The Path to Proof

Years of collaboration and hard-won lessons have produced the first software that actually computes the business impact of B2B marketing and communications.

The fact is, the path to Proof has been a long one. But after 10 years of intense development, deployment, testing, iteration and collaboration with top business leaders, I couldn’t be more excited to announce that Proof is ready for prime time.

As the top B2B marketing and communications leader at different global companies, I have worked hard to prove the precise value that marketing brings to long-cycle businesses. We’re not just talking about simply collecting more marketing data, which is already being done really well by a lot of other tools. Proof explores whatever data you have and finds the cause and effect relationships that you can’t see.

Any experienced B2B marketer knows how important it is to track reach, click-through rate, and the many other KPIs that marketing deals with today. It’s helpful to experiment with multi-touch attribution models. But it's also crucial to remember that the first is just unconnected data, and the second produces predictive estimates based on weighted formulas where the marketing team specifies the weightings.

The fact is that neither the dashboards of silo'ed data nor the various models have scratched the proverbial itch in the C-suites and board rooms of B2B companies. So, let's cut to the chase -- in the end, if you’re a B2B marketing or communications leader, what matters is being able to walk into your board room and definitively show how your marketing and communications investments have translated to actual business impact, even when that “cause and effect” is separated by many, many months. Right?

That’s what Proof does. It’s the first software platform to use long-accepted algorithms to allow anyone to accurately compute – versus simply model – both marketing attribution and the true business impact of marketing and communications. By automating some of the rarified skills of data scientists, Proof helps you understand not just what happened in the past, or what’s happening now, but how it all fits together – the crucial "cause-and-effect" relationships between various and seemingly unrelated activities over time.

There are a lot of great martech tools out there. About 4000 or so, to be precise. When we started Proof, we knew we were entering a crowded landscape where everyone claimed that they were proving business value. We knew our solution had to be more than just different and easy to use.  It had to get to the heart of the business problem.

How is it possible that, with so much data and so many software options available, so many C-suites and board rooms still have big questions about marketing's impact on the business?

To answer that, Proof federates all of your available marketing and business data, as well as relevant external data, to compute how marketing affects the business metrics that matter: things like sales productivity, customer confidence and trust, employee retention and morale, and many other key areas. It also can calculate the impact that one part of marketing has on the performance of another part, compute headwind and tailwind factors, and deliver a unique, contextualized view of the ripple effect generated by different marketing investments on various business outcomes.

It's a pretty safe bet that you’ve not seen anything like it.

A highly scalable tool, Proof can be tactical or strategic (or both.) For example, the software might determine that there's a high correlation between PR coverage and sales velocity during a particular period of time. If a company knew that, it could decide to put more resources toward PR and influencer relations to improve time to close. Part of the genius of Proof is that it also can decipher how long it will take for that investment in media relations to impact sales, enabling a marketing team to predict different parts of the marketing mix much more effectively.

For me, delivering Proof is also so much more than software – it’s my professional passion. My teams at HP, BMC Software and Honeywell Aerospace worked with everyone from Fortune business leaders to the folks in the trenches to figure out a way to build an analytics solution that would be truly meaningful and relevant to the business. Most of the industry and company recognitions -- not to mention LinkedIn endorsements -- my teams and I have received over the past decade have been directly related to being increasingly able to show business leaders the value we created.

We believe Proof demonstrates that value, and a lot of other people appear to believe that too. Some of our investors and advisors are senior business leaders and agency partners who have personally seen it work. These include individuals who are now Proof Advisors, people like BMC technology leader Jason Frye, ABM pioneer Christopher Engman, WE Communications analytics leader Karla Wachter, Honeywell EMEA-I marketing and communications leader Michelle Calcagni, Microsoft marketing vice president Debbie Hutchings, and BMC Software sales leader Chip Salyards.

The early adopters are there too. Proof isn’t just live – it’s in the hands of some of the top minds in the business. We've signed some of the top agencies and consulting groups in the world, including W2O Group, Actual, and PRIME Research.  LDWW Group, with clients such as Carnival Cruise Lines, Omni Hotels and Resorts, GameStop Corporation, and the Big 12 Sports Conference, is both a Proof investor and a partner. Fifth Ring, a marketing agency representing a wide array of global energy and industrial companies, will offer Proof to its clients. I, for one, can’t wait to see where they take it. But as agencies respond to increasing client demands for performance-based compensation, Proof is likely to deliver a real competitive edge in RFPs and beyond.

I hope you'll read our press release for all the details. Browse the website to get to know Proof. Reach out on social to get to know us, the motley crew of experienced hands behind this incredibly exciting piece of technology.

For years, great B2B marketers and communications pros have created a lot of business impact for their companies, but few could prove it. Proof measures our success in many ways, but none are more important to us than seeing CMOs, CCOs and their teams get the credit they deserve. That, I think, would be the very best correlation of all.

#ProveIt2017