At any given time, there are hundreds of processes underway in your business, from customer service to sales to accounting. Tracking all of them is next to impossible and, frankly, is likely to give you more noise than signal.
What if you want to understand the health of your marketing activities at a glance? Or measure the efficacy of your marketing team? Which KPIs (key performance indicators) should you monitor and analyze?
12 Key Metrics for Every B2B Marketer
Even with all the proliferation of tools and methodologies online, when it comes to marketing, most business owners tend to only look at a generalized traffic solution like Google Analytics and maybe total sales closed in a CRM.
As a result, they have a partial view of their marketing channels and marketing efforts that go into developing them.
But tracking overall marketing results doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, here are 12 key metrics that would give any B2B marketing manager or business owner an accurate representation of their marketing performance.
1. Website Traffic
One of the most basic but fundamental marketing metrics is the overall traffic on your website. Even though by just counting visitors you can’t tell potential customers from random visitors, a business with lots of traffic that is growing every month is a good indicator of you doing something right.
Diving a bit deeper, you can see where most visitors are coming from, which pages they visit and in what order, how long they stay on the website, and much more (more on this later).
2. Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Every website should have conversion goals set up. They don’t always need to result in sales. Clicking on certain pages or buttons could show that certain visitors need more attention from your sales and marketing team, and can be quickly transformed into qualified leads.
Read Now, Start Free Trial, Contact Us, Download App — are examples of call-to-action (CTA) buttons that you might consider to measure your CTRs against.
3. Campaign Conversions
One way to improve traffic and sales is to constantly run marketing campaigns that reach your target audience. Since there are marketing costs associated with every campaign, you need to make sure that only the most effective ones remain running long term.
Campaign conversions is the best metric for measuring the efficacy of your campaigns. Conversions can be defined as anything from emails sent to newsletter signups to quote requests.
If your campaign conversions always end up being lower than expected, it’s a sign that either you’re targeting the wrong audience or your marketing efforts need to be improved.
4. Form Conversions
When a visitor fills out a form on your website, it shows clear intent and instantly distinguishes them from the crowd. So make sure to have various forms set up on your website and be easily accessible.
The most popular forms are contact forms, newsletter signups, trial or content downloads (e.g. ebooks or white papers), and demo or quote requests.
Healthy form conversions show that your audience is engaged and has enough useful information provided on the website to move closer to a purchase decision.
5. Conversions by Source
It’s no surprise that different traffic sources convert at different rates. Visitors coming from a social media campaign are just getting acquainted with your solution, whereas those coming from a two-hour webinar are practically customers.
Looking at sources can also tell you where to focus your efforts. It might be that your newsletter is outperforming paid ads when it comes to sales qualified leads, for example. What happens then if you devote even more time to those emails?
6. Lead Quality
It’s useful to augment any conversion metric with the one that measures lead quality. Getting people to download your report just for accessing a few insights or signing up for a trial without ever intending to buy the full version doesn’t enrich sales pipelines in the right way.
Lead quality and purchase intent are hard to assess, especially without lots of customer data. But there are some good solutions on the market today, such as Lift AI, which we’ll mention in more detail below.
7. Sales Team Conversion Rates
One of the most critical transitions in any sales funnel is when a lead goes from being marketing qualified (MQL) to sales qualified (SQL). It is especially so for B2B businesses, where sales cycles are generally longer and more complex.
Marketing qualified leads show interest in your solution but are not yet at the decision stage of their journey. When they are ready to become customers, they become sales qualified and should be managed by your sales team.
A high MQL to SQL conversion rate shows that marketing to sales handoff is working properly (unless leads spend too much time in the marketing stage).
8. Time Spent in a Sales Pipeline
Another important metric to consider is pipeline velocity, which measures the time prospects and leads spend at each stage of the sales pipeline.
Pipeline velocity shows how good your sales team is at nurturing leads and managing the sales process overall. You can also estimate the average time it takes for a new prospect to become a customer.
9. Sales Deals Close Rate
Monitoring your close rate is key because regardless of how much traffic you can attract or pay for, if it doesn’t successfully translate into customers, your business is not going to go far.
You want to make sure you get enough traffic, but then focus your efforts on improving your close rate, whether it’s through changing design, training staff, or leveraging new software tools.
10. Return on Investment (ROI)
What ultimately unites all of your sales and marketing efforts is your return on investment, or how much revenue you get per dollar spent.
You need to ensure that most of your sales and marketing activities bring in enough revenue to be effective, and continuously adjust those that don’t.
11. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
One of the most fundamental metrics for B2B SaaS companies is monthly recurring revenue. Depending on your business, you can change the period of time and track annual recurring revenue (ARR) instead.
The MRR itself and its trends can quickly tell you whether your business is sustainable or not, even on the basis of cashflow. MRR growth is also one of the most important metrics for investors, if you ever decide to raise money.
12. Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
The final important metric to always keep track of is how much does it cost you to acquire a new customer — or customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Calculating CAC will tell you whether your sales team is being effective as well as whether you’re targeting the right audience.
If your customer lifetime value (CLV) is very high, you can afford to spend more on acquisition too. However, be careful of letting your BDRs spend weeks on leads that have an average CLV of less than $100 or so.
As you can see, there are plenty of B2B marketing metrics you should track. But what’s the best way to start?
We’ve mentioned the importance of lead quality above. Indeed, bringing in high-quality leads is one of the most difficult tasks sales teams face today. At the same time, lead quality also improves nearly every other metric on the list, from customer acquisition cost to pipeline velocity.
So how do you improve lead quality?
Your website likely has a chat tool your BDRs are currently using to talk to potential customers. The problem is they don’t know which ones have high purchase intent and which ones don’t.
What they need is a tool like Lift AI, which can automate the visitor qualification process and connect your BDRs only to visitors that have the highest chance to purchase your solution.
Lift AI is a buyer intent solution that measures how likely every single visitor on your website (even completely anonymous ones) is to buy your product or service.
To do this, Lift AI leverages a unique machine-learning model trained on billions of data points and millions of live sales interactions.
Here’s how Lift AI works. When a visitor with high purchase intent navigates your website, Lift AI gives them a buyer intent score enabling you to create playbooks based on their score in platforms like Drift. A visitor with a high buyer intent score can be connected straight to the next available BDR, using any chat platform you already have. At the same time, visitors with lower purchase intent could be greeted by a nurturing chatbot or a self-help guide.
As a result, your BDRs will be able to close more deals than ever.
In fact, Lift AI customers report increasing their chat conversions anywhere from two to 10 times within the first 90 days. Formstack grew its funnel by 88%, for example, while PointClickCare improved sales by 400%.
Try Lift AI for free for 30 days. No credit card is required and setting it up is as easy as pasting a small JavaScript snippet to your website. Making the first step to improving your B2B marketing metrics has never been this easy.
