Want to Quantify B2B Marketing’s Value? Do this one thing first….
Are you a B2B Marketer tired of “getting no respect”?
Do you feel like Marketing is always playing second fiddle to Sales?
If so, do this one thing:
Stop MARKETING your value and start SELLING your value to the company!
That’s it, just sell Marketing’s value to the company. But, you say, how do I do that? Well, that’s the purpose of this short post.
In just 2 quick steps, you can transform Marketing’s position within any organization. The steps are:
- Understand why your old method of measuring Marketing’s Value using attribution is wrong
- Reposition Marketing value as a multiple of Sales, not a fraction
1. Understand why your old method of measuring Marketing’s Value using attribution is wrong
Jon Miller of Engagio (now a part of DemandBase) made an excellent point in Paul Dunay’s podcast Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus. Jon said “Sales is very measurable in terms of outcomes (results), but it’s very hard to measure the activities of sales. Marketing is the other way around. It is really easy to measure all the marketing activities, but it is hard to measure the outcomes.”
Here is his statement visually:
Notice how easy it is for Sales to quantify it’s value as $100 Million….that’s the Gross Sales. For Marketing, however, there is not a direct correlation so measurement ends up being an analysis of activities, not results. This leads many Marketers toward a method of measuring Marketing’s Value by attribution, i.e., what percentage of Sales can be attributed to Marketing’s efforts?
Does this sound familiar? “Our Marketing efforts have sourced/contributed to at least 50% of the closed deals this year”. That’s a pretty weak statement and always puts Marketing on the defensive.
Trying to map closed deals back to a Marketing event looks like this:
This approach sabotages the Marketer’s efforts in quantifying VALUE by tying their results to total revenue. Slicing up the revenue pie (in this case $100 Million) and trying to cite a Marketing event as the cause implies that marketing always generates less than what is shown in the sales chart.
If a Marketer is lucky he or she may get credit for a measly 50% (or $50 Million) but that number will always be disputed by Sales.
Stop doing this!
2. Change the game and SELL Marketing’s Value as a multiple of Sales
So, take a page from the Sales Playbook and start selling your value…with conviction and confidence.
To solve this problem, Marketers simply need to look at the total revenue number for the previous year and ask one question:
To generate X dollars in sales, how much overall potential pipeline is needed?
In most cases it will be a 8-10x multiplier, i.e., to sell $100 Million there needs to be $1 Billion in overall funnel. Now, take that $1 Billion in funnel and split it to represent Marketing’s contribution (now $500 Million). Sales still gets credit for generating $100 Million in sales as well as another $400M in potential business that did not close.
Taking that approach and mapping it into our original chart we have:
Marketing Value Take Away
Marketing’s Value to an organization is much more than the sum of it’s activities. Don’t shortchange Marketing’s contribution value to an organization by trying to take credit for a percentage of sales; that’s always a losing proposition for the real value of marketing.
Instead, take the annual sales number, multiple by 5 and that is the number you should use as marketing’s overall value in revenue generation. Sales will still have a respectable, and accurate, measure of it’s contribution – total sales.
To see a real-life example of this, check out this case study: How Marketing Generates $1 Billion in Funnel Value for a $100 Million dollar per year company.
Enjoy your new found respect!
