• Recapture Growth
• Improve Performance
• Build Brand Strength
• Get Better Results in 2025

One of the most difficult challenges CEOs face is assessing Marketing’s contribution and impact to both top- and bottom-line growth. The primary reason is that, apart from judging someone’s business acumen and overall marketing expertise, much of Marketing’s contribution is hard to quantify. How much should we spend on brand initiatives and when will we see a return?  If we expand web and social media investments, when will the ROI happen in terms of new bookings or revenue expansion? 

To help CEOs address this dilemma, I created a Marketing Performance Index (MPI) together with a simple diagnostic - it takes about an hour - that provides a standardized score on the relative marketing performance for any B2B company. To ensure an objective measurement, the MPI incorporates best-practice benchmarks from Benchmarkit,  Benchmarker, and Insight Partners SaaS Marketing Periodic Table, which is composed of benchmarks from about 5,000 SaaS companies.

The MPI is compiled from three key measurement areas, Market Presence, Brand Strength and Pipeline Health.  While it's understandable why many companies obsess over Pipeline Health - after all it’s the lifeblood of growth -it’s short-sighted to just examine the pipeline. Here’s why: in any B2B market, somewhere between 10-15% of companies are in the market for a solution like yours in any given year. If you have relatively weak market presence, meaning your competitors have better Web, digital strength and a more developed channel and partner ecosystem, you will be harder to find when customers are actually in the market to buy.  

Plus, if you have a comparatively weak brand, your competitors will experience higher engagement and loyalty, meaning you will have to work much harder to create, convert and close pipeline. Companies need to be continually expanding and solidifying market presence and creating and bolstering brand strength. 

To compile a performance score, each of the three areas, Market Presence, Brand Strength and Pipeline Health has 2 performance indicators, based on the 4 key metrics associated with its influence on business success: Reach, Share, Engagement, Loyalty, Pipeline and Progression. In total, there are 24 metrics that determine the overall score. Metrics can be substituted or weighting can be incorporated so that you are measuring the metrics that matter most to your business. 

The resulting scores place the company in one of these three categories: needs improvement, good performance, or overperforming (R,Y,G). The Index provides scores for all 6 performance indicators and all 3 measurement areas, so any company can quickly determine where they are strong, weak, or just holding their own. The free diagnostic that we offer is anonymous and it takes about one hour to complete. The output includes a list of best-practice recommendations for improving performance in 18 distinct areas. Here’s a sample scorecard of a company that is in the middle or good performance tier:

As you can see, the company’s scores are from fair to relatively good, but there are no areas where it is performing at or above industry benchmarks for best-in-class. Below is a starter list of things companies can do to improve their marketing performance across six performance dimensions, listed in order of lowest cost and quickest, to higher cost and longest potential duration to complete.

To improve Reach, boost social media activity, increase Website Inbound activity and time on site and Improve Conversion Rate Optimization/CRO.

To improve Share, increase and improve paid search placements, increase SEO investments and optimization, and expand channels and your partner ecosystem.

To improve Engagement, increase content marketing and social media, do more targeted events to prioritize prospects and decision makers, and build active customer communities.

To improve Loyalty, improve customer onboarding and support responsiveness, uplevel retention and expansion programs, and conduct Customer Journey Mapping.

To improve Pipeline, improve Sales & Marketing Alignment and bolster team SLAs, improve qualification criteria and conversion outcomes, and refine ICP focus and targeting.

To improve Progression, tighten qualification criteria, speed processes, evaluate pricing parameters and make packaging adjustments and bundling offers, and examine and refine the overall selling methodology, sales enablement and sales discipline.

All of these are proven strategies and tactics based on my experience working with Sales leaders to help double revenues at more than a dozen companies, and in the process creating more than $20 billion in pipeline and over $5 billion in revenue. If you’d like to learn more about this free diagnostic or how Chief Outsiders' more than 120 fractional Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Sales Officers can help recapture growth for your company, please reach out.