Marketing Scorecard – A CMO’s Trusted Advisor

Marketing scorecard powered by a comprehensive marketing analytics frameworks has emerged to be the most trusted advisor of a B2B CMO these days.

A well designed and intuitive marketing analytics scorecard provides the much needed at-a-glance view of the health of the marketing organization

across 2 broad areas:

• How well the team is pacing towards the quarterly/monthly goals
• How efficiently the team is generating and qualifying the leads through the funnel

Data-driven CMOs are increasingly relying on marketing analytics teams to lead the charge for demonstrating the quantifiable impact marketing organizations are making. Over the past 10+ years, I have had the privilege of working with numerous data driven marketing organization led by a revenue focused CMOs and marketing leaders. The one thing that has been

consistent across such organizations is their aptitude towards quantitative aspects of marketing (demand generation in particular) and relentless focus on making data driven decisions.

They leverage analytics to continuously optimize the execution and demonstrate measurable results with the help of extremely smart marketing analytics competencies that they have built over time. Marketing leaders across such organizations actively engage with the sales and finance teams towards driving top-line revenue.

All modern revenue marketing organization usually have a catalog of dashboards powered by numerous metrics that help the marketing teams track and understand the performance of the on-going campaigns. With the maturity of marketing analytics competencies at the organizations, there is usually

a dedicated CMO dashboard that provides an executive summary of the marketing influence on pipeline and the performance of each of the marketing teams

including demand generation, growth marketing, digital marketing, customer marketing, product marketing etc. All these dashboards and the insights they provide are an integral part of the modern marketing organization.

During my marketing analytics engagements and conversations with the CMOs, consistently I have been hearing about an ask to provide some sort of a high level summary view – the score card so as to speak that enables marketing leaders to understand the current state of the marketing performance.

These inputs helped me design the “marketing scorecard” (a sample shown below) that enables marketing leaders to understand the state of the marketing performance at a glance

and it acts as the gateway towards enabling further drill down into the “how’s and why’s” of campaigns performance that power this scorecard.

The approach towards designing this scorecard is inspired by the concepts of “the index in a document” or “the agenda slide (if you will)”. With a thorough understanding of the key metrics and dashboards that are already operational in an organization, the next step is to

map these metrics to a summary (aggregate) view of the KPIs that the marketing leaders leverage to confidently demonstrate the impact that their organizations are making.

This scorecard is interlinked with the key dashboards so that whenever questions comes up around these summary numbers, the answers are just a few clicks away and the users are able to get to the answers on the fly, in real-time.

Some of the common use cases that are addressed in these score cards include:

• We are past the middle of the quarter, how is the attainment looking against our quarterly goals across the funnel?
• How has been the funnel efficiency (cohort conversions) across different stages of the funnel?
• Are some stages of the funnel back logged due to higher volume or some stages are showing lower than expected conversions?
• How have been the cycle times (average time needed to move the leads from one stage of the funnel to the other) trending in a given time frame across different funnel stages, region?
• Leads from which campaigns are moving through the funnel faster and are converting better?
• Which MQLs are being worked upon by the sales teams faster as compared to other MQLs?
• Which campaigns are helping drive new pipeline generation better and which campaigns are helping accelerate the existing pipeline?

Modern marketing technology and analytics/BI/Data Warehousing platforms have made it easy to actively track key marketing metrics. With the right analytics strategy and tools, we work with marketing leaders to empower their teams with these critical data points so that each team member can actively contribute towards fostering a data-driven culture within the organization.

We are always on the lookout for inputs and examples from the marketing community to keep adding value for our customers. We welcome the inputs from other leaders and practitioners around growth the key metrics that leaders are using to demonstrate the impact marketing is making at your organization? What kind of questions do they get from the sales teams? What data points around marketing performance are shared with the c-suite?