TL;DR - This article highlights the importance of metrics such as sales revenue, website traffic, and customer satisfaction, providing a roadmap for businesses to analyze data, identify improvement areas, and optimize strategies. By focusing on these metrics, companies can set specific goals, measure progress, and adapt strategies to enhance overall performance and customer relationships.
Ten Sales, Marketing and Customer Support Metrics You Should be Tracking
They say you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and that’s especially true in business. In this article we’ll be discussing the key metrics your marketing, sales and customer support teams should be paying attention to.
Measuring metrics for your sales, marketing, and customer support teams provides valuable insights into what is working in your company, and what isn't. Analyzing this data allows you to identify areas for improvement and help you develop ways to address them. Additionally, measuring metrics allows teams to set specific goals, track their progress, and adjust their strategies accordingly.
In the modern business environment, there is such an abundance of data that it can become overwhelming and difficult to decide which data, and how that data should be measured. To get the best result, you will need to develop a good strategy when analyzing your company's key metrics, knowing which aspects to pay close attention to and which approaches to take.
Let's go over some metrics that play an important role in most companies. We'll divide these metrics into three key areas of your business, namely, sales marketing and customer success.
Sales Metrics
Sales is the lifeblood of your business so measuring sales metrics is a particularly crucial process. Sales managers cannot rely on their instinct to make informed decisions because the abundance of information they handle is too great. Being able to keep track of company sales metrics plays a crucial role in guiding sales leaders towards reliable outcomes. Here are some of the key sales metrics you should be paying attention to.
1. Sales revenue: Often the most important metric of any company, this metric measures the total amount of revenue generated from sales within a specific period, usually over a quarter or a year. Sales revenue is a crucial metric as it indicates how much revenue a company is generating from its sales efforts. Managers will create revenue targets to guide the sales efforts. To get these forecasts accurate, they need reliable information from all areas of the business.
2. Sales growth rate: This metric measures the percentage increase in sales revenue over a defined period, this is usually over a quarter or a year. Understanding your sales growth rate gives you a good picture as to whether your sales team's efforts are paying off. You want your growth rate to increase, and if somethings wrong, you need to understand what’s causing the issue.
3. Win rate: Your win rate measures the percentage of deals that are won compared to the total number of deals pursued. Understanding issues in this area will help you understand why deals are not closing. It might be that somewhere along the chain your customers are losing interest. Perhaps you’re not focusing on the right pain points that your product solves for your client.
4. Average deal size: This metric measures the average value of a closed deal. This is a critical metric because learning how to increase the size of your deals will result in more revenue. If your company is consistently failing to close on larger deals, you’ll need to understand the reasons why.
Marketing Metrics
A good understanding of marketing metrics helps businesses to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and customer lifetime value, businesses can gain valuable insights into the performance of their marketing campaigns so they can make informed decisions about where to focus their resources.
Some important marketing metrics to understand are:
5. Website traffic: Website traffic tells you how many people are interested in your brand or product and are taking the time to visit the website to learn more about it. It can be measured in terms of total visits, unique visitors, pageviews, and other metrics.
6. Return on investment (ROI): In the context of your marketing department, ROI represents the ratio of the revenue gained from a marketing campaign compared to the cost of the campaign. A positive ROI means that the campaign generated more revenue than it cost, while a negative ROI means that the campaign lost money.
7. Cost per lead (CPL): CPL tells you how much you’ve spent to acquire a potential customer, or lead. You calculate this by dividing the total cost of a marketing campaign by the number of leads that campaign generated. Naturally, a lower CPL is desirable, as it means that the campaign was cost-effective in terms of generating potential business.
Customer Success Metrics
Customer success metrics give your company valuable insight into of your company's efforts to keep your customers satisfied, loyal, and willing to use your products or service in the future. Here are some key customer success metrics you should be paying attention to:
8. Customer satisfaction (CSAT): This score will tell you how satisfied your customers are with your company's products or service. There are several ways to get this feedback, but it’s typically measured through surveys or feedback forms.
9. Customer retention rate: There’s nothing better than loyal customers, and this metric will tell you what percentage of your customers continue to use your company's products or services. If for some reason you’re losing customers, you want to know exactly why, and what you could have done to keep them.
10. Customer lifetime value (CLV): This metric measures the total value a customer brings to your company over their entire relationship. It can help you understand the long-term value of their customers.
Best Practice for Measuring Metrics
To get a clear picture of your company's metrics usually involves a number of gears working together to make the bigger wheel spin. For instance, your technology stack will influence the way you collect data and communicate with your customers through various communication channels. You will also need to consider all the various segments of your company, how they function as a unit, but also how they function with other departments.
Depending on how your company’s technology stack is laid out, the communications and data in these departments can become siloed, leading to poor data, miscommunication, and misunderstandings between departments. Not only that, but poor data will make it harder to get tangible and reliable insights into your company metrics.
Then, focus on tracking metrics that are directly tied to your goals and objectives, such as revenue, customer acquisition cost, customer retention rate, and customer satisfaction. It is normally best to use a variety of measurement methods for each area:
• Measure your sales, marketing, and customer success by using a combination of both quantitative and qualitative methods. For instance, analyze how much traffic is coming to your website (quantitative) and how much of that traffic is leading to meaningful engagement through clicks, requests for demo, etc. (qualitative).
• Your business is like a flowing river, and nothing stands still for long. This means you need to regularly review and analyze your data to get the most up-to-date information on how things are performing.
• Set up a system for collecting and analyzing data on a regular basis and use this information to make data-driven decisions about your sales, marketing, and customer success strategies.
• Continuously improve: Measuring sales, marketing, and customer success rates is not just about tracking metrics, it's also about continuously improving your processes and strategies.
Use the insights you gain from your data analysis to identify areas for improvement and make changes to your sales, marketing, and customer success strategies over time.
To identify opportunities for improvement, it's crucial to collaborate with cross-functional teams such as Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success. By working together, cross-functional teams can leverage their diverse perspectives and expertise to drive positive results for the company.
Before you jump right in
Before measuring any sales, marketing, or customer success metrics, having clean and accurate data is the most important step. If your data is a mess and filled with errors, it will have little value at all no matter how you analyze it. If you use a CRM like Salesforce in your technology stack, you might have thousands, or even millions of records that contain flawed, outdated and false information.
The best way to cleanse that data is to use a quality Data Management suite such as Plauti Data Management (PDM). PDM offers an enterprise grade data management solution that can tackle data management from a range of angles. Besides cleaning your data, Plauti offers you powerful Salesforce Native tools to streamline and automate many of your sales, marketing & customer success processes. There also are products geared towards specific needs, such as managing duplicates in Salesforce with the top-rated product, Duplicate Check. If you would like to learn more about how to get your data happy, head over to our website today and look at how we help customers solve their data challenges.
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