stop looking at conversions

You're not selling seashells. In B2B, the time it takes your buyer to go from considering to buying is measured in months. For all you know, the people who converted today could have started their journey last week or last year.

In most B2B situations, CR is about as meaningful as measuring stuff in freedoms per square eagle.

Measuring B2B marketing by CR only gets said marketing yelled at.

Here's what to optimize for instead:

🤝 Lead ↔ ICP fit

Measure every lead/signup that you get against your ICP definition. In other words, are the people who converted the ones you were trying to convert?

If you’re getting more leads, but most are bad-fit, the new messaging isn’t helping — wasting your sales team’s time. (It’s not like they need any more reasons to be annoyed by marketing.)

As a bonus, this will signal when your ICP definition is broken.

👀 Consumption

Look at which assets people engage with and which contribute to getting a conversion.

Is that whitepaper you poured your soul and budget into getting less action than the bedroom of a dead marriage? Good news — you now know what NOT to do and can direct your energy and resources toward the assets contributing to winning deals with good-fit buyers.

h/t to Tas Bober for this one.

📈 Lead velocity

Track how quickly leads move through your funnel stages.

Do buyers—especially good-fit ones—consistently ask the same questions, and it takes them weeks to go from interest to demo call? You can massively speed things up by proactively answering those questions on your website.

Yes, this includes showing pricing.

🎯 Sales readiness

Measure how prepared leads are when they reach sales. Good messaging = better conversations.

This is probably the most manual of all, but incredibly effective — check in with your sales team on what was their best and worst buyer conversations recently, and why.

Then do one thing you can to improve the situation.

Stop looking at conversion rates—as much—and focus on understanding your buyers' journey instead.