What are the best tools you use in terms of ROI when you want to increase your sales?

By Zeeva Viola | June 27, 2017

Question:

What are the best tools you use in terms of ROI when you want to increase your sales?

Answer:

Think of ROI as Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). A good CRM enables you to track this. More importantly, think through what you need to effectively track ROI/CAC.

1. Log your travel time and costs (if you are traveling) and compare to calculate your “Cost per call” and “Cost per meeting.”

Start by tracking your weekly outbound call rates, conversion rates, and average revenue per user (ARPU) when you are calling from your office. This should be considered as an opportunity cost as part of your CACs. You might find that your ultimate sales ROI is lower when you travel because of the time and money spent to get face-to-face with the prospect.

Also log when in the sales process you are getting face-to-face with clients. You might find ways to determine more efficiencies there – maybe you are traveling too soon in the process, yielding a smaller ROI for that expense or that by traveling too soon in the process, you are putting yourself in a position that the client expects a second (or third or fourth!) face-to-face meeting before they sign the contract.

2. Determine the flow of lead generation (sources) and their intrinsic costs – AdWords vs conferences vs old fashioned research.

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Log these leads into a CRM such as Salesforce. This can be automated for web leads and entered manually for other leads such as referrals, inbound calls, and conference leads. Be specific and be consistent. For referrals, write the exact person “Joe Smith” not just “friend.” For conference leads, write out the conference, month/year, and day – “Dreamforce 9/12 Day 1.” This will enable you to run reports on these leads for conversion rate, average revenue per user (ARPU), and time to close. By including the year, you can assess your year-over-year performance. Maybe you’ll discover that conference leads take longer to close and have a lower ARPU, but have a significantly higher conversion rate. Maybe referrals close quickly with higher ARPUs but the conversion rates are lower. Sure would be interesting to now if none of your Day 3 leads at Dreamforce closed but 15% of your Day 1 leads did…

3. Overlay these tracking systems with Marketing Initiatives (i.e. start of Google AdWords campaign, conference booth expenditure, outbound email campaign to previous website registrants.) Plug-ins are available for most major CRMs such as MailChimp for SalesForce to make this tracking faster and more accurate.

**This Q&A article was originally posted on Quora. Check out Scott’s Quora page here.