What metrics will determine whether folks are helping or hindering the business as a whole?
For marketers at social media advertising automator Smartly.io, this process of prioritization involves finding business gaps, identifying teams with the most expertise in any given area — for example, customer success managers are best-placed to inform how marketers can assist the overall customer experience — and then deciding which metrics would best define success in each specific context.
“Lately we’re thinking more critically about innovative approaches that are not so conventional in B2B marketing,” Growth Marketing Manager Brian Shin told Built In NYC. “By untangling the roles marketing and sales play and paying attention to behavior that marketing can more directly influence — such as initiating conversations — we can see a greater impact that will trickle up to our high-level goals.”
With an innovative product jostling for market share in a competitive space, Smartly.io’s marketers have an engaging challenge in front of them. Shin took us through the wider framework his team is using to measure their contribution toward overall business goals.
What are the most important marketing metrics your team tracks, and why are these numbers so important to what you do?
Our metrics are always tied back in some way to our larger goal of helping sales. These metrics can be broken out into two main categories: quality and volume.
For quality, we measure conversion rates across the funnel. For volume, we track the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) as well as the number of marketing influenced opportunities.
Defining the right marketing metrics is a little like defining the “Point B” or the “end destination” on a GPS — if you get this right, you’ll find yourself closer to your destination. In that way, our quarterly benchmarks are designed to be ambitious, realistic and precise. We recognize the fact that balance between quality and volume is a recurring challenge in business, but we are intentional about honing in on quality before we swing the gates wide open on volume.
Defining the right marketing metrics is a little like defining the ‘Point B’ or the ‘end destination’ on a GPS — if you get this right, you’ll find yourself closer to your destination.”
How did you determine which metrics would be most impactful for guiding your marketing strategy? What other stakeholders were involved?
There are two steps to determining metrics. Step one is to accurately identify business gaps and prioritize accordingly. Beyond the board and leadership, the teams that understand these gaps most deeply are the ones that are closest to prospects, customers or the database. The first will be the sales team, the second is our CSMs and thirdly, we have the sales ops and growth marketing team, who works most closely with our CRM.
Step two is to carve out the marketing metrics that are best designed to fill those gaps. Lately, we’re thinking more critically about innovative approaches that are not so conventional in B2B marketing. For instance, companies like Drift focus on “conversations started” as one of their main KPIs. By untangling the roles marketing and sales play and paying attention to behavior that marketing can more directly influence — such as initiating conversations — we can see a greater impact that will trickle up to our high-level goals. However, that’s not to say we like to create silos between the two teams.
Share an example of how the metrics you track have informed your marketing strategy in either big or small ways. What impact did this have on the business?
Recently we’ve been heavying-up our marketing efforts on the regional level. There was a point in time when the company had a slightly more ‘global’ approach with our goals. As soon as we saw that each regional market or vertical is not apples to apples, we adapted to pay closer attention to the details. We established concrete goals unique to each region, and now we’ve also moved toward goals that are more vertical-specific. As a result, we’re seeing regional efficiency trickle up to the global level.
In the spirit of always improving, we’ve learned that there are limitations to only tracking leads. At the end of the day, B2B marketing is about selling to organizations, not individual leads. That’s why we’re now gearing toward tracking performance holistically on the account — the golden standard of B2B marketing.
