Our sales guys stress the last 2 weeks of the quarter. My stress starts the first day after the end of the quarter. Ah the joys of marketing ROI reporting!
While I may weakly fuss about the work, I secretly enjoy it. Digging into program and web site data is one of my favorite things.
Over the last 5 quarters, we’ve really refined our marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) and use these ROI reports to make smart decisions about how we run our business. Case in point, while performing the 4Q08 analysis in January, I discovered that our white paper leads had dismal conversion into meetings/opportunities/deals compared to our webinar and web site leads.
We use a 2-tier direct sales model where nearly all leads get directed to an inside sales team for qualification. Their mission in life is to set appointments for the outside reps. We were just about to roll-out lead nurturing, so we decided to improve ISR productivity by funneling white paper leads straight to nurturing, bypassing the ISRs.
This move gave the ISRs more time to follow-up on higher quality web site leads where our data showed that they set more meetings that turned into more opportunities. The result? A 44% increase in marketing-sourced opportunities in 1Q09. I love it when we look like geniuses.
So, as a small start-up company, what are we measuring? Our top 5 KPIs are:
- Stage 1 Conversion: the number of opportunities created off of leads created within the quarter. The higher the number, the better.
- Campaign Efficiency: the marketing dollars spent to create $1 of new business. We have about a 90-day sales cycle so we take the marketing spend (direct program spend only, not any channel spend) from the previous quarter and divide that by the marketing-sourced revenue from the current quarter. The lower the number, the better.
- Marketing-Sourced Deals: the percentage of the total number of new customer deals that come from marketing sources. Our target based upon our business model is 50%. We choose to place more value on the # of deals rather than the deal value as we frequently get add-on business from exisiting customers, so the initial deal value isn’t a true representation of the value of the customer.
- Cost per Opportunity: the marketing dollars spent to create an opportunity. Again we take the marketing spend from the previous quarter and divide it by the number of opportunities created in the current quarter. We also drill in further and track this by campaign and vendor. We aggregate the spend and opportunity by vendor to help us monitor vendor performance. This drives intelligent decisions about which vendors to continue to spend money with.
- Visitor Conversion: the percentage of unique web site visitors who respond to a web site offer. For a B2B lead generation web site, best practices say that you want to be north of 2% on this metric.
What other metrics are you tracking?
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