By Lead generation is by far one of the most important things you implement as a marketing leader. To survive in B2B technology, the B2B marketing team must deliver a steady stream of high-quality leads to sales for revenue generation.
Recently, Relequint hosted a webinar with our client, Kinettix, called "KPIs for Global IT". During that webinar, we established the most important metrics for B2B technology companies: traffic, leads, revenue, and ROI.
In this post, we'll take a closer look, specifically at each lead generation marketing KPI you need to measure to understand prospect generation performance and establish benchmarks for those KPIs.
The Most Important Lead Generation Marketing KPI for B2B Technology
You obviously need to track several KPI metrics, like website traffic, to understand your website performance. These directly impact your ability to generate high-quality traffic. In case you missed it, see Part 1 of this series: Traffic KPI.
With that said, when it comes to generating consumer interest, there's truly only one marketing KPI that matters. That's the number of sales qualified leads you're about to send to the sales team.
Because, honestly, if we're not doing that, you have no revenue and no ROI in marketing.
So, the top KPI for attracting new prospects is called "qualified lead volume". Therefore, we need to draw a straight line that connects lead generation activities and revenues.
Now, keep in mind the word "qualified". You could simply increase the number of leads by lowering your standards. But where your B2B marketing team may be saving time and effort, the sales team will pay for it 10x over.
That's not good marketing-sales alignment and also not a recipe for success in B2B tech. This is a big problem because 61% of marketers send all leads to sales.
So, as marketers, we have to measure the quality of the leads that we're generating. If that quality is low, we're probably doing one or more of the following:
- Attracting the wrong audience
- Failing to personalize and nurture the right audience at the right time through marketing automation
- Don't have a consistent marketing-sales aligned way to score those leads
But by far, the most crucial factor here is the last point. Because when you do that, it's easy to see that the other two aren't working. You can then fix them to improve the quality of the generation process happening in your B2B marketing company.
How to Measure the Quality of Leads
Measuring the quality of leads comes down to seven key metrics, or marketing KPIs, specific to generating new leads.
1. Number of SQLs
A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a possible customer. They align with the customer persona that describes your ideal customer, and they're ready to buy now. An MQL only becomes SQL when sales outreach is very likely to succeed, making it worth the sales team’s time.
2. Quality of SQLs
This is the percentage of SQLs that the sales team determines is worth their time. Again, here's where marketing-sales alignment is vital.
3. MQL to SQL Rates for Different Lead Sources
Which traffic sources, for example, Linkedin or organic Google, deliver the highest quality SQL?
4. Lead-to-Customer Percentage
What percent of leads become paying customers?
5. Average Deal Size
How much revenue does the average deal size generate? This also goes into measuring the quality of the leads and the sources they come from.
6. Customer Lifetime Value
How much revenue does each customer generate in a lifetime?
7. Revenue Attributable to Marketing
This metric justifies your B2B marketing team's very existence. So, it's essential to show that revenues result from your various social media platforms, inbound marketing, search optimization, email, and advertising efforts.
Getting Benchmarks for Lead Generation
Benchmarks help B2B technology companies:
- Recognize what's possible
- Push themselves to meet realistic goals
But if you can't track it, you can't measure it. So, it's vital to leverage marketing automation to start getting a handle on these metrics. They can be incredibly revealing.
They could explain a lot if you've noticed tension between the marketing and sales teams. But the great news is that once you know, you can take steps to fix the issues that are resulting in low-quality leads being generated and SQLs being rejected by the sales team. This alignment will directly impact your teams' abilities to generate revenues together.
Marketing automation helps you identify SQLs at the precise moment they meet the standards that you and the sales leadership team have agreed upon and can even send those directly to the sales team hands-off.
Kinettix is one of several B2B technology companies we helped to improve lead quality through marketing automation and high-value content aligned with the Buyer's Journey. We encourage you to find out how they're increasing their quality organic leads by 83% YOY by applying this strategy. Sign up to access our webinar “KPIs for Global IT” below.
