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BEST PRACTICE REPORT

Beyond Sourcing: The

Case For New Marketing
Performance Indicators

October 21, 2021

By Ross Graber with Kerry Cunningham

Summary
B2B marketing functions face unrelenting pressure to demonstrate their business
contribution in ways that are both data-supported and defensible. Although marketing-
sourced and marketing-influenced metrics are staples of B2B marketing leadership
reporting, the evolution of marketing strategies has stretched these metrics to their
breaking points. When making the transition to sufficiency metrics, marketing leaders
must overcome a significant challenge: justifying the adoption of a new method for
assessing marketing’s performance. This report highlights key points that B2B marketing
leaders can use to support the adoption of new metrics for tracking marketing’s business
contribution.

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Sourcing Metrics Are Falling Short

To better express marketing’s impact, organizations must extend marketing
measurement beyond sourcing metrics and embrace marketing sufficiency metrics
(see Beyond Sourcing: Evolving Marketing’s Performance Indicators). Marketing
sourcing metrics describe the overall pipeline and/or revenue that originated as a result
of marketing’s efforts. They have been traditionally relied upon as a direct way to
express marketing’s business contribution. Today, sourcing metrics represent the most
commonly appearing metrics on marketing leadership dashboards (Forrester’s 2020
B2B Metrics Study). However, sourcing metrics fall short in fidelity, completeness, and
significance, and marketing leaders must communicate how these shortcomings
undermine marketing performance:

• The focus shifts to what came first rather than on what will close. The typical
B2B buying cycle involves an average of 27 interactions between buyers and
sellers (Forrester’s 2021 B2B Buying Survey). There is nothing exceptional about
the first interaction between buyers and sellers that determines if deal cycles will
be successful. When a marketing organization over-rotates its priorities toward
hitting a sourcing target, resources become skewed toward inspiring the first
interaction that results in the potential buyer completing a web form. This
emphasis prioritizes finding new individuals over the business goal of efficiently
producing increased revenue. Marketing organizations are more effective when
they balance resources to address buyers at all stages of the buyer's journey and
apply the tools of marketing to produce better outcomes.

• Buying groups are ignored. Forrester’s research shows that when buyers make
B2B purchases, they operate in groups. This point was underscored in Forrester’s
2021 Revenue Operations And Buying Groups Survey which found that 95% of
purchases were made by a collection of three or more individual buyers. However,
sourcing metrics are geared toward identifying the first person who engages with
the selling organization during a buying cycle. When metrics focus on the first
individual identified, the level of success at reaching deeper into buying groups is
not reflected in these metrics. Actions to expand buying group engagement are
not acknowledged and may subsequently be deprioritized.

• Sales and marketing misalignment is reinforced. With sourcing metrics, there is

an implicit belief that marketing is responsible for finding new people to sell to and
qualify, and then handing off these individuals to sales to close. This narrow vision
is inconsistent with the evolving scope of B2B marketing organizations and
exacerbates common friction points in the demand process. In organizations
where there is a low level of sales and marketing alignment, the negative

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perception of the quality of what marketing is handing off to sales can feel ever-
present, and tension increases when revenue targets are in danger of being
missed. Simultaneously, go-to-market strategies in B2B organizations have
become less dependent on marketing sourcing net-new individuals at new
accounts and more focused on enhancing the lifetime value of existing customers
and further developing high-propensity market segments (i.e., account-based
marketing, customer marketing, cross-sell). In these scenarios, rigid adherence to
a marketing-sourced target can encourage marketers to look beyond the agreed-
upon target demand to identify white space not covered by front-line sellers. This
type of activity is misaligned with what sales must accomplish to hit revenue
targets.

Influence Metrics Are Not Intrinsically

Influential
To compensate for the lack of completeness of sourcing metrics at capturing the range
of value that marketing creates within the revenue engine, roughly one-third of
organizations (31%) deploy a marketing-influenced pipeline metric (2020 B2B Metrics
Study). As detailed in the report Measuring Marketing Influence: Getting Specific
Pipeline, marketing-influenced opportunities occur during a buying process when one
member of a buying group responds to marketing outreach. Our research shows that
use of influenced pipeline is on the decline: in 2015, 48% of B2B marketing
organizations regularly measured marketing-influenced pipeline (Forrester’s B2B
Benchmark Metrics Data). B2B organizations are rethinking marketing-influenced
pipeline metrics for two central reasons:

• Influence metrics can lack consequence. B2B organizations have grown

increasingly aware that deal success depends on engaging many members of a
buying group multiple times over the course of extended sales cycles. However,
the industry standard for marketing to claim influenced pipeline requires only one
interaction with one buying group member. When applied in this standard fashion,
influence can serve as an insignificant threshold for marketing to assert that its
efforts have affected the deal outcomes.

• Influence metrics suffer from a reputation of misuse. Influence metrics became

the common way to show that marketing actions played a role in opportunities —
especially in cases where marketers had not handed sales a lead. In the early days
of marketing automation adoption, visibility into whether marketing tactics were
involved in deals was a considerable step forward compared to when marketing
interactions with buyers could not be directly detected. However, after more than

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a decade of broad claims from B2B marketers that marketing’s presence in deals
should equate to responsibility for deal success, B2B leaders have soured on the
concept. This has been exacerbated by well-intentioned but misguided attempts
to attribute deal credit away from sales and toward marketing when influence
occurs, sometimes using creative, but unjustified, mathematical formulas. In many
organizations, basic influence metrics elicit a skeptical response from business
leaders, sellers, and marketers alike.

Post-Sourcing Metrics Align To How

Marketing Creates Value
To better express how marketing creates value within the revenue engine, Forrester
has introduced a new series of post-sourcing marketing performance indicators
(see Figure 1). These indicators work as a system to ensure that marketing’s
contributions are evaluated against the organization’s requirements to not only
generate a desired volume of demand, but also to drive better deal outcomes. The
following core justifications support this new system of performance indicators:

• Demand volume remains critical. Although there is data-driven debate on how to

best balance demand quantity and quality, the revenue engine always requires a
base volume of demand to ensure that the organization achieves its revenue
targets. Post-sourcing performance indicators redistribute the emphasis of
marketing measurement away from determining which function took the first
action with an opportunity and instead ensure that an agreed-upon volume of
demand has been activated. By assuming responsibility for a target-to-engaged
demand rate, marketing organizations increase their accountability for the demand
volumes required for the organization to hit its revenue targets. Demand modeling
begins with the organization’s revenue objective and works backward to model
the percentage of the overall target market that must reach the engaged demand
stage for the organization to achieve its objective. Although businesses can rely
on supporting metrics to fine-tune the level of effort organizational functions (e.g.,
sales, teleprospecting, marketing) devote to creating engaged demand, the
primary goal must be that agreed-upon volume targets are collectively achieved,
regardless of whether the first conversation with the prospect was linked to a
marketing response.

• Marketing’s contribution is driven through buyer engagement. The most

observable output of marketing’s efforts is seen through creating engagement —
the interaction between marketing tactics and members of buying groups as they
participate in buying cycles. When disconnected from successful opportunities,

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response rates and response volumes anchored to tactics are poor mechanisms
for understanding marketing contribution. Marketing sufficiency metrics represent
an alternative, data-driven approach for identifying the level of marketing
engagement (known as a “marketing sufficiency threshold”) and improved
business results. Improved results are characterized by a combination of higher
win rates and increased deal sizes, which ultimately equate to more revenue when
compared to deals that have not reached the marketing sufficiency threshold. By
applying this threshold to pipeline, organizations can track the portion of overall
pipeline for which marketing has achieved its intended level of buyer engagement.
This focuses attention on whether marketing is playing a meaningful role in a
substantial volume of opportunities.

• Marketing engagement must produce revenue lift. Sufficiency thresholds are set
by assessing the level of engagement that resulted in better outcomes over a prior
time period. However, those thresholds are meaningful only if they continue to
deliver better results. A marketing-lift metric quantifies the percentage of revenue
improvement associated with achieving sufficient engagement. By tracking
marketing lift over subsequent reporting periods, organizations can assess
whether the effectiveness of marketing’s engagement is maintained. The
marketing-lift metric guards against scenarios where marketing could be creating
more, but less impactful, engagement. Marketing’s contribution requires that the
volume of engagement is achieved and that marketing engagement continues to
deliver against business goals.

• Lift must come at a manageable cost. Although marketing’s engagement with

buyers must drive improved revenue outcomes, those outcomes must be
produced at an acceptable financial cost. Marketing’s actions incur program
expenses driven by development and delivery. Economies of scale may be
achievable while increasing the number of buyers engaged per opportunity and
the number of engagements per buyer; however, increased engagement results in
increased costs. Organizations must monitor the ongoing ratio of marketing
program investment to revenue lift. This investment-to-revenue-lift metric
highlights where the organization can make more gains as the result of shifting
more buyer engagement to marketing or better focusing marketing’s program
investments. The investment-to-revenue-lift metric also shows where increasing
engagement is generating excessive costs and diminishing returns. This can
present the opportunity to adjust the mix of marketing tactics deployed and the
distribution of engagement across marketing, tele, and sales functions.

Key Takeaways
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To express how marketing creates value within the revenue engine, Forrester has
introduced a new system of post-sourcing marketing performance indicators that
summarize and balance marketing’s revenue engine contribution. Although it can be
tempting to isolate a single metric and identify its shortcomings, B2B marketing leaders
must emphasize that it is more productive to view these metrics in combination, as they
highlight the relationship between marketing’s efforts and its success in driving
revenue outcomes efficiently, effectively, and in complete alignment with business
goals.

Figure 1
Marketing’s Performance Indicators

Supplemental Material
Research Methodologies

Forrester’s 2020 B2B Metrics Study was fielded in March 2020. This online survey
yielded a total of 331 respondents in B2B or B2B2C organizations across the US: 321
responses were provided by Dynata, which fielded the survey on behalf of Forrester; 10
responses were provided from social efforts. Respondents who were manager level or
higher within the areas of marketing, sales, or customer who use one of the specified
dashboards with some regularity (quarterly, monthly, or weekly) and can recall many or
most of the metrics it tracks qualified for the study. Quotas were used to control
completes by revenue, industry, and department. Dynata survey respondent incentives
included points redeemable for gift certificates.

Forrester’s 2021 B2B Buying Survey was fielded in January and February 2021. This
online survey yielded a total of 957 respondents in B2B or B2B2C organizations across
Asia Pacific, EMEA, and North America: 893 responses were provided by Qualtrics,
which fielded the survey on behalf of Forrester; 64 responses were provided by
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Forrester clients. Quotas were used to control completes by job role, revenue, industry,
geography, and purchase complexity. This biennial quantitative research effort began
in 2015 to understand buyer habits, preferences, and processes that aid B2B marketers
in their efforts to reach and engage buyers with impact. The Qualtrics survey
respondent incentives included points redeemable for gift certificates; Forrester
respondents received a copy of the findings.

Forrester’s 2021 Revenue Operations And Buying Groups Survey was fielded in
February 2021. The online survey yielded a total of 318 respondents in B2B or B2B2C
organizations across Asia Pacific, EMEA, Latin America, and North America: 236
responses came from Qualtrics, which fielded the survey on behalf of Forrester; 74
responses came from Forrester clients; and eight responses came from social efforts
on LinkedIn. Respondents were manager-level or above in operations roles in the
departments of revenue operations, customer experience/customer success, finance,
sales, and marketing. Quotas were used to control completes by job role, revenue,
industry, and geography. The survey asked about the state and vision of aligned
operations in B2B organizations as well as the organization’s operations capabilities.
The Qualtrics survey respondent incentives included points redeemable for gift
certificates; Forrester respondents received a copy of the survey results.

Forrester’s B2B Benchmark Metrics Data is a collated data source of more than 500
marketing, sales, and product organizational metrics collected from Forrester B2B
clients and non-clients from 2014 to the present. We revise the metrics in real time as
we receive and verify new data. This enables the creation of unique, comparative peer
sets of eight or more responses with common characteristics such as annual revenue,
revenue growth rate, industry, and target market.

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