5.8 How do we win?
Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald was a German-Dutch palaeontologist. Born in Berlin in 1902, in the 1930s he travelled to Java where between 1937 and 1941 a number of important hominid specimens were discovered. In 1937 one of von Koenigswald’s assistants brought him a piece of skull. Keen to discover more, he offered to pay the locals for any further pieces they could bring him. This proved very successful. Lots of skull fragments were shared that he duly paid for. He later discovered that the people had been breaking up whole skulls into smaller pieces to maximize their payments.
Measurements and KPIs drive behaviour.
They are some of the most important, most powerful tools to get right. Set them correctly and they can drive collaboration and significant business value. Set them poorly – perhaps only with a view on the short-term or without fully thinking them through – and they can put you on a path that’s difficult to retreat from. Set them unfairly, such as in a way where measurement is subjective or success is unrealistic to attain, and they will rapidly demotivate a team. Set them effectively and they galvanise action and empower people to success.
If the operating cadence is the frequency at which you review yourself, the scorecard is the measures of how you are performing. A well-structured scorecard is a performance management tool for an enterprise function. A mixture of financial and non-financial metrics define what success looks like against your most relevant or important strategic objectives and allows you evaluate where you are against where you planned to be. A published, openly reported marketing scorecard can be a tool for the entire marketing organisation to understand what success looks like. From marketing leadership responsible for defining the strategy to middle management responsible for formulating it into action, down to individual contributors who own execution, teams can understand how their actions contribute to the broader success of a marketing function. And if bonus compensation for the entire marketing team is tied to attainment of the scorecard it provides a galvanising motivator for everyone to pull together towards shared success.
Creating a Marketing Scorecard
While a Marketing Scorecard may be owned by the Leadership Team, individual teams within the Marketing function may also set their own scorecard. Providing the measures of success are related to each other, multiple scorecards act simply as a way of adding focus to a wider goal. However, while the overall Marketing Scorecard is likely to have been developed to support a cross-functional view of success, team scorecards can lead to silo’d, uncollaborative behaviour where team goals are seen to take precedence over the bigger picture. Team goals to support the overall Marketing scorecard can sometimes be all that is needed.
The hardest part of developing the Scorecard is the definition of the measures. Measures selected must align to the Marketing Strategy. But since the scorecard is likely a subset of only 20 – 30 measures among the universe of possible marketing measures, selecting the right ones is key. These measures represent Leadership’s view on where priority should be placed and on what defines success. A Marketing scorecard should contain a mix of different objectives and measures:
Impact effectiveness – what business value is Marketing driving? This could draw from the Primary KPIs identified within the Marketing Performance Framework so show a high-level view of impact across the customer journey.
Operating effectiveness – how well is the marketing function operating? This could also draw from Effectiveness KPIs within the Marketing Performance Framework, potentially supplemented with additional KPIs on the operating costs, ROI or other baselined measures.
Transformation – how well is the Marketing function evolving to meet future requirements. This could draw from identified waste, consistency or overwork success criteria or new product introductions to advance the marketing function forwards
People – how well are team members within the marketing function being supported. Are culture, diversity, equity and inclusion or development goals being achieved.
At the highest level the marketing plan should have primary measures of success for the whole organisation. KPIs and diagnostic measures should be built under this for the whole organisation, but depending upon the way you operate the KPIs may be better replaced by primary measures for different solution or product-led areas. Individual solutions and products should build their plans to the same template, all rolling to the same top-level objectives. Similarly functional plans should also fit within this framework and roll up. All teams should be able to understand how they and their peers are individually and collectively working to achieve shared top-level objectives for the marketing organisation. I’ve proposed some high-level, general examples below but these are for illustration rather than specifics that may work for every organisations or team. As stated earlier in this section, if you define a different set of objectives you will need to develop different measures, but the below should give a reasonable starting point for most marketing teams to iterate from.
| Objective | Customer Journey stages | Primary measures | KPIs | Diagnostic |
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| 1. Build Mindshare | Awareness – Review |
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| 2. Create opportunities | Awareness, Discovery |
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| 3. Accelerate and Close | Consideration, Purchase |
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| 4. Drive Adoption and Usage | Usage |
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| 5. Increase Renewals | Review |
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A scorecard should include initiatives and measures that an entire marketing team can recognise its impact against and that aligns people on the stories to tell. Stories to customers, stories to investors and stories to stakeholders should all be articulated through measurement in the scorecard. Any subsequent team-level scorecards should build from this with derivative measures of impact and effectiveness. Scorecards need to be reviewed as part of (but not as the sole component of) the operating cadence and must be analysed objectively and transparently. Scorecards for joint success cannot become tools to punish individuals, teams or functions for underperformance.
Objectively, whether the scorecard reports well or not is immaterial; the intent is to measure whether marketing is performing. A scorecard should be used to shine a light on areas that may need additional support, focus, clarity, investment or prioritisation. If a part of the marketing function is struggling it should be the duty of the entire marketing organisation to support wherever is necessary. Marketing does not work because one golden function exists in a perfect silo. Customers don’t see a single team’s output and then spread that praise to the areas that underperform and let them off the hook. Marketing works when the whole Marketing function works as one. Scorecards should be a foundation of this measurement approach and a baseline for ensuring the top-level value that the business cares about is being driven.
An example scorecard may look like the below:
| Measure # | Name | Measure detail (annual targets) | Measurement | Review frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing impact | ||||
| 1.1 | Build mindshare | Increase unaided brand awareness by 5pts YoY | Brand health tracker | Biannual |
| 1.2 | Build mindshare | Increase high-quality website visits by 15% | Web analytics | Monthly |
| 1.3 | Create pipeline | $xm marketing pipeline created | Pipeline dashboard | Monthly |
| 1.4 | Accelerate pipeline to close | X Mature pipeline coverage at quarter start | Pipeline dashboard | Quarterly |
| 1.5 | Closed won business | $Xm closed won business | Sales dashboard | Quarterly |
| 1.6 | Renewals | 80% customer renewal rate | Customer dashboard | Monthly |
| 1.7 | Perception | NPS above 50 | NPS | Monthly |
| Operating effectiveness | ||||
| 2.1 | Cost per lead | Average cost per lead reduced 7% YoY | Digital dashboard | Monthly |
| 2.2 | Content production cost | Reduce content production spend within Geo teams by 30% | Budget management | Quarterly |
| 2.3 | Reduce spend on external events | 20% reduction in external event spend | Budget management | Quarterly |
| 2.4 | Time to market | Average campaign time to market of 2 weeks | Team reporting | Quarterly |
| 2.5 | Lead conversion | Increase lead to opportunity conversion by10% | Sales dashboard | Quarterly |
| Transformation | ||||
| 3.1 | Sales enablement | New sales enablement resources delivered by end of Q1 | Project status | End of Q1 |
| 3.2 | New planning process launched | All teams enabled and using new planning process for next FY | Project status | End of Q3 |
| 3.3 | Vendor rationalisation | 35% reduction in number of vendors used for marketing activity | Project status | Quarterly |
| 3.4 | Solutions launched | 3 new solutions launched quarterly | Solution dashboard | Quarterly |
| People | ||||
| 4.1 | Team development | Growth conversations completed for all full-time employees quarterly | Employee portal | Quarterly |
| 4.2 | Early in career | 30 Early in Career employees onboarded each quarter | Employee portal | Quarterly |
| 4.3 | Employee satisfaction | Satisfaction score above 80 | Employee voice survey | Biannually |
Marketing attribution
Attribution models consider the value of pipeline and closed business against the marketing activities that may have influenced it. These models help Marketing functions understand the true business value of marketing interactions and optimise them. Different models of attribution exist and more advanced marketing functions may choose to use more than one to evaluate their performance:
First-touch attribution: full credit is given to the first marketing effort to bring a customer in. This model biases top-of-funnel activity and provides limited usefulness to understand the marketing activities that influence acceleration and close
Last-touch attribution: full credit is given to the last marketing effort before an opportunity was created or a sale closed. This model biases bottom-of-funnel activity and provides limited credit to the marketing that creates opportunities.
Multi-touch attribution: these models consider the relative impact of multiple interactions and how individually and collectively they drove business value. This model can be difficult to implement and requires significant technical experience, skills and data analysis. Multi-touch models can also disguise individual channel performance issues by hiding within the analysis calculations.
The importance of attribution models cannot be understated. Correctly attributing how marketing activities influence how mindshare is built, pipeline is created and nurtured, opportunities are accelerated and closed, adoption is driven and renewal is increased is foundational to effective execution. Without effective, accurate and useful attribution, the wrong behaviours will be incentivised. When leaders either try to motivate their teams to do the right thing without addressing measurement and attribution issues, they put their teams in an impossible position.