Marketing leadership and teams are often under immense pressure to deliver results quickly. I was recently talking to someone senior in the marketing circuit who proudly shared some immediate wins their team had achieved. Since this person was relatively new to the business, they perhaps felt the same pressures.
They highlighted how making changes to ad creatives, adjustments to CTA button colors on their website, and other seemingly minor optimization tweaks had improved click-through rates (CTRs).
While these changes had an impact on engagement metrics, the conversation never turned to the implications on revenue or how these improvements aligned with broader business goals. There was a sense of bravado in achieving quick wins, but it left me wondering whether these surface-level metrics are enough to drive long-term success and is this approach the reason why marketing and business leadership are often misaligned, especially in the B2B SaaS context?
The “Looking Good” Trap: Focusing on Vanity Metrics
I was consulting with a B2B SaaS company and while reviewing their performance metrics I noticed a common issue that many marketing teams face—an over-reliance on vanity metrics. The demand generation team was heavily focused on increasing website traffic.They were employing SEO tactics and pouring significant amounts of money into content syndication, and paid SEM programs that were targeting prospects in the awareness stage with little focus on in-market accounts.
At first glance, the results looked impressive: site traffic was consistently increasing YoY at a healthy 15%, more people were clicking on ads, and the team was able to demonstrate an immediate impact. However, when I dug deeper, it became clear that a large portion of this traffic was bouncing off the site within a few seconds. The content, optimized for SEO keywords, lacked the customer-centric focus needed to address key pain points or engage the audience.
The net impact of this on the business was that despite an increase in traffic, there was no increase in opportunity volume. Conversion rates from MQLs to Opportunity remained static too. While the team was spinning its wheels chasing a target and had this sense of accomplishment, the broader business goals such as pipeline growth and customer acquisition remain unaddressed.
The strategy had been executed backwards.
This approach misaligns marketing with business goals and also leads to inefficient spending. Businesses might believe they are making progress, but in reality, they are burning through resources without contributing meaningfully to grow their revenue.
Solution: Shift Focus to Revenue-Driven Metrics
As a marketing leader, the first question I would compel you to ask is how some of the metrics you are currently monitoring contribute to the revenue growth of the organization? Are the form fills you receive through content syndication programs converting to paid customers? Is the last paying customer you say you acquired through the last touch reporting model that attributed the acquisition to your paid search program really not a referral from an existing customer? What kind of revenue-focused marketing metrics would you need?
Here are a few steps you can take to initiate this shift
- Start with strategic alignment: marketing leadership, sales, product management and the C-Suite must come together to define your core growth goals over the next two to three years. What are the growth targets, where is it going to come from (net new acquisition vs customer expansion vs new market expansion), what percentage of it should be marketing sourced? Who is your Ideal Customer (ICP definition)? Try and find these answers internally.
Strategic alignment is not just a one-time meeting—it requires ongoing communication between departments. Marketing, sales, and product teams should meet consistently to review performance, adjust tactics, and ensure that everyone is working towards the same growth goals. Without this constant feedback loop, marketing risks becoming siloed, leading to misaligned campaigns and missed revenue opportunities.
- Define revenue driven metrics:
- Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC): Find out what your Customer Acquisition Costs are with the current marketing programs. Don’t forget to include the ad spend, human resource costs (both marketing and sales), technology costs in your calculations. This will give you the current lay of the land.
CAC is a critical metric because it helps you understand the total investment required to acquire a new customer. If CAC is too high relative to Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), your growth strategy may be unsustainable in the long term. Monitoring CAC ensures that your acquisition strategies are cost-efficient, and optimizing this over time allows for more scalable growth.
- Return on Marketing Spend (ROMS): Review your existing channels of demand generation and measure the return on investment over the past 12-24 months time frame for each source. This will give you a sense of which sources are working and which ones are not and uncover optimization opportunities. Cut the programs that have little to no ROI.
- Marketing Sourced Revenue: look at the acquisition channels that are working for you currently and reinvest / expand them to influence this metric positively. Spend the time to analyze closed won business and identify the true source. Run a survey asking your customers ‘how they found you’. This should overrule any reporting through an attribution software.
- Marketing Contribution to Pipeline: What percentage of the sales pipeline is being generated by marketing efforts? Is there room for expansion there? If yes, what are the avenues that can increase that contribution? Account Based Marketing is a great way to influence this metric positively and align both marketing and sales teams.
- Lead to Customer Conversion rate: This should be a monthly and bi-weekly analysis, spending on your sales cycle, that you should be running to maintain a pulse on how leads through the marketing funnel, how long do they take and which stage takes the longest. You can spot bottlenecks in your sales processes.
If leads are stalling in one particular stage (e.g., MQL to SQL, SQL to Opportunity), it could indicate a need for better nurturing content, more personalized outreach, or perhaps even an adjustment to the lead scoring model. The faster a lead moves through the funnel, the higher the likelihood of conversion. Having this full funnel visibility will provide you the tools to influence prospects at each lifecycle stage between lead to customer.
Moving beyond looking good
As I mentioned at the start, it’s easy to get caught up in the immediate gratification of quick wins. These wins might make the team look great in the short term but dont really have an impact on the business in a sustainable manner.
B2B SaaS marketing today requires more than just surface-level optimizations. The true goal is to strike the right balance between short-term success and long-term growth. Yes, immediate wins have their place, but they should always be viewed through the lens of how they support larger, revenue-driven outcomes with ROI considerations always.
At DemandFlow our focus is to help B2B SaaS companies create revenue-driven marketing plans. Reach out to us for a consultation if you wish to get started.
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