The Most Important B2B Marketing Metrics for CEOs

What do CEOs want most from their B2B marketing team? Clarity. They want to see results that clearly show their company’s marketing efforts are working and increasing ROI.

CEOs expect to hold their marketing leaders accountable for reaching or surpassing their numbers, just like their sales leaders.

CEOs can get frustrated when the only metrics they receive from lead marketers include sales lead activity KPIs, ambiguous brand data, and engagement reports. They want their metrics to be tied directly to revenue.

Quick Takeaways:

• ROI and customer acquisition cost are two of the top metrics B2B marketing executives want to see most.
• Knowing which metrics to focus on will help you execute, track, and analyze your marketing initiatives strategically and with confidence.
• Reporting on big-picture KPIs will offer your executives more clarity and give them faith in your marketing efforts.

The Most Desired Metrics in B2B Marketing

According to a recent survey conducted by Demand Gen Report, the most desired metrics B2B marketing executives want to see moving forward include:

• ROI by channel
• Deeper account-based marketing metrics
• ROI by content influence
• Cost of customer acquisition
• Closed-won deal analysis

40% of marketers believe they should improve their ability to measure and analyze marketing performance. Due to a desire to prove how marketing efforts impact a business’s pipeline and revenue and gain insights on buyer interests, 82% of marketers plan to prioritize enhancing their reporting abilities.

Source: MarketingCharts

B2B Marketing Metrics that Will Give Your CEO More Clarity

Every CEO cares about the lifetime value of a customer (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC), which we’ll cover below. But that’s not all you should include in your marketing reports to prove the success of your efforts.

Here are the most important marketing metrics for CEOs. Tracking and analyzing these big-picture KPIs will give you a competitive edge and clarify the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. That way, your CEO will have no doubts about the value of your team’s contributions.

1. Marketing Influenced Customer Percentage

This metric will show you what percentage of new customers were influenced by your marketing efforts. To calculate this ratio, take the total number of new customers who interacted with a marketing activity and divide it by the number of new customers you signed up within the same period.

Questions to Answer

• How are your marketing investments impacting sales productivity?
• What’s the impact on your company’s sales pipeline?
• How are your efforts impacting revenue velocity?

2. Marketing Originated Customer Percentage

Show your CEO what percentage of new business marketing is driving. To calculate this ratio, take the number of new customers you signed up in a specific period. Then figure out what percentage of them started as a marketing-generated lead. This measurement is much easier to track if you have a closed-loop marketing analytics system.

Questions to Answer

• What percentage of your customers are marketing-generated?
• How much of your revenue can you attribute to sales leads coming from demand generation efforts or account-based marketing over a given period?
• How many customers started as marketing-qualified leads?

3. Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV)

LTV can help you predict how much a customer will spend on your products or services throughout their lifetime. Calculating this number will help you understand how much you should pay to acquire new customers and retain current ones.

To calculate the lifetime value of your customers, take the revenue a customer paid you within a specific period, subtract the gross margin, and divide by the customer’s churn percentage (cancellation rate). Another way to calculate LTV is by taking the average value of a purchase times the number of times the average customer buys from you in a year times the average length (in years) of a customer relationship.

Questions to Answer

• How much do you spend to acquire a new customer in a profitable relationship?
• Which products or services are the most profitable?
• What’s your most profitable buyer persona?

4. Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)

ROMI will help you determine how much you’re spending on marketing compared to the amount of revenue you’re generating. You can use this metric to measure your revenue for individual campaigns.

To calculate your ROMI, take your total sales revenue from a specific period and divide it by marketing spend during that same time.

Questions to Answer

• What’s your ROMI?
• How much are you spending on marketing? What are you generating in return?
• Are your campaigns contributing to company growth?
• Are you recouping the money and time spent to develop and execute your marketing campaigns?

5. Time to Revenue

Time to revenue measures the length of time from when a contract is executed until a purchase is made or a deal is closed.

Questions to Answer

• How has the marketing team helped shorten time to revenue?
• What has marketing done to decrease the combined expense-to-revenue ratio of sales and marketing activities?

6. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

To calculate the cost of acquiring a new customer, take the total cost of your sales and marketing efforts within a given period. Then divide this cost by the number of new customers you acquired within the same period.

Questions to Answer

• What is the average cost of gaining a new customer?
• What is the total cost of your demand generation efforts or lead account-based marketing during a specific period? Include compensation for your entire marketing team and expenses for vendors, marketing technology, and other materials.

7. Marketing Percentage of CAC (M%-CAC)

To calculate the marketing percentage of your customer acquisition cost, take your total marketing spend for a specific period. Then divide it by the number of new customers you generated within that time.

The lower the number, the better. If you have a high marketing CAC, your marketing team may be spending too much, or your sales team may be underperforming.

Questions to Answer

• What is your marketing team’s impact on CAC?
• Are there improvements your team can make to lower this number?

8. Ratio of Lifetime Value to CAC (LTV:CAC)

After you know your LTV and CAC, you can calculate this ratio. A higher ratio indicates a higher ROI. However, if your ratio is too high, you may want to consider spending more on your sales and marketing efforts. 3:1 and 4:1 are good benchmarks to shoot for.

Questions to Answer

• Are you spending too much to acquire each customer (the ratio is less than 3:1)?
• Are you missing out on opportunities by not spending enough?

Source: HubSpot

Create B2B Marketing Content that Converts

If you need help creating top-notch content that will help you get the results your CEO wants to see, Marketing Insider Group would love to help. We’ll create targeted content your customers seek to bring more traffic to your website and help you win new customers. We can also help you calculate and measure ROI and other important metrics.

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