The Sales & Marketing KPIs that Actually Matter
The MSP 501 breaks down the metrics that partners should really be paying attention to.
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Jon Rosenson, SVP and COO at Expedient, advises MSPs to create KPIs that track the prospect relationship from initial identification through billing, then use that pattern to model your ideal clients and benchmark the best strategy to win new business.
For example, Expedient measures contact sources, lead scores based upon measured activities, quoted solutions and closed opportunities. When they can attribute top of the funnel mechanisms to opportunities that eventually appear in the sales forecast with a greater than 50% probability to close, they can more clearly see the tactics and activities that create demand and lead to bookings.
It’s easy to get distracted by metrics that are cool to track but don’t do much for your bottom line, Brendan Blowers, marketing director for PTG says. The KPIs that the PTG team focus on are maintaining a healthy engaged list, maintaining a certain open rate on emails to ensure the effectiveness of their messaging and tracking the funnel entry points and drop-offs that they can directly connect to revenue.
Blowers says working backward through the data from the signed contract to the first touch point is a great way to view a successful customer journey and make plans to replicate it.
Which KPIs should you track? Jeremy Reynoldson, director of operations for Bralin Technology Solutions, says it’s not all that complicated. You look at the ones that fit your business model and market.
All the marketing experts and sales gurus will tell you to watch your website hits like a hawk and push your sales team to reach a certain number of dials every day. But these things don’t mean a lot to Bralin’s model and go-to-market strategy.
Bralin’s team instead emphasizes the number of networking events they attend and the number of client business review meetings they conduct to get more visibility into where they stand in terms of prospecting.
How effective your sales and marketing strategy is depends a lot on the tools you use.
Ian Brady of Steadfast Solutions weaves together several different solutions to get a comprehensive view of the benefits Steadfast’s marketing efforts are producing. He relies on Google Search Console to check the indexing status and optimize visibility of his website and Ahrefs to manage backlinks.
Steadfast works very closely with its marketing firm, Ulistic, to make sure strategies and results are aligned.
Make sure you’re tracking inside sales as well as outside sales.
Digital Boardwalk CEO Tim Shoop says that although his team has KPIs in place for their engineers, which includes inside sales, their outside sales team is different. They track performance for the pipeline, won deals, and opportunities/revenue, but they don’t hold outside sales reps to a quota. Most of their deals are generated by lead gen, not the sales team.
For sales and marketing KPIs, Tolar Systems looks not just at topline numbers but at internal markers like customer satisfaction scores to assess how its service and offerings are resonating with clients, says Tolar VP Phillip Poarch, because everyone knows it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to replace them. Tolar also looks at profitability by industry because that tells it where to invest its resources.
Poarch keeps a close eye on net MRR for changes in recurring revenue to gauge how much Tolar is growing in a given month and how hard the team has to work to replace lost revenue.
Lastly, Tolar looks at its prospects lists in terms of MRR to provide a realistic understanding of its pipeline and the value each prospect could bring.
For sales and marketing KPIs, Tolar Systems looks not just at topline numbers but at internal markers like customer satisfaction scores to assess how its service and offerings are resonating with clients, says Tolar VP Phillip Poarch, because everyone knows it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to replace them. Tolar also looks at profitability by industry because that tells it where to invest its resources.
Poarch keeps a close eye on net MRR for changes in recurring revenue to gauge how much Tolar is growing in a given month and how hard the team has to work to replace lost revenue.
Lastly, Tolar looks at its prospects lists in terms of MRR to provide a realistic understanding of its pipeline and the value each prospect could bring.
Entrepreneurs don’t usually open their own businesses just for the joy of optimizing their sales funnel. They have a great idea or specific skill set they want to take to market, and then they just have to cobble together some sort of sales and marketing strategy out of things the business gurus write on their blogs or in their advice books. In too many cases, this leads to businesses tracking metrics that don’t really move the needle.
Sales and marketing aren’t the most inspiring topics for many managed service providers (MSPs) who love the tech and not necessarily the business of tech. As Mosaic451 senior cyber analyst Michael Jenks puts it, “I stay out of the sales and marketing world because it’s soul-crushing.”
We hear you, Mr. Jenks.
We reached out to the 2018 MSP 501 to see what metrics the most successful MSPs on the globe use to track their sales and marketing efforts. From recommendations on which tools to use, to customer relationship management strategies, to just plain common sense advice, these 501ers have some solid tips to share. Click through the slideshow above for the inside scoop.
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