For those of you who are hockey fans and enjoy watching Don Cherry on Coach’s Corner, it is always interesting to hear the perspective that Grapes brings to a situation. Highly entertaining at times, but often, it is wisdom that is rooted in a lifetime of experience.
One of the stats that always rings loud is that “It is not the number of shots that matters. It is the number of quality scoring chances that matter.”
I love the phrase. It harkens back to the early days of the web when it was all about counting the number of eyeballs that viewed your website. The implication was that some proportion of those visitors would flow through and become customers. But, as the dot-com crash infamously demonstrated, eyeballs do not have a direct correlation to the acquisition and growth of customers.
In marketing and sales, it is no different than hockey, it is the quality scoring chances that matter. This is the statistic that matters the most. Yet when the sales results for a company are not materializing, there is often a parade of numbers from everyone in the mix. All of those whose primary activity it is to contribute to achieving more sales, want to step up.
The talk is all about the number.
The number of flyers distributed. The number of emails sent. The number of phone calls made. The number of customer visits made. The number of demos performed. When the pressure is on, it is all about the number. Everyone wants to be driving up their number, with the “hope” that it will all translate into more business.
But as one of my earliest bosses said to me, “hope” is not a word that works in sales and marketing. It is not a verb we can use. Hope does not advance the sales process. And hope does not close orders. So you better stop hoping right now.
The number that matters most, and gives us the best reason to believe that it will translate to more sales, is the number of “quality” opportunities. And from a business perspective, the question to ask is what makes up that “quality” opportunity? What are the parameters to measure? What are the sequence of activities that will cascade together to arrive at a “quality” opportunity? It is these parameters that will make up a meaningful data set that can be analyzed and used to shore up weaknesses in the process.
Now here is the tough part.
It likely will not be apparent what sequence of activities, or what combination of channels will be the ones that work for you. At the beginning of addressing your market, it makes sense to have some level of activity with several different marketing and sales tactics. But the key is to seek out and monitor the customer journey, and whether your efforts are impacting decisions made along that journey. If they are not, you will not arrive at quality opportunities; i.e. the ones that are closeable.
And even if by some stroke of luck, you set up an effective channel right from the start, there is an undertow. Customer behavior just doesn’t stay the same. You need to keep an eye on it. If things stop producing the level of results that are expected, just increasing numbers will not result in your customers changing their habits in your direction.
Finding the right parameters is the start of building your marketing and sales processes. Tracking them and evolving them is what will enable you to better predict and direct your business.