How to evaluate your sales and marketing efforts

Sales and marketing are the life blood of any business.

Remember, marketing, at its most basic, is attracting people to your business. Sales is converting those people into paying customers.

Periodically, maybe at the quarter or year-end, evaluate what you’re doing so that you can continue your process, change it, or try something new to improve your pole-based business.

What to evaluate

Ask yourself:

• Did you meet your sales and marketing goals?
• What sales and marketing tactics did you use?
• Did you like using those sales and marketing tactics?
• Did you receive any feedback on those tactics from customers or staff?

Let’s look at an example:

Maybe your goal was to reach 1,000 new people through social media and make $1000 in sales from those people. You used all organic (not paid) social media posts and tried using TikTok for the first time. You made more than 1,000 new followers but you’re not sure if you made any sales from them. You found it exhausting to keep up with your new TikTok account while doing everything else. A few people commented that your posts made your pole-based business seem more approachable.

How to evaluate

The above example is probably a realistic way most of us are running our pole-based businesses. Assigning a random goal and then being unsure how to actually track what we’re doing.

A better way to evaluate what you’re doing is to first set better goals. That can only happen if you audit what you’re already doing. And you can only audit what you’re doing if you have effective tracking tools to really know how you’re attracting people to your business and how you’re converting them to paying customers.

How to track

One simple way to track where your business is coming from is to ask people how they heard about your business when they make a purchase. Maybe they heard about you from a friend, or maybe they saw an ad online. You can do this by adding a question to your online portal, as a follow-up email as part of receipt, or ask it in-person/on the phone.

You could also use affiliate marketing, assigning tracking codes or links to understand where your customers are coming from. Read more about that here.

You could study how your customers are finding your website. Make sure you have Google Analytics installed correctly on your website and sign up for Google My Business to receive a monthly report on what search terms people use to find your business. Read more about that here.

Putting it together

Now armed with some tracking tools, you can more accurately see that only 10 people of the 1,000 new followers you received on TikTok clicked on the link to visit your website through TikTok.

You found that the search terms you thought were driving people to your business, were not. And you may have also found a few broken links on your website which disrupted your funnel and prevented people from arriving at your sales pages.

What to do next?

Understanding what you’re doing and how it’s impacting your business is the first step, the second step is to set better aligned goals, the third step is understand how you’re going to achieve or work towards those goals by changing what you’re doing or doing something different.

Maybe you realized that this is all way too much technology for you and that’s ok! You may choose to focus on parts of your sales and marketing strategy that feel better, more authentic and easier to implement for you. If you are a solo-prenuer, you only have so much time to do all the tasks that need to be done—hating something will make it harder to consistently execute.

You may decide to hire someone to help. Or you may outsource some things like your paid ad strategy and continue to do your own email marketing.

Whatever you choose, being clear about your goals and working with actionable information will help you grow your business more effectively as you move forward. Even if you feel super comfortable with all the methods and technology available to you for marketing and sales, technology changes and it’s important to assess what you’re doing regularly so you can continue to use your time effectively.