research brief

1. © SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved. 1
Research Brief
In commercial real estate investing, a third party who plays a role in connecting
the seller with a potential buyer may receive a finder’s fee. The finder’s only job
is to make the initial introduction; everything else that goes into consummating
a deal is someone else’s responsibility. Although finding interested parties is
useful, much more is required to ensure that buyers and sellers will successfully
navigate complex real estate transactions and walk away with a deal.
B-to-b marketing organizations are increasingly focused on supporting the
entire buyer’s journey instead of just handing off potentially interested leads to
sales and moving on. But the metrics that marketing uses to help understand
its contribution, beyond sourcing leads, are still catching up to this new
focus. Buyer engagement metrics provide the most powerful way to connect
marketing’s effectiveness at interacting with buyers to its eventual business
contribution. In this brief, we define required elements for measuring buyer
engagement, introduce a series of engagement metrics and describe how they
are calculated.
Required Elements of Engagement
B-to-b buyer engagement metrics quantify the degree to which buyers (individuals
and groups) detectably and deliberately interact with a brand. Engagement
quantification is needed in b-to-b environments where marketing focuses
significant portions of its efforts on affecting business results in addition to
sourcing demand. Although various metrics can be used to indicate engagement,
all engagement metrics depend on the following foundational elements:
• Qualifying interactions. Engagement implies that an individual has
done something deliberate for the purpose of soliciting information or
a meaningful response from a brand or selling organization. The result
of the buyer’s action is an interaction (digital or human-to-human) with a
brand. Filling out a form to request information, downloading an e-book
and attending a company-sponsored event are common examples of
deliberate interactions that qualify as engagement. By contrast, walking
past signage posted in an airport does not meet these criteria, because the
buyer displays no clear signal of intent to engage. Organizations measuring
buyer engagement must specify the actions or responses buyers may take
that count as an instance of engagement. To do this, list the most common
marketing (and possibly selling) tactics and specify what type of response
counts as a qualifying interaction for each tactic and what business systems
will detect these interactions.
Defining and Measuring B-to-B Buyer
Engagement
B-to-b marketing organizations
increasingly find that metrics
related to marketing-sourced leads
and pipeline inadequately express
marketing’s contribution
Marketing functions should focus
on influencing multiple members
of buying groups across the entire
buyer’s journey
Engagement metrics are a useful
way of connecting marketing
interactions with buying groups
to business impact

2. Research Brief
© SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved. 2
• Qualifying individuals. Technically, companies do not
take actions; individuals within companies are the ones
who act. Measuring engagement requires that interactions
be associated with identifiable individuals (although
identification may happen later). Those individuals should
meet a minimum level of qualification, such as belonging to
companies that operate within a targeted market segment
and having a job role or title that indicates they may be a
member of targeted buying groups.
• Target entity. B-to-b buyer engagement must be understood
in relation to its business impact, which is measured in
relation to an account (including any roll-ups to parent
accounts for divisions and locations), an opportunity or a
demand unit. Each of these target entities can be associated
with a level of revenue achievement, product purchase and
sales cycles of measurable duration. Organizations with
strategic objectives related to account growth are likely to
choose accounts. Organizations prioritizing new customer
acquisition or individual transactions may turn to demand
units, if defined (see the brief “The Data Model for the
Demand Unit Waterfall™”) or default to opportunities. All
individuals must become associated with a target entity for
their interactions to count toward engagement.
• Qualifying time period. All interactions must be constrained
by an applicable time period. Typically, account-level
engagement looks at qualifying interactions occurring within
a rolling 12-month period, while some analyses may isolate
engagement into fiscal quarters. When assessing engagement
in relation to demand units and opportunities, establish the
qualifying time period by looking at the interactions that take
place between the opportunity creation and close dates.
Allow an additional period of time ahead of opportunity
creation based on observable patterns that indicate when
buyer interest typically begins to appear (usually equivalent
to half the average length of an opportunity-to-close cycle). In
contrast to marketing-sourced demand, which considers only
marketing interactions that occur after an inquiry is received
and before a lead is handed off to sales, the qualifying time
period for measuring buyer engagement spans the entire
buyer’s journey, from initial interest to close.
• Segment/cohort definition (optional). Although it is
possible to look at engagement across all market segments
and target entities, the power of analyzing buyer engagement
is maximized by isolating and comparing engagement
between different segments or groupings of entities. For
example, engagement can be compared between accounts
selected for an account-based marketing program vs.
similar accounts not included in that program. Alternatively,
engagement for demand units in North America can be
contrasted against engagement for demand units in Europe.
B-to-B Buyer Engagement Metrics
Buyer engagement metrics come in several variations, each
serving a slightly different purpose:
• Engagement level. The simplest form of engagement
metric, engagement level, totals the number of qualifying
interactions that occurred with qualifying individuals
at a single target entity within a qualifying time period.
Engagement level highlights the volume of interaction
that took place, which can be meaningful to sellers and
marketers as they assess individual entities and compare
engagement levels to similar interactions that have been
deemed successful. Engagement level is a foundational
concept for all other types of engagement metrics.
• Target entities engaged. Within a segment, organizations
need to understand the volume of entities that have
been engaged. For some businesses, engagement starts
with a single interaction. Yet for many organizations, the
expectation is that marketing must interact with an entity

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Research Brief
multiple times to exert a meaningful influence. When this
is the case, a minimum engagement level may be set and
a volume of interactions exceeding that level must be
recorded before that entity is counted as engaged. Arriving
at the minimum engagement level necessary for an entity
to be counted as engaged is a negotiated outcome, typically
agreed upon by marketing, sales and executive leadership.
• Percentage engaged. When measuring against a finite
number of target entities, percentage engaged describes
the percentage of those entities that have achieved the
minimum engagement level. For example, organizations with
large-account marketing programs may track this metric and
strive to have 100 percent of their targeted accounts reach
the minimum engagement level.
• Average engagement level. Understanding the volume
of qualifying interactions provides insight into the level of
engagement experienced by a cohort or segment of target
entities. Some companies find it useful to monitor how the
average engagement level trends over time and relative to
movement in primary performance indicators (such as win
rate or account growth). To calculate average engagement
levels, identify a cohort of engaged target entities (those
with an engagement level greater than or equal to one). Add
together the engagement levels of each entity and divide
that number by the count of engaged target entities.
• Average number of individuals engaged. When b-to-b
organizations are dedicated to reaching deeply into accounts
and buying groups, monitoring the average number of
individual stakeholders engaged allows business leaders to
see how effectively they are accomplishing that goal. Within
an identified cohort of target entities, total the number of
qualifying individuals with at least one qualifying interaction
within the qualifying time period and divide that number by
the number of entities.
The Sirius Decision
As b-to-b marketing functions focus more on influencing
multiple members of buying groups throughout the buyer’s
journey, they need to adapt the way they monitor their efforts
and the impact of those efforts. Through the measurement
of engagement, the value that marketing creates can be
better understood and communicated. Once organizations
understand who is being engaged, how often and to what
degree, the next challenge is identifying how to create more
impactful engagement with target entities. This challenge can
be met only through a data-driven understanding of how tactics
should be organized and sequenced to drive better results.