As a startup leader, ask yourself: Do you truly own your metrics? Or are you letting your agencies, contractors, or even internal departments hand you reports with the metrics they think are important?
In this edition of "The Question You Should Be Asking Yourself," we’re diving into the critical importance of owning your sales and marketing metrics—and how doing so can radically transform your business’s trajectory.
As a startup leader, you’ll often have a lot of different resources contributing to your sales and marketing efforts while you work to scale revenue to a point where you can justify internal hires. You might have an SEO person, paid media agency, email marketing consultant, outbound appointment booking partner, content creator, part-time sales executive, or a “Swiss army knife” marketer who does a little of everything. Building a fractional team of subject-matter experts is smart, especially when you’re in the $3-$5M ARR range. It gives you the expertise without the weight of full-time salaries.
But here's where many startup leaders falter: they don’t truly own their metrics. And when you don’t own your metrics, it’s easy for your entire team to drift, working on what they think matters, rather than what’s going to drive growth for the business.
What It Means to Own Your Metrics
Owning your metrics means taking control of the goals and clearly communicating those to your sales and marketing teams. It’s about understanding the bigger picture and ensuring everyone contributes to the same overall objectives. As the leader, you're the one who should define the company’s key goals—whether that's revenue growth, customer acquisition, or lead generation. You must then assign pieces of that goal to each member of your sales and marketing engine.
Once the metrics are defined, you need to hold your team accountable on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. Whether it's your SEO person, your email marketing consultant, or your outbound appointment booking partner, they should know exactly what they’re responsible for—and more importantly, you should know how to measure their success.
How to Define Your Metrics
To truly own your metrics, start with your annual revenue goal. Break that down into monthly and quarterly milestones. From there, figure out how many customers you need each month to hit your targets, and assign that number to each of your marketing and sales channels.
Then comes the reverse engineering: determine the conversion rates you expect for each channel, and how many leads you need to feed into each one. For example, if you know that cold calls convert at 10%, how many cold calls need to be made to generate the number of leads that will hit your monthly customer acquisition target?
Now, you’ve got a roadmap that shows exactly what needs to happen across each sales and marketing effort to reach your revenue goals.
Pitfalls to Avoid
Even with a strong grip on your metrics, there are a few common pitfalls to watch for. For instance, make sure to factor in the length of your sales cycle. A lead generated today might not turn into revenue for 6-12 months. So, when projecting your metrics, consider the time it will take for those leads to close.
Other common issues include:
Traffic is being driven to your website, but it’s not qualified, making it tough for your team to convert leads.
Sales teams are booking meetings, but they’re with prospects that don’t match your ideal customer profile (ICP)—a drain on time and resources.
You're getting lots of initial meetings, but prospects disappear once they hear your pricing. You may have a pricing-to-value misalignment.
Seasonality plays a significant role in B2B purchase decisions, so if your pipeline is stagnant, consider how you’ll nurture leads for months until they’re ready to make a decision.
Need Help Owning Your Metrics?
If you’re seeing the value in owning your metrics but don’t have the time to build out a comprehensive plan, we’ve got you covered. At LTO, we developed the Revenue Roadmap to help founders and startup leaders like you define, track, and optimize the sales and marketing metrics that will scale your revenue.
By shifting the focus to owning your data, you set the foundation for more efficient, targeted, and impactful growth. Start owning your metrics today and watch how it transforms your business. Ready to dive deeper? Let’s build your Revenue Roadmap together!
Commentaires