Measuring and Forecasting Marketing ROI - with Pranav Piyush, Founder and CEO Paramark

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Pranav Piyush, the co-founder and CEO of Paramark. We're going to be covering four, maybe even five primary topics with Pranav today. First, aligning marketing investments to outcomes that matter to the CFO and the CMO, this concept of incrementality, how to anticipate and then measure channel specific and the diminishing returns that a channel may represent, brand versus performance or demand measurements. And lastly, the top three metrics of CMO should be sharing with their CFO. So with that, Pranav, why don't you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming my guest here in the Metrics at Measure Up podcast.

**Pranav Piyush** (1:26)
Well, first, Ray, thanks for having me. This is super exciting. I recently came across your benchmark report that I think you had done with. A few other members, right? John Miller, Bill Macias and Carol Lu. So got some exposure to the work that you all have been doing and super excited to chat about all of these topics. And I think that's how we kind of got connected. I don't know if it was me reaching out or you reaching out, but I'm excited that we're chatting.

**Ray Rike** (1:57)
Can you give the audience a little bit of your background before you founded your current company?

**Pranav Piyush** (2:02)
Absolutely. Yeah. So my sort of quick rundown, engineer by training, did computer science in college, but then very quickly switched into all things go to market. So spent time at companies like PayPal, Dropbox. Was that a startup that got bought by Adobe? Was that another startup that got bought by bill.com? And switched into a marketing leadership role over the course of the last 15 years. So ran product marketing, customer marketing, growth marketing, reported to the CMO in my last gig. And that was all the build up towards Paramark. And now, the last couple of years, we've been focused on helping marketing organizations, CMOs, VPs of marketing, both B2B and B2C, with figuring out their measurement and understanding where they should invest their next dollar.

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As you mentioned, this is a topic that's especially interesting and important to me. As you mentioned, we just launched the B2B marketing budget and productivity benchmarks with the partners. And I also, about 50% of our listening audience and my personal following are VPs of Finance and CFOs. So the question I get from both sides, especially when there's a brand versus demand debate, but we'll talk about that in a minute, is what are the best metrics to understand the return on investment we're getting from our marketing spend, especially when they cannot directly measure things like how does a podcast generate leads? But this is what are the metrics to help a CFO in a CMO understand the ROI on their marketing spend?

**Pranav Piyush** (4:23)
That's a big, hairy topic, but we're going to break it down, right? So whenever, and I'm going to focus this conversation on B2B, the most important thing that a CFO and a CMO that need to talk about very early on in their relationship is depending on the consideration cycle and the buying journey, you have to pick metrics that make sense for that specific business. If it's a self-serve 14-day trial process, even though it's B2B, you can go all the way to trial conversions and revenue. You can hold marketing accountable to that because it very much functions like a consumer product. You're talking about the other end of the spectrum, where you have 18-month, two-year-long enterprise sales cycles, each deal is worth a million dollars. Well, that gets a little bit harder to measure.
First point of alignment is understanding the sales cycle, and then based on that sales cycle, understanding what is the true leading indicator of future profit. Now, let's talk about an average case. In an average case, three months, six months sales cycle, most B2B SaaS companies are going to hold marketing accountable to pipeline generated. And I'm a strong believer that that is the right way to think about your marketing measurement. Why do I say pipeline generated? Most of your marketing efforts are geared towards bringing in net new business. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't focus on retention and cross-sell and up-sell. You absolutely should. But I would argue that if you have a good product, you've got a good strategy, you've got good support, good customer success, there are other variables that have a bigger impact on cross-sell, up-sell and retention than your marketing activities. Let's focus marketing on the thing that they are uniquely positioned at, which is increasing the penetration of the market that you are operating in. And so pipeline generation is the number one in my head for an average B2B SaaS company.