‘Marketing Per Marketer’: How B2B Will Measure Success for the Next Decade

Last night I heard what I think will become the most important - really the only - B2B marketing metric for the next decade.

We’ve interviewed more than 30 of the top minds in marketing for our Do More With Less podcast this year.

In addition, we’ve sat in studios around the world and recorded in-depth interviews with at least another 30 leaders from our client businesses as part of the extensive thought leadership programmes we build with them.

We’ve become world experts in the specifics of the difficult and stressful load being carried on the shoulders of lean, stripped back (and often solo) B2B marketing functions; the anxiety behind the unreasonable expectations; the mechanics; the tool kits; the operational rhythms and the partnership support strategies being deployed by those who are actually making it work.

One miscalculation we’ve seen made repeatedly is in the rationale behind the act of reducing headcount and the decisions made concerning ‘who’ or ‘what’ to keep as well as what to lose from the business. Leadership teams are having to gamble on the diminished blend of skills, experience and channel expertise that constitute the best marketing strategy with which to arm growth plans.

Businesses will pick say two - maximum three - channels or skill sets that feel right at the crunch time of a redundancy round, then later find themselves hamstrung. Inevitably, different skills and outputs will be needed but by that point flexibility feels like a preposterous privilege enjoyed by previous generations of marketers.

For two years, OrbitalX has been developing a marketing support system for lonely such leaders and has built a scalable operation delivering 15 marketing skills for the price of one.

Last night, founder Stuart Dale shared with me a piece of thinking I reckon all businesses will adopt in the next 18months.

The conversation with Stuart took place on Alona beach on Panglao Island, Bohol in the Philippines, where the OrbitalX team gathered for our offsite this week from the UK, the US, South Africa and here in Manila and Cebu.

The big brains behind OrbitalX have come up with an index score for Marketing Per Marketer (or MPM).

Companies are under no illusion. They know underinvestment in marketing leaves sole marketing executives acting as glorified firefighters - ‘underqualified experts’ in everything with no time or resource to build effectively. Such scenarios were reported by Marketing Week B2B reporter Emily Manock in an article published yesterday, entitled ‘Never off duty: B2B marketers on the challenges of working solo'.

“I thought I’d be part of a small team,” one B2B marketer is quoted as saying. “But everyone apart from me is sales.

“You can’t delegate and you can’t push back, because if you say no to a salesperson, it doesn’t land well. So you end up doing everything, badly, just to keep the peace.”

These professionals need our help; they need our - their - industry to help.

We must stop measuring them using the same metrics as when they were in teams of 10 or 12 people. We can’t keep turning up to Monday morning meetings with fresh requests across performance and paid marketing, content, product marketing, sales enablement, SEO, events and all the rest. Not if they’re one person.

The detailed maths behind our MPM index gives businesses a score - a single number - with which to benchmark how effective your messaging, distribution, reach, engagement and growth is per head.

In testing, it’s illuminated how various small or one-person teams are over-achieving impressively. By contrast it shows up other businesses with deeper resources and more headcount, achieving less effective 'marketing per marketer'.

This will become a necessary metric of a backdrop dominated by the need to Do More With Less - a climate and set of conditions that have taken firm root; embedded for the foreseeable future.

The brutal simplicity that made Net Promoter Score so successful in the form of a single number is, I predict, how businesses, boards and investors will come to understand how marketing is performing.

After all, a single number is how bosses instantly understand the strength of a sales rep. If (or when) the same becomes true of marketers, it’ll be a welcome adoption of a new conviction in how we report marketing impact.

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