Effective B2B Funnel Tracking: A Tactical Guide

Are you looking to optimize your B2B marketing funnel and make data-driven decisions? Are you lacking full-funnel visibility due to the complexity of reporting on disparate objects in your CRM? This is a practical guide designed to provide foundational building blocks and basic tactics for tracking and measuring your B2B marketing funnel. While the examples may reference Salesforce, the principles outlined in this guide are CRM-agnostic and can be applied to more complex models, regardless of your tech stack. This guide is tailored for tactical team members working in marketing operations and analytics who are looking for an approachable resource to help them solve funnel tracking challenges. Here is an example of what your outcome could look like:

This guide assumes you are already familiar with the demand funnel. If not, read more about it here.

Building Your Tracking Framework

The ability to properly track and measure your funnel is key to being able to make smart investment decisions and prove the ROI of your efforts. There are a couple options on how to build this:

• Build a customer journey stack outside of your CRM in tools such as Snowflake and build your funnel using business logic with the foundational data in the stack. Some data you can feed into your stack are the tracking histories of leads, contacts, opportunities, campaign membership, activities, etc. This will be the most robust and customizable option. You may also feed the data back into the CRM for visibility.

• Build a custom object within your CRM that includes data snapshots at each funnel stage, gathering and joining data from campaigns, campaign members, leads, contacts, opportunities, accounts, etc.  This will only be doable within your CRM’s capabilities and limits. 

This guide will focus on the second option as we have first-hand built, maintained, and used it.  This was done via a custom object, let’s call it a Custom Funnel Record (CFR) in Salesforce.  For that reason, terminology used in this guide will be based on Salesforce CFR but the tactics should be applicable to any CRM and custom object name you choose.

When deciding what to track, you should always use your business goals as a guide. This ensures you are capturing data that is truly meaningful and actionable for optimizing your funnel performance.

Documentation

The first step is to have everything well-documented - make sure the plans, implementations, flow, taxonomy, descriptions, dates are all well-organized and kept up-to-date in a Wiki or something similar. We also recommend keeping a changelog to help everyone stay informed about updates.

Triggers

Depending on your lead flow, having well-defined and implemented trigger points for CFR creation and/or reaching each funnel stage is critical. A jumping off point to brainstorm your triggers:

• CFR Creation: 1) When a lead goes from an inactive (e.g. disqualified) status to active status OR 2) When a new lead is created with an active status.

• Inquiry Stage: Same as CFR Creation, as this is the starting stage.

• MQL Stage: When a lead is updated to your predetermined MQL status.

• SAL Stage: When a lead is updated to your predetermined SAL status.

• SQL Stage: When the lead converts and an opportunity is created.

• Closed Won Stage: When Opportunity Sales Stage updates to Closed Won.

CFR Summary Fields

These will live outside of the funnel stages.

• Fundamental Summary Fields

• Unique ID

• Lead, Contact, Opportunity, Account - lookups to related records

• Current Status - you can use a formula or workflow to calculate this

• Additional Summary Field suggestions

• Segment - SMB, Enterprise, etc.

• Territory - see performance by predefined geographical locations

• Vertical - see performance by industry

Fundamental Tracking Fields

You’ll want each of these to be stamped so that you get a snapshot view at each stage.

• Timestamps - filter by time periods, measure velocity between stages

• Campaign (ID) - campaign the prospect responded to 

• Action - webinar registration, asset download, email response, web form fill, etc.

• Lead Owner - who is working the prospect at each stage

Additional Tracking Fields

• All Stages

• Campaign groupings - group records together based on campaign themes, marketing channels, marketing teams, etc.

• Action groupings - group records together based on action types

• Lead Owner hierarchy - this can help you see the team, manager, etc. of the lead owner at the time of each stage

• Inquiry: Did this go straight to MQL?

• MQL: Lead Status, Lead Score

• SAL: Sales Activity

• SQL: Stage, Pipeline 

• CW: Revenue

• Other: What other views are helpful for your business needs?  Some examples are product interest, spend, email domain, etc.

Ensure fields are updated before the corresponding funnel stage is triggered to get an accurate snapshot of the prospect's attributes. Consider using stamped fields for historical data (e.g., dates, lead owner) and lookup fields or formulas for dynamic data (e.g., latest campaign name or grouping).

Measuring Your Funnel

Now that you have set up your tracking framework, you can set up reports and dashboards to measure your funnel.  Typically, you will want to be able to trend your data on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and/or annual basis.  

Fundamental Metrics

• MQL volume

• MQL to SQL %

• SQL volume

• Pipeline

• SQL to CW %

• CW volume

• Revenue

Additional Metrics

• Inquiry & SAL volume

• Other conversion rates (e.g. Inquiry to MQL %, MQL to SAL %, MQL to CW %)

• Bookings

• Average Bookings/CW

Slice and dice these metrics based on your tracking setup, audience, and business needs - from individual Marketing Campaigns to Marketing Teams to all of Marketing combined.

Common Challenges & Solutions

These are some real-life challenges we ran into and how we solved them:

• CFR creations inadvertently triggered: Even with our best efforts, this can sometimes happen.  Have a solid prevention plan in place as well as a plan for clean-up/deletion (and make sure to back up your data in case anything needs to be restored).

• Funnel stages triggered prior to field updates: This will mean that the attributes on the stage(s) are inaccurate.  Again, best is prevention.  Make sure you have a solid order of operations process to ensure fields are updated before the corresponding funnel stage is triggered.  Keep this process up-to-date as things evolve.

• Need for retroactive field population: Due to the changing needs of the business, you will likely need to add fields that did not exist on prior records.  Plan for this ahead of time by creating a process for when the need arises.  If there is no existing historical data, make sure to include that in your wiki and your analysts are all aware of this data discrepancy.

Additional Considerations

• Exiting the Funnel: The prospect can exit the funnel at any stage via being disqualified or closed lost. If this happens, you can close out your record or make it inactive.

• Inbound vs. Outbound Funnels: While this article focused on inbound activities, you can certainly customize these concepts to an outbound motion as well. You will want to outline your outbound funnel and determine the stages, triggers, flow and processes.

• Individuals vs. Buying Groups: For scaling and future-proofing, you will want to think about how to apply these concepts to buying groups or customer accounts rather than individuals. You can do both by having the custom object be built on an individual level and then use business logic to aggregate them into a buying group funnel. This will be applicable as you go up market.

Final Thoughts

By following this practical guide, you'll be well on your way to setting up a robust tracking framework and measuring your B2B marketing funnel effectively. Remember, the key is to align your metrics with your business goals and make data-driven decisions to optimize your funnel's performance. 

This will be an ongoing iterative process that will require continuous refinement and collaboration across teams. Once you use this guide as a starting point, you may seek out additional resources such as GSL to optimize your funnel tracking and measurement capabilities.  The sky’s the limit!