Conversion, Not Clicks | Live with Paul Rawson @ BCMU!

If your leadership team only cares about “what did we close?” but you’re stuck reporting traffic, followers and vibes… this episode is for you. 😅

In this live session, we’re joined by Paul (20+ years in marketing, now at Marmalade Marketing and a HubSpot Gold Partner) to get into the actual data and metrics that matter — what to stop reporting, what to track instead, and how to explain B2B buying journeys without hiding behind a funnel diagram.

Marketing confession of the episode:
 Paul got Argos catalogue pricing wrong and a product that should’ve been £79.99 went out as £39.99. Print mistakes are forever.

We get into:
 ✅ Vanity metrics to ditch (and why CEOs eventually come for “commercial impact”)
 ✅ The three numbers that matter most: revenue, pipeline, ROI — and why conversion and velocity deserve a seat too
 ✅ People, not personas: why named accounts beat “Jane, 32, reads The Guardian”
 ✅ The funnel is not linear (and maybe never was) — so how do we explain the journey?
 ✅ Account-based thinking: quality, penetration, and activity in the right accounts
 ✅ How long B2B journeys really are (and why 3 website visits over 2 years can still be a win)
 ✅ Lead scoring as a practical way to track progress without funnel theatre
 ✅ The “so what?” problem: data everywhere, but no story — how to fix analysis and reporting
 ✅ Minimum data every marketer should have: TAM, conversions, velocity, plus GA and website behaviour tools
 ✅ Website metrics: what matters, what doesn’t, and why top-of-funnel numbers still need context

If you’re tired of getting dragged into “why didn’t this channel convert?” arguments, or you need a smarter way to communicate marketing impact to finance and leadership — hit play.

Like, subscribe, and drop your worst “CEO hates my metrics” moment in the comments.

#B2BMarketing #MarketingMetrics #ROI #Attribution #HubSpot #MarketingOps #ConversionRate #ABM

Transcript

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We are now going to be talking about the actual data and the metrics that matter. I know we have throughout this talked about specific numbers and things that people care about, but we're going to really get into it with our next guest. So Paul, over to you. Tell us about yourself. Hi everybody, my name's Paul. I am, I think described as a marketing veteran, so I've got 20 plus years in marketing. I currently work for a marketing agency called Marmalade Marketing. We're an agency that specialises in professional services and also tech. HubSpot Gold Partner, so we do lots of interesting stuff around sort of like regeneration, marketing automation. I've spent my career working in a number of different sectors as a marketing director before working in an agency. I've worked in retail manufacturing, professional services, and lucky enough to worked in nearly 20 countries in marketing, so it's been a really good career for me. So yeah. perfectly leads us on to what is your marketing confession? I'm sure you have a couple but what's your favourite? Yeah, I've got two. So maybe people in the room are a bit young. Does everyone remember the Argos catalogue? Oh, yeah. A few people remember the Argos catalogue. to do Christmas stuff. So I used to work for Argos, Nick got cracking nearly 20 years ago, and I got some pricing wrong in the catalogue. they used to basically put a reprint sheet at the back and the pricing I got wrong, something should have been £79.99 and I bought it for £39.99. And for some of that period, you have to basically sell it for £39.99. So I got into a lot of trouble with the product team. It was like a bedside table. I was about ask if it was something that people circled for their Christmas list because I used to do that. But no, not a bedside table. That's a very good confession. There's not much you can do with a print fuck up, there? Once it's happened, it's happened. Old school. Old school. Old school fuck up. So obviously we're to get into the data conversation, into the nitty gritty. But before we start, obviously, and a lot of us have probably fallen prey to this, which is sharing vanity metrics with our senior leaders and maybe sometimes in the occasional board back to make ourselves look good. So what are some of those metrics that you think are completely useless and ones that we should maybe like banish? I think you talked a little bit before around the tenure of marketing leaders. That's where we get into a problem if you're always talking about financial metrics, because at some point somebody's going to say, well, that's great, but what is the commercial impact here? Whether it's follower numbers, website visitors, et cetera, you've got to do something to convert people. You've got to understand what your total viable market is and total addressable market is, not just about volume. And I think... There's lots of talk now and now, think, about how we're switching maybe from volume, from a quantity to a quality, and always around the conversion, which is, I suppose, why we're all in this room today. What's one metric that you've presented that you now cringe at? anything that finance can have a go at, right? Do people like Roy Sutherland, when you see him on, I think he's like, Olga V, like... Yeah, yeah. But he talks, I think he has some really good points around marketing around the concept of we're all trying to be accountants. We're actually, we probably do need some flair, but we'll never get the time because accountants have more... more say in a business than marketing people do. I don't know how many people em have a good relationship with their accountancy team and the people that work at accounts, but that I think should be your number one thing when you're thinking about marketing is how do you make friends with accountants? How do you talk about ROI? What are customers worth? em And for me, it's people, not personas. If you work in B2B and you're talking about personas, you've got to start again, I think, because... your sales team will understand who the people are in the accounts they're trying to convert and they'll be named people, not personas, not Jane, 32, Reeds the Guardian, da da da, all of that type of stuff. In B2B, I don't think that's relevant anymore in terms of how you basically attack from an account marketing-based point of view. are we admitting that we've used personas a bit too much? I think personas are a good roadmap in terms of a North Star, they're not a... Why use a persona if most of your business will understand what accounts they want to convert in a particular... quarter or a particular year, they'll know what those named people are who they are. Everybody in this room is going to at some point appear on a Lidu CRM system as a named person. They might have. Yeah, where basically you're a lead for Lidu, right, which is great, but you're not a number. This isn't going to be 60, 70 people turned into a room. It's, I have this conversation, I had this conversation, which I think is your point of mail a bit earlier around how to get people into a room and to network with you. Absolutely. So nice job on avoiding my question, by the way. So if we're going to flip it to the positive side, if you don't want to talk about numbers that you cringe at, um if you could only track three numbers to judge whether your website and marketing is doing its job, what would those be? Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. think somebody mentioned the number, didn't they, around how many websites they get and the actual conversion. I think the conversion is the real piece, but also understanding that people aren't coming to your website to convert all of the time. They're coming to your website to research and to understand where people are in the funnel. We talk a lot about funnels and how the funnel is broken and what does funnel actually mean, top of the funnel, bottom of the all of that kind of stuff. But actually understanding where people are in the funnel, I think is an interesting one. And also sort of reporting on that because those top-level numbers the business should understand that that is top of the funnel that is just people who are searching those searches out there rather than the people that are going to convert and then having tools on your website to convert people once they're further in the funnel is so the metrics would be top of the funnel and middle of the funnel so you understand what those are and how you can help sales convert those. And how do you go about communicating some of that to people? Because I think that's one of the problems that we, and again, it's a trap that we kind of all fall into, which is, you know, for us in the marketing team, we need to look at the full scope of those metrics, including some of the horrible vanity ones to sort of show people, for us to understand the journey that people take before they convert. But how do we kind of explain that to people who maybe don't understand what we're talking about? Or maybe they look at the funnel and they're like, What is this mofu thing? Yes, I'm pretty sure that nobody in this room enters the marketing to talk about funnels, right? We all want to do like parties and PR and... Richard was like, no, I don't want to do parties. But. Marketing is a cool thing, isn't it? We came into marketing because it's a cool profession and you can have real impact on businesses. uh I think I'll go back to the point that I made of look at actual customer journeys, look at people who have converted and start speaking about those individual journeys in the business rather than talking about we've had 10,000 people here and 3,000 people here, et cetera, et cetera. Just work through what an actual customer journey looks like and the touch points that you've enabled. Dan Priestley talks about 11 touch points. So thinking about how many touch points have you had and reporting on that I think is a good metrics for us to understand, say well actually yeah, this person's had six pieces of content or they've been to two events, whatever it is, understanding that the journey now is longer and more complex. And then how do you go from that to then kind of being practical and being like, okay, these people haven't had these touch points, so therefore we need to do X, Y, Z. Yeah, that also goes back to the conversion point, right? And then also the conversation I think you guys had earlier around the sales and marketing integration, making sure that you are talking to sales teams around. So the average MQL to SQL conversion rate is somewhere between 5 and 10%, right? Which is, m and you know. I've had a joke about salespeople this morning. But ultimately, salespeople don't really care about the leads that you're trying to generate. What they care about is the leads in the accounts that they want to close for the number that they want to hit so they can get a bonus. That's essentially how salespeople operate. the closer we get to that, better. We've got Rolexes and couches to pay for. Couches. 3 Series. ultimately is understanding what those accounts look like and what penetration and activity you've had in those actual accounts. So would you say that, so we're kind of mildly touching account based marketing, mildly, because we're talking about accounts. Would you say that is your preferred view to the world rather than just a straight funnel? Yeah, I think you can say there's a graphic that I think Greg and the guys share where there isn't a funnel anymore. There's like 30 or 40 different things where you're following and em is the funnel broken? We've gone through different things in marketing, haven't we? So when I first started it was, okay, we'll spend a lot of money and I worked for a business and we spent nearly 30 million pound on marketing, right? So TV, ads, radio, all the old school stuff right before digital stuff, 30 million quid. And my first job was to basically go into a shop and ask people with a clipboard. to work out whether or not they seem to have it or not. So we've come a long way from there and ultimately is understanding what do those KPI mechanisms look like, but is there a funnel anymore? And I think that's a question. don't think it's really answered yet. Can I just? Yeah. So we had a speaker at one of the previous conversion meetups and he bought Lidu for his business. He ultimately bought Lidu. And we, as a joke, were looking through how he had bought Lidu. things that he do tracks his lifetime visits. So it shows how many times people have been on your website and what they're engaged with. And he, uh I met him at an event two years before he became a customer. Great conversation, classic event lead, know, really interested, wanted to see the platform. And then we looked at what happened in the two years after that. And he went on the video website. three different times in two years. So how do you put that in a funnel? And that's the point, right? These are particularly in a B2B or in a considered purchase space, your sales cycle may well be two years and it may well be different touch points. And I suppose if you're not able to track that for something like you, it's a hell of a lot harder to explain to a sales person, don't worry, this will come in two years. It's coming. It's also the reason why like the average tenure for a a marketing director or CMO is like 18 months, right? Yeah, because they were immediately under pressure to say right help us generate more leads But in most businesses most b2b businesses, it's a it's a more complex sales process now. It's more complex sales process, more people involved in the process. It's only going to get more complex as the economy tightens. And as the economy tightens, means that more finance people are getting involved in the decisions about every product, which means that you have different types of buyers. em And if people were like the Miller Hyman. em mechanism around the different types of people in the buying group. That's a really good book and I suggest that people read it. It's really good for sales and marketing around accounts and how you'd be to be marketing and sales. Yeah, think that one of the challenges we've got here is that a lot of people are drawn to the funnel and the conversation around the funnel because it is an easy model to explain things. So like when you are dealing with people who are outside, like I think we all know how complicated it is. I don't think the room needs convincing. I think we're like, yeah, it's really hard. And there are so many touch points. Attribution is messy. The classic funnel situation. I'm not sure I think it ever existed. I'm going to be real. But I... I understand why we lean to it. So what other mechanisms, what other ways could we like maybe guide our organisation away from talking about the funnel? Because I do think then we get into this conversation around, if you drop a thousand in the top, then it shakes out at like 10 at the bottom, which is not great for us because that's not focusing necessarily on quality. And that's really kind of where we want to get to, right? Yeah. I joined a business five or six years ago where the marketing team were basically incentivized on just generating leads. So they generate between three, 400 leads a month and they get a small bonus or a couple hundred quid bonus. And then when I sat down with the sales team and said, well, how many accounts are you trying to convert this year? It's like 20. Why are we trying to generate nearly 3,500 leads? Do you like to the number doesn't equate, does it? I think that just goes back to a good conversation between sales and marketing to understand what the process is, what the addressable market is, and where does that start? And I think it goes back to the point I made before, is that... I think now marketing people, getting into more of a conversation about the quality rather than the quantity around that conversion piece. But then it is also about the nurture piece and products like Lead do make it easier for you to follow people through the process. Whereas before the attribution model, four or five years ago, was really, really difficult for B2B. And 10 years ago, we were literally, events, brochures. That's what marketing did, but now we can get more involved in the commercial process of trying to convert customers. I think to like also add like a practical thing that we all can do. Most of us can set up some sort of lead scoring and starting to look at first of all, how good are the leads when they come in, but then having lead scoring that reflects their life cycle with you. then month to month tracking, okay, we've had 10 leads at like 10 points, 20 leads at 20 points. And actually those 20 leads went on to have 60 points next month because we're doing X, Y, Z. I think that's a... It's an easy way to dump the funnel and kind of just not show it, but also then track how your leads are moving through, especially if you know you need lots of touch points. You want those points to be growing and to kind of be pushing people on. Yeah. mean, there's a, don't know if anyone read the dream data report that said that now the marketing funnel is 272 days long. So like from a velocity point of view, that's a hell of a lot of touch points. yeah. That's before sales. That's just marketing. That's just marketing nurture. Yeah. So I think, yeah, the lead scoring thing is a really good, but, but again, even with that, it's about making sure that that stays flexible because you're going to add more and more and more stuff to that constantly. So it's like, constantly going back and revisiting. yeah, don't just set it up and forget about it. And it's a great opportunity for marketing people, right? Because the marketing owns more of the funnel. there are more touch points. as it sounds constitutive, but as sales processes become more complex, marketing can help more with that because, no offence to salespeople in the room, but they can become a little bit focused on what's today or tomorrow. Whereas marketing can help with that cycle as it becomes more complex and longer, like you said. So what about teams that do seem to have all the data but seem to be still just making gut decisions? Where are you seeing that occurs in your work? what from where they've got the data around the... guess what do those, so what do those team, if there is a team, sorry, if there is a team that has all the data but seems to be ignoring it and just making gut decisions, what kind of a setup are they in and why are they kind of making those gut decisions instead of looking at the data? Yeah, it's that eight-old question, isn't it? Is marketing an art or a science? And I think it's where you probably sit on the tipping point of art and science. I think that... em Tools like ChatGPT I talked about earlier around how they can help produce more content as marketing people if we're shying away from the data or we're not particularly comfortable with numbers, you mentioned earlier as well, is use AI to help you with those numbers. Use AI to go through data. Use AI to, I think some of the more interesting things around... m looking at sales call transcripts as an example is one thing that's big at the moment in B2B. How sales people are dealing with objections, what those objections are. So we've had one tip, one tip only for B2B people is get the transcripts of the sales calls, put them through some kind of AI and allow that to enable the data process. Are you saying it's the analysis bit that maybe is falling down? they've got the data, analysis is hard, so they're making up decisions? Good It's probably what system you use, right? So some people, know, I think we're really lucky that CRM systems and systems like Lidio are relatively cheap. Like 10 years ago, 15 years ago, they weren't. So it's a lot. So you only had the big enterprise organizations that were doing enterprise sales and marketing integration sales. Whereas now it's, it's a lot easy for those with a lot of us in environments where you've got small budgets to, to, get tools that enable you to get the data. what should you do with that data? That's where I think AI can really help marketing people. think the thing that I see to add to your point, Paul, is that a lot of the teams that I work with, there's a bit of a so what missing. So people have got a lot of data, like you've alluded to, Ruta, they're drowning in it. We're like, I can get data from absolutely fucking everywhere and everything. But what the hell does any of it mean? If it's not a straight line attributed uh deal. that's pipeline or then close revenue, like people really struggle with it. It's like, so what does that mean? And I think you hit on something, Paul, which is the journey that people take. it's like taking the metrics you've got and then does that marry up with the journey that you expect people to take? So like a classic example of this is going to be, okay, so they clicked on your LinkedIn post, then they went to your website. Then what happened? Did they convert? Did they sign up to your newsletter? Did they go into a nurture flow? Did they, what happened next? And it's like, you use the data to tell that story. And that is the thing that tells you whether it's working. And those are the data points, especially for a marketing team. They're the things we need to look at. They're not necessarily the things as we've talked about with Jade, that you would necessarily report back up to the top, but that's the point. You have to get the data and then ask yourself, what happened next? Also, what does this mean? Because you can do things like look at, we increased our follower count on LinkedIn, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything if it didn't translate into something else, which is the next step. Did they go to the website, for example? just to round us off, because we need to be good on time. Quick fire, what is the minimum data we should all have in place as marketers? So we can go platforms or types. I think... um What is your total addressable market, viable market, right? What is that number? The concept of like a thousand true fans, I think is one that we should always think about in marketing, which is it's not 10,000, it's not 20,000. If it was 20,000, if your total addressable market was 20,000, your owners of your businesses will be millionaires and you'd be millionaires, right? So your total addressable market is probably closer between 500 and another thousand. So that is a key thing to start with, to say, well, how do I then allocate my marketing to Ben? activity process to those 500 to a thousand people not thinking about the 25,000, 30,000 etc. Emma, what would your minimum be? My minimum is I do think total adjustable markets really good. think the minimum that I would, I know we talked about the three with Jade, know, revenue pipeline conversions, velocity is a big one for me. I think I would encourage more marketing people to look at velocity because it is really, really long. And I think we need to figure out how to communicate that. go really uh the opposite direction of just platforms. Google Analytics and something that tracks website interaction, so like a hot jar or something like that, because without those, uh you basically can't make any adjustments to the website and know that anything happened. So I would feel quite powerless. Excellent, thank you so much. Well, thank you, Paul. We've got time for some questions for a few minutes. Questions? Yep. So, sort of going back to this sort of question. How should we be thinking about websites, this post funnel? We're here talking about convergence and engagement. The role of the website, what are the updates that we should be prioritizing? How do we build a website for this host? oh My first reaction to that is like, what is the key metric that your business cares about? So if like you were in SaaS, most of us, we give a shit about demos getting booked and demos getting sat. So if the website is not doing those two things, then you kind of work back from there. So that for me, it's always the big thing. And then how do you work back? em And that might be looking at things like CRO, SEO. oh buyer experience, like if hit your website and they don't get what you buy as we've already talked about today. Yeah, cleaning that stuff up, I think is important. I don't know if you guys have extras. Yeah, go back to the funnel. The funnel isn't a linear process, but there are still stages in the buying cycle, aren't there? And maybe it's a bit more of a cycle rather than a straight down funnel, or six or seven different funnels. But understanding... What part of effort and your resource and your time is around that educational content? So how do you educate people about the problem? think we talked a bit earlier about features and benefits. How do you basically talk about the benefits more when people might not understand, especially in today's ever-changing world, they might not understand what your features and benefits are because they don't understand the problem. So that educational content of people that aren't in a funnel or the cycle yet, I think is an interesting one for how much resource you spend on that. One thing uh I would add, so that example I used earlier where the guy was on the website 33 times over two years, So you're right, that can't fit into a funnel. There's no way I can say what stage of the funnel is at to those touch points. What are the things we eat? talk about a lot with our customers is you probably aren't going to make a sale from any one of those touch points. Like he's not going to come to the website and the website is going to be the thing to be like, I am going to buy this right now. But any one of those 33 touch points could have been the thing that stopped him buying. If he had a bad experience, he had an irrelevant experience, if the website didn't answer his questions or his concerns, I probably didn't hit me in any of those 33 touch points. I would argue I won him at the event when I gave him a dress. Hmm. Can I add on top just because we're not doing that now? oh I think the other thing is important to look at what your site actually serves right now. So for example, both with Channel Call and with other businesses, most of the traffic comes from SEO. So obviously, if we don't want a website or we massively change the website, could make so kind of understanding where they're important. points are, because if your website's getting no SEO traffic, you've not got any PPC, and it's basically like a brochure, then I don't know if you should be spending lots of time on it and it's worth it. Like that's a different discussion. I'll give you real world example. I worked for a business where we had close to nearly 200,000 unique users a month. business with 75 global offices and I reported on those unique user numbers and the CEO said in front of all the rest of the leadership team, I don't think those numbers mean shit. Literally we've had 40 conversions who the F are the other people and most of time we can't answer that question right but we know that it's if we're doing the right things in the right way but that's the concept of this CEO. The CEOs will always look at the bottom number And if we keep talking about the top number, at some point it's going to say, well, none of these are converting. So that's an interesting point around what the process is around conversion.