IntentData.io unveiled Contact Level Intent Data, which is designed to help marketing and sales teams identify key decision makers who are actively researching a product or service.

NetLine, a B2B content syndication and lead generation network, launched a new, free tool called Audience Explorer, which is designed to help marketers search and analyze buyer consumption and engagement behavior in real time.

“But how do you know it’s working? Show me a dashboard.”

You’ve been there. I’ve been there. Whether it’s your CMO, head of sales, CEO, or just that curious little reporting angel on your shoulder — we all want proof that our marketing is having an impact.

Here’s the problem: you know there are dozens of touch points between your marketing campaigns and every buying center that ultimately closes business with your company. Sometimes hundreds. But between click-through rates, opens, web visits and a whole mysterious black box of offline stuff, it’s still a struggle for us to communicate the value of our marketing programs on pipeline and revenue.

And most of the tools we use today — from marketing automation to custom dashboards — are all focused on minute interactions with individual people (inherited from the lead-based attribution that relies on a cookied form fill and known contacts, and the B2C bias that runs through most digital marketing tools).

But using tactical micro-metrics like cost per click (CPC), cost per lead (CPL) and click-through rate (CTR), and on-page optimizations is like looking at a Seurat painting up close.

You can count the dots, but it won’t help you see the whole picture.

Too often, B2B marketers end up in this scenario: you’ve measured everything. Your UTM hygiene is pristine. You track CTR, CPC and CPL on every permutation of channel and content or ad creative. And you optimize constantly, culling out underperformers and iterating on your superstar content.

But no matter what you do, your tiny tweaks never quite seem to add up to a more efficient funnel (and no one beyond the digital marketing team really thinks they matter). Somehow, you always seesaw between quality and quantity, and those optimizations don’t shake out downstream as better opportunities, faster sales cycles, or any improvement in opportunity-to-close numbers.

So, let’s start by admitting it’s not just you. Actually, it’s very possibly a problem with the way you’re measuring success — by hyper-focusing on the small stuff, you may be inadvertently losing resolution on the bigger picture.

Manage What You Measure

If you’re measuring minutia, you’re going to be focused on minute optimizations. That’s fine if you’re selling high velocity, ecommerce or consumer, but that’s not B2B.

B2B buyers are signing up with you for the long haul. Their livelihoods depend on your product working, so they need to trust you deeply. This applies to your expertise, ability to deliver and ethics.

Start Fixing It By Measuring The Right Things

The account-centric measurement mentality is designed to pull you out of the weeds, so you can understand the impact of complete, coherent, cross-channel programs, not individual ads and campaigns. This is accomplished in two ways:

1. Turning anonymous web traffic into known account traffic, so you can quantify overall program impact. According to Gartner, there are 9.6 people in today’s average buying committee. How many contacts do you typically have on an opportunity? I’m willing to bet it’s not 9.6, so odds are high that there are a lot of phantom influencers who aren’t getting enough of your attention (and who can slow your deals down unexpectedly late in the game).
2. Making it possible to track and communicate the revenue impact of higher-level programs across your organization and for yourself. By elevating the importance of open and closed pipeline value, sales cycle time and quantified engagement as the most meaningful leading indicators of true account interest, you’re able to communicate outcomes to everyone in the organization, in terms they actually understand and can get behind.

Get To The Metrics That Matter

By using newly-available, account-level web traffic data in this funnel, you’re able to focus in on exactly the metrics that mean something:

• Engagement, not leads;
• Opportunities (also not leads);
• Revenue (real deals closed);
• Deal cycle time; and
• Average contract value.

Revenue Measurement Drives Confidence, Which Encourages Bold Moves & Big Wins

We all know leads can be a little wishy-washy. But one thing that doesn’t lie is cold hard cash — that’s real revenue. And if there’s one thing revenue wins lead to, it’s confidence.

When you’re confident in your reporting, and know it represents what’s really going on with your programs, you can commit to bold ideas and big bets.

And ultimately, that’s my brightest vision for B2B marketers — a future where more of us can make bigger bets on memorable experiences, and easily understand the payoff of those bets so we can iterate and make more. But in order to get there, we need to use our data points to create the full, big picture first.

Janet Polyakov is the VP of Product Marketing at Terminus, where she runs sales enablement, digital marketing, content strategy and more. She has also served as the Director of Global Growth Marketing and Senior Manager of Acquisition and Retention at Matterport.

Aqfer aims to enable system integrators and managed service providers (MSP) to deploy customized marketing data lake solutions for companies with diverse and specific needs. The Aqfer approach is designed to make it easier to handle the large-scale complexity of modern ad tech and martech data management, as well as allow channel providers to focus on integration and customization issues that create enterprise value.

True Influence, an intent monitoring and demand generation solutions provider, named Ray Estevez as its new Chief Data Officer. He will lead the data strategy and data-driven product implementations for all True Influence products.

Remember “predictive analytics” — now more commonly referred to in B2B marketing and sales circles as “intent?” Well, that space has matured, and today there are more than a handful of companies touting intent capabilities. But not all intent is actually intentional when it comes to real interest in your solution.

DiscoverOrg, a B2B intelligence platform, has teamed up with ZoomInfo, a B2B contact database provider, to create Enrich, a new product that is designed to automatically enrich and cleanse data on an ongoing basis.

Leadspace, a B2B customer data platform, unveiled Leadspace On-Demand, a comprehensive control center that aims to empower marketing and sales teams to optimize, analyze, align and activate their data all in one place.

B2B buying cycles are getting longer and more complex. According to Demand Gen Report research, 58% of buyers said their decision process was longer in 2017 than in 2016, while only 10% said purchase time had decreased. Most buyers are conducting more detailed ROI analyses before making a purchase decision (77%), using more sources for research and evaluation (75%) and increasing the number of buying group members (52%).

Campaign Stars is a human powered, all-in-one ABM platform that aims to help B2B brands build an ABM machine and position overstretched sales and marketing teams to close more deals. The platform includes sales intelligence data, messaging strategy, content and campaign creation capabilities and more.