Capacity: A Required Dimension in B2B Engagement Metrics
Posted by: Matt Shanahan
Customer engagement is a relative measure. More is better, and less is worse. To qualify the level of engagement of a customer, you compare that customer’s engagement metrics to all your other customers. And in the B2C world, this is a straightforward process. Let’s face it an individual only has 24 hours/day of attention that can be devoted to your product. So it’s fair to compare traditional engagement metrics directly between individuals.
And while traditional engagement metrics can be used to compare individuals, how do you determine the comparable level of engagement for an organization? In the B2B world where we’re dealing with significant variances in sizes, attention capacity between two organizations can be enormously different which makes comparison of engagement trickier. How do you compare the level of engagement for a large global organization with 5,000 active users to a medium-sized locally focused organization with 1,000 employees? No longer do we have the built-in apples-to-apples comparison found in the B2C world.
In the B2B environment, engagement metrics need to be normalized to account for the differences in customers’ sizes and contracts. Incorporating firmographic information (e.g., # of employees, revenues) to compare against actual engagement metrics (e.g., # of active devices, # of active users), lets us take into account organizational capacity, allowing engagement metrics to be scored and normalized and therefore comparable. This approach lets you determine how much corporate attention you have—essentially, engagement at the corporate level.
Getting back to our example, if that large, global company with 5,000 active users out of 15,000 employees, it will be significantly less engaged than the medium company with 1,000 active users out of 1,500 employees.
By overlaying the actuals against the firmographics for the company, we normalize traditional engagement metrics, making them useful in the B2B arena. This approach let us extend our understanding from “are the individuals within the organization engaged” to “is the organization itself engaged?”

