Fellow Duct Tape Marketing Coach Joe Dager recently had a nice post about using the marketing hourglass to determine your marketing constraint. In his post, Joe discusses the importance of knowing your conversion rates and what they tell you about the effectiveness of your marketing system.
As I was reading Joe’s post, I was reminded of a lesson from my Sandler Sales Training course:
Never manage your numbers, manage your behavior.
Let’s look at referrals as an example. When we look at it realistically, we don’t have any control over when and where someone gives us a referral. There are lots of activities (behaviors) that we can do to encourage people to send us referrals, but we don’t have any control.
What the Sandler rule above means (at least to me) is that rather than focusing on “getting” 5 referrals this week, I need to focus on activities that will improve my chances of receiving them. These activities may include:
- asking for referrals
- providing referrals to others
- working with customers to send out endorsement letters
- requesting endorsements on LinkedIn
These are all things that I can control. If I have a system in place to track my behaviors and the results of those behaviors, I will understand the conversion rates that Joe posted about, and I can adjust my behaviors accordingly.
