Consumer and B2B marketing differ on many fronts, but one difference in particular speaks to challenges when selling from one business to another. Buy cycle.
Revenue serves up a universal measure of success. How do you divi up credit for revenue won? If a client was touched by eight different marketing programs, 10 sales call and knows someone that works at your company, who gets a pat on the back? If all these happen over the course of 12 months, how far back do you go to find out how you found that customer in the first place.
Tell us how you do it in your organization.
We talk about the web, because we build web-based marketing programs. Makes sense. Let’s look at some of the key metrics we or our clients use to assign blame. Impressions, clicks, response, lead qualification, deals closed, leftover budget, and lifetime customer value.
Where is this building located?
The most important in the minds of our customer are leads qualified and deals closed. Those are the most important, but often difficult or impossible to quantify. The fact that a qualified lead can be defined five different ways within the same organization makes success all the more difficult to measure.
You can’t go wrong with impressions, clicks and response as long as we can agree on the definition of a response. By that I mean, it’s easy to measure campaigns by these three measuring sticks. Impressions and clicks are often good enough when measuring success of SEM. Clicks and response handle outbound and inbound metrics equally well.
Think of an inverted pyramid with impressions at the top and customer lifetime value at the bottom. The deeper you go the better off you’ll be when handing out those bonuses. (Oops, I wrote this post in 2006.) The deeper you go the better off you’ll be when handing out pink slips.
B2B often has a killer buy cycle. If you can’t remember how you got introduced to a new customer, where will you go to find the next one. Pick a handful of metrics and start following them today. Go deep!
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