Registrations Don’t Pay the Bills: Why B2B Marketing Needs to Be Measured in Revenue

Marketing measurement that celebrates registrations and click-through rates without a whisper of pipeline growth is like bragging about your gym membership but never going near a treadmill. Unfortunately, in the world of b2b marketing, vanity metrics have somehow become gospel. Email opens, webinar sign-ups and whitepaper downloads are all treated like marketing gold, and frankly, we’re tired of it. At the end of the day, if none of these things result in a single meeting, opportunity, or deal, what are we actually celebrating?

At Stirling Marketing, we’ve made it our business to challenge performance metrics that make marketers feel good but don’t move the needle. Our approach? Revenue or bust. Here’s why:

The Vanity Metric Trap

Before we go any further, let’s be clear: email opens, clicks, and registrations all have their place. These data points are far from useless; they’re just dangerously easy to overvalue. Why? Because they look great in PowerPoint. They climb quickly, they colour dashboards nicely, and they offer the illusion of marketing performance. But the catch is, they rarely reflect actual b2b buying behaviour.

Let’s break down a few of the usual suspects:

• An email open just means someone skimmed a subject line, or quite often, their email client auto-opened it while they were deleting it.

• A click? Sure, they tapped a link. But were they a potential customer or someone killing time between meetings?

• A registration? All that proves is someone wanted access to a content marketing asset, a whitepaper, or lunch. Unfortunately, it's not a sign of custom acquisition intent.

This isn’t just a gut feeling, it’s backed by data. According to Forrester, only 0.75% of B2B leads ever convert into closed deals. That’s less than 1% of all the contacts marketing departments proudly parade as successes.Before we go any further, let’s be clear: email opens, clicks, and registrations all have their place. These data points are far from useless; they’re just dangerously easy to overvalue. Why? Because they look great in PowerPoint. They climb quickly, they colour dashboards nicely, and they offer the illusion of marketing performance. But the catch is, they rarely reflect actual b2b buying behaviour.

Why Most B2B Marketing Campaigns Are Built on the Wrong KPIs

This gap didn’t appear overnight. It’s the result of a system that rewards the wrong performance indicators, misinterprets success, and often forces b2b marketers to optimise for optics instead of pipeline and revenue.

Here’s where it usually starts to unravel:

• MQL inflation: Too many leads are deemed ‘marketing qualified’ just because they met arbitrary criteria, not because they’re genuinely sales-ready.

• Disconnected goals: When marketing teams are judged by volume, not conversion rate, alignment with sales teams disappears.

• Data without context: Tracking metrics without understanding the why behind them leads to campaigns optimised for engagement, not outcomes.

As a result, we often see Marketing and Sales speaking entirely different languages. One side is thrilled with 1,000 new downloads. The other is wondering why they haven’t had a single decent conversation in weeks.

It’s not just ineffective; it’s costly. Time, budget, and marketing investment get burned on activities that don’t advance deals. Worse, it erodes credibility across the business. Sales stop listening. Leadership decreases the marketing budget. And b2b marketing becomes a cost centre instead of a growth-driving business goal.

How to Measure B2B Marketing by Pipeline, Not Clicks

Shifting from marketing theatre to marketing that delivers isn’t just a mindset change; it’s a structural overhaul. It means dropping the obsession with soft engagement metrics and replacing them with KPIs that make your Head of Sales smile and your CFO consider increasing your budget (instead of slashing it).

This isn’t about reporting more data. It’s about reporting the right data. The kind that can withstand boardroom scrutiny. The kind that shows marketing isn’t just busy but indispensable.

At Stirling Marketing, we build our strategies around outcomes that matter:

• Meetings booked: If no one’s talking to sales, nothing’s moving. A booked meeting with the right person is one of the clearest indicators that a campaign is working. It means we’ve hit the right audience, with the right message, at the right time.

• Opportunities created or influenced: It's not enough to say marketing “contributed” to growth. We track whether marketing activity helped open new pipeline or move existing opportunities closer to the finish line.

• Pipeline acceleration: B2B deals often drag. If we can reduce the average sales cycle, even by a few weeks, that’s tangible business value. Great marketing doesn’t just fill the funnel; it keeps it flowing faster.

• Revenue attributed to marketing: This is the holy grail. We trace the customer acquisition cost, from first click to closed deal, to determine true marketing ROI.

These aren’t vanity numbers. They’re metrics that matter, and they’re ones any CFO, CRO or CEO will pay attention to.

Proof, Pudding, and Marketing Data: The Celigo Example

We know that talk is cheap. If you really want to know whether a marketing strategy is working, you need to look at what it’s actually generating. So, here’s our proof.

When Celigo (read our Celigo Case Study to learn more) - a global integration platform provider set its sights on the Asia-Pacific and Japan region, they had all the typical B2B challenges: low brand awareness, limited in-region presence, and no time to waste on anything that didn’t drive results.

They partnered with Stirling Marketing with one clear goal: to make marketing meaningful and measurable.

What We Did:

• Developed a multi-year strategy tailored to APJ growth objectives (not just a one-and-done campaign).

• Ran 33 events across 12 months, blending marketing channels like conferences, partner events, and in-house activations. 

• Crafted content marketing assets and messaging that actually resonated in key markets: Australia, Singapore, and Japan.

What Happened Next:

• 2,000 genuine leads generated: not just names on a spreadsheet, but sales-ready contacts aligned to target personas.

• Over 20 new sales opportunities emerged from marketing activity alone in 2023.

• In 2024, opportunity creation jumped 380%, and the team closed 16 new deals directly linked to marketing engagement.

• Marketing-sourced revenue generated grew by more than 40% year-on-year.

• The results were so effective, Celigo increased its APJ marketing budget by 300%.

And the cherry on top? At one of the flagship Stirling-run events, a prospect was so impressed by the experience and content that they signed a deal before leaving the venue. No unreliable attribution, or loose claim - Just the right environment for a decision-maker to say, “Let’s do this.”

Let’s Measure What Matters

If you’ve made it this far, you probably don’t need convincing that the old ways aren’t cutting it. Registrations, clicks, and form fills might fluff up your monthly report, but they won’t get you more budget, close deals, or build the kind of marketing function that actually drives a business forward. The reality is this: if marketing isn’t influencing pipeline, it’s just performance art. And no one’s funding interpretive dance in a cost-of-living crisis.

At Stirling Marketing, we work with teams who are ready to start owning their impact.

Whether you’re launching into new regions, rebuilding trust between sales and marketing, or trying to prove to leadership that marketing is more than a line item, we help you prove it with numbers, not just narratives.

Contact Stirling Marketing to see what a results-first partnership really looks like.