Getting more prospects
There are lots and lots of way to generate prospects and entire schools of thought about qualifying prospects, but we’re going to limit our discussion here to advertising. Most all companies do some form of advertising, and lots of companies do nothing but advertise for new business, so it’s a good place to start our discussion.
Getting more prospects is about one thing, tracking results. You take great care in keeping track of your accounts receivable. You pay a bookkeeper to carefully track each account. You know exactly when their payment is due. You call your customer when they’re late in paying their bill. Unfortunately, most business have no method for tracking their advertising–not even those few companies who ask “how did you hear about us?” That question is pretty useless because customers may tell you that they saw your advertising on TV or the radio or wherever, but fail to mention that it wasn’t why they chose you.
The 80/20 Rule Never Goes Away
Good tracking always has the ability to tell you exactly what route brought them into your business. Why is this so important? That’s easy, you’ve heard of the 80/20 rule; it applies to almost everything, and advertising is no exception. 20% of your advertising produces 80% of your new advertisement-related prospects. That means the other 80% of your advertising is a waste of money! Money you could use to generate explosive growth if you knew where to best invest it. Just imagine how many new customers you’d have if you simply redirected the 100% you are already spending into the 20% of your advertising methods that are actually producing results!
Tracking properly is a bit of work. Do you advertise in more that one section of the yellow pages? A car repair shop might have an ad under Auto Repair, another under Tires, and a third under Wheel Alignment. Simply learning that they found you in the yellow pages is useless, especially in a larger city with a few different competing yellow pages. Grilling your customers won’t work either, tracking must be automatic. One easy way is to stop running the same phone number all over town. Every publication can be given a separate phone number, all of which forward to your “real” phone line. This is not expensive nor complicated, we’re currently paying just $4 per month for each additional fake phone line. Each line lists the Caller ID information for each prospect. This allows us to very simply look-up which customers came-in from which advertisement. If you’re running two ads in each of two different yellow pages, that’s 4 fake phone lines. There is no other way to get so much valuable marketing insight for under 20 bucks a month! Of course you need to track all your ads, not just the yellow pages. This includes your on-line advertising, trade publications, coupon books, TV, radio, etc. Custom Internet landing pages track on-line activity just as easily as the fake phone lines track calls. The only customers that will be less accurate will be the walk-in traffic.
Now that you can easily determine exactly which ads are getting the phone to ring, it’s a simple matter of canceling the unproductive ads & pouring your full advertising budget into the ads that are actually working. Given the 80/20 rule, you could conceivably have five times your current customer volume, that’s right, 500% instantly! Granted, the growth probably won’t be that linear, but would you complain if your business only doubled or tripled?
