Part III—Why B2B Marketing is Difficult to Measure

Analytics · By On · 2 Comments

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

  • http://www.measurechange.com Marko Muell­ner

    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​.mea​surechange​.com

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/mchertudi mcher­tudi

    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.