The 3 Marketing Metrics that MATTER (to your CEO)

Proving the value and importance of your marketing team and its efforts to your CEO is no easy task. To CEO’s and board members, a lead is a dirty four-letter word, one that ultimately doesn’t move the revenue needle very much. For a Marketing VP, finding the marketing metrics that matter can be a challenge.

Fortunately, through our research, we believe we have identified the three marketing KPIs that matter most to your CEO. Presenting these three marketing KPIs at your next quarterly business review or board meeting will paint you, the Marketing VP, in a much more impressive light.

Here are the 3 marketing KPIs that matter most to CEOs.

Marketing’s Impact on the Sales Pipeline

Many Marketing VPs focus primarily on generating leads, and that’s great – a report like the Lead Trajectory report will tell you if you are on track to hit your lead generation goals. Unfortunately, all the leads in the world won’t mean a thing if very few of them are quality leads that convert into opportunities and deals. This is why CEO’s would prefer to see a report indicating exactly how much of the sales pipeline marketing is directly responsible for, i.e. if many of marketing’s leads are converting into pipeline opportunities.

But how much pipeline contribution should be considered ‘enough’? After all, outbound prospecting teams should help generate pipeline as well, along with other pipeline generating efforts like partner programs. The amount of marketing generated pipeline that is deemed sufficient for marketing to pull its weight depends on your company and industry. Marketo’s “Benchmark on Revenue Performance” research notes that at high-performance companies, marketing typically generates 52% of the sales pipeline, compared to 38% at average companies.

Marketing Campaigns that Generate Sales

Just as leads that don’t turn into opportunities are worthless, so are opportunities that don’t turn into deals. Knowing how many opportunities and deals each specific marketing campaign is responsible for generating will help the Marketing VP to better manage his or her team and maximize marketing’s return on investment (ROI).

Marketing needs to take ownership of each of their campaigns from lead to cash. They should be able to justify their “calorie spend” in each areas. Nothing will perk up the ears of a CEO more than discussing ways to maximize ROI, focusing the marketing budget on only the campaigns that generate the most sales.

Marketing Generated Bookings over Time

Finally, it’s important for CEOs to see that their marketing team is improving over time. This means being increasingly responsible for generating more and more deals by getting better at their jobs. This could be the function of launching a brand new campaign that has performed like gangbusters, or simply tweaking previous campaign plans upon the discovery of which campaigns produce the best ROI or generate the most deals.

If marketing generated bookings are slumping over time, ask your Marketing VP tough questions to bridge this disconnect. Should marketing provide more messaging in the middle of the funnel? Is sales poorly handling the leads handed over by marketing? Answer these questions to reverse your downward trend.

 

With these 3 marketing KPIs, it should not be difficult to convince the CEO of your value and importance as a Marketing VP, and for your team as a whole. Focus on these marketing KPIs over traditional marketing metrics – such as leads generated – to really demonstrate your impact.

As a Marketing VP, what marketing KPIs are you typically measured on at your company? Share your thoughts below!