Sometimes Ignorance Is Bliss: Website Analytics

July 18, 2011 By David Crankshaw
Can ignorance be bliss with website analytics?

You know the bounce rate on your website. And average time on site. And on and on for many other metrics.

Are your numbers low or high? What can you compare them to? How can you know what a ‘good’ number is?

You could compare your metrics to those of your competitors to answer this question. Or to other industries that are similar to yours.

You could look at historical patterns – this time last year, last month, last week.

You could look to the future and measure against your plan, your forecast, your budget.

You could try all these. But they would be a waste of time.

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How to Get Started with Google Analytics

July 11, 2011 By David Crankshaw
Get started with Google Analytics

Every business wants to know what is happening on their website.

But you can’t just stroll onto your website like a restaurant owner who leaves the kitchen to visit the dining room.

Or a shopkeeper who visits the store floor.

It’s invisible, this activity on your website. You need a way to record the activity and assemble it in a form that you can use.

That’s exactly what Analytics packages do. And the most popular package is Google Analytics.

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What is productivity in sales and marketing?

September 13, 2010 By David Crankshaw

What is productivity? Wikipedia says it’s the “measure of output from a production process, per unit of input.” It’s the relationship between how much energy and resource we put into a project and how much we get out of it.

Improving productivity is critical for every organization in the company, but especially for Sales and Marketing. If you could find a way to get a 10 or 20% increase in your company valuation without any additional investments, would you do it? Of course you would. Improvements in Sales and Marketing productivity are highly leveraged because they improve both our ability to generate revenue and the profitability of that revenue.

What constitutes productivity in Sales and Marketing and how do we measure it?

Is it operational?

If we look at productivity in terms of Operations, then we would examine the leads and opportunities that flow through our sales organizations. We would then compare these results to the activities and resources we devote to earning customers. In this case we would measure the qualified leads we produce, the number of opportunities, and the number of deals we close. Then we would look at them relative to the activities required to produce them.

Or is it financial?

In this case we follow the flow of dollars. We look at the money we invest in people and programs and the flow of profitable revenue that comes out.

Which only raises more questions. Is it the initial revenue from a customer that we measure, or the revenue over a span of time? Should we measure the profit?

Perhaps the best gross measure is the amount of operational profit relative to the cost of sales and marketing from year to year.

Is your operational profit relative to the cost of sales and marketing going up? Is the increase linear? If this is the case then your company is growing but you aren’t improving the productivity of sales and marketing.

Or is the curve getting steeper each year because your productivity is actually improving?

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B2B Marketing in a nutshell

April 1, 2010 By David Crankshaw

If you…

  • identify a group of buyers who have a problem that you are uniquely qualified to solve
  • understand the journey the buyer must take in order to become a customer
  • attract the attention of your buyers
  • help them to see that the problem you know how to solve is one that they MUST solve
  • nurture your relationship with them by answering questions and solving problems at each stage of their journey
  • facilitate the change management that must occur in their organization
  • demonstrate that you share their values, that you have practical wisdom in your domain, and that your interests are aligned with their interests

… then you will be successful at finding, winning, and keeping new customers.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With:

Does Marketing and Sales have to be a numbers game?

March 25, 2010 By David Crankshaw

Numbers GameSalespeople have been told for a long time that selling is a numbers game. The more people you talk to, the more people you present to, the more people you give proposals to, the more business you’ll get.

Sales and Marketing play the numbers game when they are given little control over which buyers they will target, little understanding of the buyer’s journey in their market, little ability to know when a buyer is ready to move to the next stage in the buying process, and little knowledge of what constitutes a qualified buyer.

The numbers game leads to massive inefficiencies. Marketing generates too many poor leads and Sales chases too many unqualified opportunities.

It’s as if a bicycle manufacturer bought materials from the first name in the yellow pages, told their production staff to assemble bicycles from the parts, and when only a few of them came out right, shrugged and said it’s a numbers game.

Yet we are working in a time when forces outside our control – competition, globalization, and technology – are forcing companies to get a better return on their investment in Marketing and Sales.

What is the alternative to the numbers game, a game where you have little control over your work or your results?

The alternative is to focus on the buyer and the buying process.

  • Segment your market carefully and define your ideal prospect.
  • Understand the buyer’s journey in your particular market. Buyers move from being unaware of a problem to awareness to doing something to solve the problem. Map the buyer’s needs and how you create value for the buyer at each stage of the buying process.
  • Create value for the buyer at each stage by answering questions and solving problems. Enable the buyer to move forward.
  • Know how to recognize when a buyer is ready to move to the next stage, particularly when the buyer is far enough along that the situation warrants bringing in a salesperson.

In this environment, salespeople are specialists who only get brought in when the buyer is qualified and ready to talk to a salesperson.

Marketing defines the market, finds potential buyers, and nurtures them on their journey. Sales works with qualified opportunities, facilitates the buyer through the range of organizational decisions it must make, and helps the buyer’s team determine the best solution and the best solutions partner.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With:
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