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On the surface, reporting on the ROI of your marketing should be simple. Take how much revenue a campaign earned you, then divide by how much you spent on it.
In the world of B2B, with long sales cycles and meandering buyer journeys, you can rarely get these two numbers without a bit of calculation. With digital campaigns, it can be tricky to pin down an exact cost.
These 5 reports will help you find the way through the fog of data. The strength of CRM is that it holds data from all departments. So, you can track the journey from Marketing, through Sales, to Account Management and beyond.
1. Lead Source
If this isn’t already a field in your CRM, stop reading immediately and make it one!
Back now? The source of your leads should be the first thing you report on at every level. Having a monthly, quarterly and yearly breakdown of where your leads are coming from is gold dust. You’ll be able to see which channels are in full flow, and which are only trickling.
More importantly, you should look at the quality of leads that are coming from each channel. Your LinkedIn page is pulling in 100 leads per month. But if they don’t match your killer values, it’s time to change tack.
2. Inactive Leads
In an ideal world, all your leads would be warm. Until we reach that marketing nirvana, it’s important to keep an eye on your inactive leads. How long are they inactive for? Do they start engaged then go quiet? ROI is not just about drawing in new leads, but about the ability to move leads from inactive to engaged. In many ways, this should be the easiest way to improve ROI, as you know what content your inactive leads have been sent. This means you know what to try next to try to engage them.
3. Closed Deals
All Marketing activity is designed to get new customers onboard. This is true wherever in the funnel it sits. If you aren’t regularly checking which leads have converted, you aren’t reporting on true ROI. 500 people filling in your “book a demo” form looks great on your monthly activity report. But if only 10 of them actually sign a contract, they are your ROI, not the 500.
The next level in this report is to build a profile of your customer. Do you win 90% of the legal services firms you deal with? Breaking your ROI down by industry will pay off hugely when you next plan your marketing activities. It’s much easier to argue your case for a stand at London Law Expo if you know the ROI is there.
4. Lost Deals
It may be dispiriting to look at the deals you lose, but it’s a vital part of proper ROI measurement. Do all your expo leads agree to a meeting, but ultimately fall away?
It takes guts to admit when a campaign hasn’t worked, but it’s far better to be clear. Otherwise, you keep pouring time and effort into activities which aren’t delivering anything.
5. Remainers and Leavers
It’s well known that it costs less to retain an existing customer than to gain a new one.
Sadly, this is the point in the lifecycle where marketers are most likely to have blind spots. Once Sales have handed over to Account Management, they’re beyond the horizon of day-to-day marketing activity. Getting your customers back into view is an important step. Especially if you have a short sales cycle or sell one purchase at a time (rather than a subscription model). If your new customer buys once and then leaves, you’ll want to uncover why that is. Most marketers report on average Life Time Value (LTV), but you need to dive into the detailed data to see the ROI of specific campaigns.
The ROI of reading this blog
The idea of these reports is to get under the skin of your marketing activity, to report on ROI from specific campaigns and audiences. Once you’ve built up a clear picture of where you’re losing money and where you’re earning, you’ll know what to do to get every channel delivering new leads and new customers.!
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