The CMO Quick Guide to B2B Marketing Metrics

By Grant Johnson and Omar Akhtar

If you’re a marketing leader in a B2B company, you’re probably drowning in requests for performance metrics and reports. You might feel overwhelmed by the endless acronyms filling your dashboard and quarterly board updates: CPC, MQL, CPL, MOB, CAC, ROI, LTV, etc.—with more being added all the time.

The double-edged sword of the digital age is our ability to measure everything. As the saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” But should you really measure everything? And of all the things you measure, which ones should you share with the C-suite, investors, and the board, and which should you keep internal?

For B2B CMOs looking to strike the right balance in 2025, we’ve developed a straightforward framework of three broad categories that cover the metrics that matter most. By organizing your metrics into these key buckets, you can draw a clear line between your team’s efforts and results, presenting them in a way that resonates with stakeholders.

Here are the three categories and the metrics they track:

1. Budget Metrics (Where did we spend our money and why?)

This category tracks the inputs to your marketing strategy. What is the total marketing budget, and how is it allocated across different channels (e.g., email, social, search) or programs (e.g., brand awareness, demand generation, sales enablement)? In addition to monetary inputs, this category also includes headcount, technology expenses, contractor and agency fees, and corporate allocations.

Budget Metrics provide an overview of what it takes to keep the marketing engine running and reflect the strategies you’re implementing to maximize marketing’s impact on company success. Sharing spending allocations with leaders and investors communicates your plan and your team’s capability to deliver on goals.

The key isn’t just to list allocations but to show how spending aligns with your strategy for marketing contribution and business growth. Comparative spending data from similar companies—by size, customer base, industry, go-to-market (GTM) strategy—can further strengthen your narrative.

2. Performance Metrics (How did we perform with the money we spent?)

The second category covers outputs—the results of the investments made in Budget Metrics. These are usually channel performance metrics across email, paid and organic search, social media, digital ads, and more. While tracking performance metrics is standard, it’s crucial to tie these results back to your initial spending choices.

Focus on tracking the performance of prioritized channels and benchmarking their results against industry averages (numerous public sources are available), particularly from companies similar to yours. This way, when presenting, you can show a clear correlation between budget allocations, channel results, and benchmarks.

3. Impact Metrics (What is the impact of our spending and activities?)

The investments and efforts you’ve made in activating and optimizing channels should ultimately reflect in broader impact metrics and performance indicators, both leading and lagging.

One effective way to structure these metrics is by organizing them into three distinct impact categories: Market Presence, Brand Strength, and Pipeline Health. Market Presence reflects your company’s visibility in key markets compared to competitors. Brand Strength measures the willingness of prospects and customers to engage with you and their loyalty. Pipeline Health assesses the robustness of your pipeline, your performance against best practices, and your conversion and close rates.

You should have a few significant impact goals established at the beginning of your marketing plan. While some believe that pipeline is the only metric that matters, research shows that stronger market presence and brand strength positively affect pipeline health, particularly in competitive scenarios.

By connecting your Performance Metrics (Category 2) to your Impact Metrics (Category 3), you demonstrate how performance translates into broader business impact. If your performance metrics fall below industry benchmarks, it likely indicates challenges in reaching targets.

Many CMOs make the mistake of presenting these numbers in isolation, without demonstrating their interconnections. This often leads to lengthy explanations and puts you on the defensive, rather than proactively showcasing the contributions and business impact of your team.

This framework not only clarifies your team’s results but also helps identify any gaps in spending, performance, and potential impact.

In a world where every metric competes for attention, a CMO’s real power lies in distilling complex data into a clear, compelling narrative for leadership. By organizing metrics into these three categories—budget, performance, and impact—you’re not just presenting numbers; you’re telling the story of a well-thought-out strategy, strong execution, and measurable results.

When you can draw a direct line from budget allocations to performance outcomes and ultimately to business impact, you build confidence in your marketing leadership and position yourself as a crucial architect of the company’s growth trajectory. So, as you track and report, remember: clarity, context, and connection are the metrics that matter most.

#B2B #CMO #metricsmatter #outperform

Grant Johnson is a 6x CMO, mentor and advisor with a proven track record growing revenue by 10x, from $5M to $50M to $500M+ with 7 successful exits. He has helped build high-performance teams and transform global companies, from early stage to multi-billion dollar enterprises, including: Billtrust, Emburse, FileNet, IBM, Kofax, Pegasystems, and Symantec. As a key member of executive teams, he has helped drive growth, acquisitions and integration, fostering liquidity events valued at more than $10 billion.

Omar Akhtar is the founder and principal analyst at Benchmarker , a research and advisory service that delivers marketing and spending benchmark data to B2B software companies. He is the former head of research at Altimeter Group and an expert on what good looks like for B2B marketing.