Traditional B2B buying journeys – where sales teams approach entirely new prospects – have changed. Today’s B2B customers heavily research potential suppliers before making contact.

This means marketing and sales teams need to support these ‘customer-led’ buying journeys with inspiration and education from day one. And since customers also expect the smoothest of experiences, sales and marketing teams need total alignment around strategy and messaging.

But these teams also need alignment around how they’ll measure the impact of the unified strategy and experience they deliver.

So we’re using this blog to turn the spotlight on six metrics our experts recommend to help you keep your sales and marketing teams in sync – so you can keep conversions high and increase your recurring revenue.

If you’re looking for practical ways to get sales and marketing to work together  we’d strongly recommend reading our blog on that very subject first.

Otherwise, let’s dive into the measurable must-haves.

Annual recurring revenue (ARR)

ARR is the most important joint metric for marketing, sales and customer success.It measures how much recurring revenue a SaaS business is likely to receive per year, based on its active subscriptions.

It’s a good indication of the efficacy of your sales and marketing activities, and your company’s total growth (not just new customer acquisition).

Sales pipeline

Sales pipeline measures all open opportunities in the sales funnel and the value of them – and by looking at historical data, you can use it to predict how much you will close. This makes your Sales Pipeline vital for both marketing and sales teams.

Lead to closed deals conversion rates

Knowing how many leads you convert, helps measure the efficacy of your sales process, and how good your marketing is at attracting ideal prospects. Armed with this data, sales and marketing teams can work together on both the quality and quantity of leads in your pipeline.

Closed deals

The overall number of deals you’re actually closing per month, quarter and per year is an important KPI for both sales and marketing. It can help you assess the health of your sales and marketing processes at a wider, organizational level, set clear targets, and allow you to predict future growth.

Cost of acquiring a customer (CAC)

Measuring both CAC and CAC-Payback (how fast you recoup all direct costs of acquiring a customer) is vital.

An ideal CAC-Payback time is around 12 months. Any less means you’re leaving money on the table that you could invest in more marketing and sales. Any more means your marketing and sales processes are not effective enough.

Net promoter score (NPS)

And last but not least. NPS measures how likely a customer is to promote or recommend a product/service/business to another potential customer, based on their experience.

This makes it great for predicting business growth (if used correctly). For example, by measuring short-term changes in the NPS, you can predict approximate business growth in the next month or quarter.

But its most important role is measuring the satisfaction of current customers. It’s much easier for SaaS businesses to succeed and grow when they have happy customers because they’re the best ambassadors. You can also use their success stories to entice more prospects, which will ultimately drive ARR.

And that’s it

Keeping track of these key metrics allows sales and marketing teams to get on the same page when judging the success of your unified strategy.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg on how to create an ideal marriage between your sales and marketing teams.

If you’re keen to dive deeper into how alignment enables personalised, market-leading customer experiences and drives business growth – check out the Sales and marketing alignment: The SaaS guide to creating the perfect match