this before we bring folks back is one of the challenges that I see is there’s so much data, and there’s this expression, you know, there’s a lot of data that you don’t have, and we tend to over-trust the data we do have and under-trust the data that we don’t. How do you sort of simplify this so that when you’re talking to someone, like at the board level, that you’re just giving them the real key metrics that… you know… matter? What are those?

Julia: You know, it boils down to, I would say, five. You know, so, awareness: are we building awareness and trust with our key audience? In quarter pipeline, will we make our numbers this quarter? Generated pipeline, what does it look like for the out quarter? Revenue and where were the sources? You know, how did we see that? Then marketing campaigns, are the key campaigns performing as expected? So those are five areas I look at. But the one that I find gets the most engagement and discussion is related to the SDRs. Jamie spoke to this before, in Komodo, SDRs are part of my responsibility. You know, I view this as a really vital team, whether it sits in sales, or it sits in marketing, it varies by company, but it needs to be in the best place for that company to incubate and grow this team. Your inside sales or rising sellers are really your ground truth on how marketing campaigns are performing. They will know right away when a campaign lead stream is performing or when it isn’t, and you need to have that open dialogue. So I love that feedback loop. It’s very fast. What I find the board is interested in is this is the precursor to pipeline. And so the SDR metrics, which again, are as measurable as any others, allows you to see how things are performing at the very earliest stages and create the ultimate goal they all have is around predictability. And so it allows us to say what we can create, and, you know, establishes meetings and new opportunities this quarter lead to business in Q3, Q4, maybe even beyond if it’s of the largest enterprise sales deals. And so can SDR function while early days in a pipeline in a deal’s journey, is a really important function.

Drew: I’m so glad you brought that up. I felt for a long time that SDRs were critical, that the CMO should own it because it takes away this conversation. Is this a qualified opportunity or not? And it gives you real-time feedback in terms of how your campaigns which you just described how your campaigns are performing. 

Alright, we’re gonna bring everybody back, because we’re going to talk about CMO Huddles really quickly. CMO Huddles was launched in 2020. It’s a close-knit community of over 300 highly effective B2B marketers who share, care, and dare each other to greatness. Now, given the extraordinary time constraints on CMOs these days, everything about CMO Huddles is designed to help leaders save time and empower them to make faster, better decisions. So Jamie, Grant, Julia, since you are incredibly busy marketing leaders and make time for CMO Huddles, I’m wondering if you could share one way, perhaps, that Huddles has helped you either recently or in the past and feel free to jump in. Jamie?

Jamie: Most recently, because we had a lot of work to do to put the foundation in place to do Account Based Marketing. So I reached out to the CMO Huddle community to get a recommendation. And that’s where I found my team at B2B Fusion, was able to get them onboarded, and off we went. So I had limited time to execute and I found a wonderful partner, and it was through CMO Huddles.

Drew: I love it. It is so great because this is one of the reasons why we do vet partners and bring them on so they can do it. Okay, Grant, anything you want to share?

Grant: Well, I would say it’s been quite consistent over the three-plus years that I’ve been part of CMO Huddles that you will help facilitate introduction to somebody who’s an expert in something we’re trying to do or trying to do better for the first time as well as every time on a monthly Huddle, whatever the topic may be, which are well curated, like yesterday, demand capture, demand generation, demand creation, get to practical tips, and I share with my teams, I say take action on this. Here’s some more areas to consider for content marketing. It’s just a real pragmatic, peer-based, powerful organization, where we all share, care, dare. It’s all good.

Drew: Thank you so much for that. Okay, Julia. Any thoughts?

Julia: Yeah, I’ll just add, I think I’m starting my third year as a member. And what I find consistently is that everyone has solved or is solving for something I’ll need information from. And so I found that to be when I’m referring others here, “No, don’t worry, whatever you are solving for someone else is either on that journey or solved it too.” So there’s incredible support for identifying and creating solutions, and your newer vendor referrals are really helpful as well because we know they’re trusted and proven.

Drew: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, all three of you, if you’re a Senior B2B marketer, and need a shortcut to B2B Greatness, take a second, go sign up for a free starter program at CMOhuddles.com. 

Okay, so we covered a lot already. And I’m trying to digest some of the major themes, but I want to go back to Julia brought up the SDRs. And since you all three of you, I think Grant you own them as well.

Grant: Not presently. I’ve owned them for 10 years.

Drew: So Jamie, and because I know this was a debate, but increasingly, we’re finding at least in the Huddles community that most of the CMOs own it and own it for good reason. Could you just, Jamie, make the case again, for why. So you know, I don’t know if you see SDRs as a leading indicator, but I hadn’t thought about that before. Talk about your SDRs.

Jamie: Okay, well, Julia hit on many of the things that I would say. So I echo her sentiments as to why SDRs should be within the marketing organization. But at the end of the day, we all share a common goal again, which is to create, capture, and convert demand. The reason that the SDRs do report in to me is we have a lot of work to do at the top of funnel to do exactly that. And so there’s good alignment in terms of the SDRs being able to capture and convert real opportunities. But as Julia mentioned, the feedback loop and their involvement in helping us to design the right campaigns and the right demand gen strategies and also providing feedback because they’re on the front lines as to what’s resonating. All of that feeds back so that we can capture and convert more at the very top of the funnel as we start filling that up a bit more, but it was really around that alignment of needing to get more into the funnel and get it converted. And that’s the reason we made that decision.

Drew: I haven’t actually, this is just probably wax in my ears but heard the role of marketing described as creating, capturing, and converting. And I’m wondering with Julia and Grant nodding their heads. I’m wondering if those are the big buckets, create, capture, and convert of metrics that we have in our dashboard, and then underneath, create, capture, and convert, we have sort of velocity or momentum things? Are we sort of really giving the clear picture of what marketing’s role is today in B2B?

Julia: Well, you know, I love alliteration. So anytime someone creates a phrase that allows us to describe simply, you know, create, capture, and convert are the macro objectives. And I can picture a slide in which I build indicators underneath that. So, Jamie, that’s a $5 idea right there. I think, in particular, that’s a really lovely way to explain what we are seeking to do. And at the end of the day, marketing is here to help the entire organization when we touch so many pieces, but we’re a business in business to win and attract more customers to help customers get the full utilization. Ultimately, that’s the goal of each of our organizations, you know, to create, capture, and convert, you know, I would just add, create customers for life as part of that conversion, and everything ladders underneath that to your point, Drew.

Drew: And the reason why I want to harp on this a little bit is, again, what this notion we talked about with Grant and the task force is this offense versus defense. And I feel like, if you only look at conversion, you’re on defense, because it’s a lagging indicator, there’s a lot of other factors involved and yes, you can make a difference. But we got to go all the way back to this create part. Because if you’re creating the wrong folks, you’re not going to convert anybody. And if you’re not getting them from the oh, I know who you are, to gee, I’m interested in talking, you’re not going to win either. So it feels like this progression, we all take it for granted. Yet. Every time I talk to CMOs we spend 90% of the time talking about conversion metrics because that’s what the investors want to hear. And I know you need to talk in the business of business. But do we need to educate the folks who are, you know, putting the money in the companies that the creating the capture part is like, there is no conversion without these other two? Grant, you are on that metric, taskforce. And I know you’re really, you are really, really good at helping folks understand the business of marketing. 

Grant: Yeah, I appreciate that, and I think we’re always educating, we’re always marketing marketing. And I love Alliteration as you know, I do write a blog and CMO mentor and I actually named ten C’s, because I just think, you know, the first five are creativity, communication, collaboration, and clarity, and consistency. And the next five are culture coaching, campaigns, category, and courage. And the reason I mentioned all 10 is that I don’t want to have marketing put into a box where, you know, all we do is, you know, create pipeline, you’re not going to have the right agenda, and you’re not going to get the value for the rest of your organization. So that’s why I thought like, hey, that’s great for pipeline, and for driving business alignment sales. I love those three. But I’d like to think a little more holistically. We’re a multidisciplinary role in marketing, and all the individual contributors that help work on what marketing to deliver to the business. I don’t want to minimize their value in the entire equation.

Drew: Interesting. I know we’re on the same page on that.

Jamie: So along those lines, there’s a lot of research out there. We’ve all read it. Some of it varies, but let’s just say that 50% of the sales process is over by the time that somebody actually reaches out. Okay, so let’s just assume that that is true because we see a lot of published papers on it, a company is not going to do business with you if they don’t know about your brand. And so from that standpoint, making sure that your brand is discoverable based on where your buyers are searching for information is absolutely paramount. So that gets back to the Create in capture. The other point that I wanted, and that’s by the way, how I frame it with our board and our executive team, just follow your own behavior as a consumer. So whether it’s a highly transactional kind of purchase, or one that is a relationship-driven purchase, the reality is, we’re out searching for information. We’re getting recommendations, we’re getting referrals before we actually go out and interact with the brand. So just follow your own pattern. And that seems to like the light bulbs go off. And people start to understand intellectually, the importance of that. The other is, you mentioned earlier, you don’t want to engage the wrong people. And we haven’t really talked about this. But I think this is really important too, to start from the beginning of who is your ideal client profile and making sure that marketing and sales is hyper aligned on who they are and the right people, because that’s where you need to really focus and target all of your channels specific to them. And we’ve got amazing technology that allows us to do that. And I mean, I feel very lucky as a marketer, because 20 years ago, we didn’t. So we have to be super aligned on who it is that is more likely to buy our product in the first place.

Julia: Grant shared, and this is Grant’s dashboard, but it showed – and this is something I think all marketers are doing. We’re looking at ICP and we’re looking at how many of the audience in our ICP are engaging in the various channels or are a part of our pipeline. Is it ICP or non-ICP? And it starts with Jamie’s description of a tight ICP that we’re sales and marketing. I’ve held hands around a table and said, “This is what we’re pursuing.” And it makes some of the decision-making a lot more clear when you know, in Grant’s example, how our ICP is engaging or not, which channel is showing ICP engagement or not. In the end, it makes it a lot easier than it ever was historically, when we had less concrete examples.

Drew: So, Jamie, you mentioned brand health and we talk about brand health in some ways or another. I am curious if you all are actually measuring brand health and sharing brand health metrics? And if so, what’s that look like? Grant, are you measuring brand health? And if so, what are those?

Grant: It’s another show. Another dashboard. We’re tracking everything.

Drew: Alright, Julia.

Julia: Yeah, one that I love to just socialize and share voice. How many articles in that competitive set are we receiving, you know, our articles over the total number of articles about us or competitors?

Drew: So just whether you’re out there, that’s a Meltwater type.

Julia: Yeah. A simple share of voice isn’t good.

Drew: Right. Jamie?

Jamie: Like Julia, share of voice. We’re tracking that today against our competitors. As much as I don’t want to get wrapped up in what our competitors are doing, we do track and message pull-through. The other is, how are people coming into your website. So we know that if there’s more of a spike in direct traffic, they’re searching for your brand. And so we’re looking at some of those different types of indicators that would imply a stronger brand recognition.

Drew: On the Share of Voice thing, because a lot of folks use Meltwater, has there ever been any – have you ever actually seen a decline in share of voice equals a decline in pipeline down the road? Or vice versa? And increasing your voice has resulted in more site traffic? I mean, is there any correlation there at all that you’ve ever seen in your marketing?

Jamie: I think that is so difficult to do. But what we do have, and this is another value of having SDRs report directly, is we simply ask. So in our form fields, we ask how did you hear about us? And in our conversations, how did you hear about us? And we have had cases where somebody said I heard your CEO on a podcast, or I read about you guys in an article, and that one, if that converts into one closed-won deal, that more than pays for probably the budget to some degree.

Drew: That’s certainly your PR budget, right? Got it. Grant, you mentioned that you’re using Power BI for your dashboard. I’m wondering. And Jamie, you mentioned, I think Demandbase. Are there any technologies that you are using right now? Or wish you had that are helping with this sort of getting to helping you make more informed decisions about your marketing investments? And Jamie, you’re shaking your head as in yes. So the tools that help you?

Jamie: Yeah, the tools. So as I mentioned earlier in the show, when I stepped into the role, we had Salesforce and some other tools for outbouning. We now have HubSpot for marketing automation in our campaigns. And then we implemented Demandbase for all of our orchestration and insights. And we just implemented Outreach for our SDR team. So all of those tools – and this gets back to earlier in the discussion – you need to make sure you’ve got the right data, integration points, and the workflows because all of those things compile into more insights into what’s working across the entire buyer journey. So those are all of the tools that comprise – not all but mostly – that comprise our MarTech and our sales tech environment that we’re using exactly for that and to bring intent data insights on the account level, what campaigns are most engaged with, how often they’re sitting in a deal stage, that sort of thing.

Drew: Got it. Alright. Well, we are at the point where we need to ask for final words of wisdom for other CMOs. Clearly, we could talk about metrics for hours. And I feel like every other show should be on this. You guys are awesome. Let’s talk about final words of wisdom when it comes to developing and deploying metrics. Let’s start with you, Julia.

Julia: Sure, you know, I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about our teams, you know, socializing the idea of measurement, looking at metrics regularly, making it part of regular team meetings and leadership discussions. It’s not just one person’s job to measure. If you have a data analyst, it’s everyone’s job to look at those indicators. And so it’s really important to ensure we’re talking about it and socializing how important measurement is for every developing marketer all the way through to us as leaders.

Drew: Amazing. Metrics are a team sport. Okay, Grant Johnson.

Grant: I would say that you have to have a mindset for not just measuring it but for continuous improvement. And you also have to take some risks. Sometimes the numbers don’t tell the whole story. You can get outsized returns by some aggressive campaigns, things that haven’t been done maybe in your category, before or recently, and you know, numbers, of course, help us make more objective decisions. But don’t underestimate the capability of your team to come up with and surprise you, and go above and beyond to really create some noise in the market and impact on your customer base.

Drew: That connects back to that word courage that you used in one of your 10 C’s. I love it. Okay, Jamie Gier.

Jamie: Okay, I’m gonna go geeky on this one, I’ll just nerd out a little bit. Data hygiene and cleanliness is super, super important. Because if people are not putting in good data, you can have the best metrics, but it’s going to lead you astray. And you’re not going to have the accuracy that’s required to make really good decision-making. So data timeliness, data hygiene, and making sure that that’s really tight so that you’ve got accurate information coming out. So that’s my little nerdy thing.

Drew: I love it. It is absolutely so important. It’s like direct mail or any kind of list that you have, a bad list means bad results, period. Similarly, bad data will mean bad metrics, and then that could lead to uninformed decisions. Alright. Well, thank you, Jamie, Grant, Julia, you’re amazing sports and such great insight. Thank you, audience for staying with us. 

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we’re live, join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile—that’s Drew Neisser—every other week!

Show Credits
Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!