This piece is part of a larger historiography series where I’m breaking down how modern marketing got to where it is, to actually understand the path we took so we can stop repeating the same mistakes under different names and frameworks. Read the previous historiography on marketing getting tied to revenue here.
Marketing can justify its spend with the right metrics.
There’s a version of this story that people tell themselves because it’s simple and comforting, and it goes something like this. Marketing has become accountable to the boardroom like everyone else. They have learned to speak the language of the business, and now everything is measurable, optimized, and aligned to revenue. They deliver MQLs consistently which the sales team continuously converts to pipeline revenue. The executive team praised marketing for all their hard work, fully funded the team and everyone lived happily ever after.
Is that not what happened in your story???
Yeah, me neither.
5 in house marketing roles, 2 startups, countless consulting gigs…never happened. 20 years in marketing and I never got the happy ending I was promised.
What actually happened was a lot messier and way more inconvenient. Leads that could barely convert, MQLs that were seen as garbage, meetings that went into a black hole, deals that appeared months later with no marketing activity attributed to them and endless conversations justifying my existence.
How did we get here, where the only way to prove my worth to the business was through metrics and attribution?
In the early 2000s, marketing had a real credibility problem and the business had a real need for accountability from marketing. But instead of building a better translation between the two, we slowly trained the entire function to reduce its value down to metrics.
If you want to understand why marketing looks the way it does today, especially in B2B environments where dashboards have become a kind of operating religion, you have to go back.
There are different eras of marketing performance measurement. Each playing an important role in defining how marketing gets measured. But also having a tremendous effect on flatting and simplifying marketing’s role as it relates to marketing measurement.
The Marketing Accountability Era (2004 – 2010)
This is where the shift begins. This era focused on connecting marketing to long-term business outcomes like customer value, brand equity, and cash flow, with early frameworks attempting to build a bridge between marketing activity and financial performance.
The Moneyball Era (2010 – 2018)
With the rise of platforms like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and marketing automation systems, everything became measurable, and measurement quickly became the proxy for strategy.
The “Marketing for Dummies” Era (2018 – 2024)
With too much information and not enough shared understanding of the business or the market, complexity got compressed into frameworks, playbooks, and surface-level metrics that could be easily communicated and scaled.
In 2007, organizations like the Marketing Accountability Standards Board were trying to formalize the idea that marketing activity should connect to intermediate outcomes, and those outcomes should connect to financial performance through identifiable drivers like customer value, retention, and cash flow. And good on them. It was a legitimate attempt to protect marketing by giving it a defensible structure inside the business.
The original question they were trying to answer was “how does marketing create business value over time, and how do we prove that in a way that aligns with how the company makes decisions.”
Valid questions that are worth answering. But what are the metrics used to answer those questions?
MASB had the answer. The metrics were measures of marketing outcomes. Things like CPM and cost per lead. As well as measures of effectiveness, like redemption rate for coupons and market share. They specifically noted focusing first on measures of effectiveness.
They explicitly called out that every marketing outcome metric should be validated against short-term and/or long-term cash flow drivers of the business. This is an extremely important distinction that got ridiculously simplified in the “marketing for dummies” era.
A business has different cash flow levers; revenue is just ONE of them. It could also be Revenue Growth Rate, Gross Profit Margin, Overhead/SG&A Expenses, Price Change Percentage, Accounts Receivable Days and others. Which levers are most important depends on the business model.
Different business models include wholesalers & distributors, SaaS, service providers, subscription based, supplier oriented, hybrid or omnichannel. And those are just the B2B models.
The bridge between marketing and financial performance, which was supposed to be layered and causal, got shortened into MQLs, because marketing got taken over by people who were clueless about real marketing and because ain’t no CFO got time for nuance.
And then the technology showed up and made this oversimplification feel legitimate.
Suddenly we had new metrics, AND you could actually track them. You could see traffic sources, click paths, conversion rates, campaign performance, and for the first time, it felt like you could trace behavior from interaction to action with something resembling precision.
This was a gift and a curse to marketing. We finally had something tangible to point to and validate what we were doing. But on the other hand, what did it really mean? The existence of measurable data doesn’t mean you’re measuring the right thing, and the ability to report something cleanly doesn’t mean it explains the behavior that actually drives the business.
What about those measures of effectiveness MASB was talking about? Sayonara. Too complicated, Google and Salesforce can’t track it, so we forgot all about those real quick.
This is the point where B2B marketing found its most powerful translation tool, and arguably its most constraining one at the same time, in the form of the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall.
The Waterfall was developed by SiriusDecisions in the early 2000s. It was created to fix a coordination problem between marketing and sales that had been festering for years, where one team would throw leads over a wall and the other team would complain that those leads were useless, and both would go back to their corners convinced the other didn’t understand how the business actually worked.
Glad SiriusDecisions fixed that problem.
We have to be honest. A major problem from the jump was that SiriusDecisions was a sales-oriented consultancy with little understanding of the role of marketing. From their perspective the role of marketing was centered around lead generation. Red flag number one.
In addition, from day 1 the model was never designed to reflect selling to a buying committee. Red flag number two.
The model also never helped marketing and sales align their different languages and understanding of the business. How many times have you had conversations around the definition of a qualified lead? Too many to count. Red flag number three.
What the Waterfall DID do was impose structure on chaos by defining stages, standardizing terminology, and creating a shared view of how a person moved from initial interest to revenue. Each stage had definitions, conversion expectations, and ownership, which meant that for the first time, marketing and sales could at least argue using the same map.
In its ideal form, the Waterfall was a coordination tool, a way to align functions around a shared process. Theoretically, it gave executives visibility into flow, leakage, and efficiency, and it gave marketing a way to demonstrate that what it was producing had a path to revenue.
That’s why it spread. It worked.
But like most frameworks that work in one dimension, it started to take over dimensions it was never designed to handle.
Someone fills out a form, downloads a report, registers for a webinar, requests a demo, and suddenly they exist inside the model, which means they can be counted, scored, progressed, and reported.
So everything before that is, what?? Irrelevant?
What about all that stuff before someone pops up on your website or follows you on social media or registers for your event. You think that was just because of the ad or the email or the content syndication program??
Can we please stop it.
Some of you are rolling your eyes right now, I can feel it. Hold on for a sec. Let me give you a quick example.
Take something as ordinary as buying a car. It’s often the example given to support a digital marketing strategy. People make buying decisions online without ever interacting with a salesperson. A car buyer will compare models, configure features and calculate payments, all online. When they show up to the dealership, they know exactly what they want and are ready to sign the check.
However, the question that never gets answered is why Toyota over Honda? Why Chevrolet over Ford? Why did they choose a truck over a sedan. An EV over a V8?
A buyer might spend months casually noticing certain brands, hearing their parents talk about reliability, watching a friend deal with a transmission issue, seeing a commercial that frames one truck as tough and another as refined, admiring a coworkers new sound system, absorbing conversations, and forming a quiet hierarchy in their mind long before they ever open a browser to do “research.”
Why Toyota instead of Honda isn’t decided at the point of conversion. It’s decided somewhere between reputation, perceived longevity, past experience, what mechanics say when they’re off the clock, and the quiet belief that one brand will still be running at 200,000 miles while another might make you nervous at 99,000.
Why someone chooses Ford over Chevrolet isn’t just about specs, it’s about identity, cultural positioning, and what the brand has trained people to associate with themselves, whether that’s toughness, heritage, or something that feels like it belongs in their life story. The carefully crafted narrative that a Ford F150 is a MAN’s truck, and a Toyota Tacoma is basically a tonka truck for adults.
None of that shows up in a funnel, but all of it determines what flows into the funnel.
Marketing metrics shouldn’t be limited to just funnel metrics. You CAN measure pre-funnel things, just not in the same way, and not on the same cadence, and not with the same false sense of precision that dashboards provide for post-inquiry activity.
You can measure brand awareness, share of search, direct traffic, sentiment, preference, recall, competitive positioning, and the themes that emerge in win/loss analysis. You can study how customers describe you before they buy, how they justify the purchase after, and what patterns show up across segments that consistently choose you versus those that don’t.
There is an entire discipline around this, and it connects (if you do the work), to financial outcomes like conversion rates, sales efficiency, customer lifetime value, and willingness to pay. It’s not that this part of marketing is immeasurable, it just doesn’t collapse neatly into a monthly report where you can point to one number and say, “that is the thing that caused this quarter’s pipeline to grow.”
But instead of building better ways to connect those layers, marketing started over-indexing on what the system already understood, MQLs. In the Moneyball era, brand marketers got pushed out. I mean, who needs them when all you need to do is calculate how many tradeshow leads turned into marketing sourced revenue, am I right? By the time we got to the marketing for dummies era, we had a bunch of marketing leaders who knew demand gen (and how to politic). They didn’t know squat about building a brand, let alone how to tie it business outcomes.
At the same time, the volume of data exploded, and what was supposed to be insight turned into junk. Marketing teams now have access to more metrics than any function reasonably knows what to do with, and in the absence of a clear narrative, the default behavior is to present as much of it as possible in the hopes that something in the pile will signal value.
Impressions go up. Click-through rates fluctuate. Cost per lead shifts. MQL volume looks healthy this month and slightly less healthy next month. Pipeline influenced by marketing is reported alongside pipeline sourced by marketing, and there is just enough ambiguity between the two to keep everyone slightly confused but not enough to stop the report from being circulated.
The boardroom is not actually asking for more numbers, it’s asking for translation, whether it realizes it or not. It’s asking whether the business is becoming more valuable in the market, whether it is attracting the right customers, whether marketing is making growth more efficient or more durable, and whether the company is building something that customers understand and trust before the sales conversation begins.
And we’re giving them a chart showing leads acquired by source. SO WHAT??
When marketing responds with a collection of activity metrics, even accurate ones, it reinforces the perception that it doesn’t fully understand how its work connects to those questions, which widens the credibility gap it was trying to close in the first place.
We stopped evaluating marketing. Instead we redefined marketing around what was easiest to measure.
The funnel is not wrong per se. Metrics like CAC, LTV, pipeline, conversion rates, and revenue contribution are not wrong. They are essential for understanding how efficiently visible demand is being converted into business.
But they are not the whole system and treating them as the whole system is what flattens marketing into a function that can report on movement but struggles to explain why the movement exists at all.
A more complete view of marketing accountability would separate the questions instead of forcing them into one report. One set of metrics should answer how efficiently demand moves through the system once it is visible, which is where funnel metrics, pipeline, conversion rates, and cost efficiency belong. Another set should answer whether the business is becoming more chosen in the market before demand becomes visible, which is where brand, perception, audience alignment, and market understanding live.
Both of those layers can be measured. Both of them matter to the business. But they operate on different timelines, require different methods, and tell different parts of the same story.
Until marketing can consistently translate both of those layers into business language, the function will continue to be judged primarily by the part that fits neatly into Salesforce, which is the part that shows up after the market has already made up its mind.
That’s a problem with translation, not data. And it is the same problem that started this entire conversation in the first place.
Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/
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