Key SAAS Marketing Metrics Measure What Drives Growth and Agility

The day started with the social media team excitedly sharing that they were achieving their impressions target and earning 600 clicks per week.  They reported, proudly, that they were achieving their KPIs (key performance indicators). That’s when the COO noted that in spite of 600 clicks, no one completed registration – so those accomplishments were not driving positive business results. They were achieving a KPI (perhaps poorly set) but not paying attention to the key SAAS marketing metrics that drive growth.

The social media team was not empowered to improve conversion, but their activities drew attention to the number of converted prospects. They partnered with the product team to address conversion issues, and conversions started to rise. With the systems were optimized to drive customer conversion, the social media team refocused on targeting audiences most likely to convert, driving business results. 

Measuring what matters is crucial for go-to-market (GTM) leaders in high growth SAAS ventures. An agile marketing team (and an agile sales team) needs to embrace the Agile concepts of user stories and short sprints in order to create and execute campaign tests that reach, engage and convert prospects into customers. It’s critical that sales and marketing teams clearly understand the most important business objectives of those sprints.

Every function within sales and marketing often has their own metrics. However, optimizing for too many metrics means not truly optimizing any.  The most impactful metrics provide early issue detection and insights from which to improve, especially those that tie to velocity and friction in your GTM operation. Connecting metrics that a team directly impacts versus metrics that drive the business is a crucial leadership function.

The metrics that matter vary depending on the type of business itself. Often, teams confuse their key metrics (very few and most important indicators of the business health) and the optimization metrics to help diagnose and improve their process. High velocity, low price businesses often focus on the fewest touches to an initial conversion – perhaps with freemium offers.