#234: The 7 Marketing Metrics Every B2B Leader Should Report On

In this episode, Matt sits down with Aditya Vempaty, VP of Marketing at MoEngage, to talk about a topic every marketing leader has wrestled with: reporting on the right metrics. Aditya has led marketing at companies like Nutanix, Amplitude, and Synthego - and he’s learned how to build dashboards and reporting frameworks that actually communicate marketing’s impact across leadership, sales, and finance.

Matt and Aditya cover:

• Why marketing metrics should translate performance into a common language the business understands
• The four buckets of metrics every B2B team should track
• How often you should be reporting on metrics
• The exact 7 metrics Aditya uses to report up, down, and across the org

Timestamps

• (00:00) - – Intro to Aditya
  
• (03:45) - – Why communicating marketing’s impact is a challenge for many teams
  
• (06:21) - – The importance of using a common language when reporting to leadership
  
• (08:59) - – Breaking marketing metrics into four key buckets
  
• (12:14) - – How pipeline coverage connects marketing to revenue
  
• (14:43) - – Reporting on efficiency: CAC, cost per opportunity, and more
  
• (17:58) - – The role of awareness metrics and how to contextualize them
  
• (21:55) - – How marketing and sales alignment can be measured effectively
  
• (24:24) - – The 7 core marketing metrics Aditya reports on regularly
  
• (28:07) - – How often should marketing be reporting metrics?
  
• (30:51) - – Dashboards, recurring meetings, and what execs actually care about
  
• (33:43) - – Advice for first-time marketing leaders on building reporting habits
  
• (35:57) - – Why clarity beats complexity when it comes to data
  
• (38:39) - – Final thoughts

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

Matt Carnevale [00:00:17]:
All right. I'm here with Aditya Vempaty. Aditya, how's it going, my friend?

Aditya Vempaty [00:00:21]:
Doing well, doing well. Thanks for having here me here, Matt.

Matt Carnevale [00:00:25]:
Of course, of course. So why don't you give us the background on who you are, your experience, where you're currently working right now.

Aditya Vempaty [00:00:32]:
Yeah. Empathy. I run North America Marketing for MoEngage. We're a B2C customer engagement platform that allows B2C marketers to connect with their audiences across various channels like SMS text, email, website and in app engagements and really allowing them to use their first party data and third party data for marketers to be able to reach their audiences and deliver value to them. And I've been lucky in the past to be associated with a few companies you may have heard of Nutanix, Amplitude and Synthego and you know, Nutanix has gone IPO amplitude. I led marketing and increased revenue dramatically by almost like 900% in like the 18 months I was there. And they're an IPO company and Synthego is a genome engineering company where, you know, I scaled revenue from 5 million to about 65 million in three years and grew the marketing team from four to about 25 people.

Matt Carnevale [00:01:25]:
Nice. Awesome. Awesome.

Matt Carnevale [00:01:26]:
Well, the reason we wanted to have you on today, you were a guest speaker of our marketing leadership accelerator that we ran last October, November. And specifically you spoke on marketing metrics you should know and how to report on them and you gave a killer presentation. So I wanted to impact some of that today. You know, the nice part is that you are, you know, not necessarily running a marketing measurement or reporting company. You're, you're there in the trenches and you do this every single day and have done it at multiple companies. So why don't you start by telling us like what some of your early findings were like, why this topic? Walk me through that.

Aditya Vempaty [00:02:01]:
Yeah, Going through my marketing career. Right. Obviously everyone has a path and everyone's journey is unique and they have a unique story to tell. And so what I found was, you know, I was an engineer who became a marketer. And so numbers came pretty naturally to me. And luckily, for whatever reason, I'm pretty creative on things too. And so I was tired of sitting behind keyboard. Marketing was like the natural track.

Aditya Vempaty [00:02:22]:
But the way I got into marketing was going through SDRs and I was doing smile and dial. And so how many dials is a day you made, how many emails you sent, how many people responded, how many connects did you get? So Numbers are always part of the equation. But going through my path, what I realized is having great mentors and learning how marketing is done and the ones who really stood out is using numbers to tell the story of marketing is what really matters. And for fun, as I prep this presentation for the accelerator earlier I asked ChatGPT, hey, what are the metrics as a marketing leader I should look at it gave me three columns with 12 rows. So basically 36 metrics that ChatGPT thought were valuable for a marketing leader to use to communicate what they're doing. Right. That tells you right off the bat, AI is not replacing marketers, but marketers with AI will replace marketers. Fun slogan.

Aditya Vempaty [00:03:08]:
Everyone's going around saying which isn't wrong.

Matt Carnevale [00:03:10]:
Yeah.

Aditya Vempaty [00:03:10]:
But what it really did was highlight that you have to be deliberate in the marketing metrics you choose. And the marketing metrics, what they really do, which people don't talk enough about, is they communicate the impact the marketing team is having in the industry and how they're doing as a team, but also to the rest of the company, how they're delivering on what they said they would do. And one of the things as marketing folks often forget is we have a lot of jargon about I launched this campaign, I did this webinar. Oh, brand impressions matter. Oh, it's paid, that's converting or no, it's influenced this campaign that it's just a lot of jargon to people who are not marketing in the day to day. And so what these metrics really do is translate all that jargon into a common language that most people understand, which is numbers. And that's what really you're using these metrics as a marketing leader to do is communicate how you are doing internally to your team, higher ups and the rest of the company so they can believe when you say what you're going to do, you are doing it and delivering it.

Matt Carnevale [00:04:15]:
Yeah.

Aditya Vempaty [00:04:16]:
And that's really what it comes down to. Like all these metrics doesn't matter. It's the ones that matter to your org and that will convey that story and will convey all the inputs you've done, what is the outputs they've given in ways that others can understand in a very simple manner.

Matt Carnevale [00:04:32]:
Yeah, I love it. It's funny. Like what I see a lot of people do, and I've been guilty of it in the past, is like marketing a difficult time communicating their impact to the rest of the company. So they'll take these like standard out of the box metrics like that HubSpot provides and Say, see, look, like, we've generate like, we've influenced like $200,000 with a pipeline. And the rest of the company's just like, okay, like, well, because it's like a. I have no clue how HubSpot even got to that number. And then two, that's like, there was no common agreeance on, like, whether that's the thing that matters to leadership. It's got the number we threw out there because it's like the biggest number that we can find in HubSpot.

Matt Carnevale [00:05:13]:
And I was like, see, we're. We're doing something, so there's like a big part of us too, that's like, we'll walk through some of the metrics that you like to report on. But then there's part of this too, that's like, is there a point when you start in a new company or throughout the journey where you go to your higher up and say, like, how should I be communicating the value? What do you guys care about? And like, is there a coming to common first?

Aditya Vempaty [00:05:38]:
Yeah, so that's a great question. And one of the things is setting context, right? Oftentimes, you know, I'm either reporting to the CEO or I'm reporting to like a COO or Chief Commercial officer. So one of the things often the communication comes is like, hey, what are we trying to achieve here? What's the goal for the broader company for the next 12, 18 months? And how do I set myself up to show that marketing is supporting that goal? And oftentimes I go, we have revenue targets, right? And then you have to break down like, okay, everyone's got revenue targets. Everyone has pipeline targets, but what are you really trying to accomplish? It's like, oh, well, I think we'll get there by xyz, which is like adoption of this product or getting our brand to grow bigger or having these logo customers in the space, or, hey, we don't have. We only have like a field of a thousand customers and we need to get like a hundred of them this year. Okay, cool. That. That's like the broader goal.

Aditya Vempaty [00:06:35]:
All right, so how is, as a marketing leader, can I support then? How can my team make sure they're doing the things to support that? So it shows up not just on scoreboard, but aligns up with the entire company and has an impact. And so having those conversations to revenue numbers are one thing. Everyone wants larger revenue, more revenue. But the next level and peeling the onion is, what does that look like to you? What's the strategy? We as a team are going after and how do I support that strategy? And how does the organization of marketing support that strategy? And then what are the metrics that show that strategy is working or not working through the efforts that we are giving as inputs and measuring the outputs.

Matt Carnevale [00:07:13]:
Right, Right. So you're discussing and coming to a common agreements on this, this stuff with your higher up, who could be the CEO, cco, whatever that is. How about sales for example? Are you looping them into these conversations too? Because what I find a lot of the time too is like sales will start to get skeptical of the value you're providing. Right. And then it's like they don't really understand the metrics that, that you're talking about either. So you're presenting this stuff to the revenue Org and they're just like in the background like waiting to come off mute and ask you like where the leads are.

Aditya Vempaty [00:07:44]:
Exactly. You nailed it. And so that's why like the metrics that I typically like put together that I'd almost always like use, cover that part of sales and is a clear handshake agreement that hey, if we win, you win. If we lose, you lose, you lose, we lose, you lose, win, we win. That's how we're going to set this up. Meaning that just because I drove a ton of MQLs but you missed the quarter, that doesn't sit well with me. That doesn't sit well with a sales leader, that doesn't sit well with the CEO. One team can't win while the other is losing.

Aditya Vempaty [00:08:18]:
That means there's something off, there's a misalignment in what we're either measuring or focusing on. And that's why for me, ultimately, like, especially with sales, it's like, how am I helping you build your pipeline? How am I helping you drive that pipeline forward? And that's one part of the equation. Then the other part of the equation that always I get dinged on by the CFO and the CEO is how efficient am I being? And those are two things. If generally in nine out of 10 companies, people will be happy if you hit those two. But the real part where the marketing fund really comes into play that I like always care about is that awareness. How am I driving awareness through the space and how am I delivering that? And then the last part, which is back to what you were talking about, is how do I make sure sales always has a say and is heard? You may not listen to them, but it is heard. And you have that alignment with your sales leader, be it the CRO or VP of Sales or head of sales, whatever it is that you have that alignment. And those are, like, the four key areas that whatever metrics I, like, put in place represent those four things.

Aditya Vempaty [00:09:22]:
Because if, again, back to what you're saying, like, if you're not aligned with sales and you're not helping them win, what are you really doing?

Matt Carnevale [00:09:28]:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I've been in companies before where, you know, things weren't looking great from a revenue perspective and sales was, like, clearly failing, and marketing was just kind of like, yeah, we're. We're delivering pipelines growing, you know, like, we're, you know, and they're just like, they need the most basic support from us. And we're just like, well, we're. We're doing what we're doing. Like, I don't. We don't do more than this.

Matt Carnevale [00:09:51]:
So I've definitely been on the side of that on both sides as well. I started my career in sales, so I've been on both sides, but. Cool. So the four buckets are metrics that are focused on one, driving pipeline, two, efficiency, three, awareness, and then four, sales alignment. I think those are. That's a great talk track for the rest of this episode. So I'd love to get into the first one, Driving pipeline. What kind of things are you reporting on and focused on when it comes to reporting on driving pipeline?

Aditya Vempaty [00:10:18]:
Yeah. So driving pipeline is interesting, right? As you said earlier, everyone can drive pipeline, but what really matters is one, how do you drive pipeline that actually closes? Right. What does this mean? A lot of people will say, hey, I drove X amount of pipeline, Y amount of pipeline? Honestly, who gives a shit? That actually doesn't matter. It matters, actually, the amount of opportunities that you generated, because that pipeline value can change. And so oftentimes, when we set these metrics up, I always talk to the sales owner, sales leader, whichever. I'm like, hey, look, what do you need in terms of pipe? And what's your average pipe size? And I'm going to backtrack and say, this is how many ops I got to deliver for you, because you can have some whales come in and totally blow the quarter goal for pipeline out of the water. But if that deal doesn't close, how are you de risking the situation?

Matt Carnevale [00:11:10]:
Right. I love that.

Aditya Vempaty [00:11:11]:
So, like, that's where you're like, oh, shit, what do I do? And so that's why it's more actionable to have the opportunity count.

Matt Carnevale [00:11:16]:
Yeah.

Aditya Vempaty [00:11:17]:
Then the pipeline value count, because you can hide stuff in the pipeline value.

Matt Carnevale [00:11:21]:
Oh, yeah. I love that. It's like, everyone knows that feeling when it's like a big deal comes through. That was like marketing source. And it's like amazing. Like now you've like overachieved and you look like a God, but deep down, you know, it's like the next quarter, I'm kind of screwed, but I'm, I'm good right now.

Aditya Vempaty [00:11:39]:
Yeah. And that's the thing that you can't live and die by the sort of like enterprise deals. Right. Or whales, like, because you, you can't manufacture those. And if you can't manufacture those, you're in a deeper pile of shit.

Matt Carnevale [00:11:51]:
Yeah.

Aditya Vempaty [00:11:52]:
So that's like the first metric pipeline that closes by ops. Then the next is what's your pipeline close rate? And so this is also critical because the, the first one is how much pipeline did I generate in terms of number of ops? But then how much of that pipeline is actually going to close in at what time? And this requires you to do some critical thinking, back of the envelope math that, hey, if we generate a hundred opportunities, how much closes in the quarter that was generated, how much close in the subsequent quarter and then the quarter afterwards? So then it lets you understand realistically, whatever number of ops you generated, how long will it take that cohort of ops to work through the system? So how many ops do you really need to generate? Let's say, as you said earlier, like in Q3, then how much? If I have a pipeline target of Q3 of like 40 ops, and I know that I typically close 30% in the quarter that they're made, then I backtrack and start looking at, okay, if I get to 40, how many can I count on this cohort to still be around for that quarter? Right. And so it's like, hey, whatever you generate in the current quarter, 3/4 out, 90% of that is either closed 1 or closed lost. So then you know how much new you have to generate every quarter to get to that Q3. So number of ops is the first one. And then what's your marketing source pipeline close rate, quarter on quarter from the point it's been created.

Matt Carnevale [00:13:10]:
Amazing. Love it. Let's keep rolling. Yeah.

Aditya Vempaty [00:13:13]:
So that's your first two, right? And those cover the bucket of pipeline generation, which sales is usually like, yes, that's great, I love this. But then the other one, right, is, is like efficiency. And how do you set up sales for every quarter? And that's really looking at what is your day one pipeline and do you have, typically the rule of thumb is 3x coverage, meaning on day one of, let's say you're in Q1 and you're looking at Q2. What does it look like that based on how things close, close one, close, lost and non decision. How much pipeline do you think you'll have in the upcoming quarter of Q2 on day one? And why does this matter? Well, pipeline you create in this quarter is usually for the upcoming quarter. It's not for the same quarter unless you're, you know, in SMB deals that are like annual contract value of 4 to like 10k.

Matt Carnevale [00:14:04]:
Yeah.

Aditya Vempaty [00:14:04]:
Like that's a very different ball game. Yeah, those deals will close in the same quarter, majority will close, they won't really go longer. But typically in enterprise sales cycles usually have ACVs annual contract value of like a quarter million, half a million, a million dollar deals. And these usually take anywhere from four to like 12 months to close. And so as a result you need to make sure one, as I said earlier, close rate. But then do you have enough coverage quarter on quarter for your sales team as they're going and building this pipeline? And typically you want to aim about three to three and a half x, meaning if you have 14.2 million in pipe in the quarter, then usually your sales target should be about four to five miles.

Matt Carnevale [00:14:49]:
Yeah, honestly, I love this one because. Well, a couple things. First off it's really easy like we were talking about before to be like, oh, we're, we're good for this month. Like we, we've created enough pipeline. Maybe you have one or two whales that's like covering up the blind spots or maybe like a bunch of stuff you've been working is finally coming to fruition this month. So it's like everything's kind of pouring in at the right time and it's like, oh, we're creating pipeline and we look amazing but you know, deep down like how are we going to repeat this the next quarter? And then the other reason I love this too is like this kind of gets your manager off your back. I feel like again like in the quarter they might be happy that things are good, but then when things aren't as great next quarter it's like then they're down your back and asking you like every week what you're doing and it's like then they're getting over involved and it's just a mess from there. So this is like the honest audit of like, here's where we are for the next three quarters, here's where we have coverage.

Matt Carnevale [00:15:45]:
It also shows people like, will we be able to hit the goals we've set out, like, are we there? Because, like, the last thing you want is like, the goals are set from the top and you feel a lot of pressure to hit them, and deep down, you know you probably can't. Well, I think this kind of uncovers that and just shows like, this is where things are at right now. And like, it's like, less personal. And it's like, this is where things are at and like, we will need to change things if we want to get to those goals because they're kind of unrealistic right now.

Aditya Vempaty [00:16:11]:
Yeah. And that's a great call out. Right. One of the things is these metrics in a company. If you talk about them early and you. No one likes surprises. Right. And as a leader, these metrics allow you to see surprises before they happen so that you can have these conversations about either more investment or goals recalibration, or is it that we're just not resonating with the market, or is the product just not delivering on a pain point that people care about? And that's usually why the metrics I use for pipeline generation as well as efficiency are focused on that.

Aditya Vempaty [00:16:45]:
And it kind of like says, like, okay, cool, we have problems. Let's go talk about them. Right. Everybody has problems in every company. These metrics are meant to tell you which problems are bright red, yellow, or green. And that's really the goal. And communicating that also as well to leadership and other orgs in the company as well.

Matt Carnevale [00:17:01]:
I love it. What's next?

Aditya Vempaty [00:17:03]:
The next, Obviously this is where I say the CEO loves this and so does the cfo is how do you generate pipeline efficiently? Right. Like I was talking about. And now this actually comes down to like, programmatic cost for pipeline. And people oftentimes they say, like, oh, you know, hey, we acquired all these customers and how much did you spend? And no, no, no, I want to look at the total spend. I'm like, no, no, no. You don't look at employee. And combined with programmatic spend, and it's like, this is how much it costs you. That is a very skewed view.

Aditya Vempaty [00:17:34]:
And that's like, not how it works. Because programmatic spend can go up and down as you need. Employees are there to serve that, and they support multiple programs at the same time. It's basically asking and telling, like, hey, if they want X amount of opportunities, how much will it cost to generate it? Let's say, for example, I want 50 opportunities, how much will it cost? And if you want to step back and look at it, and again, just programmatic spend, not full time employee spend. Let's say we spent 3.2 million in programs this quarter and that resulted in 120 opportunities. So from programmatic spend, which is the efficiency of the marketing team, it cost us $26,000 to generate an opportunity. That's like, okay, cool. Now I know from programmatic aspect why this matters.

Aditya Vempaty [00:18:17]:
But you will constantly get pushback saying, hey, how much did it cost to get a customer? How do I add this? How do I. The marketing team has overhead. What I put. And that's where they'll say, you're totally understating the cost of marketing. Generate opportunities by not including the employee overhead. And that's where I usually say is like, hey, that's actually not true. I'm stating the demand gen cost of opportunities because that's the business question I'm trying to answer. And if you want to talk about the overall marketing efficiency, then let's look at the customer acquisition ratio and marketing contributions to it and include the overall sales and marketing ratio into this also as well.

Aditya Vempaty [00:18:55]:
It's not just marketing is this or that. I'm trying just to understand if I put this much time and effort into things that can go up and down, what will I get out of it?

Matt Carnevale [00:19:05]:
Yeah, if we add more to the, the machine, how much more are we going to get out of it? You know, or it's like we're adding this to the machine and we're getting X out of it. Whereas like, you know, your Sal, I'm no accountant, but your salaries for the most part are fixed for in a year's time. Right. So it's not. Those are kind of a wash in this scenario. It's like, okay, we're putting 20k into the machine, we're getting 5k out of it, something is broken. Or we're putting 20k and getting 100 back. Well, now let's go put 100k in so we can get 500 back.

Aditya Vempaty [00:19:33]:
Exactly. You start understanding where you can make the investments and where you can't. And usually back to your point, if you see something and it's like giving you like logarithmic returns. Right? So scale. You either see, is this the channel or is it the campaign as a whole where it's using multiple channels, or is it now the person we have in the seat that's the superpower and can we replicate that person?

Matt Carnevale [00:19:55]:
Yeah, right.

Aditya Vempaty [00:19:57]:
And oftentimes the answer is a combination of all three. It's never one or the other, unfortunately. And so we try to simplify it to be like, okay, so it could be the channel or it's the campaign. Can we do more of those campaigns or can we use more of that channel? Or okay, is it the person? Can we replicate this person? Right? And that's where the fun starts.

Matt Carnevale [00:20:16]:
Love it.

Aditya Vempaty [00:20:16]:
The last part, right, like I was talking about, we covered pipeline generation, we covered efficiency and now my favorite, where real marketers shine, where everyone else in the room is like, okay, I don't get this is awareness. And this is the fifth metric that I usually typically measure and it's usually survey based. And basically why you care about awareness. It isn't just to be like, oh, we're doing brand awareness that's working. It's to ensure your potential customers know who you are and have a positive opinion of you and understand that you can help them. And the way you measure this is like two ways. You either do unawaited awareness and aided awareness. To measure market presence.

Aditya Vempaty [00:20:54]:
And unaided means you give a list of companies in the space and say which ones do you know? And aided awareness is, have you heard of XYZ vendor? And you measure both because one tells you like in the space where you stand and one tells you, if someone's seen your brand, do they recognize it? So an example would be like we typically do a semi annual survey and we found like 20% of buyers mention as an unaided awareness, meaning if I gave you a list of vendors, 20% of them knew who we were. But then we saw 35% knew who we were when we gave them aided awareness being, hey, have you heard of Moengage? They're like, yeah, yeah, I've heard of you. Right? So that tells you like in a sea of people, 20% know who you are. But then like if I, if they've seen your brand because that's the aided awareness, then 35% said, I know who you are.

Matt Carnevale [00:21:46]:
I want to get into like how you do this. I think that's what people are going to be thinking right away because this is not, maybe at some level this is common, but at least from a lot of the people I speak to, like, this is not how they're measuring brand right now.

Aditya Vempaty [00:21:58]:
Yeah, I mean, look, brand, everyone will say there's multiple touches, a lot of things going to brand, but you need to distill it down to some metrics that you can show are moving. And essentially brand recall is what we're really doing, like aided recall and unaided recall. And if all the efforts you're doing are working they will be able to show in the year I started, halfway through the year, can someone recall my brand in a sea of other competitors versus recall my brand when I mentioned it to them? And if the efforts you're doing are working, you will see both metrics move. It's as simple as that. And a lot of people like I use surveys to get this. I, I set up surveys and I ask people and I do this on a semi annual basis where we hit up our, either our own database or other influencers or subject matter experts, database or communities. So it's not like obviously have my database, they're going to know me because I've emailed them. But like people that I don't interact with much in their watering holes, when I email them, what happens.

Aditya Vempaty [00:22:52]:
Right. So these are things that I take into account and that's why I put up a survey to do it.

Matt Carnevale [00:22:56]:
Are you working with a third party to get those surveys out?

Aditya Vempaty [00:23:00]:
Yeah, we develop the surveys ourselves but we work with like third parties, like an Exit Five which has a community that we can go and basically get insights and inputs from to see where we really are standing with the market.

Matt Carnevale [00:23:12]:
Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, cool. Super cool. Super cool. That's a whole, whole thing of its own. But okay, I love that one. The survey is a great one. Yeah.

Aditya Vempaty [00:23:20]:
And I mean this tells you like do you need to make investments? Right. If your brand perception is low, people don't know you like cool, then we need to ramp up content. We need to go to the watering holes where these people live, spend more time there, understand what the community care about, cares about that you've audited. But what's the beauty is when you do stuff like that, it's like, it's like having an answer to the test. You already know what you need to go do and you can course correct as needed. And this also shows to everybody else like hey, I did this, this is how I'm measuring brand. And it gives them a common language again of numbers in a simple way that says this is what matters and doesn't matter and this is how we're going about it. And these activities will move those numbers one way or another, doing them or not doing them.

Aditya Vempaty [00:24:00]:
And then of course what we all love the most right back to like awareness. It's organic web traffic. This is a metric that I've always measured. Like people will come and say with the advent of AI, oh my God, what's organic? What's not organic? Where's the referral traffic? Like it's going to shift, it's going to change. But how people find you naturally is what the real Measurement is with LLMs or not with LLMs, with Google or not with Google. Now you're going to do LLM hacking to see if I can get referral traffic coming in. Right. So organic traffic combined with the aided awareness, unaided awareness, really shows the true brand interest in going further down the funnel.

Aditya Vempaty [00:24:39]:
And so it really tells us like organic traffic, that who's searching for us and how often are they coming down and how much content do we have that's resonating with them. And it shows us the overall effectiveness of our channels like SEO and content.

Matt Carnevale [00:24:54]:
Are you looking at branded organic traffic.

Aditya Vempaty [00:24:57]:
Or all, just all organic traffic, Right? Branded, unbranded, just overall what is it? And the reason being is you can get into slivers and say, what's organic, what's branded, what's unbranded. But ultimately if you are not moving the whole tab forward, you're going to confuse people. And this goes back to what we're talking about. Like what are metrics that are clear for everyone internally and to your team? Like you can go lower level and be like, hey, I run organic and I know branded and unbranded, cool, that's for you. But again, these metrics are for the C suite, rest of the company to explain in very clear, simple terms your impact, all your campaigns impacts on the organization. Right. If I start going unbranded organic traffic, branded, organic traffic, it's literally like, what would. I don't know what you're talking to me about.

Aditya Vempaty [00:25:48]:
I don't get it. And so it's back to like, how do I simplify this? In the most common language that shows the impact that marketing, removing the marketing jargon that we are having on the company.

Matt Carnevale [00:25:58]:
Yeah, love it, love it. Yeah, that's smart. This allows you to just go to the rest of your team or go to leadership and say the efforts that we're putting into X, Y, Z thing, it could be your content, social, whatever is leading to more people finding us on the Internet, more people searching us up and finding us. Right. And going to our website, which is what matters because the website is where they book a meeting with your sales team or whatever it is. So I like that you're saying it's like easy for other people to understand because I agree. And I've had situations where like I've mentioned, hey, our website traffic is going up and everyone's just like, cool, like they get it. Like more people are searching us and I've also had situations where I'm like, our website traffic is going up and people are like, oh, like, how are they finding us? Like, what are they searching? Like non marketing people.

Matt Carnevale [00:26:46]:
And then from there it's like you could answer, oh, it's mostly people searching for a company or people are searching for marketing communities and B2B, whatever the thing is. So you want to have the answers, like you said, but don't lead with like that confusion. Just lead with the, the greater impact that's happening.

Aditya Vempaty [00:27:04]:
Yeah. It comes down to even with these metrics. Right. It comes down to the story and meeting people where they are, as you said. Like, some people will be like, okay, cool, this is our total web traffic. It's going up. I'm happy. Some people might be like, hey, we as organization understand organic.

Aditya Vempaty [00:27:21]:
So tell me about organic. And that's where it's like, I usually go with organic web traffic because I want to make sure they're at least educated to that. Because organic web traffic also aligns up with efficiency, aligns up with pipeline generation, aligns up with sales alignment. Right. These are things that people can understand usually and be on the same page about. And but as you said, various parts of my organization, they'll click lower on purpose and they'll be measured to, hey, or web traffic. Branded, unbranded. I'm measured on branded.

Aditya Vempaty [00:27:49]:
Or I'm measured on unbranded and how it's converting. And we'll have those metrics but not front center unless we get asked on it.

Matt Carnevale [00:27:55]:
Yeah. Cool. And yeah, one more thing that I'm thinking of, like, I have seen a lot of people saying that the way they report on like brand campaigns working is to report on branded website traffic, which it makes sense. But if you think of it too, like if somebody is searching for a keyword that you are ranking for and they click on your site, well, now they're aware of your brand. Right. So it's like they become aware of your brand through that search too. So I think it makes sense to look at the whole pot. I like that.

Aditya Vempaty [00:28:24]:
Yeah. So this is the last one goes back to one of the earlier questions you had. And this metric seven I like to say this is where the rubber really meets the road, that all the other ones matter. They do. But then this tells you like the relationship that marketing has with the rest of the organizations, particularly sales. And typically it's a internal marketing CSAT that we run every quarter. It's CSAT meeting customer satisfaction survey. And the customer here is sales.

Aditya Vempaty [00:28:54]:
And we Give them a survey, try to make it about, you know, four to five questions on a five star rating system versus some open ended ones. And the reason we do this is sales. Typically when you ask for feedback, they'll drive by like feedback, right? They, they don't have time. They'll, the most recent thing is the biggest pain that they have with marketing versus like holistically thinking about it. And so we make sure to work with the sales leader, the CRO or the head of sales, VP of sales, whichever it is, and be like, hey, these are questions I'm asking, is there anything else you want me to ask your team? Is there anything else you're feeling like you're missing? And some will be open ended. They'll be like, hey, what is new content you'd like to see? What are events you'd like for us to attend that we're not attending already? How do you feel we're doing with making sure that we're hearing your requests and supporting you? And then we'll have, if you could change anything about marketing, what would it be right now and how we work with you? And then we have last, like overall, on a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with the marketing organization in helping you build and drive revenue? And like that's like the, the typical question that you know, we want to really see the answer on. So that's where it gives us some concrete metrics where we take their feedback and you can, you know, talk to a CEO, talk to other leaders and even talk to the VP of sales or CRO and be like, look, this is what your team gave feedback on. I agree with these things.

Aditya Vempaty [00:30:18]:
I don't agree with these things. How do we fix this? And it's a proactive nature doing quarterly basis. So that way you're getting that feedback and you're not sitting there in the dark. And by the time you get this feedback, it's too late because right. Sales is trying to close deals. Sales leaders are going to get this feedback and be like, I'll give it to the end of the quarter. And then you have your ass hanging out. Part of my language.

Aditya Vempaty [00:30:37]:
Because you haven't like synced with them and got aligned with them and you don't see this data coming.

Matt Carnevale [00:30:42]:
Yeah, no, this one's so good. I, I did it at a last company and I was like, oh that, that was like, I don't know why I have not done this earlier. It's crazy. Dave always says like there's two marketing has two customers. One is the the customers that are buying your stuff, the other one's your internal team. And a lot of the time it's the sales team specifically. So just like customer success would want to know how happy the customers are with their service. It's the same thing.

Matt Carnevale [00:31:08]:
Like you serve, especially in B2B marketing serve sales. So you need to know how happy they are with what you're providing them. And it's also a great barometer for like how aligned are you as a team? Like when you're asking things like what can marketing do better? The answers you get, it may frustrate you because it's like, oh, like how would they think that marketing could do that? But that just shows you there's an issue in alignment between you and the sales team. It's like they don't get what you do. Which is why what they're suggesting is so far removed from the idea in your head. Right?

Aditya Vempaty [00:31:41]:
Yep, exactly. And that's why getting their feedback and then getting aligned on how to educate them is so key.

Matt Carnevale [00:31:46]:
Exactly, exactly. And, and back to the open ended piece. Like, yeah, I think like some open ended questions are good, but I think it's like caution yourself too because like you could ask something like oh, like what are some things you want us to deliver on or provide? And then they'll say like we need a case study that shows how we serve this specific industry. And it's like that's because what, it's what you said. They went into a sales pitch like last week and didn't have it and they wish they did. And now it's like, or they asked you for it and you never delivered because you don't have time. And they're like oh, we need this specific case study. So that's important.

Matt Carnevale [00:32:21]:
But you don't want that to be the information you're collecting in this survey. Right?

Aditya Vempaty [00:32:25]:
You nailed it. And so that's why in the survey you want to work with the sales head of sales CRO, whichever it is ahead of time to get aligned on the questions so they know what like you're both like, okay, this is going to be a bullshit question. They're going to answer this and whatever I'm going to take into account, but that's not the one I care about me and you care about these questions. This I care for the team. This you care. And this is the one we both are going to like center ourselves around. And doing the work with your counterpart before the survey goes out is equally as important as the survey itself to set expectations and Also have their backing to make sure that the reps fill it out.

Matt Carnevale [00:32:59]:
Yeah, love it. Love it. Okay, cool. So you kind of gave the seven metrics. Really quick though. I want to talk about the presentation of these metrics. So it's going to vary company by company. Some people are using HubSpot, some people are using Salesforce, some people are using the dashboards and third party tools that connect to this.

Matt Carnevale [00:33:18]:
So maybe we won't get into that too much. But like, how are you wrapping this up and packaging it? Is it a deck that you are presenting once a month? Are you presenting things weekly? Like take me through that.

Aditya Vempaty [00:33:29]:
That. That's the interesting thing is some of this stuff lives in Salesforce, some of it lives in Tableau, some of it lives in HubSpot. And so what we do is we collectively pumped all this into Tableau, took all the data sources and we run these dashboards on a weekly basis where possible. Like the survey stuff, we're running that semi annually. Right. And the CSAT score is going to be quarterly. So two out of the five metrics are going to be reported either quarter or semiannually basis. So they don't need to be refreshed.

Aditya Vempaty [00:33:59]:
But the other five metrics are pulled in directly from Salesforce, directly from HubSpot. And that's how we look at it. And so one of the things is we make sure that all our campaigns in Salesforce are added with campaign value. And the reason I say that is that way we live in the area of where the data is actually like manipulated and used and sales lives out of it. So we know the campaign efficiencies. Yes, HubSpot has a field for that. But we're like, dude, sales isn't in HubSpot, they're in Salesforce for us. So that's where we're going to live.

Aditya Vempaty [00:34:30]:
And so all the data, this is actually a great question because we make sure all the data is accessible to the sales team as well as the marketing team. And the source of truth is Salesforce. Some people like, why isn't HubSpot? I'm like, sales doesn't live there. Where do they live? Salesforce? Well, why can't they use HubSpot? Do you want them to spend time using HubSpot when they use Salesforce? Like, come on, they're here to close deals, not make our lives easier. Right. Our job is to represent the metrics and if it's a little bit harder for us, it is. But as long as it's easier for sales to see that we have the same set of data and there's no disparity. That makes us more trustworthy, which makes us more credible to them.

Matt Carnevale [00:35:02]:
Smart. Smart. I like that. And is. Who on your team is. Do you have like, a marketing ops person who's.

Aditya Vempaty [00:35:09]:
Yeah, we have a marketing ops team that handles this and they refresh the dashboards every Sunday night. And so we have all that information ready to go Monday mornings. And we look at this every week. Right. We look at how much pipe came out. Where are we at? What's our coverage looking like for the upcoming quarter? So we look at all that stuff.

Matt Carnevale [00:35:27]:
Yeah, nice, nice, nice. And then it's like, yeah, looking weekly is nice, too, because what that does is that just. Well, it's two things. It's, you know, when you could. You have to start course correcting. Right. If you're halfway through the month or the quarter and things aren't going right, you can course correct. And the other thing, too, is it just gets people off your back.

Matt Carnevale [00:35:45]:
Right. It's like, no one's asking, how are things performing for the quarter? You know, you talk about it once a week, and that's where you can discuss those things. But outside of that, no one's super worried because they know that you're on top of it.

Aditya Vempaty [00:35:56]:
Yeah, exactly. And also the biggest thing, these metrics, also the other thing is, right, as a leader allows you to be proactive, and you've communicated what matters and what you're going to measure, and you get to that agreement with the, you know, C Suite or the CEO or your sales, and you're like, hey, this is what I'm focused on. If I need to change these metrics, let's change them. But once they're set, we're going to use them and then we'll come and revisit them, like every six months.

Matt Carnevale [00:36:22]:
Yeah.

Aditya Vempaty [00:36:22]:
Or a quarter, whatever the agreement is. But it really allows leaders to be proactive if they see things going off the rails and digging deeper. And that's the other part, is internal communication, but also for you as a leader to be proactive so you can go address situations before they happen. So there's no surprises. Right. As I said earlier, the biggest thing I think in my life, my boss is usually like, so the CEO or C Suite, they hate surprises. So if you're proactive, nine out of 10 times, people are going to be fine with whatever you want to do because you're already on it, you're digging through and trying to fix it.

Matt Carnevale [00:36:51]:
Yep. Love it.

Aditya Vempaty [00:36:53]:
So just to, like, Reiterate and wrap everything up right. There are a lot of metrics that you can use. These are seven I use. But this is not a bible. You need to adapt it to what the company needs and what the team wants to see and deploy the metrics accordingly and adopt them to reviewing them either a quarter basis or, you know, half a year basis or even a yearly basis. That that's what works. But the biggest thing outside of this is first look at the goals that you have as a company and as a team and an exec team, and then develop the metrics from that, not the other way around. The metrics should not drive the business.

Aditya Vempaty [00:37:27]:
The goals that you have should drive the business. And the metrics should show if you're reaching those goals or not. And again, to be clear, don't conflate goals with numbers. You want to. Actually, as I said earlier, is if someone says, I want to grow revenue, yes, no shit. But what does that mean? How do we get there? That's the goals, that's the strategy. And do the metrics support the strategy? Because that's going to tell you if you're doing the right things or if you're not.

Matt Carnevale [00:37:52]:
Yep. Love it. Aditya, this has been awesome. I know that this is a topic that no matter how much it gets talked about, people still are going to struggle with it, but at least just give some clarity into like real and raw numbers and metrics that people could be using. It just kind of cuts through the bs, a lot of the stuff that you pointed out here and gives somebody like a real outlook on like what a leader who's been through it many times before does and looks at. So this has been amazing. Thank you so much for sharing this with our audience and yeah, I'll see you around the Exit Five community.

Aditya Vempaty [00:38:24]:
Yeah, thanks man. Thanks for having me.

Matt Carnevale [00:38:26]:
Thanks.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:30]:
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