An effective lead generation strategy is essential for growing your business. If you aren’t measuring and optimizing inbound lead gen strategies, you may be wasting valuable resources. Ensure your lead generation is on the right track by tracking these 8 key lead metrics.

1. Total Number of Inquiries

Start with an easy one: How many site visits and content downloads does your team generate a month? A quarter? A year? This number helps measure the effectiveness of your team’s marketing initiatives.

2. Leads Per Channel

OK. So you now know how many inquiries you’ve generated, but where are they coming from? Events? White papers? Social media? Utilizing this data is crucial when deciding where to focus your marketing efforts in the future.

3. Spend Per Channel

Once you break down where your leads are coming from; relay that information to the rest of your marketing team so that they can adjust focus.  If those banner ads your team purchased aren’t generating any inquiries to your site’s landing pages, it’s time to consider a different approach.  By addressing what’s been working and what hasn’t, you’ll save your team a considerable amount of time and money while generating more leads in the process.

4. Number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

There are good leads, and there are bad leads, and it’s the marketer’s job to identify and separate the two. MQLs are leads that are ready to be engaged by sales; however, it is important to be able to measure a lead’s quality quickly to tee up sales reps with the freshest and most qualified opportunities.

5. Ratio of Inquiry to MQL

It’s easy to get excited when there’s a traffic spike in landing pages, but where’s the value if the majority of visitors don’t fit a customer persona? Get your content in front of the right people. It’s imperative to generating strong MQLs. Determine the ratio of total MQLs divided by total number of Inquiries. Use this formula to derive a working figure:

Total MQLs
Total Inquiries

6. Cost Per MQL

Unless you work for Apple or Google, your company’s marketing team has limited resources.  The goal here is to strive toward achieving maximum results in lead gen while minimizing cost per MQL.

7. Ratio of MQL to SAL (Sales Accepted Leads)

Of the leads that you qualified, how many have been accepted by sales? Sales are not burdened by lead qualification, but rather lead verification.  Thus, it is vital to do as much research as you can on an MQL to ensure that your busy sales team doesn’t allocate too much of its time to leads who aren’t qualified (i.e., no buying power or no influence).

8. Total Number of Sales Qualified Leads

If you get to this point, the lead is validated as an opportunity and enters the pipeline.  A favorite metric, it very clearly demonstrates the overall effectiveness of the marketing team as well as the synergy between marketing and sales.

All companies are different, and there is not a one size fits all customer acquisition program that works for everyone. Therefore, it is up to the marketer to decide what lead gen initiatives will work best for their company, and track metrics based off of that plan. While this is not a comprehensive list of metrics, these 8 high-level metrics are a great place to start.