Business Strategy Metrics

What’s the ROI of LinkedIn? For Refine Labs, it’s $50MM in HIRO pipeline and $14MM ARR in net new closed won revenue over the past 2 years since we implemented self-reported attribution in July 2021. I think most people would agree - pretty damn good ROI. But if we measured the ROI of LinkedIn using multi-touch attribution like most B2B SaaS companies do, it only shows $977k in closed won revenue (93% lower measured ROI). And that’s why most B2B companies don’t take LinkedIn or other forms of dark social seriously, while we’ve generated tremendous ROI for 5 years straight. And that's because most B2B companies still use the same underlying principles to measure the success of Marketing & content that they did in 2013 when B2B professionals went into the office, booted up their desktop computer, and consumed blogs & PDFs - based on tracked digital touches and form fills that were easy to track on a desktop computer from a company IP address. Basically everything has changed about the internet since then - including content formats, distribution, tracking & privacy policies, rapid evolution of social media, etc. Yet the way we measure success basically hasn’t changed. There's more tech and jargon around it, but the underlying tech & principles haven't changed. In today’s World, it’s time to focus on the bigger picture. STOP trying to prove the “ROI” of each individual piece of content using touchpoint-based digital attribution. Instead, understand that the results are built through the accumulation of tons of content & touch points over a sustained period of time - most of which never get tracked by digital attribution tools. START measuring the “ROI” of each channel overall by getting direct insights from customers about what they say is working in your Marketing. -Self Reported Attribution / How did you hear about us? Automate in SF / MAP -Sales rep asks on first call, use tags in conversation intelligence tools to automate  -Execute market research surveys to ICP buyers at target accounts that are not in-market  -Conduct win/loss analysis using primary market research interviews In a World where the most impactful programs & activities don’t get tracked by digital attribution, it’s time to be customer-centric and get insights directly from the market. #demand #marketing #b2b #sales p.s. To be clear, Attribution software, Salesforce campaigns, and UTM tracking are great ways to measure Demand Capture. But are definitely not appropriate to measure the entire marketing mix across demand creation, demand capture, and demand conversion. Step 1 in unlocking the next level of growth is changing the Marketing KPIs and Attribution models that keep Marketing teams stuck in the past.

CFO: "You delivered £10M savings. Next year we'll make your target £12M." Procurement: "Okay, we'll do our best" 🤷♂️ That trap that turns smart procurement leaders into basic purchasers. That isn't strategy. It's wishful thinking. Here is the problem: When Procurement exists only to deliver a number, everything else collapses. → Savings without context are risky. → Savings without TCO or risk weighting are misleading. → Savings without value creation, capability building, supplier performance or ROI are pointless. And when teams deliver against unrealistic targets, those targets only get bigger. The credibility trap tightens. I've seen this too often. Savings get harder year on year. → Short term cuts appear. → Bad decisions sneak in. → Category maturity is ignored. → Supplier performance is sacrificed. → The business pays more in the long run. There is a better way. A more grown up way. — Try this instead in your objectives setting: 1. Define your vision and strategy ➟ Why does Procurement exist for this business? ➟ Where do you want the function to be in two to five years? ➟ What is your unique value? 2. How do you create value beyond cost? A clear strategy stops the team drifting into reactive purchasing. ➟ Align your objectives with the business ➟ Interview stakeholders. ➟ Map problems and aspirations. ➟ Understand commercial priorities. When your objectives reflect the real needs of the business, you stop chasing artificial targets and start unlocking real value. 3. Deliver a multi tiered value matrix Any function measured on a single metric will eventually fail. Track the value that actually matters: ➟ Cost. ➟ Value and ROI. ➟ Risk mitigation. ➟ ESG impact. ➟ User feedback. ➟ Supplier performance. If the business only sees savings, that's because Procurement only talks about savings. 4. Push back on poor behaviour Respect your stakeholders but don't be ruled by them. ➟ Challenge bad assumptions. ➟ Call out unrealistic expectations. ➟ Have the uncomfortable conversations. ➟ This is what separates a strategic function from an order taker. Here's the truth most teams avoid: Procurement doesn't fall into the savings trap because the answer is complicated. It falls in because the trap is comfortable. It's easy to chase a number. It's harder to define value. It's harder to change expectations. It's harder to lead. But the teams that escape the trap become the teams that transform their organisations. Any ideas why so many still stay stuck? —— P.S. want to join 22,000+ procurement pros getting FREE insights from me every week? Join here https://procurebites.com/

If HubSpot and Google Analytics are your only attribution tools...you're tracking maybe one of eight ways a prospect could have landed on your page. One of eight. That's not a measurement gap. That's almost willful blindness about what's actually driving your pipeline. Here's why this hits so hard for LinkedIn specifically: LinkedIn has the highest-value B2B audience of any paid channel. But the buying cycle is long - sometimes 12 to 18 months. Way longer than HubSpot's default attribution windows. Way longer than Google Analytics can track before cookies expire, people switch devices, or data just...disappears. So when leadership asks for ROI, paid search looks clean and LinkedIn looks like a black hole. Budget gets cut. Pipeline drops 90 days later. They come back to LinkedIn. This cycle just keeps repeating. 78% of B2B CMOs say proving ROI has become way more important in the last two years. And I get it - budgets are tighter, the CFO wants receipts. But you're stuck in this trap where your highest-value channel is also your hardest channel to prove ROI on. CAPI is how you actually fix this. Conversions API sends your pipeline and revenue signals BACK into LinkedIn so it knows which campaigns influenced real deals - not just top-of-funnel clicks. (𝘉𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘢 𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘊𝘙𝘔 𝘵𝘰 𝘊𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘨𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘮 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘰𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴, 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮 𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘴.) Most teams don't have this set up. Which means they're flying blind and losing budget battles they should be winning. Are you using CAPI yet? #linkedinads #B2BMarketing #Impactable

I grew notus to our first million in ARR on pure vibes. Somehow I knew LinkedIn was working. The pipeline was filling up, the business was growing. But ROI was never anything more than instinct. Here’s how I solved it: At a certain point, gut feeling stops being a strategy. We needed to know what was actually driving our own pipeline. And it turned out our clients were hitting the same wall. Larger teams, more scrutiny, exec teams asking them to prove LinkedIn was worth the investment. So we built a framework to answer it. Here's the 4-layer system we use to track LinkedIn ROI end-to-end. 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝟭: 𝗕𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘀 Impressions, followers, likes, profile views. The numbers LinkedIn gives you by default. Useful as directional indicators, but on their own they tell you nothing about business impact. 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝟮: 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 Base metrics don't tell you who you're reaching. This layer is about matching those numbers to your ICP. High impressions from the wrong people is just noise. 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝟯: 𝗦𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹-𝗕𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 Once you know the right people are paying attention, their engagement becomes a lead list. This layer is about turning ICP signals into warm outreach and tracking whether those conversations convert into booked meetings. 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝟰: 𝗔𝗱 𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Insight tag, UTM slugs, li_fat_id tracking, backend automation. This is how you connect LinkedIn ad spend to real pipeline, not just inflated click counts. BONUS layer: Self-reported attribution Sales calls and a single form field asking "how did you hear about us" gave us more conviction on LinkedIn's impact than any dashboard ever did. This was the high-level view. Anything you'd add or change? — PS. I wrote step-by-step guide on the complete system, including the tools, the tracking setup, and the outreach method that drives our highest meeting conversion rate. Comment "ROI" and I'll send it over :)

How safe are technical teams that can’t quantify their impact on revenue, margins, or strategic KPIs? “Expect to be laid off if you're in a technical team that is not business or product-facing.” This stark warning comes from multiple surveys and my own conversations with C-level executives. CEOs are reevaluating their technical teams' priorities, and the implications are significant. Why is this happening? ROI Focus: Companies are scrutinizing every dollar spent on technology. Teams that can't quantify their impact in terms of revenue, margins, or strategic KPI improvements are at risk. Shifting Priorities: The era of 'tech for tech's sake' and endless PoCs is over. Business leaders want tangible outcomes, not just cool innovations. Streamlining Operations: In uncertain economic times, businesses eliminate what they perceive as unnecessary expenses. Vital technical roles are often misclassified when there is no clear connection to growth. What should you do to protect your position? Align Visibly with Business Goals: Understand your company's objectives and clearly articulate how your work contributes to them. It’s not enough to do the work. Executive leaders need to hear about it. Quantify Your Impact: Measure and report your projects’ business value in metrics and impacts that matter to executive leaders. When all else fails, track impacts on the KPIs they make a bonus for improving. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Build relationships with product and business teams. Your technical expertise, combined with their domain expertise, is a powerful combination that drives value. Continuous Learning: Stay ahead of the curve by acquiring new skills, particularly those that fill the gap between technology and business value delivery. Focus on capabilities that help you deliver outcomes vs. stopping at technical artifacts. Visibility: Don't work in silence. Regularly communicate your team's achievements and their business impact. In today's business landscape, it's not enough to be technically proficient. You need to be a strategic asset to your organization. What are you seeing, and what are your thoughts about the value-centric priority shift? Have you seen signs of this in your organization? Are businesses asking too much of technical ICs and teams?

So, how much did being genuinely nice to our customers earn us this quarter? Now imagine asking this question to your CFO. Today we are well aware and sometimes even obsessed with metrics: NPS, CSAT, churn rates…all perfectly calculated. But translating the warmth of customer happiness into cold, hard financial results? Well, that's not so simple. After all, it is not easy to connect a ‘smiling support rep’ to ‘higher EBIT’. However, the truth bomb here - Top CX performers consistently outperform their competitors. But the magic they create is not just in making customers smile. It is about connecting every delighted customer with revenue, retention, and even willingness to pay a little extra. The question for us to answer is - Are we connecting dots, or just coloring the margins? As business leaders, are we digging deep enough? What would happen if CX was tagged to every financial review, not just a customary part of the annual presentation? You could be walking into your next review, armed with not just satisfaction scores, but a clear graph of what those scores added to the bottom line. If you think ROI from customer experience is not just fairy dust, then here are 4 metrics to add gravitas to your next board meeting: ☘️ C - Customer Retention Track repeat purchase rate/ renewal rate. Know how many customers come back. Even a 5% increase in retention can boost profits considerably. ☘️ T - Ticket Size Happier customers spend more. We all do that. Measure if your CX improvements lead to higher average order value. ☘️ S - Share of Voice Delighted customers talk. Track organic referrals, online reviews and social media mentions. Don't forget - word of mouth reduces marketing costs. ☘️ S - Service Cost Zero-effort experiences reduce complaints and rework. When customers don't need to call back, your cost to serve drops. Measure cost per support ticket and first contact resolution rate. These may not happen in a day, but start somewhere. One step of transition a day leads to transformation over a quarter or a year. Let’s get past the vanity metrics and start making CX pay its own bills. About time no? #cx #customerexperience #serviceexcellence

Understanding your Processes is the key to Strategy Execution! The key to executing your strategy is achieving alignment—ensuring that all elements of your business, including strategy, organizational structure, processes, and technology, are orchestrated to support long-term success. Yet, many organizations struggle with execution because while leadership defines strategy, the connection to execution gets lost: Practitioners lack clarity on how their roles contribute to strategic goals, leading to misalignment and inefficiencies Complexity breeds poor communication and silos, making cross-functional coordination difficult Disconnected people, processes, and technology obscure impact analysis and make it challenging to measure progress effectively How can organizations overcome this? By establishing a structured, continuously maintained Inventory of processes within a Process Taxonomy—an essential foundation for alignment and execution. A well-defined Process Inventory provides: A business-oriented lens to pinpoint the impact of change with precision A common language that enables effective collaboration across teams Traceability & transparency, ensuring alignment from strategy to execution A single source of truth for understanding organizational intelligence and resources Clear accountability and ownership for both change initiatives and ongoing operations A feedback mechanism that equips strategy leaders with real-time insights into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). To deliver on this alignment, organizations must invest in building a Process Capability—one that enables them to create, maintain, and evolve their process knowledge over time. The cost of not doing this? Wasted transformation investments, frustrated customers, and lost competitive advantage when execution fails to deliver on strategic objectives. To learn more about this framework and approach, check out my book https://a.co/d/1ajgWhI Would love to hear your thoughts—what challenges have you faced when driving execution on strategy?

If you’re chasing LinkedIn impressions, you’re already losing! Impressions are a vanity metric. Last month, I was speaking with a business coach who was frustrated: “My posts used to get 50K views, now they’re barely hitting 5K. I think LinkedIn is killing my reach.” I stopped him there. The truth about LinkedIn’s this year experiment (confirmed by Business Insider & LinkedIn): Old posts were pushed into feeds, New content got suppressed, Engagement felt stale, so they started rolling the change back Yes, impressions are falling, but leads aren’t. The platform is now rewarding: -> Conversations over likes -> Reposts of high-performing content -> Engaging on other people’s posts -> Tracking client calls over “reach” Metricool’s June data: reposted content performed because feeds were tuned for “relevance” not “recency.” 5K impressions + 3 inbound leads >>> 50K impressions + 0 leads. 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐑𝐔𝐓𝐀𝐋 𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐓𝐇- Your business won’t grow from impressions. It grows from conversations, trust, and deals closed. Nothing more. Different creators will chase different goals, but here’s how I measure LinkedIn ROI: -> 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑹𝒆𝒂𝒍 𝑽𝒂𝒍𝒖𝒆 • Calls booked • Clients signed • Referrals generated • Partnerships initiated -> 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝑫𝒆𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒆𝒔 𝑺𝒖𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒔 • Quality of conversations • Consistency in posting • Positioning & clarity • Audience trust Want to know what happened to that business coach? He shifted from obsessing over views… to doubling down on DMs and lead tracking. End result? 2 inbound clients this month, with lower impressions than ever before. That’s the reality gap. 📌 Remember: Impressions are vanity. Reach is temporary. Revenue is reality. 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐞. What’s your take? Are your impressions down but leads steady?

I’ve been in enough operational war rooms to know what data gets forgotten, even though it’s vital. Many will focus on arrival times, on-time departures, cargo volumes and more, but there are critical blind spots that I want to point out and discuss with you today. One not often seen metric is equipment idle time, i.e: idle time ‘over a ship’, during an operation, and the overall time laid idle not earning revenue. We track moves per hour, berth moves, ship productivity, and some ports are good enough to share that with everyone on LinkedIn - but how long do we ever get to see cranes or trucks that spend their time waiting to be seen, to have that box removed, or loaded? This is the often hidden, efficiency erosion. Second, shift change handover takes place - but are all the gaps taken on-board? Are any parts of the productivity chain reset or do they continue? Do we start to miss real context at that point? A third missing data point is proactive maintenance triggers. Waiting for a machine to fail means downtime; tracking trends could avoid it, or at least close the gap. Fourth, visibility over inbound supplier delays is crucial. When parts are not there when you need them, or arrive late, the whole schedule shifts. Lastly, error rates in reporting, documentation (missing paperwork, miswritten codes) slows customs and causes cascading delays. These are not glamorous. They don’t feature in dashboard-of-the-month slides. Yet they are where cost, trust, and performance quietly leak out. Do you have shared terminal KPI’s in your business - where many ‘Performance Indicators’ are owned by various stakeholders & departments - but all are aligned and link up to the overall ‘governing KPI’? This approach eliminates hiding, so everyone can see and resolve the right problems at the right time, informed by their collaborative ‘single source of truth’. At Trent Port Services and TrentGO, we build diagnostics to surface these hidden data points. Real operational clarity starts when you know where your system quietly falters, and then address it directly. https://lnkd.in/dzgM-P6A Find out more in the link above or get in touch with me today.

Sales and marketing alignment isn’t a workshop topic—it’s a revenue system. A methodology that often requires culture change to stick. As teams plan for 2026, the gap between strategy and operational effectiveness across and between these two functions still blocks predictable pipeline in focused, complex markets. In other words, "jazz hands" at SKO often fails to translate into what needs to happen on Tuesday. Alignment means nothing without consistent, successful execution. As I see it across the countless client and community conversations we've had this year, four pressure points are creating most of the barriers to true alignment and impact: 1️⃣ Attribution If sales and marketing don’t share a single influence model, both sides optimize locally and the complex motions you need regress to random tactics that fail to achieve your goals. Pick a model, publish the rules, and hold everyone to it. Use it to inform planning—not just to settle debates after the fact. 2️⃣ Goal alignment Pipeline math must connect cleanly: ICP coverage → stage-weighted opportunities → win rate → revenue. If these ladders don’t reconcile across teams, you’ll miss targets even with strong activity. 3️⃣ Incentive alignment Comp drives behavior. When qualified lead and opportunity goals conflict with sales quotas you get sandbagging, over-qualification or turf wars. Consider tying marketing variable comp to sourced and influenced pipeline that closes, and tie sales to opportunity quality and velocity. Or, if you're brave, eliminate sourced/influenced metrics altogether and align incentives on metrics you can actually buy a beer with. 4️⃣ Board/investor expectations Assumptions, when left unchecked, often harden into mandates. If you don't show your board an operational plan for getting sales and marketing to work together, they'll think they have to define it for you. And you definitely won't like that. Translate board-level growth narratives into an operating model both teams can run: agreed ICP, motion mix (inbound, outbound, partner, PLG), capacity plans, and an SLA for handoffs and follow-ups. As you build towards true, sustainable sales and marketing alignment in 2026, here's a checklist of priorities to get in place sooner than later. 💡 One shared attribution model with monthly governance 💡 A joint, integrated pipeline playbook: coverage, conversion, velocity and capacity by segment 💡 Unified incentives with a common “closed-won” denominator 💡 A "Revenue Council" cadence: sales, marketing, finance, ops—meeting regularly with a single dashboard 💡 A proactive alignment board narrative with milestones and dashboards for regular updates We're all tired of talking about sales and marketing alignment. But for many organizations it has become THE blocker to predictable, efficient and sustainable pipeline and revenue achievement.