How to prove marketing ROI when you have a long sales cycle
The measurement framework that doubled marketing-driven pipeline to 60%.
If you’re a marketing leader who enjoys budget-setting meetings, we don’t believe you. Unless you’re Sarah Cascone.
As CMO of omnichannel returns and shrink reduction tool Appriss Retail, and former VP of Marketing at enterprise retail marketing platform Bluecore, Sarah’s taken her fair share of rides through the budget rodeo. In both roles, she’s been up against proving marketing ROI at a company with large buying groups and long sales cycles.
Along the way she figured out how to measure marketing in a way that clearly connects to business success—while making it easier to align on resources and budget.
The crucial thing, Sarah says, is building deep trust and meaningful relationships with executive buyers in your ICP. To measure this, she looks at metrics across three stages of marketing: awareness (educating the market on your unique POV on solving your buyers’ problems), interest (organically engaging with buyers to earn respect), and consideration (demonstrating product value to gain validation in your solution).
With this framework, Sarah is showing marketing leaders how to secure budget autonomy while delivering strong results.
Key takeaways: The 3 things you need to know about proving marketing ROI
- Develop a reporting cadence that measures the full marketing motion instead of individual channel performance. (This will give you better insight into what closes enterprise deals in a way that your CFO will understand.)
- Align with finance and sales on KPI definitions and progression criteria before launch to secure budget autonomy and avoid constantly begging for resources.
- Build a pipeline waterfall model that works backwards from revenue targets to justify budget requests.
Measuring pipeline, not channels
When Sarah first joined Bluecore, the marketing team was stuck in a familiar trap: Finance wanted ROI proof, but 6–9 month sales cycles meant that success indicators took time to manifest. The team was measuring a ton of metrics—paid ad clicks, email opens, event attendance—but couldn’t paint a coherent picture of what was actually driving sales pipeline.
Compounding this challenge was Bluecore’s constrained addressable market: They had only roughly 1,000 target accounts. This meant they couldn’t rely on volume alone—they needed to increase sales conversations at every stage of the pipeline.
The team was missing the forest for the trees. Sarah explains:
“Most marketing measurement over-indexes on individual channels, vs. the holistic marketing motion. But we all know it’s not one channel that secures a meeting or seals a deal. It’s a symphony of experiences that come together.”
Instead of measuring something like whether an individual LinkedIn ad “worked,” Sarah proposed measuring whether the broader account-based marketing and outbound marketing motions were performing across the awareness, interest, and consideration stages. This required getting finance, sales, and marketing to agree upfront on what success looked like at each stage—before any deals closed.
How to measure the efficacy of your marketing program (in a way your CFO will understand)
Step 1: Identify your primary marketing motions
At storyarb, we spend a lot of time mocking over-used business sayings—but this is actually kind of a good one: Don’t try to boil the ocean.
Proof of marketing ROI dies when you try to take on too many initiatives at once. Instead, Sarah recommends identifying 2–3 marketing motions that you believe will reliably bring in prospects and customers.
The right marketing motion for you depends on your business model. Consider the length of your sales cycle and your total addressable market to decide where to put your attention (and budget).
- Short sales cycle, large TAM: Product-led growth (PLG)-based marketing will help you reach as many people as possible.
- Long sales cycle, large TAM: Expansion-based marketing will help you first own your key verticals, then expand to the entire market over time.
- Long sales cycle, small TAM: Account-based marketing will help you reach the right companies and develop brand affinity.
- Short sales cycle, small TAM: Persona-based marketing will help you reach the right people with the right offer.
(Note: While one of these quadrants will likely be most relevant to you, multiple may apply.)
Once you've identified which motions you’ll bet on, you can begin to break them into measurable stages where marketing can actually intervene and influence outcomes.
Caption: Sarah’s slide for Appriss Retail’s ABM + outbound strategy
Step 2: Build your measurement framework
The marketing motion(s) you select now need concrete measurement points. Sarah created a framework that mapped to how buyers actually progress, with each stage anchored by a primary marketing function.
At the awareness stage, “the goal is to educate the market on our unique point of view through the lends of subject matter expertise,” says Sarah.
The core measure here is how many accounts within your TAM per month are meeting your MQL warmth threshold, based on intent signals like search keywords, site visits to high-intent pages (like a piece of hero content, benchmark report, events registration page, or pricing page), and email engagements.
At the interest stage, the goal is to book qualified meetings at the right level (senior director and above) and persona (on that 1,000 named accounts list), to ensure prospects have the necessary buying authority.
Finally, at the consideration stage, the goal is to move prospects closer to buying by demonstrating product differentiation. “This is anchored by vertical-based product marketing and competitive intel,” Sarah explains. “The objective is to demonstrate value to gain validation for our solution over anyone else’s.” She measured opportunities here by looking at SQL to SQO conversion rates, which successful marketing motions can accelerate.
Step 3: Align on definitions and KPIs with finance + sales — before launch
Your framework is only useful if everyone agrees on what it means. With your framework defined, it’s time to get finance and sales aligned on definitions—and why these are the right leading indicators to watch.
Sarah spent significant time getting alignment before executing programs.
“Once you understand the approach you think you need to take, it’s a matter of clearly articulating that narrative,” she says. “The goal is to give finance what they need from a predictability standpoint, so you can get what you need from a budget and autonomy standpoint.”
Key points Sarah and team aligned on included:
- KPI definitions — not just what metrics to measure, but what each one represented in the larger picture
- Progression criteria — for example, for SQO, they defined BANT (budget, authority, need, timeline) requirements that had to be met to advance an opportunity
- Time horizons — the team added 60-day limits on how long opportunities could sit in SQO to prevent forecast pollution
Step 4: Work backwards into budget allocation
“Once we aligned on KPIs and the different channels that funneled into those KPIs, we could agree upon not just the metrics, but how much budget would go into achieving that metric,” Sarah explains.
To prove your budget requests are realistic, start by working backwards from revenue targets.
Sarah and her business operations partner created a waterfall model that showed precisely how many MQLs, SQLs, and SQOs they needed month-over-month to hit annual targets, factoring in the time lag between launching marketing activities and when their effects would actually impact bookings.
The model brought new insights into timeline needs: given their lengthy sales cycle, most H2 activity wouldn’t make an impact until the following year, so they needed to drive the majority of pipeline and spend in H1. The model also incorporated:
- Historical performance data on conversion rates
- Performance assumptions (number of reps in seat, committed events, etc.)
- Stage progression time to forecast when opportunities would actually close
The resulting budget allocation was as follows:
- 25% MQL (awareness programs + tools)
- 55% SQL (events, which drove most pipeline)
- 5% SQO (mostly headcount, minimal program spend)
- 15% tech + T&E
Within each stage, Sarah distinguished primary spend (core channels like LinkedIn, content agency, PR for MQL) from secondary spend (experiments like direct mail, podcast sponsorships) that could be cut if needed to reallocate to better-performing motions.
More on how to balance your faithful go-to strategies with strategic experiments here.
Sarah’s slide breaking down marketing budget across stage
“You have to back into the numbers,” Sarah concludes. “The goal is for marketing leadership, sales leadership, and finance to agree about what targets you can hit based on your marketing programs, level of investment, and the people and tools you already have in place.”
Results: More pipeline, more predictability
Sarah’s approach allowed her to define a marketing plan that would help her team hit their targets—and then gave her the budget and buy-in she needed to carry out that plan. It also drove measurable impact across the business:
- Pipeline contribution: Marketing went from 30% to 60% of pipeline in one year
- Meeting volume: Meetings with decision makers (senior director and above) tripled
- Conversion rates: Mid-funnel conversion rates (SQL to SQO) jumped from about 20% to nearly 40%.
Beyond these numbers, another win was the operational freedom this framework brought to the marketing team. Because they’d agreed with sales and finance about definitions and leading indicators upfront, Sarah’s team had the agency to make tactical decisions—like cutting podcast sponsorships, or reallocating event spend—without re-litigating the budget every time.
Meanwhile the dashboards her team built allowed flexible views: they could show channel and campaign performance when needed, but the default view was MQL, SQL, and SQO performance, measured by HockeyStack. This kept everyone focused on the holistic “symphony” of marketing strategy—rather than nitpicking individual channel ROI.
FAQ: Measuring marketing impact
What marketing motions should I focus on and why?
Focus your attention on 2–3 motions—such as account-based marketing, inbound, outbound, community, or product-led growth—based on your sales cycles and total addressable market. In general, your strategy should look like this:
- Short sales cycle, large TAM: Growth-based marketing
- Long sales cycle, large TAM: Expansion-based marketing
- Long sales cycle, small TAM: Account-based marketing
- Short sales cycle, small TAM: Persona-based marketing
Should marketing own the SQO metric, or is that a sales metric?
Co-own SQOs with sales to give marketing a tighter connection to closed-won deals and more influence over opportunity progression—critical when selling to a finite market with long sales cycles. Define clear BANT criteria (budget, authority, need, timeline) that must be met for a prospect to advance from SQL to SQO.
How do I align with finance on a holistic marketing measurement approach, when they want immediate ROI?
Have a direct conversation about leading indicators vs. lagging indicators. With 6–9 month sales cycles, waiting to measure closed-won means you’ll have no early signals about whether your strategy is working.
Walk finance through what “predictability” actually looks like for marketing: agreed-upon definitions of MQL/SQL/SQO, historical conversion rates, and a waterfall model showing when marketing activities will impact demo bookings.
What do I do if I don’t have historical data to build a waterfall model?
Start with performance assumptions and industry benchmarks, then refine as you collect data. Build the model with your BizOps or RevOps partner, and plan quarterly check-ins to adjust assumptions based on actual performance. Finance will respect the rigor, even if initial inputs are partially estimated—and you won’t have to rely on those estimates for longer than the first quarter.
