Private equity/startup go-to-market executive Bryan Semple talks about the evolving B2B customer journey and how modern marketers can measure the impact of their efforts.

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Here are just a few highlights from our conversation:

C-suite marketers can't "steer the ship" correctly unless they know all the bolts and welds (05:41): "Unless you have...an operational view of the world, I've worked for some CMOs in the past that just aren't able to dive into the details of how does PPC work, how do you evaluate a PPC program, tell me about SEO, why are these numbers up and down. And one of the things from my time in the Navy on the boat was you knew how everything in the boat worked, so you could go and ask questions of people....

"It's the same thing...as a modern CMO. Unless you can go down and have discussions about what's going on with digital advertising and understand what people are presenting you in terms of the data, it's very hard to add value and it's very hard to make sure that the money...is being spent correctly.... CMOs today, VPs of marketing, anybody in marketing, you need to have an understanding of the minute details of how the business does operate if you're going to be effective and drive things correctly, because the model in these high-velocity models is very complicated and you have to be a master of all the details."

Forget year over year: you need to check certain metrics daily (09:38): "We actually do daily numbers.... I've got eight screens across the way behind my desk, and they actually have a bunch of daily metrics up right now in addition to real-time traffic metrics. We look at numbers daily and, when it comes to traffic, we actually look at traffic on an hourly basis and we compare it to the same amount of traffic a week before....

"We're feeding an inside sales team, so we can't wait a week to say 'oh yeah, something broke last week.' So the daily and the weeklies tend to give you validation that everything is working correctly. It's going to quickly spot if you've got traffic jumping up and down what's going on. If suddenly your form conversions change...something happened on the site. So the weekly is almost a way just to validate that everything is operating correctly. For anyone that's got Salesforce...or Marketo or HubSpot and they're using GoToMeetings and WebExes and they're sending out emails, there's a lot of moving parts in this system.

"The 'close-often ones' are to make sure things aren't broken, and then where you get the longer trends is when you do the month-over-month comparisons...and then when you get to the quarter to quarter, that's where you spot the longer trends of where your business is suffering or things are changing you don't catch.

"On a week over week basis, traffic doesn't generally doesn't change that much. Your form conversion rates generally don't change that much (or actually they will depending on what you get sent out). Your 404 errors on your site. What you see is, week over week, things generally don't change that much, and if they do, you need to understand why they changed and what you did. You're almost looking for the absence of change and when you do see a dramatic change you should understand exactly what happened there."

You can read Bryan's blog at storymetrix.com and follow Bryan on Twitter @vk_bryan.

Bryan and I talked about much more, including scoring leads, tradeshow ROI, and more, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

This episode brought to you by Citrix GoToWebinar:

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Music credit: Noam Weinstein.

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Published on March 16, 2016