A Survey of the MAPI Marketing Council
Summary
“CEOs are growing impatient with marketing. They feel they get accountability for their investments in finance, production, information technology, and even purchasing, but don’t know what their marketing spending is achieving.” Marketing measurement is a little bit of art, and a little bit of science. It is especially challenging in a B2B environment, where long sales cycles, difficulties in measuring immediate initiative impact, and a general lack of understanding of marketing’s strategic role are commonplace. Our conversations with members have highlighted a tension between a desire to improve ROI measurement and the reality that many marketing initiatives do not show ROI overnight.
MAPI surveyed its Marketing Council to get a better understanding of how members measure the effectiveness of their marketing departments. We looked specifically at which metrics members use, how satisfied they are with their ability to measure marketing effectiveness, and the support that they get from senior management.
“Effective measurement is the holy grail of B2B marketing. The problem is the time lag between cause and effect, and the line of sight from marketing action to closed sales.”
Marketing Executive, chemicals manufacturer
When asked what priority senior management places on marketing measurement, 42% of respondents indicated it was a high or very high priority. However, a majority of respondents (54%) are either not very satisfied or not at all satisfied with their ability to measure marketing effectiveness.
Respondents who are satisfied with their ability to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts reported a higher level of senior management support than their peers who were dissatisfied with their ability to measure marketing performance.
Commonly cited obstacles to measuring marketing effectiveness included insufficient marketing data, insufficient tools to analyze data, and a long sales cycle.
The full report is available only to Marketing Council members.
The MAPI Marketing Council is a networking and benchmarking forum for marketing executives from large, global B2B manufacturers. For information on membership, please contact
Net Promoter Score
NPS is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three categories. “Promoters” are loyal enthusiasts who keep buying from a company and urge their friends to do the same. “Passives” are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who can be easily wooed by the competition. And “detractors” are unhappy customers trapped in a bad relationship. Customers can be categorized based on their answer to the ultimate question.
The best way to gauge the efficiency of a company’s growth engine is to take the percentage of customers who are promoters (P) and subtract the percentage who are detractors (D). This equation is how we calculate a Net Promoter Score for a company:
P – D = NPS
So what: The average score is 5 to 10%. Ebay and Amazon is over 50%. Posting the score to employees, and encouraging them to boost it, can help a business owner focus her staff on customer service. This entire concept is the work of Fred Reichheld and described in his book The Ultimate Question.
