So a benchmark is determining where you are today and this will help you set your goals properly. So determine where you are now by measuring the following. So what does your current lead volume look like? What’s your MQL volume? And what are your opportunities look like that are generated per month, per quarter, per year? What are you doing now to generate these different customer leads in the different stages of the funnel? What are your current conversion rates for lead to MQL to SQL to opportunity and to close? So, by conversion rates, How many customer leads that come into your funnel convert to MQLs? How many of those MQLs convert to SQLs? How many SQLs convert to opportunities, and so on.
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If you’re finding that you’re generating a lot of customer leads but a not of them are converting to marketing qualified customer leads, then you know that you might have an issue with lead quality. By really looking into these conversion rates, you can determine where you should be spending your time. What is your current conversion velocity? So, how fast are things moving through your funnel. So once you have a lead into your system, how many days, weeks, months does it take for that lead to hit the other stages? What are your current successes by program and by content? So what are the different types of lead generation programs that you’re running today? What type of content do you have today? And how are those programs and content performing? What are the current recycle rates from sales back to marketing? So of all the customer leads you’re handing off to your sales team, how many of them are they recycling and sending back to marketing? What are your current lead sources? So where do your customer leads come from? Definitely sit down and make a comprehensive list of all of these sources.
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And then what is your current marketing-attributed pipeline, if you can currently measure this. So how is marketing influencing your current live pipeline or closed revenue? If you do have measurement in place, either with a tool or through spreadsheets, you might be able to calculate this. If not, don’t worry about it. We will be talking about this later in the course but, if you can benchmark it, make sure you’re benchmarking it now. So what are some common lead generation goals? So more high-quality customer leads..
What marketer doesn’t want more customer leads and what marketer doesn’t want more high-quality leads? Moving leads faster through the pipeline. So, another common goal is once a lead does get into your funnel, making sure that they are moving faster from lead to close. The faster those leads move through your funnel, the more sales your team can close. Improving branding or supercharging your inbound. So, while lead generation inherently means generating leads for your business, improving branding can also be a large goal when it comes to lead generation.
Even though branding sometimes doesn’t have a direct measurable impact, branding does have an impact to how people outside the organization views your company and so that will automatically supercharge what you’re doing for inbound marketing. Focusing on program optimization. So, you are spending money on marketing programs. If you’re not spending money now, you will hopefully be after this course. And are you focusing on program optimization? Making sure that you’re spending money in the right places and you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck.
Improving sales and marketing alignment and communication. Again, this is a goal of lead generation because you want to have that really, really solid and smooth lead to sales and marketing handoff. Increasing close rate and deal amount. So this is just table stakes here, the better and the more leads that you can generate for your sales team, the more you can increase close rate and deal amounts, especially if you have more high quality leads in your funnel. So what are some common lead generation metrics? So what should you be looking at as far as measurement? So, some common metrics that I’ve seen in the past that people will measure, number of leads generated, number of MQLs generated, and number of opps generated.
So these are more activity-related metrics but still very important to understand how many leads are generated by marketing, how many MQLs are sourced by these marketing programs, and how many opportunities, again, are sourced by these programs. And these are often the numbers that a CEO or your board might want to see. They want to look at these volume numbers. Conversion rates per program.
So, how are your lead generation programs converting? So, are you seeing that you’re spending a lot of money on a particular event but none of the leads that you’re generating through these events are actually converting to various stages in the funnel? Conversion rates per funnel stage. So, this is out of every lead that’s being generated, how many are converting to MQLs?How many converting to opps ad so on. You want to make sure you’re looking at how things are converting through your funnel to identify areas that might be a little bit leaky and that might need you to spend your time optimizing.
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