Ideally, you want to tie everything you do back to its impact on one of the following three business goals: profitable revenue growth, customer retention, and awareness and perceptions. But it can be challenging to find direct links from specific marketing activities to one of these three goals. What you can do is to measure the effectiveness of your portfolio of programs by looking at the overall impact to these metrics.
In your case, in addition to measuring these end goals, you want to measure intermediate objectives. Let’s discuss each one.
Sales enablement. You want to build a confident sales team. You also want to give your sales team the ability to support themselves. And of course, you want to sell the product. The types of measures you could consider include:
How many opportunities have passed sales qualification?
How many opportunities are moving through each stage in the sales funnel?
How long does it take to get referral customers?
Public launches. First, determine whether this measurement is for new or existing products. Are you gaining new customers? How many? How many did you expect? If this is for an existing product, what is the current rate of new customer acquisition? Does that number improve after launch?
Customer happiness. If you have a SaaS-type product, usage should be easy to gather. The targets should be determined by setting a baseline (what you are getting today with minimal effort) and then improving on those numbers. I also recommend creating an annual customer satisfaction survey; the first one will be your baseline. Are you moving the number up over time?
There are no “standard” industry KPIs to measure what you’re after, but these can get you started. Regardless, once you decide what you want to focus on, measure it, then take action, and finally, measure it again and again.
