Measuring Marketing: A Complete Breakdown

Today on Stacking Growth, you get the full live event from Dale Harrison and Matt Scinella while they cover the intricacies of marketing ROI. They dig into measurement why traditional ROI is the wrong approach, where it can work, and they answer audience questions. Then they cover all aspects of brand and performance marketing and the best way to measure each pillar of your marketing process. Hope you all enjoy.

Let's go ahead and kick this off. I'm really excited to walk through this sort of measurement methodology with Dale Harrison. We've been going back and forth on it now for several weeks. It's going, it really factors itself well with how business is run.

It takes more of a wider aperture outside of just marketing source and also accounts for a lot of the costing that goes into actually creating revenue for the business. I think all those things will hopefully come to light here as we go through this discussion. If you have been here for any of the previous discussions, you will probably know that we have normally run over an hour going through these. I would expect to do the same today, just based on how Dale and I have worked on this and even our dry run.

Basically, when an hour, I can only imagine what the actual live conversation will be. I do want to hand it over to Dale to kind of walk through some aspects here of this, of the deck. We'll talk through it. Please bring your questions.

I have a couple of my own questions overall, but this should. What this really is about, what bringing this kind of brain measurement or lack calculation is about is about giving you guys a repeatable and defensible way to measure against your brand investments in the absence of having an MM or even being able to use things like multi-touch attribution, things that most businesses don't have the, can't make the business case for or don't or have too much technical debt to actually bring something like that on. So this will give you a repeatable methodology that should be very easily to defend to your finance team because it's going to account for a lot of aspects that they think about as they think about the financial health of the business and it's going to give you a chance to look at really how brain is supposed to work, which is something that should affect all aspects of the business, not just marketing sources. So that is exactly what this ROI calculation is going to bring into the fold.

So Dale, go ahead and get started and I'll jump in as things transpire. Yeah. And if anyone has questions, throw them out and I'm not going to be looking at the chat or anything. So I'll rely on Matt or Stephanie to stop me and we can dive into any questions.

So marketing ROI, everyone does it. So let's start with ROI is typically calculated. These come from the Facebook HubSpot and Salesforce websites and they should be fairly, fairly recognizable to most people. So Facebook says that it's your revenue minus your marketing cost divided by your marketing cost.

And then ROAS is sales revenue divided by ad spin. ROAS is essentially the same revenue minus marketing cost. Salesforce because they're a sales oriented company and they acknowledge that there's actually such things as sales teams. They have a little bit broader definition where they simply call it marketing value, although they never actually defined what marketing value is, but they assure you that that's the number you should be using.

And so there are some fundamental problems with these. So why is this wrong? So first and foremost, revenue is the wrong metric because businesses run on gross margins. They don't run on revenue.

As a result, it's misaligning marketing spend with the revenue recognition events in the sense that, and there's two misalignments here. One misalignment is with the fact that only a small portion of that revenue actually gets recognized as value to the business because the revenue doesn't come for free. You actually have to have made and sold something in order to get that revenue and there's some cost in delivering the product and there's definitely cost in acquiring the customer. The other thing is that it fails to capture the long duration impact of brand marketing.

We've seen this over the last 20 years, especially in B2B digital marketing, where you've seen this almost complete abandonment of brand marketing in favor of the more easy to measure short-term performance marketing. Maybe the bigger, more subtle issue is the fact that it can't be used to determine if our marketing is effective. That it really is a measure of how efficiently you're spending the budget, but it's not a measure of whether or not that budget spend is actually producing effective results for the business. So, marketing RIs essentially an efficiency metric, which means that it's got a much narrower scope than how people tend to try to use it.

Again, the distinction here is efficiency is doing things right. How well were the resources used relative to the outputs versus effectiveness is doing the right things, so the degree to which the things you're doing are achieving business objectives. I want to start with a little bit of discussion on how even when you can calculate an ROI number, it can be misleading. This is the other problem with ROI, is that it's often used to try to represent the value that marketing is bringing to the business, which is an effectiveness measure.

And it's really at best an efficiency metric and often not even a very good metric for that. So one of the examples I always use is this idea of what's the ROI of a factory building. Nobody calculates the ROI of a factory building. So why are factories housed in buildings to start with?

The buildings cost money up front to build and they keep costing you for every through maintenance cost. Why aren't all factories just built out in the open and the middle of a field? Because their ROI is negative. No matter how you calculate it, it's a negative value.

And the answer is that the factory building is bringing value to the business through mechanisms other than generating revenue or directly generating revenue. That factory building has value to the business and is worth investing in because it takes the contents of the building, the machine tools and the workers that are running the factory, and it makes them both more efficient and more effective. So the machine tools last longer because they're not on the weather. They're not down as often for maintenance.

So these both reduce cost and increase output. The workforce is more productive. The factory doesn't have to shut down every time it rains. So these are always that the building that houses the factory is bringing value to the business and why businesses are more than happy to pay money to build a building even though it has negative ROI.

And so ROI is not always an ideal measurement for certain types of activities and assets. And I think marketing is one of these. So in many ways, marketing is a lot more like the factory building. Sales is more like the factory.

So marketing delivers value by being this nonlinear amplifier of other linear functions of the business. So if marketing didn't exist, several things would happen. Once the sales team would have to spend a significant fraction of their time basically doing coal prospecting to find leads rather than spending all of their time focused on being able to take leads that are likely to buy and focus on trying to close those to revenue. So because of what marketing does, sales is going to close deals faster at a higher close rate and at a lower cost, sales cost.

And what would be happening if marketing didn't exist. And I've seen this often in companies where you'll have an early stage startup and they will basically not do any marketing for the first two, maybe three years and they focus entirely on being sales driven. So they'll hire that sales team. And what you see that sales team doing is often spending at least half of their time just trying to prospect looking for someone who's likely to buy, then they have to basically explain a company that no one's ever heard about before.

And the entire sales process tends to be very, very inefficient and very costly without marketing being there to lay the groundwork ahead of time in terms of awareness about the product and the company, the ability to build trust in the product and the brand, and the ability to be able to identify and capture those leads so that sales can do the thing that really brings value from a sales standpoint, which is closing deals. So where are best and worst cases for marketing ROI? And if you go back to the early prehistory, the earliest use of marketing ROI tended to come out of what used to be called direct response marketing. So these were companies, this was pre-internet, so 30, 40, 50 years ago.

There were companies that sold products by putting ads in the back of magazines and you would either mail something in or you would call an 800 number and be able to then buy the product either through mailing something in or through calling the phone number. And in those cases, there's no sales team, there's sort of no brand marketing typically. Everything that you're doing with marketing is directly immediately resulting in a sale. And so a lot of that kind of old school direct response marketing looks a lot like digital marketing that is focused exclusively on performance marketing.

You know, exclusively on things like, you know, paid search would be an example of something that would be equivalent to that. So this still works quite well if you're doing, you know, something very narrow like pure online direct to consumer marketing that kind of that traditional whatever we spent this month on marketing applies to the revenue that came in because the lag time between when we made the marketing expenditure and when the revenue hit, it tends to be a very, very short time window where it does not work well is for most of B2B. And part of the problem here is we tend to have very long time lags and long purchase cycles. So, you know, certainly something like enterprise B2B enterprise SaaS, the average purchase cycle is five plus years between coming back in market to buy again.

For many, especially for larger companies, it can often be a decade or more. So once you've got that CRM system installed, you know, you're going to go years before you're going to ever come back into the market to look at the potential you're placing it. And the other problem here is that a lot of these B2B products have a very long sales cycle. So not only is it a very long period between purchases, but once they are ready to purchase, the sales cycle happens over a very extended period of time.

And you know, and then the other part is the very heavy involvement in cost of the sales team and closing the deal. You know, it's not atypical for the budget for the sales organization to be significantly larger than the budget for the marketing organization and B2B companies because a lot of resources have to be poured into closing those deals. And we need to be able to somehow account for all of this if you want to do an ROI measurement. So the first step here is if you think about ROI, it's two parts, return and investment.

So return on investment. So the first step here is we need a better version of return. So the first thing to know is that the return in ROI is not revenue. Revenue does not come for free.

Every dollar of revenue costs that business something to collect. And the business only gets to keep just the portion of that revenue that's left over after paying the cost associated with making, selling, and delivering the product. And even for something like a SaaS product, that cost of just delivering and provisioning one more unit of that product is far from zero. I mean, typically that number is in the 20 to 25% range because you've got all of the onboarding, the provisioning, you know, there's it's usually relatively labor intensive.

There's the initial support to get them up, you know, to get the customer up and going. That's all the part of delivering the product that you would not have paid those dollars out if you had not sold that one extra unit to one extra customer. And then there's all the cost associated with running the business in general beyond just delivering and selling the product. So let's give an example of why revenue ROI is a really, really bad idea.

So let's say we've got two campaigns and you're reporting your campaign ROI is out and this is using kind of the traditional meta hub spot kind of definition. So all we know is that one campaign generated 250,000 revenue, one 400,000 each campaign cost 100,000. So we have 150% ROI and a 400% ROI. So which campaign was best for the business?

So if this is all you know, then you would say campaign day generated 150,000 more in revenue and has almost three times higher marketing ROI. It looks like a no-brainer. But reality is you have no idea. This information tells you nothing about which of these campaigns was best for the business.

And the reason why is let's look at what the campaigns are doing. So campaign A is so the campaign is for the widget store. And then we have a new campaign. And the main thing is we have better widgets.

Campaign B is 50% off sale. So if we come back and recalculate this, but based on gross margin, and we'll talk about exactly what gross margin is in a minute, but as a rough estimate, gross margin is the amount of money that the company keeps out of the revenue for their next incremental sale. So if the underlying product has a 50% gross margin, then that 250,000 allows the company to book 125,000 in profits. The 400,000 if we sell it at half price, we're going to cut our margin in half.

And so now that 400,000, the business only keeps 100,000. So you're actually selling a lot more stuff and putting less money in the bank. And when we recalculate based on a margin based ROI, instead of a revenue based ROI, suddenly campaign A has a 25% ROI and campaign B is a complete wash, zero return on investment. So not only is this massively wrong, but the final answer of which of the two campaigns is better, completely reverses once you start looking at how many dollars the business actually gets to keep from the sale versus just looking at the revenue.

So this is why you cannot use revenue as the baseline for an ROI calculation. So this takes us into how do we do a margin based ROI? And the problem is what type of margin? It turns out that there are 10 or 12 different types of margins that will be familiar to people in finance.

The two most commonly used and talked about is net margin and gross margin, but there are many, many other kinds of margins that financing can be aware of. So net margin is at a very, very high level, how much income do the business make after they paid all their bills versus how much revenue they generated. So in most businesses, that net margin is down and around 12, 15% is relatively small, which means that they're spending 80, 85, 90% of the revenue they bring in is spent on running the business, making the product, selling the product, delivering the product, and then all the overhead of running the business. But a more important number is what's called gross margin.

So this is essentially revenue minus cogs divided by revenue. So cogs is an acronym. It stands for cost of goods sold. And so this really encompasses everything that a business has to spend to be able to deliver one more unit of product to a customer.

So if you're manufacturing Toyotas, it's the cost of all of the parts that you had to buy and bring into the factory to assemble into a Toyota, all the labor it took to assemble those parts. And then all of the expenses that you incur in getting that car from the factory to the showroom and into the hands of a buyer. So it's all of the things associated with making and delivering the product to a paying customer. So there's another type of margin.

And this is the one we're going to focus on. It's called contribution margin. So contribution margin is gross margin minus the cost of selling the product. So we have essentially two costs here.

It costs something to produce one more unit of the product and get it delivered. But then it also costs something to get that customer to be able to close that customer that we're going to deliver the product to. And so these are both real costs that come off of revenue. So in that cost of acquiring a customer is essentially the cost of the marketing plus the cost of the sales.

And so what's left over after this, so this is a contribution margin essentially what's left over after making the product and getting the product sold. And these are real costs that businesses have to write checks for and send out the door and they only get to keep what's left over. So the important thing about contribution margin is that it's what's called the marginal cost of delivering the next unit of sale. Meaning we're not looking at what did it cost to build a factory.

We're not looking at what did it cost to how much do we spend on the development team to produce the SaaS product. So these are historical sunk costs that ultimately we need to recover those costs as a business. But the first step in recovering those costs is to make sure that we sell it for more than the direct cost of making it and selling it. So if we're going to sell it for $100, we need to make sure that it costs something less than $100 to both make it and to sell it and deliver it to the customer.

And so even businesses that are early stage fast growing businesses that are losing money, where they're relying on outside venture capital investment to be able to cover their expenses, there's still the expectation that contribution margin will be positive. And you see this for instance with Amazon in their history. So Amazon did not start booking profits for almost 20 years. And they spent that time basically making a lot of money off of every individual unit they sold.

So their contribution margin was very positive on each individual item sold through Amazon. But they were taking those profits and pouring it back into building more warehouses, buying more inventory and buying more trucks and airplanes to deliver it. And so they were basically financing their capital expansion over the first 20 years because they had really strong contribution margin for each individual item sold. And so that's typically what you see in businesses is that you focus on not revenue, not net margin, which can both be, net margin can be way negative, what you focus on is contribution margin.

So now if we go a little bit deeper, contribution margin is still not marketing's return. It's not what marketing is delivering to the business. Marketing is only delivering a part of that. So some fraction of that revenue would still have come in even if marketing didn't exist.

And again, you often see early stage startups that will invest in a sales team well ahead of bringing in a marketing team. And in those companies, they were still making money, maybe not very efficiently, but they were still bringing in revenue long before the first sales person was ever hired. And so sales is directly producing some fraction of that revenue, but then there's some additional fraction of revenue that exists solely because marketing is in place and doing their job. The other thing that's important here is this is not about marketing sourced revenue.

Marketing sourced revenue is a very bad idea. And the reason why is that just because marketing solely sourced that lead doesn't mean that lead instantly materialized into a pile of cash, that lead still has to go through a lengthy and expensive sales process. And so when marketing does their presentation to the board or to finance, and they say, we had X number of dollars of marketing source revenue, when they leave the room and the sales people come in and do their presentation, the sales people will say, that's BS because every one of those deals, we sold it. And that's a convincing argument that not only completely undermines the whole concept of marketing source revenue, but undermines the entire credibility of the marketing team.

And because the reality is that in a sales based organization, if you're not a direct to consumer, fast fashion, e-commerce site, if you're in something like a typical B2B enterprise SaaS company, every single dollar of revenue flowed through the hands of a sales person. And that sales person typically put in weeks or months of expensive effort that the company is acutely aware of having paid for before that revenue materialized. And so there's really no concept of marketing source revenue other than as a mechanism to kind of destroy your credibility with finance and senior leadership in the company. So how do we actually get at this contribution margin?

And there's a couple of ways of doing it. And what I want to talk about is kind of the simpler of the two ways. So here, you really kind of just need four numbers. You need your total revenue, what your your cards are.

So what would the direct cost to make and deliver the product? For a SaaS company, this is not going to be the cost of this development team, but it's going to be related to things like server and bandwidth cost. A lot of the costs are going to be related to provisioning and early stage onboarding and support. So these are all part of what it takes to deliver that type of product.

If you're a manufacturer, it will be what's the cost of the materials and labor to produce one more unit of product and then what's it cost to put that on a truck and get it delivered to an actual customer. But there will be some sort of a cogs figure. For manufacturing, that cogs can often be 40 to 60% of revenue. For SaaS company, it can often be as little as 10 or 15% of the revenue, but it's not zero.

And then what do the company spend on sales and what do the company spend on marketing? So basically, contribution margin is going to be the gross margin minus the cost to get the customer. So essentially, what did it cost us to make and deliver the product and what did it cost us to get someone to deliver the product to? And so an example of this would be if we made 40 million in gross revenue for the quarter, we had 10 million in cogs, we spent 10 million for sales cost and 5 million for marketing cost.

So at a very high level, that contribution margin is going to be the 40 million in revenue minus the 10 million minus the 10 million from sales cost minus the 5 million. So that 40 million in revenue is going to become 15 million. And this is why the traditional way of calculating marketing ROI massively grossly overstates what the ROI is, because you're reporting ROI against 40 million, but the company only gets to keep 15 of that. And the deal is that they know, people in finance know this, they're not being fooled.

They know that these ROI numbers that marketing is reporting are completely fantasy numbers. So let's say there was a question about where's the cost of the dev team? Where's dev team fault? Dev falls under cogs in a sense, does it not?

No, no. So typically, here's an easier way to visualize how you account for the dev team. The dev team for software product is equivalent to the factory for a physical product. Because they're the ones that the dev team is the ones that are actually making the exact thing that gets delivered to a customer and used.

And the same way that a factory is making the widgets that are taking parts in the door, they're adding labor to it, and then they're using their machine tools to then fabricate these parts into a final product that gets delivered to the customer. So the factory is considered a capital expense. So whatever it costs you to build that factory is a long-term fixed sunk investment. So typically, you've already spent the money on the factory before the first unit comes off the floor.

And the same way that you've already spent huge amounts of money on that development team before the first usable version of the product is ever able to be logged into. So typically, what you do is you want to separate, from accounting standpoint, you separate out these long-term sunk costs that you had to make an investment in in order to have something to sell. Separate that out from your short-term variable cost. So if you didn't make that investment to create the product, you would have nothing to sell.

But once you've made that investment, then there's going to be some cost to actually deliver it to the customer and to actually acquire the customer through sales and marketing. So basically that investment in software development or that investment in building the factory is a CapEx that then gets either amateurized or depreciated over a period of time. So in other words, at some level in the accounting, they are applying some cost, some prior expense toward building the product to every individual product that goes out the door. But from our standpoint, in terms of because marketing and sales are purely operating expenses, they're not capital expenses.

And so that's why we can focus just on contribution margin. What's that incremental cost of getting one more unit of the product delivered to a paying customer? And so anyway, so this is why it's treated a bit differently. The other thing is there's also a lot of additional overhead.

So there are other operating expenses, op-exes that the business incurs that are sort of spread out across everything that's less, you know, there would not be part of contribution margin. So for instance, the finance team, the accounting team, HR, you know, the facilities, you know, the office that you're in and what it costs to pay the rent on the office, these are all overhead expenses that are assumed to be kind of fixed expenses for the business as a whole. And you're allocating portions of those expenses to each new, you know, each new unit of sales revenue. But, but it's not, these are not expenses that would go up or down if you sold more or less.

And so the kind of the key question is, if we suddenly sold nothing this month, you know, what would our expenses be? If we sold twice as much this month, how would our expenses change? So if we let go of the sales team, let go of the marketing team, just went to zero activity on all of those, you know, obviously revenue would go down. But the, you know, but these aspects of expenses for the business are considered variable costs, meaning that they're going to go up and down as revenue goes up and down in a way that, you know, the size of HR, for instance, isn't going to go up or down each month based on well, not revenue, but not what I per down.

You know, long term is the business grows, HR will grow with the, you know, essentially relative to the size of the business, the whole, but it doesn't fluctuate up and down from month to month. So we talked about the R side of ROI, but we also need to look at a more complicated part, which is the I side, the investment. So I is the marketing cost. So, so one of the things that we have some advantages with in looking at revenue and contribution margin is that revenue tends to be fixed to specific points in time.

So, you know, when the sales team closes a deal, you know, we know exactly, you know, when that revenue even occurred. And we know exactly how much it is at that point. So revenue is easy to measure and contribution margin is easy to estimate, but marketing costs tend to be spread out over time. And that makes it a lot harder to connect market specific marketing costs to specific revenue.

And again, the thing that's been done with, with sort of the incorrect approach to, um, calculate marketing ROI is, is to look at current period revenue divided by current period marketing costs. But the fact is, is that little or none of that marketing cost in that given month or quarter, um, actually had anything to do with the revenue that came in that month or quarter. Um, and a specific example here is that if, if marketing is delivering a stream of leads to sales, but sales has a, say a 90 day closed cycle. So, so a 90 day average sales cycle.

Um, then, you know, even if that lead, that next lead ends up closing and becoming a customer, there'll be no revenue recognition event for another quarter because there's a time lag there between when marketing has done his job and when sales finishes his job and actually produces revenue. And, um, so the revenue doesn't come in instantaneously. Um, and you know, so if you're, if you're in a business that's running, say a one quarter average sales cycle, which is not a typical at all within B2B SAS, if you're running a one quarter sales cycle, that means that no marketing expenses this quarter had any influence on this quarter's revenue that, that it will have, have, you know, major influence on next quarter's revenue, but not this quarter's. And the reality is, is that once that prospect enters the sales process, marketing has very, very little influence over either the rate at which, um, you know, how quickly the deal will close or how likely the deal is close.

Most of those things are either already locked in or they are outside the control of anything that marketing can do. So marketing has little or no contribution once the prospect is in the sales process. Their contribution is what happens during the period of time up to when that prospect enters, enters the sales process, um, which I realized counters is counter against a lot of kind of folklore within B2B marketing, but there are really good studies that show that, that, that whether you're doing no marketing or a lot of marketing in terms of, um, of kind of self support marketing, um, deals close at exactly the same rate. Doesn't matter.

Um, and the reason why is is that that almost all of that, you know, if it takes 90 days for sales to close a deal, it doesn't mean that they need 90 days worth of constant convincing to talk them into it. Um, oftentimes they're talked into it, you know, by the second or third day. And the rest of that time is how long does it take for procurement to process the paperwork? How long does it take for accounting?

I mean, for, um, um, legal to review the contract. How long does it take accounting to set up a vendor record, um, so that they can accept an invoice or a P O. Um, and you know, there's no email campaign you're going to run that will make legal review that contract, you know, one day sooner. You know, there's no email campaign you're going to run that's going to make procurement, you know, get off their rear ends and process that, that paperwork one day sooner.

And that's the bulk of why things take a long time to sell to close is there is a lot of internal machinery that has to go on within the customer that neither sells nor marketing have any control over. And then likewise, you know, the highest predictor of whether or not you're going to win a deal, um, is whether or not you were in the day one consideration set, um, which is driven entirely by whether or not the buyer was aware of the brand well ahead of when they came in market to buy. And so, um, uh, you know, so about 75% of what determines whether or not, um, a particular product gets selected for final purchase is entirely determined by whether or not there had been good brand marketing done and the buyers, the, you know, the key buyers were aware of the product and the brand before they had a need. So again, marketing has very, very little to offer to influence things once the sales process has started.

Therefore, you know, if we're trying to calculate an ROI, what we really have to look at isn't anything that marketing, any marketing expenses during the time that the sales cycle is underway, you have to look at what marketing did before the sales process begins. And we'll look at that in a second. So, uh, so I want to talk about kind of categories of expenses. So we have performance marketing and then how to think about these in terms of figuring out how to allocate these historical marketing expenses to current period revenue.

So performance marketing is basically focused on generating leads that sells will close over the next average sales cycle. It acts on the 5% of currently in market and it generally does a very, very poor, economic system job of producing any kind of durable brand association for the 95% who are not in market. So, um, uh, so any of the sort of lead gen performance marketing kind of activities are inherently very, very short term and they will either produce a result or not produce a result within one sales cycle and they'll have no less in effect after that. Brand marketing will also produce immediate results.

So this is one of the great misunderstandings in B2B marketing. Brand does not take a long time to produce a result. Brand marketing will produce a result instantaneously, but it will only work on people who are already in that 5% who are in market. Um, and to give you a specific example, I have run billboard campaigns for extremely niche B2B products.

Um, uh, specifically these were, were research products sold to scientists doing biomedical research. We would put billboards up at the, the traffic choke points leading into a major medical or academic research center. Literally the hour the billboard goes up, we could immediately start to see impact in terms of, of brand awareness search and in terms of the performance of our, um, um, uh, page search campaigns and the performance of our placements in category generic search. And we could immediately start to see traffic to the website coming directly result of that billboard and that billboard is, you know, you do not get more classic brand marketing than a billboard.

The other thing that we would see though, and this is the thing with brand marketing is that there's also a long term effect because it's designed to form a durable brand memory association, these memories can influence the 95% as they come in market over future time periods. So we would run these billboards for like a month. At the end of that month, we would still see this heightened effect. We would see a greater than, than normal rate of things like brand awareness search, uh, for up to 90 days after the billboard went down.

Now again, it was gradually declined because people would forget about us, but over that next two, three months, even after the billboard is down, there's still enough people that saw the billboard, saw it enough times that they remembered it, they've not yet forgotten it, and they will continue to be influenced by that piece of marketing long after the marketing goes away. So this is the real power brand marketing is that it gives you this, you know, the performance marketing works very short term. Brand marketing also works short term, but brand marketing keeps working off into the future, but at a diminishing rate as these memories are progressively forgotten. And then the last thing is this idea of latency to revenue.

So revenue is not instant. There is some average cell cycle. So once a product, you know, once a prospect enters that cell cycle, marketing's got little or no ongoing influence. So, you know, if you've got a 90 day cell cycle, this implies that no marketing expenses this quarter influenced any current quarter close one deals and the associated revenue.

So we have to be able to do these time shifts if we want to figure out how to line up the marketing expenses from the past with the current period revenue. A final note here. So average cell cycle is really critical to doing these sorts of ROI calculations. So best practice is to generally aggregate marketing expenses and time blocks that match average cell cycle.

So, you know, if the average cell cycle is 90 days, then aggregate the marketing expenses by quarter and recalculate the ROI on a quarterly basis. If you've got a fast cell cycle, say a 30 day cell cycle, then do everything on a month by month basis. And generally, if you've got a very long cell cycle, nothing much is changing fast in the business. So you don't really need to recalculate an ROI number every day or every week or every month.

And so, you know, the idea here is to look to the cell cycle as kind of the way to chunk up time, you know, chunk up your expenses on the marketing side, you know, in blocks that match the cell cycle length. So applying the model. So we're getting closer to an actual number here. So what I want to talk about is a concept kind of visualized what I had just talked about about the fact that these brain campaigns work immediately, but then they continue to have an influence off in the future.

So, so this is a, this is looking from the standpoint of we did some marketing this quarter. So or this month, you know, whatever time period. So we did some brand marketing, we did some performance marketing. So the performance marketing will entirely have an effect, yet, you know, good or bad, positive or negative.

Its effect is going to, is going to be completely, will completely occur within one cell cycle, because its focus is identifying people who are in market and activating them into the sales process. And at some point they're going to reach a close, close one or close loss. And then they're, they're not going to be in the market for typically a long time to come. The brand campaign will do exactly the same, same thing, but only for people who are in that 5%.

But because there are future buyers that see that campaign that will come in market next quarter and the quarter after and the quarter after, that this, this quarter's brand campaign will continue to have positive influence on future sales cycles, but at a lower and lower level, because what's happening is people are rapidly, progressively forgetting that they saw the brand campaign. Now again, if we're running the same brand campaign every single quarter, then we're refreshing these memories and you get a somewhat different effect. What I'm looking at is kind of what's the diminishing influence on future sales cycles for what we do during this, this sales cycle. So performance campaign, so a sales day today won't become revenue for one sales cycle in the future.

So and just to make the conversation easier, let's just assume for now we're talking about a 90 day sales cycle, but yet to adjust this for, you know, if your business is sales cycle is different. So the revenue that closed this quarter was a result of marketing leads delivered last quarter. That means that we need to match this quarter's revenue against last quarter's performance marketing expense. Now the brand campaigns, the question here is how fast are people forgetting?

And this is a very hard number to measure, but there are reasonably good estimates out there. And because we've been some very good studies going back decades now, looking at how fast people forget, you know, how fast these brand memories are forgotten across a population. So for high consideration goods, which most sort of expensive B2B products fall into this, a reasonable estimate is that about 50% of the people exposed to a B2B brand ad will have forgotten it within 90 days. So there'll be no active recall.

And you know, but what that means also is that, you know, 50% forget it in the next 90 days of that 50% 50% of those will forget it in the next 90 day period on down. So it's like a radioactive decay, except its memories. And so, you know, this gives us an estimate of decay rate that's a reasonable estimate to use. And again, part of what we're trying to get at here is a reasonable, defensible marketing ROI estimate, not necessarily an exact number.

And so, you know, if you don't like the 50% in 90 days, you know, you can replace it with another number if you have better data. Most people don't have better data. This usually requires pretty extensive market research to be able to precisely measure that for your product. But, you know, again, for high consideration B2B goods, it might be 12 weeks, it might be 10 weeks, it might be eight weeks, but none of that's going to make that much of a difference in the final calculation.

So what we need to do, though, is we need to allocate this period's brand campaign expenditures across future cell cycles. And let's just do a really quick look at this idea of decay. So if we're losing 50% of memory, you know, with every quarter, then the idea is that this quarter's brand expense can be allocated in terms of half of the cost going to the current quarter, 25% going to the next quarter, 15% to the next quarter, 10%. These are rough estimates of what a 50% per quarter decay rate would look like.

It's technically 50, 25, 12.5, 6.25. But again, this list is just sort of rounded up to easy numbers. And this is what this looks like. So if we look at, you know, if we implanted, you know, recallable, durable brand memories in 10,000 people's heads, you know, within one month, 22% well, they're forgotten within two months, another 17 and a half, you know, three months, another 14%.

So you get this kind of decay curve over time. And this is what we're trying to take into account in terms of how prior expenditures for brand marketing are still having a lingering influence on people that are currently in an active sales process this period. So let's put pull the pieces together here. So to do a marketing ROI estimate, we need a few pieces here.

So we need this, some estimate of incremental contribution margin instead of revenue. We need to factor in the latency effects, the fact that sales takes time. We need to factor in the lag effects of brand marketing's influence, how it will continue to have influence off into the future, you know, or inversely how historical investments in brand marketing are continuing, you know, to have lagging influence into the current business cycle. And then we need to align the average sales cycle as the baseline period and to focus on calculating an overall market ROI.

And one of the things I want to talk about as well, just briefly, is this idea of you could do, there's a lot of different marketing ROIs. There is what is the total marketing ROI for everything marketing is doing. But then there's also what's the ROI on this campaign or what's the ROI for, you know, we're doing connected TV. So what's the ROI on CTV?

And then the other thing that people attempt to do is just a bad idea is what was the ROI on this one deal. You know, and the problem is that it is impossible to know all of the influences that are associated with, you know, a particular customer or even a particular channel or a particular campaign. You know, and one of the things that is, you know, has been, you know, a massive influence from Refine Labs is to popularize this idea of dark social, the idea that there are a lot of influences that are going, you know, that are pushing customers toward your brand or toward a competitor's brand that are completely invisible. They're outside your ability to either to even know that exists much less to be able to measure it.

And so it becomes, you know, it becomes essentially a complete impossibility to try to figure out the ROI of a deal or even the ROI of a channel or campaign. You're much better off just trying to come up with a broad ROI that represents all of marketing's investments, you know, in the company and, you know, and then being able to defend that number, you know, at a fairly detailed level. So, so we need two pieces here. We need to calculate an I and we need to calculate an R to get the ROI.

So, so we need to start with some assumptions about average cell cycle, brand memory decay rates. Again, it's, you know, it's not hard to look at the CRM to get to, you know, to see what a particular company's average cell cycle is. The memory decay rates typically are not going to have any information on that. In the absence of any information, 50% per quarter is, you know, is a reasonable defensible estimate.

It will never be, you know, the decay rate might be faster than that. It will never be slower than that. This is, this is basically the slowest that people will forget. But again, it's a reasonable, it's a reasonable number in the absence of a more specific measurement.

And then you want to look at period by period, marketing expenditures broken out by, by in the three categories, performance campaigns, brand campaigns, and then admin overhead because a big chunk of marketing has nothing to do with campaigns. You know, it's, it's all the martech cost, all of the, you know, data analytics, you know, all of the management overhead, you know, so there's lots of other costs other than what did it cost us to produce, you know, this brand campaign or this performance campaign. So, this is what real numbers would look like. So what we're looking at here is the current cell cycle.

So, and I just marked this as Q and then we're going to pick up expenses off into the past between performance and brand. So this is Q minus one. So one quarter in the past, two quarters in the past, three quarters in the past, four quarters in the past. So the idea is 100% of the performance campaigns, we're going to allocate against, you know, from the from Q minus one, we're going to allocate to the current quarters revenue.

We'll allocate all of marketing's admin overhead to the current quarter. And the brand will allocate half of what we spent on brand this quarter to our last quarter to the current quarters revenue. But then we'll pick up 25% of what we spent one quarter previously at that end, 15% of what we spent two quarters or three quarters previously, I, you know, 10% from four quarters previously. And we basically add up the pieces.

So here what we assume is, you know, $100,000 a quarter total marketing cost, 50,000 are spent on performance campaigns, 40,000 on brand and another 10,000 overhead. And then we've got these base assumptions of a 90 day cell cycle and a memory decay rate of 50% per quarter. So there's really no hard math here. And most of these numbers, either marketing already has it or marketing can go to finance and finance can help get it for them.

So what we're doing is we're picking up bits and pieces over different time periods, adding them up to allocate them against the revenue that's generated from within the current cell cycle. So a couple of notes on this. So this example assumes a 90 day average cell cycle, which also assumes that you're calculating the R on a quarterly basis. The, you know, and all of the categories and marketing expenses are basically aggregated on a quarter by quarter basis.

So the final allocation of marketing cost is simply equal to the total, in this particular example, this final allocation is simply equal to the total quarterly marketing cost. So here we're assuming a hundred thousand per quarter in total marketing cost and we're adding all these pieces up that gives us back a hundred. So the question is, why don't we just do it the old fashioned way and say current period marketing cost, a hundred divided by current period, revenue or contribution margin. And the reason why is that this example just for simplicity assumes that you're spending exactly the same amount, quarter by quarter forever.

So in other words, you know, the last five years you've been spending 40,000 on brand every single quarter and 50,000 exactly every quarter on performance. The reality is campaigns come and go and expenditures vary over time periods. And that's why you have to look at what the actual expenses were. So if you have a business that never changes, where you're always spending exactly the same amount for brand and performance every single quarter forever, you know, one, that's not a very interesting business.

It's not going to be growing. But in those cases, you know, it's going to be, you're going to have a lot simpler final allocation amount for marketing, you know, for the marketing investment. But real business is these numbers, you know, these baseline numbers. So there's 25% allocation from two quarters ago, you know, is going to be 25% of a different base than the 50% of the brand expenditures from last quarter that we're using.

So so you have to understand that you really need to look at these allocations against the actual numbers quarter by quarter to be able to get an estimate of what those investments were. So the final part here, we're getting close, is we then need to calculate the R in the ROI. And so here we basically need to understand what the revenue and the gross margin rates are. The sales costs, because 100% of the sales costs are going to apply to current period revenue.

And then whatever allocated marketing costs, there's an alternate and more precise way of doing this, where you, you measure the rate of incremental sales contribution versus incremental marketing contribution. But these generally require some sort of a fairly good MMM study. Most businesses don't have that. So, you know, the good enough mechanism is just look at how much the company spending on sales each period, and then, you know, come up with this allocated set of marketing costs based on this sort of analysis, you know, to figure out, you know, how much of the historical marketing costs have an influence this particular sales cycle.

So what does this look like? So here, if we had gross accrued revenue, and this is one additional term here. So when that sales team closes a deal, it may still be, especially with the large corporation, it could be 30, 90, 60, 180 days before, you know, Exxon actually does, and why transfer to the company's bank account. And so, so it's not really how much revenue was collected, but how much revenue was accrued.

And so what accounting does is they will say, we know it's coming, it may take six months before we get Exxon to finally pay us, but we know it's coming. So we're going to accrue those closed one deals to the current periods accrued revenue, you know, and then we'll adjust this when the actual dollars come in. So, so if you're having this conversation with, with finance, it's important to understand that what you're looking for isn't the cash flow of this quarter, but the accrued revenue of this quarter. So, unless say the gross margin rate is 85%, so this is not out of alignment for a SaaS company.

So that means that of this million, we get to keep 850,000 before sales and marketing costs. And then, you know, let's say sales costs were 250,000, and then our calculated marketing allocation, looking at these historical values, comes in at 100. So this gives us a contribution margin of 500,000 out of the million. So basically it says, once the company was able to deliver the product, you know, and pay for acquiring that customer of that million, 500,000 is left.

And you know, and then we apply that against the allocated marketing cost, and this would give us a 5X ROI. So how is this different than the usual marketing ROI calculations? So one is contribution margin is used instead of revenue. This is no matter what you do, you really need to shift to contribution margin if you want the numbers to have any sort of credibility.

The mere fact that you walk into finance and say the word contribution margin out loud will massively increase your level of credibility. So, the other thing is, you know, you want to do a holistic calculation. So, you know, sales doesn't come for free. So, you need something that is factoring in the real cost of the business of running that sales organization, because, you know, even when marketing delivers, you know, an absolute guaranteed to close deal, it still has to go through the sales process and that sales process is still not cheap, not free.

You know, and then the other thing is to recognize that there's a latency between when marketing does its thing and then later what sales has done its thing and the revenue event occurs. You know, which means that marketing costs from these prior periods have to be systematically allocated to current period revenue and contribution margin. So, you know, and the net effect of this is generally a much more believable realistic number but a much smaller number. So, if we look at kind of the naive marketing ROI that you get from HubSpot or Salesforce and Meta, and this is a slightly different example.

So, I'm not sure all of the supporting data, but just give you an estimate of kind of some reasonable numbers from a real company. You know, the naive way of doing this where you're like total revenue, you know, and you're only applying the current period sales cost to it. You know, you come in at a 12x ROI, which is a gross overstatement. You know, once you switch to simply total contribution margin, not even taking into account those sales costs, you know, this comes out to 9x.

Once you come in with incremental contribution margin, it's going to drop by, you know, another factor of more than three. And you know, and then when you start factoring in time lags, the RO actually goes up slightly and then there's one last thing that we haven't really talked about as this idea of cross effects, meaning that your prior brand marketing will make your performance marketing more efficient and more effective. So you get more value per dollar spent with your performance marketing if you're marketing against people who are already familiar with the brand. And that can make the ROI go up a bit higher.

But even in the end, you end up with an ROI that is between a third and a fourth what you would get doing kind of a naive calculation. And again, people in finance know this. They may not know why 12x is wrong, but they know that there's something seriously wrong with 12x ROI because they're looking at how the business is underperforming and they're looking at how much sales is missing their targets. But supposedly marketing is blowing it out of the park.

Meanwhile, sales is running at, you know, they can't hit 50% of allocation. And so, you know, these sort of grossly absurdly inflated ROI numbers that get reported out of marketing, everybody knows that this is complete make-believe numbers, even if they can't explain exactly why it's wrong. And so the idea of coming in with this kind of a structured approach, you know, when reporting these kind of numbers is that you can defend every single part of this number. And so the idea is not necessarily to come up with an absolutely precise number because I don't think that's possible.

But to come up with a number that is reasonable likely within the ballpark of reality, but a number that you can defend in detail in ways that will be acceptable by the CFO, the CEO, and the board. So, and then one last thing about marketing ROI versus campaign ROI is that campaign ROI is extremely hard to estimate reliably. You know, these ROAS numbers you get from Google and Facebook are complete bullshit. And again, are intentionally maxed way, way above anything related to reality because again, it's in their interest to convince you to pour all your money into more Facebook ads and, you know, quit sending any of that money to Google.

So everybody is going to grossly over report, you know, the ROI and ROAS numbers. And then the other thing is that the problem with campaign versus overall marketing ROI is that buyers are influenced by multiple exposures, most of which we cannot see or track. So it's generally better to focus on overall marketing ROI. Don't try to come up with individual, you know, campaign level or deal level ROIs.

You know, and then be able to present these numbers with, you know, with much more credibility and in a way that's fully defensible within the language of finance and business. All right. Well, I'll let you cook that entire time. I just decided to not jump in on that at all in any dollar, but that was fantastic.

I really appreciate you walking through that. There were a couple of questions. I'm not sure. I'll go through them in a second.

I think that's like a one quick question because I think this is fairly obvious. But we'll bring it up anyway because we were talking about it before we even went live. When you and I were running through this a couple hours ago, I was like, you know, if you're venture backed and you're basically spending more money to acquire customers than you're probably earning, you know, you've got to probably have in some instances like a negative marketing ROI in some cases. And like, I guess, you know, that's not something that would be uncommon, I suppose, in a venture backed company that spending a lot of money to acquire a customer, yes?

So ideally the answer would be no. Sure. I mean, ideally, no, but now it works with the house as the marketing costs usually are loaded into those forms. So, you know, so one of the things with something like SaaS is that your underlying gross margins are very high in SaaS because the cost of delivering one more unit of software online is quite low, which means that the bulk of your cost for delivering one more unit of the product is primarily the sales marketing cost.

And you see this, you know, with things like CAC Payback Time, you know, if your CAC Payback Time is five years, you know, so that so and this would be a fully integrated CAC that's not just the marketing CAC, but you know, what is that cost of acquiring the customer from both the sales and the marketing side? You know, if it's a five year payback on a SaaS product, but your average turn rate is three years, you are not going to be a surviving business period. Not only are you not going to be a surviving business, no one's going to want to buy you because the way a business survives or even gets bought is by having positive contribution margin, meaning, yeah, maybe very expensive to run the business and very expensive to run that that software development team. But for every individual unit we sell, we're making a solid profit on it.

And so again, a clean example of this is to look at the history of Amazon, where Amazon was making from day one, they're making a very good profit off of every item that they sell and ship. But you know, they go 20 years without booking a profit because they're taking all of that, all of that gross margin from those individual sales and pointing back into capital investment. So you know, if a software that SaaS business is going to get, say bought, which is probably the more common exit these days, and I went through a part of my career working in finance and specifically working in mergers and acquisitions. So I did valuation analysis for acquisition targets.

And one of the things that we looked at was, you know, is there a positive contribution margin, you know, for each item being sold? Because the company might be losing money. But what we're going to do is we're going to wipe out all of the overhead. So we're going to wipe out HR, finance, accounting, warehouse, facilities, all of that.

We may even wipe out their manufacturing if we can manufacture the product on our own production line and be able to soak up excess production capacity we've already got. And so, but as long as we know that we're going to make a profit, you know, a positive contribution margin on each additional sale, then we can buy this profit, you know, this company who's never made a profit and still be able to make this a profitable acquisition because we just get rid of all the overhead. The problem is, is if you look at a company and you say, even when we get rid of all the overhead and all we're down to is just what it costs to make, deliver, and sell the product. And they're still losing money.

There's like nothing we can, you know, there's no way to make this a good deal. And I think you're going to see this over the next, you know, few years now that we're in kind of the, the, the, the post, you know, zero interest rate policy era and the post kind of grow at all cost era in VC investments is I think you're going to see a lot of these VC back companies will end up simply not even being sold just being shut down because there's no way that, you know, Adobe could come in and buy you or could come in and buy you and ever make you profitable. Right. What you see now is a lot of companies just merge essentially, which is probably going to come with, you know, a lot of layoffs on the back end of that as well.

And there's some weird accounting stuff that makes those mergers make sense where you can actually take two losing companies that are never going to make it and merge them and at least on from an accounting standpoint, make it look good through what's called goodwill where you can basically turn those past losses into an asset on the balance sheet. It's a very, very weird, funky accounting, but, but just because you see two companies merge doesn't mean that that this is anything other than a desperation move ahead of eventually going under. Sure. But I have that positive contribution margin, you know, you got to be able to make and sell it for less.

I mean, you got to be able to sell it for more than it costs you to make and deliver and sell the product. One of the things we talked about when we were talking about the calculation of this ROI was how expansion revenue fit into this. And we do normally, you include this in this in this in this ROI calculation. And the primary reason when we talked about it was that a lot of the times the bulk leader expansion revenue happens within the first, you know, once a one and a half years of actually getting getting the customer, right?

Because like a lot of these things happen through pilots. So you can prove the product, the value of the product and then the implementation comes in and then you end up expanding it, which speaks a little bit to what you and I were talking about earlier around the idea of the bow time model and how to do architecture. But yes, we do include expansion revenue in this calculation. Right.

And the reason why is it's generally not going to be a large enough fraction of total revenue to really move the needle because again, we're not trying to get a precise ROI number out to five decimal places here. We're trying to get something that's plus or minus 50 percent. We're trying to get something that's in the ballpark because what we've been delivering is more like, you know, 5x or 10x, too big a number. If we can get it down to a number that we can confidently say we're pretty sure the actual RO number is plus or minus 50 percent of this value reporting.

That's a big error range, but it's still a lot closer than anything that's being delivered now. And it's going to be a much more credible conversation to have with senior leadership around what market is actually bringing to the table. One other thing that I mentioned that I noticed in the comments, this worth mentioning is this idea of labor allocation. Certain parts of labor within a marketing budget is really kind of just overhead.

But a lot of that labor is being applied to specific campaigns. So the question is, is this person doing creative development work? So are they creating the ads and the campaigns? Is this person doing media buying and media planning and media allocation?

These all are just part of the cost of either the performance campaigns or the brand campaigns. Then you have the people running the MARTech platforms, the people doing the analytics. That's pure overhead. This is not doing anything to bring a new customer in the door.

This is a total dead waste of, not once they dead waste, but these are dead expenditures that are maybe making people feel fuzzy and warm inside the company, but they're not bringing one more customer in the door. And so marketing ops, MARTech, analytics and reporting, upper management and marketing, these are all overhead. None of these are going toward actually running the campaign that's going to bring a customer in the door. And so that's how you want to think about allocating labor between, would this campaign have not gone out the door if this labor had not been applied to producing and setting up and running that campaign?

Or is this labor associated with things that are not directly associated with getting any campaigns up and going? Right. But there's a lot of dead weight in all departments, not just marketing. You see the same thing in even in sales, which tends to be a pretty highly efficient organization in terms of labor utilization, but even in sales, there's still a certain fraction of that organization that never sees a customer, never talks to a customer, never closes a deal.

So one question. How often do we do this sort of calculation? My guess is you do it every sales cycle, essentially, to sort of re-benchmark yourself. And then second question off the back end of that is, how do you let this influence your decision making in terms of what activities to do?

I mean, to have the number is good to present it, to leadership, and for them to know it is good, assuming that they buy into it. But with it, if you're the marketer, marketing leader, marketing subject matter expert, looking at this, and you see that number, how does it influence your own action? Speaking from someone who's had senior leadership positions, who's had positions in finance, if you think about how finance is really operating, finance acts like a banker, in a sense. You've got all of this cash coming in the door, and the question is, what do we do with the cash?

So we could use the cash to write checks to our shareholders. So lots of companies do that. But some portion of this cash has to be reinvested back in operations. And so one of the things you're doing as a CFO is you're saying, should I put more cash into sales versus marketing, more cash into, say, new feature development for out of the development team versus putting cash into HR.

And so at the end of the day, these kind of ROI values at the level of organizational units are really there to help finance make cash allocation decisions. If I took $10 from marketing and moved it over to sales, am I going to get more revenue or less revenue? And if I get more revenue, then if I move $10 over, do I still get more revenue? So you're constantly balancing these investments across the organization.

And so the ROI numbers are what they are. And if you deliver bogus numbers based on what HubSpot tells you, those numbers are going to be ignored, and somebody in finance is going to come up with their own numbers for you instead. And chances are you're not going to like what those numbers look like because they're not going to have any of the nuance and any of the understanding of how marketing works the way that we just talked about. And so even if the numbers aren't great, even if the numbers mean that you're going to lose budget to sales or to development or something, if you don't deliver reasonable numbers, someone else is going to come up with numbers that are probably less reasonable.

But someone is still going to make these decisions. You may not know about them. You may have no, you know, the only thing you may know is that your budget got cut 25%. They have no idea why.

But you know, and you see this in companies, you know, sales just got a 50% increase in budget and we only got a 15% increase. How come? The how come is people are looking, you know, people in finance are looking at what's the best return I can get on relative investments across different organizational units within the company. And, you know, and so you want to be at the table with the best possible number that is sufficiently believable that they'll use your number versus something that they come up with on their own.

It's sort of a brutal explanation, but it's the reality of what happens behind closed doors. Yeah. There's another question actually that got asked that. I thought was super interesting, which was about kind of making this or can you make this kind of our like, like, I think almost forelooking to help forecast and like how you put kind of brand budget allocation into a forecasting exercise like this to predict what you or forecast what you think you may get out of an increase in brand investment or forms product investment or what to like.

Yeah. I think that feels like almost its own kind of event. But like I'll let you get the short answer before we break. I mean, when done properly, that's called MMM.

I mean, that's the reality is that's essentially what that's essentially what you're trying to come up with out of an MMM model and technically that MMM model is trying to get more precise numbers for how different categories have been impacted revenue historically. And then you can take that model and say, if things don't change or if things continue to change at the pace that they've changed in the past, in other words, if we're growing 10% per quarter and we've been growing 10% per quarter for five years, then we can assume that we'll continue to grow 10% per quarter. And therefore we can make some estimates as to what the future could look like differently if we altered our investments in say brand versus performance versus buying more MARTech that's not going to bring any new customers in the door. But usually you need more information than what you can get from our like calculation to come up with that.

And one of the things that gets tricky here is that as you put more and more money say into a particular channel, so a lot of MMM is really looking at channel level performance, as you put more and more money into say LinkedIn ads, you're going to reach a saturation point where you put twice as many dollars in a LinkedIn and you're going to get 1% more response out. So you've got these S curves where once you roll over the top of that S curve, you just quit getting, you know, you quit getting good performance out of the additional spend, which means you need to then shift and reallocate that budget to a different channel. And that's a lot of what MMM will help you do is to map where you are on those S curves, how likely it is that adding, you know, X% more dollars to a given channel is going to result in, you know, Y% more response, meaning Y% more leads, more self qualified leads, more revenue, depending on how you're doing MMM models. Right.

All right, we went an hour and a half. That was fantastic. I appreciate you showing through that. And hopefully, I like all of you got some value out of that as well.

I certainly did. It's been really fun to work with you on this series overall and go and kind of go over how to do this. A lot of these things are, you know, been around, but actually for quite a while, it just feels like a foreign concept I think for some in B2B tech where it's a little bit more of the zeitgeist out there for how to measure how to measure marketing. We will make sure that this deck gets to you all by email.

We will surely put this on our YouTube channel as well. Dale, I hope that this is not the last time you and I do an event together because I've really enjoyed doing this with you. I certainly have. We certainly talked other ideas for things to do as well.

So hopefully we're able to bring those to fruition. But I do want to thank everyone who stuck 32 minutes past the allotted time. I appreciate you all doing that for sure. And yeah, if you guys have any questions, feel free to reach out.

I will leave with Dale on it. And most definitely will hopefully do another one of these in the near future. So thank you. Anybody works on your side?

Yeah, if anyone has additional questions, throw comments into the LinkedIn event notice for this. And we'll keep an eye on that and answer any of those questions in depth through comments. Yeah, cool. All right.

Thank you all so much. And yeah, I see some comments about doing a workshop stuff like that. Like, yeah, like, please, please come to me or come to us with ease. We'll be happy to have you to make something work out of that.

So that sounds awesome. All right. Thank you all so much. Have a great rest of your day and a great rest of your week and a great upcoming Labor Day weekend for those of you all who are doing it.

I appreciate you all that so much. I'll go on.