Types
1. Sales Growth
At the end of the day the best way to judge your marketing’s success is by measuring its growth in sales revenue. Fair warning—to do this you must have a strong stomach. Once you start measuring your marketing’s effect on sales growth, it will initially take some adjusting to weed out the marketing that does drive sales. Measuring your sales growth is, however, vital to the long-term health of your company. Not only does it serve as a good indicator when it comes to strategic planning, but it also allows for identification of growth trends.
Don’t be shy in sharing your sales revenue with your employees as well. This often instills a level of ownership with your workforce and reinforces that everyone is in the same boat navigating toward the same end goals.
2. Leads
It’s simple math. The more leads you get the more sales opportunities you have and the more sales opportunities you have the better are your chances of sales growth. The importance of leads to a marketing and sales department is comparable to the importance of something like gasoline to an automobile—it’s what drives them.
Not all leads are created equal however. Be sure you’re familiar with the difference between Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). These are simply different lifecycle stages of the same lead.
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead judged more likely to become a customer compared to other leads based on lead intelligence. MQLs are those people who have raised their hands (say by downloading an eBook or whitepaper) and identified themselves as more deeply engaged, sales-ready contacts than your usual leads, but who have not yet become fully fledged opportunities (source).
A sales qualified lead (SQL) is one that your sales team has accepted as worthy of a direct sales follow-up (source). SQLs have been vetted much further and indicate a prospect that is ready to make a decision.
Understanding the synergy between both MQLs and SQLs is vital toward understanding your company Leads to Close ratio—which is the number of leads you’ve received over a specific period of time divided by the actual amount of leads you’ve closed.
3. Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV)
What is your customer worth to your business over the lifetime of your relationship? Any idea? Hello? Bueller?
The idea of determining just how much your customers are worth to you seems a bit daunting, however, that’s no excuse not to know it. This KPI is a great way to gauge your company’s ROI, and it’s a wonderful figure to help strategize future business goals. While not exact, figuring out the lifetime value of a customer involves figuring out all sales your average customer have initiated over the course of your relationship.
