Lead Tracking, Management, and Conversion is Critical Part of Developing Your Business.
We’ve recently begun tracking our promotional efforts by getting more serious about how we measure and manage our lead stream.
While this process directly applies to managing a self-defense school, the process can be adapted to almost any business paradigm. To start, LASER stands for Leads, Appointments, Shows, Enrollments, and Referrals; if you’re not tracking these milestones within the promotional process, you’re probably underperforming your capacity.
In management consulting parlance, if you don’t measure it, you don’t manage it. While most businesses track sales, and perhaps even, percentage of sales to visits or “pitches”, its clear few businesses integrate their tracking system back to every lead or inquiry. For this reason, it may be that your visit to sales ratio is high, but you may also be missing three to five times the business by not better tracking and managing your leads through to sales.
It’s obvious that the way we present our business can have a dramatic effect in this process. And, I’ve found that communication style and brand consistency are often not well managed in the formative stages of the promotional cycle. As a result, many of the leads that materialize never even make an appointment to learn more about the product or service. Diagnosing and prescribing the fix for these communication blunders can have a dramatic impact on the bottom line.
Conversely, by managing the other end of the promotions cycle, we can ensure that a corporate culture of post-close promotion also helps to generate more leads. Specifically, I’m alluding to referrals. This process not only helps to bolster the lead pipeline, it also re-enforces your brand and culture by allowing your customers to recruit other, like-minded friends, who would also likely value your product or service.
Finally, none of this can be put aside as obvious. Your employees/co-workers take their cues from you. Clearly, then, you must communicate what is important and create the measures and incentives to communicate this loud and clear. In the end, optimizing your LASER process will increase your business in a multiplicative manner. So do it.
