3-Step Process for Moving from Metrics to Holistic Analytics

Imagine this scenario. You’re coming off of an awesome weekend. The weather was great. You got to hang out with your best friends. The kids got along. There was no traffic on the way to work. You’re feeling good. You click the “up” button for the elevators in the office lobby. The doors open…you enter…and you realize your CEO is on the elevator with you. You smile. He turns to you and says, “Good morning. How are things in the marketing department these days?” Now, you’re feeling pretty confident after the great weekend and you’ve really been digging into the marketing metrics lately so you proudly respond, “We’ve improved email open rates by 15%, and 200 people visited our booth at the last trade show.” He frowns and says nothing. The doors open, and you get off.

You thought he would be impressed that you knew your stats. What went wrong? What went wrong is you weren’t telling a story that was interesting to a C-level executive. Executives are looking for information about revenue growth, and you gave him in-the-weeds marketing activity data. Your confident response was not what CEOs spend their time thinking about. What if you could get a do-over? Would you know what to say?

Unfortunately, for many, the answer is “No.” You don’t have the data and analysis to talk about things that influence the bottom line: revenue growth, pipeline velocity, cost reductions, etc.

You need to start moving from metrics to holistic analytics. Here is my 3-step process for being able to talk to your executive team about what really matters to them:

Step 1 – The Basics

This is ground zero – where you start creating a foundation for what will become a great story. This stage involves gathering and tracking all the marketing and sales metrics that will help inform the marketing team.

Some of these metrics include:

• Generating clean and targeted lists for campaigns
• Open rates, click through rates, and form submission rates compared to industry standards (or improvements over time)
• Followers on social media or numbers of shares
• Number of leads sent over to sales

This is the data you need in order to make decisions about where to invest your marketing resources. Getting a grasp on these figures shapes what you do, where you spend money and how to allocate time.

Keep in mind, these numbers are backward-focused. They let you see what happened in the past so you can make predictions about what to do in the future.

Step 2 – Simple Data Integration

Now that you have a handle on what you’re doing and are able to make adjustments based on what you’ve discovered, it’s time to take it a step further.

At this point, you need to start connecting all your disparate marketing data sources together so you can begin to feed all the data-points into a central location. For many, the first step is to connect CRM and Marketing Automation platforms so they can talk to each other. Once you do that, you bring in web analytics, online advertising data, MRM and ERP, etc. Wherever there is data that influences marketing spend and sales revenue, you connect these systems. The goal is to be able to associate marketing activity with pipeline growth, pipeline velocity and ultimately, closed deals.

As you begin to do this, you start to see where things are getting stuck and you implement strategies to plug holes in the system. This is where you begin to tell a story that’s compelling to your executive team. You have data that shows contribution to the bottom line!

Some of the metrics you will be looking at include:

• Percent and number of leads accepted by sales
• Percent and number of opportunities created
• Pipeline contribution
• What is your cost per lead, and cost per opportunity
• Is the cost of your lead generating efforts outweighing the revenue tied to those efforts?
• Funnel level conversion rates
• Marketing and sales attribution
• Revenue-to-cost ratios

This is still backward-looking data, but a more robust version of it.

Step 3 – Holistic Analytics

This is the point where you bring all the data together to capture and present a universal view of the truth. You begin to truly move from measuring activities – to measuring results – to predicting the future. You are creating the processes that will allow your marketing team to create repeatable results, rapidly scale as your business grows, and give you a portal into where you will be in the next quarter or through the end of the fiscal year.

At Stage 3, you obtain a tactical level view of your return-on-investment and dive down to specific activities, segments, and channels that are driving growth. When looking at all touch points, you can understand your customers’ behavior and predict what drives them to engage with your company.

You will be doing analysis on:

• Marketing contributions to revenue
• Top performing campaigns by revenue contribution
• Top performing channels by revenue contribution
• ROI by channel spend
• Revenue forecasting

As you build your model, key in on weak areas and focus your marketing efforts on improving the sticking points. For example: maybe you notice that leads are stalling out between SAL and SQL. What do you do? Do you need a new pipeline accelerator campaign? Should you modify the one you have? Do you need to trigger inside sales to re-engage after a lead is stagnant for too long? Should you try mixing up your medium – print, digital, display, voice – to connect with people in multiple ways?

As you work toward holistic analytics, ask yourself these four questions:

1. Do you have visibility into your marketing spend so you can gauge marketing effectiveness?
2. Are you manually creating reports from several different data sources in order to get the data you need?
3. Are you able to measure all your data sources (including social, search, online advertising) and then accurately measure ROI on these marketing efforts?
4. Are you able to forecast things like pipeline velocity, ROI and revenue contribution for the next quarter?

Figure out how to answer all four of these questions. If you aren’t sure, find someone (e.g., Relationship One) who can help you. Then, next time you’re on the elevator with your CEO, he will ask you to tell him more, instead of leaving you in awkward silence.

Have I missed something? Agree or disagree? What do you think? Let’s keep the conversation going.

View the corresponding presentation to this article from the 2014 Modern Marketing Tour.