A sales and marketing matrix, part 2

Mapping how I spend by time (and the Churchill Club’s money) gives me an immediate fix on where I can make savings and efficiencies.

Although no one else in Melbourne really seems to focus on the same content in the same way as my organisation the Churchill Club, we really compete against anyone else that takes up potential customer time with ideas and networking. So we are competing against a huge list, many of which are free and government-funded.

The final thing about this framework is that it lends itself to generating simple but effective KPIs. Consider what happens when I allocate costs and outcomes to the programs. The following image is a drill-down on my networking activities and assumes (for the sake of simplicity) the Churchill Club paid me $2000 to generate sales.

On Churchill Club duties last month, I spent eight hours meeting new people, four hours persuading people to come to events and sending out emails to new people, eight hours delivering events and another two hours sending out the bi-monthly email to subscribers.

As a result, I met eight new people, generated two prospects, delivered a Churchill Club event to 46 people and offered the event to a total of 900 subscribers.

Calculating it out in Excel, it looks like this.

Clearly I can see from my framework that trying to generate new customers by meeting people is very expensive. Any program I can find that generates leads for under $91 is a winner.

Spending time working on a prospect is also expensive with only two of the original eight I met being likely to turn up to an event (cost $182 each, not including the initial time).

My time spent delivering the programs was way too expensive for a $33–$44 event. If we were a for-profit we would be going backwards at a great rate of knots.

Finally, it’s clear that sending out emails isn’t actually free at all. When you include my time it’s actually costing about 20¢ per email.

Actually now that I’ve written the above, I quite depressed.

On the bright side, I now have some hard figures to work with to fix the Churchill Club.

So, I am sure that plenty of people will hate my system and point out the flaws, but It’s mine, and I think its kind of cool, In a process-focused technology kind of way.

Brendan Lewis is the founder of two IT service firms, Edion and Verve IT, and executive director of the Churchill Club.

To read more Brendan Lewis blogs, click here.