Importance of a Singular Metric for Marketing and Sales

Marketing is comprised of a magnitude of channels where we are tracking various figures. Many of which are vanity marketing metrics to our C-suite and leadership teams.

Aligning ourselves with sales metrics is critical to secure more budget and resources, and keep marketing focused on revenue-generating initiatives.

Today, we’ll be diving into the importance of a singular metric for marketing and sales. This is crucial because it’s “focused”. When I say “focused” I mean having a singular metric you can focus your time, your team, and your resources toward that one common goal.

This way, we align all the different campaigns we’re running, teams we’re managing, and spend we have to our disposal, and all of this focus will allow us to see success in a much shorter timeframe.

At Directive, we focus on the singular metric, new user acquisition, also known as lead generation between both our sales and marketing teams. The reason this is valuable is to illuminate how we think about lead generation and how I can help you learn from our experiences.

Success Between Your Lead Gen Teams = One Sales and Marketing Metric

As we know, marketers and sales professionals are dying to add new “opportunities” to their CRM. But what does the sales team call an opportunity? What does the marketing team call an opportunity?

The difference between the two can be confusing, and we can’t look at each department in an apple to apple lens. It’s essential to have clarity here.

Sometimes, there are disagreements between your marketing and sales teams because they have different goals and metrics that mean different things.

Let’s leave the tension out! We want continuity between our teams.

At Directive, one of our top marketing metrics, as well as our sales team’s success indicator is, is tracking proposals given. This lives in our CRM as an opportunity.

As simple as it sounds, getting to the point of saying our singular metric is “proposals given,” was a powerful moment for us. It eliminated the idea of MLQs and SLQs and aligned both of our departments with one singular sales and marketing metric. I know it can be powerful for your firm as well!

Now knowing this, anytime we’re talking with sales or marketing, or we have a group discussion, we can ask how many proposals were given as a result from a campaign, a sales development representative’s efforts, an email, or another initiative. We can tie it back to a singular metric to measure success.

Keep in mind, this metric should also be something both teams involved have control of.

We do not measure revenue, because revenue is a trailing metric. Revenue in one month is indicative usually of proposals given in a prior month, and we want to have real-time feedback on the metric we’re using.

Measurable Marketing—Measuring Top Marketing Metrics

Next, we can easily measure how many proposals were given and what channel they may have come from.

As a marketer, you need to own all the other numbers for your marketing channels and have to work closely with your data analyst to track Google Analytics activity. From there, integrate that into your CRM, or use a tool like Bizible, which unifies behavioral and ad data with sales outcomes and machine learning. With this, you can make the right marketing decisions.

Whatever you’re doing, it’s essential to ensure that your metrics are measurable, and correlated back to the singular metric your company values.

We get dragged into the fine print of the various channels we use as marketers and lose sight of what pays everybody in the room.

That is why having a singular metric that we can continuously default to is so important.

If you want to take your marketing efforts to the next level, you can count on our expert tech marketing team to get you there. We specialize in Customer Generation and have a proven track record of delivering exceptional results for our clients.