Geonexus

Marketing is a process in your company that enables sales to occur.

It’s a process of creating value for the customer with information that matches their buying process with your selling process. Or, as the Eisenberg brothers say, a process to “understand their needs, anticipate their questions and provide the information that helps each one make a decision.”

Often sales is viewed as a numbers game. It’s a common belief that you’ve got to have a big funnel with lots of suspects going in one end and a few sales coming out the other end.

But that’s only because most companies find it hard to run marketing in a systematic way.

In manufacturing, if the factory says it will make 1000 blue widgets in June, then that is exactly what will happen.

If marketing says it will produce 50 qualified leads in June, well, who knows?

What’s a qualified lead anyway? And how do they know they can produce 50 (and only 50)?

Part of the problem is that persuading people that it is in their interest to make a purchase is not easy. It’s not as predictable as making blue widgets.

But another part of the problem is that marketing is not as systematic as it could be. It’s not viewed like other processes in the company that can be studied, measured, and consistently improved.

Imagine if your marketing was more systematic, if it had a more predictable outcome. Then it would be possible to set more specific goals.

And one of the first goals would be to decide how many customers you would want to attract in the next period of time.

Knowing the result of the process lets you back up step by step and plan for the resources you need. The resources to create the value that will enable these buyers to become customers.

How many new customers will it take to support your growth goals?

The simple* tool above let’s you explore the answer to this question. It lets you see the relationship between revenue growth and customer growth.

Just enter the values for Growth Rate, Average Revenue per Customer, and Number of Current Customers. The tool will calculate the number of new customers you will need to support this growth rate.

Here’s the url for the tool if you want to see it bigger.

* By simple I mean it makes some assumptions and and doesn’t account for all factors. It doesn’t take into account additional revenue from current customers; it assumes revenue from new customers is constant; it assumes that all new customers arrive at the beginning of the year.