The B2B Subscription Startup Guide to MarTech: What to Track and Put in Your Stack

I couldn’t count the number of times I've been asked the following questions in my 20 years of MarTech implementations:

1. Which success metrics should I care about about?

2. Which user events are the most actionable?

3. How should I build and use my stack to scale?

B2B marketers compete in a marketplace. Small, known customer bases and lengthy purchase cycles require clearly defined lead scoring, tight nurturing funnels, and consistent engagement across the customer lifecycle.

That's why we’re collaborating with Segment’s Startup Program to show you the tools, metrics, and user events crucial for optimizing your stack's impact.

The Added Value of a Solid B2B Subscription Stack

Getting B2B marketing right means aligning your team members with their responsibility to the purchase cycle, helping them identify and fast-track high-value leads, and ensuring smooth transitions between funnel stages and business functions. I can’t imagine B2B companies remaining competitive without the feedback, insights, and added functionality that tech stacks provide. 

Top B2B Events Your Stack Should Track 

You can't optimize what you don't measure. Marketers in B2B subscription businesses need deep visibility into their audience’s firmographics, combined with the ability to get granular and tinker with each conversion step along the way. Here are the top B2B events you should track:

• Lead Created: Unknown visitors become leads once they submit a lead form, sharing attributes, and contact information.

• User Created: Occurs once visitors create a login in the application for the first time. You’ll benefit from an event property that’ll distinguish between new accounts and users invited to existing accounts.

• [Feature Used]: This event’s name will be custom to the most important features in your application. Record it so you can optimize for retention, advocacy, or revenue. Examples include Integration Enabled or Task Created.

• Order Completed: This event will be used to report on revenue, conversion rates from free to paid, and customer retention.

Top B2B Subscription Metrics—How a Stack Helps Measure What Matters

You need metrics covering your customer journey from beginning to end across nurturing touchpoints and noteworthy events. That also includes recurring subscription metrics and evaluating marketing and sales performance (and marketing-sales collaboration). 

Marketers can learn how features correlate to engagement, churn, and satisfaction by analyzing behavioral differences in feature usage across user groups. Below are just a few metrics that B2B businesses should focus on.

New and Total Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

Users who trigger the Payment Completed event are at the start of MRR or ARR. The metrics help you iIdentify valuable user cohorts and behaviors by comparing marketing channels, feature usage, and retention trends.

Trial Subscription Conversion Rate

Learn how frequently visitors become trial users after viewing your marketing pages. Cross-reference page views with User Created to get a handle on how well your channels or campaigns convert.

Sales Opportunity Closed-Won Rate

Combine the User Created and Payment Completed events to begin tracking. Factor in feature usage and original marketing channel of these users in your analysis to optimize this conversion rate.

Visitor-to-Signup Conversion Rate

This conversion rate is a key part of the full customer journey, and you’ll get the most mileage out of it by integrating your CRM tool with a data warehouse. When analyzing, you’ll want to look at both CRM and website activity, as recorded by Segment.

Use Cases of Integrations for B2B Growth

When you combine the power of a variety of sophisticated MarTech tools, you not only pool together valuable resources, you expand each tool’s abilities. Making the best use of these advanced use cases can help you scale B2B revenue. Get inspired below.

Analyze Firmographics to Validate Lead Quality

Lead quality almost always takes precedence over lead volume—early-and-middle staged B2B marketing programs frequently shift their focus away after sales struggles to qualify poor-fit leads.

In this use case, use Clearbit Reveal to gather firmographic data via IP addresses, which you need to qualify visitors. You'll next use the Clearbit Enrichment to add even more context to leads. Finally, you’ll pass this data to your data warehouse BigQuery, and your user journey analytics tool Amplitude. 

Combine Salesforce and Autopilot for Automated Messaging and Salesforce Integration

Connecting Salesforce and Autopilot creates a loop that synchronizes shared fields. When data is added or changed in one, it's applied to the same contact in the other.

We frequently use Autopilot with our clients in this way for lead scoring and automated messaging. As well as for keeping CRM records complete in Salesforce.

Automate and Power Personalized Messaging

Clearbit's enrichment data can superpower your touch points. When you use Segment to connect it to Customer.io and Drift, you can trigger automatic personalized message sends based on company info for each lead.

I’ve seen custom messaging make a considerable impact—more leads, higher conversion rates, increasing coverage of the customer lifecycle, and, most of all, volumes of first-party data for further optimization.

Add Customer.io Email Events

Email marketing data is often disconnected from tech stacks and conversion strategies, leaving money on the table. This use case is designed to help with just that — fully integrating key email events and expanding our analysis of full customer journey.

Email events Segment is able to send downstream include Email Delivered/Opened/Clicked/Unsubscribed. They can then be used in BigQuery or Amplitude, where they’re processed or analyzed. It’ll help with validating messaging strategies, improving email conversion rates, even moving the needle on retention.

Enable Custom Marketing Attribution

Custom attribution models use JS to send the data such as Page and Identity tables. But such custom data sources can be hard to sync with your reporting and data exploration tools such as Chartio.

With Segment, you can translate data and consolidate taxonomy, so they live alongside data from other sources in your warehouse and reporting tools. As a result, you can build accurate attribution and calculate your ROAS.

Your Visual Reference of B2B Tool Integrations

The above diagrams were taken from our B2B subscription MarTech stack infographic — with examples and explanations of B2B stacks integrated through Segment.

Download this pdf to remind yourself of best practice and ideas for your stack.

Join the Segment Startup Program, Build a Strong Stack, Grow Your Ecommerce Business

Segment's Startup Program gives early-stage startups all the tools they need to build high-performing stacks. Eligible startups get $25k in Segment credits for up to two years, using Segment’s Team Plan. On top of that, Segment is also giving away more than $1 million in free marketing and analytics platforms (Like Amplitude and Amazon Web Services). Heavy discounts on software are also available—and you unlock Segment’s advanced resources like the Analytics Academy or Analytics office hours.

To be eligible, startups must have been incorporated fewer than two years ago and have not raised more than $5 million in funding.

Don’t wait! Learn more about Segment’s one-of-a-kind Startup Program. And if you’d like a hand picking your tools along the way, feel free to use our WYSIWYG MarTech stack builder.

About the Author

Dan McGaw is the founder of McGaw.io, MarTech speaker, and co-founder of analytics tools such as UTM.io. He’s worked extensively with Segment implementations and led the creation of tools such as the Segment CSV importer.