🕵🏻‍♂️ Measuring B2B marketing for companies with a long sales cycle

Feb 08, 2023 2:32 pm

Hey ,

B2B marketing reporting shouldn't be complex. Here are 3 categories and 11 core metrics that come into play when you want to measure B2B marketing for companies with high ACV and a long sales cycle.

Revenue metrics;
Pipeline metrics; and
Print metrics

Let's break down each of these metrics one after the other.

I-) REVENUE METRICS

Here are 6 things you should pay attention to when it comes to revenue metrics.

1. 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠-𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐮𝐞

How much revenue came from your marketing campaigns? Aim to increase the % compared to sales-sourced revenue. This will show you if your marketing is effective and whether or not your brand is gaining recognition.

2. 𝐖𝐢𝐧 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞

A low win rate indicates:

bad targeting;
low-quality opportunities; or
misalignment with your sales team.

3. 𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐜𝐲𝐜𝐥𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐭𝐡

When the sales cycle length decreases, you are accelerating revenue.

4. 𝐀𝐂𝐕 (Average Contract Value)

5. 𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐩𝐢𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲

Sales pipeline velocity demonstrates revenue trajectory according to your sales cycle length, sales-qualified opportunities, ACV, and win rate.

If this metric is growing, it proves that:

you are targeting the right accounts;
you have a marketing message-market fit;
you have good buyer enablement;
there's no friction points in the buying process.

6. 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐑𝐎𝐈.

Demand or brand activities can't be measured by sales opportunities or CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).

We recommend taking a holistic view of marketing-sourced revenue, sales pipeline velocity, and marketing budget in order to calculate marketing ROI.

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Dear , it is important to put these 6 metrics into the revenue report in order to have a holistic view of the performance of your marketing and its actual contribution to revenue.

But if you have a long sales cycle, you should probably opt for full-funnel marketing. Just that in this case, you’ll have demand gen and plenty of awareness activities that can’t be measured just by leads or cost of acquisition (CAC).

You’ll definitely do lots of things that can’t be directly attributed to revenue. Still, that doesn't mean you shouldn't track those metrics.

Here is why.

Let's assume you have a couple of key accounts that generate 20% to 25% of your revenue. But the thing is, you'll have to run a new campaign in the next 6 months in order to upsell or renew the contract.

In that case, it's really important for you to strengthen the relationship with those accounts because your competitors are probably putting their best foot forward to snatch them from you.

Maybe they’re SERIOUSLY prospecting and engaging with the buying committee.

So, day in and day out, all you can think about is how to keep your customers.

Then, you decide to host a private event with them. You invite a thought leader to give a comprehensive workshop on a subject they’re interested in. On top of that, you unveil your new plans for them.

As a result of that, you renew those contracts you needed so bad. Everyone’s happy on your team. But what happens next with attribution, dear ?

Well, the truth is, attribution here can’t be straightforward because you didn’t upsell the customers during the event. But you know for a fact that the event came in handy.

It helped you get fantastic insights about the actions of your competitors and outsmart them.

In a nutshell, just because the event didn't generate immediate results/revenue doesn’t mean it wasn’t helpful.

table

II-) PIPELINE METRICS

There are two main metrics you need to track here. The first one is engaged accounts and the second one is marketing-sourced sales-qualified opportunities.

7. 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐬

But what exactly are engaged accounts? Glad you asked, dear .

These are companies that are not sales-ready but have demonstrated significant engagement with your campaigns.

For example, they:

visited your website a couple of times;
checked your pricing page;
checked your case studies;
signed up for a product demo;
spent about 30 minutes visiting your website;
etc.

We also have scenarios where decision-makers or buying committee members would send connection requests to your sales, marketing, or executive teams.

Literally, this is proof that there's something going on. There is a significant engagement but they booked no demo nor sent an inbound request.

This is what we call engaged accounts. And BTW, engaged accounts are more or less the same as MQLs (marketing-qualified leads).

They are not sales-ready. These are companies that should be forwarded to your account-based marketing (ABM) team.

In the event you don't have an ABM motion, your sales teams should have at least a soft touch with them, connect, and engage in building relationships, collectively running additional account research, and understanding the needs of those accounts.

8. 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠-𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬-𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬

The more engaged accounts you have in your pipeline, the more sales-qualified opportunities and marketing-sourced pipeline you'll generate.

We also recommend looking at the length of conversion from engaged accounts to sales-qualified opportunities. It will help you make better revenue and pipeline forecasts.

III-) BRAND METRICS

Obviously, there could be a lot of discussion about what to include in brand metrics. But let’s keep it simple, shall we?

There are 3 main metrics to consider here: inbound opportunities, media invites, and brand mentions.

9. Inbound opportunities

Actually, we like to look at inbound opportunities because they show a huge correlation. If your brand is growing, then more people will be coming from your content and since they already know and trust you, they’ll be eager to hop on a call.

10. Media invites

While media invites are ok, it’s extremely important to track their quality. The more invites you are getting from industry-leading media, the higher your brand recognition.

For example; you can get:

an invite to a well-known and respected podcast in your industry;
a request from a journalist to be featured in a well-known industry portal or media;
an invite to give a talk at a respected industry conference.

These are all outcomes of brand activity and they’re positive signals that your brand is gaining traction.

11. Brand traffic and brand mentions

What matters the most here is to see how often your product or your company is being mentioned as a recommended solution to specific challenges.

So for example, when it comes to full Funnel.io, we love to see how often do folks recommend us as people to follow for all things full funnel ABM.

The more mentions you gain, the higher your brand recognition.

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Depending on your business model, you might change metrics by adding churn, LTV, and CAC, but the principles will still be the same. So in general, every campaign you run should have its own set of metrics.

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Join Andrei and Vlad this Thursday for a new webinar on ABM Strategy 2.0:

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