This one is the one that gives sales and marketing people the heebie-jeebies because this is about performance and the scariest thing in marketing – measurement, strap in.
There is absolutely no point reaching for a dictionary for a definition this week because there is no dictionary definition of sales and marketing performance. In fact, this may be the first definition committed to text anywhere on the Internet.
You may find it inconceivable but my experience is that the vast majority of small business owners and sales and marketing managers are flying blind with little or no idea of how they are performing.
The great likelihood is that you are developing a marketing strategy to improve your sales and marketing, to improve the outcomes, more awareness, more enquiries, more sales, more customers, more turnover, more profit and more dividends. More, of course, is a relative term, relative to what you have now and if you don’t know what you have now you have no basis on which to judge your gains. You could run the most effective marketing campaigns known to man and achieve huge successes and you will never know.
So understanding your current performance is key to developing an effective sales and marketing strategy in fact, until you know how you are performing currently it is impossible to set meaningful or realistic marketing objectives.
So having established that performance is really important how, and where, do you find the data that will inform you reliably how your has businesses performed to date. The good news is that the data probably exists, it will be in your systems. if you use diaries or computerised calendars some of the information will be there, if you use a sales and marketing database some of the information will be there, if you use accounting systems some of the information will be there. The not so good news is that these systems are set up for the benefit of sales and marketing people or accountants so there may be some work involved in extracting the information that you want, and your sales people and accounting people aren’t always helpful.
So what is it that you really want to know about your sales marketing performance, the answer is everything, including:
- which marketing initiatives are in effect
- how many leads are generated
- how many appointments are set
- how many appointments are sat
- how many quotes are delivered
- how many proposals are delivered
- what is the value of quotes/proposals
- how many sales are closed
- what is the value of closed sales
- how much has been invoiced
- how much has been collected
what is outstanding
- what is the profit margin
- what is in the bank
- what is owed
Once you have all of this information to hand you will feel a burden lift from your shoulders, there is no doubt flying blind is scary and stressful. In the same way that you wouldn’t drive a car without a working instrumentation panel you shouldn’t run a business without a good idea of exactly how it is performing.
So that should give you a blogging clue about sales and marketing performance, next week I will be talking about marketing objectives. So come back next week if you haven’t got a blogging clue about marketing objectives.
