Just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean you should
Some things in your business are easy to measure and others are more difficult. Many wedding and event pros that I work with do very little tracking in their business. A few do a lot. For me, and for my clients, businesses like yours, I want you to focus on things that you can change, not just things you can measure, just because you can measure them.
Listen to this new 7-minute episode for a little perspective on what you should and maybe shouldn’t be trying to measure.
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Below is a full transcript. If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or contact me via text, use the short form on this page, or call 732.422.6362
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– Just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you should. I was talking to a client the other day about metrics, and most of my clients don’t have really good reporting and metrics about their inquiries and conversion and things like that. And then I have some that have crazy kind of reporting that goes really really deep. And the question comes to what do you need to actually measure? And just because you can measure something, doesn’t mean that you should. I think I’ve mentioned this on another one of the podcasts where a client of mine called up and asked me how many calls did I want my sales reps to make when I was a VP of sales at The Knot? And I said I didn’t have that as one of their goals. And he’s like, “Well why not?” I said, “Well, because calls is not what I was trying to get. “Sales is what we’re trying to get.” So I measured sales because you get what you measure. That was another one of my podcasts where “You get what you measure.” So it comes down to again: just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you should be measuring it. What I want to look at is what can you take action on?
Are you measuring things that you can affect change on once you know what those numbers are? Because the best thing that reporting is good for, just like with Google Analytics or anything else, when it comes to your sales or anything, you only want to be measuring things that you can change, that you can see that change over time and that’s the best thing that reports do. Just like when I look in QuickBooks and I look at my financial statements for my business I’m looking at this year versus last year or last year versus the year before, or this year versus last year and the year before. And the reason for that is I’m looking to see the trending, trending up, trending down. I’m looking at different line items, which expenses are trending up or trending down. And mostly I’m looking at profits because sales are great, but profits are better. And that’s why you want to make sure that you’re measuring things that you can effect change on.
So take a look at the things that you are measuring. You know don’t just tell me you’re getting more leads from this source than that source if you can’t tell me what your conversion from those sources are. So yeah it’s easy to be able to look and say “Oh, I got X number of leads from The Knot “and X number from WeddingWire “and X number from Facebook and X number from Instagram.” Okay, that’s something you can measure, but if you’re not looking at the conversion of those and the dollar value of those conversions, you’re not getting a full picture. So don’t just measure in leads because leads doesn’t tell you sales and average sale and profit from those different things. So what would I want to know if you can measure it is the leads you get going to the conversations that you have with them, which is probably through email, through messaging, through texting, things like that. How many of those people you got to then get to the next step, which is for some of you a sale, or some of you it’s going to be a meeting or a tour or something like that, that could be the next step there. And then going to the sales.
But I also want to know if you didn’t book somebody because you were already booked on that date and couldn’t book them again, that was a good quality lead from that particular source. And you need to put that into a bucket and say, “hey, that was a good lead. “I didn’t book it because I couldn’t book it.” It’s not the fault of the source right? So if you got a great lead from WeddingWire and then only to find out that you’re booked then you can’t do that day. Well, it was still a great lead, it’s not their fault that you were booked already that day. As opposed to just getting more leads like the people who tell me, “Oh I got a lot of leads from Facebook”. But they don’t convert a lot of those leads. Well you get fooled by the big number. So just because you can measure something doesn’t mean that you should. But then if you are measuring things, what are you going to do with that information that you’re getting from that? You can measure the number of leads, you can measure the traffic to your website, you can measure how long people stay on your website, you can measure bounce rates and all these kinda crazy things, but should you care?
Well another one of my podcasts was about the only three things I care about with Google Analytics. How much of your traffic is mobile, which pages they look at, and what the source of that traffic is. It’s the same thing with sales. You know, I don’t want to just know sales dollars if you’re not knowing profits. It’s easier to measure the sales dollars than it is the profitability of those. But the profitability is the money you have left over. And if you’re just measuring sales or you’re just measuring leads without knowing that “hey I couldn’t book that because I was already booked for other weddings that day” now you’re really not getting a full picture. So think about before you start wasting your time, or I should say investing your time, it could be one or the other, depending upon what information you get. Just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you should be measuring it if you’re not prepared to do something with that information. I remember one time I was going to do a survey and I asked “Are we going to survey our customers about this?” And I was told by the CEO, “No” because we weren’t prepared to act on the information. And if you ask people in a survey you should be prepared to act on that information that you get from them, otherwise they feel like they wasted their time and you’ve lost some of that goodwill with the customer.
So before you start doing measuring, and I think you should be measuring, but before you start doing measuring, are you measuring the right things? Things that you’re able to measure, things you’re able to track over time, or is it just, “wow that’s interesting information, “but there’s really nothing I can do with that information.” For me the bounce rate on my website is irrelevant because I look more at my calendar, is my calendar full, and what do my financials look like? If we’re profiting then I really don’t care what the bounce rate is on my website so I don’t even look at it. It’s there, it’s on a report, but I don’t look at it. So what is it that you want to measure? What are you going to do with that information if you’re able to get it? Otherwise maybe put your efforts into something else. Thanks for listening.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
- Apple Podcast:
- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
- Pandora:
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