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Like all marketers, my focus as a marketing leader is continually on the brand, our performance and how we can improve. But as we step in and out of the trenches rolling up our sleeves executing on tactical initiatives, occasionally that focus becomes blurred. If we have a blueprint for what metrics are important, we will always be able to refer to this “cheat-sheet.”
Highly competitive marketers read on – others… this is not for you
If you’re a performance-based marketer, this is for you. So, take off your creative hat and put on your analysis hat – you will need it. For those of you who can’t be bothered, you may want to skip this blog because it’s too challenging for you right now. When you’re ready to dig-in to performance-based numbers, come on back, the information will still be applicable.
We will touch on 3 important areas in part 1 of this series. Within your marketing ecosystem visibility below are areas you need to pay attention to throughout the year. Some of these numbers are not so easy to get, so you will need to really dig-in. But trust me, if you can obtain realistic numbers for each and apply them to your strategy for marketing and retention, you will be golden!
Size
In sales and marketing, everything starts with size, quantity, and volume. Without any of these, well… to be honest, you’re in big trouble. Let’s dive in.
- Market Size: Regardless of your brand and what you sell, you need to develop a market size metric (percentage or individual unit #). This can be hyper-local, regional, national, global or even by product or service area. However, you craft this number, make sure you get it and it’s as accurate as possible and you can prove it. This needs to be done first before you move on to the next step.
- Your Brand’s Represented Size: Similarly, your brand’s size needs to be quantified juxtaposed to your market size. Make sure you measure it exactly the same way as your market size metric, otherwise this information is pretty much useless.
PRO TIP: Prove it: If you don’t have access to these numbers, set up a means to obtain them frequently. If this is your first time, it’s going to be hard. Do some research, dig into your CRM, talk to others in the company. I guarantee others will want to know and help in this process.
Leads
This is self-explanatory. Total leads you can probably get in about 10 minutes. Your qualified lead metric is much harder. You need to be able to measure these and provide a qualitative and quantitative metric. You’re probably wondering how. Well, have some discussions with your sales teams, IT, analysts and web folks. Craft a method to score a lead when it comes in. Once you have it, soon you will be able to measure against the total.
PRO TIP: Scoring will provide your sales team with an extremely value metric. They will then be able to spend more time on high-scoring leads and less time on low quality, low scoring leads. Marketing will also be able to send low quality (low scoring) leads to nurture campaigns.
- Total leads – measure total leads by (week, month, quarter, year).
- Qualified leads – Score these with qualitative and quantitative metrics.
Cost
This just might be the easiest of all the sections we’re reviewing. I figured your brain would need a break. If you made it this far – congratulations, you’re on track to successfully solve the metric dilemma most sales and marketers don’t have access too.
- Cost of Customer acquisition: Certainly, you know what your annual marketing spend is. Take your total lead quantity and divide it by marketing spend. My suggestion is to add the total of all paid media, services, agencies, freelancers, and content creation costs. I would not add staff salaries, website, server, rent costs if you have them and normal business software fees. All things that are required for being a business don’t add. This is a metric that needs a little explanation. Be thoughtful, you will be able to increase the number or decrease the number based on the items listed in your marketing spend. Be accurate and be thoughtful. There is not a perfect right or wrong. But there should be an accurate metric.
PRO TIP: Spend some time thinking about exactly what items you want to include – it matters.
- Length of Sales Cycle: Talk to your sales team. If they are not measuring each lead-to-purchase time in your CRM, your next best method is to talk to every salesperson who prospects and closes deals. You don’t want to just take a guess. You need some evidence of how long this is. You may even want to take a look back at some historic deals, look at the email string for the first touchpoint and then when the deal was closed. Your IT and sales teams will be able to help with this.
PRO TIP: When you look at both of these metrics, it will help your marketing team determine the value of new marketing initiatives. We will not dive into sales and marketing funnel location in this blog. However, when assessing new marketing initiatives, this is an additional criterion that needs to be looked at in conjunction with the cost of customer acquisition and the length of the sales cycle.
Overview
Marketing teams need to collaborate more with sales. You may not want to hear this, but the sales number should be the marketing number your team is striving to reach. So, plan accordingly. In this article, we talked about size, leads, and cost. Start figuring out how you can obtain these numbers – the sooner the better. Create a system for constant measurement, monitoring, and recording. These are VERY important because in part two we will unpack three additional items to add to your measurement portfolio. Digital, Repeat Customer and ROI –Enjoy!
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Scott MacFarland is the Director of Marketing for HMY Yacht Sales in Jupiter, FL. He’s an advocate of exciting new ventures, digital marketing and transformation, transformative learning, and how to continue to be at his best in today’s digital marketplace. Scott has had the opportunity to work with some amazing business leaders, all of which were instrumental in his perspective and desire to continue growing through business change.
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