Know What You Don’t Know…5 Tips to Improve Your Sales Tracking and Measuring

I met a business owner last year who was spending $12,000 a year on local radio advertising. This was a small local function centre trying to book weddings and corporate seminars. $12,000 is a big investment! I asked the business owner what sort of response he was getting from the ads. He didn’t know! He’d never bothered to ask his customers how they had heard about him and didn’t know if even one cent of his investment was effective. Before you laugh and say, ‘What a goose!’ ask yourself this… Can you account for the effectiveness of every dollar you’ve spent on advertising in your business?
There’s an old saying you’ve no doubt heard: You can manage what you can measure. Marketing strategies can be expensive, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to be spending the money unless you track and measure how well it’s working for you.
Here are five things you can do to ensure you are getting the information you need to make the most from your marketing dollar:

1. Set goals Remember those science experiments in school where the teacher would make you write a hypothesis beforehand? I hated them. I just wanted to throw the chemicals together and create a big bang. Unsurprisingly, I was never able to say how well my experiments worked because I couldn’t compare the results to the original objective. It’s the same with your marketing strategies. Decide on a clear goal for your campaigns, such as “To acquire 3 new A Class customers” or “To get a direct mail response rate of 15%.”

2. Select a good response device If you’re testing a newspaper advertisement, then simply tracking whether your sales increased won’t give you enough information. You’ll need to be asking every new person who enquires, “How did you hear about us?” The increase may not be coming from the ad at all. You need to make sure that you have designed a method to measure the very thing you want to test.An easy way to do this is to include a response device in your campaign. For example, a print advertisement could have a coupon that customers cut out and bring in to your store. A radio ad could have a special phone number. Emails can be coded with keywords that are unique to that message. At the very least you should be consistently asking your customers, “By the way, do you mind if I ask how you heard about us?

3. Focus on ROI You may be thrilled that you got a 25% response rate to your email offer, but what revenue did this generate? If your marketing strategies aren’t paying for themselves in return on investment, then you need to look again. “What about awareness?” Yeah, I hear people ask that all the time. Advertising to raise awareness is fine if you have the marketing budget of Coca Cola, but most business owners can’t afford to invest huge sums of money on marketing that isn’t resulting directly in sales. And the only way you’ll know is to measure!

4. Measure everything, big and small A business owner I talked to last year kept saying, “I need more business, I gotta do more advertising!” But when we measured what was going on in his entire sales process, we discovered he was getting enough leads but was only converting 5% of them to sales! By improving his selling skills and quotes he was able to increase his conversion rate, and therefore his turnover. Measuring is about more than the results of a single campaign. You need to look at the ‘big picture’ …and regularly! Not just the source of your leads, but how many you are converting to customers, what they are spending with you and how frequently. If you know the ‘big picture’ by tracking your sales process, you’ll always know what specific area to work on with your marketing instead of blindly spending money.

5. Repeat, repeat, repeat! The whole point of testing and measuring your marketing is to find out what works for your business. When you find something that works, keep doing it. There’s nothing wrong with testing a few changes to see if you can get an even better response, but don’t abandon the things that make your marketing successful. The flip side is just as crucial. If it’s not working, stop wasting your money!
Tracking and measuring your marketing will put you in control of growing your business, instead of forcing you to fly blind.

John Logar helps organisations achieve more than they thought possible through consulting, coaching, keynote presentations, seminars and training in the areas of leadership, values, team performance, marketing and risk management. John has addressed and consulted to over 1,000 organisations in commerce, government and not-for-profit.