Chapter 1
The B2B Customer Journey
The B2B customer journey is more complicated today than ever
before. With more channels to engage with, and more devices to
engage on, tracking the customer journey is no simple task. Between
offline channels like industry conferences and prospect dinners, and
the multitude of online channels (search, social, display, referral,
email, etc.), accurately capturing the complete journey requires a
number of technologies and integrations.
Looking at our data, our closed-won customers engaged with us
36 times on average before deciding to make the purchase. And with
so much information at every buyer’s fingertips, Forrester says that
90% of the B2B buying process happens before the customer ever
reaches out to a salesperson.
Here’s what a B2B customer journey may look like. Notice that
we didn’t say “typical” — with so many different ways to go through
the buyer funnel, hardly any journey is typical.
A marketing manager is going to attend a marketing
conference in a week, and decides to check out which
companies are going to be in attendance ahead of time.
He navigates to your website and maybe checks out a blog
post or two. When the conference rolls around, he drops
by your booth, chats with your sales reps and scans his
badge, making him a lead. A week later, he sees your com-
pany name pop up in a Twitter chat and it occurs to him
that he saw you at the conference. But then the chat goes
on and he forgets that he was going to check out your
website again. The next day he sees one of your ads on
LinkedIn, remembers that he was going to search your
company the day before and types in your company name
on Google, where he proceeds to navigate to an ebook
and downloads it. At this point, a sales rep reaches out
and schedules a demo for the following week. After a few
weeks of swapping emails and answering questions, he
brings his boss, the VP of Marketing, into the conversa-
tion. After a few more emails and phone calls she agrees
to start a trial.
Suffice it to say, there is a lot of consumer data to track and make
sense of. Just in this hypothetical journey, there was a handful of
touchpoints, both online and offline, and multiple people were
involved in making the purchase. It’s the role of marketers and
marketing data to make sense of this.
Chapter 2
Measuring the Customer
Journey: Marketing Data
Gone are the Mad Men days of marketing, where creativity and
intuition completely overruled metrics and data. Now, they must
work hand-in-hand. This is especially true in B2B marketing. With so
much competition and tight marketing budgets, marketers are under
tremendous amounts of pressure to demonstrate measurable
results — data to prove that marketing is doing its job and getting
better every day.
How marketing does this traditionally falls into two categories:
activity metrics and engagement metrics.
Activity Metrics
When it is the marketing team’s turn to give an update to the compa-
ny, how often do you hear something like this: “We published 15
articles, sponsored two events, contributed to a webinar, and
launched three new paid media campaigns this month.”
These are activity metrics. And all too often, this is all that the
marketing team brings to the table.
When that is all you can report, you lose a lot of credibility in the
organization. That’s because, while interesting, these activities are all
on the cost side of the equation — they don’t say anything about
contributing to the success of the company.
Activity metrics are good to know internally. They keep the
marketing team organized and up to date with what everyone is
doing. But what the company really wants to know is the success of
these activities, the results. This brings us to the second category of
marketing metrics.
Engagement Metrics
Ok, so you’ve moved beyond activity metrics and want to show
the results of your activities. Did people read your 15 articles? How
many people did you talk to at your two events? Did any prospects
follow up after attending the webinar? And, are the new paid media
campaigns effective?
All of these questions can be answered with engagement
metrics: views, clicks, likes, comments, time on site, click-
through-rates (CTRs), etc. — anything up to and including converting
anonymous visitors (online and offline) into leads.
However, engagement metrics only measure the top and middle
of the funnel. Once a visitor fills out a form and becomes a lead, they
typically go through a “qualifying” process. Is their company big
enough (or small enough) to be a legitimate prospect? Do they use
the tools necessary for your solution to make an impact? Do they
have the problems that your product solves? If you’re selling enter-
prise software, an employee of a three-person startup can fill out a
form and download your ebook, but that doesn’t make them a poten-
tial customer.
As soon as a visitor turns into a qualified lead, they are passed to
the sales team. They are no longer under the domain of the market-
ing team, and therefore, no more marketing metrics are tracked
through the remainder of the funnel.
Engagement metrics are a good step along the way to reporting
marketing outcomes, but they don’t quite make it all the way. After
all, you can’t keep the lights on and pay employees with leads.
When marketers prioritize achieving engagement metrics —
things that measure the top and middle of the funnel — they
optimize for marketing itself, not the ultimate outcome of marketing,
which is customers and revenue. This data, however, is held on the
sales side.
Closed-won customers engaged with us
36 times on average before deciding to
make the purchase.
B2B Marketing Attribution 101
