Revenue. That is, social media does not matter. Podcast downloads don’t matter. Marketing exists to help your company sell more. And, if you can’t show how marketing is impacting revenue, then there’s no point. So it all goes back to revenue. But of course, it differs according to the type of business. If your enterprise sales make it really tough to own revenue, maybe the proxy metric is pipeline. Ok, so then I’m going to think about owning pipeline and consider the two or three leading indicators that I can show in pipeline, e.g., traffic, new leads, new opportunities, etc.
At Privy, for example, we have a high-velocity freemium funnel. So we’re focused on revenue but we also have a sales team. So we’re looking at sales-assisted revenue and touchless revenue. Then, marketing basically helps both of those buckets. So ultimately, if we’re ahead or behind on revenue that week, we have to have a story around why it’s like that.
We also look at all the leading indicators: weekly traffic, weekly conversion rate, etc. It’s traffic-to-visitor conversion rate, free-to-pay customer rate, etc. And of those individuals who became customers, where does the revenue come from? Is it the sales team directly or marketing self-served? That’s what we look at weekly.