Marketing Metrics that Matter to C-Level Executives - with Dan McGaw

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOpSquared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talk 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 It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Dan McGaw, founder and CEO of mcgaw.io, and founder of the National Association of Marketing Technology. Today, we will be covering three main topics. The marketing metrics that matter, to a B2B SaaS or Cloud CEO or CFO. The marketing metrics that matter to a B2B SaaS or Cloud Chief Marketing Officer. And then the top five B2B market tools that every B2B SaaS company needs to have implemented. Dan, would you please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast?

**Dan McGaw** (1:15)
Hey, thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to being able to do this. This is a lot of fun and I'm super honored to be able to be here.
I've been in marketing technology and technology in general for over 20 years. So I got my start back in 1998, sending mass emails since before there was even mass email, right? So I've just been doing this for a really, really long time. I started my first company when I was 13 So I've just been a natural entrepreneur trying to hustle and get this stuff done. But since then, I've done a lot of cool stuff. I was the head of growth at a cool company called codeschool.com. We were one of the pioneers in online education for developers, helped get that company acquired by Pluralsight, a big player in that space. After that, I was also the head of marketing at a company called KissMetrics, one of the pioneers in online marketing and analytics for marketing analytics. So really, really cool there. I was actually the replacement for Neil Patel at the company. And then after that, I started my consulting practice, mcgaw.io, and we're a marketing technology marketing analytics agency. We help companies basically choose tools, integrate tools, operate them. So I've just been around for some time. I've seen some shit. I've got the battle scars to go with it. So it's definitely been a lot of fun.

**Ray Rike** (2:18)
Well, it's interesting. We won't bore the audience to death with our common background, but one of my first ventures into hosted subscription software was at the first generation of marketing automation, a company called Market First back in 1998, and also been very involved in metric-centric applications. And that's where we're going to start today, Dan. This is the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. And there is so much data out there. I almost think we have a overload of data, but we're not making great metrics-informed decision. So my first topic I want to discuss with you, what are the top-level marketing measurements and ROI metrics that a B2B SaaS or Cloud CEO or CFO should care about to know how their marketing investment is providing returns?

**Dan McGaw** (3:05)
Yeah, really, really good question. I think a lot of companies, they have a lot of different metrics. So every business is of course going to be different, right? Cause you're going to want to measure a bunch of different stuff. But I think some of the most foundational ones that people obviously need to have a really good metric on is like, you have to know your lifetime value of the customer, right? Like that's extremely, extremely important to know your lifetime value of those customers. And that's super, super helpful in regards to marketing. And the next thing that you really want to do once you start to get your lifetime value metrics is you need to start understanding what is your lifetime value per channel. So when you think about your first touch marketing or last touch marketing, what is your lifetime value for those channels? Because a person who's going to come from LinkedIn, right? Their first touch is from LinkedIn compared to somebody who comes from a conference. Their lifetime value can actually be quite different.
And that's really, really important to know, is understanding what our lifetime value is per channel. Because what's going to happen is you're going to need to take that lifetime value metric and you need to start understanding what is your ROAS number for those channels. So return on ad spend. Now, one of the things that we see a lot of companies do is they only focus on the return for ad spend on their ad spend. And really, you know, at the end of the day, you're spending money on SEO, you're spending money on content marketing, you're spending money on social media, you're spending money on brand. You really need to start to try to understand what is the return on investment from those channels. And it can be a little hard to track, right, for many, many companies because they don't necessarily track their data, their cause data well enough when it comes down to how much do we spend on SEO, right, and all that stuff. But if you can really figure out what is your lifetime value that you typically earn from first touch acquisition in your marketing and then you understand what is the return that you're getting from that channel, well, you can very easily start to understand, like, am I being profitable in these channels? And as a CEO or a CFO, the biggest thing that you want to be able to do with your CMO or anybody on their team, right, is really start to understand where are we making success out of our marketing and where are we not? And how do we dial the crappy part back? And how do we understand how these things work together? And that's one reason why I think understanding those metrics is going to be important because if you don't understand that metric and you just take the aggregate that you typically get from those things, naturally you're going to have a lot of issues when you're really trying to prove profitability. Obviously, you need to have things like lead count, lead conversion to opportunity. You need to have opportunity to close deal one, conversion rates, things like that. Those are going to be the next ones that you really need to make sure that you have, but those are kind of baseline metrics that I would say are a little bit easier to get to. It's the hard metrics, which is lifetime value and marketing attribution, which is really, really hard to get to. But I think to be successful in today's marketing, those are things that you really have to have.