Building An App to Quantify A B2B Marketer’s Strategies
How do you quantify your marketing department’s efforts on bottom-line sales?
Edit: see the first version of this template here and associated community thread.
Our mission is to empower all you makers out there to build apps for you and your teams. Turns out Product Hunt is closely aligned with our mission with their new Makers feature. I got involved early on in the community and started posting some of my goals and it’s been great to see that community grow over the last few months.
Product Hunt announced their Makers Festival a few weeks ago (and we posted about it on our community as well). I decided to participate by building an app in Coda :).
The Problem Faced By All Marketers
If you are a B2B marketer or manage a team of marketers, chances are you have been tasked with this question: how do you quantify your work?
These strategies are typically difficult to quantify in terms of sales impact:
- Seminars/webinars
- Events/conferences
- Whitepapers
- E-books
- PR
- Social/Content
While most of these strategies are digital and you can employ a lead capture mechanism to get e-mails and phone numbers, how does that lead go through the rest of the sales funnel to eventually convert into a sale? How do you properly attribute a sale generated by the marketing team when there could be many touchpoints along the way by sales and customer service?
Build A Model to Define Marketing’s Contribution
A friend of mine is building a model (in Excel) to help her organization to answer this question. There are some issues with the model:
- Difficult to update when you get “actuals,” or the actual numbers from a given marketing campaign
- Not easy to account for different cuts and dimensions: product category, region, etc.
- Generally not easy to use or share the model with others in the organization
In order to address these pain points, I am re-building the model into a Coda app 🤙. The app will be more dynamic and user-friendly compared to seeing a bunch of cells on a spreadsheet. I have seen my fair share of Excel and Google Sheets models that are flexible and robust enough to account for many different scenarios, but when it comes time to actually using the model, only the person who created the model actually knows how to plug-and-chug the numbers into the model to create the output required.
Some other workflows that I’ve seen are problematic with working with an Excel model for B2B marketers:
- Reporting on your results means copying and pasting from Excel into Google Slides or PowerPoint
- Excel doesn’t integrate well with your other systems for tracking marketing’s efforts (e.g. communications calendar, webinar planning doc, etc.)
Excel models should ultimately be easy to use and update, but since there are so many ways a team member who is not familiar with the model can “mess up” the model, there has to be a better option out there. The answer is an app that can:
- Define your marketing’s teams contribution to the bottom line
- Customizable by the average user on your team; be it the CMO or a marketing coordinator
What Will This Coda App Do?
This app will answer two questions:
- How many leads do I need to reach in order to drive X number of sales or conversions given my current marketing funnel and conversion rates for MQLs, SQLs, etc.?
- More importantly, given #1, how do I plan my team’s marketing efforts for the next 6–12 months in order to bring in this number of leads into my funnel?
There are other specialized apps and software out there to quantify social media and other lead capture strategies, but this app will give the marketer a holistic view into how to view all strategies be it online or offline.
