“If I can’t measure it, I’m not doing it!”

My technology manager and I were chatting with a client last week about different ways to approach marketing, when the client suddenly said, “If I can’t measure it, I’m not doing it!” Wow! I love that!

Most businesspeople we talk with don’t think a lot about measurement when they’re talking about marketing. And if they do, it’s very rarely to that extent. I was genuinely shocked!

I’m a big believer in measurement. In fact, I spend most every Saturday morning in a local coffeeshop recording our marketing and sales measurements from the previous week… things like website activity, email metrics, social media numbers, our sales pipeline and so on. I believe in measurement so much that there are a handful of phrases that I recite frequently about the value of measurement:

• “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
• “What’s gets measured gets done.”
• “Measurement eliminates argument.”

So, if your sales and marketing measurement could use a little sprucing up, first, ask yourself this question…

Am I measuring the right things?

Here, I think about a two-phase measurement process: activity and follow-on action. Here are a few examples to explain:

1. How many people visited our website in the past month (the activity)… and of those, how many reached out to us (the follow-on action)?
2. How many people visited our blog… and which topics/titles were the most read?
3. How many people saw the webinar landing page… and of those, how many actually registered for it?
4. How many prospects are in each stage of my sales pipeline… and how long has each been at that stage?

This two-step measurement helps you to understand the numbers a bit better by drilling down below the surface.

Now comes the ‘so what’ moment. You’ve done your activity/action measurement, so here’s the next question…

What am I going to do with this information?

Measurement for measurement’s sake is just a waste of time. The purpose of measuring is to learn from it and to then get better at your sales and marketing. And here are some examples, using the four measurements above:

1. On website measurement: If inquiries are down, I might need to start testing different call-to-actions or different layouts of the Contact Us page.
2. On blog measurements: If one of the goals of a blog is to attract people to the website, then I need to write more posts in the future that are similar in nature to the ones that are most popular now.
3. On webinar registrations: If the landing page is not converting visitors into registrations, then I need to test different landing page layouts and copy.
4. On pipeline stages: If ‘time in stage’ for some of the prospects is well above the company average, then I need to coach that sales rep on ways to move those prospects to the next stage.

It’s a basic market research flow: conduct the research > do the analysis > draw some conclusions. And in this case, the conclusions are how to improve your sales and marketing outcomes.

Bottom line

All of this measurement can seem a bit daunting, so to help you get started (or get better at it) in a sensible way, here’s a simple process to consider:

• First, based on what you’re doing, determine the top 5 or 6 marketing elements you want to measure. Then do the same for sales. For marketing, it will likely involve website visitors, email metrics, social media metrics, gated content downloads, etc. For sales, consider total sales, sales by rep, sales by product line, pipeline activity, etc.
• Next, limit your measurement efforts to one hour a week. That should be plenty of time if you’ve set up tracking sheets.
• Finally, put this hour on your calendar – on the same day at the same time – every week. Lock it in. Schedule around it.

Do this… and measurement becomes a habit. And once it’s a habit, you’ll be on track for continuous sales and marketing improvement.

Good luck.