As more marketing teams embrace agile methods, marketing leaders are increasing their focus on measurement out of necessity. One of the central tenets of an agile approach is frequent measurement so teams can quickly iterate or refine campaigns to improve performance along the way. Agile marketing projects also tend to be shorter in length and time, so it’s even more imperative to have measurement tools that can accurately track progress toward goals in real-time.
This can get complicated for marketing teams that have dozens of solutions in their martech stack, all of which produce their own metrics out of the box. Data on clicks and open rates is useful, but it doesn’t resonate beyond the marketing department. And that raises another issue since agile project teams are typically cross-functional. A single source of truth is a must, and since the CRM is the de facto revenue record system at most B2B companies, it makes sense to house martech data inside the CRM.
We’ve had customers tell us that if they had to strip their martech stack down to bare essentials, they’d keep the CRM, where they create and collect leads, plus their primary marketing automation system (Marketo, for example) and their Full Circle Insights solution to measure everything. But most B2B companies are using multiple martech tools — it’s not unusual for teams to use 10 different digital marketing solutions, plus an additional five deployed on the company website.
The Measurement Sprint and the Martech Stack
We’ve discussed the concept of a measurement sprint before — it’s a sprint that runs concurrently with an agile project sprint to measure what’s happening with the campaign, monitor the progress of leads via funnel metrics and attribute revenue to marketing touches. Let’s take a closer look at what a measurement sprint might look like in the context of the martech stack. Meeting cadence would depend on the length of the agile sprint, but here’s how measurement sprint meetings would typically unfold:
- Meetings include core people from marketing operations, sales operations, demand gen, sales development/telemarketing, etc.
- The group reviews campaign execution, looks at funnel metrics and attribution data and flags any anomalies for further analysis.
- The team determines whether they are ahead or behind on progress toward project goals.
- Marketing notes lead volume, velocity and conversion rates, and sales assess lead quality.
- Meeting wrap-up includes resolution on questions asked during the session, with action items assigned for outstanding issues.
A week later (or more frequently, depending on the length of the agile project sprint), the team meets again, and the process repeats. Given the focus on metrics, it’s essential for all of the data from point solutions in the martech stack to be consolidated in one place: the CRM. CRM data is widely credible and accessible across teams, and those qualities are necessary to fulfill the ultimate purpose of the measurement sprint, which is to inform future decisions on campaign investment.
Single Source of Truth Reduces Complexity
Thinking through the steps of a measurement sprint underscores how critical it is to have a single source of truth about data. A B2B company might be running 100 different programs using a variety of point solutions that generate huge amounts of data. But if you can aggregate the data in a single source of truth and connect it with sales, you can measure impact on the funnel and accurately attribute revenue.
Martech solution sales are strong even in an uncertain economy because of the shift to digital platforms. That can complicate data analysis for the marketing team, especially an agile marketing team since real-time measurement is so critical. But with the right measurement tools inside your company’s single source of data truth, the CRM, you can build agility throughout your martech stack.
