5 Foundational Questions of Marketing Measurement

First of a 2 part series. 

As a former CMO with a passion to measure marketing impact on the business, I’m often asked by others ‘what should we measure in marketing?’   The temptation is to race right to the visual presentation level of dashboards.   However, it’s best to start with getting context.

While it’s probably the right question to ask, it’s often a difficult question to answer without context.  However, there are usually common questions to consider on the journey to this answer.

1. Let’s start with the first one – what is your reporting objective?

There are two typical models of reporting objectives – first is to make business decisions from the reporting, the second is to make Marketing as a function that is accountable for their impact.

Our next article will dive more deeply into what to actually measure.

2. What role are you in?

This can be complex – if you are ‘doing the work’ vs. ‘delegating the work’ there is a tendency in our clients of ‘doers’ to provide vanity metrics to their boss – web page visits, clicks, downloads.   ‘Doers’ that get promoted make that vanity metric connection to business impact – retention rates, new revenue growth, etc.  ‘Doers’ that also ask to get their compensation tied to pipeline performance are ahead of the curve relative to their peer set.  If you are the ‘C’ level leader of Marketing, the next post will dive into what exactly to measure from a business impact perspective.

3. Who owns Salesforce?

This is a key question because getting marketing attribution done right relies on Salesforce process and methodology.   If marketing is the ‘owner’ which we find in about 30% of the cases, the ability to orchestrate change is much easier.  As a ‘guest’ in Salesforce, you then rely on others to help you execute that change.   Dashboarding inside or outside of salesforce could also be a function of who owns it and where is the information most credible.  We typically recommend dashboarding inside Salesforce.

4. What state is your data in?

With data decaying at 3%/month due to people changing jobs (in a good economy!), a database without governance is like ordering a year’s worth of milk supply at your home thinking you will be good forever on your milk diet.  Data is at the heart of sales effectiveness, marketing effectiveness, and inside sales effectiveness – so much productivity is lost here because ‘no one owns the data’.  This is a critical function that also drives attribution.  So it’s prudent when measuring to know the exact state of your data.  We often recommend creating a dashboard for this data.

5. What is your selling motion?

Are you a transactional sale?  An enterprise sale?  A sale involving partners?  A sale that has cold to qualify with a BDR function?  Each of these has dramatically different attribution needs and/or use cases in measurement.

What are you seeing as common questions or issues in measuring marketing?