In my opinion, the most important metric that’s missing from email marketing and CRM systems is the company-level response rate.

Because many B2B sales cycles are long and involve multiple people, the B2B marketer needs a way to track open & response rates from entire organizations–not just individual leads.

The benefit of tracking an organization’s engagement with your marketing is that you will be able to find hidden buyers within your existing lead pool.

Consider a buyer at the top of the sales funnel. Maybe the boss forwarded a junior employee a marketing email for your webinar. The boss wants to know a little more about your services but isn’t ready to jump on a sales call.

If you get a hold of that individual employee and they say “not interested” you will most likely give up on that company–because there isn’t enough time to figure out if someone else in the organization is truly interested.

Company Level Response Rates could expose hidden buyers for your products by measuring the engagement with your ads by multiple people at a target company. If there is high company level engagement, a salesperson should keep digging even though one person said “no.”

Of course, if there is not interest from the rest of the organization it is time to move on to other prospects.

Invented: Circa June 2011