Alex Shipillo, Senior Marketing Manager at Influitive, and our CEO, Bonnie Crater, co-authored an article called The One Attribution Strategy B2B Marketers Must Steal From B2C. This strategy is something called cohort analysis, which is grouping orders together, categorizing sales, and analyzing them over time periods to identify common customer characteristics. Analysis of this type (especially with the large amounts of customer data available in B2C) provides in depth insight into consumer buying patterns and allows B2C companies to gain visibility into the health of their marketing efforts across different segments.
In the B2B world more and more customer (and prospect) information is being tracked, especially through digital marketing efforts. With this available data (often captured in CRM systems like Salesforce) B2B marketers can build comprehensive demand generation funnels and segment them over time by variables such as geographical location, industry, company size, and much more.
Taking this analysis and measuring month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year provides B2B marketers some really interesting trends to look at and a great way to optimize their marketing efforts to maximize revenue generation.
For example if you can see your conversion rates from the MQL (marketing qualified lead) funnel stage to the SAL (sales accepted lead) funnel stage every month and measure them against each other, you can determine what this should look like on average and dive deeper into the time periods with lower numbers. You can take a look at which campaigns were being run and where those leads are coming from to determine which campaigns provide high quality leads that sales wants to work with or see if sales just didn’t hit their SLA that month. Maybe that display ad on Google generating a ton of clicks isn’t actually providing any good prospects for sales.
Without cohort analysis measured inside your CRM system (so you can access both the marketing and sales data) it would be impossible to get insight into metrics like this. So think about how you can take a page from the B2C world and leverage their analytical methods to drive revenue for your company.
If want to more insight into how Alex does this at Influitive check out the webinar he did as part of the DemandGen Reports Lead Lifecycle series last week.
