The New Way to Measure Marketing
Try to picture a salesperson running to their head of sales shouting, “Look at marketing’s first-touch attribution numbers! They’re incredible!”
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It just wouldn’t happen, would it? Nor would that head of sales excitedly forward those numbers to the board. I think we can agree the reason is simple: That is not why those numbers exist. Marketers generate them to try to argue marketing’s value.
Today, with that value firmly in question, we are going to have to get a bit more serious and start reporting numbers that could realistically excite the board. In other words, it is time we phase out the old vanity metric playbook and start measuring differently, just as we now think differently. Because if buyer behaviors have changed and our campaigns (and we!) have changed, so must our measurements.
Though, you do not want to switch metrics too suddenly. As we explore in this chapter, it is best to do it in phases. Other teams will not immediately understand why all the squirrels have changed their coats, if you’ll permit us to stretch our Sciuridae Rodentus analogy across yet another chapter. As such, you may need to continue to report the gray squirrel metrics for a while.
Let’s dig into what that means.
Marketers have spent decades training people on the wrong thing
We can begin with a little housecleaning: In the new, rapidly changing landscape, you can throw MQLs right in the trash bin. Not because they are inherently bad, but because the way they are set up tends to encourage bad behavior. MQL thinking tends to go like this: “A prospect took enough activities to pass an arbitrary threshold in our made-up scoring system, thus someone should call them.”
That could actually work, if it stayed within marketing and it was a minor measure in a great pantheon of other metrics. But we did a bad thing and taught executives and boards to equate MQLs with dollars. That, in turn, restricts marketing’s ability to do their job. It puts them on a treadmill of delivering a certain number of leads per month based on presumptive math about how many will close and what they are worth.
Worse still, senior leadership thinks of these numbers as following some sort of natural laws of marketing physics, and apply their scientific management: Next year, they ask you to deliver the same number of leads for the same revenue, at a lower cost. These executives focus 100% on cost efficiency and conveniently miss that the leads are really three winter-fattened assumptions in a trench coat.
The leads aren’t just weak, friends. They are made up. They are tepid signals masquerading as money, festooned in all sorts of fancy calculations that are equally suspicious. Or as Inverta’s EVP of Innovation and Co-Founder Kathy Macchi puts it: “First touch, last touch, they’re all BS. People have only done it to prove marketing’s value, and they don’t do anything to improve marketing. You chose the model you want to tell the story you want.”
And now, unfortunately, marketers are locked into following these metrics even while they lose the ability to control that story. These past few years they’ve watched anxiously as the quality and close rates have whipsawed with the market and the seasons. As a friend of Inverta’s put it recently, “We spent 10 years training all those executives on it, and if you say you don’t want to measure those anymore, they just think you’re trying to shirk your responsibilities.”
Just consider the language marketers have been using. Have you ever seen a waterfall reverse course and flow upward? Marketers have been trying to do the impossible, figuratively and literally.
Instead, we should be measuring NRR, MQA, LTV, and more—10 metrics in total
Perhaps you are heartened to discover that some of these acronyms you already know! Net revenue retention (NRR), marketing qualified accounts (MQA), and lifetime value (LTV) should be pretty familiar for most in B2B. They are the ones to focus on, plus a few others.
In this age, it is essential to use several metrics together. As Harvard Economist Todd Rose wrote in his book The End of Average, there are secrets hiding in your segments. You have to drill down into your NRR to find that while your NRR is 135% (good), it’s only because a few big accounts grew and it masked that many others churned (bad).
Similarly, only focusing on LTV and assuming it’s a fixed number that doesn’t change can lead you to some pretty starry-eyed analyses.
Let’s explore all nine metrics in more depth, and how you might think about them in this new era. (This all assumes you have an ICP and are tracking an account funnel with all the usual volume, value, velocity, and conversion metrics.)
1. Lifetime value (LTV)
Lifetime value is of course the dollar value of an average customer over an average lifetime. It is essential you track LTV not just across all customers, but also by segments because you will find a great deal of variation. Here’s a good test: If you compare your LTV average and LTV median and find they are more than one standard deviation apart, you probably have a few big companies dragging the average up. Meaning, you should really only look at LTV by segment.
For real insight, segment LTV by:
Company size
Contract value
Customer goal
Industry
Company type
Your LTV is, however, backwards looking: It tells you what your customers have spent, not what they will spend. It’s up to smart humans to decide who that ideal buyer is going forward. (See Chapter 1.)
There is also the danger that your company or buying group is too new to calculate a useful LTV. And when you change your ideal persona, offer new products, or there’s a big shift in the market, it can reset your LTV assumptions.
Which is why you should also track NRR.
2. Net revenue retention (NRR)
This is the net revenue you retain after factoring in all new revenue added along with churned revenue lost. You may gain customers as well as grow customers, which is why this number can be above 100%—say, at 110% or 120%.
Why we like NRR: It’s time to give up what Velocity Partners calls “the sugar rush of leads.” If you need customers to stick around, it encourages you to think longer term. It’s not just new logos. It’s, “How many logos will we need in year two?”
Focusing on retention shifts the game a little: Marketers have at least two audiences within each company to win and retain: The company itself and your individual champion, who may hop companies. In that way, NRR isn’t just numbers. It’s a good proxy for all the customer trust, political sway, and relationships your marketing team forms which isn’t usually counted. If you can recognize when champions churn and when you get multi-threaded on accounts, you are measuring more of your true value.
When calculating an account’s NRR potential, consider:
- Is it a good account?
- Likely to renew?
- Likely to grow?
- Are we multi-threaded?
Remember, there is such a thing as “good” churn, too. Some customers are expensive to support or don’t reflect the base you want. It is a good thing to lose those customers. You’ll have to explain that to others.
NRR isn’t just numbers. It’s a good proxy for all the customer trust, political sway, and relationships your marketing team forms which isn’t usually counted
3. Marketing qualified account (MQA)
MQAs can tell you whether what you are doing presently is working or not—especially in a world that’s no longer reliant on form fills. Though many marketers we talk to are measuring this without operationalizing it. It exists in a deck but not as an object in their CRM. In which case, it doesn’t really have any power to help you measure those new buyer behaviors.
An organization that passes your criteria for a good customer and that is showing engagement from multiple buying group members and signaling that they are in the market for your solution.
How you define your MQA is as important as how you define your ideal buyers. We’d recommend assembling it from two angles:
- What are the characteristics of an ideal account?
- How do we define a quality engagement or response?
We can tell you what isn’t a qualified engagement: Outbound touches. In the old MQL schema, marketers counted merely reaching out as engagement, but as we all know, all that matters is what accounts do in response.
And then what does a marketer do with that definition? How are they providing increasingly useful information to that account? It matters deeply how you operationalize it:
- How tightly do you hold to the definition?
- What if a non-qualified account comes inbound?
- What do you do with an account with high third-party signals, but zero first-party engagement?
This is where marketers can get really, truly, helpfully involved in sales. A salesperson may be in love with an account but your data shows first-party data has dropped off, while third-party data continues to show research. That’s a warning signal.
4. People engaged (lead) per account
If you receive multiple leads from an account, it’s not a bug—it’s good news. That’s buying group behavior in action, not just isolated interest.
Of course, engagement insights vary significantly depending on the source:
- First-party data = known leads and tracked activity
- Anonymous traffic = unconverted but potentially active buying group members
- Intent data = offsite research signals (third-party research on competitors/solutions)
5. Historical engaged people (lead) per
Run a historical analysis on closed-won deals to see how many people engaged. Report regularly on the total leads versus the number of accounts, for instance, 409 leads from 200 accounts.
6. Historical engaged people (lead) to opportunity ratios
Going back in time to analyze the average number of leads per opportunity (typically 1.5 to 2.5) helps establish a baseline for what success looks like. Use historical benchmarking to assess current pipeline health and how effective your marketing is.
7. Anonymous web traffic
Track it but do not share outside marketing, for all the reasons we’ve covered. Traffic can be directionally useful: 70%+ of buyers will never fill out a form. The majority of buying signals are anonymous site visits. It’s the primary form of response to your marketing. Prioritize accounts that show increased anonymous activity even in the absence of form fills.
8. Engagement effectiveness
This is a great one to get you away from relying on MQLs: Measure whether you are driving the right engagement to help sales win deals. Try to go beyond quantitative measures such as visits and downloads to things that reveal more participation, like whether they asked questions on a webinar or brought a group to the discovery call.
Compare engaged accounts to win/loss data to determine if engagement correlates to sales success. Focus on account-level engagement rather than individual MQLs.
9. Missed opportunities and competitive loss signals
Accounts identified that an intent tool labels as “in-market” but have not engaged with your content are sure to buy from a competitor. Track which “in-market” accounts never convert and correlate that with your competitive win/loss.
10. Campaign alignment and channel incentive structures
Do not let the medium become your only message—measure how your various channel-owning teams are coordinating to deliver integrated campaigns. Use integrated planning to align on the segments, messages, and outcomes across teams.
In sum:
- Move beyond MQLs: Embrace buying group behaviors, engagement depth, and market intent as your primary signals.
- Redefine success: Metrics should focus on enabling sales and driving effective engagement, not simply lead volume.
- Tell the right story: Measurement is not just about tracking, but about influencing internal stakeholders and justifying investment.
Uh oh. Now, you have a change management issue
Like an old signal only just reaching a distant space station, boards and CFOs are still only getting up to speed on the measurements we taught them. (And now sort of regret, if we are honest.) Which puts you in a tricky situation: If you build a new dashboard for your new metrics, they’ll seem embarrassingly empty.
The best way to prove your case for the new metrics is to gather a year’s worth of data. Your pipeline machine will need most of the year to be fully operational. You’ll need that data to help shift their focus from, “We need to hit the same numbers as last year but better” to “We need profitable, efficient growth that’ll pay off in the long-term.” Because that’s playing the long game. Not the three-week game, but the three-year game.
So, for a while, you’ll actually need to manage two dashboards:
Set a deadline for when you’ll have enough data to make a case and fully transition over. Assuming this all proves accurate! There is no A/B test like running a regression analysis against last year’s data to actually see how things looked with your new way of measuring. It’s not a certainty that these are the right metrics for your specific company. But we can tell you from helping over 500 organizations manage their marketing, this is where it’s all headed.
Once ready, make the announcement. Say, “By this date, MQLs are dropping off the board.” This runway gives the finance team time to adapt and adopt. (And potentially grieve the MQL they’d come to love so dearly.)
The future of measurement
Recall throughout this guide how many times we’ve pointed out that adaptability is key—well, even while we write this, generative AI promises to rewrite everything we know about measurement. In the near future, we anticipate AI dashboards will be able to:
- Self-heal and find new data points
- Show generative-acquired intent signals
- Offer live feedback from synthetic personas
- Autowrap tracking to all links
- Generate novel visualizations unique to your company
- Build board decks autonomously
Until then, start working on that black squirrel dashboard in secret. And rest assured, this shift from focusing on short-term, overly presumptive MQL and first-touch metrics to long-term LTV, NRR, and MQAs is the right one. Wherever the future holds, it will change more, and this is the basket of metrics to help you peer into that future and seize the revenue opportunities before you.
Because as trust in marketing dwindles, nobody’s going to save us but us. Nobody’s going to trust that we’re sunsetting the MQA without a viable alternative. It is imperative upon every marketer to be generating metrics that point to revenue, so they can be part of those conversations, and be right enough that we earn that trust back.