When it’s just you in the business, or you’re the boss, no one makes you keep hammering away at what needs to be done except you. Marketing may be the most important activity in your business, but it’s also hard to be consistent, with everything else you have to do.
Here is one system you can use to keep yourself on track with marketing activity. Start with your revenue goal.
- Divide the total dollar goal into pieces. If the goal is $1000 in the next month, that means ten ads at $100. Or two consulting jobs at $500. Or 100 sales of a $10 item. Figure out what you have to sell in your business to reach your total dollar goal.
- Estimate how many contacts you need to make, on average, to make those sales. A common ratio I’ve heard is six contacts for one sale. So 60 contacts to sell ten ads. If you’ve blocked out five days to work on marketing this month, that’s 12 calls per day. When you get to this point, you may find that you need to adjust the dollar goals based on a realistic level of activity. Twelve sounds pretty do-able, but 120 means you need to go back and re-evaluate your goal.
- Use the daily goal to make sure you follow through on the marketing. You can track this on your work calendar or a separate sheet or card. You need to make 12 calls, so count your calls until you reach 12.
Here’s an old telephone sales activity tracking system you can adapt to track your own activity.
- Your goal for today is 12 calls.
- Make 20 empty spaces: o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o.
- Dial the first potential customer, and fill in the dot.
- If you just leave a message, put an M.
- When you speak to the actual person, draw a slash through your dot: /
- When the customer commits to the next step (appointment, sale, further contact, etc.), circle the dot: O
When you have 12 slashes for 12 contacts, you are finished for today!
To make it easy to follow through consistently, I put the o’s on a mailing label template, and printed them out. Then I stuck one to each day on my paper datebook.
“When nothing seems to help, I look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps 100 times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet, at the 101st blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” -Jacob A. Riis
How do you make sure you are consistent in your marketing activity?
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
Love this. Everything you discuss here are methods I teach my reps. From breaking down larger goals into much smaller, manageable ones, to creating a tracking system.
I’m a big fan of the “Countdown method”. If you know you need to make 12 contacts it’s great to cross off number as you go from 12, to 11, 10…and so on. Use momentum to carry you through the task!
Thanks, Dan. The countdown is another useful approach.
Great tips. We need to quantify things and take them on in manageable chunks. Especially in sales.
Another very basic idea when factoring in time is ‘goal periods’. Great for breaking down long days, and when thinking about all those calls and presentations starts to make your stomach turn at breakfast.
x amount of calls per 2 hours, say. And the key bit–a reward at the end–food, a walk about, whatever. Relied on something similar to tackle 14 hour days for many years.
Erik, thanks! Rewards are key motivators.