The Most Important B2B Marketing Metrics for CEOs

Do you know what CEOs want most from B2B marketers? They want clarity about marketing metrics and revenue contribution.

CEOs often ask questions like “How much revenue is our marketing contributing and what’s our ROI?”

They expect their marketing leaders to provide clear metrics and be accountable for meeting their pipeline numbers just like sales.

In short, CEOs want marketing leaders to go beyond metrics like marketing qualified leads, engagement reports, and squishy metrics around a brand that aren’t tied directly to revenue or growth.

For example, I read this chart via MarketingCharts about the State of B2B marketing metrics.

Current State of B2B Marketing Metrics

They report, “The majority of senior B2B marketers are using basic marketing analytics tools such as web analysis (91%) and spreadsheets (80%)…” citing a recent report [download page] from Regalix.

Additionally, I found this great comment from Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions in TrustRadius’s new 2016 Buyer’s Guide to Marketing Automation. She sheds light on why this is such an issue. Ardath said:

They [marketers] have a hard time proving value, as they cannot tie to revenue. Many only can do last-touch attribution. They lose visibility once a lead moves into the sales realm. Marketing is often removed once it goes into sales, which is a mistake. There’s no continuous thread.

Read on to learn what you should measure.

Every CEO cares about Lifetime Value of Customer (LTV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) but what other marketing metrics do they actually care about?

6 Marketing Measures that Will Give You an Edge and your CEO Clarity

Here are six big-picture questions you can answer work on solving and measuring to give you an edge to help your CEO get clarity.

1. Marketing Influenced Customer Percentage

What’s the impact are your marketing investments making on sales productivity? On the sales pipeline? On revenue velocity?

2. Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)

What’s your return on your marketing investment (ROMI)?
How much are you putting in marketing and what are you getting out in revenue? The difference between these two numbers gets expressed as a percentage.

3. Marketing Originated Customer

How many and what percentage of your new customers are marketing generated?
How much revenue can you attribute to sales leads coming from your account based marketing or demand generation efforts over a given period?
How many customers started via marketing qualified leads?

Also, this measurement is simpler to track if you have a closed loop system.

4) Time to Revenue

What has your marketing done to help shorten your time-to-revenue?
What has your marketing done to lower the combined expense-to-revenue ratio of sales and marketing activities?

5) Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

What is your average expense of gaining a single customer?
What does your combined marketing and sales cost/divided by the number of new customers?
What is your marketing a percentage of the total customer acquisition cost?
What’s the total cost of your lead account-based marketing or demand generation efforts during a particular period? This number includes Marketing team total compensation, Vendors, marketing technology, costs, and materials)

6) What is your ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost (LTV:CAC ratio)?

Calculating this ratio will show if you’re spending too much to acquire each customer or if you’re missing opportunities from not spending enough.
The higher the ratio, the better. 3:1 or 4:1 is excellent.

If you want help calculating LTV:CAC, check out this post.

Cheatsheet for CEO-level calculating marketing measurements via HubSpot

6 Marketing metrics your CEO actually cares about Source: hubspot.com

Conclusion

You can start working on these six key marketing measures now. I’ve seen marketers who really dig in and answer these big-picture questions get an edge. Also, they ultimately get bigger budgets and have more influence inside and outside their companies. These are high-level measures will are supported by more detailed metrics you need to dig in to gather and use with your team and share with other departments.