Sales and Marketing Accountability: KPIs are the Key to Measuring Effectiveness

In order for any company to successfully improve its sales process, there needs to be a way to measure the effectiveness of specific sales and marketing efforts. Team members from both departments must also take ownership of the KPIs that directly relate to their roles.

Of course, the first step is to determine which metrics are actually KPIs (or key performance indicators). There's certainly no shortage of metrics from which to choose! But identifying the ones that truly reflect the health and power of your sales process is a fundamental step toward measuring effectiveness — and ultimately making adjustments as needed.

Let's dive into some of the more common sales and marketing metrics, see which department should take ownership of them, and also discuss ways you can keep all of your team members on the same page.

Common Marketing KPIs

Many marketing teams will use the following metrics as KPIs as they monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns:

• Form completions/submissions. This quantifies how many visitors to your website provide contact details through a sign-up form.
• Conversion by content source. This is an excellent way to determine which types of content are driving clicks and form submissions on your website (e.g., email, social media posts, blog content).
• Conversion by traffic source. Along with the type of content, you also want to determine which platforms are generating the most traffic to your site: Google search, social media platforms, ads, referrals, and so forth.
• Heat mapping. This metric tracks where visitors put their mouse on a website or landing page during a session. You can use tools like CrazyEgg to capture this data.
• Total emails sent. This and the following two metrics are a great way to determine how effective email sequences are in moving leads through the funnel. Of course, the first step is determining how many emails were sent and did not bounce.
• Email open rate. This metric measures the percentage of successfully delivered emails that recipients opened. The email open rate is a powerful way to gauge how effective an email subject line is, and the level of interest in the topic under consideration.
• Email click-through rates. This measures how many recipients clicked on a CTA in your email. This can be measured either by total email population, or as a percentage of the open rate.

Common Sales KPIs

After a prospect moves past a certain point in the sales and marketing funnel, it's important for the marketing team to hand the prospect off to the sales team — which means the sales team will have an entirely different set of KPIs to quantify their effectiveness at converting leads and closing deals. Some KPIs your sales team may look at include:

• Emails sent. Yes, sales reps typically have to send follow up emails to leads both hot and cold. How this metric actually works could vary depending on whether you want to measure emails sent to leads with a certain "lead score," or just the total number of leads who enter the stage of the funnel owned by the sales team.
• Calls made. Similar to emails sent, this is the number of sales calls associated with a specific category of lead.
• Webinar/magnet/submitted form outreach. You can take the previous two metrics (emails and calls sent) and tie them to a specific trigger event, such as when a lead attends a webinar, interacts with a lead magnet, or submits a contact form on your site.
• Response time. This is a big one, and can be analyzed from both angles: the time it takes your sales rep to reach out to the lead after a trigger event, and also the time it takes your lead to respond to that outreach. Of course, you only have control over the response time of your sales reps, so for practical purposes that should usually be the metric you focus on.

Apart from the above metrics that focus on activities your sales team is expected to perform, it's also helpful to measure the makeup of and changes within your sales population (that is, the leads in your sales pipeline). The following metrics are helpful for this:

• Number of sales-ready leads. This refers to the number of leads sales owns. This metric is often measured over set periods of time so that analysts can identify trends in lead volume and conversion rate.
• Number of first appointments. This measures the number of leads currently scheduled for an initial appointment with a sales rep. This metric is especially relevant if marketing generates those appointments.
• Number of follow-up appointments. As the name suggests, this tracks how many leads attended the initial appointment and are now scheduled for a follow-up appointment.
• Population of deals or opportunities. This measures the total number of potential sales currently on the table and can be filtered according to different stages within the sales process (e.g., leads awaiting proposals, leads reviewing proposals, leads currently negotiating a sale, and so on).
• Population of deals won and lost. The "bottom line" sales metric: how many sales transactions have been successfully completed vs. how many have fallen through.

Keeping Sales & Marketing in Alignment

The above metrics are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to potential KPIs. And we haven't even mentioned common high-level KPIs, like revenue, close rate, leads generated, cost per lead, or ROI.

Nevertheless, the important thing is to make sure your KPIs are relevant to actual business success and that your sales and marketing teams understand which metrics they own. Setting up a KPI scorecard is only half the battle — it's vital that team members understand their role in the overall sales process and which KPIs they will be held accountable for. Whenever you first institute an integrated scorecard (and whenever you adjust it in the future) make sure that your expectations are clearly communicated to both teams (perhaps in a joint meeting). Keep the lines of communication open throughout any sales or marketing campaign. 

At the end of the day, identifying which metrics are actually KPIs for your company and communicating ownership expectations to each team will help you to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your efforts, and ultimately improve your company's sales performance.

Learn More

​A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in our book  Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources.

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