Enhanced Lead Performance Tracking with Sales & Marketing Data Combined

Sales and marketing are invariably interdependent. The sales team needs the marketing team to attract new leads and keep current customers engaged with high-quality content. Marketing needs sales’ insights and intelligence to adjust their campaigns, messaging, and targeting in order to connect with their audience in a meaningful way.

Aligning the strategies of the two teams can significantly improve the performance of both of them. And the only way to effectively and successfully do that is to track conversion rates along each step of the lead conversion funnel in a KPI dashboard.

In this post, we’ll give you 14 key performance indicators (KPIs) to use to measure both the performance of your marketing campaigns and the quality of your sales pipeline. Then, we’ll show you how to easily implement that using a CRM tool, like HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Salesforce and ClicData to build a KPI dashboard to serve your sales and marketing efforts.

3 Reasons to Combine Your Marketing & Sales Data

1. Understand where your best leads are coming from

Getting a continuous flow of new leads is the prime mission of marketing, but we all know that not all leads have equal value for your business. Marketing teams need to focus their efforts and money on the acquisition channels that bring the best leads — the ones with a short closing time and high revenue.

You need to differentiate the volume and the quality of your leads per channel and adjust your campaigns accordingly in order to be cost-efficient.

Compare your ad campaigns performance

Let’s say you’re running two social media campaigns on Twitter and LinkedIn for three months, with the same budget, to increase requests for product demos. In order to evaluate which channel has been the best performing one, you need to ask yourself a few questions for each channel:

• How many people saw the ad?
• How many of them requested a demo?
• How many of those actually attended the demo?
• How many showed interest in the product?
• How many became paying customers?
• How long did it take to close the deals?
• What is the cost per lead? Cost per customer?
• Which type of lead generates more revenue?
• Did you make some profit?

In order to measure the true performance of your marketing initiatives, you need to look beyond the basic campaign metrics (impressions, CTR, conversion rate) and track your leads all the way through the conversion funnel.

Identify your non-paying marketing golden nuggets

Of course, the principle also applies to non-paying marketing activities such as SEO, email marketing, and social media. These activities take a lot more time to implement than any of your paid campaigns because they require ongoing research, creativity, and maintenance. But if done right, they can also bring life-long customers.

You can transpose the questions above to find out which channels are the most profitable and allocate your time and resources efficiently. Once again, the goal is to differentiate the volume from the value of your leads per channel. You might find out that you get a higher volume of leads from social media traffic but that the cost per lead is lower from your referral traffic. In that case, it would be worth spending time on building more quality backlinks.

By combining and mapping data from your Google Analytics account, lead generation programs, ad, and social campaigns to your contacts and deals data from your CRM, you will be able to easily calculate your marketing ROI per acquisition channel.

2. Identify what needs improving in your lead conversion funnel

Lead acquisition isn’t the final goal for marketing and sales teams —  the deal closing is! Your leads go through several steps before they actually turn into paying customers – and even more steps to make them your Brand Ambassadors.

You’ve spent a lot of time and money attracting those leads to your sales pipeline; to leverage that effort, you need to make sure you’re pushing the majority through your entire conversion funnel.

Fix your leaking bucket

You can’t consider your marketing and sales strategies as successful if you have a high volume of new leads, but your conversion-to-customers rate is low. You have a leaking bucket that needs to be fixed ASAP.

If you track your leads at each phase of your conversion funnel, you will be able to find your weak spots and take the right actions to improve your performance.

Let’s say that your conversion rate from new lead to demo done is fairly good, but you notice a drop after the demo step. Here are a few reasons we can point out right off the bat:

• The product demo didn’t meet the lead’s expectations
• The lead’s needs have not been properly understood
• There’s a discrepancy between the promise (marketing messaging) and the result
• You didn’t attract the right lead; often, they’re not the decision-makers

Starting from these assumptions, you need to review your process, take the right actions, and, of course, measure the improvements.

Replicate your successes

Of course, your marketing and sales strategies are not all bad; you’ve had your successes, too. If you understand what made them successful, you can leverage that result further. Let’s say you’ve had a big increase in your closed deals over the last three weeks. You can expand on that good work if you:

1. Identify the sales rep(s) who closed more deals than usual
2. Identify the typology of leads closed (verticals, industries, regions, acquisition sources…)
3. Review their closing process and identify what was done differently
4. Update your sales process to scale the success to your entire team

The ability to quickly fix your weaknesses and replicate your successes can only come from the continuous and attentive monitoring of your sales and marketing KPIs.

3. Keep your competitive edge

Implementing a unified analysis of your pool of leads can ultimately improve your sales and marketing strategies’ performance.

By creating a single version of the truth, you can quickly grasp which initiatives are hurting or growing your business. Then, by monitoring your lead conversion KPIs, you can take immediate action at the very first sign of dropouts and anticipate any damageable events for your business.

Real-time KPI analysis and monitoring give your marketing and sales teams more confidence in their actions and empower them to be more innovative. Taking it to a higher level, building a data-driven culture in your company can only lead to better performance management across the board.

14 KPIs For Your Lead Performance Dashboards

Now that you’re 100% convinced that blending your marketing and sales data will help your team better manage their performance, let’s take a look at the KPIs you want to keep a close eye on. Since you want to measure both the volume and the value of your leads, here are ten essential KPIs that can help you do that:

• Total organic leads
• Total PPC leads
• Total PPL leads
• Total MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads)
• Total SQL (Sales Qualified Leads)
• Closing rate per lead category
• Average time to close
• Average cost per lead
• Average cost per customer
• Average MRR/ARR (for subscription-based models only)
• CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value) – If a customer pays you $100/month for your product or services for two years, their CLTV is $2,400.
• Net Profit – (Total revenue – total expenses) ÷ Total revenue
• ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment). ROMI includes all your operating costs, discounts, staff, etc. You calculate the ROMI: (Revenue – all operating costs and discounts) ÷ Customer acquisition costs (resources, ads, shipping, tools, staff, etc.)

How to Build your Dashboard with Using Your CRM and ClicData

The final step of your lead conversion tracking is to build your dashboard. You will need at least two things: your CRM and a reporting tool.

ClicData is a business intelligence and data visualization platform that allows you to connect, aggregate, and visualize data from any source. We have connectors to major CRM and marketing tools, including HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, SugarCRM, and more.

When combined, your CRM and ClicData can help you build powerful sales and marketing reports — including your lead conversion dashboard. Here’s how it works:

Data Connectivity – Easy and fully-Automated

Let’s take HubSpot as an example, and let’s see how you can connect your data to ClicData. The process remains the same for all the other tools mentioned above.

1. Open a trial account with ClicData
2. Add a Connection to your CRM account: HubSpot.
3. Follow the prompts to authorize the connection between the applications

Your ClicData and HubSpot connection is now working! The next step will be to pull your marketing and sales data into ClicData.

1. Go to the Data Tables & Views tab
2. Click Add New and select your new connection to your CRM

You now have a list of all the datasets you might use in your reports.

Select the ones you want to import. In our case, we want to import the Deals dataset. Click Next.

4. Preview your dataset to make sure you have all the columns you need for your report

That’s it! Your HubSpot data is now uploaded to your ClicData account. If you like, you can set up custom schedules to update your data automatically at the frequency of your choosing. Of course, since it’s best to keep a close eye on your data, daily updates are ideal. We recommend you set up your updates on a weekly basis, at least.

Repeat the steps for all the datasets you want to import from HubSpot — and then from Google Analytics, social media, your Ads accounts, and others, too.

Custom and Advanced Data Visualizations

Now, the fun part: dashboard building! But while it’s fun, it’s not necessarily easy. For best results, it requires some thought and planning. ClicData’s Dashboard Designer feature offers more than 70 visualization options of charts, tables, interactive maps, funnels, gauges, bullet charts, and many more.

But the best thing about this dashboard designer might be that you can combine multiple datasets into a single chart. For example, you can compare the number of clicks from your ad campaign (e.g., Display, Search, YouTube, etc.) to the number of deals generated by the same source, such as data that is sitting in your CRM.

You can also create interactions between your charts to filter your data and help your dashboard users drill down into the data. For example, you can use the map on your dashboard and filter all your other charts by clicking on a country.

You can also fully customize your dashboard with your company color palette, insert media or annotations, and create advanced visualizations using formulas in your widgets.

Here’s a dashboard example with all the KPIs mentioned above that you can use with your team … Right now:

Dashboards are only useful if they are used! Sales and marketing teams should be able to pull up their dashboards and live data whenever and wherever they need to — at the office on their laptop, before a meeting on their phone, during a meeting on a TV screen, whatever.

The ClicData platform lets you access your marketing and sales KPIs with a live link from any browser and any device. You can also deliver dashboards by email or export them to any particular format automatically.

Executive Summary

While there might be hundreds of techniques out there to acquire new leads and transform them into paying customers, there’s only one way to make sure your marketing and sales teams are heading in the right direction, and that is by leveraging KPI tracking and data analysis.

HubSpot is a go-to tool to create content, automate your workflows, and manage your leads. It is filled with valuable data that can help you fix mistakes or enhance your marketing and sales initiatives. The only thing that’s lacking is that it just needs to be leveraged with a BI tool.

With ClicData, you can quickly build your KPI dashboard and monitor your lead conversion funnel. Know exactly where your best leads are coming from, how long it takes for your sales team to close them, where your leads are dropping out, and, of course, how much profit your marketing and sales campaigns have generated.

You can start today with a free trial account on ClicData or, book a call with one of our Product Specialists to help you build your KPIs faster.