Secrets To Successful B2B Sales And Marketing Metrics

Welcome to the age of math marketing. Sales, inherently, has always been about numbers. But in B2B especially, marketing is increasingly asked to take responsibility for the measurable output of its efforts.

Of course, there are no shortage of numbers to track and evaluate. Choosing to focus on exact sales and marketing measurement is one thing, focusing on the right numbers that help you focus and make better decisions is still another.

This collection of short essays and best practices span across the entire sales and marketing pipeline, and offer a specific, actionable perspective to help you start honing in on not just a better metrics discipline for your department and organization, but better improvements and results for your efforts.

I look forward to hearing your feedback!

Matt Heinz President, Heinz Marketing Inc. matt@heinzmarketing.com

Metrics: Three Defining Measures Of Sales And Marketing Success 2

Big Data Is Overrated, Focus On These Types Of Data Instead 3

Ten B2B Sales And Marketing Metrics Worth Tracking 4

B2B Lead Generation: Four Better Measures Of Success 5

Four Sales-centric Social Media Metrics You Should Be Tracking 6

Four Critical Components To Maximize Webinar ROI 7

The Five Most Meaningless Sales Metrics You’re Still Using 8

Three Important Sales Metrics You’re Probably Not Tracking Today 9

Stay Focused On The Right Number 10

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Much has been written on the vagaries, metrics and particulars of driving true sales and marketing collaboration in B2B organizations. This goes well beyond just attending more meetings together. Ultimately, it’s about having the same objective and working as a cohesive unit to drive higher sales.

But how do you measure that success? Which metrics do sales and marketing leadership watch on a weekly (if not daily) basis to determine the health of their combine efforts?

I’ve seen several organizations experiment with this, using a variety of metrics and depth of scorecard. And although each respective team must watch and manage to a broader set of metrics, these three should lead sales and marketing discussions, and guide where they focus next to ensure they remain on course and above expectations.

1. Current Selling Period Pipeline HealthWhether you sell based on a monthly or quarterly sales cycle, how healthy is the current pipeline (qualified opportunities expected to close this period), and how confident are you based on that pipeline sales and quality that you’ll hit or exceed your sales goal?

Most marketers, at this point, claim that there’s very little they can do to impact current-month or current-quarter sales. And in a world where marketing’s role is primarily about lead production, that might be true. But if sales and marketing are working closely together, there’s still plenty marketing can do to help bring more deals over the line.

If you look a level deeper at the current pipeline, for example, what could possibly keep those deals from coming through? Are there decision makers who need more information, need more assurance, more context-building or more urgency, to get the deal done? What messaging, validation tools and more can marketing provide to support sales in their effort to close as many current opportunities as possible?

2. Qualified Pipeline For The Next Two Selling PeriodsMost sales organizations (let alone marketing groups) put their entire focus on the current selling period, and don’t start looking at the next selling period until, well, the first day or week of that next period. But if you wait that long, you’ll always be playing catch-up.

If you sell on a monthly sales cycle, you should constantly keep an eye on the growth of opportunities 60 and 90 days out. Your models should tell you exactly how big of a pipeline you should (ideally) have going into the month, which gives the marketing team in particular a bogey for finding new short-term sales opportunities out of their lead generation efforts.

This might be one of the most important sales and marketing alignment metrics available to teams today, not only because it cleanly combines short-term, outcome-oriented measures for both sales and marketing, but it also provides very tangible, actionable next steps for each group based on what the numbers are telling you.

3. New Opportunities CreatedThis measure is independent of specific closing date, but is absolutely tied to your common definition of what a qualified, new opportunity looks like. It’s unlikely you’re setting up new qualified opportunities for nine months from now if you’re on a monthly sales cycle, but those opportunities will likely be spread out across 1–4 months in the actual sales pipeline.

So this measure is more about ensuring that sales and marketing are working together to generate enough regular opportunities to generally spread out across your model and fuel near-future closed business.

You can look simultaneously at how these new opportunities actually spread across close-date months, but your model should indicate how many new opportunities are required each month independent of close date. Where should that production be month-to-date or quarter-to-date, and where are you currently?

Metrics: Three Defining Measures Of Sales and Marketing Success

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Just because you can get more of it, doesn’t mean it’s good for you. The world is enamored right now with “big data”, and the wealth of information around us does hold promise.

But our efforts to analyze and leverage as much data as possible could be keeping us from seeing two more accessible, more important segments of data that can have a more immediate impact on your business.

What’s more important than big data?For one, fast data. At least for now, being able to access and react to real-time data is more important than waiting for whatever “big data” tells us to do. This will evolve over time as big data gets easier and faster to analyze, but your customers and prospects today are working in real-time.

That Web site visitor is here now, but might be gone in a minute or less. How do you engage them? What message should they see on your site first?

What action did they just take that means they’re ready for the next step? How quickly can you identify and take action on that step?

Fast data is key to this, and we have both access to this as well as the technology to act fast. In 2013, more Web sites will publish dynamic content on their home and landing pages based on what they know about the visitor. It’s happening already today, with significant increases in engagement, stickiness and conversion.

What’s also more important than big data is the right data. Sounds self-evident, right? Maybe not.

Look at your own company’s key metrics dashboard. Are all of those metrics important? Do they really help you make decisions? Could you teach the organization—your leadership team, management team, and front-line employees—to look at less information but the right information to make critical decisions for the business and your customers?

More data isn’t necessarily better. Focus on getting and leveraging the right data, faster.

Big Data Is Overrated; Focus On These Types Of Data Instead

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Quick Disclaimer: Just because you can track it, doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can track it, doesn’t mean it’s important. Choosing the right metrics that will give you clarity and drive action in your business is most important.

1. Marketing Cost Per SaleYou absolutely must track leads through to close and beyond. This helps you understand not only spend efficiency but cost per lead source and, eventually, lifetime value of leads you may be generating from higher-priced channels. Even better if you can track those leads through to renewals, referrals and other post-sale activity.

2. Customer Lifetime ValueWhat are you willing to spend to acquire a new customer? It’s more than just the first purchase or first month’s revenue. Which customers are most profitable to you? What do they look like, where do they come from, and how can you get more of them? How will this insight drive sales incentives and behavior as well? And is your customer experience team involved in defining target customers and setting expectations before the sale?

3. Nurture Database PerformanceFirst off, how are you defining a lead that’s in a “nurture” category—someone who’s somehow qualified but not yet ready to buy? What number and percentage of deals come out of your growing nurture database? Do you know what catalyzed their movement out of nurture and into an active buying cycle?

Bonus points if you can use this insight to predict future revenue from your nurture database over time. What’s a new “nurturable” lead worth to you based on this model?

4. Sales Cycle LengthHow long is each sales stage once a lead is qualified and in the market to buy? What catalyzing events (internally or externally) accelerate deal velocity? Where are your opportunities getting stuck and is there anything you can do to proactively move them through more quickly?

Many lead generation models don’t take into account sales cycle length and duration, and therefore overestimate new sales in too short of a period of time. This metric is critical to accurate forecasting.

5. Addressable Market SizeDoes your entire organization define your target market the same way? How do your sales goals translate to market penetration expectations? Based on your funnel input and conversion assumptions, are those market penetration expectations realistic?

Depending on the maturity of your market, you may also want to make sure your addressable market is small enough. Are you unique enough for your immediately most addressable customers, or are you reaching too broadly?

6. Lead-to-Opportunity-to-Sale Conversion RatesYou can quickly over-complicate this one, but at minimum make sure you understand two numbers: How many leads does it take to create an opportunity, and how many opportunities end up closing? Bonus points, of course, if you can further break this information down by lead source, vertical industry, sales rep and any other angles that help you optimize for acquisition cost and sales volume.

7. Deal SizeAre some deals not worth pursuing? Do you know where your sweet spot is, and are you proactively targeting it? Are you adjusting your sales and marketing strategies based on revenue, margin and lifetime value yield potential?

8. Qualified LeadsFirst, ensure that sales and marketing agree on a common definition of a qualified lead. And it’s OK to have different stages of qualified leads. But make sure there are explicit next steps for managing these leads moving forward, and explicit roles for both sales and marketing to do that. Now look back at your lead sources, nurture paths and other activities to determine where you’re most successfully generating qualified leads from, and double down there.

9. ReferralsToo often companies constrain potential referral volume by making the act of generating a referral too difficult. A cumbersome form or registration process may be easier for you to track, but may lower your capture rate. What programs and incentives do you have in place to drive the right referrals? And are you segmenting referrals from customers vs. prospect, influencers, etc.?

If you’re doing it right, the biggest source of referrals for your business may be a group that’s never given you money, and never been an active customer. How are you engaging, capturing and measuring referrals with that audience?

10. CustomersQuantify your best customers, and ensure that your sales and marketing efforts are focused on finding and closing more of them. Is your core or most-valuable customer segment growing or shrinking? Can you quantify your share of wallet? What additional opportunities do you have to increase loyalty, lifetime value, referral potential and more?

Ten B2B Sales And Marketing Metrics Worth Tracking

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B2B Lead Generation: Four Better Measures Of Success

If you work for or with a marketing team that drives leads for a sales team, it’s likely a mistake to measure your success based on lead volume.

Lead volume doesn’t matter.

What matters, of course, is revenue. Your job as a marketer is to give your sales team the best opportunities possible to close business, increase sales, and grow the value of the overall business. To that effect, there are far better ways to measure marketing success instead of pure leads. Here are four good things to evaluate.

1. Lead QualityLeads are only good if they represent individuals or companies who can buy. Sit down with your sales team and agree on a common definition for a qualified lead. This can include things like company size, title, industry, and purchase timeline—whatever you agree on. Leads you generate that aren’t quite “in profile” aren’t necessarily bad—some will still have revenue in them—but your primary job is to focus on optimizing volume and cost of the in-profile leads first.

2. Pipeline ContributionSimply put, how many of those leads generated become active sales opportunities? Sure, this step requires work by your sales team, but it’s another good indicator of lead quality. This step also requires marketing to work collaboratively with sales to get the job done. No more passing leads over the wall and walking away. Marketing’s job includes helping the sales team continue working with new prospects until they’re ready to buy.

Deal Size: If you look deep into your lead generation metrics, I guarantee you’ll find trends that help you increase deal size at the lead level. Do particular industries buy more? Do certain titles tend to buy more products? Certain company sizes, geographies? Find the trends that lead to bigger deals, and find ways to generate more leads like that moving forward.

3. Percent and Number of Deals from Nurture DatabaseIf a lead isn’t ready to buy, but hasn’t said no, it’s marketing’s job to nurture that prospect until it’s ready to be passed back to sales. How well does your marketing team drive interest and urgency with your nurture database? How well does marketing identify when nurtured prospects are ready to buy? This is a great way to ensure your marketing team is innovating ways to drive urgency among your prospect database, and many of those urgency drivers will work in primary lead generation channels and campaigns as well.

4. Cost Per Lead All The Way Through To The Sale Too many B2B marketers measure cost per lead (and sometimes even cost per in-profile lead), but fail to look at relative marketing cost of the opportunity and sale. A certain lead source can look great based on cost per lead, but if the conversion to opportunity and sale (not to mention lifetime value) is too low, leads that cost more can actually be better for the business after sale price and renewals are factored in.

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Four Sales-centric Social Media Metrics You Should Be Tracking

There are dozens of social media scorecards, and most of them are good but lacking. It’s not enough to track followers and traffic. There’s a deeper story you need to be telling and tracking.

Maybe I’m a hammer and everything looks like a nail, but I expect social media to play an active role at the top of the sales funnel. It’s not a direct response channel, and shouldn’t be managed as such. But, there are symptoms of an active and productive social media program that indicate its preliminary value to the sales funnel.

Here are four specific metrics I recommend you watch in particular. These can be tracked on your social media scorecard right alongside your volume and activity metrics.

1. People Talking About YouFollowers don’t really tell you anything. There are dozens of companies you can pay to pad your follower count on Twitter, for instance, but I guarantee 90 percent of those followers will be crap. And even if you get relevant people to follow you, that’s no guarantee they’ll pay attention or actively engage. A real indication of social media strength and value to the sales process is engagement.

How many people are re-tweeting your content? How many are mentioning you by name in their tweets and posts? How often, in other words, does your network recognize and consume your content, then point it out to others? This not only is a proxy for message penetration, but also indicates how effectively you’re driving pass-along for those messages to new audiences.

2. Number Of Pages Driving Traffic On Your SiteThis may sound like an SEO metric, and it is, but you can directly impact this metric over time with a robust content publishing strategy. If you’re regularly publishing quality content on your blog (or curating third-party content that’s still published on your site via services like Scribit), you should see a steady acceleration of the number of pages across your site driving traffic from a variety of sources—SEO, social links, etc.

If you’re active in creating content, this represents a residual, ongoing source of traffic. Create a post that the social Web likes and Google ranks, for example, and it’ll drive incremental traffic every day as you create new content that does the same. And it goes on and on.

How does social directly impact site traffic? In addition to your followers driving traffic via their own posts and retweets, Google is increasingly looking at social influence

as a means of prioritizing publishers at the top of search results. So if your content is relevant AND your social followers are actively sharing it, your changes of ranking high in search increase significantly. Your social strategy, in other words, has a direct and significant impact on SEO. And that connection is only going to get stronger over time from this point forward.

3. Non-Brand Keyword Traffic Look within Google Analytics for most companies and the top performers will be branded terms—variations of the company name and/or product names, for example. But if you’re succeeding with great content and social sharing, you are over time increasing the non-branded, more buyer-centric keywords and phrases driving traffic to your site. You should be tracking overall volume as well as percent of overall traffic with non-branded keywords.

This is particularly important if you consider how your buyer thinks. If they’re farther along in the buying cycle, they may know your name and use it in their search. But chances are significantly more prospects are searching based on more generic buying signals—pain points, needs, obstacles, desired outcomes, etc.

These are the keywords and phrases you should be using in your content, and threaded throughout your social channels. Do this consistently and you’ll increase the consistent volume of qualified prospects coming your way who are earlier in the sales process, and less likely to be engaged with your competitors.

4. Number Of Keywords Driving TrafficIt would be much easier if all of your prospects used the same keyword to search for your solution. But this, of course, is not the case. In fact, the majority of searches on Google continue to be for “long tail” searches, or those that aren’t often used and are far more obscure than the high-traffic keywords that are more expensive via paid search and harder to rank for via natural means.

Good content, however, over time can help you unlock and rank for that long tail of keywords. And deeper you get into that list, the more likely a prospect searching for that string will see relevance in your content and engage. Again, this isn’t just about SEO. The keywords you want to rank for need to be threaded through your content, but also actively used in your tweets, LinkedIn updates, Facebook posts and more.

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Four Critical Components To Maximize Webinar ROI

Are webinars already a core component of your 2013 marketing strategy? Not only do your events need to stand out from the mass of others out there, it is also critical to do so cost effectively with measurable results of Marketing Qualified Leads.

There are some important steps while preparing and following up that can increase your effectiveness and ROI down the line. Here are four worth keeping in mind at all times.

1. Desired OutcomesFirst, ask yourself, “What is the end goal of this webinar?” Is it to generate leads, to use in your nurture campaign, or to establish thought leadership and credibility? All have their uses and purposes, but the reason will determine your audience, layout and metrics to measure success.

2. Target Audience and PromotionNow you can determine the ideal audience, and what they know about your company. Get creative on your invitation; don’t stick to the overdone simple letter format. It is important for the invitation to address the audience correctly, and share information they don’t know without providing info they many already know.

If the webinar is targeted for your in-house list, an intimate, personalized invitation will work great and fits the relationship. Whereas, if inviting new contacts from a purchased list, or first contact, an informative and well branded layout will be more appealing and provide more insight into your brand.

Email invitations aren’t the only way to promote your webinar. Post details to your social networks, such as Twitter and LinkedIn. Even asking any co-workers or co-presenters to spread the word to their network is a great way to reach new contacts. Some Webinar service providers (such as BrightTalk) may also have marketing channels you can use, such as newsletters, banner ads, etc.

3. Extended Webinar LifecycleDon’t forget how to up-cycle your webinar after the live version is completed. Record your webinar to be used in other campaigns, such as nurture campaigns, or assets to gate throughout your site!

It is also important to offer the recorded version to all who registered for your webinar but were unable to attend; they could still be very interested in viewing the webinar. Another great way to repurpose your webinar is to use the manuscript to create white papers, best practice guides, fact sheets or infographics. Get creative!

4. Follow Up Lastly, determine the appropriate follow up steps, not only to take with those who attended, but those who did not attend as well. If you have a lead scoring program in place, determine the appropriate change in score based on attendance. Based on your desired outcome from above decide the best follow up.

If your webinar was an intimate, product specific event for hot leads, it makes sense for sales to follow up with calls. If the webinar was to establish credibility, the attendees should be sent into a nurture campaign to further qualify the leads.

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The Five Most Meaningless Sales Metrics You’re Still Using

The only thing that really matters in sales is closed business, but to get there (and to help your team more predictably exceed expectations month after month) there are always a series of leading-indicator metrics we track to ensure we’re on the right path, that our proven processes are being followed, and that activities are being executed that will lead to closed business.

Unfortunately, in our zeal to measure and manage, we often focus on the wrong metrics. If left unchecked, this not only allows reps to game your system, but can also reinforce and/or require behavior that is in fact counterproductive to finding, qualifying and closing good business.

Here are five of the most meaningless metrics still actively tracked and enforced in many current sales organizations.

1. DialsOf course, the one thing that every sales rep can control is how often then pick up the phone and talk to a prospect. They can’t control inbound lead volume, market conditions, weather events or other external factors. But they can control dials.

Problem is, dials rarely if ever have a direct, independent correlation to pipeline-building and closed business. When aggressive dial expectations are in front of a sales rep, they too often fill their daily-dial quota with unqualified dials, too many dials to a not-ready-to-buy prospect, or (if they really want to game your system) they’ll dial the same dead phone number over and over to inflate their numbers.

There’s no question that increased activity can lead to more opportunities. But dials alone—without watching list quality, dial-to-conversation conversion, and output of dispositioned leads and/or new opportunities—is a shallow and often irrelevant number.

2. Demos Or Appointments ScheduledThe idea of tracking appointments isn’t the issue. It’s doing it without context or qualification that represents the biggest challenge for sales organizations nationwide. A demo or appointment should imply a level of interest on the part of the prospect. Even if you’re offering something of independent value in exchange for some of their time (a market analysis or audit or similar), the rep shouldn’t even waste their time with the demo or appointment if the prospect hasn’t been pre-qualified somehow.

A good rep who wants to inflate her numbers will grab time with as many prospects as possible, even though most of those conversations are going nowhere. Her appointment

metrics look great, but with low conversion she’s not creating real closeable pipeline (and wasting time that could have been spent qualifying other prospects).

3. Talk TimeSales managers often incorrectly correlate talk time with quality prospect conversations. In some cases that may be true, but it’s not universal. Long phone conversations (especially with early stage prospects) can just as often be small-talk than qualifying. Small talk can be great for rapport-building at the early stages of a sale, but it can also fill valuable selling time with chatty prospects who like to talk but have no intention of buying (or who may not be qualified as a near or long-term buyer at all).

This is also one of the easiest metrics to game. Smart reps can dial a number and leave their phone off the hook when taking a break or leaving for lunch. They might also fill their talk-time by checking in with existing or past customers to see how they’re doing (which often leads to more small talk). Good relationship-building for the company (and sometimes for a renewal or upsell), but not always the new sales rep’s job.

4. Salesforce.com Log-insThis metric is especially used in field sales environments, where reps are distributed and not in the office often. The assumption is that Salesforce.com log-ins are equivalent to how often they’re working, or updating their pipeline. Even if you want to better enforce CRM usage, this metric is completely irrelevant. Sure, if a rep hasn’t logged in for over a week, there’s probably something wrong. But having this one on a metrics scorecard belittles your reps and takes focus away from externally-focused metrics that really matter.

5. Logged Activities In Salesforce.comLet’s just say that nobody is going to get an award for recording the most touchpoints and actions with a prospect to get the sale. Measuring daily actions (calls, voicemails, emails) without context or qualification not only is way too broad of a metric, but the micro-management implication to the sales team is nearly always counterproductive.

Rather than measure overall logged activities, start with a well-defined sales process and intent for each action. Ensure that certain logged activities or milestones imply a commonly-understood level of qualification or progress with the prospect. That way, you’re looking at the right metrics, but also can better interpret what they mean as it directly relates to pipeline size and velocity.

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Three Important Sales Metrics You’re Probably Not Tracking Today

It’s easy to evaluate your sales team based on pipeline size, closed business, performance against quota. But there are other metrics you probably have access to already that can help you improve individual and overall sales performance. Here are three of my favorites.

1. First-Month Customer SatisfactionOne month in, most customers haven’t yet realized the value of the product or service. But they should already have developed an opinion of how well what they’re now experiencing matched the expectations set by the sales rep. If your sales team is selling right—setting the right expectations, selling on outcomes and benefits instead of features—the customer should know exactly what they’re getting into and have a solid satisfaction level even in the first couple weeks.

2. Average Selling Price vs. Team Average Or Expectations Simply put, is the average deal size from each rep living up to expectations? Is an individual rep performing better or

worse than the team average? This is an important and often overlooked metric, especially in markets where small deals take just as much work to close as large deals. Your reps may feel good about closing the small guys, or feel good about closing the “back up” sale of a smaller product to a bigger customer, but is that where their (and your) time is best spent? Make sure your reps are going after big-enough deals.

3. Current vs. Previous Territory PerformanceSales teams too often ignore historical performance. They don’t use the precedents set in previous selling periods or by previous sales teams to predict or expect future performance. Let’s say you have an experience rep working a new territory or vertical industry. Is their performance dramatically different than what you saw from that territory previously? There may be good reasons—you may be saturated, or inventory could be low. But if you’re seeing significantly lower performance vs. what was previously achieved, it could be a sign that potential sales are somehow being left on the table.

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Stay Focused On The Right Number

It’s easy to get focused on numbers that make you feel good, but don’t do much to drive real business results.

Take sales, for example. If you close a ton of sales but price too low, or bring on the wrong customers who increase your operational costs and decrease employee morale, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Your organization might also get excited about some of the most visible metrics, which are good for top-line but don’t add up to much profit.

A client recently asked us to help them accelerate the number of events their facility hosts each month. They’re a private club. It became quickly clear that their events

business—basically food and beverage—was about a 15–20 percent margin business. Highly visible and nice to fill the rooms.

But membership is an 80 percent margin business.

The rest of our meeting, as you would expect, started focusing on a very different objective.

Top line doesn’t matter unless it’s driving profit. Sales don’t really matter unless they’re driving long-term relationships with the right customers that maximize margin opportunity.

Focus on the right numbers. There aren’t that many of them. Nothing else matters nearly as much, and the right decisions across the entire business will get you there faster.

More Information About Us

8201 164th Ave. NE, Suite 200 Redmond WA 98052Ph. 877.291.0006www.heinzmarketing.com

About Matt Heinz

Matt Heinz is the Founder and President of Heinz Marketing Inc. Matt brings more than 12 years of marketing, business development and sales experience from a variety of organizations, vertical industries and company sizes. His career has focused on deliver-ing measurable results for his employers and clients in the way of greater sales, revenue growth, product success and customer loyalty.

About Heinz Marketing

Heinz Marketing is a Seattle marketing agency focused on sales acceleration. Heinz Marketing helps clients achieve sustained sales success by growing revenue from existing customers and cost effectively identifying and winning new customers.

Contact Heinz Marketing

Heinz Marketing Inc. 8201 164th Ave NE, Suite 200 Redmond, WA 98052 877.291.0006 www.heinzmarketing.com acceleration@heinzmarketing.com

Learn More About Heinz Marketing

Interested in learning more creative ways to make the most of your marketing?: Request your FREE 10-minute brainstorm at www.10minutebrainstorm.comJoin our newsletter: www.heinzmarketinginsights.comCheck out our blog: www.mattonmarketingblog.com Follow Matt on Twitter: www.twitter.com/heinzmarketing

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