Reporting is the lifeblood of any business … yet far too often, B2B revenue teams fail to consistently monitor their marketing and sales engagement.
And honestly, why would they? Traditional approaches and metrics don’t paint an accurate or actionable picture for best-in-class selling.
Thankfully, we’ve got the lowdown on the right metrics to measure, and how to measure them. Keep reading to get the scoop.
Key Performance Indicator or Just ‘Activity Indicator’?
Revenue teams have long relied on metrics such as:
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- MQLs
- Impressions
- Conversions
Most marketers compile these metrics into spreadsheets and applying formulas to estimate pipeline impact. But this still largely relies on assumptions and guesswork — two things antithetical to drawing accurate conclusions.
In fact, these metrics fail to tell marketers if their activities are actually driving revenue. They don’t indicate if you’re reaching the right accounts or the right decision-makers within those accounts — which is the real measure of success.
Modern B2B sellers must leverage tools that empower them to report how they’re impacting specific target accounts.
Here are several ways your team can enhance their reporting capabilities — from both a strategic and tactical perspective.
Revealing the Full Picture of Buyer Activity
Traditional metrics don’t provide revenue teams with an understanding of their influence on key accounts and contacts. An email’s click-through rate only matters if the right people are clicking through. If a recipient has no intention of purchasing your services, then it’s wasted time trying to measure your influence on them.
For better reporting, you need to capture the signals that reveal which buyers are in-market and actively looking for products like yours. 70% of the buying journey happens anonymously, so finding those signals requires the right technology.
6sense calls this uncovering the Dark Funnel™ because we’re able to reveal which accounts are performing anonymous activities like:
- Visiting your website, but ducking your forms
- Searching for topics related to your offerings
- Visiting third-party review sites
- Researching topics about your competitors
This activity adds up to an accurate picture of a buyer who is interested in what you’re selling — but you’d have no idea they exist if you’re missing those signals.
Using Intent Data to Measure the Market and Your Pipeline
There are incredibly important insights that can be gleaned from gaining a birds-eye view of all the activities going on within your business, like:
- The total number of accounts and contacts being reached
- The top channels your prospects are engaging with
- The topics your audience searches for the most
- The best performing campaigns across the organization
- The most engaged industries or geographies
- Where your target accounts fall in their buying journeys
Of course, this information is only valuable if it’s easily accessible in a convenient location.
Activity Dashboard
For instance, in this screenshot of the 6sense platform users immediately get a view into those macro metrics:
Pipeline Intelligence
The most important high-level metrics that organizations rely on are those that reveal pipeline health. But many businesses don’t have a quick way to assess this. 6sense’s Pipeline Intelligence gives your teams at-a-glance access at the current level of your pipeline, projection versus plan, and each team’s influence.
This dashboard is generated automatically. It does not require teams to spend hours or weeks compiling spreadsheets to calculate projections.
Instantly available also means instantly actionable. If performance is lagging or there’s a gap in your pipeline, you can spot it, correct it, and stay on course to hit your goals.
The snapshot also shows the overall performance of your revenue driving activities, and highlights the areas you’re making the most impact. You can use this data to double down on your strongest revenue generating activities, and eliminate or refine those that aren’t working as well.
Drilling into Account-Level Metrics
Your team wants deeper insights about its influence on specific accounts or contacts. And they want to know if their activities are adding to the pipeline, pushing accounts further along their buyer’s journey, or helping to close deals.
Diving into account or contact level metrics should reveal:
- The number and type of engagements happening
- The exact campaigns and content the account is engaging with
- The topics an account searches for most
- The channels they visit most
- A visualization of the account’s buying team, and your company’s level of engagement with key stakeholders
Here’s a look at what the overview for an account within 6sense looks like, with the ability to drill-down into deeper insights:
Not only are these account-level metrics incredibly important, but having the power to pull reports based on those metrics also reveals critical insights. For instance you can unlock reports that show you:
- All of the accounts currently in a specific stage of the funnel
- The accounts engaging with an individual campaign or topic
- Accounts with no engagement
Conclusion
We’ve moved past the days of manually pulling CSV reports every month to understand how your team is driving revenue. Your business can now leverage technology to help you understand the overall performance of your activities, as well as how you’re influencing individual accounts.
