It always seems that marketing metrics is a fertile topic to discuss and write about but after reading a few recent Forrester research reports I think they really helped me to crystallize how I am going to be tracking metrics going forward but they also gave me a sense of what importance I should give to each of them.

While not plagiarizing them outright – I think I have adapted them to things I have blogged about before. I still feel there is only one metric that counts – SALES. Ringing the cash register is the best if not the only way to prove marketing value (as I have told you in the past). And our lead nurturing platform has been immensely helpful in giving transparency into that process and showing that value.

But many of you have questioned my outright simplicity of just using one metric by saying to me – don’t you measure Impressions? or don’t you measure Cost per Click?

Well of course I do but do I then email those stats to the CEO? No. But I do feel they have a place in your metrics so let me give you my 3 tiers of marketing metrics:

1) Reach metrics – Web site impressions, page views, radio impressions etc…
2) Efficiency metrics – Cost per click, time spent on the website, downloads of a paper or podcast etc.
3) Value – Contribution to Pipeline, contribution to Bookings, ROI on overall bookings.

So there you have it and these tiers infer some priority to them – reach being the least and value being the most.

I am also going to begin to look at reach metrics PAIRED with value metrics – ex – graph my weekly lead flow against my media budget looking for spikes or relative lift. This could be a good way to prove lift on a media budget for those budget discussions we all have.

Does Sales really care about leads? Maybe not.

If you ask Bill Binch, VP of Sales from demand generation software provider Marketo, he prefers pipeline and bookings to leads. Ironically, as much as lead nurturing and lead scoring can help generate pipeline and revenue, by framing the discussion around leads too many marketers ignore the equally valid perspective of their sales counterparts. This can lead to diminished success for many marketing-led efforts around lead management.

This is just one of the many disconnects between sales and marketing that we’ve been exploring in the series Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus. This is my 3rd such podcast with Marketo in this area. First we started with a CEO’s perspective then we did a VP of Marketing perspective and now we have the VP of Sales perspective. Getting the Sales viewpoint is critical for marketers since lead management initiatives always require buy-in and support from Sales to be successful.

Special thanks to my friends at Marketo for allowing me to interview their VP of sales for this podcast. They use what they sell to create opportunities for themselves, so there is no better place to look for ideas on how to optimize your own demand generation efforts than by talking with the guys who sell and deliver that for a living. I always learn something I can incorporate into my lead nurturing platform every time I talk with them! I hope you learn something too…

About Bill

Bill brings 16 years of best practice sales, leadership, and operations experience to his role leading all of Marketo’s sales and customer success activities. Prior to joining Marketo, Binch was VP and General Manager, Distribution, at AVOLENT, where he managed the team focused on the distribution market, small & medium businesses, and install base customers. Prior to AVOLENT, Binch developed his sales and operational experience at Oracle, PeopleSoft, and BEA Systems, where he built and managed direct, inside, and channel organizations and ran business units ranging from mid-market business customers to strategic accounts. Bill graduated from Arizona State University with a BS in Marketing.

 

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