Imagine this: you’re a CMO, and you’ve just accepted a position at a promising B2B SaaS company. You have seen plenty of growth opportunities and know your team will start seeing positive results as soon as 90 days out.
Your CEO is eager to sign you up for performance goals, and you’re under pressure to commit to tangible results. The problem is that you need to figure out what your team can report on today. For all you know, they could have gaps in their lead data or still rely on vanity metrics like website visits.
You’re faced with a dilemma: commit to goals without knowing if your team can track them, or take the time to understand the existing metrics. While rushing into goals might seem doable, it’s better to take a step back, assess the current metrics, and avoid committing to outcomes that can’t be measured. It’s about setting yourself and your team up for success in the long run.
Our best advice to any new CMO is to take a breath and take the time to figure out the metrics in place before signing your team up for outcomes that they can’t measure.
Start With the Basics of CMO Marketing Analytics
The key to improving marketing analytics is to understand where you are starting. What are the metrics you understand? What are the metrics you don’t understand? Where are your blind spots? This also prevents you from making promises to the board or C-Suite that you can’t report or prove.What’s in the 90-Day Guide Roadmap?
During the assessment, you’ll understand whether you can track and report on key components of your overall go-to-marketing plan. We’re modifying what we focus on to match your self-assessment, so many early-stage items are assumed “complete.” If that’s an incorrect assumption, you can use previous stage work plans to close the gap.
The following is a list of areas you’ll be assessing and a short explanation of why they’re essential.
Confidence in Our Target Market Definitions
As a marketer, you know precisely how important defining your ideal customer profile (ICP) and key personas is to nail your message. While your executive team may be operating with 100% confidence that they have uncovered their customer profile, they may be in denial. We’ll assess whether you track and automate key data points necessary to unlock your ICP.
Lead Execution
We’ll ask you several questions to help you uncover system issues like integration breakages and process gaps.
Understanding your lead gating mechanisms is also crucial to understanding the maturity of your organization. It’s common for sales to receive every form fill response by default in small organizations. It’s (unfortunately) also not uncommon for operations professionals to get a little overzealous when they first implement lead gating.
Funnel Awareness
Sales leaders have a history of memorizing key funnel metrics. They understand that the key to attaining more pipeline predictably is understanding which stages are “sticky” and whether core conversion rates are on pace or behind industry benchmarks.
The most critical aspects of the funnel for marketers are MQL conversion to pipeline and pipeline conversion to bookings (or the pipeline coverage rate). If your team understands which lead channels convert more efficiently and how much pipeline is needed for sales to hit the next quarter’s number, you can react and create positive outcomes before the quarter ends.
A B2B MARKETING RESOURCE
The B2B CMO's Guide to Unlocking the Funnel
Check out our guide for more on how and why the funnel is vital in B2B.
Attribution and Proof of Marketing “Contribution”
B2B SaaS organizations operated on a volume-centric goal structure prioritizing lead generation. Over the years, businesses have adjusted their goals to focus more on booking efficiency. Giving your team a pipeline and bookings goal creates different behaviors that force the team to align with the sales goal.
Determining where your organization is on its attribution journey will help you quickly understand department alignment (or lack thereof). And remember, just because a company has a multi-touch attribution model doesn’t mean they’re using it in the boardroom or with finance.
Control Over Budget
Every marketer hopes to work in an organization where they can drive the budget conversation. Working in collaboration with finance and agreeing on a methodology to calculate the return on marketing investment is the only path to this utopia.
Reactive vs. Proactive
A regular reporting cadence builds confidence in understanding numbers. It will naturally lead to understanding or spotting when the company is behind the target and what can be done to fix it. The goal is to eventually be a best-in-class marketing organization with easy access to return on marketing investment data necessary to improve your overall strategy.
Find out the #1 reason it’s time to invest in marketing analytics. Or just download our CMO’s 90-Day Guide to Better Analytics.
