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Whether you are promoting your B2B business through paid search, using blog aggregator sites, on social media, or through any other platform, you hope that it’ll give some good results.
But how exactly will you know whether or not those efforts are paying off? How will you figure out which efforts are delivering the best results, and which ones aren’t effective at all?
When your performance metrics are clearly defined, you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. You’ll be able to see how each change impacts various metrics, and what kind of improvements you need to make.
This post will go over everything you need to know about B2B performance metrics so you can take those insights and figure out whether or not your business is financially viable.
Clearly Define Your Goal
Although it’s crucial to define your performance metrics, there are other important steps you need to complete first. If you simply set metrics without any intent or purpose, you’re putting the cart before the horse.
That means you need to clearly define your goal beforehand. Doing so will help you gain a better understanding of what to measure because you’ll understand which metrics are relevant and important to your goal. Some of the common goals you might want to set are:
- Driving more traffic to your website
- Generating more sales-qualified leads
- Driving higher conversions
- Increasing your revenue
- Improving your engagement rate (i.e. time on page), etc.
To really focus your efforts, define one primary goal with a couple of secondary goals to support the main objective. For example, your main goal may be to increase your annual revenue by a certain amount or percentage. And your secondary goal may be to generate a certain amount of revenue every month.
Learn More: How to Use Social Media for B2B Lead Generation
Which Metrics Are Relevant to Your Goal?
Based on the goal you’ve defined, you can start making a list of some metrics that are relevant for measuring performance. In other words, which metrics will help you understand how close you are to achieving your goal? If sales and revenue are your primary goals, some relevant metrics will include:
- Total sales revenue generated. The most obvious metric to measure is the total revenue you’ve generated within a certain period. This will be the base revenue you’ll be using to keep track of all the new revenue you generate over the following months.
- Churn rate. Despite your new revenue, there is a possibility that you’ll lose some of your existing customers. So keep track of your churn rate to make sure you account for every loss and compare it against your total revenue to understand your real revenue.
- Cost of acquisition. How much do you have to spend on acquiring new customers? You need to also keep a close eye on the total costs you incur for generating revenue such as on display ads, content marketing, etc.
- New customers. Aside from calculating the number of customers you’ve lost, you also need to calculate the number of customers you’ve acquired. You can use this information to keep track of how much potential revenue you can generate on a monthly basis.
Feel free to add more metrics based on your needs and preferences. The list is always customizable, and you can simply include metrics that you think are vital for measuring your performance.
Monitor Your Performance
After you’ve defined your performance metrics, you can start measuring your overall performance in terms of sales, revenue, or whichever goals you’ve set for this campaign. By observing how your campaign is performing across various channels, you will understand which channels are most beneficial for you. You might also discover untapped potential in channels you’re sidelining.
It would be a good idea to track which campaigns and sales plans are delivering the best results. Find out which are the most valuable revenue sources. For help with performance monitoring, you can refer to tools like Cyfe and GinzaMetrics in the tools list below. These will give you clear insights into which sales plans to prioritize and which plans to discontinue. By doing this, you can minimize unnecessary spending and focus only on the most profitable revenue sources.
What Gets Measured, Gets Managed: How to Use Metrics to Boost Performance
In addition to this, it’s crucial that you closely monitor your content performance to understand the role it plays in revenue generation. You need to identify which content plays the biggest role in your conversion funnel and which content isn’t performing so well.
This will give you a fair idea on how to improve your content strategy and create more effective messaging. It will also help ensure that your best content plays a much bigger role in the sales funnel so you can eventually improve your overall performance.
Learn More: 50 Alternative Ad Networks to Open Up New Channels of Growth in 2018
Compare Different Segments
While you measure your overall revenue from all your customers, it’s important to compare the revenues you generated from different customer segments. You’ll be more able to see how buyer personas affect behavior, thereby giving you actionable insights into how to appeal to your most qualified customers.
This breakdown also shows whether your most effective sales funnel works equally across all segments. Or you can even find out whether or not there’s a higher churn rate within a specific segment. Then make necessary adjustments to how you reach out to different personas.
Make Changes and Adjustments as Needed
Tracking your performance isn’t the final stage. After you’ve analyzed how your campaigns and efforts are delivering results, you can use the insights to make necessary improvements and further boost your revenue.
Based on what you’ve learned from measuring your performance metrics, you can look for areas that need improvement. For example, if you find that a certain channel is generating high amounts of traffic but minimal conversions, you might want to review the journey of those visitors. Maybe you were displaying an irrelevant landing page or maybe there’s some non-functional element on the page.
If you find that visitors from a certain channel are converting much better than others, figure out what the reason is. What are you doing differently for these visitors? Are there specific personas for which this channel is more effective? And how will you implement those same tactics to improve your revenues from other channels as well?
Learn More: How to Increase Your Conversions with Online Customer Engagement
Tools to Measure B2B Performance
There’s no way you can measure all your B2B performance metrics manually. For this, you’re going to need tools that accurately measure different aspects of your performance.
Analytics tools should be your top priority because 86% of B2B marketers in a Regalix study have used analytics data to better track their ROI.
The study also found that investing in analytics has helped B2B marketers allocate their marketing budget more effectively and identify the most valuable channels.
Here are some of the best tools you can use:
Cyfe
Identify your top-selling plans and sources of revenue using tools like Cyfe. Find out which revenue sources you should leverage to drive higher revenue.
Depending on which of the 50-plus pre-built widgets you deploy on your dashboard to display KPIs from the various platforms you’re already using, Cyfe can also help you to measure your total revenue generated, number of new customers acquired, top-performing sales reps and audience engagement via social media, advertising and email.
GinzaMetrics
Keep an eye on the visibility of your B2B website using tools like GinzaMetrics. Track the performance of different channels (social, email, search, etc.) in driving traffic to your site. The tool even lets you measure the performance of your retargeting campaigns and your referral programs. 
Pardot
Monitor your sales funnel and understand where prospects are getting stuck without converting by using a tool like Pardot. With this data, you can adapt your marketing campaigns to close sales more effectively.
This tool also tracks your email marketing campaigns and helps you understand how recipients engage with your emails. You can measure metrics such as open rate, click rate, deliverability, bounce rate, and opt-outs.
Pipedrive
Make accurate predictions about which deals are most likely to close using tools like Pipedrive. You can monitor ongoing deals and compare them with closed deals to see the correct course of action you need to take.
The tool neatly categorizes deals based on the sales stage they’re at, which helps you understand what you need to prioritize and how you can refocus your efforts.
Optimizely
Build multiple versions of a webpage and test them to see which one delivers the best results using tools like Optimizely. You can single out which designs and algorithms to use to boost your overall revenue and you can deliver variations of your experiment to visitors based on cookies, location, ad campaign, and more.
Visual Website Optimizer
Run A/B tests for conversion optimization using tools like VWO. You can research your visitors and run tests that will enhance visitor experience and further improve your performance. This tool helps you thoroughly understand how each page variation performs in terms of revenue, clicks, sign-ups, and other conversion goals.
Common Performance Metrics to Measure
If you still have a hard time figuring out which metrics you should measure, you can also take a look at the following common B2B performance metrics. These are some essential metrics that most B2B companies can use for understanding how their business is performing:
Metrics for Lead Generation
Every B2B company needs to understand how they’re performing in terms of lead generation. Are their marketing efforts attracting enough people who are interested in their products? And how valuable are those people in terms of potential conversion?
Here are the important lead generation metrics you should measure:
- Rate of Leads Driven by Different Channels – Use this metric to understand where your leads originated from. Find out how many leads each of the channels are able to drive to determine their value. You can measure leads from inbound marketing efforts, paid search, organic search, and more.
- Qualified Lead Rate – You should also measure how many qualified leads each of the channel is able to drive. This will help you understand the most valuable channels and how to further leverage them for higher revenue.
- Sales Qualified Lead Rate – Not all the qualified leads you generate will move further into the sales funnel, so it’s crucial to measure the number of qualified leads that your marketing team has deemed ready for the next stage of the buying process. In other words, you should be measuring the number of qualified leads that turn into sales-qualified leads.
Learn More: 9 Mission-Critical Lead Generation Metrics You Need To Track
Metrics for Sales
Now that you have some of the metrics you need in order to measure the top and middle of your funnel, you should also understand the metrics necessary for measuring the bottom of your funnel. Use the following metrics to measure your sales performance:
- Closing Rate – Understand how many sales you’re actually able to close out of the total sales you formally pitch. Calculate the number of people you formally ask to buy your product and compare it against the number of people who end up buying.
- Win Rate – You can calculate your win rate by dividing the number of closed won opportunities with the total number of closed opportunities (both won and lost).
Other Metrics
The metrics discussed above can give you a clear idea how your sales and marketing efforts are paying off. But to really understand the long-term effectiveness of your marketing strategy, you should also calculate metrics such as customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, etc.
Conclusion
The tips provided above will help you measure the performance of your B2B business more effectively. And by accurately measuring your performance you can make adjustments to your campaigns and marketing approaches. This, in turn, will result in better performance and higher revenue for your B2B business.