Building Your Marketing Scorecard: Measure What Matters
When it comes to driving growth, actionable marketing metrics are far more powerful than impressive board-level numbers that might not reflect your day-to-day reality. Especially for early-stage teams, focusing on what you can actually measure—and how those metrics inform your next step—is what sets you up for smarter decisions and true progress. Building a clear, cross-functional marketing scorecard is the first step in aligning marketing, sales, and CS around the outcomes that really matter.
Align on What to Measure—and Why
I start every new scorecard conversation with these prompts:
What specifically do we want to measure, and why?
Do we have the tools or data sources to capture it? If not, how simple would it be to get there?
How will this data help us act or change something? (Not just “because we can…”)
Which teams will use it, and how will we keep everyone bought in?
Honestly, building out a cross-functional scorecard is as much about conversation as it is about spreadsheets. When you invite Sales and CS to help shape what gets measured (and how often), you avoid those “what does this even mean?” moments that kill metrics’ credibility.
Weekly Scorecard: Marketing Benchmarks in Action
Goal: Set benchmarks and spot leading indicators—the early buzz, trends, and engagement that come before pipeline and revenue. You should be able to answer: What should I care about, and focus on here? Am I seeing the right audience engage (tiers, seniority, region)? Is our social presence compounding? Are we getting more out of our campaigns this week than last? Some of the metrics most helpful to capture week-over-week.
Unique Marketing Touchpoints
Touchpoints by Companies Reached or Account Tier
Website Visits (New vs. Returning %)
LinkedIn Followers and Engagement
Monthly/Quarterly: Connecting to Pipeline and Revenue
Goal: Understand how much impact your marketing is truly having, so you know what to double-down on (or ditch). Drill deeper by reporting:
Leads & Opportunities: By funnel stage, region, ICP tier, opp type (new, upsell, cross-sell).
Pipeline & Revenue Influenced: What dollar value did marketing actually touch? What share of closed-won revenue started with a marketing interaction?
Channel ROI: Where did your best conversions come from—events, webinars, paid, organic?
Benchmarks: Winning rates, deal velocity, and ACV for marketing-influenced deals versus the overall.
Channel and Campaign Performance: Sharpening Your Focus
Goal: Go granular—what campaign sequencing, touchpoint mix, or channel blend truly moves the needle for your specific market?Break down:
Campaign members and engagement by ICP tier, role level, and region.
Campaign correlation with client health metrics, sophistication scores, and time-to-value.
Sequencing: How quickly are you turning touches into opps, opps into closed revenue?
Get Everyone on Board—Literally
The best scorecards are built with Leadership, Sales and CS, not for them. Agree upfront on:
What each metric means (what’s a campaign member, MQL, influenced opp, etc.)
Cadence for sharing results (weekly check-ins for “air traffic,” monthly/quarterly for deeper dives)
Getting and using downstream data (win rates, velocity, time to onboarding) to close the loop and refine what you measure—together.
Establish Benchmarks, but Don’t Get Stuck
Benchmarks give you context for what’s “normal” and what’s a true outlier. Over time, this lets you pull apart just noise from the game-changing campaign.
Set a regular review schedule and keep the scorecard itself dynamic. Invite feedback, update as your GTM motion evolves, and let data inform decisions, not dictate them.
Final thought: Done is better than perfect. Your first scorecard will have gaps—but a focus on actionable insight, shared ownership, and regular review is what will empower you to move faster and smarter as a revenue team.
Ready to align your marketing metrics to actual decisions and results? They don’t need to be fancy—they just need to drive learning and action. If you’re not sure where to start, pick two priorities, map your measurement plan, and open the conversation across your go-to-market team. You’ll be surprised how much clarity (and momentum) follows.
