I’m sure many of reading that title will quite literally cringe and want to dry reach. “But Fiona, I HATE numbers and anything like that.” Well keep saying hate and it will rule your life. But allow me to let you in to a little secret that I learned a long, long time ago when I worked my day J.O.B. in insurance.
Statistics is the absolute single biggest thing that will indicate if you are on track with your sales or not. When I worked in insurance, we catagorized different vehicles into groups according to the vehicle’s age and a few other factors. We also categorized people into age groups, male and female, their demographic and so on and so forth. So when the claims reports came out, we wanted to figure out which groups caused us the most problems. Needless to say, it was the under 25 year olds in modified later model cars from lower socio economic areas and mainly male. So obviously, we set the premiums higher to reflect this issue and then later on went to reducing the overall claims that came in and increasing the company’s profits.
Now I know you reading this running your MLM/Network Marketing business will be saying “so what? How does that relate to me?” Well a lot actually. There’s quite a few things you can keep track of in your business so let’s start by looking at lead generation.
Monthly I keep a tally of my different lead gen. strategies and how many leads I have gained from each method. So, I’m going to look at one of my monthly stat sheets and give you a live example. I keep a table in word and put the date that the lead registered on my website, their name and what country they came from, what the marketing source was (for instance newspaper, Google, word of mouth, pulltab etc), then if I managed to send them information, did they make the follow up call and what their decision was. At the end of the month, I tally up how many leads came in from each of the sources. For this particular example (and yes it was a very slow month), I had 21 leads, 14 from Australia, 3 from the USA, 3 from the EU and 1 from NZ. 11 came from Google, 2 from pulltabs, 7 from the newspaper and 1 was word of mouth. I sent 11 the information, 3 showed up for the follow up call and I got one customer. So from a statistical point of view I could learn that 52% came from Google, 9.5% came from pulltabs, 33% came from newspapers and 4.8% from word of mouth. Thankfully word of mouth doesn’t cost me anything, otherwise I would have probably eliminated that lead gen. method as it didn’t bring me much. Clearly I would continue on with Google. What else these stats tell me is that the quality of leads isn’t particularly high. Only 1 customer from 21 leads is not particularly good, so I more than likely need to consider other variables and make the relevant changes to my campaigns.
The next thing I look at from a statistical point of view is to whether or not my results are reflective of my goals. Last week I shared with you a very simple business plan by starting off with what you want to earn in a year and working backwards to a daily plan. So did you hit those daily targets? If not, did you make up for them over the course of the month? If no, then maybe you need to add in more lead generation methods. If you need to bring on board 6 people per week in order to earn you $100k per year and you only brought in 2 for the month, then clearly you know you have some work to do. My daily targets for leads are around the 7 mark. So I know that if I’m not dialling that every single day, I won’t hit my income goals.
If you are not sure exactly what is going wrong, split test. What do I mean by split testing – it’s just changing one variable. If you’re not sure it’s your ad, run different ads and just change one thing, for instance the title, or the domain name or the first sentence. Keep everything else the same. If you think it’s your script, try substituting a sentence with something different. Play around and find what works. Because when you find what works, don’t change it. You’ve found the success recipe. Then your job is to share that with your team so they can duplicate it for themselves. But remember, show them how to fish, don’t give them the fish otherwise they won’t be able to feed themselves and that is what business owners are supposed to do.
Hope you found some value in this post and can start to immediately implement this little strategy that will quite literally turbo charge your results. How can you possibly make changes to anything in your business if you don’t know what is working and what is not. You could be quite literally throwing money away without knowing it. It’s simple common sense really. Feel free to share this with your team and let me know your thoughts.
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