As the saying goes, “Make new friends but keep the old. One is silver, and the other, gold.” The same applies to customers. Much value is given to the acquisition of new customers, to great branding, to fancy websites. Still, very often, the focus on customers who have already been acquired is a secondary consideration.
If there is one thing, you must never forget, companies that succeed put their customers in the spotlight, for both acquisition and retention.
This spotlight on retention becomes even more important when it comes to B2B companies. The business model for such B2B organizations is not the one where they’re expected to generate daily new customers without any need for resales and remarketing. B2B customer engagement is rarely ever just a one-time thing, especially if you’re doing it right.
Now comes the question of understanding how to attribute value to the efforts of acquisition and retention. What parameters to judge your actions on. It is pretty simple. With the use of an insightful recurring billing and subscription management tool and tracking the right acquisition metrics, you’ll see quantifiable data on the impact of your efforts.
Here are six essential metrics that all B2B companies should track to benchmark for success –
1) Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures the average cost spent converting a prospect into a customer. Understanding CAC is essential for keeping track of the return on investment for your marketing & sales teams’ efforts.
2) Ratio of New versus Returning Users
While the standard may differ from industry to industry, estimates generally claim that it costs at least five times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. This is very important since these returning customers may have a significant ability to attract new customers.
New leads by source information on how many leads you have coming through your sales pipeline and tracking where they’re coming from can help you better target future offerings to reliable sources. If, after tracking new leads by source for a certain period, you find that significantly more leads are coming in through one channel over another, you can course-correct your strategy and revenue allocation.
4) Pipeline Velocity
Forecasting is one of the most challenging tasks associated with revenue management and planning purposes, but the right tools and solutions can help simplify this. Pipeline velocity helps to understand how long it takes buyers to move through your B2B company’s sales process. If a buyer spends too much time in your B2B company’s sales pipeline, they may not make it all the way through – they may abandon your B2B company in favor of a competitor, instead.
5) Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric that shows how much money a typical customer spends throughout their relationship with your company. Using CLV, you can better understand the different personas among your customers; the first step to effective targeting or personalization allows for a personalized experience, something many customers now expect.
6) Churn Rate
In its most simplistic form, the churn rate is the percentage of total customers that stop using/ paying over a period of time. So, if there were 10,000 real customers in March and 1,000 of them stopped being customers, the monthly churn rate would be 10%. It would help if you focused on keeping your B2B company’s churn rate as low as possible.
In Conclusion
Regularly tracking the right metrics for your business and implementing changes based on what the data tells you can be a game-changer for efficiently driving acquisition. Businesses with subscription billing software (or subscription businesses) can help track this data, swiftly respond to changing dynamics, and scale better and faster. With a plethora of real-time metrics, user feedback and insights on subscriber usage patterns and deeper insights can be generated with Magnaquest’s Subscription Management and Billing system. You can use this learning to speedily design and deploy value-added services, increasing the proficiency of all outreach across new and existing customers.
