Justin:
This is a big topic, obviously. RCA, like Adam alludes to, helps with opportunity/pipeline/revenue.
Unpopular opinion (sorry, Marketo!), Marketo reporting doesn't give you the kind of marketing analytics you need to really find this out. RCA can be great for pivoting around Opportunity values and campaign attributions, but not finding where the kinks are.
E.g., buying cycle stages. We set up scores for buying cycles—which pieces of the website are Awareness, which are Research, which are Consideration, which are Decision—and do scoring on that level. This shows a lot more quality information about where leads are in the buying cycle, what stage they're getting stuck at, and the quality of sourcing/influencing channels. Pure lead score is too linear to show actionable data, just a loose proxy for how much stuff a lead did around your marketing. A lead who jumps around your pricing/locations/contact page is further along in the buying cycle than a lead who likes to read your blog posts, while theoretically behavior lead score could be the same.
The real value is looking at the derivatives of those values, though. You can hackily do some of this in Marketo, but my opinion is that trustworthy/comprehensive/actionable data requires some more than this. RCA is good for analyzing opportunities, and that's obviously where the dollar signs are, but some operational metrics are necessary to speed up those opportunities.
The derivatives are important to see lead score velocity (change in lead score over time) and lead score acceleration (change in lead velocity over time). This is for nurture, for example—you could send 10 nurture emails to a prospect and they all fell flat except for #6 which was spot-on and caused the prospect to do deep research into your company. Another measure is (behavior score)/time. (Demographic score/channel) is good for seeing your targeting quality.
Buying cycle stage scoring is also important because it guides your content—you can see where your gaps are in the buying cycle content and fill them. Maybe you have lots of Awareness information but nothing moving people from Research into Consideration. When you use buying stage as a driver for your marketing, you also get more effective lead nurturing, not just email drips.
Lead statuses are generally more about who owns the lead internally han how close a buyer is to buying your product/service. They're both necessary, and there is obviously correlation. But moving to a buyer-centric buying stage measurement is more effective when you're marketing to that person.
Comprehensive reporting can come through third-party integrations (e.g., Birst). These can pull data from Marketo, SFDC, Google Analytics, and other data sources. Not easy to set up, definitely, and they require a large deal of marketing analytics knowledge to know which measures are actually important. Definitely a worthwhile investment—you can use it to get operational directions, identify kinks in the funnel at broad and granular levels, get executive summaries, and everything else that's valuable for showing/getting greater ROI.
Long-winded answer, sorry!
Best,
Edward UnthankMarketing Operations Specialist
Yesler
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