By Jennifer Wong, marketing at HasOffers
The most important step for building a marketing machine is to establish goals and baseline metrics. Goals created from thin air are probably not very realistic and won’t set you up for success. Goals developed from baseline metrics will help you set a more realistic expectation of your marketing plan for your sales team and executive board.
A well-defined baseline will help you accurately plan resources for all your marketing programs to reach your goals. You can figure out the contribution needed by each marketing channel and the budget associated with it. You’ll know what the “total” should equal when adding together the results of all your marketing campaigns from each channel. By identifying goals at multiple stages in the marketing-sales funnel, it’s also easier to identify if you are on the right track along the way or to spot where there are inefficiencies in your funnel that you can improve before the end of the month.
These are the questions to answer when establishing your baseline metrics to set realistic goals:
Start with the bottom line:
- What is the average sales price?
- What are the revenue goals?
- How many deals are required to achieve the business goals?
- How long is the sales cycle?
- How many sales reps?
- What is the win rate?
- What constitutes an Opportunity?
- Do opportunities have multiple stages?
- What is the average opportunity age?
- What is the conversion rate between leads to opportunities?
- Who’s processing the leads?
- What happens with new leads?
- What happens to new leads that don’t convert?
- Do leads have multiple stages?
- How fast are the leads processed?
- What is the average lead age before converting into an opp?
- What’s the visitor-lead conversion rate?
- Do all leads come from visitors?
- Where channels do visitors come from?
After your baseline metrics and goals are set, now comes the fun part. Your effectiveness in reaching these goals comes from your ability to fine-tune the mix of the right amount of quantity and quality of these leads. It’s easy to attract 5,000 leads, but if they don’t convert into opportunities at the expected rate, you just caused more headaches for your sales team to sort through these unqualified leads. If you attract 1,000 great leads and they convert at a very high rate, at first look it may seem like a good thing, but in reality you’re probably missing out on a lot of leads because you were too narrow in your targeting.
Do you know your baseline metrics for your business? How close do you come to achieving your monthly marketing goals? Have you yet figured out the right marketing mix for your marketing program?
Jennifer works on the marketing team at
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