It's just a quick story from me today - something my Dad told me years ago which has always stuck with me and the premise of which will always apply when it comes to sales and marketing.
Dad worked as a small business consultant ahead of retiring by the seaside a few years back and was working with a guy who owned a carpet business which was thriving.
It was doing so well in fact, that the owner was struggling to keep up with demand, which is why he was speaking with my Dad for some advice.
He also had one major issue - despite being so busy, he wasn't making any real profit. His income was barely matching his outgoings.
So Dad took a look at the books and noticed that he was spending £5k per month on a double-page spread in the local newspaper and immediately questioned such a huge outlay.
The client replied that it was essential, as since he'd placed the ad, business had been increasingly booming and was showing no signs of slowing down.
Dad thought it would make some sense to know how true this statement actually was, and so purchased five phone unique phone numbers, which all forwarded to the client's main office number, but which could be easily tracked on a simple dashboard.
He then switched one of these numbers with the main office number being used on the double-page spread, as well as on a few other ads being run in various places.
After a fortnight, he looked at the analysis.
The double-page spread had generated just two phone calls, neither of which had gone on to even request a quote.
But one number was absolutely dominating the calls and sales - and where was it placed?
In the window of the local newsagent, for £20 per week.
On this evidence, the client took the opportunity to withdraw the ad from the newspaper and guess what - it had no impact whatsoever on his business, and added £5k per month onto his bottom line.
It's a simple message but massively important.
You should be testing and measuring all of your marketing efforts - from the source to the sale.
There's no point in spending money on marketing channels that aren't directly contributing to sales - but you'll only know this if you're tracking it properly - either via telephone numbers, Google Analytics, your CRM or anything else that can help you to dissect the data.
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