The disconnect between CEOs and CMOs has been a recurring issue in business. A notable Fournaise Group study revealed that 80% of CEOs don’t trust their CMOs, compared to the 90% who trust their CIOs and CFOs. This lack of trust stems from several factors:
- 71% of CEOs feel that B2B CMOs are too invested in the next new technology that will supposedly boost lead generation
- 75% of CEOs think that CMOs misuse (and don’t understand) the words “Results,” “ROI,” and “Performance,” and they don’t speak the same language as the rest of the C-Suite
- 85% of CEOs want B2B CMOs to focus on KPIs like Prospect Volume, Prospect Quality Rate, Marketing Effectiveness Rate, and Revenue Potential generated by marketing
CMOs face short tenures due to a disconnect in demonstrating marketing value, as reported by Harvard Business Review. Despite the nuanced nature of marketing performance, especially in areas like press, paid search, and SEO, marketers must address this gap.
The key is effective data utilization and appropriate tools and skills, implemented through a strategic approach aligned with marketing analytics maturity phases. Let’s examine how organizations can leverage these phases to showcase value and build leadership trust.
Overview of Phases
Our discussion will be based on these laid-out phases of marketing analytics maturity:
- Phase 1: Ad Hoc
- Phase 2: Descriptive
- Phase 3: Informative
- Phase 4: Real-Time
- Phase 5: Predictive
- Phase 6: Prescriptive
Phase 01: Ad Hoc
The Reality
In the early stages of a company’s growth, leadership recognizes the need for marketing to promote their company and product. However, as marketing costs accumulate, they begin to demand evidence of the effectiveness of these activities.
This scenario presents several challenges:
- Limited budgets lead to the use of inexpensive tools
- Inexpensive tools often lack proper integration capabilities
- Poor integration results in disorganized data structures
- Disorganized data makes reporting difficult or impossible
Unfortunately, these factors don’t contribute to a positive image of marketing leadership.
The Quick Fixes
In smaller organizations, marketing executives typically gather metrics from various disconnected sources. Accurately attributing leads to specific marketing efforts without integrated campaign data in their CRM is challenging. Their measurable metrics are often limited to:
- Social media metrics (follower count, engagement rates)
- Website performance (visitor numbers, bounce rates, form completions)
- New contact acquisitions
Regrettably, this data often lacks depth and context.
Marketing leaders often resort to vague discussions about brand awareness, “directionally accurate” data, website traffic, and form submissions when questioned about profitability, efficiency, and prospect growth. This approach fails to impress C-level executives. Many marketing teams lack the resources and tools to link their activities to the sales pipeline effectively.
Even hiring a skilled data analyst isn’t a complete solution—investing in better tools is crucial. Relying solely on basic connectors for Google Sheets and Excel has significant limitations.
The Long-Term Solution
To connect marketing activities to pipeline and revenue effectively, investing in tools that offer seamless integration or purchase separate integrators to normalize the data is essential. This is also the ideal time to start utilizing Campaign and Campaign Member objects in your CRM and implementing rigorous tracking of budget and actual expenses for these campaigns.
If working with a limited budget, prioritize a marketing automation platform (MAP) that integrates with your CRM. Ensure proper tracking is set up on your website. Most importantly, seek out marketers who understand the importance of using analytics to demonstrate return on investment.
Phase 02: Descriptive
The Reality
The descriptive phase brings us to a point where we have:
- Integration between forms and the Marketing Automation Platform (MAP)
- Communication between the MAP and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
- Utilization of standard campaign and campaign member objects in the CRM
- Enrichment tools to enhance limited-form data collection
With campaign members created for each marketing interaction, we can now set up automatic associations between campaigns and new opportunities. This sophistication allows for recording lead stages and measuring lead generation metrics like MQL and SQL. However, this capability hinges on having someone who can correctly automate the process.
At this juncture, we can perform source reporting to some extent. However, pinpointing the exact origin of any deal remains a challenge. In truth, each deal results from a collaborative effort among sales, marketing, and your channel team (if applicable). As a result, each team often reports different contribution figures to the board or, at the very least, engages in quarterly debates over who deserves “credit” for a particular sale.
Marketing continues to face pressure to demonstrate the effectiveness of their awareness-building efforts. Increases in web visits, social media followers, and inbound leads often fall short of satisfying stakeholders—particularly when these inbound leads are attributed to a chat tool rather than the channel initially directing them to the homepage.
The Quick Fixes
I’ve observed manual checks implemented to maintain Source reporting with minimal conflict.
Pro Tip: Conflict still exists. It just usually occurs behind closed doors rather than in board meetings.
“Solutions” often include sales ops verifying the source at opportunity close. Monthly deal reviews are conducted by stakeholders who research each opportunity beforehand. My personal favorite is the acceptance of this as a “directionally accurate” metric, which only works when it’s not tied to someone’s compensation plan.
The Long-Term Solution
Investing in attribution technology is crucial to demonstrate the value of early funnel activities. Equally important is having an analyst skilled at explaining the value of attribution to the C-Suite. They need to articulate why marketing needs attribution, its usefulness, and the rationale behind the chosen models without:
- Putting the CEO to sleep
- Setting off alarm bells for the CFO
- Ruffling the Sales VP’s feathers
For more insights on selling attribution to your executive team, check out our detailed article here.
Bonus: With this approach, source data becomes less critical in proving marketing’s value, potentially ending the age-old debate of who sourced an opportunity.
Phase 03: Informative
The Reality
Before diving into the Informative phase, several crucial steps need attention. Primarily, there’s a pressing need to implement robust data hygiene processes and establish well-defined campaign hierarchies and naming conventions.
The importance of data hygiene can’t be overstated. Marketing teams have been amassing contact information, enriching data from various sources, and inadvertently creating duplications using separate lead and contact objects. While human data entry errors contribute to this issue, they’re a minor part of the overall problem.
When choosing an attribution tool, be prepared for a list of issues that need addressing before implementation. This might involve backfilling historical data, structuring campaign hierarchies, and standardizing custom channels and naming conventions.
It’s worth noting that some tools—like CaliberMind—take care of these processes for you.
The major payoff of this stage—provided you secure executive buy-in—is the ability to showcase your campaigns’ value, including those at the top of the funnel.
The Quick Fixes (That Aren’t Really Fixes)
You might be tempted to rely on your MAP’s attribution and customer lifecycle tracking capabilities, but be warned: the results may be less than ideal. Most of these platforms need a standard object for opportunities, making it challenging to connect the dots accurately. Moreover, many still rely on single-touch attributions or outdated demand generation funnel models.
The same limitations apply to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. With either of these options, your results will heavily depend on:
- The structure and organization of your campaigns
- The consistency of your data entry practices
- The cleanliness of your account data
- Whether you’ve phased out the lead object
The Long-Term Solution
Investing in a tool capable of connecting to all your data sources is key. Opting for a solution that only integrates with your CRM or MAP limits the scope of data considered, preventing you from seeing the complete picture.
Consider the channels where you currently struggle to demonstrate value. If your chosen attribution tool doesn’t address these areas, you might be wasting time and resources trying to clean data you can already interpret.
Seek out an attribution company that will collaborate with you on best practices and handle much of the data work on your behalf. Don’t compromise by accepting a situation where you’re left to manage complex data issues on your own.
Be wary of any provider claiming they can deliver results without addressing your data issues. Always remember the data analyst’s golden rule: Garbage in, garbage out.
Phase 04: Real-Time
The Reality
With the ability to measure various stages in the buyer journey and demonstrate the value of early-funnel campaigns, attention now turns to enhancing the marketing-to-sales handoff. A significant gap exists between these teams: Marketing struggles to understand why Sales don’t pursue their leads, while Sales often dismisses the majority of leads as unqualified.
This stalemate drives transformation. Marketing needs to evolve, becoming more proficient in defining the ideal customer profile (ICP), assessing engagement levels, and refining lead prioritization techniques.
The Quick Fixes
Consider adopting Sales’ ICP definition or analyzing engagement metrics, closed deals, and demographic data. However, without integrated systems, you’ll likely manage numerous CSV files and spreadsheets.
The Long-Term Solution
To effectively counter the “all leads are worthless” argument, implement a system capable of analyzing accounts and leads from multiple angles. This system should allow you to examine successful deals, associated accounts, and contact data, and compare these with unsuccessful leads to determine the relevance of your data.
Alternatively, invest in a tool that automates this process and incorporates machine learning models. The key is to develop an engagement model that considers ICP, demonstrates success in Sales, and gains their trust in your data-driven approach.
Phase 05: Predictive
The Reality
With robust performance metrics at your fingertips, forecasting goal attainment becomes a breeze. For the tech-savvy, machine learning integration opens doors to mapping optimal buyer journeys and tailoring content by industry and persona.
Intent data is on your radar, but the volume of indicators challenges operationalization. You’re wary of granting sales unrestricted access, fearing they might disregard your carefully crafted ICP and Engagement scoring models in pursuit of every lead.
Your ad platform integration now allows you to articulate ROI across the board – from trade shows and webinars to digital advertising. You’re even factoring in personnel costs and total budget to fine-tune your customer acquisition strategy.
Gone are the days of C-Suite data disputes. You’re now equipped to address anomalies with well-thought-out action plans.
The Quick Fixes
Navigating intent data feels like sipping from a fire hydrant. The sheer volume is overwhelming, with only a tiny fraction proving valuable. Dumping this information into data lakes or warehouses often creates a chaotic mess.
The Long-Term Solution
When it comes to intent data, your choices are limited. Leveraging machine learning to sift through the noise and pinpoint meaningful interactions is crucial for distilling data to a usable form for sales and other departments. Once optimized, this approach has been known to trim sales cycles by 4-6 weeks.
While KPI-generating tools are useful, having a skilled data analyst who can delve into trends, explain anomalies, and propose solutions is invaluable. Investing in one or two talented analysts can free you from constant inquiries, allowing you to focus on delivering strategic value to the organization.
Phase 06: Prescriptive
This is a CMO’s utopia.
You now possess solutions to marketing challenges and insights that can enhance the entire go-to-market strategy. You’ve earned recognition as a strategic business leader by demonstrating your department’s contribution and efficiency.
You’ve achieved the status of a visionary leader—a distinction shared by only 17% of marketers.
Congratulations! Your potential is limitless.
A Few Nuances Worth Mentioning
Ad hoc, descriptive, and informative phases often respond to the executive team or board members demanding proof that marketing is positively impacting the business.
Real-time and predictive phases typically begin a new line of questioning from the rest of the leadership team. The focus is no longer on whether you know if what you are doing is having any impact. They now want to see if you can maximize your impact without continually asking for more budget.
The prescriptive phase marks the end of people questioning whether marketing is pulling its weight and can scale with the business. If you have the right tools and resources, you have the information to make you a strategic leader.
As a part of our “Band-Aids,” we mentioned that you could purchase tools to move along in maturity. You can buy integration connectors, visualization tools, and piecemeal solutions. Or you can work with a B2B marketing platform that is as innovative as you are.
Don’t hesitate to contact us with your marketing attribution and analytic needs. We wish you the best on your data journey!
