In the framework we developed, Share good news, Track who’s interested, and Follow up, we measure three things essential to your marketing efforts:
- Volume – how many?
- Velocity – how fast?
- Value – how much?
For velocity, your CRM (Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, etc.) will have time stamps of the actions of your sales team, your marketing team, and records and leads that move through the funnel.
(For clarification purposes, we refer to records as “strangers,” people who have no clue who you are and what you do, and leads as email addresses of those who now know what we do.)
But there’s more to reporting velocity than what resides in your CRM.
Velocity refers to the speed at which things move through your pipeline, which can be incredibly helpful for you, as a marketer, to know and share with your leadership team, who will be looking for month-over-month (MoM) and year-over-year (YoY) data.
Unfortunately, there is no button for that in HubSpot; no CRM out of the box will give you the MoM or YoY figures you and your leadership want.
All marketers need to learn how long things take to happen and what “good” is for you (it’s different for everyone), even if that means throwing it into an Excel spreadsheet.
Understanding how fast someone goes from being a stranger to having some awareness of you to a closed deal is only achieved by measuring the deltas between those points of your funnel.
And the best way to do that is by using our two favorite key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you measure velocity:
1. Top of funnel to Middle of funnel
Here, we measure how fast someone goes from being a stranger and not knowing anything about you (top of funnel) to showing some interest but no inclination to buy. They have some awareness of you and are in your ICP (Middle of funnel, aka MQL).
2. Top of funnel to Bottom of funnel
This KPI measures how long it takes someone to go from being a stranger to acting interested in having a conversation about money.
Remember, this is NOT about:
- Becoming a customer
- Your sales cycle pipeline (closed deals)
This KPI measures your marketing pipeline velocity, a crucial piece of data to inform your efforts.
If you can identify those two KPIs and show the month-over-month and year-over-year data to your leadership team and the impact of your marketing activities against those, you’ll get a seat at the table.