Metrics to Measure Sales and Marketing

May 10, 2011 by Tim
Filed under: Marketing Strategy

Measure your Sales and Marketing

Direct marketing is about being accountable and transparent. You do this by always testing, always improving your control program. The fusion of Sales with Marketing is new, this is because management wants to understand the productivity of each stage, status of key activities, and the emerging issues they need to worry about.

In managing the revenue cycle, and by default sales and marketing alignment, visibility is critical to helping them temper their instinctive response to the deluge of daily email, phone calls and meetings.

Direct marketers have known for a long time and are already familiar with, namely KPIs. With the right set of metrics, CEOs can better understand marketing’s effectiveness as well as the impact alignment has on the top- and bottom-line. While there are literally hundreds of sales and marketing metrics that can be used; it comes down to a few that measure alignment and frame that all-too critical joint conversation with sales and marketing about what’s working and what isn’t.

Making customer metrics real

Here are a few examples of metrics that both management : End-to-End Conversion, Revenue Diversity and Outcome Profitability.

End-to-End Conversion Metric

measures the conversion ratio for the full revenue cycle well as for each of the major stages – from market attraction through sales close and customer lifetime value. Benchmarked over time this metric highlights leakages and inefficiencies between stages, sales and marketing, and enables more accurate forecasting and target performance setting. Aligned organizations tend to have stable conversion ratios and use this metric to discuss how to improve the ratios between the stages and overall.

Revenue Diversity Metric

measures the productivity of lead generation. There are hundreds of lead sources like the web, direct mail, physical and virtual events, email, cold calls, eCommerce, other distribution channels, etc. This metric provides visibility into how broadly and efficiently marketing reaches target prospects, which lead sources are most productive and how effective sales converts them into revenue. Aligned organizations manage their revenue sources using portfolio management techniques to balance the diversity of lead channels. The key is to invest eighty percent of resources into high productive lead generation sources. The remaining twenty percent should be consistently invested in a wide and ever changing range of new channels.

Outcome Profitability Metric

is applicable to companies that sell complex products or solutions. Since not every sale can have four walls and a roof where the buyer only cares about comparing product features; complex solutions need to link the buyer’s desired outcome, which is often role-based. Used in conjunction with customer-centric methodologies, this metric measures profit attributable to each specific business problem or “outcome” sold to. While this approach is counter to how revenue is typically analyzed, which is by product lines, it gives the CEO great visibility into how well sales and marketing understand the buyers, their business problems and how effective they are in pursuing those opportunities.
Direct response accountability is the competitive edge that drives direct marketing success. Measurability of each direct mail response helps small direct marketers analyze the cost per response with list coding and to calculate expenses to the cent. Budgets can be forecasted with greater accuracy. I can teach you how to update your promotions both online and off.

My professional direct marketing experience

began in magazine circulation management from this I honed my skills in list purchasing, testing, and analyzing.

I learned the importance of direct response planning and budget forecasting and most importantly, providing a follow-up with back-end analysis, fulfillment of orders and inquiries. I also gained some valuable job experience with Jackson National Life Insurance as Marketing Database/Direct Mail area.

Allow me to help you implement your next strategic marketing plan focused on your niche. I will make the most of what you already have by analyzing your biggest strengths and exploiting your competition.

Timothy Little – Direct Marketing Consultant

Tim Little
1 (888) 889-0552

Service Description

Let me use my researched methods that have been proven to work, implementation know-how, and optimization expertise to boost your company’s marketing ROI and sales performance.

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