Every CMO or Marketing Director who is responsible for generating leads for a B2B sales team should have these 10 reports on their Salesforce.com marketing dashboard. While most companies focus exclusively on the creation of sales management dashboards, marketing management dashboards are becoming an increasingly important tool for fostering alignment between the sales and marketing teams. Moreover, the reports contained in this dashboard will all but insure 360 degree accountability between the sales and marketing departments.
The lead aging report tells you exactly how old your leads are and if your sales team is responding to leads in a timely manner. The report can be built in a variety of ways. More sophisticated versions of this report use a custom field that calculates the elapsed time in minutes between the created date on the lead and the current date. Why is measuring lead age so important? Inbound leads quickly grow cold. According to a study published in the Harvard Business Review in March 2011, there is a golden hour of opportunity with inbound leads. More specifically, leads that are responded to within the first hour were 7 times more likely to be qualified by the sales team than leads that had been ignored for more than 1 hour. For more on how lead response time impacts sales, please read the full article on HBR:The Short Life of Online Sales Leads
The lead quality report is a matrix report that displays the composition of the marketing funnel by lead stage. Typical time frame for this report is for the current month. To create this report you need to use the lead status field along with several custom values or create a custom field on the lead object in Salesforce to track the progression of leads through the marketing funnel. Done correctly, this field is similar to the opportunity stage field but provides very fine-grained insight into stages in the marketing funnel. Most importantly, creating this custom field facilitates a critical feedback loop from sales to the marketing team on the quality and type of the leads marketing is generating. Unlike simplistic lead scoring methods (e.g., good, mediocre, bad) the lead stage tracks sales activities with the lead and uses BANT criteria as a framework for defining the stages. This allows you to create additional reports to track the progress of leads between stages.
The all leads by source report is a big picture report that tells you where your leads are coming from by lead source. Typically the time frame for this report is the current calendar year and the data is represented in a pie chart on the dashboard. This report answers these key questions: Where have the leads come from over the past year? What % is each lead source?
The leads by source by month report is a matrix report with a stacked bar chart that gives you insight into the composition of the leads being generated every month. The simplest way to build this report is to use the lead source field on the lead object in salesforce. This report answers these key questions: Where have leads come from every month? What is the trend? Is one source producing more leads than another? Does the lead volume correlate with marketing expenditures?
The sales by lead source report is a simple report with a pie chart that displays closed and won opportunities by lead source and displays the composition by percentage on the pie chart. For most B2B companies with sales cycles that span past 30 days, the date range on the report is set to the current calendar year. This report answers this fundamental question: Which lead sources are producing the most sales?
The opportunities by stage this month report is a funnel report that displays all the opportunities by stage in the sales funnel with a close date of this month. As the chief marketer you need to know if the leads you are generating are turning into opportunities for the sales team. This report shows the number of leads sitting at each stage of the funnel. For this report to be effective the sales team needs to accurately record the stage for each opportunity in their sales pipeline.
The opportunities by lead source report is a simple report with a pie chart that displays all opportunities created by lead source. This report provides you with the basic information on which types of leads are being converted into opportunities. For this report to be truly effective you need to have fairly fine grained lead source attributes defined in Salesforce. With this information you can make a quick assessment of which lead sources are generating opportunities which are duds.
The leads created per week report is a simple vertical bar chart that tracks the number of leads generated every week by the marketing team. The most useful aspect of the report is that it gives you an instant assessment of the number of leads and the trend week to week.
The leads created per month report is a simple vertical bar chart that tracks the number of leads generated monthly by the marketing team. The most useful aspect of the report is that is gives you an instant assessment of the number of leads and the trend month to month.
The leads created per quarter report is a simple vertical bar chart that tracks the number of leads generated every quarter by the marketing team. The most useful aspect of the report is that it gives you an instant assessment of the number of leads and the trend quarter to quarter.
This collection of reports is just the beginning of building out a comprehensive dashboard of reports to monitor and track the progress of your marketing programs. In addition to these reports, you should also consider creating several variations of these reports that are filtered by month, week, quarter, year, and other criteria.