Forward progress newsletter, February 2007 submission
November 9, 2009
The Gold, The Opportunist and The Entrepreneur – Tom Caprel
November 9, 2009

How often do you check the score? – If you scare easy don’t read this!

By Dean R. DeLisle

When talking with many of you through the process of score carding or creating mission critical measures, we need to determine what is a valid frequency. If we look too frequent then we get bogged down with information or make knee jerk reactions. If we look too sparingly, then we miss making important decisions.

How often should we check the score? It really depends on your business model. We deal with many service- based businesses, which quite frankly carry the model of a sales based organization. And, since most of your come to us for growth, we will focus on the initial sales measures for this issue.

Keep in mind that in most sales based organizations the company is helping feed the sales force with leads. So most companies start with the distribution of leads. They like to or should be concerned with how many leads of what type are going to which sales people. Once we can see this information how often should we look?

Well for starters we need to determine, how many are we getting and how many people are we distributing to? If lead flow is less that 50 leads a day and there are less than 10 sales people, then weekly is probably fine. If you are pushing 100 leads and have more than 10 sales people then you most likely will want to kick up the frequency. So for a good lead distribution watch use the following guidelines.

0-50 Leads per day Weekly

51-100 Leads per day Bi-Weekly

100+ Leads per day Daily

Why would we watch leads daily? Depends on what you spend on your lead generation and what are the sources. Consider you are getting them from the website through forms, email blasts and search engines. You might want to adjust your spend based on change in lead quality or simply a drop or increase in volume for that time period. If we look too infrequently we can be spending precious marketing dollars on the wrong type of lead.

For example: We are using “Paid Search” at a click rate of $1.25, and our budget is $125 per day, that means we are getting at least 100 leads per day. Let’s say we change our marketing message and check these leads every couple of weeks. We now have 1,400 leads the sales force is has been working for the last 2 weeks. However, we notice that 90% of these leads are not ready to even buy for 6 months. This means that our sales force has been calling out and chasing these leads, which have already told us they are not ready to buy. Think of the wasted cost of the sales people and the good leads that we could have generated for them had we looked daily.

Lost Wages10 People, 80 Hours, $15 per hour  = $12,000
Missed Opportunities (10 People x $20k)= $200,000
Original lead price (click rate $1.25)= $1,750
Morale = Priceless

By the way, you thought your lead cost was $1.25, check your math, it’s now $153 per lead!

Who cares, we now have more leads in our database right? Ask the person who writes the check!

– Now how often do you want to check the score?

*Please, note that if you did not catch last months newsletter you can go to www.forwardprogress.net/news.php and get a good start for what measures to consider.