by Glen Springer | Jun 14, 2017
Why are Marketing Metrics so important for success? Athletes have known the answer for years. Quite simply, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. This is why of the six teams leading early in the 2017 MLB season, five are advocates of the data-driven systems advocated in Michael Lewis’s, Moneyball.
Over the past ten years, we have seen data transform the way businesses are run – and sales and marketing are no different. You can use data to help you to improve what is working, remove what is not working, and make smarter business decisions in the future. Capturing this data is one of the key drivers of the recent adoption of CRMs like Salesforce.com, and Marketing Automation Systems. It’s also why working with an outsourced sales company may be a smart move for many companies because they can help them capture key outsourced sales and marketing metrics.
So how does all this impact your business? In sales, like sports, consistent wins don’t happen by accident. Repeatable results are driven by repeatable math—numbers that define your sales team’s past performance will predict future performance.
Here are the key outsourced sales and marketing metrics you can expect from an outsourced sales company.
Outbound Calling Metrics
The first key metric an outsourced sales and marketing company can help with is, how much outbound activity does it take to generate a lead. An outsourced sales company will measure the results of every call and track the connection ratios (how many calls does it take to get a person on the phone). Your outsourced sales reps will also track how many calls result in someone that is mildly interested in your solution, and willing to accept Marketing Material (Marketing Qualified Lead – MQL), and how many buyers have a potential need for your product (Sales Accepted Lead – SAL)
In most cases, cold calling alone may not be the most effective way to generate leads and you will understand these metrics clearly. Below is a chart of the cold calling metrics you can expect from an outsourced sales company.
Email Lead Generation Metrics
Marketing Sherpa found, 70 percent of buyers now prefer to learn about new products and services from email first. For about the cost of a cold caller for one month, you can now make 25,000 to 75,000 potential buyers and influencers aware of your solution. What is important from a data perspective is, you can also test up to nine different messages as part of these campaigns. The key outsourced sales and marketing metrics in this case will be:
- What messages and subject lines resonate most in the market
- What offers were most engaging
This information can help you to determine:
- What messages your callers should focus on
- What content should you create to help digitally educate your buyer
Key Outsourced Sales and Marketing Metrics Scorecard
Building a consistent flow of leads is the most critical first step in scaling a sales effort. But if you’re over spending or underspending on your lead generation efforts, you will not be keeping your closers’ (your most expensive sale cost) time maximized. A scorecard will tell you:
- How much and what type of activity is required to generate a lead
- How much outbound activity is required to generate a single qualified sales opportunity
- How many of those opportunities will result in a proposal
- How many proposal does it take to win a deal
Gabriel Sales Provides outsourced sales and marketing metrics
Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Start-ups launch modern sales and marketing operations. As part of building, launching, and executing sales campaigns to fill your closers sales funnel, we provide key outsourced sales and marketing metrics. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing services we invite you to visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.
by Glen Springer | Sep 18, 2015
While social proof is not a new phenomenon, its manifestation in the digital world has interesting effects and implications in terms of commercial attitudes and behaviors. Learn more about the effectiveness of social proof for b2b marketing in this blog, “Why is Social Proof Effective in Marketing?”
by Glen Springer | Feb 24, 2014
It is imperative that your marketing team be data-driven. Budget dollars are tight and need to be accurately spent. Having clear data on how each of your marketing campaigns are performing is essential to being able to forecast sales, scale your campaigns/operations and re-allocate budget from low performing to high performing campaigns.
At Gabriel Sales, our entire organization is data-driven, including the marketing team, who manages quantitative reporting and scorecards for both clients and internally. The key performance metrics we traditionally measure are the following:
- Inbound Traffic by source
- Web form conversions and inbound calls by source (Total Prospects)
- Prospects who want to talk (Sales Accepted Leads aka SALs)
- Prospects who have a project need and budget (Sales Qualified Lead aka SQLs)
- Proposals
- Closed deals
- Revenue
If you notice, we are accurately tracking the entire funnel. We do this using a combined integration of web analytics, marketing automation software, CRM software and experienced data analysts. By calculating conversion rates from previous stage (e.g. what percentage of proposals close or what percentage inbound traffic converts to web forms), we can better forecast sales and allocate spend to marketing campaigns to best enhance our marketing and sales funnel’s performance.
Additionally, with marketing automation software at the crux of our marketing and sales operations, we can see what traffic/lead conversion sources are most likely to convert to proposal and closed deals. This helps us scale those marketing campaigns that have the best conversion performance.
Lastly, we can see what sources have the poorest funnel performance and reduce or eliminate spending on those campaigns (as long as we’ve tested enough to be sure the campaign is not viable for the particular product/service we are promoting).
This level of reporting built-in to your company is no longer just a competitive advantage but is a key to sustaining and growing your business in today’s market.
For more on increasing B2B sales funnel productivity, read “The Value of Marketing Automation in the B2B Sales Process”. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by Glen Springer | Nov 27, 2013
Having integrated and managed multiple marketing automation software solutions, the following features were not part of any of them.
1) Generate a prospect list report with last email correspondence topic and date.
Why?
I want to know when people were last contacted to make sure everyone is getting nurtured appropriately, and no one has fallen out of drip program cycles unnecessarily.
Feature Note: The ability to select prospects by last correspondence date and select a next action, e.g. send an email, would be extremely useful.
2) Profile and score prospects via social channels that are not opted into my database, yet.
Why?
If I can connect with someone directly outside of my marketing automation database, I should be able to get a gauge whether he/she is a potential customer for my business without needing him/her to be cookied on my particular site.
Feature Note: A database within the marketing automation software of all social connections/fans of multiple social pages and company representatives would be a revolutionary addition.
3) A recommended call-to-action engine based on matching the following: 1) a registered database of my content (that my marketing automation software understands the contents of) 2) content consumption patterns by my prospects.
Why?
When viewing a prospect, I’d like my marketing automation software to prompt me for some recommended actions/next-steps to take for that particular prospect, e.g. finding an interest pattern and prompting me to send a piece of related content they he/she has not yet consumed.
Feature Note: Having a one-click “Execute this Action” button would be supreme for this feature.
4) ‘Emails sent’ check and suppress/delay automation.
Why?
The ability to suppress or delay emails would be helpful in not overbearing prospects with too many emails.
Feature Note: The ability to override the delay/suppress should be available in case a critical announcement needs to be sent.
For more on marketing automation, you can find more educational blog articles here. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
