Biggest bang for buck

I am not American and neither was the VP of marketing that said this to me back in 1999.

"Tell me which marketing activity gets me the biggest bang for my buck". But this is effectively a simple explaination of what measurable marketing is.

1999 was when my quest to measure marketing effectiveness began. We set out to figure out what marketing activity gets the biggest bang for buck in that particular organisation. We started with a marketing dashboard, effectively a wishlist of figures we would like to understand and track over time and then worked our way back from there. Testing, measuring, refining, test, measuring and refining. It was arduous and painful, but it resulted in the following comment:

"Claire delivered terrific and measurable results from her Markeing team. As a sales professional leveraging these results, it was refreshing to be able to evaluate the success or failure of their efforts in quantifiable terms that mattered to my team - numbers of clients won, and $ of Account Value, rather than in nebulous terms such as 'awareness' or 'brand recognition'"

So there you have it, sales and the board don't want to know about awareness or brand recognition, they want to know how the marketing impacted sales results.