When you are able to track advertising in this way, some very powerful things begin to happen. Your ability to objectively evaluate advertising options greatly improves. Your negotiating position with advertising and marketing vendors improves. Your ability to hold these vendors accountable to promises and expectations they set improves.

These things should enable you to have significant impact on the cost of and quality of leads. If you can reduce the average cost of each lead by 10% and increase the quality of each lead by 10%, that could be big for your business couldn’t it?

Well, that’s just scratching the surface! After all, getting the leads is not really the most challenging part of acquiring customers is it? It’s closing the deals. It’s hiring, training, motivating and managing all those sales people to take the leads your marketing generates and turn them into customers.

There is no question that the single most effective way to ensure the success of a sales person is to provide him or her with the highest quality leads. If 80% of your sales people are over quota this year instead of 20% like last year, what does that mean to your bottom line?

Download Free eBook

OK, hopefully I’ve got your attention now! So let’s get specific about how we can measure the results of your advertising and marketing, channel by channel, ad by ad, so you can maximize the most profitable and do away with the duds.

#1 Way to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily
Create a system to track leads from first contact through to close.

Now, don’t lock up your checkbook so fast… I’m not proposing that you run out and spend thousands of dollars on expensive solutions. In fact, this is one area where things can and should be extremely simple. Heck, if you can draw up a one page “lead sheet” that your reps can use to quickly check off the results for each and every lead, great! You’ll need someone to sit down periodically and tabulate the information but, this type of low-tech approach might be the best place to start for many.

Regardless of what method or technology you choose, here’s what you need to know about each lead –

Where did it come from? Be specific here. If they found you on the web, you need to know exactly how. If they did a search first, then you’ve got to know what they searched for. If they saw an ad in a magazine, you need to know which one.

Are they qualified? In any business, there are 3 or 4 questions you can ask any lead and know if they’re likely to become of customer. You’ve got to be sure you ask these questions every time and record the answers. (See our recent eBook – Double Your Sales in 2010 – for more discussion of how to qualify leads)

What are they likely to buy, for how much and when? Ultimately, we want to project the total amount of sales that can be expected and the projected time frame for each and every advertising option you have. This info is clearly crucial.

Did they actually buy and if so, what and for how much?

A couple of other things that are important to find out –

What’s this person’s role in the purchase decision?

Are they currently working with a competitor?

Again, if you can come up with a low-tech way to capture this information consistently for every new lead, that’s great. After all, this is going to require some changes in your processes and methods for your customer facing team so, you should keep it as simple as possible. However, if there are more than one person in your organization dealing with each potential customer or if the volume of leads that anyone in your team is considerable, then writing it all down can get to be a problem. Remember, all your analysis will be skewed if this information isn’t gathered consistently.

So, investing in a good contact management solution or CRM can be wise. Keep in mind the purpose of this exercise… You’re going to reduce the average cost per lead, increase the average quality of each lead and ensure that your sales people beat their quotas and your company grows!

Basic requirements for your contact management system or CRM solution that will allow you to measure your advertising results effectively –

Allows you to document the above information quickly and easily for each and every lead

Allows you each person on your staff that will interact with the lead or prospect before purchase to update the same contact management or CRM database

Allows you to mine the information captured to see the number of leads from each advertising source and quantify the portion that buy, aren’t qualified and/or are still in process.

That’s it. Remember, simplicity is key to success here. This is a means to identify the most profitable advertising channels for your business, it’s not an end in itself. Don’t get enamored by CRM solutions that do everything anybody could ever want but, cost thousands per person and take months to implement. That could defeat the purpose.

Regardless of whether you choose a low-tech approach or a high-tech online contact management solution or web based CRM system, you’ve got to be able to learn this information about each lead. So where is that data going to come from?

#2 Way to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily
Ask the prospect.

Again, we’re going for simple. Sure, you could invest in all sorts of technology, fancy survey emails or even telemarketing surveys to gather all this info but, how long is that going to take to put together? What will it cost? Believe it or not, many sales people will push back and resist asking the specific questions you need answered. You’ll need to help them understand how you’re going to use the information to provide them more leads that are higher quality.

It’s crucial that you follow through too. You can set your efforts back by months or years if you force this on your sales team and then fail to use the information.

Be clear – every person that has contact with the lead before they purchase is going to need to be consistent in asking the decided upon questions and recording the answers.

#3 Way to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily
Make it automatic.

Hey, wouldn’t that be cool? If you’re completely ecommerce, then it may be possible. All this data can be gathered by your website and shopping cart. However, if your customers typically talk to a human being at your company as a part of their decision making process, then there is going to be some manual data entry. No matter how shiny and new and innovative your contact management or CRM solution is, it’s the information that your customer tells your sales person that is likely to be the most valuable to you in measuring the effectiveness of the advertising that drove him or her to your company.

So, you should focus on automating all the other steps along the way and making it as quick and easy as possible for the sales person to add their contribution.

For instance, you can easily have different 800 numbers that you publish in each ad so you’ll know how the lead found your company when you pick up the phone. If they’re visiting your website first, you can build tracking into your web forms that will capture what terms the lead searched for in Google to find you. Many online contact management systems and web based CRM solutions allow your web forms to post new sales leads directly into the database with tracking information embedded.

If you’re using a contact management system or CRM solution, then required that the sales rep fill out all the key data we’ve discussed when they create or update the lead’s record. Also, make sure it’s easy for the sales rep to see what key information has yet to be gathered on each lead so they can ask those questions.

I’m sure you’ve got the idea. In the end, we want to see a table something like this –

# of Leads Qualified Closed

Trade Journal Ad 100 50 20

Paid Search 200 50 10

Radio Spot 50 25 15

Add the costs for each of those ads and you can calculate which is most profitable. You’ll be amazed to find that what you think you know if wrong and how much opportunity is available when you redirect spending to the most profitable channels.

Remember, this is the 5th chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

Related posts:

1. 2 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG
2. 4 Reasons You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing
3. Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine

But you need to know right? You need to be able to direct your advertising and marketing dollars to things that work. Things that generate profitable results. But typically all you can do is look at sales results in aggregate and try to make judgments about many discrete marketing channels.

The big guys do it by spending even more money on research, surveys, etc. That’s great if you’ve got the time and money. In most small businesses, you find out how the marketing is working by asking your sales people. After all, they’re the ones in the organization that speaks to most of the respondents to your marketing. This seems perfectly logical but it’s not.

Part of this is obvious. Bonus and commission plans can incentivize sales people to paint a skewed picture of the situation.

This is not to disparage sales people. They’re just trying to increase their commissions by selling more. However, if your sales compensation structure and your business priorities are not aligned well, this can amplify their perception of the value of certain types of leads.

#1 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG – Sales people see volume as good.

You have to search long and hard to find a sales person that won’t tell you they can use more leads. More leads means more opportunity to them. More leads means more need for the services of a sales person. You may believe more leads is better also. If so, please see Reason #2 below!

You may sell into multiple markets or sell an assortment of different products or services which require marketing in different channels. So, you run an ad in a trade magazine for product A, attend trade shows to market product B and do “pay per click” search ads for product C. It’s very common for sales people to perceive leads from a trade show to be far more valuable than others. They’ll even “feel” like there are more of these leads than others when trade show leads are the lowest by volume.

I say “feel” because most sales people have no means of actually knowing how many leads they’re getting. Frankly, unless they’re paying you for the leads, they have little incentive to keep track.

Download Free eBook

Trade show leads “seem” important and valuable to sales people because of the amount of time spent on trade shows and because they actually have met these people already. Sales people are relationship oriented. When they’re looking at a stack of 50 business cards from the trade show that they spend 2 days on last week, all of whom they met personally, they’re going to see those as “warmer” leads than the 500 names of CFOs in an excel file that you just purchased for them to cold call. Also, if they are more experienced with a certain type of lead or product or company, they’ll perceive those as more valuable. So, when you ask your sales people about the leads, they’re going to over emphasize the ones that are warmer and most familiar to them.

This may seem like a minor point but, it can be huge in terms of dollars! If you spend $10,000 on a trade show plus 2 days of your sales person’s time and get 50 leads, you’ve got to close at least 20% of them or your average sale better be well over $2,000 or both or its just unprofitable after you take sales compensation and operational costs out. On the other hand, if you may be able to spend $5,000 to get 100 leads via your website and your sales person hasn’t invested a minute yet.

Which brings us to…

#2 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG – Can’t measure sales results from leads any better than you can

It’s really all about the quality of the lead. If you’re not using contact management software or a CRM solution to track the leads by source and tie that to results, then you can bet your sales people aren’t either. Sure, you probably have one or two sales people on your team that tell you they use Outlook or contact management systems like ACT! or Goldmine to track the leads you give them but, the fact is that’s not really their job as you’ve defined it and so, it’s likely to get inconsistent attention at best.

Even if you are using an online CRM to capture contact information for all leads that come in, where it came from and which sales person it was given to and your sales people are adding in the actual results once they make contact with the lead, it’s probably not happening all the time. If a sales person is given 100 leads in a month and they forget to log in the results for 5 or 10 of them, it can skew the analysis of this information tremendously.

What you want to know is how many leads came in, tied to each marketing channel and whether they were qualified and if they made a purchase. Seems simple doesn’t it? It’s simple for your CRM system to give you a nice analysis of this information but, it’s another thing to get to the point where you have it all in one place so the analysis can begin. If you’re not using any kind of CRM today, just try and track the leads that come in next month. If you are using a CRM solution already, you know what I mean.

You may be able to capture and track all leads that come in via your website. You may even have the front office trained to track all the call ins that happen when your ad runs in the local business journal. But what about referrals or trade show leads? Those go straight into your sales people’s hands… Even once you’ve figured out how to capture all the leads, it’s getting a good read on the quality of those leads that’s key. And it’s the most difficult part of the equation.

After all, it has to be objective for it to be really useful. Just like your sales people will have a tendency to see volume as good for its own sake, they’ll also have vague “feelings” about the quality of leads from certain sources that have more to do with the difficulty of getting in touch with those leads and generating the first real conversation about need than anything else.

To make it work you have to boil down lead “quality” to a series of objective measurements. Are they in the right industry for you? How much are the currently spending on products or services like yours? Maybe for you it’s as simple as how many employees they have or what their annual revenue is or how much they spend on telecom each month. For many small businesses trying to carve out a niche for themselves, it has to be much more specific.

If you’re using a contact management system or CRM solution, put fields in the system for your staff to enter the answer to these questions. If not, use a spreadsheet or even a printed “lead sheet” with blanks to input these answers. This way you’ll be able to measure leads based on each of these criteria and you’ll know which of your sales people just aren’t asking the right questions.

Remember, this is the 4th chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

Related posts:

1. 4 Reasons You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing
2. Pour In The Jet Fuel – Part 5 of Double Your Sales in 2009
3. A New Race Car to Success in 2010 for Christmas This Year

In the pre-Internet days, a publication called “Consumer Reports” was very popular. Those of us that pre-date Gen X, Y, etc. remember how often Consumer Reports was cited in advertising. If your company was reviewed positively by Consumer Reports, you were darned sure going to let me know that. Their specialty was doing in-depth tests of all the important components of each product and then comparing all the major competitors side by side. What made them unique is that they did not accept advertising. This enabled Consumer Reports to conduct their analysis objectively and just as importantly, it gave their readers the impression they were uninfluenced by advertising dollars. Relatively high subscription payments from readers were the only source of funding to pay for all that exhaustive research.

Why did so many readers pay such a high price for Consumer Reports? Because it helped them make smart purchase decisions. People wanted to feel like they “got a good deal” or made the “wise choice”.

In addition to reading serious publications like Consumer Reports, other options were going out on your own by visiting stores and the library, checking with the Better Business Bureau, and talking with friends and colleagues.

Lots of time was invested in all of this investigation. Then, once you selected your short list of products and vendors, you had to start calling or visiting vendors and negotiating the price and terms.

As recently as 10 years ago, making a truly wise decision and getting a good deal involved a LOT of time and diligence.

So it’s no wonder that the Internet has become a crucial step in most people’s buying process. What most people don’t realize is how much the Internet has changed things.

As an example, just think of your last car purchase. Your buying process probably included all the above steps with the addition of some Internet searches. In the past, you might get out and visit some dealerships early in the process and “kick some tires”. And what’s the one thing we all detest about visiting a car lot? When it gets down to negotiating, there’s the inevitable process where the sales rep keeps going to check with his manager on the pricing, financing, etc. Why is it so frustrating? Because they leave you sitting there waiting not just once but several times in a visit. Sometimes for 30 minutes or more at a stretch!

When you were buying that car, when you did your searches on the Internet, you probably found some vehicles online that you requested more information about. That probably meant waiting for a sales rep to receive your request and call you. I bet you ended up spending a lot more time with the sales people that called you back quickly! We hate to wait. Especially when we’re ready to buy!

So the Internet has become the place to go for quick research and a quick response. In fact, virtually all buying processes involve two separate activities on the Internet. First, you do your research. Second, you reach out to vendors you’ve selected to actually begin the negotiation process.

#1 Radical Change in the Way People Buy: The Internet is the first place people go to do research to aid in their purchase decision and when it’s time to contact your business.

Even if people have to visit your physical location to make their purchase, you can bet they will look you up online to check store hours, get a map and maybe even request some info before they visit.

Your company needs to be a resource for customers during every step in their buying process. In fact, you can reach a much wider market via the Internet than you can via other media for the same money. You can expand your marketing reach and fill your funnel with far more prospects than you have today. But first you have to be sure you have what your customers want in at least three points in their process of deciding to do business with you.

We’ve already talked about two of them – the research stage and the contact stage. However, the most valuable step is actually the first step. It comes before the prospect has even decided to make a purchase. Maybe they are not even aware that the type of thing you sell is available. They’re just sitting out there suffering from a problem that you can cure for them.

Imagine if you were able to become a resource for folks with that particular problem or challenge before they decided to do something about it! Now you’re engaging with your entire market and positioning yourself and your business as a trusted authority on the subject. Who better to do business with when the time comes?

#2 Radical Change in the Way People Buy: Reaching a wider audience is no longer done through branding your product and service to the masses. It’s done through branding yourself and your company as a trusted information resource for people with problems you can cure.

In upcoming chapters of “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”, we’re going to get specific about how to get yourself and your company in front of the right audience at the right times.

First though, let’s consider another way that the Internet has changed the way people buy. Remember the story about Consumer Reports earlier? The magazine filled a need for objective research for consumers. In the old days, if you were lucky, you had a friend, relative or colleague you could call on for advice about an upcoming purchase. For most of us, that meant we had one or two people we could call on about a given subject. Sometimes we just didn’t know anyone with the right sort of experience. That meant we were left talking to Uncle Bill, who seemed to know a little bit about everything…

The process of reaching out to people you know is a natural human instinct. Advice from friends suffers from at least three flaws –

A. People tend to think highly of their own decisions, which leads them to recommend things they’ve previously bought or visa versa.

B. People tend to tell others what they want to hear. Your colleagues are not likely to tell you anything that disagrees drastically with your point of view. They’ll skew what they say about their real feelings to make them more compatible with yours.

C: It’s time consuming to make contact with people and get their advice.

So here we are with the Internet making all our research easy and fast. It’s also very quick and easy to reach out to vendors for information. When you’ve got a problem and you’ve decided to fix it, most of us are not disciplined enough to put the brakes on and wait a week or two while we reach out to selected friends and colleagues.

Where do we turn for that crucial “advice from a friend” component of our buying process?

Online communities. Some would call it Social Media. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Groups, etc. They’re all the rage right now of course. For many business owners and sales managers, they seem to be a way for employees to waste a lot of time talking with friends about non-work related stuff. However, these communities fill an important function in most buying cycles. They connect the buyer –your prospect– with others that can lend some advice in a very fast and organized way.

If you haven’t tried any these online communities yourself, then put this book down now and sign up for LinkedIn or Facebook. Join a group related to the industry you’re in. Ask a question that a prospect of yours would ask. Watch how many folks response and how varied their input interests are. The key question is how many of your competitors can you find in the community?

Recently Google began indexing LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter internal pages, among other sites. This means that when your prospects start their research by doing a Google search, they’re going to see recent discussions about related topics in online communities right alongside the regular web page results.

Back to the human need to connect with other humans for advice. These sites make that so easy and so fast, you’d have to be crazy not to post a question about an upcoming purchase.

#3 Radical Change in the Way People Buy: Online Communities are a rapidly growing touch point in the purchase process because they provide fast access to the experience and expertise of hundreds or thousands of people rather than the two or three people most of us know to ask.

The good news here is that this trend is still relatively new. Even in many high tech but very specialized fields, you may be the first of your competitors to take advantage of this trend. Many of the sites also make it extremely easy to monitor what’s being talked about related to your business or industry quickly.

Your short list of near term objectives for online communities should be –

1. Identify the communities you need to participate in. Ask your customers where they spend time. Don’t try to be everywhere.

2. Figure out how you can keep tabs on topics of interest to you in these communities efficiently. Many, like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, make it very easy.

3. Start getting involved in discussions that are related to your area of interest or expertise and/or business. More on this in upcoming chapters.

For most business owners that have been around for a few years, the website is an online version of your brochure or catalog. You’ve probably spent some money on the design of the site, as well as Search Engine Optimization and Pay per Click advertising. As discussed in our first chapter, “4 Reasons You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing”, you probably weren’t pleased with the results and felt you overpaid.

That has to change. As you read the following chapters of “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”, you’ll probably want to spend more time and money on your online presence. That’s good. However, we’re going to make sure you know what you’re getting and how to measure it first. Overtime, your online presence must become the most robust and appealing of the “interfaces” with customers and prospects you have.

In the coming chapters, we’re going to get very detailed about how to get you in front of a much wider audience as a trust expert in your field. You will have the opportunity to control the prospects buying process before they even know they’re buying anything!

Remember, this is the 2nd chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

Related posts:

1. Why CRMs Fail and What To Do About It
2. Number 1 Mistake Online Advertisers Make
3. Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine

Register for Free eBook

small and medium sized businesses face with limited resources for advertising and marketing when attempting to grow their sales. The eBook provides affordable and actionable steps any business can take to generate qualified sales leads without busting the budget.

“Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine” will be released as a series of chapters (blog posts) here on our blog, one post per week. Then we’ll release the entire eBook in PDF format when complete in February. Register now and we’ll notify you via email as each chapter is released.

• 4 Reasons You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing
• 3 Radical Changes in the Way People Buy Going On Today You Can Use to Increase Profits
• 4 Fallacies in Marketing and Selling that Cause You to Waste Money and Destroy Profits
• 2 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG
• 3 Ways to Measure Your Advertising and Marketing Results Easily
• 6 Action Steps to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
• 8 Metrics You Must Know About Marketing

Related posts:

1. 4 Reasons You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing
2. Double Your Sales in 2010
3. “Double Your Sales in 2009″ Begins Monday January 23!

4 Reasons You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing

• How failure to set measurable expectations and then measure the results leaves you in the dark.
• How advertising and marketing consultants try to keep it that way. It sure feels that way, doesn’t it?

Of all the places you spend money to run your business, you can probably explain in minute detail where it all goes and how that investment returns you profits.

When you write that check for marketing and advertising, don’t you feel that rock in the pit of your stomach? You know something’s not right about it, but you know you’ve got to advertise to keep selling. So you bite the bullet and spend some more cash.

It’s because you’re unclear about exactly how that investment is going to make you money. There is way too much gray area! Sure, you know what you’re paying for. But do you know exactly how much profit to expect from the expenditure?

If you pay for a booth at a trade show, you don’t know how many people will attend or how many will stop by your booth. If you pay for a magazine ad, you don’t know how many people will see the ad or how many will call you.

In truth, you might as well head to Vegas and put that money on the roulette table, spin the wheel and see what happens. That’s what you’re doing when you spend on marketing and advertising today!

You would not be in business if you didn’t know what you’re doing. You’ve learned to be specific and clear about your expectations in every other aspect of your business. So why do we let ourselves throw money away like this?

#1 Reason You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing:
Advertising and marketing vendors and consultants don’t want you to know what the return on each marketing investment is!

It’s not in the interest of someone selling you ad space or a direct mail campaign or their time to create campaigns to help you measure the return. It’s much easier for them to inflate their invoice if you’re clueless. So they point you to completely unmeasurable benefits like “branding”. They tell you about their huge circulation numbers.

You are not a marketing guru. It’s easy for them to throw around big numbers of viewers or readers or registrants —- and it sounds great.

The fact is, there are hundreds and thousands of minute variables that go into a typical advertising campaign that can make or break the results. Often many different people and vendors are involved. No one wants to be accountable for the whole enchilada.

But you are. So you’ve got to hold them accountable just like you would a vendor that provides you with parts for your manufacturing process or your landlord. If the roof is leaking, it needs to be fixed.

Register for Free eBook

And there is a HUGE leak in your marketing process!

#2 Reason You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing:
You are not setting expectations for the vendors and consultants and you’re not setting them for yourself.

So, it’s not really the fault of all these marketing folks that you can’t tell what you’re getting out of your ad spending. Just like everything else when you run a business, it comes down to you. You are not tracking what happens when they do what you pay them for.

Sure, they run the ad, you show up at the trade show, your direct mail piece gets sent. And that’s all you expect of the vendor. But that’s not what you’re really paying for. You want the phone to ring!

How many phone inquiries does it take to make that ad worth it? How many business cards do you need to collect at the trade show to make it pay off?

At a minimum, you should know the expectations in measurable specifics each time you write a check. If you spend another $5,000 on updating your website, how is that going to result in more sales and more profits? If you can’t figure it out, don’t write the check!

When you start thinking this way, you’ll find that the ad vendors and consultants working with you become extremely helpful. They can tell you what typical response rates are to this or that type of ad. Put them on the spot. Make them commit to a number. If you hit it, it was a win. If not, you won’t be doing it again. You’ll certainly get that extra bit of focus and creativity out of them to make your campaign a success!

#3 Reason You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing:
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

Unfortunately, most businesses aren’t organized enough to track the real results. If you’ve got an ad running in a magazine, a classified ad in the local paper, and a trade show all in the same month, when the phone rings, can you really tell how that prospect heard about you?

Well, the good news is that its not hard to do. You’ve just got to start asking, “How did you hear about us?”

It really is that easy. Just ask. Track it on a simple piece of paper with tick marks if you have to.

Imagine how much fun you’re going to have! A month or two after the ad runs, you can sit down with vendor and show them, “This is how many inquiries we got from this ad.” Do the math with them. “We spent $1,000 and got 20 inquiries. That’s $50 per lead.” That may good or bad in your business. If it’s bad, then I bet you get a better deal on your next ad run with that vendor. Or maybe you don’t bother next time. If its a good result, then you’re probably going to want to spend more money next time. The difference is that you’ll be making decisions about investments that you believe in and because you know what to expect.

#4 Reason You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing:
You’re letting them baffle you with their bullshit.

OK, so nothing we’ve discussed is rocket science. Only one problem… these guys are creative types. They’re expert at painting pretty pictures with words and images and putting the right spin on things. The advertising industry has convinced generations of entrepreneurs and business people that advertising is a creative process and you can’t really measure creativity.

If there is one thing you need to take away from this is that you cannot buy into that thinking. If they refuse to help you set expectations and measure the results, then it’s probably because they know they won’t measure up. Move on.

Find marketing and advertising partners that understand how important measuring the results is and offer solutions to make it a reality for you.

The concept of measuring the return on your advertising investments is not new, but its becoming much more crucial. The world is changing. You can no longer rely on one medium to promote your company and your products. You’ve got be in a lot of different places and the list is growing.

If you don’t have measurable expectations for each channel, that rock in your stomach is going to get much bigger and its going to eat you alive.

In fact, the changes taking place in the way people buy and the way those changes affect small business marketing is our next topic!

Remember, this is the 1st chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

Related posts:

1. Double Your Sales in 2010
2. Pour In The Jet Fuel – Part 5 of Double Your Sales in 2009
3. A New Race Car to Success in 2010 for Christmas This Year

There are good leads and not so good leads. Many times, you instinctively know the difference. Other times, you’re completely surprised by the results.

You spend a lot of money and time to generate these unpredictable results.

The leads your sales team pursues is the fuel in your sales engine. Right now, you’re pouring all sorts of different types of fuel into the tank. Premium, Plus, Regular, Deisel, etc.

No wonder the results are unpredictable. No wonder it seems like parts of the sales engine just are performing the way they should.

In the first 4 installments of our "Double Your Sales in 2009", we’ve covered setting the "qualification bar" high enough that sales time is focused on the highest value customers, knowing the return on your investment in sales time and expense at each step in your process and holding your team accountable for following the process you design.  Click here to start with "Qualify Early and Often", the first installment.

When you’re pouring all sorts of different types of leads into the engine, it just makes good sense to try and filter out the bad ones before they go too far. Making the adjustments described in the earlier installments of "Double Your Sales in 2009" will increase sales. No question about it.

What if you could ensure that you’re pouring only the best kinds of leads into the tank in the first place? That’s what I call Turbo Charging Your Sales Engine. Now that you’ve tuned the engine for high performance, let’s stop putting regular gas in. Let’s pour in some jet fuel and really take off!

Obviously, you would have already done this if you could. What’s holding you back? Most often its the fact that you get sales leads from multiple different sources and the results vary widely from lead to lead even within one single lead source. In other words, you’re cold calling, you’re going to trade shows, you do some direct mail and you promote your website and the quantity and quality vary widely from month to month as well as the cost. Its very difficult to measure each source of leads objectively. Especially if you’re not following a system of qualifying each lead consistently as discussed in our earlier installments.

However, if you ARE qualifying or disqualifying each lead consistently, tracking those results lead by lead and holding your team accountable doing it all as you have designed, then you are only one last step away from putting that jet fuel in their engine!

In our last installment, we talked about setting a simple means for your sales reps to easily record the answers to their qualification questions for each and every lead. Click here to read "Set the Mustangs Free".

If you’re collecting this information, you can analyze it from the standpoint of things that matter most in your business. If you’re asking each lead how many widgets the purchase each year, then in a few weeks you’ll begini to see exactly where your sweet spot is… Your close rate will be highest for leads that purchase a certain number of widgets.

All you need to do now is add one more piece of data to the puzzle. For each lead, track where it came from. That’s it. Too simple right? Well the trick here is that you’re combining the information about where the lead came from with more specific information gathered by the sales team when qualifying the leads.

Now you have all the information you need to do three very powerful things:

1. Find your sweet spot – # of widgets, # of employees, current supplier, etc. and find sources of leads that better match that sweet spot.
2. Redirect your marketing dollars and cold calling efforts toward leads that are more often qualified and purchase most often.
3. Create low investment means of responding to and nurturing leads from sources that aren’t the best match for you.

You may feel like you have a pretty good feel for your sweet spot and which lead sources perform best instinctively. The difference here is that by truly measuring the information, you’ll KNOW. And I probably don’t have to tell you how wide the gulf is between a gut feeling and knowing. All of the sudden, you’re empowered to make decisions confidently. This is very important because some of your gut instincts are wrong. Its tough to go against your instincts unless the facts are overwhelming. In addition, your sales team has their own instinctive feel for what’s working and what’s not. You’re going to need to convince them too. Nothing works better than the unequivocal facts.

Here are a couple of things to expect: Almost without fail, I’ve seen companies blown away by how poorly some of their most costly marketing efforts peform when measured objectively. It could be your website, it could be the trade shows you go to or it could be your cold calling. You will be surprised to find that one of the sources of the most leads, and maybe even the most sales, actually provides a lower percentage of leads that are truly qualified and purchase than most of the others. In addition, some of the sources of leads that you feel are "less important" will turn out to be providing a much higher rate of qualified, close-able leads than most of the others.

This is where the jet fuel comes from! You’re going to stop spending money and time on the poorly performing lead sources and start spending more money and time on the high performance lead sources. This won’t be an easy transition but, you’ll be armed with the facts to confidently move forward.

It still amazes me how huge the amount of marketing resources that can be retargeted usually is. All you’ve got to do is take that first step and start tracking what happens. The facts will begin to speak for themselves. Your total marketing expenditure doesn’t have to change at all. You’re going to sell more without spending an extra dime. Now that’s an offer you can’t refuse!

You can Double Your Sales in 2009! You don’t have to increase spending at all. You just have to start managing your sales process in a more systematic way.

Let’s go back to the beginninig and review the entire process from start to finish:

Qualify Early and Often – define questions that indicate the "qualification" of any lead and ask every lead right up front before you invest lots of time and money in them.

Timing is Everything – create guidelines for what makes it worthwhile to take each step in the sales dance with each prospect.

The Law of Attraction – teach everyone on your team to say no to prospects unless they are sure that the investment of their time and your money will yield the desired result.

Set the Mustangs Free – make it easy for sales reps to track what happens with each lead, the answers to your qualification questions and the sales activities invested in. Hold them accountable for following the process by sharing the results of this tracking with the team.

Pour in the Jet Fuel – track the source of each lead and redirect marketing efforts and investments toward the lead sources that generating the most frequently qualified and close-able leads.

This process does not have to take months. If you start today, within 30 days you’ll begin to see improvements in relationships with the most valuable sales prospects and you’ll begin to see where your marketing investments should be realigned.

There is no reason that 2009 can’t be the best year you’ve ever had. Your selling process is about to turn into a high performance selling machine. Wasted time and money will be minimized and your sales team will be focused on the best possible opportunities more often.

In just a few days, we’ll release the entire "Double Your Sales in 2009" series as one comprehensive e-Book. Don’t forget to register to receive the entire "Double Your Sales in 2009" series as an e-Book here.

Related posts:

1. “Double Your Sales in 2009″ Begins Monday January 23!
2. Set the Mustangs Free – Part 4 of Double Your Sales in 2009
3. “Double Your Sales in 2009″ Begins Monday January 23!