Marketing Metrics that Matter to the CFO - with Chris Golec, Founder and CEO Channel99 and Demandbase

**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 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 Chris Golec, the founder and CEO of Channel99, and formerly the founder and CEO of Demandbase. We'll be covering three main topic areas with Chris today. First, the evolution of B2B marketing over the last 10 years. What's changed, what remains the same. Second, how B2B marketers can become more metrics informed and financial outcome centric in their measurements and their behavior. And third, why chief marketing officers and chief financial officers need to speak the same language. Hey Chris, take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Chris Golec** (1:22)
Thanks for having me, Ray. It's great to be here and really excited to have this conversation.
Yeah, so my background is more engineering. I worked in supply chain for a while with GE and then started a software company in supply chain in the mid 90s. And when the Internet was just taking off, everything was B2C. Then supply chain became sexy and supply base had a nice exit in 2000 And then I created Demandbase 2006 to really help companies manage the supply chain between marketing and sales. And Demandbase is now a large provider leading the account based marketing segment. And I left there recently and have started a new venture, Channel99, to really take this whole management and measurement of vendors and suppliers and marketing to a whole new level.

**Ray Rike** (2:15)
Well, let's use as a foundation our opportunities to talk about marketing going forward with the last 10 years. You had a front row seat being the CEO of Demandbase. How have you seen B2B marketing evolve and even change over the past few years?

**Chris Golec** (2:31)
It's a great question, right? I kind of look at B2B marketing going through three major phases. The first phase was there was no B2B marketing technology up until about 2005 The first first association of B2B market was really marketing automation, right? And the Metrics was more clicks, more leads, more email. And really, that was really a volume driven game. The next phase was really account based marketing, where Demandbase was created to really focus on quality. Volume is great, but sales teams don't care about the volume unless it's the right account, right? And so the next wave of ABM that really kind of took hold, I'd say in 2010, 2015, was really around quality. And so as we go into this next phase, I think it's really about efficiency. What's the financial performance of marketing? What am I spending to generate this opportunity? And how does it compare to the sector?

**Ray Rike** (3:32)
Wow, you just opened up Pandora's box for me, and it's really a passion of mine. We recently conducted some benchmarking research with Lean Data, ClearBit, and HMHQ, and Modern Sales Pros. And we were trying to figure out how people are measuring the return on investment of their marketing spend. And Chris, we had 490 SaaS B2B companies participate, and I was shocked about this. But 19%, only 19% said that they're actually calculating the ROI of marketing by creating a marketing cap ratio. So for every dollar of marketing that I spend, how many dollars of qualified pipeline am I generating, and how many dollars of new customer revenue am I generating? Does that surprise you? Because I thought we all said that B2B marketers need to become more like B2C performance marketers, and it's not happening.

**Chris Golec** (4:26)
Yeah, I know. It doesn't surprise me, only because that's why I've started Channel99 to fix that. And it is amazing that that is still happening out there today. So I'm excited about the opportunity there, and there is just a tremendous amount of inefficiency in B2B marketing. The challenge for marketers is just hard to expose it and fix it.

**Ray Rike** (4:50)
Wait a minute, you're telling me that all this talk about attribution, first touch, last touch, multi-touch, that the talk isn't resulting in true ROI insights to marketing spend?

**Chris Golec** (5:03)
I am telling you that. And with confidence, I can tell you, first touch is wrong, last touch is wrong, multi-touch is probably wrong. Because most of the traffic coming to a B2B site is not properly attributed to the right channel.