A couple of months into new campaigns, a lot of B2B companies end up with two versions of the truth. The marketing report says cost per demo is down and volume is up. The sales team says lead quality has dropped: wrong job titles, no budget, people who don't turn up. Usually both are right, because they're measuring different points in the funnel.
An early win measured at the wrong point is dangerous. Check every marketing win against the business number behind it.
One stupid thing a lot of marketing teams do, and not just agencies, is judge themselves on the marketing KPI: cost per lead, cost per booked call, cost per demo, the marketing-qualified lead rather than the sales-qualified one. To a certain extent that's fair, because it's often the number you're judged on first.
But there's usually a business KPI behind the marketing KPI, and it's doubly important. For a company with a sales team, that's pipeline and revenue.
The marketing number is the one an agency can see in its own ad platforms and move on its own. The business number means wading through someone else's CRM and talking to a sales team that might have bad news. So most agencies stop at the lead, and sales gets invited in at month three, usually to complain.
If you're the one stuck between a green report and an unhappy sales team, it's usually because the win was measured at the first point it could be counted.
If every number in your agency's report comes from an ad platform, that's the gap.
We worked with a healthspan membership business whose main goal was a set number of booked sales calls per day. Getting there needed a 7x improvement in cost per scheduled call, so we needed a big idea. We found one: social ads featuring a famous person, sending people to a landing page featuring the same person. The sales team's calendars filled up, we were beating the cost-per-call target, and everyone was elated.
Then we waded through the Salesforce data instead of the ad platform data, and found a lot of those calls were no-shows. If we'd kept scaling, we'd have filled the calendar with people who were never going to buy.
The ad platform will never show you this. It counts a booked call the moment someone fills in the form. Whether they turned up, and whether they bought, lives in the CRM.
Do the sum with your own show rates. With illustrative numbers, a £50 booked call with 70% no-shows costs £50 ÷ 0.3, about £167, per conversation. A £100 call from another channel with 20% no-shows costs £100 ÷ 0.8 = £125. So the cheaper channel costs a third more per real conversation.
[IMAGE: show rate by lead source, from the CRM]
The sales team hears what's wrong with the leads long before it shows up in a dashboard. Most agencies only hear from sales when something has gone wrong. We talk to sales from the start.
One of our clients sells cloud data visualisation software. CTOs sign the deals, so that's who the marketing targeted. Their sales team told us the best leads, and the people who championed the purchase internally, were actually product managers. They were right. We changed the focus of the marketing and opened up significantly more pipeline.
When sales says the new demos are poor, that's a finding. Ask them which ten demos from last month were worth having, and what those people had in common.
Agree a target that sits as close as you can get to how the business makes money.
We worked with a B2B financial services client with a long sales cycle, and moved their target from leads to opportunities. Instead of pumping in cheap leads, we went after people with the right profile who showed real signs of buying.
Launch quickly, then read the result where the business reads it, in pipeline, before you scale it.
This week, pull last month's demos from your CRM and split them by source. For each source, check:
If the cheapest source on the dashboard isn't the cheapest on that list, you've found your false positive.
Sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date with all the latest movements in the field.
More from Ladder Blog
The art world is being disrupted by generative AI, and artists aren’t happy. Generative AI models like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion were trained by scraping millions of images from the internet, without permission. Artists claim this violates copyright, while the companies training these models argue this falls under fair use.
Read More →In the world of digital marketing and data-driven decision-making, creative testing is a pivotal tool in achieving business growth. Gone are the days of relying on gut feelings or guesswork; now, business decisions are powered by data-validated insights, meticulously collected, analyzed, and validated. This transformative process empowers businesses of all sizes, from established enterprises to budding startups, to thrive in an ever-evolving digital market. This article looks at the practical applications, challenges, and innovative transformations associated with creative testing, offering you valuable insights and actionable strategies to implement in your own digital marketing efforts for achieving growth and success.
Read More →
