Tracking your Sales Organizations efforts for increased bottom line
profits by Margaret Miller
Tracking your sales efforts goes much more beyond keeping good statistics on the
amount of sales your team makes or the tracking the amount of prospects that
call or visit your company. marketing result
tracking
is a succinct method, bordering a science, but a science that can be easily
adopted into your organization. In fact, many organizations have built simple
tracking methods through automated systems, eliminating 10's of hours of time,
and resulting in simple to read reports.
I am going to outline why successful organizations track all of their efforts
as well as what we should be focused on tracking on a day to day basis.
Marketing Result Tracking
First, what is tracking? Tracking is the systematic process of record keeping
and documenting every single action that a sales organization makes.
As an example:
Inbound telephone calls, outbound calls, calls from specific forms of
advertising, calls from your yellow page ad, and visits to each page of your
web site, how long each visitor stayed on your web site.
The list goes on, as you now have a clear understanding of where I am going
with this. You can break down the tracking into subcategories, a process that
many automobile organizations have become very accustomed to doingas in
prospects to walk-arounds, walk-arounds to test drives, etc.
Now, there are several ways to implement a very simple yet effective tracking
method, one that can be automated that will ultimately save you countless
hours.
For all of your advertising, this is the easy part. Simply subscribe to a
number that attaches to your organizations primary hub telephone number.
This way, you can simply identify every single call that comes in from the
various advertising in order to see the effectiveness of each form of marketing
that you have out on the market.
This process itself, marketing result tracking, while being extremely simple to
implement, will certainly give you a huge insight to all forms of advertising
avenues that you currently invest in. You see, tracking is more than just
keeping track of what is going on in your processes and advertisingit
gives you the necessary insight immediately to act on unsuccessful campaigns
and tells you where you should potentially invest in some of your more
successful campaigns.
In order to track your website effectively, you will have a ton of
alternatives. Many will come directly from your web host, as many of the more
aggressive hosts have now added sophisticated tracking tools in order to better
server their clients. Simply go in to your Control Panel to see what is
available, and for those of you that are not as technically inclined, believe
me when I say thisno matter how savvy you are with a computer, you will
certainly be able to view the tracking statistics from your web host.
Now, for those web hosts that do not offer any form of website tracking, or
tracking tools that too basic, there is a myriad of options for you. Simply
visit http://www.breiterstrom.com/tools
to get a great idea of some available options. For marketing result tracking,
there are certainly some very sophisticated options, but if you are just
getting into the mode of tracking, we suggest applying a simple tool (although
many of the simple tools give you great tracking statistics).
Now, what are some of the benefits of effective marketing result tracking?
Well, let's say that you have a yellow page ad that you have had developed
using all of the top strategies. It outlines in its headline a true benefit
that your prospects are looking forblowing your competition away that are
seated in the same section of the phone book. Now, you have spent x dollars
on that ad, and at the end of the year it is time to review your advertising
budget. You determine that you received 172 more calls from this yellow page ad
over the course of the year than any other form of advertising, but you paid a
fraction of the cost. You may decide at this point that it is worth it to
increase the size of your ad for the coming year.
While an extremely crude example above, it was meant to only be an example for
marketing result tracking. There are several issues regarding marketing result
tracking that need to be addressed effectively when determining where each and
every dollar of advertising is spent. While this is certainly important, you
will never be nearly as successful in allocating these dollars without a proper
tracking process in place.
When a well structured tracking system is implemented in coordination with a
well formatted testing strategy, you are destined to have a tremendously more
successful outcome.
Having been in the marketing industry, engaging marketing result tracking and
seeing how little attention to testing and tracking that most businesses adhere
to, you can easily begin dominating your market in a relatively short period of
time, leaving your competitors in the dust wondering what the heck just
happened to the marketand why their phones are no longer ringing.
Now, as far as tracking internal events, wellfor the most part, you are at
the mercy of your sales staff to give you good feedback. Many sales
organizations have implemented CRM giving the company the opportunity to track
the internal sales process with more ease. I say the opportunity because
our studies have shown that the best CRM is only as good as the feedback given
by the sales staff and if the sales staff is not keen to giving feedback where
it may not be in their best interests the organization ultimately ends up
with skewed results. There are certainly answers to this issueanswers
that you are welcome to explore at our home site of
http://www.breiterstrom.com
.
Regardless of how much marketing result tracking your organization has done up
to this point, we recommend that you immediately begin at least tracking the
basics. One mistake companies make is that they think that it is all or
nothing and this leads them to ultimately do nothing.
Start something. Perhaps just with your outside advertising and your website
traffic. In a short period of time you will be happy you didwith huge
increases in bottom line profits.
Margaret Miller
Visit the site below to subscribe to the free monthly newsletter now, and to see
how their Testing and Tracking department can help you with your
marketing result tracking.
About the Author
Margaret Miller specializes in advanced testing and tracking methods. Having
been given the distinguished compliment of "Queen Mother of Result-Based
Testing" you can rest assured that her strategies and techniques themselves are
thoroughly tested. Benefit from Margaret's monthly newsletter publication she
publishes with her Breiter Strom colleagues, a highly successful Marketing
company located in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
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