Do you know where most of your business finds out about you? Do you know how much you’ve spent on acquiring new business and how much each of those sources has generated?
With Daylite, finding the return on investment for customer acquisition is as easy as counting to 5.
By calculating how much money you’ve spent acquiring business and how much you’ve gotten back, you can make better decisions about where to allocate your budget and avoid unnecessary costs. By tracking where your business is coming from in Daylite, you can calculcate the effectiveness of your campaigns – whether it’s time educating referral sources, money spent on Facebook ads, or cost and effort put into online reviews.
When you capture where your business is coming from, you can track the success of your campaigns to know what works and what doesn’t. This helps you make better decisions about spending money to get new customers, by leveraging data you’ve accumulated over the years.
Daylite opportunities allow you to do more than just track sales. You can use opportunities in Daylite to capture the source of a lead and the amount of business each opportunity offers. This allows you to calculate how efficient each source of acquisition is, so you know where to focus your future marketing dollars and resources.
Follow these 5 steps so you can track the effectiveness of your customer acquisition initiatives and grow your business.
Step 1: Capture Opportunites in Daylite
To determine which initiatives are getting you the most business, and to calculate the return on investment, start by creating an opportunity in Daylite for each new lead that comes your way.
If you are already using Daylite opportunities, then you know they are tailored to record potential business. As you add more opportunities into your database, you develop a rich library of information that you can leverage to answer why business is won and what efforts are getting you the most reward.
If you aren’t already using opportunities in Daylite, starting is easy. To learn how to create an opportunity, start by watching this tutorial video: How to create an opportunity.
Step 2: Define the Source
Unless this person stumbled into your office by accident, and suddenly realized they needed your services, they heard about you from somewhere. By tracking your opportunities in Daylite, you capture the finer details such as how you’re acquiring new business.
When you get new business leads, ask they how they heard about you. This can be over the phone, in your first meeting with them, through email, or even through an online contact form on your website. You can then use Daylite to capture this information within the Type field of the opportunity.
This field is specifically for the source of the opportunity. Daylite comes with a few examples built-in. Advertisement, inbound and outbound calls, emails, and website forms. You might have more sources, and you have the flexibility to add more. Referral, repeat customer, Google Search, a networking event are all great examples of what you might want to add.
You can add more by going to Daylite > Preferences > Opportunities > Opportunity Types.
Over time you will learn which initiatives are not effective and by deactivating a type, you can keep all your past data while still removing clutter from a long list of types that aren’t necessary. Reviewing which types are active should be a part of your workflow as well.
Step 3: Create Estimates for Every Opportunity
Discussing the costs of your services early in your workflow helps your customer decide if your services are within their budget, and helps you weed out those who may not be serious about you. You can quickly create an estimate after you have created your opportunity in Daylite. You can make a precise estimate, broken down by each line item.
It’s important to note that even if you don’t send the estimate to the lead, you should create one so you can attach a value to this potential deal. This helps you identify how much business a client may bring in, even when a proposal doesn’t convert. Otherwise, you won’t see the potential returns lost, which is an important part when evaluating your sales workflow.
To make an estimate in Daylite, go to the estimate tab after creating the opportunity. When you add each item or service, and their price, the estimate’s total will appear in the Total field of your opportunity. You will use this value for reporting later.
Step 4: Track Wins and Losses
By tracking whether you’ve won or lost and opportunity, as well as the reason, you then have data to report on your opportunities overall. This helps you understand what you’re doing right, and what needs improvements.
To track this in Daylite, you can use the State to track whether the opportunity is won or lost. And you can use the State Reason to track why it was won or lost.
Recording the opportunities won and the reasons also allows you to know your conversion ratio and track what sources lead to most won opportunities. At the same time, tracking lost opportunities and the reason why, allows you to report on why you’re losing business and what you can improve on.
This can also help you identify whether particular sources are leading to lost opportunities so you can dig into why. For example, an event you go to yearly may result in many opportunities, but they may all end up lost because they’re not the ideal customer. This tells you that event is not worth the investment. Even though you may have gotten many leads from that source, if most of them don’t convert then you’re not getting a good return on investment.
Opportunity states are fixed, but the reasons are customizable by going to Daylite > Preferences > Opportunities > Opportunity State Reasons. Here, you can describe why an opportunity is won/lost as well as all the other states.
Reasons could be “Unable to meet specifications” if the client was asking for things you couldn’t match, or “discounted price” if you had to give the customer a discount to convert them. It’s good to be as descriptive as you can, without having too many reasons that it becomes unmanageable to report on later.
Step 5: Run Reports
By using Daylite opportunities, you can see how easy it is to add value to your typical customer acquisition workflow. You get a much bigger picture of how well you’re doing with just three fields: Type, Total, and State. Now you can leverage all this data by running reports so you can answer questions about your business.
With Daylite you make reports in several different ways:
Insight View
Insight view gives you the ability to see the data you add into Daylite, and quickly and dynamically narrow down all but the data you want to see. Here you can zoom into which opportunities you’ve won or lost, where they came from, and overall total of each.
By filtering opportunities in Insight View by source, you can see where most of your business is coming from and make better decisions about where you want to spend your money and resources. You can save these views as a Smart List so you dig even deeper or revisit them in the future.
Opportunity Analysis Report
By using the Opportunity Analysis report, one of the reports built into Daylite, you can get vital information about all your opportunities over a set period of time. You see how much revenue each type has brought you– whether referrals, Facebook Ads, or a trade show event.
While not dynamic like Insight View, it is an excellent way to pull in a lot of data quickly and make meaning from everything you have. If this report doesn’t meet all your needs, with the help of a Marketcircle Expert you can build customize reports that fit your specific needs.
Lists and Spreadsheets
If you want to analyze your opportunities in a list, you can use the Multi-Column list view. This allows you to have control over what information is displayed and how you organize it.
To view Opportunities in a list view, go to All Opportunities, and change to Multi-Column List View and start adding new columns to the table. Now you can compare things like, which referrals give you the most wins, and see if they are worth the extra effort comparing their totals to other sources. To focus in on the specifics, you can create filters and then save them as smart lists for later review.
If you wanted to display this data in a chart, manipulate it more or combine it with other information, you can you can export this list use it another app such as Numbers or Excel.
Daylite opportunities are designed so you can easily add information into Daylite, and report on it later. By tracking where your business leads come from, how much they bring in, whether or not they convert, and why they’re won or lost, you can make informed decisions on where to spend your time and effort. This helps you better prioritize your customer acquisition initiatives and helps you grow your business.