The essence of selling is to provide customers with solutions all while generating income for your business. So, if you are spending too much to convert a single lead, then you should try to reduce your sales costs.
There are strategies that can help you maximize your sales efforts and increase your cash flow.
It all starts with knowing your sales expenses and the methods for tracking them. Here’s a helpful guide for analyzing your sales costs and avoiding the risk of spending more than your business earns.
See what’s jacking up your eCommerce expenses
Before you take any action, you need to identify why you are spending so much on closing leads. Analytics plays a very important role when it comes to gauging the profitability of your business. Using platforms like Google Analytics, you can generate insights that can improve your sales process and discover new opportunities for getting the most out of each closed deal.
You only need to focus on the most important data for your organization. If you have an eCommerce website, you can improve your ROI by tracking these important metrics:
1. Conversion rate: This is calculated by dividing the total number of visitors to your website by the number of visitors who bought a product. The conversion rate helps you understand how efficient your marketing and sales efforts are when it comes to generating customers. If you have a low conversion rate, you will see a significant loss of revenue even if you are able to close high-quality leads. For that reason, it’s important that you focus on increasing your sales conversions so your efforts are better aligned with your organization’s goals.
2. Lead acquisition costs: Generating leads costs money, especially if you are using a multi-channel approach for reaching out to targeted segments. Taking it as it is, your lead acquisition costs tell you how much you spend for generating a potential customer. For this, you will need to divide your marketing spend by the number of leads you generate. Depending on your industry, you should be able to keep the costs of these leads down by simplifying the buyer journey or engaging your customers using quality content.
3. Funnel drop-offs: Also known as the abandonment rate, this metric shows you the number of leads that discontinued their journey toward a conversion. Selling is a process. Before buying an offer from you, people have to go through several steps where they are influenced by the information they see. Newsletters, blogs, downloadable e-books, and other collateral can help them decide. When they leave the funnel at a certain point without buying, you may want to audit your campaign and figure out how to improve your messaging.
You can access these metrics by setting up a Google Analytics account. From there, you can gain a better understanding of your business’ sales performance.
Track your campaign spending
These metrics offer you a general view of how much you spend acquiring and converting leads, but you also need to itemize each expense so you’ll know where to scale down.
Are you paying more for your PPC campaigns? How much did it cost to run YouTube ads? Were you able to maximize your email campaign? It’s important that you analyze these activities so you can properly optimize your sales process.
Monitor your operational expenses
A portion of your income goes to other expenses such as the salaries of your sales team as well as taxes. Even if you are able to close a certain number of sales, you won’t be able to maximize your revenue stream if you are paying a lot for everything else that keeps your business running.
Operational expenses can be very hefty, regardless of whether you reach your sales targets or not. You need to analyze these costs down to the last penny, so use apps like Hurdlr that can help you monitor your business expenses, identify tax deductibles, and cut back on unnecessary spending.
Keep tabs on your marketing
Your marketing campaign is essential to the performance of your sales team.
You will need to strike a balance between quality and quantity. You want to reach out to as many qualified prospects as you can to reach your sales goals, but you may need to make sure you are not paying more for your marketing efforts.
It’s imperative that you focus on the factors that could bloat your marketing spend:
Facebook Ad Sales:
Facebook Ads lets you measure the ROI of your online ad campaigns within the network. Simply turn on the conversion tracking feature and set up a pixel so you can start tracking purchases attributed to your ad campaign.
Cost-per-click:
When you are running PPC campaigns, you may want more people to click on your ads. But getting a lot of clicks does not always translate to more sales opportunities. Instead, you should focus on the cost-per-click metrics instead of the number of clicks your campaign generates. Whether you are using AdWords or Facebook Ads, the platform you are using for your campaign provides you with total control over your ad spend. Getting prospects to click your ads, however, is a different matter.
Engagement rate:
Finally, you need to make sure your campaign is able to attract the right prospects. Tracking the engagement rate of your ads and content materials is crucial for optimizing the marketing and improving customer lifetime values. Measuring customer engagement is pretty straightforward. All you need is to track the behavior of your customers. You can focus on how long they stay on a certain webpage and their responses to the content you are sharing on social media.
What to do with all these numbers
Once you have a good idea about the crucial metrics you need to track for optimizing your sales efforts, you need to use this information to recalibrate your marketing campaign and scale down on business components that have a considerable impact on your revenue.
From this, you can then create quality content that nurtures your prospects and influences their decision to buy your product. Only then can you get your sales expenses under control!
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