The year is 2023. B2B marketers have a host of tools at their fingertips to track engagement and activity, monitor intent, and automate workflows. However, not enough marketers are looking at the right data points in order to have a tangible, trackable impact on revenue. The good news is that, with the right CRM and MAS setup, tracking the right metrics can be quite easy.
Conversion Rates
Modern B2B marketers are shifting their mindset to quality over quantity for lead creation. Some are going as far to say that the MQL is dead. While we do believe it’s important to track MQL creation numbers, you must also track lead conversion rates. Doing so helps marketers understand whether budget is being allocated to efficient channels and generating high-potential leads for your XDR and Sales teams. By increasing conversion rates, marketers will see their customer acquisition costs decrease and marketing contribution percentages increase. Keep scrolling for more on marketing contribution percentages. 🙂
Lifecycle Lengths
Understanding your buyer journey is important for marketers to deliver the right communications at the right time in order to move opportunities down the funnel.
Firstly, understanding how long leads sit within a particular stage of the your funnel can identify where most of your leads get stuck. Based on Discern’s machine learning analytics, we know that the longer a lead or opportunity sits within a certain stage, the less likely that they will close. For revenue-driven marketers, this is a great opportunity to step in and nurture the leads to help them advance and ultimately become customers.
Additionally, you’ll want to run a lot of testing to ensure your content is optimized. Lifecycle lengths provide a good baseline to understand the quality and timing of your content. If you see your baseline lifecycle lengths increase or decrease in response to different messages or send times, you’ll know what content has the greatest impact.
Marketing Contribution Percentage
Not many people talk about what percentage of pipeline and bookings should be originated from marketing efforts. Perhaps this is because many non-marketers believe all pipeline should be generated from marketing. But for companies that rely heavily on channel parters or XDRs, it is clear that marketing should not be responsible for sourcing all pipeline. By identifying a marketing contribution target and monitoring performance against that target, marketing is set up for success in order to focus on the quality of leads (rather than quantity). When reverse engineering your marketing funnel, it is critical to take into account the marketing contribution percentage in order to establish reasonable lead creation targets.
Marketing Influenced Pipeline & Bookings
Marketing attribution continues to be a grey area for many B2B marketers. Despite dozens of attribution tools and several methodologies, we need to accept that marketing attribution is both an art and a science. Attribution methodologies will vary based on the business, and cannot be a one size fits all approach across the board. Regardless of the attribution model ultimately selected, marketers should focus on how that influenced pipeline number changes over time. This can help identify which campaigns, tactics and channels have the greatest ROI. This information will also help streamline budget conversations.
Marketing Originated Pipeline & Bookings
Different from marketing influenced pipeline/bookings, marketing originated pipeline/bookings looks at the opportunities sourced directly from marketing efforts – usually looking at the last touch. This metric is very easy to track using a simple opportunity source pick-list. This is the golden number many marketers will want to use to demonstrate their value on new bookings during board and management meetings.
The Challenge With B2B Marketing Analytics
As mentioned above, calculating and monitoring these metrics can be pretty straightforward with well-implemented CRM and MAS platforms. However, conversion rates and lead cycle calculations are often misleading. Many calculate conversion rates and lead cycle lengths by looking at the stage entry date since it’s an easier report to automate. However, doing so pulls in outliers: leads created several periods back that finally advanced after a long delay. Ultimately, these outliers will over-inflate your conversion rates and cycle lengths.
For accurate calculations, marketers need to look at leads by cohort. Meaning, looking at the activity of a single group of leads created within a particular period. Seeing how cohorted conversion rates and cycle lengths evolve will give you more accurate trend data. However, doing so is not easy without manual data analysis.
Discern is solving for this issue with automated cohort analytics. We look at your CRM and MAS history tables in order to provide an accurate view of lead behavior trends without manual work.
