Why long sales cycles make B2B marketing hard to measure

Long B2B sales cycles make marketing difficult to measure. When a purchase takes months or even years, the time between marketing activity and a completed sale creates a fundamental problem for attribution, optimization, and ROI. The longer the cycle, the harder it is to know which marketing activity actually influenced the outcome.

I didn’t train as a marketer. I started my career as an electronics engineer several decades ago, and the math skills I developed proved invaluable as the internet, digital advertising, and marketing automation brought numeracy to the fore in our industry. I confess to being one of those annoying marketers who love a good spreadsheet.

I clearly remember trying to work out how to control systems that had time delays. Frankly, I didn’t retain everything I learned, but I do know that trying to control a system that has a time delay is really, really hard. Today, I work with many brands in the engineering space — I couldn’t leave my first love completely — and their long sales cycles have shown me how much the same problem applies to B2B marketing.

B2B is different from B2C

When I started my marketing career, I remember a great direct marketing lecturer telling me there was only one question you needed to ask when someone purchased a car: “How long do you intend to keep the car?” 

His point was that you don’t really think about the next car you want to buy until you’re ready to change. There’s little or no point in direct marketing to that person until about six months before they’re ready to buy their next car.

Of course, building the right perception of your car’s brand needs to happen continuously. This article isn’t really about brand marketing. It’s about the direct response marketing that’s at the core of most of today’s digital campaigns. 

The point is that encouraging a consumer to visit your dealership when they intend to keep their current car for another two, three, or more years is a waste of time and money. That’s just how it is in B2C.

B2B, however, is different. I’ve just purchased a car. It took me about a month to shortlist the brands and models that interested me, test drive them, and place the order. That’s not how B2B purchases work, particularly when it’s a high-cost, high-involvement purchase.

In my world of engineering, teams of people tend to evaluate products for months. I worked with a client who provided infrastructure for airports. The evaluation period took several years, and in some cases, more than a decade. During this period, many internal and external experts and consultants analyzed the products and wrote reports that eventually led to a purchase. Consumers don’t buy like this.

Another problem is time to market. For my clients that manufacture electronic components, for example, their customers have to design the components into a printed circuit board, write software for the system, test, get certifications, and then have the system manufactured in volume. This can take years. 

The product continues to ship and generate orders for its components for many years afterward. Producing a return on marketing investment is almost impossible until the product reaches the end of life.

This isn’t just a martech problem. No CRM or attribution software is going to give you the actual ROI until the sales cycle and your customer’s product lifecycle have finished, and that can take a mighty long time.

Microjourneys — not such a great solution

Of course, we all know the answer to finding the actual ROI, right? Rather than track an entire customer journey, we need to track microjourneys.

For example, what do I need to do to get someone to visit a website, download some technical information, or attend a webinar? You can achieve these goals very quickly, while still allowing for optimization and continuous measurement.

But microjourney tracking has its limitations. How do we quantify the value of a white paper download, webinar visit, or someone having a beer at our trade show booth? As soon as you start or alter the promotional activity, the audience you generate changes. 

Put simply, your biggest customer might have come to you through one of your webinars, but when you ramp up promotion, you’ll probably get competitors attending as well. They’re rarely, if ever, going to be one of your customers!

Ultimately, the biggest issue is that these microjourney measurements rely on non-business metrics. Webinar registrations, data sheet downloads, or even worse, website clicks don’t measure quality. Your microjourney, in effect, leads you nowhere.

Thinking back to my engineering days, the standard approach to controlling systems with delays was to reduce the controller bandwidth. A marketing translation might be: “Don’t make changes until you’ve allowed the sales cycle to complete fully,” which isn’t particularly helpful if my client’s sales cycle is three years. 

I’m not sure they’ll thank me if I wait three years before my first Google Ads optimization. To make things worse, I’m sure some marketers would quite like MarTech to stand still for a few years so they can keep up. That’s not going to happen.

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The solution is always to eliminate vanity metrics

However, all isn’t lost. Ultimately, you can solve the problem by making microjourney measurements meaningful. Don’t just count and ramp up numbers. Measure quality, purchase likelihood, and likely customer or project value. Simple, right?

Sadly, this is really hard to do. But if I can work out how, that’ll be my next MarTech article. Or maybe it’ll win me the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize of Mathematics. 

Until then, we’ll have to build better models. Don’t just count webinar attendees. Measure their fit with your ICP. Understand the company size and likely purchase value. If your marketing increases volume, that’s great, provided there isn’t a corresponding reduction in the quality of contacts.

The most important thing is to stop kidding yourself that raw numbers on a spreadsheet tell you, or your boss, the full story. They’re not. Take the time to give yourself and your boss a clearer picture.