Follow these 9 metrics to keep your lead gen agency from failing

This quick guide outlines the main metrics you should follow as a lead generation agency.

We’ll delve into the practicality of the primary metrics you should follow, both from the operational and sales perspective within your agency and when executing successful cold outreach campaigns.

So let’s get started.

Metrics to follow for cold outreach campaigns

Whether you execute a campaign for yourself or your clients, there are many KPIs you should track when it comes to cold outreach campaigns.

But one is more important than others.

And it’s not an open rate or a reply rate.

We’ll see what it is later.

The first metrics you should track for cold email outreach are:

• Open rates - tell you how good your subject line and the first sentence (hook) are. They also give you a hint about whether your email deliverability is good or not. The higher the email open rates, the better.
  
  Your open rates should always be above 60-65% or more.

• Reply rates - open rates tell you how compelling your subject line and the first sentence are. But reply rates tell you:

  • How adequate the rest of your email is

  • Is the offer good enough?

  • Is the email relevant to the prospect?

Bad reply rates mean that your email copy needs to be better. So go out and A/B test different versions of your emails, offers, triggers, and calls to action.

The minimal reply rate you should aim for is 5%+
But remember that you can’t build a list of 100% relevant prospects. So, don’t focus too much on the reply rates. Instead, focus on the main metric that we’ll talk about soon.

If your campaign is based on LinkedIn, then your metrics will go as follows:

• Connection request acceptance rate - similar to the cold email, but instead of email opens, we track the acceptance rate of our connection request.

• Reply rate - If the prospect doesn’t respond to the connection request, we’ll usually send them an ordinary LinkedIn message a few hours or a few days after accepting the connection request. In this case, as above, we’ll track the reply rates,, but this time for the LinkedIn messages.

These are the first two metrics you should track when conducting cold email or LinkedIn outreach campaigns.

But, as promised, what’s the most vital metric to track?

What metric tells you whether your email is wrong or not?

Whether your email gets clients or not?

It’s called the email-to-meeting ratio.

It’s essentially the number of emails you must send to secure one meeting.

The smaller the ratio, the better - you need to contact fewer prospects to book a meeting.

Eventually, this metric will tell you how good your offer, emails, and targeting are.

The average ratio might vary from business to business and from industry to industry.

However, a rule of thumb that lead gen agency owners see across all industries is that, on average, you must send 600 emails to book one meeting.

That’s the average across all industries. Now, in some industries with good offers, you can have a 1:400 ratio and, a 1:800 ratio, but you should always aim to be at least beneath 1:600 or 1:700.

If you do the LinkedIn outreach, the numbers are slightly different because, due to restrictions, you can’t contact that many people quickly.

When you create LinkedIn outreach campaigns, you essentially want to optimize for quality over quantity, so naturally, the connection-to-meeting ratio is lower, around 1:100-150. However, you’ll need more time to create and personalize your prospect list.

Once you figure out your email-to-meeting ratio, you will:

• Know what campaigns perform or underperform.

• Have predictable results

  • If you know that, for example, you need to contact 500 people to book one meeting, then to hit a quota of, let’s say, 20 meetings a month, you’ll need to contact 10.000 different people.

The email/connection-to-meeting ratio is crucial if you charge your client per meeting booked.

Let’s see the math.

Let’s say you charge $250 per booked meeting a month.

For your agency to be sustainable, you need to book as many meetings as you can each month so you can naturally earn more and cover all of your expenses.

If your meeting-to-prospect ratio is 1:500, and you need to bring 20 meetings monthly, you must build a list and contact 10,000 prospects to make $5000/month from one client.

When you know these metrics, you’ll know exactly how much capital to outsource and what your teammates need to do to hit the monthly quota.

Pipeline Conversion Rates

You might or might not be in charge of clients’ sales pipelines. But in any case, you are in charge of your pipeline, so you need to know what metrics to follow.

The basic sales pipeline looks like this:

Contacted lead > Replied > Discovery Meeting booked > Demo meeting done > Deal closed.

Now, depending on your specific pipeline, it may have more stages, but this is the basic.

So, what metric do we need to know here?

Stage conversion rates - What’s the percentage of people that move from one stage to another?

For example, it might look like this:

Contacted leads (500) > Replied (50) > Discovery meeting booked (10) > Demo meeting booked (6) > Deal closed (2)

The email/Connection-to-meeting ratio tells us how many people who contact us will book a discovery call, but understanding conversion rates in other stages tells us how many people will become clients.

For us, we need more than knowing the email/connection-to-meeting ratio. Yeah, that’s great for optimizing our outreach campaigns, but the end goal is to close deals.

If our conversion rates in other pipeline stages are low, we need to fix something.

Identify the biggest drop-offs and optimize those stages. For example, we have a big drop-off and a low conversion rate during the transition from discovery call to demo meeting. In that case, there might be some problems with people attending our demos.

Perhaps we can set up automated sequences to remind people about our second call so they won’t forget.

If we know the metrics mentioned above (email-to-meeting ratio and stage conversion rates), and if we want to grow our number of clients, then our growth and math look like this:

Other operational metrics to follow inside your lead generation agency

Here are the other metrics regarding your ops that you must know in the middle of the night:

• Client acquisition cost (CAC) - how much will you spend acquiring one new client?

• Client acquisition timeline (CAT) - how much time do you need to close a new client?

• Client Lifetime Value (CLV) - what’s your client's lifetime value?

• Client Churn Rate (CCR) per month or quarter - what’s the percentage of clients who cancel their subscription per month or per quarter?

• Net-Promoter Score (NPS) - This one measures client satisfaction. If your NPS score is 9 or 10, then you’re doing a great job. If it’s eight or less, you need to improve something to make your clients more satisfied.

All these metrics above will help you:

• Understand how much you can spend to acquire a new client

• How much are you going to earn from each client

• How much work you need to put to get the desired CLV

• How many leads/new prospects to contact and in what timeline to meet your or clients’ revenue goals

• And more.

The Bottom Line

You need to know your numbers to build a real business out of your agency, to have predictable revenue, and to have peace of mind. 

Put extreme focus on figuring out the metrics from above, and all your ops and delivery will seem easier.

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