Businesses and their marketing organizations that promote products or services with complex sales cycles often lack visibility beyond generating the initial sales leads from their Web sites, trade shows or other offline initiatives. For example, once Web leads are generated, they move into the black hole of the SFA/CRM system with almost no ability to tie results such as closed deal quantities and sales values back to the marketing campaign costs, thus leaving fully measured ROI (or return on marketing) unanswered. To provide concrete answers to these ROI and other related questions, marketers should endeavor to integrate their Web analytics/campaign management solutions together with their SFA/CRM applications.In lieu of this type of integration, most marketers are confined to measuring premature and often, misleading campaign metrics such as total lead quantities and their associated cost-per-lead metrics as a basis for performance. Once marketers are enabled to measure metrics beyond initial lead conversion such as:
Qualified leads and sales opportunities
Closed deals
Sales values
all at a campaign or tracking code level, marketers can prioritize which marketing investments such as advertising placements (which keywords, banner ad placements, email, etc.), site promotions (webinars, white papers, product tours, etc.) are yielding results deeper in the sales cycle relative to their counterparts.Derivative metrics such as creating Sales, Cost, and Customer per
Impression
Click/Event Conversation
Lead
Qualified Lead/Sales-Ready Leads/Opportunities
Customer
can provide meaningful insight into the effectiveness at every stage in the marketing and sales cycle.Looking ahead: Part III—Why B2B marketing is difficult to measure. We’ll discuss the complexity of measuring marketing to accounts which are most often comprised of multiple contacts or committees.Looking back: Part I—Measuring B2B Marketing
Part II—The Real Metrics & KPIs for B2B Marketing
Businesses and their marketing organizations that promote products or services with complex sales cycles often lack visibility beyond generating the initial sales leads from their Web sites, trade shows or other offline initiatives. For example, once Web leads are generated, they move into the black hole of the SFA/CRM system with almost no ability to tie results such as closed deal quantities and sales values back to the marketing campaign costs, thus leaving fully measured ROI (or return on marketing) unanswered. To provide concrete answers to these ROI and other related questions, marketers should endeavor to integrate their Web analytics/campaign management solutions together with their SFA/CRM applications.In lieu of this type of integration, most marketers are confined to measuring premature and often, misleading campaign metrics such as total lead quantities and their associated cost-per-lead metrics as a basis for performance. Once marketers are enabled to measure metrics beyond initial lead conversion such as:
all at a campaign or tracking code level, marketers can prioritize which marketing investments such as advertising placements (which keywords, banner ad placements, email, etc.), site promotions (webinars, white papers, product tours, etc.) are yielding results deeper in the sales cycle relative to their counterparts.Derivative metrics such as creating Sales, Cost, and Customer per
can provide meaningful insight into the effectiveness at every stage in the marketing and sales cycle.Looking ahead: Part III—Why B2B marketing is difficult to measure. We’ll discuss the complexity of measuring marketing to accounts which are most often comprised of multiple contacts or committees.Looking back: Part I—Measuring B2B Marketing