Marketing Metrics That Matter: 
A Conversation

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer podcast. I'm here today with Taz Bareham. Taz, welcome back to the pod.

Taz Bareham: Thank you. Nice to be here.

James Lawrence: It's awesome to have you back. So, uh, for those of you that didn't catch Taz's first episode, um, it was about the rise of the fractional CMO and it was one of the most listened to episodes we've had.

So far, so definitely worth, uh, worth a listen if that's something you're interested in, but if you didn't hear Taz's first pod, then you wouldn't have got the introduction. So I'll introduce her. So Taz has over 20 years of experience across B2B, B2C and SaaS. Previously, she was the head of brand and comms at eBay.

CMO at an SATA job add, as well as resd. In addition to her client side role, she's worked in strategy and planning roles at agencies like Clemenger and MNC Saatchi. She's now working across a range of businesses as a fractional CMO, and I wanted to to get. Has onto the pod to have a conversation around marketing measurement, showing the value of marketing within an organization.

Um, and we're chatting just prior to recording. And I think for us, this is not a conversation. If you're in an e commerce environment, if you're in an environment, which is fast moving, big data sets, and you're trying to think of marketing mixed modeling, and you've got really awesome attribution, I think this is a conversation around those marketers.

And those of us working in businesses where it's a longer path to purchase, um, it might not necessarily be dollar in dollar out marketing. I think there's so many marketers that I speak to. It's so hard to, um, to show value in the work you're doing. There's always this kind of, well, if you can, you know, prove it's working, we'll keep putting more money in, but setting expectation correctly.

So I thought an awesome person to have onto the pod would be Taz. You've got so much experience. So Kind of both inside of marketing teams and outside. So that's a, that's a quite a big introduction, Taz, but I think it's a good so solve that difficult challenge. But I thought a nice place to start the conversation would just be to kind of talk about what you see marketers struggling with when you kind of go in and meet with new teams or meet with new businesses.

Taz Bareham: Yeah, sure. So in my role as a fractional CMO, I tend to go into businesses where they've got maybe a handful of established marketers, but they tend to be more marketing manager level. Um, and I usually get called in because maybe the leadership team are looking at the marketing team and trying to work out what it is they're doing and how to relate the value they're bringing through to the business objectives.

And so the key thing that I work with marketing teams on is really how to understand. what they're looking at and how to connect the dots for the leadership team. So the one thing I say to everybody that I see them struggle with is how to contextualize their data and how to, um, create a clear line through to the business objectives.

Um, I say get close to the data as fast as possible, um, what I see marketers get stuck with is when I say that is that they get lost in campaign metrics or isolated months of data, um, and they make sweeping generalizations of what they're looking at and they haven't kind of looked broadly at the context.

So like seasonality, trends over time, um, you know, they're looking at isolated months and not looking back at whether, um, that's an anomaly month. or they might spend time overemphasizing focus on things like website traffic, and they're not really reading that audience. So the CEO doesn't really care about how many people are coming to the website.

They care about who's coming in the door and creating a sales opportunity or converting as a sales lead. So really, it's about getting to know your audience. Um, contextualizing your data, looking for relationships across the data points that you're looking at and starting to relate everything from a business perspective rather than just a marketing perspective.

Yeah, I've got a lot more to add, but yeah, that's generally what I see is just that sort of, um, the tricky bit for marketers that they sit very in a funnel vision and not looking at the outside world.

James Lawrence: And \ how do you kind of connect that business strategy to marketing and how, how similar is it like is generally a most of the kind of, uh, metrics numbers you're looking at quite similar when you come into a business or is it very contingent on the industry and the type of business and where they're at in their journey?

Taz Bareham: Yeah, good question. I mean, every business is a subjective. The CEO is looking at revenue, net new revenue, and where it's coming from as a, um, an important metric from a business perspective, no matter what kind of business you're in. So if you start there and work backwards to say, okay, where's the revenue coming from?

And where is marketing having an influence on that revenue? And then work back from that to say, okay, how are we influencing that? Um, and look at the full sort of buyer. journey, the bio cycle, the conversion rates across through that bio cycle and the metrics that are important at different points in that bio cycle, then you can start to map out what are ones that marketing owns directly.

What are ones that marketing influences and what are ones that maybe marketing doesn't directly influence, but by working closely with other teams can have a better understanding on and, uh, you know, be part of that conversation. And so, you know, I think that a lot of the time marketing and this is just in the businesses that I happen to have worked in.

I find that marketing can feel a little siloed from the rest of the business. Um, and often it's really about making sure there's a go to market team that looks at the full buyer journey. and potentially moves to goals that are more aligned to the full biojourney rather than isolated metrics and where everybody's like pointing fingers at each other and blaming each other.

Yeah. Breaking down those silos and not everything because there are some that specific to roles, right? And then for marketers, there's obviously leading indicators to say, are we on the right path that nobody else cares about but will influence marketing strategy. But there are opportunities to connect the dot into other teams and make sure that those conversations are happening with other teams as well.

Um, with marketing, I say, you know, your biggest job as a marketer, some of the time is to get your internal team on board because when you do, when they're clear about what you're doing and why you're doing it, And they have the opportunity to question and put some input into that and feel heard, they can become your biggest advocates.

But when you're not championing the internal story and making sure that communicating often and clearly, um, nobody knows what you're doing. And that's where the pointing starts. And you can find that Instead of being your biggest advocates, they can be your biggest thorn in your side.

James Lawrence: And when you say internal team, is that synonymous with kind of sales teams?

Or is it broader than that?

Taz Bareham: It's broader than that. You know, absolutely. You need to be, um, if you've got a sales team, if you're in a business that has a sales team, their marketing needs to get close to the sales team to understand, um, how, you know, where those, uh, frustration points are and how they can get closer to the, the sales team.

Sales conversations and to support those conversations. Um, but typically, I mean, my background's in SAS, so you have a responsibility right through to,

James Lawrence: um,

Taz Bareham: activated, um, customer. So through customer success and onboarding and then. You know, arguably marketing is getting more and more. It's like a full, um, any touch point is a brand opportunity, right?

So even for existing customers and building out that flywheel of, of advocacy, it's like, how are you influencing that? How are you helping that happen within the business as well? So you're not just sitting there thinking I'm only opening the door and then everything else is everybody else's responsibility, but it's like how, um, Can you be part of that journey all the way through and add value to the customer, the prospects, but then also the teams that are dealing with those touch points will see greater value in marketing as well.

James Lawrence: So if you're in, say, SAS longer by a journey, potentially, um, multiple stakeholders, you know, on the, on the, um, on the prospect side, are you still, if you're coming into an organization, Can You've looked at the business plan, you've met, um, with the C suite CEO. Are you kind of then working When you talk about mapping the customer journey, are you still kind of thinking like a funnel in some ways?

Like, what are those activities, you know, at the top of the funnel? And what are some metrics that matter there? Middle bottom kind of thing. Is that like, philosophically, how you're still approaching things?

Taz Bareham: Uh, I mean, it depends whether you buy into the funnel, the flywheel or whatever that we're dealing with.

But I think understanding, um, influence points throughout a buyer journey, whether whatever shape it takes, it's important to say, okay, what are the, what can marketing influence each of those points? And how would I measure that marketing is having an influence at those points is probably what I'm looking at.

Um, But yeah, so when I'm going into a business from a SAS perspective, you know, the, the, the famous number that everyone puts out there is only sort of three to 5 percent of your market or ever in buying mode at any point in time, businesses have swung from being very brand focused to being very performance and direct response focused and now kind of swung from that.

the pendulum swinging back to, okay, okay, we need to invest in longer term strategy and ongoing sort of thought leadership and building that presence in market. It can't all just focus on the kind of the bottom engine or the traditional bottom of the funnel ready to buy right now. Um, so then it's like, how do you champion that longer term strategy as well?

Um, in the mix. And also there's a huge opportunity in SAS in particular for, um, when I've mentioned flywheel for there may be partners that you're working with, there are an opportunity. There may be existing customer base that can create that advocacy. There's cross sellers upsell opportunities. There's all of that.

There are opportunities to create inbound revenue or net new revenue for the business that aren't just going and trying to find people that don't know you there yet, but yet that aren't even in the market to buy, which can be very costly, especially if you're not doing all the other stuff to support that as well.

And so I think, um, especially in businesses where they've got a small team and they've got to make some decisions on where they're focusing, uh, sometimes it's going through and just really talking to them about, uh, Where they are focusing and are they focusing for the biggest impact and potentially it's about closing up some leaky buckets in the buyer journey as opposed to going out to market and trying to find new potential leads,

James Lawrence: you know, which I guess you don't identify unless you've properly mapped what that customer journey is, right?

And where is doing what

Taz Bareham: where and what's happening? Yeah.

James Lawrence: And in terms of leading indicators and lagging indicators, if we could just kind of unpack that for a little while.

Taz Bareham: Yep. So, leading indicators are anything before they've happened and they help you predict sort of future outcomes and course correct early. Um, They're probably more important to the marketer than they are to the rest of the business.

Maybe your CMO as well, but that's where you might be looking at. Um, website traffic, engagement rate, new visitors, um, click through rates, anything that's suggesting what might happen off the back of it. And so if you're running a campaign and you can see a sudden spike, spike of interest, then you can look at, you know, maybe it's the ad creative, maybe it's the targeting that's been really working well for you.

Um, and then you've got to track that through to success, right? And then lagging indicators are reflective back of what's happening. So it tends to be things like, you know, revenue. So did you make the sale? Was was that a successful campaign? Um, it might be return on ad spend. It might be, um, churn rate, that sort of thing.

So it's after the fact, and both are really important as a marketer because they're helping you build up a full picture of what you thought was going to happen and what actually happened. And then when you've got that, you can reflect back on that. And as you're planning for your next campaign to go, okay.

What do I think I need to put my effort for success? And what do I think is going to happen? Again, always planning for what's going to happen, what you're expecting, measuring it, seeing if what you're expecting happened, and then being able to adjust your strategy the next time as well. So that's what leading and lagging up.

James Lawrence: And what do you what advice do you have? For marketers that might not be great, great with data, great with numbers, analytics, statistics, but you're not necessarily in a huge team where you can kind of just pull in other parts of the business. Like what advice would you have on that? Because I imagine a lot of these things don't come that naturally to a lot of marketers.

Taz Bareham: No, but, um, there's always somebody that works in finance. So the first thing I would do is go and spend some time with that person in finance that's pulling reports for the CEO for the board and understand what's important for them. Um, how are they taking the data that you're giving them or data they're pulling from the rest of the business and preparing reports for the board and for the C suite?

Because that's when you can get a sort of business context of what you're looking at. So they may not be able to show you absolute reports. Hopefully they can because your business is open and transparent. But when you see what the board is looking at, then you can start to understand. how you might play a picture.

And even if not, that bit's not obvious, you can start to use or reflect back some of the language that they're using or that they're focusing on when you're explaining what you're doing. Um, and you might not get it right all the time at the beginning, but the very fact that you're trying to relate it to business metrics will be noticed and we'll put you in good stead.

Um, but yeah, there'll be somebody in finance. That's not a sort of CFO level that you can spend time with and get them to explain some of the terms. And some of the things that are important at a business level so that you can start that learning journey and then obviously You can always tap into AI and have a good conversation.

So I want to learn about this stuff What's a learning pathway for me to get closer to understanding business metrics and how that relates to marketing metrics? Um,

James Lawrence: that's an awesome. Yeah awesome response, right? Because I think it Yeah, can I kind of connects all the dots doesn't it? It kind of it's bringing it's elevating the conversation that you're having within the business.

You're kind of moving It's important. I think for all marketers to understand cpcs all those things, but you also need to be taken seriously You And to do a good job, right? You need to be understanding, you know, what, what actual, um, impacts you're having on bottom line, right? Um, but it also, I think, is showing goodwill and an eagerness to work with the finance team and initiative and

Taz Bareham: And for the sales team, you know, like, you pick, uh, somebody in the sales team, That you feel like you can talk to easily and just get to know what they are saying when they, you hand over to them, what are they doing?

Where are their frustrations? What, what is their process? Like, what are they being judged on as well? And that helps you kind of complete the loop as well. customer success, the more you can spend time with different people in the business and understand what's important to them. Then when you're talking to them about what you're doing, you can relate it to them.

And again, like I said, you would then talk to them about what they want to hear, not what you want to tell them. Classic marketing, you know, talk to your audience, not what you want to kind of deliver to them.

James Lawrence: Yeah. What advice. Would you have because I think something we hear so often is, you know, we've got x, we're happy to spend x. And when we get y back, we're happy to, you know, to exit. And like, of course, you would say that, um, and I think a lot of marketers.

Are under so much pressure to demonstrate success and it does feel there's always this kind of ebb and flow between brand and performance. And I think it's kind of like, of course, you'd put money in through performance and prove that it works. But most of the theory suggests that you won't get excellent performance unless you do properly invest in brand.

And like, how do you go about trying to it. Educate non marketers or non believers in the importance of brand and how do you see the best marketers working within their organization to have mature conversations to try to educate and try to get that buy in to invest in metrics and activities that might not super dollar in dollar out in terms of how they manifest?

Taz Bareham: This will be the bit where people see his breakup, I reckon, because this is an age old conversation. And there's so many people on both camps and there's so much noise on LinkedIn every day about this exact question. So, um, there are increasing studies that support, and I would always say if you can find data to back yourself up, always find data to back yourself up.

There's been a bunch of studies that have been released recently, and I'd have to look them up to be able to quote them properly, um, but supporting. Why investing in brand is important. And that's the sort of stuff where I say, build your case study with data to go and have the conversation, but also know that you're never going to win by saying that you're just investing in brand.

You've got to be kind of like, whatever the analogy is chewing gum and running at the same time, you've got to learn to be able to do both and find the balance of both. So when I go into businesses, I always look for. What are some quick wins? What are some obvious things that feel like you can you can prove that the wheels can start turning, that give you permission to start doing some of the longer stuff along the way as well?

Um, some companies have the budget to do things like brand tracking, to use things even like Um, there's a platform called track suit, which has that continual always on brand tracking. Um, you can look at um, Uh pr coverage and social listening and um surveys branded search volume all that sort of stuff that says People are getting to know about us and then going back to some of that Multi touch attribution modeling that starts to look at the impact or the effect of different Activity as a collective rather than individual channels um And looking at your marketing efficiency ratio, I know from working with Rocket there, you know, we've had campaigns where we've had brand activity and very, well, you know, direct response performance based activity and can see over time when we switch any of the brand stuff off, maybe there isn't an impact straight away, but it starts to fade quite quickly and you need, you need the other stuff supporting you in order to kind of prove value.

So anything that you can do like that to build case studies and. Bring data to try and build that argument, I think, is really important. But then, um, yeah, it's also lots of reading and making sure that you've got backup of, of, um, smart people that are out there that are touting the goodness of investing in brand as well.

So it's not just one solo voice in the business trying to say that. And I think any. Smart CEO and leadership team right now is reading all the stuff that's out there and all the data that's been thrown around and is probably aware of it. It's just working out what is the right balance for the business and what people are prepared to put behind it, knowing that some of those people don't intend to be around long times.

They don't care about the long effects. They just want you to make this month's and this next month's some. Uh, targets. Um,

James Lawrence: yeah, isn't it the challenge? Isn't that where the, the theory of good marketing, particularly, well, basically across the board, even if you're selling something more transactional. But the reality is, is that it takes years to build up a strong brand.

And particularly if you're in this kind of, um, SAS or complex B2B, it might, it might be a buying decision being made. Every year or two years or three or five by a business and but we all run businesses on kind of monthly targets and quarterly targets and boards and CEOs and investment doesn't come, you know, it doesn't continue if you're not getting this kind of shot.

So it's kind of so, so, um, chicken and the egg, isn't it as to how you I think you're right. I think the data piece, um, Yeah, proving your point with data, even if it is third party studies or third party case studies. Um, just as a when you're dealing probably with people that are often a bit more numbers driven and

Taz Bareham: yeah,

James Lawrence: and less kind of gut driven.

Taz Bareham: Yeah, I don't think you can ever build a case for brand without data behind you in, um, for the C suite. So I tend to, I earmark a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, especially anything that could help with that sort of conversation and then create myself a little sort of, um, a reference library, I suppose, to call on depending on who I'm talking to, what sort of things to surface.

But yeah, there's there's so much stuff on LinkedIn at the moment, in particular, as a content source for these conversations that anybody interested in this area can pretty much like search and find a whole bunch of people to follow that are very big advocates in this space.

James Lawrence: Love it. Any other advice in terms of I guess demonstrating the value of marketing activities in an organization.

Taz Bareham: , I think I've said most of the things. So, um, making sure you're communicating clearly and often understand who wants to know what within the business. And what's important to them. So you're communicating things that are relevant to them rather than the things that you want to tell them.

Um, Be wearing vanity metrics so you're not, so you're taken seriously within the business. Getting close to that business data, um, and making sure that you're talking about marketing in the context of the business, not marketing in a vacuum. Um, Spending time with others across the business as well. And then if you're feeling overwhelmed, just take a breath and take a step back because there are so many things that you could be doing and you can get a little bit bewildered and sunk.

So just take a step back and think about if it was your business, what would be most important to you first and then layer down from that. So you can make your long list, but then prune it right back. So you're not trying to measure too many things at once and just getting overwhelmed and then getting lost on what you're focusing on.

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's, that's good advice.

And, um, like, how do you, And it's so challenging, but how do you try to build out cases around attribution in these more complex environments where, you know, last click can, can be misleading?

Taz Bareham: Yeah.

James Lawrence: We, um, like you're right, like every, I think it's true to say across the board at Rocket and it kind of goes, I think when we talk about brand in a digital world, context, you've kind of got two considerations.

One is just a generally strong brand, right? We all feel a certain way about Qantas and ComBank and whatever else. And it's not based on activity from the last couple of months. It's built up over decades of, for different reasons. So I kind of look at strong brands in that sense. There's brands out there that we all feel a certain connection to.

Then when you go into market in their space, you're more likely to go forward with those brands because of. Decades of brand work, but then in digital, we definitely see with our clients that strong brands perform better, but then also brands running brand campaigns in the shorter term. So if you are running a whole bunch of activity, top of the funnel, YouTube display, whatever it might be, you will also drive much better kind of short time performance campaigns kind of at both levels.

Um, but I guess, how do you try to, I guess, In the different environments you've worked in, like, how do you try to build up the best picture you can on attribution, and what are those things that are working? Webinars, white papers, content, all that stuff.

Taz Bareham: I lean heavily on my agency. No, I, I think, uh, so in things like SAS, there's, we look at, uh, potentially cohort analysis.

So people that are coming in during campaign periods and how they track over time rather than, um, month on month. So you might follow a cohort that's been heavily marketed to with brand activity at the same time, and then you might look at lifetime value. But To that point, then you need to work with people that are committed to a longer term view of things to actually analyze and get an idea of what's going on, because when you've got a long, complex sales cycle, a lead might come in in October, they might not convert until June next year, but they may convert and then become a very valuable customer that's very loyal and provides and other leads into the business and stuff.

So you kind of need to track that over time to work out what's going on rather than going, okay, we had, um, these channels firing on this month. What happened in this month? What do we think about it? So it's like, okay, of the ones that came in that month, is there, are you proving that they're at a higher value or that there are a lower churn rate or, you know, the lead quality was there, but you need to then look at that.

over a time period rather than just a little spikes. And that's what I was saying with marketers looking at only monthly data and not looking at. The wider picture, it's very difficult to kind of create that story.

James Lawrence: Yeah, I know we've worked together in the past where that's been totally borne out, right?

Where, um, driving really good short term results,

successful in that period, then over time, when you actually look at lifetime value and you know, higher quality customers versus lower quality. They're coming from different activity. And if you were just judging everything based on month to month to month to month, you never actually would have realized that, you know, customer bucket over here with this activity is actually over the longer term, a far more valuable prospect, right?

Taz Bareham: It's like throwing a promotion and then people buying on promotion and then they're churning at a greater rate. So if you're only looking at the month's results, you go, woohoo, we've like doubled our lead volume, we've doubled our sales for the month. But. They're out the door very quickly. Then was that a valuable thing to do versus slow and steady?

You know, snail wins the race or was it a pair?

James Lawrence: So it might be good to now dig into some of the struggles you see marketers having within organizations that you work within, like, what do you see as some of those kind of common challenges or common issues?

Taz Bareham: Um, So I think I mentioned before, sometimes marketers tend to take data at face value and in isolation.

So the other thing that I see is, is sweeping generalizations. And this is just really about learning over time about context, for example. So sweeping generalizations saying, because this, then this, and making assumptions on the data that is in front of them, or making leaps of faith. Um, and then. CEO leadership team will pull that apart as soon as they see that.

So and then they won't believe anything else that you're saying. So you have to really make sure that you're solid in your thinking. You've done your research, you understand trends, relationships, the context versus absolute numbers. Um, and then the other thing is globalization. So I think This is a term that doesn't mean say we're talking about the world, but it means that you're, you're dialing data up to make a bigger assumption than is possible.

So for example, because we've got a big spike in website traffic, that is going to have an effect on Lead volume this month, which in turn will mean that our sales will spike. That's not necessarily true. We don't know that there's a relationship between website traffic and, uh, leads and sales. Unless you've worked that out and proven that a spike in traffic leads to those things because we know between us that you can buy traffic.

Yep. Um. And it doesn't mean it's good quality traffic, and it doesn't link down to the bottom line. And the CEO will want to know if you're making a statement, a big global statement, have you done due diligence to make sure that that's grounded in something? Or are you looking naive and therefore you're kind of undermining anything else that you're then going to say in the rest of that delivery?

Yeah. So avoiding sweeping generalizations, not taking things at face value, um, making sure you've got the kind of the context, the relationships looking externally as well. I mean, we mentioned very briefly, he said, don't mention the election, but I'm going to something like SAS, where there's a long complex buying cycle, things like.

Whether or something that happened week on week don't make massive differences, but things that go on for a long time and put the heebie jeebies into a lot of people in terms of big decisions that are going to make and security of business, et cetera, like an election do have an impact. Election's an extreme one, but there are other significant things that are going on, um, that you, you can look externally to, or you, if you're working with an agency, you can say you're working with a bunch of other clients.

Are they seeing something like this in this particular point in time, or is it just us? Because sometimes the answer that you might come back with is that this is a trend in the market, not a trend just for us. And if we ride it out, we'll come back out the other side of it. Um, so having some context is good.

And then the other one I was going to say is, Before starting any initiative, working with marketers to say, think about what you expect to happen and, um, don't just look at random metrics afterwards. Think about what you expect to happen and how you're going to measure it. What does success look like?

What are you going to do if it goes the way you're thinking it's going to? Are you going to double down, put more money into it? Um, what if it doesn't? What's your plan for if it doesn't go that way? So you're planning ahead and you're thinking, About the data before you're into the knee deep in it and then thinking about the impact because a lot of marketers I speak to have no shortage of ideas.

Right? What you want to think about is why are you doing that? What impact do you hope to have? How are you going to measure it? And how does that compare to all the other things that you could be going to drive an impact?

James Lawrence: Yeah, I think it's the only thing that can actually keep marketers saying because.

There is an infinite way of going to market with any product. Every single marketing department in the country is limited by resources. And I think you just have this constant outside pressure, which is sales teams and CEOs. We should be doing this. Why aren't we doing this? Why aren't we doing this? I think the only actual way of.

Being sane is to know this is what we're, we're shooting for in terms of metrics or numbers or success. And then this is, this is the path we've decided to go based on experience and research and past data and whatever it might be. So, otherwise you, you know, you. You will never get there, right? Because you'll constantly change tact and

Taz Bareham: yeah,

James Lawrence: um, and throw new tactics against the wall.

Taz Bareham: Yeah, I think the other thing worth saying is everything seems measurable right now, but just because you can measure it doesn't mean you should measure it and beware of vanity metrics because a lot of junior marketers get very excited about things that aren't. probably don't matter and won't have an impact down the line and then present them as very exciting to senior people within the business.

And again, that's just really about making sure that you're presenting, you're building your own personal brand within the business by knowing business metrics really well, even though you might be excited about, you know, followers or likes or whatever, think about the audience that you're presenting to and what they actually care about, not what you want to tell them.

James Lawrence: How many metrics? I know that it will depend, but. In your experience working with pretty senior boards, heavy hitters, CEOs, et cetera, like how many, and you talked earlier around kind of tracking that by a journey and you know, what are those things that kind of matter on the way through? How many metrics would you be presenting to a board say each month?

Taz Bareham: They don't, they don't really care about marketing metrics at all. They might be interested in marketing influence revenue. Um, there's still a lot of companies that are interested in MQL, SQL, that sort of thing, and like they give you sort of MQL targets, but increasingly the MQL is, is becoming a marketing qualified lead is becoming less relevant.

And it's really about sort of, um, Uh, sales speed of the sales cycle and successful kind of lead to sale, um, conversion rates and things like that, rather than, you know, number of MQLs, which becomes. a less relevant figure.

James Lawrence: Yeah.

Taz Bareham: But yeah, at a board level, they're really in front, they're really interested in more business metrics and then marketing influence on that, as opposed to cost per lead or, um, you know, click route through rate or anything like that.

James Lawrence: Yeah. And I think, and then in terms of when you, if you're dealing with a managing director level, CEO level.

Taz Bareham: Yeah.

James Lawrence: What kind of dashboard or numbers are you showing them to kind of say, this is working or it's not working.

Taz Bareham: Um, so. And that's something I do work with marketers on is never to present just the month or the month on month, but always to prevent present a trend line so they can see, um, if it's an anonymous anomaly month or and what's happening over time.

So, um, any dashboard that I put in front of a senior person would be visual with a trend line and a month a month number. Um, and it'll be much more focused on sort of, like I said, sort of marketing influence revenue. It may have a lead volume number on that, but they're interested in more of that sort of conversion, uh, ratios.

And relationships rather than any absolute numbers.

James Lawrence: And I do think that context that you referenced earlier is so important. And you mentioned junior marketers, and I think I see it in the agency when we have more junior staff coming on board. And it is this almost having to defend results in that short term.

Month to month to month, you know, this went down, but he's the right look and it's, it's okay to say there is a wider force at play here, right? And to your point, like US elections, then it almost doesn't matter which party wins an election. It's the uncertainty of who will win it before the election has been determined.

Funding dries up, but 2 to 3 years when an election is called, certain budgets stop being spent and that kind of ripples through the economy. Um, There's no doubt that the last 12 months last 24 months have been difficult, but certain sectors based on inflation and interest rates and whatever else. So it's, I think it's, you're kind of doing yourself, but also your client a disservice if you're ignoring.

The kind of the macro factors that are at play.

Taz Bareham: Yeah,

James Lawrence: because you still need to navigate within those, right?

Taz Bareham: Yeah, that said, being on the receiving end as a client as well, obviously, you know, there are bigger factors at play and you want your agency to say, this is what's happening in the world. This is what we're seeing across our client base.

Yeah, then, you know. Being a CMO talking to an agency or being a CEO talking to a CMO. The next question is, so what, so what are we going to do about it? What's in our control that we can do something with? So one thing I would say is keep lines of communication open, communicate often, communicate clearly visually, um, and never hide from a bad result.

Always communicate it, but just make sure that you've got a plan of what you're going to do about it and clear on what the learning is in relation to that result and what you're going to do differently to try and turn that around.

James Lawrence: I love it. I love it. Taz, awesome conversation. I'll, um, I'll finish the pod probably the same way we finished our last one, but I can't actually remember to tell you the truth. What's the one piece of advice that you'd give to an in house marketer? And this is an important one because you've got so much experience in this space.

What's the best piece of advice?

Taz Bareham: I will reiterate something that I said before because this is something that has stuck with me so many times in so many different roles is never forget your internal audience. And by that, I don't necessarily mean the C suite, the leadership team, your boss, the people that you know are important.

Think about all the people across the business that could be marketers with you and cheerleaders for what you're doing. The product team, if you've got one, the sales team, the finance team, they all are interested in what you are doing. Marketing is a fun department, but if you keep everything behind closed doors, um, it's easy to become quite siloed.

So make sure you're really well connected across the business and you're communicating and, um, advocating what the marketing team's up to regularly.

James Lawrence: I love it. I think it's a great one. Taz, thanks so much for coming back onto the pod.

Taz Bareham: Welcome.

James Lawrence: Thank you.

Taz Bareham: Thanks for having me.