Whether your preference is to examine pipeline or funnel influence, website traffic or brand health or marketing-qualified leads or accounts engaged, as a marketing leader you’ll know which performance indicators give you the best view of whether your initiatives and campaigns are delivering.
When your head is down trying to drive results, it’s sometimes hard to take the blinkers off and look at what is happening elsewhere in the business. But it’s beneficial to keep your eye on what metrics other functions and leaders are tracking, as these may also provide useful insights into marketing’s performance.
At our recent roundtable for senior marketing leaders, we asked participants to share the top non-marketing metrics they listen to.
1. White space opportunities
Many sales professionals are so focused on finding new business, increasing business with existing customers is often ignored.
These ‘white space’ opportunities (named after the blank gaps left when analysing existing customers in a spreadsheet) can be lucrative, if sales have the insight to go after them. They also need the right incentivisation. If they’re solely measured upon net-new business, that’s what they’ll go after.
In one IT business, each sales person is measured against white space, accounting for 25% of their individual target. It has been a reaction to the sales team’s leadership always prioritising net-new business – which is harder to close than trying to reactivate dormant accounts or increasing opportunities for cross- or up-sell.
Marketing has made great strides to measure its contribution to new business wins, but how to track how it influences additional sales with existing clients remains a black box for many. Working with sales to provide this analysis to expose these opportunities is one way to build the relationship between the two functions, and ensure your influence on these sales is credited.
2. Employee engagement
Tracking your employee engagement is a useful metric to understand if you’ve managed to communicate your company’s objectives effectively. You can measure this form of engagement through a simple survey, or a more sophisticated measure such as Net Promoter Score.
A tricky aspect for a number of businesses in the discussion was how to reach those employees that might exist outside your traditional channels. For example, at one facilities management provider just 15,000 of its 50,000 employees have a corporate email address or access to the intranet. The firm has been exploring an app, those employees can download to their mobile phone as an alternative – but even this has issues, as they can’t be compelled to download it.
3. Glassdoor rating
When this was suggested by one roundtable participant, it drew a large intake of breath among the other attendees. Although the perception that the employer review site can offer a platform for disgruntled ex-staff to stick the boot in, it’s an increasingly important external signifier of how staff are treated and internal culture.
Indeed, as Joel Harrison reported the war for talent is so acute among martech firms and agencies in California, that some have their Glassdoor reputation blown-up and framed in their corporate reception.
If your own rating doesn’t look too healthy, encourage employees to post their own reviews (genuine and honest is the key, as paid-for corporate-speak will do you no favours).
4. External review sites
Similar to the Glassdoor rating, reviews on customer sites can be similarly useful. Not just due to the impact brand advocacy can have on your reputation, but because of the double benefit it can have on your search engine ranking.
If you’re confident in the quality of your service or product, they can be really beneficial. One business that dominates the compliance training marketplace, has also cornered the market on review sites, pushing its competitors further down the search results page.
5. Social Selling Index scores
Want your sales team to be more proactive on social? Tracking their Social Selling Index score, and encouraging them to be competitive with one another was a successful tactic for one marketer at the roundtable.
The SSI is quite a blunt instrument – essentially an overview of your LinkedIn profile, scoring you on four areas; personal brand, connections, engagement with others over the network, and building relationships. All of which lead to an overall score out of 100. It may be simplistic, but the naturally competitive instincts of the sales team will kick in and they’ll want to beat their colleagues.
It’s also an indicator of how healthy the relationship is between marketing and sales. In time this could be expanded to cover other metrics to form an overall assessment. These could include how many customer references or testimonials the sales team are providing. One sales director has added a KPI worth 5% of his team’s target, requiring them to bring in case studies that can be used by the marketing team.
