Leads & Deals
How Do You Measure Success Across Teams?
Sales success is easy to measure. Did you beat your quota?
Marketing success is easy to measure. Did you beat your metrics?
It can’t be that simple, can it? Taking it one step further, how is the quota set? What determines the metrics and who sets them for a team or individual?
Depending on where you are in the organization and your role, things can be simple or complex. There are even times when things can be simply complex – like thinking through the process it takes to get deals closed to hit your quota. Managers are responsible for the success of each member of their team, and are also responsible for the overall success of the whole team.
In business, numbers matter. Stocks rise and fall based on the expectations and reality of earnings. Increasing expenses in a growth market can be quickly reversed in a slowing market through layoffs or cost cutting measures. When you strip it all down, however, things at the individual level come together to create these numbers in total for the company.
On the sales side, things can be binary. The first question is how much did you close, without the need to hear any stories about deals that were pushed or lost to a competitor. If you’re not a closer, the question is probably more about how much did you drive in terms of leads – did you move someone from the lead stage to the prospect stage and into the hands of a closer?
Marketing metrics focus on the importance on driving people into the sales conversation – this can be to a self-serve platform or an SDR / AE. They can also look at activations, conversions, cost per X, or even webinar attendees. Each is important in its own way depending on the overall goal of the business.
Things can get a bit sketchy or more difficult when you try to convert define between teams. When a lead comes in and it’s scored, does that score match with the probability of closure? Is it given a score based on the marketing team’s insights without input from sales, who is responsible for closing? When a customer signs because of the outstanding webinar they saw, is it fair to put it into the salesperson’s win column?
Given the desired outcome is a closed deal, and that it takes a lot of energy and effort to close deals, who truly deserves credit? Does the marketer get paid a commission for a closing that comes from a lead generated from his or her campaign? Does a salesperson lose money for a deal lost if the lead was a perfect potential customer sourced from a marketer’s campaign on LinkedIn?
Understanding the nuances and malleability of metrics is important when measuring the success or failure of a team or process. By looking at the right metrics in context, you can get a fuller picture of what is happening and what can change for the better. A deal that closes in a day counts the same as a deal that closed in months – all measured in dollars. A lead that comes in from a webinar counts the same as one from social media or an eBook download (with the caveat that they might be scored differently).
With robust analytical metrics that dive deeper into the process, you can get a better idea of what is happening in the business. Using historical data provides a window into what worked and what didn’t and help to streamline things going forward.
None of this is easy to do, often things can be counter to traditional thinking. Just because something worked before doesn’t mean it will work again. Running the same successful marketing campaign can work for weeks, or tail off in effectiveness over the course of days. A proposal sent to a prospect that worked might not be perfect for the next prospect.
The key is continuously iterating beyond base metrics and coming up with creative ways to understand success. Finding the right language in an SDR email and translating it to a FB post or webinar headline will add revenue to the bottom line. Knowing exactly what brought in the last few leads from a marketing campaign will help perfect the tactics in the sales process to close deals.
Measuring these wins and losses keeps teams creative and daily routines interesting – pitching the same thing with the same demo gets old fast. Recycling the same old campaigns and only watching results drains energy. Revitalize your process, inject work with new ideas and do things differently than your competition. It will mean a lot, especially in an environment with layoffs, economic uncertainty, and increased scrutiny on every facet of the business.