Business Marketing by Numbers

When clients call, life is great. You know that your business marketing is working. You feel like you are the best in your field and are fulfilling an important role in the community. Then a few days go by and no one calls. 

If you have focused on seducing your market, it might be time to look at the numbers. Shift your focus to how many people you are telling about your home based business.

Business Marketing - a Numbers Game

How many people are you reaching with your message? If you do not have as many clients as you would like, you are obviously not talking to enough people. But how many is enough? To work that out let us look at a whole year, because all changes take time.

Clients:

If you know how many clients you would like per week, multiply that by 52 (e.g.: 20 clients per week x 52 weeks: 1040 clients per year).

Enquiries:

How many of the people that call to enquire actually become your client? (e.g.: let’s assume it is 8 out of 10 people, a conversion rate of 80%, divide 1,040 by 80%: 1,300 enquiries). That is how many enquiries you need to generate to end up with 1,040 clients.

Approaches:

The hardest question is probably how many people you have to communicate with to get them to enquire. This varies widely depending on how you communicate and how well you have pre-selected the people you are talking to (defined your target market). 

A letterbox drop usually gets 1-2% enquiries return. A well produced direct mail could get up to 10%. The best lead generation is through your own personal contacts, people you actually meet and talk to.

So on average, the enquiries generation might be 5% of who you communicate with, divide 1,300 by 5%: 26,000 approaches.

That looks pretty daunting. But there are a few other things that can be done to reduce this figure.

Repeat Business:

One of the cheapest and easiest ways to increase your business is raising the number of times a client comes back. 

This comes back to staying in touch with your clients. Make them feel special and looked after. Think about the best frequency for your clients to see you. Then contact them around that time.

This dramatically reduces the necessary approaches, exactly by the quantity of times your clients come back (e.g.: they might come back 4 times a year on average). That means you can divide 26,000 by 4: you need 6,500 new approaches.

Referrals:

Another great way to reduce the need for many approaches is to get help from your existing clients. Coming back means they are excited by your product or service. 

People love to refer their friends to something they are excited about, but they might need to be asked for it. If you assume that every third client refers one additional client, 6,500 divided by 1.3: 5,000 new approaches.

Weekly Business Marketing:

Next break this down into weekly numbers (e.g.: let us assume 50 weeks per year: 5,000 divided by 50: you need to approach 100 new people per week. 

Now you can turn that into a plan for the year of how to achieve this number. Test many different approaches to business marketing, see which yield the best return (e.g. looking at the cost in time and money, which brought the most most profit in).

Conclusion

It is good to keep daily written record of your numbers, especially approaches, calls for repeat business, asking for referrals, new enquiries, referral enquiries, new clients, repeat clients. After a while, you will be able to check your assumptions in the calculation and refine it.

If you find that your results do not match your calculations, you can now go back and check where they fall short

• Do you approach the right amount of people, but not enough enquire?
• Do you get enought enquiries, but fewer people actually become a client?
• Do you have enough new clients, but they do not come back?
• Do your clients came back, but do not refer others?

Once you know where your point of failure is, you can improve on that particular part of the process. Your home based business marketing becomes a lot more successful when you break it down like this.

Continue to Seducing the Market.