These past few weeks we’ve been revisiting the question:  “What would be the most desired type of outcome from your influencer outreach project?”

Increased sales of course would typically be number one, at least in the eyes of a client. But often this is impractical to quantify. The person commissioning the influencer program may not be in close enough contact with their salesforce to know when a sale has resulted from the program. Maybe the client company isn’t set up to capture sufficiently granular sales data or maybe it sells indirectly, through a reseller or partner program. And perhaps there’s not a clear sale to be had – with the goal instead being adoption, advocacy or similar.

Qualified leads might be the goal. Once more it needs a pretty close relationship between marketing & sales to agree on specifically what activities created those qualified leads, and there has to be a defined timescale in which to measure such results. Who’s to say that the positive advocacy created through an influencer program will create those leads within that timescale?

Creating new routes to market is even more difficult to quantify. Establishing a relationship with a particular influencer may well lead to them introducing you into new sales situations, and so opening up new routes, but what counts as a new route and what simply a new prospect? And as with the age-old sales argument, when is a sale a new sale and not just a revenue extension of an existing sale?

You might also consider any clear sign that your activities have resulted in ‘moving the needle‘ of important players. There are many ways you may choose to measure this. At Influencer50 we measure this in two primary dimensions – increasing Approachability and Favorability.

As a result of this thinking we’ve just been updating our RoI Proofpoints page on our company website – and we have some great quotes covering all four bases.

Does anyone else track alternative outcomes?