Top 7 Metrics for a Chief Marketing Officer

Live from Schenectady, New York, it's SaaS Talk with the Metrics Brothers, Growth and CAC.

And I'm Growth, better known as Ray Reich, founder and CEO of Benchmarket.

And I'm CAC, better known as Dave Kellogg, independent consultant, EIR at Balderton Capital, and author of Kellogg.

And together we are the Metrics Brothers.

We go together just like gin and tonic, Ray.

Ah, well, we're moving back to the pub theme. I like that. And also, by the way, do you know that it rhymes with click and clack?

Well, click and clack is growth and CAC. Yeah, for sure. That was a deliberate thing never to be admitted. But in any case, what did we cover last week and what are we going to cover today, Ray?

Well, last week we covered the top metrics for a chief revenue officer, so I thought let's make sure sales and marketing gets equal time. So why don't we cover the top metrics that are important to a chief marketing officer? And I think, Dave, didn't you even do a blog about this recently?

I did do a blog on this recently, but, but, but Ray, since you've been so busy finding us sponsors, I do think we should take a word from our presenting sponsor right now.

The Metrics Brothers is proudly sponsored by Benchmarkit, the B2B AI and software industry's largest, broadest, and most contextualized benchmarking index. Dave Kellogg and Ray Groth Wright have put the Metrics Brothers podcast on hiatus for the remainder of 2026. All episodes we have ever recorded are still available on your favorite podcasting app. You can reach Dave @Kellogg and Ray on LinkedIn @RayReich. Thank you so much for listening to the Metrics Brothers podcast. Okay, welcome back. We're so excited to have our new sponsor Gainsight. But Dave, why don't we go into the blog? And I think that somebody even asked you, what are your top 5 metrics to present marketing metrics at a QBR or even a board meeting? And that was really the catalyst for this, right?

Yeah, this post started because I got an email from an old friend who's a highly accomplished kind of SVP at billion-dollar companies, worldwide head of demand gen. And she was working with a CMO on a board update or a QBR update and just saying, hey, if you only had 5 metrics, and I love this style of question, if it's constrained, hey, you only get 5. Well, I cheated and went to 7, but if you only get 5, what would be the 5 things you'd present? So that's where this came from. And you're right, Ray, I did do a blog post on this. So this has kind of gotta be a summary or a chat about that.

Well, I love constraint-based forecasting, so let's go into constraint-based marketing metrics. You want to take the lead on this, Dave?

Sure, Ray. So, so the, the first thing I did is I did end up with 5 somethings but not 5 metrics. Uh, and, uh, what I ended up with is 5 groupings because I, I wanted the metrics— as you know, I like metrics, but I want them to be measuring something or reinforcing something. So I wanted to talk about them in terms of the marketing mission. So the 5 groupings I created were one, you know, basically what do we do here in marketing? And literally I would present this way if I were doing a QBR or a board meeting. I'd say, look, we do 5 things here in marketing. One, we make pipeline that closes. 2, we tee up sales for success each and every quarter. 3, we generate pipeline efficiently, right? It's not enough that we just generate it, but we keep an eye on cost. 4, we get the word out. And 5, we care what sales, our internal customer, thinks about our work.

I love that, especially the last one as a former head of sales. But let's get into the number one thing I think you really focused on, and that was pipeline that results in sales.

Yeah, so, so let's start here. So we make pipeline that closes, right? Not just pipeline, and because that's That's just like counting leads and not knowing what happens to them. And, you know, I think counting pipeline is certainly better than counting leads, but, but counting pipeline and then watching if it closes is even better. So, so the 2 metrics I would use there would be one, marketing sourced pipeline generation. So how much pipeline did we generate? Uh, and we can talk about dollars versus OptiCount in a minute. Uh, and then how did that pipeline convert?

Yeah.

So the first 2 metrics to me would be, we look at how much pipeline, kind of a volume metric, and then we'd look at a conversion metric. And at one level, you could view the conversion metric as a pipeline quality metric. You gotta be a little careful with that 'cause there's other things that drive conversion, either great or poor salesmanship, right? But for example, but, but, you know, kind of all other things being equal, Pipeline that closes at a higher rate, I would argue, is kind of the definition of higher quality pipeline.

Yeah, but I got to double-click on something that you said right up front, and that is you're talking about marketing source pipeline and how it converts. How do you define marketing source pipeline, Dave?

Yeah, and we should do an episode on this, Ray, uh, because I, I feel like if I, if I take the bait here, I'm going to end up talking for an hour about attribution. So the question is, okay, so for a given opportunity, who gets credit for it? Who sourced it? And my short answer for this exercise was to just say, look, my answer is use whatever source, attribution mechanism you have. So however you do it, use that. Because virtually all the companies I work with have some mechanism for attribution and pipeline sourcing. So rather than kind of take the bait and go talk about that, and we probably should, but it's a bit of a black hole topic, so it's almost I'm reluctant to kind of step on the slippery slope because, you know, we'll be here at minute 45 and not having answered anything and feel like we're banging our head against the wall because that's generally what attribution conversations feel like. But we could do an episode on that separately. But the short answer to your question is, when I say marketing source pipeline generation, that is important because I want to say this is the pipeline we generated because other sources, you know, there are other sources of pipeline, sales itself, outbound SDRs, ABM programs, PLG, and get outbound BDRs or partners. Like there's a bunch of different sources of pipeline. So I want to talk about the pipeline that we are responsible for, right? Because of the QBR, I don't want to be seen as taking credit for someone else's work, right? I may look at overall pipeline in a different context, like if I'm forecasting pipeline to make sure sales is set up, which we'll talk about in a minute, I'll look at all source pipeline. But right now, hey, we're marketing, we make pipeline. It's a big part of our job. At most companies, to me, it's between 60% and 90% of pipeline comes from marketing. And we have some agreed-to mechanism for sourcing it, i.e., when we get the credit and when we don't. By the way, I'd footnote that so anyone who cares can see it in the footnote. And then I'd talk about 2 things. How much did we generate? And then what has been the conversion rate on it?

Yeah. One of the things I always did, and once again, we can't go too deep on this, is I always like to also calculate it with inbound hand raisers. Because people who said, I want a demo, or I want to contact us for a sales call, It probably came out of some type of marketing engagement.

Correct. And the reality, to take one step on the slippery slope, is the reality, at least in enterprise where I do most of my work, is they probably had 15 different interactions with the company over the past year. And that's where you start down the very steep and very slippery slope of attribution.

Now, the blog that you wrote about this, you also said, I use opportunity count versus pipeline value. A little insight into why you do it that way.

Yeah, I do it for a couple of reasons. Uh, one, because I, I always like thinking metrics as a portfolio. So I'm definitely going to look at pipeline coverage and dollars. You're going to do it in the next section. But I think when you're— and knowing that partly shapes my answer here, right? Knowing that, hey, Ray, don't worry, I care about coverage because coverage matters a lot, but just not right here. Right here I want to talk about count. And the reason I want to talk about count There's a couple. One, I think it's more visceral. I hate to say it, but hey marketing, go generate 117 opties that get to stage 2. To me, it's just a better kind of war cry than hey marketing, go generate $16 million in pipeline. The other problem I have is that whenever I talk about pipeline, I like to have a date. So if you're gonna talk about pipeline dollars, this would be what quarter pipeline is it? To me, as soon as you start talking about pipeline dollars, I wanna know the close date. Is it this quarter pipeline, all quarter pipeline? It could be true of opti-count as well, but still, it doesn't beg the question. At least I just want to know how many you made with no implication of when they're going to close. So I just count them. The other thing I'd say is opportunity value varies, right? So, so look, if all I'm going to do is take every opportunity and multiply it by $50K because that's our average deal size, I'm just using dollars as a misleading proxy for count, which is what most people do here, right? If I just made one, say it's the last week of the quarter and I made 7 of them, I can tell you, hey, Ray, I made 7 opties. What are they worth? I have no idea. Sales hasn't had time to figure that out yet, or we haven't qualified enough yet to know what it's actually worth. But there are 7 opties. Sales accepted them. It just feels more honest. It's also less gameable that, look, if I'm a head of marketing and I have a good relationship with my VP of sales, I could theoretically ask them to juice some of the opties. Who's gonna notice if they go juice 5 opties by $50K, gets $250K more pipeline, I hit my coverage, I hit my pipeline generation goal, and you just trim them back down? 5 weeks later, who's gonna notice that? Nobody, right?

Maybe if there's gaming going on with pipeline, Dave.

It varies over time. Yeah.

So— The other thing, before we move off conversion, you know, it's like win rate. Win rate's not a point in time. It happens over time. Same with conversion. Maybe 50% of the opportunities convert within a normal 180-day sales cycle.

Yeah.

What about those that convert 270, 365? How do you look at that?

Yeah, I mean, I think you need to pick Some standard interval. It's probably one standard deviation, maybe 2 out from your average sales cycle. It depends on the distribution, right? How tight the distribution on your average sales cycle is. But you want to, like, say you have a 6 to 9 month sales cycle, I would do a 12 month rate. Obviously, here's the problem with conversion metrics. People love conversion metrics because they're about sales, so they're highly aligned to the mission, right? The thing that's terrible about them is they're horrifically lagged. Because if you have a 6 to 9 month sales cycle, and that's an average, right? That means a bunch of things close well beyond that. You probably should go 12 months on your conversion rate. So, you know, A+ for alignment, but kind of, you know, D+ for timeliness. But I still think you should look at it. And, and I think anything else, like, oh, we can look at how many get to demo or how many get to legal, right, if you're trying to trim that time frame. But they're still not the same thing as getting one. So, so rather than create some intermediate proxy between stage 2 and your closed stage, I'd rather just make more time and just say, look, this is a lagging metric. And if we want to know, do we think we're generating good metric, good pipeline, right? We can look at whether it's in the ICP. We can look at whether it gets to stage 2 or stage 3. But there are other things I can measure to help answer that question, Ray. But, but, but to me, if I only got, you know, 5 or 7 metrics, in this case 7, and I want to show marketing's aligned to sales, then let's talk about sales.

Okay. The 3rd one I love because it's one I live by, and it's day 1 pipeline coverage. Tell us a little bit more about what that actually is.

Yeah, so this one's under the heading of, we tee up sales for success every quarter. And I think that's a different concept than, we make pipeline that closes, right? Because I can make a bunch of really high-quality pipeline, but if it all doesn't close for 3 quarters, you, my friend Ray, will be dead by the time we get there, right? That sales can starve to death in the fullness of time, right? Marketing gets to talk about the fullness of time. Hey, we generated $12 million in pipeline, go us! But like, oh no, none of it's for the next 3 or 6 months. We're literally— our compatriots are literally going to starve to death while we celebrate this pipeline. So I like starting with pipeline that closes, as we did, but then I immediately come back to— and by the way, we want to make sales successful each and every quarter, which means we want to start basically— because people don't like this sometimes. They like to look at, you know, 12-month rolling pipeline coverage, or they like to look at some other metrics that I think are hard to calculate and less meaningful. And I just want to say, if I want you to make your number every quarter, I just need to sign up to make sure you have enough at the start of every quarter to make your number, period. And yes, it means I should be looking at next quarter pipeline and the quarter after that. But the key metric is how often, what percent of the time in the last 2 years have I teed you up for success? Am I giving you the pipeline coverage that we agree you need on day 1 of the quarter? And by the way, I'm blurring a little bit here because it's not marketing-generated pipeline coverage. It's all—

Yeah.

Source pipeline coverage. And I'm doing that because once again, I could hit my goal, but if alliances and outbound SDRs miss theirs, you're still kind of naked on the quarter. And my goal is that you not be naked. Um, so that's why the first one is about me, how well I did at hitting my goals for generating pipeline. Say I'm supposed to generate 65%, I generated about 65%. Say it's supposed to be closing at 20%, It is on that, you know, rolling 12-month basis. So go me. But you, my internal customer, do you have what you need to be successful? I don't care why you don't. I need to fork— what this does, if you track this as a metric, Ray, is it forces you to forecast it, right? So now I have to forecast it. I have to look at all sources because I think the marketing head should be the quarterback of the pipeline. And if I see trouble, I need to try and do something about it. Like, say it's week 3 of this quarter, I go, Ray, we're not tracking to have a good Starting day one pipeline coverage, right? I did the math. Here's the math. I'll show you what I calculated. But we've got a problem. What do we want to do about it?

Right?

There's, there's too little of that happening between sales and marketing. There's too much finger-pointing. Hey, I'm going to hit my goal, but you look like you're screwed. But no, no, it's, Ray, we've got a problem. I want you to be covered on day one.

Yeah. Well, you said something just a little bit ago. Every one of the marketing executives I worked with, they agreed they didn't want to see me naked at the beginning of the quarter. Or any other—

there's one thing we can all agree on, Ray. I think we may have found the one thing we can all agree on here.

But you did say in your blog, and I kind of— I don't think I agreed with this. You said day 1 pipeline, because no sales organization I know of has a clean pipeline on day 1 of the new quarter.

I know, Ray. So, so this is going to sound a little bit contradictory, but when I do analytics, I do them on week 3. So you say, what's a, what's a good pipeline conversion metric? I would say week 3 pipeline conversion or week 3 pipeline coverage. So when I'm trying to analyze the business, I use week 3 precisely. And people ask me why I use week 3, because I need to give sales enough time to no longer have a valid excuse that we're still cleaning up after the end of last quarter. And if I use it in week 3, that means day 1 of week 3, which means you had 2 full weeks to clean the shit up.

2 weeks is good, but man, 15 minutes into the episode and we're only through 3. So let's move to number 4 if that's possible. In 2024, it's the talk of the day, efficiency.

And by the way, Ray, just to answer that question fully, I still like day 1 coverage even though I peg all analytics to week 3. And I like day 1 because I want to start the quarter with that. I know it's going to shrink a little bit from day 1 to week 3, and I'll also have understood that shrinkage. So it's quite deliberate. It's an excellent point. Number 4, we deliver pipeline efficiency. I'll let you decide how much you want to drill on each one of these topics, but this one is demand gen cost per opti. Here's what it costs to get an optee, and I'm picking demand gen costs rather than total marketing cost. I believe demand gen cost is generally a variable cost, right? Like, I would not typically put the VP of demand gen salary in there or the people in there. I would talk about kind of the variable demand gen cost, how much we spent to run this campaign, to buy the list, to execute the campaign, to host the webinar, to host the seminar, to exhibit at the trade show, the kind of variable demand generation cost. And then we're watching that because that's the thing we can best control. It's also the thing that, by the way, if you tell me the demand gen cost is $2K and you need 10 more of them, I can tell you I need $20K to do that, right? And if I'm doing some sort of more broad marketing average cost, that's not true. I don't need another 10th of a CMO and a quarter of a PR person and this much, right, to get 20 more opties. So I wanna kind of get the variable cost of an optie so I can say, Ray, they cost $2K. And you go, great, I need 10 more. I'll go, great, give me $20K.

That makes a lot of sense. But I also know you're a CAC ratio, you know, advocate. So wouldn't you also want a marketing CAC ratio that shows total cost?

Yeah, it was a contender here. I, I prefer— it's just a different metric to me. So, so if I had a longer list, I think marketing CAC's a perfectly valid metric. If I, if I have to be restricted, I just like to get overall CAC, sales plus marketing together. I also like to look at the sales-to-marketing I think those 2 would be my preferred over just a straight marketing CAC because the marketing CAC, once again, is less actionable, right? So you need 10 more opties. I don't know how to calculate what this is going to cost given a marketing CAC, right? But if I know a cost per opportunity, that's why I like it. It's super tangible, it's super visceral, and it also leads you down the path of calculating, you know, cost per deal, right, when you apply the close rate, etc.

You know, I talked to a lot of marketing, San, Chief Marketing Officers on metrics to measure up. So the next one I was really interested in, and that was awareness, because how do you measure awareness? And that's your number 5 metric.

Yeah, there's 2 ways to measure it that I know of. One is more of a PR way, which is share of voice. And there's vendors like Cision and many others who will sell you share of voice, and you tell them a kind of a scope of a universe of publications and who you're tracking and who your competitors are, and they'll give you reports about how much coverage you got relative to your competitors, and ideally the tone of that coverage, positive, negative, neutral, et cetera. That's not what I'm talking about here. I would call that share of voice. What I'm talking about here is awareness in the market. And the way you get this typically today is you need to run proprietary research. So if you're a $2 million company, it's probably a little small to do that. But if you're $20, $30, $50, you can be running a quarterly study with a market research firm where you're going out and trying to measure awareness, you know, awareness, consideration, trial, purchase, positive opinion. There's a handful of things you can measure and in my mind should measure quarter of magnitude, $25K a quarter, to know where you really stand on an inside-out measurement. Because almost everything else we look at, Ray, is kind of navel-gazing. We're looking at our systems, we're talking to the people that we found. And the beauty of this is now you're just talking to the market. And I think it's super important not to lose track of that. So that's why I like awareness. The other metric we have under get the word out was organic web traffic. And that's simply, to me, I just want to keep an eye on what's happening on the website. And is it going up? Is it going down? Are more people coming or not? I want to exclude paid because that generates noise, and I just want to keep an eye on it. And I think it's important to watch, to be honest. I mean, it's not conclusive, right? I'm not going to drive that to deals. But, but look, if it's going down, I want to know why, and I want to know what we're doing about it and why I shouldn't be scared for 6 to 12 months from now.

Yeah, I would love to know what the conversion rate is from organic web traffic to a lead, a hand raiser. Is that a good measurement? Because if you're measuring website visitors, I want to know how engaged and how good of prospects they really are.

Yeah, I mean, you're getting into conversion rates there and you can build a big marketing table. I call it the mega table. I'm not suggesting that this is a QBR-level update and maybe at a marketing QBR you may want to look at the whole thing. And a lot of them strictly aren't conversions, by the way, just to be technical. But in any case, you could just show total web traffic, total form fills, total MQLs, right? I encourage people to show that table. But I don't know why, Ray, this one's just more intuitive. But I want— I really, I think a CMO should be able to tell you at any moment in time how many people went to our website yesterday and whether that's up or down and what it means. And the answer might be it means nothing, right? But I still want them to know. It's like, what's the altitude of the plane, Ray? Just tell me. You're flying the plane. You should know how high it is, right? Is it a key performance indicator? I mean, yes, I don't know, but you should know it. Important context. Got you.

And the last one, You know, we're the metrics brothers, but here we're the metrics twins because your last one is you're measuring sales satisfaction. That's an incredible metric I've never heard of before.

Yeah, I always did this back when I was CMO. I would run an internal customer satisfaction survey, I'd call it, and I'd ask sales a lot of things. And it's very helpful at budget time for negotiating with sales. It's also helpful to market to sales. I think, you know, a lot of CMOs die because they don't internally market. You know, the physician heal thyself, right? A marketer market market thyself. A big part of your job is convincing sales you're doing a good job for them, and that starts with market research. Hey, you guys told us you wanted this, so here's what we did about it. Um, you guys told us we're doing well. I often, I often ask them to rate marketing on a scale of like 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, and then rate it relative to the last company you worked at, because sales is a pretty tough critic on marketing. So they'll go, well, our marketing's a 5, and you go, well, is it better than the last company? Be like, yeah, it's tons better. So you got to be ready for both questions there.

I love that in context of my last VP of marketing, which is why I got fired.

Oh no, another episode where we discuss Ray getting fired. This is like 2 in a row now, right?

I know, my CRO, um, hat's coming off. But for anyone who wants to dive into these details, I think on Kellogg it's called the Top 7 Marketing Metrics for QBR or Board Meeting, and I would encourage everyone to go read the details, Dave.

All right. Well, thanks, Ray. Hopefully people enjoyed this kind of 2-part series on top metrics. Last week was CRO. This week was CMO.

And next week, if I can talk you into it, we're going to do one that neither of us have really owned exclusively, and that's the Chief Customer Officer, the metrics that a top customer success executive needs to be tracking.

Okay. I'm down for that.

Okay. Thanks, Dave. Thank you, listening audience.

Thanks a lot, Ray. Take care.

The Metrics Brothers: AI, SaaS, and More is a production of The Metrics Brothers Growth and CAC And a member of the Benchmarket Podcast Network. By accessing this podcast, you acknowledge that the Metrics Brothers make no warranty, guarantee, or representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information provided or the humor content of the jokes told.

Ahem.

Ray? Information, opinions, and recommendations presented are, according to our spouses, probably wrong and provided for information purposes only. This podcast should not be considered professional or, for that matter, unprofessional advice. We disclaim any and all liability for any direct, indirect, indirect, misdirect, incidental, special, ordinary, consequential, inconsequential, or other damages arising out of any use of, or God help you, reliance upon the information presented here. Ray Grothreich is based in New York City and available on X @RayReich. Dave Kellogg is based in Silicon Valley and available on X @Kelblog. Schedectady, which is French for unspellable, is not our actual production Thanks for listening.