Do marketing and sales operations feel daunting at times? Don’t worry. It happens to lots of agency owners.
The shoe maker’s kids have no shoes...am I right?
Building a truly profitable agency requires you to carry off your marketing and sales strategies without worrying about the outcome.
With that said, understanding your sales inputs and outputs becomes mandatory. These are necessary elements of your business that can help you sustain continuous growth.
Why?
These metrics provide valuable sales data. They can give you the information you need to make great business decisions and scale your processes.
Now, that’s not to say that everyone’s familiar with sales inputs and outputs. And if you’ve been struggling to scale your company, you may not be all too familiar with it, either.
As such, the following sections will go over what these metrics are, how they work, and what you stand to gain if you use them correctly.
Sales inputs and outputs are specific metrics within your business.
Think of inputs as the behaviors or activities you’re doing to achieve a particular result. The outputs, meanwhile, are the results of what you’re doing.
To understand the concept better, let’s look at it from the perspective of email marketing.
Your inputs are the total number of emails sent to your clients and prospects. Meanwhile, the outputs contain click-through rates, open email rates, and any leads generated from those emails.
For the purpose of sales, you can view the input as the number of calls placed versus the output or the number of scheduled meetings.
It’s all about generating outcomes. An action that you do (input) will lead to you getting a result (output.)
But why should you know these metrics?
It will allow you to excel at predicting future sales and any behaviors or actions that could generate your desired results.
Once you know these, you’ll figure out the pros and cons of your actions. This will enable you to make incremental improvements and continue to grow your operations.
If you want to double your sales in the next three months, for example, you’ll probably need to increase your inputs to double the output vastly. But you can’t know for sure which inputs to adjust until you’ve identified these metrics and interpreted the data.
For a better understanding of inputs and outputs, let’s look at a more detailed example.
An agency that generates 30 new clients per year at $80,000 each would gross $2.4 million in total.
For you to do that, you need to generate 120 proposals every year. And to get to that number of proposals, you have to generate 400 marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
Moving on up, you might need 8,000 prospects in your sales funnel to get those 400 MQLs.
At this starting position, improving everything you do by just 2% can have a drastic impact.
Instead of turning 5% of your funnel into MQLs, 7% would give you 560 MQLs and 180 proposals compared to the previous 120. You would also increase your closure rate from 25% to 27%, putting you at 49 clients and $3.9 million in revenue.
That means you could make $1.5 million more in revenue with a mere 2% improvement in your inputs. Doesn’t that sound like something you’d welcome in your agency?
As you can see, you can make a considerable improvement in your agency without an equivalent increase in costs.
Of course, the question is…
How do you get that 2% improvement?
You’ll have to go through an analysis and make some changes. But it’s going to feel less daunting to work on your marketing and sales operations when you know that a 2% increase can drastically improve the outcome.
So, that’s how you have to look at it.
Most business owners, however, think differently. They look at what it takes to go from 30 new clients to 49 and see a 63% increase in clients. They’ll go on to assume a similar increase in marketing and lead generation required.
But in reality, a 2% increase in marketing and sales efforts may be enough to generate a 63% increase in client acquisition, as you can see from the previous example.
Take a moment and look at the hero portion of your website. If a prospect lands on your site, what impression would they get in the first 10 to 15 seconds?
Will they know who you are and what you do?
Here’s why I’m asking.
I used to get plenty of emails from people asking for help in one area or another. However, they’d often follow up with excuses like I’m too expensive or their agencies were too small for my service package.
Clearly, I wasn’t clear enough as to who I could actually help with my marketing. And after making slight adjustments and removing some components, I raised my lead flow significantly.
So, that’s the sort of thing that can happen when you understand your inputs and outputs.
You’re able to make the right moves and speak to your ideal audience. You’re able to identify what the prospects who interact with your brand really want and if you can give it to them.
In essence, you can get better at noticing the subtext in conversations with you or about your brand.
These sales metrics give you valuable data regarding your sales funnel – what’s working, what’s not, and what you must change to get better results.
When you’re running a business, you’ll have a vast amount of metrics to track and understand. But your sales and marketing inputs and outputs could be among the most crucial factors that contribute to your agency’s growth.
To get new clients, you’ll have to rely on a great funnel. And to make that funnel work, you have to understand every stage and action you have to make to get more qualified leads.
Get accustomed to looking at the right numbers, and you can have sustainable and continuous growth in your agency.
Are you ready to start improving your inputs and outputs? Are you eager to learn more about how your numbers impact your business and client experience? Then, apply to our agency accelerator program, and we can get started on this.