If you’re reading this, you probably already have a metric that you can use - and you don’t like it.
Most likely, it is MQLs, or leads, or - as a more advanced version - “marketing-sourced pipeline”, or “inbound opportunities”.
And you know that none of them is how you want to be measured.
Because each of these metrics puts all the credit on one single touch with one single person. “They downloaded our PDF”, “they requested a demo on our website”, “they clicked on a Google ad and left their email in a form” - and still it’s not connected to revenue, because the last touch is a sales call and a BDR message and no one cares how many webinars the client attended before that.
But if you sell a complex product with high ACV and a long sales cycle, a straight line from one touchpoint to revenue isn’t enough. You need to think accounts, buying groups, and buyer journey stages.
Let’s explore five ways to look at your metrics to understand the true marketing influence - and three not-so-obvious ideas to strengthen it if you do marketing for products with long, complex sales cycles.
Disclaimer: all those metrics are account-based, meaning that you need to have an understanding of your TAM and, ideally, a list of accounts that your sales and marketing agreed on as the right companies to target.
This one is crucial in long and complex sales. And the only way to survive the "correlation isn't causation" argument.
Yes, one display ad wasn’t the reason they bought, they would have bought anyway.
Yes, the client was already in conversation with us when they visited that event - it just helped unstuck the deal.
But if we measure a bigger group of accounts against the criterion “touched by marketing / not touched by marketing”, we can identify difference in conversion rates throughout the entire sales cycle: website visit to discovery call -> to qualified opportunity -> to closed won.
Important note: you should run this analysis on all accounts and deals, regardless of deal source. Inbound or outbound - but if marketing touches happened throughout the journey, they need to be measured against conversions.
Take every deal you closed last quarter. For each one, list every channel that shows up anywhere on the account's journey before the opportunity was created — the whole sequence, from the first ad impression to the last BDR email. Then count how many of your won deals each channel appears on.
You'll get something like: LinkedIn on 8 of 11 won deals, events on 5, review sites on 2, and your webinar programme on none.
That last number is what makes the rest of the report credible. If every channel you run turns out to have contributed something, your CFO will read the whole thing as budget defence. Show them a channel at zero — "we spent $40k here and it appears on none of the deals we won" — and the numbers next to it start counting for something.
Run the same list on closed-lost and you get the other half of the picture. A channel that shows up as often on deals that died as on deals that closed isn't telling you anything about intent.
Disclaimer: this applies to channels that are relatively easy to measure - ads, lead gen, email, etc. Your thought leadership efforts (podcast appearance, social presence, activity in industry communities) aren’t that trackable. The only way to trace them is to implement self-reported attribution (more on that later) and ask how they found you in discovery calls, if sales is willing to do it.
Your target list is finite. Several hundred (maybe thousand) companies that sales and marketing already agreed on. So you can confidently say, “here’s how many of those companies we actually reached this quarter, and which ones”.
Source: N.Rich AI - “Hot Accounts” app.
The important part is the movement: which accounts entered coverage since last quarter, which fell out, and which have never been touched at all. Name them. A list of 27 companies that moved since April is something your CRO can open and check against their own pipeline.
The ones that fell out are worth raising yourself. An account you reached in Q1 and then went quiet on is a gap you want to find and proactively highlight, before someone else finds it.
Agree what "reached" means before you publish the first number, because that's the first thing anyone will ask. Two channels, or a website visit, or a minimum engagement count - pick one, write it down, and keep it stable across quarters, or the movement number stops meaning anything.
For a 12-month sales cycle, a quarter with no closed deals can be either the beginning of an end - or the one before the best quarter in history. And account movement tracking helps you tell the one from the other.
On top of that, this is an unexpectedly good way to measure brand awareness.
Build a report of how big of your TAM share interacted meaningfully with your assets:
Being able to say, “out of 3000 our ICP companies, 500 meaningfully interacted with our content this quarter, up from 450 last quarter” resonates with the revenue team much better than “our brand awareness is at 25%”, which raises a lot of questions.
With 6-figure, complex products buyer journeys aren’t linear. Usually it takes 2-3 closed lost deals with the same company before they become a client.
As a marketer, your goal is to be there throughout all this period, producing always-on and meaningful engagement.
Build a dashboard in your CRM with “meaningful ICP touches”. Not ad impressions or clicks, but something that signals your ICP’s readiness to take proactive action:
Each of these is a reason to give the sales team additional context and a reason to reach out. And this outreach will stand out massively among the same “saw you liked John’s post…” or “congrats on your new role” openers.
You can build the list in your CRM (here’s an example of filters in HubSpot) and notify account owners about new accounts appearing on the list.
The reason marketing mostly loses to sales in face-to-face debate? Marketers operate “audiences”, “clicks”, “CTR”, “industry studies” - then a sales rep comes in and says, “I spoke to an enterprise company yesterday, they don’t care about that”.
And because there is the exact logo attached and the logo is already in pipeline, it’s becoming more credible.
Solution? Show the exact logos too.
We had a $150k deal started because the company found us through ChatGPT. And this was one of the arguments of our marketing team to invest in AEO.
This isn’t about the exact metrics or tactics - but something to keep in mind if your goal is to generally improve visibility and cross-team collaboration (and recognition, of course).
This probably makes you gasp and think, “Again? Are we so insignificant that we need to wait for sales to praise us?”
As sad as it sounds for your creative soul - but sales are the ones getting the last signature and bringing the good news to the entire team. And yes, you need to make sure they mention you in their Oscar speech.
In account-level measurement, this is getting much easier: you’ll be able to track all marketing touchpoints for the account in a single journey - highlighting the “hidden evaluation” phase that led to a discovery call.
Source: N.Rich AI - “Closed Won Analysis” app.
But never make it a drop-down list.
You want the answers to be as raw as possible, to identify the non-obvious channels and patterns.
This is how you can finally figure out what’s behind this demo request sourced from “Direct traffic”.
Then make sure that you find and highlight the insights in front of the entire org. “That 300k deal started when their champion heard our founder on a podcast”, “LinkedIn appears in 10% of deal sources, but 20% of people mentioned it in self-reported demo forms”.
This is market intelligence. This is how you help the company understand what channels really matter for acquisition, conversion and retention.
Probably it’s already late and you’re looking for ways to prove marketing influence exactly because the “standard” metrics aren’t looking good.
In this case, trying to suggest alternative metrics can read like “you’re trying to invent new KPIs because you’re not able to hit the current ones”. And this isn’t a good position to be in.
But in case the numbers look just fine yet, initiate the conversation now.
Frame it as a way to get better insights into the complete buyer journey in order to:
Bonus: work on expanding the understanding of “marketing”
You’ll be surprised how many people think of marketing as just paid campaigns. Here’s a Reddit thread that confirms it.
“I need to prove my impact - so what if I turn off marketing for 4-6 weeks?” - obviously, “turning off marketing” is impossible unless it’s about lead gen campaigns.
And we all know what a marketer’s week consists of - it’s not setting up campaigns 40 hours a week. So you need to find a way to make all your activities make sense - proactively.
A healthy view of marketing isn’t a hat on top of someone’s head that you can just take off and put back on. It’s the bone structure — you can’t just remove one bone and expect the body to still function properly.