Goal setting is a critical decision making process for any business. Failure to establish appropriate goal can contribute to more widespread failures, dampening of company morale, wasted opportunities, and misallocation of resources. To avoid these outcomes, we must use more than intuition, ambition, and experience to motivate our goal setting decisions. Our goals must also be informed by relevant data. This blog post will outline four key data sets that can optimize our goals for customer growth in the workspace services industry: Leads generated and conversion rate, lead sources, and customer decision making period.
Sales Leads Generated and Conversion rate
Customer growth begins with lead generation, so it is important to record real data on the number of sales leads drawn by your current marketing endeavors and the success of your sales team in converting those leads to customers. If your sales team’s conversion rate is moderate to high, you know that you need to focus your goal on increasing the number of opportunities they have to sell by contributing more resources to marketing. If the conversion rate is low, then you need to focus your goal on improving their effectiveness in the sales process. A low conversion rate compared to leads generated could also be due to insufficient sales staff to handle lead volume. In that case, your goal should be hiring and training additional staff to further grow your customer base. In short, lead generation and conversion numbers help produce more specific targets and justify your strategic planning activities for reaching those targets.
Lead Sources
Part of your goal for customer growth could be geared at improving the effectiveness of your lead sources. You must record the investments made into your marketing endeavors and the quality of the leads generated by each. Some forms of web advertising generate hundreds of leads per month. Yet, if those leads far less likely to reach customer stage than leads generated by other sources, is it worth it include that form of marketing as a component of your goal for customer growth? Or if your time is spent nurturing a strategic partnership that only produces 1 successful referral in a year’s time, is achieving your growth goal by referral accomplishable in the goal’s timeframe? Questions like this should be considered as you are setting your goal and strategizing how to attain it.
Decision Making Period
In the workspace services industry, decision making periods are rarely within a 30-day window. People like to think long and hard about where to house their business and rightfully so. Tracking the time from lead to customer stages will help you install a reasonable time period for your goal. Use the decision making period that occurs most often (mode) for your customers rather than the average time period to define your time limit for reaching the goal. Using the average can cause you to attribute too short of a time to see maximum results. To better illustrate this point, consider the following data set.
Average time: 38 Modal Time: 42
If you evaluated the success of the goal activities at the 38-day average mark, you would miss out on the majority of customers that took 42 days.
Final Thoughts
If you’re not currently tracking these figures, contact us at Workspace Strategies, and we can help you get the systems and procedures in place to make recording this data easy and reports on this data accessible. We also provide complete serviced office management services to ensure that businesses meet and exceed every goal assigned.
