Metrics for Marketing

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In the Modern B2B blog, Marketo posted an interview with David Taber, author of Salesforce.com Secrets of Success. The interview is a worthwhile read. Toward the end of the interview David suggest a few metrics that marketing should be tracking through CRM:

• Time to "first touch" of a lead
• Number of converted leads per rep per month
• Average time to convert
• Number of fully qualified leads accepted by sales each month
• Number of sales cycles started due to marketing efforts
• Value of sales pipeline started due to marketing efforts
• Proportion of leads rejected (and neglected) by sales
• Marketing cost of acquiring a new customer
• Value of sales pipeline influenced by one or more campaigns (SFDC's new campaign influence feature makes this much easier to measure)
• Profitability of new customers due to marketing efforts
• Loyalty of new customers
• Percentage of repeat business

This is a great list. While you may not measure each of these monthly, reviewing some of them on at least a quarterly basis can alert you to problems. For example, “time to first touch” can help you identify bottlenecks in your lead follow up process. This “first touch” is probably someone on an internal telemarketing team so you might also consider measuring “time to first touch by sales.”

This latter metric will measure the handoff of qualified leads between telemarketing and sales. You can look at the aggregate metric to see how well the defined process is working. You can also look at the metric by sales person to see if any particular rep is bringing the metric down. (If that’s the case, I suggest marketers let sales leadership handle the performance issues.)

I also really like the 7th metric “proportion of leads rejected (and neglected) by sales.” The percentage of leads accepted will tell you how well your team is sticking to the lead scoring and the universal lead definition that you worked so hard to create. If there are neglected leads that met the scoring thresholds, then you know sales isn’t living up to their end of the agreement.

A 100% acceptance rate is unrealistic as prospects will sometimes tell the telemarketer one thing and sales something totally different. And, in these days of shifting budgets and vanishing projects, things really can change in a matter of hours. However, whenever there is a lead that is not accepted by sales, it’s an opportunity to gather valuable feedback from your sales team.

Marketing should meet with the sales reps regularly to review each lead that was rejected. Why was it rejected? Are there questions that telemarketing should be asking to better qualify the prospects? Do we need to rethink our lead scoring thresholds? Should we add this lead to a nurturing track?

Finally, the 4th metric “number of fully qualified leads accepted by sales each month” is the “quota” on which marketing should be measured. If your Universal Lead Definition and lead scoring thresholds are set appropriately and you have a solid understanding of sales ability to close qualified opportunities, then this metric should allow you to predict sales results with a fair degree of accuracy.

All the best!

Melissa