An old sales manager used to drill that into my head.
I thought of that recently when we decided to let a client contract expire with a business in the home improvement industry. While that might sound odd – to resign a piece of business in a slogging economy – a bit of explanation is in order.
Unlike many other media, good internet marketing measures nearly everything. This wealth of information is relevant only after the successful organization and indexing of their web sites. This part of the process assures search engines can locate and evaluate websites – and, provide relevant search results to consumers. Steerpoint helps to connect the dots that actually get sites found.
Eventually our engagements arrive at a point where we need to gauge our success. It can take several months to a year, but we want to be able to quantify actual internet leads and understand how, why and when that inquiry either becomes a sale – or, falls away. There are many revealing variables that are powerful indicators of success that need to be watched, influenced and monetized.
Back to this particular client: While we successfully boosted their organic rankings – to the first page in many searches – he decided he was unwilling or disinterested in activating the kind of measurement systems that would actually hold everybody accountable.
He would have been able to really quantify his ROI – and, help understand where some of his internal personnel problems might be hiding. Unfortunately, he was satisfied with only having a vague understanding what we accomplished with his site and of how we were impacting his flow of qualified leads.
In addition to Google Analytics, we sometimes use affordable phone tracking program that are integrated with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) suite of tools. So, on top of being able to measure search results, key words and click-thrus – we can source phone calls and track deals pending, deals lost and deals closed. In the competitive home improvement industry, it was surprising to have a client be so reluctant to install some basic accountability measures – metrics that would have benefitted everyone involved.
This approach was so successful for one of our national clients, they recently decided to discontinue their PPC Google campaigns. They will pocket tens of thousands of dollars annually after we proved that our approach would sustain their flow of business leads with only organic search results. The are able to generate site traffic thru successful SEO and measure and track each in-bound lead with the CRM measures we implemented.
At some time, every business relationship requires each party to take a leap of faith. It does not always happen. We think it’s a small leap. With the right partner, we can get the website found and make phones ring and, ultimately, prove how many new sales we’re helping them to close.