Velocity Not Volume: The Metrics and Tools You Need for Marketing to Deliver a Pipeline to Sales

When thinking of their marketing efforts, marketers often focus on the wrong metrics. This happens when goals are not properly defined. Marketers tend to measure volume — from website visitors to marketing qualified leads, instead of velocity. The question you should be asking: How fast can marketing deliver pipeline to sales? 

In my experience, the best way to get to the right metrics is by working backward from your revenue goal. Start by identifying your revenue goals. Then define the questions you want to be answered and make sure you're collecting the right data to answer those questions. Be sure to define metrics that focus on velocity (speed) and effectiveness (doing the right thing), rather than volume (doing more) and efficiency (doing things right). That way you can ensure you’re putting your effort towards the strategic work that keeps sales converting quickly.

Don’t leave your revenue analytics to business functions that don’t understand marketing. They are just to important.

Don’t leave your revenue analytics to functions like business intelligence (BI) or the finance teams, who don’t understand marketing. They are just too important. Instead, hire people with who are strong marketing analysts that can make the link between insights and strategy, and put the fundamentals in place to make it all work together, like data, systems, and processes. You need people who can provide you with insights around how your programs impact pipeline and closed deals, and give you the data you need to demonstrate the value of those programs to your CEO. The problem is that most homegrown BI systems weren’t built for marketers who need dedicated, simple and easy self-serve marketing and sales analytics. When you're putting together your revenue performance tech stack make sure it includes the components you need for the kind of analysis you need to run:

Central marketing database: Revenue analytics requires access to highly detailed marketing data, and you need to have one source of truth for this data. You’ll need to track historical data around when marketing programs ran, what their attributes were, who they touched, how much they cost, and so on. Without this information, revenue analytics are virtually worthless.

Easy-to-use analysis dashboards and Ad hoc reporting: You need to be able to explore data trends and gain insights without wasting valuable time on building custom reports. There is data that you want to look at consistently, every day and at times several times a day. These need to be set up in clear, big, easy to read dashboards. That said, different initiatives require examining different data sets so you also need the ability to get reports ad hoc so you can dive deeply into the data and customize their own ad hoc reports.

Monitoring and alerts: If you're working on automating (even just for part of) your lead generation you need a real-time monitoring and alerts system that can update the CRM system with the relevant data the sales team (or sales development team) needs to move the lead further down the funnel. Alternatively, you can further nurture the lead (and further qualify it) through automated emails or content suggestions. The point is that you need a CRM system that supports this kind of activity. A system that both marketing and sales teams can work on to monitor the lead cultivation and development.

In most businesses, the Marketing organization is the center of a business. The beating heart. It pumps leads into Sales teams (and supports sales outbound efforts), It supports the Product teams with relevant content and product marketing, and supports success teams by strengthening the community and reducing the churn.

That's why marketing goals should be closely linked to the company's business and revenue goals and derived from them. And all they need to get the task done are the right tools.