Think about the last time you were on a conference call with someone in a different location. Did you run into any communication challenges — technical, or otherwise? Did you find yourself trying to speak up but failing to get a word in? If there were multiple people on that call, did you find that everyone was able to participate?

Remote meetings are becoming increasingly commonplace. Not everyone you work with is able to sit down in the same room with you. For many of us, most of our meetings now include remote employees or team members from across the globe.

That’s the trend we started to see at HubSpot. As we expand globally, more and more of our meetings and teams are spread out across our different offices. That doesn’t just mean waking up early or staying up late to have a call with colleagues in Sydney. It means learning to work with our colleagues in a completely different (and potentially challenging) way. 

After talking to other companies with growing numbers of remote employees (including Zapier CEO Wade Foster), our marketing team decided to do “Remote Week.” 

We had 3 goals for Remote Week:

• To work more effectively as a highly distributed team, and help pave the way for more effective collaboration across geographies for HubSpot as a whole.
• To cultivate empathy for full-time remote workers.
• To improve our communication with remote workers, and be at our best when working remotely.

And we had a couple of rules:

1. Everyone on the team must be remote for the week. They could work from anywhere they wanted, but they could not be in a HubSpot office.
2. Everyone must have an internet connection and be able to join meetings with video.
3. No one should postpone or reschedule any meetings. They should try all different types of meetings while remote: 1:1s, team meetings, cross-functional meetings, etc.

After a week, we gathered feedback from everyone who participated, and discovered some common trends that will help us more effectively manage our remote employees moving forward.

Lessons From Remote Week

1) For larger meetings, you need a facilitator.

For meetings on the larger side, it can be a real challenge to ensure everyone’s voice gets heard. Everyone is talking, side conversations happen between people in different locations, and before you know it the meeting is over and you didn’t get the chance to weigh in on the discussion. 

This is where the team facilitator comes in. The job of the facilitator is twofold: 1) Make sure everyone gets a chance to talk. 2) Recognize when side conversations happen so you can make sure these are shared with the full group.

To make sure everyone gets a chance to talk, it’s important to notice when someone is trying to get a word in and keeps getting overlooked. A good way to spot this is to have the facilitator keep a lookout for “the goldfish face”: the face someone makes when they keep opening and closing their mouth before they get the chance to actually say anything. By having a facilitator picking up on this and prompting participants to speak in turn, the issue can be eliminated.

Another issue with large remote meetings is side conversations that happen with people in the same location. For example, my team is spread out across Cambridge and Dublin. There are often side conversations that go on between the teams in Cambridge and Dublin by muting the call to say something to their colleague sitting next to them.

One effective way that we learned to solve this is making everyone go in a different room (even if they are in the same location) to give everyone a fair chance to speak and to make sure these side conversations derail the main discussion.

2) Take advantage of spontaneous discussions.

When you are physically in the same location as your colleagues, you have the opportunity for spontaneous conversations throughout the day. Whether it’s a morning recap of the latest Game of Thrones episode, or a quick chat to hash out the details of a problem that couldn’t be solved over email, these unplanned face-to-face meetings bring us closer to our colleagues and help us discover new perspectives. 

During our remote week, we knew we needed a way to recreate the beauty of these spontaneous conversations. In practice, it takes a bit of effort. It means you have to be open to hoping on a quick, unplanned video call to answer a question or clarify the details of an email.

We also are big proponents of recording a quick video over Loom to communicate something when your team isn’t all available for a live call. In fact, I have woken up to many Loom recordings from my team in Dublin to explain a detailed analysis or the latest experiment they wanted to run.

Having regular, open communication like this is key to avoiding any miscommunications and making sure your team still feels like a unit even if they do not see each other face to face.

3) Find your ideal routine, and stick to it.

In the morning I wake up, shower, get dressed, walk my dog, and catch the bus. I get to work, make my tea, do some morning reading, respond to emails, and start my day. I have my morning routine, and I have another routine at the end of the day to wrap up.

We are creatures of habit — having a clear routine gives us structure and enables us to be productive. And that’s doubly true for remote workers. 

At the beginning of Remote Week a lot of us found that our routine was just off. We woke up and then were unsure what to do next. Do we start responding to emails? Do we work on that next experiment? Do we make breakfast? Workout? What do we do first? At the end of the day, we had the same conundrum. When do we stop working? Should we have dinner, and then go back to work?

Even when you work remotely and don’t have to get into the office by a certain time, it’s still important to have a routine. Though it took us all a couple of days to figure out how to structure our time during Remote Week, we eventually all figured out our own individual rhythms to ensure we were getting our work done without burning out.

4) Remain visible within your team even if you aren’t actually visible.

If you are one of the only remote workers on your team, it can be easy to get heads down on your work and lose out on the regular communication that goes on with the rest of the team. Something that our team became very aware of during Remote Week was finding a way to remain available and visible to our colleagues even when we weren’t directly in touch.

There are a couple of key you can stay on your team’s radar, even when you’re not in sight. One of them is through participation in team meetings. When you’re remote, it’s extremely important to speak up and share your thoughts during big discussions. 

Another way to remain visible is to participate in group discussions over chat. At HubSpot we use Slack for our communications, and have cross-team channels devoted to everything from work-related projects to out-of-office interests, like yoga and dogs. It’s easy to not participate in those discussions, but it’s way more rewarding and valuable to share your ideas, the latest interesting article you read, or even what you did that weekend.

Even if you can’t be physically visible in the office, it’s important to stay visible within the organization. 

5) It seems obvious, but you need good WiFi.

I saved the best, and arguably most important, for last. Ensuring you have the proper technology to do your job and stay in touch with colleagues is absolutely essential. It can be frustrating for everyone involved if all of a sudden your computer freezes, or your internet crashes and your call is disconnected. And you know that always happens when its least convenient. 

Before you plan to work remotely (even if it’s just for a day), test out the locations you plan to call in from. If you are working from home, make sure that you have a strong WiFi connection. Test it out with a friend or colleague ahead of time to make sure you’ll be able to get your job done effectively and stay in touch with the necessary people.

If you think you might want to journey to an alternative location during your remote work week, test that out as well. I encourage my team to test out new coffee shops they want to work from during lower-stakes meetings — like 1:1s with their manager — instead of waiting until a larger team meeting. This reduces the danger of your technical difficulties impacting more people.

As you’re getting your remote setup ready, figure out if you need other tech besides WiFi. Having a second monitor at home for example can help increase your efficiency. Having a standing desk is another way to make sure you get to move around during the day.

Taking Remote Week Back to the Office

Remote Week was a fantastic experience for the team. It gave us a unique opportunity to put ourselves in our teammates’ shoes and truly understand the pros and cons of remote work.

Since this experience, we’ve learned to be more collaborative with our remote counterparts, make sure everyone has a voice in team meetings, and be more flexible when hoping on a quick video chat with a remote colleague. The next time you interact with a remote colleague, remember these lessons to ensure you build a productive and collaborative environment for your team and co-workers, no matter where they work. 

Gone are the days of the CMO who isn’t fluent in metrics, analytics, and spreadsheets. The internet has made marketing far more measurable (and therefore more accountable to the CEO) than ever before.

But CMOs struggle to find the right metrics that will get them credibility, and show how marketing contributes to the bottom line — especially when 80% of CEOs don’t trust the efforts of their marketing teams.

Some of the best marketing metrics look at the total cost of marketing — including program spend, salaries of the team, and overhead — and relate those costs to the results you care about: revenue and customer acquisition.

Other metrics, like cost per lead, cost per follower, or cost per page view can be useful to look at within a marketing team, because they can help you make decisions about where to focus, and what parts of your marketing process are broken.

But most CEOs care more about the cost and the net results than the interim steps. This list of metrics is meant to focus on the most critical measures of marketing that your CEO will likely want to discuss with you.

Here are some metrics the HubSpot marketing team has found most useful over the years while growing our company and working with other members of senior leadership and our board.

The 6 Marketing Metrics Your CEO Cares About Most

1) Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

This is your total Sales and Marketing cost: Add up all the program or advertising spend, plus salaries, plus commissions and bonuses, plus overhead within a given time period. Then, divide it by the number of new customers in that same time period.

For instance, if you spent $300,000 on Sales and Marketing in a month and added 30 customers that month, then your CAC is $10,000.

2) Marketing Percentage of Customer Acquisition Cost (M%-CAC)

We compute the marketing portion of CAC and call it M-CAC, and then compute that as a percentage of the overall CAC. The M%-CAC is interesting to watch over time, and any change signals that something has changed in either your strategy or your effectiveness.

For instance, an increase either means that 1) you are spending too much on marketing, 2) sales costs are lower because they missed quota, or 3) you are trying to raise sales productivity by spending more on marketing, and providing more and higher-quality leads to Sales.

For a company that does mostly outside sales with a long and complicated sales cycle, M%-CAC might be only 10-20%. For companies that have an inside sales team and a less complicated sales process, M%-CAC might be more like 20-50%. And for companies that have a low cost and simpler sales cycle where sales are somewhat humanless, the M%-CAC might be more like 60-90%.

3) Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC (LTV:CAC)

For companies that have a recurring revenue stream from their customers — or even any way for customers to make a repeat purchase — you need to estimate the current value of a customer and compare that to what you spent to acquire that new customer.

To compute the LTV, you need to take the revenue the customer pays you in a period, subtract out the gross margin, and then divide by the estimated churn percentage (cancellation rate) for that customer. So, for a type of customer who pays you $100,000 per year where your gross margin on the revenue is 70%, and that customer type is predicted to cancel at a rate of 16% per year, then the LTV is $437,500.

Now, once you have the LTV and the CAC, you compute the ratio of the two. If it cost you $100,000 to acquire this customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1. For growing SaaS companies, most investors and board members want this ratio to be greater than 3X — because a higher ratio means your sales and marketing teams have a higher ROI.

Higher is not always better, though. When the ratio is too high, you might want to spend more on Sales and Marketing to grow faster, because you are restraining your growth by under-spending, and making life easy for your competition.

4) Time to Payback CAC

This is the number of months it takes you to earn back the CAC you spent to get a new customer. You take the CAC and divide by margin-adjusted revenue per month for the average new customer you just signed up, and the resulting number is the number of months to payback.

In industries where customers pay one time up-front, this metric is less relevant, because the upfront payment should be greater than the CAC — otherwise, you’re losing money on every customer. On the other hand, in industries where customers pay a monthly or annual fee (as is the case for many SaaS companies like HubSpot), you usually want the payback time to be under 12 months, meaning that you become “profitable” on a new customer in under a year, and after that, you start making money.

5) Marketing-Originated Customer Percentage

This ratio shows what percentage of your new business is driven by marketing efforts. To compute it, take all of the new customers you signed up in a period, and look at what percentage of them started with a lead that the marketing team generated. This is much, much easier to do when you have a closed-loop marketing analytics system, but you can do it manually — just know it will be time-consuming.

What we like about this metric is that it directly shows what portion of the overall customer acquisition originated in Marketing, and it is often higher than what you might think. In our experience, this number varies widely from company to company. For companies with an outside sales team supported by an inside sales team with cold callers, this percentage might be pretty small, perhaps 20-40%. But for a company with an inside sales team that is supported by a lot of lead generation from Marketing, it might be as high as 40-80%.

Note: You can also compute this percentage using revenue instead customers, depending on how you prefer to look at your business.

6) Marketing Influenced Customer Percentage

This number is similar to the Marketing Originated Customer Percentage, but it adds in all the new customers in cases where Marketing touched and nurtured the lead at any point during the sales process, not only by originating the lead.

For instance, if a salesperson found a lead, but then the lead attended a marketing event and then later closed, that new customer was influenced by Marketing. This number is obviously higher than the “Originated” percentage, and for most companies, we think this number should be between 50% and 99%.

Marketing Metrics Cheat Sheet