Marketing as a Sales Productivity Amplifier - with Mark Stouse, CEO Proof Analytics

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Mark Stouse, the Chairman and CEO of Proof Analytics. Today, we will be covering three main topics with Mark. First, marketing metrics, lagging versus leading indicators. Second, marketing as an exponential amplifier to sales productivity. And third, return on marketing investment. What are the top three metrics to measure ROI? Mark, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Mark Stouse** (1:10)
Hey, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Basically, I am a communicator who became a marketer and a CMO in large companies who then turned into a software company CEO. And so I have a very non-traditional career path, and at least in one sense. And part of it has pretty much run all the way through the last 20 years or so, has been this whole topic of ROI or impact or, you know, whatever word you want to ascribe to it, how do you prove it, right? How do you actually optimize it? Now, we talk a lot about being able to plan, predict, prove and pivot. And that really sums it up. I don't care whether you're a marketer or a CEO or somebody else, right? Everybody's having to plan. Everyone's having to give guidance to stakeholders or shareholders about what they think is going to happen. Everybody has to then substantiate that. And then as things iterate, as things change, because we live in a dynamic world, you got to be able to change with it.

**Ray Rike** (2:24)
I agree. And I love the fact that you started as a communicator, even though you've had great roles as chief marketing officer and chief customer officer, and of course now as chairman and CEO of Proof Analytics. But let's get right into it. There's all these posts and debates on LinkedIn about the metrics that matter for marketing and specifically for a chief marketing officer. So I'm going to go right into the tough question first. What are the top three kind of company outcome metrics that you think a CMO should be focused on and even own, not co-own?

**Mark Stouse** (2:57)
Well, actually, that's a very straightforward answer. And I think that while it's a matter of debate among marketers, it's not really a matter of debate among anyone else. Right. So if you kind of think about, I'm going to focus this on marketers. So marketing's mission is to help sales sell more product to more customers faster and more profitably than sales could do by itself. That's it, in a nutshell. Right. So if we kind of look at that in terms of kind of break out those kind of three basic areas, we're talking about more deals, we're talking about bigger deals, and we're talking about faster deals, faster deal velocity, right? And how does marketing improve sales performance in those areas? That's the big question. I mean, that is it.

**Ray Rike** (3:54)
Mark, so it sounds like, you know, if you look at more deals, higher value deals and less time, the ultimate outcome metric to be a marketer should be measured by is revenue trends and revenue growth. Is that right?

**Mark Stouse** (4:07)
It is, but it's also the relationship between what marketing is doing and its time lagged impact on sales. So if you don't understand that marketing and sales create value asynchronously with each other, you're going to have a problem.

**Ray Rike** (4:25)
Let's double click right into that. So because you're singing my song, which is revenue and pipeline are two of the lagging indicators, those high level output metrics that marketing is delivering. But marketers also want to know about what are my leading indicators? What are those metrics that actually impact the size and velocity of both pipeline and new revenue? Can you limit it to three kind of marketing specific metrics that truly are leading indicators, Mark?

**Mark Stouse** (4:50)
Yeah. So part of that is going to be situational within a company in terms of what they're trying to achieve. But I'm going to say this, data by itself, KPIs by themselves are not enough. You cannot get to where you want to go with data only.
You've got to have the analytics. So data is a measurement of what happened in a particular time and in a particular place. And by definition, it is in the past. There is no forecasting with data by itself. Right? You have to be able to use analytics, mainly regression-based analytics, to say, okay, based on what has happened in the past, here is a forecast into the future. And then you've got to be able to recalculate that model to see where the variations are as the future becomes the present. Right? You get a new data set and then you recompute the model. Are we on? Are we off? Right? It's really a lot like a GPS. You think about a GPS on your phone, right? It's, this is where I am, this is where I need to go. It gives you a proverbial route to value, right? Your route to your destination. And then it's tracking you and it's tracking all the things that make the journey work or not work that you don't control. And then it's saying, hey, guess what? There's been a big pile up ahead. If that hadn't happened, it was, you know, stay where you are. But it did happen. So we're going to need to re-route you. The ability to do that is the whole ball of wax.