Proper sales funnel for a service business

[Jon L]

I'm trying to set up a sales funnel that would help us properly track our deals. I want to be able to glance at it and know how we're doing as a business. I set one up a while back and what I found with it was that people were advancing very quickly through the first couple stages and then getting stuck in the middle. Because of the natural 'bump in the middle' shape, it wasn't obvious just by looking at it that we weren't getting in enough new leads. (We assumed that because people advanced so quickly to the middle stages that this shape was just fine).

Here's the funnel as it stands now:

Qualified
Pain Identified
Budget identified
Proposal
Negotiation
Won

Am I missing anything? Should I remove anything?

One thing that I'm not sure what to do with:
In our sales process, there is a key moment where we get the prospect on our side - they become an advocate for us. (said another way: we get on their side, and they know it...we form a partnership) Depending on other factors, of course, (budget, etc) this is usually the 'make or break' moment in the sales process. Regardless of what the deal turns out as, we're very likely to do some sort of deal with them at some point. Conversely, if we're not able to get this to happen, the entire deal will be an uphill struggle, and is pretty unlikely to happen. Is this a sales stage? or is it something else?

 

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[AndrewNC]

Qualified
Pain Identified

Budget identified
Proposal
Negotiation
Won

Am I missing anything? Should I remove anything?

Between the pain identified and the budget -> I would start telling a story about a previous client similar to them who had success after working with you.

The metaphor will allow them to realize the value of your service easier, and when you have that higher level of perceived value up front, it can help close the deal.

 

[The-J]

I'd first look at the efficacy of your sales process. Where is your bottleneck, and why? You've outlined what it takes to get a person to go from qualified prospect to customer: what are the limitations to doing this?

Where is your sales process failing to get your salespeople on the prospect's side?

In general: people love to talk about their needs. So it's no surprise that people advance through the first stages quickly.

Depending on the businesses you work with, you may be failing to get unanimous approval from the entire organization. It's a lot easier to convince 1 person than it is to convince an entire organization of people with different goals.

@Ubermensch @csalvato @JAJT what do you guys think?

 

[csalvato]

Am I missing anything? Should I remove anything?

I know absolutely nothing about what you are selling aside from vague stuff.

I don't know if you're selling $10M defense contracts or $4 phone cases in the mall.

This thing...

In our sales process, there is a key moment where we get the prospect on our side - they become an advocate for us. (said another way: we get on their side, and they know it...we form a partnership) Depending on other factors, of course, (budget, etc) this is usually the 'make or break' moment in the sales process. Regardless of what the deal turns out as, we're very likely to do some sort of deal with them at some point. Conversely, if we're not able to get this to happen, the entire deal will be an uphill struggle, and is pretty unlikely to happen. Is this a sales stage? or is it something else?

... is a part of every sales process - usually somewhere between qualification through to negotiation, and happens at different points in each sale.

So, I can't help you with the vague information provided.

Why is everyone on this forum so terrified to give any detail?

 

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[Jon L]

Thanks for the response so far. Here's a little more detail:

What we do: We write custom software - anything from rental processing systems to embedded industrial controls. Prices typically fall within 10k to 100k

I should clarify that deals rarely come to a complete halt in the middle of the funnel. I think our sales cycle is long because of the nature of what we're selling. "Custom" means 'whatever you want it to be,' and that can take a while to figure out.

The more that I think about it, the more that I think I don't have a problem with how I'm designing my sales funnel. Like @The-J said, people like to talk about their needs, so the first stage or two go by quickly.

Here's my real question: what metrics should I use to determine the health of my business? What I think I'm going to start paying attention to are:

1) # qualified leads/week
2) # proposals/week
3) # closed deals/week
4) Projected monthly revenue
5) Actual revenue and profit

 

[Kung Fu Steve]

What we do: We write custom software - anything from rental processing systems to embedded industrial controls. Prices typically fall within 10k to 100k

I think sale cycle for that price point is almost always long... but I wouldn't limit yourself to that belief with EVERY customer. Are there situations where you have closed quickly? Are there ways to identify that kind of prospect?

I should clarify that deals rarely come to a complete halt in the middle of the funnel. I think our sales cycle is long because of the nature of what we're selling. "Custom" means 'whatever you want it to be,' and that can take a while to figure out.

One of the key distinctions you might think about is making it as EASY as possible. Even though there are many steps, you can always improve the process by making each step simpler to understand and simpler to execute (if that makes sense). Perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, perfection is when there is nothing left to take away.

The more that I think about it, the more that I think I don't have a problem with how I'm designing my sales funnel. Like @The-J said, people like to talk about their needs, so the first stage or two go by quickly.

I think you know what you're doing, too!

Here's my real question: what metrics should I use to determine the health of my business? What I think I'm going to start paying attention to are:

1) # qualified leads/week
2) # proposals/week
3) # closed deals/week
4) Projected monthly revenue
5) Actual revenue and profit

I think these are fantastic to measure on a weekly AND monthly basis.

The only MAJOR thing I would add here is generating referrals.

How many referrals did we generate from this prospect? If it gets tracked, it gets managed. Make it mandatory in your sales process.

And I guess if you really want to be anal, you can track the close rate of those referrals separately.

 

[Jon L]

I think sale cycle for that price point is almost always long... but I wouldn't limit yourself to that belief with EVERY customer. Are there situations where you have closed quickly? Are there ways to identify that kind of prospect?



One of the key distinctions you might think about is making it as EASY as possible. Even though there are many steps, you can always improve the process by making each step simpler to understand and simpler to execute (if that makes sense). Perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, perfection is when there is nothing left to take away.



I think you know what you're doing, too!



I think these are fantastic to measure on a weekly AND monthly basis.

The only MAJOR thing I would add here is generating referrals.

How many referrals did we generate from this prospect? If it gets tracked, it gets managed. Make it mandatory in your sales process.

And I guess if you really want to be anal, you can track the close rate of those referrals separately.

love that...yes, totally agree that what gets tracked gets managed. That's why I don't want to track the number of cold calls, emails, etc. that we do. Those don't necessarily generate business. Proposals generate business because we won't do a proposal for anyone other than a prospect we think we can close.

I like the referrals idea too. We don't ask for enough referrals, and when we do, we don't ask them again when they said they'd provide referrals the first time we asked (thinking about one particular client here).

 

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[Jon L]

I think sale cycle for that price point is almost always long... but I wouldn't limit yourself to that belief with EVERY customer. Are there situations where you have closed quickly? Are there ways to identify that kind of prospect?



One of the key distinctions you might think about is making it as EASY as possible. Even though there are many steps, you can always improve the process by making each step simpler to understand and simpler to execute (if that makes sense). Perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, perfection is when there is nothing left to take away.
.

Companies we cold-call into take a lot longer than ones that come to use through Adwords. its probably 6 months (or more) for cold calls vs 2-4 weeks for adwords. All I can think of thus far is the obvious - for Adwords, they're actively looking for a solution to an immediate problem. Cold calls, we're uncovering needs as we talk with them...needs they may not have realized were solvable until we came along.

On the 'making things easier' front, there was a company I ran into that had a pretty interesting sales process that they published on their site. I'm not yet sure how I can adapt this to my process - every customer is different - but its an interesting thought.

https://www.techvalidate.com/engaging

 

[Kung Fu Steve]

Ya know, maybe my only other thought here is if you are tracking calls made, leads generated, etc. (even if it's casually done) you might be able to see if it makes sense to cut that out and shift gears. Maybe throw more money into adwords or somewhere you're getting a better return.

Or just maybe you need better phone sales people/phone sales process.

It gets to be a lot of numbers but they tell you everything.

Back in the Dojo we tracked info calls, walk-ins, and # of people who signed up on the 1-month special. I didn't necessarily need to track how many people showed UP to the 1st lesson because usually that number was reflected in the amount of people who signed up on that. Does that make any sense?

So if we had 11 info calls, 10 walk-ins, ideally we SHOULD have 21 new signups, but that number was around 75% because of the people who would bail on the 1st lesson or reschedule for the next month or whatever. But just knowing the business I knew that 99% of the people who came in for the first class signed up.

Today, we're tracking workshops with attendance, tickets, and referrals. I should probably start tracking sales AFTER the workshops but that's going to be tricky.

 

[Andy Black]

I'm not answering your question per se, but maybe some of the following helps...

I setup a "Weekly Trading" Google shared spreadsheet with my service clients.

They record on a weekly basis the number of Enquiries, Leads, and Sales they had that week. (Sales are attributed to the week of the initial Enquiry).

Most of my clients weren't really tracking this stuff, so I think you're already ahead of the game.

In other columns, I'll simply add the Clicks and Cost (and sometimes Impressions if appropriate) for each of their advertising channels.

We very simply divide the total Enquiries and Leads by Clicks to get rough Click-To-Enquiry-Rate and Click-To-Lead-Rate. We can do the same with Sales, but sometimes the length of the sales cycle and low volumes can make this a bit meaningless.

Overall, we're trying to detect trends and cause and effect, rather than get attribution per channel perfect (which I don't think is possible anyway).

I tell clients that we start like this, and will have enough insight to start making changes and detecting improvements or dis-improvements.

I also stress that the reporting will evolve based on our learnings as we go along. Maybe for the next iteration we segment by Location, or Service, or Device the visitor was using when they found the site, etc.

 

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[Jon L]

Ya know, maybe my only other thought here is if you are tracking calls made, leads generated, etc. (even if it's casually done) you might be able to see if it makes sense to cut that out and shift gears. Maybe throw more money into adwords or somewhere you're getting a better return.

Or just maybe you need better phone sales people/phone sales process.

It gets to be a lot of numbers but they tell you everything.

Back in the Dojo we tracked info calls, walk-ins, and # of people who signed up on the 1-month special. I didn't necessarily need to track how many people showed UP to the 1st lesson because usually that number was reflected in the amount of people who signed up on that. Does that make any sense?

So if we had 11 info calls, 10 walk-ins, ideally we SHOULD have 21 new signups, but that number was around 75% because of the people who would bail on the 1st lesson or reschedule for the next month or whatever. But just knowing the business I knew that 99% of the people who came in for the first class signed up.

Today, we're tracking workshops with attendance, tickets, and referrals. I should probably start tracking sales AFTER the workshops but that's going to be tricky.

Yeah...thats really what I'm trying to get to in my business ... that one key number that tells me at a glance how things are doing.

I've thought about the adwords thing - we get the best/easiest business through that, BUT, if Google decides they're mad at us for something, there goes our business. I want to diversify beyond Adwords. As part of that, we are going to set up a system where we have a number of cold callers that pass leads over to my main sales rep.

 

[Jon L]

I'm not answering your question per se, but maybe some of the following helps...

I setup a "Weekly Trading" Google shared spreadsheet with my service clients.

They record on a weekly basis the number of Enquiries, Leads, and Sales they had that week. (Sales are attributed to the week of the initial Enquiry).

Most of my clients weren't really tracking this stuff, so I think you're already ahead of the game.

In other columns, I'll simply add the Clicks and Cost (and sometimes Impressions if appropriate) for each of their advertising channels.

We very simply divide the total Enquiries and Leads by Clicks to get rough Click-To-Enquiry-Rate and Click-To-Lead-Rate. We can do the same with Sales, but sometimes the length of the sales cycle and low volumes can make this a bit meaningless.

Overall, we're trying to detect trends and cause and effect, rather than get attribution per channel perfect (which I don't think is possible anyway).

I tell clients that we start like this, and will have enough insight to start making changes and detecting improvements or dis-improvements.

I also stress that the reporting will evolve based on our learnings as we go along. Maybe for the next iteration we segment by Location, or Service, or Device the visitor was using when they found the site, etc.

yeah this is good...we have adwords configured with analytics. I don't know what the actual numbers are, but I do know that we have 5-10x'd the number of leads we're getting per click. Ideally, I'd be able to see all this on one dashboard...but that is for a later time. Right now, we have one set of reports from our CRM, and the other from Analytics. We do track conversions (leads) in analytics, so I could very easily calculate this stuff. I just need to do it.

 

[Shrewedmoney15]

I'm trying to set up a sales funnel that would help us properly track our deals. I want to be able to glance at it and know how we're doing as a business. I set one up a while back and what I found with it was that people were advancing very quickly through the first couple stages and then getting stuck in the middle. Because of the natural 'bump in the middle' shape, it wasn't obvious just by looking at it that we weren't getting in enough new leads. (We assumed that because people advanced so quickly to the middle stages that this shape was just fine).

Here's the funnel as it stands now:

Qualified
Pain Identified
Budget identified
Proposal
Negotiation
Won

Am I missing anything? Should I remove anything?

One thing that I'm not sure what to do with:
In our sales process, there is a key moment where we get the prospect on our side - they become an advocate for us. (said another way: we get on their side, and they know it...we form a partnership) Depending on other factors, of course, (budget, etc) this is usually the 'make or break' moment in the sales process. Regardless of what the deal turns out as, we're very likely to do some sort of deal with them at some point. Conversely, if we're not able to get this to happen, the entire deal will be an uphill struggle, and is pretty unlikely to happen. Is this a sales stage? or is it something else?

Are you doing small sales or large sales? Depending on the type, it will shape your funnel. I've done professional selling for sometime and I can shoot you funnel based upon your product or service size.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

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[Jon L]

Are you doing small sales or large sales? Depending on the type, it will shape your funnel. I've done professional selling for sometime and I can shoot you funnel based upon your product or service size.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

My company creates custom software...typically ranges from 10-100k

 

[Shrewedmoney15]

Ok. So you need to adopt spin selling methodology. I'll post a framework we use to close 25k+ deals

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

[JAJT]

What tool are you using to track your sales process?

Given that you seem to be doing serious business, I'd HIGHLY recommend looking into Salesforce. Every company I've ever worked for uses it in their sales department. To put it bluntly - it's F*cking fantastic.

It's designed from the bottom up to help you with literally every question you are asking right now. It has default stages relating to what most companies go through and you can customize whatever is necessary to make it valuable for your business.

In a very, very, very general and vague description of it - people start as leads with a lead source (webinar, referral, cold call list, email list, whatever). You can have notes and activities and scheduled actions and a million other things that make working a lead useful. After you find there is potential business to be had, you convert the lead into an account with an opportunity attached to it. Accounts are what they sound like - companies with contacts attached to them and details about that particular business or division. Opportunities are potential business with that account. Opportunities have all the stuff you need to know at a glance to help close the business - what stage it is in, potential close date, probability of closing, if it's open or closed, call logs, contact details for everyone involved (their vp of sales, software engineers, marketing team, etc...), meeting notes, attachments of important documents, proposals that have been sent, and a million other things.

The power of salesforce is once you start using it, you can pull up reports at a glance that answer any damn question about your business that you want. You can even setup dashboards to see many multiple reports at a glance in fancy speedometer or bar graph form:

At the companies worked for, we would have a weekly 1 hour meeting to go over the current opportunities and their next steps. When everyone is using the tool properly, you can literally go over millions of dollars in business in your pipeline in an hour and have a very good idea of what needs to happen to move them forward. It doesn't matter if you have 1 sales person or 50, 1 city or the whole world - you can slice and dice and sort the information so efficiently that it gives you 100% total transparency into your funnel, what has been done and what needs to be done.

I don't mean to sound like a salesforce shill but I'd highly recommend you looking into it. It has been a lifesaver in my professional selling career in the B2B space.

 

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[Jon L]

What tool are you using to track your sales process?

Given that you seem to be doing serious business, I'd HIGHLY recommend looking into Salesforce. Every company I've ever worked for uses it in their sales department. To put it bluntly - it's F*cking fantastic.

It's designed from the bottom up to help you with literally every question you are asking right now. It has default stages relating to what most companies go through and you can customize whatever is necessary to make it valuable for your business.

In a very, very, very general and vague description of it - people start as leads with a lead source (webinar, referral, cold call list, email list, whatever). You can have notes and activities and scheduled actions and a million other things that make working a lead useful. After you find there is potential business to be had, you convert the lead into an account with an opportunity attached to it. Accounts are what they sound like - companies with contacts attached to them and details about that particular business or division. Opportunities are potential business with that account. Opportunities have all the stuff you need to know at a glance to help close the business - what stage it is in, potential close date, probability of closing, if it's open or closed, call logs, contact details for everyone involved (their vp of sales, software engineers, marketing team, etc...), meeting notes, attachments of important documents, proposals that have been sent, and a million other things.

The power of salesforce is once you start using it, you can pull up reports at a glance that answer any damn question about your business that you want. You can even setup dashboards to see many multiple reports at a glance in fancy speedometer or bar graph form:

At the companies worked for, we would have a weekly 1 hour meeting to go over the current opportunities and their next steps. When everyone is using the tool properly, you can literally go over millions of dollars in business in your pipeline in an hour and have a very good idea of what needs to happen to move them forward. It doesn't matter if you have 1 sales person or 50, 1 city or the whole world - you can slice and dice and sort the information so efficiently that it gives you 100% total transparency into your funnel, what has been done and what needs to be done.

I don't mean to sound like a salesforce shill but I'd highly recommend you looking into it. It has been a lifesaver in my professional selling career in the B2B space.

I'm using Pipeline Deals, having tried quite a few of the ones out there in various capacities. SFDC is pretty amazing, but its not exactly easy to set up, and I only have one sales rep. The more i get into Pipeline, the more I like it, actually. It has an integration with Excel that lets it download new data automatically...with Pivot charts, etc., you can create much of the charts and graphs that SFDC is capable of.

 

[JAJT]

SFDC is pretty amazing, but its not exactly easy to set up,

Very true. It's nearly unlimited power and flexibility comes with equally unlimited setup options. You almost need to hire a SFDC consultant to have any chance of getting it setup properly unless you are intimately familiar with it already.

Just thought I'd mention it because as a salesperson I really, really loved it and found it useful. Never used Pipeline so I can't comment there.

 

[Andy Black]

yeah this is good...we have adwords configured with analytics. I don't know what the actual numbers are, but I do know that we have 5-10x'd the number of leads we're getting per click. Ideally, I'd be able to see all this on one dashboard...but that is for a later time. Right now, we have one set of reports from our CRM, and the other from Analytics. We do track conversions (leads) in analytics, so I could very easily calculate this stuff. I just need to do it.

Consider starting here.

Remember though, that Analytics isn't recording Leads, but people hitting a certain page. If that's the Thank You page after filling out a Form, then these are just web form fills. It's good to see this number, but the more useful number is how many genuine and unique enquiries you get. (Some form fills are duplicates, some are marketing/web companies chancing their arm, etc).

Not all enquiries become genuine Leads. Maybe they're looking for something you don't do. Maybe this can allow you to add a negative keyword to your AdWords campaigns. Maybe you have to exclude them via your ad copy, or landing page copy. Heck, maybe you start doing that work or passing the leads on.

So it goes: Visitor (click) -> Form Fill/Call -> Enquiry -> Lead

Then into the stages of your own funnel.

With AdWords, there's a lot that can be learned from the first few stages, and a lot that can be optimised to help improve conversion rates later on.

 

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[Jon L]

Very true. It's nearly unlimited power and flexibility comes with equally unlimited setup options. You almost need to hire a SFDC consultant to have any chance of getting it setup properly unless you are intimately familiar with it already.

Just thought I'd mention it because as a salesperson I really, really loved it and found it useful. Never used Pipeline so I can't comment there.

yeah I think you're right. We aren't there yet.

I used to work for a place that had a $500k/year sfdc spend. They had a full-time admin + they paid for SF's technical account manager service - forget what they called it - but basically they set up everything for you however you wanted it.

It was AMAZING though. the workflows they had set up were phenomenal.

And then they bought Oracle. ($20M later and they still didn't have as smooth an operation as what they had with SFDC)

 

[Jon L]

Consider starting here.

Remember though, that Analytics isn't recording Leads, but people hitting a certain page. If that's the Thank You page after filling out a Form, then these are just web form fills. It's good to see this number, but the more useful number is how many genuine and unique enquiries you get. (Some form fills are duplicates, some are marketing/web companies chancing their arm, etc).

Not all enquiries become genuine Leads. Maybe they're looking for something you don't do. Maybe this can allow you to add a negative keyword to your AdWords campaigns. Maybe you have to exclude them via your ad copy, or landing page copy.

So it goes: Visitor (click) -> Form Fill/Call -> Enquiry -> Lead

Then into the stages of your own funnel.

With AdWords, there's a lot that can be learned from the first few stages, and a lot that can be optimised to help improve conversion rates later on.

I like that...and I think it depends what you call a 'lead.' For us, we're so excited to get someone calling us that we call every submission a lead. About half to 2/3 of those are qualified leads. (depending on the month and which ad we're running...this most recent one is working much better)

I did just set up something in my CRM so we can track 'contacted a new qualified lead' events, though

 

[Andy Black]

I like that...and I think it depends what you call a 'lead.'

Totally. It's also real pain when different people are answering the phone and adding leads into Salesforce based on their own definition of a lead. It's even worse when those people are praised on their high Lead-To-Sale-Rate, and then only add in Leads they think they can close. I've seen that happen and was getting flak for the low Click-To-Lead-Rate, until we added a dialler in and spotted there were a load of calls going unanswered, and a load of calls just not getting added as Leads... because the inbound team didn't think they could close them.

we're so excited to get someone calling us that we call every submission a lead.

Except you're not excited about an SEO company filling in the form suggesting you contact them. You won't count those as Leads, but they might show up in AdWords and Analytics as a conversion. Make sure you use your own count of Leads that week, not the AdWords or Analytics count.

About half to 2/3 of those are qualified leads. (depending on the month and which ad we're running...this most recent one is working much better)

This is interesting. Is it just variance that this month is working better, or have you optimised your campaigns (keywords, IP targeting, ad copy, etc), landing pages, form length, etc?

What would be interesting for you is if you could track what AdWords campaign, keyword, ad, device, etc drove each lead that came in. Add those parameters to the URL and capture them in the form.

Here's what I often put on the end of a URL to pass AdWords parameters. I like putting all the parameters into the utm_campaign parameter, so we can pick up and parse out all the other parameters.

• utm_campaign=_source*adwords_device*{ifmobile:mb}{ifnotmobile:dt}_keyword*{keyword}_matchtype*{matchtype}_creative*{creative}_adposition*{adposition}_network*{ifsearch:SearchNetwork}{ifcontentisplayNetwork}_target*{target}_placement*{placement}

You might find this post useful:

• www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/lead-gen-for-local-service-businesses.61148/page-2#post-474945

And you might might want to re-watch these videos:

• The most important formula in business
• Online direct response metrics

 

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[Jon L]

Totally. It's also real pain when different people are answering the phone and adding leads into Salesforce based on their own definition of a lead. It's even worse when those people are praised on their high Lead-To-Sale-Rate, and then only add in Leads they think they can close. I've seen that happen and was getting flak for the low Click-To-Lead-Rate, until we added a dialler in and spotted there were a load of calls going unanswered, and a load of calls just not getting added as Leads... because the inbound team didn't think they could close them.



Except you're not excited about an SEO company filling in the form suggesting you contact them. You won't count those as Leads, but they might show up in AdWords and Analytics as a conversion. Make sure you use your own count of Leads that week, not the AdWords or Analytics count.




This is interesting. Is it just variance that this month is working better, or have you optimised your campaigns (keywords, IP targeting, ad copy, etc), landing pages, form length, etc?

What would be interesting for you is if you could track what AdWords campaign, keyword, ad, device, etc drove each lead that came in. Add those parameters to the URL and capture them in the form.

Here's what I often put on the end of a URL to pass AdWords parameters. I like putting all the parameters into the utm_campaign parameter, so we can pick up and parse out all the other parameters.

• utm_campaign=_source*adwords_device*{ifmobile:mb}{ifnotmobile:dt}_keyword*{keyword}_matchtype*{matchtype}_creative*{creative}_adposition*{adposition}_network*{ifsearch:SearchNetwork}{ifcontentisplayNetwork}_target*{target}_placement*{placement}

You might find this post useful:

• www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/lead-gen-for-local-service-businesses.61148/page-2#post-474945

And you might might want to re-watch these videos:

• The most important formula in business
• Online direct response metrics

True enough on the SEO companies (they get annoying after a while). We've had about 5 qualified leads and 10-12 total submissions from Oct - April and then 5-6 total submissions and 4 qualified leads in the last month, so its pretty easy at this point to do the math in my head. I know those aren't large numbers, but when the average lead turns into a $10K customer, and one of them is $100k/year, its a pretty good ROI.

In April, I hired a friend of mine to do adwords optimization. He pretty much deleted everything I'd done and started from scratch. He did a bunch of keyword research first (which I hadn't done/didn't know how to do), restructured the entire account and then redid all the ads. I put together a brand new landing page, and we're about to finish a project with a copywriter where the 2 landing pages will be redone professionally.

So between the adwords redo and the new landing page, we've about 6x'd the response rate. And that's with a landing page that I wrote, so once the professionally written copy goes up, it should be even better.

I love the idea of passing parameters on the ad URL...more data to analyze

 

[GuestUser4aMPs1]

Here's my real question: what metrics should I use to determine the health of my business? What I think I'm going to start paying attention to are:

1) # qualified leads/week
2) # proposals/week
3) # closed deals/week
4) Projected monthly revenue
5) Actual revenue and profit

Forgot where I heard it, but it seems like there are only two things that really matter at the end of the day.

1: How Much Was Sold Yesterday?

and...

2: How Much Money is in the Bank?

This is what I ask every morning before work.

It forces you to be brutally honest about the health of the company.

Personally for services, I track earnings from revenue-generating activities as an indicator of overall business health. Billable hours for work performed.

Mainly looked up this post for creating my own sales processes, but out of curiosity what are you using as your overall health metric now?