#239: How To Measure Your Marketing Efforts (And Why Click Attribution Is Dead)

#239: Measurement | In this Exit Five live session, Dave sits down with Pranav Piyush, Co-Founder & CEO of Paramark (ex-PayPal, Dropbox, Adobe, BILL), to talk about the future of B2B marketing measurement.

Spoiler alert: it’s not clicks.

They break down why the old way of doing attribution doesn’t cut it anymore and why leading B2B teams are shifting toward incrementality, experimentation, and marketing mix modeling.

Dave and Pranav also cover:

• The gaps in the old way of doing attribution
• What the best B2B marketing teams are doing now for attribution
• The key questions CMOs face from boards and execs about measurement
• Three things you can do this quarter to improve your measurement

Timestamps

• (00:00) - – Intro to Pranav
  
• (04:33) - – The Purple Cow mindset: why differentiation matters more than ever
  
• (06:13) - – Pranav’s background (PayPal, Dropbox, Adobe, BILL → Paramark)
  
• (07:18) - – “Measurement is Robin. Creative is Batman.”
  
• (08:33) - – Why click/touch attribution is flawed and misleading
  
• (12:03) - – The 95/5 rule: most of your audience isn’t in-market…yet
  
• (14:48) - – How top brands (Asana, DoorDash, P&G) measure beyond attribution
  
• (16:13) - – What is incrementality and why it’s more useful than attribution
  
• (18:33) - – Why revenue isn’t always the right KPI - especially in long sales cycles
  
• (20:33) - – Intro to marketing mix modeling (MMM) and how it works
  
• (22:33) - – Visualizing baseline vs. incremental impact on pipeline
  
• (23:48) - – Geo testing: how to prove a channel’s impact without attribution tools
  
• (25:48) - – The branded search trap: why you should test turning it off
  
• (28:18) - – Even Meta, Google, LinkedIn admit attribution is flawed
  
• (29:03) - – How to measure untrackable stuff (organic, content, social)
  
• (32:33) - – Why “credit” kills performance
  
• (34:23) - – Measurement for startups
  
• (37:18) - – What to do if all you track is closed-won revenue
  
• (39:03) - – Why attribution software is overkill under $100K in spend
  
• (40:18) - – Should you ask “How did you hear about us?”
  
• (43:03) - – How to carve out budget for channel testing
  
• (45:43) - – Don’t skip audience research
  
• (49:03) - – Creativity is still your #1 growth lever (measurement just supports it)
  
• (50:33) - – Wrap-up and final takeaways

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. How's everybody doing? Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. This is an Exit Five live session. Producer Danielle has just rolled me out onto the stage. Forgive me. My kids crushed me this week. I got sick. I was talking so much trash to Exit Five team, to my wife, to my family, about how, you know, since I've been cold, plunging, if you didn't know, my immune system has been top notch.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:39]:
And then obviously what happens this week, just like always happens, you get crushed. And so if I have less energy than normal, it is what it is. But I'm here. We have a great session today. Pranav is the founder of Paramark. And, you know, marketing lesson number one is replay the hits. And Pranav has been one of the top rated speakers at almost everything that we've done. He spoke at our flagship conference drive this year.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:00]:
This topic around marketing measurement is always one of the most popular, most interesting sessions for people out there. And so I'm super happy to be doing this. Yeah. So Danielle mentioned. Where's everybody at the chat? So I'm Dave. I'm the founder of Exit Five and I'm your host here today. We do these live sessions once a month where we bring in a subject matter expert for a topic that matters to you. In B2B marketing, we do a deep dive.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:24]:
We do SEO, email teardowns, website teardowns, ABM. Today, the topic is measurement and attribution. I used to do this podcast where I interviewed CMOs and I would ask them all at the end of the interview, if you could snap your fingers and solve any one problem in marketing, what would it be? And they all say the same thing, which is measurement. Pranav has an awesome way to help you think about this, to help you solve these challenges, and really, most importantly, to stop battling over credit inside of the marketing team. That's where a lot of this falls down. So we'll bring Pranav up in a minute. But first, do me a favor. Write in the chat.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:55]:
Let me know where you're writing in from. So I'm Dave, I'm in Burlington, Vermont today, and I also want to know, why are you here? Why did you take time out of this? You could have just signed up and you could have been one of the, you know, a thousand people to sign up and we'll just send you the recording. But I want to know, why are you here today? What do you want to learn? You just like hanging out in the chat, you heard that we do awesome webinar. Not webinars. But why are you here? That's what I want to know. Pranav just here because he loves hanging out with me. Danielle said because you'd fire me if I skip this. Yeah, that's.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:24]:
These are all good. Tara says I keep asking myself why I'm here every day. Well, we don't do them every day. We do them, you know, once a month. We got Sacramento interested to see how you measure marketing performance, how to show our teams value to a data driven executive team. Liz, we got you, we got you here. Right in the right place. Martha wants to know how to improve information for decision making.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:44]:
Stephanie wants to see if there's anything new learn. So we got you all covered. Now last thing, I'm going to give you one. This is unprovoked before we bring in Pranav. And during this session today you're going to put your questions in the Q&A. Put them in the Q&A because we can sort them by upvotes and then we can bring them up. So Pranav's going to present for a little bit. He's got a nice little deck we're going to go through.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:00]:
Not long, quick, tight. And then we're going to take all your questions because it's, he's really great at helping you solve your problems and we want to make this about you, but I want you to go back, I want you to put this book down. I want you to go and find the book Purple Cow. Anybody read this Purple Cow? Seth Godin, it is more important than ever today that you read this book. This book came out in the early 2000s and it is more important than ever today because why? Because AI is everywhere. And everyone says that AI is just going to take everything away from us, commoditize everything. But also there's more startups, there's more competition, there's more noise than ever. And the point, the premise of Purple Cow is hey, if you're driving down the road you see a hundred black and white cows in a row.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:38]:
Those cows are not interesting. They don't stand out to you. But if I'm driving down the road and I got my kids in the car and there's a purple cow, you better believe we're going to stop and take a picture and tell everyone about that purple cow. And so I just want to read this really quickly to you since you're a room full of marketers here. He says no one is going to eagerly adapt to your product. The vast Majorities of consumers are happy, stuck, sold on what they've got. They're not looking for a replacement. And they don't like adapting to anything new.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:03]:
You don't have the power to force them to. The only chance you have is to sell to people who like change, who like new stuff, who are actively looking for what it is you sell. Then you hope the idea spreads with them and it moves along the curve of adoption. I love this mindset of thinking that nobody wants to buy your product. Right. It is your job to convince them that you are different and to show them how you can be the Purple Cow. Go back and study the timeless lessons in marketing. This is the stuff that's always going to pay.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:28]:
Go pick up this book, study Purple Cow. If you've already read it, send me a dm. Blue ocean is greater than red ocean. That's right. All right, Danielle, that's my preamble. Let's get the talent up here today. This is Pranav. He's the founder and CEO of Paramark.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:39]:
Used to be one of us back in the day. Now he's a founder. He was head of marketing, head of growth at a bunch of great SaaS, companies you've probably heard of. He knows exactly where you're coming from if you're in the chat today. And I'm excited to have you here, Pranav. So the stage is yours, my friend.

Pranav Piyush [00:04:52]:
Amazing. Thank you, Dave. I gotta start this story. So I remember buying a course. I think even before DGMG, you had the 10 laws of copywriting.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:04]:
That's right.

Pranav Piyush [00:05:05]:
Laws of Copywriting. And that was my introduction to. Damn, you've been in.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:09]:
Dude, you've been in my funnel for that long. That's so cool.

Pranav Piyush [00:05:14]:
And I took that course and I'm like, oh, my God, I am hooked. This is the way. And just, you know, here we are, how many years later, so super thrilled to be here to be talking about marketing measurement. But I will start with something different. I'll start by saying measurement is Robin. All right, what do I mean? The Batman is actually creative. And so I tell this to every marketer. Measurement is not going to solve your growth problems.

Pranav Piyush [00:05:41]:
It's not going to solve your business problems. What is going to solve your business problems is creativity. And creativity is not something daunting, something that you lock yourself in your room with a designer and just do that. But it's really thinking deeply about your audience, where they are, who they are, their jobs to be done, their problems, their aspirations. And then tying your message back to those things in ways that are going to be noticeable. If you get that right. If you figure that out. Measurement is easy.

Pranav Piyush [00:06:12]:
So we're going to talk about measurement. But yeah, that was a quick intro from me and happy to jump into stuff.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:18]:
Yeah, let's do it. You got it.

Pranav Piyush [00:06:20]:
Okay, so how do we measure our marketing efforts? And importantly, why is Click Attribution dead? And I know everyone hates this whole topic of like, x is dead, Y is dead. Is it really dead? It's not dead. But I'm here to tell you seriously, that if that is the only way that you measure the impact of your marketing, you're in for a world of hurt. And I will help you understand why that is. Questions are extra welcome. So if you have spicy questions, put them in the Q and a quick intro on myself. I'm an engineer who turned into a marketer over the last 15 years. Spent time at PayPal, at Dropbox, was at Adobe, was@bill.com, reported into the CMO in my last gig before starting Paramark.

Pranav Piyush [00:07:05]:
And like Dave mentioned, I myself kind of experienced this problem. But I also talked to a whole bunch of marketers around me and, and everyone was struggling with the same thing. And I'm like, we spend a trillion dollars on marketing every year and yet this is still a problem. We can't figure out how to measure stuff. And so that was the starting point for why I got so excited about measurement. Okay, I've talked to, if I can summarize, probably thousands of marketers in the last, like three or four years about this problem and whether it's B2B, B2C, Enterprise, SMB, PLG, D2C, use any acronym. All the CMOs, all the CFOs are asking the same questions. And it's these six questions.

Pranav Piyush [00:07:52]:
So before we talk about UTM codes and click IDs and MMM and incrementality, forget about all of that and just remember that whatever you're doing, if you're not answering these six questions, none of it matters in the measurement game. You gotta really simplify and boil it down to these six. Take this, stick it on your wall, put it on a notepad, put it somewhere and try to figure out how you're going to answer these questions in the next three months. And hopefully today's conversation will help. Okay, so I don't know if you've seen this episode of the West Wing. This was one of the first episodes that I watched when I moved to this country in 2011. And funnily, the second episode of this first season was titled Post Hoc ergo propter Hoc. This is Latin.

Pranav Piyush [00:08:42]:
And what it says is after this. Therefore, because of this, and this is a very simple sort of concept, that just because an event happened right after another event does not make the first event the cause of the second event. I'll give you an example. I clicked on a Google Ad and then I converted does not mean that the Google Ad caused the conversion. It's a very simple concept. But for whatever reason, this is hard for people to really internalize. So the real question is, what happened to inspire that Google search in the first place? And that is the inherent problem with click attribution and touch attribution. It assumes that whatever that click was has a cause and effect relationship with your conversion.

Pranav Piyush [00:09:38]:
And so I kid you not how many teams that I talk to, how many marketers that I talk to that tell me that come to me and say, hey, all we are doing is search ads because we can't figure out how to measure anything else. Dave, are you back? Dave's still figuring it out. So whether it's YouTube, whether it's Facebook, whether it's LinkedIn, marketing doesn't work in this linear way where you see an ad and then you immediately click on it and then you immediately fill out a form. Right. How many of you do that? We don't. The way it works is you see an ad and if that's interesting to you, maybe sometimes you click on it, but more likely two days later or three days later, you just type out exit5.com in the browser and go direct to the brand. Right. Even more common, you go check out their LinkedIn page and see if you can track down the founder and have something interesting that you can learn from that founder's profile on LinkedIn.

Pranav Piyush [00:10:37]:
Or sometimes if it's a consumer product, you go to Amazon, you search for it on Amazon and buy the thing that you want. So this idea that you can track everybody through the entire path and through this entire journey, it just doesn't work. And then you add all the privacy issues and the consent issues and you're dropping a whole bunch of data. So in any click or touch based attribution model, you always often are going to underweight under count all of the channels that are more, I would say top of funnel, video, audio, graphic, and you're going to overweight the channels that are bottom of the funnel, search intent, signal based. So I don't know if you agree or disagree. I'd love to take questions on this, but my Opinion is there's something much better than touch based or click based attribution. And we'll talk about what that is. But before we talk about that, a related and a very important point here.

Pranav Piyush [00:11:36]:
By now you have heard this probably a gazillion times. It's become a hot topic on LinkedIn, the whole 95, 5 rule. But if in case people aren't familiar with this, what it says is that, you know, it's not a perfect science of 955. It might be 97, 3, it might be 80, 20, it might be different depending on your industry. But a vast majority of people in your audience in your category are not in market to buy whatever you're selling. So it's a fraction of people who are in market. And the people who are in market, they're probably doing their research, they're searching, they're going to G2, they're checking out your LinkedIn, they're checking out your website, they're leaving what has become popularized as signals, right or intent. And that is all limited to that very small set of your market that is immediately ready to buy.

Pranav Piyush [00:12:29]:
You should absolutely figure out how you should reach them and measure the impact of your efforts. But on the other side, you have this 95% of the market that is not ready to buy. And every day some of that 95% become in market. And you also have to figure out how to measure the impact that you're having on that 95%. And did you get them to think of you as they are entering the market? And so this is a really important concept. It's like inherently related to how we should be thinking about measurement. So what are some of the best companies doing to solve this? Right. This is like I said, a trillion dollars are spent a year on this stuff.

Pranav Piyush [00:13:14]:
So surely somebody must have figured this out. And yes, it turns out they have. You look at some of the best companies out there, whether that's consumer like PNG or B2B like Asana. And there are published blog post go Google Asana marketing mix modeling and you will see that five years ago they started on this journey. Five or six years ago they built their own internal model. Yes, they had to go hire a bunch of data scientists. It was expensive, but they figured out how to measure all of their channels, not just their search ads. And how do they optimize their marketing mix with that broader view and picture.

Pranav Piyush [00:13:52]:
So it's not impossible. But yes, it is expensive and maybe the costs are coming down and we'll talk about that. A little bit. Okay, so we talked about click Attribution, Touch Attribution. Not working. And we talked about these companies like Asana and PNG and DoorDash. And indeed these are all public posts. You can go look them up.

Pranav Piyush [00:14:11]:
What are they doing? What they care about is not attribution and credit. They care about incrementality. And that's a, funnily enough, not even a word. It's actually a made up word called incrementality. But the idea is amazing. It's simple. There's the version of your business today, you do some marketing and then you have a future version of your business. Does that business grow? And if it doesn't, then whatever you're doing in marketing is not incremental.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:38]:
You know what's funny? This is the first year that we've really started to spend on our business. And so like this is me as a thinking from our product as an example, right? And within the last couple months we've basically 10x our spend on LinkedIn ads and everything is up across the board. Website traffic is up, emails is up, trials is up, organic search is up. We haven't run the math on all of the numbers, but it just directionally feels like that incrementality feeling is like, oh yeah, everything seems to be better with a still relatively small investment on LinkedIn. Like, let's keep going. And then there's no. Because we have a simple business, there's not a lot of nonsense or bs and so it's like, it's working, let's keep doing more of it. And I think a lot of this just where it falls down is when you get inside of the company and you gotta argue over, you know, the sales team and the cfo and there's just a lot of nonsense.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:26]:
But what I've always appreciated about your approach is just taking these concepts and kind of making them simple to understand and like.

Pranav Piyush [00:15:33]:
And the reason it's working for you, Dave, and for everybody else who's, you know, been able to crack this is the prospect that you're reaching on LinkedIn would not have become an Exit Five member or bought a subscription unless they saw that ad. Because if they would have done that anyway, then your ad is not incremental, it's not driving anything. So you gotta figure out the incremental impact of that ad. And guess what? When you're really, really small, when you're starting from a small baseline, it'll be obvious, right? You don't need math and software, you will do it. And you will see the business grow because you're only doing it on one channel. When it gets complicated is when you have multiple channels. And imagine, Dave, if you had LinkedIn running, you had YouTube running and you had, you know, I'm just making this up, Instagram running. And now you're trying to figure out, well, is it LinkedIn, is it Instagram, is it YouTube? And now suddenly the picture is a lot murkier.

Pranav Piyush [00:16:27]:
Right? So how do you make sense of that? The first thing that I said, and it ties back to your point. We overcomplicate everything. In SaaS, there are a gazillion different metrics. And I love this quote, everything that can be counted does not necessarily count and everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. So start with what is it that counts? And I would argue that this is the contrarian take here. It's not always revenue. Let me explain. I'll take the example of a business that has an 18 month sales cycle.

Pranav Piyush [00:17:00]:
True enterprise, 18 month sales cycle. I run marketing and by the time it shows up as a closed one, it's 18 months. Am I really going to tell my CFO, hey, hey, hey, wait up. It's going to take 18 months before I can show impact on revenue. I can't do that. Right. So this whole idea that you measure marketing through revenue is a little bit of a cop out. It's like people saying things without actually thinking about it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:25]:
Think about the flip side of that also. Right. Which is like, I always struggle to articulate this, but the flip side of that is also like, what if you only. You know, for me, I've always done podcasting. I think it can be a great strategy and it does lead to pipeline in some way. That's a little bit hard for sometimes people understand. But at the same time, if you only did things that could directly measure tied to revenue within the next 30 to 60 days, then the playbook of how you would do that would be completely different, 100%.

Pranav Piyush [00:17:52]:
And guess what? If that was the only way to do it, everybody else would be doing it. And then what's the defensibility of the business? So there are some challenges that you have to think about now. Okay, so what do you do? Right? How do you then go from this? Like, let's take the Same example, right? 18 month sales cycle, don't go with revenue as the measure of success. Yes, you got to keep your eye on revenue. The whole business has to. But marketing is driving something that is a leading indicator to that revenue. Is that pipeline? Is that qualified opportunities what is it? That is a leading indicator. That means it is truly correlated with future, future success, but also moves fairly quickly with your marketing stimulus.

Pranav Piyush [00:18:34]:
And this is also where a lot of marketing teams get hung up. Because if you're not going to have an easy way to demo your product, an easy way to talk about pricing, an easy way to even book a meeting with your sales team, then this becomes really hard. You don't have a leading metric because everything is like takes three months or six months to actually get full visibility. But if all of those things are happening, if you're doing good marketing and you're making the buying process easy, then guess what? A demo call a demo booking on your website can be a leading metric. So you pick that and you measure your marketing success on overall meetings, on overall demos that your business is driving. And then you look at every single channel, right, I mentioned you've got LinkedIn running, YouTube running, Instagram running, you got Google maybe you've got events, you've got email. Guess what? You can actually take all of that and the activity that's happening in those channels and start to find the relationships between each of those channels and your demo bookings or your pipeline number. This is called marketing mix modeling.

Pranav Piyush [00:19:34]:
I overly simplified it, but this is possible. This is being done at public companies, pre IPO companies, fast growing series A, series B startups. This is not out of reach for a majority of marketers. Now you can't do this or you shouldn't do it. If you're only doing 100k in spend, would I recommend that Exit Five go do this? No, it's absolute overkill. But even just visualizing what I'm showing you on the slide right now of what my key metric is, and then the impressions across every channel, you know, time over time. So week over week, month over month, will give you insights where you're like, oh wait, look at that little spike in events. And that correlates perfectly with my pipeline going up.

Pranav Piyush [00:20:16]:
Hmm, I wonder if there's a correlation there. Right? So that's exactly what you are doing, simple common sense stuff without getting overly granular about tracking each individual through the journey. Now if you were doing this at scale, guess what? This is what you get. You get this amazing visualization of incremental versus baseline. You can take your entire pipeline and say how much of that pipeline is incremental as a result of all your YouTube and LinkedIn and your Google investments. And baseline is really interesting. Baseline is a concept, is saying your word of mouth, your organic demand in the market. And the last one, your built up brand equity.

Pranav Piyush [00:20:58]:
Your built up brand equity is what you have invested in over the entire history of your brand. So think about it this way, right? Salesforce, They've existed for 25 years. Their baseline is massive because there's so much built up awareness, there's so much built up brand equity. And so your in month, in quarter marketing is driving a small percentage of your total pipeline. So both your incremental and your baseline should be going up and to the right. That is what good marketing looks like for almost all brands that we work with. And then you can break down your incremental into individual channels and what have you. And if you have sophisticated, you know, data scientists and analysts, they can do this for you in house.

Pranav Piyush [00:21:41]:
There are open source tools from Google, from Meta that let you do this in house. You don't need expensive software to get going. It gets a little bit harder when you run into like multiple geographies and you don't have a data scientist and all that fun stuff. And that's when you go out and get help. Okay, this is my favorite topic, Dave, with Exit five. We did this offer earlier in the year where we had a brand consultation, right, with a bunch of brands. I probably had like 50 conversations in January alone. And a lot of those brands were spending only 100k, 200k, 500k a year.

Pranav Piyush [00:22:15]:
And they're like, hey, we're stuck in this trap of like only investing in search because I have no way to prove that these other channels work. How do I do this? How do I communicate to my CEO and my cfo? I don't have money and time to do. Mmm, it's too complicated. I don't even have the data yet to be able to do it. The simplest answer is running a simple geo test. Very, very simple. I'll explain how. We'll take the Exit Five example.

Pranav Piyush [00:22:41]:
You can probably look at all new subscribers to Exit Five in any given month and you probably have some location information on them, right? So you can take like we got 500 signups and this is how they split up between California and New York and Texas and what have you. You put that through and put it in a spreadsheet and you'll be able to visualize your top states. You pick a state that is big enough where you can have enough sample and take all of your LinkedIn advertising that you were just talking about and just focus it on that state. That's your test. Everything else is your control. And when you do that now over the next one to two months, you will see whether your LinkedIn spend, because that's the only thing that changed in that test period, caused an inflection in your subscribers from that test state. Now you have clear evidence and you can roll this out nationally. And when you go back to your cfo, guess what? You look like a rock star.

Pranav Piyush [00:23:35]:
Because why? You ran an experiment, you have statistically valid results and there's a clear proof and linkage between your investment in a channel and the impact it had on your metric that you care about. Rinse and repeat across every single channel. So again, it doesn't work if you have 10 deals a month. But if you have 10 deals a month, why are you worried about measurement? Go figure out how to get to a hundred before you worry about measurement. So between things like marketing, mixed modeling and incrementality testing, you know, you've got this sorted. I'm going to jump through a couple of slides and then open up for questions because I think there's some really good content here. This is from 2011, you guys. This is when I was at ebay.

Pranav Piyush [00:24:12]:
I didn't have a role to play in this. I was part of the PayPal team. But the ebay team ran this study where they took all of their branded search ads, everything that had ebay in it, and turned it off both on Microsoft and on Google. Guess what happened? Nothing. All of it just went into organic. As simple as that. And so the first thing that I recommend to every brand is you're probably spending 10, 20, 30k a month on your branded search ads. Go test it.

Pranav Piyush [00:24:43]:
Go test turning that off and seeing what it does to your business. Do it for a certain time period, do it in a certain location. This is the easiest, easiest test that you can run. We did this with a brand series C startup, fast growing, guess what? 300k in savings identified right off the bat. Go take that to your CFO and be like, hey, we tested it, it doesn't work. Can I take this and reallocate to YouTube to see if we can drive growth there? The easiest conversation you're going to have with your executive team. Now, there's a flip side to this, right? Some people you might be in a competitive environment and some competitors bidding on your branded search terms. And yeah, maybe there is some incrementality to branded search ads, but not at the 300k level.

Pranav Piyush [00:25:26]:
Maybe it's at 100k level. So this is also just not a blanket statement of like, branded search ads are bad. The idea is to Test and test the right level of spending so that you're not wasting money and you're finding opportunities to go test other things. Okay, here's another example. I love this one. This is from Sundar. I'm just giving him some free airtime here. You can go check him out on LinkedIn.

Pranav Piyush [00:25:50]:
This is a post that went completely viral. I think close to 10,000 likes just happened two weeks ago and they just turned off a certain set of their meta ads for Uber and their expectation was that signups and first rides are going to go off a cliff. That was the expectation. Guess what happened? Nothing. Business just continued. And again, they did it in a controlled way, in a testable way where they're able to show that by running these tests they can find the appropriate level of spend. This is not all the money that they were spending on meta. This is specific campaigns, specific strategies that they had a hypothesis that maybe this is not as incremental as our attribution models show.

Pranav Piyush [00:26:30]:
So you have to be able to do these types of tests before you. You are ready to call is your channel or campaign incremental or not? Okay. And then I will leave it here with this last slide. I said a lot of words today. I made a strong case for why you should think about other ways than just touch based or click based attribution. But guess what, it's not just me saying this. These are direct quotes from meta, from Google, from LinkedIn. They're all saying the same exact thing.

Pranav Piyush [00:26:59]:
And so this is coming straight from the horse's mouth. There's a reason that Google has an open source marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing product. Same thing for meta. LinkedIn doesn't have one, but they really should. So don't take my word for it. Go do your own research. There are ways to do marketing measurement that do not rely on faulty click based data. I will pause now, get off my high horse and see if there are spicy questions.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:24]:
Good. Yeah, we got a lot of questions. So in that example you mentioned focusing one geo on LinkedIn ads. For example, let's only show LinkedIn ads to people in New York and let's measure that. I understand thinking about the lift on that. Right. How do you think about it with something that's not a paid channel?

Pranav Piyush [00:27:40]:
Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:41]:
I think with paid channels it's easier to be like, we're going to spend X and we want to get Y out of that. I think from what I see around Exit Five is, you know, people have questions about like how would you educate the Org and think about doing something like content podcasts, YouTube channel, where the result might be over time, you build a reputation, you build a brand, you do a great job with it. People, hey, we're going to do a five episode series of some type of fun, funny, you know, we sell to hr. We want to do some like, you know, reality show for hr. That's obviously not a direct sales offer, but we may end up booking deals from that. Give any guidance on how to help folks think about making those type of investments with the same type of thinking?

Pranav Piyush [00:28:24]:
Yeah, absolutely. You first have to decouple two things in that question. One is the asset and then the second is the distribution and the asset production. I think of that as your content. Right. What is it that you're doing that is going to speak to your audience? And I think about investing in those like massive underinvestment and creative across the board. Right. So is that a blog post, is this an ebook, is this a podcast, is this a video? Whatever it is.

Pranav Piyush [00:28:53]:
But you got to have a set budget for content production, asset production, and you can't measure the ROI of that directly. That's dumb. If that's the conversation that's happening with your CEO and your cfo, go find a different job or like try to figure out how to convince them that you have to have enough fuel that you have to put in the engine. Now let's talk about distribution. That's the engine. You have organic channels, you have paid channels. Let's not use organic, I hate that word. Owned channels and rented channels and paid channels.

Pranav Piyush [00:29:25]:
Let's use that. You can't do geotargeting for rented channels like organic social. That's not possible. But what is possible, and this is something that we do all the time, is you have to test different types of assets on those organic channels at different times. So you will see from me and Dave, you do this right, you're trying videos, you're trying ads, you're trying ads on organic. I even do that, you know, long form posts, short form posts, 60 second posts, podcasts, all of those. You try and see what's going to get the best engagement. And engagement is the measure of success.

Pranav Piyush [00:30:02]:
It's comments, it's likes, it's impressions. But most importantly, you can now get statistics on ICP impressions. I don't know if people have seen this, but you can look at your LinkedIn stats for any post and see the titles, you can see the company sizes, you can see the locations. And as long as you're looking at those over time. And you're seeing that? Oh yeah, lots of VPs of marketing liking and commenting and seeing my post, you have clear signal that the algo likes you and it's putting it in front of the audience that you care about. If you're getting it all from folks that are not your audience, then stop doing that. Even the vanity stuff doesn't work. So there are ways of looking at those leading metrics for organic social.

Pranav Piyush [00:30:42]:
You can do some type of testing in a pre post way. I'm going to post once a day, I'm going to post twice a day. And how do you do that? For one month you just post once a day. The next month you post twice a day and you see if anything in your impressions and engagement changes or not between those two months. So you can construct your tests in your own way. You don't have to be a scientist to get this right. Just do stuff and have a common sense approach to how you're going to measure it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:08]:
All right, and then we'll get into the Q&A. But I wrote this in the chat. I also think one common trait among good marketing leaders that at least I've seen is the ability to talk about the marketing strategy and how things should be measured versus if you let the whole org decide how they should think about measuring marketing, it is a different position to be in. I think seeing some of your slides and being like, here's our strategy, here's why we're doing the things we're doing, here's how we're going to think about them sets the context for like changes the discussion inside of the org versus being like, okay, well we've done six episodes of our podcast and we don't have any incremental sales meetings yet. So why are we doing this? Well, the reason we're doing this is because we believe X, Y and Z and where that's going to lead to this outcome down the road. And I think you do a good job of that. And I think it's a, it's a behavior that people should model inside of their companies for talking about the marketing strategy, having a strong opinion. Here is our marketing strategy.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:00]:
You know, you're not going to tell me how we're going to think about measuring this. I'm going to tell you how we're doing it and how it benefits the company.

Pranav Piyush [00:32:06]:
And I think the other thing that's related here is getting away from this marketing sourced, sales sourced whatever, whatever conversation. The first thing you have to do if you're in that Situation is no, no, no. Our goal is overall meetings. I don't care if it's inbound or outbound. It's overall demos, it's overall pipeline. And the moment you have that conversation, the whole credit game goes away. And you're now thinking about how do I drive that number? If that number was a hundred for this month, how do I go to 120, 150 next month? And as long as you're on that track, who cares? I think what's really interesting is there's this whole notion I see a comment in the chat actually that says what about business models where it's not a demo, it's like all sales led. And what I mean by this is it's door to door type of environment where I'm like a salesperson, one on one conversation at an event, at a conference.

Pranav Piyush [00:32:57]:
It's very like sales led as opposed to you can just book a demo on your website because it's a 300k product. I'm not going to book a demo on the website for whatever reason. I will challenge that. But let's just say that that is true. Then what do you do? Then your measure of success for marketing is actually quite clear is the number of sales meetings that are successfully being booked every month. That's it. And now you're thinking, well it's sales job to book that meeting. So how is marketing thinking about that as a measure of success? Here's why.

Pranav Piyush [00:33:28]:
If you are doing your job right as a marketer, when the salesperson reaches out to your audience to book that meeting, they've already heard of you, they've already seen you, they've already developed a preference for you and so booking that meeting is a lot easier. So if you think about the same concept that sales meetings is actually a can be a measure of success for your marketing initiatives, the same concept that we walked through today applies and it works. So that'll be my answer to some of the questions in the chat about a non marketing led type of motion.

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:58]:
All right, let's get to these in the Q&A by we'll sort them by most upvotes. This is from Chris. In your opinion, where should startups focus? Often CAC targets are aggressive and budgets for branding are often overlooked because every dollar needs to tie back to the growth model.

Pranav Piyush [00:34:12]:
Quite simple. You're a startup and you don't have a ton of cash. Guess what? Powermark is a startup. We're two years in. We don't do a whole bunch of spending on marketing. Our go to was organic social. I am always, always surprised when I talk to marketers and they don't have a strategy for LinkedIn, for Instagram, for TikTok, for Reddit, for all of these things that are at your disposal without any spend. And guess what? You take the stuff that works and that organic stuff and you boost it through ads and there you go.

Pranav Piyush [00:34:49]:
That's your test and learn strategy. Go all in on social that whether it's B2C B2B. I've talked to marketers who have spent billions of dollars in both B2B and B2C and they say the same thing. Start with organic social, start with communities. That's where you learn, that's where you hear what's really going on in the community and then you take that and amplify it with paid.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:13]:
I'm always going to be a fan of scrappy marketing, startup marketing, guerrilla marketing, like those ways to get going and to get initial traction. Let's bring some of that stuff back.

Pranav Piyush [00:35:24]:
Tell me about it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:25]:
All right, this question is from Megan. My boss really wants to be able to correlate the money spent to returns, but we don't have things like MRR subscribers or demos to track activity. We just have close contracts or not. Given my own lack of insight into CRM pipeline contracts process, how am I able to attribute revenue to my own marketing actions?

Pranav Piyush [00:35:46]:
Great question, great question, Megan. So listen, there is no shortcuts to this. So my first response to you when I hear that, when I see that is you got to go instrument some stuff on your website or your buyer journey. If you have nothing other than a closed one contract, you don't even have the infrastructure to be able to do the right measurement. So measurement, like don't worry about measurement right now. Go fix that problem of like how do you get your sales team or whoever is doing all that data entry into the CRM to be able to log the first meaningful meeting that they have with a prospect and that's going to give you the data. Then go do stuff you could do proxies, right? People hate on the idea of traffic as a measure of success. I think traffic is great.

Pranav Piyush [00:36:33]:
So if you don't have anything and you have to start somewhere, traffic is a great starting point when you're spending money, see if you're actually inflecting the traffic to your website in a positive way, you can run the same GEO concept that I talked about run in a few cities and if it's working you will see your GA light up like Overnight and if it's not working, you'll know that everything is flat. Okay, clearly it didn't resonate. So traffic is a good proxy, but taking that to a CFO and a CEO will be a little bit challenging. So be ready for that conversation and then tell them, well CEO, go tell the sales team to instrument a better sales process. I'll have a better metric for you. But right now traffic is all I have.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:12]:
It's like the answer in there is in the question, right? It's like that's the end state that we want to get to. So what do we need to do in order to be able to measure this? What do we not have? Yep, this question was in the chat, not the Q&A. But I want to ask it what type of attribution is most appropriate for companies like under a hundred K? I know you said mixed marketing models, geo testing and incremental is more appropriate for bigger than that.

Pranav Piyush [00:37:34]:
If you're thinking about attribution software and you're spending less than 100k, something has gone terribly wrong. Let me explain. You're focused on the wrong thing. At that stage it should be obvious what is working and what is not working. The reason it's not obvious is because you're taking 100k of spend and you're peanut buttering it across multiple channels and you're spraying and praying and hoping something works. Sorry if this comes off as too direct. So what would I do if I were in your shoes? I would pause all that spend. I would test each channel one at a time to see if I can inflect whatever that metric is for success.

Pranav Piyush [00:38:11]:
Let's take Powermark's example. Our leading metric is demos booked on our website. If I'm going to do advertising, I'm going to do one channel at a time until I know it's proven. My message, my offer, my targeting, my distribution is awesome before I move to the next channel. And so I don't need attribution because I'm doing one channel at a time. There is nothing else to attribute. And if you do it that way, you build your layer cake and by the time you're done, your business is off to the races. So trying to do attribution when you're spending a hundred k, 200 k, I would even argue 500 k.

Pranav Piyush [00:38:42]:
Waste of.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:42]:
Money Questions from Leonardo does it still make sense for you to ask customers, where did you first hear about us?

Pranav Piyush [00:38:50]:
Absolutely, yes. You should always get that data because talking to customers is priceless. And don't just Ask them, where did you hear of us? Ask them, hey, what else do you listen to? And what else are you doing? Try to really understand your customer. And there's nothing wrong with asking, where do you hear of us? I'll give you this example. I bought a new service recently for our business and I remember that I saw some type of an ad on some type of a social platform. And when I finished buying this service, they had a form with like 20 options of where did you hear about us? And I'm like, I don't.

Dave Gerhardt [00:39:27]:
This is Ecom. This is what they're saying. Anytime I bought a product like, like a consumer product, they, they have, literally, it must be a database. They pull like every possible way someone's ever bought and they ask you to add it there.

Pranav Piyush [00:39:39]:
And so that's my point, right? Of ask the question. But please be careful in how you construct that question. And where are you asking it? How are you asking it? Because if you were to tell me Instagram versus TikTok versus Facebook stories, I can't tell the difference between those three because in my head I'm just like scrolling my phone so it makes sense to ask it, ask it the right way. There's lots of good research on how to ask it the right way.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:04]:
What would be the goal of looking at that data anyway? Is it just like a directional, like, roughly? I feel like I know where people are coming from. It's a way to get insights like, what would you do with that data?

Pranav Piyush [00:40:15]:
Very good question, Dave. To me, it's a sanity check. You're not actually making many decisions off of that data other than doing a sanity check. And your gut tells you that your organic social is working, but it doesn't show up in any of your attribution models because guess what? That's what happens. And so when you ask that question and you see, oh, LinkedIn, and you're like, but I'm not advertising on LinkedIn, but I am doing a whole bunch of organic. You can draw some simple sort of correlations there. So I don't think it's bad, but it's like, does it really help you in deciding how much you should invest more or less in a certain channel? I don't think it does, but there's nothing wrong with the data. Like, it's good additional data point.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:53]:
When I was a CMO at Privy, we asked that question on everybody that signed up. And kind of out of Nowhere, within a 60 day period, we got a ton of referrals from TikTok. And that was an example where it was a really cool thing. And we found this one woman, you know, she had started a channel that was basically for like Shopify entrepreneurs and she recommended Privy as a tool. And that's an example where like that data helped us be like, huh, I wonder if there's a play here where like A, could we reach out to her and incentivize her to do more of this and then B, clearly there's an appetite for this. So could we go find four or five other influencers and then could we go and go run some plays after that? Right.

Pranav Piyush [00:41:30]:
Love that example.

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:31]:
Yep, I know I'm a genius. This is a great one. How much budget should be attributed to testing new channels versus tried and true when budgets are tight and sales targets are aggressive? And let me also add one more thing of this. I think I've learned a lot over the years. I think I'd be a much better marketing leader than I was then. One of my weaknesses was being very short term focused because of the pressure to hit the number. Now, this quarter, this year, right? CMO, 10 years, marketing leader tenors are short. All of a sudden the plan grows 25, 30% next year.

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:59]:
I haven't scaled marketing channels on the same path. There's not one channel you can just drag and drop or drag the spreadsheet to make it work. So I'm curious to hear, you know, that question plus kind of my nuance there. And how do you figure out testing and learning and testing into new.

Pranav Piyush [00:42:13]:
Yeah, this is a hard conversation because there's not a short answer to this. You have to get this right in your planning cycle. Because if you've already done the planning right, I'll give you an example. We're sitting in February here. If your annual plan for 2025 is set and now you're thinking about how do I allocate money for experimentation? That's a much harder conversation. You're not going to go back to the CFO and say, hey, I need more budget for testing. So if you're in that situation, your best bet is to figure out your entire allocation, right? You've got brand search, non brand search, LinkedIn, email, whatever, whatever. And you have to reallocate between those channels to make room for testing.

Pranav Piyush [00:42:52]:
And that's your only real option before you can go back to the CFO and say, hey, we ran an experiment within our own budget, prove that we can get more incremental returns out of X, Y and Z and therefore give me more money. If you were proactive about it, you will think about it before the annual planning cycle. And if you were lucky enough to do that, then you're asking for at least 10 to 20% of your budget in an experimental bucket. So 10 to 20%, that's what the best teams are doing. And why is it 10 to 20%? It's actually a quite simple answer. Whenever you're doing an experiment, you're trying to create lift in your metric, right? So if you're trying to create lift of in demos or pipeline or what have you, if you only try to create 1 or 2% lift, it's basically just noise. What that means is those. Is it really lift or is it just happenstance? You can't tell.

Pranav Piyush [00:43:40]:
So you really have to aim for a 5 or 10% lift in your experiments. You have to aim high. To aim high, well, you have to invest high, right? If you invest 5 or 10%, maybe you can get a lift of 5 or 10%. You see what I'm saying? So it all boils down to have at least 10 to 20% of your budget for the entire year set aside for testing and do those tests every month, every two months. That's my recommendation.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:07]:
What's the question you think somebody should be asking right now?

Pranav Piyush [00:44:10]:
Oh, wow.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:12]:
And you just went through, and you're hiring a marketing leader right now. And so maybe.

Pranav Piyush [00:44:16]:
Okay, here's something that that's interesting. A lot of the time I've spent in the last six weeks talking to many, many, many, many startup marketers. I asked them, have you done any audience research? And almost always their eyes light up and they're like, no. What is that? Tell me more. And I'm like, go Talk to your 10 best customers and ask them about how do they consume media. Ask them to open up their phone, what's on their home screen, Ask them what podcast they listen to, ask them what YouTube shows they watch. Ask them what TV they're watching, what newspapers they're subscribed to, whether digital or physical. And I kid you not that 90% of marketers aren't doing that.

Pranav Piyush [00:45:04]:
And why am I saying this? I'm saying this because, again, going back to, like, the fundamentals, right? Forget about measurement. The fundamentals are, where does your audience hang out, how do they consume media, and how are you going to show up in front of them? And if you haven't done that research, you're just kind of throwing spaghetti in the wall and hoping that somehow you'll get lucky and measurement will work. But if you were to do that upfront you know, investment in audience research, your shots on goal, your efficiency of testing is going to be much, much better. So I don't know if that was a question, but I did want to.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:35]:
I also think one of the, one of the hardest problems is that everything in marketing has been proven to work for some company at some time. And so it's like, we could do ABM, we could do SEO, we could do TikTok, we could do events, we could do direct mail. Da, da, da. It's like, I almost want less options. And so sometimes it's like I want less budget, less team, less resources, because we can only do it this way. And it gets hard when you're like, can do anything and so shrinking.

Pranav Piyush [00:45:59]:
Dave, Dave, I kid you not, that One of the CMOs that I was having dinner with two weeks ago, amazing, amazing person. He's like, I told my CFO to reduce my budget this year. I'm like, why'd you do that? And he's like, because I'm a shareholder. And I think that if he can reduce our sales and marketing as a percentage of our revenue, the company's going to be worth more. And I'm like, yes.

Dave Gerhardt [00:46:21]:
Yeah, get more organic or more inbound? More organic. Okay, this is not a question, but I want to. So in two seconds, Danielle's going to throw up a poll. We're going to get live feedback on this session. We do it. You can rate Pranav, rate our, you know, rate this session one through five. You've said to me that right now, in the age that we're entering in, I, I've started this session talking about Purple Cow. It's more important than ever to stand out, be remarkable.

Dave Gerhardt [00:46:43]:
You're a former engineer, you're doing a measurement company. You're very data driven, analytical. And yet you say to me that the variable for success, the number one thing you care about right now is in marketing, is creativity. Can you just share your take on that and why with this audience? And I just think it's such a healthy narrative. And especially on the heels of I saw some chatter earlier in the week on, on LinkedIn about another community in the kind of SaaS and tech space. And someone was basically saying, like, everyone wants the CMO to be the CRO. They all kind of want to fold marketing in to just be a part of sales. And there's this whole camp that I think we could do a better job advocating for, which is like, what's the job of marketing? We level set here? It's about creativity.

Dave Gerhardt [00:47:21]:
It's about storytelling. And I want to hear you say that.

Pranav Piyush [00:47:23]:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's so simple in many ways, right? It's back to the purple cow story. Do you want to be like everybody else? And if you are like everybody else, guess you are going to have the same business as everybody else. Shrinking margins, pricing pressure, no differentiation. And what are you left with? You're left with a small, small business. And that's okay. Like, maybe that is what you had in mind. So if you had running a lifestyle business and you do not need to differentiate.

Pranav Piyush [00:47:53]:
Hey, every laundromat is pretty much the same. As long as you have a great location, you'll be fine. That's okay. But if you're building a business and you have an ambition to get to 10 million, 50 million, 100 million, a billion, guess what those brands require standing out from everybody else. It's a very simple. I don't know if you've heard this story that in every market there's only one or two majority winners. So if you want to be a majority winner in a market that means you've taken 50% or more of market share, there's only one or two. And so how do you become that one or two? You have no choice but to stand out in a way that's very, very different.

Pranav Piyush [00:48:32]:
And that takes creativity and measurement. Is your sidekick. That's going to help you on that journey of growth. And ultimately, you got to figure out how you're going to unleash the creativity within you, within your business. And we think we play a small part in that. And that's what we're here for.

Dave Gerhardt [00:48:47]:
Love it like some Tony Robbins. Unleash the creative within. All right, give us a rating of this session, one through five. Let us know how you know. Hated it. Loved it. Somewhere in the middle. I thought it was great.

Dave Gerhardt [00:48:58]:
Caught me taking a bunch of notes during this for my own, for my own benefit. Always great to chat with you, Pranav. Go check out paramark. Paramark.com follow Pranav on LinkedIn. I found that that's a good way to stay smart on some of these topics after we have these folks on our podcast in the community on these live sessions. Hop in there. Follow him on LinkedIn. You'll get a steady stream of.

Dave Gerhardt [00:49:18]:
I think you can do a good job of curating your own knowledge by basically finding people that you find interesting and want to follow them on LinkedIn. I think it's a great way to do it. Go follow Pranav. Pranav Great job. Back to work. You're in founder mode. This is fun. Get back into founder mode now.

Dave Gerhardt [00:49:32]:
That was great. Thanks for doing this.

Pranav Piyush [00:49:34]:
I'm going to plug one last thing, Dave. I'm going to take all the questions that are in the chat or in the Q&A, and I'm going to answer them on LinkedIn over the next few days. So we'll. Or maybe in the Exit Five community. I'll do it both.

Dave Gerhardt [00:49:45]:
Just upload them to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to write the answers.

Pranav Piyush [00:49:51]:
Yeah, I'll do that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:49:52]:
All right, man. Great to see you. Thanks, everybody for hanging out with us. We'll see you all next time. I'm gonna go charge my magic mouse. My kids are home from school. I'm out of here.

Pranav Piyush [00:49:59]:
See y'all.

Dave Gerhardt [00:50:03]:
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even gonna ask you to subscribe and leave a review, because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit Five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exitfive.com our mission at Exit Five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit Five.

Dave Gerhardt [00:50:32]:
There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every, every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community.

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