Juuso Lyytikka has written The Top 5 KPIs Marketers Need to Measure (And How to Measure and Improve Them), giving us some food for thought and some simple conceptual KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that would help us to measure and evaluate our marketing success.
Here are his KPIs (the article goes into greater detail on each of them):
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Customer Acquisition Cost
- Marketing ROI
- Traffic-to-Lead Conversions
- Lead-to-Customer Conversions
These are all good, but I can see some readers rolling their eyes figuring out how to make them work in practice, especially when the sample size is rather small and the lead time from initial possibility to final sale is quite long — which is a characteristic of the AEC industry. (I mean, we don’t sell too many jobs a year when they are million dollar projects; and the pace from lead to decision-to-buy could take months or even years.)
Nevertheless, some discipline and if necessary back-wards analysis to establish the KPIs can be valuable. I think understanding the demographics, characteristics, and relationship source will be especially important in setting out your “go/no go” parameters for RFP and responses, considering the significant time and resources that must be spent to answer them.
Sales funnel graphic source: https://www.mailmunch.co/blog/sales-funnel/