Use data to grow by thinking like a Rev Ops pro (📈 MTN #14)

In this edition

• 📊 HubSpot funnel metrics for B2B companies
• 💡 GA4 “Events” all SaaS companies should be tracking
• 📈 Using data to grow, by thinking like a Revenue Operations pro

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📊 Featured Benchmark Data (from Benchmark Groups)

HubSpot marketing and deal funnel metrics for B2B companies

Median HubSpot CRM & Marketing performance for B2B companies (May 2023):

• Sessions: 5.6k
• Deals Created: 32
• New Opportunities: 7
• Deals Closed Won: 6

Join this group to view more metrics, and how your company stacks up. See if you’re ahead or behind the curve, and where you can improve.

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💡 Trends & Insights (from Reports & Surveys)

GA4 “Events” all SaaS companies should be tracking

It’s crucial to build a marketing and sales funnel that lets you see how your company is performing at each stage of the customer journey. 

From the time prospects visit your website, to the time they sign up, purchase, or close a deal, you should be able to visualize performance at each stage. 

For SaaS companies, many of these funnel stages take place on your website and in your product. And chances are, you’re using Google Analytics to track some, or all of them.

Prior to GA4 (in the fondly remembered era of Universal Analytics), companies would measure “Goals” to track the performance of user behaviors they considered important. But with the advent of GA4, these funnel stages can be tracked as “Events”.

Similar to Goals, you can create Events for any important visitor action you want to track over time. For example, many SaaS companies will want to track things like:

• Homepage conversion rate
• Product page conversion rate
• Pricing page conversion rate
• % of blog readers who visit product pages

According to Databox Benchmark data from 193 SaaS companies in February 2023, the median Events per Session was 7.47 and the median Event Count per User was 10.99.

In other words, each user visiting one of those SaaS websites in February logged a total of 11~ events. The top quartile logged 17, while the bottom quartile logged 8~. 

Obviously, the events a SaaS company tracks are going to depend heavily on its unique strategy, positioning, and growth stage. But there are certain events every SaaS company should be tracking. And we wanted to put together a resource to help you understand and start tracking them in GA4 (if you aren’t already).

To do that, we surveyed a number of companies to see which events they find most important.

Here are some of the insights:

• Over 60% of our respondents agreed that GA4 has provided a clearer overview of activity across their digital properties
• Of 5 main funnel stages (Acquisition, Conversion, Adoption, Navigation, and Retention), Acquisition is by far the most closely tracked (nearly 2x the others), followed by Retention
• Top events companies set up are designed to track acquisition & engagement (new user sign-up, sessions, page views, etc), lead gen and conversion (chat interactions, demo form requests, etc.), product usage & feature adoption (creating reports, exporting data, etc.), search & navigation (internal or product search, blog or resource search, navigation path analysis, etc.)

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📈 Drive Predictable Performance (from Metrics & Chill)

Using data to reduce churn, improve marketing, and find product-market fit, by thinking like a Rev Ops pro

Sam Bowley, a senior Rev Ops leader, came on Metrics & Chill to share basic steps any B2B company can take to pull data out of their customer lifecycle journey, and use it to drive growth.

Here’s one almost any company can do as long as their CRM has the most basic data.

Start by isolating a cohort of customers who have recently churned, or retained/upgraded.

First, analyze three basic details:

1. Their industry
2. The employee size (or revenue size)
3. Who the decision maker was

Next, analyze the trend lines to see when the decision to churn or retain is most commonly made (month 4, month 6, etc.), and look for common trends among both groups (e.g. number of users in their account, amount of time they use your software, etc.).

By studying these two things, you can start to unearth insights and share them with your Marketing, Sales, or CS team.

You’re mainly looking to answer: “of the customers that churned/retained, why did they make that decision, and how can we apply that knowledge further up the funnel (to CS, Sales, or Marketing).”

For example, you may notice that 87% of all retained customers are from 2 specific industries, or that in most cases the main point of contact holds the same title. So you inform Marketing, and they refine their messaging and targeting.

Or, that most people churned by month 4, so you work with CS to analyze what might be happening around that timeframe. You find that 80% of those who churned never added additional team members to their account, so you implement a new onboarding flow to encourage that to happen in the first 3 months.

Sam recommends doing this every 6 months on average, though the optimal timeframe depends on your stage and company.

Here were a few other tips he offered:

• Smaller companies without a dedicated Rev Ops pro should start small and simple.
• Be curious, and aks questions.
• Come in with an open mind. Avoid bringing a preconceived hypothesis.
• Study the raw data, then start to form a story that’s informed by it.

If you want to hear all the insights Sam shared about using data to grow your company, listen to the full episode anywhere you get your podcasts.

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Drive predictable growth

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