In my previous post I covered how businesses, particularly in the B2B and B2C SaaS sector, face tighter budgets that are under greater scrutiny. As we move into 2025 and beyond there is a dire need for marketing to adopt a revenue-focused approach that can be measured by metrics which directly correlate with business outcomes.
As promised, I am sharing my two cents on how you as a marketing or business leader can make the transition and laying out a roadmap of exactly where you can start:
1. Audit Your Current Metrics
The first step in shifting to revenue-focused marketing is to conduct a comprehensive audit of the key marketing metrics that you are currently tracking. What does your marketing team currently report on? Is it website traffic? Is it the number of MQLs? Is it the number of impressions? Ad rank? Engagement rates, CTRs or something else?
Do you track conversions from MQLs to SQLs and thereafter Opportunities? Do you know what your win rates are and how they are trending over time? Many businesses measure a wide array of data points, but not all of them contribute to understanding the true health of the business and marketing’s impact on it.
Why It’s Important:
An audit allows you to identify which metrics are truly driving growth and which are merely vanity metrics. Website traffic for example is a vague metric to report on. Here’s why – a high volume of traffic does not necessarily indicate great quality or that your business is actually getting in front of high value accounts or even the right kind of prospects.
I was working on a project recently, and the business’s site was receiving thousands of website visitors monthly. On digging deeper I discovered that most of the traffic had an average session duration of under 3 seconds and the source of this traffic was a wide range of outbound cold emails. Not a single lead was generated from the website for the past 3 years!!
Building the right kind of SEO and content strategy becomes imperative towards attracting buyers. More on that in another blog post.
How to Do It:
- Identify Key Metrics: List all the metrics your marketing team currently tracks. Categorize them into those that directly impact revenue (e.g., Cost Per Lead, Investment Per Lead Source, Customer Acquisition Cost, Return on Marketing Spend, Lead Source Wise Conversion Rates) and those that do not (e.g., social media likes, ad impressions, site traffic).
- Evaluate Their Effectiveness: Assess the relevance of each metric in the context of your business goals. For instance, are your MQLs translating into SQLs and eventually into closed won business? If not, it’s time to reevaluate the quality and criteria of qualifying those MQLs and also identify which lead acquisition sources are working. In 2025, the key metrics that I believe every business must monitor are:
- Marketing Contribution to Revenue Pipeline – What % of net new pipeline is generated by Marketing
- Customer Acquisition Costs – Overall costs of acquiring a new customer that includes spend on tech, sales, advertising, marketing and salaries. You can divide total acquisition costs by number of new customers acquired over a particular period of time.
- Win Rates – MQL to Closed Won business. While monitor the conversion across each lifecycle stage, MQL to Closed Won tracking will enable you to maintain an effective health check.
- Annual Recurring Revenue – Revenue generated yearly from annual subscriptions
- Return on Marketing Spend – Value in $$ that your marketing initiatives generated. This should be the revenue generated for each dollar spent on marketing. Ideally for every dollar spent on marketing a return of $3+ is generally considered healthy.
2. Implement a New Reporting Framework
Once you’ve identified the metrics that matter, some of which I listed above, the next step is to build a reporting framework that prioritizes those metrics. Some businesses may not even be tracking the data that can help them report on some of the metrics that matter. So if you find yourself in that situation, it’s great, as you now know and can take the steps towards fixing it and reflect your marketing initiatives. By building a new reporting framework you can align your marketing initiatives with your revenue goals.
How to Build It:
- Select the system: Traditionally organizations have been using a whole range of tools, like PowerBI, Looker, Tableau etc in conjunction with Google Analytics, CRM (Salesforce) and Marketing Automation (HubSpot) or ABM tools like DemandBase and 6Sense. However, there is merit in creating this visibility on one system which could be your CRM as that’s where your customer data and prospect information primarily resides. Maybe in conjunction with one of these Data Analytics tools but invest the time and the resources on building this reporting framework that you can use for that full circle visibility.
- Customize Reports: Tailor reports to provide insights at different levels—executive summaries for leadership, detailed analyses for marketing and sales teams.
For example, I would create two simple reports for my executives –
a. An aggregated report of qualified lead flow per month split by product segments and their conversion through the funnel
b. The number of net new marketing sourced opportunities and their $$ amounts split by product and source
For my marketing team, I would create a more detailed report split by sources of acquisition and also review campaign specific reporting by channel.
What this will do is cut the noise. You will clearly be able to visualize what’s working in your marketing and which channels are effectively contributing towards driving revenue growth. So anything that is not directly or indirectly contributing to revenue, I would cut it. Cutting things like Content Syndication, and ToF Paid PPC are a few such channels where you can immediately see some savings. The goal is to measure the whole range of marketing activities together to see whether marketing is actually delivering on its promise. Remember the goal is to bring the focus towards revenue-focused marketing.
3. Refocus and Retrain Your Teams
Even with the right metrics in place, success depends on your teams being aligned and focused on these new ways of working and letting go of ‘we have always done things this way’. So many of us have been doing things a certain way that adopting new ways of working can be tough and frankly is the primary challenge we need to overcome. Retraining your marketing and sales teams to prioritize revenue-driving activities is crucial.
Here’s how:
- Sales and Marketing Workshops: Put them in one room. Ask them to cocreate their plans on how they can achieve their goals and seek alignment on targeting, ICP fit, pain points and value proposition. This will guide both marketing and sales in the same direction. Seek their inputs on how success will be measured and why some of these new metrics matter to your business. Don’t just discuss metrics, also discuss initiatives – what are the current demand gen channels, which ones are working and why, where are opportunities to A/B test and more.
- Regular Reviews: Before cutting down a lot of initiatives at the same time, start small and see the results to learn and recalibrate along the way so that you monitor your pipeline and correlate the lead flow with the new initiatives you will introduce.
I was working at a professional services company and introduced ABM there, the project was new and little understanding existed within the teams of how it could help the business. I worked with sales to define the ICP and create a Target Account List (TAL) pulled from the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Total Serviceable Market analysis. When we aligned together on these initiatives, sales was always eager to hear which ones of their target accounts had intent spikes or reported some engagement so that they could prioritize and personalize outreach.
4. Optimize Lead Qualification Processes
Lead qualification is another area that requires attention when transitioning to revenue-focused metrics. It’s not just about generating leads but ensuring that these leads are high-quality and likely to convert.
What is the definition of that MQL? Start by reevaluating your definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead. Once again, these should be ‘hand-raisers’ or contacts who explicitly asked to be contacted by your business. This would typically happen once they have done their research and found you to be worthy of their attention to address their current pains.
Defining your inbound lead or a marketing sourced lead as a hand raiser who explicitly asked to be contacted by your business can vastly improve the quality of your demand generation initiatives and refocus them towards programs that actually help the business generate revenue.
Why It’s Essential:
Improving lead qualification processes helps ensure that marketing efforts are focused on leads that have a higher chance of becoming paying customers, therefore optimizing spend to acquire both in-market accounts and driving demand creation initiatives. Again keeping marketing revenue-focused.
Practical Steps:
- Refine MQL and SQL Criteria: Update the criteria for what constitutes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – must be hand raisers or prospects filling out that Contact Us or Demo Request form and a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – must have a declared need or booked second meeting. Ensure these criteria are aligned with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
- Use Automation Tools: Define lifecycle stages clearly in your CRM and Marketing Automation tools. Create operations playbook to manage the handoff process from marketing to sales, and documenting everything on all qualified prospects from source of acquisition, number of touches to closed won or closed lost business.
5. Adopt Multi-Touch Attribution
Finally, to fully understand how different marketing efforts contribute to revenue, adopting a multi-touch attribution model is essential. Most of us rely on either first or last touch attribution but in my experience that doesn’t really tell even half the story. Here’s an example – one of our prospects had 72 touches before filling out that Demo Request form but actually converted on a PPC form. So the attribution model suggested that PPC worked and totally ignored all the other engagements the brand had with our business. Without the visibility across the full range of marketing motions it would quickly prompt executives to double down on their paid promotions.
Embrace the Shift
Transitioning to revenue-focused marketing is not just a tactical change; it’s a strategic shift that aligns your marketing efforts with your company’s financial goals. By auditing your current metrics, implementing a new reporting framework, retraining your teams, optimizing lead qualification, and adopting multi-touch attribution, you can drive more sustainable growth.
In my next blog, I’ll dive deeper into each of these key metrics, providing even more insights and actionable steps. If you’re ready to make the shift or need guidance on where to start, feel free to reach out to me at DemandFlow.
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