Most business executives
intuitively understand
that they must
do some form of marketing
in
order to maintain or increase their business.
At the same time, most
business executives also understand that their
marketing cost is one of
their largest business expenses.
There is a joke common to
many executives and business owners that they know that
50% of all
their marketing efforts are a complete waste
but they just don't know which 50% it is.
Is that you?
There is a disturbing
paradox: these same business executives often have
difficulty justifying future
marketing campaigns because they can’t
answer key questions about their past campaigns.
Five key
questions that they - and you - should be able to answer
about every marketing campaign are:
#1 - Campaign Cost:
What did the marketing campaign cost? Seems like an
obvious question,
but many business executives cannot answer it.
#2 - Leads:
How many direct sales leads did the campaign generate?
Leads are the first
measure of a campaign’s effectiveness revealing how many
responded to the campaign.
#3 - Sales Cycle:
How many leads resulted in appointments or calls? How
many resulted in
proposals? How many leads made it into the sales cycle
is a measure of how effective the
campaign “offer” is. A good offer will yield a high
ratio of sales activity.
#4 - Sales:
How many orders or contracts did the campaign generate?
The bottom line for
any campaign is orders or contracts. All too often the
sales cycle is long enough that many businesses can’t
(or don’t) connect the actual sale to a specific
marketing campaign.
#5 - ROI:
What is the return on investment of the campaign? The
bottom line for the business is whether the campaign was
profitable.
The
goal
of all
this is to
spend more money
on
campaigns that work
and
quit spending
money
on campaigns that don't.
Business owners that cannot
answer these important campaign questions
complain "that
it’s just too difficult to keep the records
needed to give them this information, or it takes too
much time to pull this information together."
That may be
true if it has to be prepared
manually.
But the businesses that can put their fingers on the
pulse of their marketing with this type of data will
regularly outperform those that can’t – it’s that much
of a vital competitive
advantage.
Enter CRM.
This is why Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) has
become a key competitive tool for
growing businesses.
CRM makes it easy to track which
campaigns are working and which are not
and which
customers, prospects or
lists are most likely to yield orders.
