Double Your Website Pipeline Within a Quarter
I read a post here on LinkedIn using fancy data to say that 90% of revenue influenced by Marketing activities won’t be recognized for 9+ months 🤮
While there is some nuanced truth to this, the overall premise of this message is wrong & overstated.
Because it makes a blanket assumption that all Marketing investments are meant to make an impact on the same time horizon & fails to recognize that Marketing investments can be deployed for different objectives across the customer lifecycle, including:
1. Pipeline Conversion = Impact revenue this quarter by Marketing to active pipeline.
Examples: Field marketing events to active pipeline, buying committee targeted digital ads to in pipeline accounts, etc.
2. Demand Capture = Impact pipeline this quarter by converting in-market accounts and buyers demonstrating clear intent to buy.
Examples: Google ads & SEO. Retargeting ads. SDR cadences. Website conversion optimization.
3. Demand Creation = Impact pipeline in future quarters by targeting accounts and buyers that aren’t in-market and drive future consideration & activation.
Examples: Thought leadership & content. Organic social. Community. Awareness-based paid social, etc.
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The correct statement is that Marketing Investments focused on DEMAND CREATION won’t be recognized into pipeline / revenue for 9+ months.
But B2B companies barely spend any money on Demand Creation. A far majority of the Marketing budget is spent for Demand Capture and Pipeline Conversion. And those investments should be impacting revenue in 1-6 months for sales cycles less than 120-ish days.
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Example:
$100MM ARR SaaS company
Baseline: $3MM in website pipeline per quarter
Implemented strategies focused on Demand Capture = Optimize the website conversion flow based on TTM sales velocity metrics. Optimize the handoff & SDR follow up cadence. Optimize Google Ads for high intent search queries.
Impact in 90 days: $7.4MM in website pipeline in the next quarter (all-time company high).
On an average 78 day sales cycle, lots of that pipeline will roll over to Closed Won within 4-6 months total from investment to revenue.
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I’m all for having patience in Marketing & taking a long-term, customer-centric view.
But statements like this that suggest all Marketing investments will take almost a year to make an impact are wildly overstated, act as a crutch for underperforming Marketing teams, and generally aren’t helping the B2B Marketing profession.
The unlock is separating the investments by (1) Demand Creation, (2) Demand Capture, (3) Pipeline Conversion, and then analyzing those investments separately on different time horizons and with different KPI & attribution strategies.
Marketing is about balancing the short-term and the long-term.
Don't read the headlines: the best way to get fired as a CMO is to think that all your investments aren’t going to pay off to revenue for 9+ months.