Having started a new Director of Marketing position recently (last week, woohoo!) and using a BI tool for the first time I couldn’t wait to have the ability to see all the metrics I care about in one place and not have to deal with manually updating a spreadsheet everyday. As exciting as that prospect was (and is) one of the problems I had early on in my career is knowing what numbers actually mattered. This of course can vary depending on your company goals and product. If this is still to be determined or you’re being super proactive about data, here are some metrics to gather to get you started.
There are a lot of ways to increase your leads, but what you need and your sales team needs is the number of leads that are likely to close to go up. When your company has an idea of what it looks like (company size, industry, job title, whatever it is) you can now pull how many marketing qualified leads you have in the pipeline and work on increasing that number.
This one has the potential to be tricky, especially for software companies. In one of my previous positions we thought that our web traffic was WAY above industry standard, but when we filtered out the people who were coming to the site just to login to our program we realized that we were way below. Make sure to add filters to divvy out what your new vs returning traffic looks like (PS you can also set up alerts in Google Analytics so you know when your traffic drops).
Google Analytics and Ads will actually allow you to assign monetary value to each conversion. This is an incredibly helpful exercise to do if you’re trying to decide which action you really want to encourage potential customers to take not only on your site but also through nurture campaigns and ad campaigns. If you’re not sure what those are, this Quietly article is a great walkthrough on how to get started.
Depending on what your goal is on your site (free trial, schedule a demo, interact with chat bot, etc) will depend on what conversion rate you care the most about. If you haven’t been tracking this previously and aren’t sure where to start, you can look up average conversion rates by industry to start with a benchmark.
The only way to tell if your MQLs are actually working well is to see how they move through your sales process. If the majority of them don’t move past a free trial and/or call with a BDR (business development rep) then you know your definition of a marketing qualified lead needs to change. If they get right up to signing a contract but then don’t follow through you need to take a look at the sales process and see what you’re missing. Tracking where people are dropping off in your sales funnel can help you determine if it’s a lead gathering problem or a sales problem. Seeing these rates in a dashboard is helpful, but also listen to calls to see if you’re missing anything.
Are you currently using any of these metrics to track success? Are there any I’m missing from this list that need to be included?
If you’d like to learn more about data and the capabilities of an all in one BI tool be sure to register for our free event coming up on November 12 to see what Grow can do for you.
