B2B Marketing Metrics That Speak C-Suite

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketer! If this is your first time listening, welcome and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today’s episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6 and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring and daring each other to greatness, and we’re doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition, to challenge convention with an added half-day strategy lab, exclusively for marketing leaders. We’re also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they’re gone. I promise you we will sell out and it’s going to be flocking awesomer!

You’re about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. In this episode, Julie Kaplan, Michael Callahan and Bindu Chellappan break down how to prove marketing’s impact with metrics that win over the C-Suite: clear, measurable and impossible to ignore. 

If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, 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 Huddle Studios. It’s a live streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I’m your host, Drew Neisser live from my home studio in New York City. In a perfect world, every dollar spent on marketing would have a directly measurable impact on the business. That’d be amazing. Every marketer would be a hero. Well, surprise, surprise, it’s an imperfect world, and alas, even the most skilled and savvy B2B marketers can’t achieve this level of attribution. And there are a lot of good reasons for this. Frankly, reputations aren’t built by one action, right? If we just spent $1 here and we got $10 out, life would be easy, but in B2B, it could take 25, 50, 100 touches before a buying committee is ready to commit. And even with these 100 touches your brand may not be strong enough to survive a last minute competitive price cut. And then there’s the broader impact marketing can have on customer retention and employee recruiting and all these other peripheral factors that you’re doing while you’re doing your marketing. It is in this imperfect world that most CMOs operate, finding some way to persuade their CEO, CFO, board and/or investors that marketing is having a positive impact. They’re using directional KPIs of their own creation, or perhaps those imposed upon them. The bottom line is that finding the bottom line is complicated, and with that, let’s bring on Julie Kaplan, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Revenue Operations, and a returning guest who previously appeared on this show to discuss introverted CMOs and ABM on the cheap. Hello, Julie, how are you and where are you this wonderful day.

Julie: Hello. Thanks for having me on. I am in lovely Maryland, where it is unseasonably cool.

Drew: It’s really amazing. We’re having the same glorious weather here in New York. So let’s get at the one-thousand foot level. Are there 1-2-3 metrics that matter most to you, as the CMO?

Julie: So it’s interesting, because this revelation came to me from talking to one of my fellow CMO Huddles. And really what matters is, what are we trying to do for the organization? Our job, our day job, is all about trying to drive pipeline. So when I’m talking, when I’m really evaluating the efficacy of our team and sharing that with the senior leadership team, I’m boiling it down to what did marketing deliver in the way of marketing-driven opportunities that are in the pipeline. That’s what matters. That’s what they can care about, and that’s what we can obsess about.

Drew: So marketing-driven pipeline, I get it. I mean, I understand that if you can show that you can do that on a predictable basis, you’re going to be a hero with your CFO and, you know, your CRO and everybody else. So let’s talk about that and break that down. So what does marketing-driven pipeline look like? What are the sort of pre-metrics that get you there?

Julie: So again, when I’m sharing it up, I’m not drilling down into the pre-metrics. I just say here’s what we spent in a year, and here are the opportunities that were created based on when their first touch was a marketing touch right, non-relationship oriented lead. So we in marketing will drill down underneath that a lot, and we’ll dig into it, but we don’t separate out, you know, here’s brand spend and here’s demand gen spend. We just say it all rolls up to here’s what we’re giving salespeople in their pipeline that’s turning into real opportunities. Now you used a word, the word predictable, which I love. We are not in a position to have enough data or have had enough time, given that our volumes are a little bit lower and high dollar value deals. So it’ll take us some time to get to the point where we’re at predictable. The question is, if we spend this amount of money and deliver this amount of pipeline. Is it worth it? And what you can see is yes, it is.

Drew: Marketing-driven pipeline. So the pipeline for folks that represent some business value, right? You can attach a deal size to that pipeline. So in theory, you can take your total cost of that, your marketing expenses and then the value of the pipeline. And divide one, and you have an ROI.

Julie: Right? And if you want to get more specific, right, if we quantified marketing opportunities, because we don’t have control for winning business, right? So we won’t say marketing closed one. However, what you can do is say, “Well, look, we’re delivering these leads, and we can assume a close rate of x, or even, you know, a lower close rate than you might find if it were a relationship-based opportunity,” but however you decide to calculate, you know what you’re doing, you’re delivering incremental value to the organization. That’s what you’re there for.

Drew: And I love how you frame this. And it feels very simple. It’s not but it feels very simple. So are we looking for folks that are trying to set this up, a 3x, a 4x, a 5x? I mean, what is it? What would make sense for, you know, a business like yours, in terms of, okay, revenue, that’s what an opportunity really is. It’s a revenue thing divided by the spend. And, you know, we’ve had other folks in Huddles who talked about a 5x or a 10x and now sometimes that’s based on just advertising spend or program spend. But do you have a sense of that?

Julie: Yes, I do. I’m not sure I would share that publicly, but what I will say, generically, right, is sales can—they’re really good at their job, and they are going to deliver relationship-oriented pipeline that doesn’t scale. And your business needs you to scale, at least in our case, right? We’re trying to scale. So what can we do over and above, where, over time, we can say we’ll invest this and we’ll get this out of it? Again, we’re not at the predictability part yet, but that’s what we’re going for, right? When anything incremental, over and above what sales can do is a value. The question then becomes, at the organizational level, is that the right way to spend your money, like going for incremental spend, or are you going for better products, better whatever. But then you as a marketer, have elevated the discussion from the weeds, click-through—all important, but it’s click-through rate, whatever—to what are you delivering to the organization, and what trade-offs does the organization have to make to enable that.

Drew: And all this time, we’re talking about net new customers, right? And so in theory, you have said, “Okay, for the year, sales is going to deliver”—make up a number—”50% of pipeline, and marketing is going to deliver 50% of pipeline.” And then I’ve seen this conversation where marketing is ahead. Marketing is, you know, we said we’d deliver 50% and right now we’re delivering 60%; sales is underperforming. How are you managing that, in terms of the business expectation of what marketing will deliver?

Julie: Well, we’re early on in our maturity level, so we haven’t gotten to that conflict yet, and that would be a lovely conflict, right? We’re delivering a substantial point of pipeline. So the discussion is, is this good to have in our pipeline, or would you like to see this go away? Right? If you spend more, you’re going to see some of this go away, right? We spend more, we will learn how much we can incrementally improve how to scale. It’s, I know it sounds simple and probably overly simplistic, and you’re right in the day to day. It’s not. I really try hard to keep the conversation at the C-Suite level to “Are you delivering value to the organization?” And this is what we define as value to the organization in a way that we can support sales.

Drew: Right? So again, I want to phrase this so carefully, because this is you’re in a relatively early stage company. Net new is a top priority, versus upsell, cross sell. And so when you’re talking about net new customers, you have to be looking at Pipeline. Okay, great conversation. I can’t wait. We’re gonna bring on Michael Callahan now. Michael is the CMO of Salt Security and an industry expert who’s been with us before to delve into the topic of cybersecurity and product led growth. Hello, Michael. Wonderful to see you again. Hello. Um, so and how are you, and where are you this fine day?

Michael: So I’m good. I am in Dallas, Texas, so right in the middle of, basically, like living on the sun, it’s never not hot here. I think it’s about 110 and we’re just dealing with it, right?

Drew: You have a sort of, you have a Texas glow at the moment with this con. Ah, there’s a good way to say, yeah. That’s yeah. So I’m curious. So you heard what Julie was talking about, and let’s talk about your metrics in contrast, or in comparison to where Julie started the conversation.

Michael: Yeah. So I think Julie was right on pipeline. Is it right? So pipeline is the ultimate thing, if you keep asking, like I always tend to ask these questions on the team, but why are we doing this? Why are we doing and keep, like, stepping up that ladder? The ultimate Why is, well, we’re doing it for pipeline. That’s it. That’s where, that’s where it all ends. I have a SL, maybe a slightly different take. One of the things I learned earlier in my career was I’ve always been focused on pipeline, and I was talking about pipeline and how it was growing, how we were doing, and it seemed like I was getting like, these sort of like, who cares looks from the field. And I dug into it, and I’m like, I get it. Now the reason they don’t care is because they don’t care about pipeline. They care about their pipeline. And so the change that I made on pipeline is, I do talk about we’ll talk about it overall, but more specifically, I go, I look across the field team and say, what is the pipeline target for that territory? And then you have the How are we doing against it? Is there a gap? Are we above or below? What do we need to do? Where do we need to apply more? Where do we need to play less? But that turn, it really helped, and it really helped the line, the sales and marketing teams, for sure.

Drew: And let me understand the nuance of this, because I think this is really important, which is, are you saying there’s you look at pipeline now as a total thing, and because the sales reps only get more commission based on originating it versus survey. You know why this issue?

Michael: Sort of what you said. So what I’m talking about is like, so I clearly have a pipeline target that I need to get to to hit the company number. So we have multiple that we want to always have that coverage. But when I talk like that with the teams, nobody cares, other than me and the CRO and so how do you make that meaningful and actionable? Is you go down to the territory level and say, what is the number we need to get out of this territory, and then the activities are between this little like territory group or pod, or whatever you want to call it, of the account manager, we call them AEs, so the AE, the BDR, the SE and the CAM are all working together to say, how do I get to the pipeline that this territory needs? Or the city, which is different than thinking like, oh great, we have this wonderful coverage and at the highest level, but individually, you know, the territory in the West may be starving, and we don’t, we don’t know it unless we are looking specifically at what is the pipeline.

Drew: So we can’t look at so I get it, you have to get it almost down to a salesperson level in order, absolutely right, in order for this to sort of add up.

Michael: Well, that’s why people didn’t like, I reckon. I’m like, I’m talking about all this wonderful stuff. We’re doing this pipeline building. And everyone’s like, yeah, I don’t care. I’m like, Well, why don’t they care? This is wonderful. And it was like, they care about them. And so if I now I’m having the discussion directly with the rep, they care. And we’re like, okay, we need to have a million dollars this quarter in new pipeline from your territory. This is what we’re gonna do to help you get there. And that could be very different than someone else’s territory who needs maybe more or less or different types of activities.

Drew: Right? And so if they’re looking, if you deliver 50% of their quota in some way, you’re you’re a hero, right?

Michael: I’m glad you brought that up here, because one of the things that I’m trying to break down, and this is this is this has been going on for years and years, and so it’s a hard like wall to knock down. I’m trying to move us from what is sales going to bring, what is the channel going to bring it, what is marketing going to bring? And the reason I’m trying to move from the individual components to like, what do we need in this particular territory to drive the business is that we create sort of an artificial silo. The those groups don’t work independent, right? So like, if you think about like, let’s just say a sales person is going to try to go develop some pipeline for their territory. What are they going to do? Well, they’re probably going to use white papers that we built. They may send some media that we got coverage on. They may send a webinar we did. So is that really sales, or is it marketing? Same thing in the on the marketing side, if we’re doing something, and we’re like, oh, yeah, this, this, this sales person had this wonderful experience. Let’s use that case study to get more people whose credit is and it’s, it’s really hard because we like ingrained it in the industry, like, Oh, these are the three channels, and they support it, but they’re really not that independent. And so I’m trying to break that wall down to focus on it.

Drew: And I wanted to go there, because it is. It’s a ludicrous notion to think that someone would buy any product anywhere without going to the website. Who owns that generally, marketing, what’s on the website, all sorts of sales enablement tools. Who did that? Marketing, you know, who runs the webinars that that got on confidence to put you on the list? Marketing, so the sales guy finally calls and go. Then the customer says, Oh yeah, I’ve heard of Salt Security. Sales guy takes 100% of the credit. It makes no sense. So this is the part that I’m really struggling with, because marketing, there’s marketing driven, and then, of course, there’s this other world of marketing influence, which is every sale, right? So if we focus as marketers simply on marketing driven, I feel like we could be, and in some cases, that’s only 30% of you know, particularly if you have channel in there too, that might be 20% of the business, right? Because you got channel with 30 or 40, and you’ve got sales direct. So it kind of looks like, Oh, you’re spending all this money for 20% of our business, but it’s not so I’m wondering how you besides the fact that you’re working with your CRO and your channel to help them understand, how do you make that case? Because this is a problem I have with just starting with pipeline. Is that there are no sales without marketing.

Michael: They would never happen. And the same on the other side, like, unless you’re unless you’re doing direct to consumer, there’s no sale without a sales person, right? They’re too interconnected. So I think so. I haven’t completely solved this, but I feel like I’m making progress. And I’ll tell you, one of the ways that I’m doing that is saying that each person, each group still has to have their operating metrics, right? So the sales team still has to have their as marketing and channel. So we still are looking at, what’s our return on the investment, what is their cost per lead, what activities are drawing more interest or influencing more in another suite and in the BDRs, how many calls are they making? How many LinkedIn connections? So you still have those operating metrics. And if you can do that and say, and then, what do we expect from sales? What about channel reward marketing? It gives this comfort. Gives this comfort that, okay, we are actually managing the business. But those all collectively lead to the thing that’s really important, which is, what’s the territory in the pipeline? The way that I’m starting to do it again, I haven’t, I haven’t cracked this completely, right? But okay, that I’m trying to do it is we’re all we’re all selling all the time, and so I have the one on one, conversations with our leadership team, and it’s, it’s one on one, and it’s me like talking about this vision, and every time that I have it, I think I learned a little bit more from the other perspective of the function, and it helps move it forward. But this idea that it’s all about the pipeline in that territory, I think everyone is like, Yeah, that’s right, that is the important thing. So then it’s like, well, what’s the how do we know if that’s working or not? And that’s the part that we’re looking at now.

Drew: So I want to come back to this when the whole group is together. Because the thing that keeps sort of driving me crazy with this notion is you’re spending dollars. You think about your budget and say, We got to get it all on the inbound lead opportunity, because that’s how marketing and the truth is, 70% of the dollars are doing this other stuff and having the influence of it, and yet, we’re looking at the ROI on the 20% of the business, and that I want to come back to, but we need to get Bindu involved, so I can’t wait to hear the group discussion on this. Okay. Bindu Chellappan is the senior vice president of marketing insights at Corpay who is joining the show for the very first time. Hello, Bindu and welcome. How are you and where are you this fine day.

Drew: Super excited. Drew. I am based out of Atlanta, Georgia.

Drew: All right. Well, we’ve got the East Coast covered pretty well, a little bit of the West Coast. You got to hear this part of this conversation so far. What did you hear, and how did that impact your thinking about metrics? So thinking about metrics?

Bindu: So a lot of what Julie and Michael said completely resonates, and that’s something that we are struggling with right now. So just before this call, that’s exactly the conversation that we were having too, you know, what is, you know, is it enough to just look at marketing-led versus like marketing-influenced? And how does marketing-influenced even get defined, right? What happens, and especially now that this year, we have a huge brand-to-demand campaign going on. And how do we attribute that, you know, back as, like, marketing influence? So that is something that we are actively working on right now. And there are some suggestions to make it into, you know, a campaign of all the, you know, accounts that we are targeting. And those are certain discussions that we are having now. And it doesn’t stop there. So once the opportunities are created by the sales, marketing doesn’t stop there, right? We continue, you know, I mean providing air cover to all of these accounts. So the influence doesn’t stop, and so we continue our work there too. So, you know, that’s, that’s one part of the, you know, big metrics push that we are leading. I’m in corporate marketing, so I’m not involved in the day-to-day functions of any business. So I’m in a unique position where, you know, the role does not end in the acquisition marketing, but we also take it into the customer marketing side of the business. And couple of metrics that I’m, you know, actively working on there is retention, both number of customers and the volume retention. And then, you know, do we have the share of wallet for the customers? And then, of course, cross-sell and upsell is a big part of the equation too.

Drew: And you know, you can have the because I’m imagining, I mean, Corpay is a large company, so I would imagine that retention and upsell are, you know, reducing churn and selling more to existing customers is a huge business opportunity and a source of revenue, right? I mean, existing customers are a big part of your business.

Bindu: Exactly.

Drew: And so as a marketer, and it’s interesting because it really does depend on where you are as a mature company with thousands of customers, obviously retention is a metric that starts to matter a lot more. And it’s funny because we didn’t hear what Julie and Michael, we didn’t hear lifetime value. And I would imagine you’re thinking about that a lot.

Bindu: Absolutely, that’s an important metric.

Drew: How, from a corporate standpoint, you talked about brand to demand? Can you just explain that? Talk a little bit about what you mean by brand to demand.

Bindu: At Corpay we went through a brand, a rebrand, earlier this year. So in March, we changed our name from Fleetcor, which was, you know, our origins were in in a fleet card, fleet payment solutions. And now that, you know, we have become more on the corporate side of the, you know, corporate cards, corporate payments side of the business, the, you know, the rebrand was an essential thing. So in March, we went through a rebrand exercise, and we have become Corpay and with that, we have a big push of, you know, building brand awareness. And we started the brand awareness campaign sometime last year. And the whole idea from brand to demand is you start with the awareness, but you want to kind of track it all the way to see whether you are able to convert. So of course, that has to be marketing has to take it all the way to bringing revenue. So that’s what I mean by brand to demand.

Drew: Well, and again, we could still put the lens of customer retention on this, because you have existing customers from Fleetcor who may not even know that you’re Corpay. So that’s one aspect of this. And then, you know, it’s an interesting case history, because you’re for the rest of the market, that’s not a you’re starting from scratch. You’re literally at zero from awareness standpoint. And we all know that’s not a good place to be.

Bindu: Absolutely, yeah.

Drew: So have you figured out sort of what are the sort of in-between metrics that you from even just awareness tracking, but that will help you sort of track from brand to demand.

Bindu: Yeah. So we are tracking all the usual metrics, you know. I mean, we’re like, you know, always looking for benchmarks as to companies like us who have had a rebrand. How are they performing? So, you know, we start with right at the top of the funnel, metrics like impressions, frequency, Share of Voice and Brand Awareness metrics all the way down to, like, mid-funnel and the bottom of the funnel. So we are tracking everything right now.

Drew: It’s so hard, because when you’re tracking everything, it’s like you’re tracking nothing. It’s what, what is, have you been able to sort of distill anything down where there’s one or two metrics that show that what you’re doing is working or not working.

Bindu: Yes and no. And when I let me start with the no part first. So Fleetcor, all the businesses have been there with us from before. So the only the rebrand happened, but our customers kind of know us, you know, with the product brand name, so and the market kind of knows that, you know, we are what we sell. So those, you know, those kind of remained, you know, those were kind of our baseline, and they remained more or less similar, right, same as before the rebrand. What we are seeing is like, okay, the rebrand are now, how does the awareness look like? Brand Awareness look like we are tracking that aggressively the downstream metrics, the, you know, at the end of the day, the leaders only want to see the revenue and but we see an increase in revenue. It’s, you know, you can, you can tally all the way back. Attribution is always very difficult with the, you know, with the MarTech landscape that we have, but we’re trying to stitch things together to show what influence all this marketing campaigns have had on the closed wins.

Drew: So there you have it. Show me the money. That is the metric that matters. That is the part that we’ve been talking about with Julie, Michael and Bindu. Okay, we’re going to take a second and I’m going to talk about CMO Huddles, and then we’re going to bring everybody back and we’re going to wrestle this beast down to the ground. Okay, so let me talk about CMO Huddles. Launched in 2020 CMO Huddles is a close-knit community of over 300 highly effective B2B marketers who share, care, and dare each other to greatness. Given the extraordinary time constraints on CMOs, everything about CMO Huddles is designed to help leaders save time and empower them to make faster, better decisions. So let’s bring back Julie, Michael, Bindu, since you are incredibly busy marketing leaders, I’m wondering if you could share something, maybe, Julie, you’ve been with us the longest.

Julie: Well, I think I actually mentioned it at the top of the hour. You know, I rely on Huddles to tell me the latest and greatest in what they’re thinking and doing. And I can’t tell you how many times out of these discussions, it has sort of reframed what we’re doing in our in our organization, sometimes we need to listen to what other people are doing so that you can rethink in a fresh way than what you’re doing in your own organization. And this is a great, very effective way to tap into a lot of smart people quickly and effectively.

Drew: And I love that. And one of the things that I’ve heard, and I’ve just, I keep hearing, “I don’t have an hour for myself to sort of sharpen my saw a month,” and I’m trying to figure out, how can you say that to yourself? Because you make the time, Julie.

Julie: It pays off. That’s why I make the time, because I hear things and I can apply them. So I’m not doing it for myself as much as I’d love to say that I was and doing it because I am better at my job. When I listen to other people what they’re tackling, one of the things that I get out of Huddles that I wouldn’t be able to get on my own because I’m so intensely focused on doing a good job is, I don’t always look at what’s happening out there in the marketplace. You know. How are other companies using AI? How are other companies thinking about metrics? How are other new companies sort of maturing through what you know? What tools are they using to help communicate to the organization? I don’t have 20 hours a week, things, mark each one of those, and rather talk to a couple smart people and then go with it.

Drew: I love it. Well, thank you for that. I appreciate it. Michael, anything to add here?

Michael: Yeah, you know I would. The thing I would add is, I really like the Slack channel. It’s, it’s super helpful. In fact, I use it two different ways. So one, I mean, when I start in the morning, I look at all of our key metrics. I go into Salesforce, I go into Power BI, and look at how is everything trending. The next place I go is into Slack. I look at what’s like, highlighted with a little thing that says there’s a new message. And I click through and see, oh, is there anything interesting? It probably. I probably will. I do it every day, but it probably takes five minutes or so to just kind of get a quick read on it, but then I use it also as we’re struggling with, with the problem or challenge. You go through someone’s probably already written about it at some point in the Slack, or people are really good about about answering. So I like that. It’s a great it’s a great tool because it’s like, it’s based on when you have time. It’s not like you have to be there for a certain thing. Can just go and it’s a resource whenever you need it. I love it.

Drew: And Bindu, you’re relatively new to Huddles. Uh, what’s your been experience so far?

Bindu: So six months into Huddles, and I love it. This is one of the best investments that I’ve made. You know, I completely echo what Julie has said. It’s, it’s like, you know, it’s the learning from peers. It’s either somebody is going through what we are going through or has already solved it. And the learnings are, like tremendous. One thing I’ll add to both what Michael and Julie have said is, I love the Slack Wednesdays. It’s a focused hour first is like, it’s been what you call it, like shared dare. It’s like a dare to myself that okay, I’ve been able to put myself out, right? And then, you know, put the content out. That’s one, you know, that’s been a great challenge to myself, and I’ve been able to, you know, sustain it. So that’s great, you know. And look forward to Wednesday evenings just to read all the all the articles that people have written. It’s like a couple of hours of learning, intense learning, and some of these, some of them are, like, amazing. So what Julie said about, you know, learning, what’s happening in the market? That’s, that’s what Slack Wednesdays are for me.

Drew: Well, I so appreciate the three of you and your kind comments. If you’re a B2B, CMO, who can share care and dare with the best of them and need a shortcut to B2B, greatness. Take a second and sign up for our free starter program at cmohuddles.com. Okay, so let’s, uh, we’ve got one question from the audience. Let’s go there. How do you bridge the gap between high level marketing metrics and what sales really wants, which are qualified leads.

Michael: I might reframe that a little bit. The high level marketing metrics, in my view, are like, those are the operational metrics that you need in marketing, understanding what is my return, what’s my investment? How are what’s the conversion rates up on the funnel? Sales wants those leads, but I think of it, they just don’t want you to, like, in the, you know, in a back alley, hand them like a paper bag and go, “Okay, here’s some leads.” And like, you go one way and then go the other way. It’s together, right? And so the way we bridge it, at least, is we’re like, this team is responsible for creating this pipeline together. So it may be, here’s 10 accounts that we want to penetrate. Great. Where are we? Are we? Do we have two of them, three of them, one of them, whatever. But I think that’s it. It’s that working together is where that bridge, where that bridge happens.

Drew: I love it. I want to keep going on this, because we’ve we started on it, which is this question of the relentless focus on net new and yet we know that the marketing spend has impact, not just on your your marketing qualified opportunities, whatever you want to call it, but on everything else. And how do you know? And let’s just say for a moment, 25% of your pipeline is from marketing. We’ll call it sourced, right? So 75% is not how do you know? And that in the you know that 75% is being influenced by marketing that you’re spending enough on the influencing, because that’s more of the business than your your pipeline. Because what I keep seeing in budgets is, if I really looked at the dollars, I’d say 90% of the dollars were going to marketing, driven marketing, you know, sourced and but it’s not 90% of its impact.

Michael: There’s something that we do during and this is, I don’t know that you can ever get a like dollar $1 out on anything in B2B, because it’s all too interrelated. But we do look at that like that so many times that you’re talking about, we’ll look at share of voice, which is, it’s not perfect. There’s a lot of cons, you know, but it’s okay, and it gives you that direction, we also look at branded search. So we’re saying, like, if people are searching and our name, we must be doing something right in that other part of the business, like the general like it’s it’s influencing, or it’s creating some sort of perception in people’s mind, if our branded search volume is higher than our competitors rate, which is our benchmark, I mean, it could be infinite, but that doesn’t help you much. You’re really just trying to beat your competitors.

Drew: It could also be a trending thing, rather than an after year, right? Just tracking the trend, because if our branded search is going up, that’s better than it going down.

Michael: Wait, let me write that down.

Drew: There’s nothing but pearls coming here today, keep listening, because they have some smart things to say, as opposed to the triteness of what I just said. Okay, so again, let’s go to Julie on this question of attribution and how an allocation, right? Because there’s this we’re spending money to drive net new,

Julie: We don’t separate the two spends, so we consider any win by sales or marketing assisting win, right? And all of the things that we do to drive awareness for net new are appropriate for existing customer. Customers, and they’re appropriate for you know, relationship driven leads our sales people are using our blogs to engage with their contacts. We get form fills from current customers who are already in our database, already talking to to our sales people. That is not a bad thing. That is a very, very good thing. So all the things that we do to support net new are the same things that we need to do to, you know, remain in the forefront of the consciousness of our current opportunities and our current customers.

Drew: Interesting. Okay, I’m gonna have to digest that. This was an episode I’m gonna go back and listen to after the fact, analyzing and wrap my mind around that. Because what you’re essentially saying is you’re spending money to support the business, and you’re spending it in the same way, regardless of whether we’re talking driving, marketing, driven or supporting the sales.

Julie: I’ll give you a tactical example, right? Yeah, we use ABM marketing, right? And we make sure that we have display ads to every account in our target account birth, that includes our current customers, that includes are in pipeline customers. We do not separate them out and say we’re going to track them separately, or we’re going to send them a different ad, right? We we might, we might retarget them differently, or we might send a different triggered campaign based on their behavior. But we don’t treat them differently. If you’re in you’re we’re in the funnel, whether you started with us from a relationship with sales people, or you’re a current customer, we’re still going to interact with you the same way, and it should behaviors.

Drew: Interesting. So Bindu, how does that, as you’re hearing that, how does that apply in your world?

Bindu: It’s complicated. Yeah. Educated. So, you know, every loe has a different way of attributing, you know, it’s kind of, you know, there are, there are ways, like, you know, okay, if marketing has touched, or has the campaign and for one year, you know, if it converts, it’s like, you know, it’s attributed back to marketing. That’s like, one business does that some businesses have three months and some have, like, even loser, right, anytime for specific campaigns. So it’s not very, you know, it’s not a clear cut attribution that we are looking at, but something like what Judy said completely resonates with us also. The lead cycle is pretty long for our some of our products too. And with an ABM approach, it’s like, you know, we go after the entire tal for some time, you know, for a period of time, and then based on what the intent signals are, and if you’re just pushing them down the funnel, you know, the ads and the campaign kind of kind of shifts based on the nurture campaigns, kind of shift based on where they we feel they are in their purchase journey. But you know, even once they become opportunities, we still are campaigning. We still are providing marketing support to those leads.

Drew: You probably also, because we’ve been talking about this for a month, also still, once they even signed the deal, there’s that first month of getting them up to date. So it doesn’t even So Michael, save me on attribution here. Save us all. Solve this problem. What? What’s the problem with attribution? And how are you You know, what would be the solution for better attribution.

Michael: All right, so here’s the here’s the problem, and use this example before, and I if and I it has worked, but not always. But the the issue with attribution is it, it is a really good measurement. If you’re targeting one company with one person with one activity, if you have those three things, then you can absolutely know this worked or it didn’t. But as soon as you have more than one of any of those, more than one contact at a company, more than one activity that they’re engaging with, it’s impossible what you can do. And when I’m when I’ve explained that people, like some people, will go, Oh, I get it immediately. And others, you go, Okay, well, let’s take one more example. Super gamble one company, one contacted that company, but they went to a webinar and an event. What gets credit? And then they kind of go, Okay, I see that. It’s so we step back and go. So what’s the best we can do? Is we can directionally say what activities are influencing our pipeline more than others. It’s not going to tell you specifically, but it will give you some outliers. You’re like, man, we are spending money and content syndication, and it’s not doing anything Well, let’s pull that back, right? But it’s not specific. You can never get that one to one attribution unless, like I said earlier, you’re in, like, the BDC, and you go, Oh, I’m selling potato chips, right? Do it in five second. Coupon. What happened? And I’m doing no other promotions, right?

Drew: It feels like, so do you actually use an attribution tool to try to sort through this? And with some, because I know that some folks have attribution tools that try to put some kind of percentage impact on various aspects of the spend.

Michael: I mean, we do it. It’s probably like, like, Julian Bandu have to where it’s like, the first touch gets a higher percentage than other ones. You could divide it evenly after that. Sometimes we I have seen it, we don’t do it until right now, but you could do it the last thing gets the heaviest weighting because that’s what you, in theory, feel like tripped, tipped him over the edge. I could kind of argue that the other way and go. I don’t know that’s just the last thing,

Drew: Exactly but I do think, for example, like events are often seen as really expensive, right? You gotta get a lot of staff in a particular physical event, but they’re really good for late stage, because you have to get people together and you close, and you get other customers around there to sort of do it, and so, but they only stop at your booth, either one because the salesperson was able to get a meeting, or because they recognize your brand and they’re interested.

Julie: Yeah, one thing we did which might be helpful, you know, a very practical thing that people can view. We took the spend across all of our efforts, and we summarized and compared that to a variety of different metrics, like spend across the year versus warm pills across the year, spend across the year versus click through rate across the year. And one of the things that we noticed when we looked across time, rolling everything all up, not you know, identifying one particular thing is when we dropped our spend, the performance of everything dropped form fills, dropped great draft. Now that might be where we are in terms of our maturity, right? We’re still working our way up to build awareness. But what we know now, even even without sort of parsing out the details, we know if we spend less performance on on each of these things overall is going to go down. So we know our spending needs to stay the same or go up if we want to continue, you know, improving form fills that click through rates and other things like that.

Drew: So that’s fascinating. And by the way, we talked about this a lot over the last few years, which is, you know, on March or 17th or so, 2020, a lot of brands just stopped spending. And almost all of those brands that did that, if the CMO stayed there, saw six months, 12 months later, their pipeline was all empty, relative to those that kept spending. So there was some wonderful accidental tests that happened during that period. But I’m curious, when you looked at your spend and you said you stopped, first of all, can you say, share what you were spending on? That was the thing.

Julie: Yeah, we didn’t actually stop, but we because we were sort of in some budget constraints. We narrowed our tal so we were we were limiting how we were spending money, and some of our ad spend went up, so we had to sort of contract what we were doing, and that’s when we saw all of the performance drop. Interestingly enough, when we, when we look at how things build back up over time, it’s slower. So when you, when you lower your spending, there’s a quick drop and increase your spending. There’s a steep, you know, there’s a, not a steep, there’s a slower incline to recovery. So when we It makes me pause before you know controlling or contracting what we’re doing.

Drew: It’s amazing that that you’ve been able to determine that, by the way, tal is total addressable something or other. What is Tal total addressable? Accounts? Yeah, okay, the reason why Proctor’s in gamble spends 52 weeks a year is that their studies over the last 40 years have shown that awareness will drop 50% in a month and then another 50% in a month. Now they didn’t have this other part that you just shared, which is, it’s hard to buy that back. Yeah, that is fascinating and really important.

Michael: There’s an analogy on this Drew, like, like, in the stock market right up. So if a stock goes down 10% today, if it goes up 10% tomorrow, you’re not back to even that’s the same idea, right? Like it has to the goes up 10% tomorrow, you’re not back to even that’s the same idea, right? Like it has to the return. It’s not as high of a ramp or high of a rate.

Drew: Yeah, but it’s fascinating that, because if every business could show that, if you could show we turned the meter off a little bit and then look, our form fills went down, our click through rates, and ultimately, probably your close rates went down. If you could actually find that correlation, it. Can be hard to make the case of causation.

Michael: The other side of that, if I, if you don’t mind, is we went through a spend reduction. It forced some issues, for some for some hard choices. And what came out of that, with investing less than we were, was we actually found where we weren’t optimal, and we increased that so our like, our meetings to qualified opportunities doubled, but the total number is lower because of the lower spend, but it forced us to be more efficient, and we optimized it. So now there’s a there’s actual business case to say, look, we reduced the spend, we focused, we got better quality, and then the conversion percentage is higher. So if we invest back in we would expect more than we were getting before. And that’s, that’s a good like metrics based discussion to have,

Drew: Yeah, although I can also see what happened, which we saw happen, which is, Oh, you did it with 20% less. Great now. Now keep going, find another 20% of efficiency.

Michael: That’s the risk of it. That’s right. So that’s where you need that strong relationship with… In fact, I think one of the other than CRO which is sort of obvious. The CFO-CMO relationship is key.

Drew: Well, and I and obviously the CFO has to believe the metrics that you’re showing, and ideally they’ve developed them with you, because they’re the ones who have to create Predictable Revenue for the organization. But I’m curious, you optimized again, we’re talking about optimizing for marketing source. What are we optimizing for? Because if we’re optimizing for the wrong thing, you might have short term versus long term issues.

Michael: Yeah, so we didn’t think of it quite that way, but I guess I could probably back into the marketing source. This was more, how many meetings are we getting, and which are BDRs tech drive? But they drive that from outbound activities and inbound qualification. And then two, how many convert to the qualified opportunity? There’s a little bit different than what you were saying, but it’s, it’s we optimized around that. If, how do we get that original from meeting to…

Drew: And again, I guess the question is, so, if the world was Google, so the way Google works is, is you spend a certain amount of you have awareness of your brand, or you don’t. If somebody does this search, your brand comes up and other brands come up, in theory, right? This is for paid advertising. If your brand has a higher awareness, more people will click on it, and so therefore you could spend less per cost per click, because more people and Google will actually make more money on you, because more people will click on yours than the other. So it’s not always the highest bidder that wins. So I guess we could look at being optimizing for net new meetings, but it was still an argue that, if they haven’t heard of you, your net, right?

Michael: Yeah, that’s not gonna be the top it’s the number above that one, which is just is gonna stay flat or decrease. And then you can only optimize so much, right? At some point you’re gonna max out, like you’ll be at 100% it’s like the most you could ever be, right, recruiting from meeting to up. But who cares if you can only do 10 meetings, right, and you need 100.

Drew: Right? It’s and again, we can go back to the Google example is there’s a certain point in time where you can’t spend another dollar on Google, because no matter what happens, there’s just not enough. But if you actually increased awareness of Google, your cost like we go down. Okay, so this is a lot. We covered a lot. We’ve talked about challenges of measurement, but we’ve all sort of net, sort of landed on on pipeline as as a classic measure of one, and obviously one that’s important to the organization. We’ve also talked about the challenges of attribution and not getting bogged down on it, but looking for trends. We talked about turning off media for a month or two, just to show that if I do that, everything else gets screwed up. So let’s go with some final words of wisdom for CMOs on getting their metrics right. And Bindu, since you were last, you get to go first final words of wisdom.

Bindu: Two things. One is align the metrics with the business objectives. And I would say, almost work backwards. Start with, you know, revenue is the focus, and work backwards. And then, you know, decide what is the best marketing vehicle that can get to the, you know, get to revenue. Getting this established is a long journey. If somebody thinks that they can come in and, you know, within three months, you will have a robust, you know, set of Marketing Analytics set up. It’s not going to happen.

Drew: Takes time. Okay, so be careful on over promising on that. Okay, next up. Michael, final words of wisdom,

Michael: Yeah. So, since Bindu took two I’m going to do a little bit different so if you can see on the on Drew’s bookshelf, there’s a book there that’s white with the blue dash there, which happens to kind of match his shirt color. And if that’s intentional or not, it’s called Renegade Marketing. Awesome, awesome book. It was actually how I met Drew. Someone sent me the book, and I was like, wow, this is really good. And reached out, and we ended up connecting a book. Couple years ago, and there’s a really good message in there about marketing people being CATS, and I will leave the teas there, but it’s a really good message, and it’s a great book, so I would recommend people go read it.

Drew: I love it all right. Well, and yes, the ‘s’ in CATS is for scientific and why we focus on metrics on a show like this, and why that’s so important. So thank you for that shout out. okay, Julie,

Julie: I’m going to echo what Bindu said, which is, start backwards, you know, what is the overall corporate metric that you need to help deliver, and then work backwards from there. Taking the ‘me’ out of metrics is a lot about making sure that you’re delivering value between the organization the drill down isn’t as important as a roll up when you were naked. Stand out.

Drew: I love it, all right. Well, perfect timing. Thank you. Julie, Michael, Bindu, you’re amazing sports. 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!