Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Sales growth
Leads generated
Cost of Marketing/Sales --- year over year
Web presence - natural search engine position
Time to market on new produccts
Trade show booth attendance
the list could go on and on

Since a basic purpose of Marketing is to create and retain customers, these two items should be tracked. Market share information can be obtained and an experienced "Marketing Director" would know how and where to get the information.

At a macro level you can determine the size of the market by determining your NAICS code and finding out how big your industry is. See the link to the attached video for getting market share data:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-Oj22Zl7dM

Small businesses must keep their metrics simple. To ensure that your marketing is bottom line and customer focused, track how many new customers your marketing efforts bring in and how many customers you have retained.

I'm not a big fan of market share since there are so many ways to define it and measure it. You could spend far more time and money trying to figure out if he met that metric than it's even worth.

I agree that smaller companies should keep it simple. I favor 2 metrics.

Budget - Any good marketing director needs to be able to effectively manage a budget.

Opportunities generated - I go back to this one over and over, but let me explain the difference between using this metric vs leads.

Marketing and sales needs to define the minimum standards for opportunity vs lead. I have a blog post on this at https://themarketingsurvivalist.blogspot.com/2008/06/leads-are-for-marketin.... This step is important since by agreeing to this, sales is agreeing to follow up on 100% of the opportunities generated. Anything less and you're wasting your time marketing.

Once you have an agreed on standard for opportunity, you work backward from sale's close ratio of similar opportunities. if you are lucky you have some way of showing sales' track record, but you may just have to ask them to guess. By working backward you can determine the target number of opportunities that your Marketing Director needs to generate.

For example, if sales agrees that they can close 30% of opportunities (remember this is different than leads) and your sales goal is 100 sales for the year, you need to generate 334 opportunities.

I also like this metric better than market share because this one is directly connected to the bottomline, yet completely within marketing's control.

All the best!

Melissa