3 Things to Know About Testing and Measuring in Your Business

Why should I test and measure?

For starters, if you don’t know where your clients are coming from, you’re just reaching.  

You don’t know which marketing tactics are working, so they could be an expense instead of an investment.  

How well do you know how well your sales associate is doing?  It may feel like your conversion rate is high, but in actuality, that’s how it “feels,” but it could be much lower and you’re losing out on some serious new business.  

What about knowing how much each sale is costing you?  Which services or products are the most profitable?

Once you know these things (and these are just a few areas to test and measure!), you can make better informed decisions.  You’ll be able to see where there needs to be improvement.  Maybe your conversion rate is actually high, but you aren’t getting many new leads, or the other way around.  Maybe you’re not selling enough high ticket items which could boost your profitability.  

Once you know the area that needs work, you can make more thoughtful, strategic decisions based on facts and figures.  

Here’s 3 most important things you should know about testing and measuring to better track benchmarks and growth:

1. Testing and measuring is not really anything new!  

You’ve most likely been doing it in your business, you just aren’t keeping track and documenting what needs to be tested and measured.  Remember that paid social media ad you tried that “didn’t work,” or the sales incentive for your team that did “ok?”  That’s what testing is - about finding out what produces the results you want and what doesn’t, then making tweaks and decisions based around that.   

2. If you aren’t already, starting TODAY you need to ask people how they found out about you.

If you don’t, you’ll continue to spend money on marketing and advertising that may not be working.  What a waste of resources!  If you aren’t sure where your leads are coming from, you may keep putting time and financial resources into an ad that never brings in a sale. You may even accidentally cancel a campaign that’s actually working to bring you more leads.

It’s impossible to know where a new customer came from merely by sales - customers come from so many different places.  Trust me, if you ask someone how they heard about your business, NO ONE will have a problem telling you!

3. Be regimented and determined. 

Testing and measuring isn’t a one and done type of process.  You must do it regularly and repeatedly.  It’s not difficult, especially if you build a system to ask each customer how they heard about you. Then, train, train, and retrain and engrain in your employees to ask every.single.time.  Stress to them the importance of understanding and being honest about testing and measuring for the mission of the company.  

Where to begin?

A great place to start is to create a testing and measuring sheet for each area of your business that you need to start tracking.  Start with initial benchmarks, and then measure where you can make improvements.

At ActionCOACH we have numerous testing and measuring tools and strategies.  If you’re interested in learning more about how to grow your business, contact us for a free strategy session specific to your business.