Data-driven decision-making is critical in B2B marketing. It guides intelligent resource allocation, budgeting, and campaign optimisation.
B2B businesses also tend to have long, complex sales cycles. Without metrics, marketing efforts can quickly lose alignment with sales processes. This can lead to inefficiencies and a lot of lost opportunities for profit.
Today, we’ll introduce you to the marketing metrics you need to support B2B sales growth. With this guide, you should learn how to track your entire buyer journey and support the development of both B2B sales and marketing efforts.
A comparison of B2B vs. B2C marketing metrics
Before we dig deeper into B2B marketing metrics, let’s do a comparison to B2C or business-to-consumer. Here’s how they stack up against each other in key points:
The buyer or sales journey
One of the biggest differences between B2B and B2C marketing is the length of the buyer journey.
B2B generally has a longer and more complex buyer journey. It even tends to feature multiple decision makers in a single sale.
Compare this to B2C, where shorter sales journeys happen. There are more impulsive buyer decisions here too, with typically only one decision maker per sale.
Lead quality over quantity
B2B is more focused on the quality of leads over the quantity of leads. In it, what matters most are metrics like SQLs-to-close ratios (a measure of the efficiency of turning Sales Qualified Leads into closed deals or sales) and lead scoring.
This tells you that B2B marketing is more quality-focused compared to B2C. B2C marketing metrics for leads tend to be focused on things like conversion volume. That’s the total number of conversions that happen in a specific period.
Account-based marketing (ABM)
For account-based marketing, B2B is more concerned with detailed things like account penetration and influence. It will also involve looking at engagement scores for targeted companies.
The idea in B2B is to hone in on the high-value accounts and most influential decision-makers. Again, this ties into the focus on quality over quantity.
Compare this to B2C where you tend to focus more on broad audience engagement. B2C marketers can look at millions of potential consumers and decision-makers in comparison to B2B ones.
Audience segmentation here is also a bit broader than for B2B, which can be highly personalised. B2B account management can involve tailoring messaging to specific or individual account needs, for example. B2C will tailor its messaging to something like a demographic instead.
Sales cycle metrics
The B2B side will track metrics like lead velocity and average deal size when assessing the sales cycle. Once you get to B2C, however, the focus switches to shorter-term counterparts – like shopping cart abandon rates.
Part of the reason for this goes back to what we said about B2B having a more complex sales cycle. With its many touchpoints and longer timeframe, it’s harder to focus on short-term metrics the way B2C does.
The B2B metrics you should monitor
There are certain metrics that B2B businesses should keep an eye on for optimal marketing. The ones we’ve listed below are the crucial ones for driving growth.
That’s because they allow the business to identify what’s working and fix what isn’t. It lets you double down on the effective strategies and drive growth in a scalable and efficient way.
Without these metrics, you would only be guessing about how to refine your strategies. These give you clues as to what the market and your customers need or prefer. You can even combine them with predictive analytics and AI tools to better use the data.
And you can use a lot of utilities to track the metrics below. These range from all-in-one solutions like HubSpot to powerful CRMs like Salesforce. Pipedrive and Marketo are other examples.
Lead generation metrics
MQLs and SQLs | MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) are people identified by your marketing team as likely to become customers. SQLs (sales-qualified leads) are the same, but identified by your sales team. Tracking numbers for these lets you measure the quantity and quality of leads you’re generating. |
SQLs-to-close conversion rates | SQL-to-close conversion rates tell you what percentage of SQLs turn into customers. They tell you how effective your sales team is at converting leads into buyers. |
Engagement metrics
Account-based website traffic | This is an indicator of which accounts are engaging with your marketing content. You can track website visits from specific target accounts to get this, for instance. It can help you figure out which accounts are most responsive to which efforts. |
ABM engagement scores | Account-based marketing engagement scores measure how engaged accounts actually are with your efforts. How often do they open emails? Download content? Attend your seminars? It helps you get a better sense of the reception per account for your content or campaigns. |
Pipeline metrics
Lead velocity rate | This is an indicator of how quickly leads go through a sales pipeline. It can tell you the average time it takes for a lead to become an opportunity, in other words. This is an excellent way to measure pipeline efficiency. It can also help you better outline your typical customer journey in planning. |
Pipeline-to-revenue ratio | This measures the potential revenue of your sales pipeline. It can also calculate the total potential revenue of all deals in that pipeline. With it, you can get a better gauge of your sales team’s conversion ability. It also identifies bottlenecks and predicts future revenue. |
Customer metrics
Customer acquisition (CAC) | Simply put, this is the cost of getting a new customer. The typical way to measure it is to calculate the total cost of marketing and sales efforts to acquire a new customer. Knowing this is a great way to figure out how to allocate your budget more efficiently. |
Customer lifetime value (CLTV) | This measures the total revenue a customer generates over their lifetime. For instance, it may tell you how much revenue a customer will generate for you over the next five years. Use this to better grasp long-term customer value and segment customers into the high- and low-value ones. |
Customer retention rate | This is a metric of how well you keep your customers. Which ones continue to do business with you? Knowing this may help you refine your customer retention efforts. As retaining customers is often cheaper than getting new ones, this can be a critical part of your process. |
Let us get your B2B marketing on track
It might seem like there are a lot of critical metrics to watch in B2B marketing – and there are. But don’t worry, over time, you should get used to monitoring these for your efforts.
If you find yourself struggling or unsure about your current marketing strategy, talk to us! We provide tailored B2B marketing for SMEs in Singapore. Contact us for a chat about your B2B marketing needs today.
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