Finding the right sales KPI’s to use for sales and marketing alignment can be tricky.
The B2B sales funnel has changed dramatically, as both the the solutions offered by companies and the buyer’s journey have evolved to be much more complex.
Marketing used to simply own the top of the funnel, but this shift has made it necessary for sales and marketing to work together longer into the sales cycle. As the number of stakeholders has increased, successful sales strategies require more directed, high quality content to push prospects along the purchasing path.
The more sales management is able to put marketing and sales on the same page, the easier it is to close deals.
If you’re just getting started with measuring sales and marketing alignment, what you need is visibility into the revenue cycle. Here are five sales KPI’s that provide a basic look at how your sales funnel is performing so you can develop and iterate strategies for alignment.
Top Sales KPI’s to Gain Visibility into Alignment
1. End-to-End Conversion
Measuring conversion ratios across the full sales cycle, from lead to deal closed, will allow you to see how deals are progressing through designated stages. When measuring End-to-End Conversion, the sales pipeline metrics for the entire revenue cycle and each of the major sales pipeline pillars are needed.
Over time, this data provides insights into the major inefficiencies between the sales stages: where deals are more likely to stall, where marketing is needed to provide more support, where marketing needs to hold off, etc. Major variations over time are important red flags for the teams to investigate.
2. Lead Funnel Velocity
It’s not the easiest metric to measure, but knowing how quickly your sales and marketing teams are moving leads through the pipeline gives you insight into where bottlenecks are forming in the processes. Time kills deals, so create date fields in your CRM that correspond with major stage progressions to time-stamp how your opportunities travel through the pipeline.
3. Number of Touches
How many touches are required to progress an opportunity from one stage of the sale process to the next? By measuring the total number of touchpoints required by both sales and marketing, you can get a deeper understanding of how the two teams interact and contribute to leads progressing through the buying process.
4. % of MQLs to Become SALs
What percentage of Marketing Qualified Leads end up converting over to Sales Accepted Leads? For many, this is the key metric describing sales and marketing alignment. Is the sales team using what the marketing team is providing? Is the marketing team providing what the sales team needs? If this ratio ends up being low, there are major discrepancies between marketing and sales qualification priorities.
5. Content Performance and Usage
The content that marketing provides moves leads through the sales pipeline. Understanding which pieces of content work, and what content sales needs, is necessary for marketing to prioritize content strategies. Poor performing content is a sign of poor conversation, and alignment, between your marketing and sales teams. Having a designated sales enablement plan to facilitate a seamless exchange of ideas and a simple, collective content storage area will help in this respect.
In today’s sales environment, it’s imperative for sales and marketing to work in tandem. These five metrics will provide you with the information you need to create strategies for more alignment.
