11 calculations data-driven B2B marketers love & need

1. Customer Satisfaction

This goes without saying. If your customers aren’t happy, you won’t get customer references, you’ll get a horrible reputation (spread online) and your product/service simply won’t sell. Buyers are smart. They now look into reviews, ask their peers, get advice. That is B2B. For more, check out also my blog on why B2B Marketers cannot afford to have dissatisfied customers.

A great way to track customer satisfaction is through NPS or other surveys with the standard question: “How likely are you to recommend _______ to a friend?”

2. Churn

This is the essential metric to calculating customer loyalty. Reducing churn rate can significantly impact your bottom line. Churn can be measured by calculating the percentage of customers who stop purchasing your product after a given period of time (30 days, 90 days, one year).

3. Profit

Revenue minus costs. Need I say more?

4. Customer Lifetime Value

The customer lifetime value (CLV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.

Customer lifetime value ($) = Margin ($) * (Retention Rate (%) ÷ [1 + Discount Rate (%) — Retention Rate (%)]) — Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value

5. Conversion Rate

This would be essential to determining the best demand generation tactics. You would calculate the number of people contacted (for a given demand gen tactic) compared to the number that became a customer as a result of the campaign.

6. Bounce Rate

If people are leaving your website, “Houston,” we’ve got a problem!

7. Test-drive conversions

After the prospect has test-driven or demoed the product, did they buy it? After the 30-day free trial, did they buy it? A small conversion rate after the test-drive could indicate serious problems with the product itself or with the ease-of-use, training or sales communications. It is imperative that this metric be evaluated and investigated.

8. Brand awareness

Typically number one in B2C, this valuable metric remains top of mind to B2B marketers. The most efficient way to measure brand awareness is to hire an external market research agency and conduct a simple test with the question: “What is the first brand name you think of when you think of service/product description/product benefits.” Some might argue that number of searches for the product could be tracked, however, how can you be sure they associate your particular product with its description?

9. Cost-per-lead

How much does each lead cost and how many of them convert? Calculated by marketing spend vs. number of marketing qualified leads accumulated and marketing spend vs. number of sales qualified leads accumulated.

10. Cost-per-conversion

The total cost of generating traffic compared to the conversions.

11. Acquisition Cost

Once you’ve got your conversion rate, you can calculate the acquisition cost by calculating the total cost of marketing spend divided by the number of customers who take the offer.