Tracking Your Sales Organizations Efforts For Increased Bottom Line Profits

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