By When it comes to business success, revenue generation is by far one of your most crucial B2B marketing KPI. Without a clear line between marketing and revenue, it's impossible to justify your marketing budget, let alone continue spending to reach a B2B technology audience.
Understanding how to measure it and get benchmarks to set SMART goals is vital. First, you start with marketing-sales alignment and then long-term business success follows.
We recently co-hosted a webinar with B2B technology company, Kinettix, called “KPIs for Global IT.” During our conversation, we established the four most important KPIs: traffic, leads, revenues, and ROI. Below, we'll focus on the revenue piece of these KPIs that’s most indicative of B2B marketing success.
How to Draw the Line
Measuring actual revenues is fairly straightforward. How much money does the company generate? But to understand revenue generation and effectively influence it, you must be able to draw the line between marketing efforts and the end product. You have to consistently track what's happening in-between those phases through marketing automation to understand how marketing influences revenues.
To this end, you'll track several marketing KPIs that contribute to revenues. Some of these may sound specifically like sales team KPIs rather than marketing KPIs. However, within an aligned marketing and sales team, how these perform is everyone's responsibility and a reflection of the whole team.
Revenue Growth: Seasonal trends aside, monthly sales growth should be going up as marketing efforts reach more people with the right message and the target moves through the Buyer's Journey to lead to companies delighting customers with a personalized sales funnel. Most companies calculate this year to year. But ideally, you need this number from month to month. It's critical that you understand the seasonal factors for this number to be meaningful. Tracking this using automated analytics tools can help you identify these trends and better understand if you're really seeing an increase or decline. This will allow you to generate better projections for a smarter marketing budget.
Average Profit Margin: Increase engagement and retention after a sale through B2B marketing automation and high-value content. Generate delighted customers who share their positive experiences. As you do, profit margins rise.
Sales Opportunities Generated: A sales opportunity isn't just any lead. It's a sales qualified lead (SQL) that the sales team can close with little time or effort. You can achieve this perfect timing through a marketing-sales aligned lead scoring system that automatically notifies the sales team and completes the hand-off when the lead is ready for sales outreach.
Meeting Sales Target: Sales target is a distinctly sales team-oriented KPI that marketing directly influences by only sending high-quality SQL to sales. If sales isn't meeting its target, we need to re-evaluate the lead generation and lead scoring that is happening on the marketing side of things.
Sales Closing Ratio: This metric tells you to what extent the "SQL" your lead scoring automation sends to sales are actually "SQL".
Lead to Sale Ratio: By measuring this marketing KPI, you know if you're attracting the right audience and converting the right people into leads. This will allow you to streamline your marketing and cut waste. You'll increase revenues while reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC).
Average Order Size: The amount people spend on your B2B technology is a direct reflection of how well you're presenting the value proposition of that tech to their business through consideration and decision-making content.
Customer Lifetime Value: This marketing KPI shows your ability to generate brand loyalty through high-value content coupled with marketing automation to keep them engaged with that content.
Revenue Concentration: This metric ensures you're not overreliant on a few contracts to generate revenues. For example, what if a couple of massive corporations represent 30-40% of your B2B technology licenses? If one or both of those big clients leave, they could take down your whole operation. You don't want to be in that position.
Benchmarks for Revenue Generation KPI
You should first look at industry benchmarks. But also, consider your current revenues. For example, if you're only generating $10,000 a month, it's a lot easier to double that than it is when you're generating $100,000 a month. Most businesses will experience slower growth as they achieve higher revenues. This represents significant growth and stability.
At the same time, you're leveraging data, streamlining, and cutting costs through marketing automation. So, ROI goes up even as the revenue generation growth rate may go down once you reach a certain point.
Your revenue growth will therefore be much more meaningful when you break it up into the metric mentioned above. As you consistently track the above metrics through marketing automation and analytics, you'll now only understand how to make your B2B marketing goals SMART. You'll see clearly how marketing automation contributes to increased revenue generation.
