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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 doing¡as 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 advertising¡it 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 this¡no 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
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 for¡blowing 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
market¡and why their phones are no longer ringing.
Now, as far as tracking internal events, well¡for 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 issue¡answers
that you are welcome to explore at our home site of
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 did¡with 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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