17 Feb 2020
When it comes to strategic decision making, KPIs (key performance indicators) are an important tool and help you get different angles to implement for optimizing your b2b lead generation campaigns.
There are multitudinous KPIs but most of them are not so important or might be useful at a higher level of optimization.
In this article, we will discuss some of the most important KPIs that companies monitor in their outbound b2b lead generation campaigns that would help you refine your marketing practices.
Modern lead generation campaigns involve multiple channels for marketing and promotion. The complete list of KPIs/metrics in this article is divided on the basis of those channels:
Let’s get started!
Most people think that cold calling is dying but believe me, we have experienced our best conversion rates through cold calling.
We are emotional beings, we need human interactions before we are convinced to make a rigid decision. Try implementing cold calling at any stage of your b2b lead generation funnel, you will notice some changes for sure.
The most important KPIs for cold calling that we have been using in our b2b lead generation campaigns are-
People nowadays devaluing email marketing because they don’t know how to leverage the power of a proper email marketing strategy.
All types of outbound emails viz.cold emails, nurturing and followup emails enable you to streamline your b2b lead generation processes unless you do it with proper planning and tracking.
One of the most important email marketing KPIs that helped us get better results are:
Social media is one of the strongest ways that you can acquire leads. And within social media platforms, LinkedIn is considered to be the best platform for b2b lead generation.
The KPIs that you should keep a track (for LinkedIn) are:
Remarketing involves targeting people who have already interacted with your company (or website in this).
The reason behind retargeting is people already know you, they trust you and your product or service, interacting with them will help more in conversions.
The KPIs that you might look:
These are not all exhaustive but there are numerous other parameters too which can help you optimize your ad campaigns but the above mentioned are the most common which will quantify your results.
Note: Use Facebook pixel (pixel event) for retargeting. Through Facebook pixel, you will be able to retarget the audience who has already visited or interacted with your website.
Content plays a major role in any b2b lead generation campaign and if we are tracking our marketing and sales activities then why not we have KPIs for content marketing?
People invest a lot in content marketing but most of them don’t consider tracking in the right way. To keep your ROI healthy you must consider metrics depending upon-
A content’s quality is decided by how much it is capable of engaging customers. The more people it can engage the more it validates for driving leads for your b2b lead generation campaign.
The KPIs to consider content’s engagement are: Likes, Comments, Shares, Reviews and Follower count.
The above mentioned KPIs are more of a general KPIs but if you are using content in email outreaching for acquiring leads then you should keep these KPIs in the list too:
NOTE: You need to keep track of these metrics in every phase of your lead generation campaigns i.e. lead capturing, lead nurturing and follow up & closing.
Lead Scoring is nothing but scoring your leads at some scale which validates of converting them.
Scale can be of any type, you can use your own metrics to define their validation in the funnel.
This might be a common part in most of the companies practices but it is practically helpful in aligning your efforts into better focus.
You can use our lead scoring scale which helped us increase our efficiency to multi-folds.
The lead value will help you contextualize the actual value/worth of a lead in your business.
With CAC and CPL you have the idea of how effective your campaigns are but to make further decisions you need to have an understanding of how much value each lead holds. The below are the KPIs which will help you to have a firm idea behind valuing leads.
MRR, monthly recurring revenue, is the number of paying customers multiplied by the average amount of all the customers.
New MRR, is the additional MRR you have gained this or the recent month.
Expansion MRR then is the additional MRR you have gained from the previous month through upselling or cross-selling to your existing customers.
In simple words, LTV is the net profit of a customer over a lifetime.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) = (total expected lifetime purchases) X (Profit margin) – (Cost of customer acquisition or CPA).
These two parameters will help you to align your focus in the right direction. You will have the clarity with the value of each lead which will further let you decide whether you should invest more in acquiring and marketing those leads and others like them or you should focus more in other areas.
NPS is the parameter that quantifies the likelihood of a customer recommending your product or service.
The survey asks participants to vote on your product or service on the scale of 1-10. The scale is divided into three categories-
a. Promoters (9-10): They like you, not only they like you and continue to be your customers but they will recommend you and your products/services to others.
b. Passives (7-8): They are just satisfied. They can become customers to others in your competition.
c. Detractors (1-6): They don’t like you. They not only contribute to your churn rate but they also tell others to avoid doing business with you.
NPS will help you to understand how popular is your brand in the market. It is more of feedback that people give to your product or service.
Customer acquisition is a challenging task but retention of customers is what makes a business survive.
We have seen metrics behind customer acquisition, the KPIs that we use in behind customer retention are:
Customer churn rate is the rate at which a subscription-basedcompany is losing its customers due to account cancellations or non-renewable of subscriptions.
Customer churn rate is important since losing customers because of the mentioned reasons will affect your ROI badly.
The two parameters inside the customer churn rate are:
Gross customer churn rate:
Gross customer churn rate is the rate at which the company is losing customers.
Net customer churn rate:
Net customer churn rate is the measure of the difference between gross churn rate and new customer churn rates.
For example, if a companies gross customer churn rate is 5% and new customer acquisition rate is 2% so the net customer churn rate will be 3%.
A positive net customer churn rate is a sign that the company is in trouble, as customer growth is contracting. In simple words, try to keep the net customer acquisition rate to be higher than the net customer churn rate.
Cost per lead (CPL) is the total cost of acquiring a lead, and customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the cost of acquiring or converting a customer.
CPL and CAC are important metrics that will help you to not spend your entire budget in generating a couple of leads.
For example, if you have spent $1000 on Facebook Ads, and you have generated 50 leads then your CPL is $20 (it depends on the industry and location you are targeting your ads).
And if you have converted 2 customers from those 50 leads then your CAC is $500. By knowing these parameters you always have an idea on how to keep your ROI positive.
Note: Here, we have considered a simple example of only Facebook ad spend. Your CAC and CPL will include the cost of your marketing, sales and advertising.
The ratio of the number of quotations you send to the total number of conversions happen.
This KPI will let you discover the quality of leads that drift in your pipeline. This will help your sales team to reorganize their operations and organize their time more productively.
Sales volume by location(including locations based on areas or different stores at the same location) will help you understand the nature of the audience and what works best at that location.
For example, if you have a large sales volume at region A, it indicates there is high demand there and you can customize your services and products for your audience based on the location.
If you have similar sales volume in two locations say A & B then you can try A/B testing by implementing the promotional campaign in one location while holding in other location to track and adjust accordingly.
System touches refer to the number of touchpoints that happen in a rep. System touches are interactions of any type with your lead e.g. emails, calls, meetings, video calls etc. Though all of these have their own degree of impact in converting a lead into a customer.
Tracking the number of average systems touchpoints in your sales cycle or rep help you to analyze what strategy you might follow to get better conversions.
For example, in an A/B testing your sales team would have taken 7 emails, 2 calls and 1 video call to convert it while the other one would have taken 5 mails, 1 call and 1 video call to convert.
Your later strategy is a winner since it took fewer system touches to acquire the customer, and you need to optimize the other accordingly.
A sales cycle is the average length in time of closing or converting a lead into a customer.
This is one of the important metrics to analyze whether you are investing your time in the right strategy. You should know which rep is closing in 3 weeks or which one is closing in 6.
It might look like the lesser time it will take to convert the better the result. But sometimes an immature converted lead might contribute to your churn rate. In that case, a longer sales cycle will yield a healthier result.
When you start relating the sales cycle length with customer retention as well as satisfaction, you will be able to optimize your lead generation reps for better business efficiency.
Upsell, Cross-sell and Down-sell rates are the ratios of the number of the customers that purchase your product or service package other than what they have initially opted.
Converting a lead into a customer is not the only thing that makes a successful business. You have to make them stay and even more satisfied than the last time. It’s like building relationships.
You should have predefined reps for the upselling, cross-selling customers and if you don’t then you need to run different reps and go along with those that perform well for upselling and cross-selling respectively.
Every KPI is traceable to the core objectives of the business. Always keep a checklist of these KPIs in every phase of your b2b lead generation campaign starting from awareness to conversion.
The final say is, you and your team will be able to make better decisions in day to day marketing activities.
And always remember, you can’t improve what you can’t measure.
