Metrics Shmetrics Who Needs All That B2B Lead Analytics?

Here is the report on the conversion of qualified web leads to oppotunities generated between Saturday and Sunday with an estimated closing time of between 2 and 3 weeks. Here is another report of total leads generated by various channels and the return on investement for the first half of last month. Here is the ratio of emails sent with projections for revenues of next month based on last years open rates. Just because your CRM software gives you a million reports and does analytics like nobody’s business, it doesnt mean you need to use all of them.

With all the analytics features available now, it can get confusing if you are tracking 30 different metrics every week to understand where your lead generation or sales figures stand at that point of time. Printing and analyzing unnecessary reports can actually become more a bottle neck in your lead management process rather than being  a source for information which can help you better it. In short, if you spent half a day on reprimanding your sales team for a reduced number of sales calls and number of hours spent logged onto the CRM as compared to last month when your monthly revenue from qualified opportunities was actually higher this month…..then you are missing the point.  Too many data points to analyze can often create a wrong impression and shift your focus from results to questions on how much activity was there?, how many campaigns were run, how many raw leads were added? 

Good reports have only the metrics you need to track. Additional ones that need to be pulled up to solve certain problems or take a closer look into how a particular campaign worked can be done when required. Here are a few pointers that can help remove the noise created by distracting analytics reports and still give you visibility into your lead management:

•  Create a dashboard which has only the metrics you have identified as important to track on a daily or weekly basis. Any other report can be pulled on a need basis.
• Track the simple metrics which show you the results and where you stand in terms of those results. In the end the aim is to generate results from all the activity and not just generate activity since thats what lead generation entails.
• When you compare metrics, compare them with the right context. As we mentioned, if your sales people did less calls than last month but still got more customers than last month, then they did something right, not wrong. 
• Tracking metrics is pointless if you cant convert what you leanrt from them in to tangible action items and use them to improve on the results.

Maybe there should be a report on all the pointless reports some of us end up reading just because we can. Or, we could simplify it and get what we need to know and filter out the rest.
 

Related posts:

• 7 Simple Do’s To Maintaining A Clean CRM Database
• Inbound Lead Qualification: Making Your Sales Team Love You