Do More With Less. What?!

Are you kidding me?  Do more with less?  Amidst all the cutbacks in this economy, this has likely become one of the most overused clichés in corporate America.  And, I think it perpetuates a mode of thinking that can be bad for your business.  Here’s why… 

The reality is most often the “do more with less” thinking leads to less people just working more hours and doing the same things, the same old way.  Rarely does this thinking actually lead to doing something better.  I would like to offer an alternative to this accepted wisdom.  How about “do better with less”.  How about doing better instead of more?  Wouldn’t that make more sense? 

I would encourage you to apply this philosophy to your business, especially when you think about your marketing and sales efforts.  If you adopt this approach it means you need to know how you are doing now and based on my observations of many businesses, most just don’t have a handle on how they are performing when it comes to marketing and sales.   

To get a handle on how your marketing is performing start by getting a handle on two measures – response and engagement.  We’ll take a little deeper look at both.

Response simply provides a gauge on how many prospects are reacting to your marketing.  It is typically measured as a % of the audience who were potentially exposed to your marketing effort that actually responds and contacts your business – whether they pick up the phone, visit your website, etc.  This can tell you about how effective your effort was in finding your target market and how relevant your message was to the audience.

Engagement is a more intriguing measure as it captures how deeply involved the prospects become with your business as a result of your marketing (and sales) effort.  Obviously, having someone contact you is a good thing.  But, having them contact you and then walk through a product demonstration with a sales person is even better.  So, by picking some key milestones like contact, product demonstration and price quotation and monitoring the number of prospects that reach each of those can tell you more about how qualified the prospects are that you are attracting with your marketing efforts.  Most engagement metrics are expressed as a % of the total prospects that move to a given engagement milestone.

In addition to indicating the quality of the prospects being attracted, engagement measures can also point to areas of improvement in your overall marketing and sales process.  If, for example, plenty of prospects (let’s say 100) are contacting you and several (let’s say 90) are sitting through a demonstration but not many (only 10) are receiving a quote it might direct you to a problem with your sales team or some gap with your product offering.  Typically, these measurements are expressed as a % of the prospects that move from one engagement milestone to the next one.   So, in our quick example, 90% (90 / 100) of our contacts converted to a demonstration but only 11% (10 / 90) of our demonstrations converted to a quote.

Now, with these two areas of measurement in place, your business is in a position to understand where your marketing and sales efforts are most productive and where they have the greatest opportunity for improvement.  You are actually in a position to continuously improve, not just do more with less, but actually do better with less.

Until next time… Here’s to you making better marketing and sales decisions.