ShedTitans Technical CFO for the Shed Industry The shed-industry practice of CodeHaus

01 Marketing

Are your marketing dollars working or wandering?

Most owners have a gut feeling about which marketing works. A gut feeling won't show you where the money is going to waste, or which channels bring in the customers who make you money.

How hard is it to get these numbers?

Seven questions. For each one, pick how hard it would be to get the answer today. Then I'll email you what your answers mean and where to look first.

1. What share of your sales can you trace back to a specific marketing source?
How to find it

Pull the last 90 days of sales. Next to each one, write where that customer first heard of you. Count the sales where nobody knows. Every other marketing decision rests on this one.

2. What does each channel cost you per sale?
How to find it

Don't stop at cost per lead. Take your total spend on each channel (ad spend, agency fees, and your own team's time) and divide it by the number of customers that channel actually brought in.

3. How many leads never get a complete follow-up?
How to find it

For 30 days, count the leads that come in and the leads that get every step of your follow-up. The gap between the two is leads you paid for and dropped.

4. How many places in your marketing promise something you can't deliver today?
How to find it

Go through your ads, your website and your printed materials. Compare them with what you can actually build and deliver right now. Write down every place where the marketing promises something production can't, and count them.

5. How many of your qualified-lead criteria do marketing and sales agree on?
How to find it

Ask your marketing team or agency, and then your sales team, to define what makes a lead qualified. Ask them separately and count the criteria both answers share. If they don't match, you've found a source of friction on both sides.

6. What share of your leads come from outside your service area or target market?
How to find it

For 30 days, sort every lead into three piles: ideal, acceptable, and outside your area or market. The third pile is money spent on people you can't sell to.

7. When did you last test one message, offer or channel against another?
How to find it

Look back over the last six months for any test: two versions of an ad, a new offer, a new channel tried on purpose. If you can't find one, your marketing has been running on what worked last time.

Or I check it for you

In the audit, I pull the marketing numbers out of the systems you already run, talk with whoever is closest to them, and check them against your books. Many findings come with a dollar figure, and those go to the top of the list. Some don't, and I won't make one up.

Two weeks, $3,500 flat. If by the end of the first week I can't get to the data I need, I'll tell you then and refund the fee. You walk away with the build order, whether you ever hire me again or not.

Talk to Matthias about the audit