What is marketing and its roles?

What KPIs are most suitable to measure the performance of functional roles like sales, online marketing, inbound marketing, operations, customer service, product management, human resources, and development in an SaaS startup?

• Answer:

  I can suggest a few for each: For marketing, on a monthly basis you'll want to track: Total # of new leads (duplicates don't count) # of qualified leads Lead-to-sale conversion rate =  # of new deals / # of total new leads Qualified Lead-to-sale conversion rate = # of qualified leads / # of new deals Qualified Lead-to-opportunity = # of opportunities / # of qualified leads Of course for the above, you'll need to define what a qualified lead is. From my standpoint, it's someone who has explicitly expressed interest in your product or service or has done a good amount of research on your company which can be tracked and scored with a tool like Marketo, Eloqua or Pardot. You should analyze qualified lead to opportunity and qualified lead to sale to see how good or bad you're doing from a sales standpoint also. This should be looked at per individual rep and the sales team as a whole. By analyzing this portion of the funnel, you can dig into why qualified prospects may not purchasing. By adding a Closed Lost reason in your sales process, you can see if a majority of deals are being lost based on budget, feature deficiency, etc. Sales could be benchmarked on: Win rate = number of Closed Won deals / total number closed deals Individual qualified lead to sale Average sale price Each of these can be used to assess how your reps compare to each other and who needs a bit more coaching. Lastly, customer success. Our customer success team is measured on the golden SaaS metric: retention rate.