The One Big Metric, Our Secret To Attracting B2B Leads Like A Magnet

Hello friends!

You know the awesome thing about digital? It’s that you can track EVERYTHING.

You know the terrible thing about digital? It’s that you can track EVERYTHING.

And that’s why we’ve come up with a concept we call, “One Big Metric.” It actually comes from a book called The ONE Thing by Gary Keller where he examines commonalities from some awesome businesses such as Google and Starbucks. “What is it that makes these companies so good?”

And it was that they focused on one thing. So for Google, it was search. For Starbucks, it was coffee. And of course they veered from there later on, but… that’s what they focused on and that’s what they mastered first.

So the question Gary asks is…

“What is the one thing that I can do right now such that by doing so, it makes everything else easier, or otherwise unnecessary?”

What’s this have to do with web analytics or digital marketing?

Well, we’ve taken that concept and we’ve changed it to be…

“One Big Metric.”

We have a lot of metrics flying around… how do we know that we’re tracking the right things?

Well, we track everything (of course), but if we change the question that Gary Keller has posed in his book, we’ve changed it to sound more like this:

“What is the One Big Metric that we can focus on and impact such that by doing so, everything else becomes easier or otherwise unnecessary?”

So for most companies, that’s leads or sales… or it’s as close to the money as we can get. It’s ROI. It’s return on ad spend. It’s return on investment.

So: clicks? Great. Impressions? Okay… Engaged users on your site? That’s better —

Leads? Very good. ROI? Revenue? THAT is the holy grail.

And so when you use this lens, when you look through this lens, your whole world will change.

So what’s your One Big Metric? Follow me to the whiteboard real quick, let’s take a look at this…

Alright, thanks for joining me at the whiteboard. So, One Big Metric.

Every business is different. And often, you can’t really get all the way down to revenue — you can’t track all of your activities down to revenue. Especially if you’re like a mass-market, B2C company such as GEICO. You have all these billboards, and commercials… you’re looking at metrics such as:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Video Views

And it’s hard to say, “Hey, this commercial drove this much revenue!” It’s darn near impossible. Even if you have tracked phone numbers that go to call centers and you’re logging whisper messages and all that… it’s going to be very hard to track that all the way down to revenue.

Now, if you’re like a niche B2B outfit and most of your leads come from referral or through the web, well then maybe we’re able to track it all the way down to revenue.

And that’s what we at WebMechanix are really interested in. We like to see how these metrics (impressions, clicks, views, etc.) come all the way down to sales. Sales is revenue, revenue is “Return on Investment.”

We love it when our clients call us and say… “We got another deal!” or “We got another lead that’s going to turn into a deal!” “Another Opportunity,” or “We got Marketing-Qualified Leads.”

That’s the world we live in. And we love to see our impact, the difference that we make, that our work makes on the One Big Metric.

But there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. And perhaps the most important thing you can do is think about this question. Think about “What is the One Big Metric and how am I tracking it all the way down to revenue?”

So go do that, come back, report back — leave me a comment, email, tweet, whatever you want. And we’ll see you another time.