I’m a big believer that the better you inbound marketing agency is at inbound marketing, the better you are at getting your clients leads and the happier your clients. I also believe, and this is based on feedback I get from prospects, most of the inbound agencies are still struggling to get clients results.
So if actual, quantifiable, program performance is what makes or breaks our engagement with clients, then you need to be adept at benchmarking their pre-program funnel, so you can illustrate for them the in-program funnel and then eventually the post-program funnel numbers.
The inbound marketing metrics and results should be dramatic enough for these clients to be—as we like to put it—raving fans. Here's how to produce a Click To Close Funnel Analysis.
Website Visitors
This is pretty easy, at least from your perspective. How many visitors a month does the company get to their website? Some prospects or clients might have trouble getting you this information and others might even have trouble getting you the credentials to go in and get this for yourselves, but it’s the first step in a number of educational opportunities when you start working with new companies.
Returning or new, I don’t care. In fact, I like sites that have a lot of returning visitors. This assumes there’s no log-in portal or any customer access point that’s inflating the visitor numbers artificially. Returning visitors means opportunities for lead generation with a more aggressive content publication effort.
Marketing Qualified Leads
Visitors that convert and provide contact information are marketing qualified leads. As long as we’re ONLY offering educational content and not free iPads or iPhones, the people who download your client’s content should be leads. It's likely that almost 90% of those leads will be top or middle of the funnel leads—but they’re leads none the less, they need to be treated as leads, counted as leads and they need to be nurtured into the bottom of the sales funnel.
Sales Qualified Leads
Any inbound lead who asks to speak with your client, or fills out any of your bottom of the funnel offer forms are considered sales qualified. Perhaps the naming convention is slightly off because the prospect has qualified themselves for a sales call and the sales person has not yet spoken with them. However, for the purpose of the funnel analytics, we’re calling them sales qualified. As I mentioned above, typically about 10% of all lead are in this bucket.
Sales Opportunities
Once a sales person has their initial conversation with the prospect they need to make a determination as to whether this person is actually an opportunity or not. This is where the qualification criteria becomes important. Are the sales people talking to power? Do they have acute pain? Are they a good fit for what you do? In most cases, these sales qualified leads will NOT be sales opportunities. But to understand the currents state of your client’s funnel, you need to know how many of the leads are actual opportunities today.
Proposals/Agreements/Contracts
Almost every single client does this stage a little differently. We provide recommendations and agreements. Other clients provide contracts or proposals. Regardless of what they produce and what they deliver not all sales opportunities will result in documentation being created and delivered, so you need to figure this stage of their funnel out so you can benchmark it. This also produces an opportunity to help your client revise this stage of their sales process so it offers their prospects less friction in the sales process and results in more new business.
New Clients or Customers
Finally, the last stage of the funnel is actual new client numbers, new customer numbers and of course the revenue associated with these new customers. All of this is important data.
Here’s what an average MONTHLY funnel might look like before we get started.
- Website Visitors – 4,000
- Marketing Qualified Leads – between 1% and 3% of visitors, let’s say 2%, so 80 MQLs
- Sales Qualified Leads – estimated at about 10% so 8 SQLs
- Sales Opportunities – estimated at about 25% of SQLs, so 2 new sales opportunity per month
- Proposals or Agreements - this should be a high percentage, if it’s a solid sales opportunity, they should move to the paperwork stage 75% of the time, so that would be 1.75 a month or 3 over the course of two months
- Closed Business – again, this should be a high number, let’s say 66% of the time they get the business, which would in this case produce about 1 new customer per month from marketing generated leads.
Average Revenue per New Client/Customer
Don’t forget to figure out what each new customer is worth from a revenue perspective and from a profitability perspective too. These are both important metrics to understand, benchmark and to keep an eye on. As your inbound marketing starts to work you want to make sure this number is increasing too.
Click To Close Lifecycle
Finally, the time it takes from the first click to the signed paperwork being returned is the sales cycle. You want to know that number, benchmark that number and be able to show improvements there too. Speeding up the sales cycle helps the client realize more revenue within their financial cycle which can dramatically impact their business in a number of areas.
Once you have these critically important metrics you can begin to plan out what inbound marketing and inbound sales tactics are required to get your client to their business goals. But without this type of analysis, you’ll basically be flying blind.
Report on the improvements up and down the funnel monthly, so your client sees the changes in conversion rates and the actual numbers the inbound program has contributed to. Looking at program performance like this also changes the conversation from a tactical and transactional one. “Where are my leads?” To a more strategic conversation. “Look at the impact we’re having on your funnel.”
Start Today Tip – Build this work into either your pre-sale assessment work or your post sale strategy and planning work. Regardless of where it gets done, it needs to get done. Skipping this is not an option as you’ll be executing tactics with no idea of how it’s impacting the business as a whole. Make sure you report on this monthly since making an impact across the funnel give you many more ways to prove your value and help you continue the engagement or even upsell additional services while you’re in the middle of the engagement, two very positive outcomes from doing this work.
Agencies 2 Inbound – Helping You Go ALL IN ON Inbound!
