Metric: How many touches does it take? Name to Opportunity

[Anonymous]

Do you track how many touches it takes to get a "name" to an "opportunity"? And if so, do you do this via a report, or by simply looking at each opportunity manually to deduce that # (difficult if you have a lot of opportunities)? Or do you use a metrics/reporting tool that helps you get to that data point? 

And... do you track that information on single-attribution, for one key player with the opportunity, or do you look at everyone at the account that's associated with the opportunity?

[Anonymous]

Jen, this is a very debated and complex topic that most marketers, including us at Shipwire, struggle with.

There are many ways to measure your information but I've found most people like RCA or a manual method with CRM and Excel. We do the latter since our setup is a bit custom.

We use a multi-touch attribution model broken out by timeframes (name to lead, lead to opp, opp to won) and also give credit to lead source. We use Salesforce and have found SFDC Campaigns/MKTO Programs to be very helpful in our "touch" measurement.

[Anonymous]

This is a difficult metric to use beause its incomplete.  Where is the prospect in the purchasing cycle when they first engage with you?  Have they seen your brand in other locations?  Did they meet a salesperson once at a cafe and be impressed (or turned off) by your company?  

On the lead level, the best approach is to assign the lead to a sales rep early, who understands their job is to make a good impression and identify the buying stage, rather than try to close them.  

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

In regards to attribution, I've never cared for first-touch or last-touch attribution. We look almost solely at campaign influence based on the "success step". For all of the marketing campaigns that touch a lead from the time they come in to the time they become an opportunity to the time they become a customer, if a prospect actually reaches the success step of a campaign like downloading a piece of content or attending one of our events, they're at least tacitly telling us that those campaigns had some level of impact on their decision to become a customer.

In regards to your metric, Jen, I think it could be an interesting measure. Why not create a custom scoring field that simply increments +1 each time the lead is associated with a campaign? Then you could run a report of contacts associated with opportunities and average out their # of campaign touches.

[Anonymous]

We definitely look at lead source, and the trigger event/campaign closely... as well as the various motivators along the way that seemed to engage the prospect throughout the cycle. So, I'm not too concerned about overlooking the specific qualifying data... I'm really just curious if there's a magic average # of touches, between sales and marketing (and what that mix is), that leads to an opportunity/won deal. This number is going to be different for everyone, and I realize it doesn't paint the full story, but it's an interesting data-point to monitor over longer spans of time. From year to year, if the average number of touches goes from 6 to 20... does that reflect on the quality of touches being made - or the marketplace at large?

The data is going to be different for each company/product/vertical, B2B vs B2C, etc., so it doesn't seem like there would be a handy benchmark to monitor against however, talking with different companies, it seems like for many, this # has universally increased over the last few years... Could this be just an indicator of the increase in volume of messages we receive each day (that it takes more to break through?) Just food for thought... and something I thought I'd take a look at!

Drew - I like your idea of a custom scoring field! We definitely score on behavior, but having a scoring field that just ticks up by 1, and doesn't contribute to the overall lead score, is a great idea. Thanks for the idea!

[Anonymous]

Awesome, Jen. I'd love to hear how this works out for you. We may actually implement something like this ourselves as I think it's a pretty interesting metric.

Good luck!

[Anonymous]

For what it's worth, the number I've always hear is 7 touches. But I feel like an average is so vague. Like you said, Jen, it's going to vary by an incredible amount depending on industry, product, B2B/B2C, etc. 

The custom scoring field is a great idea...might implement that as well here.

[Anonymous]

Great discussion!  Revenue Explorer provides two metrics in Program Opportunity Analysis that measure the average number of Program successes before the Opportunity was created or closed.  See below for an example report.



You can add a timeframe dimension to this report to see trends as shown in the example below.



TJ

[Mackenzie_Warre]

Can anyone confirm for me that the 'Average # of Successes' is calculated across leads with a contact role on the opportunity? That seems like the most logical answer to me, but I can't find it in the documentation anywhere.