I wonder about writers that make stuff up. There’s so much stuff in everyday life. This is a real conversation that happened last week with a real business owner. I thought about making this an e-book, but didn’t feel like building a landing page, etc. If you want more or have questions, let me know. I also thought about publishing this as an original/exclusive on the Customer Collective, but they can edit my content and I don’t want them to edit this post. Enjoy!
This particular business owner happened to be in the floor covering business and wants to increase the retail traffic to his store. He’s been in business for several years and working in the industry even longer. He’s a Hubspot customer and recently worked with a marketing agency for several months, but business didn’t grow.
I asked a lot of questions. Some he answered fairly freely. Sometimes he resisted. There were some meaningful exchanges. One series of questions centered around what’s working? He was spending money on Yellow Pages, Yellow Book, newspaper, building signage, and various other traditional advertising media in addition to inbound marketing. When I asked him where his business was coming from, he got indignant and asked me if I had ever run a business and when I did, did I know where every piece of business came from. When I answered, yes and yes, he was pretty sure that I was lying because he wasn’t able to determine his sources, so he assumed that I couldn’t.
So, Thing #1 is keep track of your time and money and the results that you get. You’ve only got so much money. I’d want to know how many customers and how many dollars I got from every dollar that I spent so that I knew what generated my best return, which was the worst and every one in between. Don’t forget your time! Writing blog posts, analyzing data, tweeting, optimizing, learning, etc. may be your smallest money investment, but it may make be your largest time investment. So, it’s important to track your time and be aware of the opportunity cost of your time investment.
Thing #2 is to use the data to re-distribute your investments. You invest in advertising, promotion, etc. to generate leads. If you know how many customers and how many dollars each investment yields per dollar of investment, all other things being equal, why would you continue making the smaller yield investment? Why not stop the smaller yield investment and put it into the investment with the best yield?
Finally, thing #3 is to use the data to maximize the conversion of your leads to dollars. In the first two points we talked about how many customers and how many dollars each source yielded, but if one source yields a $100 per lead and another source yields $1,000 per lead, aren’t you curious why? Do you really think it’s the source’s fault? If your sources are generating different dollars per lead, that may not be a source problem. That may be a symptom that your sales and marketing processes are misaligned. You’re not selling the way your customer wants to buy. Selling in the 21st Century requires total integration of your marketing and sales process. It takes twelve weeks, but at the end of twelve weeks, you’ll know how to maximize the return on your marketing investment. Click here or here.
RainMakers & Sales Rock Stars 
Rick – Interesting that his first thought was that you weren’t being honest, rather than, “What a great idea, I wonder how he did that”?We teach everyone one of our customers’ sales reps to ask a new prospect, “How did you hear about us”? and then add that information into a lead source field in their CRM. It’s one of the easiest ways that Sales can communicate to Marketing what’s working and what isn’t without even having to talk to them!The HubSpot/Salesforce integration makes this a pretty seamless and straightforward process on the inbound side. Even without advanced tracking tools, it’s simple enough to add this detail into CRM or even a contact manager like Sage ACT! when updating the record. I smack my forehead (Doh!)when I hear of something simple like this that I just hadn’t thought to do. We can get buried in the day-to-day stuff and forget to look for solutions that can help dig us out. But when you get a great idea handed to you on a platter, geez, don’t fight it, just do it!
Lindsay, you have to remember that I am a salesman and everybody knows that salespeople lie every time they open their mouths!
If you are a salesperson who lies, then I am a petite blond supermodel who married a NFL quarterback.Numbers don’t lie, even if sales people do. Even marketers can’t make numbers lie for too long.