Measuring B2B marketing performance
Performance is easier to assess when it’s measured against the two objectives of B2B marketing:
- Cultivating consistent customers – CCC
- Preventing price pressure – PPP
CCC is about keeping your customers loyal and finding more like them: sales and volumes. PPP deals with building and maintaining margins: delivering the right Value to the right people.
Are we asking the right questions?
Data, analytics and metrics are the components for assessing marketing performance. But, if you ask the wrong questions, then the answers don’t matter. If CCC & PPP really are the two objectives in B2B marketing, then performance isn’t something that can be determined internally:
The market rates your performance in terms of what it gives you – volumes, margins and loyalty.
And if you accept that, then perhaps marketers should be examining the answers to questions like these:
- Is the Value your company delivers clearly communicated to all elements of the market – is there a consistent reflection of the brand and what it represents? How do you know this?
- Does the entire market-facing team believe the brand messages and act accordingly?
- What are the sales objectives for both CCC and PPP? What info do you have about targets, timeframes and ambitions relating to each set of products and services. How do you know they are being met?
- For existing customers, how are you performing against forecast volumes and margins? How satisfied are customers with your company in terms of contributing to their continued success?
- What are the requirements for lead-generation in terms of volume and conversion? How are leads ranked and how do you measure their origins and the cost of attracting and converting them?
- From the point of first contact with a lead, how well is the ‘conversion chain’ working? Who monitors progress and performance in the chain?
- What’s the ROI from marketing? In some ways, this is the simplest question of them all. It’s the combined and measured impact that all of the above are having on CCC and PPP.
Measure outcomes: don’t confuse activity with achievement
Producing and placing an ad is not an outcome. The response generated by that ad isn’t even an outcome. The impact that the response has on CCC & PPP is an outcome. So, measure that.
Developing a new product is not an outcome. Launching the product is not an outcome. The product’s impact on CCC & PPP is an outcome. So, measure that.
And so it goes on: the process of linking marketing activities to outcomes and then measuring. Because Outcomes are the Differentiators – how you contribute to customers’ success is what differentiates you in the market.
A gentle warning: be careful what you measure
Measuring performance in terms of CCC and PPP is perhaps not as straightforward as it looks: it’s easy enough to define what you need to measure but it can be hard to put the rulers in place. It can be even harder to keep them there.
What happens if the results from measuring B2B marketing-performance demonstrate shortcomings within a company? Who is responsible for change?
Measure with muscle
If you do measure, do it for a purpose. It’s important to understand how shortcomings will be addressed and then re-measured to assess the impact of improvements. This can be CEO territory in terms of motivating and monitoring the necessary changes.
Presenting marketing measurements can be a tricky task. Results can be skated over: ‘Product development a problem? Surely not?’ ‘TQM forever letting us down? Really?’
Top-level support to act upon the results of measurement is essential. If the commitment to act is not there, why bother?
Read more on measurement:
Leveraging B2B’s buying motivators - how to analyse the influence of ‘Value’
So what is Value? - the five buying motivators in B2B
Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
