Funnel Conversions - What We Care About Mostly

Every marketing organization assess the effectiveness of their execution via different metrics. At Zend, we drive a significant portion of the revenue through the marketing funnel and thus lead generation metrics are at the heart of running the business. We measure hundreds of different metrics ranging from standard website traffic and download statistics, through newsletter parameters and all the way to on-line store purchase behavior. Saying that, we are generally very focused on a small number of key performance indicators (KPIs) for our main product line:

• "Top of the Funnel" - Track-able exposure to our content mostly through web visits and open-source/free downloads
• Activity- 
• Registrations - How many folks registered with us
• Downloads - Number of downloads of non-free products
• Real Interest- This is a metric of the level of activity within the funnel that eventually drives qualified leads as part of the nurturing activities. This includes trials or license requests, event attendance, etc.
• Qualified Leads-
• Volume- Number of of qualified leads provided to the sales team. This is so important that we have a weekly(!) commitment from marketing to the sales team on how many leads (and in what geography) are provided.
• Quality- Conversion rates of the leads into opportunities and closed business (bookings $). This is an important measure that has significant impact on the sales reps' yields.

 In 2010 we overachieved our qualified leads quota. We did this by closely monitoring the funnel metrics every week and quickly adapting and changing our behavior based on the trends we saw.
It takes full transparency to drive such behavior!
Getting there is difficult as it exposes every weakness very broadly but crossing that bridge is well worth it.