Find your hidden money: Part I

Hello marvelous practitioners!

Thanks so much for your contributions from my prior columns. Your inspiring words are contagious.

In my next two columns, I’ll be covering the specific questions we need to think through in order to find our hidden money. Yep, there’s hidden money, so be sure to stay current with your LIS reading.

The two major thought questions we’ll talk about in this column involve internal marketing — the process of finding your future hidden money inside your existing business.

When we talk about internal marketing, what we are talking about is internally marketing to your existing business. I’m not talking in this segment about external marketing, which has to do with advertising and marketing to people who are not currently your clients. Internal marketing involves marketing to your existing clients, who are already your raving fans.

So our first major thought question is this:

What percentage of your business comes from trackable referrals?

Don’t guess because your guess isn’t correct. Trackable referrals from where? These are referrals from friends, neighbors, co-workers and relatives. That is where your next business is coming from. Did you notice? I didn’t say Internet leads! I didn’t say social marketing! Although these are very important, we get so hyped on the new things, we forget what brought us to the dance for years and years prior.

If you are guessing what percentage of your business comes from referrals, then you don’t know where your trackable referrals are coming from.

So let’s keep in mind the wisdom of William Edwards Deming, the famous statistician and the important American who improved Japan’s quality processes: “What gets measured gets done!”

You must implement a simple tracking system within your company to make sure that every single time your team is involved in a conversation discussing potential new business, they start with the question, “Where did you hear about us?” (No, you don’t need a computer or a spreadsheet for a simple tracking system.)

As a business leader, you really need to know the source of your new business. Why? So that your future allocation of advertising and marketing dollars will be spent on the highest yielding target audience.

That takes us to our second major thought question:

What percentage of each sale made is set aside for traditional advertising and social media marketing?

We’ve talked about asking for the referral and tracking the referral. Now we want to find out what percentage of each sale is set aside for traditional advertising and social media marketing.