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Regardless of the cost, companies spend a lot on marketing and advertising and many times do not know what they get for it. What you are trying to accomplish with these costs is to draw new customers to your door. What you really need to know is what effort on your part helps to do that very well.  Here are a few ideas on how to begin understanding how your firm really gets new customers.

Find out from where new customers begin:

• Ask all new customers starting today what caused them to call your company for a quote. You need to know because you spend a lot on finding and winning new customers and you must find out if your methods pay off or not.
• Was the customer called upon by one of our sales personnel? If so, who and how well did the meeting go? Were all questions answered and follow-up comments resolved?
• Did the customer initially read our website? If he did, was everything covered and explained well enough for him to make a decision?
• Did the customer receive one of our brochures or advertisements in the mail? What about the mailer caught his eye or made him call our company?
• Did the customer receive a referral from another company which suggested to try our company? If so, what company gave out our name? Has someone on our staff called that business to thank them for the referral?
• Did the customer see our commercials or advertisements and then decide from those television spots to call us?
• Did the customer notice our company’s sponsorships of nonprofit organizations and that is what caused them to call for product quotes?
• Did the customer see news stories mentioning our company’s capabilities?
• Did the customer happen to see the company trade show booth at the industry trade show?
• Did they talk to anyone who manned the booth and took questions?
• Did the customer see our billboards?
• Did the customer see our company vehicles with signs and phone numbers on all of the doors?
• Did the customer drive past the plant and notice our displays in the yard?
• Did the customer call us because of one of our employees (other than sales personnel)?

Actions to take for new customers:

• In your database, keep track of why each customer came to your company initially. (i.e. mailer, referral, sales call, advertisement or some other notable reason)
• Write the declared SIC code and SIC name for all new companies in your database to be extracted, sorted and used later (library sources are free of charge and accessible online).
• Run all of the customers and sort them by their SIC code and then next by the type of effective advertising that worked.
• Sort for the most frequent methods of advertising that seemed to work (i.e. 41% mailers, 28% physical sales calls, 18% telephone calls (solicitations))
• Increase your efforts on the successful ideas and approaches. Do more advertising that brought in the most customers.  Those obviously work better than all of the other methods for your particular business so use them to increase sales.
• If the more effective rate is physical sales calls, hire more sales people.
• If the more effective method for your firm is advertising in the local paper, buy a long term package deal and ask them to place it strategically within the weekly issues to boost your business.
• If the more effective method for your company to get sales is cold calls, hire more outside sales people.
• For the highest SIC code ranking, buy a list of companies that compete in that SIC code and aim a marketing campaign within that SIC code since your firm is already familiar with company types.  You have the experience to deal with those firms so buy more names in the same industry.

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