A Case for New Metrics in B2B Marketing

Thought experiment: Your lead volume went up this month. It could be because:

1. More people are hearing good things about our company (Positive Awareness)

   1. We ran ads. People saw ads, remembered ads, saw a deal we’re offering this month, submitted Contact Us form

   2. We own a bunch of content that talks about stuff our target customer searches for (SEO strategy)

   3. We got a PR hit

      1. News article

      2. Organic social post from an influencer

      3. Spoke at a conference, was on TV, influential podcast, etc.

   4. Our customers are talking to other target customers

2. We improved our website / lead capture conversion rate (CRO)

3. Demand for the thing our company sells went up / shifted (Demand)

   1. We’re in the right business!

   2. Our product has really great product-market fit in this moment

   3. Our customers are growing, so they want to spend money on stuff

   4. A competitor shit the bed / closed down

That’s about it. The above contains literally all the levers that move that number (and I know this because I did a very scientific poll on a website that used to be called Twitter). The point is that there are a mix of things you can control in this list as well as things you can’t control. 

I’m oversimplifying but I’d say you have some control over most of #1 and #2 and basically zero control over #3. I know we like to call what we do “demand gen” sometimes, but let’s be honest: most companies aren’t nearly big enough to literally change demand for an established product category (or worse, a new product category). We hopefully play in a marketplace that already has customers eager to buy the thing we’re selling, provided they’re presented it in the right time and place at the right price. 

Yet, demand is the thing we’re often missing when we’re measuring marketing with lead metrics. Maybe we feel like it’s an “excuse” to say that demand has fallen across an entire industry or that the product has issues that are impacting its product-market fit. But the truth is we actually have no idea how much this factor is either buoying or sinking our lead number at any given time. There are ways to quantify demand overall; most industries have market data so you can see if you’re in a growth cycle or not. In fact, this is one of those “strategy decisions” your executive team makes in deciding where to play, and yet another reason why having a marketer around that table is critical. “Hey guys, why are we serving a shrinking industry instead of that growth one that has people lining up to spend money?” is a good question to ask if you’re seeing demand shift!

So if our lead metrics are loaded with factors out of our tactical control, what to do? I’m not suggesting we abandon them, though I do hate them as readers of this newsletter well know. I’m suggesting we get smarter about measuring the things that are under our control, and advocating for them to the CEO and executive team colleagues as an unpacking of our topline [X]QL metrics. This is why we think our number is going up or down, and in that ‘why’ we can figure out what we should do about it. Let’s go back to that list of factors and explore some examples of new KPIs that could work:

I’m sure I’m leaving out a lot of great ideas for KPIs that tell the story; each company is different. But I hope this opens your mind to the ways you can show your impact (or lack thereof) beyond just the tired “lead go up” story that – honestly – your CEO is probably not buying if you’re in an upcycle and that isn’t going to stop you from getting hosed if you’re in a downcycle. 

Getting more specific about the things we’re impacting can also teach non-marketers how to think about marketing effectiveness in fairly common sense ways.

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Hope all of you enjoyed the summer break. I’m glad to be back into posting as we approach Q4…because as the great Todd Keats always says, “there’s no Q5.”