If your sales funnel is like a road map, metrics are a lot like the step-by-step directions you take to get from where you started to where you want to end up. Metrics are a snapshot of the present – they tell you where you are, how effective your past choices were and what you need to do to make sure you end up in the right place moving forward. When it comes to designing and optimizing the perfect sales funnel, there are a few core metrics that you’ll absolutely want to start using.

Conversions

Your conversion rate allows you to essentially take a macro look at how your sales funnel is performing. Remember that this is just one small part of a much bigger picture, but to be fair – it’s a pretty important part. Out of all of the people that you have the attention of, conversions will tell you how many of them were really buying into what you have to say and how many couldn’t wait to go find someone else to listen to.

You can use conversion rate to break down all of your individual channels and see how they’re doing. If you send 1000 emails and get 10 conversions, for example, your conversion rate is 1% – not great. Getting 500 conversions from those same 1000 emails would be a conversion rate of 50%, however, which is pretty spectacular.

We use Improvely, Google Analytics and Infusionsoft Data to gather conversion data, however there are plenty of tools out there to help you gather this data. If you use funnel builders like ClickFunnels, this data is built in.

CLV (Customer Life Time Value)

CLV or Customer Lifetime Value is a number that essentially breaks down how much money you’ll make from a particular customer over the lifetime of their relationship with your company. As the general success and efficiency of your sales funnel increases, this CLV metric should be increasing at the same time. If it’s not, you likely have a serious issue somewhere along the sales funnel that you should identify and correct as soon as possible.

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

Customer Lifetime Value is hugely important to know so that you can compare it to another important metric – Customer Acquisition Cost. If you’re spending $100 to acquire a new customer but the average customer only has a CLV of $75, you’re essentially losing money on the deal. These two metrics have a direct relationship – as you work to increase one (CLV), you should be working to decrease the other (CAC) at the same time.

Revenue Pipeline

Revenue pipeline is an important metric to understand because it helps make sure your sales funnel is still headed in the right direction. Based on data like lead close rates, average revenue per sale and more, revenue pipeline can help you take a look into the future and project the average value of each lead based on current information.

As you make adjustments to your sales funnel, you can use revenue pipeline to help get a sense of their effectiveness in real-time as other metrics increase or decrease as a result.

DPL (Dollars Per Lead)

Dollar Per Lead (also known as Revenue Per Lead) is the total revenue from all sales made to a specific lead group divided by the total number of leads from that group. For example, if a total of $10,000 in revenue had been generated from a specific lead group and the number of leads in the group was 100, the calculation would be $10,000/100 which equals $100 per lead. The total revenue should include all sales made to date including sales made via an offline process (i.e. tele-sales, live event sales, etc.)

It is important to know your DPL for two reason. First, assuming that you know your customer acquisition cost then by knowing your DPL you will know if your marketing campaign is ultimately making you money or not. If you’re spending more money to generate a lead than you are making from that lead it’s time to tweak the campaign or even shut it down. Second, by knowing your DPL you can create a revenue model that will allow you to project revenue over a given time period. Revenue forecasting is a key component to scaling a business.

ROI (Return On Investment)

Return On Investment is the bottom line metric used for any marketing campaign. It is simply the total amount of profit (Revenue Minus Cost) generated by sales made to a specific lead group divided by the total marketing cost it took to create those leads. If $100,000 of revenue was generated at a cost of $50,000 the ROI would be 100% (ROI is always displayed as a percentage.) Any ROI over 100% means that the marketing campaign created at least double your investment.

ROI is the highest level view of the success or failure of a marketing campaign and should only be used to make decisions when taken into context with all the other metrics and data. For ongoing marketing campaigns ROI can be calculated at specific intervals (i.e. monthly, quarterly, etc) to show trends.

Qualitative Data

All of the above metrics are what are known Quantitative Data. Quantitative Data helps you identify what the strengths and weaknesses of your funnel are, and the overall performance.

QUALITATIVE Data helps explain why OR why not steps in your funnels are converting. Integrating tools like scroll, click and tap heatmaps or page recordings on your funnel pages or order forms, allow you to see HOW people are interacting with your funnel.

Studying your funnel’s qualitative data is extremely helpful when trying to identify potential funnel optimizations. It is an extra layer on top of your funnels quantitative metrics.

To collect qualitative data we suggest installing something something like HotJar on to all of the pages on your website.

Startup Stock Photos

In terms of sales, one of the most valuable tools that all marketers have in their arsenal is and will always be good, old-fashioned word of mouth. One customer uses your product or service and walks away satisfied. They tell two people, those two people each tell five more and pretty soon you’ve got a steady stream of new leads beating down your door to see what the fuss is about

In many ways, referral partners and affiliates are the 21st century, digital version of this very basic concept. Obtaining a referral partner is often something that happens organically, but businesses CAN help speed this process along through a number of important strategies.

Referral Partners and Affiliates: The Basics

A referral partner is typically a blogger, a particular website or some other type of publisher that produces content that would be of interest to the specific people you’re trying to reach. A referral partner with a significant email list that appeals to your target audience, for example, is one example of this idea in action. They could send out an email to their list that mentions your product or service and, as you already know their recipients are in your target audience, you will have a much higher click through and even sale rate than you would via more general means.

The Benefits of Using Referral Partner Strategies

To that end, referral partners can be a truly excellent source of traffic for your sales funnel. As your network of referral partners increases, so do the number of mentions your brand gets on the Web. That activity brings more eyes onto your products and services, creating more leads and more opportunities. The cycle then repeats itself as more relevant content makes its way online.

Referral links can also be a great way to help keep track of which efforts are performing to your expectations. You can track leads that come from a particular email address, for example, by setting that source up as a dummy referral partner and paying attention to the level of attention it can generate.

If you’re an existing Infusionsoft user, you’ll no doubt be pleased to know that adding referral partners inside of Infusionsoft is a whole lot easier than you may have initially thought.

To find out more, watch this tutorial that I’ve recorded that will help you shed valuable insight on this important process.

Your CRM is essential to your business, and the precision of your CRM can add levels of sophistication to your business. List segmenting and behavioral tracking are two of the most useful techniques at your disposal. Here, we take a look at how list segmenting and behavioral tracking can help you.

List Segmenting

Obviously you want to keep up with your contacts; however, it becomes much easier to market to those contacts if they are segmented by metrics of your choosing. This is what Infusionsoft offers with its list segmenting feature, a slightly hidden, but especially useful, organization feature.

Infusionsoft specifically allows you to segment your lists and connect them to other aspects of your CRM; for instance, you can send automated emails to only a certain segment that you have designated beforehand.

Behavioral Tracking

Getting in touch with your customer base once you have integrated them into your system is an ongoing job. If you want to maintain your relationships, you need to know what trends people are following and why. Behavioral tracking gives you an inside track as to what your audience is doing. When you combine the tracking features of a robust CRM program with list segmenting, you get a very powerful tool that can help you hone in on marketing strategies for a precisely targeted audience.

Putting the techniques of list segmenting and behavioral tracking together can save a business a great deal of money in both acquisition and maintenance strategies. Many large scale companies are using these techniques, and the best performers in the SMB market have already embraced the new organization that segmentation and tracking bring to them. It is also a great way to narrow down the people who are most important to market to if you have a limited budget with which to work.

The partnership of Memberium and Infusionsoft can help you track the behavior and the interests of your customers through list segmenting inside your membership site. With statistics at your fingertips, you will be able to make better decisions about how you use your audience.