Categories

Authors

Pages

Recent posts

Recent comments

Archives

Part III—Why B2B Marketing is Difficult to Measure

Wednesday, 2 January 2008 @ 14:40, by Mikel Chertudi

Once marketers are enabled to tie campaigns to metrics deeper in the sales cycle such as closed deals, sales values, and sales-ready leads, determining which campaign to associate to the metrics becomes a complicated process. One closed deal could possibly have 10 or more different campaigns associated to it depending on the number of campaigns associated with each contact and the total number of unique contacts (both decision makers and influencers) on the account.To provide a meaningful solution to this problem, marketers should deploy a multi-campaign touch/source methodology and analysis which allows marketers to define multiple ROI campaign views from which to make marketing investment decisions. I recommend at least four different campaign views that are most important and influential to every closed deal:

  1. First source—which campaign/interaction sourced the account (not just the lead) into your database regardless of how long ago it happened.
  2. Marketing touched—that any campaign/interaction (defined as a meaningful exchange or interaction – i.e. they downloaded a paper, took the product tour, attended an event; companies can decide if they want to include less engaging metrics such as a click to a particular product or personalize landing page or click-through from an email.
  3. Last touch—The interaction just before the opportunity is created. I’m defining sales-ready opportunity as the phone or in-person meeting between a sales professional and prospect to review the solution (once the authority of the prospect and potential need or interest have been established). This last touch (also referred by some, as “progressed” i.e. Sirius Decisions) often demonstrates which interaction is most influential in getting the account to “meet” with you.
  4. Combination of marketing touched—this would be a report that would show you the combination of campaigns/interactions at an account level to show which interactions worked harmoniously to create the opportunity; this could also be created an roll up level to decide which combination of campaigns/interactions were the most common to a grouping of closed deals or created opportunities.

Looking ahead: Part IV—Slicing your B2B marketing measurement for prioritization. We’ll next discuss breaking your reports down into different classifications or views for reporting.Looking back: Part II—The Real Metrics & KPIs for B2B Marketing

  • on  
  • Bookmark at  

respond to post

responses

  1. Marko Muellner2008/1/16 @ 1:48 am

    Mikel,
    Thanks for the post, it’s very insightful.

    As you’ve pointed out, it’s a lot of work to even begin to define marketing influence on the complex B2B sale. What you don’t explicitly share is that most of this data is captured by and stored in the CRM system and not within the traditional analytics silo. It’s also been my experience that to accomplish what you describe well, requires, at a minimum, rich campaign tracking and reporting and disciplined Sales people who take copious notes at each stage of the sale. Lastly, both pulling together these reports and drawing confident conclusions takes dedicated resources and a good bit of human effort and expertise. It’s a beautiful vision and one we all should shoot for but the complexity of implementing this level of marketing measurement is far out of reach for many many organizations.

    Sorry for being pessimistic, I really liked the post and appreciate the depth of thinking. I’d love to hear your perspective on the tools and expertise needed to pull all this together.

    Thanks again.

    Marko Z Muellner
    http://www.measurechange.com
  2. mchertudi2008/1/22 @ 10:01 am

    Marko,

    Thanks for your comments, you’ve hit the essence of this post – it’s not simple. And you’re right – the perception is that accurate, meaningful B2B measurement (involving complex sales cycles) is far out of reach for many organizations. However, the reality is that with the right ingredients (rich campaign tracking and reporting, Sales people that enter thorough interactions) that you describe in addition to intelligent, experienced people who “own” this to improve and refine process, it is achievable for those businesses who make it a priority. I can tell you that we’ve had this system in place for Omniture for over a year now, and the results are phenomenal – it did take two years to build including processes and methodologies wrapped into our Closed Loop Marketing Solution for Salesforce which we productized for joint Salesforce and Omniture customers. Let me share some of the results: We now know which keywords, publishers, banners, emails, offers, sales calls, tradeshows, uber campaigns, and the combination thereof not only drive leads into the sales organization, but most importantly, fuel sales-ready opportunities, closed deals, and the sales values associated with them. This has been a journey for us and we’re still continuing to add small enhancements to process, but it has been a journey well worth the travel. I’ll write a post further outlining the types of tools, processes, and expertise needed to pull this all together.