Brands are no longer just symbols, names, or designs. They have become an identity. A cohesive message delivered in unison.
Products have become abundant in the market. There is a technology that can solve every business problem. And, with the technology comes the buyers and competitors.
An organization or individual must compete for the attention of the buyer.
With social media, individuals can position themselves as solutions to problems, too. This could be a marketing problem, as the rise of influencer marketing would suggest. Or they could sell their product, like Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest. Have no doubt, he is an SEO influencer and the face of his organization. People buy his product because his name is attached to it.
But why is this? Some organizations and individuals present themselves in a manner that we find refreshing.
Their charisma is infectious and investing our attention is entertaining and enlightening. Once an organization or individual is perceived to be charismatic, they begin to hold the attention of a relevant audience.
These organizations and individuals are called brands.
For all the vagueness of the term, we must ask: What is a brand?
Why is brand identity important?
Let us talk about a famous story: Michael Jordan and Nike. In 1984, Nike and Michael Jordan created a historic moment in sports and fashion: the Air Jordan.
The legendary red and black Jordan pair were on full display during a pre-season game when Michael Jordan wore it for the first time.
The NBA was furious. They sent a letter to Nike stating the shoes violated policy and would levy a fine of $5000 per game. Nike agreed and paid the fine for each of his games, revolutionizing marketing.
The Air Jordan became an anti-establishment and a rebel-figure sneaker in the market, becoming the most popular individual-led brand ever. The legendary sneakers sold enough copies in May to reach $70 million in sales.
You may think that Nike here is the brand in question, but let us pivot and understand that while Nike defined itself as a disruptor and risk taker, it was Michael Jordan, the conqueror, who would take the limelight. And not just for his exceptional skills on the court but his presence and sense of marketing.
From his iconic ‘Be Like Mikeʼ marketing campaign to Space Jam, he became a phenomenon. A brand.
But looking at Jordan, doesn’t it feel more than that? He had no term or design. All Michael Jordan had to offer was him.
In the influencer market of personal branding, where thought leadership has become vital to stand out—a brand should be defined as the ability of an organization or an individual to craft a recognizable voice that creates an emotional response within an audience.
The need for a brand voice or identity
Have you heard about CEPs? These are Category Entry Points. These cues inside the buyer’s head help them retrieve a brand from their memory banks.
In any category, certain brands will come to your mind. Think about smartphones. Which brand comes to your mind? Apple or Samsung?
Think about AI. It’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is it not? Whatever the category, you have associated certain products with a brand. For a brand you trust, you don’t buy only for the product but rather the experience the brand provides through them. You want to be identified with it.
A brand voice helps organizations and individuals develop a unique voice that can be thought of easily in buying situations. This voice can generate an emotional response. Or generate trust from B2B buyers in the market for risk-mitigating solutions. A brand voice helps buyers understand what you/your organization stand for.
Crafting a brand identity takes creativity, patience, and experimentation.
Why do you connect with certain brands? It is because something resonates with you. Something that the brand does or conveys speaks to you on a personal level.
That is the brand identity. A way of saying and expressing their ideas. Crafting this voice or identity takes patience, a readiness to experiment, and creative risk-taking.
Let us break the brand voice down into two parts.
Crafting an identity from the organization/individual perspective.
The importance of the voice for the buyers/consumers.
Brand Identity: The creator’s perspective
To find the brand identity, the creator— organization or the individual—must understand the why. This is the noble mission of the brand. For businesses like Apple, it is to bring the best user experience through their services, products, and software.
For SEMrush, it is to make marketing competition fair and transparent. For individuals, take the de facto productivity brand, Ali Abbdal. For him and his team, it is helping people build a life they love.
Knowing the why helps brands craft a clear and concise message. The why provides the core of a brand identity.
Once a brand identifies its core, it can move towards the next layer, the how.
The how details the process of you bringing your mission into reality. If Apple wants to create the best user experience, how are they doing it? It is by using the best available specs in the market and designing their products to have a premium feel.
Or Ali Abbdal? How does he help people lead a life they love? Through free productivity resources online and actionable steps for successful and time-efficient people.
The how brings your why into existence and provides a platform for people to believe in you.
The next layer of this equation is the what. What are the methods by which you deliver your why and how? For Apple, the iPhone, iPad, and Mac are the what.
For individual-led brands, the recent trend is that of the content. Individual brands deliver the what by showing themselves to the world. It is their personality and their life that draws audiences in.
Many platforms enable this, from the GenZ culture of TikTok to thought leadership on LinkedIn. Social media empowers anyone to rise, organizations included and become a cultural phenomenon.
And brand identity is all about it: Becoming a cultural icon.
Keen readers must have noticed that a brand voice follows Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. But it is not that he discovered the formula. He observed that successful leaders and brands followed this type of identity exploration. A differentiating brand builds from the inside.
Brand Identity: For the buyer
Why would the buyer decide to go for your brand? For B2B buying scenarios, they want to mitigate risk without disturbing the status quo.
While purchasing, they think along these verticals:
Will our purchase integrate well within our existing systems?
Does the purchase solve a problem we are facing?
Will it solve any potential risks we will face in the future?
There is a reason why SEMrush, Salesforce, and HubSpot are so easy to integrate with existing software and data collectors. And vice-versa.
Usually, the conversations are around avoiding market failures and adding organization-elevating solutions. For B2B buyers, disruption of their organization is not a safe option. This rings true for most traditional organizations.
According to Gartner’s survey, the B2B buying committee has 6 to 10 individuals. Each individual has concerns and options they would prefer. Yet this group of opinionated individuals manage to reach a conclusion.
ABM is to be greatly appreciated for this. The core of ABM campaigns is a cohesive, consistent, and seamless brand identity.
If the majority in the buying committee: –
Can identify with your brand
Find it relatable
Believe the solutions align with their mission and values.
Accepting the promise to deliver a positive outcome is tangible and achievable.
They will accept your solution as the best in the market for them. With an over-flooded market of goods, services, and personalities, buyers will purchase from you because of trust and perception.
Your brand identity will do the selling. Now, it is your product team’s job to deliver on the promises the voice has made.
Marketing and Storytelling.
Human beings are wired for stories. We derive meaning from understanding a person’s or organization’s story.
Microsoft as the underdog, Or Metaʼs electric rise to stardom. We love a good story. Here is where brand identity is found, in the story of your brand.
Marketing messages can do a lot of things. But it cannot replace a good story. All good stories are marketing, but not all marketing is a good story.
Some messages seem underhanded, while some feel shallow and full of empty promises. A brand’s story relies on resonance and the ability to deliver. A brand that cannot make good on its promise will not find its identity because it is based on false promises. But truth without a distinct voice will fall flat on the audience’s ear.
Marketing teams must deliver the message with creativity, passion, and a deep understanding of their “productˮ and audience.
To understand what works, use a growth marketing approach. Experiment, analyze, create, and reiterate.
Brand voice and identities are an organization and individual way of showing their personality and explicit truth. It is a platform to attract and engage with the right buyer.
However, the line of cultural relevance and customer sensitivities must be considered. What kind of cultural impact does your brand want to make?
Believe it or not, every organization and individual has the power and accessibility to become an icon. The trick is to find the correct audience and the right voice.
Create an identity with your brand positioned to say something unique to you.
Points of Parity and Points of differentiation: The players of innovation
We often compete to be different. But what happens when the audience can’t relate to us? Think, it’s all about parity.
Competition between organizations is a necessary factor for economic growth. As markets worldwide become saturated with solutions, the buyer asks: What do you do differently?
This is an overlooked, almost silent question lurking in their minds.
The customer drives comparison between two businesses. They want something different; they want to be served according to the market standards.
A business must offer what its competition has and more. It’s called parity and differentiation.
Parity and differentiation are crucial for a brand to thrive in saturated markets. While this may seem like a lot to ask for, business success boils down to meeting a customer’s needs better than anyone else.
But how can a brand create a positive loop that benefits customers and organizations alike?
Parity and Differentiation are a positive loop that drives innovation.
Innovation has driven every part of our society and will continue. Especially in the knowledge era, we find novel solutions to most problems. But are these innovations in your opinion?
Innovations are considered great works. To do great work, Paul Graham of Y Combinator says, one must find a knowledge frontier and identify its gaps.
Within the context of brand strategies, it means recognizing the points of parity and bringing differentiation.
It is a continuous process as standards evolve and new opportunities arise. Brands that succeed at this process sit at the top of the food chain for longer periods. They identify emerging trends and cause disruptions. But to understand how you can do it.
You need to understand
What are Points of Parity (POPs) and Points of Differentiation (PODs)?
Points of Parity: Every industry has a standard that they must maintain. If a business wants customer segments to take them seriously, they must provide these services. These services are uncompromising and expected from any player. Explore Lead generation services.
Points of Differentiation: These are the unique selling points of a product. What does a business’ product do differently than a market? PODs empower a business to bring a change that gives them a competitive edge.
What makes them so important?
As we have said before, you could say these two are the dimensions necessary for innovation.
If your product is too different from its competitors and does not do the basics of what is needed, there is a chance it could be ignored completely. On the other hand, if it is just as good as the competition, then there is a zero-sum game. For new companies, it is difficult to supplant an existing player in the field.
For brands and their organizations, if they wish to create a difference, they first need to provide the market with what they want. Blind differentiation or straightforward parity will cause difficulty in competing, slowly causing downfall.
And that is best exemplified by the two products below.
The Google Glass:
Google Glass is an innovative technology. But it was ten years ahead of its time. General people did not understand the use of the glass. A unique product with no competitor. And that is where it failed. Only tech lovers understood what it was trying to do. It was not relatable to the public at large.
There was no parity.
Between privacy concerns and low profits, Google had to discontinue the product, to the dismay of many. In the VR/AR market, it is difficult to imagine the product losing.
Microsoft Zune:
The Zune presented itself as a competition for the iPod. But it did not take off. Zune was plagued by a single problem: It had no differentiating features.
The iPod was established, and it had the advantage of iTunes and Steve Jobs backing it up. Zune, on the other hand, failed at conveying its message. There was no clear message. Zune presented these beautiful and artistically inspired ads but it failed to reach the wide market.
And in the end Zune couldn’t establish a real reason to choose it over the iPod. Causing its failure.
For a brand and product to work, it has to walk the thin line of parity and differentiation. Organizations are bound to this loop, but it is not a negative loop. This loop sets the industry standards and then breaks them by innovating inside the frame of reference.
It allows customers to adapt and change with the product instead of causing a backlash or misunderstanding.
That is true innovation.
Points of Parity: Competitive Advantage
Parity can be used to undermine your competition’s uniqueness by adopting it as a market standard. As such, these innovation loops are not just good for isolated companies but for the competitive market in general.
Point of parity avoid the pitfall of alienating the audience by providing context and a frame of reference for the product. Ensuring that a large portion of the market does not find the product irrelevant or unrelatable.
And they empower a business to disrupt another by emulating or providing a better experience for the end customer.
Example: Google Workspace has been disruptive to Microsoft Office. Google’s tools allow users to collaborate worldwide because of its cloud-native solutions and cost-effective pricing.
It enabled small businesses to set up their workspaces quickly and at cost. On the other hand, big organizations could use sheets, docs, and Google Meet to set up meetings and work on large projects together.
This caused a problem for Microsoft. So, what did Microsoft do to break this advantage? They adopted Google’s toolset. They rebranded Office 365 as Microsoft 365, providing cloud applications and AI-driven features. And integrated Teams in their suite, helping businesses streamline their communication in one place by offering safe file sharing, chatting, and video conferencing.
Even though Microsoft was an early player in the productivity game, Google broke it by adopting its point of parity and then putting their spin on it. They overtook Microsoft by a margin, making Microsoft adopt their differentiation as a new point of parity.
By understanding a market’s point of parity, you can position yourself as a disruptor, thereby adopting the points and differentiating.
Understanding your brand and the market is the road to finding parity and differentiation.
Discovering parity is not as simple as copying the existing trends that your industry falls into.
A phone that does not provide advanced network connectivity will fail to the one that does. Even though it is the same market, there is a difference in expectations.
The two dimensions are closely linked together. And differentiation, essentially, is putting a spin on parity.
To find parity, an organization will usually go through these steps: –
Identify customer expectations and existing solutions.
Match your product to the existing market
If the product is not ready to be understood by the market, it lacks relevant parity.
Integrate customer expectations (A picture editing tool, for example, must have a .raw file editor)
Rematch the product to check if it has the basic functions of an “industry-standard” product.
Once you know the points of parity. What is your brand or organization ready to add to it?
Adding your unique proposition to the market standards will create differentiation and innovation.
For Google Workspace, this was their cloud-native environment.
Equality and difference— that is innovation.
Parity and differentiation cannot exist in silos. To bring forth innovation, organizations must base their brand strategies on implementing the two together.
A unique perspective that does not resonate with the intended buyer will fall flat. And the same set of solutions will not rouse anyone into buying either.
After all, the race is on to provide an unmatched experience. But if the experience is not a mix of known and unknown, the end buyer will be disoriented and unable to understand what you offer, even if it is good.
Only by incorporating old strategies, finding their gaps, and then spinning them will organizations place themselves as customer-centric and innovators at the same time.
Business Intelligence (BI) Platforms to Help Optimize Your Workflow
How can businesses overcome the challenges of data mining to unlock the hidden potential of raw data and convert them into meaningful insights?
Organizational discipline is the key to workflow management. Decluttering and sorting through the data we work with streamlines our operations and boosts productivity.
To play chess, the pieces must be staged in a specific way and move strategically. We consider all the positions on the board before making a move against the opponent.
Managing the heaps of data is one of the most complex tasks. Our business objective should be improving our management skills to curate a smart business strategy. The more sorted the data is, the higher the possibility that it’s manageable, accessible, and easier to understand.
Data is omnipresent but how we interact with and study it remains different. We streamline these ways by engaging and understanding it through data analysis software.
Businesses require such tools for swift and comprehensive analytics to drive growth.
Each department in an organization understands and presents the relevant data differently to condense the condition of the business.
Significant BI tools for workflow management
Business intelligent platforms are crucial tools for workflow management.
These platforms combine software and additional services transforming raw data from multiple channels into actionable insights.
Business intelligence platforms work as catalysts, converting raw data into meaningful information, i.e., declutter and sort. These platforms collect, manage, organize, and analyze large quantities of data to make informed business decisions.
Additionally, it is through their functioning that data becomes accessible. They help businesses retrieve the latest, past, in-house, third-party data, etc., to help evaluate the performance. BI platforms allow the IT and other departments to work with and understand each other beyond making assumptions.
The nervous system of your organization
The right business intelligence platform works as the nervous system of your organization.
Business intelligence software integrated with visualization tools, advanced analytics, and data mining technologies offers a centralized platform.
By providing accessible insights, this software propels your business to become data-driven, and gain a competitive edge by helping simplify customer behavior.
In this fast-paced juncture where everyone requires a kickstart, business intelligence tools help you stay ahead of the curve.
How do these tools help us do that?
In practical terms, the standard BI tool helps identify the snags and address them accurately to streamline workflow operations. Additionally, it has become an efficient tool to optimize overall operations and track key metrics introducing cost-effective solutions into the business structure.
Business intelligence solutions are integral in administering your organization as data-driven.
Automation is the vehicle unleashing its potential to become one.
Use of automation in the fast-paced digital world
Across the business intelligence landscape, automation is crucial to maintaining a competitive edge in the fast-paced digital world.
Automation in business intelligence helps streamline, optimize, process, and analyze the collected data by boosting the capability to save time. Equipped with automation tools, business intelligence platforms underscore strategic and recurrent business decisions and tasks.
Have you heard of the terms, technologically-challenged or technophobe?
This is what you are labeled as if you manually attempt to collect and enter data into the system.
Introducing automation in business intelligence platforms helps save time and effort. Certain automated processes help avoid manual data entry or processing, increasing employee productivity by allowing them to focus on other strategic tasks.
Automation also helps negate other human mistakes. It reduces and corrects any errors in reports, ensuring the business maintains updated, precise, reliable, and accurate data.
In simpler terms, there are specific components of automation through which business intelligence platforms cater to your data processing and management preferences:
Data collection
Data collection is the first and most basic step of data processing.
In this step, raw and unstructured data is collected from different sources (internal and external systems), segregated to find clean authentic data, and structured uniformly for comprehensive data analysis.
Clean data is a requirement for accurate, to-the-point insights. Hence, the automation highlights and eliminates any inconsistencies, duplicates, or discrepancies.
Data Analysis
After collecting, cleaning, and integrating data, the next step is inspecting and transforming data i.e., data analysis.
Automation helps in the reliable data description, modeling, and interpretation to make data-driven decision-making using advanced analytics. In this stage, the tools help identify patterns and trends to establish correlations between data sets.
After finding a correlation, it becomes much simpler to extract meaningful insights, accentuate important information, and draw conclusions to plan a roadmap for the future.
Monitor and Track
After swift data analysis, automated processes leverage the easy access to big data to monitor and track the workflow performance.
It simplifies report generation through customizable dashboards for a clear visual representation of data and automated reporting tools.
By creating and sharing detailed and accurate reports across a user-friendly interface, stakeholders can easily access important business information.
Automation in business intelligence platforms can manage and organize large heaps of data. As the business gradually expands, it is needless to expend additional costs and resources as the automation tools have scaling-up capabilities.
The overall function of business intelligence platforms is catering to real-time insights for organizations without slowing down, such that resources and time are freed up for more significant tasks.
Understanding market trends with business intelligence tools
But the major question is – are they reliable?
Each organization has distinguishable business requirements. Choosing the perfect business intelligence software depends on the department’s needs and the volume of data.
With the data mountains inherently present within, how do businesses harness their power? Through BI systems.
However, before finalizing the right tool, your business has to consider particular specifications –
Ease of access and use: The BI platform should be easily accessible by all employees, i.e., from tech-savvies to technophobes. It should confidently allow the user to configure the data, process natural language, and provide required setup assistance.
Automation capabilities: Automation is the principal foundation of business intelligence platforms. The chosen BI platform should then seamlessly integrate automation, and support natural language insights and visual report creation with one click.
Does it support AI? With the onset of AI, we aim to look past data. To establish simpler customer service structures within the business, the software should allow chatbot assistance and other interactive and conversational AI services.
Seamless Integration: To elevate operational management and seamless integration of processes, is the BI platform part of an ecosystem of apps? This enables an organization-wide improvement in productivity. Does the BI software allow integration with multiple data sources?
Broadly, your chosen business intelligence tools should be adept at data management. It should assist data warehousing, allow easy data mining, and aid in data modeling processes.
Top services to manage your workflow
The ideal tools and services for your business can transform your workflow and instill productivity.
Here are the 5 best business intelligence platforms of 2024:
QlikSense by Qlik
Qlik is available for Web, iOS, and Android.
QlikSense comprises a diverse range of visualization and data reporting features offering versatile options.
QlikSense is a complete, fully customized analytics solution.
Sample data is already available within QlikSense which saves you the importing time. This BI platform works efficiently with one dataset or hundreds, enabling comprehensive visuals detailing the sales numbers.
These are structured into customizable graphs and provide an overview of the dataset(s). After the platform completes uploading and visualizing your data, its built-in AI-powered Insight Advisor allows you to ask questions regarding natural language, insights, summaries, and predictive analysis across different data sources.
One of the best features of this platform is its accessibility. Available across different devices, you can access your reports and graphs to make edits anytime and anywhere – all-in-one-functionality.
Microsoft Power BI by Microsoft
Microsoft Power BI is available for Web, iOS, and Android.
Power BI is one of the most widely used business intelligence platforms.
It allows effortless integration with other Microsoft products to quickly track any edits/changes made to the available data. One of its most supportive features is access to Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams with a click.
Microsoft Power BI, a web-based business analytics suite, highlights real-time trends and offers valuable insights through comprehensive data visualization. This BI tool seamlessly integrates and is highly intuitive. If two datasets are connected, it can recognize the correlation, and changes to one are visible in the other dataset as well.
Zoho Analytics by Zoho
Zoho Analytics is available for Web, iOS, and Android.
Zoho Analytics is a self-service business intelligence software.
Zoho Analytics offers in-depth analysis and reports using automatic data syncing, scheduled periodically. This BI tool is one of the straightforward platforms to navigate and learn through a free on-premise plan.
It has built-in AI-powered features such as conversational AI, unlimited detailed reports, and predictive analytics and allows third-party integrations.
Zoho Analytics is designed to help solo entrepreneurs manage and analyze big data, even for the novices.
If you do not understand its functionalities, it offers demo videos with a user-friendly interface with walk-throughs.
Zoho Analytics leverages visual data representation to signify data flow from one end of the pipeline to another. It offers geo maps, i.e., map layering that unearths multiple data layers and identifies the hidden dimensions.
One of its most fascinating features? Immersive report viewing between different tabs, widgets, and an upgraded dashboard builder.
Domo Data Experience Platform by Domo
Domo is available for Web, iOS, and Android.
With cloud computing taking over the internet for flexible resource sharing and economic scaling, Domo is one of the best business intelligence tools for optimizing your workflow.
Domo allows seamless data integration from multiple sources such as databases, spreadsheets, social media, etc. It is entirely cloud-based with a faster load speed, making it easier for multinationals and small businesses.
Imagine it as a data library that connects, supporting over 1000 pre-built ones. Once the data is connected, managing it is as easy as a pie.
Additionally, it helps prepare your data, identify relationships, automate, and filter without any prior SQL knowledge. The Domo app hosts APIs, data management, and manipulation tools for all your data management preferences. It can also make the required data calculations with the Beast Mode available in the app.
Tableau by Salesforce
Tableau is available only on the web.
Tableau is one of the dynamic data visualization builders that allows diverse sharing options for team collaboration.
Tableau is one of the top-rated BI tools for team collaboration. It specializes in data visualization and discovery and its collaborative capabilities.
Using this, you can share dashboards and workbooks with your teammates. They can leave the necessary comments on the work and collaborate on the data analysis process to streamline workflow.
Tableau supports data integration from multiple platforms such as SalesForce, Google Analytics, and MS Excel and has in-built workbooks, known as Accelerators, to support the imported data. Tableau offers different products depending on your business needs, such as Tableau Server for organizations, Tableau Desktop for the general audience, and Tableau Online for hosted analytics.
Making important business decisions in the minimum amount of time is the need of the hour.
Business intelligence platforms rely on technological advancements to analyze data and help employees and high-level executives make significant decisions.
The business intelligence platforms help administrators extract, monitor, and enhance data from internal and external systems while producing reports and dashboards easily accessible to stakeholders and decision-makers.
Graphs, infographics, and scorecards are increasingly necessary to develop these reports.
The BI platforms offer a helping hand in Zoho analytics, data mining, modeling, and statistical analytics to harness insightful conclusions and curate these embedded graphics smoothly.
Data is the backbone of every industry.
Business intelligence platforms offer a structure to this heap by organizing and attributing meaning to them.
With the focus on automation in recent years, the demand for BI software will increase significantly for all businesses as they rush to propel their decision-making processes with confidence that their data is accurate and trustworthy.
AI turns a 50 year-old-dream of scientists into a reality! A chess genius creates history.
For a groundbreaking discovery, Sir Demis Hassabi was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Google DeepMind Director, Dr. John Jumper. Hassabis, the Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs invented AlphaFold— a unique system that integrates predictive analysis of protein 3D structures from their amino acid sequences.
Over recent years, the world has witnessed impactful transformations introduced by the advent of artificial intelligence in various domains. There is a new addition to this list of applications—protein design.
Protein structure is increasingly complex, involving a series of amino acids in different arrangements/patterns. For several decades, researchers have attempted to decipher proteins’ 3D structures with various experimental techniques that involved extensive procedures. Predicting the structure is cumbersome and intense, but not anymore. The latest AI-integrated innovation has simplified this process and made it possible.
Before pioneering AI to decode protein structures, Demis Hassabi was a chess prodigy. He believes that the strategic thinking he applied in chess was the driving force behind his AI journey. In 2018, when he first competed with the algorithm, it was based on a comparative analysis. However, the updated model added deep learning which is quick to identify patterns and determine protein structures accurately.
There is no doubt that the AI revolution is an asset for not only brands but also scientists. It is paving the way for technological adoption in developing novel solutions for complex processes such as protein sequencing. As the world continues to adopt and integrate AI on a larger scale, we are sure to experience more marvels thanks to this technological advancement.
Weaknesses in your sales pipeline are detrimental. Can the right sales pipeline metrics help elevate the buyer’s journey?
Numbers and data, when isolated from each other, are meaningless. They exist within specific contexts.
We turn them into a quantifiable metric by tracking, analyzing, and comparing them to churn out meaning. This is how metrics help us gauge the effectiveness of a method.
Across the marketing and sales landscape, metrics help us assess and measure performance or production. It quantifies your marketing efforts to measure their effectiveness in boosting conversion rates and lead sales velocity.
Sales pipeline metrics operate in the same manner.
Sales pipeline: The basic understanding.
Sales pipeline is a visual representation of how your prospects move through the different stages in the funnel, i.e., from initial contact to closing a deal. Simply put, it helps analyze the overall buyer journey – what’s causing the drop-offs or why it’s taking so long to close a deal.
Sales pipelines are unique for every business and industry. What it generally looks like depends on the buyer’s journey, depending on their interests, preferences, priorities, and research.
Each buyer moves distinctly to accommodate the pipeline according to their journey, i.e., personalizing and making it effective. More than being sturdy, the pipeline is elastic and adapts to the prospective movements.
It generally includes three processes: lead generation, lead nurturing, and deal closing.
And, these are broader stages covered within the sales pipeline:
Prospecting ⇒ Lead qualification ⇒ Initial contact ⇒ Official proposal ⇒ Negotiation ⇒ Closing the deal
The most crucial objective here is that the pipeline should be able to handle the volume of leads without compromising the engagement quality or performance. If your brand is witnessing low conversion rates, certain challenges within your pipeline should be addressed.
Some of the common challenges your sales and marketing team may encounter include:
Lack of historical data on closed deals
Off-market target audience guiding leads off-base
Absence of measurable targets
Lack of visibility or knowledge regarding the status of the sales pipeline
These are the potential weak spots of your sales pipeline.
So, how do we overcome them?
The Importance of Sales Pipeline Metrics in Driving Success
Certain metrics let us assess how to alleviate these concerns and improve the different stages across the sales journey.
Pipeline metrics are crucial.
Each team member should familiarize themselves with tracking them regularly. Even if the sales pipeline metrics vary for businesses, some general ones should still be tracked by your team.
Understanding what drives your prospects to close a deal in a win or what makes them drop off midway through these metrics also offers significant opportunities for improvement.
This is why choosing the relevant metrics takes precedence.
How can you choose the right sales pipeline metrics that align with your business goals?
1. Align metrics with the business goal you wish to achieve.
Don’t just track numbers; ensure that these numbers boost you closer to your business goals. This data, when siloed, doesn’t mean anything. But within the right context, they mark your progress towards your objectives.
For example, if your goal is to elevate the organization’s market share, then total revenue wouldn’t offer you the nuanced picture. Here, tracking the share of wallet and sales per territory makes more sense.
The crucial factor here is taking a granular approach. If you are dominating the market, how do you ensure that it remains ten years down the line?
2. Leverage a balanced approach.
Identifying bottlenecks is as vital as predicting the success of your sales strategies. To get a more molecular insight into where the lacks and gaps are most prevalent, you can’t just focus on certain metrics while dismissing the rest.
It’s true that the approach must revamp in today’s modern sales landscape. But traditionally relevant metrics take as much precedence as implementing new ones.
This means taking a balanced approach to choosing the right metrics.
Your strategic framework should entail a mix of lagging and leading indicators – one that demonstrates the past performance (closed deals) and ones that forecast (qualified leads).
A balance between them can help your marketing and sales teams to revisit, review, strategize, and analyze accurately.
3. Assess periodically and update your metrics.
One of the most strategic means of selecting the right sales pipeline metrics is assessing what’s working and what isn’t, and updating the list.
It’s crucial to start from somewhere. Each data point can give you the slightest idea into what your sales strategy needs to rework on.
What worked before might not work today. Don’t let the stale metrics prove your efforts ineffective. So, review them periodically to ascertain that they align with the current business challenges and requirements.
4. Get a comprehensive understanding of the entire customer journey.
Numbers wouldn’t always tell you where the rupture is. Most often, sales hit the wall while making a sale or post it.
This is because most only focus on pre-sale metrics and interactions. This damages the customer experience and leads to missed opportunities.
To avoid this, it’s necessary to track the customer experience, too. Metrics, such as sales cycle length, can offer you a 360-degree insight into what’s truly going wrong.
The bottom line?
The sales pipeline metrics you end up choosing must be actionable. If they aren’t, it poses a significant obstacle for you.
These metrics should illustrate a specific behavior – what is happening, what has changed, and what can be done about this.
The right sales metrics don’t merely offer postmortem pipeline analysis. They allow you to proactively make informed decisions and offer clarity into nuggets that often go unnoticed.
Don’t measure everything. Focus on those that align with your goals.
Fundamental sales pipeline metrics to amplify your efforts
Opportunities
The total number of opportunities matters because it portrays the results of your lead generation efforts. Your lead generation efforts should target prospects fitting the ICP, i.e., the ideal customer profile.
What factors qualify prospects as opportunities? There are some criteria that most businesses focus on.
Demographics – age, gender, income, family structure, education, occupation, etc.
Firmographics – company size, ownership, market share, location, sales cycle stage, financial performance, etc.
Psychographics – value proposition, goals, interests, lifestyle choices, etc.
A prospect does not have to follow each criterion, as they vary according to the organization.
To track this, teams must prioritize lead quality because it aptly demonstrates which leads are the most valuable and can easily convert into opportunities.
By analyzing which accounts you count as an opportunity, your team can optimize its marketing efforts and improve lead-nurturing processes to keep them engaged as they move through the pipeline.
How can we assess lead quality?
To simplify this, your sales team can use the BANT or MEDICC lead qualification framework.
The opportunities should be tracked and assessed weekly, monthly, or bimonthly, depending on the preferences of your company. However, it can also be done regularly in case of rapid market fluctuations, multiplying lead volumes, or during push season due to an event.
New Leads
The number of new leads entering your pipeline offers an overview of the success of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, it helps outline your brand’s market reach and offers quantifiable data to back your efforts.
It is necessary to highlight these new leads to establish whether your lead generation strategies are efficient.
Once in a while, we should question whether we are chasing hollow leads with no future potential and wasting our resources.
The end solution follows a comprehensive tracking system and establishes a timeframe depending on the pace and volume of generated leads. Document the number of leads, segment them, analyze the trends, and then compare the different lead-gen efforts to help optimize your strategies.
Overall, lead quality reflects your sales and marketing efforts – how effective they are. But it could largely differ from business size to industry to marketing strategies.
Hence, there’s nothing as simple as “good” or “bad” leads.
By documenting the acquired leads regularly against how many of them actually convert, the results will automatically indicate the performance of your strategies.
MQL to SQL Conversion Rates
This conversion rate calculates the number of marketing-qualified leads who convert into sales-qualified leads. They show interest, sign up, provide their contact info, and subscribe for a demo period to further inspect the solutions offered to them.
These metrics highlight the performance of your lead qualification strategies.
An effective lead-nurturing process will eventually illustrate high engagement results, which may translate to high conversion rates. This indicates a healthy alignment between the sales and marketing teams.
How often do we assess MQL to SQL conversion rates?
Calculate MQL to SQL conversion rates monthly. With this, you will allow the lead qualification processes to work at their own pace, enabling you to make adjustments and understand if they are returning the desired outcomes.
The acceptable range for this conversion rate depends on the industry, business objectives, and past performance – your MQL-SQL conversion rate benchmarks.
Lead Velocity Rate
Velocity measures whether an object is accelerating or decelerating. This applies to a sales pipeline. The lead velocity rate compares the leads generated in the current business period to the previous one.
The velocity rate calculates qualified leads, helping you analyze whether your lead-generation efforts are fruitful and effective. It aids in strategic resource allocation and sales processes, amplifying your efforts.
This metric is crucial to understanding your business revenue growth.
If the number of generated leads for the latest sales cycle remains similar or lower than the previous sales cycle, you know you’re doing something wrong. Thus, it should be assessed monthly or quarterly, depending on your company’s needs.
There is no acceptable velocity rate.
It depends on the industry and your business. Remember, you are your biggest competition.
In every sales cycle, the target should be to generate more leads through improved strategies compared to the previous one.
Average Deal Size
Average deal size is another significant factor that measures the health of your sales pipeline. It represents the monetary value ascribed to a sale.
Tracking the average deal size your business is partaking in helps with sales and demand forecasting.
In the long term, regularly tracking average deal sizes can assist in optimizing and streamlining strategies for marketing and sales initiatives. It is important to reach your brand targets and meet broader market conditions.
Sales Cycle Duration
Analyzing the monetary value of a sale is as significant as calculating the duration of the deal. This metric focuses on the details. It offers an insight into how a deal got stuck and why, with ways to improve it.
Sales cycle duration is the average time a deal spends at every specific stage of the sales cycle. Tracking minute errors resulting in potential delays is easier by calculating the sales cycle duration.
Additionally, this provides crucial insight into the sales cycle length, i.e., the time it takes from the initial contact to the lead being closed. This is also one of the sales pipeline metrics to track.
After all, this also affects the time a deal takes to close.
There are three metrics that we are addressing – average sales cycle duration, sales cycle length, and time taken to close.
These three metrics also help sales forecasting, so your brand can establish practical targets.
A long sales duration can cause a huddle in your pipeline, resulting in relatively high lost deals or drop-offs.
Both these metrics depend on diverse factors, such as the complexity of the product or service. The sales cycles across the B2B landscape are generally longer due to the several decision-makers in the buying committee. And this might delay the purchase as each of them holds their interests and pain points.
You should curate your marketing techniques based on your target market to overcome such hiccups.
Establish priority and build trust regarding the prospects.
Conduct customer research and feedback programs.
Provide social proof through value propositions that align with the prospect’s preferences and pain points.
Time-sensitive offers that urge prospects to take action.
Streamline and integrate your lead nurturing and sales enablement strategies to retarget interested leads and stay on their tail.
These sales pipeline KPIs are mutually dependent on each other to some extent. But their goal remains the same, i.e., measuring how efficiently your sales and marketing efforts convert leads into paying customers.
Number of Deals Won
This pipeline metric tracks the number of successful deals. This is relative to the total number of opportunities during a specific period.
Conversion rates are crucial to drive business growth.
The higher the conversion rates, the faster your business can attain its goals. This is why conversion rates are one of the most crucial sales metrics.
If the conversion rates are low or don’t align with industry benchmarks, you can outline fresher roadmaps by identifying the areas of improvement.
What factors contribute to a successful deal? What have you done differently to win a deal than the one dropped off?
These are the questions you ask your sales and marketing team while analyzing the conversion rates and other trends in your data.
Most often, the opportunities may be high, but the win rates are low, signifying a major lack in the closing stages of the pipeline.
Age of a Deal
This is one of the effective and simple metrics you can use when a deal is taking an unnecessarily long time to move through the pipeline, or the prospect themselves are taking too long to make a decision.
With an increasingly long decision-making period, it is less likely that a prospect converts.
You need to assess why the lead didn’t convert and where they got stuck.
How do you avoid this? – Identify the bottlenecks, remove them, and boost the sales velocity.
To move this forward, your company should equip the sales representatives with the right resources and sales enablement or acceleration tools to drive the purchasing process.
By accelerating the sales processes, the age of the deal will automatically reduce, offering space for more successful closes.
Sales Rep Activity
This metric offers insight into the sales team members’ sales performance. Measuring this helps foster team productivity and takes team accountability.
It outlines how your sales team performs through outreach emails sent, the number of calls made, and the meetings booked by each sales representative. Track the sales and categorize them based on factors such as rep, team, region, product/service(s), etc. using efficient CRM tools.
Through the results, your team can assess whether the sales rep is compensated for their contributions. And once analyzed, underperformers can be equipped with more resources and support from their superiors.
How do you improve the number of top performers, boost sales rep activity, and amplify sales?
The lack of correct skills and knowledge is a huge obstacle. To improve this, offering regular training and coaching sessions to newbies is a way to go.
The training should include actively engaging with prospects and staying updated with industry trends. Actively assessing and improving individual sales per rep will help boost the sales team’s productivity.
Total Pipeline Value
This sales pipeline metric measures the total value of deals in your pipeline. The total pipeline value depends on the value of the sales opportunity, the pipeline stage, and the time taken to close it.
By tracking the value of the current opportunity, it is possible to measure the total forecasted business revenue. Hence, it is a valuable metric for sales forecasting.
If you compare your total pipeline value with your win rates, it can help you forecast how much sales revenue could be generated at the end of the sales cycle. If combined with the sales cycle length, it can help analyze the total revenue potential.
To calculate TPV, each opportunity is provided with a specific monetary value, helping to estimate the total sales amount.
Customer Churn Rate
Also known as the customer turnover rate, it’s the number of customers you’re losing or drop-off from the purchasing journey.
This can be quite a requisite KPI for businesses, as it indicates customers are losing interest in your product or service.
However, this might not be the actual case.
Drop-off rates are as important as win rates. It becomes difficult to identify the improvement areas without highlighting the weak points.
Customer churn rate is a necessary metric in subscription business models.
It calculates the customer percentage that doesn’t renew and cancels their subscription services within a month or a year. Hence, this pipeline metric is significant for companies that rely on a recurring pricing model like SaaS or subscription services.
Implement CRM tools to determine how to boost the workings of your subscription models. And highlight the number of paying customers currently compared to the beginning.
⇒Customer churn rate formula = (the number of customers lost/total customers at the beginning of the period) *100
For the broader picture, the customer churn rate helps highlight the forecasted revenue, improve customer loyalty, prioritize customer success, and enhance marketing strategies.
Average Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer acquisition cost signifies the company’s expenditure on acquiring new customers. It includes marketing and sales expenses, salaries, overheads, commissions, bonuses, etc.
The main expenses entail the content, training, software, and other overhead costs. The goal is to prioritize investments that generate regular returns with minimum maintenance costs, such as curating content-specific blog posts.
It helps you assess the profitability, i.e., the amount you spend on a customer compared to the profit you make from selling your services to the customer.
This metric helps with resource allocation, making your customer acquisition process efficient and simpler. Simply put, there is no significant need to focus too long on this process. Sometimes, an expensive customer might not mean that they are equally profitable.
Your sales and marketing teams should incorporate smart and streamlined strategies. An uncommonly high CAC might mean inefficiencies that require vigilance to enable long-term stability.
Remember to research your target audience. Host automated testing regularly to maximize your ROI using the existing customer acquisition efforts.
How can you calculate the customer acquisition cost?
First, add all the sales and marketing expenses. Then, divide this total by the number of new customers.
⇒ CAC = (sales expenses + marketing expenses)/total number of new customers
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
After spending an ample amount on your cost acquisition efforts, how do you assess whether it is profitable?
Through customer lifetime value.
This metric calculates the value the customer brings to your business, including the amount they spend on your services, their time as customers, and their purchase frequencies.
By taking individual CLV into account, you can analyze the value of your entire customer base. It will offer insight into how much effort you should spend on customer acquisition.
To enhance CLV, focus on customer retention.
Implement new customer service strategies promptly, addressing their concerns to build a strong professional relationship. When the customers are satisfied and happy, they are likely to remain loyal and purchase your services.
The most significant strategy for driving customer lifetime value is improving customer service, personalized recommendations, discount offers, user-friendly websites, etc.
So, finding a solution based on the metrics can help you improve your sales and marketing strategies. One of which would be to reduce the stages in the sales funnel that are unnecessarily time-consuming.
Now that we have listed the most significant and common sales pipeline KPIs, why is it important to track the right pipeline metrics?
Because even the slightest mistakes can render their efforts ineffective, hampering the ROI, and congesting the pipeline.
Fundamental mistakes teams make while tracking sales pipeline metrics
We’ve established that the right sales pipeline metrics go beyond conversion rates and total revenue. The actual challenge lies in aligning the metrics with business needs and the growth stage.
A majority of teams overlook the nuances, leading to a conundrum. This creates obvious mistakes that fester, especially due to a significant knowledge gap.
What are some of the fundamental ones?
Isolated focus on vanity metrics: Even today, businesses continue to prioritize numbers that look good in theory but don’t represent the actual performance. This could create a false sense of progress, while deeper performance issues remain overlooked. And even mislead or confuse the stakeholders.
Misaligned or irrelevant metrics: Most teams don’t take the time to understand the broader objectives and how they align with sales performance. This can easily derail your focus, not making any significant contributions to your business’s current priorities. And SDRs might end up pushing low-margin deals, delaying crucial shifts.
Overlooking the context: It’s context that takes precedence over raw numbers. Metrics should be segmented by channel type, customer profiles, etc., to spotlight performance gaps. An inaccurate picture can lead to strategies that only work for a specific segment. Marketing and sales must fine-tune their approach accordingly.
Each of the above mistakes can have a compounding effect while tracking your sales pipeline metrics. They distort the overall assessment that impacts how the resources are allocated and how strategies are executed.
But there’s an antidote: intentional, agile, and goal-aligned metrics that align with the evolving sales and growth model.
A healthy sales pipeline is like a cocktail glass.
After passing through this milestone, the opportunity pool should remain approximately the same, and the probability that the opportunity is won is highly likely. This is the make-up of a healthy sales pipeline.
To some extent, we may think about how the shape of the sales pipeline aligns with reality.
The stages and shape of this movement vary according to the buyers, industry, and sales processes.
Why is sales pipeline analysis crucial? To optimize your sales performance, client experience, and drive business growth.
Maintaining a simple and efficient sales pipeline is healthy for your business and sales revenue. But how do we know what “healthy” looks like?
FAQs
1. How can you effectively assess your sales pipeline?
A. Assessing your sales pipeline isn’t about counting closed deals or appointments booked. It’s about deal velocity and step-by-step conversion rate, among others.
To effectively assess its health, your teams must dive into comprehensive reports to spotlight bottlenecks and performance gaps. And segregate the metrics’ analysis by deal type or client profiles, or lead source, etc., to identify hidden ruptures.
2. What are sales pipeline metrics?
A. Sales pipeline metrics are qualitative and quantitative values that track the number and quality of created opportunities. These are crucial to demonstrate the health of your sales pipeline – whether your sales strategies are bearing the desired outcomes.
The common metrics are pipeline value, customer acquisition cost, customer churn rate, deal age, number of deals won, etc. A mix of both lagging and leading metrics provides a curious insight into what’s happening and the revenue potential.
3. How can you track sales pipeline metrics?
A. Generally, sales pipeline metrics can be tracked through your CRM systems through detailed reports and comprehensive dashboards. Your focus should be directed towards updating the deal progression, individual sales rep performance, sales cycle length, etc, ones that actually align with your core business goals.
Regularly tracking these metrics can help you tweak your sales strategies to elevate their effectiveness. And improve revenue forecasting.
4. What benchmarks or industry standards should I compare my sales funnel metrics with?
Industry benchmarks such as a 25-30% win rate and a 3x pipeline coverage ratio can add an advantageous starting point for you. And one of the most relevant benchmarks to compare with is your organization’s historical data.
While focusing on the competitor can help you outline a strategic edge, prioritizing your internal metrics can highlight what needs tweaking, whether it’s cross-departmental alignment or an update in infrastructure.
5. What are the most common pitfalls businesses face in tracking sales funnel metrics?
One of the most common pitfalls is depending on inaccurate data that doesn’t offer any useful insights. They can be misleading for your teams as well as stakeholders. Additionally, most businesses make the mistake of tracking the wrong metrics, overlooking segmentation, or merely focusing on lagging metrics.
With an undefined sales strategy, reaching the critical mile may seem like an endless struggle. These 5 steps map out the route to closing more deals.
The success of your brand relies on a solid sales foundation. Without knowing the critical markers, it is hard to measure sales performance. The lack of a clearly defined sales strategy may be why 45% of surveyed sellers believe their biggest challenge is incomplete data. When your sales team follows a system, it allows them to take the right actions at the right time. The 5-step sales process is a structure to improve the efficiency of your closed deals. It is a guideline to ensure that you are on track and open to tweaking your sales approach.
While the sales approach requires tailoring as per your product or services, the five-step sales process lays a strong foundation to get the pipeline moving. Your sales team can utilize this linear approach to move through each step efficiently. These sales steps allow you to seamlessly monitor the performance and identify gaps that require improvement.
Mastering this framework makes it easier to tweak or modify your sales process strategy in alignment with your goals and the client’s needs.
Step 1: Prospecting
Prospecting involves developing a list of prospects likely to convert into paying accounts. This step has everything to do with researching potential leads and knowing them as much as possible. Understanding the target niche is the stepping stone to drive a sales strategy that yields the results. Focus on your ICP instead of randomly targeting a pool of audience and going nowhere in the journey.
Step 2. Connecting with the customers
Ace the first impression with your target audience. While interacting with the prospects, work toward not making the conversation sales-y. The goal of this step is to transform from a generic call to schedule a first appointment that could potentially close a deal. So, setting the tone right is of utmost importance here. Building a strong relationship with your client can go a long way.
Step 3: Identifying the pain points
Spend enough time figuring out the challenges of your target audience. You can begin by asking relevant questions to draw out the problem and understand how your offering could address the pain points. As you do your research, also find out their preferred solutions and whether they have budget constraints. Communicate your understanding of their problem and how your solution can help. When doing so, emphasize the winning points while at the same time not sounding too sales-centric.
Step 4: Sealing the Deal
Closing a deal involves a series of discussions and reasonings. As you move towards the final step, make sure you walk through the right questions. Talk about the details of your sales flow chart and be open to handling questions and client objections. Have a clear plan in place as to what you will do if the client objects or if they are not ready to commit yet. Such preparation will pave the way for overcoming roadblocks swiftly.
Step 5: Keeping up with the Follow-up
The journey doesn’t stop at signing a deal. Once you have closed a sale, make sure to follow up with the client. You need to make sure that the client receives the product/service as discussed and the whole experience simulates customer satisfaction. This small initiative can work in your favor, promoting brand loyalty. A happy client is likely to be loyal to your brand. At this stage, do not hesitate to ask for referrals to generate new leads.
Wrapping up
Sales are centered around fulfilling milestones. Every aspect of the sales cycle revolves around garnering the right clients, identifying their pain points, strengthening bonds with them, and offering an ideal solution. These 5 steps can be a real game-changer for your business, aligning with your vision and adding structure to an otherwise complex sales process. You gain clarity and can deliver the best solution to address the customer’s pain points.
