With host Darrell Alfonso
Is your team ready to tackle marketing planning? Any other year, you might be coming to the table armed with the data and metrics needed to make sound, data-based choices for the year ahead. 2020 is a little different.
While we’re all learning to be more agile in our marketing plans this year, the annual marketing plan isn’t going anywhere. Planning season seems to cause a surprising number of companies to scramble for the data they need, but if you prepare right, it certainly doesn’t have to be that way.
Ken Evans, VP Demand Generation and Marketing Operations at Fuze, has some terrific insights on this topic. Ken is a 20-year marketing veteran, having held senior marketing ops and demand generation roles at a variety of B2B technology companies.
Over the course of his career, Ken witnessed marketing teams scramble every time marketing planning season came around.In order to plan effectively, a marketing team needs a significant amount of insight into last year: where the organization spent, why they made certain investments, and what the business impact was. But this data takes time to compile, and when the CMO calls asking for a marketing plan in two weeks, it causes major fire drills.To avoid that phenomenon, Ken developed a set of metrics and practices to help him get a head start before each marketing planning season.The metrics help his team discover the valuable context information about what went on in their organizations the previous year, so they can make informed decisions for the coming year.Those metrics and practices are what we’ll share in this post.
Before diving in, Ken wanted to impart three things he’s learned over the course of many planning seasons as a marketing ops practitioner.
There will be some non-campaign activities that must be prioritized, but may not be easily measurable. It’s just a fact of life in marketing—some very worthy marketing efforts are not very quantifiable, yet they’re critical to our marketing plans.
Making an exception for Truth #1, a data-driven approach to marketing planning is truly the only viable, defensible one. Data is the ultimate tool in your marketing planning arsenal.
Your goal is to help your CMO make decisions more easily. You can accomplish this by knowing your business even better than she does.
Now, let’s get into Ken’s specific recommendations. These are the metrics he recommends assembling as you prepare for marketing planning season. They fall into four buckets, which happen to align very well to our VP of Insights & Growth, Sam Melnick’s Ultimate Hierarchy of Marketing Measurements!
Questions to Ask
Example Metrics
Stakeholders That Care About These Results:
Technology Involved
It’s a good idea to compare the metrics in this category against benchmarks from SiriusDecisions (or other analyst groups).
Forge relationships with the finance team for help in getting these answers.
All we’re doing at this stage is collecting information; we’ll get to the judgements later
Learn more about the benefits of marketing and finance alignment in our blog about growth hacking!
Stakeholders That Care About These Results
Don’t expose these metrics to the CMO yet; it’s important to gather the full context around the business impact of these numbers before presenting to the executive suite.
For these metrics to be useful, the marketing and sales groups in your company must have agreed-upon conventions, such as the definition of an MQL. These common definitions are essential in making sure different departments don’t come up with conflicting measurements
Questions answered
When measuring pipeline, the issue of whether to measure pipeline-sourced or pipeline-influenced becomes a tricky thing. It’s not possible to recommend one or the other, since the more appropriate will have to be decided according to how your company does business.
If you use an account-based (ABM) model, for example, pipeline influence becomes very important since it may take 25 activities to achieve the overall goal of getting a target account into a sales opportunity.
These metrics aren’t gathered by a single marketer in isolation. Rather, this is where the big meetings happen, where senior marketing and sales leaders talk about context, strategies, and goals as you head into marketing planning season. The other three groups of metrics support this discussion.
Wondering how to frame these conversations? Start with whichever questions the CMO is typically asked by the board.
If you’re thinking that compiling all this data sounds like a lot of work, you’re right. You may need one, two, or even more months to gather the data. But, your efforts will pay off. In Ken’s experience, preparation like this truly makes the difference during marketing planning season.
When you prepare these metrics, you’re setting the table for marketing planning season. Every single metric on these lists might not be relevant to your organization. Apply the judgement, insight, and context to know which metrics will truly help set your marketing team up for success as they go to build their plans for the coming year.