The One Metric That Matters

Most marketers would say I’m an idiot, but I don't believe in attribution. It forces you to focus on the WRONG things.

Here are five reasons why I don’t measure any marketing activity I spend time on.

The Most Important Things Are Unmeasurable

The two things that come to mind when I say this are “brand” and “demand creation.”

I can’t measure the direct effect that anything I spend 80% of my time on has on RB2B. I have no idea how many signups came from this post, and I don’t know what the three podcasts I did last week produced.

Yet, I know it’s working better than anything I’ve done before. If I were optimizing for things I could see with my own eyes (beyond MRR), my days would look totally different.

You Can Only Measure Demand Capture

The least important parts of business are what you can actually measure.

You can only measure demand CAPTURE, when someone clicks on an ad, books a demo, hits your site from Google, or responds to a cold email or LinkedIn DM.

Measurement Leads To Misguided Optimization

How do we respond to only being able to measure demand capture? With more paid ads, SEO, cold email, and LinkedIn messages. These activities are only CAPTURING demand, not creating it.

Executive teams don’t have the patience to scale demand creation. Six months in, the CEO asks how many leads we got from the podcast or organic social. When the response is “I don’t know,” the budget goes to paid search.

Attribution Platforms Are Often Wrong

This bothers me more than anything else. So many of our customers have already made up their minds to buy before they were ever shown a retargeting ad.

But, LinkedIn still claims the retargeting conversion. The reality is that the buyer came from listening to me on someone’s podcast or from reading my posts.

Am I supposed to believe that our ROAS is positive? I’m really not sure.

Spreadsheets Don't Reflect Reality

We’ve all seen the model: “If we hire X people in Y department, we’ll grow by Z.”

I've made this rookie mistake, and I think most CEOs are right there with me.

I believe it never works because we don’t appreciate how important the unmeasurable, TRUE components of business growth are. Brand and demand creation activities don’t fit anywhere on that spreadsheet.

Human Connection

It’s 2025. As outbound continues to die, the unmeasurable becomes ever more important. The quickest way to grow a SaaS business is by building a brand. The best way to scale a brand is by building a personal (not company) profile.

Demand today is actually created through human-to-human connection, and social media platforms facilitate this connection at a massive scale.

I’m creating human-to-human connection by:

Pouring my thoughts (and heart) out on LinkedIn
Responding to every comment someone leaves
Hosting a weekly LIVE and interactive event

I can’t measure what any of it is doing to our business. Except for the most important measure of all…

ARR… up-and-to-the-right!

Conclusion

Traditional marketing attribution often misses the mark.

Here are the key takeaways:

Focus on the Unmeasurable: The most critical growth drivers, like brand building and demand creation, cannot be tracked with standard attribution tools.
Don't Mistake Capture for Creation: Measuring ad clicks and demo requests (demand capture) is easy, but it ignores the activities that created the demand in the first place.
Avoid Misguided Optimization: Over-relying on measurable data leads to pouring budget into scalable but less effective channels, like paid ads, at the expense of brand building.
Embrace Human Connection: True demand is built through authentic, human-to-human interaction on platforms like social media.
The Ultimate Metric is Revenue: The only metric that truly matters is bottom-line growth (ARR), not the flawed data in an attribution report.

Instead of getting lost in spreadsheets and vanity metrics, the focus should be on activities that genuinely drive growth, even if they can't be measured precisely.

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