Written By Debbie Qaqish on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011
14 cities, 14 groups of CMO’s, and 14 conversations on metrics that drive revenue marketing performance. This CMO Roundtable is an invitation only event for CMO’s and senior marketing executives being sponsored by Marketo with key note speaker Jim Lenskold of the Lenskold Group (and author of Marketing ROI.) I have the good fortune to be able to attend all 14 discussions and soak up what CMO’s are really doing and thinking around metrics.
Post each CMO Roundtable, I’ll capture what they had to say! Since I did not post the first three, this post will serve as an aggregation of conversations…
San Diego CMO Roundtable:
- Lively conversation on first touch versus last touch attribution. No real agreement.
- All agreed the ability to provide multiple attribution is best.
- Not all attributions have equal weighting – focus on inbound or active touches versus outbound or non-active touches.
- One company looks at if the deal closed in the prior six months, they look at the multiple touches and divide the revenue by number of touches and evenly distribute.
- One good practice mentioned was to pick 5 closed deals at the end of every quarter for analysis. Look at all the touches across these five deals and try to spot trends that can be re-calculated into the next set of campaigns.
- Conversations around ROI without a marketing automation system and ROI with a marketing automation system. Clearly, much easier to do and get richer data with marketing automation. This would make an excellent white paper or Playbook.
- Is ROI about just what marketing does or is it all the way through to close – most CMOs agree it’s all the way to the revenue line and does not stop when the lead is passed to sales.
- CMO’s can no longer say – “I did my job – I delivered the leads” Must be accountable for revenue.
- CMO’s and their teams have variable compensation tied to the sales funnel – # of opps, $ of opps, % contribution to pipeline and revenue marketer.
- Clearly marketing automation is a VERY efficient and cost effective revenue engine but it takes time to get to this level.
- Proper use and integration of SFDC is critical to revenue success for marketers.
- Service level agreements between sales and marketing is required BUT it places a big responsibility on the shoulders of marketing.
- Look at Quora as a great community for tips and tricks for the revenue marketer.
- What if I had 10% more budget – what could I produce? Still a hard question to answer for most CMO’s.
