Stacking Growth | The B2B Marketing Podcast Measuring Marketing: A Complete Breakdown
Sep 9, 2025
Dale Harrison, a marketing ROI expert, joins host Matt Sciannella to reshape how marketing investments are evaluated. They discuss the pitfalls of traditional ROI metrics and emphasize the significance of time lags in B2B sales cycles. Dale shares how past marketing efforts can have long-term impacts, reshaping the narrative that brand marketing takes ages to deliver results. He also explores the complexities of customer acquisition costs in SaaS businesses and promotes a more nuanced understanding of marketing contributions to revenue.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Revenue Misleads ROI Calculations
- Revenue is the wrong basis for marketing ROI because businesses actually run on margins, not top-line sales.
- Using revenue-focused ROI misaligns spend and hides the true value marketing brings to margins and operations.
Marketing As An Amplifier, Not A Direct Generator
- Marketing acts like a factory building: it amplifies efficiency across sales and operations rather than directly producing revenue.
- Removing marketing forces sales to prospect more and lowers close rates and productivity.
Direct Response Analogy For Performance Marketing
- Dale compares modern performance marketing to pre-internet direct response ads that produced immediate sales without a sales team.
- He argues pure performance works for short-lag DTC but fails for most B2B with long sales cycles.