Sales and Marketing Metrics: Measuring Success and Driving Growth
If you’re in the world of sales, you’ll know that measuring results is important. You can’t just go on with your sales efforts and not measure your success with them.
At the end of the day, you should be able to figure out where you’re going wrong with your demand generation.
But you can’t do that if you don’t know how to measure results in the first place. If you’ve never done this before, the process can seem a little complex.
You would need experts to come in and help you with this. They can measure the effectiveness of your demand-generation efforts.
In doing so, they help you understand what you can do to improve your sales and marketing efforts. If you don’t know which metrics you should be using, we’re here to help.
Let’s talk about a few sales and marketing metrics you can use to measure success. These metrics are sure to help you drive long-term growth as well.
Table of Contents
Why You Need Measurable Metrics
Let’s first get into why you need measurable metrics, to begin with. As a marketer, you should know that trends can change in the blink of an eye.
What you may see trending online today may not be popular tomorrow. So, you need to keep up with what your target audience wants to see online.
It’s not easy to do this if you don’t rely on metrics. The metrics you look at will give you an idea of what customers are liking online. Once you figure this out, you can go ahead and talk to these customers. You can tell them about your brand and products to keep them interested.
Or, if you don’t have the in-house resources for it, there’s a way out. You can hire an appointment-setting company to reach out to your customers. These companies have experts working with them who know how to deal with customers. They set appointments and contact your customers at the right time.
In this way, they ensure your demand generation efforts don’t go to waste. Instead, they help keep your customer’s interest in your brand for long periods. You’ll find that appointment-setting companies rely on metrics to figure out which leads to chase.
They use metrics to understand which of your leads are most likely to convert. They can save you the time and effort needed to chase leads who aren’t interested in your products in this way. Without metrics, it’s difficult for experts to know where to invest resources.
But you need to know which metrics to look at for demand generation. So, we’ll take you through some measurable metrics that are sure to come in handy for you.
Lead Generation
One of the first metrics you’ll need to focus on is lead generation. You can find several parameters against which to measure your demand generation efforts. The right comparisons can help you understand which leads are worth chasing and which aren’t.
The first thing to look out for with demand generation is how many leads are interested in your products. It’s not easy to figure this out if you don’t use advanced software to record responses to your ads. Once you figure out the volume of leads you’re receiving, you can move on to response time.
You’ll have a chance to understand how long your leads are taking to respond to your marketing efforts. You can also use these metrics to figure out how long it takes them to buy your products. So, you can measure how effective your sales functions are with demand generation.
But it’s not enough for you to record your lead response time and be done with it. You also need to follow up with your leads and get them to convert. So, another useful metric here is the percentage of leads you followed up with. This will also help you identify the percentage of leads you let go of.
At the end of the day, the main thing that lets you figure things out is how many leads are converted to sales. If this is a high number, you’ll know that your marketing and sales departments are doing a good job. If not, you could hire an appointment-setting company to handle demand generation.
Activity Sales
Another metric you’d need to watch out for is activity sales. This metric will show you what activities your salespeople are engaged in every day.
How busy they are or aren’t should help you understand how effective your sales function is. Usually, high activity in your sales department will show you’ll get good results from it.
But you may have noticed an increase in automation in sales these days. Your competitors may be using CRM software to manage their interactions with customers.
If they’re doing so, their sales departments may record a little less activity than yours. And that doesn’t mean their sales function is ineffective.
If you’re spending too many resources on sales, you could also consider using such software. It’ll help you save on costs while also increasing your demand generation efforts.
This goes for both your B2C and B2B demand generation efforts. You should remember that automation isn’t a bad thing in the world of sales.
Sure, total automation can kill the originality of your marketing campaign. But, a little automation can go a long way in freeing the time you’d need to manage your leads. Even if you’re using automation, you should still focus on your activity and sales metrics.
If you think your sales function is ineffective, pull up these metrics from employees. You may notice that some of them aren’t making enough phone calls or sending enough messages to your leads. If they let your leads drop in this way, it could lead to a loss of revenue in the long run.
You should check their activity metrics often to keep them on their toes. You can look at activity metrics like their conversations with customers on the phone. While not all customers prefer these conversations, they may prove useful for you.
Sales Productivity
You could focus on your sales productivity to know how well your salespeople perform. You may find that your activity metric is high but your revenue isn’t increasing in line with this. While there could be a lot of reasons for this, it could also be because of low sales productivity.
This is why you need to check your sales productivity metrics now and then. If you have high sales productivity, it means your salespeople meet revenue targets. But if the productivity is low, it may be time for you to start changing a few things about your sales function.
It doesn’t make sense for you to spend large amounts on sales if you’re not getting satisfactory results. Think of how competitive online marketplaces are these days.
Also, think about how long you’ll survive if you don’t hit revenue targets. You could depend on appointment-setting companies to help you hit revenue targets.
Since these companies have experts with them, they know how to increase productivity. If you prefer your sales function to be in-house, then you need to focus on the productivity metric.
You can start by measuring the time each salesperson spends on selling activities. Then, you can move on to recording how much time they spend on manual labor. This would include how much time they spend taking down customer details. You could even measure how much time your sales staff spends creating content.
If you’re using sales tools such as CRM software, you can measure the results from these as well. Think about it, don’t you want to know if your investment in these tools is paying off? Lastly, you can measure how many quality leads your salespeople have followed up with.
Conclusion
You can now see why it’s important for you to focus on measurable metrics for marketing and sales. Sure, you shouldn’t focus on quantifiable results alone if you want to increase your revenue. But you should know that you can find deficiencies in quality if you focus on metrics.
Figuring out which metrics to use to measure your success will help you boost your revenue. You’ll understand where you’re falling short with your marketing and sales functions. You can then try to figure out how you can improve these functions. One way to go about it would be to hire sales experts to help you out.
For example, you could choose an appointment-setting company that manages demand generation. This would help you free up your resources to focus on a marketing campaign. You can then try to improve your efforts with ad targeting and marketing strategies.
You’ll find this to be much more useful when looking to boost your demand in the long run. Also, look for the right experts to help you create the content you need to increase visibility. The more people see you online, the more your demand-generation efforts will pay off.
But, even if you’re receiving good responses online, don’t ignore your metrics. You’d be surprised to find there are several things you’re doing wrong despite driving revenue. There’ll always be some room for improvement when it comes to your sales and marketing efforts.
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