My top tips to ensure your B2B marketing makes a measurable impact

I may be bias, but I do think that B2B marketers have it hard. There’s the huge amount scrutiny that comes with spending someone else’s money, the multi-layered decision-making processes and the hordes of different stakeholder opinions and agendas to contend with. What’s more, often it takes bloody ages to win a piece of business, making it challenging to attribute any business success to marketing! B2B marketing is not for the faint-hearted!

Despite being a critical driver of business growth, our contributions often go underappreciated. We’re not blameless in this. This disconnect is exacerbated by our own historically poor communication of our impact, leaving our precious marketing budgets vulnerable to cuts and scepticism.

But it doesn’t always have to be this way!

From my experiences, here are four practical steps to help you set up your B2B marketing efforts for measurable success and demonstrate your undeniable value to the business:

1. Link marketing goals to business objectives

Too often, we fall into the trap of focusing on marketing metrics that don’t resonate with business leaders. Your marketing goals should all be designed to drive impact against the business’ metrics, especially revenue. Build your strategy around KPIs that demonstrate direct contributions to revenue, customer acquisition, or market share. The easier it is for the business to understand how marketing can help achieve its business goals, the greater your chance of getting buy-in and recognition.

2. Take the long view

It rare in B2B sales you will get a quick win! With longer sales cycles, focusing solely on in-year marketing-influenced revenue or Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) is too short-term.

According to the Ehrenberg-Bass Theory, 95% of B2B businesses are not actively in-market at any given time. Therefore, B2B strategies should balance short-term engagement and demand generation with long-term brand-building efforts. Reflect this in the KPIs you select, to present a complete picture of how you are impacting current and future revenue.

Measuring Marketing Influenced Pipeline and Marketing Influenced Revenue over an appropriately elongated timescale, can be useful methods in measuring marketing impact over a longer sales cycle.

3. Redefine the MQL

MQLs often have a bad reputation, and it’s not entirely undeserved. Neither a download nor an event registration, whilst valuable, is a lead. Pushing inferior quality, poorly defined leads to sales, erodes trust between marketing and sales teams.

To address this, tighten up your definition of an MQL. Collaborate with sales to identify what qualifies as a “good” lead—focusing on both behavioural signals and demographic fit. Then, design lead-nurturing programs that move potential buyers further down the funnel, setting sales up for success with higher-quality leads.

When MQLs are well-defined and agreed upon, they can serve as a powerful tool to demonstrate marketing’s effectiveness.

4. Build a Solid Foundation

No matter what you do to prove your worth as a B2B marketer, you will always be doing it with one hand tied behind your back if you don’t have some of the operational foundations in place.

• Good data and CRM infrastructure: Reliable customer data and a robust CRM system are non-negotiables. Without them, targeting and tracking customer engagement becomes an uphill battle, and reporting on success will always be flawed.

• Pipeline and reporting processes: There is little value in reporting on MQLs, if the follow up process isn’t robust or if the business doesn’t have a consistent and accurate process for tracking opportunities through the sales pipeline. Without this, connecting marketing activity to revenue will continue to be frustrating.

Measuring impact in B2B marketing isn’t easy and very few are doing it perfectly. Long sales cycles and short-term business pressures are a challenging combination for marketing!

But by taking steps to become more commercially aligned and strategic in our metrics and reporting, we can change perceptions and protect (and even grow) our budgets.