B2B Lead Blog

Brian, great questions.

IMO, the most important metrics for B2B marketers to measure for CEOs are ones that connect the dots between marketing initiatives and Return-on-Effort in the sales funnel. IMO, the best way to do this is by measuring the impacts of sales efforts on customer behaviors.

Hope this helps.

Good input. Thanks!

Great topic. Marketing metrics come in many shapes and sizes, from high level to detailed. Different people need different numbers.

For top management, I really like the percentage of forecasted sales opportunities that originated from marketing campaigns. This avoids focusing on generating large numbers of low-quality leads: marketing needs to be responsible for generating the right leads. I guess that pretty much covers your first bullet point.

If you divide that number by the total cost of marketing, you have a nice ratio to cover bullet 2.

Brian, were these some of the metrics that you were thinking about?

Great input! Yes, this is what I’m looking for. Thanks! Keep the ideas coming.

Great topic and great inputs! Here goes my 2 cents
Couple of important metrics / issues most of my clients at this part of the world (Asia) are concerned about -

1. Lead nurturing effectiveness – following through the prospect in all the touch point and seal the deal when client is ready. Includes the holy grail of a perfect lead nurturing scoring system.

2. Last effective touch point. In the era of multiple marcomm touch points it’s becoming more and more vital to identify the last push towards the purchase decision.

3. Identifying the effective ‘watering holes’ – basically trying to identify where are the hang outs of the prospects. Most of them realized that trying to create another community is tough, rather going to a agnostic community and being engaged in the conversation is much effective. But question remains the same – which ones?

Well I think it depends on the buying cycle. In my area the buying cycle is often long. So have to focus on getting found, you have to have the right info to capture the interest and you have to get the prospect’s info. So I think you have to focus on nurturing leads that might not yet be identifiable leads – they’re just looking for info; keep providing reminders to those closer to making a decision; and evaluate the numbers of actual leads that convert and how long the conversion cycle takes.

Brian I love that you are asking the question because I think the increasing importance of online marketing for B2B makes this a more complicated message.

Some metrics I have been evaluating more are the Internet reach of competitors – ie their online visibility. What are their SERPS for common keywords, what traffic volume to competitors get? What is their bounce rate or pageviews vs. our website http://www.oshyn.com ?

I evaluate how content we put on the internet changes the volume to our website and correlate that to changes in lead volume and lead quality.

An excellent post with some really good questions! Thanks.
The comments all pose some interesting metrics, but in our experience, one of the best ways to measure effectiveness is to use Return on Investment. Yes, it can be difficult to calculate for marketing endeavors, but it’s not impossible.
Many of our readers and clients asked us how we do calculate ROI, and so we wrote a series of posts aimed at providing more depth. The link at the end of this comment is to an index of 4 posts: (1) How to measure the ROI of your website as a whole, (2) The 10 best free ROI calculators on the Web and (3), How to build your own ROI calculator so that you can measure the ROI of your SMM. And the 4th post describes How to Run a Social Media Marketing Campaign, giving details on the Process we use which involves calculating ROI.

Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/cEc0ln

Great input all. I look forward to seeing additional input.

It so much depends on the goals of the company. I worked with a company that only cared about getting more new clients and would do it at break even. Their goals was to sell the company at a multiple of the subscriber count.

The sales cycles that I work with most are quite short. Many buyers purchase the product at approximately the same time they visit the site. So for me, the most important metric is purchases/subscribers per day.

We have found that traffic and hits and conversion percentage are a poor metric because there are times that we will have a post make it to the front page of a bookmarking site, inflating our traffic.

This is a great question.

I think it’s ROI on the channel / effort.

This is the way I go about determining this…

Step 1) Write down all the marketing effort / channe options and figure out

a) The monthly cost
b) Your “expected” monthly return for the investment

This is hard but you have to start here.

Step 2) Calculate for each channel/marketing effort:

a) Average conversion rate of the lead * max monthly quantity of leads (that convert at the rate to the left) * average $size of the converted lead = avg monthly rev

b) Avg monthly rev / your monthly investment = ROI for the channel

Step 3) Compare all the ROIs for all the channels in a nice table. Each marketing effort/channel should be a row.

Step 4) Add up the “monthly rev” for each (starting from the top row) until you hit your monthly goal.

If you can’t even get broad data that covers this, then you either need to press the person responsible for that marketing effort or realize that you’re making a decision without enough information.

Brian,
Your site has great content but the search on your site sucks!! Why would you use anything but Google??? Its free or next to free and works well. Please chnage your search so people can find more of your valuable content easily. Thanks!!

Thanks for your input on the search function. I tried Google site search and it doesn’t index my blog frequently which means people miss out on content too. If readers have other suggestions, let me know.

One of the key metrics are you own data, the results of long term conversion against actual sales IMO.

Brian,
Great questions.
I always start with:
Leads to opportunity conversion by lead type/channel.
Proves % quality leads
Proves which types of leads are most likely to convert.
Ultimately it is then possible to measure ROI by lead type, but first good to focus on where mktg is helping fill the bottom end of the funnel.
Hope this is what you were looking for.
Cheers Claire
http://www.twitter.com/claireipowell
Measurable Marketing Projects

The one metric that CEOs should obsess over is the number of marketing generated, sales accepted leads. From there you can calculate great business metrics:

* $ in marketing spend to generate a sales accepted lead
* Sales accepted leads to deals closed
* $ in marketing spend to revenue generated.

Its also critical to track these metrics month over month. If I notice an upward trend, it may raise a red flag about my business – namely the amount of capital I’m going to have to spend to acquire new customers.

I agree with Christopher. While ROI is useful to use annually for determining strategy, it’s not effective for quarterly or monthly monitoring. At least not for long sales cycles. It winds up being too backward-looking.

We track the numbers at the sales/marketing interface. For new leads, we track the number of sales-accepted leads, the average lead score of those leads and the total cost per lead, including direct costs, personnel and overhead, with certain initiatives like SEO capitalized over 12 months to account for the fact that their cost doesn’t align with their effect.

Internal to marketing we also track these numbers broken out by channel along with the drivers of these metrics (eg: raw leads, raw leads to sales-accepted lead ratio, etc).

The one area to increase effectiveness is to perform lost prospect/sales analysis. Done by an idependent firm, this form of analysis can quickly provide input of why people who had interest/need did not wind up purchasing your product. Wealth of key information as to effectiveness of sales/marketing efforts, perceived/actual quality factors, weaknesses in product positioning and pricing. It would be interesting to know how many businesses conduct lost prospect/sales analysis. In today’s competitive global market it is vital to know why a hard earned prospect buys a competitive solution or none at all.

Thank you for sharing this to us. It is really interesting to know that there are different kinds of metrics have been used. I think that whatever metrics you use as long as it suits your company then go for it.

No one care about shareholder value? Interesting…

There is something to be said about HOW to measure these results in relation to WHAT should be measured.
Most people spend way too much time putting together their own database and infrastructure to track their results. Best advice: Leave it to the experts to do it for you. If you have something to track, chances are someone has already set up the process to do so.
Everyone has great input on which measures to follow, but most fail to execute properly.
DM me at @B2BMaven for more info.

Great comments all. Thanks!

In my opinion, the most important metrics for CEOs are: 1. Cost to acquire each new lead. 2. Cost of qualified lead. 3. Conversion ratio of qualified leads to raw inquiries 4. Sales acquisition cost. 5. Average sale amount. 6. Growth in the house file. 7. Growth in Website traffic.

That’s my short list but I think a CEO is better monitoring a few key data points instead of reams of data. Preferrably, this information can be presented in a dashboard format.

This post has really led to a fantastic discussion, and I really had to get my ten cent’s worth in as well. Earlier I commented on quality vs quantity, and how wasteful low value leads is of salespeople’s time and motivation.

In days gone by (and even today still…lol) telesales staff would engage in cold calling, sitting and making 100′s of phone calls to secure a couple of sales, or appointments for sales staff to go out on.

The ultimate closing rate was generally very poor, which resulted in very few reps “making it”. The guys that did however inevitably turned out to be really good salespeople, who would ultimately end up bringing in good business, with the resultant benefit to both their pockets and the companies bottom line.

Today’s world can not afford such a wasteful scenario any longer, so starting with proper sales training through to proper marketing and with that proper lead generation is key to making things happen with your marketing budget….the definition of “proper” is a subject of much debate, of course.

Take care.

Lizzie

This is all fine and well, but just bouncing around the echo chamber unless and until marketers can figure out a way to get buy-in from the CEO on running quality vs. quantity campaigns.

It’s a bit of a Catch-22. Can’t run higher-quality program until the CEO sees proof it works in his “unique snowflake” of a business; can’t get proof until we run that program (which takes time away from the “fill the funnel at all costs” activity).

Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

Any suggestions on that one?

Great discussion here. The marketing metrics I look at include: money spent on each marketing activity and the resulting sales revenue, cost per lead, how many of the leads convert to revenue, the value of the customer once acquired, and overall satisfaction of the customer.

Keep up the good work. I love your blog.