So it’s time to create your next Inbound Marketing report and you really want to impress your boss....
RevOps is showing no signs of slowing down. More and more businesses have realised they need to align their operating functions to support sales, marketing and service, all in the hope of maximising their revenue potential. The holistic view RevOps provides removes any silos and frustration while offering a clear view of your revenue streams.
But with RevOps comes a bucket-full of new metrics — on top of all the other KPIs and data you're currently tracking. RevOps metrics are critical, though, as they allow you to quickly diagnose and solve any issues, rather than risking your business losing valuable time and money.
Forget your vanity metrics. As marketers dabble in the website, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing and more, you need to have your set of unique metrics to track. So, here are six valuable RevOps metrics that should matter to you if you're a marketer.
- Revenue
- Revenue retention
- Lead-to-close ratio
- Pipeline generation
- Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
- Customer churn
Revenue
You want your channels to drive revenue and the central focus of RevOps is increasing revenue. What type of revenue you track, though, can depend on your industry. Monthly recurring revenue works for some, annual recurring revenue works for others while certain industries tend to track average revenue per user.
Revenue is an important RevOps metric to track because you need to know where it's coming from and how much it impacts the pricing of what you offer. Then, you need to work out if the revenue is coming from new customers, return customers or anywhere else.
When you can identify how changes in your business impact revenue, then you can focus on genuine growth in your business.
Revenue retention
Bringing in the revenue is one thing — retaining it is a whole different ball game. Revenue retention is another critical RevOps metric to track for marketers as you need to understand how satisfied customers are with your business. After all, it's their satisfaction that determines how your business grows.
Gross retention and net retention are valuable KPIs to keep your eye on, as they'll show how much your customers are still interested in your products or services. If the retention rate is low, it's time to make some changes to your offering and switch up your marketing tactics.
Lead-to-close ratio
The number of marketing qualified leads you get is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. It's a vanity metric with little substance. The RevOps metric you should track is the lead-to-close ratio, so the total number of leads that actually turn into closed leads.
It's simple to work out: Divide the number of your total leads by the number of leads you closed. This metric will give you insight into the quality of the leads you passed on to the sales team and how effective the sales team was to close those deals.
If the ratio is high, your marketing efforts are working and sales are doing a great job. If the lead-to-close ratio is low, it's time to re-evaluate with your sales team on your marketing collateral and how the team uses it.
Pipeline generation
Having a sales pipeline in place will shorten your sales cycle, ultimately fast-tracking the number of deals you run through your sales team and boosting the chances of converting more prospects into paying customers. That's why pipeline generation and velocity and critical components in driving revenue growth — and why it's a RevOps metric marketers should track.
With this metric, it makes it even more important for all revenue-generating teams to learn sales enablement techniques, even the marketing department. Doing this will positively influence the likelihood of a lead becoming a sales qualified lead, where you can analyse the validity of the quality of leads and assess how effective your marketing campaigns are.
With this knowledge, you can prepare specific plans to solve prospects' biggest concerns and answer their questions. You can also tweak campaigns and resources to generate better leads all the time.
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
This one's pretty simple. To bring in new customers, you need to invest some $$$ into your marketing and sales efforts so you can attract your ideal audience. That's exactly what customer acquisition is — the amount you spend on marketing to acquire new customers.
If you can align your branding, products or services and your marketing messages, the channels you use to acquire new customers can attract and convert prospects into customers at a much lower cost than companies that don't have these aspects aligned.
Marketers should analyse this RevOps metric because it highlights how much you need to spend to acquire new customers; making this a cost that needs to be top of mind,.
Customer churn
Customer churn measures the percentage of existing customers who no longer use your product or service within a specific period. Sadly, every organisation — no matter how big or small — experiences churn. You could be the biggest brand in the world with plenty of efficient customer retention strategies, customers will always either lose interest or go elsewhere.
Just think about your own shopping habits. I'm the worst for it. Adidas throw countless points at me as part of their loyalty programme to get me to keep buying from them, but I'm a sucker for a pair of Nike's so I'm always jumping ship and stop buying/lose interest in Adidas for a while. It happens.
Here, marketers should work closely with customer success teams as part of the RevOps strategy to try and retain as many customers as possible. By working with the customer success or service team, you can ensure both marketing and sales did everything they could to keep customers and balance sustainable growth.
It's good to know what your customer churn rate is, so you can analyse what you're doing correctly to keep your customer base happy and also figure out why some customers leave. By having this information, you can be proactive to lower customer churn throughout the customer journey.
What ties all of this together, though, is ROI. No matter how many metrics you track and KPIs you have to meet, the ultimate goal is to prove ROI with all of your revenue-generating channels. That part can be a bit difficult, so we've created a conversion calculator to help.
Start proving the ROI of your marketing campaigns
Proving ROI is typically a challenging task, especially if you're responsible for managing the ROI of multiple revenue-generating marketing channels. Our conversion calculator is an easy way to track overall campaign ROI where you can input data unique to you.
The best part? It'll only take a few minutes to complete as the calculator is pre-formatted with only the most relevant equations to help you work out your ROI.
Try it for free today using the button below.