Why B2B CMOs Must Proactively Own Their Measurement Framework

Disclaimer: This article does not apply to all marketers. Infact, RevSure works with many forward-leaning CMOs and marketing teams who have taken the opportunity to get ahead with driving and benefitting from owning their Measurement framework. However, we continue to find a good amount of marketers falling for the echo-chamber of no measurement.

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The Marketing Echo Chamber

There’s a counter-productive trend sweeping B2B marketing today (atleast in the mid-market segment): CMOs and marketing teams shunning attribution and measurement altogether.

It’s easy to see why. CMOs are under constant pressure from CEOs, CFOs, and CROs to prove value. Past attempts at attribution often failed—misapplied models, over-simplified dashboards, flawed assumptions. 

And now, an ever-growing echo chamber (observed in everyday social posts)  has taken root:

• Buyer Journeys are non-linear. Brand investments are long term and can’t be directly measured.
  
• Dark channels like podcasts and communities don’t show up in click-based models.
  
• The things that truly matter in marketing often can’t be measured at all, etc.

While none of these statements are entirely wrong individually, they’ve become shields to avoid the uncomfortable reality: measurement is messy, imperfect, but at the same time,  absolutely necessary.

The “No One Understands Marketing” Trap

Follow any such LinkedIn conversation, and too often the conversation spirals into collective self-despair, like:

• “CEOs don’t get it. It would be easier if the CEO removed themselves.”
  
• “CFOs only see numbers.”
  
• “No one appreciates marketing.”
  

Or it swings to the other extreme—back to “marketing 101”: focus on the ICP, messaging, pain points, nurturing, brand building. Important, yes. But used as a reason to disengage from measurement entirely, it becomes a trap.

While it is true that many CEOs and CFOs might not appreciate certain aspects of marketing and sometimes even earnest attempts at explanation have fallen on deaf ears,  the “no one understands us” stance is counterproductive. 

Here’s the bitter truth: no CEO or Board will accept a CMO who says marketing can’t be measured. Marketing spends investment dollars. Investments demand accountability.

Outside-In Perspective: Different Yardsticks — and the Perception Risk of a Double Standard

Across the business, every function is measured and analyzed rigorously:

• Sales: booked revenue and closed-won deals.
  
• Product: adoption, product usage, reviews, and feature engagement.
  
• Customer Success: retention, upsell/expansion, CSAT, NPS.
  

The metrics may vary across organizations. 

Yet marketing often operates under a different yardstick: “Just do good marketing.”

This isn’t always intentional, but it creates the risk of being perceived as a double standard. Every other function is held accountable to clear, quantitative metrics, while marketing can come across as the only discipline that resists being measured. 

That perception undermines credibility. If marketing wants a seat at the strategic table, it can’t be the outlier that asks to be judged differently while expecting the same level of investment as sales, product, or customer success.

Marketing Basics Are Not an Antidote to the Measurement Problem

When attribution and measurement efforts have failed in the past, many leaders retreated to the comfort of “marketing basics” as the antidote: let’s get back to truly knowing our ICP, understanding customer pain points, shaping messaging, building brand, and nurturing relationships. Let’s not waste time and resources on building dashboards. 

Yes, those fundamentals are absolutely essential. In fact, they’re the very foundation of great marketing. But let’s be clear: going back to basics is not a replacement for measurement. It doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to track impact and improve decision-making.

Marketing isn’t just about capturing and capitalizing on in-market demand—it also extends to shaping long-term perception and preference. It involves imprinting memory and awareness in the prospect’s mind well before they actively begin searching, building recall so that when a need arises, your brand is the first one they think of, and engaging with stakeholders who may be problem-unaware and solution-unaware today but could become tomorrow’s buyers. Ultimately, it’s about developing brand preference early on, which directly impacts win rates and drives greater sales efficiency.

But none of these conflicts with measurement. In fact, measurement is what helps us optimize those basics—deciding where to invest more, which channels to double down on, which messages resonate, and how to defend budget with credibility.

Take podcasts, for example. They may not generate direct clicks or form-fills, but they build awareness and imprint memory that surfaces later in the buying journey. Measurement helps you connect that awareness to downstream effects. 

The Right Push Back in the Right Way

‍There are genuine reasons why marketing often pushes back against measurement. It’s true that marketing impact is difficult to measure and often plays out over long time horizons. Buyer journeys are non-linear, spanning multiple channels and touchpoints.

Some of the most valuable activities — like word of mouth or brand impressions in non-trackable channels — rarely show up in the data. Even multi-touch attribution, in its broadest definitions, struggles to capture how influence and awareness actually build over time.

And even when data is available, it is often tough to separate causal impact from simple correlation. So even simplistic marketing mix methods might not work. Too often, the measurement frameworks pushed onto marketing are incomplete or flawed, and teams are judged by suboptimal tools or simplistic models that cannot represent the full picture.

This frustration is valid. But here’s the irony: it is precisely why marketing must own its measurement framework. If you don’t define it, someone else will, and you’ll be stuck being held accountable to methods that misrepresent your impact.

Experience Got You Here — Evidence Keeps You Here

A frequent fallback in the absence of measurement is experience. Yes, one might have managed an XXM budget and scaled a company to unicorn status, but that does not cover for needing measurement in your current role.

Experience may have earned you the role. But it wasn’t the war stories alone—it was the ability to adapt, to navigate new categories, markets, and contexts. That credibility now needs to be re-earned.

Relying solely on authority or past success is no different from avoiding measurement. Both sidestep the responsibility to validate today’s decisions with evidence.

CMOs don’t sustain credibility by pointing backward. They do it by proving—through measurement—how marketing investments are delivering impact right now.

So What Could a Measurement Framework Entail?

While every business is different, certain principles and concepts hold true. A measurement framework should align with the buyer journey (awareness, research, consideration, purchase) and the way you are orchestrating your GTM funnel from top to bottom. So, think about how you will:

• Measure the impact of different channels: online, offline, ABM, paid, events, virtual events, webinars, OOH, brand, Social, etc.
• Clarify the role of each channel and how it contributes to different aspects of the buyer journey.
• Define leading indicators, output metrics, and outcome metrics that reflect execution, near-term performance, and ultimate business impact.
• Explain how so-called “vanity metrics” (like spends, impressions, touches, clicks, engagement) can serve as meaningful leading indicators when linked to downstream impact such as branded search, demo requests, or pipeline creation.
• Identify operational, tactical, and board-level metrics that connect day-to-day execution to strategic visibility.
• Ensure alignment with the CFO, CRO, and operational teams so marketing’s framework speaks the same language as finance, revenue, and operations.
• Within this context, determine how you will measure ROI across programs and initiatives.
• Identify which analytical tools: such as MMX, MTA, Incrementality or other advanced analytics can help you relate leading indicators to eventual outcomes like pipeline and revenue.

Here’s how that can look in practice as an example:

• Leading indicators (early signals): awareness lift, impressions, clicks, social engagement, webinar signups, branded/organic search, event attendance.
• Output metrics (conversion-focused): demo requests, trial starts, MQL → SQL conversion, pipeline created, opportunity stage progression.
• Board-level / outcome metrics (business impact): deal velocity, win rates, pipeline coverage, CAC payback, LTV: CAC ratio, contribution of marketing-sourced/influenced pipeline and revenue.

The key is that the leading and output metrics you choose must be at least statistically related, in a significant and ideally causal way, to the outcome metrics. This is where advanced measurement methods come in: MMX, MTA, and Incrementality each serve their own purpose in validating those relationships and ensuring that what looks like “signal” is truly impacting business outcomes. This doesn’t mean the framework will be perfect or final. Think of this as an initial starting point, a scaffolding you can refine, adapt, and evolve as your business, channels, and GTM motion mature.

Enterprise vs. Mid-Market: A Tale of Two Attitudes

This resistance to measurement shows up most often in mid-market companies. At that stage, marketing leaders (not all) often lean on the “just do good marketing” mindset as an escape from the messiness of measurement. In that environment support structures are also very lean, and companies are not set up with the skill sets needed for measurement. 

By contrast, enterprise CMOs don’t have that luxury. Operating at greater scale and complexity, they want visibility. They’re hungry for sharper measurement and better insight because they understand that at a macro level, patterns emerge. And those patterns can be surfaced and measured.

It’s not that enterprise CMOs face fewer challenges—if anything, their complexity is higher. But they’ve accepted the truth: without measurement, there’s no way to optimize spend, justify budgets, or steer strategy with confidence.

This is the mindset mid-market marketing leaders must adopt if they want to grow into enterprise-ready CMOs.

Why CMOs Must Own the Framework

Many CMOs push the responsibility for measurement onto Ops, Tech, or Analytics teams. That’s a mistake. Support teams can stitch together the data, run experiments, and build dashboards. But only the CMO understands how marketing actually works across channels, across the buyer journey, and within the unique context of their product, category, and GTM motion.

You designed the strategy and the campaigns. You know which channels are for awareness, which are for conversion, which shape preference before the buyer is even problem-aware. You understand how marketing builds brand, activates demand, influences pipeline, accelerates deals, and improves win rates. That knowledge can’t be outsourced.

Owning the framework means defining the minimum standards for what constitutes an acceptable measurement method: the inputs, the outputs, and the outcome metrics that matter. It’s about being explicit on why those measures tie back to strategy. By doing so, CMOs can push back against flawed accountability models while still ensuring credibility.

You don’t need to know every formula or run every regression. But you must set the tone, define the approach, and make sure the framework reflects your strategy. Because if you don’t drive it, it will drive you.

Escape the Echo-Chamber: Measurement as an Iterative, Reflective Practice

Here’s what often gets lost in the noise: measurement isn’t about perfection. It’s about practice.

Think of it as an iterative, reflective discipline—designed to bring a marketer’s qualitative intuition together with data-driven insights. It adds quantification, not to strip the art out of marketing, but to help make better-informed decisions.

The best CMOs don’t treat measurement as a rigid system; they treat it as a feedback loop. Each cycle of measuring, analyzing, and refining sharpens both the science and the art. Over time, that reflection compounds into smarter investments, stronger campaigns, and clearer credibility with the C-suite.

Escaping the echo chamber means rejecting the false comfort of “marketing can’t be measured” and embracing measurement as a living practice that evolves alongside your strategy.

Getting Beyond Anecdotal and Consensus-Based Decision Making

When scaling experiments and allocating scarce resources—budget, time, talent—measurement is the foundation for confident decisions.

Without it, marketing falls into two traps:

• Anecdotal decisions — guided by gut feel, opinions, or isolated success stories
• Consensus decisions — deferring to what “the room” believes rather than what evidence shows

Intuition and collaboration matter, but without validation, they risk drifting into guesswork.

Take podcasts as an example. You might assume they drive awareness because they show up in branded search or are mentioned in word of mouth. Self-reported attribution may reinforce that belief. But is it statistically validated—say, through measurable lift in branded search volume, or significance in a marketing mix model that accounts for long buying cycles?

Podcasts may indeed be a critical lever. Yet when trade-offs arise—budget freezes, reallocation decisions, or prioritizing the next marketing dollar—anecdotes and consensus aren’t enough. Measurement is what separates signal from noise, providing the clarity to make the right call at scale.

The Good News: Tools Are Getting Better

The reasons of yesterday don’t hold up anymore. Measurement tools are improving continuously, such as:

• Marketing Mix Modeling (MMX): Once the domain of consumer giants, now adapted for long buying cycle B2B contexts.
  
• Incrementality Testing: Controlled experiments, lift studies, and holdouts that finally tell you, “What truly moved the needle?”‍
• Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA): No longer limited to simplistic first-touch or last-touch models or just click based models—today’s approaches bring a broader definition of “touch”, use statistically valid, data science–driven methods.

And in parallel, many marketing leaders have turned to primary surveys and self-reported attribution to capture what traditional methods missed. These are valuable—especially for understanding dark channels and qualitative impact—but they are not separate from the measurement framework. They’re inputs that enrich and strengthen it.

Together, these tools provide insights and measurement at different levels of the marketing decision hierarchy and can be used to make better decisions across channels, campaigns, audiences, regions, segments, messaging, budget allocation, etc.. Each method has its pros and cons, and no method is perfect, but when used correctly, they unlock a treasure of insights. 

When built on a strong data foundation, these approaches let CMOs not just measure what matters, but measure it better over time. And that’s the real opportunity—measurement doesn’t have to be perfect on day one. It must evolve, just like your marketing.

Conclusion: The Bitter Truth

Marketing teams often shun measurement because of past trauma—because it wasn’t done right before. But that’s no excuse for abandoning it. 

The truth is simple: only marketing can own its measurement framework. Others can support, but you alone know how your strategy and tactics are meant to work together across the funnel & buyer journey.

The best CMOs don’t hide behind reasons. They get ahead. They lean in, own the framework, and push for better measurement every quarter. They know:

• If you don’t own it, someone else will.
  
• If you don’t drive it, it will drive you.
  

And that’s the bitter truth.