Join us on 30 September for our live webinar, Winning More of the Operators That Matter. Secure your spot. 

A huge barrier to business growth is that marketing measurement often stops too early in the customer journey. It’s easy to track how many people opened an email, clicked an advert or downloaded a report, but none of that tells us whether we created a commercially valuable customer interaction.

AFH has a particularly complex attribution challenge. The audience is relatively small and highly specialised, with 50 highly relevant leads worth considerably more than 5,000 email opens. Analysis puts a typical B2B buying journey at 60+ touchpoints, including conversations with no digital trace, so no single interaction or channel can credibly claim all the credit.

Plus, the person you market to isn't necessarily the person who buys, and the person who buys isn't always the person who makes the decision. An operator might be influenced by a chef, an operations director or a procurement team, but the actual transaction may happen through a wholesaler or distributor. As a supplier, you don't always have visibility of that final operator-level transaction.

This fragmentation demands a new strategy. Measurement has to be treated as a whole-company activity: marketing, sales, finance and the MD should all be looking at the same picture of customer engagement and performance. It’s the most effective way to connect marketing activity to commercial outcomes, improve visibility across the customer journey and build reporting that drives real value.

1. Connecting marketing activity to commercial value 

First, opens and clicks need to be layered with progressively more commercially meaningful measures. The real question is always what happened next: Did that engagement create a qualified opportunity? Did it influence an existing one? Did it lead to a sales conversation, a listing, a trial, a new account or ultimately a purchase? And what did we learn that can improve the next decision?

As a result, AFH-focused brands must look at metrics covering the whole journey: engaged audience, qualified leads, sales acceptance, opportunity creation, pipeline progression, conversion, revenue and, where possible, customer value. But perhaps the most commercially valuable AFH measurement is decision-making unit penetration: what proportion of the buyer group inside a target account have we actually reached? It rarely appears on reporting templates, yet it’s crucial when decisions are made across buyer groups rather than by a single visible contact.

It’s also important to plot out which metrics matter at each stage. An awareness campaign shouldn't be judged on immediate revenue. A lead-generation campaign should have a much clearer connection to qualified opportunity. Judging both by the same measure is how good activity gets cancelled and poor activity gets renewed.

2. Improving visibility across the customer journey

Next, AFH brands must improve how they collect and connect data, drawing on wholesalers, distributors, sampling partners and their own sales team. The principle is to capture enough clear information to connect activity to a customer, an account, an opportunity and ultimately an outcome. 

From distributors and wholesalers, that information might include customer or outlet identifiers, product or category information, volume or value sales where available, timing and location. From sampling activity, we'd want to know who was sampled, where, when, what product they received and what happened afterwards. And from sales, it's about closing the loop: account ownership, opportunity status, stage, expected value, activity, outcome and ideally the reasons for winning or losing.

The hard part is that these datasets rarely share a common identifier, so nobody can join them without deliberate effort. That's why a strong data foundation is so crucial. Consistent identifiers and structures are what allow those interactions to be joined into the strongest possible view of the customer and their journey. Without them, each of those datasets is just another silo. 

After all, data only tells you what's happened. Connected visibility and expertise tell you what to do next.

3. Building reporting that drives real value

In an indirect channel, no system can draw a perfectly clean line from a click to a case sold. The aim must be triangulation rather than perfect attribution. A connected reporting system helps to narrow AFH measurement and attribution gaps, telling you which accounts were engaged, which people inside them progressed, and which of those accounts subsequently appeared in depot or wholesaler reporting to build a credible picture of contribution.

AFH-focused brands therefore need measurement dashboards that work for the whole commercial team, not just marketing. At Omne, we recommend a three-tier structure:

• At the top: ideal customer profile (ICP) coverage, buyer group reach and content consumption. Are we reaching the right operators, and enough of the right people inside them? 

• In the middle: engaged accounts, contact-to-meeting rate and sales-accepted leads. 

• At the bottom: opportunity value and velocity, win rate, cost per opportunity, and retention or expansion.

This structure provides a throughline from who marketing reached, to the outcomes it influenced, with each tier answerable on its own terms rather than everything being judged against revenue. It’d also need to highlight lessons to apply to future activity: Which audiences respond? Which messages work? Which journeys accelerate progression? Where are we losing people? 

The test is whether it serves everyone at once. Sales get clarity on who's ready to buy. Marketing gets instant feedback on what's working. Leadership gets ROI, not just reports. The MD, Marketing Director, Sales Director and Finance Director all see a shared version of the truth. 

The more connected the data, the better we understand which audiences, channels, content and interactions are contributing to progression.

From fragmented data to connected intelligence

As Omne research reveals, operators buy on proof, rather than promises. The same standard should apply to how we measure our marketing. But better commercial outcomes, visibility and reporting depend on a connected view of data and customer intelligence. 

Join us on 30 September for our live webinar, Winning More of the Operators That Matter, where we’ll explore how leading brands targeting the AFH space are building stronger revenue attribution and commercial measurement - so they can understand who matters, what they're doing, where they are in the journey and what action should happen next.

Secure your spot