Mike Harris, CMO

ROI Calculator for B2B Marketers

by Mike Harris | Jan 9, 2021 | B2B Marketing ROI, Chief Marketing Officer

Your B2B marketing ROI matters.

Wooden blocks spelling B-2-B against a blurred background.

You are welcome to use our new marketing ROI calculator, customized especially for B2B marketers.

We looked at a lot of ROI calculators available on the web and found them inadequate. So we developed our own.

Our calculator is built in Google Sheets. I recommend that you download the calendar, study it a bit, and customize for your business and circumstances.

Pay attention to the built-in notes, indicated by red triangles in a few cells.

This is a free download if you are a subscriber to my monthly updates (scroll to end).

Many thanks to Anders Hoff for providing the foundation for this calculator.

The back story

Marketing ROI in B2B has evolved from a mostly ignorable nuisance to a must-have for today’s top performing marketers.

CEOs and CFOs are under more pressure than ever to show results and they’re transferring that pressure to you.

Most ROI calculators seem to be configured for e-commerce. This doesn’t work for overall B2B marketing, with our lengthier sales cycles and metrics requirements.

An ongoing project

View this ROI calculator for B2B marketers as the start of your ongoing efforts to track ROI from various activities over time. You will need to customize the calendar for your purposes. For example, there are fields for deal closing probabilities that only you can enter. However, we’ve provided some back-of-the-envelope formulas to get you started.

Plan to own the calculator. Download it from Google Sheets and customize it. Share it with your colleagues, especially those in sales. Help them understand your objectives for measuring ROI and how it helps the company overall.

How to use

Our calculator is actually six calculators in one, plus an Overview of all your marketing ROIs:

Email
Events
Advertising
Social media
Public relations
A blank template

Pick one ROI calculator that seems like a good place to start. Customize it where you can and make a note of the fields for which you’ll need to find information. All of the ROI calculators contain probabalities of a deal close from various CTAs. Obviously someone scheduling a demo from your landing page is going to carry a much higher weight than someone just clicking on a content link.

The best way to use this is make a copy of the entire worksheet for each month. Then within that month make copies of individual spreadsheets for multiple campaigns in the same category.

Works best with a marketing automation platform

You’ll work a lot faster with a marketing automation platform. A good platform will deliver a lot of the data you’ll need for this spreadsheet.

However you can still find the right data with Google Analytics, your website platform and dozens of other tools that deliver campaign results.

July Newsletter – from Mike Harris

by Mike Harris | Jun 30, 2023 | Chief Marketing Officer

Key marketing trends for the second half of 2023

high cost marketing exiting stage right
artificial intelligence in marketing
strategic narratives and executive branding

As we wrap up 1H, here are some new and helpful trends in B2B marketing for 2H.

1. Smart money moving away from high-cost marketing

I’ve always been a fan of low/no cost marketing. With new clients, that’s the first thing I make sure they are maximizing.

Now, smart companies are catching on to what’s not working so well anymore:

Paid search and SEO. It’s just too crowded and expensive for SMBs. Recent studies have pointed to this as a key reason CAC has risen dramatically in the last year.

High-cost CRM and marketing automation platforms. Way too many SMBs are using expensive legacy platforms like Salesforce, Pardot, Hubspot, et. al., when hundreds of high quality options are there for a fraction of the cost.

Advertising in general. Ad-blocking and ad-blindness are real, and here to stay. Never in the history of business have sales prospects had so many options for ignoring our advertising. And they do.

One-size-fits-all marketing. Regards tech and SaaS purchasing, many companies have added non-tech people to the purchasing process. That’s a key reason why marketing doesn’t resonate with everyone in the value chain.

I could go on. My point is there are more ways than ever to engage audiences and prospects without giving your CFO heartburn.

#2. Artificial intelligence changing the marketing landscape

Marketers have always been good at chasing shiny squirrels, and throwing good money after bad.

Regards AI, you can bet that the 80/20 rule will apply here. Eighty percent of marketers will rush into it, and waste precious time and money because they don’t know what they’re doing.

“Hey, we don’t have a marketing plan but I just KNOW AI will generate leads to beat the band!”

The twenty percent, however, will take a look at everything they’re doing (or could be doing) in marketing and ask, ‘how can AI help us save time and money with our growth initiatives?’.

How To Organize Marketing Growth Initiatives

Here’s a handy list of AI tools for marketing. I’ve been using some of them and think they’re pretty nifty.

#3 – Strategic narratives and executive branding

We may not believe our solutions are commodities, but most observers perceive us that way.

It’s getting harder and harder to stand out. And I’m seeing lots more demand for strategic narratives linked to executive profiles and stories.

Why? Humans in 2023 are following humans, not companies or products. The question ‘why us, why now?’ gets answered faster when an audience sees an authentic, unique human touch in your company.

Resonance is everything these days.

I have a new offering in this space.

Building Executive Brand Image

Wrap Up

Enjoy the 4th of July.

Thanks for keeping me in mind for marketing projects. This year I’m focusing more on one-and-done projects than long term contracts. Seems to be the way consulting industry is heading.

Finally, I’d like to intro you to a professional colleague, Eric Weynand. Eric is a CPA and a Texan, who has a fractional CMO practice based in Montevideo, Uruguay. I’m enjoying our chats and can recommend if you need fractional accounting and/or CFO help.

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B2B go-to-market strategy

by Mike Harris | Oct 11, 2020 | B2B Strategy

Enterprise software company wins big with B2B go-to-market strategy

sales presentation best practices

Overview

How do you choose the right B2B go to market strategy?

DataFrameworks, a Silicon Valley company had a unique solution for file management in enterprise data storage environments.

Additionally, they used an often overlooked go t0 market strategy.

A year after beginning work with Harris CMO Partners, they were acquired by DellEMC.

Here’s the story.

Founders recognized a trend

The founders recognized a growing trend in the data storage space. Rich content (sound, video and images used at the same time and place) was overwhelming enterprise IT departments with petabytes of unstructured technical data and rich media content. There was no dedicated solution for allowing end users to access and retrieve massive rich content files from storage environments.

Consequently, IT departments were overwhelmed with requests from end users to find and deliver rich content files. Besides, this increased the costs of storage management dramatically in companies that are heavy users of rich media files. Affected industries included media and entertainment, software development, life sciences and more.

The trend was forecasted to keep growing for years.

Image of tall data servers in the clouds.

Where’s my data file?

The challenge…

Like most early stage B2B companies, DataFrameworks had a limited budget. Correspondingly, they decided to forgo marketing except for a website, focusing on B2B go to market strategy instead. Also, they minimized direct sales and focused on partnering with large OEMs in their market space. These included HGST, Quantum, DellEMC and others.

Instead, they used a small sales team to call on the OEMs. And they chose us to do the partner marketing. Selling their solution to thousands of OEM salespeople would be a lot of specialized work. DataFrameworks needed a variety of support materials created to get their new, expanded OEM sales teams up and running.

The solution…B2B go-to-market strategy

Harris CMO Partners was hired to help. Working closely with the founders, sales and technical teams, we created architecture diagrams, solution briefs, business cases, sales presentations, sales kits, press releases, event marketing and more.

The great thing about this client was that they knew precisely the business value of their solution. “Bringing business and IT together to unlock the value of data trapped in silos.” With that, and a couple of white papers they had created early on, we went to work.

Shortly after we started working with DataFrameworks, they partnered with DellEMC. It was a perfect fit with Dell’s Isilon product line, a family of scale-out network-attached storage systems, designed for demanding enterprise file workloads.

Isilon’s sales team already had relationships with the companies DataFramework wanted to target. Now, all DataFrameworks needed to do was educate and coach the DellEMC team.

Their B2B go to market strategy was working well.

The first customers…

We decided to focus on large OEMs (like DellEMC) serving data intensive industries including media and entertainment, life sciences, oil and gas, EDA, software development, automotive and others with complex workflows.

In their first phase of sales, they focused on acquiring a handful of marquee clients. These included Disney, ESPN, Quantum, IBM, NetApp, illumina, Sony Pictures and many more.

B2B go-to-market strategy success

I worked closely with both DataFrameworks and DellEMC to execute successfully the B2B go to market strategy.

I created the sales and marketing story, sales training and plenty of intriguing content.

Once DellEMC had the new solution firmly established as a partner offering with its existing customer base, sales materialized quickly.

The tech giant saw distinct value in acquiring DataFrameworks and completed a succesful acquisition.

DataFrameworks’ solution is currently featured in DellEMC’s Enterprise and Midmarket IT Transformation solutions.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/dell-emc-claritynow-data-management-software-helps-transform-data-value/

More on strategy

Market strategy is hugely critical to your success.

You might like this article on how Steve Jobs outfoxed the major competition in his time.

How Apple Competes…And Wins