Adventures in Business and CRM

Have you ever begun a weight loss plan without owning a scale? Perhaps some of you have, but for the most part, people like to know the results of their massive sacrifice, effort, and insane workouts. If you’re anything like most of the people that I know, you’re usually checking the scale like everyday to make sure you are losing weight – only to find that you’re gaining a few pounds in between your actual weigh-in days. Generally, by the time your weigh-in day rolls around, you’re back on track in your weight loss, with a minor scare that made you work even harder to get the weight off. You know… the usual culprit …water weight.

Obsess About the How’s, Why’s and Where’s

Being obsessive over weight loss numbers can be motivating, but also quite intimidating. The same goes with looking at the cold hard facts of marketing efforts. I know a million marketers who love checking their analytics and viewing the traffic that they get to their sites. However, they almost never check the numbers that matter most – the dollars, and the percentages.

The Dollars = The Amount of Sales or Revenue

The Percentages= How many of your site leads converted into Sales or Revenue?

Without a solid system of tracking actual results, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of what’s actually working. Although I hear complaints about the extra work that it takes to track a sales pipeline, (the process a sale goes through from a lead, to an opportunity to an actually sale) this process is imperative for a any marketer to discover the true cost of their efforts and the actual Return on Investment they are realizing. Would you blindly throw dollars into a campaign if it were you own money? You’d want cold, hard facts…right? Many marketers are lax on following strict pipeline management tractics, being that they work with client money – but the trick is to spend it like it’s not only YOUR money, but as if it were your last few dollars.

A Business’s $100,000 Marketing Mistake

I once worked with a client who was trying to market their site and their offline product for over a year…all by themselves.  I meet with them at their request, as they were at their wit’s end trying to figure out how to spend less and make more money. The first thing I asked them for was their analytics data and their conversion rates – neither of which they had.  So, I asked if they had tracked their leads over the past few years..at least keeping the customer’s name, region, and referral source. Again, they hadn’t. They also didn’t have solid data as to the actual campaigns they were running, or how much they all cost during their last fiscal year. Bad news. We went back into their accounting, and found they had spent nearly $100,000, gained only $30,000 in new sales, and had absolutely NO idea which campaigns produced which sales.

This is definitely not something you want to do. All of the world’s best marketers will tell you how important utilizing a CRM is. If you think you can’t afford one, there are many cost efficient solutions out there – even a few free solutions!

What was one of the biggest realizations that you made after implementing CRM into your marketing efforts?

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