Marketing ROI & the 95-5 Rule: What CMOs Should Actually Measure with Jeff Ignacio

#9 - If your CEO is asking for marketing ROI and you’re not sure how to answer, this episode will change how you think about measurement entirely.

Most marketing leaders are being held to a single attribution model and a handful of demand gen metrics — and missing the bigger picture entirely. Jeff Ignacio, a 10-year revenue operations leader with a background in FP&A at Intel and Google, brings a rare blend of finance and go-to-market expertise to one of the most contentious topics in B2B marketing: how do you actually measure what marketing is doing?

In this episode, Mandy and Jeff dig into the 95-5 rule, multi-touch attribution, the dark funnel, and why tying marketing ROI exclusively to pipeline source is one of the most common and costly mistakes CMOs make today. If you want to lead like an operator and finally make a compelling case for the full value of marketing — this is the conversation.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The 95-5 rule: why 95% of your buyers aren’t in market yet — and what that means for how you allocate budget
• Marketing attribution models explained: first touch, last touch, multi-touch — and why you need more than one
• Why measuring marketing ROI only by pipeline source puts blinders on your strategy
• How to think about diminishing returns on paid channels and when to reallocate
• Where AI is transforming lead scoring, enrichment, and go-to-market intelligence

Chapter Markers:

(00:00) Jeff’s Background: From FP&A to RevOps

(05:02) How to Think About Marketing ROI

(10:04) Attribution Models and Why You Need More Than One

(21:32) The 95-5 Rule and the Dark Funnel

(34:22) AI, Lead Scoring, and the Future of Go-to-Market

Connect with Jeff Ignacio:

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffignacio
• RevOps Impact: revopsimpact.com

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Transcript

Mandy Hornaday: Hey, Jeff, it’s so great to have you on the Growth Activated podcast today. Thanks for joining us.

Jeff Ignacio: Hey, Mandy, great to be here. Good to see you as always.

Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. I’m so excited about today’s conversation because time and time again, with almost every client I walk into, CEOs and CFOs all really want is marketing ROI — and yet they don’t really know how to define it or what that means. Even when I talk to the marketing leaders of the function, they don’t have a good grasp on it either. With your background in revenue operations, you’ve got a strong hold on your own practices and best practices in the market. I’m really excited to dive into the details with you today.

Jeff Ignacio: Absolutely. And before revenue operations, I was in FP&A, so I have a unique blend of viewing the world from a finance perspective. Hopefully that’s going to lend well to this conversation.

Mandy Hornaday: Why don’t we start there? Tell us a little bit about your background and what has led you to this point in your career.

Jeff Ignacio: I’m a head of revenue operations and have been so for the last 10 years. Before that, I was in FP&A — finance, planning, and analysis — at Intel and Google. At Google, I supported the go-to-market team for what was then known as Google Enterprise, which encompassed six different product lines from Google Cloud to Google Apps to Maps. In that role I had the capacity to support annual planning, sales, marketing, and customer success — really articulating what we were doing from a strategic finance lens. Not just telling the story of what happened historically, but planning ahead: how do we allocate resources, what are the different scenarios or business outcomes we could drive? Then I moved into sales operations, where I took on more responsibility around business systems and eventually learned marketing operations as well. Today it’s about end-to-end revenue operations from marketing ops all the way through CS ops, encompassing strategic planning through to tactical execution.

Mandy Hornaday: For those who may not work with a RevOps team right now, what are some of the things that are always top of mind for you?

Jeff Ignacio: I have four key pillars. I view revenue operations as the steward of where go-to-market strategy and execution come together, supported by process, enablement, advisory, and systems. Most folks would include data in there too — I also like the acronym PTSD: process, technology, systems, and data. Running a go-to-market can be traumatic at times.

Mandy Hornaday: It can. How do you typically partner with marketing on a daily basis? Where has that relationship really flourished and where does it sometimes break down?

Jeff Ignacio: I’ve seen a couple of configurations. I’ve reported into marketing at times as a revenue operations leader, and at other times been a RevOps leader with marketing as a standalone organization. I don’t think it matters where it sits, but there are pros and cons. If marketing ops sits under revenue operations, it can become an issue of speed when you’re launching several campaigns in a tight time crunch. If it’s embedded within marketing, you optimize for speed but risk upstream and downstream challenges if one organization moves without making the other aware.

Mandy Hornaday: How do you approach investments in the go-to-market function? How do you think about ROI across the entire function, given your financial planning background?

Jeff Ignacio: ROI is an expression of the excess revenue or bookings generated from a fixed amount of expense. When you think about sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue, publicly traded companies typically sit around 45 to 55%. Within that spend, you’ll see different ratios of sales versus marketing depending on the go-to-market motion. For an enterprise selling motion, roughly 30% of every sales and marketing dollar comes from marketing. As you move to a PLG or high-velocity inbound model, that shifts to 70 to 95%. Then you work backwards from revenue to bookings, from bookings to opportunity, and you think about win rates. When it comes to per-unit metrics, I work with marketing leaders on cost per lead, cost per MQL, cost per opportunity. That’s where attribution becomes contentious — because whatever model you use changes the story.

Mandy Hornaday: And when you get into attribution, it’s not just demand gen either. There’s content marketing, product marketing, brand — a lot of marketing leaders just look at the demand gen lens and miss the rest.

Jeff Ignacio: Exactly. Some folks look at it purely as: how much am I spending on paid ads, paid social, paid search, and how much revenue am I generating? But that misses the point that there are other marketing functions at play. Brand is another element entirely.

Mandy Hornaday: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on attribution modeling. I’ve seen this exact contention in previous companies where sales, marketing, and biz dev are fighting over credit. As someone who’s agnostic and just cares that the machine is working overall, what’s your approach?

Jeff Ignacio: I’ve seen those fights too. What I recommend is looking at attribution models consistently over time, and not just one — looking at several. The reason is that when you look at a problem from one angle, you’re going to develop a set of solutions, but you might be missing critical information. I highly suggest looking at first touch, last touch, and maybe one or two multi-touch models. Every time you do that, you’re going to have a different perspective on the problems facing you — and you might see different problems entirely. It makes the conversation longer, but that’s time well spent. And when you communicate with your sales partners, you have a codified process to explain why you’re recommending what you’re recommending, because you looked at your pipeline several different ways. I’d also give credence to the idea of influenced versus sourced. Maybe outbound gets credit — but does that mean inbound had no hand in it? Maybe someone saw your billboard three years ago and your logo stuck with them. You have no way of tracking that attribution, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t influence the deal.

Mandy Hornaday: What would you recommend based on company size or sales cycle length? Do you always default to first and last touch?

Jeff Ignacio: I primarily work with mid-market and enterprise selling motions — average contract values from $50K up to six figures, with sales cycles of around 120 to 210 days. Because of that length, there’s going to be a lag. You’ll want to look at marketing touches from several months before pipeline is sourced. There’s no one-size-fits-all, but I’d recommend developing a thoughtful approach. For first touch, you might establish a lookback window of 180 days.

Mandy Hornaday: For marketing leaders where their CEO is tying them exclusively to revenue — how should they be thinking about marketing-sourced revenue when they’re asked to report on it?

Jeff Ignacio: I call it the over-salesification of multiple functions. For marketing, when you’re being measured only on revenue or pipeline sourced, you’re putting blinders on and probably missing some of the most important elements of what marketing does. Think about brand recognition. If you ask anyone on the street to compare your company versus your peer set and they mention you in glowing reviews but have never seen a demo — does that not also have value? In the early stages, a company might pour money into demand gen and last-touch conversion. But a competitor down the street is also building a big shiny brand. In conversational intelligence, most people think of Gong first. In chat, they thought of Drift. In sales engagement, Outreach. Those brands may not win every deal, but they’re on every evaluation scorecard. That brand value may not pay off for a year or two, but when it does, you didn’t have to pay for that last conversion. So being measured only on marketing-sourced revenue is a tough one because there’s a bigger job at play.

Mandy Hornaday: I think it’s one of the biggest pain points today — marketing being relegated to a lead generation function and losing sight of brand, awareness, and share of voice. Do you partner with marketing leaders to help them quantify brand impact?

Jeff Ignacio: Honestly, I’ll be truthful: I don’t think I’ve seen it done really well. My instrumentation has primarily been on the revenue side — cost per lead, cost per opportunity, cost per SQL, CAC. Revenue operations helps and hurts at the same time. We help by chopping up your funnel into conversion points and measuring everything. We hurt by creating a campaign execution framework that slows everything down until it’s perfect. A company like Duolingo just has their lowest-level employees launching viral TikToks without any approval process. That completely bypasses RevOps — and you’d miss those moments of virality.

Jeff Ignacio: I really subscribe to what’s called the 95-5 rule. About 5% of your buyers are in the market at any given time. When they see your ad, it’s going to resonate and they’ll click. But then there’s the other 95% who aren’t in market currently. They might be locked in with another vendor, happy with that vendor, not pain-aware, or not even aware a solution exists. So does it make sense to pour all your money into that last-touch conversion and forsake the other 95%? Those are things that are really hard to measure, but you want to have that thoughtful conversation.

Mandy Hornaday: And I have to wonder if there’s also a law of diminishing returns if you only focus on that 5%. You might be over-saturating them. Talk to me about diminishing returns on channels.

Jeff Ignacio: I teach a class called Finance for RevOps, and in lecture three I cover marketing and finance. Let’s say your CFO is tied into cost per opportunity metrics and they see that LinkedIn has a substantially lower cost per win than TikTok. Naturally they want to zero out TikTok and max out LinkedIn. But if you max out LinkedIn, you should see a diminishing marginal return — you’re bidding up keywords, more ads run, but there’s a finiteness to how many people will see them. Your cost per lead and cost per op will start to increase. At that point you can either tweak your messaging, tweak your audience, or stay within LinkedIn. But if you don’t see any marginal gain, you’ve probably saturated the channel. You can shift back to organic on LinkedIn and reallocate paid to another channel.

Mandy Hornaday: And a lot of marketing leaders aren’t effectively communicating which campaigns are purely for awareness — targeting the 95% — versus which are closer to cash and targeting the 5%. We’re not doing that well. What have you seen work well in terms of dividing time and budget between the two?

Jeff Ignacio: What works really well is someone who can carry the room and effectively communicate: we have a balanced set of targets, some short-term, some long-term. The same framing works with a CFO — they understand short-term versus long-term goals. Short-term: hit your pipeline targets, hit revenue. Long-term: high share of voice, high brand recognition. Customer success can also support marketing here — loyal customers who become evangelists provide referrals and word of mouth that reinforces brand. No one department works alone. There’s a flywheel.

Mandy Hornaday: For those who don’t have sophisticated reporting yet — where would you encourage people to start?

Jeff Ignacio: Have an honest conversation about the different types of touch points you can have, then build from the ground up. Start with your UTMs at the demand gen layer — your UTMs should feed your first and last touch model at minimum. Multi-touch is a bigger build, but there are out-of-the-box solutions. Then think about account-based marketing touch points in your CRM throughout the opportunity. Crawl, walk, run. Start with first and last, walk is multi-touch, and running is thinking about every element of how marketing could influence the deal. There are also intent platforms now — what’s been called the dark funnel — that capture account-level and even persona-level signals. Just be careful: traditional platforms that have been around for years have around 30 to 35% accuracy on anonymous website visitors.

Mandy Hornaday: I’ve played around with a few of those. You’re right — it doesn’t always get it right.

Jeff Ignacio: Best in class for technologies built half a decade or more ago is around 30 to 35% accuracy. If I got 30% right on my math scores, I wouldn’t be passing. Yet people are paying six figures for these softwares.

Mandy Hornaday: I know you’re a huge proponent of AI. How could it be leveraged to help marketers put this kind of measurement in place? How are you using it today?

Jeff Ignacio: I’m using it for enrichment. An example: your enrichment provider fails to provide the signals you need, so you open the company website via automation, crawl the site directory, grab every link, send that data into an LLM, and the LLM analyzes it and outputs the data back to your CRM. That goes beyond traditional lead enrichment. You can also use it for lead scoring. Traditional if-this-then-that scoring systems are created by hand. A more advanced approach runs a regression analysis, a multivariate analysis, and then feeds new leads into the regression for a predictive score. Then you can even add psychographic elements — is this company traditionally a leader in adopting bleeding-edge technology? That’s data you’re not going to get from an enrichment provider. I also use AI in voice mode on ChatGPT as a sounding board — what am I not considering, what are the strengths and weaknesses of my argument? Playing contrarian to myself.

Mandy Hornaday: I’ve been playing around with market research, competitive analysis, and buyer personas. The psychographic side is really fascinating. And one of the things I want to try is uploading prospect calls and synthesizing key challenges and feature requests. I used to go listen to Gong calls one by one. Now you can throw a hundred in and synthesize quickly.

Jeff Ignacio: How many marketers actually jump in and listen to Gong calls? How many revenue operators? Most heads are in the sand configuring Salesforce or Marketo. You can aggregate that data, put it into a vector database, and RAG right on top of it — retrieve, augment, and generate. Think about the old way of building a persona map or ICP: interview customers, build out a full profile, map to your enrichment provider to find your TAM. Now you can build a persona baseball card — the metrics they’re measured by, how they get promoted, what makes them get fired, their objections, the solutions they consider, where you differentiate — and hand that to your sales development team.

Mandy Hornaday: What is the one thing you’d encourage marketing leaders or go-to-market leaders to be considering as it relates to AI to prepare for what’s coming?

Jeff Ignacio: Embrace change. Keep your mental facilities nimble. The person who used to shovel horse poop off the street didn’t expect the automobile to take their job away. I’m seeing revenue operations move offshore to Latin America — sales operations talent in Brazil and Colombia is highly certifiable in Salesforce at a fraction of US salaries. And beyond that, AI is going to take away parts of every role. If you’re not investing in higher-value-added activities and finding differentiators, your job security is at risk regardless. My father was a hospital records clerk — someone who used to walk manila folders on a metal cart to an archive. His version of that job now is double-clicking on a folder and saving a file. If he were in that role today without adapting, he’d be unemployed.

Mandy Hornaday: I was actually talking to a CTO friend this morning about how software development jobs have started to crash. Five years ago it was the hottest job to learn. Now if you’re not an elite engineer working on AI, you’re redundant in a lot of ways.

Jeff Ignacio: And it’s happening in revenue operations too. The point is: don’t hold on to what got you paid for the last 10 years and assume it will keep paying you. Find the higher-value work, stay curious, and keep adapting.

Mandy Hornaday: Any final words of advice for marketing leaders in the world of measurement, data, and AI?

Jeff Ignacio: Embrace change. And make a bold case for why marketing makes your business different from its competitors. Yes, you’re going to keep investing in what’s closest to cash, closest to revenue. But save space — if not more — for making sure your company is top of mind. So that when a customer is ready, you’re already on the short list of vendors they were considering. You didn’t have to spend money on that last-touch conversion because the brand had already done the work.

Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. Awesome, Jeff. For people who are interested in connecting with you and learning more, what’s the best way to find you?

Jeff Ignacio: LinkedIn — Jeff Ignacio, I-G-N-A-C-I-O. And I run courses on revopsimpact.com. They can find my other areas of interest from LinkedIn.

Mandy Hornaday: We actually met because I took one of your courses, and it was incredible — well worth the spend. Thanks, Jeff. I so appreciated the conversation today.

Jeff Ignacio: All right, thanks, Mandy.