#235: Why Your B2B marketing Measurement Is Broken and can A.I. help?

Speaker A: G'.

Speaker B: Day. It's George from the B2B playbook. If you're a B2B marketer and you're stuck spinning up, um, some random campaigns based on whatever the business asked you to do that week, or you're chasing low quality leads and you're watching sales take credit for business that you help create, but instead you're stuck justifying your activities to leadership. Well, we made something for you. The B2B incubator is our demand generation program for small in house B2B marketing teams. It's built around our 5B's framework and it gives you the strategy, the templates and the system to finally take back control of your marketing and actually align with sales. And we show you how to use AI the right way, not to do more of everything worse, but to know exactly what to focus on and to do that better. It's a top rated demand generation course. We've had over 315 graduates, including marketers like Allison from Rivet who went through it and with their team are now driving 70% more pipeline for the business. So if you've got some training budget sitting there that's unused, this is exactly what it's for. Applications for the next cohort close on 26 June, but of course we have our self service program available if that timing doesn't work for you. So next time you take that first sip of coffee in the morning, head to the B2B incubator.com join us and take back control of your B2B marketing. All right, let's get on with the show. M. Welcome to the B2B playbook where we help B2B teams punch above their weight.

Speaker A: We're your hosts, Kevin and George. Each week we break down how modern B2B companies build demand, win deals and grow revenue using our 5B's framework.

Speaker B: So if you work in marketing, sales or customer success and you want to make a bigger impact in your business and hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

Speaker A: And remember, revenue growth starts with people, not platforms. You know, there's a lot of AI, uh, hype about what you can, can't do. Vendors tend to promise, um, magical insights that will be surfaced. They really often lack that tailored precision or reporting maturity that B2B teams need. It's such a small town, it's such a small icp. There's so much little data. Ah, how do you give it enough data for the AI to learn and for it to give you actual tailored advice?

Speaker B: Fortunately, we feel our 5Bs framework has stood up to the test of time so far, even in the age of AI.

Speaker A: And it's really about building a framework that helps, you know, once you're at a stage where you've got some data under the belt, where you've got some understanding of your dream customers. Those flashy dashboards and now flashy AI dashboards haven't ever been the cure all or the silver bullet that uh, uh, we hope they would. You know, another dashboard is not going to make your business grow faster.

Speaker B: Welcome back to the B2B playbook. Today we're talking about whether you need all that flashy AI powered analytics to analyze and measure your marketing or just whether some simple clear objectives and a spreadsheet will do. Kevin we love spreadsheets but anyway, I'm not going to give it away which direction we're going to go. There's definitely some great use cases we're going to get into. We are uh, in into season eight of the show, if you're just joining us for the first time. We spent seasons one to five sharing our five base framework for demand generation. Season six and seven we answered a lot of frequently asked questions about how to build that demand generation engine. And season eight that we're now deep into, we're looking at how it fits into a wider go to market strategy and also how it connects to your revenue system. Kevin, for those who are just joining us for the first time or they want a refresher on our 5B's framework and what it's all about, can you please tell them?

Speaker A: Yeah, of course, George. So the 5B's framework starts with be ready, which is all about deeply understanding your dream customers. Then we move on to be helpful, which is about developing relationships of trust online, uh, and particularly through the content that you create in B scene. We then talk about how to amplify that and focus that relationship building, whether that's working your way in or buying your way in with some ads and be better. We talk about how to optimize that whole process that you've built up until that point. And finally in Be the Best, we talk about the advanced strategies and tactics that the guys at uh, the big end of town use, how you can implement them within your own practice and how to use the whole framework as a flywheel over time to continue to improve your process.

Speaker B: And if you want to go deeper in each of those sections, head to the B2B playbook.comm we have a newsletter there where we're always sharing things about our Five piece framework and we've got some guides to it as well. Now again we are talking about how to get insights without those expensive tools and whether you do need AI to help you do some of this analysis and measurement. Kev. And where someone who, and we're people who have been playing around with it for a long time, we've got some ideas on maybe how we can use it. But why is this important to discuss today?

Speaker A: Kev? Uh, I think it's important to realize that you know, even before AI came along and we had lots of dashboards built manually, um, those flashy dashboards and now flashy AI dashboards haven't ever been the cure all or the silver bullet that uh, uh, we hope they would. You know, another dashboard is not going to make your business grow faster just because it's surfacing a particular metric that you weren't looking at before. So it's really about understanding you know, the limitations of that AI driven uh, analysis um, and how you should really approach B2B marketing reporting. You know, even, even aside from the fact that you know, a lot of the metrics that are measured in these dashboards are uh, vanity metrics in comparing to B2C, we just don't have as much data in B2B marketing um, to really do the sort of analysis uh, with any sort of uh, confidence enough so that it's statistically significant, that it's enough to guide a particular budget investment allocation, let alone making decisions about the growth of your business, um, from a marketing perspective, um, so we really advocate for sort of revisiting uh, the 5B's framework for structuring your reporting. Are you coming uh, from a foundation of deeply understanding your dream customers? Are you measuring things as valuable to them? Are you building helpful ah, content that is then in turn building relationships and what are the signals and measurements for that. And then you know, we're all about um, finding insights with simple tools. I um, think the complexity of um, whether it was the attribution piece that we talked about last time or the amount of metrics that are just out there that you can analyze that could be a causation or correlation factor, uh, um, how do you define what you're looking for and how to just build a simple spreadsheet to service some of that stuff, sure if it gets complicated as the business grows over time, you can build a fancy good looking dashboard, but I think a lot of times it just happens to be a reskin of what a spreadsheet could do in a much simple way. And finally we will cover as well, um, sort of when those AI tools start to make sense, um, what things you can do with AI to help you in that process to make things easier, um, and basically cover the exceptions of where AI powered measurement analysis can really provide unique value. Um, why it's kind of important to uh, sort of look at this piece and to, and to decide what's the right approach for you. First one is, you know, budgets are particularly tight in B2B marketing teams. You know, we're lean teams, um, as acquisition costs rise and the CFOs start to scrutinize spend, marketing tools in particular seems to be the first thing on the chopping block. You know, do we need SEMrush, do we need Ahrefs, do we need, um, you know, claude code for the marketing team who shouldn't really be coding? Or, or it's the other extreme. Are you using claude code enough? Do we need to be paying for these attribution tools or reporting tools? Um, and so, so because of that tightness, because of the need for marketing teams, uh, to be cost effective, we need to find cost effective reporting methods as well. Secondly, you know, there's a lot of AI hype at the moment and I think if nothing else is just going to keep going up, maybe it's peaking. But even if it's peaked, it's still a lot of AI hype about what it can't do. Uh, vendors tend to promise, um, magical insights that will be surfaced, um, with not a lot of effort. Um, but when we look at some of the early products, um, that are out there, they really often lack that tailored precision or reporting maturity that B2B teams need. You know, it's such a small TAM, it's such a small ICP, there's so little data. How do you give it enough data for the AI to learn and for it to give you actual tailored advice? Um, it's going to get better over time and the more data you have, the better it's going to get. But for most B2B marketing teams working in small teams, how realistic is that, um, today? And that's probably a big if, um, for us. And finally, um, we think it's important to discuss it because when you get to the analysis and measurement maturity, um, piece, it's often quite uneven across organizations. There's many out there that still really rely on vanity metrics. And then even the ones that are more advanced and shifting to a more holistic view of things, they haven't really shifted fully to that Holistic long term view, um, that's more important than buying another tool. Uh, it's really an internal organization alignment, um, issue rather than the tooling.

Speaker B: Why don't we now get into our framework of, and we love thinking in frameworks because frameworks last beyond the latest tool or hyped AI. And whatever it is that's come out, um, you know, the frameworks we find really endure. Fortunately, we feel our 5Bs framework has stood up to the test of time so far, even in the age of AI. But this is just another one that you can take and use and relies on a lot of the principles that we advocate for in our 5Bs framework.

Speaker A: And it's really, and it's really. Sorry to interrupt, George. And it's really about, um, building a framework that helps, you know, once you're at a stage where you've got some data under your belt, where you've got some understanding of your dream customers, you build some content. How do you pull that all together? How do you analyze all that, uh, to start to make it better and to start to build that flywheel within your business?

Speaker B: And then it really starts with, well, what are you trying to make better? So that's the first part of the framework. So start with your objectives and who that ideal customer is. There's a good chance that your business has multiple ideal customers. Our advice is always to focus on one at a time to give them the love and attention that they deserve and define again what your objective is. Are you looking to acquire your new customers for the business? Are you looking at activating existing ones? So if you're product led, growth focused, you have a lot of free tiers and you're looking to activate more people to that paid tier. Are you looking at uh, an expansion play? So you already have a bunch of accounts that you're working with. How can you get them using more of your product or cross sell them to something else that you're doing? When you're doing that, you need to, of course, as we said, have a very deep understanding of that ideal customer in mind. That is going to be the target target of that objective, whether it's expansion, net, new, whatever it might be.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, go back and visit those criteria that you set when you first came up with your icp. You know, do you, do those criteria still apply in defining them? Do the disqualification criteria that you put on before still apply? Uh, in your particular case, as your business grows and your niches, uh, maybe get saturated or you move on to different niches, you need to Revisit, um, those ICPs, maybe you just need to add another ICP in there. Um, but this is a good time to revisit that piece and make sure that's still right before you even get into the measurement.

Speaker B: On this show, we talk a lot about being remembered in the right moment when your buyer actually has the need. Well, here is our moment. If you're thinking about switching agencies that you're finally ready to bring one on for the first time. We're actually a B2B demand generation agency. We run LinkedIn ads, Google Ads, Meta, all the channels that your B2B buyers hang out in. And of course we do the strategic component that is completely aligned with our 5B's framework for demand generation. This is all we do. So when that moment comes, we want you to think of us. And if you're still just figuring out your next move as a marketer, uh, next time you've got a two minute coffee break, grab our free upskilling report from the b2b playbook.com. you'll get instant personalized results showing you exactly where you sit compared to other B2B marketers and what other ones driving real pipeline are, uh, doing. We'll also send our best free resources over to you based on your answers. Check it out@the b2b playbook.com. okay, back to the show. And then the next step, Kev, is segmenting the outcome of that work into tiers. So segmenting your ICP into tiers, typically tier one would be your highest priority accounts. Tier two might be those that are, you know, promising but less urgent. Tier 3 could be ones that, you know you're monitoring and aren't as urgently important. You want to tailor your budgets and messaging accordingly. That's just one way of tiering, right? It, it just needs to reflect whatever your business's reality is. So it's about allocating your resources that you have available in the best possible way. So let's say that your business services, multiple industries, maybe one particular industry vertical, there's a real headwind in there. And all of a sudden that means that there's more demand for your product or service from that particular industry. Maybe, Kevin, they belong in their own tier and you've allocated more budget to them because you know that that's a better place for you to play in versus one that's maybe reevaluating how they view your category of services or whatever it might be.

Speaker A: Definitely. I mean, the crux of this step is just to figure out, you know, within Your icp, if you defined it within your tam. What's priority number one? What's priority number two? What's priority number three? And how do you play differently with those? Because if you have a clear idea of that, then you have a clear idea of, okay, how do I adjust my measurement, my reporting, my analysis based on which tier I'm looking at. Maybe for the tier ones you want to be looking at a lot, um, a lot more sort of lower funnel, uh, metrics, maybe for the top, for tier two, tier three, however you've cut it, uh, maybe they're longer play. So you want to be looking for leading indicators. You want to be looking for indicators that you're building relationships with them. The important thing here is once you figure out the tiers that starts to influence once you figure out your icps, then you figure out your tiers within them, you can start to use that information to color how you do your reporting analysis.

Speaker B: If you like this channel, you're going to love the B2B incubator. It's our demand generation course built for B2B marketers who are tired of doing random acts of marketing and whatever the business asked them to do. We show you how to take back control by implementing our 5Bs framework for demand generation and how to align more closely with sales. It's a top rated cause. We have over 315 graduates like Allison from Rivet who credits the program with helping her, uh, drive 70% more pipeline for the business. We also show you how to use AI the right way, not to do more of everything worse, but to focus and do the right things and do them better. So if you're ready to take back control of your B2B marketing and be proactive instead of reactive, head to the B2B playbook.com and check out our demand generation program to learn more. Okay, let's get on with the show. And Kev, often we see with tier one, you know, a lot of companies will have like an enterprise motion of, of what they're doing and tier one ends up becoming, you know, the biggest accounts that we want to target. But hey, also we can service the mid market too. And to your point, the way that you measure the success of that will be different to tier 2 as well. Right? So if you're targeting enterprise accounts, not a great chance, Kevin, that people are going to view your ad, uh, click sign up and they're going to become a customer tomorrow. So you're starting to look much more for those leading indicators of success. And it's Normally a much tighter relationship with sales and we're doing a lot of heavy lifting at their end too. And that could be quite different if you're running, you know, a PLG motion to SMBs or mid market.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. So you really have to figure out um, as you're considering that question of reporting and measurement, um, what your actual plays are and what your tactics are and strategies are because that will again influence how you're measuring for success. So in that particular case, George, really connecting like an ABM play with demand generation, um, which is all about, you know, maybe you're running a targeted set of ads, uh, for your tier one, tier two campaigns that you specifically targeting through ABM through a sales, um, motion while simultaneously running maybe broader reach campaigns for other tiers that are not connected to that ABM play. So um, they would then be measured differently. So once you have the tiers and you have the tactics and strategies, then you can start to map out okay, like what the measurements kind of are. Um, another part of that is you probably wanted to do or redo some of your cataloging work. So when you did the cataloging of the market, you did the research the accounts, uh, potentially you're revisiting that and making sure that the data points collected on that is right and that's being influenced as well. Um, particularly things like, you know, current providers, renewal dates, key pain points, you know, others, key pain points still resonating. Maybe that's something worth measuring. Um, and particularly you want to potentially prioritize your ABM players and your measurement. Uh, those that are coming up to renewal dates, um, those that are in market in the next month or quarter, those are probably the ones that the dashboards should be focused on. Uh, maybe there's a page for the tier 2s, um, that reports similar uh, stats, but that will be a second page in the deck. The front page should probably be your high priority accounts. And that pretty much leads to the final step. You know you want to in, in the context of all that you want to then look at how do you simplify the reporting to report on the things that matter most? Don't drown in fancy flashy AI dashboards. Track a few meaningful metric. Is it reach of target accounts, particularly in ABM play, Is it engagement by Persona or by um, your ICPs at the nurture stage? Uh, is it self reported attribution? Um, so you're starting to see some of those lagging indicators come through as well in terms of lead form fills from your ICP audience And what does your qualified pipeline revenue impact, uh, start to look like for those key tier one accounts? Maybe particularly within the ABM play and the margin campaigns connected to those ABM plays? And often you can just use spreadsheets to aggregate a lot of that data and visualize those signals. There might only be a handful of things you're looking for. Maybe it's just, you know, how much influence have you had on the pipeline and how much engagement have you had from your icp? And that could just be a handful of campaigns. And then you just simply overlay that with the ABM play just to see what that, uh, velocity looks like in the pipeline with those accounts that you've had conversations that you've had touch points with on the ad side, Maybe that is enough, um, to show marketing's impact and a directional guidance for what you should be doing.

Speaker B: We did this analysis recently for a client in the Edtech, um, world. And quite fortunately, they, you know, subscribe to the whole Adam Manderovich idea of cataloging your market, which is where your sales team, as you've already captured Kevin, go out and actually try and record a lot of the information that salespeople have in their heads. But they don't put in CRMs like renewal dates, why someone bought from you, what they like, what they didn't like, um, you know, what they pay, all that kind of stuff. And so their CRM was actually quite rich with, with notes, um, for their clients that they won, but also for those that churned or lost to. And we were able to work with them to consolidate a lot of that information with the help of our good friend Claude, to go through and pull the top reasons as to why the closed one people ended up buying, who were the key buying roles, what influenced them. And then for those that closed, lost, you know, why did they churn? What could they have done better? And that analysis piece worked really nicely. That client does a fair bit of volume. So I think we looked over the last 12 months or so, and that was enough to give us a pretty clear picture. We then took those insights, distilled them further, and said, okay, these are our top Personas. These are the top reasons why they bought our products. Does our current creative match that? M. Not really. There's definitely some things that we can play up more. And then we briefed our designer. We've launched that, and we're seeing, like, really strong impact from it already. The messages is leading indicators at this point in time, but we're seeing that those messages are really hitting Home with the key people that we want to get in front of. And when you go through, when you look at the analysis of, well, what message should we be pushing? It's probably not going to blow your mind because you have some understanding of that ideal customer already. But there's likely several themes that are competing in your brain already from your analysis. So uh, this just helps put a bit of data behind that as well and tells you, based on the information you have, where should you make your bets?

Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. I think this is where AI can start to help. You've given a great example there. You know, if there's a lot of rich data in there, how do you sift through all of it to find the themes? Potentially Chord, uh, or chatgpt is a great way to do that. First run at it, um, obviously get it to verify, verify for yourself, have a human sort of review stage to that. Um, but you can't really start that conversation with AI if you haven't defined the proper questions first. You know, are you looking at things like which accounts have engaged with our contract renewal messaging? Are we asking questions like, you know, um, ah, marketing, qualified accounts progressing to sales conversations? You won't really know where the bottlenecks are and what you're looking for if you don't have that full contextual understanding of what your plays are, why they are the way they are, what the tiers, uh, potentially are. Um, you can even get, you know, and now we're getting into some of those uh, things that you can get AI to help you with. Even if you have a simple specialty, you want to build that, you can get AI's help to build that. You know, you can tell it to have columns or account name for the tier for impressions, clicks, whatever metrics that are relevant, qualitative notes as well, columns for those. And get something like Claude connected to the right data sources to pull those things together. Then you can use things like filters and pivot tables to surface patterns for yourself. Um, but Claude is obviously going to be very good for pulling some of that data together for you for that first run. Uh, you can incorporate um, as I mentioned, as we mentioned before, you can incorporate some of the qualitative data. Maybe you want to add columns for notes, uh, from sales calls. Maybe you want to add columns for comment themes from LinkedIn ads. Maybe you want that self reported attribution response in there as well. This context alongside the quantitative data and columns can often explain what the trends are a lot better than any algorithm can. And again you can get called to do that first run for you of doing that analysis. But make sure you double check it and then you can iterate and refine from there to get those actionable insights quicker. Uh, if you need to rerun the activity, another great use case for AI to set up a skill project, what have you to rerun that, um, every quarter, every six months, every year. These are the areas where it's really, AI is really going to help you accelerate your analysis. Uh, particularly when those data sets become too large or when pattern recognition becomes harder or less obvious. Particularly the case when you're in B2B where there's a lot of qualitative data and you need to pull out the themes.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Sifting through the qualitative stuff, Kevin, that would have taken us so much longer. Um, using our spreadsheets, probably doing a lot of regex matching and then you know, that would have just been a massive, massive effort. And we always used to try and do it as well. Um, like we would try and do that to the best of our ability but these things I think are just so much better at doing it and a lot faster as well. And so yes, for B2B, great use cases when you have a lot of qualitative data to help you sift through it. But just keep in mind that practical framework that we gave you. Um, so you do have some good guardrails around it.

Speaker A: Yeah, augment not replace um, that human judgment piece within and you know, nothing can really replace a clear framework. So key takeaways for this episode. Clarity beats complexity I think is the main theme here. Um, before investing in any AI tools, make sure that you know exactly what questions you need answered. Um, make sure that um, you have that context around, what your plays are, what the strategies that marry up to them are for the different tiers. Um, all those contextual things will be important to get into place before you hand it off to an AI assistant of some sort to help you get the answers that you want. Um, and often you might find that a spreadsheet will suffice just fine for that process. Particularly in B2B. The 5B's framework helps with that. Obviously we've given you a framework again in this episode as well to do that. Um, to do exactly that. And finally, holistic measurement matters. Um, so focus on metrics that link marketing to revenue and um, make sure to focus in on those early signals and the qualitative data, um, data points because that's really uh, going to give you, um, but that's really, because that's really going to give you, with a clear framework, um, the human insight that this needs. Uh, and then you can use AI to accelerate that process analysis.

Speaker B: Fantastic. Okay, well, if you want to learn More about our 5Bs framework that we keep talking about, head to the B2B playbook.com We have a newsletter that goes out pretty much every week, um, where you'll learn more about it. And we have plenty of resources on the 5B's framework too. We'll give you a bit more of a guide on how to navigate the framework and also how the rest of our episodes. Well over 230 I think now, Kevin, relate to it. And if you want to go deeper on a particular topic, we've got all that. There's a, um, as always, we've got links to everything that we discussed in the show notes. And Kevin and I are just so grateful that every week more and more of you are tuning into the B2B playbook. If we could ask just one thing, it would be to please pass the show onto someone who you think would find it helpful. Hopefully it's a help to them and we would really, really appreciate it. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you, Kevin, for your time. Thank you, viewers and listeners. Take care and we'll catch you next week.

Speaker A: Thanks, George. Thanks, viewers and listeners. Take care and catch you all next week.

Speaker B: A quick note before you go, listeners. You can find more great content and get in touch with us, uh, at ah, theb2bplaybook.com be sure to subscribe to

Speaker A: this podcast and our newsletter while you're there to get the latest news, tips and resources from our playbook.

Speaker B: We'll be back the same day and same time with another episode next week.

Speaker A: Thanks for tuning in to the B2B playbook. Remember, successful B2B marketing starts with the buyer.