I talked with a senior marketer at a technology company the other day who has had it with metrics. She says marketing has become overly defensive, obsessed with proving its value rather than generating real impact on the business. This has driven a focus on managing leads rather than driving new demand.
She asks a tough, but valid question: Are we really measuring impact or just measuring activity?
She talks about engaging customers much earlier in the sales cycle—indeed, before they have articulated a need. It is the thinking that underpins of one of ITSMA’s big shticks, Account-Based Marketing—which boils down to treating important customers as markets of one and building a relationship in which you help them articulate their needs.
Yet here’s the nut: Marketers tell me that it’s notoriously difficult to trace front-end demand generation all the way down to the point where there is a well-defined opportunity.
But what’s the alternative? Research says that marketing is providing less than a quarter of the leads that result in a sale. Perhaps focusing earlier in the sales cycle could bump up the numbers. Surveys, research, and thought leadership help attract customers who are still trying to decide what their real needs are.
But it’s harder to measure demand generation activities. They generate awareness, they build credibility, but all that can be lost on the way to a sale. Indeed, this marketer says she had a lot of resistance to her thought leadership program that focused on ideas rather than products. “Air cover,” sniffed detractors. Blather that extended the sales cycle unnecessarily.
It took time and effort to turn that perception around. And it took a different kind of metrics—metrics that looked at how the thought leadership campaign improved the company’s share of voice with media and analysts and moved the discussion with customers up to a higher level in the organization.
Still, it’s hard to connect the dots directly to more customer pull. Upper management has to do that. Says this marketer: “Did the campaign contribute to our increase in overall customer pull? I would say yes it did. Now, did we measure that and connect all the dots? No, we didn’t have to. It was pretty obvious to the management team that that was what was going on.”
That strikes me as a controversial assertion. We all know that loyalty is fleeting. Customers attend all your thought leadership conferences and learn everything there is to know and then throw you over for another.
How do you measure early stage demand generation programs? And what percentage of your portfolio are they?
