I've been doing this B2B marketing thing a pretty long time. One topic that rears its head in most client conversations is that the team is busy, but there's no real muscle to translate activity into language the exec team gives a stuff about – pipeline value and velocity, conversion rates across the funnel, key account penetration, and revenue. I know most marketers work hard – very bloody hard – but there's a perennial struggle to demonstrate what outcomes are being delivered.

What are the foundations for success?

Measurement is a classic example of something that's important but, seemingly, not urgent. It often gets bolted on at the end. It's akin to giving an acceptance speech and offering up thanks to twenty people but forgetting to mention your wife. Trouble's brewing. A lot of the time, campaigns are run with a loose sense of what constitutes success. Everyone vaguely talks about awareness, leads and supporting the sales team but, truthfully, that's just operating on vibes. Irrespective of the setting, it's common sense to agree goals and aligned KPIs, something that's ideally done in conjunction with the entire go-to-market team. In the absence of this, people end up reaching for metrics that make the initiative look good in retrospect or – to borrow a phase from The Wire – "juking the stats".

Sod the silos – it's good to talk

Marketing definitely needs to expunge any element of an island mentality that might exist. That means agreeing with the wider organisation what their expected contribution to brand growth is, as opposed to hatching a plan in a vacuum, executing it, and then reporting vanity data. This dialogue should happen at the outset of a programme, so things like expected pipeline contribution and velocity are well understood. In essence, it's all about transitioning from reporting being a stressful exercise characterised by sleepless nights to a team sport working against a shared scorecard.

What about the technical requirements?

As with most things in life, talking will only get you so far. Agreement on goals is a good foundation, but you also need to channel your inner Super Mario and get the (data) plumbing sorted out, which is where a lot of teams end up dealing with leaks. Like oil, data needs refinement – you need to be asking whether it's complete, clean, trustworthy and flowing the way it's needed. Can you pull website behaviour, CRM records, media campaign metrics and intent signals into one place to build a more sophisticated performance picture?

Granted, this is more RevOps territory than marketing, but that's kind of the issue. It requires a certain type of thinker and skillset that marketing teams often don't have embedded. In that case, cultivating the right relationships across these teams ends up being a critical success factor for proving ROI.

Remember that even good data doesn't interpret itself

Okay, things are going well. You've got the goals, alignment and clean unified data. But you still need someone who goes beyond staring at the dashboard with a vacant gaze, instead extracting something genuinely useful. Data, at its starting point, is ultimately unorganised information but, with an interpretation layer, the real value is translating this into unique insight that drives impactful action. Some of the most valuable people I've ever worked with in marketing have an underrated knack of really understanding what the numbers mean and how they can be weaponised. What's more, a glut of organisations are building AI workflows to speed up the interpretation process, although this still needs to be carefully administered by humans.

What's stopping this being normal practice?

By no means do I profess to have all the answers, but here's some thoughts on why marketing might be struggling on measurement:

  • Skills gap: This is about people who sit at the intersection of marketing strategy, data structure, and commercial storytelling. I think that's a rare combination which is rarely directly hired or trained for.
  • Bandwidth and prioritisation: Building measurement capability does require a time and resource investment which can feel daunting when there's pressure to deliver now, but the plaster has to be ripped off at some stage. When people say they've got "no time" for this, it usually means it's "not important enough compared to everything else I'm drowning in".
  • Incompatible expectations: Is the purpose of measurement to prove marketing's worth or genuinely optimise the programme? The former demands clean, defensible numbers, while the latter warrants messy honest signals about what's going wrong. Something has to give.
  • Incentives: This is an oldie but a goodie. Sales is judged on revenue against quota, while marketing is scored on leads (along with less tangible vectors like awareness, preference-shaping and sales enablement). There's potential for a lot of tension in the space between the two camps, centered on things like lead quality, timeliness of follow up, and attribution – i.e. how to carve up credit for wins.

So, where have we landed?

I don't think this is really a tooling problem. As an industry, we're absolutely swimming in tech that can facilitate effective performance measurement. In many ways, that's also part of the problem – tool sprawl and expensive investments in platforms with no plan for how they're weaved into your patchwork ecosystem.

The right tools are important, but this is more of an upstream challenge. One that requires leadership to prioritise cross-team alignment and data plumbing, even if this means letting certain staff put a 'temporarily out of order' sign outside their office door while all the ducks are neatly assembled in a row.

Back to The Wire, paraphasing Lester Freamon: "The [dashboard alone] won't save you". But a discovery call with Invera might, so book one now.

Image credit: © 2002 Blown Deadline Productions/HBO Entertainment