Here’s an interesting article that makes the argument that revenue is a trailing indicator. This  quote from the article that best sums up the author’s point of view, “Not only does revenue not capture or highlight … critical business metrics, in many cases it masks them driving companies to falsely assume they are doing well. If revenues are up, customers MUST be happy. If revenue is up we MUST have strong market positioning. If revenues are up we MUST be gaining new customers. When revenue is up, the only thing you know is . . . revenue is up.”

This value of this insight cannot be overstated. It is probably human nature not to ask too many questions when things are going well. This tendency to “leave well
enough alone”; and to “not fix what ain’t broke” is as widespread as these hackneyed phrases espousing it as a virtue. But another point made in that blog post is that by the time revenues drop it may very well be too late to do anything about it.

It is for this reason that it is important to look not just at the bottom line, but other metrics as well that are indicators of the health of your company at a much more granular level. How, exactly, are your marketing efforts paying off? Can you measure this, comparing the performance of your individual campaigns? If so then you’re able to see where your efforts are paying off and where they are not. This kind of information enables you to focus your efforts where they yield real results.

Are you distributing leads intelligently among your salespeople? Being able to put the lead in the hands of the agent most equipped to handle it within seconds of receiving the lead is easy when using a lead management system. Get the biggest fish to the best salespeople; make sure agents only get leads they are licensed to close. Whatever your business rules, time is of the essence: Getting the right lead to the right salesperson right away means that they are more likely to be the first one to get the lead on the phone.

Another key advantage to using a Lead Management System is that it doesn’t just let you make decisions about accumulated data, it also makes it easy to tweak your sales process. So when you find something that works for one team, or one campaign, roll it out in the others and see in hard numbers if the solution can scale to benefit the whole company. Using Lead Management you can find what works, and make it the new standard.

There are so many metrics to learn from, and it’s easier than ever to accumulate data from your company’s sales and marketing effort. The overvaluing of revenue as the pre-eminent performance metric is a holdover from a time when companies did not have the access to technology that characterizes the current landscape. In a simpler time, the fact that you were above water was a good indicator that you were doing ok. These days, there is so much data being collected and so many tools to make sense of it, it just isn’t good business to ignore it.

Tags: Lead Management