How to Know If Distributor Marketing Is Working: Key Analytics

Implementing distributor marketing strategies is great. But that is only half of the work. The second half is tracking and analyzing your business metrics, so you can know whether or not those strategies are actually effective. At Winsby, we built a key metrics portal for our clients, so they can see how much of an actual impact our marketing efforts are having on their company, their sales, and their overall growth.

If you want to know whether or not your distributor marketing strategies are working, then you need to look at the following business metrics.

What business metrics and key analytics should you track?

There are a wide variety of numbers that will help you gauge the health of your company and whether your distributor marketing efforts are producing actual results. Here are some of the most important business metrics we include in our clients’ Winsby portal:

• Customer retention rate
• Net growth rate for number of accounts
• The number of active accounts
• Customer purchase frequency
• Top customers
• When customers purchased last & who hasn't purchased recently
• New customers
• Lost customers
• Historical revenue
• Growth in the number of invoices

Many of these key analytics correspond to specific marketing activities. Below are several examples.

Email marketing and purchase frequency

One of the best ways to know whether your distributor marketing emails are effective or not is by looking at your customer purchase frequency. This metric measures how often individual customers buy your products or services. The bottom line is that your marketing emails should be generating sales or contributing to sales by moving customers along in your sales funnel. At Winsby, our clients’ customers who receive our emails purchase two to three times more often than customers who don’t receive our emails.

If your marketing emails are not generating a comparable increase in purchase frequency, then you may want to evaluate how you can improve them to generate more sales.

Customer satisfaction surveys and your retention rate

A crucial piece of any distributor marketing and sales strategy are customer satisfaction surveys. They reveal what is most important to your customers, how your customers want to be communicated with, and any issues that your customers are having. The best way to know if your satisfaction surveys are working or not is to look at your number of lost customers and your overall customer retention rate.

For example, at Winsby our customer satisfaction surveys improve our clients’ retention rates by 20% to 30%. Again, if you are conducting surveys and you are not seeing these types of improvements in your business metrics and key analytics, then there is room for improvement.

Sales rep performance

Analytics are critical for understanding how your sales team is doing. Business metrics for sales rep performance matter, because they provide a quick look at who is underperforming and how they can improve. When managers understand these analytics, they can set goals for the team and for individual sales reps, then see who is achieving the goals and who is not. By tracking performance, you see whether your sales team is meeting targets and can quickly identify anyone who is not.

Compare the performances of your sales reps using metrics like sales conversion, appointment setting, customer retention, and revenue.

If you want to know for sure whether your distributor marketing is working and how it can be improved, then you need to start looking at all the key analytics. Contact Winsby today to set up your own business metrics portal.