It scares me when I see how little business owners tend to know when it comes to understanding the cost per sale, cost of acquisition, and just general analytics and data around how the business is performing overall. And so in this video, I wanted to hit a really simple tool and some simple strategies to help you track things like your sales data, your marketing data, and understand where you’re getting the best results, where to focus.

And how to improve

Hey, how’s it going? Ryan Caswell here from b2bleads. com. And let’s jump straight into it. So I want to share some ways to help people who have potentially no systems in place to start tracking their sales, understanding what their conversion rate really is, where, where to focus, what platforms perform the best, provide the best leads, all that kind of stuff.

So let’s start by looking at sales in general. And what we really care about when it comes to generating a sale for the business. And ultimately you can say it’s conversion rate. I know you can say a bunch of different things, the offer, et cetera, et cetera. But ultimately what it comes down to is what is the cost of the sale?

And the cost of the sale really comes down to what is. The, the time of the person who’s running the sales calls or conducting the sales activities. What is their hourly rate or effective hourly rate? So what’s their cost? What’s their conversion rate? How well does the offer the service, the product, you know, work, that’s going to determine your conversion rate as well.

What’s the lead source type, all these things are variables that are going to determine what your cost of sale truly is. And for a lot of businesses. This is just, you know, a lot, this is a lot to consider and there’s no real simple way to track this and really look at it component by component, like a machine and say, all right, well, this is performing better than this.

Maybe we should focus on this. Maybe we need to improve this. Maybe we just cut this out and double this. Most businesses can really stand to improve by doing less, not more. It’s about understanding where you get the best results, doubling down on that. And cutting things out that aren’t providing the results.

This is something we’ve done for five years and we’ve really honed in on what we believe is to be the highest returning activities. And it’s helped us basically grow very lean, very profitably. So I’ve created a tool. It’s, it’s quite simple. It’s not super high powered, but people who don’t have a CRM in place and processes and things to measure their sales stats and marketing activities, this is a great place to start.

And it does more than that as well. It tells you which types of clients to focus on, how to grow your business. And I wanted to quickly share it with you. So if you head to b2bleads. com forward slash u b u t, u b u t, the ultimate business up level tool. That’s the name I came up with five years ago. It’s a bit goofy, but it’s a great product.

Let’s have a quick look. So for those of you who don’t have anything in place to track sales, download a copy of this, put it in Excel, use it as Google sheet. You should be able to just download it or save it into your documents. And let me just quickly share how easy it is to use every time you conduct a sales call.

It really is as simple as adding that person’s name in Bob, let’s put some data in Susie Jane. Terry. You put in the date that you conducted the call. Let’s put it in for January. And then let’s say that one was a sale and this one was a sale too. Well, let’s say three of them were sales. Pretty simple. If you have a call, you put it on the sheet and then if it was a sale, you put it as a sale.

And when you head to your scoreboard, you’re going to get month by month, how many calls you’ve actually conducted and what your conversion rate on the sales calls are. This is a holistic look at it, and like I said, I’m not trying to complicate things here. It’s nice and simple, but the sheet is very powerful and it lets you go into a lot more detail.

So here’s Plan calls where you can say how many calls you want to have planned. It’s good to set KPIs for yourself five five So you didn’t hit the target that month and that’ll give you some, you know, something to look at and say, okay Well, why didn’t we hit the target? What can we do better next month?

Now where it gets really cool is for most people That’s all you need to do is start tracking your calls and that’s gonna be a great place to start where it’s quite useful Is if you want to track which sources are actually the best so you can think when you actually have the call where it came from So for most people, like I’m hoping that LinkedIn is going to be a source for their lead generation, networking, content marketing Facebook webinars, speaking you can add different ones here.

Word of mouth referral, and you can see these are the different strata, different things. You can do that are going to lead to business. And so when you pop your sales calls in, you can put in the source. You can say, okay, well, Jeffrey came from LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn.

You can see which methods have generated the most most clients for you. And if you can put in your cost for each method. So let’s say you’re running LinkedIn lead generation. It’s costing you 100 per month, or let’s say 200 with all your subscriptions, January and February. Word of mouth cost you zero.

Content marketing, I don’t know, let’s say 50 a month. You’re going to start getting your cost per client acquisition for each of the different platforms that you use. And you also get, so long as you start putting in your time as well, you don’t have to do this. I recommend you do this. This is one of the most powerful things any business owner can do.

I found a lot of people don’t like to track their time, but missed opportunity for those who want to, who don’t want to. If you pop in your time for each of the different clients that you were working on,

treating time in 15 minute blocks, and then you look at the different, you did some time on content marketing and you’ve spent a bunch of time on LinkedIn. And as we head to the scoreboard. You’re going to start seeing the actual time per client acquisition as well. So it costs you nine hours and this one networking costs you two hours per client.

You can start to see how this is really useful because you can see if you want your time to be worth, let’s say 600 an hour, you want to make a million dollars. In a year, you, you’re quickly going to see some bottlenecks here. Like, all right, if it’s 600 now times nine, like, okay, my true cost per client acquisition is actually more than I’m actually making from the client.

And you start to see where you’re going to need to start delegating work to different people. And it’s going to help show bottlenecks and bottlenecks are not always obvious. Sometimes you feel like because someone’s, you know, you’re getting money from a client that you need to keep taking that money.

But if it’s a bottleneck to where you want to actually reach your goal and when you reverse engineer it, then it’s going to be really telling you to say, okay, well, you know, it looks like we’re making money from them, but it’s an opportunity cost for a client or customer to buy a better return. So you can actually get that kind of information too.

If you’re putting in the number of hours that you work on each of your clients. You know, how much each client generates in revenue, you know, the expenses for each client say it’s a thousand, you can start to get your effective hourly rate. So, you know, I mean, these are terrible, terrible examples, but 10, 000 expenses, 1, 000, you’ve spent an hour on each and only half an hour on Jeffrey.

And so you can see your effective hourly rate, 18, 000 an hour, not bad is best for Jeffrey. And so you can start to identify which clients. You can add the most value to for the least amount of work, you can see where you get the most leverage. And if you know where you get the most leverage, that’s going to help you grow.

It’s not about getting more sales. It’s about getting more of the right sales, more leveraged sales. This is where people often get it wrong. You need to, as a business owner, you need to get more and more leverage with your time. And you need to start delegating more and more and more in order to get your effective hourly rate higher and higher so that you can make more.

Cause it needs, your time needs to get more valuable. That’s your limited resource. And if it’s not getting more valuable, you can’t just simply work more and more and more if the time doesn’t simply exist. So if you, this is what you really need to focus on making your time more valuable because everything else will fall into place.

I get really excited by this as you can probably tell, but if it all feels a bit overwhelming, please just make sure you track your sales stats. How, what’s your conversion rate month to month. And try and understand what marketing platforms, what methods provide the best return, the best cost per acquisition.

Cause you, you’re going to get great data on what not to do. And that’s where people struggle. They try to do too much. Small businesses, I see it all the time. They’re always trying to do too much. You’ve got to start cutting shit out of the business. And the crap isn’t always obvious. It’s the stuff that seems like it’s working.

But when you see something’s working better. That’s going to be what you need to focus on. Anyway, hope that was helpful as always Ryan Caswell from b2bleads. com. If you use any tools like this, that you find a useful and help you understand and analyze data, nice and simple, love to hear from you. Put in the comments below and have a great day.

Cheers.