Who here tracks their leads on a regular basis, why do you do it, meaning what do you get out of the information, what information is important to you and why?
How do you use the data once you have it?
I have my own ideas as to why I think this will be benifitial but I’d like to hear from the rest of you.
I’m working on a spreadsheet with some of the the data I believe will be relevelant and looking for ideas
Replies
I keep a simple chart going. Date of call, who called, who referred them, description of job, site visit made?, proposal delivered?, amount of proposal if any, and outcome.
Construction is a long-lead-time kinda thing. Jobs we're going to do this year originated last year, to some extent. There's at least a 3 month 'germination' period, often up to more than a year. So, I figure I know what's going to happen 6-12 months from now if I keep track of the calls we get.
I also like to keep tabs on the referral source. We do some advertising and I need to know to what extent that's working, although I think it's hard to do accurately. Specifically, we get some calls from word of mouth but I know that advertising has an effect on people remembering to refer us, and/or people accepting the referral because they've heard of us thru advertising.
Well this seemed to sink like a rock.
I realize that the time from the orginal call until a decesion is made is usually long. What I'm going to be tracking is the number of leads/month, how they heard of us, the type of job, and the dollar amount of the job.
What I hope to be able use the data for is tracking the number of leads vs. sold jobs in both number and dollar volumne, the breakdown in how people hear of us, referal, previous client, print, tv, radio ad, job signs, and the wonderful source of the yellow pages.
I think this would be benificial in both the short and long term to compare to historical averages, of which we have none at the moment.
I agree tracking the advertising and source of lead will be difficult, but like you mentioned, it would at least give some idea as to if certain forms of advertising are better then others. I'm in the middle of trying to put together an excel sheet that would quickly give me this information, we'll see how usefull it is or if I blew my weekend on nothing ;)
I don't think it's a waste of time to track this stuff. It's useful to have some sort of forecasting going on, so that you know if you'll be playing your guitar on a streetcorner soon or not. I'm going to add a column to my chart that shows the time between original call and start of work, where applicable. In some cases there is no call after the presentation of the proposal for quite a while, then out of the blue they call and want to get it going. That happened this morning already...
I had orginally thought of tracking, time from call/proposal to sale then decided not to clutter up the spread sheet I'm working on.
My reason for omiting it is the amount of variance, some projects will sell on the first call, some won't sell for a year, and every now and then several years later. When I finish this spread sheet I'll post it here
We are a handyman service/light remodeler. So we get a lot of calls that turn into jobs quicker than a builder or large remodeler would. I use what we refer to as a "data sheet'. Simple homemade info sheet and we always ask where they heard about us. We do it primarily to monitor the success of our advertising and what percentage of referals we are getting.
Being relativily small I don't do advertising that doesn't pay for itself. As long as I get a job or two that will show enough profit to pay for the ad I will stick with it. Little activity, no advertising. Advertising sales people always bring up that it is a repetative business. I tell them that is a nice theory when dealing with their money. I usually try a new add campaign for 90 days to test it. I am not sure if this is the info you are looking for. DanT
So what's the story here, CAG???? Is all this tracking, marketing, and spreadsheet stuff for your new position as VP of Operations at your current employer, or is there some top-secret new venture in the works???
Bob
No new top secret venture in the works, least none that I could tell you about and not kill you ;)
Seriously though, VP of Operations sounds like something I could put on my business card and be all official and stuff, in reality I'm a combination of salesman, estimator, & manager, handling day to day stuff, wouldn't call it total control over the day to day but more or less.
So, I'm trying, one piece at a time, to become more efficient and productive in all the different aspects of my job, this was something that struck me as worth looking at in terms of a big picture.
Every year the Boss has broke down the total # of jobs, total Volume, volume of each job type, and how those job's came to us as leads. Well, I figure it would be easier to create a spread sheet to do that for me and on a more regular basis then once a year. Plus I would only have to enter 5 key pieces of information to do so, so once the spread sheet is completed it will not take much time at all.
I'd also like to track the leads we have, and how many jobs we sell out of every lead both as a raw number and also in terms or dollar volume, I believe the dollar volumne would be more important then the total number. If I sell 8/10 and those 8 are all worth 2k but the other two were worth 100k each, I don't think I can really say I'm selling 80% of the work we're bidding. ;)
Eventually I'd like to look at the profitability of each job type we perform and see which jobs are more profitable and which we need to either improve on or get away from. But that is something for another day, along with a long list of other task's I'd like to get going on.
I've also been reading a lot of your forum on JLC in regard to PROOF system, can you recommend any books on the subject?
Thanks Neil
Edited 1/30/2006 5:24 pm ET by CAGIV
"I've also been reading a lot of your forum on JLC in regard to PROOF system, can you recommend any books on the subject?"
Sure, lurk at JLC, and actively participate here- I see how you are.....
The only books I've seen with any in-depth how-to on PROOF are Irv Chasen's books that he used to sell at his seminars (you can buy them not thru the American Subcontractors Association and a few other sources for around $275), and Ellen Rohr's book, which I don't have in front of me but is called something like "Where Did the Money Go?" I believe her website is http://www.barebonesbiz.com .
Of course, you could always pay me to come out for a one-on-one session to get you guys up to speed with capacity-based markup.........
Bob
You know, I think I've been reading over at JLC as long as I've been particapating here, and not one post at JLC ;) maybe that should change
I recently purchased Ellen Rohr's "How Much Should I Charge" but it hasn't been delivered yet.
Between work and school reading I have enough books to keep me busy for quite sometime...
and yeah we could pay you to come out here, something tell's me you ain't a cheap date ;)
and yeah we could pay you to come out here, something tell's me you ain't a cheap date ;)
nope- I'm easy, but I'm not cheap.....lol
You just have to find a few other local contractors who need help, get them all together, and book a conference room for a seminar. When you do that, the first class airfare, five-star hotel costs, limo service and daily rate become much more paletable......
Bob
or...
I could keep hitting you up for advice here and at JLC...
and then when I act all smart, ask for a raise in place of the 5 star hotel, limo, etc. ;)
You obviously haven't caught on yet, grasshopper- all of the "good stuff" comes out in the paid seminars. The stuff here and at JLC is just the teaser- we've been feeding you all the wrong answers on the forum, which we replace with the right answers during the seminar ;)
Bob
ah crap, all the wrong answers hunh?
Do you ever give seminars at JLC live?
or the remodeling show in Chicago?
Well it's finished, I damn sure hope I can make use of it, given the amount of time, though if nothing else I did learn a lot about Excel in the last few days.
Take a peek, tell me what you think and what you would do with the information if you had it.
This all started out from wanting to track all the jobs, their types and where they came from, and snow balled into me figuring while I was at it, I mind as well track the leads as well.
I posted this in the MS Excel Question thead, but this looks like a good place to post is as well.
CAGIV, pivot tables are difficult to understand the first time through. I think your spreadsheet looks good. However, you will find that updating it or making changes to it will be a real pain in the future. Just imagine adding one more Job Type or adding one more column of information to analize (it would take a while). You may be better off keeping all the data in one big long list and using Autofilter and Pivot Tables. Spend the couple of hours learning about those features and it will save you a tremendous amount of time in the future. I'll post an example below. When I created the spreadsheet below, I recorded some of my actions in a flash video (I didn't edit the videos so they might be a little rough). You can view those videos here:
http://www.maderasoft.com/LeadTracker/CreateDropDownLists.htm
http://www.maderasoft.com/LeadTracker/CreatePivotTable.htmThe way the data is set up in this excel file makes it very easy to make changes. It is easy to add or remove columns to track additional information. You can easily delete rows. You can easily sort and filter. Hopefully this helps. A correctly designed spreadsheet in the beginning can prevent many headaches (and swearing) in the future.
Lorin
Thank you for your help, I'll take a closer look at it tonight, from first glance it does look more effective and efficent.
I had the thought of how difficult it would be to alter the spread sheet in the future, and it was a PITA everytime I did make a change to it as I was building it.