Client Reference Cisco Marketing Investment RoI

Cisco asked bChannels to look at ways to measure the RoI on marketing investment, in particular the European Cisco Expo event program. We looked to establish marketing goals for Cisco Expo events and to put in place process to gather relevant measures of success.

The Challenge

There is an apocryphal story of the CMO who said "I know half of my marketing budget is wasted, but I don't know which half".

The measurement of ROI on marketing spend in a complex B2B environment like IT is an industry-wide challenge.

Events are usually the most popular marketing activities amongst vendor and partner sales teams. They create the ideal opportunity for relationship building and contact nurturing. However, they often produce few leads and are extremely expensive on a cost-per-hit basis.

As a leader in on-line collaboration tools, Cisco needed to measure the real value of 'old world' marketing techniques like events.

Establishing Marketing Goals

Working with in-country stakeholders we built a clear picture of the goals of the event in each region. We clarified the target audience and agreed what metrics might be used to measure success. Direct Mail activity, for example, can be measured quite easily based on numbers of responses and value of closed sales from those responses.

It became clear that events were aimed at increasing awareness, which it is not so easy to link to down-stream revenue. We built a model that assesses the effectiveness of an event in moving the target audience along the pre-sales cycle, from awareness to consideration, consideration to preference, etc. and then relating that to revenue up-lift.

Post Event Surveys

Based on the agreed metrics we refined the post-event survey process so that it allowed us to measure success. We mapped the results to the CRM system and defined the reporting process to measure the comparative ROI, rather than just the delegate satisfaction which is the traditional measure of an event's success.

Events are now followed by detailed analysis of the goals by target audience and relevant survey feedback to measure success.

Why this matters to Cisco

If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

The results of our work are used by Cisco to drive the budgeting process so that investment is made in the activities with the highest return. By benchmarking between activities, they allow this decision-making to be transparent and identify areas of best practice as well as potential improvement.