Marketing - a numbers game
September 21st, 2007 by Alexander KohlWhen clients call, life is great.
You feel like you are the best in your field and are fulfilling an important role in the community.
Then a few days go by with no one calling. After a week you really feel down.
Questions start racing through your mind: “Why is no one calling? Maybe they did not enjoy it after all? But they should know how good it is for them! Maybe I am just not made for this?” Uncertainty sets in and it gets harder to do anything to move forward.
Support from someone else who can keep your motivation up and lead you back to clarity is one way out of it.
Another possibility is to shift your focus from outcomes that are difficult to influence to what you have 100% control over: the number of people you are telling about your services.
Marketing - a numbers game
How many people are you telling about your services? If you do not have as many clients as you would like, you are obviously not talking to enough people. But how many is enough? To work that out let us look at a whole year, because all changes take time.
Appointments:
If you know how many appointments you would like per week, multiply that by 52 (e.g.: 10 appointments per week x 52 weeks: 520 appointments per year).
Enquiries:
How many of the people that call to enquire actually book your service? (e.g.: let’s assume it is 8 out of 10 people, a conversion rate of 80%, divide 520 by 80%: 650 enquiries).
Approaches:
The hardest question is probably how many people you have to communicate with to get them to enquire. This varies widely depending on how you communicate and how well you have pre-selected the people you are talking to (defined your target market). A letterbox drop usually gets 1-2% enquiries return. A well produced direct mail could get up to 15%.
The best lead generation is through your own personal contacts, people you actually meet and talk to (e.g.: on average the enquiries generation might be 5% of who you communicate with, divide 650 by 5%: 13,000 approaches).
That looks pretty daunting. But there are a few other things that can be done to reduce this figure.
Repeat Business:
One of the cheapest and easiest ways to increase your business is raising the number of times a client comes back. Giving all past client a call to enquire how they are will usually make them feel good and looked after. And it will often lead to a new booking. Think about the best frequency for your clients to see you. Then call them around that time.
This dramatically reduces the necessary approaches, exactly by the quantity of times your clients come back (e.g.: they might come back 4 times a year on average: 13,000 divided by 4: 3,250 new approaches).
Referrals:
Another great way to reduce the need for many approaches is to get help from your existing clients. Coming back means they are excited by your service (not just the modality you practice, but also by the personal attention they get). And people love to refer their friends to something they are excited about, but they might need to be asked for it (e.g.: Assume that every second client refers one additional client, ½+1=1.5. 3,250 divided by 1.5: 2,167 new approaches).
Daily:
It is best to break this down into daily numbers (e.g.: you might want to work 44 weeks a year, 2,167 divided by 44: 50 new approaches per week, working 5 days: 10 per day; if you want more free days, working 4 days: 12.5 per day)
Your turn
Now you can work this out with your own figures and it will give you your daily goal of new people you need to communicate with. Or you can use the sample numbers. That was the easy part anyway.
Actually doing it on a daily basis is more difficult. But now you can measure your success on how many people you actually communicate with. Forget about the clients you have (still treating them well and calling them for repeat business and asking them for referrals, but just not being so focused on how many you actually have) and put all your energies into communicating with the right amount of people. Is it 10 out of 10 each day? Or is it only 2 a week?
Every day you have achieved your goal will lift you up and motivate you further. You will learn along the way how best to communicate and the clients will come out of it as a side effect.
It is good to keep daily written record of your numbers, especially approaches, calls for repeat business, asking for referrals, new inquiries, referral inquiries, new clients, repeat clients. After a while, you will be able to check your assumptions in the calculation and refine it.
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Tags: health, Marketing, practitioner
December 20th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
[...] I get a lot of resistense from natural health therapists. They usually say that they do not want to give anything away. You can find some of my thoughts on that at Massage Marketing - a numbers game. [...]