Get a Clear View (part 3)

Last time we talked about the concept of a marketing/sales funnel and understanding what’s going on inside it.  Today, I want to dive in a little deeper (with an example) to illustrate how capturing just one piece of information can give you a much clearer view of your progress toward growing your business.

Let’s look at the traffic that comes to your business.  If you captured the number of people who came to your business or contacted you, you would have a pretty valuable piece of information.  Ideally, you would know the amount of traffic (or number of contacts) for each potential response channel (e.g. store, website, phone, e-mail, etc.).   This information can reveal some interesting insights into what’s working in your business and what’s not.

Let’s suppose you have been running a series of ads in a small local or neighborhood paper and you have kept your message pretty consistent over time.  Now assume you decide to sprinkle in some new messages and even increase the frequency of your ads.  So, now you have changed a couple of variables that you hope will result in higher sales.  However, you find at the end of the month that your sales are the same.  The first thought might be “Crap, that didn’t work”!

 But, since you kept track of your traffic count, you also find that the number of contacts during the month went up almost 20%, as compared to last month.  So, did the change in advertising tactics help?  It would appear so.  Traffic went up – that’s good news.  Yet, there is some bad news.  You got more visitors but you got the same number of sales.  In other words, your conversion of the traffic into sales went down.  With this information it looks like we have started to reveal some potential opportunities for improvement or at the least some areas to investigate.

 If you follow the customers’ steps it’s clear they took a big first step and contacted your business.  You can now begin looking at what happens when a prospect contacts your business.  Is there a problem with how your team greets or helps them?  Are they getting any further engaged when they contact your business or are they getting confused or stuck and leaving right away?  Perhaps they are not finding what they expected to find.   No matter what you might find, you can see that this one piece of information helps you narrow down your focus.  It helps you know and learn more where the opportunity for improvement might be in your business.

 There is a conclusion I hope you reached from this example… Guessing is not necessary.  You see, even though there are some new questions that will pop up as you measure and learn more about growing your business, it is clear that you don’t have to guess anymore.  You can have a clear view of what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to growing your business.

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

Get a Clear View (part 2)

There’s more to getting a clear view of your marketing and sales efforts than just understanding your Customer’s Journey, as we discussed last time.  There is also a need to get a better view of your progress and success.

It seems odd, but a lot of businesses (even the big ones) don’t really have a clear view of how they are doing in their efforts to grow their business.  Sure, all of us know our sales results at the end of the week or the end of the month.  And most of us know how much we spent on marketing each month.  But, frighteningly, only a few of us know much else about the successes and/or failures of growing our business.  Does this sound familiar?

 Because we only know a couple of facts about our marketing/sales effort, we tend to guess.  We guess about what is working and what’s not.  We guess about how much advertising we should do this month.  We guess about where we should spend our marketing dollars.  That’s right, we are guessing.  Sound familiar?

So how do we stop guessing?  Let me offer this analogy to see if we can help ourselves.

I would encourage you to think of your marketing and sales effort as a long tube or funnel.  Picture putting your marketing investment in the front-end of the funnel.  Now imagine coming out the back end of the funnel are your sales.  See the graphic below as a rough example of what I mean.

 

Now as you see this, you might also see that the fundamental problem we have with growing our business is that we typically only see what went into the funnel (our marketing $) and what came out the other end (our sales $).  So we can only guess as to what happened in between.  We have no other facts to help us make decisions. 

We need to get more facts about how we are doing.  We need more facts about what’s happening inside our funnel.  There are usually plenty of indicators that are available to us but we don’t measure them.  By measuring, even one indicator, we can learn a lot about the progress we are making on growing our business.  The goal is to understand what’s happening with your marketing and sales effort and eliminate some guessing.

I would suggest you start with something simple – if you are a retailer, for example, start with understanding your traffic to your store.  Other businesses could keep track of incoming phone calls if they don’t have a retail store front.  Either way, a simple tally sheet will do.  Just ask your team to keep track of every visitor (or caller) to your business.  Don’t get hung up on whether someone came into your store and asked for directions… just keep track of all the traffic to get started.  Once you get that down you can refine your tracking later on.

Now, if I were to ask you at the end of the month how things were going.  You could tell me, not only how much you spent on marketing and how much you sold, but you could also tell me that the traffic to your store increased or decreased during the month.  That may not seem like a lot right now.  But, we’ll talk more next time (in part 3) about how this one piece of information can tell us about our business and give us a “clearer” view.

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