Riding Out The Recession With ROI Measurement

Are Your Sales "Falling Through the Cracks?"

Hey, here's a news flash. The economy? Not doing so well.

And for anyone who thought a new year and a new president would provide an instant fix? Well, scratch that off your wish list and start waiting for the Easter Bunny, it's about as likely he's going to show up. We're officially in a recession and some experts have even begun to whisper the dreaded "d" word - "Depression." Which, you might find, is also the name of the most prevalent state of mind among many salespeople these days.

Now is not the time you want money slipping through your hands. But that's precisely what happens with entirely too many businesses every single day - even when times are good. Unless you measure the ROI of your marketing, advertising and customer service in a thorough and accurate way - and make the necessary adjustments based on the results - you could literally be losing thousands of dollars every week in lost sales.

Imagine trying to heat the inside of your home in the dead of winter - but the house has giant cracks in its walls, so any warm air has absolutely no chance of staying above freezing. Number one, you'll be shivering in your living room and, number two, your heating bill will go through the roof.

With the financial "freeze" icing down the markets, the situation isn't much different. Your revenues could be going down, but, in desperation, you may boost your marketing and advertising dollars to heat up your sales - after all, common advice is to redouble marketing efforts in hard times. So you could end up spending more and more - but still not see any upward movement with your sales figures.

If you haven't bothered to measure ROI performance, you may not even be targeting the right group with additional direct mail or ads. Not only that, whoever is handling prospective customer calls may be completely mishandling them - by not gathering critical contact information and not leading the caller to the sale of the product of service. Those are big "cracks" in your sales walls - and more money isn't going to fix those cracks, just drive your bottom line even further down. Proper ROI measurement will fix those cracks, however - and, if you react correctly to the data, you'll end up spending less to get more positive revenue results. And less for more is definitely an awesome business model for these times!

So before you start blindly throwing around marketing dollars in a panic to recover dwindling sales, strongly consider investing in ROI measurement to determine what works and what doesn't. An airtight sales machine is an efficient one that costs you less, pays off more and helps you get through the toughest of times.

Copyright (c) 2009 Richard Seppala

I'm Richard Seppala, Your ROI Guy. Visit me at http://www.yourroiguy.com to find out more about how to make sure your sales and marketing efforts are winners.

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