B2B marketing has built the most sophisticated measurement function in business.
I mean that. Not as a set-up for a joke.
Think about what’s available now. Every touch a buyer makes, logged. Attribution models that can apportion credit across nine interactions over fourteen months. Intent data telling you a company is in-market before they’ve contacted anyone. Dashboards refreshing hourly. Cohort analysis, funnel velocity, engagement scoring, channel mix modelling.
There are something like fifteen thousand marketing technology products. Fifteen thousand. Finance has a general ledger and a spreadsheet.
And with all of that, most marketing functions still can’t answer the simplest commercial question anyone could ask them.
What does it cost you to win a customer, and is that customer worth it?
Not roughly. Not cost per lead. Not a blended figure someone put together for a board pack. The actual number, fully loaded, against what that customer actually returns.
Ask for it and you’ll usually get one of three answers. A cost per lead, which isn’t the same thing. A cost per acquisition that counts media spend and nothing else. Or a pause, followed by someone offering to go and work it out.
How does a function measure this much and know this little?
Because measurement follows the question you were set, and we were set the wrong one.
The question marketing has spent twenty years answering is: can you show that what you did contributed? That’s a credit question. It’s about proving involvement in something that already happened. And once that’s the question, the tooling that follows is exactly what got built. Attribution exists to apportion credit. Influenced pipeline exists to claim a share. Engagement scoring exists to demonstrate activity mattered.
All of it is beautifully engineered for a question nobody outside marketing actually cares about.
The question the business is asking is different, and much simpler.
Is this worth doing?
That doesn’t need attribution. It needs two numbers put next to each other, one of which lives in marketing and one of which lives in finance.
Nobody built a fifteen-thousand-product industry to answer it, because there’s no industry in it. It’s arithmetic. It takes a few hours and a conversation with your finance lead.
The uncomfortable part is that the sophistication made things worse rather than better.
A function that couldn’t measure anything would have been forced to argue from judgement, and judgement is at least honest about what it is.
What we built instead was an apparatus producing enormous quantities of real, accurate, internally consistent data that answers a question the room didn’t ask. And because the output looks rigorous, it takes a long time for anyone to notice that it isn’t answering anything.
It survives every budget review. It gets waved through politely. And it never once changes a decision.
I’m not arguing for less measurement.
I’m arguing that the most sophisticated measurement function in business has been pointed, with real skill and considerable expense, at the wrong thing.
Turn it a few degrees and it’s the most useful function in the company.