← Renegade Marketers Unite
Renegade Marketers Unite
429: The B2B Marketing Performance Index
00:50:37
When it comes to marketing metrics, what you measure—and how you measure it—can make all the difference. In this episode, Drew Neisser is joined by six-time CMO to explore how to create marketing dashboards that go beyond vanity metrics to tell a...
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, Renegade marketers. If this is your first time, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. You're about to hear a bonus huddle where experts share their insights into the topics of critical importance to our B2B community. CMO huddles. In this bonus huddle huddler Grant Johnson shares his Marketing Performance Index, an awesome and simplified way of measuring what really matters. If you want to follow along with Grant's screen, make sure you check out the index linked in the show notes on renegademarketing.com or watch this episode via our YouTube channel. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one podcast for B2B marketers. All right, let's dive in. Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive, demand, and just plain cut through proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and chief marketing renegade, Drew Neiser. Hello, huddlers. We all know that pipeline revenue, cost per acquisition, and lifetime value are important metrics because your PE firms and your VC firms will never let you forget that. But they're lagging metrics and they don't capture marketing's full impact on the organization or any momentum you might have generated to solve this challenge. Five time CMO Grant Johnson created a dashboard that captures the bigger story, and he's used it in his last two positions. And today we're going to actually walk through it. It's kind of a big premiere, at least as far as this show goes. So I'm excited to share it with you. For those of you who are not watching this in YouTube but are listening via podcast, we'll do our best to explain the charts that Grant is going to share. All right, Grant. Hello. How are you? And where are you, Drew?
- [02:19]
B
I'm doing great, Drew. Thanks for having me. I'm in sunny Southern California in San Clemente.
- [02:26]
A
I know it well, and I can just imagine that sunshine and the tennis courts that go with it. All right, so just in case, we love to do this on this show with the bonus huddles, in case our audience has to leave early or we need to persuade them to stick around. Can you offer three things that many marketers get wrong when it comes to metrics, track and dashboards?
- [02:53]
B
The first thing is they track far too many. And we've heard the terms vanity metrics, metrics only, that matter to marketing. The second Thing and I think it's probably the most important thing is they don't get agreement on which metrics that the CEO, the CRO, the cfo, the C suite can care about are the board and investors and they get hung up on other metrics that they think are important or maybe show great momentum nobody cares about. And really the third thing is to have set a baseline. Those are the 1, 2, 3. If you don't listen to the rest of the podcast, although I hope you do.
- [03:40]
A
So I want to go through those one at a time and this is really tricky. Maybe I'm going to start with the second one first just because I know we want to get agreement on the metrics and I know that there's no problem. Nobody's going to argue with you about CAC and lifetime value and pipeline and revenue and that's all they want to talk about. But the whole purpose of this dashboard is to broaden the lens and say there's more that you can care about. So walk this fine line because look, they don't understand necessarily because they're not. They have no training in marketing why these things matter and why you can't just spend a dollar and get a dollar output. So walk us through this. Getting agreements on a metrics and but getting a little bit broader aperture, if you will, than just revenue and you know, cac.
- [04:33]
B
Right. And it takes a long time in many cases to get understanding and agreement on why these other metrics matter as well. So let's start and we're going to go through the market performance index. We'll start from left to right with market presence. And you know, market presence is really about being there, being found when prospects are searching, looking for alternative solutions, losing the status quo, something new. And so it measures each of the three areas, market presence, brand strength and pipeline health, which as you say, many execs only care about the third one. Each of these has basically two performance indicators and six, four metrics each. So 24 total metrics. So if you think about, you know, reach, you know, your media, your social media, you know, your site visitors, if you're getting less than your competitors, and all these are in the context of your competitive set, your competitive dynamics, it's less likely a customer is going to find you don't even have an opportunity for a BDR sales to present why they should care, what your value prop is, why you should be in the running. So that's, you know, market presence. Then brand strength measures both the engagement with customers and prospects and the loyalty and Almost every company and I've mostly been with B2B SaaS companies. You, you have to land and then you have to expand, you have to grow those customers. And if they're not engaged with you, if they're not looking at your customer communications, your website, your product announcements, they're not loyalty, they're not loyal to your brand, they won't defend you when somebody tries to undermine you, then you're going to lose share of wallet. So that's why these two, they all work together so that when you create a dollar a pipeline, you have a better chance of converted to closed one revenue people forget that not all things are created equal. Not everybody's perceived for the same competitive stature. And so if you've got market presence going well and brand strength going well, your pipeline is going to be more productive.
- [06:32]
A
So I know that and you know that and you've seen this. But I'm going to push a little back on a little thing you've described almost an educational progression where say, hey, if they haven't heard of you, you're not going to get on the list. If you don't have strong customer relationships and brand strength, you're not going to stay on the list. And then eventually we can talk about, you know, revenue and pipeline. We know we're going to have those. But those first two, those are the parts that I feel like often get lost in the conversation. Oh, you're just talking marketing speak now. Help us get to how did you sell this in to a CEO who's look, their board is always going to say to them, more revenue, more revenue, more revenue, more customers, more customers, more customers.
- [07:21]
B
Well, there's a couple ways, you know, first of all, There are certain CEOs that have a more general manager, maybe less of a technologist or less of a financial bias, have more sort of a general view. And they understand that customers, whether B2B or B2C, they're influenced by intangibles and their perceptions, not just by something that's purely functional and concrete. And so I was fortunate in my journey as a CMO to have the CEO and it's in. We'll discuss it today in burst over three years. Eric Friedrichsen understand that marketing is an equation and it and it's, it's comprehensive IT market ultimately touches all aspects on the buyer's journey. They may not be the lead source or the origination of the opportunity, but they're going to touch it. And so he and I agreed that I would measure 24 various metrics across these three areas. And so we could look at if, you know, something went up and something went down on the whole, it went up, it was good. Sometimes they're all moving in one direction in a positive way. Sometimes you have market disruption. And so I still think that it's very unlikely if you, you know, raise your hand if you're one of those super fortunate folks. I think you blogged in this recently, Drew, right. And you're allowed to do everything and not question on anything. He understood it. I gave him objective quarterly report on how we were doing. And so we had an ongoing dialogue. But almost always you're going to have to do some level of education. And if you set the baseline, you can show that, hey, these two numbers went up and see how we got more efficient in pipeline. Oh, okay. There's no substitute for just showing the numbers because that's the language of business that everybody understands.
- [09:09]
A
So. All right. The post you're referring to is my tongue in cheek. There ought to be a list of the luckiest CMOs in the world. Because what you're basically saying is if you are fortunate to have a CEO who can think that there is an equation that this is not a spend a dollar, get a customer, then you are likely to be able to sell this broader framework of measurement. So I'm going to go back to your. So we've covered basically baseline and agreement. So just before we get to the chart and in the index, you talk about too many metrics and you've sort of, you've narrowed it down to 24. But what I like about your index is that it's really, you could ladder up to three buckets and two KPIs, so you could get it down to just six if you really wanted to. I think that's right. Because if you actually had to talk about 24 metrics to a board, they'd be going, what are you doing?
- [10:03]
B
Well, are just three. Like I've had a board say, like, how we doing analyst relations. Well, that influences. Well, like they know who we are. Our brand strength helps us. We need to be the upper right. Of course you do, but your marketers, they don't. They look at your website, they look at your, you know, they look at, if you're at a Gartner, a van, for example, all these things influence the influencer. So you're right. I think you could reduce it to three metrics. But as I've said, do others. And you know, I've had a number of huddlers. Thank you all who try this out, and anybody can try it out. We'll talk later about that is what matters. Like, there may be five, there may be 15. You need to get agreement on what matters. You can measure anything you want. I had 100 my last company, but I didn't report on more than just a couple. Right, so that's exactly right.
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A
Drew, let's put up the index so we can talk about it and where the variables are. But what's important in this dashboard. We'll call it that for the moment.
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B
Yeah, that sounds good.
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A
All right, so hopefully those of you watching this, so what we're seeing is the marketing performance index and the three big, broad buckets that Grant talked about. Market presence, brand strength, pipeline, health, and then underneath. So let's do it one at a time. Let's go back to market presence, and what are we really resolving here? I see some copy under market presence, but what are we actually measuring?
- [11:20]
B
Well, customers are exploring, and just out of intellectual curiosity, they've got a problem that they need to solve. They're trying to see, hey, is there a better solution than the one I adopted two, three years ago? And so I just picked these four, because I think, as you mentioned at the outset, Drew, that they're more directional as to how well you're doing. Comparative. Like earned media and social media don't exist in a vacuum. You either get coverage over your competitors, or you don't either are building followership, engagement or not. You either have a dynamic site or you're lagging with your competitors. And the same thing with events. You know, events reach is really about in your industry. There may be 5, 10, 15 events that most of the customers and prospects go to. Are you there? Like, I've had what I call intercept marketing. They didn't know we existed. We hadn't invested in our brand. But they saw our, you know, tagline. They saw our value prop. They talked to somebody at the show floor, said, hey, you know, you might be someone I should consider. So that's, you know, that's the market presence reach. Then share is, you know, it's related to that. It's really about, okay, let's measure your share of voice in the media. Let's measure, you know, what percentage you have on indirect sales, what sort of search you're getting with SEO with your names. You know, some companies do well with SEO because they've got, like, a dedicated person, but nobody knows their brand.
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A
So stop for one second. I want to stay on reach for a moment. One, I just want to answer A quick question. What do you mean by events reach?
- [12:45]
B
And what I mean is you pick again, there's a definition for all these. I'll share that later. But you pick the events that you think are most influential in your industry. Whatever, you know, vertical or verticals you serve or, you know, whatever type of industry customers will go to those events. And so you want to be present when they're exploring new solutions or they're trying to decide if they should stay with existing solutions. So that's what I mean by region. It's basically a simple metric of are you increasing Your reach by 10% a year, by 20% a year, 30% a year? It's based on your increase of your presence.
- [13:22]
A
I got it. So we baseline, say 20, 23, and we say we went to five events, right. And we're just going to ladder that up to 100. And then so the next year we go to six events and now we're at 10% over what we were the year before. Is that sort of how you get to some kind of index per quarter?
- [13:45]
B
Yeah, exactly. And what I as I've talked to a number of huddlers, Drew, I felt like, hey, if you don't measure one of these 24 or three of the 24, you know, what do you measure that matters to your business, that matters to the C suite, that matters to your investors, Right. You know, in the things that they're talking about. So you can substitute anything, but, you know, if you're going to substitute events reach, it ought to be something that talks about where customers can find you. It could be a review site. You could put that in there if you wanted to.
- [14:13]
A
And so what's interesting with this is because you could also try to measure event like absolute reach. Like what how many people went to the trade show or how many people actually came to your booth. Right. And signed in, which, you know, may or may not be an accurate measure. Some people would be there with a clicker or something, but one way or another, the point is it's more about the trend than it is the absolute in almost all of these. Right. So even if we looked at earn media, which is the amount of press coverage that you get, you could look at it if you wanted to. You could look at it on impressions, total impressions gain, or you could do it on a just stories written basis. But either way, you're looking for an upward or downward trend and you're going to index with your baseline, right?
- [15:03]
B
That's exactly right. And since this is a bonus huddle, I'M an author. Bonus. I figured out the absolute equation for events. And you know, because events, especially fiscal events, we've all returned to, those are costly, is you want to measure, not just increase, you want to measure coverage and composition. And what I mean by that is we all have certain segments we sell to and so are there more people from those segments, small, medium, large, you know, healthcare, financial services, government going to the vent or not. And composition is, you know, what, what are your Personas? What are the decisions? What are their titles? So you got a bunch of low level tire kickers, to use a phrase. You could increase by 10% but you're not getting decision makers. So you can always get more sophisticated. It's an overall growth metric. But you know, with events you can take it next level deeper to make sure you get the right people, you know, going to your booth and having good, you know, productive conversations.
- [15:55]
A
So one of my favorite expressions when we covered events for a whole month in CMO huddles was revenue in the room. And we talked about that where. And that's really where the sales guys have to book meetings as a result around that. And you could look at it and you could say revenue in the room could be another way of looking at it. And you baseline that well in Q4, the revenue of the room at these trade shows were X. A year later it was Y. Did it go up, did it go down, did it go sideways? Because this is as much about forward progress as it is about the absolute. And if you get stuck in the absolute, you're going to hurt yourself in this thing. You know what's really hard though with earned media. And I think some folks will take look one article exposure in the Wall Street Journal could be worth a thousand in a little trade pub or vice versa. Sometimes that trade pub could just be the one. So some of these are trickier than others. Right, right.
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B
And that's why you can put weighting on these. Right. You may have, you know, scores and weighting factors. You know, you just have to figure out again to the baseline that manages your business and go from there.
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A
Okay, so we've done reach, now we're talking about share. And I'm just gonna. There's four segments under share, share of voice, indirect sales. And let's stop with share of voice. Are we, do we need have to have a meltwater or muck rack to measure that share of voice?
- [17:22]
B
Or you know, ideally if you have automated measurement systems, it's better. But you can, you know, you can count them up, right. You Know, you can certainly based on your, you know, search mechanisms and you can just compare that way. But yeah, it would be better to have one of those services. That way, you know, you're presenting objective, accurate, comprehensive data.
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A
But we are talking about essentially digitally tracked impressions. Right. For share of voice.
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B
Right. And you could get qualitative. What, what's the value of a feature versus a mention versus somebody actually using your value prop, you know, on message, that's even more valuable. But you know, it's a raw measure. A share of voice is a way to start. And most companies that I've been at, you know, you try to increase that share little by little.
- [18:10]
A
Right. And what's funny about that one is if we did it based on just, we index it, you could have a really low share of voice and you're making progress, but you still have a really low share of voice. And so it would be nice to see that in that particular case, if you have a low share of voice because you're underspending, it would be nice to be able to have that show up. Okay, then we have indirect sales percentage. What do you mean by that?
- [18:34]
B
I mean is how much of your sales are from partners, resale, referral partners. It's not required. There are many companies that get to a billion and beyond that are all direct. But in my experience, 20 years of doing this, if you've got these channels, these OEMs partners or referral partners, they're going to be tailing your story, they're going to bring leads, they're going to reinforce your position as the vendor of choice within in a competitive battle. And so they just, it's an indicator of your presence because other people know you exist, that maybe they're part of your ecosystem. And I just think it helps you. Where I've seen companies grow indirect sales, they've generally grown revenue. If you think about the levers of a business, there's product, there's channel, there's geography, things like that share of wallet. And this is one of those that really, if you can build, which I've been fortunate, good indirect systems, they're going to be part of making. Your number will come through channels.
- [19:32]
A
So but in that when you say indirect sales as a percent of total, right. So what's interesting there is you could have that number go up, right. Because everything else is down. So how does that work?
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B
Well, look, there's always going to be, you know, something that you have to look in the context of the, all the metrics, right. You could have that go up. But, you know, if you look across the board, you know your NPS is going down because you, you know, you stop, you cut customer support by 30% and it's taking you two days to, you know, meantime, to resolution for a ticket. So your customer set goes down. Right. And you're losing more customers or, you know, so these other factors, that's why you look at whatever you feel is the cohesive set. For me, it sees 24. And if that's going up, but, you know, nothing else is going down, you'll probably be surprised if your overall revenue, bookings and revenue are going up. Something's driving it there. Right. And this helped you figure out the complementary factors. And I think this is one of those that has an outsized impact. If you're 10% indirect and you go to 40% indirect, your share of the potential market you can get to is probably going to be bigger. Right.
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A
Okay. Unbranded search, that's just people typing in your. Your name or your cat.
- [20:46]
B
They're typing in the problem they're trying to solve. You know, order they're trying to solve. You know, don't get hacked. And then branded is the name you use for your product. You could use a descriptive term or you can have a proprietary term. Right. But it's just a couple different ways of seeing how people, what they know about you and how often you show up.
- [21:05]
A
So, but with, I get with branded search, because it's like of the total times people are searching, how many times are they actually searching you by name? And that one, if people are searching by name for you more clearly, your awareness is going up. It is a great thing. I don't quite understand unbranded search because someone else could be driving the category and saying, hey, we're creating a new category. They're doing a great job with it. And you're not getting any of that because it's all associated with their brand. How does that one work?
- [21:33]
B
Yeah, so I would use, I'd use Google Analytics or something similar to where if SEO, if you've optimized your web properly, your web pages, your landing pages, your key terms, and those are the terms that are looking to solve the problem. You know, optimize cash flow. Okay. Reduce. And then you, they come to your website, you will. It will show up on your search reporting that you got an unbranded search. There may be different sub terms they use, but you'll know it wasn't. They weren't looking for, you know, inverse chrome river, which is, you know, one of the companies where they weren't looking for a Chrome river travel expense solution, they were looking to lower my travel and expense costs. Right.
- [22:11]
A
So we're really talking about keywords, owns and keywords.
- [22:14]
B
Exactly. And you define those keywords that you track.
- [22:16]
A
I got it. Right. So there. There might be 30 keywords in the category that really matter. You rank in the top five for three of them today, but if you get eight of them tomorrow, you've made headway. I get it. Okay. All right. So you've created some sort of number for each of those. And at the end of the, say, reach one, you have a score for reach. Right. And that adds up. And then you have a score for share. And on the chart we're looking for, we see that in this particular case, it needs improvement on reach. But you're doing great on share.
- [22:55]
B
No, this is actually. I actually have. I'm going to show you after this. This was trying to land on one page. This was not scored. This is saying this is three. That's why those are all blue. You can either be. Needs improvement, you're below 60, you're 70 to, you know, 89. Good. You're over 90 or 80.
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A
Got it, got it, got it.
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B
Right.
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A
All right. Okay. We'll get to that in a second. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. This show is brought to you by CMO Huddles, the only marketing community dedicated to B2B greatness and. And that donates 1% of revenue to the Global Penguin Society.
- [23:28]
B
Why?
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A
Well, it turns out that B2B CMOs and penguins have a lot in common. Both are highly curious and remarkable problem solvers. Both prevail in harsh environments by working together with peers. And both are remarkably mediagenic. And just as a group of penguins is called a huddle, our community of over 300 B2B marketing leaders huddled together to gain confidence, colleagues, and coverage. If you're a B2B CMO, why not dive into CMO Huddles by registering for our free starter program on CMO huddles.com? hope to see you in a huddle soon. So let's move on to brand strength. And what are we really measuring when it comes to brand strength? Not specifically, but in a general basis. What are we covering?
- [24:21]
B
I have put into two parts, engagement and loyalty. And engagement is both for prospects customers, but it's generally even more important with prospects. So you know your social media. I use the example. One company could have 10,000 followers, which I've been there another can have 50. And the company with 50,000 followers has less than one engagement. The company with 10 has like nine. Like, they love that. They're relevant, they're meaningful, they speak to that particular prospect. Customer segment. And so engagement is something you can track and it shows whether you, you're gaining momentum or you're losing it. Right. So that's engagement. There's events that you do, customer round tables or regional events. Community. I've talked to a number of huddlers where they don't have an online community, but maybe it's their customer advisory council, you know, that they, they just try to see, hey, is that growing or getting, are we getting more fans, more influencers, are we building a following? Right. And then third party event is. That's really like where else you're going to go. You can go to whatever your industry, whoever runs those events or like the main analyst events. And again, that just shows you know how you're doing there. So that's engagement.
- [25:27]
A
Okay. I want to make sure that. So social media, we're tracking some form. Again, it depends on the brand and so forth. But it could be engagement per post, it could be, you know, I'm not sure if you settled on a specific social media.
- [25:43]
B
I just do month over month overall engagement. You set your baseline. You do five posts or you do four posts. What's your total engagement on those posts?
- [25:52]
A
Got it, got it. And then we've got owned events that people showing up and so forth. Hopefully your own event budget didn't get cut because that's not going to be good. But you'll see it there. Okay. Community. What I love about that, it just reminds everybody. You probably should be thinking about that. I mean you could be looking at it as user conference. You could be talking about customer events, something where you're bringing your customers together and then third party events. What's it. How do we make distinguish between third party event and events reach?
- [26:26]
B
It's not owned. Right. So the events reach is just, is the total number of events as a percentage that you're in percentage that the third party's event is how you know what's the total reach of all those. That all those audiences. Right. So if you go to like some little conference tabletop I used to do in cyber security, you know, you get, you know, 100 people or go to Black Hat, you get a hundred thousand people. That's more of a quantitative measure.
- [26:55]
A
Got it. Okay. All right, let's now go through loyalty and the four measures that you have there.
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B
Yeah, these actually are unique in the, in the market performance index is that I'm not defining these. These are defined, have been defined for, you know, decades. Certainly, you know, at least two decades for, for SaaS. But so, you know, net performance, if you're below 30, you're underperforming 30 to 70. Your, your good performance over 70 is world class. NPS has been around a long time. They define it CSAT. The same thing, CSAT. If, you know, if you're above 90, it's good. If you're below 90, it's average. You're below 70 or so forth, you're in trouble. Gross retention is basically of 100 customers, how many do you retain year over year? And net retention is. What's the net retention dollar. That's finance. You know, CFO partners of ours, love. This is like even if you only retain 95%, which by the way is good, if you grow each customer 10%, you're actually at 105%. You have the 95 plus, they're at 110%. You add that to the 95, you get to 105. So, you know, again, some companies don't, they're not SaaS. Maybe they're on premise or maybe they just don't track it that way. You can substitute other royalty measures, but if you're getting more of your customer's wallet, that's a good thing.
- [28:10]
A
Right? And I probably, yeah, I mean, I have such a problem with NPS because it is such a moment in time measure. It's like if you just talk to customer service and you had a good resolution, you'll give a high score. If you're about to call them, you'll give a low score and you won't really know what the issue is. So you won't know.
- [28:30]
B
But I think just like anything else, if you start looking at it quarter over quarter, month over month, year over year, there'll be causality as to why did this go down and why did it go up. Or you can figure that part out. You're right. Point in time metrics are crazy to make judgments on. Right.
- [28:44]
A
Okay, then we get to. Okay, so that's loyalty. And again, I think you, you may find that customer satisfaction is a better measure for you than that promoter, in which case you can find another one in there to help you assess loyalty. But I like the distinction between gross retention as a percent of customers and net retention as a, a revenue s scenario. Because if you keep all your big clients and you grow them, life is pretty good. Even if you Lost some of the smaller ones.
- [29:13]
B
Most of us that are SaaS, you know, experience have, you know, at risk. And we're not putting the, you know, $1,000 a month customer, we're putting the 10 or $100,000 a month customer that that's going to make a difference the business. Right, exactly right.
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A
Okay, so now let's talk about pipeline health.
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B
Yeah, for me, pipeline health, this is probably where I have a hundred metrics or you know, dozens for a lot of people. And I just pick four that I've seen. Like if these are going in the right direction, if you're growing the number of top of funnel leads, you may not be efficient at converting them. Right. You may need to score them better. Conversion is basically if somebody comes to your website and gives you their name, you know, they could be allow contact me or they want to contact sales, they want to download gated content. But I was talking to Brian Ma and our group group here and we all know Brian at Zoom Info and he said hey, for me it's like the, you know that they do the demo right or somebody else, it might be the trial. You decide what's the most important conversion that shows you're getting to opportunities, right? It's the path to opportunities. Hopefully the path to close one business pipeline multiple is it's going to vary by every business. I've generally found in 20 years of mostly enterprise mid market sales is you got to have you know, 3 to 4x. You know, if you're above 5 it's easy, if you're below 2, it's going to be hard. I know some companies where they're not even a 2x and they're every quarter they're struggling because you know, you think about a 2x sales has to win almost 50% of the deals, right? And then ROI is however your CEO or board wants to measure roi, you could measure on an absolute basis of all dollars, marketing people, programs and tech stack. How much revenue does it produce? I actually love the subcategory of ROI program dollar meaning that you know, I've already covered ROI for the overall team and technology. If you give me another $100,000, how much revenue can I produce? And if I can produce 400,000, close one business. I've had CEOs and boards tell me just ask for the next hundred thousand once you've proven it. So the first time is going to be hard to do the business case. But if you can prove it and you can show how you did it, then ROI can be a Difference maker.
- [31:19]
A
Yeah, it's such a tricky one and I believe you have to work with your CFO to get that number believable. Right. Because they've got to fully load it and decide what costs go in. And I also imagine it's really hard from a time frame standpoint if you have a long 18 month sales cycle. That gets tricky. But before we go to that, because I want to come back to leads for a second. It's funny, we've sort of all over the course of the last two years said pooh, pooh leads. Because leads, you can't eat leads as they, you know, as the folks might say. And they're not really anything until they actually become an opportunity. Right. Because there's lots of, there's lots of ways of driving, beefing up your lead number and then watching your conversion numbers just tank. Because they're not really leads, they're just people who might be in the market five years from now. So why did you keep leads in here?
- [32:11]
B
Well, I mean the reason I kept it is, look, you, I've managed bdr, a lot of us had, many times. You gotta have context and you have to have calls, then you have to have conversations and eventually convert them to somebody who wants to talk to sales. You still really haven't converted them. Right. But just using those four Cs and I think if you want to get precise, use mqa, you know, or you know, whatever other terms you want to use does. If you do, you know, ABM account based marketing and like that's it's got to score 100, it's got to be somebody who's a decision maker in your, you know, Personas and then that's a lead. It's not just somebody responded or they opened an email. You have to determine leads where it's going to be meaningful to your business. And for me, I've looked at a qualified leads. I get a very good conversion. If you see them right under progression MQL SQL. If they don't make it to mql, maybe you just, maybe you just put MQL in there. You have to decide what lead is meaningful. But if you don't get top of funnel growth, I don't care how efficient you get, you can't just get efficient and grow. You can't cut your way to growth. You've got to ultimately grow the total pie.
- [33:15]
A
Wait, you can't cut your way to growth?
- [33:17]
B
Ah, well, don't tell PE that.
- [33:19]
A
Yeah, exactly. We've had that conversation before. Okay, so I, I Appreciate the fact that that could be MQLs. And what I also appreciate the fact is, and this is, I think really important, is you're not leaving that one to just stand out there on its own because you are immediately going from on the next column, you show MQL to SQL, which is really important. And you're also showing MQL to conversion, which is really important. So. And you can't get to either of those without, as you said, there's got to be somebody who's actually talked to somebody who said, yeah, I'm interested. These days marketing should be really, really good at, at qualifying what looks like an opportunity. Okay, so we've got, we're going to call it. I'm gonna, I, I can't use leads. I've just too many times that people. So we'll call it marketing qualified leads. Then we have conversion. And what we're talking about, conversion there is that they actually became a customer.
- [34:15]
B
They signed a deal, they gave somebody who gave you permission quid pro quo. You gave them content to follow up. You, you, they, they're added to your database. They want to talk to you. You know, maybe you've got a conversational agent and they want to have a conversation with the BDR str and so they're willing to engage.
- [34:33]
A
So that's. So they've, they've said, yeah, it's like they'll talk. They want to see the demo plus or talk to a salesperson. Yeah, whatever you decide conversion is. But it's not. They've signed a contract.
- [34:47]
B
No.
- [34:47]
A
Okay.
- [34:48]
B
On the far right, you know, you know, closed or one business.
- [34:52]
A
Got it. Right, Right. Okay. And then we have pipeline multiple, which is essentially another way of saying coverage for salespeople.
- [35:00]
B
Yeah, exactly. And it gets really tough when you got multiple sales teams. Like every sales team needs 3-4x. It's hard to uniformly, you know, create pipeline. There's, there's ways you can do with ABM Carnegie close to that. But, you know, enterprise sales are going to tend to take longer. They're going to need more multiples and, you know, more transactional SMB businesses. Maybe you have an E commerce site and they can make the decision on the web. You probably need to lower multiple. When it's the multiple of your bookings target. If your bookings is 10 million per quarter, you need, and you need a 3X, you need 30 million in pipeline that could be realized within a given quarter.
- [35:35]
A
Okay. Roi, we've already talked about, again, working with your CFO to define what that Is okay. And then progression. We've got MQL to SQL. So you turned over a bunch of marketing qualified leads to sales and they said, nah, these are no good.
- [35:53]
B
Yeah, that, that does happen.
- [35:54]
A
That does happen. But. And still we're looking at that ratio. Right. And we're tracking that ratio. And ideally that ratio is getting better, not getting worse.
- [36:04]
B
Yeah.
- [36:04]
A
Okay, then we have SQL to. I'm going to sales qualified one or sort of. That's, that's.
- [36:11]
B
They're sales qualified opportunity mql. So I call the sales the skeptic lead. I call it sales qualified lead. Like BDR touches it. But again, you may only have two stages, you have three stages, but it's all the funnel you need to show progression in velocity. And so you need to look at how these things are, you know, going. And you can look at them by team, by geography, by product line.
- [36:34]
A
Okay. And then close rate we're talking about, we now have sales qualified opportunities. How many of those did they close?
- [36:42]
B
Yeah. And that's when they first entered the pipeline. So let's say the five stage sales process. Stage one, sales is a qualified lead SQL. And so how many actually get to close one contracted business.
- [36:54]
A
Right, okay. And we obviously, we want that number to get better, not get worse.
- [37:01]
B
Well, right. You did a survey recently, Drew, you blogged it. And I was a little concerned to read as well because I had not experienced quite that. No, the average is like 17%, let's say it's even 20%. You got to have a 5x multiple, right. To make the number. So you got to really watch that one closely and you have to figure out like I do win loss analysis, was it price, was it, you know, engagement, was it features? You know, was it just. We're making slow decisions because the economy, you understand why it's changing. Right.
- [37:29]
A
So what's the. And so your last one is win rate. What's the difference between the reason I.
- [37:33]
B
Picked that again, you could substitute close rate for something else. I picked win because what I found is in looking at a lot of win loss analysis over the years is you generally have certain head to head that you know, you've got to win against your top two competitors. And let's say you're winning against a bunch of upstarts and other people that aren't proven and you know, you're celebrating probably too soon, but you're losing somebody else's gaining market momentum. So I. It's a sub of close rate, it's a subset and it's when I Track head to head against competitor A, competitor B, my fiercest competitors, those are the ones I want to beat. So that's why I like to look at. And sales likes to look at it. And it helps. Hey, I remember when I was quarter, one company says, you know, we were beating IBM 50% of the time they bought us. That was filed up, by the way. It was true. So that's why win rate is key.
- [38:18]
A
Okay. All right, let's go to the next slide and look at this with numbers or with the color coding.
- [38:24]
B
Let's look at the score. Yeah. First I want to say, yeah, thank you, Drew. And thank everyone listening and participating. I know it's a lot to get through. We're now going to do the speed drill. It's really easy to do. Takes about 30 minutes. I can just walk you through it and it'll produce a score like this one. And so let's go through the scores and I can go the individual scores, but it's color code to make a little bit easier. So, you know, this happens to be a company that was doing fine. And reach, engagement, loyalty, pipeline, progression, they're all just, you know, solid, you know, yellow solid. But it kind of catches your eye because, you know, you can improve. But in share, they just really weren't, you know, they didn't, they didn't have pr. Like, they weren't invested in pr and you know, they just, like social media was anemic and it just means they're kind of losing momentum. And so they, you know, kind of. It points out, like there's a couple areas that they could easily, you know, you don't necessarily have to have a full service agency. Right. You can, you know, pay per article or you can have freelancers, but you gotta be in the conversation. So when you do this, you start to see, and I'll go to the next couple, you start to see like there's some. Every company is going to be unique in what they can do, where they have budget, resources, human staff, resources to pay attention to something. Some things say, hey, I can't deal with that now. This is more important. So that's one score right there. And then some quick diagnosis on what to do. Right? Okay, next one. So here's the company. And you know, these all companies, you know, let's say between 25 and 250 million, because I can't name who they are. I always promise anonymity, but I can. It's. It's something that you can certainly see a parallel in. This is a company that Was, you know, really good, you know, good in.
- [40:04]
A
A lot of areas.
- [40:05]
B
But in their engagement, oh man, their customers, they always show up to their events, they comment on the post. Well written post. I took value from it right away and so forth. And they were like, the top score, you get a hundred, right? It should have been flashing green. However, the red flash is progression. And if you look at the scores, you can get 10, 15 or 25. If you're listening, it's just, how do you get to 100? Right. I won't do the math in my head, but trust me, the best you can get is a hundred. And so if you look at what they were doing in their MQL to SQL, that first number of 10, they just, you know, maybe they're not qualifying, maybe they're going too wide of a net, maybe they need to narrow. Do what it's called the, you know, the happy path. You know, who progressed from MQL to SQL, SQL to 1 and why and what period of time, what do we do? You can look at the buyer's journey, what touches, how many touches do we have, right? And so, and their win rate was terrible too. It was like 14%. And so these are some of the things that they can do to try to bring the win rate up. Certainly that's why partly, you know, you're going to have to have enough at bats, but they've got to do better progressing to get more, otherwise they're going to have to build, you know, 8x, which is, I don't know who has the budget for that anymore.
- [41:15]
A
So let me stop you on this one because in this particular scenario, this is my worst scenario, right? Because this is, hey, you're doing okay with market presence, you're doing really pretty well with brand strength, but your pipeline is a problem. So why are we even bothering measuring these other two areas when pipeline is a problem and the solutions that, you know, to Pipeline are qualifying better or something? Because you can't point to these other ones necessarily.
- [41:42]
B
Well, they could have had a 40 instead of a 50. I mean, it could be worse, right?
- [41:48]
A
It's not. My point is simply all eyes and the board and the C suite and the CFO are always going to go to Pipeline Health first, right?
- [41:56]
B
Sure, sure they will.
- [41:58]
A
And as marketers, what we're trying to say is there's a whole story here, there's a whole progression. And so what we're basically saying at this point in time is we're doing every pretty well in market presence. We're doing really well, in brand strength, pipeline is a problem. So either we're selling to the wrong people, which means we're marketing to the wrong people, or our salespeople aren't very good or our product pricing is a problem or some other thing. Right. Which again, it's not a marketing problem in this case.
- [42:33]
B
It's somewhat of a. It's more of a sales problem. Exactly. It could, you know, it could be, you know, the 8020 rule, only 20% of the sales folks are hitting the quota. You know, productive. Could be a, you know, sales discipline. I've been at companies where we determined, well, we had this number, that we were, because of the desire to make quota, make the number show, put points to the board. They were progressing stage to stage too fast. So you just have to do the diagnostics and say, like, what do we correct in this case? They probably because the engagement of Python was healthy. To your point, Drew, they probably should narrow the set a little bit because some of these, when you start looking at the opportunities which they close and won, the ones they didn't, there are certain areas where they really didn't stand a chance. Right. You know, maybe it's competitor C, they do fine against competitor A and B, but you know, avoid competitor C because they're locked into the financial services vertical. They've gotten 80 of the top 100, whatever, you know, 70, the top 100am long if they're legal or something like that. So you're right, they're still going to over rotate on sales in this case. And there's some things market do, but in this case, progression really was a sales execution challenge.
- [43:39]
A
Okay. Which of course we all know that marketing doesn't win regardless. But the other thing I'm wondering about is because these other areas are healthy, is it possible that in the moment of time this was just a bad quarter, but in two quarters from now things are going to be better?
- [43:55]
B
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've seen quarters made by, you know, whales and every company I've been at, you know, new products, suddenly they're adopting that one. And you know, there's, there's no single factor, they're all interrelated. So as long as you're looking at enough, you can determine the reason why and what to correct about it. But yeah, this could have been, hey, it's a bad quarter.
- [44:14]
A
Okay, let's go to the next example.
- [44:17]
B
So what I thought I'd do here is just jump into a two year and again, it's a bit of an eye chart, but what's Instructive. This is what, what was done. I was at inverse when I started doing this Q1 of 2020. I looked at a quarter by quarter and I mentioned the aggregate score is top score is 100. You know, we started 62 in the first quarter, 2020. See that the graph on the top, the numbers are right. But I also looked at hey, what was happening externally because you talked about you could have a bad quarter. Well Look, Covid hit 2020, right. And then we, we put an inbound system in. We got 5% lift there and replatform a website. We were on, you know, spaghetti wire and whatever bailing wired spaghetti coaters up that then we finally implemented a cross sell system. You know, then there was you know, market pullback and a new product launch. So part of what's good is just trying to determine like what were the leading causes of improvement or you know, where you, where you fell short.
- [45:11]
A
But you know what you see is the score is getting better over time. Yeah. And so in theory there was also. Business was better over time.
- [45:22]
B
Yeah, and that's exactly right. Business was better over time. The company was doing better. You know, I think most business try to improve across the board. Every function tries to say hey, you know, that's why you have QBRs and you know, KPIs. And we were just executing better as a team, better as a company holistically.
- [45:39]
A
And of course obviously this marketing performance index includes some measure of sales. So they can't, it's not independent of them. But it would be interesting to just overlay sort of either both net new revenue and overall revenue on top of this thing and to sort of to show either the lagging correlation or something because it'd be really interesting. Ultimately, you know, these numbers can't stand alone. Right. You still are going to have to show that trend. Well, had an impact.
- [46:14]
B
That's exactly right. And look, I can tell you that in year one to year two, I worked very closely with the head of install based cross sell, the head of customer success and my marketing team, all three of us. It was well orchestrated. We grew a hundred percent year one to year two in cross sell we grew 50%. We would never have done that even if we were all working hand in hand if we didn't have the product innovation and higher product adoption. Right. And products that worked well as, as, as advertised, if you will. Right. And so it took all these things working together. It wasn't like some miracle marketing tactic or some silver bullet or some, you know, sales hero that made the Entire year. They may made one deal but this was the cohesive set of cross functional, go to market team working together, you know, product sales, marketing, customer success to get to that outcome.
- [47:06]
A
So and I think if we sort of wrap this up, I mean the thing that really it gives you, once you get buy in that I'm going to track these things and you start to show this over time it gives you something else to talk about rather than just revenue. Right. And because it is this journey, they know it. And you know, I mean you, you also shared at one point, you know, the journey map that you did, at least privately with me and it was like, oh my God, look at all those touches. So feel like this strengthens. So before we wrap up, I think it would be helpful just when it comes to creating a metrics dashboard, give us two do's and one don't.
- [47:57]
B
Well, the first thing to do is you've got to have measures that will stand up to scrutiny, right. That it's not like you're not making these numbers up. You know, I, I had instrumented from Salesforce reports, which is the source of truth that most companies are. There is a power Bi dashboard. You could do it with Excel yourself. And so you go check the numbers. I'm not making this up. So that's the first thing to do. The second thing is you have to get positive affirmation that these metrics matter or these metrics matter most and those are the ones that you're going to communicate. You may still track the other ones, you still make changes. Nobody cares about your bounce rate or your time on site. Probably they care if search term doesn't show up on page one. Right. What you don't do is you don't read the audience, you don't ask for feedback, you don't talk to a board member for the board meeting and say what do they want to hear? Right. Don't review it with your CEO. Right. And you also don't drive your team crazy. You know, don't just measure stuff because you can measure what you think is going to make a difference. Because we all got a lot to do. Put GNA to work, do somewhat for you. So.
- [49:05]
A
All right, I know you're still looking for some beta testers, right?
- [49:09]
B
Yeah, exactly. You, you know, you just, you know, reach me through the huddles or granitemomentor.com I've done it with a few folks. Whoever wants to do it, you know, just book 30 minutes and I'll walk you through how to do it and then we'll do one more call. Could be 15 minutes and I'll send you a PDF. I'll send you the Google sheet and you can set your own baseline, figure out what your right metrics are. And I just added to the databases are all anonymized and that way I can if I need to tweak a number to represent best practices over time, I can do it.
- [49:41]
A
Awesome. All right, thanks, Grant. This was a fantastic huddle. I hope you all enjoyed it. Thank you.
- [49:48]
B
Thank you.
- [49:50]
A
If you're a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring and daring CMOs@cmohuddles.com Renegade marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neiser. Hey, that's me. This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkin and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the Amazing Burns Twins and the intro voiceover is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests and learn more about CMO Huddles or my CMO coaching Service, please visit renegade marketing.com I'm your host, Drew Neiser. Until next time, keep those Renegade Marketing caps on and strong.