Principal – DW Creative Marketing
Dave Wieser is Principal of DW Creative Marketing, whose mission is to “Help the Doers create their legacy.” His career of 20+ years in the advertising and marketing industry has led to a wide range of experiential roles, including media selling, media buying/planning, marketing strategy, research, business intelligence and data analytics…
Do you know your business numbers?
You might have a solid grasp of your revenues and expenses. However, those financial measures are lagging indicators of business success. While that data is helpful, it does not provide much insight into your sales and marketing efforts.
Why You Need Sales and Marketing Metrics?
Without measures, you cannot tell if your business is gaining or losing over time. In contrast, if you know that you need to present to ten prospects to land one sale, then tracking the number of scheduled presentations is a helpful metric. As a manger, tracking metrics is important because it gives you useful information to evaluate and reward your staff. If your employees feel that high performance will be rewarded, you will start to see more of those results.
Six Metrics To Start Measuring (Traditional and Online
To illustrate the marketing metrics, you may wish to measure, here are six metrics that you can track:
1. Number of store visitors.
Using a door counter, you can easily count how many people are visiting your company each day. If visitor volume starts to decline, you will find out quickly and have the opportunity to improve.Resource: You can track people as they move through your store. Find out more about the opportunity through this article: The single greatest miss in retail store metrics: Footfalls.
2. Inbound Phone Calls
Tracking inbound phone calls is an excellent metric to track. For the best results, you may want to use a CRM (customer relationship management) system to organize the information. At first, simply tracking the volume of calls will give you insight. If you already have that tracking in place, the next step is to assign scores to the caller. For example, a caller who makes an appointment to see a specific car should have a higher score than someone who is “just browsing.”
3. Referrals
Your current and past customers represent a rich source of marketing opportunities. Equipping your sales staff with scripts, messages and other resources will help. Once your staff is trained, start measuring them. As with other metrics, start by counting the number of referrals. Once you have that data in hand, track how many referrals convert to customers.
Resource: for further insight on referrals, I recommend “Million Dollar Referrals” by Alan Weiss. The book is focused on the consulting field, but the principles can be applied in other areas.
4. Website Conversions
Your website has the potential to act as a 24/7 sales and marketing representative. However, it can only generate results for you if you have a tracking process in place. I regularly see clients miss opportunities in Google Analytics. For example, they cannot determine if their online advertising is working or whether they should make a change. At a minimum, I recommend setting up goals in Google Analytics and tracking your results on a monthly basis.
Resource: For an introduction to goals and conversions in Google Analytics, read Google’s “Set up Analytics tracking” article.
5. Number of full sales presentations (or demos) that convert to sales
The number of sales presentations made to qualified customers is a key measure in many businesses. In the car business, taking customers out on a test drive tends to be a critical step. Taking a test drive makes the car buying process change from an abstraction into an experience. For that reason, tracking the number of test drives is a helpful marketing measure. In the software industry, managers often track the number of free trials that convert to paid subscribers.
Caution: If you are considering connecting metrics to individual compensation, tread carefully. You may end up producing unwanted results. If you award a bonus to the representative with the highest number of test drives, quality may decline. In other words, your reps may feel pressure to “game the system” to get the reward.
Review All Your Metrics On A Balanced Scorecard
You may already meet with your finance manager or accountant each month to review your company’s performance. Carry out the same process with your marketing metrics. To keep the data easy to understand, I recommend summarizing the results on a single page. As you gather more data, you can compare results over time (e.g. is this July better or worse than last year)?
By tracking metrics, you can determine if you are achieving your marketing strategy. If you have no guiding strategy, you may end up tracking data that has no value. For more insight on marketing strategy, read my article [LINK TO MARKETING STRATEGY VS TACTICS article].