The Business Advisory Blog

The Business Advisory Blog

Insight, news and updates from Alliott NZ Chartered Accountants, Auckland New Zealand. The views expressed here are the views of the author and should be discussed in further detail should an article be relevant to your individual circumstances.

While every effort has been made to provide valuable, useful information in this publication, this firm and any related suppliers or associated companies accept no responsibility or any form of liability from reliance upon or use of its contents. Any suggestions should be considered carefully within your own particular circumstances, as they are intended as general information only.

Vanessa Williams
Published on

Find the numbers and measure relentlessly

In any business there are three core activities that are very important to understand.

sales up-435And it’s not just about the activities themselves but the numbers that sit behind them.

Those activities are:

  1. Marketing
  2. Sales
  3. How you service and keep your customers

If you think about marketing, there are activities you will undertake such as lead generation initiatives that generate opportunities for you to sell to new customers.

When you think about sales, that means the people and activities that are done to sell what you do.

Then, when you think about customer service it’s also about the people and activities that drive that function.

Where it’s really important is the understanding of spending x to get y.

Let’s use dollars to make the point.

If you spend $100 on a marketing activity what will the result be?

If you can guarantee (because you’ve studied this) that the expenditure would generate 20 new enquiries; that following a sales process your team could close, say, eight new customers; those customers bring in, on average, $500 per year each, and you spend $100 to service those customers then that would be a good investment.

But until you know those numbers you really have no idea what you can spend on marketing with any sort of justifiable return on investment.

If you don’t know those numbers then it’s time to find them out and the team at Alliotts in Auckland can help you to do just that. Call us on 09 520 9200.

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